Heart's Blood

  "Tight." He nodded with satisfaction.

  The second stall seemed just as solid.

  In the third stall, he found a single loose board and hammered it shut with three well-placed nails. Then he packed extra dirt around the bottom of the board, stomping it down with his sandal. He promised himself to check it often.

  Finally, he went into Auricle's stall. She'd slept through the hammering and the whispered conversations with Slakk and all the to-ing and fro-ing. He guessed she could probably sleep through the end of the world. When he slid into her mind, it was all muzzy, a kind of purposeful gray landscape.

  Checking around her stall, Jakkin found the boards tight, though her tail lay against part of the back wall and he couldn't get her to wake in order to check behind. Any drakk willing to chance a full-grown dragon was a dead drakk, anyway. However, there was always the possibility that a dragon's fiery breath could set the whole incubarn aflame.

  Always something else to worry about, he thought. But he let Auricle sleep.

  And soon after, he let Slakk sleep as well. As promised, Jakkin took the first watch himself.

  14

  THE FIRST COUPLE of hours were quiet with only a few hammering sounds coming from down the corridor and the occasional pipping of hatchlings. Jakkin walked through the stalls, checking and rechecking the walls and floors. When he found himself beginning to yawn, he woke Slakk.

  "Your watch."

  "Already?" Slakk said without much conviction and a whine in his voice. With Slakk, every conversation started with a complaint, and Jakkin knew better than to argue. But why is Slakk still around?

  "You used to say," Jakkin began, his voice pitched low, "that when you bought yourself out of bond, you'd never work with dragons again. Yet here you are, a free man and still at the dragon nursery."

  Slakk shrugged but didn't answer. It seemed as if he was not yet awake enough to talk.

  However, that shrug told Jakkin everything. Slakk's complaints were simply part of his personality. And after all, what else did Slakk know but dragons? At the nursery he had three meals a day and a warm place to sleep. If he got sick, there was the hospice. If he got old, he could help in the kitchen. If he pair-bonded—though Jakkin could hardly believe anyone would put up with his constant complaining—there was special housing for couples. Jakkin shrugged back, keeping his own silence.

  They changed places, Slakk standing, stretching, scratching behind his shoulder, making soft grunting noises, occasionally wandering into the various stalls assigned to them.

  Jakkin took the blanket and went into Auricle's stall, where he lay down close to her for warmth, though the barn was certainly warm enough already. But the familiarity of lying close to a dragon was comforting. Shutting his eyes, he was fast asleep within moments, snoring lightly.

  He dreamed of Akki, not as she'd been in the caves or in the great city of The Rokk, nor as she'd looked out in the oasis back when he'd first trained Heart's Blood. The dream took place where he first met her, in the hospice, her black hair hanging straight down her back, her generous mouth laughing at him, as she nursed him back to health.

  Why did you leave? he asked her in the dream.

  To save the dragons, she answered, holding up the hatchling by its tail.

  Why did you leave? he asked a second time.

  To save the dragons, she answered, holding up a full bond bag. She shook it and it rang with the sound of coins.

  Why did you leave? he asked a third time.

  She began to scream.

  Jakkin woke, startled, his heart beating wildly. Oddly, the screaming continued even though he was wide awake, staring into the dark. The screaming wasn't just out loud, but in his head, too, accompanied by a series of horrible images: blood-red rivers, bones piercing through skin.

  Suddenly he realized that Akki wasn't doing the screaming. Slakk was. And there was an awful smell in the barn.

  Drakk! Jakkin reached for the mask that was still attached to his vest. The smell was everywhere and the mask did little to filter it out. The stench was overpowering. He wanted to vomit. But not in the mask! he warned himself. Not in the mask.

  Leaping to his feet, Jakkin grabbed his knife and stumbled toward the stall door, but his feet tangled in the blanket and he nearly fell forward, cursing loudly. "Fewmets! Worm waste!"

  Now Auricle was standing behind him and screaming as well, rocking back and forth, her voice high-pitched, her sendings frantic, huge, streaking lightning bolts plowing through a muddy sea.

