Shadowed By Wings (5 page)

“Clever little rishi whelp, hey-o?” he cackled. “Well done.”

The unnatural healing of my body felt tainted, then, sullied by his pleasure in it.

“Where do I piss?” I snapped.

His smug leer vanished, replaced with a scowl. He rose. “That’s not my concern.”

“It will be, if I start urinating all over the place. How much do you want Temple angered?”

He leapt toward me, slapped my cheek. My head snapped back and thudded against the silo, and the stinging ring of the blow, so instant, so unanticipated, clouded my ears and vibrated like a hornet in my head.

His raised hand clenched into a fist, as if he were struggling with himself not to strike me again, and his eyes rolled briefly in their sockets.

I stared at him and held my breath.

“You are mortal, Skykeeper’s Daughter,” he finally gasped, chest heaving. He dropped his hand to his side. “Never forget that. Mortal
and
subject to my authority.”

I touched my burning cheek gingerly, tears from his blow blurring my vision.

His face twisted and, as if of its own accord, his hand sprang up to strike me again.

“Your response is ‘Yes, Komikon’!”

“Yes, Komikon,” I gasped.
Yes, Master.

He leaned down into my face, his chin braid like a rat’s tail upon my throat, his breath as foul as bile. “You can be hurt, rishi whelp. You bleed. Never forget that.”

I swallowed.

“I won’t, Komikon.”

“You’ll build yourself a latrine, understand? You’ll pay to have it monthly purified, as you’ll pay to have the apprentices’ quarters cleansed.”

He waited, then tensed.

“Yes, Komikon,” I said hastily.

“Good.” With a snort, he turned to leave.

“How?” I dared ask. “How will I pay? Komikon.”

He paused, then turned back to me. He gave a tight, venomous grin.

“You’ll do my bidding, girl. That’s how you’ll pay. Now, get back to your hammock.”

And I had not the heart to ask, then, what his bidding would be.

THREE

A
s the dragonmaster had bid me, I returned to the empty stall designated as mine.

It was well past middle-night, and the dark was chill and dew-laden. The stars were as hostile as a thousand eyes, all glaring at me from the silken sheets of night’s bed, as if, by my very passage, I’d woken them from carefree sleep. It was a night of cloaking black, as airy and dark as watered silk, with the merest bowed splinter for a moon; the darkness reminded me of a clan’s pidi-nos, the treasured strips of black silk used to tie a woman’s wrists to the chancobie, the throne of submission and apology upon which a woman sits during a Claiming Ceremony.

Each stable yard I crossed looked much like the last: rows of stone stalls, all ringed about a square court, each stall housing, behind an iron gate, a sleeping dragon. The scaled beasts slept without care, secure in the dragonmaster’s domain, their snouts settled like roosting birds upon dewlapped throats or their necks stretched long between foreclaws, muzzles prone upon the ground. Some dragons slept with neck curled over spine, head thrust under one wing; others stood on all fours, head drooped low, firm lips almost brushing the ground. Ribs rose and fell. The occasional limb dream-twitched. A stomach rumbled here, a tail thwacked stone there.

I knew that no such restful sleep awaited me, for I feared the animosity of my stable peers and wondered whether they’d dare oust me from the dragonmaster’s domain this very night, even with the Komikon somewhere present within the stable yard walls.

I therefore didn’t lay upon my coarse twine hammock at first, but paced about my stall, bedding chaff shushing round my ankles like wood shavings falling leaflike from a carpenter’s lathe. The slate beneath the bedding was cold and damp on my soles.

Sometime toward dawn, exhaustion wore me down. I found a good-sized stone, and, clutching it to my chest, clambered onto my hammock. The old twine creaked beneath my weight.

I stared at the stars as they faded to the color of rain in the gray murk of the oncoming dawn, vowing not to let my heavy lids close.

I jerked violently awake much later, when the rock I held thudded to the ground. Heart pounding, I blinked and squinted against the brightness of the sun. Muddle-headed, I listened tensely to the very sounds of industry that had, the day previous, lulled me to sleep near the grain silo.

