Serpent Catch: Book Two of the Serpent Catch Series Read online

  After several hours, Phylomon saw only three dragons fall. “When I was young,” he told the others, “more would die.”

  “Ayaah,” Scandal said. “That’s a fact. My grandfather told me the same. The dragons don’t fly that high anymore.”

  Phylomon lay and thought: if a genetically linked trait proved fatal, then it was less likely to be passed on. Someday, no dragons would ever fly above that fifteen-thousand foot ceiling. Their numbers would increase, and they would take a heavy toll on the megafauna as they foraged. The world was evolving in ways that the Starfarers had not intended.

  All day, Phylomon had been considering a way to show Tull the power of Falhalloran. Now, he saw a way to show everyone. It was time to cull the dragons.

  ***

  Chapter 5: Burning Rain

  At dawn, while the Hukm slept, Phylomon took Ayuvah into the hills with nothing but a day’s rations. Tull would not have seen them leave but for a pain in his ribs that woke him at odd hours. Tull, Scandal, and the women were forced to stay in camp, for they were surrounded by the wild Hukm.

  That night when the two men returned, Ayuvah bore an odd look of wonder on his face. Scandal asked them where they’d been, but Phylomon evaded the question, his tone carrying enough authority that no one dared ask again.

  Yet a few hours later, while others sat around a fire and ate, Ayuvah brought a bowl of cold fruit to the wagon for Tull. “I have been to Falhalloran today,” Ayuvah said, “the city of new birth, where the humans created our forefathers. I spoke to a man made of fire, and entered his chest, and found that it was the doorway to the city. I sat on a couch that floated like dandelion down, and a beam of light burned teachings from the Starfarers into my head.”

  “What kind of madness is this?” Tull asked. He knew that Falhalloran had been a spaceship, a city many miles across that floated in the sky where the Starfarers worked for hundreds of years to perfect the plants and animals that they put on Anee. But Ayuvah spoke as if the city were a man, as if the city were still intact. “Falhalloran was destroyed by the red drones of the Eridani. It dropped from the sky like a duck that has been shot with an arrow.”

  “The city was not killed,” Ayuvah said. “Phylomon buried it near here, but it still lives!”

  Tull scratched his thin beard. Ayuvah talked as if this were a creature, not a building or a spaceship. In an effort to understand, Tull attacked another way. “What did this man of fire tell you to do?”

  “The man of fire did not instruct me,” Ayuvah said. “The man of fire, I think, is the Animal Guide for the city. It was the city who instructed me. The Starfarers gave it a brain of its own. It told me and Phylomon how to set up the machines that will start the Festival of the Dragon as it was meant to be. We set symbols of power and light and sound in the woods, and configured them. Tonight, we will see the festival as the Starfarers meant it to be, for the first time in a thousand years.”

  At sundown, a thick mist swallowed the city of Sanctum, an unnatural fog that flowed across the landscape from three directions—the north, the southeast, and the southwest. It rolled over the ground faster than any Hukm could run, and though Phylomon had spread the word of the festival, many Hukm fled from the fog, for it cracked and sizzled like fat frying in a skillet, and it crept unnaturally low to the ground, never more than four or five feet, so that those who got caught in it could no longer see their feet and stumbled in their attempts to escape.

  The Hukm pulled out their great horns and blew in warning, and the clear bellows of the horns swept over the land and echoed off the nearer hills. The mammoths in the field trumpeted in fear. The fog rolled forward until it met at Sanctum, and all three waves collided at the great central pillars that still supported the skeleton of the city.

  From the very ground music swelled up, a haunting call that could have been a distant panpipe or even a voice. It came from all directions at once, as if the stones had broken into song, and the volume was tremendous, yet it seemed to be far away.

  In the mountains, dragons sounded their warning cries of grawk, grawk. Tull heard flapping wings, but realized it must be something in the music, an imitation of the flapping of wings. The composition continued to ring through his head, and he could not be sure whether the music was inside him or outside, but in the song, Tull heard Tirilee singing, “Come. Come to me!”

