Dedication

For my family

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One: The Heat of Battle

Chapter Two: Fields of Fire

Chapter Three: Of Serpents and Samurai

Chapter Four: The Dragonhunter’s Home Life

Chapter Five: A Home Life Destroyed

Chapter Six: How a Dragon Tracks its Prey

Chapter Seven: Hunting a Master of Dragons

Chapter Eight: The Ice Dragon

Chapter Nine: A Loneliness of a Great Ship

Chapter Ten: The Tiger Dragon

Chapter Eleven: Showdown at Sea

Chapter Twelve: The Contents of One Abandoned Dragon Ship

Chapter Thirteen: The Unknown St George

Chapter Fourteen: The Dragon of Japan

Chapter Fifteen: How the Other Half Lives

Chapter Sixteen: Culture Clash

Chapter Seventeen: A Traveller to the Orient

Chapter Eighteen: Light Without Heat

Chapter Nineteen: Heat Without Light

Chapter Twenty: Never go to Tokyo Without a Sword

Chapter Twenty-one: Beware of Falling Serpents

Chapter Twenty-two: The Doctor is Out

Chapter Twenty-three: Bullets of a Bullet Train

Chapter Twenty-four: Tricks of the Trade

Chapter Twenty-five: Fire that can Hide

Chapter Twenty-six: Where Tigers Lurk

Chapter Twenty-seven: A Tiger’s Eyes

Chapter Twenty-eight: City of a Billion Wonders

Chapter Twenth-nine: Secrets of Bombay

Chapter Thirty: Cornered Beast

Chapter Thirty-one: Enemies and Allies

Chapter Thirty-two: Where There’s Smoke

Chapter Thirty-three: No Suicide Missions

Chapter Thirty-four: Dragon Trapping

Chapter Thirty-five: Chamber of Horrors

Chapter Thirty-six: The Way a Fire Dies

Chapter Thirty-seven: Small Sacrifices

Epilogue: The Dying Embers of the Day

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE The Heat of Battle

There is only one thing you can count on with Evil.

Evil will do things you never counted on.

Simon St George hated that fact as much as he detested the African sun. The heat in Kenya was unbearable and the shadows the sun cast on the trail were hatefully dark, making it difficult to see if a serpent was ready to leap out of the tall grasses.

And they were hunting serpent. The possibility of a fiery death was always with him, and Simon found it sickening rather than exciting. His father was quite the opposite. Riding tall in the saddle ahead, Aldric St George steered his horse with a stern energy, a quiet thrill that a fight could come at any moment.

Aldric insisted on them both going on horseback for the ease of movement over the rough terrain, but looking back jealously at the car in his wake, Simon cursed his father’s old-fashioned ways and yearned for air conditioning.

Behind him, the battered Jeep spat rocks from its wheels, slowly rolling through the ragged country – a neglected dirt road amid long yellow grasses. Beside the worried Kenyan driver sat Alaythia Moore, the beautiful New York artist who lately looked a bit awestruck by the wilds of Africa.

Simon squinted back at her, the dirt on the windows making her nothing but a pretty shadow. He rode up alongside his father. “You think she’d rather be out here with us?”

Aldric focused his eyes on the trail. “Simon, keep your mind on the task at hand.”

“We’re miles from the African dragons,” said Simon. “We still have to get past the next two villages. I just thought she might be lonely in there.”

“It’s hot in the sun. Why the devil would she want to be out here?”

“For the company,” said Simon unhappily. Unless he was lecturing him, his British father was never much good at conversation. Simon wondered how Aldric and Alaythia spent their time alone. He figured they must always be planning strategy, going over the old scrolls and Books of Saint George, learning the Serpentine language better or designing new weaponry. Alaythia’s skills as a magician had grown tremendously over the past few months.

Simon turned as the Jeep pulled around them and Alaythia looked out. “You have to be sick of the sun by now,” she said to Aldric. “Why don’t you tether the horses to the back and get some shade in the Jeep?”

Aldric smiled at her. “You mean step into the modern world?”

“Yes,” she said with exasperation. “You should’ve left the horses back at the ship.”

Alaythia, Simon thought, had just a touch of what he now recognised as New York attitude, with the slight hint of expectation that rich people carry around which she had yet to completely lose. (Her grandmother had left her a fair amount of money from a Manhattan property fortune, which had soon dwindled away on bad investments and charity donations.) She leaned out more, her beaded necklace clanging on the Jeep’s door. “Come on,” she prompted again. “Quit being the angry warrior and take a break in here.”

“We’ll see what you say when that jalopy gets a flat tyre or the transmission goes,” said Aldric. “We do things the St George way. We’re not going to drop traditions that have been handed down for centuries.”

Simon watched the two of them, surprised to see his father looking relaxed for a moment. That must have been the fifth time he’d smiled in the past two days – a record. Alaythia could bring that out in anyone, he thought.

“We’re coming up on the next village,” she said.

“This isn’t the way I remember it,” said the African driver and translator, as he slowed down and let the horses pass, staring at the settlement. “There should be more people out. It was a busy little place …”

Aldric looked alarmed as they neared the town, a sorry set of flat, boxy buildings in faded colours. A very old Ford sat in the high grass, ruined by time and hard rains, proof of Aldric’s claim that this was no place for motorcars.

And then beyond the junked car, a human skeleton lay in the grass.

“Halt,” Aldric said to his horse, Valsephany.

Simon stopped behind him, having a bit more difficulty with Norayiss, his own stallion.

The skeleton was clean and white, left out in the sun for a long time. Flies scarcely bothered with it. Simon noted with some disgust that an arm had been lost, most likely taken by scavengers, jackals perhaps. He’d seen the rot of death before, but hadn’t quite got used to it.

The skull gleamed, a horror made ordinary by the afternoon sun.

“What does it mean?” he asked his father.

“I’m not sure,” Aldric answered.

Aldric pulled a crossbow closer to him in the saddle, as did Simon. Alaythia had a rifle, its wooden stock covered in runic symbols. She held it closer, leaning out of the Jeep as the driver reluctantly drove it forward.

More death greeted them. Skeletons lined the twisting road, looking as if the people had fallen there in some attempt to escape the tiny town and no one had bothered to bury them. It was a strange sight and Simon felt queasy.

The path to the village became yet more riddled with skeletons and bones, and the horses’ hooves crunched over them as it was impossible to get round them. Large boulders sat on each side of the road and Simon noted with alarm that one of the huge rocks was smeared with blood.

Blood?

Two young boys ran towards the St Georges as they arrived. They were shouting something, terror in their eyes.

“Disease,” said the translator from the Jeep. “They’re yelling about disease. It is some terrible death let loose here.”

“What kind of disease?” Simon asked, suddenly wanting to turn and ride away.

“They don’t know,” said the translator. “Many diseases in Africa. This one works fast, they say. Many days at work. Many people dead. Many dying.”

“How many days?” Aldric asked.

“They want medicine,” the translator said. “They expect medicine from us.”

Simon looked at the African boys, feeling terrible, sensing the fear that swirled around them.

“We don’t have any medicine,” barked Aldric, sounding angry, and Simon recognised it as the way he always reacted when he couldn’t help. His father moved his horse onward as the boys ran alongside, pleading. “I need to know how many days since the sickness came,” he repeated to their driver.

The translator tried to get an answer. “They don’t know. They are children. They lost track of time …”

“Have there been any fires here?” asked Aldric.

The African translated. “No. No fires. Just a fire in the heart. Sickness of fire.”

Simon trailed Aldric, with the Jeep coming up behind them. The translator was becoming more agitated. “This sickness is not normal,” he said. “This death works too quickly. They should’ve got word to the last town we were in. No one did.”

Aldric kept moving.

“This is not right,” the translator yelled after him. “We should not go further; this is not right.”

“It is right …” said Aldric, “for what we’re looking for.”

Alaythia offered the boys a rune-covered canteen of special water. “Drink, splash it on you,” she advised them. “It will protect you.”

Seeing they did not understand her, the translator took the canteen and used some of the water on himself, passing it to the children with a few hopeful words.

Simon looked back. The boys seemed sceptical, but they splashed the water on their skin and drank deeply all the same.

“There’s not enough water,” Aldric complained.

“It’s something,” she said, sounding annoyed. “The mixture is weakening in the sun, but it’ll help them if they aren’t already sick. Let them have it.”

“There’s not enough,” repeated Aldric in a grim tone, for they had reached the centre of town. He was staring ahead. Amid old, broken-down cars and trucks, there was a group of low, flat buildings. Through the open doors, Simon could see many people lying on beds. He stopped his horse and surveyed his surroundings.

He grimaced. The people were choking and gasping for air. Some men lay in doorways, lifting their arms weakly. And then Simon realised that every single person there had lost all their hair. The man in the doorway, the women gathering water at the well, the sick he could see in the beds – all were completely bald. It was jolting. Simon looked back. The boys who led them in had shaven heads, or so he had thought, but now he could tell that several of the other villagers, many of them children, had lost their hair as well.

“How long has this sickness been here?” Aldric demanded. “Ask this man.”

The translator got out of the car, keeping his distance as he questioned a man in a doorway. “Six days,” the translator reported. “One boy arrived in town and grew ill, and from the second day, it spread to everyone. Weakness overtakes you. You have no desire to live, no strength. There is …”only one mercy. There are five deaths every hour,” the translator choked on the words. “In another day, the entire town will be gone.”

Simon swallowed hard, the reality hitting him. He looked at Aldric, whose eyes burned with anger. Alaythia got out of the Jeep and moved towards the man, bringing him the last canteen.

“Alaythia, please,” Aldric said quietly. “You can still catch this disease. Let Simon help him; his blood is stronger than yours.”

Simon took the canteen from Alaythia, who moved back, looking helpless and angry. The boy gave the man a drink from the canteen.

“It won’t do much good now,” said Alaythia and she looked at the translator. “But tell him it’s strong medicine. He may believe it. It may help.” And indeed, the man’s eyes brightened as he took the drink.

“Now ask him if there has been anything else unusual,” Aldric ordered.

The man told them there had been thousands of vultures gathered on the veldt outside the town before the disease struck.

“Thousands?” asked Aldric.

“And jackals as well,” the translator explained. “Many scores of them.”

“Where did they gather?” asked Simon. He knew, as his father did, that where there were ripples in nature, there were dragons.

“I know the place,” said one of the boys who’d led them. “You bring some of that medicine to my mother and I will show you where the scavengers settled, miles up the road.”

Aldric looked to Simon, who held the canteen.

“No, not him,” said the boy, pointing to Simon. “The woman must bring it. My mother will not be seen by men in her state.”

