Authors: Stephen Deas
Tuuran already had Jasaan pinned to the floor, his men around him. Zafir strode among them, a wildness coursing through her. They were huge, these Adamantine Men, muscle and strength, and yet she felt taller than any of them. She kicked Tuuran off Jasaan.
‘You just had to make a point, is that it? Let him up,’ she said. Her glare snapped to Jasaan. ‘Did you see? Did
you
see, Night Watchman?’
Tuuran nodded.
‘They can be killed.’ She waited as Tuuran’s men drew away. There was an uncertainty to the way Jasaan looked at her now. An amazement. Not a fear, exactly. Was it awe? He half-expected her to murder him. It was in his eyes, yet he wasn’t afraid. She crouched beside him.
‘Do you see? They die. They
can
die.’ She offered him her hand to help him to his feet. She thought perhaps he might take it, but in the end he shied away.
‘Holiness,’ he said. He shook his head, bewildered and confused. ‘From birth to death we obey. Nothing more, nothing less. Lystra is our queen and our speaker. But I will vouch for what I have seen. I will speak of your victory.’
‘We’ll kill a hundred dragons more and it still won’t be victory, but so be it.’ Zafir nodded. ‘Lead the way, soldier of Narammed, and takes us to where we might all stand together and turn back this tide.’
They ran, all of them together, while the dragons skittering through the tunnels lashed the stone hatchling to rubble and came on.
Water. Deep and dark and cold, black as death and old as unholy Xibaiya. The dragons swim silent through its icy calm, drawn by the current. Bottomless and timeless, these holes and burrows from when half-gods strode the sky and labyrinth wyrms crawled beneath the skin of the earth to caress their doomed goddess. Long gone all of these, all but their relics, earth places whose desiccated souls stir restless now, goaded from their eternal sleep by the murmurings of the goddess’s spear. Hostile and sullen they watch the dragons pass; but though the dragons feel their presence they know the ancient earth for what it is, toothless and without power. The dragons care nothing for its animosity, and besides, water bows always to the moon, fickle and changing and ever shifting.
Mile after mile the river draws them on into the air once more, to a grand void of darkness rising among the mountains, the great fissure spread wide like an opening wound. In blackness the hatchling Silence skitters across wet slime-drifted stone and pauses to listen.
Little ones. Silence feels their thoughts. They are close now.
Jasaan led them fast through lamplit passageways carved long ago to a grand cavern riddled with pillars of water-grown stone, fangs rising from the ground and hanging from above like the teeth of some ossified devil as tall as a mountain. The walls and low-pressing ceilings of stone lifted away, and Zafir felt the tightness in her chest lift with them. Space. A chance to breathe. Not like open skies, but not the oppressive cage of dark narrow places either. Their Taiytakei torches shone bright, dancing leaping shadows across the twisting spires. The Adamantine Men talked quietly among themselves of the Great Flame, the first mother of all dragons who climbed from the earth beneath the Spur and gave birth to a thousand eggs, a dragon as big as a city. Zafir knew better. She had an idea, now, of the father of dragons. The carvings in the Pinnacles laid it out for anyone to see if they had eyes to understand. The Black Moon had made them.
‘How far does all this go?’ she asked Jasaan. The caves under the Spur belonged to the alchemists and always had.
‘A realm all of itself,’ he said.
Across the cavern, close enough to see with their torches, gates of iron and wood hung open into another maw-like darkness. Men thronged around them, lit by bobbing alchemical lamps. Lystra’s Adamantine Men and Lystra herself, a hundred strong arms in dragonscale. They even had a pair of scorpions, battered and bent in places, salvaged from the walls of the Adamantine Palace after it fell. On either side the cavern fell into a darkness black and all-swallowing. A sense of lurking demons clawing at Zafir. She pushed it aside as best she could and approached the gates alone. It helped to have something there, right in front of her, something immediate to fill her head. A scorpion pointed at you was good for that, and the hostile glare of soldiers who had once sworn to serve her. For the second time she faced Queen Lystra, old rival and enemy, face to face and eye to eye, wary and pleased at the distance between them. Once-impossible things came more easily now, but it still took a breath or two before she could bring herself to drop to one knee. She couldn’t bow her head. Too much pride for that.
‘Dragons come,’ she said. Her voice echoed through the emptiness, the darkness. She spoke the words loud. ‘This is your realm, Lystra of Sand. If you will have it, I will stand at your side, my men with yours, until these dragons are gone or else we die in their fire.’
