The dragon’s muscular body tensed beneath Brill as it launched into the air. With one hand he gripped a fold of loose skin and the other clutched the cask of dragon wine, which would serve as well as coin if the rebel Danton wasn’t at his destination.
Brill peered ahead, bracing himself alongside Plu’s neck. In the distance, he could see the dark outline of the Fire Ranges cloaked in a blood-red sunset. As their speed increased, the wind made his eyes water and he had to turn his head to the side to catch his breath.
After traveling for a half hour or so a loud roar ripped through the air behind them, so deep and booming his heart lurched painfully. Startled, he nearly lost his hold and his cask of dragon wine. Clinging with his legs, he carefully peered over his shoulder and tried to ignore how he trembled. Silhouetted against rising Belle moon’s light, a huge dragon flew in tandem with Plu. It was three times the size of the young Plu. Its wings were long with ragged tears and holes in the softer membrane. It called again, and this time Brill felt Plu’s body undulate beneath him as he bleated an answering call.
Then Plu plummeted, and the rushing wind captured Brill’s shocked yell. Plu eased out of the dive to glide over ragged foothills bathed in light and shadow, then he entered a pass lit by the rays of a near full Belle moon. The pass was narrower than Brill had first thought, and was littered with jagged outcrops of rock. Plu dodged them all in one long sinuous movement. The other dragon did not follow.
Below, Brill caught the orange glow of cooling lava and the stench of rotting eggs. The landscape changed abruptly as they exited the pass on the other side of the ranges. Where the moon’s glow pierced the darkness, he could make out some vegetation on a ground riddled with cracks and crevasses and deep, dark clefts, perhaps disguising valleys. As cloud briefly obscured Belle moon, Plu gave a plaintive cry. Brill looked anxiously around them. Then, in the blackness ahead, he thought he could make out small lights on the ground. He hoped they were nearing their destination.
Plu drew down his wings in long, deep movements, to slow their pace and gently lose altitude. The young dragon’s neck rose up, and Brill clung tighter as Plu descended with his claws extended. Ever so slowly, the beast touched the earth, the downbeat of the wings perfectly timed. Brill climbed down, stretching his stiff muscles, but feeling exhilarated. He had just ridden a dragon. By the source! He’d never thought he would do such a thing. His heart slowed its heavy beating and he calmly and tentatively approached Plu’s face. Quietly, he called out the dragon’s name and stroked his tongue as Salinda had instructed. It was slimy, and the breath wafting from the mouth nearly made him gag. “Go back for Salinda, Plu. Hurry!”
In the moonlight he saw that Plu arrowed his head in a parody of a bow and beat his wings. Brill stepped further back, shielding his eyes from the wind-blown dust as Plu loped along and then rose up slowly, beating his wings powerfully to give him lift. The darkness swallowed all trace of the young dragon while Brill stood motionless and watched. Then he took in his surroundings. He couldn’t see much of anything except a few looming shapes that he took to be shrubs. Kicking with his feet, he could tell that the ground was rocky and not very inviting. He waited, listening for voices or the sound of footsteps in case anyone was on watch or had noticed his arrival.
The silence was eerie. There were not even the sounds of wildlife. He felt truly alone. Clouds rolled in to dim the light from Belle moon. In the sky, the violet jewels comprising Shatterwing sparkled momentarily while the moon was overshadowed. Northward, he saw a meteor plummet and burn in the atmosphere.
“One less rock to fall,” he said like a prayer.
He found a boulder to lean against and placed the wine next to him in the dirt. Sleep was what he needed. Later, he would seek out the rebel lair and find this Danton, if he was still alive. It was quiet. No animal cries, no wind in the trees … nothing. The sound of rock hitting rock reached him, startling him out of a doze. When it didn’t recur, he relaxed again, letting his heartbeat slow and his eyes close as fatigue won out.
*
Near dawn, Brill launched himself out of sleep as if propelled. It wasn’t the dream—a reliving of his capture combined with vivid flashbacks of the Inspector’s abuse. He heard voices: one close to his ear, one far away. He was on his feet in a second, crouched down, head angling from side to side to take in his situation. He noticed too late that the wine was gone. He patted the top of his shirt—gone too were the vine leaves, which had been tucked away safely. Whispering surrounded him, the pisha pisha sound of light voices on the breeze.
He turned full circle. Damn him for a fool. He could see now that he had slept in the wide open. The stone he had leaned against was in the middle of a rocky field dotted with stunted shrubs. Already wan light crawled over the landscape, revealing more and more how stupid he had been. To his left he saw that the land fell away to a tiny valley filled with dark-leaved trees. To the right the land peaked in a barren red-brown hill, which met another to form foothills. Above were the ranges he had crossed the night before. The whispering turned to snickering laughter. These must be the rebels, and they thought him an idiot. Not the first impression he had needed or intended to make.