As the translation came, Aldric nodded, understanding. Alaythia needed no prodding; she took the canteen from Simon and followed the boy past some buildings to the first of several large, plain-canvas tents on the edge of town. The tents were left over from an old UN operation and had been set up as quarantine early on, the boy explained through the translator, who hurried to keep up with Alaythia.

Vultures and jackals stood waiting a few metres away. They had been hidden by the buildings. Their eyes followed her with interest.

Alaythia took one look back at Aldric and Simon, and entered the tent behind the boy. She heard the translator follow her with a rustle of the tent flap.

Inside, decorated blankets lay on the floor. Masks were hanging on the walls, while the sweet smell of incense filled the tent. Two old women lay in cots on either side of the tent and their eyes begged for mercy.

A teenage boy knelt between them and he greeted the first boy with a weary nod. The translator stood back at the entryway, seeming to apologise for disturbing the elderly women and perhaps explaining the necessity.

“I have medicine,” said Alaythia, but she did not move closer to the women.

The translator helped them exchange words:

“What do you ask in return?” asked the second boy, suspicious.

“We’re looking for something,” Alaythia answered. “We need a guide. But you can have the medicine even if you don’t help us.”

“You are looking for the Unseen,” said the boy, fearful.

“The vultures and jackals outside,” Alaythia said. “We want to know where they came from. There was a place they gathered on the first day …”and there would have been fire near there …”Do you know it?”

“What is there if you find it?”

“We are looking for two beasts. They are brothers and they work together. Very unusual. They are serpents but they look like men. They brought the disease to you …”They like to see suffering; they feed on it.”

One of the old women shifted in the bed and propped herself up on one elbow to get a look at Alaythia. But Alaythia’s own eyes were drawn to the flies that had gathered on the floor, rivers of them, hundreds, easing up from between the rugs. She began to tremble.

Outside, Simon had a bad feeling and began moving his horse towards the tent. Aldric followed. As soon as his eyes fell upon the masses of jackals and vultures gathering, Aldric knew. “The brothers. They’re here.”

Simon and Aldric spurred their horses towards the tent.

If they did not move quickly, there would be a new skeleton in the African sun.

CHAPTER TWO Fields of Fire

Inside the tent, Alaythia stared at the two old women muttering at her in an unfamiliar language and she saw the healing fluid in her canteen bubbling over, boiling. She dropped it as the metal burned her hand. The translator tried to catch it, but burned his own fingers. He yelped and fled from the tent, cradling his hand.

“Uncareful magician,” said one old woman, hissing in English. “We have long awaited you—”

“Moritam kettisem sedosica,” cried Alaythia, spell-chanting. “Do not cast your fire, dragon – I have taken the power of your skin; you will not be armoured against the flame.”

“Lies!” cried the other woman, her eyes wild.

“You will burn with me,” warned Alaythia.

The two old women lunged at her, lashing their claws as they transformed into African Tall Dragons, each of them four metres of fury. Alaythia fell back and lifted a huge wooden mask for a shield as the first dragon sunk its claws into it.

The two boys had already darted away and now they ran directly into Simon and Aldric still on horseback.

Alaythia scrambled out of the tent as the first dragon, a fearsome black-and-brown beast called Matiki, pounced upon her, sinking its teeth into her armoured back, flinging his long black braided mane.

Aldric fired a crossbow shot into the creature’s head. It did no harm, but Matiki dropped Alaythia, who rolled free as the dragon’s twin, Savagi, lurched from the tent, scrambling towards her on all fours. Simon and Aldric both shot at the beasts – landing arrows in their arms and necks. The dragons roared in pain and turned to assault the riders.

Perfect, Simon thought. We drew them from Alaythia.

But his joy was quickly lost as Savagi leaped into the air, landing upon his horse, clinging to its neck. A huge snout stared him in the eye, and if the serpent hadn’t wasted time roaring in anger, Simon might’ve been crunched in its fangs. But his crossbow had one bolt left – and he shot it into the monster’s throat.

Savagi screeched and tumbled back, somersaulting to land a few metres away.

Simon’s horse jostled backwards in the dust.

Matiki had turned on Aldric and risen, man-like, to his full height. He slashed his long muscular arms, trying to get at the knight who kept his horse moving and stabbed back at the beast with his sword.

Simon looked at Savagi’s terrible yellow eyes and knew what was coming. The serpent reared its head back, its black throat swelling up. It was about to throw fire.

“NOOO!” cried Matiki, and yelled at his brother in Dragontongue.

“Listen to your brother,” cried Alaythia, who understood their words. “I’ve cursed your armour; you cannot burn your way out—”

“We have kept our magic from raging,” cried Matiki to his brother. “We have come too far. We need no fire to kill these swine—”

But Savagi’s rage was too much. Fire shot from his jaws.

Simon ducked and turned his horse, but the blast of black-yellow flames burned his shielded back, scorched his hair and singed his horse’s mane. The animal screamed and gave in to fear, galloping away from the threat.

The flames roared over Simon and met the ground, flaring up in the yellow grass like a match to paraffin.

Alaythia scrambled for the well and climbed on top of it, and Aldric rode his horse clear as the fire spread across the parched ground. Some of the flames leaped on to Matiki and the dragon screeched in pain.

Simon at last got his horse to stop its run. The fire was sweeping over the veldt plains, whipped up by an unnatural wind the dragons had brought on but could not control. Simon rode over to one of the old trucks, a rundown relief vehicle loaded with water. He opened its valves and water gushed from it, cutting off the fire from the village.

But the veldt beyond was burning wildly. The flames were soaring across the yellow grass with such speed it made Simon gasp.

With Alaythia in relative safety, Aldric pulled a trigger on his saddle. Darts spat from tiny guns mounted on the saddle and flew right into the African dragons, again and again. Like a machine gun, the device riddled the creatures with silver barbs. Savagi howled and leaped for Aldric, swiping his claws against Valsephany, but the horse was protected by armour, the steel plating merely scratched and mauled in a spray of sparks.

Still Savagi did not give up. Dodging Aldric’s sword, it managed to claw at him, nearly at his throat. Simon saw his father get struck below the neck. As he rode closer, Simon could see blood streaming from the cut and he was filled with fear. He reloaded and fired his crossbow, avoiding his father’s body and targeting the African dragon’s head with precision. The arrow hit and the creature rocked from it, but did not let go.

Alaythia screamed and fired her rifle at Matiki, keeping him at bay, preventing him from helping his brother.

Simon could hear Aldric snarling in pain and he wondered if he was going to witness his father’s death. But galloping closer, he could see Aldric moving his sword fast as ever. He was going to be all right.

Matiki squealed in delight as Savagi swung for Aldric, but the warrior slammed his hand against the wretched creature’s chest and called out its deathspell, the sacred words that would destroy a dragon. Quickly, Savagi broke clear before the spell could be finished. More fearsome than the knight’s sword was a deathspell.

Aldric cursed. A half-spell was little use. Savagi fell to the ground and snapped at Simon’s horse’s leg in passing. The serpent tore a chunk of muscle away and darted for cover.

Aldric punished him with a glancing blow to the shoulder from his silver sword.

The two dragons dived into the fire, screaming in pain, trying to escape.

“Go after them!” Aldric yelled.

How? thought Simon.

“They’re going through it – so are we!” said Aldric, and he urged his horse into the flames. Simon, on blind faith, followed his father’s lead and drove his horse through the wall of fire, knowing the other side would be clear.

And it was. The dragons had cleared a way for themselves – a passage in the fire. They ran and then galloped on all fours. Aldric and Simon rode after the creatures, walls of fire flashing by on either side.

The dragons had parted the raging fire on the African veldt using a desperate magic, for the flames could easily burn them as well as their enemies.

The horses were terrified, and Simon would have been too, but he kept his mind on the targets. He tried to take aim, but he was riding too fast, his crossbow shaking in the rush. He tried in vain to slow Norayiss, but the horse was wounded, terrified, and Simon could see no way out.

Ahead, the African dragons split up, making two passages through the flames.

Simon went left; Aldric went right. Simon saw his father ride after Matiki and he realised he couldn’t go back now. He would confront Savagi alone.

But the creature kept charging ahead down the trench.

Simon knew he had to try to take advantage. Attack it from behind. He had never ridden so fast. Down twists and turns he went as the African dragon fled before him through a maze of fire.

Blasting away with his crossbow, Simon looked around in panic for a way to escape this confrontation; he wasn’t ready for a dragon kill on his own. But his arrows cut into the dragon’s hide and Savagi now turned towards him, grinning pitilessly – the boy was his.

The cornered dragon leaped upon Simon, landing his great jaws directly on Simon’s crossbow, which the boy swung before him for protection. Again Simon fired the bow and the last bolt emptied from the chamber, snapping the dragon’s head back. A direct blow shattered teeth in the dragon’s jaws.

Savagi fell back upon the ground and stray flames caught on his skin and the exo-skeleton on his back. The dragon howled.

It turned, furious, and pulled at Simon, dragging him off the horse with shocking speed. His crossbow tumbled.

The injured beast’s breath was laboured, but he had Simon in his grasp and was ready to crush his neck.

Suddenly, behind him the wall of flame tore open and Matiki went flying to the ground, wailing. Savagi’s huge armoured ebony head swivelled to see his brother dying.

“Deathspell …” the brother said, and red flames took him, bursting from somewhere inside the beast, killing it at last.

Aldric rode out behind him and jumped from his horse, slamming into Savagi. Simon was knocked loose and Savagi was so surprised by the move, he choked as Aldric drove his sword into his belly.

The creature struggled to hold Aldric back with his long arms as Simon dived back into the fray and shoved his hand upon the weak flesh at the dragon’s heart.

“Ordris africalla sadentiss ishkal,” said Simon, and the deathspell took instant effect: Simon felt his hand burned as the Serpentine heart burst into perfect red fire. The creature fell back away from Aldric in surprise at the quickness of its own death.

As the black-yellow flames around them dropped away, Simon could see lions, real African lions, running from the terrible inferno, and a group of stampeding giraffes alongside panicked hyenas, all trying to get away from the real king of the jungle…

Fire.

When Alaythia found them, Simon and Aldric had climbed up into a tree, having nowhere else left to run. The veldt was utterly blackened all around them. The tree itself was beautifully unscarred, a random survivor of nature’s supernatural wrath.

The brothers’ red ashes drifted past her, where their Serpentine bones had faded to nothing. Somehow the horses must’ve galloped fast enough to avoid danger, for Alaythia had their bridles in hand, bringing them back. Simon was always jealous of how she could coax them to her from anywhere by simply whistling.

