He let his chest down and filled it again. Outside, the big skaler was doing the same, moving the air like approaching thunder. A clatter of rocks suggested it was struggling to hold its position. Ren risked another look, pulling back quickly as the skaler turned its head. It seemed to be scanning the sky for some reason. Why? What was it waiting for? What help did it need to lift up anything as small as Pupp? And why hadn’t it made a call to the others to say the youngster was alive and found?
The reason soon became chillingly clear. One of the beast’s short limbs came into view. Set among its claws was a large stone.
‘No,’ Ren mouthed.
Too late. The skaler thumped down with so much force that the rocks zinged and sparks flew. Ren could not believe what he was seeing. The adult snorted, apparently in annoyance, opened its jaws and raised the stone again.
This time, Ren screamed openly, ‘NO!’
By rights, it should have been the last word he spoke. But at the very moment he’d opened his mouth another skaler had skriked in the distance, drowning him out. The skaler on the ground gave a worried start. It dropped the stone and replied with a kind of irritated grate. It shook its head as if to say there was nothing to be found.
Then it glanced down quickly, bared its teeth and disappeared into the sky.
10
Stunned. That was how Ren felt. Stunned and hollow inside. After some moments of indecision, he started to make up positive reasons for what he’d just seen. He told himself that the skaler might have been striking at a slitherer that had wound by looking for an easy meal. Maybe the beast had used a rock because the pupp was too close to survive a burst of flame? For all Ren knew, it was, in fact, rescued; when the adult had flown, its feet had been hidden from view. But his mind refused to accept those reasons, and when he at last peered over the ledge there was no sign of any splattered slitherer, just a flash of blue between the stones. The pupp was buried on the slope, not moving. Struck down by one of its own.
Sorrow the like of which he’d never known began to squeeze Ren’s youthful heart. Yet even with the evidence bare before him, he was struggling to believe what had just happened. He ran the scene through his mind once more. Skaler, landing. Pause. Stone. Whichever way he sifted it, the facts came back to him swathed in darkness. A green skaler had cruelly attacked the pupp. It had struck with a stone and…
…not completed the kill!
Ren dropped to a crouch and squinted. Yes, there was a definite twitch of a foot, a little knock of pebble against pebble. Dismissing any thought for his own safety, he quickly jumped down and separated the stones. Amazingly, the pupp was alive, nestled in a cavity between two boulders. Ren remembered the adult’s snort of annoyance and wondered if the young one had seen the blow coming and dived into the hole to protect itself. The impact had probably knocked it senseless, giving the attacker cause to believe it had done enough – but also leaving room for doubt.
Carefully, Ren dragged the youngster clear. It was bleeding from a gash where the legs joined the belly. The goo trickled warmly over Ren’s wrist, the same green fluid he’d seen oozing out of the mother’s head. In that moment, the pupp snapped back to life, kicking in terror and biting Ren’s hand. Stifling a cry, he clamped its mouth shut. Grimacing, he looked at the back of his hand. Blood was springing from an arc of fine holes.
A fresh call from the far side of the mountain reminded him of how much danger he was in. The skaler could return at any moment to finish off what it had started.
What to do?
The cave was the obvious answer, but… He wiped his wrist – and that gave him an idea. A slim chance, but it might just work, though it would mean inflicting more hurt on the pupp. ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered. Kneeling down, he clamped its mouth again and squeezed its belly till more green spurted out of the cut, enough to make a pool on the face of a boulder. The youngster wriggled and jerked like fury, but in a moment it was done and Ren was upright again. He launched the pupp in the direction of the cave, praying it wouldn’t crash and hurt itself further. But it was learning fast what its body could do. Instinctively, it beat its fragile wings, this time creating enough momentum to fly a short way and land safely on the ledge.
