The Passage to Mythrin 2-Book Bundle (22 page)

She tried to look away, but it was too late. The dragon's gaze locked on hers. She could not stir a muscle. The eyes were bright green, like emeralds with the sun behind them. They burned into her head, burned right through the light baffle spell she kept there. They read, they saw …

The dragon screamed and Pier was free. The ledge emptied. A single red drop splashed onto a stone at the edge of the cliff. By the time Pier's heart had thumped twice, the dragon was a jagged shape against the sunset. Then it dropped beyond the hills to the west.

“Seeker! You are hurt?” Yulith bounded up the hill. Her arbalest already had another bolt slotted into place.

“N-no….” A deep breath, then another, to quiet the trembling. “No. It never touched me.” She crawled back from the cliff edge, climbed to her feet, and bowed formally. “Many thanks to your fine aim, Warrior.” The weak spots in a dragon's armour were few and small, and it took true skill to pierce one.

Yulith bowed in return. Then she looked past Pier and her eyes widened. She stabbed a calloused finger at the cliff edge. “See, where it bled!” After thirty years in arms, the last ten as the Triad's Warrior, it took a lot to make Yulith sound excited.

Pier knelt. A loose stone sat on the cliff edge. It was about half the size of her palm, pale grey like the rest of this ridge, smooth, and now printed with a star of shiny red that dulled and darkened in the sun.

This must not be left lying. Dragon blood was rare and magical. Dangerous. She picked up the stone by the edges, careful not to touch the crimson star, and slipped it into the canvas pocket that hung from her belt.

“Cunning beast!” Yulith scowled. “It must have slithered in low, close behind this ridge.” She jerked her chin at the Hall of Gates and the stony hillside behind it. “I will post watchers up there. We will not be surprised again.”

Pier took one more look at the valley, with its sparkling little river. The breeze blowing from the east smelled of late-summer grass and apples. From here you could see, through the gap between the hills at the end of the valley, a silver line at the horizon that might be the ocean.

It was all she knew of this world. Such a good place, it looked. Such a good world to live in. So they'd all thought for three wonderful days, until the dragons came.

No children ran and laughed in the valley now. All the younger ones were safe in the caves. Weaver Gram and his apprentices were twining a baffle spell to hide the cave mouths. The warriors had gone back to shooting at targets, wooden disks tied to windblown branches, in the meadow beside the river.

But everyone knew weapons and spells were not much good against dragons. They were just a stop-gap. It was time the Seeker got back to work.

Pier started back towards the Hall of Gates, where their only hope hung like a dream, just out of reach. “You should take rest!” Yulith called.

Pier just shook her head, and the Warrior didn't argue. There'd been no rest for anyone since yesterday afternoon, when three dragons, black and bronze and green, soared over the camp, and then wheeled and flew back. They'd swooped so low you could see the muscles slide under their scaly skins.

That was a terrible moment. It was the first they knew there were dragons here, too. Was there any world anywhere not overrun by dragons?

Then today this big red one. It wouldn't be long before more dragons came. Next time they'd be ready to flame.

The Hall of Gates — Pier's name for it — was high and bare. The walls were more air than stone. Tall, narrow, round-topped holes showed where windows used to be. Only six windows still held glass: coloured shapes held together by strips of metal to form pictures. Sun poured through them and splashed the floor with ruby and purple and leaf-green light. The colours were warm, but the stones were always cold in here, no matter how hot it was outside.

Most of the windows showed men and women fighting with griffins and harpies and other monsters. One showed a boy climbing a hill towards a starry sky, and reaching up as if to pluck a star. Pier liked that one. The boy had a kind face, she thought.

I wonder where the people are that made the windows?

The one where the Casseri had entered this world now stood dark and lifeless. She'd been able to do that
for her people at least — break the passage so that no dragons could follow them through.

Maybe breaking things is all I can do.

Pier faced the one window that really mattered. It showed a man on horseback aiming a spear at a huge, green, coiling snake. The warrior's coat was blue, the exact colour of the gate when it was fully formed and just before it dissolved into the passage between worlds. Not that Pier had ever reached the passage stage with this gate.