“The sickness is gone,” she reported. “It left the village the instant you killed the dragons.”

Simon gave a sigh of relief. His stomach had been churning ever since the fighting stopped; taking action was always better than having time to worry.

“You could’ve waited for me, you know,” she added, brushing her long hair back from her face theatrically.

Simon smiled. Aldric squinted down at her from the tree. “You could’ve jumped in a wee bit faster,” he replied. “Then I could be the one down there, traipsing around, casual as a Bond Street shopper.”

She laughed at him. “It’s a deal then. I’ll take the lead next time.”

Simon groaned, for he knew there would be a next time. And soon.

CHAPTER THREE Of Serpents and Samurai

There were decorations in the steel-walled house, but very few things that did not directly reflect Najikko’s profession. What caught the eye would be the Samurai suits of armour that lined the halls. Always keep a little something of your enemy close by. It helps you to conquer your hate.

And how he hated the human warriors.

Najikko’s cold stare travelled past the suits of armour to a room where six new “visitors” awaited him. They had come seeking help, like many others. They were beautiful women and yet all he could see were imperfections. Ugly as sin they were to him.

Najikko looked out of the window at one of many cities that he owned and wondered how long it would be before a challenger came to his doorway.

CHAPTER FOUR The Dragonhunter’s Home Life

If anyone asked, Simon would say he lived in New England, but he was rarely there. He lived in a chilly, rundown, ex-British castle – a former fortress built in America during the Revolution and later modified to resemble a true baronial manor in the 1880s by a lord who wanted a touch of home in the States. And it must have succeeded in looking authentically English, for it was the only place Aldric could be convinced to make into a permanent residence. It was not yet a home in Simon’s mind, just a stand-in for one, though he welcomed the stone walls after the heat of Africa. In his first few months as Dragonhunter, he had been all over the map. Now he moped around the giant house, feeling snappy and tired, unable to sleep.

Simon felt fifty years old and wondered how his father managed all this travel. There Aldric was, clanging around the big kitchen with all of the energy of a cat, making some kind of sausage breakfast, and all Simon could do was stumble towards an old chair and hope his father remembered to make him something (sometimes he didn’t).

As Simon slipped past the stove, Aldric spun about taking some biscuits out of the oven, and bumped into him, dropping the biscuits on the floor.

“Simon!” his father barked.

“Relax, I didn’t mean to get in your way,” said Simon, sinking into the chair. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re always saying sorry,” grumbled Aldric.

“You’re always making me,” Simon sighed. They had grown into better coordination on the battlefield, but at home, they were all left feet and elbows and chaos. He watched as his pet fox Fenwick dived for the spilled biscuits.

Simon listened to the familiar sounds of Aldric chasing the fox with a flyswatter and looked out of the wide windows towards his old schoolhouse, the Lighthouse School for Boys. It was a rare, clear day and he could see the lighthouse tower and the Revolutionary War buildings in all their rundown beauty, and for a moment he wondered what the boys there were thinking of him. Crazy Simon St George, the hermit kid, who lived in the castle and studied at home behind closed doors. Little they knew.

“You’re up. I knew I heard some ridiculous tirade,” said Alaythia, entering the room with a plate of sausages and a basket of piping hot biscuits of her own. There was also the less appetising smell, Simon noted, of sulphur and ancient herbs. Alaythia often had unusual and interesting fragrances around her; Simon had found that her cooking would do that.

She strode past a surprised Aldric.

“What’s all this then?” Aldric stared.

“I decided to avoid the usual arguments – and the usual shortages, since you always forget me and Simon – and just make breakfast myself, in the alchemy lab,” chirped Alaythia, and she sat down to serve herself the meal. “Simon?”

“I’m going to skip breakfast,” said Simon, trying not to look disgusted.

“Not a great idea,” she said, but didn’t push the issue. She was good that way.

“Rancid stuff, smells of burned rats,” grumbled Aldric. “Just ’cause yours looks better doesn’t mean it’s good.”

“Simon thinks my food is spectacular, he’s just not hungry. And Simon has excellent taste, don’t you, Simon?” She winked at the boy.

Aldric frowned. “His opinions frighten me.”

“Well, there may have been rats in the vicinity and they may have got torched – but none of them found their way into the sausages,” she said, and continued eating.

“I don’t need any help making breakfast,” Aldric said, but Simon noticed he sat down and helped himself. “I’ve managed well enough without your help all these years, haven’t I? What I will say for you is that you’re getting a touch better each time out.” He half grinned at her.

“Glad you think so,” she said. “There may be rats in the sausage after all.”

And as they discussed this possibility in playful and somewhat aggravated tones, Simon tuned them out and moved away towards the window. He didn’t like the way his father and Alaythia flirted; he wasn’t sure if it was because they didn’t seem serious enough about each other, or because Simon himself had begun noticing Alaythia’s prettiness a bit too much, an uncomfortable thought he sent away quickly.

Fenwick stood up at the worktop and pushed in Simon’s direction a stray biscuit which Aldric had saved from the floor. Simon actually took it.

His white horse was trotting in the field outside and, watching it, Simon snapped out of his sleepy state. Deciding he needed a ride, he grabbed another biscuit from the table and headed for the door.

“And where do you think you’re going?” asked Aldric.

“Into town.”

“Not for long, we’ve training to do. Lances today.”

Simon kept going, keeping the debate to a minimum. “Training again? When am I going to prove myself enough to you?”

“It’s not about proving yourself, it’s about keeping up your skills. This isn’t a bloody game, is it? You can’t fail at this.”

Simon left the big stone kitchen and headed down a cold hallway, but their voices echoed behind him. “You know, a little of that goes a long way,” Alaythia told Aldric good-naturedly. “You can never just let things be, not even for a second.”

“What’re you going on about? My father used to knock me down if I tried to walk off like that.”

“Well, you can look forward to the same wonderful relationship with Simon. You don’t have to browbeat him so much, he’s not afraid of hard work. He hates himself enough already.”

“Oh, and why is that?” grumbled Aldric.

“Because he isn’t you. Obviously,” said Alaythia. Listening in the dark hallway, Simon could feel his face turn red. “Let him fail,” she added. “It’s how you learn, right?”

Simon went on to the hallway, filled with newspapers from around the world which might hold signs of supernatural events – the hallmarks of stray dragon magic.

There were circles around articles like “African Forest Fires at All-time High” and “Strange Lifeform Sighted in Jungle” and so on. Simon was actually obsessed with these strange activities. They gave him nightmares, filled up his thoughts, gave every action in the world a darker purpose. Like his father, he now saw a dragon presence in everything and he worried constantly over every news story, from strip-mining and pollution to crime and – right there, he thought, his eyes on a small headline. What is that? “Factory Laying off Thousands of Workers in Unusual Move.” That’s one of them, spreading hate, expanding its little domain of misery, that’s what that is. This was all he ever thought of now; it was just worry, worry, worry; he could hardly see the forest for the trees. Was there any end to this stuff? Was he losing his mind?

His ears pricked up for a second. To his embarrassment, he could still catch the talk in the kitchen.

“He’s got a girl,” he heard Alaythia say.

“How do you know that?” wondered Aldric. “If he met a girl, he’d clean himself up more.”

“That’s why I say he’s got a girl, not he ‘met a girl’. If she didn’t already like him, he’d have fixed that sloppy hair of his.”

Simon heard the remark and left the house, patting his hair down in sudden regret. But going back would mean a lot of chatter about who she was and all that, and there was nothing he wanted less than advice from his father. His hair was a blond, wiry, standing-at-attention deal anyway; not much changed that.

And anyway, the horse ride to town would mess it up.

And anyway, the girl liked him enough to see past all that.

As he rode Norayiss down the long driveway, Fenwick scampered alongside. Simon wondered how the fox knew he was leaving. Aldric came to the door and shouted after him, “Be back by eleven! After training, we’re going to look for Order members.”

You do it yourself. What a waste of time, thought Simon, galloping down the tree-lined trail. For months, the St Georges had been trying to find new converts to the Dragonhunting cause and it wasn’t going well. No one else could see the serpents in their true form, so more often than not, Aldric and Simon ended up looking like complete nutcases.

It used to be that the Order of Dragonhunters found soldiers from the families who had sworn to protect the St Georges since way back in the Middle Ages. These were people who passed the job down to their sons and daughters, and so on, and so on. But the modern world had forgotten Simon’s ancestor, the ancient knight Saint George the Dragonslayer, and those who knew the truth had been destroyed by the serpents. It felt hopeless. There was only Simon, Aldric and Alaythia against the hundreds of dragons listed in the White Book of Saint George.

As Simon slowed his horse to a trot, watching the dusty, pebbled road pass under him, he remembered the last meeting he’d had with a distant cousin of an Order member. The poor construction worker from Massachusetts had never heard of Dragonhunting. The ordinary man had sat across from Simon and Aldric, near a half-finished skyscraper, and munched on his sandwich, looking bewildered.

The guy thought Simon and Aldric were insane, and it had been no better with any of the other six candidates they’d gone to see, all descendants and distant relatives of dragon fighters. The Order of Dragonhunters was clearly a dead issue, but his father never gave up on anything.

Simon’s horse was moving now into the town of Ebony Hollow. Past the first few quiet streets he found the novelty shop where his girlfriend – he hoped he could call her that pretty soon – was saying goodbye to her father, the shop owner, and walking to school.

“Simon!” said Emily, surprised to see him. “You’re back from …”where was it again, Spain?”

“Africa actually,” Simon replied, trotting his horse alongside her. “We went from Spain to Africa.”

“On a job with your dad, right?” she said, looking at him sideways, a bit confused. “Are you ever going to tell me what kind of job he actually does?”

I may do that, thought Simon, looking at her pretty eyes in the morning light. I may really do that.

“Come on, I’ll give you a ride,” said Simon, offering his hand, and she smiled cautiously, but kept moving.

He trotted down the street beside her, crossing the trolley car tracks. Any time he had someone his age to talk to, things would come pouring out of him. It just happened. It was this desperate habit he was developing. Actually, to be honest, it was just around her. She was the only one he really talked to, or tried to anyway.

“You said it was toxic waste disposal, I think,” said Emily. “Why do you have to go round the world to do that?”

“Well, there aren’t a lot of people who know how to handle the kind of …”dangerous material we deal with.”

“It doesn’t make you glow, does it?” she said and laughed.

“Uh, it can,” he said. He pretended to have trouble keeping Norayiss on course, pulling the reins to flex his arms. He was pretty sure Emily noticed how big he was getting. He was growing stronger every day with training – constant training, so he knew he’d gained quite a bit of muscle – though he wasn’t as tall as he’d like to be.