Clenching his hands tightly, he shouted, “Show yourselves, cowards! I seek you.”
A voice called from behind him. “What do you seek, dust-mad heathen? Death or a quick death?”
“I’m no heathen. I seek Danton.”
“He’s dead,” a disembodied voice said. A few chuckles sounded after it.
“Kill him now,” another voice, deep and grating, said.
Brill’s stomach dropped as he circled around, trying to spy their location, to count their number. No Danton meant he would have to fend for himself. But Salinda had been so sure he was alive and well and here in these foothills. Plu had set him down here for a reason. If he tried to put himself in their shoes he could ask himself, would he have trusted a stranger—one obviously so keen to be seen? The answer was easy—of course not. He had to be firm and show no doubt or he was dead.
“I don’t believe you,” he called out, tilting his head in the direction of the disembodied voice. “I seek to join this rebel force. I have escaped from the vineyard.”
He heard the sound of boots grinding grit. As if he had materialized from nowhere, a man stood twenty paces away. He had a beard and dark hair and eyes. He looked half-starved and his clothes were only slightly better than rags. “How did you escape?” he asked.
Brill began to relax, until he saw a vicious-looking array of short blades and a longer sword attached to the man’s belt.
“Who’s asking?” he said a touch cockily.
The bearded man’s hand hovered over the hilt of one of the swords. Sweat gathered between Brill’s shoulder blades, but he held himself still. The rebel didn’t answer, but he relaxed his hand and began to walk around Brill, drawing closer in a slow arc, looking him up and down as he went.
Brill remained tense but unclenched his hands in readiness for an attack. A rock hurtled out of nowhere. Brill ducked under it. Another rained down from the other side. The ragged rebel watched him, neither smiling nor frowning as Brill dodged the various stone missiles. Next a dagger winged toward him. Brill heard its whistle as it cut through the air. He was tempted to catch it, but didn’t trust his reflexes after so much misuse and torture. He would need training before he was ready to fight again. He dived to the ground, hearing the blade hit the boulder and then clatter against the rocks behind him. When he looked up, the bearded rebel lifted his hand and the barrage of missiles stopped.
“You’re a boy,” he half-laughed, half-said. His comrades snickered from their hiding places.
Someone called out. “Give ’im to Andy … he likes boys.” Brill jerked his head around, trying to see who it was. More jeers echoed. Brill tried to pinpoint their positions. They were well hidden in this barren landscape. This lot were good, he thought. “I’m young, yes,” he called out. “But I’ve seen a lot … done a lot.”
“Who are you?” the man asked. There was no humor in his voice. His dark eyes glittered with intensity.
Brill met his gaze. “I am Brill of Duval province, leader of the Duval insurgents.” He didn’t want to divulge everything.
The man nodded. “The Highland Confederacy?”
Brill’s eyes widened. “Yes. You know of it? My father—”
“Yes, I’m acquainted with Hubert’s philosophies. I’m not sure I agree with him … you know, all that caring and sharing and then all the deaths …”
“But …” Brill couldn’t resist the appeal of speaking to someone who had known his father, or at least of his ways.
The man frowned, though he let the hardness slide out of his face. “You landed here last night on a dragon. How did you do that?”
“Salinda.”
Except for a fractional widening of his eyes, the man held his expression firm. But Brill was now certain this man was Danton. “Salinda sent the wine for Danton …”
“And?” the man whispered.
“She sent greetings.”
“Liar!” Danton yelled and stepped forward, his long blade already in his hand and aimed at Brill’s throat. From their various hiding places, the others leaped up, brandishing their weapons.
Reflexively Brill stepped back against the boulder, eyeing the blades glinting in the morning sun, and added hastily, “She said, ‘Tell him I send my love and will see him soon.’”
Danton stilled and then he exhaled. “Thank you,” he said with something akin to relief as he lowered his sword. “That is what she would say. But why would she send a child to me? Why would she risk her life for you?”
Brill puffed his chest out. “I’m no child. I’m seventeen going on eighteen. Do you mean she is in danger now? But Plu is going to collect her.”
“She’s coming here?”
“Yes, she said she would come this evening. She didn’t think Plu could carry us both so far.”
“How did you convince her?
Brill shrugged. “I’m not sure. Things have changed, I suppose …”
The rebel stood to the side, glancing casually at Brill as if he couldn’t take him seriously at all. “Come on, tell me why she helped you.”
