The Dragonlord's Call Short Story Collection Read online

  The Dragonlord’s Call and Other Short Stories

  The Dragonlord’s Call

  All she knew was that they used to ride dragons in Jin-Sayeng.

  Everything else from her land of birth was a haze of memory, too tinged now by the grief of her father’s death. Even the language—which she had spoken since childhood—felt strange on her tongue. The first time she had opened her mouth here, they had stared at her as if she had an extra head. She later learned it was because she had odd turns of phrases, that she spoke as if she was addressing a room full of scholars.

  “What are you doing?” Aunt Margga called from the kitchen table. “It’s time for breakfast. I have to get out in half an hour. Get out of your head and join me.”

  Namra frowned, but she crawled to her feet to follow. Her nose turned at the sight of the food. It was familiar enough, but the past few days had revealed otherwise. Food, she had learned, could be deceptive. There were grits in the rice, the peppercorns were enormous, and the meat often had so much more fat than lean that it wobbled with every bite. It all made her stomach turn.

  This morning, it was just rice and dried fish, which seemed safe enough. She pulled down her sleeves to pick at it. From across the other side of the table, Margga uttered a deep, debilitating sigh.

  “So like your mother,” she said. “Such a city girl. And now she’s gone and married a wretched Dageian—do you think she’ll even remember you?”

  “She promised she’d send for me,” Namra managed.

  “Until then, you’re here. Stop acting like a princess.”

  Namra shoved the bite of food into her mouth. Just as she expected, the first crunch through the rice had something hard in it. She picked up a glass of water and swallowed, forcing it all down. She knew what she looked like, even without having to glance at Margga to confirm, but she couldn’t help it. She didn’t mean to be rude. The food just wasn’t what she was used to.

  “I’m not acting like a princess…” she began.

  “Don’t talk back, either,” Margga snapped. “Such a spoiled child, I swear. I don’t know what your father was thinking, deciding to raise you in the lap of luxury. That nephew of mine, for all his intelligence, dead before forty. From a cold!”

  Namra turned her head, trying hard not to show how much the smell of her aunt’s breath bothered her. It was noxious, teeming with earthy herbs and betel nuts that Margga chewed to hide the scent. “It wasn’t luxury, aunt. We were poor there. And they wanted you there too, you know.”

  “Did they, now?” Margga laughed, her breath hissing. Her teeth were stained red from the betel nuts, making it look like she had been digging through a carcass. “Could have fooled me. Your parents never once looked back.”

  An old pain, in that—that Namra’s parents took everything and left their family, including one aging aunt. You didn’t do such things if you were Jinsein—you just didn’t. The warlords could go to hell and back; family was sacred.

  “Anyway,” Margga puffed. “I’d be accosted by those Dageian mages the moment I get there. I told them this was the safest place for you, too, but they didn’t listen. The young never do.” She gave her another look, as if expecting her to argue with that one, too. But Namra knew she was baiting her and kept her mouth shut.

  She turned away from the old woman’s unpleasant expression to the window where rain was falling in giant rivulets. The smell of it here was different, too. Swampy, almost, with a headiness that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. She wasn’t what Margga said she was. It had nothing to do with luxuries. But the only childhood she could recall was the one she spent in the Empire of Dageis, the greatest bastion of civilization the continent had ever seen. Though she had lived in a hovel wedged between the grey buildings and tight alleyways of its poorer districts, the mages kept the streets clean, the local government ensured there was plenty to eat, she was friends with the girls two doors down, and her parents loved each other.

  That all changed when her father died. The after-effects of a plague that swept that quarter, one that caught even the mages and the mage-healers off guard. Dageian citizenship did not come easily for those without money, and with her father’s death went the security that his employment at the local scribe shop offered. Her mother had to sell off her father’s things, what little was left of it. The brushes and jars of ink, and the thick, expensive paper, the kind that seemed perpetually thirsty for every stroke. “He won’t need them anymore, child,” her mother told her, smoothing out angry tears with callused fingers as carefully as if they were fragile gems. “We do what we must to survive.”

  Namra had to watch the man who raised her burned in a mass grave with three hundred other unfortunate souls. They had very little left for a private pyre after her father’s illness… even regular physicians didn’t come cheap. We do what we must, she thought to herself while her mother became friendly with the funeral director. He, too, had lost his wife.

  They were married six moons later. In the corner of the solar where they were having the wedding feast, her mother wiped more angry tears from Namra’s cheeks and told her she was to head back to Jin-Sayeng. “Are you getting rid of me?” Namra asked. “You’ve gone and replaced father, and now you’re sending me away.”

  “I’m protecting you,” her mother said.

  “You left Jin-Sayeng because it wasn’t safe. And now you want me to return.”

  “The war is long over. You will go and wait for me to send for you.”

  The sound of Margga removing the plates from the table snapped her back to the present. Too late, she attempted to reach for them herself, but Margga slapped her hands away, admonishing her for not paying attention. She watched in silence as the old woman cleared the table with several successive sighs. “Try not to burn the house down while I’m gone,” she said.

  “It’s the middle of the monsoon,” Namra replied.