“Nobody understands why you don’t go to school,” Emily remarked.

“It’s just home-schooling.” That didn’t sound too strange, did it? “It’s not a big deal, I just travel so much, helping my dad, that I can’t really …”Have you ever thought about my name?”

“Your name? Simon?”

“No, St George. He was a real person. The legend says he fought a dragon, a long time ago, in the deserts of North Africa. A real dragon, OK? I mean, it’s not a legend, people say it was a real creature, whatever it was.”

She creased her brow, half-amused. “And that relates to you …”how? I don’t get what you’re talking about.”

He paused. What if there were real dragons, but they didn’t look like dragons. And they did really terrible, really evil things, making all these supernatural events you hear about that no one can ever explain, and hurting people, and killing people, and someone had to stop them from doing this. Oh, no, no, no, don’t say that …

“It’s not toxic waste dumps, that’s not what I deal with,” he said at last.

“And what do you deal with?”

A species. He answered in his head. A species that drives people to do evil because it feeds off misery, soaks it right into the skin. It tortures people. If the serpent doesn’t actually do these things himself, he forces people to do it for him …

“Maybe we can talk about this later,” Simon mumbled. Luckily, there was no more time for talking. They’d reached the school.

Emily looked up and manufactured a smile. “I’ve got to go. Your horse is amazing, she’s really calm. So, um, I’ll see you around the shop, I guess. Maybe I could finally meet your dad,” she said.

“He’s not real social,” said Simon, embarrassed.

“Well, you can bring him by if you want.”

She walked off across the grass and joined a group of girls, and he noticed her shoulders were raised and tight. When she finally shot him a glance, it was strange and Simon knew he had now put up a barrier between them. She was scared of him; he occupied a land of fairy tales and craziness. Or was he just thinking too much?

He wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

At that moment, a terrible shadow passed across the sun, but then was gone before it could be deciphered. He wondered if the menace was all in his mind; his world was always ordered by threat and fear.

Fine. Live in your fantasy land, he thought, looking at the mean-eyed girls with Emily. This is real and I’m one of the few people in the world who can protect any of you. You need me. He wished they knew it.

But he had no stomach for sulking; that was his father’s habit – Aldric’s genetic gift that he had probably passed down – and Simon didn’t want it. Strong, silent type. Right. What a joke. Silence is weak. It means you’re afraid. He couldn’t have got his father’s strength and agility, oh, no, that would have been too good, so he’d inherited a total inability to talk to anybody.

Or had he? Maybe he would get along with everybody just fine if he got more of a chance to hang around them; if his father wasn’t always dragging him around the world or shoving hard work in his face.

Stop it. Come on. Get out of your head, Simon thought. Here he was talking to himself instead of to other people and he realised he’d been staring at the girls as they walked away. I’m not staring at you, I’m just thinking.

He tried to figure a way to look natural. Stop sleepwalking, he told himself. This is your life.

Sometimes it seemed like the ordinary world was the one that was like a dream.

CHAPTER FIVE A Home Life Destroyed

Simon left the school and Emily, riding back home upset. He passed some teenagers pulling in with their cars and it finally hit him that he must look incredibly stupid to Emily on his horse. How great and impressive I thought I was. Look at me. What an idiot. All the kids looked so confident, so ordinary, with nothing to worry about except homework or a Friday night date.

I don’t know how to act, I don’t know how to be, he was thinking. What do people expect? I’m a human disaster, I don’t even have anyone to tell this to, except Alaythia.

As his horse weaved through the light traffic and back to the weed-sprouting trolley car tracks, Simon passed a group of boys in suits headed for the Lighthouse School further away, their hands full of a junk-food breakfast from the corner shop.

They watched Simon pass. He was the mysterious boy, the one who had left the boys’ school on Halloween night and then came back to live hidden in the old castle house outside of town.

“Simon St George,” he heard them whispering. He had always wanted to be a legend at school. He never knew it would make him feel so alone.

“Doesn’t all that riding make you bar-legged?” said one boy, as if challenging Simon.

“Bow-legged,” said another boy. “Not bar-legged. Idiot.”

“Whatever,” said the other. “He’s so weird. He never leaves his house, his horse is his only friend.” He made kissing noises. “It’s his girlfriend.”

Pathetic jokes. Simon rode past them. They still lived in their little land of dumb humour and stupid pecking orders.

He knew things they would never know at the Lighthouse School – the darkness under life, the pain and fear of battle – and he was content to know all this, but it felt like the days of struggle ahead were endless, the enemy unconquerable, and he would never be done with the fighting until he was dead.

He could see boys lining up for roll call on the field beside the lighthouse, neat rows in neat uniforms, and for a minute he wanted to wrap himself in their perfect boring school day, to avoid the disorganised, rambling lessons he’d get later from Alaythia, and the harsh training he’d get from his father.

He saw his old friend Denman, the lighthouse keeper, heading into the tower. The gruff old Scotsman and his wife had practically raised him from infancy, but now Simon felt they were strangers, caretakers who did a job and rarely smiled. Without knowing it, Simon had been a burden, a danger to them because of the dragons who were always hunting him, and he was a precious thing too, the last of the Dragonhunters, bringing a responsibility that made the old couple weary. He knew his father disapproved of the way they raised him. To this day, Aldric seemed to begrudge them the fact they had seen Simon’s growing-up years. Simon still spent time with Denman now and then, but not today. There was no time.

Simon turned Norayiss, moving away from these old memories.

As he came up the hill and rejoined the road, he noticed there were no birds chirping in the trees. The world had been enveloped in a strange quiet. When he looked down at the horse’s hooves, they made no sound on the pavement; it was as if Simon had momentarily gone deaf.

He stopped his horse, worried.

And then …”the shadows began to shift. The ones on the left side of the road vanished and suddenly the shadows of the trees on the right side of the road began to stretch towards him. The darkness reached forward, like a set of black claws. It was as if someone had moved the sun to the wrong side of the sky.

Simon swallowed hard.

Then he noticed that the trees far off in the forest, near his home, were beginning to rustle as if tremendously agitated. The whole forest there was shaking. A great, immense thing was moving in those trees, or causing the trees to shudder somehow. And it was headed for his house.

He spurred Norayiss on.

The horse sped down the street and tore off into the forest. As he neared the castle, struck with panic, Simon realised he had only a small silver dagger for protection. He never dreamed he’d need body armour this close to home. He felt open; easy prey.

He took hold of the knife. Silver was the finest weapon against dragons, but it was the deathspell that killed them – and if it was a serpent on the attack, he had no idea which spell to use as they were specific to each dragon.

So which one was on the attack? There were hundreds of the beasts listed in the White Book of Saint George.

The horse dashed through the Ebony Hollow forest and Simon noticed with horror that the ground was rippling with beetles which were pouring out of the ground. Green-yellow insects wriggled from the earth and swarmed around the horse’s hooves.

This kind of warping of nature could only mean a dragon in their midst. But where?

As he thundered down the road to the castle, he found no sign of the killer, just Aldric and Alaythia outside in the field, brushing Valsephany. Simon felt calmer, thinking perhaps the serpent had merely been spying on them, and the idle talk he caught between his father and Alaythia relaxed him for an instant.

“It’s just really weird, what happened in Africa,” Alaythia was saying. “The brothers knew where we were, they were ready for us, they set a trap. And they knew how to trick me into coming in first. They knew we were coming into that village just at that time, and they knew exactly where we were.”

“Keep it down,” he heard Aldric say. “Simon’s coming. He doesn’t need to know all of this.”

“Listen, something’s happening,” Simon warned. “There’s something here—”

Suddenly, a set of claws snatched him around the shoulders from behind and hoisted him off the horse, into the air. He screamed, childishly, instantly hating himself for it, but he couldn’t see what had him.

He heard the beating of terrible wings, the smell and heat of rancid breath were everywhere.

“SIMON!” Alaythia screamed, and Simon suddenly saw her down below, firing small bolts of silver from a wrist device. They shot towards him, narrowly missing his ear. He heard a dart plunge into the beast that clutched him, but the animal made no reaction and Simon was carried further up, the pasture growing small far beneath him, and then he saw it twist away in a terrifying spin.

Simon’s head swirled from dizziness and he tried to see what it was that had taken him. But there was no way to see; it was behind him.

He heard his father’s rocket-arrows shooting up from below – Aldric must’ve got to his travel pack, left by the horse trough. The rockets hissed, whisking around the dragon, and Simon saw in the spinning world above Ebony Hollow the white flare of their passing.

“You want to get back to your father.” The serpent laughed. “I’ll make sure you do …”

The voice was pure terror. A female, breathing these threats with fearsome delight.

Simon clambered to get hold of the creature’s claws so he couldn’t be dropped.

“The question,” said the Serpentine beast, “is whether you go down in one piece …” And she dropped him, just enough so his stomach sickened, then snatched him back. “Or in many different, bleeding pieces …”

Suddenly, one of the rockets connected! A silver barb slammed into the dragon’s neck.

The creature was now streaming fireblood – sparks showered down on Simon from the injury, burning his skin in little pinpricks of agony. Green-yellow flames flickered lightly from the dragon’s wound. It was enough to get the creature to descend, but still the dragon held tight to Simon.

Now the creature let loose a massive torrent of flame and Simon felt a disgusted thrill at being with the dragon as the fire charged loose. It engulfed the upper part of the old castle and the wood tiles of the roof, knocking down stones in the walls from sheer force. On the second pass, the dragon set fire to the other side of the house, the Victorian wing made of oak and cedar.

Struggling, Simon could see the castle house returning to view, speeding towards him, and he realised the serpent planned to hurl him against the tower.

“We shall leave him something to remember you by,” she said in a husky growl, and Simon soared with her, past the field, past Alaythia and Aldric rushing to take aim, and then he saw the tower coming for him, closer, closer, closer—

SLAM! A second rocket-arrow burned into the creature and took it off course. Simon was dropped, clattering painfully to the sloping roof, then rolling in and out of the fire and plunging to the flat top of the stables.

He was all right.

He had the wind knocked out of him, but he would’ve been caught breathless anyway at the sight of the dragon above him, a green-yellow beast with long tendrils of many colours trailing behind its soaring body.

Another rocket hurtled past him and he saw it miss the serpent. The creature blurred into nothingness, cloaking itself in magic. He felt it swoop past again and snap at him, invisible jaws tearing at his shirt.

He looked up, catching his breath, and squinted, scarcely able to penetrate the beast’s magic enough to see it. But he could make it out as it was bleeding fire into the air. He saw the creature descend in the Ebony Hollow forest. It needed to recover its strength.

