She rose from her knees and looked at her wrists, where manacles had rubbed her skin raw. Soon those horrid things would be back. Too soon.
After a few minutes, Zena appeared at the doorway and walked into the firelight. In her bony hand, she dragged a thick chain that split into two thinner ones leading to a pair of manacles. “Hands out,” she said without emotion.
Koren stretched out her arms. Her sleeves rode up toward her elbows, exposing her wrists. Zena clamped the manacles in place with a metallic click. Koren blinked. It sounded like the closing of a door that would never open again.
“The prince is here,” Zena said. “I recommend that you tame that sharp tongue of yours.”
Koren leaned to the side to see around Zena. The fire cast undulating light across a small dragon, perhaps a fifth of Arxad’s size. Narrow blue beams flowed from his eyes and scanned the room. With his wings spread low and sweeping the floor, he shuffled slowly toward them.
“Welcome, Taushin,” Zena said. “We are over here. Just follow my voice.”
Koren stepped closer, her heart thumping. Although she had figured out that Taushin was blind, actually seeing the proverb come to life brought a pulse of excitement. The hatchling from the black egg did, indeed, have a handicap. How should she receive him? Maybe pretending to serve him gladly would work, at least for now.
The young dragon beat his wings, lifting himself slightly off the floor, and glided to Zena’s side. His blue eyebeams swept past her and landed on Koren’s face. The moment the light touched her skin, an odd sense entered her mind—something drilling in, probing. It caused no pain, but it filled her with the chill of exposure—cold air with no warm blanket to wrap around her body.
She raised her cloak’s hood as far as possible, shadowing her eyes. Any amount of protection felt better than a sense of nakedness.
“Ah!” The dragon’s eyes locked on her own, pushing the beams deeper into her mind. “There you are, Koren.”
“I am glad to meet you face-to-face,” Koren said as she dipped her knee. “Pardon me for saying so, but you told me you are blind. How are you able to recognize me?”
“I am blind visually, but I can use your eyes. Once the connection is complete, you will be my surrogate. As a Starlighter, you will serve as better eyes than I would have had naturally. You will provide a view of the present and the past.”
The drilling continued. Koren turned her head away, hoping to obstruct his view. “What is your goal?”
“Freedom. I have come to provide liberty to every species.”
She turned her head back toward him. “Really? Why does one of your own prophets say otherwise?”
“If you are referring to old Tamminy’s doggerel,” Taushin said with a laugh, “he has sung that ballad for centuries, and it has degenerated into a doomsayer’s dream in the minds of dragons and humans alike. If we want to live with courage, then we should not heed the ramblings of one who cowers at every cloud looming on the horizon.”
She clutched the fringe of her cloak tightly. “So what do you want me to do?”
“Your service,” Taushin said in a pleasant tone, “will begin here. You might have noticed that the Separators’ book is missing. Zena has confirmed that no official business has called for its removal, so we assume that an intruder has stolen it. It will do the thief little good. It is merely a record of slave Assignments along with some history that no one will comprehend. Yet some of that history is crucial for my purposes, so I will need you to conjure its contents with your gifts.”
“How can I? I know nothing about it.”
“Every word in that book has been spoken in this chamber. As a Starlighter, you will be able to gather the echoes from the air around you. Since this is a skill that you have not yet exercised, I will give you some time to practice.”
Koren let his beams enter her mind again. It was so hard to hold him back. He was powerful, seductive. Even his call to learn a new skill sent shivers of excitement crawling from head to toe. Of course she wanted to learn. Of course she wanted to master a Starlighter’s arts. But what would it cost? How could she become powerful without falling into this mind-bender’s trap?
Forcing a kindly smile, Koren dipped her knee again. “Thank you, Your Highness. I appreciate your patience and longsuffering.”
“My longsuffering?” Taushin asked. While Zena stooped and attached the chain to the floor ring, the dragon’s blue eyes seemed to laugh. “Dear Starlighter, it is not I who will suffer if you are slow to learn. It is you and your fellow slaves. When I return, I will explain why their lives depend on your cooperation, and you will learn to put away your false smile and serve me with your heart.”
ten
Sitting cross-legged with her back against a tree, Elyssa propped the Basilica’s book on her lap. While Wallace knelt at her side and looked on, she rubbed her finger on the leather cover, feeling an embossed symbol that looked like a pair of dragon eyes, yellowed and worn, hovering above a pair of human eyes.
As her skin drew in the feel of the designs, her Diviner’s sense interpreted the chemistry. The yellowing didn’t appear to be a result of age. The dragon eyes were actually painted that way. The human irises had once been green, but now only a few flecks of green paint remained. The cover felt old—very old—but since she had no experience gauging the age of leather, it seemed impossible to guess how old it might be.
She kept her fingers curled around the sphere, hoping to block its influence for the moment, and opened the book to the first page. A bold title filled most of the top half, apparently several carefully shaped letters spaced into two words.
