Dragon Thief (11 page)

Perfect! Kal chuckled in delight. Simple. Unusual–unique, even. A family heirloom he had caused to be misplaced in Immadia many, many moons ago.

Whistling a jaunty tune, he returned to the bedchamber.

Ambushed!

When his heart had been restored to its proper place in his chest, and Human-Tazi had finished smothering his mouth, chin and cheeks in kisses–being unequivocally delighted with the new, smoother Kal–she stepped back.

“Presents for me, King Kal? You’re too kind.”

“You shall be my Queen,” said he, pulling out a showstopper of a complete Fra’aniorian bow, which took three full minutes and fair dint of exercise to complete. “First, we must gild the finest flower of Mejia.”

Tazithiel turned the garment over in her hands. “Er, which is the side which is mostly missing–the back or the front?”

“Oh for the silver tongue of a bard when I need one.” Kal’s droll expression ignited a flood of rose in her cheeks. “I couldn’t guarantee your safety either way. That’s right, now try the mirror. It’s big enough for your Dragoness.” She turned and twirled, showing him the daringly backless design. “Breathtaking,” he approved, triggering a few stray sparks that leaped from the small of her back to his possessive hand. “Now, I’ve a special gift for you. Close your eyes. Hold out your hand.”

“What is it?” she asked, turning the item over in her fingers. “A scale–Kal, are you having me on?”

“You may open your eyes.”

“It’s a White Dragoness’ scale,” he explained, watching her reaction closely, the better to enjoy her delight. “I’m told it once belonged to a Star Dragoness–”

With a shriek, Tazithiel dropped the hand-sized scale and attached necklace at her feet as though she had palmed a cobra. She stared at the gift in horror, her hands shaking violently. “Kal, I saw … I saw–how could you do this to me?”

“Uh–”

“I can’t wear it! Oh, you foolish, foolish man! Oh, great Islands, Kal …” Tazi’s hands covered her mouth, her eyes above them, wide with raw horror. “That’s the three thousand. Right there, that’s the price on your head.”

“What? Impossible, Tazi. It’s a Dragoness’ scale, no more, no less.”

“Where did you get it, Kal? Another fortuitous find? You were just strolling about a remote corner of the Island-World when a bit of treasure fell miraculously into your pocket?”

For the first time in his life, Kal considered his profession, and felt dirty.

“It was a dare,” he explained, unwillingly. He crouched to pick up the scale and its simple golden necklace, sized for a slender female neck. “A down payment on my Thieves’ Guild membership at Erigar Island. I so desperately wanted to be accepted in their world, Tazi. I was a boy of fourteen summers. I had no idea what I was doing. They convinced me I needed something big; I knew the tales about the riches of the Dragon-Queen of Immadia. So I went and stole something of hers. It wasn’t heroic or daring or even terribly difficult, just a distinctive piece which I found lying openly on her dresser. I’d heard a ballad tell of its existence. The scale of a Star Dragoness.”

More gently, Tazithiel said, “That scale would be the prize possession of Aranya of Immadia, Kal, she who is arguably the most powerful Dragoness who ever lived. She has moved Islands to find it again. Whole Islands–you’ve no idea how badly she wants it back.”

Her gaze was level. No levity. No threat. Yet Kal felt cornered. His world had closed in; suddenly actions had consequences, and upon the vines of his choices, strange and troubling fruit had begun to sprout. He wanted to say this was Tazithiel’s fault, but the Kal of any smidgen of honesty knew better. Privately, he tossed honour, truth and the justice his past deeds deserved, into the nearest volcano. Was he not Kal, the walls of whose world were made to be scaled, fortresses infiltrated and maidens … he glanced guiltily at Tazithiel. Robbed! He’d always considered a conscience to be akin to fungus, germinating in weakness and nasty at the edges. Herein lay an entirely novel peril, but it was the endpoint of a thread Kal recognised, belatedly, had come to be woven within the tapestry of his life over the last decade or so. Bah.

“At risk of being accused of swearing at you again,” Tazi added, “I’d urge you to consider returning the scale to its rightful owner.”

He grunted, “I’ll think about it.”

“There are few things I’d beg of you, Kal.”

The fragility inherent in her statement rattled him. She meant for both their sakes, he realised. Should a Dragon be caught shielding this secret, it would fly with the grace of a lead-filled Dragonship. But how would anyone ever know, or work out, who had possession of some special Dragon’s scale? And how could a single scale be so ruddy important?

His fingers curled around the metallic scrap. Kal pocketed it.