He looked down to see Aldric yelling at him from the pasture, “SUIT UP!”

Simon swung himself to safety off the stable roof and rushed for his travel pack hidden in the hay. In five minutes flat, they had retrieved their horses and were pursuing the dragon in full body armour, galloping at a raging speed.

“The Ashlover Serpent,” cried Aldric, for he’d memorised the White Book of Saint George as Simon never could. Simon and Aldric rode hard through the forest, leaving Alaythia to use her magic to battle the blaze at home.

The forest crackled with an unnatural wind. They stopped at a hole, a fiery spot, devoid of vegetation and underbrush. A thin, leathery blanket stood before them, and as they watched it began to dry up and wither, curling into nothing.

“It shed its wings,” said Aldric.

Human-like tracks in the soft ground left the area and led towards town.

“She’s injured,” Aldric observed from horseback. “It will take all her strength to seal those wounds. We’ll find her in town.”

Simon’s heart was beating hard. No serpent had ever been fought here. No dragon had known where the home of the Saint George descendants lay. This creature had to be recovered. And killed.

They galloped into town, where a street of suspects greeted them. It would take a moment for Simon’s eyes to adjust and see through the disguising magic – and in that time, the serpent could look like anyone. A limping man caught his attention, but Aldric focused on a girl in a wheelchair, pushing herself away as fast as she could.

Simon watched her glide through a small crowd of people leaving breakfast at the Old Soldier Café, and the girl did indeed seem in a hurry. He saw her blood hit the pavement, the red droplets turning to green and then burning away …

Then his vision rippled, as if looking through a mirage, and he saw not a girl but a wounded, scaly creature limping for cover.

The Ashlover Serpent.

It turned the corner and Aldric and Simon hurried to catch up.

As they rode down Main Street, the Ashlover slipped into the novelty shop and gave a howl and a screech, its mouth exploding with fire. Glass shattered out. The fire screamed.

“No!” Again Simon couldn’t breathe – this time out of fear for Emily’s family.

Green-yellow Serpentine flames lapped out of the windows. It was a bad fire. The wooden structure was old and it would burn easily.

“Wait! It could be a diversion to get us off track,” said Aldric.

“No,” argued Simon, “the thing’s in there …” And he rode towards the fire as fast as he could, dismounting at the door in a rush.

Through the flames, he could see the wounded creature lying in a circle of green and yellow fire. It was just an attempt to slow the hunters down. Short of air and nearly unconscious, the dragon was weakening.

Aldric pushed past Simon, walking right through the flames. As the serpent kicked at him with its great clawed feet, Aldric wrestled it down and slammed his hand upon its heart. It took many tries, the serpent slithering out of the knight’s grasp over and over again, but at last the creature stopped shaking and Simon knew his father was reciting the words of the deathspell.

Aldric stumbled back.

The colourful tendrils of the dragon, like wispy tentacles, pulled in and closed around its body, and caught fire …”and the beast burned away into red ash that blew over Aldric and into Simon’s eyes.

The Ashlover Dragon was dead.

“Is anyone in there?” Simon yelled into the store.

“If they were, they’re dead,” said Aldric, but up the street Simon could see Emily’s father rushing from the post office. He’d missed the danger.

“It’s an arsonist,” Simon yelled to him, climbing on to his horse. “There’s smoke – I think our house might have been hit too!” Simon turned and rode with Aldric out of town, ignoring the bewildered passers-by.

Emily is safe at school, Simon thought with relief.

But his own house was burning.

By the time he and Aldric returned, Alaythia had drawn a massive black storm cloud to the house and the resulting rainfall had, for the most part, ended the fire. But the castle was blackened and much of its interior had been gutted.

What Simon considered home was now an ugly memento of a dragon’s evil.

CHAPTER SIX How a Dragon Tracks its Prey

How did it know?”

Sitting at the biggest of the Old Soldier Café’s tables, Alaythia twirled a tea bag in her mug and repeated the question. “How did the dragon find us? There’s nobody to give that information away. We haven’t told anyone and we’d know if we were followed – we’re always incredibly careful.”

Aldric said nothing, tapping the table nervously.

“All my comics,” said Simon, “my games, everything’s torched. It was so hot it even melted all my metal soldier figures. I’ve had those since I was a little kid.”

“None of those things matter,” said Aldric quietly.

“They matter to me,” Simon said firmly.

“That’s not what I meant,” said Aldric sympathetically. “That isn’t our home any more. It can’t be. If one dragon can find us, then many can.”

Simon took his remarks like a lashing. It hadn’t occurred to him how bad the situation was.

“Maybe not,” said Alaythia, seeing how Simon felt. “If we can figure out how it found us, maybe we can take steps to make ourselves safe again – to undo the problem.”

Aldric eyed her during an uncomfortable pause. “There is a way,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “It’s not done very often. There are dangers to it. All kinds of dangers.”

“What are you getting at?” Alaythia asked.

“The skull,” answered Aldric. “If it survived the blast, even just shards of it could provide answers to these questions. If you as a magician were to take hold of the bones of this dragon, its dying spirit could enter you and it’s possible you might glimpse the serpent’s thoughts before the spirit faded completely. But I don’t think there was anything left of the beast.”

They needed to find out. Simon welcomed the chance to get to Emily’s shop and he was curious to see her father’s reaction to him. While at the café, Alaythia had grown calm enough to cast a spell on the street so that all those who had seen Simon and Aldric in battle gear would forget what they’d seen.

“You can do that?” Simon had asked.

“Don’t be too optimistic, OK? It’s magic, but it’s not magic. The memories will be gone, but the suspicion will remain,” Alaythia said as they were leaving. “You may get people giving you funny looks or asking questions for a long time.”

“It’s not as if they think we’re an average, ordinary family as it is,” Simon muttered.

A few minutes later, they were standing in the cinders before the novelty shop. Simon had seen the horror of fire before, but never in his home town. He hadn’t realised until now the dragons could reach so deeply into his life.

Emily’s father was standing nearby, talking with a worried neighbour. Then her mother’s car pulled up and Emily got out and wandered over to Simon, looking a bit dazed. “My father told me what happened,” she said. “What’s going on?”

Simon looked at her and tried to find the right words. He said he saw someone throw a match and run. He and Aldric gave everyone the same story: they didn’t get a good look at the guy, whoever he was; he was small, maybe even a kid, someone who had done this randomly. But there were no real suspects as far as the police were concerned.

Alaythia, however, had found evidence of the real arsonist.

As Simon was being questioned, he saw Alaythia tap Aldric on the shoulder and they moved away from the policemen. Simon saw her showing Aldric a small bone shard she had taken from the ashes of the shop.

It was all that remained of the beast.

“This will not be pleasant,” Aldric told her, and he placed the skull shard back in her hands and closed her fingers over it. Simon noticed how much older his father’s hands looked against the smooth ivory of Alaythia’s. The skull bones of the dragon were the most useful of any fragment, but his father’s seriousness made Simon feel less than fortunate. In the ruins of the castle tower, candlelight flickered around them and the moon pierced the uncovered window.

Aldric had decided to return to the castle because it was dangerous to try this experiment anywhere else and, after all, there was nothing much left to ruin.

Alaythia’s face took on a deathly colour almost immediately and she closed her eyes.

“You will be able to see into the creature’s mind,” Aldric told her. “Its most angry, sad or deeply-held memories. You will not like what you see. You may witness things you have never imagined before. Thousands of murders may pass before your eyes – and you may see them all in terrible detail.”

There was no mistaking the skull bone as anything else. It bore red, vein-like patterns, but Simon had never understood until now what those patterns might contain.

Simon reached out and held Alaythia’s arm, but Aldric moved his hand away gently. “The dragon’s spirit might enter you, Simon,” said Aldric. “I do not think you would like that.”

The darkness in his voice convinced Simon immediately and he backed up against the stone wall to feel safer.

“Be careful, Alaythia,” Aldric whispered. “Its spirit may want to toy with you before it vanishes from life completely …”

Alaythia had gone into a trance and now began to whisper the ancient language of magic. For an instant, her young face looked weathered with age, then returned to normal, but her voice changed as she chanted. Soon the room filled with two voices coming out of her, one of them horrible and Serpentine. Alaythia began to tremble and Simon saw Aldric tighten his jaw.

Then she quietened and fell back into sleep, her hands still holding the shard.

While Alaythia slumbered, Simon roamed the burned castle, his nose filled with the musty smell of a dead fire. Because of the rainfall, the ground was mushy and muddy beneath his feet, and as he ran his hand over the blackened walls, Simon counted one blessing: that Aldric kept most of his important belongings on his ship.

The few photographs of Simon’s mother were kept in Aldric’s stateroom on board, hidden in a cabinet. She’d been killed by the White Dragon when Simon was very small, so those mementoes were things he couldn’t replace. He didn’t have memories of his mother; as a young child he’d been sent to boarding school for safekeeping from the dragons. Those photographs were all that connected him to her.

A rustling came from the darkness ahead and Simon clutched his torch tightly. Something was up there.

Simon didn’t move. He was alone, his father out of earshot in the next wing. It would be impossible to get to him fast if Simon was under attack. He’d have to face this alone.

If it was an assassin, it wasn’t being quiet. It was moving in the muck in the blackness ahead, then suddenly, it pounced into a puddle in the hallway, spattering water at Simon, and an animal’s eyes gleamed in the moonlight.

“Fenwick!”

The fox smacked his lips and then gave something like a grin. Simon allowed himself to breathe.

“What are you doing here?”

The fox trotted through the darkened hallway and leaped on to a low cabinet that had survived the blaze. Simon, familiar with this routine, looked straight at the animal’s eyes, which slowly darkened.

The fox wriggled its snout at him and Simon felt a tickling in his head as if whiskers had brushed over his brain. Then Fenwick held its mouth open, as if its breath held magic. And it did, Simon had learned.

He had, over time, earned the animal’s trust enough to be rewarded with a bit of his mother’s magic, a spell she’d left on him: Fenwick brought Simon things the fox had heard.

First, Simon saw only darkness and heard a group of voices, all of them boys, kids he knew from the Lighthouse School. Fenwick had eavesdropped on them and captured their conversation in the wind, pulling it into his mouth.

Now Simon saw them in his mind, talking about him:

“Weird guy …”

“Always by himself when I see him …”

“What’s so weird about him? He’s just home-schooled.”

“You ever know anybody home-schooled? It means their parents are kinda out of it.”