Ren knelt again. His left hand was burning with pain from the bite, but he ignored it and used the palm of the other to smear the green blood in a trail across the rocks. To this he added some dung from his hair, still wet enough to spread. In a moment of inspiration, he reached into his robe and pulled out the caarker leg he’d found. It was the size of the pupp’s, but with one toe less. He planted it carefully at the head of the trail, leaving just one toe showing. Then, with a wary eye on the sky, he pushed as many stones as he could toward the site to try to create the illusion of a rock fall, even managing to tip up a huge boulder before he scrambled back into the mountain.
He found the pupp there, huddled and miserable. This time when he picked it up it didn’t struggle, but just settled in his arms as if it no longer cared what happened to it. Ren cradled it in a fold of his robe, then slipped back into the shadows and waited.
Before long, the large skaler came back. It went through all the same motions as before: pausing, breathing, checking the sky. It bent its head and Ren heard it sniffing. He prayed it wouldn’t rake the rocks, and it didn’t, an outcome aided by a closing shudder from the sleeping mountain that added a last trickle of stones to the pile.
But the skaler wasn’t done. It raised itself up and thumped down on the erth with colossal power, doing this twice before it flew off. When all was quiet, Ren emerged from the cave and looked at the site. His ‘burial’ mound was flattened. Whichever skaler had committed the strike didn’t just want the youngster dead – it wanted it deader than dead. For the first time, Ren felt truly afraid. His mission had taken on a whole new twist. He could not abandon the youngster now, nor could he risk another try at returning it. He looked across the silent landscape. The Kaal settlement seemed very far away. Perhaps he should have listened to Targen the Old and never let himself become entangled with the skalers. For whichever way his life turned now, he was going to encounter more enemies than friends, the worst of them being a dark green skaler with a speck of red in its hateful eye.
And a broken fang on its upper left side.
11
Ren decided not to wait for nightfall. The death of the female skaler had brought others to the mountain from all directions. But as time went by and flurries of snow began to drift into the cleft, the sky emptied and he guessed that the beasts had gathered around the great ice lake. If they were anything like the men of his tribe they would have come together to decide what must be done. Now and then he could hear them roaring. He almost felt he ought to be among them, sharing their loss, giving word of what he’d seen. But that was a fever talking. His bitten hand was beginning to swell and purple blotches were spreading out around the tooth marks. He could feel the pupp’s fire flowing up his arm, breaking in beads of hot sweat across his brow. Another reason to get home soon. He needed herbs. He needed Targen the Old.
But first he had to attend to their wounds. The youngster’s cut was healing quickly. The blood loss, in fact, had almost stopped. Ren spat on his hand and rubbed some wet into the wound, then tied another strip of his mother’s under-robe around the belly, knotting it off at the back, between the wings. It was a struggle. Although the little one was yet to grow scales, there were bristles all over its bony body that wanted to stand up at different angles. And like any young animal, it pecked at the binding as soon as it was on. Ren sighed, knowing he had done all he could.
For himself, he made another binding, which he wrapped three times around his injured hand and attempted to tie off using his teeth. While he was labouring, he noticed the skaler sniffing at the dressing he’d applied to his knee. He batted it aside before it could rasp the red stain on the cloth. ‘Nuh,’ he grunted, the tie betw
een his teeth. He didn’t want a skaler tasting his blood. Who knew where that might lead?
Grracck, said the pupp, which seemed to be its response to everything.
Ren went back to his hand.
The pupp, looking on, tilted its snout and tottered forward again, this time stretching its wiry neck and nipping at the knot that held the knee tie in place.
The dressing slipped down Ren’s shin.
‘No!’ he said, and tried to swipe the pupp again, but was overcome by a sudden bout of dizziness, a sway so strong it turned him onto his side. He lay there panting, the mouth of the cave growing large and small. Once again the pupp came forward, lifting its dark wings, sniffing for blood. Ren tried to kick out, but the fever wouldn’t have it. This was it, he thought. His life was over. The skaler had numbed him with a poisoned bite. Now he was just a lump of meat, as useless as the caarker he had trampled in the tunnel, as dead as the mutt with its staring eye. Killed by a skaler barely out of its egg.
