The Onyx Dragon (33 page)

Ahead, that slender black huntress just flew on and on and on, indefatigable. At barely the size of a fledgling, this level of resilience should be … ay, impossible. She flew lower, by his wings, but no slower. By the time dawn warmed her pretty tail-spikes, she was flying five hundred feet above the Cloudlands, right in the danger-zone yet still achieving speeds of over fifteen leagues per hour. Many of his Night-Reds would soon have to turn back. The Dragonwing remained half a mile above and four miles astern. What was she thinking? Where could she fly to, out here?

And then he saw it. A disturbance in the Cloudlands just a pebble-toss behind Pip. A disturbance that tracked her flight-path with ominous intent.

He had erred. Silver’s bugle of horror split the morning.
Faster! Catch her!

The hundred-strong Dragonwing swooped, powering up to their full attack velocity. Pip did not seem to notice. She was certainly not aware of the acidic cloud-eddies boiling in her wake. Was she sleeping on the wing? Some Dragons could doze on the wing, but the practice was generally disregarded as saving minimal energy, while in Herimor, it placed a Dragon in deadly danger. Out here the skies seemed clear of predators and parasites. Silver spit angrily. Soft Northerners! They did not know how easy life was, north of the Rift.

And Pip. Two hundred leagues she had travelled and unerringly located the only trouble in this entire Middle Sea! Clearly, she had a gift.

Now the eddies seemed to suck downward, before exploding in a mountainous surge of black and yellow scales, a colour as poisonous as the deadly salamanders of Herimor. A shockwave of magic blasted back into his Dragonwing, scattering the Night-Reds and knocking many unconscious. They fell to their deaths in the Cloudlands. Silver himself was shaken to the very core of his fire-stomach, but his superior shielding saved him.

Pip reacted, flitting sideways. The great Land Dragon snapped out a paw. She struck a talon, tumbled, and then–what? A spit or glue attack? Like a fly ambushed by a cunning chameleon, the struggling, howling, gloop-covered Pygmy Dragoness vanished into that maw on the tip of a purple Island-slapper of a tongue.

The monster dived. Its huge, damp-slick body disappeared beneath the ever-present, opaque cloud layer with one final swirl of gases. Draconic laughter bubbled up from the deeps.

Shurgal!

Silver gathered his decimated Dragonwing with a series of low commands. His shell-father would be displeased. Very displeased indeed.

Now, Shurgal would come to bargain for the First Egg. They must be ready.

* * * *

Stuck in a glob of hot grey glue that could have engulfed Emblazon, never mind a Pygmy-sized Dragon, Pip vanished into Shurgal’s maw. Oddly, she did not fear to be eaten. Death was apparently the least of her worries. What she felt was … fury? She grew weary of jumping from one volcano to the next, from sizzling trouble into the heart of the bonfire. Not that Dragons minded molten rock. She felt him dive, felt the undulating motion of the great body apparently running or swimming as the pressure grew steadily; her ear-canals constricted to compensate, making the sounds reaching the inner ear-organs muffled but still audible.

Then, Shurgal swallowed.

Pip might have screamed a Word of Command save that she barely had enough magic left to shield herself, and that imperfectly. She rolled down a cavernous gullet on a floor of rippling draconic muscle, before abruptly branching off into one of his stomachs–not a food-stomach or a fire-stomach, thankfully. A water-stomach.

BUBBLE!
Shurgal’s voice crashed over her.

How?

Do you know nothing? Make an air-bubble. Like THIS!

She replied,
Softly, mighty Shurgal. I am … tiny and frail. Please.

Dragons loved small, cute things, perhaps because they were so mighty. Pip had once watched Shimmerith playing with a kitten upon her paw, her eye-fires mellowing into orange and apricot tones. Shurgal’s tone unconsciously mellowed as she played to his instinctive protection-sense. Yet his intellect was vast, and the colours she sensed in his mind, dark-fires of green and a muddy brown–not a healthy sign. According to Silver, those colours were the signs of mental instability or even insanity. Her health, first. Pip formed an air-bubble around herself and queried Shurgal about how best to filter the toxins she sensed seeping through her flawed magical construction.