“I’m not saying that, but he’s never there, he won’t talk about what he learns all day, I see him out there practising with, like, a steel lance, riding his horse, it’s totally bizarre and if you get close, his dad chases you away from the house.”

“His dad is weird.”

“That lady isn’t though. Is that his mum?”

“No, she’s too young …”I think she might be a stepmum or something. She’s really nice. I’ve talked to her a few times in town. If it weren’t for her, I’d think that place he lives in was a nuthouse.”

“He always liked playing with fire when he was here,” said one boy.

Another said, “He was always building bonfires out on the beach. It’s totally obvious he was the one who set fire to the joke shop, ’cause that girl who works there said she didn’t want to see him any more.”

Simon groaned. Now he was prime suspect in town for the fire that had ruined his home. Life was interesting. Very interesting.

He patted the fox, wondering if Fenwick felt sorry for him.

He would have felt sorry for himself – but a scream interrupted his thoughts.

Alaythia.

What Alaythia saw with her dream-eyes was not a world anyone would seek out. For the longest hour she’d ever known, she had experienced life, or pieces of it anyway, as a female Pyrothrax from Brazil, the Ashlover Serpent.

Alaythia saw herself burning the houses of the poor throughout South America; she saw herself consuming lost children, runaways on the streets of Rio de Janeiro during crazed celebrations in the night. She heard strange music in the serpent’s head and contemplated the moon in the jungle with such love, she was surely insane.

When the Ashlover burned bones and flesh, Alaythia felt the fire leave her mouth, and it felt sweet in her throat, like ambrosia, like chocolate, like rainwater after a desert journey. The flames gave her visions and a sense of giddy joy, every time a different taste than the last.

The memories were a clash of events, a jumble. Alaythia would see one thing happen, then another, without knowing when they happened, but among all these events she could hear a calling, a cry, a memory of a sound in the serpent’s head.

The Ashlover Serpent had been drawn to New England, called there, pulled there, by a humming in its ears, by a force, a need, and it had followed the source all the way through South America, north through Mexico, and up the ragged North American coast to Ebony Hollow. The serpent had been plagued with terrible dreams. It had needed to stop these nightmarish visions. And so it had gone to the source: the castle home of the St Georges …”and to Alaythia.

Alaythia’s love for Aldric had sent a sound and a light and a tremor into the world that she could not control; it was true of all magicians who fell in love with a Dragonhunter. All magicians were women, and from the Old Ages it was always a terrible risk for them to fall in love with the knights they protected. The dragons could feel this power emanating from the magician and could track it. It was as simple as following a beacon of light.

The Ashlover Dragon had come for Alaythia.

More would come now.

Alaythia knew she would have to leave this house.

CHAPTER SEVEN Hunting a Master of Dragons

There is no other way, Alaythia’s note read. The serpents can find us wherever we go; they can catch the scent of our emotions the way blood in the water draws a shark. I cannot hide my feelings for you, Aldric, or, for that matter, for Simon. I don’t know how to bury them. I cannot stop feeling.

Simon sat at the table in the dim early light as Aldric paced the ruined kitchen.

“Dreamer,” Aldric muttered. An insult judging by his tone.

Barely awake, Simon ran a hand through his hair and stared at the letter again. He’d seen it first, but he still couldn’t quite believe it and he found himself reading aloud in a whisper, If there is a magic I can learn that will disguise my feelings, a way to hide so no serpent can find us, I do not know what it is. The hope I have is that I can find the Chinese Black Dragon and bargain with him for help of some kind. He is no ordinary dragon and if he helped us once, perhaps he will again. Forgive me for leaving. With all of my love …”Alaythia.

“We’ve tried that, Alaythia,” grumbled Aldric, speaking to the letter as if she could hear him. “We weren’t able to find him, what’s different now?”

“Maybe she saw something in her dream,” said Simon quietly, remembering her expression in the trance. “Something from the dead serpent that gave her a clue about where the Black Dragon went.”

“Then why didn’t she tell us? We could’ve helped her.”

“Well, I guess she doesn’t think so. I mean, anywhere she goes with us, the dragons sense exactly where she is,” Simon protested.

“You’re being pretty bloody reasonable, aren’t you?”

“You think I like this?”

“Why didn’t you see this coming?”

“If you didn’t see it, how am I supposed to know what’s going on in her head?”

“You’re closer to her,” griped Aldric, and Simon felt himself turning red.

“Everything was going fine, we had it all set right, didn’t we?” Aldric muttered on. “It was all working. We could’ve got our minds round this together …”

“What’re you talking about?” said Simon, getting angry now. “Everything’s back the way it used to be. You get to yell and scream at me, and there’s no one to tell you you’re wrong. There’s nobody here on my side.”

“I’m on your side.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You want to have a row right now? Fine. But you can’t blame everything on me. You’d like to, wouldn’t you?”

I’d like you to shut up, Simon was thinking, burning to say it.

“You’re a loner, Simon, you like being alone. You don’t have friends and you want it that way. Stop blaming me for every little thing in your life, for your own good.”

Aldric’s eyes hardened and Simon cowered inside as his father went on. “I know what you’re thinking. Why don’t you say it outright? I drove her away, is that it?”

Simon stared back. “Not on purpose, but I think, yeah, you wanted her out of here. Everything was just getting way too normal for you to stand it.”

“That’s a bunch of rot. Tell me where the note says anything like that,” Aldric retorted. “She was happy. I gave her a good place to hone her talents. I was always here for her.”

“You’re so here for her, she’s not here.”

“Well, I’m going to get her back.”

Silence. It took Simon a second to react. “We’re going to go after her?”

Aldric was tapping his pipe on his teeth the way he did when he was deep in thought, a habit that always annoyed Simon. “But figuring out where to start won’t be easy,” Aldric said, fumbling for a plan. “She could be anywhere. The Black Dragon hasn’t been seen since London. And Alaythia has a head start on us.”

“A big head start,” said Simon, looking at the clock on the wall. It had a small cut-out for the date in its face and if the clock was right, Alaythia had left a bit of spellchant behind. “We’ve been asleep for three days.”

“What?” Aldric followed Simon’s gaze to the clock. Alaythia had put a spell on them that kept them out of commission long enough for her to get anywhere in the world.

“I thought I felt stiff when I woke up,” said Simon. “I thought it was ‘cause the bedframe burned and I had to sleep on the floor.”

Aldric made a sound in the pit of his throat like some kind of angry animal. “That deceptive little genius.”

The Ship with No Name set sail as quickly as possible, loaded with every possible weapon, device, scroll and book they could salvage from the castle. Simon had ridden to Emily’s house for a fast goodbye, but she had acted strangely, seeming not to trust him, and he feared the rumour that he was the fire-starter might have reached her.

But when he looked back, he could see her in the doorway watching him go and he could not read her expression.

So he had that to worry about, on top of everything.

Once they were at sea, however, Simon’s mind was kept busy with the ship. Alaythia had left its magic intact and there were traces of it still alive in the rigging and the sails, but everything about the vessel seemed sluggish and moody, like someone awoken in the middle of the night. Simon had to hammer on some of the devices and rods that worked the sails just to keep them going. Aldric scowled at that – the ship had been made by Simon’s mother, the renowned magician Maradine, and anything she had touched was sacred to Aldric.

His father had allowed Alaythia to make the ship her own, though, and Simon had noticed the many additions she had brought in over the past few months. Not all of them were magical: homemade pottery and dried plants hung about in the ship in leather pouches and slings, ornate hand-painted tea kettles and little knitted “sweaters” for things like oil canisters and medicine bottles. She would always see herself as an artist, even if no one else did. But it did warm up the look of the place.

As Aldric set the course, stubbornly the ship took on the waves and stabbed its bowsprit eastward, for all the good it would do them. How would they find her?

Aldric seemed to have a plan, though he didn’t seem confident it would work and Simon had to press him for the details. Many times he had seen his father hovering round an old brass globe in a nook near the galley, and when Fenwick nosed around it, Aldric had bcome angry. The importance of this was not lost on Simon.

“It may do us no good,” Aldric warned. “She’s cleverer than us. But if she was in a hurry, she might’ve forgotten a few details. See?” He allowed Simon to look closer at the globe.

The way it worked was this: many times they could not get close to a dragon, only to its men, its workers, its minions, so Aldric and Alaythia had developed a technique to handle the problem. They had created a set of extremely small arrows attached to little tracking devices, homing beacons for lack of a better term. Shoot these tiny darts into the henchmen or their clothes or cars without them knowing it and their movements could be tracked on the globe.

It looked like technology, but it wasn’t. It was the methodical work of a magician using a kind of sorcery at least four centuries old.

“Alaythia took weapons with her,” Aldric explained, “one of which was an arrow containing the tracer device. We can use that to follow her, if she hasn’t purposely thrown us off the mark.”

Simon nodded. A little light was glowing on the brass globe showing the beacon Alaythia was carrying. The fox gave a little whimper and placed its snout on the signal, pointing somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The clue puzzled Simon.

Was she headed to China? That was the last place the Black Dragon had lived. Back then, he had been an enemy, but what was he now? He had helped Simon when it really mattered, in the battle of the Serpent Queen, when every life on Earth was in the balance, but who was he really?

And how would he react to Alaythia on her own?

CHAPTER EIGHT The Ice Dragon

Everyone wanted the Black Dragon dead.

It was the obsession of the entire Serpentine world.

Rumours were swirling around the Serpentine world that perhaps the Black Dragon, or Ming Song as he called himself, had gone back to China, for there had been news reports of drought and animals dying en masse in the interior of the country.

But then serpents of every kind had been there searching for him, causing their own distortions in nature. It was a kind of mania. The dragons had an unquenchable thirst for revenge. Their prey was elusive though. Some serpents had even come to believe that the Black Dragon had passed through their borders like a ghost, leaving no trace whatsoever. He was fast becoming a legend.

No one knew anything for certain.

However, in the Swiss Alps there had been some hikers who reported sightings of a small furred creature darting its way among the rocks, something shadowy that vanished into holes and caves. The reports became a joke around Swiss mountain towns.

Such incidents were not laughed off by Herr Visser, the Ice Dragon of Switzerland, a lowly worm in the grand scheme of things. He was a rare creature who did not seek out riches or high office, but instead enjoyed smaller pleasures: torture, mind games, spreading sorrow and grief, and the occasional quiet homicide.

Not that he was without vanity. He kept his slick Serpentine skin clean and well-groomed, right down to the hairy spikes on his head and his goatee, and in his human form he always tried to be presentable, even to those he despised.

As a dragon, the Ice Serpent wore permanent camouflage for winter. The left side of his body was perfectly black, the right side purely white. The colours split him down the middle; black ice clung to his darkened side and frost collected on his ivory side.

