And then, as the eastern sky ahead of us lightened to its deep, umbral-purple dusks of the predawn, the air was split by a new sound.
“BWAAARRM! BWAARRM!”
“Inyene!” I gasped, flinching in my seat as I looked around for the metal monster that she flew that made that sort of sky-splitting metal shriek.
But it wasn’t her, and none of the other Dragon Riders – or even Ymmen himself – appeared fazed by the noise. Instead, the Riders were only quickly pulling the last of their straps and belts tight around their waists and their weapon racks, before hunkering down—
Oh. I remembered the giant brass horn I had seen when we had first arrived – high up on the tallest tower, which had to be supported by iron railings and supports. The fabled Dragon Horn of Torvald, I thought. The sound that had started wars and had called dragons to the defense of this ancient citadel for hundreds, perhaps even a thousand years…
The other dragons tensed and compacted their muscles before they sprang – but at the heartbeat before they did, Ymmen took the initiative and leapt first, surprising and startling the Stocky Greens and Sinuous Blues on the platforms beside us so much that they awkwardly hopped into the air, beating their wings in indignation, squawking and screeching their fury at being upstaged.
“We fly!” Ymmen roared with glee and I felt my jaw aching with the wide grin that took me over. The fresh night air was in my face, and my hair was teasing out from its tribal knot behind me as I heard my own voice hollering and whooping in delight too. For a split second, the dark moors and barren rock faces of the sacred Mount Hammal rose to meet us, but then—
CRACK! A sound of imminent lightning and thunder as Ymmen snapped his giant wings open on either side – one of them still bearing the forked-tree scar of his injury that I had helped him to heal so long ago.
Ymmen’s giant wings suddenly caught the updrafts of air that flowed up the steep mountain climb towards the Academy, and I felt the tension thrum through his wings and shoulders – a twinge of pain from his wounded shoulder, causing me worry – before we were swooping and lifting, rising up higher and higher over the citadel of Torvald. The avenues and lines of lights below us dropped away, becoming ever smaller and smaller until they were like the tiny dance of fireflies seen from a distance – if, that was, fireflies obeyed such things as streets and right-angles. I could smell a twinge of woodsmoke on the air from the earliest of Torvald’s bake-houses, and the small gasps of noise of predawn city life: A bell sounding, a cattleman hollering to his animals that roamed the slopes of the mountains…
But then we were flying. We were flying free and wild up into the skies, with Ymmen performing a wide, circling turn high over the citadel before angling his nose and wings and slamming his wings down in a beat that drove us to the north and west.
Behind us, came the disgruntled shrieks of the other Dragon Riders who were ‘supposed’ to have been escorting us – as they jumped and scrambled from the Dragon Academy in disarray, eager not to be made to look slow!
“Ha!” I couldn’t help but laugh, and, for but a brief second, I forgot Inyene and the awful predicament that we were all in—
Ach! Until, of course, in the next moment a line of white lightning-pain spiked between my temples, passing behind my eyes as the Stone Crown made itself known…
Chapter 17
Abioye D’Lia
“What under the Stars is he doing!?” I called out to Tamin beside me, looking in confusion at the Dragon Rider ahead of us – one of our escorts – who flew in tight circles, their dragon flaring its wings often and erratically.
Our small troupe of dragons and riders had been flying for the best part of an entire day, and I was finally starting to get a read of this strange landscape they called the Middle Kingdom of Torvald. I wonder what this place was called before it was called Torvald, I had to wonder, thinking about my own home – the Plains that had never been Empty, but were certainly wild.
“Garden,” Ymmen addressed me, and with it came the dragon-knowledge pregnant in just the briefest word of a place full of rivers and deep forests, meadows and long lakes where fat-bellied fish swam. The Middle Kingdom was bounded on at least three sides by mountain ranges, this dragon memory informed me; what the later humans called the World’s Edge far to the east (separating my home of the Plains from this ‘Garden’) and the Dragon’s Spine to the west, as well as another set of mountains to the far south, past which started the great hot deserts. There was so much information contained within the simplest of dragon thoughts, whole layers of song and history and memories and sensation all rolled into one.
“Garden,” I said, feeling as though that might have once been a nice place for dragons to hunt and feed on the slower-moving herds and flocks of this place… But it hadn’t looked much like a garden today, had it? I had to admit.
The Middle Kingdom of the Dragon Riders was ravaged. We had flown through the dawn light over the far dark line of the Masaka – sorry, World’s Edge – mountains, and on through the day, and every time I had lifted my eyes, I could see palls of smoke on the horizon, or the blackened and ruined circles where once must have stood entire villages, and towns.
As the day had grown long and the sun high, we had flown over armies and warbands of Torvald moving down the wide and straight roads – or sometimes crossing the long, brown fields towards the next site of ruination. Every time that we had seen them, our accompanying five Dragon Riders had set up cries and the dragons had trumpeted their greetings – to be met with the distant, tiny clamor of men and women banging on shields and breastplates.
These people do love their dragons, I had realized, which had helped a lot to lessen my feelings of estrangement from these ‘civilized’ people out here in their stone walls and high towers. Fortifications which had not stopped the metal queen, Inyene, though, I was forced to admit.
The Torvald dragons and their Riders, too, had let out low calls of dismay as they saw one after another loved or famous landmark destroyed by mechanical fire and metal claw. Even Tamin had gasped once, when a long structure had appeared between two hills on our rightward wing-side – it looked like a gigantic brickwork dam, but one that had windows and arched doors along its length, and battlements crowning its league-long reach.
Or it would have, if its center wasn’t destroyed, I thought, for this man-built ridge of castle and city had been completely burst apart in its center, and was still smoking where Inyene’s abominations must have dug and tore at it in their frenzy.
“That’s the stronghold of Rampart!” my god-Uncle had called. “It’s stood for nearly two thousand years – it used to be a defense against the northern route!”
“Looks like it was the stronghold of Rampart, Uncle,” I said, my voice grim. I was empathetic for those who had lived there of course – but what I saw when I looked at the destruction was the incredible power that Inyene now wielded, even without the Stone Crown.
The Dragon Riders had insisted we pushed on as far from that tragedy as possible before eventually stopping. It was a wise decision, likely owing more to the fact that they didn’t want to have the sight of one of their greatest marvels in their eyes, or its smoke at the backs of their throats as we ate, than to military strategy.