Brill tried to hide the anguish he felt. The pain was still too close to the surface. “The Inspector interrogated me.” He felt the heat emanating from his face. “In the end she summoned the dragon.”
Something in Danton’s eyes grew cold. He nodded once and clenched his jaw. Next thing he was slapping Brill on the back companionably. “Welcome, kid. Too bad you didn’t bring Salinda with you. We can wait, though. How’s old Mez?”
“He died before I got there. A couple of months ago, I think Salinda said.”
Danton sucked in an audible breath and his eyes grew fierce. “So Mez is dead. That does change everything.”
*
In the city of Barrahiem there was no music, no voices lifted in song, no footsteps echoing in the corridors or whispers of discussion humming in the air. Occasionally, Nils heard the soft lap of water from the deep lake, distorted and loud in the emptiness. But that was all the sound there was besides his own breathing, his own weeping.
Hunger drove him to the gardens in search of food. The storehouses full of sealed food packages and technology reminded him too much of what had been lost. He would seek food there eventually, but for now, he could not. The large cavern where the main food supply grew had run riot. Food abounded, but the orchards and vegetable beds were overgrown and unrecognizable compared to the order he remembered. Overhead most of the growing lamps still shone out their bright heat, which, combined with the glow from the shuwai, ensured that the plants had plenty of light. The stream that provided irrigation still flowed unabated. He checked the flow, noting that it had increased and changed course, wiping out a number of the palon tuber patches, which were now more like a marsh.
As he chewed on some bloodberries, he tried to imagine what had happened in Barrahiem while he slept. He could not shake the feeling of loss. The study of the heavens and the manipulation of the elements, among other ethereal subjects, were the Hiem’s religion and livelihood. The most highly valued occupations belonged to record keepers, archivists and historians. His people kept their secrets in the deepest places of Margra—caverns and vast storage vaults, the whereabouts of which only the Hiem knew. Was that now to be lost?
The archives would reveal the awful truth. For awful it must be. He stood and went to search the records down in the honeycombed tunnels beneath the city. It did not take long for him to locate the first account. It was in his family’s section.
Within he read of Ruel moon, which in his youth he had seen from the observatory at Trithorn Peak. At that time it had been cracked and had developed deep fissures. It was held together by bands of red power placed there by Moon Binders, the prior inhabitants of this world, ancient before the Sundwellers and the Hiem settled there. Ruel had seemed so solid then, and the power that had held it together was beyond even their imaginations to comprehend. That such power had failed, and the moon finally split, were still facts he found hard to believe. Yet he had only to look around him at the empty city to know that they were true.
From that day at Trithorn Peak, Nils had dreamed of studying the heavens like Trell, his grandsire, had. Glancing up from the archive record he was reading, Nils realized that Ruel’s end had happened far earlier and more violently than even his revered grandsire had predicted. It had broken apart, leaving a trail of debris in the sky, which was named Shatterwing by the survivors. When Ruel had split, a large section of it had impacted the surface of the planet, nearly destroying it entirely. Even at the time of the most recent records Shatterwing had been the source of meteors that had continued to bombard the planet.
There was a kind of excruciating comfort in reading the archives, re-living what had occurred so long ago now. Luckily for him, the timepiece on his sarcophagus had failed, which had to be why it had released him. A tender was supposed to have woken him after one hundred years. But according to his research he’d been asleep for sixteen hundred and forty-five years, give or take, and the end, when it came, had been a mere twenty years after he had been interred.
He had been an outcast historian … inept through choice. The only career he had ever really wanted to pursue was to study the sky … to delve into the mysteries of science—but that had not been his assigned calling. Trell was already the family’s representative in that field; the Elders would not allow another. That denial of the path he had longed to take had sown the seeds of Nils’s misdeeds, the so-called rebellion against the order of things that had led to him being imprisoned.
From the archives of his kin, Nils pieced together the catastrophe that had wasted his world, taking with it his people, their great works and much of the knowledge they had hoarded for that future, greater age.
The impact site had taken out Stregahiem, the city that was beneath the continent of Strega. Then for some reason the Hiem had begun to die elsewhere, too. The records were patchy—a shocking reminder of the chaos that must have reigned at the time. His people were usually so meticulous that only a severe trial would have overset their attention to detail, their dedication to the greater work of the Hiem. One historian spoke of the amount of dust in the air, clogging lungs. Another record mentioned a virus that had dropped thousands of Hiem every day. Perhaps the Hiem had become too full of despair to care for themselves. After reading the accounts from the time, Nils was left with no clear explanation for the mass dying off. The Hiem’s legacy now belonged to Nils and Nils alone. What a burden for one so unworthy as he considered himself to be.