He saw the world in black and white. Everything he did was pure as snow, but anyone who went against him was viewed as black as pitch and disposed of appropriately.

Of course, he wanted to dispose of the Black Dragon more than anything.

Wouldn’t that be nice, to freeze him in ice and watch him rot for the next few years? The Ice Serpent considered the old Chinese dragon a turncoat who had tried to make himself look grand in old age by siding with human allies during a great battle.

Killing him would make the ice creature famous among his kind. Otherwise, Professor Visser would remain an unimportant snake posing as an unremarkable teacher of history, even his murders unnoticed. And he had little time left to change his destiny.

The Ice Dragon was dying. Old age would get him – and soon. He had pressing things to do before that happened.

Switzerland would not be safe for him much longer, with all the turmoil in the serpent world, with so many dragons wanting new lands to conquer. But he was unhappy for other reasons. His fire did not keep him warm and no matter where he went he felt a chill upon his skin, a frightening touch from old Mr Death, who was on his way, reminding him each day with a white kiss of frost.

He hated snow and ice. It so happened he was born into a place that in the past was not often fought over by other serpents – a refuge for a weak dragon. Living here was no blessing however; the cold world around him had affected his magic.

The frost settled on him after he woke each morning and could often be seen even when he took on his human form as a blue-skinned and isolated old man. No magic could keep him from looking old. He tried, but the wrinkles always returned to his weak human disguise. The teeth yellowed. The eyes he saw in the mirror grew dim and veined and blurred. His powers were withering. No question about it.

But there was new hope he could make something of himself before it was too late.

The ice creature had followed the reports of the Chinese Black Dragon’s appearance in the Swiss Alps, but when he arrived in a new ski village he sensed the enemy had moved on. It was only when the Ice Dragon had investigated a remote crevice blocked by fallen trees that he found anything of import.

And what a thing it was. The Ice Dragon had found the remains of a cave encampment, fresh with the scent of the Black Dragon. Ahhh, he thought. Here is a Serpentine soul nearly as old as myself, and one filled with barbaric memories.

He had observed the Black Dragon only briefly during the death of the Serpent Queen, and was now excited to find all sorts of nuances to the dark one’s character.

Left behind in the Black Dragon’s haste was a travelling teaset and a much-used pipe. As the ice creature poked his claw into the bowl, he could feel remnants of life, for a dragon’s breath contains traces of his spirit.

These were fresh ashes. And ashes speak to dragons.

Ashes and dreams, dreams and ashes, time for the rotten to take their lashes, he thought, remembering one of his own poems. In his mind, he was no history professor; he was an undiscovered poet of rare talent.

Below him, little beetles covered in frost wriggled out of the ashes of the dragon’s campfire, trying to survive. The frost shook loose, revealing their black colouring.

How long ago had the Black Dragon been here? The Ice Serpent mulled it over – and had an answer sooner than he thought. Suddenly, he heard a rustling deeper in the cave …

His old heart quivering, the Swiss dragon darted back behind a rock, watching as a black shape entered the icy white den. The Chinese dragon, hairy and hobbled and small, was returning to his nesting spot – not abandoned at all – and immediately he knew something was wrong. His hair stood on edge, his nostrils flaring.

“Who hunts me?” asked the Chinese creature.

The Ice Serpent had nowhere to run. “I hunt a traitor,” he cried, and he leaped out and tackled the Black Dragon. The old serpents growled like two badgers, rolling about in the ice and snow, fighting feverishly.

The Ice Dragon dug his claws into the furred flesh of the Chinese beast and pried open its jaws. He then used the most disgusting of magics – he sucked out part of the Black Dragon’s spirit.

As the Black Dragon gasped for air, its spirit-traces were invisibly pulled out. Acting fast, the Black Dragon burst away in a flurry of dark sparks that bedazzled the white cave, transporting himself several metres outside the cave. He hobbled off down the mountain, getting away, though the trick had cost him energy.

The Ice Serpent was worse off. Older and weaker, he was in no condition to give chase.

But the icy beast had won something in the battle. In the split second that he had touched the jaws of the Black Dragon, he had tasted his spirit. It so happened the thought he touched upon was the memory of an encounter with, of all things …

Oh, to write this down, he thought. I must record this immediately.

Everything he knew went into his books, his History of Serpentkind. It was his obsession, an attempt to write all of the stories of the dragon race, and now to have found spirit-traces of the Black Dragon, the most despised of them all, was a great treasure.

Chasing the Black Dragon now was only a piece of the puzzle. The Ice Serpent had got something better than a turncoat. A new plan was forming in his head.

Hours later, he went back to a little café in the mountains for the warmth of its fire, though it did him little good. He quaked from the constant cold and his lips were turning blue, though he still managed to look human, which was something. At times his lizard skin could become visible, so he covered himself well these days. His old black trench coat, smelly and stained, fanned out around the chair. In its pockets were books of poetry and out-of-date travel writing from the 1950s Beat era. At the moment, however, he was doing far more important writing of his own.

He was jotting furiously in his book:

The Black Dragon must now be remembered not just for the freeing of the St George child, but also for this astounding discovery, which will ultimately be the undoing of the entire Dragonhunter tribe. This requires immediate and meticulous investigation. There are two groups of hunters, unknown to each other but known to the Black Dragon, and now to me, both in number and location. Extraordinary development. Unprecedented.

The Black Dragon had encountered these other hunters and the Ice Dragon had seen his memory of escaping without detection.

Herr Visser shivered and wheezed and laughed, and the woman who served him coffee looked at him with open disgust. Visser stroked his goatee proudly and clutched the book tightly against his chest.

“Some kind of secret you have there?” the waitress asked.

“Oh, I should say it is, yes,” snorted Visser in his gravel-throated German.

“You’re a writer?”

“Yes, yes. To be sure,” he said, looking away from her and hunching his shoulders. The place was nearly empty. Just two other travellers. Men. Photographers from the look of their gear.

“I like good writing,” said the waitress.

“You won’t find any of that here.” The Swiss professor smiled, showing coffee-stained teeth. “It’s a nasty little bit of writing.”

“Is it a scary story?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Let me take a look at it,” said the waitress curiously. “Let me be a sounding board. I might have some advice for you.”

“Oh, no doubt, yes,” mocked the professor. “When in doubt, go to a coffee counter in an out-of-the-way restaurant for literary criticism.”

“You don’t have to be rude about it,” the woman replied. “I read a lot of books of every kind and it gets a little dull around here, in case you haven’t noticed. Just let me take a look, give you some feedback.”

“The writing’s over!” Visser snarled and slammed the book down, away from her reach. “I want to watch some television and I want some privacy, thank you very kindly.” With that, he pulled from his pocket a little black and white television and turned his back on her.

“And warm up the coffee,” he ordered, his eyes fixed on the screen, shivering again. “It’s not hot enough, it doesn’t warm me at all!”

The woman wandered off, confusion and a bit of humour dancing in her eyes, as if she might be laughing at him.

The Ice Dragon’s chest was pounding. The discovery of the Black Dragon’s little secret, the peering eyes of the waitress, all of it was upsetting his old heart. He didn’t ask much of life, but he wanted things quiet and that was hard to get these days. He considered himself a person of simple pleasures: good music, good wine, the burning of a good woman now and then. He liked to think, to prepare a little bit of a meal for his mind. And he liked privacy when it came to writing. Was that so much to ask?

He scratched at his black turtleneck sweater, feeling tightness at his throat. Through his thin, dark, half-circle eyeglasses, he glanced back at the waitress who had gone into some private room. Good. He relaxed a bit.

He usually liked to be left alone. And yet, there was something in her interest that was exciting. His nervousness came out of anger. He felt a sudden, careless desire to tell the waitress everything about himself. He was dying, he knew that, and he just wanted someone to know who he was, someone to understand. No more hiding.

And what would he say to her? What would she care to know?

He played the flute. He was a horrid player, but his magic made people hear the music as if he were a great master.

He played cards and gambled. He always won. He gave the money to women. Then sometimes he’d eat them. In summer he sold poisoned flowers on the streets of Zurich just to talk to people.

Loneliness had driven him to find human companions, but eventually they disgusted him. And he was losing grip on his own powers. One woman he rather liked had turned to ice before his eyes when he touched her and her arm fell off with a clunk, her blood frozen inside like an ice lolly. Things he touched would often freeze. Nothing could be done about it. He found ways to fill his time without friendships.

He was a fan of the TV show Columbo. He generally watched it in a smoky café on the tiny black and white television set he carried with him everywhere. It was the only thing that ever played on the television. He was watching it now.

He spent his nights on the tops of buildings under the stars, next to the stone gargoyles. He would read them poetry. They said nothing back to him. They had no opinions and he liked that.

His poems were bleak and made sense only to him. He thought of them when he was burning people or freezing them to death, when his mind would think in dreamy, rattled words:

Dark. The Souls of the People.

White. The Art of the People.

Kiss the rage, and kill it if it doesn’t look like us.

Fold the riddle over, and the riddle stays the same.

Howl and fight and it does you no good.

Eat of this darkness and I’ll give you dessert.

There were others, worse than that. Hundreds of them, written over two centuries in many languages. He wrote the poems on pages that were half black and half white – the same shades as his dirty apartment in Zurich and his dirty office at the University.

People hated the poems. He’d tried to get them published for centuries. No magic he could conjure could get people to like them. And people hated him, no matter what disguise he took on. People hated him. And dragons hated him.

And this was who he was.

Maybe the lady wanted to know these things about him, maybe he would tell her. Maybe he would tell her that he was going to die in a blaze of immeasurable glory and her world would grow very dark after that, for the only books that would be read would be his.

There were pieces to put in place first, however. Finding the Black Dragon was possible now, for he had torn a bit from the old lizard’s mind and knew his immediate destination. He would go after him soon. That was the simple part. Far more challenging would be to bring the hunters all together and have them die in a single blow. There’s your fame. There’s your poetry. Dead together, all at once, and you to plan it, witness it, put it into your book.

He would write his own place in history as the killer of the hunters.

It ought to have been a triumphant thought, but the Ice Dragon’s eyes came to rest on a heap of little beetles outside the window, dead from the frost. He liked to keep the beetles and gnats and bugs alive in the cold, and sometimes he’d even keep them warm in his mouth.

It struck him that if he couldn’t keep his own collection of insects alive, he hardly had the strength to kill the Dragonhunters himself. Pathetic little thing I am, he thought. He’d require help to destroy them, but who could he turn to? The new Russian beast, fresh from Chechnya? An Arab Sand Dragon? The two strongest in Asia, the Japanese dragon and the Bombay serpent, would have nothing to do with him. Would they? Now there’s an interesting thought. Lots of potential there. But he’d need to move fast.

