Northern Storm

Chapter Thirteen

He had taken her out of herself with a rush of ecstasy that swept all her resistance away. She became “dimly aware that he had cast her off. No matter. She didn’t need him. She was free to revel in the delight suffusing her.

Now she was the rushing breeze, making cats’ paws on the surface of the sea, tugging at ruffles of foam until the waves did her bidding, rolling and breaking. Other breaths of wind hurried to join her game, following in her train, adding their meagre strength to her growing might. Now she was the sterner draught driving in off the ocean to scour the land, relentless as she brushed obstacles aside, commanding all lesser breezes. She ignored the weakling eddies of air seeking shelter in the lee of trees and hills, sweeping past to rise into the skies beyond, carried on an exultant surge of pleasure.

Here she was rarefied, dancing in the emptiness. The sky was her plaything, the clouds her delight. The highest wisps of vapour trailed behind her like wind-tossed hair. She drew them out into glittering threads, finer than the sheerest gossamer, and threw a milky veil over the distant sun. She was an artist, weaving beauty out of sheer inspiration. Which was entertaining in its way, but what was the point of possessing such power if she didn’t do more? What could she do with it? What couldn’t she do?

She drew the zephyrs to her, commanding them to suck the heat from the earth below, rising high on their appropriated might. Snaring the flurries, she drove them out over the water, wrapping them into squalls fat with captured moisture. Storm clouds filled the void, coalescing under the pressure of her ominous unseen presence. The water was too weak, falling as frantic rain in a vain attempt to escape the air’s crushing sense of purpose. She sent a gale to drive the downpour into the shore, cowing the submissive earth, lashing it with hail. Crackles of lightning illuminated the darkening clouds as the rising currents of air inexorably reclaimed the fallen rain at her command.

At a whim, she set the thunderclouds spinning. The storm swirled at her bidding, drawing gusts from further and further away into the frenzied dance. The rush of the winds, wheeling ever faster, was music to her ears. The power was dizzying, enthralling. She trembled with it, revelled in it, euphoric. Ripples of ecstasy shook her. She was air, pure and simple and omnipotent.

No, she wasn’t. She was Velindre. She was a mage of Hadrumal and if she couldn’t master herself better than this, she had no claim on the rank of Cloud Mistress. She fought her way free of the encircling clouds, seeking the centre of stillness, the better to regain some control over herself and the element and the seductive sensations that suffused her.

With that refuge gained and some fragile hold over her wizardly senses secured, Velindre considered the catastrophic storm. How to put a stop to this self-indulgence before it ran utterly beyond her control? The wheeling tempest loomed all around her, threatening to rush headlong into maddened violence. The clouds in the heights were spreading out to claim more and more of the sky. She concentrated on maintaining that hard-won calm, within and without, and finally saw what she must do.

Fire was caught up in the storm’s coils, capturing the sea spume and drawing the moisture high up into the skies where the wind flogged the white billows till they bled great gouts of rain. Fire was the element that set all others in motion, she remembered dimly. But fire could be snuffed. Velindre reached for the warmth drifting through the seas far below and drove it away. She seized a fugitive breeze and wove a carefully selective barrier between the ocean and the whirling storm clouds above. Rain fell, slipping gratefully through her spell to escape into the cooling deeps. Try as it might, the storm could draw up no moisture to replace the downpour. The clouds cooled, the rain lessened. Velindre tore a rent in the tempest’s formidable wall, sending the thunderclouds stumbling and falling away from one another. The deadly intent of the storm dissolved into confusion.

The magewoman opened her eyes. She was standing on the shores of Azazir’s lake, cold and wet in her sodden chemise and stockings. Mud oozed between her toes. Her tangled hair hung loose around her shoulders, wet and clinging. She blinked painful tears from her eyes as the sun rose over the rim of the barren valley with piercing brightness. Low beams struck pale gleams from the glistening rocks around her and tinged the ominous clouds still circling relentlessly above in a strange yellowish haze. ‘Hadrumal.’ Azazir’s contempt was chilling.

Velindre slipped and almost fell as she turned to see him beside her. She opened her mouth but she found she had half-forgotten how to speak.

‘You can’t rise above their small-mindedness any more than Otrick could.’ Azazir stood there, a man made out of elemental water that sparkled in the early sun, motes of green magelight rising and falling within him. ‘Arrogant, self-willed, all of you. Incapable of letting yourselves go. Incapable of finding your true potential.’

‘Self-control is not self-will,’ Velindre retorted with effort. ‘And losing one’s mind is hardly a route to wisdom.’

‘Self-control,’ sneered Azazir. ‘Self-doubt and denial.’

‘Self-restraint,’ spat Velindre, wiping sodden hair out of her eyes. ‘Something you’ve never bothered with. Not pausing to wonder if you should do something, just because you’ve established you could—you don’t call that arrogant?’

‘I serve a higher calling.’ Azazir’s unearthly eyes glowed green. ‘I serve my element. I will not be confined by Hadrumal’s petty rules and fears.’

‘I wish to master my element,’ Velindre retorted, ‘not to have it master me. Loss of myself is too high a price to pay for whatever power I might gain in following you. Where is the man you once were, Azazir?’

