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“Oh.” Náli braced his hands on lean dragon shoulders and regarded this new position. “Well.” He hadn’t considering riding him, for some reason. “Are you sure you’re big enough for that? Am I too heavy?”
Valgrind croaked, shook his head, and spread his wings in answer.
“Oh, gods. All right. That’s what I get for asking.” He took a tight grip on Valgrind’s neck spines, leaned low, and clamped his thighs and calves tight against the drake’s sides. “Try not to–”
With two lurching steps forward and a furious beating of wings, Valgrind threw himself aloft without a shred of his parents’ grace.
Náli was very glad there were no witnesses, here in the land of the dead, and, if asked, would deny that he had screamed.
It was an arduous climb, at first. Twice, Valgrind tipped dangerously to the side and Náli held on with gritted teeth and grasping fingernails. Eventually, though, the wingbeats gained a rhythm, he caught a sun-warmed updraft, and they were safely aloft.
“Do you know where you’re going?” Náli called.
Valgrind trilled an answer that could have been yes, could have been I’m hungry. Regardless, Náli was stuck for the moment; he pressed his cheek to the sleek, flexing neck, keeping low as possible, and held on for the ride.
Time stretched, impossible to gauge. Fields and hills and dark blue ponds passed beneath them, an endless tapestry. Valgrind slipped lower in the sky, once, as a herd of slender, white-tailed deer went sprinting across the plain.
“No,” Náli said, sharply, wishing for a bridle and reins.
Valgrind made a despairing noise, but climbed back up into the air, winging them on their way to wherever the little beast thought fit to take him.
Eventually, a smudge appeared along the horizon. One that grew larger, gained dimension, and eventually took the shape of a mountain range. A single peak in the center stood above the others, snow-capped, pointed and faintly curved like a wolf’s fang. Valgrind let out a cry, one that echoed deep in Náli’s chest, accompanied by a tug. A sense of there, that place.
The wind picked up, gliding through the sawblade mountain peaks; it buffeted Náli’s face, streamed his hair out behind him, and turned Valgrind’s wing flaps choppy and strained.
“Bank, bank!” he barked, and, belatedly, Valgrind did, angling in a way that sent them rushing toward a dark void on the side of the mountain. “Wait! Slow down!”
A cave, he thought wildly, before they smashed into it. Náli shut his eyes, but at the last second, Valgrind spread his wings and dropped, landing on a natural ledge there with a dramatic swoop that was echoed in the pit of Náli’s stomach.
He cracked his eyes and found they were inside a tall cavern cut into the face of the mountain, that they were alive – as alive as one could be in the land of the dead – and in one piece. “Next time,” he fumed, as Valgrind craned around to look at him, “try a little finesse.”
“Kirik!”
Shaking a little, Náli slid down, grateful for solid ground beneath his boots. At the front edge of the cavern, he spotted a narrow, well-camouflaged set of stairs carved into the granite that led down out of sight, presumably all the way down to the plains below. The ceiling overhead was easily fifty meters high, plenty of room for a much larger drake. Sunlight poured in through the opening, slanting across a stone floor worn smooth by time, weather…and, judging by the snatch of a whisper he heard, the passage of many feet.
He stepped toward the deep pool of shadows that lay beyond the sunlight’s reach. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
Rustling. Whispers.
Fragment of a warning: “…don’t! He…”
He took another step. “It’s Lord Náli. Of the Fault Lands. If you’re from the village, you’ve seen me many times…and attacked me, the last time,” he tacked on at the end, unable to keep the irritation from his voice. “Valgrind is stupid and obnoxious, but he isn’t dangerous.”
A grumbling sound of disagreement issued from behind him.
He patted the air, absently. “Shh, you are stupid. Listen,” he called, raising his voice. “I seek your shaman. Your wise man. Your…whatever you call him. I don’t know his bloody name.”
More rustling. More whispers. Then the scuff of a boot sole. Sunlight skimmed across worn boots, and dusty trousers; passed up the fraying embroidery of a tunic stitched with small, twisting dragons. The man stepped into the light, and Náli nearly recoiled, because his face was different – but not truly. The beard had been shorn and his hair combed until it lay in shining rivers over his shoulders. A gleaming circlet set with a diamond sat on his brow. Dusty and patched as his clothes were, they had clearly once been fine; and his face, without the beard and the harsh shadows of the cookfire, was the fine-boned, elegant, handsome face of the dead king that emerged each time he ventured into the white water.
“My name,” said the shaman he’d been forced to visit his whole life, “is Lucian. For my mother. The first Corpse Lord of the Fault Lands.”
~*~
Náli’s first thought was of course. Of course, this was the first Corpse Lord.
His second was I’m an idiot. Because how had he never guessed this? Where else would the gate of the dead send him but to the hearth of his distant ancestor?
Lucian led him deeper into the cavern, and around an outcropping of rock to reveal an interior chamber even larger than the first, lit with the light of candles and braziers. Bedrolls lay unfurled on the stone ground, and privacy had been procured with wood-framed hide screens and quilts hung up between poles. “It isn’t much,” he said, gesturing to a wooden crate set before a brazier. “But it’s dry, and warm, and out of the wind. Easier to defend as well.”