Suddenly, he heard the waitress laugh and he spun round to see her standing there, reading his book.

My book.

“What’s the big deal? I just wanted to look,” said the woman, noticing his eyes. “I don’t have anything to do around here. What’s wrong with you?”

“Wrong with me?” said Visser, his lips trembling.

“This is not scary,” said the woman. “It’s just random notes and …”and poetry. Poetry about snakes. Is that what you write?” She was bewildered.

“Not snakes,” said Visser through clenched, yellowish teeth. “Serpents. Dragons.”

Nothing seemed funny to the woman any more.

The other two customers looked over, alarmed.

Visser rose. Now he towered over the woman, almost two metres tall, his skin rippling as heat waves passed over him, and her jaw dropped as she realised she was staring at a black and white beast with eyes like yellow marbles.

“True poetry is not written in ink,” said the Ice Dragon, “but in fire.”

And he set the woman ablaze in the colours of good and evil, a black and white fire that matched his own skin. The fire leaped into the air and carried her up to the ceiling, dropped her ashes in a split-second and then spread to the photographers. One burned away in white fire, the other burned away in black.

Burn a little hope, today, snuff out a little light.

Ebony doesn’t burn, my friend, it only turns to white.

Die, die, and learn to like it, child …

It only stings a little while, it’s really very mild …

His Serpentine mind was humming. But he found himself abruptly disappointed, for the fire he had made was turning to ice. It behaved like fire, flickering and moving about, but it was ice, no doubt about it. He had no control.

The ice-fire stopped its quivering, the sharp spires of ice stilled and the moving mass of crystalline flames ceased their crunching, breaking passage. The serpent was left alone with frost-filled walls and ceilings.

His fire had gone cold.

Gloomily, he watched the rest of his TV show in the frigid ruins. Then he left the lonely café in the mountains and headed for the sea to set his plans in motion.

CHAPTER NINE A Loneliness of a Great Ship

Simon St George and his father had found their way to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where the globe had showed Alaythia, but there had been no sign of her. Simon began to have serious doubts they would find her even with the tracer device because they could never quite catch up.

“If she took a plane, she would be in China by now,” commented Simon.

“Yes, but if she took a boat,” said Aldric, “she would be closer to the ocean and she’d have a better chance of sensing the Black Dragon. He may very well be on the sea, on the move.”

Simon frowned, considering the predicament.

They were at the table near the galley and the stove began belching black smoke. Aldric cursed and tried to save his stew. Nearly everything they cooked went bad now; it was as if the ship were punishing them for losing Alaythia.

The ship itself seemed lonely without her. At night it made howling noises with the wind in its sails, and the rigging clanged rhythmically as if calling out to her.

Simon and Aldric knew exactly how the old ship felt.

To stave off the emptiness – Aldric could spend entire days not talking at all – Simon had begun writing to Emily back in Ebony Hollow, though he knew he’d never send the letters, and if he did, she’d never read them. There were too many details in them about dragon signs and dragonhunting; they would have sounded insane to her, but he kept trying to find a way to make the dark world he knew seem reasonable.

The ship felt like the most desolate place on Earth and the only thing that filled it up was the thought of Emily. He had started talking to her in his head. He knew he was thinking about her mainly because he had no real friends, but it was a useful way to kill time and he figured it honed his skills for talking to people his own age. He worried endlessly about how to explain it all to her, and he worried she might be in danger, if a stray serpent seeking Alaythia somehow found its way to New England. He worried that he and his father wouldn’t find Alaythia, or that they’d find her dead, and then he feared that even thinking about it could make it happen. There was always something to worry about.

Simon’s stomach churned that night as he began a new letter.

“I think I’m getting an ulcer,” he muttered and looked over at Fenwick on the floor. “I wish you could talk,” he added, lying in the dim light of his bunk built into the ship’s side. The fox stared back with no particular expression.

Fenwick would have no sympathy for him. Fenwick had no worries. He was strong.

“Never mind, I’m glad you can’t talk,” said Simon, feeling chastised.

Then he heard his father clanging around in his cabin, sparring with no one, brandishing his sword. These days, Aldric never seemed to sleep. He blamed himself for everything and Simon wished things would go back to the way they were in the old days – when Simon got blamed for everything.

After a while, Aldric came out of his cabin and into the passageway where Simon’s bunk was. Simon stood staring, afraid he was in trouble.

Gruffly, Aldric handed Simon a bottle of ginger ale. “Here. Drink with me.”

And that was all he said.

Simon looked at Aldric, holding the warm bottle in his hand.

“I was thinking we might talk,” his father said sharply, sounding angry although he clearly wasn’t.

Simon just stared.

“Well, go on then, open it,” Aldric said, and Simon pried off the bottle cap. He stood there awkwardly.

Time passed like sandpaper over skin, the two of them in the passage, saying nothing, the ship rocking gently.

Aldric was in another world altogether. Staring at his bottle, he didn’t look at Simon. The silence stretched on between them and Simon shifted on his feet. Aldric still wasn’t saying anything. And then finally his father, grunting some indecipherable apology or explanation, pulled out his pipe and just walked away, returning to his cabin. His door clanked shut.

Simon remained unmoving.

He looked at the bottle in his hand, the top of it staring back like the eye of some odd animal.

“OK,” Simon said quietly to himself. He sat on his bunk. Then he lay down and waited for something to happen.

He heard Aldric go up on deck. Maybe the night air would cool him down.

Fenwick padded over and nuzzled Simon’s hand with his snout. He seemed to want to cheer him up. It took a moment to realise the fox wanted him to move.

He got up and followed Fenwick down the passage, past the cold night air streaming from the hatchway above, all the way to the end, to Aldric’s quarters. Simon almost never went in there.

The fox nudged the door open. Feeling a nervous heat in his stomach, Simon hesitated, but Fenwick scurried into the stateroom. Simon figured he could always claim that he was just getting the fox out of there.

The room was a mess, the way it always had been before Alaythia came along. Tunics and coats lay in a pile, old scrolls, spell books and travel guides were splayed out everywhere.

Fenwick climbed on to the bed with its wool blanket and animal pelts – a Viking’s idea of comfort – and poked at a bookshelf. Looking back to be sure Aldric wasn’t coming, Simon moved to examine it.

Fenwick knocked open a small door in the bookshelf, revealing a pile of old photographs. Surprised at this secret cache, Simon took them out and felt a stab of guilt as he stared down at his mother’s face. They were pictures of Maradine and Aldric, a long time ago, stacks of them.

His heart raced with excitement. The past stared back at him. In black and white or faded colour, pictures from all over the world.

Aldric was young, in his twenties or thirties, his face more rounded and less hardened. He looked a lot like Simon and he was handsome. Maradine was smiling, sometimes laughing, bright-eyed and long-haired and strong – and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Alaythia.

Simon had seen pictures of her before, but never so many. He knew she had lived on a ranch and she was often pictured next to a horse, one Simon hadn’t seen before. She was his mother and he felt somehow the images should have told him more, and that he should have felt more. It was strange. What stirred his emotions was the man in the photos.

Aldric. He was the same in many ways. Tough gaze, clenched jaw, ill at ease in front of a camera. Still, in a few pictures he looked calm, satisfied, happy.

Simon looked to Fenwick. Why did the fox want him to see this? Is this how you cheer me up? he thought.

The fox’s eyes flashed and turned black, and then Simon was seeing the animal’s memory. It was the strongest feeling Fenwick had ever sent to him. Simon’s surroundings faded away and he now felt himself on the ship in a different time and place. What he saw amazed him.

In that moment, Aldric St George was a young man; he was on deck with Maradine and they were dancing slowly; he was spinning her around. It was night and there were a thousand stars, and he was singing an Irish tune. Simon couldn’t believe it – his father was actually singing and it was good. He sounded just the way Simon would have expected, but the boy had never heard him before, not ever.

He knew then that his mother had died because of her feelings; that was how the creature had found her. But there was no sadness in the knowing, there was just a bright night before him and his mother spinning, her long hair swinging about.

He smiled, hearing his father sing. He was there, with them both. He wanted to laugh, and then it was gone. Everything vanished.

He was in the creaking ship with Fenwick staring back at him.

It was then he realised the only picture in the room that Aldric had on display was one of Ebony Hollow: he and his father …”and Alaythia.

If they didn’t get her back, he wouldn’t get his father back; not fully, not ever. He stuffed the pictures back where they belonged and got out of the stateroom as quickly as he could.

CHAPTER TEN The Tiger Dragon

The Black Dragon of Peking had unleashed a never-before-known hatred among serpentkind. It was well-known that he had helped the dragon killers and been instrumental in burying the Queen of Serpents.

So many had died in the Grand Battle of the Serpent Queen and the remaining dragons were now trying to take over their territories. The entire Serpentine world had been thrown into disarray, the hierarchies demolished; all over the map, serpents were fighting for new turf.

There were new avenues opening up in crime, terrorism, business and military dictatorships, and as always there were some who grasped the opportunities better than others.

One such creature was the Dragon of Bombay.

She was a tiger dragon, a shapely, female, humanesque form with a thin set of huge transparent wings, useless wings. They stretched down her back, pretty and striped, like a fashion accessory, like a mink coat or something wonderful and insolent.

In fact, fashion was her domain. In her human manifestation, she had made herself look like a beautiful East Indian model, so striking she had been on the cover of countless magazines, appearing as a youngish woman with mocha-cinammon skin, a tall frame, high cheekbones, sleepy eyes with long black lashes and a slender body. She had used her looks to earn a small fortune on the catwalk some years back, before an ugly argument with an American model caused her to lose her temper – and she had torched the Manhattan girl in a New York minute.

Several more of these arguments, usually over boys, resulted in more deaths – and dodging the police made the whole thing hardly worthwhile.

She decided to move into manufacturing, using sweatshop labour. Little girls and boys, and incredibly poor men and women, were chained to sewing machines for long hours so that she could make millions selling high fashion at shocking prices.

She had a formula. In the factories there was an ivory sculpture with a giant tiger’s eye painted on it on every floor. The eye hypnotised the workers. The workers never complained.

Each tiger’s-eye sculpture had a pupil like a giant pearl, which moved back and forth with a very slow, eerie clicking. At the same time, the sculptures gave off a low hum, like a growl, that would grow louder whenever the workers showed the slightest rebellion. Then the labourers would grow weak, uncertain, and decide not to challenge their masters.

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