Читать книгу The Saint of Dragons: Samurai - Jason Hightman - Страница 11

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?