Soon, the air improved as she began to find some limited control of the fine art of gas flow, both into and out of her bubble as she floated on the surging waters of Shurgal’s third stomach. The glue began to wash away, leaving her wings tacky but serviceable.

Well. From the Marshal’s torture-chamber to the inside of a Dragon’s stomach. Life was looking up.

She began to speak, but Shurgal silenced her irritably. Pip gasped at the outpouring of his magic, understanding that he was concealing their tracks and even the aura of their passing, the magical disturbance every Dragon created as they traversed the Island-World. That signature, which the Marshal had wielded so effectively against her.

Deeper and deeper he ran; the pressure multiplied accordingly, his movements becoming ever more fluid. She imagined the Dragon running down an under-Cloudlands mountain. With the increased pressure, her efforts with the shield became more and more challenging, for the outward osmotic flows grew sluggish and the inward flows harder to manage. She wished desperately for Silver’s fine mental control. He was just so ridiculously talented–could he be devious enough to have intentionally supplanted her in an effort to gain the Marshal’s trust? Was that his plan? He was a creature of Herimor, after all.

Nothing would be easily forgiven, or forgotten.

The motion of Shurgal’s body changed to a side-to-side rippling which felt like swimming. Pip wished she could see something, anything at all, of the fabled under-Cloudlands realm, but her world was darkness save for the natural glow of her fire-eyes. She stood in a bubble just large enough for her Dragoness, floating beneath a curved, ribbed roof of deep purple, in a cavern which appeared to be three-quarters full of water. To her left, three successive layers of massive sphincter muscles had constricted the water’s egress, and hers. She supposed this place was as effective a jail as any.

Sensing no immediate danger, Pip slept warily–one eye half-cracked open, jungle style–for she judged her best form of defence was to recover her magic. After a period she estimated to be eight or nine hours, Shurgal suddenly growled:

Speak. You had a question.

Pip deliberately relaxed every muscle which had clenched in surprise.
Shurgal, what do you want of me?

The First Egg.

At her soft interrogative, he added,
The First Egg belongs to my kind, the Land Dragons. I am Shurgal-ap-Tuûar-bàr-Rhiytûxi, Guardian of Wisdom of my tribe the Rhiytûxi, also called the Water-Runners. There are many tribes. Some, in your tongue, you would call Shell-Clan. There are Stellates, Deep-Dwellers, Air-Breathers who make your Islands above the Cloudlands, tribes named for colour and allegiance … very many. You peak-dwellers think of this realm as dead, yet it is alive and filled with life in all its many forms.

Shurgal’s mental voice had a curious edge to it, almost an echo, and nuances she had never sensed in a Dragon’s mind before. Pip wanted to examine him more closely, but there was a crystalline quality to his mind that denied access, making her regard slide aside like claws skittering over crysglass.

And you gave the Egg to–

Re’akka stole the Egg! With his foul power, he convinced Leandrial and her perfidious kin to steal the First Egg, the greatest treasure of my kind, leading to Imbalance and war and suffering.

Finally, Pip worked out how to modulate the Land Dragon’s telepathic Dragonish, so that his passionate roaring subsided to a dull growl, like faraway thundering. Better that than hurting her extremely tender brain still further. Yet still, she sensed that curious double-echo behind his voice, and wondered what it meant.

So you–

He roared,
I summoned the Nurguz to punish this pathetic Marshal by destroying his tribe.

And therefore, all the Lesser Dragons and Shapeshifters above the clouds,
Pip said, aghast.
Yet why can the Nurguz not hunt down here? Your magic is greater than any in our airy realms, surely, the greatest prize of all? Well, besides the First Egg. Everyone seems to want the Egg.

Ah, the joy of speaking Dragonish. She inevitably fell back into archaic speech-patterns. Hearing herself speaking this way was a source of amusement, yet the topic was crucial. Pip focussed narrowly on his response.

In the loftiest of tones, the Land Dragon explained,
There are different types of Dragon magic, just as there are different dialects of Dragonish. I speak your dialect to help you. The Egg’s shell-magic is inanimate. The Nurguz has no interest in such power. It lives for the hunt, for the taste of life itself. Our harmonic magic is a different form again. The primary restriction appears to be depth. The power demanded of the Nurguz’s manifestation into our physical realm is prohibitive at such depths.