‘Gone where you haven’t the courage to follow, that much is plain.’ The translucent mage smiled with open derision. ‘Go back to Hadrumal and try to live with yourself, within those confines, now that you’ve tasted true freedom in your magic. Try to content yourself with your plodding progress, groping for knowledge in your fearful obscurity. Don’t tell me you haven’t learned more in these past days than you could in a lifetime on that rock!’ Laughing, he walked towards the water, growing paler and more transparent with every step.

‘Wait!’ Velindre found she was trembling and not merely from cold, fatigue and slowly building outrage at his assault on her. ‘What did you mean, “in these past days”? How long was I I. . .’ She struggled and gave up. There were no words to describe where she had journeyed.

‘Who knows?’ Azazir halted almost on the water’s edge. Ripples ran towards him, eager to narrow the gap. ‘Who cares? I abandoned almanacs and hourglasses along with all of Hadrumal’s other constraints.’

‘I said stop!’ Velindre raised a shaking hand and summoned a wall of air to block the mad wizard’s path. The questing lake waters flowed away on either side, baffled. ‘Yes, you’re right. I’ve learned a great deal Boni this experience.’ She stifled a shudder at the recollection of such insidious delight. But I haven’t learned what I came for. I came to ask you about dragons.’

Dragons?’ Azazir turned with a smile of delight that was the most terrifying thing Velindre had seen yet. ‘What business could a frigid inadequate like you have with dragons?’

Not so inadequate,’ Velindre retorted coldly. She looked up and wrenched the winds free from the strangling grip of Azazir’s ceaseless storm. With a battering blast of air, she drove the rain aside and seized the warmth of the sun riding high above. In an instant her clothes, such as they were, were dry, and she had driven the deathly chill from her bones.

Not so inadequate?’ echoed Azazir, mocking. He raised a hand and his magic crashed through the barrier she had erected between him and the lake, brutal as a breaker from a winter storm at sea. Her spell disintegrated under the assault. He looked up at the clouds and they swirled inwards, crushing the shaft of sunlight she had pulled down. ‘Want to try that again?’ He grinned at her, open challenge in his eerie eyes. Now that I’m ready for you?’

‘I came here to learn, not to fight.’ Velindre shook her head. ‘The lowest apprentices know better than that.’ She drew a breath to keep her voice calm. ‘You’re right,’ she repeated. ‘I’ve learned an astonishing amount. Or rather, I’ve seen that I can work instinctive magic with a power I’ve never known, if I allow myself. Instinct isn’t knowledge, though. If it was, every migrating bird is a secret sage.’

‘I see they still teach how to chop reason into shards of logic in Hadrumal.’ Azazir laughed, his mood as fickle as the glitter of sunlight on the lake. ‘Shards so fine that there’s nothing left. Knowledge is overrated, my girl.’

‘But you hold knowledge Hadrumal has lost,’ Velindre persisted, bolder now that she was dry and warm. Her golden hair obscured her face, coiling and frivolous in the teasing breeze. She brushed it back with irritation. ‘That’s what I’m seeking: the knowledge you shared with Otrick. What do you know about dragons?’

‘You’re persistent, I’ll give you that.’ Azazir turned his back on the uneven surface of the lake and the waters sank back to a glassy smoothness. ‘Or rather, I’d say Otrick gave you that. Among other things.’ His smile took on a lascivious curve that sat bizarrely on his liquid face.

‘Don’t think you’re in any condition to follow him there.’ Velindre was surprised into an incautious response. ‘And I’ve long since given up on lesser liaisons.’

‘My condition is whatever I choose it to be.’ Azazir walked away from the water and with every pace he took on a greater solidity. His skin turned a pearly white, pale as a fish’s belly, shining with a faint suggestion of scales. His hair and beard bristled, long and unkempt and washed to a colourlessness somewhere between grey and white. Only his eyes stayed the same, lit from within with that same green madness. ‘So you want to know about dragons, my cold and constrained lady mage? What do you already know?’

‘I know they laired in the Cape of Winds from time to time, where the mountains of Tormalin run into the sea.’ Velindre kept her eyes resolutely on the mad wizard’s face. ‘Where they were hunted for their hides and teeth and claws. One voyage could set a man up for life, if he came back. Plenty didn’t, from all I’ve read. And I’ve also read, in Otrick’s notes, that there always had to be a wizard on the ship otherwise the dragon hunters wouldn’t sail.’

‘But you don’t know why,’ Azazir taunted her. No, you wouldn’t. Hadrumal has been happy to see that knowledge erased from its dusty libraries and learned tomes.’

‘Why?’ demanded Velindre.

Azazir stepped close to whisper in her ear. ‘On account of all a dragon can do for a mage. Because of what a mage can do with a dragon.’

Velindre spread her hands. ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

Azazir’s grin had all the reassuring warmth of a death’s-head. No, you wouldn’t.’

‘Then teach me,’ Velindre challenged, hands on her hips. ‘If you don’t want to see that knowledge lost up here in the wilds.’

‘Why should I care?’ Azazir studied her intently.

‘Because you want to see wizards exploring their full potential,’ Velindre shot back ‘How can they do that without a fuller understanding of all they might achieve?’

‘You think you’re up to it?’ His smile turned cruel.