It was going to eat him alive.
When he woke, the pupp was the first thing he saw.
There was blood, red blood, around its mouth.
Horrified, Ren sat up and felt for his knee. He feared he would find the leg severed in half or at best put his fingers in a gory hole. But the limb was good and the wound clean, all its shredded edges sealed. At first he thought it had healed itself and the skaler had grazed on a crust of dried blood. But a gouge like that took days to mend. And though he couldn’t know how long he’d been sleeping, he felt sure that very little time had passed. That must mean the skaler had healed him. And all he had done for it in return was to slap it around the cave.
He put out a hand, palm upraised. The skaler was hesitant, but eventually climbed on and seemed glad to be cradled back at Ren’s chest. It had pulled off its dressing, but its bleeding had stopped.
Ren tickled two tiny stumps on its head.
Grracck! said the pupp.
Ren laughed quietly. ‘Grracck,’ he whispered, in a tone he hoped would sound grateful. He glanced outside. The snow was falling steadily now. Not the best conditions for running, but at least he felt better, stronger for the sleep. And though his bandaged hand was still a worry (unlike his knee, it hadn’t stopped hurting) now was the time to leave.
With the pupp in his arms, he approached the cave mouth. Another low rumble drifted over the hills. The skalers were still by the lake. What was going to happen, he wondered, when he walked into the settlement and laid the pupp at the feet of Targen? The Kaal might kill the youngster just as gladly as the adult skaler would. But men had voices he knew and understood. Men, he could reason with – he hoped.
First, he had to survive the journey. ‘We go,’ he said to the pupp. He pointed to the hills, the forest, the scorch line. ‘You stay close to Ren.’ He made claws with his fingers to demonstrate.
The skaler gurgled and gripped the robe. Ren accepted the pinching this time, but the noises, he knew, would have to stop. He put a finger to his lips and made a shushing sound. The pupp made a happy hurring noise. ‘No,’ Ren whispered, shushing again. He wagged his finger. The pupp tried to nip it, thinking they were playing. Ren sighed and patted its head. Hopefully, it would get the idea as they went, otherwise one of them, at least, was dead.
All the while keeping a watch on the skies, he took the drop one boulder at a time, careful not to stand on any rocks heavily wetted by snow. If a bone broke now or a muscle tore, the journey home was over before it had begun.
He started to run as he hit the slope proper, the skaler bobbing freely at his chest. The ground chattered as he knocked the shale aside. Noisy, but a risk worth taking, just to get across the scorch line as fast as he could.
He ran at an even downhill pace, covering the ground twice as quickly as he had in the night. The Whispering Forest was his first objective. Before long, it rose in the distance, a huge ribbon of green flowing over the hills, just starting to be capped by snow. Ren ran and ran, finding rushes of energy he never knew he had. He was almost on the point of self-congratulation, close enough to the trees to think that the skalers were not as smart as Targen claimed, when the pupp made a warning noise. Ren hit the ground fast, pulling up his legs and sheltering the youngster in the curve of his body. The land outside the forest was more green than grey, with few rocky outcrops of any size. Even huddled in a ball, he was going to stand out. And maybe his nose had gotten used to the smell, but his robe no longer reeked of filth. Ren pressed his eyes shut, trembling from his hair to his aching feet. He could hear wingbeats. Close. Very close. Any moment now the erth would boom and a skaler would surely set itself down. All Ren could do was offer up the pupp and the darkeye horn still tucked into his robe and hope that the monster was merciful.
But there was no boom. No shake of the erth. Ren felt the rush as the thing swept over. It was flying low, and yet it had missed him. He took a chance and opened one eye. A skaler was disappearing into the distance. It was one of the two he’d seen fighting earlier. Not the glorious white one tipped with yellow. The other. The strikingly-coloured blue.