  Righting himself, Jakkin stepped out of the tangle of blanket, and turned. "Lie down, thou beauty." He meant it to be calming, encouraging, but it came out as an order.

  Auricle was used to orders. She lay down.

  Turning back, Jakkin rushed through the door, looking around till he found Slakk in one of the two smaller stalls he'd claimed as his own sleeping room. He was on his knees, shaking, covered with blood.

  "Slakk!" Jakkin cried, his voice filtered oddly through the mask.

  Slakk looked up, screaming silently, his eyes wide open, haunted. His mouth gaped. He kept sending gouts of blood and flame into Jakkin's brain.

  A sending? Jakkin was sure of it. But how?

  In front of Slakk was a female drakk, rather small, but deadly nonetheless. Even a tiny drakk could open a man up, spilling out blood, bone, intestines.

  This drakk, however, was dying. Jakkin could hear her pain, her anger, her astonishment. She had a gaping hole in her belly and a slash ringing her neck, so wide that her oily green snake head lay half off. But still she kept moving, gashing the air with her vicious talons. Each time she lifted those talons, her wings lifted as well, disclosing scabrous sensor organs that pulsed like a beating heart. In her opened belly lay a clutch of white eggs.

  A female. A young breeding female. Jakkin shuddered. Likkarn wouldn't like that.

  Slakk's hand clutching the knife slashed down again, this time smashing the eggs. He screamed as his fingers touched the hot blood that pooled in the drakk's wounds. Then, as if waking from a nightmare, he looked down at the horror in front of him and tried to scrabble back from it. Whimpering, he held his knife hand against his chest. The drakk's hot blood must have scorched his hand. Suddenly he began crawling backward, all the while continuing to howl.

  "Slakk!" Jakkin called, but Slakk didn't seem to understand him. So Jakkin walked carefully around the dying drakk and bent down, trying to take the knife away from Slakk before he hurt himself with it. Slakk wouldn't loosen his hold on the bone handle. He was weeping loudly now and babbling, though Jakkin could make no sense of what he was saying.

  There was a sudden movement in the stall behind them. Turning swiftly, Jakkin brought up his own knife and looked around frantically, his entire arm trembling.

  "There, lads." It was Balakk, with Likkarn next to him, their masks securely fastened over their noses. They'd come to check on the noise.

  Likkarn stepped around the drakk and, with a swift purposeful slice, cut the drakk's head off. Then, with his boot, he kicked the back of the creature's body, which sent it sailing over to the side of the stall.

  The stench was now overpowering. Jakkin gagged, then fought down the impulse to throw up. Not in the mask! Not in... Grabbing off the mask, he vomited so hard into the straw, bits actually came out of his nose as well. Wiping his mouth and nose with his sleeve, he replaced his mask. His stomach was no longer roiling, but now he was having trouble breathing and his mouth felt as if he'd been eating fewmets.

  Balakk and Likkarn ignored him. Instead they searched around the stall, rechecking every bit of it carefully—walls, floor, and joins.

  Once his nausea had passed, Jakkin helped them in their hunt, though Slakk remained sitting on the straw-covered floor, rocking back and forth, his damaged hand cradled against his body.

  Eventually Balakk found a small loose floorboard through which the drakk must have crawled. Slakk had missed that on his inspection, and for a brief moment, Jak
kin thought he deserved what he'd got. But only for a moment. Slakk looked so miserable and hurt crouching there, not far from the drakk's awful head, that without thinking, Jakkin sent him a comforting ribbon of light.

  Slakk never noticed.

  I must have been mistaken about that sending. But it had been so loud, so definite.

  Balakk hammered seven nails into the board. He would have kept going, but Likkarn bent over and laid a hand on his shoulder.

  "It's almost all iron and no wood now," he told Balakk in a soft voice.

  "That will do," Balakk said at last. "That will do." And he stood.

  They made another round of the stall but found no more loose boards, no holes in the floor. All the while, the smell continued to get worse. Even Auricle, three stalls away, complained, sending Jakkin pictures of bilious gray-green mud, popping and splattering.

  Only after the men were sure of the stall did they check Slakk, who was now just whimpering. Balakk placed the mask over his face and patted his shoulder, though Slakk responded to that no more than he had to Jakkin's sending.