* * * *

That day, they were King and Queen together.

Kal and Tazi explored Istariela’s hoard. Thoughts of the Star Dragoness’ sad fate at her beloved’s claw gave way to merriment as they sampled his collection of the finest wines and brandies money could buy–or not–sourced from the private vaults of those Kal loudly disparaged as ‘popinjays, fools and warts upon an Island’s backside’. They competed to see who could dress in the most foppish costumes, the most opulent silks, velveteen and Fra’aniorian lace; they tried on crowns and diadems, rolled down slopes of gold drals and rooted about in random treasure chests, hooting and exclaiming over their discoveries, and retired at intervals to play with the bed hangings and waggling sceptres and suchlike.

Her laughter was Dragonwine to his soul. A small part of Kal did wonder why the Dragoness’ revelry appeared quite so frenzied, but this day was about casting their cares aside. Assaulting uncrossable mountains could wait. Sampling another vintage? Much more appealing.

Having slept a slumber of excess and decadence, Kal stirred with great care come morning, and heard a peculiar vibration in his lair–a deep, heavy purring sound. He rubbed his temples, unable to decide whether this was his hangover or the Island about to fall upon his head, and stumbled off to make his ablutions. On second thoughts, that icy waterfall in the Star Dragoness’ bath chamber was just the rajal’s shirt. The water would pound cold reality into his pebble-stuffed cranium. Wash these mawkish morals down the nearest drain. He should make plans with this Dragoness. See the world’s treasures from close up. Mmm.

Kal emerged from the waterfall. Louder. That dratted humming; it set his teeth on edge. The whole cavern complex vibrated as indignantly as a beehive kicked down a hill.

Rescuing his trousers from a place of abandonment upon a bedpost, Kal dressed and set off to investigate, which took him all of a few seconds. Tazithiel? In all her draconic finery, his sweet Dragoness lolled upon the gold in the central chamber, humming to herself. The chamber hummed back, only at a considerably greater volume and discernible menace. Well. A most fetching image of their first meeting popped into Kal’s mind–only, he did not fancy the glint in her Dragon’s eye. Nor the tenor of the chamber’s response.

“Finest of the morning to you, o noble Indigo Dragoness!” he sang out, setting his foot upon the steps descending to the treasure-floor.

With an ugly growl, Tazithiel slipped through the gold like a terrace-lake trout sporting in churning water–surely, a feat of physical impossibility, yet she dove beneath the surface, rippling toward him, before breaching in a shower of coins, baskets and bullion-bars. Kal staggered as a suit of golden armour bounced off his shoulder.

Get away from my treasure, little Human!

Kal stared. Green flame in her eyes? No hint of recognition–was she feral?
Tazithiel?

Out, you miniscule pest! Mine!

Her muzzle swung about, not the blindingly quick snap of Dragon reactions, but hellishly fast anyways. Kal twisted and leaped in one fluid motion, avoiding her sweeping burst of flame at the expense of a scorched shoulder. He ducked behind a twenty-foot golden statue.

What by Fra’anior’s roots is wrong with you, you gigantic smoking lizard?
Kal shouted.
Stop it!

Her paw curled about the statue. Tazi stalked him, spreading her wing on one flank to cut off his escape, and her paw on the other.
You despoiled me.

You were a willing part–yie!
Kal sprang aside and managed to ride a jewelled breastplate twenty feet down into a golden dell amidst the treasure. The Indigo Dragoness slithered after, her eye-fires blazing an unholy, unnerving shade of green.
And enthusiastic! Taaaazzzzzziiiii …

Wailing was no help. Running for his life–eminently more advisable. Kal kicked showers of golden drals into the Dragoness’ maw as he zigzagged up a slope, pumping his arms, before diving down the other side with the poise of a swooping falcon. He would outrun this Dragoness if it was the last …

His belt snagged on a three-quarters-buried Dragon lance.

“Help!”

The Dragoness snaffled him up with the dexterity of a cutpurse relieving a merchant’s belt of its load. She snarled,
Help is far, far away, you wriggling louse. Now I will–

As she spoke, the Dragoness’ lungs filled with an inrushing of wind. Kal dangled from her paw rather more like a bedraggled rat than he cared to admit. With a massive grinding sound, the wall opposite cracked open. Even Kal sensed the cave’s magic now, rapidly escalating from sweet harmonies to a storm-dangerous shriek. Tazithiel, maddened beyond reason, did not appear to sense the changes in their environment.

Her fire jetted forth.

