Master of Dragons

Chapter Five

Drutheira stared out at the sun setting over the Arluii. Neither of the others had spoken to her since the grim trek down from the gorge, not even Ashniel. Occasionally she had caught them looking sidelong at her, but the accusatory gazes had quickly fallen away. They were still scared of her. Sullen, but scared.

Now, crouched around a meagre fire and with the wind snatching at their robes, the questions came haltingly.

‘You’re sure you finished it?’ asked Malchior.

‘Of course I’m sure,’ snapped Drutheira.

‘But Hreth-’ started Ashniel.

‘It wasn’t Hreth. Khaine’s blood, even you could see that.’

‘Kaitar,’ said Malchior.

‘Yes. Or whatever was inside Kaitar. And we banished them both.’

Drutheira found it hard to concentrate. Her mind kept going back to the final glimpse of Sevekai as he sailed over the edge. The Hreth-thing had been little more than a grasping bundle of ashes by then, but Sevekai had been alive.

She shouldn’t have cared, and didn’t know why she did. They had shared a bed together, of course, but Drutheira had shared the beds of many druchii and not mourned their deaths a jot. Their relationship had been neither close nor deep; they had been thrown together by their orders, both refugees in the grime of Elthin Arvan seeking a way home, so she should have cared as little for Sevekai’s death as she had for all the other many deaths she had either caused or witnessed.

Perhaps it was the fatigue. She felt like she had been crawling across the wastelands forever, hunted by both dawi and asur, forced to creep into mountain hollows and make temporary homes in the trackless forest like any common bandit. Even the simple task of getting back to Naggaroth had proven beyond her. For the first time in centuries, she felt vulnerable.

Are we still capable of loyalty? she mused, watching the sun sink lazily towards the western horizon. Do we even remember what it is? Could we go back?

She knew the answer to that even as she asked the question. They had all made their choices a long time ago; she certainly had. Sevekai had been so young — he’d had no knowledge of the Ulthuan that had been, the one that she had fought alongside Malekith for mastery of. He could never have known how deep the wounds ran; he had not lived long enough to learn to hate purely, not like she had.

For a long time hatred had been enough to drive her onwards: hatred of the asur, hatred and contempt for the dawi, hatred of those in Naggaroth who had plotted and connived to see her exiled to the wretched east in pursuit of a mission of thankless drudgery. Now, perhaps, the energy of that hatred had dissipated a little.

I am exhausted, she admitted to herself at last. Unless I find a way to leave this place, to recover my spirit and find fresh purpose, I will die here.

‘So what of Kaitar, then?’ came Ashniel’s voice again, breaking Drutheira’s moody thoughts. ‘Still you tell us nothing.’

Drutheira glared at her. The three of them sat on blunt stones in a rocky clearing. The fire burned fitfully in the centre of the circle, guttering as the mountain wind pulled at it. Mountain peaks, darkening in the dusk, stretched away in every direction. The Arluii range was big, and they were still a long way from reaching its margins.

‘What do you think he was?’ asked Drutheira.

‘Daemon-kind,’ said Malchior firmly.

‘How astute,’ said Drutheira acidly.

‘But why?’ asked Ashniel. ‘Kaitar was with Sevekai for years. He followed orders, he killed when told to. Can you be sure?’

‘You saw it leap. It was a shell. As was Hreth.’ She poked at the fire with her boot. ‘Banished, not killed. You never truly kill them.’

Malchior kept looking at her, a steady glare. ‘How long did you know?’

‘A while. Sevekai guessed it too.’ Drutheira suppressed a glower. Malchior was a thug, not half as clever as he supposed, and explaining herself to the two of them was tiresome. ‘But none of my arts would divine it. For as long as the orders from Malekith were in force I couldn’t move against him, but it has been over a year now since I was able to commune. Time to test Kaitar’s mettle, I thought.’

Ashniel snorted. ‘Test it?’

‘If he had been druchii the dragon would not have harmed him. Up until then, believe me, I was not certain.’

‘So it was all for him,’ said Malchior. ‘The dragon in the dark.’

‘I’ve been hunting that dragon for thirty years. An opportunity presented itself: skin two slaves with one knife.’

The dragon still shadowed them. She had not yet attempted to ride it — it was too soon. Its spirit was wild and frenzied, damaged like a cur beaten too often by its owner. The only thing stopping it from killing them all was the bond of magic placed on it hundreds of years ago.

Urislakh, it had once been called; the Bloodfang. The black dragon still answered to that name, though only grudgingly, as if unwilling to remember what it had been in earlier ages.