‘I think I can take what I learn back to Hadrumal and share it with others,’ she said steadily. ‘Whereas you’ll be condemned out of hand if you go back.’

‘All right. I’ll show you what I know of dragons. Then maybe you’ll see why I live up here in the wilds.’ The emerald madness in Azazir’s eyes faded as cunning lit his face. ‘Whether you can learn from it, whether you can set aside your fears, with your mind hobbled by Hadrumal’s teachings, that’s another question.’

‘Let’s see, shall we?’ Velindre raised her eyebrows expectantly. She fought not to shiver, not with cold but with apprehension.

‘Yes, let’s,’ murmured Azazir as he squatted in the mud and thrust his bony white fingers into the cloying ooze. The ground trembled and the lake glowed suddenly green in its crystal depths.

The spiralling clouds above fell apart to blow away. The sun flooded the valley with brilliant light and frail spring warmth. Velindre looked around to see the mud all along the shore drying out, the glistening rocks tuning dull.

Dust wafted from the ridges of the valley’s edge, confused and helpless.

She turned her attention to the lake. That was where all the water was going, concentrating all the elemental power the mad wizard had gathered here. She frowned. Why were the ripples receding from the shore? Shouldn’t the water be swelling the lake? She took a step forward, the parched ridges of mud now hard enough to bruise her unshod foot.

‘Careful,’ warned Azazir, intent on the depths. ‘You don’t want to catch its eye. It’ll be hungry.’

The waters seethed, boiling into white foam shot through with cold green phosphorescence. A dragon erupted from the lake. The long, sinuous body seemed to flow endlessly upwards, water streaming from its glowing scales. Its underside was pale as the lightest jade, its sides dark as deepest agate. A crest of emerald spines snapped erect along its backbone, running up its snakelike neck to crown its long head with a diadem of lethal spikes. It spread vast wings, greater than any ship’s sails, leathery membranes translucent in the sunlight. It rose higher, long tail finally leaving the lake, water streaming from the viciously barbed tip. The dragon soared up and circled the lake, coiling around itself in defiance of the empty air and the pull of the ground below. It opened its long, predatory jaw and screamed out a challenge, its glittering white teeth as long and as sharp as swords. With the last echoes of the ear-splitting shriek still reverberating around the hills, it folded its wings with a clap like thunder and dived back into the water. A cascade of spray exploded from the lake, falling to vanish into the thirsty ground. Velindre couldn’t help but tremble, standing with her hands clasped to her face.

‘Did you feel the power? You should have done. Air and water are so often partners in magic. That’s why you were so open to me before.’ Azazir was at her shoulder, pressing his cold body against hers. ‘Did you feel the power? That’s why Hadrumal doesn’t want its wizards knowing how to summon dragons: because that dragon’s aura has a more powerful resonance for the likes of me than the highest, mightiest waterfall in the world. You could do more with the merest touch of a cloud dragon’s aura than with all the storms of a winter brought together. A fire mage wouldn’t know such power if he stood on the lip of a flaming mountain’s crater. There’s no place in the darkest depths of the earth that would hold such power even for the likes of Planir. That’s why Hadrumal doesn’t want us knowing about dragons.’

‘I felt power, yes . . Velindre stared at the water. ‘Pure power. I could have worked water magics far beyond my own affinity—’

‘It’s barely a hint of the power surrounding real dragons.’ Azazir squatted to sweep a hand across the undulating edge of the lake. Out in the deeps, emerald radiance rose lazily to the surface. The dragon broached with barely a ripple, lolling in the crystal waters, wings folded close to its long, lithe body. ‘That looks like a real dragon to me,’ Velindre observed, motionless.

‘Look at it,’ commanded Azazir.

‘I am looking,’ Velindre retorted.

‘Look at it like a wizard,’ he ordered with some irritation. Not like a gawping peasant.’

Velindre narrowed her eyes and studied the dragon idling in the water. She could see the beast in all its savage glory, coiling this way and that to send countless little swells hurrying to the shore. More pertinently, she could half-see, half-sense the magic that pervaded it. She realised that elemental power was as much a part of the creature as the scales and sinew, bone and blood that a peasant would see, in that instant before he soiled his breeches and fled. What was there for a wizard to see? She focused on that roiling nimbus of elemental power, tracing the pulses, the ebb and flow. ‘There’s a void.’ She frowned. ‘Where its heart should be.’

‘Well done,’ approved Azazir. ‘It’s a simulacrum, not a true dragon. For which you should be very grateful; a true dragon would know you for a mage and see you as a rival to be slain. It would bite your head off before you could think of escape.’

Velindre strove for understanding. You mean this is an illusion?’

‘Does it look like an illusion to you?’ Azazir snapped. Would I give up so much of myself, the power that I have amassed over a lifetime, to make an illusion?’

Belatedly, Velindre noticed how the mage’s appearance had changed. He was still naked, but the shimmering patina of fishlike scales had faded, leaving his ancient skin wrinkled and scarred, mottled with age, his ribs visible. His hair and beard were a sodden mess, stray strands clinging to his hollow cheeks. His eyes, deep set and shadowed, no longer glowed with that unearthly light, for all they were still as green as emeralds.