Pip gasped.
It’s a Shapeshifter?

A dimension-shifter.

Can you … send it back?
she asked cautiously.

No. Once summoned, the Nurguz will strip this world of its magic. There is no return. It is an intelligent, voracious and ruthless hunter. A scourge.

Yet the Shadow was apparently attached to the Marshal, or at least his Island, for it had chosen not to chase her. Teleportation could not be the answer. Too illogical. Pip’s mind returned to the problem of Shurgal. Doubtless, he planned to use her to bargain with the Marshal, or worse, to use her powers to steal back the First Egg. Yet the fate of the Egg concerned her as well. If there was an Ancient Dragon inside, she should protect it from a creature such as Shurgal, who wielded a power gained from–she stopped, thunderstruck. Roaring rajals!

Unsteadily, Pip said,
So, what part do the Theadurial play in this complex power-game, o Shurgal? Do they not seek the Egg for their own ends?

The Theadurial dwell at enormous depths in the great rifts of Herimor,
he replied.
In their pupal stage they are able to parasitize Land Dragons, growing like your jungle vines along the brain-stem. What interest would they have in an Ancient Dragon’s Egg? They’re highly specialised parasites capable of inhabiting only one type of host.

And your parasite, does it agree with you, Shurgal?

My parasite?

The Theadurial I sense embedded in your flesh.
Well, that much was intuition, but one Pip was reasonably certain of as she tried to piece together the true story of the First Egg and its claimants. And which Dragoness had laid it? She had not even begun to unpack the saddlebags of that question.

Shurgal’s movement stilled. For a moment, he simply drifted there beneath the Cloudlands. Pip heard her steady hearts-beat and was thankful for life; for how long, who knew? For the poisons continued to leach gradually into her system.

Suddenly, a new voice emerged, a voice of muted tinkling, as if crystal chimes clinked together beneath a layer of foul grease–that was her mental image. Pip blanched. She had never imagined such a hateful sound. Had she been a jungle jaguar, every hair on her spine would have stood bolt-upright and she would have backed away, snarling. She felt physically sick as it sneered:

Smart little Dragoness, aren’t we?
So full of tasty nuggets of magic. Never mind, one little taste of my
urzul
and you will be ready to be parasitized–

KAAABOOOM!!

Shurgal quaked as an unseen force struck him amidships.

Again, an enormous blow shook the great Land Dragon. She had imagined at first Shurgal had run headlong into a mountain, perhaps, but now he shuddered in pain beneath repeated strikes, turning Pip’s hitherto slightly rocky ride into a Pygmy Dragon-sized pip rattling about in an enormous shaker half-filled with water. She tumbled about in her shield-bubble, desperately trying to shore up her defences. Then she heard a muted roar without–another Land Dragon! Leandrial! Her prison bounced in every conceivable direction as the Land Dragons grappled, bellowing at each other with the hatred of mortal enemies.

Pip cried,
Leandrial! Leandrial! In here!

Suddenly, magic gripped her. The Theadurial! She tried to beat it away, but its magic was like trying to beat tendrils of greasy darkness. Fragments kept touching her, and everything they touched, became tainted. Pip had never fought anything like it. The Theadurial slipped through her shielding like a Dragon’s talons rending an undefended Dragonship’s air-sack–was this
urzul?
Or the Theadurial’s native magic? It was different to anything she had sensed in the Marshal. Panicked and in pain, Pip struck back with the psychic blasts Silver had taught her, and this at last caused the creature to recoil. She patted herself down mentally. All parts present.

Leandrial! Help!

Talons! Without warning, a massive talon blazed through the water-stomach right above her head. Pip hurled herself aside, gasping–a burning talon? Again, what magic was this? Reeking emerald smoke curled from the trench carved in Shurgal’s stomach lining, before it closed apparently of its own accord. Never mind shielding! She had a different problem. Leandrial was trying to cut her out blind, and doing a fine job judging by the sounds out there. The fray escalated to a whole new pitch of deafening. Pip curled up as the Land Dragons battled furiously, cuffing each other with blows fit to shake Islands, snarling and growling and tussling in an unimaginable physical battle. She wondered how many Humans had stood on an Island, felt a tremor, and not known it was Land Dragons scrapping somewhere near the roots of their domain?