Free The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume III: Volume III by Irene Radford

belched hot ash in a tall column that reached for the sky.
    “It’s not Hanassa!” Yaala yelled, hauling Powwell back from stepping through the imagery into the unknown landscape. “We can’t go there, Powwell.”
    “Of course it’s Hanassa. The gate always returns to Hanassa and nowhere else. See the path leading up the cliff to the plateau. It’s Hanassa. I have to rescue Kalen. We’re going now!” The fifteen-year-old journeyman magician grabbed her arm and yanked her forward until she stumbled through the blast of swirling colors toward the alien scene.
    “But the path is outside of Hanassa. The dragongate is supposed to take us into the heart of the mountain!” Her words evaporated in the rush of hot wind.
    A vortex of spiraling energy caught Yaala. Up and down, right and left, now and then, distorted, blended, became one and shifted. Disorientation lurched in her stomach, then numbed the back of her neck. She needed to curl into a fetal ball but couldn’t find her feet.
    More hot air hit her in the face. She blinked away the fine grit of volcanic ash that blurred her eyes. She sat on the hot red sand beside the strange black lake.
    “This isn’t Hanassa. We have to go back.” Yaala scrambled for the rapidly fading gateway. Her knees sank into loose sand. She couldn’t rise or crawl fast enough. The cool green and brown of a forested road in Coronnan on the other side of the dragongate swirled into a kaleidoscope of colors. The air stilled and around her the temperature rose.
    The smell of sulfur intensified; the smell of Hanassa. But this wasn’t the city of outlaws her mother had ruled with a bloody fist.
    Sweat broke out on Yaala’s brow and back, almost as if she was still in the pit beneath the hidden city of outlaws.
    Her generators and transformers were in the pit. She had to return to them, get them working again in order to claim her heritage.
    “Where are we, Powwell?” she breathed the words, careful not to inhale any of the dust that permeated the air. Her fair scalp beneath her pale hair puckered and she knew she risked sunburn and dehydration even with the heavy ash haze.
    “I—I’m not sure where we are.” The young magician turned a full circle. He chewed his lower lip and ran a hand through his thick mass of curly dark hair in indecision. His gray eyes took on a cloudy look, mimicking the sky. A flutter of movement within his tunic pocket indicated his hedgehog familiar didn’t like this place any better than Yaala did.
    She hoped Thorny pricked Powwell deeply with his sharp spines.
    “Why did we use that portal? I told you something was wrong.” Yaala was also scanning the red-and-black horizon for anything resembling a familiar landscape. A dark speck soared in the distance, near the belching volcano. A dragon? Her dominant spinal bumps prickled, like a dog’s ruff standing on end when faced with unknown dangers.
    She could see nothing but miles and miles of wind-sculpted sand dunes and baby mountains reaching all the way to the distant horizon where the very active volcano belched again in a shower of spark and more black ash. The dragon disappeared within the dark cloud. Yaala ducked instinctively, even though the hot wind blew the dangerous fumes away from them.
    “The dragongate is only supposed to work one way on this end,” Powwell mused. “From Hanassa, you can go ’most anywhere if you wait for the right opening. But all of the destinations lead back to Hanassa and nowhere else. We should be in the tunnel overlooking the lava core.”
    “Well, we found an active volcano. But that’s the only resemblance to Hanassa—which blew its top and collapsed into a caldera aeons ago.”
    “Oh, Kalen, I’ve failed to find you once again.” Powwell beat his fist and his forehead into the hot sand. “How much longer can she hold out in the pit, or the void, or wherever she’s hiding?”
    “How long can we last here, with only a few journey rations?” Yaala shifted