Discomfited at seeing the old man thus revealed, she turned back to the frolicking dragon now blithely lashing the lake with its tail and snapping at the resulting spray. ‘So this is something between an illusion and a true dragon?’

‘And it’s an innocent. It knows nothing of a true dragon’s magic or cunning.’ Azazir cackled suddenly, startling Velindre horribly. ‘It’s a mighty beast all the same and real enough to bite the head off anyone coming up here to bother me. Do the hunters and trappers still whisper about me, wondering what riches the mad wizard is hoarding?’ He laughed again, sounding quite insane enough to deserve the title. ‘They don’t get past the dragon even if they force their way through my other spells. It’s tied to me, you see, because I’m the one who made it.’

‘It’ll do your bidding?’ asked Velindre, incredulous.

‘Does that look like a lapdog?’ mocked the ancient wizard. No, but if I look on something and know it for an enemy, the dragon feels it, too. Dragons kill their enemies. They’re creatures of unfettered power and untamed instinct, even such fleeting ones as this.’

‘You told me not to move, in case it ate me.’ Velindre tried to pick out the crucial questions from the clamouring maelstrom inside her head. But I’m no enemy to you,’ she insisted, emphatic, in case the old wizard let slip any doubts to the distant dragon.

No, but you could be food.’ Azazir gazed happily on his creation. ‘I told you, I don’t control it. It’ll go off to hunt soon enough and there’s no man or beast in this forest that will escape it.’

Velindre turned her thoughts resolutely from what Hadrumal’s Council would say or do if they knew Azazir was wont to set a dragon eating fur hunters. You called it fleeting. What did you mean by that?’

‘You don’t think I would reduce myself to this for long?’ Azazir studied his withered hands. ‘You saw the void at its centre. It has no heart, nothing to hold its power together or to hold the other elements at bay. It will fade, in time.’

‘How much time?’ Velindre asked immediately.

‘That depends,’ said Azazir with a sly smile, ‘on how much power went into its making.’

‘How do you make something like that?’ Velindre wondered aloud.

‘Simple.’ Azazir waved an airy hand. ‘And quite the most difficult thing you’ll ever attempt. The first step is like creating an illusion; I assume Otrick taught you that much? Summon all the elemental power you can, bring it together and use that to fabricate the creature. You’ll probably still fail,’ he predicted gleefully.

‘You said it wasn’t an illusion.’ Velindre swept her hair back off her face again, irritated.

‘It isn’t,’ said Azazir with biting precision, suddenly angry. ‘Once you have the shape of it in the midst of your magic, you summon still more power, if you’re capable, which I doubt. Force enough elemental power in on itself, letting none escape—none at all—and it will reach an intensity where the magic grows out of its own substance, doubling and redoubling. Once you’ve achieved that, the creature will live, for as long as the magic remains. While the magic remains, its aura is a source of purer power than you can possibly imagine . . .’ His voice trailed off, his expression avid. ‘Of course, the more you draw on it, the sooner the magic is gone. When the element exhausts itself, the dragon fades.’ The passion in his eyes dwindled to be replaced by something akin to weariness.

‘Simple, as you say,’ Velindre murmured sceptically. ‘How do you guard against being consumed by the magic you’re summoning?’

‘Like some mageborn taken unawares by their manifesting affinity?’ Azazir looked at her, sardonic. ‘That, my dear, is your problem. As is finding sufficient power. My element is all around me here. You couldn’t give yourself over to the air, even for a little while. What makes you think you can attempt such a spell?’

‘Otrick could do it,’ retorted Velindre, ‘without letting himself run howling mad on the wings of a storm.’

‘You think you’re the equal of Otrick?’ Azazir guffawed as if he had heard a ripe tavern jest. ‘I would be,’ Velindre murmured, more to herself than to the mad old wizard, ‘if I could do this.’ She gestured out to the water where the green dragon was now floating, wings outstretched, basking in the sun. What will that one do, if I can summon up another dragon?’

‘A rival coming into its territory?’ Cruel expectation lit Azazir’s face. ‘It’ll fight. They may be born of the elements but they’re beasts when all’s said and done. True dragons claim a territory for themselves where they hunt, where the elements are at their rawest, to give them power for working their own magics. They fight among themselves for the choicest territory, to the death or until the loser yields and flies away. That’s why dragons would come to the Cape of Winds, following the heights and the storms when they’d been driven out of the far mountains.’ As he spoke, his eyes drifted towards the north.

‘So they were never the strongest,’ he continued, ‘for all the hunters would boast of their bravery in taking on such a mighty quarry. Even a dragon isn’t so mighty if it’s already wounded, with its magic exhausted. Dragon and mage alike—spending too much of our substance on our spells can be the death of us,’ he warned Velindre with a sharp expression.

‘So the hunters just found them exhausted and “butchered them?’ she asked with distaste.

‘You think they needed a wizard along to help them do that?’ Azazir’s screech of laughter made her jump. ‘You think they’d pay a wizard half of everything they made just to whistle up a wind or calm the seas on the voyage? No, you stupid chit. Even a wounded, weary dragon could kill a boatload of hunters without blunting a claw.’