  He bolted straight, and thought he must have fallen asleep. He heard the call again, and realized it was not Tirilee but the beautiful voice of some other Dryad who sang.

  Suddenly, far in the distance, as if wakened from sleep, a giant Pwi stood. He seemed for a moment to be made of cloud, but he solidified until he looked as alive and fleshy as any Pwi—yet he stood a hundred feet tall, and although he was a mile away, Tull could see him as clearly as if he stood at arm’s length.

  The young Pwi warrior wore a black loincloth, and had flowing hair the red of autumn maple leaves, with fierce blue eyes. He was chained to the earth hand and foot, and he struggled to break his irons.

  In the distance, the Dryad sang to him, and the giant searched in all directions, looking for the singer. Forests of pine arose, trees a thousand feet tall, so that they surrounded Sanctum, and each tree was as twisted and craggy as any that lived, so the Pwi stood helpless, trapped in a haunted forest.

  Now the singing Dryad appeared, leaping from beneath the fog-shrouded ground, bursting into the air, with robes of cloud that shone like starlight. Wings magically sprouted from her back—as translucent as those of a dragonfly, with veins of shimmering cinnabar.

  She sang in a mocking, lilting voice, a song of love without words. Her hair was as dark as the trunk of a pine, in the wet of winter, and her face was more pale and beautiful than anything Tull had ever dreamed.

  For a moment, she fell quiet; in the distance dragons screamed. Tull wondered if their cries were part of the music, and he looked out over the valleys. In the moonlight he saw winged shadows flying from the mountains and plains all around—great-horned dragons and tyrant birds, even swift dragons no larger than magpies. Thousands of dragons were winging from the mountains and foothills.

  Tull studied Scandal’s face for a sign of a reaction; the fat man sat by a pile of fruit where he’d eaten his dinner, nervously shoving an apple into his mouth while he watched the show above. Ayuvah cast his eyes about in awe, seeming to try to catch everything at once, while Tirilee stood like a statue, glaring at the scene in subdued rage. Wisteria clenched Tull’s hand, and her palms were hot and sweaty. Most of the Hukm stood with round eyes, like mournful dogs, mesmerized.

  The Dryad continued her song in the ancient tongue of the Pwi. Tull could make out only a few words, “delicious pears … garden … come out … desert places.” For each word he understood, a dozen passed him by. Yet he understood the gist of the tale—the young man was chained to his love for a dead woman. He wanted to go lie down in the House of Dust with his lover, but the Dryad called him back to the land of the living, offering the sweetest of gifts if he would spend his life with her.

  But it was not to be, for the dragons were coming now from the distant lands, and the Dryad, as she circled the skeletal pillars of Sanctum, dancing in flight, cast fearful glances at the approaching dragons.

  Come the dragons did—real dragons, hoary old beasts ripe from the mountains, young dragons with dripping jaws fresh from their kills. The sight of a giant woman projected into the air drew them. It was strange and vast and somehow threatening at a fundamental dragons. They’d been bred to kill such things.

  They flew at great speed, and the Dryad was forced to dance in ever-quickening spirals, to evade their jaws.

  Soon they chased her as if they were a great swarm of blackbirds that darkened the sky, and they cried out in madness at their inability to catch the winged woman.

  At last she fled above the plains, she called to the young man to accept her gift and live free.

  But he prayed instead to Adjonai, the God of Terror, and with a
crash of thunder his chains burst.

  Dark wings sprouted on his back, blacker than night. He thundered high into the air, intent on attacking the knot of dragons that lashed out at the winged Dryad. He caught the rearmost dragon, tossing it down, and the creature burst into flames at his touch and came roaring to the ground not a quarter of a mile from Tull’s camp.

  The Dryad raced toward the young man for protection, and for a moment they met in the sky and soared up, up, as if they would touch the moons.

  The dragons followed, a spiral of wings, like starlings chasing a pair of owls.

  Some of them latched onto the young man by the leg, trying to drag him down like dire wolves, slashing at him with their horns.

  The dragons’ mouths burst into flame at the touch, and they roared in pain. The young man cried out as the dragons ripped great shreds of flesh from him. Blood rained on the crowd in great patters, and the smell of burning metal filled the air.