Lystra, armoured for battle as she’d been before, turned her back. Zafir stayed as she was, down on one knee but head held proud. Waiting.
Tuuran watched, half of him wondering why Zafir didn’t just blast the wretched queen under the mountains with a nice dose of lightning like she had with her sister Jaslyn. Teach her some manners, that would. The other half of him busied itself with how long they had before the next hatchling came scrabbling after them and how, exactly, he was supposed to do anything about it while Zafir held the spear that conveniently turned them into stone, and how, exactly, he was supposed to do what a Night Watchman was
supposed
to do and keep his speaker from harm when there were dragons one way and a horde of hostile soldiers and alchemists and scorpions the other.
‘This is just a little bit shitty,’ he grumbled. He looked at White Vish and then at Jasaan. Jasaan at least had the decency to look away, shamefaced. ‘Well? Dragon-slayer? Do you stand with us or not? If it’s not then could you at least go and ask your queen if she might just possibly consider helping us not all burn to a crisp?’
Jasaan shook his head. ‘I’ll stand with you, Tuuran. But you’ve been gone a long time. You don’t understand what Zafir did here. You don’t understand what she means to them, how many died because of her, how—’
‘Dragon!’
The cry echoed from the tunnel, which was handy for Jasaan because it saved him from a punch in the face. Zafir didn’t move. She didn’t even look round. Which was all very Zafir, but not very helpful.
‘You going to get that spear, then?’ asked Jasaan. But that wasn’t how this worked, and he really ought to know it. Bloody queens. Both of them as bad as each other. Just happened to love one of them, that was all.
Shit. Did I just think that? Bollocks no!
The love of duty. That was probably what he’d been thinking. Yes. That.
The soldier he’d set at the rear watching for dragons came bolting past out of the tunnel, and Tuuran had never been so grateful for something else to think about. ‘How many?’ he yelled.
‘Six? Ten? I don’t bloody know. Lots! It’s big, this one. Hardly fits.’
Big made it slow. So there was that.
A last glance back to the gates with their scorpions. Would they do better to hold there? Lystra seemed to think so, but Tuuran wasn’t so sure. Better here at the entrance with the dragons trapped in a tunnel and coming at him one at a time. Once they spread into the cavern the men at the gate might kill two or three, if they were astoundingly lucky, and then everyone died in fire …
‘It’s never the bloody easy way, is it,’ he said, as much to any of the old spirits of the legion that might happen to be watching. They ought to be, he thought, because there wasn’t going to be another fight quite like this for a while. True Adamantine Men – even if there were only a dozen of them – armed with a pair of lightning throwers apiece, with Taiytakei gold-glass shields and armour. Men who just might keep their shit together when a dragon came at them. ‘Sit yourselves down and enjoy it,’ he muttered, ‘if only because there might not be any Adamantine Men left come the end of it. If you could find some way to pitch in and help, that would be nice.’ On the other hand, they might just think it was as good a blaze of glory as any to die in.
Ghosts. He was talking to ghosts.
Zafir was still on one knee before the gate. Still not moving, still no bloody use. Down to him then. He shouted at his men to back away a distance from the tunnel mouth and get their shields and those lightning throwers ready, because they were bloody well going to need them, because any moment now the first dragon was going to come and hose everything with fire until it squeezed itself out, and Tuuran needed them far enough back not to burn, but close enough that they had some chance of hitting what they were aiming for once they started throwing lightning back the other way. And even this handful might have held a tunnel where dragons could only pass one at a time if their lightning throwers had worked as well as they did in Takei’Tarr or in Merizikat, but they didn’t. Took bloody ages to find the strength to fire again. Ever since they crossed the storm-dark, and Tuuran didn’t have a bastard clue why. Bellepheros reckoned something to do with the dragons, but it hadn’t made much sense.
‘Never the bloody easy way,’ he grumbled again, and looked about for anyone else who had a nice big axe and might be up for using it. ‘You!’ White Vish. ‘With me.’ He looked at Jasaan. ‘You too, dragon-slayer, for when one of us gets his head burned off. The rest of you lot, shield wall and blast anything that shows its snout through that hole until it stops moving, but not until it’s poking its nose out, mind!’
‘We’re going to die here, are we?’ asked Jasaan.
