Chapter 20 - Rolodia

A warm fire glowing between three tremendous boulders that comprised the entire crown of a tiny Islet a hundred leagues north of Gi’ishior, a portion of lightly grilled bat and the kindness of two friends, were all Hualiama needed to recover. Flicker treated them to a comical rendition of her altitude sickness, making up all sorts of nonsense Lia was convinced she could never have said, not if all the Islands of the world turned into mountains of purple jelly inhabited by singing draconic eels.

Resting against Grandion’s flank, with the warmth of a Dragon at her back and a fire dying to embers before her, Lia brushed out her long, wavy tresses, which unbound tumbled to the small of her back, as she tried to make sense of the day which had been. One question troubled her above all others. Best blurt it out before it burned a hole through her tongue.

“Grandion, did you murder that child?”

The Tourmaline Dragon heaved a sigh that raised such a gust, it almost snuffed out their campfire. “Must you ask?”

Hualiama wished she did not always feel she had to walk the narrow edge of her fears with him. In a small voice, she said, “Please. I must know.”

Grandion said, “That was the moment, Lia, when I realised matters had gone too far. Others had warned me. Would I listen? We stalked a child on Ya’arriol Island. I lay in wait in the densest part of the jungle, concealed, and she skipped right into my paw as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Singing, as you do.”

“Seeing me, she screamed.” Grandion’s digits curled as if he could still feel the child there, her heart fluttering in mortal terror; Lia could imagine the scene all too vividly. “Her eyes were wide, petrified, and so blue–like the child I remembered. Delicate, she quivered in my paw. Alive. A tiny fledgling, innocent of any wrongdoing. All of my murderous thoughts crashed in on me. I saw … the evil … and I asked myself, what had she done to deserve this? I was a hatchling killer, an egg stealer–not yet in deed, but certainly in my hearts. Most certainly in the dark fires of my Dragon hearts.”

Lia said, “Yet there is good in you, Grandion. You showed me mercy.”

“Aye. And I burned you.”

“You were feral.”

Grandion’s chuckle occupied a melancholy tomb beneath an Island-mountain of heavy thoughts. “Here we sit, Hualiama, representing the two great races of the Island-World. Human and Dragon. One young and vital, the other ancient and noble. Yet we Dragons have lost much. It is said we travelled from the stars. What calamity drove us hence? Have you ever asked yourself that? And what is nobility, if not a choice–not a birthright, as many Dragons believe, but the actions and choices of an honourable heart? Protect the innocent. Nurture the little ones. Stand against evil in all its forms. We must in all our deeds, exhibit integrity. We Dragons are the apex predators of this Island-World, for who dares hunt a Dragon? All the more, therefore, are these things asked–nay, demanded–of us.”

“Please, Grandion, tell me what happened to the child.”

His muzzle curved around until his lower jaw lay almost in the fire, and both of his eyes fixed on Lia. Though her question was plaintive, a tiny giggle suddenly escaped her lips.

“And what’s that giggle for, you green-eyed imp?” demanded the Dragon.

“I was just imagining what it might be like to have a neck like yours. I could look completely backward.”

“I see that Humans excel at barbed compliments, just like Dragons,” he smiled. “Well, let me put your mind at rest. I hid the girl in the leaves and bade her be as still as a mouse. When Yulgaz and Ra’aba arrived I attacked them and lured them away. That Human hatchling lives, as best I know. The Dragons chased me to Ha’athior Island, and the rest you know.”

“Ra’aba?” Lia echoed.

“Razzior. I said Razzior.”

“No you didn’t, I clearly …” Some unknown, poisonous quality in Grandion’s gaze corked the words in her throat. A soul-lost feeling swept over her, an awareness that if she pressed the point, the Dragon might tip over the edge of sanity. “I misheard.”