  Aunt Margga gave her a look of scrutiny. “Knowing you, you’ll find a way.”

  Namra struggled not to let the tears fall, even after Margga had left. She could be strong, couldn’t she? We do what we must.

  She made her way to the edge of the window to stare at the sky, to see if she could find dragons.

  It the first thing she had looked for when she arrived in the war-torn nation her parents once called home, her eyes staring straight up at the skies that they say used to turn black from the beasts’ wings as their monstrous shadows swallowed the clouds. A twinge of fear, followed by disappointment. They used to ride dragons here. They didn’t, anymore. The Jin-Sayeng in front of her looked nothing like the Jin-Sayeng of her father’s stories.

  Since then, she had made it a habit to check, anyway. It was a pleasant distraction from thinking about her father, which was always liable to send her into a stupor. It hadn’t even been a year yet and everything was still raw, the pain like a swollen wound that could crumple with the slightest touch. She still didn’t know how she was supposed to live with it.

  A flash of lightning streaked the sky, followed by a rumble. The dragon-tower in the distance lit up momentarily, like a torch. Namra felt her heart skip a beat. She believed in signs, nevermind that the Dageian children used to make fun of her for it. A Jinsein thing, her father had taught her. But something about the gravity of that moment made her get up without even really thinking it through. She found a cloak and ventured out into the rain.

  Her father’s stories played in her head as she walked along the road. She imagined the beasts roosting around the spire in the distance, that it wasn’t the lightning but their fiery breaths that made it flash across the sky. Family was sacred, but so were dragons.

&nb
sp; “We were prosperous when we had dragons,” her father liked to say. “Back then, the Dragonthrone’s coffers were teeming, there was work and food for everyone, and it looked like our nation was headed towards a greatness that would rival Gaspar or even the empires of Dageis and Ziri-nar-Orxiaro themselves!”

  Were. The past. It was always about the past. Past wars. Past glories. There was always a tinge of sorrow in her father’s words when he spoke. It was greatest when he spoke of that last war, the one started by Yeshin of the Oren-yaro, who attempted to seize the Dragonthrone for himself. The bloodiest war in all of Jin-Sayeng’s history, it ended in a stalemate not long after Namra’s parents escaped with her to Dageis. She wondered if he regretted leaving. He had no way of knowing the war would be over so fast. He told her you had to do that, sometimes—had to throw caution to the wind to make a decision, even if you didn’t want to.

  The road turned uphill, and then she found herself staring at the Citadel’s gates. At the falcon emblem that hung over the Citadel’s gates and the scrawl at the bottom of the banner with the words Knowledge. Patience. Benevolence. All scrawled in Jinan. It surprised her how effortlessly she read them. Carefully, she allowed herself the memory of the time her father was teaching her to write the Jinan script—the swoops and the curves, so different from the blocky text of the Dageians. She remembered how tiny her hand felt in his big, firm ones, remembered marvelling at how much care he took with every stroke. He loved his work. Even to a five-year-old, that much was clear.

  “Do you see this?” he asked, making a small dot on top of her name. “We didn’t have that a long time ago. But without it we wouldn’t be able to say your name properly. Na-ma-ra, it would read.”

  “It sounds the same,” she replied, frowning.

  “It doesn’t, my dear. The evolution of language is a beautiful thing. To be able to put down your thoughts in the mother tongue, with all its subtleties…is a beautiful thing. Do you see?”

  She didn’t. She only saw that he also loved Jin-Sayeng, and yearned for it every waking day.

  The familiarity of the handwriting on the banners struck her. For the first time in months, she allowed herself to feel her father’s loss, cloaking herself in the comfort of grief. He was gone, but not everything that was him. Not everything.

  Subdued, she made her way back to Old Margga’s hut and almost didn’t notice the procession until it was right behind her. She dodged to the side of the road just in time to avoid embarrassment and gazed in wonder at the sight of her father’s banners now adorning the side of an enormous chariot drawn by six horses. Soldiers marched alongside, armed with heavy pikes and halberds. They moved with precision, each step calculated. Namra figured someone of importance sat behind the curtained chariot. A high official of the Ikessars, perhaps. Not the Ikessar princess—everyone knew she hasn’t left the Citadel in years.

  Namra was still thinking when the volley of arrows appeared in the air.

  She was standing just close enough to the road to see them land right on top of the soldiers. A good number fell to the ground in a pool of blood. Namra backed away just as the horses began screaming. The flash of steel and then—just off in the distance, a throng of warriors came charging from the woods above them, clad in nondescript armour, corded bands instead of helmets on their heads. In the ensuing chaos, her one and only thought was to find a way to escape.

  She made it into the forest and then to the edge of a rolling cliff overlooking one of the small lakes that trailed in chains along the northern edge of the valley. She paused to catch her breath before hearing footsteps. She turned, wondering if she had it in her to fight. If her father was a fool for being dead at forty, what did that make her? Dead at fourteen! Aunt Margga warned her!

  But it wasn’t a warrior. It was a young man—a boy of about her age. “They’ve come to kill me,” he said simply, his calm voice a stark contrast to the panic in his eyes. “Will you help?”