Tuuran bared his teeth. ‘If we do, won’t it just be glorious?’ Which, in the end, was all that was supposed to matter. He tucked himself out of sight where the tunnel opened into the cave, where the dragons had to pass, lightning thrower at the ready, axe propped against the stone beside him. Waved Vish to the other side. He sneaked a glance into the tunnel and swore loudly. The hatchling was only yards away, slithering on its belly, scales scraping along the walls, almost too big to fit.
The dragon grinned and belched fire. Tuuran barely jerked out of the way in time, and then everything kicked off.
‘Hold!’ he screamed. ‘Hold!’ Last thing he needed was people wasting precious lightning, and he needed the dragon out in the open, or at least a part of it, enough of it to hit. He flicked another glance at Zafir. Still hadn’t moved. Nor had the men at the gates, but he had their attention now right enough. So that was something. He grimaced at Vish. ‘Die well. That’s the best we ever get, right?’
The dragon lunged out, claws scrabbling for purchase, trying to pull itself through as fast as it could. Its jaws snapped round and bit at him. Tuuran jumped back as flames swept over him, screaming burning pain. Then lightning, a cacophonous scatter of thunderclaps that set his whole skull ringing, loud enough to blur his eyes. The dragon shrieked. It coughed on its own fire.
‘Now! Take it down!’ He snatched up his axe.
Lightning flashed, dazzling. Thunderclaps boomed. The cavern air shook in deafening echoes. Light and noise and he could barely think, but that didn’t matter. Didn’t need to
think
. Just needed to bring his axe down on the hatchling’s head.
He swung. Missed as it snapped away. Bastard thing was half out of the tunnel now, almost loose. Another bolt hit the dragon and then another. It screamed and shook, talons flailing. Vish brought his axe down on its head. Glanced sideways, cut deep but not deep enough to kill. Jasaan jumped wildly past him, smashing his blade into the dragon’s snout, and still it came. Tuuran roared and leaped, howling with every ounce of muscle, springing into the air, axe square into the dragon’s skull with all his weight and strength behind it. Down deep, the whole axehead driven through scale and bone. Wrenched it free and jumped again, screaming his head off for it to just die, over and over and …
He stood for a moment, gasping. The dragon fell. Half his face was burning agony where its fire had caught him, worse than when that fire witch had burned his ear off in Aria.
‘It’s dead, boss,’ yelled Vish. ‘You killed it.’
Tuuran nodded. ‘
We
killed it.’ His ears were ringing. After-flashes of lightning seared his eyes. He staggered, trying to orient himself, and then the dragon lurched forward, and for a moment he thought it was still alive and howled and lifted his axe, and damn, what did it take to kill these bastards? But then he understood: the dragons in the tunnel behind were barging it out of the way, ready to come at him again, and just for a moment he wondered if he could really do this any more.
Not an Adamantine thought that. He shook himself and scanned his eyes over his waiting men, crouched behind their Taiytakei shields. The glow of their lightning throwers in the gloom. He picked them out, the bright white dazzle-light of the ones primed and ready, the dull glimmer of those already loosed. A dozen left still strong. Good enough. One of the pair fixed to his left arm still gleamed bright too. Never mind the roar in his ears, never mind the flashes of light and shadow that meant he could barely see, or the pain of his scorched face. He let it eat him and turned it to savage anger.
‘Come on then!’ he bellowed. ‘Who’s next? I don’t care how many of you there are. One by one my axe will have you!’ Maybe they’d get three or four before their lightning was spent. But like he’d said: fucking glorious.
Zafir still didn’t move. What was the bloody woman thinking?
The dead dragon flopped to one side. Two small hatchlings shot through the gap, one after another. Tuuran caught the first with his lightning and sent it tipping head over tail in among the stone columns. ‘Someone kill it! Kill it quick!’ He swung his axe at the second. Missed. Vish shield-slammed it. Lightning hit it in the face, three bolts at once, and Tuuran ended it with a second swing, straight through the neck. A small one this, if you could say that anything was small when it was the size of a carthorse. Jasaan ran at the hatchling loose in the cave. Another soldier broke from the wall of shields. In the gloom Tuuran didn’t see who it was, but he saw the hatchling dart and lash with its tail, saw his soldier fly twenty feet through the air, chest caved in, saw him smash against a stone pillar like a petrified tentacle and slump still. Lightning sprawled the dragon back down. Jasaan slammed in with his axe. Two more men dived out of the wall and finished it.