Dragon Thief Read online

  With that, his confusion finally evaporated. This woman was no image; no trick of faultless enchantment. She was a Shapeshifter, one of the rare ‘third race’ oft maligned in ballads and histories. No wonder her kiss had felt so perfect, defeating his intent to unmask the Dragoness’ subterfuge; no surprise that she possessed freaky lakes-full of power and confidence. A tall, strong man had never presented the slightest physical threat to an unarmed, unclad woman. Still, there was no evidence of any Dragoness, but he sensed, he imagined …

  Her hand braved the divide to touch his cheek, a fingertip touch that burned as though she had branded him. Kal forced himself not to flinch; it was the girl who shuddered instead. “I don’t eat people. Never. You’ve a soul; perhaps even a claim to a grain of intelligence.”

  Kal snorted.

  “Don’t you desire my Human form?”

  “Evidently, eminently and everlastingly,” he shot back.

  Roaring rajals, and he meant that too. Had he lost his mind? Kal had never committed to a thing–well, bar a pilfering project or three–in his four decades of life. He was hypnotised. Blinded. Sailing gaily off the Isle of sanity.

  What did he care about that, when the girl had eyelashes so long, they would whisper butterfly-kisses against his cheek … thundering Cloudlands storms! He must be delusional. Could he think of nothing but eyelashes? Meantime, the mysterious beauty searched his face by touch, sight and even an odd itching that he took to signify magic.

  Carefully, Kal said, “This … uh, most fetching manifestation of your … uh, indisputable draconic magnificence … does not wish to perform said despoliation? Actually, it’s the other thing, I mean, person–Dragoness–that I sort of hold a few concerns about. Minor concerns.” He illustrated with his fingers. “You know, such as what I’d look like flattened beneath your paw, Tazi, or dangling like a cane-rat between your bedazzling fangs. Naturally, such trivialities are hardly worth the breath–”

  “You can meet my Dragoness another day.”

  Kal tried for a winning grin. “Have you heard about the tenth day of the week? It’s called ‘never-ever-day’.”

  I like you, little Human.

  Creepy! That voice made his skin feel like a pair of boots he had once owned, which had shrunk a few sizes during his two-week traipse through a swamp in the Ur-Malka Cluster. His mission had ultimately been successful, but he never wanted to see another leech as long as he lived. That infestation of his unmentionables … Kal shuddered.

  Tazi said, “See? My Dragoness likes you too.”

  See? He was talking to a schizophrenic madwoman who made an art form of strange voices.

  The moment swelled to awkward proportions–rather akin to an invisible Dragoness shouldering its way into their conversation, Kal imagined. He could envisage only one way he might escape being barbecued like a wild pig, and that involved … getting involved. Entangled. With a Shapeshifter Dragoness.

  The Island-World was awash with peculiar forms of insanity; right now, most of them belonged to an errant outlaw.

  “Very well,” he said, feeling heat steal up his neck to reignite his cheeks, “what exactly did a dazzling Dragoness wish to do with my … sceptre?”

  A wicked giggle and a renewed yearning of her dark locks constituted his reward. Tazi said, “I rather hoped you might return to feeling diverted.” The rubies clinked upon the floor. The emerald wafted away to a nearby treasure pile.

  Kal’s heartbeat pounded fit to burst his eardrums. “Desperately diverted. Utterly defenceless.”

  “Might there be another kiss involved?”

  He considered this, head askance. “Though my upper lip throbs, your request strikes me as far from odious.”

  Tazi’s eyebrows arched at his choice of words. “Perhaps after said kiss, Kal, you might be persuaded to wield your sceptre in a truly kingly conquest?”

  “Triggering a welter of looting, destruction and general mayhem?”

  “Spoken like a true romantic.”

  Kal decided that this feeling of reckless abandon to a fate which had seized him in its claws and winged off across the Island-World, could not be entirely bad. Fatal, most certainly. But he would leap into his grave smiling. He said, “So, I take it you approve of mayhem and destruction, o beauty of ten thousand Isles?”

  “What a foolish question to ask a Dragoness,” Tazithiel gurgled happily.

  Kal drew her into his arms. “Then I am a fool for thee.”