Flicker’s mouth was catching flies. He fidgeted with the splint on his ankle; Hualiama told him off sternly, while her thoughts raced off over the Cloudlands. No, it was an honest mistake–it had to be. Dragons could not be Humans, could they? Besides the impossibility of mixing Human seed with Dragon, the very idea was repugnant and physically unfeasible. Perhaps Dragons could change shape? But nothing in all the volumes of Dragon lore she had ever read, even hinted at the possibility. The engineer in her knew without a shadow of a doubt that the sheer size and physical volume of a Dragon could never be compressed down into Human size. Matter did not vanish into nonexistence, only to reappear. Magic itself operated according to laws similar to the physical realm. It did not arise from nothing–nothing arose from nothing! Magic existed intrinsically in the very substance of the world.

Just before he attacked her, Hualiama remembered thinking how strongly the Orange Dragon’s body language, tone of voice and even a peculiar aspect of his gaze, had reminded her of Ra’aba. Could a Dragon’s spirit or power subjugate a Human mind and inhabit a person’s living soul, making Ra’aba the mindless thrall of the Orange Dragon? She whispered, “A magic capable of binding minds.”

The Tourmaline Dragon almost tied his neck in a knot, until his nose bumped against her leg. “You speak of forbidden things,” he whispered. “Fearful powers.”

Laying her palm flat against Grandion’s nose, Lia said, “Permission for a titchy Human girl to scare a fire-breathing colossus?”

He blinked. “I’d claim with all my draconic arrogance that you can’t scare me, Hualiama, but I find entirely too many mysteries in your existence for that to resemble anything but a flight of foolishness. Speak.”

“Promise you won’t breathe fire?” She patted his nose; the dragonet helpfully tittered away as Grandion snorted uncomfortably. When he nodded, Lia summoned up Amaryllion’s words. “Brace yourself. ‘At that time, a giant comet shall streak across our skies and the balance of the Island-World shall be thrown into disarray. Old powers will fail, and a new race–the third great race of the Island-World–will rise from the shadows, a race born of magic’.”

Grandion could not have looked more stunned if she had slapped him in the muzzle with an entire Dragonship.

“Do you know of a third great race, Grandion? Do you–”

“This is deep Dragon lore, Hualiama!” he hissed, his eyes filling with ember-like orange fire in the semidarkness of a three-moons night. “How came you upon such dread knowledge?”

There were moments when Grandion seemed just like any good friend, and other times when he seemed as alien and terrible as the infamously wicked Dramagon, who legend named the father of all Red Dragons. Dramagon was said to have subjected his Human slaves to terrible experiments and torture. Hualiama was quite certain that the temptation to shorten her life at his claw-tip quivered in his body in that instant. Pretending unconcern, she returned to working a particularly stubborn knot out of her hair, but was grateful when Flicker hopped into her lap.

The Tourmaline Dragon whispered, “By the First Eggs of the Ancient Dragons … you would fracture the very foundations of this Island with such thoughts!”

Pensively, Hualiama outlined Ra’aba’s words, that fateful evening when she had met the Nameless Man. “Ra’aba tried to murder me, or have me murdered,” she said. “He believed that would break the prophecy. Amaryllion also believes that the prophecy and I are somehow linked–and, I recall, that I might have been born somewhere in the East.”

“Not with those ears,” said Grandion. Abruptly, the tension seemed to drain from his body. “We Dragons say ‘but one egg is laid at a time’, by which we mean, events will befall us as they will. Let us focus on Ianthine and the dangers she represents. You mentioned before the need to learn Juyhallith, the way of the mind. As you know, we Blue Dragons are skilled in the ways of high magic, for example, the shield I built for you this afternoon to help you withstand the cold of our altitude, or the concealing magic to hide your presence–never mind, those matters have already passed beneath our wings. I know a few Juyhallith techniques and will teach you, if you wish.”

Hualiama swallowed. How could she trust a Dragon to meddle in her mind? “What must I do?”

“Describe at length how astonishingly handsome a dragonet I am,” Flicker put in.

