had placed Flicker on the floor, the pirates were all either unconscious or dead, and Master Jo’el was kicking down the door into the main body of the Dragonship, beyond.
“Right. Do it all on your own.” Hualiama wrestled with the controls, snorting, “Typical man.”
A deep voice tickled her neck. “Aye?”
Hallon, or Rallon–she could never tell them apart. Ja’al had a trick, however. He said Rallon had a tiny scar on his right cheek. This must be Hallon.
“Aye,” she said, biting her lip. Lia’s hands raced over the controls. Back-thrust to counter the weight dragging them into a stall. A touch of the ailerons to stabilise the linked vessels. “A little more power, engineer boys,” she called down the tube. Something snappy and rude floated back to her ear. She growled, “Is there a problem?”
“Aye, Captain!”
“What?”
“Ah … no, Captain!”
The beat of the engines increased as the men stoked the fires. Hands racing over the controls to steady their steep descent, Hualiama looked down and saw a tidy cottage dead ahead, surrounded by clumps of men and women locked in close combat. Slam the throttle! Spin the wheel! Slewing the Dragonship violently, Lia scraped over the grey shale roof and brought them to a spine-jarring landing on the path beside the house. The Dragonship’s superstructure groaned, but held together.
Lia said, “By the fires of–”
“Swords!” chorused Hallon and Rallon.
Her hand paused in the motion of wiping sweat off her brow. Right. Evidently, no-one had the time or the inclination to admire her wonderful landing. Drawing her nazatha, Lia sprinted to catch up with the giant twins.
Outside, chaos engulfed her. Men bellowing. Metal screeching against metal. The wails of the wounded. The low, uncanny chanting of the monks, ‘For the Dragon. For the Dragon,’ somehow droning through the general mayhem, as the unarmoured monks swarmed the battlefield, making her imagine a cloud of lethal butterflies fluttering over dark vegetation.
Nausea seared her throat. Lia gulped. This was no training field. Blood splattered the dark volcanic stone walls of the nearby cottages, typical Fra’aniorian stone dwellings with shuttered windows and neat gardens laid out front and back, abutting towering walls of volcanic vegetation a hundred feet tall. Here, she saw a man fall from a monk’s blade, the metal slick with blood. There, two bodies lay draped across a fallen basket of prekki-fruit. And children, slain! Beneath a bush, she saw a pair of tiny bodies bearing axe-wounds to their torsos, mercifully beyond any pain, now.
A red haze descended upon her vision. She knew a Dragon’s rage as if she were with the Tourmaline Dragon, even within him, knowing the potential blazing in her fire-stomach and the power of the Island-World’s premier predator at her fingertips, wild and feral, uncontainable. Suddenly, she had no need of Hallon’s hand to pull her forward. The twins gasped as Lia spun past them into the thick of a knot of bearded pirates, who wore the crimson headband that seemed to mark their sorry crew.
Slash. Parry. Slide beneath a wild overhand blow, rising in a fluid motion with her sword outthrust to spear the man in the armpit, where his armour left him vulnerable. Thunder into a clutch of three pirates trying to kick their way through the door of one of the cottages. Knocked over. Lia rebounded a fraction of a second ahead of Rallon, grateful for his shattering kick to the knee of an assailant as she slid her blade past his tall oval shield to pierce the base of the man’s throat.
A near-perfect cut skidded off another pirate’s forearm before penetrating the leather fold of his elbow armour. His sword dropped from nerveless fingers. “For the Dragon!” spat from her lips. From the corner of her eye, she saw one of the twins finishing the man with a mighty, cleaving blow.
Lia sprinted down a pathway between dense, towering jiista-berry bushes to ambush half a dozen pirates as they tried to reform ranks. Her roar was so mighty she tasted blood on her lips from a throat ravaged by a sound no Human throat should ever have made. The men froze. Hualiama tore into them with a pure, draconic wrath she could neither deny nor command. Rallon and Hallon hurled themselves into the fray; a violent clash of swords ensued. The nazatha blurred in front of Lia’s face as her training kicked in. At some level, she recognised that if she simply reacted, letting her instincts carry her through, she could fight better than ever before. Her clumsiness