  Chapter 3: Draconic

  WHEn Kal’s Eyes unshuttered, it was to light upon a sight that made him scream. It was not a nice scream. Not a yelp of happy surprise. It was not a lingering, despairing shriek, such as a criminal might make if he was kicked off a league-tall cliff to fall to his death in the Cloudlands, which Kal had once observed in Sylakia. Barbarians, those Sylakians. No, it was a chopped-off scream that scored furrows inside his throat with the gusto of a ravenous Dragon gutting a ralti sheep.

  It was the kind of scream that ended in a heartfelt expletive.

  Kal was not the swearing sort. He despised men who felt every second word needed to express the filth of their thoughts. In his line of work, he often rubbed shoulders with such men. However, there were times in one’s life when an expletive seemed justified. Indeed, it was arguably the most honest response he knew to the close regard of a fiery eyeball the size of his head, and the fact that the eyeball’s owner had him clasped in her paw, with the air of a feline toying with a luckless rodent.

  “Best of the evening to you, Kal,” purred the Dragoness.

  “I-I-Islands’–unholy windroc droppings!” he spluttered. “You are a d-d … a delight to the eye.”

  Meantime, his brain imitated a maddened gerbil trapped in a cage, babbling, ‘Aye, but she’s freaking enormous, you ralti-stupid idiot! A smoking-at-the-nostrils, gleaming of fang, scale-armoured lizard–or haven’t you noticed?’ Not one inch of her was less than mind-bendingly draconic. Predatory. Deadly in the way a finely-crafted sword was deadly, or a volcano spat molten rock, or a wildfire consumed everything in its path. She was, in a word, awesome. Roar-some. Fulsomely fire-some … and he was a gabbling, purple-headed parakeet.

  He wheezed, “You’re Tazithiel? Also? Partly?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Where are you hiding the … uh, rest? Of you?”

  “Elsewhere. It’s Shapeshifter magic. I can switch between my Human and Dragon forms at will.”

  Magic? Oh, that explained everything and nothing all at once. Aggrieved, Kal tried to recall if Tazithiel had appeared by magic, sleeping on her pile of treasure, or if she had merely blinded his normally acute larcenous alertness with her irresistible charms. Besides, the other manifestation of her being was so much more … well, less … but infinitely more appealing, in a way that only the sight of a hundred fangs gleaming in a recently bedded woman’s jaw could make him feel. He could only hope his endeavours had been up to the mark.

  Kal said, “I despoiled a Dragoness? I never imagined such a phrase might be spoken …”

  His voice trailed off. What now? Kal had no experience of draconic expressions, but he could have sworn he saw sadness enter her eyes in the form of swirls of shadowy fire. A quiver shook her paw, which rested like a hot blanket upon his chest, as if a painful memory had punctured her playful mood.

  She raised her paw. “Go.”

  “What?”

  “Go. I’m letting you go.”

  Words stuck in his craw. What of all they had shared? The haze of wonder which had permeated their time together, the warm satiation which filled his body now? Might he joke that the king’s sceptre lay bowed? Blunted beyond repair? He did not want to leave. Some unfortunate royal’s diadem was imprinted in his left buttock as though he had sat upon a porcupine, but otherwise, he was quite content to stay put. Too terrified to move, truth be told.

  As he hesitated, the Dragoness said, “My draconic finery has struck mortal fear into your impoverished soul. Now’s the time, little man,
you run down that tunnel as fast as your legs can carry you, fire up your Dragonship, and never return.”

  Kal searched her fiery gaze. He looked over the parts of the Dragoness he could see. Most Dragons were one colour. Tazithiel, from what he could tell, was a sapphire tending to indigo in the upper parts–definitely indigo in the detail of her wing-struts, wing bones, spine spikes and skull spikes–but that colouration was broken with complex patterns of grass-green, gold and even white. He was lost over the Cloudlands on this one. Kal could not believe he was about to refuse a creature that could clearly swallow three of him with a single snap of her mighty jaw. How could this end well?

  Nevertheless, he had declared himself a fool for her, so he might as well act in character.

  He inquired, “Have I displeased you, Tazi?”

  Smoke curled out of her vast nostrils.