The day was well on its way toward noon. The dragonmaster apprentices of Komikon Re were hard at work. I had slept, ignored and untouched by them, since dawn.

I sat up carefully, conscious of the weals on my back. Of the ribbons of ruined flesh, only a crisscross of ridged skin remained. I ran my fingers cautiously over the snakes of scar tissue. No pain. Slowly, I climbed off my hammock and stretched. Healthy muscle pulled beneath feather-healed skin.

Well.

I stood there, sound in body but not in mind, and stared blankly at the day before me.

What to do now?

Attack the monumental task I’d set before myself, of not only surviving the wrath of Temple for joining the dragonmaster’s apprenticeship but also becoming a dragonmaster, with the aim of using the influence and power a Cinai Komikon commanded to alter the very fabric of an entire nation.

Great Re. Is it any wonder that the prospect exhausted me, that I felt rooted to the spot with defeat?

Once again, I had the brief, sharp realization that, had I followed my original intentions of killing Kratt at Mombe Taro, my head would have long been separated from my neck by an executioner’s blade. I shivered with brief longing for the escape death would have afforded me.

Clutching my elbows to myself, I closed my eyes and took an unsteady breath to clear the dark thought from my mind.

The seductive scent of venom lay as heavy as lead over the stables, and as I inhaled, the fragrance flowed down my nostrils and set my heart glowing like a live coal. The acrid yet honeyed scent danced on my tongue, pimpled the skin on my arms anew, sang through my veins, swelled my heart, soared through my soul.

Yes. Oh, yes. That most desired scent, reminiscent of limes and licorice both: venom. I could not breathe enough of it, ached for it, trembled for it, was dizzy and aroused and consumed by need because of it. I could not help it; I opened my mouth wide and inhaled deeply, repeatedly, savoring the warm, malleable scent as a nebulous substitute for liquid venom.

A feverish flood of memories surged over me: crumbling convent rotunda; ancient, infertile bull dragons. The rasp of scaled hide against my thighs; a dragon tongue leaching black venom upon my belly.

This, then, was a reason to forge into the day: the possibility of imbibing venom. A despicable reason, yes, and a crutch I reached too readily to lean upon. But even as I realized that my fondness for the dragons’ poison provided a stronger impetus to confront the day than the mere desire to live had, I dismissed the dreadful revelation.

I inhaled again and again through an open mouth, drunk on the odor of the dragons’ fire, and when my head reeled from too-quickly sucked-in air, I finally stopped and opened my eyes. Vision unsteady, pulse racing, I took stock of my surroundings.

A massive courtyard sprawled before me, ringed by stalls made of granite blocks quarried from who-knew-where. Half the stalls stood empty save for youths who frantically shoveled manure, and the stalls that were occupied were occupied magnificently by Roshu-Lupini Re’s uncut dragons, yearlings and satons both, females either too young or too hard-worked to lay eggs.

Lean and nervy, trained to spring into the air upon the slightest spur touch and lock talons with other dragons, these were fighting beasts. Unlike the dull hides of the wing-amputated brooders prevalent throughout Clutch Re, or the faded, flaking hides of the dying bulls I had cared for while in Convent Tieron, the scaled hides of the Roshu-Lupini’s destriers fairly shone with vitality and color.

Whereas a brooder’s hide is dappled rust and moss, the hides of the Roshu-Lupini’s dragons shone chestnut and the green of wet jungle foliage. Whereas a brooder stands with head hanging, indifferent to all and sundry, the destriers snorted in their stalls, their long, forked tongues flicking out, black as tar with venom. They rumbled, they tossed their heads, they threw their weight against the heavy iron gates that barred them within their stalls. They rasped their deadly talons against stone.

I loved those dragons, I did.

With my body miraculously healed and the scent of venom effervescing through my blood, I loved those dragons. Exhilaration swelled through me and I felt I could spread my arms and fly.