Mustering her courage, Lia raised her chin to meet Grandion’s gaze without recourse to her natural diffidence. “Dragon?”

Grandion’s grin seemed especially draconic as he said, “You must make yourself vulnerable.”

* * * *

Over the following two days, Grandion and his companions winged northwest to Rolodia Island, enjoying a stiff following breeze. Hualiama trained at shielding her thoughts from casual ‘borrowing’, as the Tourmaline Dragon called it, while they approached the broad, shallow oval of Rolodia Island from the air. The locals liked to name the Isle the ‘Lake of Jade’, referring to the colour of the terrace lake waters which surrounded the entirety of the Island, four tiers in all, and the densely vegetated interior, which ranged from tall jungles to towering bamboo forests.

Grandion landed stealthily near Rolodia’s only town at the southerly tip of the Island in the early afternoon. Reasoning that either of her draconic companions would attract too much attention, Lia convinced them that she enter the town alone to purchase herself a bow and a quiver of arrows. The gate guards questioned her rudely; a trader barged over her foot. Unfriendly place. Lia adjusted her headscarf self-consciously, confirming that her distinctive Fra’aniorian ears were hidden from casual view. She received a number of openly hostile looks as she inquired at an inn just inside the gates for directions to the market area. Hualiama had visited Rolodia before, but as a royal guest. This was startlingly different–probably a good experience, she told herself. Who was she trying to fool?

Lia drifted along a narrow row of brick-and-board shops, the dark eaves providing the barest sliver of protection against the white-hot twin suns’ glare. The market area seemed far too quiet. Where were all the customers? A quartet of guardsmen loitered about in an alleyway she passed by, eyeing her with the air of dogs considering a juicy bone. Ugh.

“Oi, ah fancy me that bit of skirt,” she heard as she ducked inside a likely-looking establishment.

Inside, the weapons shop was dim, and stank of oils and leather, together with the tang of hot alloys from a forge which was being worked somewhere in the back. A little apprentice boy, spying her, pelted into the back crying, “Da! Da! Is a lady.”

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“A lady, you say?” The man’s voice was gruff but not unkind.

“A pretty lady, Da! Will ya marry her? Will ya? She wearing swords and all, Da!”

A hugely muscled man ducked through a hanging bead curtain leading to the back room. A Western Isles warrior! Hualiama tried not to stare, but his dark-skinned kind were uncommon enough around Fra’anior to arouse her curiosity. The armourer’s eyes were dark points in a broad, scarred face, and his gaze dropped briefly to the Immadian forked daggers at her belt before leaping to note the hilts of her swords rising behind her shoulders.

“Well, lady,” he rumbled, his accent thick and unfamiliar. “I hope you know how to use those swords in this town. I am Jarrik the Armourer. How may I serve you?”

“I am looking for a good bow,” said Lia, realising she had been foolish on two counts. She wore rare Immadian daggers on her belt. First mistake. The second mistake, not remembering Remoyan attitudes to women who bore weapons.

“Long, short, crossbow or recurve?”

“Recurve. Compact size with a strong draw.”

Without a word, Jarrik moved to a weapons rack affixed to the wall above three neat heaps of round shields, and selected a bow. “How would this suit you?”

Lia raised an eyebrow at him, which was a long way up. Jarrik looked to be the kind of man who could beat through walls using nothing but his head. “It’s pretty, I’ll grant, but I’d need something sturdier.”

He presented her the weapon. “Test the draw for me, please. What’re you hunting?”

“Windrocs,” she said, drawing the bowstring to her ear with ease.

“Aye? Would you indulge me with two further impositions, lady? Show me your palm, and show me one of your swords.”

With a slight bow, Hualiama drew the Nuyallith sword from her preferred left side, and laid the weapon in his hand. The Armourer’s brow furrowed. He tested the sword’s weight and balance with a professional flourish, and then ran a finger reverently along the blade. “Sweet. Windrocs, eh?” He turned her palm over in his blunt-fingered paw, pursing his lips at the well-used calluses which her training had developed. “Hmm.” He passed her the blade; Lia sheathed it without hesitation.