  “Did I offend you at the first despoliation, o Dragoness, or the fifth?” He meant to make light of matters, but his joke fell as flat as a drunk stumbling out of a tavern. Islands’ sakes, he was struggling to remember the day’s doings, which was desperately unjust. A haze of lust was simply an inadequate description, in his opinion, when she had stood all the volcanoes of his existence upside-down, and the five moons had apparently inflicted him with their madness at once.

  For a seasoned felon, he was starting to have a disturbing love-affair with the notions of truth and honesty. Much more of this and he’d break out in a rash.

  A thicket of fangs menaced his nose. “Go, before I kill you.”

  Kal folded his arms. “No.”

  “NO?”

  Ignoring the ringing in his ears, and the despairing wail of common sense, logic and reason taking a running leap off the cliff-tops of sanity, Kal reiterated, “No.”

  “HOW DARE YOU REFUSE ME?”

  A fireball blasted over the treasure, blackening the cavern wall opposite.

  His fatalistic bent clearly had not departed; or, more accurately, his mind had probably snapped under the strain of Dragon fear. “Magnificent lady,” he opined, “and you are magnificent, as I believe my rubbish poetry earlier fell woefully short of extolling with the slightest skill or adequacy, I must, most regretfully at this point in our budding relationship, make a small confession.”

  She snarled, “Confess to what? Insufferable verbosity? For I assure you, I can cure that ailment with the swipe of my smallest talon.”

  Kal decided he preferred abbreviated words to an abbreviated neck. He rapidly modified a sentence liberally smothered in verbal petals, and rattled instead, “Severe stubbornness issues. It’s a terrible affliction. Quite incurable.”

  And he placed his arms behind his head, stretched out, and pretended to relax while her Dragon-thunder shook dust and stones from the cavern roof, and Tazi rearranged her hoard with the violent thrashings of her tail. Finally, she bellowed, “Get out of my sight, you intolerable man!” Smoky, sulphurous breath blasted into his face. Kal screwed his eyes shut, partly at the blast, and partly because soiling his trousers in terror was not an accolade any man of his years wished to earn.

  Only the massive, beastly panting of her lungs filled the silence. Even that sound was ridiculously humungous, like forge-bellows working overtime.

  “Well?” Her growl shook him from head to toe.

  Kal muttered, “I’ve considered your proposal. Same answer.”

  “No?”

  “Simple little word, isn’t it? Spelled ‘N-O’.”

  “Take what you wish of my hoard and begone with you, pesky Human!”

  “Treasure bores me.”

  The Dragoness growled, “You’ll be singing a different tune when I dangle you by your scrawny ankles from the nearest cloud.”

  Although, the dread of dangling by his fingertips over a pit filled with deadly cobras, as a small mistake in the Palace of the Royal Optinate Meraxil the Magnificent, Despot of Da’ooba Island–his true name, and hardly the least of the little braggart’s titles–had led him to experience, could not hold a candle to this girl’s power over him. Nor could the snarls of the ten wild rajals protecting King Terman of Telstroy’s treasure cavern begin to match hers for ferocity.

  What a woman!

  Overloaded, his sense of terror had evidently become numbed into insensibility, or had fled to the same place where he had mislaid all reason and the common sense possessed of any self-respecting mosquito.

  Scrambling to his feet, Kal reached impetuously–and unsteadily, given his state of enervation after the days’ exuberant deeds–for her eye. Tazithiel jerked back, making him dance about like a child being teased by a taller bully. Finally, he folded his arms. “Fine. I can’t reach. Close your eyes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m clearly not the only inhabitant of this cavern with stubbornness issues?”

  “Because then you’ll be out of my sight?” inquired the Dragoness.

  “You’ve exposed my cunning plot,” Kal admitted, unrepentant. “Right, Dragoness. You will explain to me why you first lead a man on, and then–oh.”

  He knew. It was not a question he would wish to put to any woman, especially not a seventy-foot scorcher filled with Dragon-fire and other unmentionable, nasty bits of magic, who could undress a man with her mind–what a horrible idea. A pox on that, it was an excellent notion. What man had not dreamed of possessing such a power? Kal cudgelled his brain for an exit from the verbal snare he had built for himself, and failed. She had been the one with no experience, in her Human form. He knew that beyond doubt, and could not square it up with her behaviour. Tazithiel had behaved as one trying to prove something, either to herself, or to another. Why? There could be only one answer.

  With unaccustomed gentleness, Kal asked, “Who hurt you, Tazithiel?”