“That’s easy enough,” Wallace said. “Book one.”
She pointed at the lines underneath, smaller letters but equally neat.
He spoke slowly, pausing as he deciphered. “This … record … ordered by … Magnar the … uh … large, I suppose.”
“Great?” Elyssa offered.
“Probably. Magnar the Great … will be written … to give an account … of events as they … hmmm …”
“Something not clear?”
“I don’t know this word,” he said, pointing. “It might be their word for rain, but since it doesn’t rain much, I don’t hear it very often.”
Elyssa mumbled the phrase. “To give an account of events as they rain.”
“I guess that sort of makes sense,” Wallace said.
“Sure. As events rain. As they transpire.”
“That works, but if we have to read like this, it’ll take forever.”
“True. I was hoping this might give us some clues that will help us find Jason, but we can’t afford to study it for days.” She thought again about mentioning the book’s whispers, but out in the daylight, the events in that dark Basilica room seemed like a dream.
Wallace pointed again, this time at a line near a lower corner. “That’s a date. It looks like this was written more than four hundred years ago.”
“Four hundred years! How could that be?”
“The book is awfully worn. Couldn’t it be that old?”
“That’s not it,” Elyssa said. “Why would the Separators have a book like this for their task of separating humans before humans ever arrived? And how could the words be written so neatly by a dragon? I was guessing that a human wrote this while a dragon dictated, but now …”
“Now we’re completely confused.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
Elyssa closed the book and set a finger on the lower pair of eyes. “These are human. There’s no doubt about it.”
“Could they have put those on there at a later time?”
She exhaled heavily. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Would she know?” Wallace pointed at her closed hand.
Elyssa blinked. “What do you mean?”
“This might sound crazy, but I’ve heard stories about what a Starlighter can do, so—”
“It won’t hurt to try.” Elyssa shot to her f
eet, turned back to the tree, and propped the open book against the trunk. Then, uncurling her fingers, she let the sphere’s energy flow over the text. As the particles began fogging her senses, she stared at the page. The odd words stared back at her, unchanging.
“I don’t know if this is going to work, Wallace, it’s just —”
“Look!” Wallace thrust a finger toward a grassy gap about four paces away. A man sat on a three-legged stool, leaning over a small wooden table and holding a quill. He dipped the point into an inkwell and began writing with great care. When he came to the bottom of the page, he stopped, as if frozen.
Elyssa reached out and turned the page. The man turned his page as well. When the paper settled, the man disappeared, and a new scene slowly took shape. It looked like a village of some kind with shops, cobblestone streets, and leafy trees lining the walkways on each side.
“This is the first story in the book,” Wallace said, pointing at the page. “It starts with, ‘One hundred years ago today.’”
“So this is an event that happened five hundred years ago.”
“That’s my guess.”
“I’m going in,” Elyssa said. “Turn the page whenever the action stops.” She rose and walked toward the image. Holding the sphere in her open palm, she extended her arm to keep the energy flowing back to the book.
As she entered the scene, the energy enveloped her mind. She was really on the street, walking on cobblestones.
A woman emerged from a shop. Dressed in an ankle-length skirt of dark blue and a white long-sleeved tunic, she could have easily passed for a middle-class employee in Mesolantrum, perhaps a headmistress of a school or the overseer of peasant labor in the governor’s palace.
The woman turned back to the shop and called out, “Timmon, come out immediately.”
A small boy hopped through the doorway. “I want to look at the dragons. I’ve never seen baby ones before.”
“You saw them. That should be enough. Dragons are workers, not pets.”
After the mother and son hurried away, a man walked out from the same shop, rolling a cage behind him on a cart. Two small dragons lay within its thick bars, one reddish-brown and the other a lighter brown with scarlet tones blended in. With their necks intertwined and their bodies nestled close, they appeared to be siblings, perhaps newly hatched.
As the man drew close to Elyssa, she lifted a hand to ask a question, but he walked by without noticing, and the cart passed right through her leg.
“Okay, then,” she muttered.
She followed him to the end of the street where another man stood next to an adult dragon. A collar had been fastened around the dragon’s neck just below its jaws, and the man held a small, thin box in his palm. He glanced at it from time to time as he turned it over and over in his hand.
“Have they been measured for collars?” the second man asked.
The cart-pulling man nodded at the young dragons. “One needs a five and the other needs a one-point-five.”
“One-point-five? Who ever heard of such a compliant dragon?”
“The meter actually said one, but I bumped it up a notch just in case.”
The second man squinted at the cage. “I’ll wager the red one is the five.”
“He is. You’d better put the collar on him while he’s sleeping. He bit the hatchery keeper so fiercely, it took twenty stitches to close the wound.”
“A few jolts will set him straight.” The second man pointed the box at the adult dragon and pressed a button. “Lower your head,” he barked.
Grimacing, the dragon extended his neck downward and set his head on the street. The man climbed up the neck and settled on the dragon’s back. “Pick up the cage with your claws, and fly me home.”