Jarrik dismissed his rack of bows with an irascible wave. “None of these. Come into the back, lady.”

He moved to a cupboard opposite the furnace, reached inside without looking, and selected a weapon. Lia’s eyes moved to the little apprentice, who stared at her open-mouthed. She winked at him. Sweet lad.

“This is the weapon for you.”

Hualiama examined the bow curiously. It appeared to be constructed of an exotic type of lacquered hardwood, and the recurve of the tips was slightly more pronounced than she was used to. The grip fit her hand as though crafted for her alone. The craftsmanship … aye. Gorgeous.

Jarrik explained, “It’s a Haozi hunting bow, from the far southern end of the Eastern Isles. They ride a type of giant boar on their hunts, beasts that rival a ralti sheep for size. With practice–” his teeth flashed a quick grin at this “–you should be able to draw it fully.”

Right he was. Hualiama grinned back at him as she managed just over a three-quarters draw. “This is an excellent weapon. I don’t have enough coin for a bow of this quality, however. Would you accept an alternative form of payment?”

“As in?”

“Excuse me.” Reaching down her tunic front, Hualiama liberated a ruby the size of the top joint of her thumb from a secret pocket. A shadow fell upon her spirit as she remembered Inniora’s plight. Please let Ra’aba have mercy on her … “Will this do?”

Jarrik raised the gemstone to the light. “It’s more than adequate, aye. You will require a quiver and arrows? My best for you, lady.”

“And a few leather belts,” said Lia, measuring rapidly in her mind as an idea popped into the forefront of her mind. Aye, she could ride Grandion alright. He was about to be thoroughly vexed by her plan, however. She knew exactly how she would pull his leg, or wing, or whatever …

Having settled with Jarrik the Armourer and wrapped her more obvious weapons in a cloth he provided her, Lia stepped out into the dazzling suns-shine. Unease tickled her spine. In the narrow road to her left, a dozen youths played a strategic game of stone-tossing against a wall. Right, a similar number, standing and staring at her with the peculiar intent of those inciting each other to mischief–not of the humorous kind. Pretending to rub her eyes, Hualiama adjusted the cloth to provide easy access to her swords, knowing in her bones that if Grandion was prowling somewhere high above, these youths were already dead.

The youths closed in rapidly from her right, limbering up a motley assortment of weapons. Lia had expected a few insults, perhaps a way she could use her feminine wiles to slip by. No posturing from these. This confrontation was planned, organised and dangerous. She spied the town guardsmen looking on from the mouth of the alleyway with bored inattention. No help there.

“Sword-wearing rajal!”

“You trying to start a riot, foreign girl?”

“Beat her!”

Thankfully, the viler comments were swallowed up in a general ruckus as the youths broke into a run.

Little Lia briefly considered retreating into the weapons shop, but a fierce fire burned in her breast. Bullies. She hated bullies. Lia dropped her bundle, leaving a sword in each hand. Stepping out into the cobblestone street, she gathered her concentration as Master Khoyal had so painstakingly taught her. Mentally, Lia saluted him. ‘I never appreciated you enough, Master. This is for you.’

The thudding of feet matched the thudding in her senses as Lia’s mindfulness expanded in concentric ripples. The footing, the precise quality of the dust in the air, the smell of silverback trout baking in a nearby shop, the sound of Jarrik pumping the bellows to bring his forge up to heat, all filtered into her awareness. Time seemed to slow. The foremost youth charged in with his iron-shod staff levelled at her belly, his fellows just a couple of steps behind. Lia stood still, arms relaxed at her sides, her blades hanging toward the dirt. But inside, she was as taut as a coiled spring.

Now.

Let the dance begin.