  His quiet question broke her. A cry rose from her throat, as evocative as a wind keening through the rough-bitten caverns of the Western Isles, where he had once raided a warlord’s treasure trove for scrolls of forgotten Dragon-lore. The sound was so elegiac, so multi-harmonic and hair-raising, that tears streamed uncontrollably from his eyes.

  After a long pause, he added, “Tell me who he was, and I shall slay him.”

  The Dragoness laughed roughly, her paw bruising his ribs before releasing him from what Kal took for a draconic hug. “You see much, for a thief.”

  “I haven’t seen much, not in my life,” he replied, bitterly. “Have you paused to ask why I refuse, consigning my person to mortal peril?” She shook her huge muzzle. “Were you to inquire, I would say this: Jewels and gold I have possessed aplenty, but I found they cannot satisfy. Pleasure have I sought, and enjoyed with the fruits of my labours, but pleasure is fleeting. My life booms with the emptiness of a drum, when I longed to be the drummer, to play a tune that might last longer than the beat of sound upon an ear.”

  “So an afternoon’s recreation turns you into a philosopher?”

  Kal voiced a growl of his own. “Yesterday’s me would have fled up that tunnel and never looked back. What the volcanic hells did you do to me, woman? Dragoness? If this is a spell, can you erase it and let me be Kal again, the ne’er-may care wind that blows where he pleases, and leaves no mark?”

  The huge eyes studied Kal, filled with flame that mingled and swirled restlessly, like smoke curling from a fire. “It’s no magic of my making–word of a Dragoness.”

  Vertigo threatened, but Kal locked his knees. What an unmitigated disaster this trip had turned out to be. He had found his treasure, aye. That treasure had promptly turned around and seized him. Furthermore, it had grown skull spikes and fearsome talons, and a beastly temper to match. Now, his spinning head was starting to consider doing things with this treasure that no honest–there was that despicable word again–spendthrift should ever open his mind to. He should flee. Wriggle. Weasel. Take back control.

  Instead, Kal said, “I find myself treading unfamiliar territory, Tazi.”

  “Aye, me too.”

  “You can’t trust me.
I don’t trust me.” He drew a deep, shuddering breath, appalled by the power of the truths tripping from his tongue. These things he had never admitted, not even to himself. “I’m not a good man; never have been.”

  “Good? Did I ask for good? Did I seduce a monk?”

  “Let’s be clear,” Kal countered, bold as brass, “that I, wielder of the most magnificent sceptre in Human history, am the one who seduced you, o fearsomely fair fire-maiden. I stole your heart and wreaked the aforementioned plunder–”

  “On the contrary, you dunderheaded upright-walking naked ape, it is I who ravished you with the fiery passion of my mightiest enchantments.” Her paw clasped him again, massively powerful, and her eye-fires shifted to a gentler apricot colour. “Rogue or none, you did not run. Kal, I’ve never told anyone else, but I feel I must tell you. I’ve lived here alone, these nine summers. I came here because no other Dragon would dare to make this crossing. I came to be alone.”

  “Aye. I did wonder.”

  She said, “I was born a Dragoness on Mejia Island, south of Jeradia. In my sixteenth summer, I discovered I was a Shapeshifter. I concealed the ability at first. But eventually, I felt I could keep my secret no longer. I had to entrust it to someone. I told my shell-parents.”

  Tazithiel’s breathing deepened; flame licked around her jowls, several feet above his head. Then, the Dragoness inclined her head to meet his gaze with a wounded mien. “There are some Dragons on Mejia who hold to the old ways. They believe that Shapeshifters are an aberration. Aberrations must be corrected, or killed. So my father handed me over to Endurion, a Dragon Elder, for correction. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  He whispered, “I can’t imagine. I don’t want to.”

  “I was a forty-foot juvenile. Endurion was a hundred-and-ten foot adult Green. He ‘corrected’ me at great length, Kal. He enjoyed doing it.” The second expletive of his evening burned the thief’s lips. “My kin on Mejia refused me magical healing. Usually, with Shapeshifters, injuries sustained in one form reflect accurately on the other. Thankfully, I’m a little special. Though as a Dragoness I am too damaged to achieve what we did today, as a Human female, it is still feasible. As proven.”