Or with any gate, by my own skill
. She shoved the thought aside, climbed up on the wooden box set there, and reached in over the deep sill. She had to stretch to get her hands on the glass. Her shoulders ached.

The green snake darkened, the warrior and his horse faded from sight. Blue light flared. Branching shapes that looked like glass and glowed like sapphire, but weren't either, tangled where the window had been. Pier closed her eyes and held her breath and moved her fingers. She'd done this so often in the last three days that now her fingertips knew every twist and turn.

Beneath the surface, in some place as far from her fingertips as the earth is from the stars, Pier's thought swerved through mazes of blue fire. Dipped and twisted and swooped, swift and sure, towards the other side, towards where it opened … into … the … passage ….

Ten heartbeats. Twelve. When she got this close, sometimes she forgot to breathe.

The sapphire light dimmed and faded. Pier's arms fell like sticks of lead. She didn't bother to look, didn't need to. The gate was gone again. She had failed. Again.

She rested her head on the stone sill. Eyes still closed, she pictured the shining thing that waited — she knew it — in the world beyond this gate, the thing that would save her people. The great Prism of legend.

To sense it, that was the dream of every seeker. To find it, to wield it, that was the work of a master. But now all the seekers were dead, including Seeker Kwan. All dead but Pier, the youngest and least. Pier, who had never actually opened a world gate by herself.

And that wasn't the worst of it. Thanks to heaven that Yulith didn't know how Pier had failed them all, just now, out on the ledge.

That dragon, it got inside my mind. It saw. It knows.

The dragon flew as far as the tangled lands before she allowed herself to sink. Not back to Sissarion, not like this. There were rivals who would smile at her weakness. At least one would snatch at the chance. He would not win, of course, but she wanted no strife, not just now.

Here. This was a good place. Deep in a gully, a dry river bed, where the cliff leaned out at the top and screened her from the sky. The smooth red stones still gave back the sun's heat. She crawled under the overhang and crouched. She wrapped her wings around her body.

There was pain. That could be endured. But this metal thing in her armpit, that must come out. She clenched a clawed fist around the shaft and pulled, hard and quick.

Then she studied the thing. A metal stick with a barbed head meant to rip flesh. Demon work for sure. Her blood had pitted and blackened the metal, but not badly enough. It could be used again, if found.

She tossed it onto the rocks outside the overhang and exhaled fire. The bolt glowed red, twisted, and fell into bits. Good!

Now, sleep. Heal. But not too long. Something must be done about these two-legged invaders, these ardini. Especially the small pale one, with her head full of painful light. She meant murder, that one.

Wrong to call them demons, even so. Must remember that. They were human. They were like Amelia.

Amelia. Amelia, where …

The dragon dreamed.

Amelia woke. The yellow walls of her bedroom glowed with morning light. The breeze drifting in the window smelled of dust and gasoline, mixed with the honey scent of alyssum planted in pots on the sidewalk. The hum of traffic on King Street, below her window, mixed with the soft roar of tumbling water in the Dunn River gorge, just beyond the buildings on the other side of the street.

It was already hot. The sheets were damp with sweat. Her tank top stuck to her body.

She dug her face into the pillow and blotted tears. Just a dream, again. The first one in more than a month. She'd thought all that was over and done with. Guess not.

Not fair! I'll never see Mara again, or the Ruby Kingdom, but I can't get them out of my dreams. It's like I keep losing them again, over and over and over.

“It felt awful darn real, though,” she said aloud.

She realized then that her right hand was closed in a tight fist, and it hurt. She opened her fingers.

Stared at what was there, biting into her palm.

Clenched her fist again. Leaped out of bed, burst out of her room into the corridor. Slammed into Simon's room and crashed the door against the wall.

He wasn't there. Annoying as ever, dear cousin Simon had made his bed and squared all the magazines and papers on his desk, like it mattered how neat his desk was, and left.