  "I should have put the mask on him," Jakkin said.

  "You had other things to think about, boy, as did we," Balakk told him, though Jakkin wasn't sure if he was referring to his getting sick or his looking about for the hole the drakk had come through.

  "We can't get him to the hospice until Dark-After is done," Likkarn said. "Another few hours." He looked at Jakkin carefully. "But at least we can take him out of here. The smell alone will kill him."

  "Or me," Jakkin said. The nausea had returned and he fought it down. He didn't want to throw up again, though he doubted there was anything much left in his stomach.

  "Or any of us," Balakk added.

  "Will you watch him, keep him warm?" Likkarn asked.

  Jakkin had never heard the old bonder speak in such soft tones. "It's already warm," he said. He was sweating in his leathers.

  "He'll be in shock, chilling. Keep a blanket around him. Bed him down near your Auricle, if she'll have him with that smell. Otherwise, you lie down by his side. He'll need it."

  Jakkin shrugged.

  "Only get that fewmetty knife away from him first."

  "I'll send Arakk back here to take turns with you," Balakk said.

  Jakkin nodded. He looked over his shoulder at the drakk's body. Even without a head it was still moving sluggishly.

  Likkarn said gruffly, "That piece of worm waste must have been desperate for food."

  "She had eggs in her belly," Jakkin told him.

  "Ah. That explains it."

  "Slakk smashed them."

  Likkarn nodded. "Good boy."

  They got Slakk to his feet, though he wouldn't let go of the knife, and led him as far from the little stall as possible. The stench followed them. Slakk had been drenched in the drakk's blood.

  Auricle screamed when they came near, reacting to both the smell and the blood. And possibly the knife, too. She hackled as well, the back scales of her neck rising up like a small fan. No amount of sendings could quiet her, so they moved Slakk into a different stall, an empty one, halfway back down the corridor.

  "When you can," Balakk whispered to Jakkin, "get the knife and wash it off with sand." There were boxes of sand along the corridors. Sand was always available to help clean out stalls. "Otherwise the blade will be eaten away by the blood."

  "I will." Jakkin was actually more worried about Slakk suddenly using the knife on him than he was about blood eroding the blade. "I will," he repeated.

  "And as soon as it's light, you can get him back to the bondhouse, and a bath for both of you." Balakk talked about them as he would a dragon.

  "I wish it could be now," Jakkin said, his skin already itching for hot water and yellow soap. He could do it alone, could get back to the nursery house through the cold of Dark-After, but that would give away the secret. And it wouldn't help Slakk at all.

  ***

  WHEN THE MEN finally left him alone with Slakk, Jakkin stared at his friend as if he'd never seen him before. The boy's face, gray and sunken, had only begun to soften, though that somehow made him look worse than ever. His hand clutching the knife, though, had not relaxed at all and was still tight around the handle.

  "It's all right, Slakk," Jakkin said to him in the same soft tone he'd used with the hackling worm. "You're a hero. You can sleep now. Give me the knife."

  Slakk said nothing, but held on to the knife till his knuckles turned white. He kept shuddering like a young dragon.

  Jakkin remembered how Slakk had managed a sending—the blood-red rivers, the bones, that scream. Or did I only dream it? Jakkin wondered.

  No, he may have been asleep at first, but he'd been wide awake when Slakk sent the blood and flames. And if Slakk could send and Likkarn could receive sendings ... I need to find Akki as soon as possible, to tell her. It may be important. He put a hand on Slakk's shoulder. "There, there," he said, trying to find his way back into Slakk's mind. He sent a calm river, a long meadow of green grass, then waited.

  Nothing.

  He tried again, this time sending a rainbow, all bright and cheery and easily picked up. But Slakk's mind was closed to him, and no amount of nudging and pushing could get it to open again.

  "Never mind," Jakkin said, still speaking in soft tones. He led Slakk to a corner of the stall, where he might feel protected on three sides. Putting a blanket over Slakk's shoulders, Jakkin knelt and tucked it around Slakk's knees. All the while he crooned, "There, there, there," as if talking to a hatchling instead of a seventeen-year-old boy.