  Some Hukm roared and shook their war clubs in the air; others howled and hooted and beat the ground with fists, enraged at the spectacle; many of them ran to Phylomon so that a crowd filled the camp.

  The winged Dryad cried in terror, tried to rush back for her young love. She tried to pull him up from the jaws of dragons that tore at his legs.

  Tull could not understand why the Hukm were so frantic, but Wisteria shouted to Phylomon, “Stop! You’ve got to make them stop! The dragons are killing him!”

  “That is the way it is supposed to be,” Phylomon yelled over the roar of the Hukm. “With his death, he buys her freedom.”

  Tull suddenly realized why the Hukm were angry. “They are alive! Aren’t they?” Tull shouted. “At first I thought them clever illusions. But those creatures are alive!”

  The Hukm roared in anger, and Tull pushed his way to Phylomon, for he feared that the Hukm would attack. He pulled his sword of Benbow glass to guard the Starfarer while the Hukm loomed around them both.

  Phylomon shouted, his words nearly lost over the rage of the Hukm and the battle cries of dragons. “Of course, they’re alive, but they are not flesh!”

  Tull looked at him in horror, and Phylomon tried to explain. “They are creatures made of plasmas—heated gases. The Starfarers called them piezoforms. The Pwi and his love are no smarter than cats! Generators under the city create gravity holes so they can come to life here for a few hours. Yet they think! They feel!”

  A great dragon soared up and ripped at the Dryad’s shoulder, and she cried in pain and dropped toward the city to evade it. For a moment, the Hukm all hooted in fear. “Yes, they are alive!”

  Tull shouted, “But your people can’t do this—create a living being and watch it die—for mere entertainment!”

  Phylomon looked at the young Tcho-Pwi. “Don’t you understand? Why do you think the Starfarers created you?”

  Tull stepped back, reeling from the realization that he’d been created for amusement. He understood now. In the eyes of the Starfarers, with their near immortality, his life was so temporary that it must have seemed fleeting. The Starfarers, like gods, would have looked down from Sanctum and smiled to see his pain, would have mocked his accomplishments, abhorred his stupidity, would have watched him until he bored them, and then would have turned away.

  Tull stepped back from Phylomon. He looked up. The winged Dryad swooped down to rescue—no, to die with—her lover. Dragons swarmed about them both, ripping, clawing, tasting doom in mouths full of burning plasma. Like the ill-fated couple, the dragons were no smarter than cats, creatures of pure instinct.

  Yet, Tull realized, the dryad had feelings, compassion. She expended her life for another.

  “She has a nobility that the Starfarers lacked,” Tull shouted at Phylomon.

  The lovers flapped their wings and pitifully, rose higher. All at once, the red drone moved over the horizon, like a great orange shooting star.

  Tull had never seen the red drone when its engines kicked in—it had always been a placid little star. Now in the blink of an eye it flitted almost directly overhead.

  The Eridani warship opened fire. Streaks of light rained down on the dragons quickly, and out over the plains they dropped in rain of flaming cinders.

  The young Pwi and his winged love broke free and soared even higher into the sky, beyond Sanctum’s gravimetric fields into a realm where no dragons could follow. There the lovers suddenly expanded and dissipated, their plasma smearing across the starlit sky like watercolors in the rain.

  The dragons croaked and flapped their leather wings under the moonlight and struggled to reach what was left of the young couple.

  They died in fire for their efforts.

  When the show was over, while the dragons still croaked and shot upward and died, Ironwood Woman came to the group, a cape of black scimitar cat hide over her shoulders. The look in her eyes was hard to define—rage, fear, horror. Tull wondered briefly if she would order their executions.

  She bowed to Phylomon so that her stubby tail bobbed in the air. As she stopped before him on her hands, the rest of the Hukm followed suit, so that across the plains ten thousand Hukm bobbed their tails in the air. Tull did not have to understand their language to see the reverence in their act. She was saying, “You Starfarers are gods.”

