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?
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