White fire, burning through his pocket faster than the eye could follow, smashed into the space between Kal and the Indigo Dragoness. He clutched his hip instinctively. Saw a light blaze so brightly, it highlighted every bone in his hand.

KAAARRAAAABOOOOM!

Kal and his superheated girlfriend parted ways with a devastating explosion–Kal to smash against a pile of gold plates, Tazithiel to be ejected from the chamber through the unfeasibly small crack in the wall opposite. What–the air had undulated around her and … he groaned, shifting his battered body. Nothing broken, maybe.
Ding!
A golden platter chimed cheerfully as it bounced off his skull.

Now that was magic! Dazed, Kal’s gaze dropped to his smoking vitals. Oh, freaking fireballs! He treated the material of his trousers to a frantic flurry of slaps, putting out a small blaze. There was charred, oozing skin, but oddly, he felt no pain.

Tazi? Through the four-foot gap in the chamber wall, he saw the Dragoness cartwheeling away through the sky in a flurry of limbs and wings, out of his line of sight.

“Tazithiel–no!”

K
AL limped UP
to the surface and over to Mistress Chema’agion’s triangular log cabin to request treatment. She was a short woman but as broad in the beam as a Dragonship, and more direct than a quarrel. Called ‘Chemi’ for short, she hailed from Seg, northwest of Sylakia Island.

She greeted him at the door with a scowl and a sniff of disdain for his condition, given her extensive experience with Kal’s wounds in times past. “Here comes trouble. What you want, boy?”

“Mistress Chemi.” Kal bowed deeply. “How’s your family? Your husband? Your–”

“Yardi! Clear the dining-room table!” she yelled in a voice like a Sylakian Captain of the Hammers. “Got us a patient.”

Chemi had four teenage daughters and one son, and a husband who was famously spear-thin. They made a most unusual couple–her husband Taggion was a gangly Northerner, as pale as parchment, while Chemi was as round and brown as a nut. Kal had known them since their oldest was swaddled as a babe.

Kal eyed the horizon once more before ducking inside to a chorus of giggles. Tazithiel, thank the heavens and all five moons, was still making angry circuits of the Island-Cluster, hopefully working off a severe case of Dragon greed and her deep contrition at having injured her cherished Rider’s sceptre and adjacent parts. Or was it the scale which had burned him, while somehow protecting him from the Dragoness’ fire?

Yardi, at fourteen the third in line and boldest of her sisters, greeted him sweetly, “Islands’ greetings, Kal.” This with such a fluttering of eyelashes, Kal wondered that they did not snap off. “Mom, do we need to remove his trousers for treatment?”

“Get on that table, boy!” Chemi’s brown eyes flashed at her daughters. She bawled, “You girls got chores, or what?”

Kal rather suspected their chores would centre on the kitchen. Perhaps he ought to have worn a shirt. Then again, he was so sore, the added attention was surely no hardship.

Chemi growled, “You jump in a campfire, boy? What you done to your manlies?” The giggling! Chemi yelled at her daughters again; four brunette heads vanished behind a doorpost, but Kal could hear them tittering away back there. “Lie down. Don’t want none of your complaining. Always turning up at my door like a dirty brass dral with some hole or other in your hide. You bleeding clumsy for a grown man. Ha’aruka! Boy, where you gone hiding? Get me a bucket of fresh water–snippety-quick!”

“Yes, Mom.”

The door banged. Silence. Kal hissed as Chemi touched the blistered skin on his shoulder. “No charcoal in here. No cloth, neither. What kind of burn you got, boy?”

“Dragon fire,” said Kal.

At the same time, Ha’aruka came sprinting back inside, pallid and trembling. “Mom, there’s a-a-a …”

“Speak up! For a boy of fifteen summers you gone lost your tongue?”

Tazithiel strolled through the open doorway. Not Dragon-Tazi, but her Shifted form. She wore not a stitch of clothing. Kal reddened. Ha’aruka looked as though he had swallowed a bonfire. Dragonesses! Roaring rajals, did they have to flaunt themselves?

Then again, her flaunt-ability, if that was a word, was completely off the scale.

Without missing a beat, Mistress Chemi flipped a cloth over her son’s head and thrust him out of the room. The boy vented a low groan of frustration. Kal sympathised, oh aye! Meantime, the Mistress drew herself up to her full height, which was not saying a great deal, but her expression said far more. Kal beamed. Right, this should be fun, Mistress Chemi giving a Shapeshifter Dragoness the full brunt of one of her infamous broadsides.

Chemi scooted out a chair. “You with this worthless reprobate, great lady?”