  ***

  Chapter 6: Man on Fire

  The next morning, Tull woke to the smell of breakfast cooking—corn cakes and beef jerky. Scandal, Ayuvah, and Tirilee sat glumly around the wagon, eating. Nearly all the Hukm were asleep, thrown on the ground like giant dolls, sleeping with clubs at their sides. They did not like the human camp, with its ever-present fire and smelly humans, so they slept far away, and most of them would not rise until late afternoon.

  Half a mile away, Phylomon sat beneath a tree with Ironwood Woman, their fingers working as they talked.

  Tull walked over to the fire, stretched, and dished up a plate. “What’s going on over there?” he asked, nodding toward Phylomon and Ironwood Woman.

  “War plans, I gather,” Scandal said. “Ironwood Woman wants to attack Bashevgo, and Phylomon plans to lead her battle.”

  “Hunh,” Tull grunted. The less such things were spoken of, the better. If the wrong person were to hear the battle plans, they would become common knowledge in the halls of the Slave Lords on Bashevgo.

  Scandal said, “Ayuvah here was just telling us about the man of fire that he saw. He says there’s a cave filled with artifacts from Falhalloran.”

  Tull felt stung. He did not like that word artifacts. The laser cannons at Bashevgo were artifacts. The hoversleds that the Lords of Craal rode down the streets were artifacts. Benbow glass and Phylomon himself were artifacts. Always that word was used when speaking of things of power. It was not a word that inspired peace of mind.

  “I was just thinking,” Scandal said, “That the man of fire might be more help to us right now than a barrel of sea serpents would. I mean, Ayuvah here says that the man of fire gave him and Phylomon some kind of token that let them create those monsters last night, and if the man of fire can create monsters to kill dragons, surely he could make something to kill anything that swims over from Hotland.”

  “Possibly,” Tull said, though he suspected that Phylomon would have suggested the possibility first, if it could really be done. “We should ask Phylomon.”

  Scandal cleared his throat, “Aah, not so fast there, Friend. Perhaps we should ask Phylomon, and then again perhaps we should keep our thoughts to ourselves. Ayuvah, when you were in the cave, did you see anything worth money?”

  “I—uh—don’t know,” Ayuvah said. “I saw the man of fire, and we traveled down a long tube on a couch that floats. And then a beam of light filled me and taught me how to arrange the symbols of power.”

  Scandal frowned. “Did you see any Benbow glass, or any of those lights Phylomon has chained around his neck? Maybe a refrigeration cube or a power cube? Anything like that?”

  Tull understood the problem. No one had ever heard of flying
couches or light beams that teach. Scandal wouldn’t know how to work them. What he wanted was something useful—glass for weapons, refrigeration cubes for his inn.

  “There were many lights in the cave, but not like the one Phylomon uses. These glowed all the time.”

  “I can buy light bulbs out of Denate,” Scandal growled. “You don’t suppose the man of fire would mind if we looked around in his cave, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” Ayuvah answered with a note of fear in his voice.

  Scandal pushed, “What do you think would happen if I threw a bucket of water on this man of fire?”

  Ayuvah frowned. “I think that he would kill you. He is not made of fire like our campfire. He shines like the sun, but he does not give off heat or smoke. He does not burn like wood. I do not think you can kill him. Phylomon called him the ‘Aspect of Falhalloran,’ but the man of fire referred to himself as the city of Falhalloran.”

  Scandal scratched his beard. “How can a man be a city? Or have the kind of power this man has? Certainly, if the man of fire marched against Bashevgo or Craal with an army of giants, the Slave Lords would pee their britches in terror. There is something you aren’t telling us. Maybe it’s something you don’t even know. Why don’t you take us to the cave?”

  Ayuvah shook his head. “Phylomon made me promise not to show it.”

  “I promise never to reveal where it is,” Scandal said, “if that makes you feel any better. To show you my good faith: I’ll give you thirty silver eagles if you take me to this cave.”

  “You only want to loot the cave,” Ayuvah said.

  “I only want to speak to the man of fire. I promise I won’t take anything that he’s not willing to give to me freely. Fair?”

  Ayuvah thought. “Will you give me the money now?”