A step off her left foot allowed the staff to slide by her torso, not an inch from her skin. Her red-tinged Nuyallith blade lifted gently, severing the youth’s arm at his wrist. Spinning beyond her howling victim, Lia gutted an intrepid swordsman with a clean slash across his belly, her right arm rising into a vertical parry, the left swinging beneath a club to spear a man in the thigh. These were ill-trained fighters, but the onrush caught up with her. Lia collected a cudgel blow to the shoulder and a painful stamp upon her foot, momentarily arresting her dance. Her blades shimmered darkly, left and right, leaving attackers screaming in their wake. Those at the back skidded to a halt. Vaulting a fallen dark-headed man, Hualiama rebounded off a shop wall, smashing her head into the jaw of a man just behind her.

She stumbled, dazed by the violent clash of heads. Crossbow quarrel! Her left blade, the red one, deflected the incoming quarrel before its presence even registered in her mind. Where was the archer? Springing upright, she executed the double windroc technique on a luckless rogue who was still facing the wrong direction when her blades pierced his neck and right kidney simultaneously.

Here came the other dozen youths, aware now that their intended victim was not about to lie down and beg for mercy. Lia whirled out of the dancing crane into a modified kingfisher skill, pausing just long enough to allow a blade to swish past her stomach, before leaping high into the air and striking from above, lightning-quick. Her left sword pierced a man’s eye, the right slid into another man’s cheek.

Bellowing a Western Isles war-cry, Jarrik the Armourer came charging out of his shop, using his shield as a battering-ram to crush four men against the opposite wall.

“Fancied some exercise,” he grinned, abandoning his shield to twirl a two-handed war hammer about his head. “Just bop these thugs, one, two!”

Spill their brains was what he meant.

“Thanks!” Lia ducked a javelin and used the momentum to knock a man’s feet out from under him. Jarrik finished him off by the simple expedient of dropping his knee on the man’s chest, crushing his ribcage. Grandion would have approved of that move.

For a few moments they withstood a siege of cudgels and swords, before the youths saw the better value of cowardice and fled. Gathering her weapons with exasperated haste, Lia quickly armed herself and slipped her swords into their sheaths. No point in skulking about now.

“That way,” said the Western Isles warrior, pointing.

Halfway down the road at a dead sprint, Lia heard a tramping of booted feet ahead. A cohort of Rolodia’s grey-clad guardsmen marched into the narrow street between the shops, blocking it. She turned.

“Run!” yelled Jarrik.

The sound of more boots echoed up the street. The real trap was sprung. Lia spared a half-breath to wonder if Ra’aba might not somehow be behind this, before she realised what she must do. She bounded up onto a barrel and from there, sprang up to the eaves and swung herself smoothly onto the roof. Lia raced across the uneven surface as the monks had so often trained to run across the uneven boulders near the crater lake.

For a long drawn-out second, she thought she had made her escape.

Whap! A weighted net snarled her body. Hualiama had not seen a rooftop guard post, but they had seen her and fired a net in her direction. Deprived of the use of her arms and legs, Lia toppled helplessly, rolled down a shingled slope, and tumbled into the street below. A mound of red-dyed cloth broke her fall, but she had no time to struggle free of the net. Cruel hands seized her.

“Now you’ll pay, girl!”

An unseen cudgel slammed her head into the cobblestones. Blackness overwhelmed her instantly.

* * * *

A Princess locked in a tower. The same prekki fruit of old, Flicker chirped, slipping between the bars of Lia’s tower cell.

Flicker! Hualiama gasped. What … where did you come from?

The dragonet inquired archly, Good shopping trip? What’re you still doing in here?

Escaping, of course. Lia worked vigorously at the lock on her left ankle. Toss it in a Cloudlands volcano, this one’s so blasted stiff …

Shall I fetch the keys off that hook, straw-head? Her brilliant smile made him flip an aerial somersault–gingerly, to avoid further hurting his ankle. The dragonet chattered, Aye, thank you Flicker. You are my saviour, my best friend and indeed, the true dragonet-king of all Fra’anior. Here. Loosen those chains while I call Grandion.

