Voyages of the Flying Dragon Read Free Page A

us everything, and I mean everything , we enter fully into this place. We become physical creatures.’
    â€˜So, you die too?’
    â€˜Sometimes.’
    â€˜Sometimes?’
    â€˜You cannot live without dying. That is the way of the world. But not everything that has a physical form is alive.’
    Missy glanced around at the others on the bridge. They had been following the conversation closely. ‘What does that mean?’
    Disma looked her in the eye. Missy felt pierced by her red gaze. There was something disturbingly human in that stare, but also something so totally foreign that Missy knew shewould never be able to fathom this creature. Not completely. ‘What I mean, Missy, is that not all Lilim choose to manifest as living creatures when they enter the physical realm, and of those of us that do, not all of them choose death. When a pact is done, there are ways … well, you have seen what remains of the Lilim who were bonded to the Greygori line.’
    Missy shuddered, remembering all of the statues in the King’s audience hall in Asheim, the place where she had first met Lord Butin. When she had been standing in that hall amongst the statues, she had thought they were so perfectly carved that they could almost have been real Lilim turned somehow to stone. She’d never imagined she’d been right about that.
    â€˜So,’ Missy said, ‘when a pact is done, you can choose to die, or to live forever as a statue?’
    Disma flicked her hair in such an offhand way that Missy wondered if the trait were something she had taken from Anastasis. ‘Oh, it needn’t be as a statue. That was the Greygori way, but really any physical object will do.’
    â€˜Isn’t that worse than death?’
    â€˜I have no idea,’ Disma countered, ‘as neither fate has yet befallen me.’ She paused. ‘It is a cruel trick, don’t you think? We yearn so for the world of physical things, yet the cost … the Bestia have it easier, I think.’

    Lenis woke slowly, drawn to consciousness by the dull throbbing of his body. He was in his bunk in the engine room.Yami had probably carried him there after he had succumbed to the soporific effect of Long Liu’s medicine. Lenis was getting used to the aches and pains that accompanied his training. The fact that he could feel himself getting stronger made them bearable. He might not yet be a match for Shujinko, but he was confident that, in time, he could beat the older boy on his terms, without falling back on his empathic abilities. Ever since he had used his powers to subdue Warlord Shōgo Ikaru, Lenis had been aware of them growing in ways he had not expected. He had always been able to feel what others felt, to form bonds with Bestia and sense what they most needed or wanted, but he had never suspected that he would be able to affect the emotions of others, or to use his own feelings to exert influence over them.
    His altercation with the Warlord had been an awakening. Ever since, his powers had grown stronger, his sense of others more pronounced. In quiet moments when he lay alone on his bunk, he had even begun experimenting with his own emotions, taking hold of them and manipulating them intentionally instead of by instinct, which was what he had done when in the Warlord’s grasp. It was not that he wanted to control anyone – since Nochi he had never attempted to overpower someone with the force of his empathy – but he was intrigued by what he could do simply because he could do it. Lenis wanted to test the limits of his developing powers. He would never actually use them against someone, he told himself, unless they were trying to do him harm, but if hedid ever have to use them again, he wanted to know what he was doing.
    Sometimes, when his training had left him tired and battered, he entertained fantasies of throwing Shujinko over the railing, propelled by the power of the boy’s own fear,