He fell silent, one wrinkled hand absently stroking his straggling, knotted beard, dark-green eyes hooded and contemplative. He looked old beyond imagining. No, the wizard was there to summon up a simulacrum like that one, to fight the wounded dragon to utter exhaustion and sap what remained of its elemental magic so that it couldn’t breathe death or lethal illusion on the hunters. If a wizard could manage that, he’d more than earned his share, wouldn’t you say? Then dissolving the simulacrum was his problem while the hunters tracked the exhausted dragon to wherever it was laired and hacked it to pieces as it lay helpless. If they were lucky, it wouldn’t take their heads off in its death throes. That happened more than once,’ he added with ambiguous neutrality.

He rubbed his hands briskly together. ‘Let’s see if you can do it. Let’s see if you’re even half the mage Otrick was.’

‘I don’t want to summon up a dragon just to set it fighting that one for your amusement,’ Velindre said with distaste.

‘That’s Hadrumal talk, all ethics and imbecile niceties. Besides, you’re assuming you’ll succeed. I’m inclined to think my beast is perfectly safe.’ Azazir clicked his tongue disdainfully. You came up here to learn. I’ve told you what you need to know. Where else are you going to try it? Down in the lowlands where the beast can gorge on some villageful of idiots? Or here where I can fetch you back if you summon so much elemental air you’re overwhelmed by it?’

‘You’d do that?’ Velindre looked searchingly at the old mage. And how could she let such an opportunity pass? she asked herself.

‘Otrick was a friend, the best of my friends,’ Unexpectedly, Azazir sounded almost sane. ‘I didn’t have many. I’ll help you for his sake and yes, there’s part of me that doesn’t want to see such knowledge lost at Hadrumal’s decree,’ he acknowledged vindictively.

She had come so far and she could hardly hope to experiment with such beguiling, perilous knowledge back in Hadrumal. Velindre gazed out at the basking dragon.

‘You say it will fade in a day or so, regardless of what I do?’

‘Or when I get tired of lending it my strength.’ Azazir looked at the oblivious creature with faint resentment, his moment of humanity ebbing away.

Velindre bit down on her qualms. Otrick had done this, after all, without disasters bringing down the wrath of the Council.

‘Will you watch my working?’ she demanded. ‘Tell me where I go wrong, if I should fail?’ When you fail.’ Azazir nodded. ‘For the first few times. Until I get bored.’

‘Then let’s see how hard this can be.’ Velindre reached up into the brilliant blue sky in search of breezes. Faint winds were just starting to rise from the bare slopes of Azazir’s valley, now that the unhindered sun warmed the bare earth and rock. She noted them but did not bring them under her control just yet, looking further afield. As colder winds blew in from the surrounding heights to claim the space those first breezes had just vacated, she caught them and wove them together. More gusts followed and she captured them, but these shallow wafts offered nothing like enough elemental power to try the process Azazir had described. She looked higher into the sky where the winds were stronger, following their own imperatives high above the distant snow-fields and mountainsides, shearing away from the bizarre disruption of the elements around Azazir’s lake. Velindre drew on the alluring recollections of the wild ride the old wizard had thrown her upon. She reached out and summoned the elemental force with unexpected ease.

She reminded herself to feel the earth beneath her feet and the sun’s warmth teasing her hair, soothing her skin beneath her crumpled chemise. There was no birdsong in the barren valley but she could hear the splashing of the green dragon and the slapping of ripples on the muddy shore. This was never going to work if she didn’t keep firm hold of herself, denying the illicit temptations Azazir had shown her.

‘Get on with it.’ Velindre saw the old wizard wave a dismissive hand at the lake and the air shuddered with a rushing crash of water as the dragon dived for the depths. ‘He won’t stay gone for long and if he sees you working magic, he’ll most likely attack.’

She stared unblinking up into the sky. Even as she drew down the power of the uppermost winds, she searched beyond them. There was one secret Otrick had taught her that few, if any, other wizards in Hadrumal knew. Maybe Rafrid knew it, maybe not. No matter. If she could master this spell, no one would dispute her pre-eminence over him. And Azazir could eat his mocking words.

There, she had it. In the very highest reaches of the sky, just before the air became too thin to sustain them, the fleetest winds she’d ever encountered were racing unhindered by the rumpled earth below, indescribable power at their core. No wonder the early mages who had followed Trydek to find refuge from dangerous ignorance on the mainland had approved his choice of Hadrumal, when they’d found such strength in the upper air above it. And Otrick had made it his life’s work to find other such winds. She summoned the intoxicating strength and blue light crackled all around her as a ribbon of elemental energy fell from the cerulean blue. Velindre gathered all the lesser currents of air to it, braiding them around that sapphire heart of unfettered power. Blue magelight flickered and vanished, snapping and fluttering. Flurries of dust along the lakeshore died as the breezes hurried to do Velindre’s bidding. The air cooled as the heat of the sun fled in disarray. Spray danced up, impatient to join its sympa­thetic element. Velindre spared just enough concentration to banish it. The droplets ran away to hide in the lake, duly chastised.

The sapphire light glowed bright, a swelling column reaching up from her upturned palms into the vast emptiness of the sky. It held steady, pulses of brilliant light running up and down its length. Velindre drew her hands just a little distance apart and focused all her mageborn instincts on the space between them. The azure beams within the column of light flickered and then began coiling in on themselves. The light grew brighter, paler, lightning-white with pulses of sapphire shooting down from the uppermost sky to vanish into the incandescence building between Velindre’s outstretched hands.

