Pretty much the same as if they were treating you as slaves, I thought heavily. Even though the bright sun was rising now, and dawn had done its work, it was hard to feel the thrill of that flight. Everything had been marred by Inyene.
“Nari,” Tamin was prompting me, and I looked up to see him regarding not me, but the dawn sky. “Indulge an old man for a moment. Let me tell you the tiny bit of dragon lore that I know.”
“Please do,” I said. Anything to take my mind off the terrible feelings of betrayal and disgust that were emanating from the dark recesses of the cave.
Was Ymmen feeling angry because I had spoken his name? I thought suddenly.
“Not you. The abominations.” Ymmen’s fiery words blossomed in my mind, and with it came the knowledge that he meant the mechanical dragons. He was disgusted that they even existed. That his kin had been used in such a way.
“The Histories of Torvald cited that a dragon’s name remains hidden to humans, given to it by its Brood-Mother and for it alone. Should the dragon choose to share it with a human, it is invariably because that dragon has chosen that human to be its bonded partner,” Tamin said.
“Bonded partner?” I asked. “Like the Lady Artifex and Maliax?”
Tamin nodded. “Precisely. But names are like gifts. The importance is in the giving of them. Once given, the dragons’ names are recorded and can be used by others – but the first human to hear it is always the one that the dragon chose to share not just its friendship with – but its soul.” The older man was speaking softly, reverentially.
Bonded with a dragon. I couldn’t believe it. In truth, I didn’t understand it. Tamin must have seen my confusion plainly, however, as he continued:
“With a bond, all of those things that I mentioned before – the joining of minds, the strange powers – they all become possible,” he started to say.
“How?” I asked quickly, my thoughts quickly overtaking my mouth, “if I can learn how to do these things – break mountains, whatever else you said – then I could defeat Inyene! I could free the Daza!” Is that what Lady Artifex could do? I thought in wonder. Suddenly, a door of possibility had opened in my heart. We finally had a way out of this nightmare!
“Nari, Nari,” Tamin’s voice was calming – the same infuriating tone that I remembered him using when I had been a child and throwing a tantrum. Could he not see how important this was? “Dragon Lore is a strange branch of knowledge. Only the scholars at the Dragon Academy of Torvald might know the answers to your questions. And to ask them, you would first need to ask permission from the King of the Torvald and the Middle Kingdom itself!” He made it sound impossible.
“The gifts that bonding with a dragon brings can be unpredictable. They do not bring the same for every person. One of the earliest tales tells how a dragon could give its very life force to its bonded partner – making them stronger, quicker – even bringing them back from the brink of death itself!” Tamin said in awe. “There is a tale of the Dragon Riders Rigar and Veen, who lived far, far longer than their natural span of years. And then there was the Lady Saffron, once a queen of Torvald itself, who could wrest rocks from the ground with just her mind.” Tamin looked helplessly at me.
“There is so much that is myth, that it is hard to know what actually happened and what didn’t – but we do know that there were once schools of Witches and Monks and Wizards who would spend years learning the ways of their dragons, and honing their craft.”His gaze turned back to the northeastern horizon, where Inyene’s camp stood. “I fear that we do not have the time to learn these secrets, and neither can we really know what gifts you might get from your bond with the noble Ymmen.”
I was adamant not to give up on my dreams of saving my people personally, just like the Lady Artifex on Maliax would have. “But still, Uncle – even if we were just using the dragon’s strength and skill and his fire – that might be enough!”
“Would it?” Tamin looked doubtful.
I gritted my teeth in frustration. I knew what Tamin was doing. He was trying to be practical. He was trying to think things through in the careful, orderly manner that had made him such a good senior clerk for Torvald.
But I was certain that the time for orderly action was gone. I had an idea. “At least this then,” I proposed. “If Ymmen agrees, then I will ask him to fly me to spy on Inyene’s keep. There is one person there who knows Inyene and her plans and the workings of the metal dragons better than any other,” I said.
Tamin’s eyes widened. He knew just whom I was speaking of. “Lord Abioye,” he said.
“Inyene’s brother.” I nodded. He would be the one to know how to stop the metal dragons. And I was sure that if it came to it, he would see the sense in answering my questions now. Especially if I was riding atop a fire-breathing bull dragon.
Chapter 13
Poison Berry
It was clear that my bond had changed everything now. It was as if, as soon as I had a name to call what was happening to me, everything accelerated. During the rest of that day following my flight, it was hard to keep my thoughts focused on the small jobs of our hasty encampment.
Looking now at our smokery, our small collection of branch-woven or branch-sharpened tools – they looked futile. Silly, even, compared to the magnitude of the task ahead: sneaking into the keep. We had settled into spending most of the day in the cave, lest any of the mine scouts venture this far up the Masaka and discover us. During my time to sleep I dreamed constantly of flying, of soaring high over sunlit lands and low over fields and seas – even though I had never even seen the ocean before.
And I dreamed of the metal dragons. Or rather, I had nightmares about them. I would be flying or floating towards them in that way of fever dreams, and suddenly their eyes would blare with blue Earth Light, and they would raise their metal faces to look at me.
But in my dreams, now that I saw them, they weren’t just dead and lifeless machines. Now, they had some ghastly semblance of life. Their borrowed scales made them look like a half-dead creature, still grotesquely clinging on to existence.
I woke up with a start, knowing that I could no longer wait. “I have to do this tonight,” I said as I approached Tamin, who was once again tending the smokery and his newly caught fish that evening. The sky was turning a deep orange-red, and it made me think of the color of the fireball that the metal dragon had breathed.
Tamin looked up at me in alarm but nodded. He knew the stakes as well as I. It wasn’t just that every day that we spent up here was a day that our friends and families were down there in the mines. Perhaps they were dying. Perhaps they were being beaten.
It was that every day, Inyene was working to add more metal dragons to her horde, I thought dismally. Forcing my people to be complicit in the creation of the monsters that would bring about their own demise. How long before there were too many – if there weren’t already?
“We,” Tamin said, standing up straightaway. “We have to do this.”
I shook my head immediately. For some reason, my heart knew that Ymmen would not take Tamin. It wasn’t that the two disliked each other, but Ymmen had chosen me, and had given me his name. I was the one that the black dragon – still only a scant few days from being seriously ill – had trusted.
“It has to be me, Uncle. You know this,” I said, and Tamin hung his head.