The dragon grunted, obviously annoyed. The man pushed the button again, this time holding it down.
Wagging his head from side to side, the dragon moaned. After a few seconds, the man released the button. “No more back talk!”
The first man chuckled. “I suppose you’ll be glad when these two are old enough to do the job.”
“It won’t come soon enough. But this old beast will make many fine pairs of boots, don’t you think?”
“True, my friend.” The cart-pulling man mopped his brow with a handkerchief and looked up at the sky, shielding his eyes with a hand. “If we don’t do something about that star soon, no one will wear boots. We’ll all have to go barefoot and wear bathing suits.”
“Or roast to death. I hear the weapon is almost ready. If it works, we’ll be rid of that scourge forever.”
“Not soon enough. If I could, I would fly up there myself, tear it out of the sky, and throw it in the river. That would stop the worshipers.”
“Not likely. We’d probably hear rumors about fish rising from the river and telling bedtime stories to the children.”
The two men laughed for a moment, then froze. The sound of rattling paper reached Elyssa’s ears, and, like a turning page, the scene warped and reshaped into a new vista, a row of five stalls with high ceilings and wide berths.
Elyssa looked around. Ambient light had diminished, indicating evening or early morning. She appeared to be inside a stable, though it was considerably larger than the stables at home. Chains and oversized manacles hung on a pair of iron hooks on the wall to her left. Against the opposite wall, a long rod with a sharp blade attached to the end leaned precariously.
Above the neck-high door of the closest stall, a dragon head appeared. As he extended his neck, his reddish scales glittered in the light of Solarus’s morning rays, framing the black collar near his jaw.
He made an odd guttural noise that sounded like a call.
“Wallace,” Elyssa said. “Help me out. What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Are you awake?’”
Elyssa replayed the noise in her mind. It would be helpful to learn the dragon language, but this crash course might be too difficult.
Another dragon, more brown than red and also wearing a collar, appeared at the stall beyond the first one. As the two dragons spoke, Wallace interpreted, calling into the scene from his place at the tree.
“I am awake,” the second dragon said.
“What are you doing?”
“It is dawn. You know what I am doing.”
The first dragon snorted. “I have given up on prayers. We need to stop waiting for divine help and learn to help ourselves.”
“These are not contradictory. This morning I focused my prayer on ideas for our escape. If you have received one from the Creator, I am willing to listen.”
“Whether or not it is from the Creator, I do not know, but I do have a plan. I have learned to make a high-pitched noise that blocks the signal to my collar. I have practiced on our stalls’ signal throughout the night. I believe I can neutralize it long enough to break free.”
The second dragon’s voice grew excited. “Then fly. Escape to the Northlands where the king will take you in.”
“You can continue believing the myths, brother, but I will not leave without you. I swore to you long ago that nothing would separate us, and I will not break my vow.”
“I appreciate your devotion.” The second dragon thrust his neck out, as if to indicate his own collar. “Are you able to neutralize mine as well?”
“I will try, but if I cannot do both at the same time, I will teach you how to make the sound yourself. Once you learn, we will escape together.”
Elyssa looked back. The stable door opened to another world, a forest scene where Wallace sat next to a tree. That world seemed so strange, distant and warped, an inadequate reflection of reality.
She squeezed her eyes closed. Think, Elyssa. Concentrate. That’s the real world out there. You’re standing in a story.
Opening her eyes again, she nodded at Wallace. “Keep turning the pages. I think we have a lot to learn.”
Using his clawed hand, Arxad placed the crystalline peg in the central hole in front of the portal. Three tunnels at
the rear of the chamber faded away, replaced by a swiftly flowing river.
“Excellent!” Magnar said, his ears twitching wildly as he stood next to Arxad. “After all these years, we will finally go back.”
Arxad straightened and looked at Magnar. “Indeed, the door is open, but you must test your ability to return here before we both go in. Jason mentioned a genetic key, so I am concerned that the humans might have altered the return access.”
“Yes, of course.” Magnar stepped into the river chamber and turned back to Arxad. “Remove the peg. If all is well, it will take no more than a few seconds for me to open it. If I do not reappear, open the portal on your side.”
Arxad wrapped his claws around the peg but left it in place. “My counsel is still to stay here. We can take Cassabrie and the stardrops and hide in the wilderness until Taushin resurrects the Northlands star. Then we can use her to restore the kingdom to you.”
“Do you think Taushin will be so easily defeated?” Magnar raised a foreleg and pointed at Arxad. “You were the one who insisted on sparing Koren. If he captures her, and Zena trains her, her power will grow.”
“Not beyond Cassabrie’s.”
Magnar snorted. “Your dream of reuniting Cassabrie with her body is beyond reason. You have visited her too frequently, and her charms have muddled your thinking.”
“My thinking? If you think you will persuade the armies of Darksphere to come to our aid, then perhaps a muddled mind is a genetic predisposition.”