Now she had to create the illusion of a dragon. She drew out a thread of blue-white magic to mark the long line of the creature’s back above the shoreline before her. Chilling the air, she studded its back with spines like icicles, rising from a ridge of thick scales grey as frost. Spreading her hands, she ended the tail in a heavy blunt spike and turned her attention to the arrow-shaped head, long, lean jaw white as the purest cloud, opening to reveal a mouth of blue shadow and an array of ice-white teeth cruel as a mountain winter.

‘Don’t stand there admiring it,’ scolded Azazir. ‘Give it some substance. Don’t stop gathering the magic’ Velindre struggled to maintain her grip on the pulsating mass of elemental energy. The column of azure light was rippling alarmingly, sapphire pulses shooting skyward. The dragon began to fade, barely sketched as it was. She bit her lip, tasting blood in her mouth as she fought for control over the fickle element.

Slowly, painstakingly, Velindre wove the magic together and strengthened her creation. She gave it long elegant limbs where sapphire light made bones and sinew and cloud clothed them in muscle and scale. She hammered out white armoured plates for its flanks before moulding smaller belly scales, opalescent as sunrise clouds. Mist coalesced into vast translucent wings shimmering with faint rainbow haze.

‘Very pretty,’ murmured Azazir with scant admiration. But can you make it fly?’

Sparing just enough attention to ensure that her carefully drawn creation did not fade, Velindre concentrated on gathering every scrap of elemental power that she could find between the uppermost skies and the valley she stood in. She felt herself suffused by possibilities, her hair spreading in a halo, her skin crawling with the touch of untamed energy. Focusing on the brilliant heart of the column of light, she forced the elemental might into the maelstrom of magic, confining the roiling power in an ever tighter circle. Some remote, dispassionate part of her mind wondered how many times she had told arrogant pupils never to summon more magic than would be released in their spell. How foolhardy was this? All the same, she concentrated every fibre of her being on winding the circle of power ever tighter, ever smaller. A pinpoint of sapphire light flared in its burning white heart.

‘That’s it!’ Azazir crowed. Now cut it loose, throw it to the dragon or we’ll both be dead!’

With a thrill of horror, Velindre realised that the sapphire spark was doubling in size with every beat of her heart. It was sucking the power out of the sky of its own volition. There was no way she could contain it. Distantly she recalled Otrick musing on just how the wizards of fearful mainland fable might have wrought their legendary destructions. Now she knew. If she didn’t confine that raw, burgeoning power within the simulacrum of the dragon, mages and non-mageborn alike all the way to Hadrumal would see just such a disaster unfold.

She hacked at the column of braided air with pure blue energy. In the instant before the sapphire spark could burst free to scour the valley even more bare than Azazir had made it, she thrust the elemental power into the motionless form of the dragon. The cerulean light vanished, recoiling in all directions, whipping back up to the highest reaches of the sky.

The dragon shivered and blurred, distorted as a distant mirage. Then azure fire kindled in its eyes and it yawned, long slatey-blue tongue tasting the air. It sprang upwards, spreading its great wings and flexing them, tail lashing wildly. Velindre caught her breath as it slipped down the sky, awkward and ungainly. Then she saw the creature catch the whisper of a breeze and seize it, curling the air to support itself with pure instinctive magic. The dragon soared high, graceful and beautiful. It looked from side to side, gathering the winds to itself until a nimbus of blue magelight surrounded it.

Velindre reached out to the aura and shivered. It was that pure, invigorating power that had seduced her in the heart of the storm, yet now it was something more, laced with the dragon’s uncomplicated delight in its union with the element that had borne it. She couldn’t help herself; she drew the magic to her, opening herself to it. The dragon’s head whipped around and it dived to land on the shoreline with a faint thud, talons gouging the dry mud. Cocking its head to one side, it glared at Velindre, hissing faintly. ‘Let it know you’re more powerful than it is,’ Azazir warned.

‘How?’ Velindre asked in a strangled whisper. Her knees felt like water. She licked her dry lips and her tongue found a raw edge on a chipped tooth; she’d clenched her jaw that hard. Close to, the beast was more tenifying than fascinating.

‘Think of it as an unruly apprentice.’ Azazir was callously amused.

Velindre locked gazes with the dragon. It took a stealthy pace towards her, mouth opening wider. Those teeth were incredible, like shards of indestructible ice. She flung an abrupt bolt of lightning just in front of the dragon, smudging its white purity with a shower of dust and stones. The creature retreated, head sinking low between its forefeet, icy spines flattened to its long neck. The light in its eyes faded a little and its long tail curled around its hind legs. Its long blue tongue flickered out to taste the ground where the lightning had landed and it extended a curious forefoot to the blasted hole. ‘Good,’ Azazir approved. Now—’ Whatever he might have said was lost in the water dragon’s emerald fury as it stormed up out of the lake. It ran across the surface of the water, shrieking a challenge that echoed around the barren valley. Unfurling its pale-green wings, it sprang into the air before it reached the shore and plunged down, vicious talons extended on all four feet.