  Just then Jakkin heard a strange sound and looked up. Slakk was weeping and the knife had fallen to one side.

  "I'll hold on to this," Jakkin said, grabbing up the knife. Slakk made no protest. "You sleep. I'll stand guard the rest of the night."

  Without any nod of agreement, or word to show that he'd understood, or even an acknowledging grunt, Slakk closed his eyes.

  Jakkin couldn't tell if Slakk was actually asleep or only pretending. But true to his word, he stood over Slakk until Dark-After was done and the bell for morning rang through the incubarn, signaling day.

  15

  THE BATH took almost an hour and—hot water followed by cold—Jakkin still didn't feel clean. The drakk stench lingered on his hands and in his hair. He could taste it each time he swallowed.

  And if he was bad, Slakk was worse, coughing frothily as Jakkin scrubbed his wrists where the drakk blood had soaked through the gap between leather and shirt. Then the cough turned deep, sounding like a death rattle. Of course it was really only his lungs trying to clear themselves of the drakk smell. Or so Balakk explained afterward.

  Between them, Balakk and Jakkin got Slakk out of the bath and to the hospice, though it was clear that he hadn't been badly injured. A bit of burn on one hand was the worst of it. But he hadn't said a word to any of them since the drakk attack. Every now and then he whimpered piteously. And kept on coughing.

  They left him at the hospice, with a visiting doctor from the nearest dragon nursery in attendance. Evidently Likkarn himself had been up at first light to drive off to fetch him.

  "Don't worry," said the doctor, a man with a series of blood scores on his right cheek and neck. "A bit of rest, a bit of feeding-up should do him."

  "That doctor knows more about dragons than men," Balakk said as they walked out into the sunshine. "It's the same thing he says when he looks at failing studs. 'A bit of feeding-up should do him.' He's an old fraud." He spit to one side, raising dust by the walk.

  Jakkin laughed, a short sharp hough of a laugh, but remembered how it had taken days for him to adjust after his drakk hunt. And he'd never had his hands deep inside a drakk like Slakk had. "Will Slakk be all right?"

  "Slakk his name and slack his mind. His body will be fine, though he'll have scars," Balakk said, which was not what Jakkin wanted to hear.

  ***

  AS SOON AS they'd grabbed some breakfast they joined the drakk hunters
.

  "We don't go hunting on an empty stomach," Likkarn warned. "No food, no form." It was what was usually said about fighting dragons before they were taken to fight in the pits. It was the same thing for this drakk hunt.

  For once the dining room was quiet. Jakkin was glad of that. His mind was abuzz with everything that had happened. He couldn't have stood being further burdened by talk.

  The hunters sat to one side, guzzling their takk and mint tea, and no one else in the room asked questions. It was as if the seriousness of the hunt ahead silenced them all.

  Kkarina came into the room a half dozen times, on tiptoe, which—given her bulk—was pretty amazing. It was a kind of rolling walk, yet graceful. Like Sssasha, Jakkin thought. She never spilled a drop of the takk—or the tea—as she refilled cups. The slabs of lizard meat were eaten without a word said. Jakkin had three eggs, which he pushed around the plate, finally eating one because he had to. Even though it wasn't true, everything smelled of drakk to him.

  At last the hunters were done eating and rose as a group, taking turns going to the johnnyloo. Then they met outside, where they formed two lines behind Likkarn and Balakk.

  "Check your equipment now," Likkarn warned them. "There'll be no time to do it once we spot a drakk."

  They each took a moment to look over their leathers, their masks, their knives and stingers. Jakkin put his right hand to his knife, checked the mask with his left. Thankfully it was a new mask and didn't stink. There weren't enough stingers to go around, and he—like Arakk and Tanekk, both about his own age—went without, having to rely only on his knife. Well, Slakk did fine with just a knife. But no matter how strongly he thought it, Jakkin couldn't convince himself. He felt vulnerable without a stinger, though he'd never actually used one and had no time to learn.

  "We need to be well prepared, lads," Likkarn told them. "You all know what happened in the incubarn last night. If there are other females ready to lay eggs, we won't just have a drakk problem, we'll have a drakk invasion."