Great lady? Kal almost choked in outrage.

Tazithiel seated herself as if this were the most perfectly natural behaviour in the world. From behind the doorway, he heard someone sigh, “Did summer just sit down in our kitchen?” and another, shyer voice, “She’s
so
beautiful.”

Wretched exhibitionist!

“He can be rather trying,” said Tazi, with a twinkle of her eye meant for Kal and his hyrax-bemused-by-a-cobra grin.

“You far too good for him, girl. Sweet young petal like you, it’s beyond my powers of reason what you see in that washed-up old geezer.”

Kal had begun to gasp in protest when the nude menace opposite somehow sabotaged his air supply with her Kinetic power, turning the word into a pained wheeze. “Geeeeee …” he whistled. He resorted to hand-signals to express his infuriation.

“Speechless, I see?” Chemi snorted. “Fine quality in a man, says I. Just you treat this woman princess-like, Kal, or I swear … I’ll have none of your cavorting and frolicking about like you done with those other poor petals–girls! Close your ears!” Kal hissed as she applied salve to his shoulder. “You been teaching my girls nothing good about men, you disgraceful lout. Ha’aruka, get your head back in that room this instant!”

“I’m reformed, I swear!”

Chemi smiled sweetly. “He reforms them two at a time.”

“
Two?
” Kal found his volume.

“Maybe I’m exaggerating a touch. Sure seems like it, though.”

“I’ve my methods for keeping him in line,” Tazithiel smiled, acting so innocent, Kal could gladly have throttled her. He wanted to yell something about Dragon fire, claws, talons, underhanded magical jurisdiction over his trousers, and …

“You two staying for dinner? Of course you are,” said Mistress Chemi, neatly slamming the door on any protest. “Great lady, you borrow yourself a dress. Mind you, I’m not putting my salve anywhere near his manlies. Might catch myself something ghastly.”

Tazi drawled, “I’m sure it won’t inconvenience me.”

“Here.” Chemi tossed the pot of salve to Tazi, who caught it deftly. “You won’t need much. Not for his manlies, anyways.” Howls of mirth erupted from the next room.

“Evidently not,” smirked the Dragoness.

Kal shouted, “Great Islands! Is there no justice in this world?”

* * * *

“Is my little Kally-wally comfortable?”

He was not, but Kal was not about to dignify Tazithiel’s barbs with a response.

Kal stared at the ninety-foot breadth of her wings, cupping and shifting huge volumes of air. He rode Dragonback as had many famous Riders before him, only their purpose was noble and their cause just–at least, those who followed the values of Hualiama, long-ago Princess of Fra’anior. She had established the Dragon Rider Academies to train peacekeepers and law-givers. Peacekeeping was a foolish notion. Land oneself slap in the middle of every manner of conflict? Unhealthy, unwise and naïve. Further, many Dragon Riders were as crooked as the infamous broken-trees of Ur-Naphtha Cluster in the West. Noble? Well, Tazithiel was nobleness incarnate, and that was one aspect of the gulf between their natures.

She said, “And his eensy-weensy manlies?”

“Hurting like a freaking–” Kal skipped a swear word. What was the point in moral superiority if he still
thought
the word? “Just hurting.”

“I’m sorry I burned you,” said Dragoness-Tazi. He was not convinced by her fiery contrition. “More herbs?”

“Kallion of the kingly sceptre has downed enough herbs to turn some of these Islands green,” he replied, gesturing at the tan barrenness far below. “How does anything live out here, Tazi?”

“Life is more tenacious than you might suppose.”

He wondered if she was talking about her experiences. “Let’s try not to tangle with any drakes, alright? I’m feeling sensitive.”

Tazithiel guffawed, “The best part was when Mistress Chemi started describing in detail how to apply the ointment, Kal. You could’ve carved holes through Islands with your expression!”

“Bah. Self-restraint. Who ever invented such a ralti-stupid idea?”

Chortling away with a volley of flame-hiccoughs, the Dragoness said, “Your favourite monks, no doubt. Kal, you can feel sensitive for a few days yet. We’re less than a day from your hoard and I, for one, appreciate how difficult it is to leave all that avarice behind.”

Tazithiel had acted subdued since her display of draconic lust which had come within inches of turning one purportedly rehabilitated thief into a Dragon’s breakfast. They discussed the protections Istariela must have placed upon her hoard, but reached no conclusions. Tazi knew of no Dragon magic which could thread a Dragoness of her size through the proverbial hole in the needle, nor one which responded to draconic avarice.