The cloud dragon writhed out of the way barely in time. The water dragon lashed out with its spiked tail and caught the newcomer full in the side, ripping at its white scales. Purple blood oozed from the wound. The white dragon whipped its head around and fastened its teeth on the green dragon’s hindquarter, worrying at its leg. The water dragon screeched and extended its wings, flapping wildly and whipping up a cloud of dust as it fought to pull away. The cloud dragon held on until it was standing at full stretch on its hind legs, wings outspread to keep its own balance, still tearing at its rival’s flesh. Green-brown blood from the water dragon’s vicious wound stained the pristine whiteness of the cloud dragon’s face and neck.

The green dragon opened its mouth to breathe a torrent of burning spittle at its tormentor. The white dragon recoiled and released it, sinking back on to its hind legs, still ready to spring, its head weaving from side to side as it licked its bloodied teeth with its slatey-blue tongue. The water dragon wheeled in the air, holding its wounded leg tight to its long body, remaining clawed limbs still extended in warning. The white dragon darted up and this time the green dragon’s lurid breath caught its wing, searing the white membrane like acid. The cloud dragon shrieked in uncomprehending agony, tumbling through the air as it tried to escape the pain. The green dragon pursued it, wings pumping to rise above the shining white creature. Once it was above it, it tore at its white head and neck with its glaucous foreclaws, agate-spiked tail lashing at the wounded white wing. Now the cloud dragon’s head was soiled with its own purple blood, one eye torn to a blind, mined socket.

It rolled in the air, falling away, trying to escape. The green dragon shrieked its triumph and groped down with its unwounded hind leg, desperate to rip into the white dragon’s unprotected belly. Its exultation was cut short as the cloud dragon breathed a lacerating hail of icy blades straight in its face. The green dragon threw its head back and the cloud dragon shot upwards, jaws fastening on the water dragon’s throat.

Wings beating frantically, it forced the creature back, rising above it for the first time. Now the water dragon was on its back, the soft hide between belly and hindquarters exposed, only one clawed hind foot raking the air to defend its vitals. It tore frantically at the cloud dragon’s armoured neck and shoulders with its forefeet, claws skidding off the thick ridged scales.

Forelegs flailing to defend its head from the water dragon’s tearing claws, the cloud dragon ripped with its hind legs, opening great gouges in the jade-green scales of its foe’s belly. The water dragon lashed back with its tail. Throwing a muscular coil around the white dragon’s own tail, it hollowed its back, wrenching those vicious hind claws away from its wounded underside. Writhing upwards, it bound itself so close that the white dragon had no room to claw at it again. With a single powerful beat of its wings, the green dragon forced the two of them out over the surface of the lake. Then it folded its mighty wings closed with a snap that whipped smoky spray from the water.

The white dragon flapped hysterically, but with holes gaping in its wing, it couldn’t escape the dead weight of the water dragon pulling it down. It released its killing bite, head straining upwards. The green dragon thrust down with its head, brownish blood muddy on its emerald scales, dark tongue questing for the waters below. With the cloud dragon still caught in the coils of its tail, it fell into the lake. Both creatures vanished into the depths, trails of purple and muddy green blood blurring the crystal purity of the water.

Not so strong, your little effort.’ Azazir drew a deep, satisfied breath. The shining pallor of fish scales gleamed beneath his skin and green light shone in his eyes.

The battling dragons erupted on to the surface of the lake in a blaze of sapphire and emerald light. They reared up, batting their wings for balance, each ripping away scales from the other with foreclaws and teeth. The cloud dragon was hissing, the water dragon’s cry a resonant moan that sent a shiver down Velindre’s spine.

She watched, tears filling her eyes, as the two creatures’ struggles grew weaker, blows landing without strength, evasions becoming clumsy and useless. Finally the cloud dragon collapsed backwards, head drifting on the subsiding ripples. Its motionless wings spread outstretched on the water and its tail dangled away into the depths. The water dragon fell forward on to its enemy’s body, claws scraping ineffectually. It gaped, stretching its sinuous head forward to rip at the cloud dragon’s throat, but this last effort was beyond it. It collapsed, tongue lolling over its teeth.

Velindre watched, tears falling unheeded down her cheeks, as the creature she had woven with her magic dissolved. The wings blurred to mist, sapphire bones momentarily revealed like a spread of fingers before they vanished. The long, lithe body turned to grey fog tainted with the dusky purple of a storm cloud. The head was the last to fade, the remaining azure eye now dull and lifeless, turned to Velindre in mute reproach. She shivered as it disappeared.

‘Draw the magic to you, don’t let it blow away on the wind,’ Azazir rasped.

Velindre watched the green dragon fading, its wounds widening, cutting the creature into butchered remnants that drifted apart on the water, mercifully growing fainter, with scales, claws and teeth the last to disappear. She saw Azazir transmuted to a hollow semblance of man once again, filled with green-hued water, emerald madness in his eyes.

Now do you understand?’ He turned to her, eerie intensity lighting his face. Now will you stay?’

‘Yes, I understand,’ she said tersely. ‘I understand why Otrick so rarely summoned a dragon. I understand why he kept such magic to himself. He would never create such a creature so lightly, to see it fade and die so soon, still less to watch it killed like that.’ Revulsion choked her.