  She stared back for a heartbeat and found herself nodding. It wasn’t in her nature to refuse such a well-worded request. But also, it occurred to her as they made their way down the pink granite, that the boy must be of some importance. His clothes were several cuts above hers—they were almost ceremonial, black and edged with silver thread, marked by the same sigil her father designed. He was also wearing a silver circlet around his head with a single, green jewel in the center of it.

  Only when they reached the bottom of the cliff where the lake met the shore in small, butterfly waves did she turn to face him. “You’re an Ikessar,” she breathed.

  The boy knotted his brows together before he replied. “I am. Will that be a problem?”

  She glanced at the sigil. “My father worked for you. For your clan, I mean.”

  “Do I know him?”

  “You wouldn’t have. He’s dead now.”

  They heard voices above them. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him into the shadows, behind an outcrop of rocks large enough to hide them. There, she turned and noticed the crevices spreading, converging towards a cavern. Without thinking about it, she dragged the lordling into the gap.

  They found themselves in a tunnel. Namra remembered that a network lay underneath the villages, built during the war to help Princess Ryia’s troops escape should they ever find themselves trapped by the Oren-yaro. They didn’t have much time—the lordling’s assassins would know about the tunnels, too. She urged him to walk a little faster, and they plunge deep enough to find themselves in total darkness.

  Here now, she took the time to let her eyes adjust. She was able to make out the faint outline of the path before them. They stumbled blindly along it until they find themselves in a wide cave. Water dripped freely from the walls, forming a small pool in the middle. Sunlight and fresh air streamed from gaps along the ceiling.

  Namra stopped by a rotting footbridge and bent down to take a drink from the pool. She turned to the lordling. “It’s clean enough,” she said. “You should try it.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  Namra wipes her face and peers at him. “You are a lord.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. Just the way you speak.”

  The boy flushed. “You’ve got a strange manner of speaking yourself.”

  “That’s why I know. I grew up in Dageis.”

  “Your father worked for us, you said.”

  “During the war. Well…during the beginning of it. He designed your sigil.” Namra gestured at the falcon emblem on his tunic.

  “I see,” the lordling replied. He left it at that—no praise or word of gratitude. Everyone said the royals could be rude, and if Namra was more Jinsein, perhaps it would have upset her. But growing up in Dageis had taught her to tolerate rudeness, and in any case, she didn’t think he meant it. Already, he was staring at the water, perhaps wondering if he should risk drinking from it after all. It was fascinating to see him attempt to come to a conclusion, as if the very act of drinking was something that deserved such tortuous analysis.

  Eventually, he dropped one hand into the water to scoop out a handful. He tasted it.

  “Are you dead yet?” she asked.

  “I suppose not.” He dipped his hand to drink a little more before dabbing his wet fingers over his dirt-streaked forehead.

  “Why do those men want to kill you?”

  “I don’t know,” the lordling admitted. “They killed my soldiers. It was a reasonable conclusion.”

  “Perhaps they mean to capture you and then torture you.”

  “Another possibility.”

  She gave a quick shiver. “Is this how it is here?”

  The lordling glanced at her, confused.

  “The fighting. The killing. You don’t seem very upset that your men are dead.”

  “It has always been Jin-Sayeng’s way.”

  “I think I know why my parents left, now,” she said, more to herself than him. She stood up. “If we take one of these forks, we will reac
h the villages. But if your assassins follow you there, I don’t think they’ll be able to protect you.”

  He shuffled his feet, unsure of how to reply. She realized she had laid out the dilemma of his life. You died, or you got other people killed. Every choice led with death. What kind of doomed nation would birth such circumstances?

  “Well, nevermind,” she said, trying to make him feel better. “I really don’t know which way Darusu is. I’m new here, I told you. I arrived just a few days ago.”

  He took in this new information without a word. “We were on the northern edge,” he murmured. “And Darusu is to the south. And judging by the directions we took…” He picked up a stick and began to make etchings on the ground.

  She glanced at his sketch. “The middle tunnel,” she said

  He nodded. “That would be my guess, too.”

  “But if it leads straight to the assassins?”

  The lordling was quiet for a moment. Eventually, he allowed his shoulders to sag in what appeared to be a shrug. “Then it would only hasten our impending doom. Unless you wish to starve to death in the darkness?”

  She had no intention of dying at all, here or out in the surface. Nevertheless, he had a point, and she shuffled after him. They walked in silence. Namra, wishing to take the edge of the fear with the sound of conversation, cleared her throat. “That was quite a procession you had there. Just going to Darusu, you said?”

  “The road to Darusu,” the lordling said, “which, incidentally, forks to Oren-yaro.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Oren-yaro. That’s where the butcher lives, right?”

  “Butcher?”

  “Yeshin the Butcher. From the war.”

  “Warlord Yeshin died recently.”

  “I didn’t realize. The villagers never mentioned it.”

  “I do not believe it is common knowledge. We only just found out a few days ago ourselves—the Oren-yaro wanted to keep quiet about it. They think that it is fear of him that keeps the rest of us compliant. The fools.” He bit his lip in an effort not to say anything more.