He let it fade from his sight before he stood up. A poor (or stupid) hunter it might be, but if nothing else Ren was grateful for the rest. He waved it goodbye, arrogantly thinking he could now afford to stroll into the forest. But as he turned toward the trees, he found his way blocked by the point of a spear.
It jabbed at his belly like the end of the mother skaler’s tail, carried by a man no wider than the bones his skin stretched over. A man with so much hair around his face that his eyes looked like two eggs in a nest. Despite the cold, his chest was bare, the skin grown over with dark green moss, notably on his shoulders and back. Twigs and old leaves were clinging to the moss and even some wild flowers sprouted there. A treeman. The first Ren had ever seen. Two more of them rose from the ground as if they had floated up from the grave. The Kaal had always believed that the skalers had driven these men from the forest. Yet here were three, all wielding spears.
‘What got?’ said the first, dribbling into his beard. His milky eyes squinted at the shape in Ren’s hands.
Ren wrapped his arms round the pupp. He wouldn’t be able to shield it for long. ‘Mutt,’ he said.
The treeman squinted. Outside the forest, their sight was poor. ‘Show,’ he grunted. He jabbed again.
Ren shook his head. ‘I am Kaal,’ he said proudly. He nodded at the lowland beyond the forest. ‘I have no quarrel with treemen. Let me go.’
A second man stepped forward, the point of his spear less lenient than his friend’s. Without warning, he stabbed Ren’s bandaged hand.
Ren cried out and the skaler echoed. Its head wriggled free and it hissed like a slitherer. Tiny though it was, its teeth, when it set its jaws wide, were chilling.
All three treemen backed off in fear.
Ren clasped his injured hand. ‘Stand away,’ he growled, the words burning angrily on his tongue. And at first he thought they were going to allow it, but they looked at each other and seemed to reach a mutual conclusion.
Kill the boy.
Kill the beast.
They came for him, spears raised, murder in their eyes.
A strange sensation flooded through Ren. In the face of this danger he suddenly felt the mother skaler’s presence, as if she had emerged from within him like a spirit. But what could she do? He had nowhere to run and no weapon with which to defend himself.
Or did he?
Faster than the treemen could have thought possible, he went into his robe and pulled out the darkeye horn. He held it high in his fist, the way they held their spears against him. Now the mother skaler came alive in Ren. His chest seemed to double in size. The fingers on his bitten hand curled like claws. More remarkable than that, his lips rolled back and he heard himself roar. But it was not the roar the treemen ran from, it was the fire that b
urst from the darkeye horn. Ren felt it coming like a rush of hot blood, from the centre of his chest all the way down his arm. It leapt across the space between them, catching the nearest man and setting his brittle grey hair alight. He screamed. His spear hit the ground. He fled with the others, beating his face, leaving cinders trailing on the wind. He ran from the boy who made fire in his hand. The boy who could roar like a skaler.
Ren sank to his knees and let go of Pupp. The youngster, who seemed unaffected by the conflict, was happy to potter and graze for a moment. Ren looked at the horn, still glowing at its tip. He clamped his fist even tighter around it, curling his fingers into its spirals. ‘What am I?’ he whispered. He raised up his hand and stared at the bite marks. The mother skaler had left him now, but during the time she had spent in his mind, she had opened a pathway to understanding, beginning with the words she had spoken in the cavern: galan aug scieth. ‘I am you and you are me.’ That was what it meant. Somehow, she had made herself part of him.
And Ren was coming to know her too, and all that glittered in her haunting eye. She was called Grystina, of the Astrian line. To her son she had also given a name: Gariffred, meaning ‘flame of truth’.
Gariffred. On Ren’s tongue, it was hard to say. Begging respect, he chose to stick with Pupp. But there were other words that caught his imagination. He had always wondered how they named themselves, these astonishing creatures of fire. Now, with the mother’s help, he knew. They hailed from a world they called Ki:mera. And they were not beasts, nor monsters, nor skalers, but went by a word that spilled off the tongue like a storm of fire.
Dragons.
They called themselves dragons.