As the jail tower was a little ways out of the city, down near a garbage heap which smelled emphatically appealing to Flicker, he and the blue blunderer had decided that with a touch of Grandion’s concealing magic, they could rescue the Human girl and earn themselves kisses. Well, kisses were his privilege. By his wings, there was no way he’d allow that prowling Lesser Dragon to muscle in on his girl, shiver the thought and turn his fires to ice!

Having signalled Grandion as agreed, Flicker returned to the cell to find Lia gone! The door yawned open. In a flash he whizzed down the spiral staircase. He narrowly avoided crashing into the back of Lia’s head and instead, violently assaulted the man facing her with a crossbow levelled at her chest. Meantime, Grandion landed on the roof, shaking the building. Twang! A quarrel quivered in the wooden ceiling of the room beneath Lia’s previous cell.

Hualiama chopped the man down with the hard edge of her hand. “Flicker, I had it under control!”

“That’s what you’re doing with a lump on your head, in jail?”

“I was in the middle of escaping, you brainless lizard,” she complained. “Look, the guard captain laid all my things out nicely on his desk so that he could choose what he wanted for himself. Let me just collect–”

“Grandion is so upset with you–I’m upset with you!”

The Tourmaline Dragon thundered, “WHERE IS THAT PEST?”

“Hmm, sounds like he’s planning to rip the roof off,” said Lia, strapping on her daggers with a studied unconcern that had the dragonet gaping. Would he ever understand the ways of a two-legged female? “Tell him to wait just a rajal’s whisker, Flicker.”

Flicker coughed up fire as he squeaked, “You tell him!”

A huge blue paw smashed through the floorboards, shooting splinters and chunks of wood across the room. Grandion snarled, “You come here right now, you wretched bundle of vexation, or I swear I’ll pulverise this place–”

“Coming, Grandion,” she cooed.

Flicker blenched. That was completely the wrong tone to take with a Dragon … on cue, Grandion’s fury erupted in spectacular style. He roared so deafeningly and so long that the Islanders could probably have heard him back on Gi’ishior, never mind Rolodia. Rock detonated just a couple of feet above their heads, while the south tower wall bulged and cracked as he flexed his muscles. Nails shrieked as the incensed Tourmaline Dragon tore through the floor, tossing boards and sturdy beams to the winds.

Hualiama shrugged her Nuyallith sword harness over her shoulders. “Right, Flicker, just a couple more things and I’ll be ready.”

A wordless squeak of dread escaped the dragonet. Hualiama deftly sidestepped a grasping paw, as if the Dragon were fishing for her like a dragonet fishing in a pond, and scooped her belongings into her arms.

“Quick, Flicker. Upstairs now.”

“There’s neither an upstairs nor stairs left anymore,” he pointed out.

Grandion’s forepaws swept the room from either end, eventually corralling the Human girl near the middle. His muzzle punched through what remained of the ceiling. The Tourmaline Dragon glowered at Hualiama from a distance of six inches, panting great gasps of smoke, growling deep in his belly as his tail idly demolished another section of the Rolodian jail tower behind him. Flicker sensed that his righteous wrath had robbed him of words, or more accurately, he did not wish to open his jaw and embroil her in a deadly firestorm. Grandion’s sword-like talons flexed as if longing to burrow into a certain Human’s impudent neck.

Flicker decided that at this precise moment, the path of valour would be to bury himself beneath the rubble, or be flying a hundred leagues an hour in the opposite direction.

“I’m ready when you are, Grandion,” Lia chirped, with a radiant smile. “Oh, and this is for coming to pick me up after my shopping.” Leaning forward, Hualiama planted a kiss directly on Grandion’s left eye. “You’re the best.”

Although, a dragonet could be moved to contemplate murder on occasion.