“Greed is the face of ugliness,” he said. “I should know.”

She winced palpably.

He worried about what they flew toward. His hoard had been one matter. Another, quite different concern lay ahead at Yin’toria Island. He should drop by. In his line of business, it paid to keep the staff hopping. Aye. A devious smile played about his lips. A Dragoness might provide just the medicine they needed, if she did not slay him first. Hopefully, her many-clawed tyrannical majesty would major on the playing and pay less attention to the slaying.

She said, “Most of the drakes prefer the western periphery of the Island-Desert anyways. In this season, we should find a few other Dragon Riders strutting about, notching up kills. Hopefully friendly. No way under the suns the search could have spread this far, this quickly.”

“I prefer to leave hunt-and-kill operations to those patently designed from the ground up for such pursuits,” Kal replied. Now optimism? In his view, pessimism paved the road to a long life.

“So, my dear sweetmeat formerly called Kal, am I to understand you subscribe to the theory that the Lesser Dragons were designed by Fra’anior and his ilk?”

“You’re a Shapeshifter,” he said, alert to the threat implied in her words. “That’s different.”

“Hmm?” She blew a smoke ring over him.

“Your impeccably sinuous draconic physique is an ode so sweet–” Kal coughed unhappily as the happy little smoke-rings turned into acrid billows. “Smoking out this hard-working artist while he’s composing poetic praises to the glories of your every scale is hardly an appropriate expression of gratitude, Tazithiel. Consider yourself told off.”

“Methinks he avoideth the question.”

“Methinks mine masculine mystery must mercifully remain mute.”

Thus they passed the hours of flight in banter and companionable silences, as the tireless wingbeat of an Indigo Dragoness propelled them ever westward, day by day, across the breadth of an Island-Desert matched in size only by the Cloudlands oceans themselves. Still, Kal would have preferred to imagine that life thrived beneath that toxic cloud-layer and not all was a pernicious wasteland. In the above-cloud world, the stultifying heat was barely relieved by the cooling effect of Dragon flight. No water. No terrace lakes, which ringed many Islands further north. There was no relieving greenery, only the cloudless, baking days and suffocating nights, and countless tan and brown Islands scattered across equally tan Cloudlands. The wind-borne dust swept off the Islands created setting suns so huge and ethereal, the twin orbs rivalled the Yellow moon for size.

The sense of desolation multiplied the deeper Dragon and Rider penetrated the trackless wilderness of the South. Kal could imagine the conflict which must have taken place here; battles which had toppled Islands upon each other or split them asunder. Some areas were merely piles of rock sticking a few hundred feet above the restless Cloudlands, as if the corrosive clouds sought to drag the shattered remnants to their final doom. In other regions he saw vaulting, undercut rock formations carved and smoothed as though eroded by long-desiccated rivers, through which strange and fey winds blew, making Tazithiel as skittish as a kitten playing on hot flagstones. Already tan of skin, Kal shucked his shirt and grew as bronzed as the statues in one of his display chambers.

In the evenings, they made camp in a hollow or nook sheltered from the incessant wind. More often than not, the Shapeshifter transformed into her Human form. Perhaps she guessed at Kal’s wariness of her Dragon-manifestation, he thought. Freaky how she could just appear out of thin air. What a refined filcher wouldn’t give for that power!

One such evening, ten days after they had left Kal’s lair, Tazi impishly curled her fingers around his biceps, carving his skin with pretend-talons. “Mmm, I could snack on this.”

“Given recent experience, I’m not entirely partial to becoming your snack. Watch out!”

She glanced casually at a deadly copper cobra, spitted perfectly through the skull by Kal’s throwing-knife. “Fine strike, Rider Kal.”

“Fresh snake for dinner? I’ll collect the wood.”

“You’re injured.” Tazi pursed her lips as she regarded Kal’s new, rather less charred trousers. “We need to safeguard the royal sceptre.”

“Well!” Kal hitched his fingers in his belt while puffing out his chest. “Just wait until I deploy the royal sceptre on you, Tazi. I’ll make you–”

“Only when it stops … oozing.”

“Tazithiel!” Kal turned purple, white–he did not know. “You’re disgusting! I’d appreciate a touch of sympathy from she who … oh. Welcome to my embrace, thou comeliest of Isles maidens.”

Pressing the supple length of her body against his and gazing upward through her eyelashes, the Shapeshifter murmured, “I’m most indescribably remorseful about the suppurating, pustulent, unsightly burns covering your epic manly parts, dearest Kal. If I could, I’d wave my fingers and–”