‘So you understand nothing,’ Azazir said with contempt. ‘You had better leave.’

‘Gladly,’ snapped Velindre, but not in my underclothes, thank you all the same.’ Cutting violently through the confusion of magic that now permeated the lake, she searched the barren rock of the bottom. She brought all her scattered belongings to land at her feet in a flash of sapphire light.

‘Better hurry,’ warned Azazir as he rubbed his hands together. His fingers were flowing through each other as the dry mud beneath his feet turned liquid once more. The dry rocks began to shine in the sunlight as they were coated with cold moisture.

Velindre looked up to see that the sky was still unclouded and snapped her fingers to summon a flame of pure fire. It burned elemental red, hanging in the air, and she set her clothes drifting around it, steam rising from the sodden cloth. She pulled on her damp boots, stamping as her stockings rumpled uncomfortably beneath her heels. Finding a silver-backed brush in her sodden bundle, she dragged the bristles angrily through her protesting hair.

‘What are the differences between a true dragon and simulacrum?’ she demanded. ‘What else do I need to know?’

‘What else?’ Azazir’s voice rippled with the myriad streams now cascading down the sides of the valley. ‘Why should there be anything else?’

‘Because there always is,’ Velindre said grimly, subduing her imperfectly brushed locks in a tight plait. ‘Especially with wizards. You said there was a void at the heart of a simulacrum. What is there within a true dragon?’

‘I wondered if you’d remember to ask about that.’ Azazir’s laughter was like a winter brook tripping over stones. ‘Maybe you might be Otrick’s equal, one day.’

‘Well?’ demanded Velindre.

‘A true water dragon has a heart of emerald.’ Azazir looked out at the lake and excited ripples raced towards him. ‘Ruby for a fire dragon, sapphire for one living among the clouds. Amber for a dragon born of the earth, for some reason. That’s the other thing the hunters were ready to risk their lives for, to cut out a dragon’s heart. There are no purer gemstones.’

‘They killed them for jewels?’ Velindre was astounded.

‘So, will you be trying this again?’ Azazir looked at her, his head on one side, expression—as far as it could be seen—contemplative. ‘Or will you just run back to Hadrumal, tail between your legs, too frightened to admit where you’ve been?’

‘Otrick would summon a dragon in times of direst need,’ Velindre said carefully, noting that she was now standing in mud up to her ankles. ‘I imagine I would do the same, if I could see no other way of saving myself or some vital situation.’

‘Be careful where you work such magic,’ warned Azazir softly. ‘The dragon will go hunting out of blind hunger, not realising what scant time it has to live its borrowed life. It won’t only hunt meat. It senses the void at its heart, even if it doesn’t understand it. It’ll seek gems to fill that emptiness and it will rip apart a building if it gets so much as a sniff of a diamond ring.’

What happens if it finds them?’ Velindre wrenched her ill-fitting skirt over her head before fighting her way into her bodice, now shrunken in oddly inconvenient places.

‘I imagine it’ll win a true life for itself,’ mused Azazir as he gazed out over his lake, which was starting to glow green once more. ‘Then you would have a lot of explaining to do in Hadrumal.’

Velindre gathered up everything else she cared to salvage inside her blanket and tied it into an awkward load. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t suppose anyone will come here again, not from Hadrumal, but if they do, there’s no need to say I was here .

Azazir ignored her, walking away. Angered, Velindre reached out to hold him back but her fingers simply rippled through his arm. He gave no sign he had even noticed, first striding, then running towards the lake. He dived into the crystal waters and vanished in a flash of emerald radiance.

Velindre looked up to see the roiling grey clouds that had capped the valley before returning in full force.

She closed her eyes and sighed. Where should she go: to Hadrumal or Relshaz? She had this secret now and there was no unlearning it. Was it a secret she wanted to share? What would Dev, of all unreliable, untrustworthy people, do with such knowledge? But these wild wizards had the lore, if one of them could forge a dragon to plunder the Aldabreshin islands. Could she bring herself to hand such dangerous power to Dev, so that he could raise a dragon of his own to rip the interloper to pieces? How long could it be before the Archmage got wind of this dragon loose in the Archipelago? Wouldn’t it be better to be in Hadrumal when that happened and be on hand to present the assembled worthies of the Council with a solution? Necessity would force Planir to overlook her visit to Azazir. Let them deny her the rank of Cloud

Mistress then.

But could she live with herself if hoarding this hard-won lore meant that Dev died and innocent people besides, even if they were savage Archipelagans who would murder a mage as soon as look at her? She was cold, dishevelled and exhausted. Her body ached for the reassurance of a warm bath, clean clothes, food and wine. She needed peace and solitude to make sense of this whole unnerving experience, but she couldn’t face the lofty isolation of her silent room in Hadrumal. She needed people around her after the desolation of Azazir’s madness. People who wouldn’t be asking any questions until she had some answers.

Velindre opened her eyes and seized the last wisps of air still struggling to escape imprisonment inside Azazir’s unnatural storm. Picturing one of the more discreet inns among the bustling cacophony of Relshaz, she fled the silent lakeshore in a flare of sapphire light