Kitchen. He was always there, eating something. The amount he ate, it was amazing he wasn't fat as a pig. But no, the kitchen was deserted, the dishes washed and drying in the rack. The air smelled of toast.

A sheet of notepaper torn from a spiral notebook lay on the table. In Grandmother's flowing handwriting it said,
Enjoy your first day of vacation, lazybones. I'll be in the shop. You know how to crack an egg. C.

A blue sticky note stuck to the sheet. In small, careful printing it said,
Gone to track. S.

“Nine metres thirteen!” Ike called. He let the measuring tape slither back into its case. “Not bad! Nowhere near as
good as with the cantaloupe, though. And you stepped outside the circle again.”

“Again!” Simon wiped sweat from his face with his T-shirt sleeve.

He and Ike were practising shot-put on the dirt track behind Dunstone and District Secondary School, where he and Ike would be in grade nine in September. The high school had the only running track in town.

They'd started at seven, in the cool of the morning. The cool was gone now. As Simon trudged towards where the five-kilo dumbbell had thudded down, he kicked up puffs of dust with each step. At least there was nobody watching him except Ike. Nobody to laugh when he tripped over his own feet for the twentieth time, or landed the weight in the wrong place entirely.

Not that Ike didn't laugh, sometimes. But they'd been friends long enough that that was okay.

Simon glanced at the two-storey building next to the track. The cantaloupe was up on the roof. He and Ike didn't have a regulation four-kilo iron shot, so they'd had to practise with other things. They'd borrowed the dumbbell from Melissa, who worked at the
Dunstone Independent
.

Dust and sweat and humiliation. Was it worth it?

This past year, Simon had finally — finally! — discovered something athletic he was good at. He could
put the shot farther than anybody else at Dunstone Public School. He'd worked hard at it, too. Lifted weights three times a week, put the shot for an hour every day after school.

Here, at last, was a way to prove to himself, and to certain other people — like … well, just as a completely random example, like Dinisha Rajeev — that he wasn't some pencil-necked geek, all brains and no brawn.

Only, he kept stepping out of the circle. Every part of him was focussed on making that iron ball fly, except his feet. His feet never did get in the game.

“Thing is,” he said to Ike as he picked up the dumbbell, “in the Weird Games we don't know how big the circle will be. There might not even be a circle. Or it might be tiny.”

“There probably won't even be a regular shot,” Ike agreed. “Last year it was tomatoes. The year before it was bowling balls. Doesn't matter. You need control no matter what.”

“Easy for you to say.” Ike was a shrimp, but he ran the way a bird flies and he could change direction on a pinhead. His feet never played tricks on him. He'd actually won silver in the 400-metre race at the Regional Middle School Track and Field Meet last month.

Ike's supreme ambition, however, was to win the Hec Manning Trophy in the Dunstone and Area Weird
Games (DAWG), which took place at the end of June each year. That was also Simon's supreme ambition. They were planning to win the trophy as a team.

Simon had hoped that his cousin Amelia might be part of their team. She would only be here for another two weeks, and kept telling him how she couldn't wait to get home to Vancouver. That was where she'd lived all her life, until her engineer parents had flown to Peru last December to help build a water treatment plant. They'd decided, against Amelia's protests, that the best thing for her would be to stay in Canada with Simon and their grandmother, Celeste, for the next six months.

Now the six months were almost up. In July Amelia would be flying back to Vancouver, though not for long. She and her parents would be moving east to Toronto in August so her parents could take jobs with a big engineering company. “I feel like a yo-yo,” she grumbled.

Simon realized, to his surprise, that he was actually going to miss her. Unlike him, Amelia was good at breaking rules and getting away with it. That, too, was what the Dunstone and Area Weird Games were all about. But she rolled her eyes and muttered “Mercy!” whenever the games were mentioned.

The main thing was not to let Kevin Purcell win again. Kevin was a year ahead of them, and he'd won the senior DAWG last year. Before that, he'd won the
junior DAWG two years out of three. And he never let anybody forget it.