The courtyard was a-clatter with motion. Pitchforks flashed in the early morning sunlight as apprentices mucked stalls, carted away manure, and wheeled in fresh bedding and fodder. In a shadowy corner, two scrawny boys worked the rusty handle of a pump; water gushed out, splashing into what appeared to be an open aqueduct running through the far side of every stall. Curses rang to and fro; bellows echoed about. Snake poles and muzzle hooks glinted from the cool shadows, the tools wielded by boys either astraddle a dragon or attempting to immobilize one for grooming.

At the far end of the courtyard leaned two dilapidated, narrow structures: the apprentices’ latrines. A pile of lumber and a stack of bricks sat to one side of them. Ah. I understood at once. Those were the materials the dragonmaster wanted me to fashion into a latrine, and the tools I’d require to do so.

I flared my nostrils, piqued by the flagrant challenge he’d set before me. Like any other man, he’d assumed that, as a woman, I’d have no idea how to build a latrine. Such a simple task would not confound me, hey-o! I lifted my chin. I would show him that I was no ordinary woman.

I started across the courtyard, the red, sunbaked earth as warm as fresh blood upon the soles of my bare feet.

At the same far end of the courtyard as the latrines and pile of lumber, an immense sandstone archway led to yet another stable courtyard, and beyond that, another. A line of apprentices was just starting to walk beneath that sandstone archway, each apprentice leading a muzzled, wing-pinioned dragon by means of a hook notched firmly in one of the dragon’s nares. They were taking them somewhere, perhaps for exercise.

I stopped a moment, halfway across the yard, and watched the apprentices and their winged charges disappear through the archway into the courtyard beyond.

How big
were
the Roshu-Lupini’s stables? There was no way I could tell, standing there, though from my fevered rambling the day previous, I knew the ochre sandstone walls enclosed the entire stable domain, however large. Those walls were twice my height and topped by ceramic shards, necessary to prevent rishi and bayen alike from pestering the dragons and holy Re, our illustrious Clutch bull, with petitions for good luck, fertile wombs, and plentiful food.

Dragons were divine. By mere dint of their intact wings and venom sacs, the Roshu-Lupini’s dragons were regarded as especially divine and most likely to answer the prayers of the devout. There was no real logic in that supposition, but superstition and myth run strong amongst rishi.

I continued across the courtyard, toward the building supplies stacked beside the apprentices’ latrines. The lumber was new and freshly treated with hagi, a Malacarite pitch used to protect wood from the elements, and as I approached the stack of wood, the tar-and-vinegar reek of the hagi combined pleasantly with the stables’ peppery tang of venom.

The planks were straight, the tawny color of heart-wood, and bore few knots. Never before had I worked with such fine wood, for during my years in Convent Tieron, the lumber we’d used to mend our mill wheel had been roughly hewn and weathered, castoffs grudgingly sent our way by the Ranreeb, who, as Temple’s Overseer of the Jungle Crown, was responsible for the Tieron sanctuary.

A wooden crate stained blue and decorated with a rendering of a dragon’s head sat atop the lumber. I crouched on my haunches and cracked the crate open.

“Hey-o,” I murmured in wonder. “What have we here?”

The array of tools within was a treasure. Reverently, I touched one of the sharp teeth of a saw, then picked up a hammer. As a woman, I should have had little knowledge of how to use such tools. But I’d had an unusual life, in Convent Tieron.

I stood, said the customary quendi cinai farkta, the request to the Dragon that the chosen site meet with the bull’s favor, and looked about for a shovel to begin digging the latrine pit.

One of the young apprentices mucking stalls spotted me and hailed another apprentice, a brawny fellow who stood atop a cart loaded with fresh fodder. The brawny fellow lumbered down from the cart and stalked toward me. I recognized him immediately: Egg, the oaf Dono had tried to goad into mounting me.

I fumbled to cover my front with Kratt’s cape, which hung askew from my neck.

With a scowl upon his massive face, Egg lurched toward me. A shadow crossed over him when he was but several feet away. He abruptly stopped and glanced at the sky. I likewise looked up.

A carrion bird glided not far above our heads, swooping toward the great sandstone wall that surrounded the stable domain. Egg shuddered with relief at the buzzard’s deceptively nondescript appearance, then turned his scowl back on me. The bird looked at me from its perch and shook its feathers.