Free The Onyx Dragon by Marc Secchia Page B

had positively awoken since his thrashing at her paws, not half as serious a character as she had judged him to be. Pip said, “I wonder if the Spine continues under the Cloudlands all the way to Jeradia? Maylin?”
    Maylin pretended to clap her hand to her forehead in realisation. “I knew we shouldn’t have left Yaethi behind. She’d have consulted a centuries-old scroll of secret Dragon lore inked by the Ancient Dragon scientists in order to memorise the precise measurements of every possible landmass within a thousand leagues. In lieu of which–”
    Silver said, “We look for disturbances in the Cloudlands. Clouds swirling about a half-hidden peak down there could be a clue, or smoke and outgassing from volcanic vents, or at night, a shallow, active volcano may backlight the clouds from beneath. In Herimor, it is common for Islands to float due to the action of hentioragions –that is, a large family of swarming Dragon species which infest the underside of Islands in their millions and builds nests from skin-covered, helium-filled nodules. We call them Bloats.”
    Unexpectedly, Emmaraz performed an aerial half-bow. “Thank you for the instruction, Master Silver.”
    Pip, Maylin and Emmaraz burst out laughing.
    “Ah, but I have barely begun to disseminate the all-conquering vastness of my wisdom,” said Silver, suddenly changing his wingbeat so that he imitated a fowl strutting through a village, “for the ragions are a vast class of sub-draconic creatures notable for their extraordinarily effectual gas-producing physiologies, some specimens of which float lazily through the air like your Dragonships, while others literally employ gas propulsion using rearward-facing, sphincter-controlled orifices–a novel use of bodily functions. And trust me, you don’t want to fly downwind from one of those, either.”
    “Stop, have mercy,” hooted Maylin, clutching her stomach. “Whatever you do, please don’t tell that story to Nak. We’ll never hear the end of flatulent Dragons.”
    To the tune of Silver protesting the accuracy of his teachings and Maylin pulling his wings until the young Dragon howled with mirth and rage, the students and their young Dragons swept across the khaki-tinged Cloudlands, rising to a flying altitude of two and a half miles above that deathly realm, which the balladeers called ‘the blight of the Island-World’. No-one, not even the Dragons, knew why the base of their world was covered in an everlasting, impenetrable layer of gases, but everyone knew a terrible end awaited anyone or anything that fell into the Cloudlands. Their acidic wash afflicted even the lowest-lying, hardiest lichens. Only Land Dragons dwelled in those toxic depths, Pip believed, able to survive the immense pressures and heat, and the poisons of their native demesne.
    In her heart, she cried, Leandrial, how will we defeat this enemy? How will we return the First Egg to you?
    Nothing stirred. The Cloudlands brooded in immovable majesty. Life clung to the paltry rocks peeking above that vast, rolling cloudscape, a precarious perch between the billows below and the rain-bringing, life-giving clouds above. Why had the Ancient Dragons chosen to carve their Island roosts out of such a forbidding landscape? Simply because this was where they had arrived? Was the whole Island-World like this, or did the rumour of a world beyond the Rim-Wall Mountains convey the nub of an inexpressible truth?
    Pip turned in her seat to gaze back at Jeradia. A farewell. A bastion of life, of her brief history, already slipping away into the horizon. All that mattered out here was the will to keep flying across an unconquerable domain, the strength and magic of a Dragon, and the spread of great, multi-jointed wings upon the warm, redolent breeze.
    She said, “Silver, is Dragon flight all about the physics and mechanics involved, or is there a certain amount of innate magic a Dragon must employ in order to stay aloft?”
    “I would not