She didn’t know where it was at that moment. Possibly aloft and out of sight, possibly curled up in some dank crevasse hissing out its misery. The beast would come back when Drutheira summoned it — her leash was long, but it was still a leash.

Ashniel still looked pensive. ‘So what does it mean?’ Her frail, almost fey features were lit red by the firelight, exposing the hollowness of her cheeks. The rose-cheeked bloom she had once worn when in the carefree courts of ancient Nagarythe had long since left her. ‘Was Kaitar one of Malekith’s creatures?’

Drutheira shook her head. ‘Daemons serve their own kind. We have been duped.’

She let the words sink in. It was a shameful admission. No greater crime existed in Naggaroth than to be made a fool of, to be deceived by a lesser race; and of course, to the druchii, every race was a lesser race.

‘But for what?’ asked Malchior, speaking slowly as his mind worked. ‘What was its purpose?’

‘Who knows?’ said Drutheira impatiently. ‘Maybe it was watching us. Maybe it was whispering everything we did to its dark masters. Maybe it was bored by an eternity of madness. You should have asked it before we killed it. Perhaps it would have told you.’

Malchior flushed. ‘Don’t jest.’

Drutheira sneered at him. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. We have already been made fools enough.’

‘So you care not.’

‘Of course I care!’ she shouted. The firelight flickered as her sudden movement guttered the flames. She collected herself. ‘It still lives, somewhere. We have lost four of our number. The asur and the dawi will kill us when they find us. That is it. That is the situation. Of course I care.’

Neither Ashniel nor Malchior replied to that. Ashniel chewed her lower lip, thinking hard; Malchior stared moodily into the fire. Drutheira watched them scornfully. Their minds worked so sluggishly.

‘Then what do we do?’ asked Ashniel eventually.

Drutheira sighed. The sun had nearly set. Shadows had spread across the clearing and the air had become chill. She felt weary to her bones. ‘What we have been trying to do: get back to Naggaroth. I cannot commune, so we must get to the coast. Malekith must be told that he has daemons amongst his servants.’

Malchior looked up at her, his eyes bright with a sudden idea. ‘We have a steed.’

‘It will not bear us all,’ Drutheira said. She watched the last sliver of sunlight drain away in the west. In advance of the moons rising, the world looked empty and drenched in gloom. ‘In any case, I did not raise the beast merely to test my suspicions of Kaitar. We have more than one enemy in Elthin Arvan.’

Her eyes narrowed as she remembered her humiliation, years ago, at the hands of the asur mage on the scarlet dragon. The pain of it had never diminished. The long privation since then had only honed the sharp edge of her desire for vengeance.

‘We cannot leave yet,’ she said, her voice low. ‘Not until I find the bitch who wounded me.’

She smiled in the dark. She could sense Bloodfang’s presence, out in the night, curled up in its own endless misery.

‘And we have a dragon of our own now,’ she breathed.

Liandra heard the voice before she awoke. It echoed briefly in the space between waking and sleep — the blurred landscape where dreams played.

Feleth-amina.

She stirred, her mind sluggish, her body still locked in slumber. Then her eyes snapped open and her mind rushed into awareness. She had been dreaming of Ulthuan, of fields of wildflowers in the lee of the eastern Annulii, rustling in sunlit wind.

Feleth-amina.

Fire-child: that was what the dragons called her. The dragons always gave their riders new names. They found Eltharin, she was told, childish.

Liandra pushed the sheets back. It was cold. Nights of Kor Vanaeth were always cold, even in the height of summer. Shivering, she reached for her robes and pulled them over her head. Then, barefoot, she shuffled across the stone floor of her chamber to the shuttered window.

Feleth-amina.

It was Vranesh’s mind-voice. Those playful, savage tones had been a part of Liandra’s life almost as long as she could remember. The two of them had been bonded for so long that she struggled to recall a time when the link had not been present.

Where are you? she returned, fumbling with the shutter clasp.

You know. Come now.

Liandra opened the heavy wooden shutters, revealing a stone balcony beyond. Starlight threw a silver glaze across the squat, unfinished rooftops of Kor Vanaeth. Her tower was the tallest of those that still stood, though that was hardly saying much.

Vranesh was perched on the edge of the railing, waiting for her. The sight was incongruous — Liandra half-expected the balustrade to collapse under the weight at any moment.

I was asleep, she sang, still blurry.

You were dreaming. I could see the images. Your dreams are like my dreams.

Liandra rubbed her eyes and reached up to Vranesh’s shoulder. Familiar aromas of smoke and embers filled her nostrils.

Do you dream? she sang.

I have known sleep to last for centuries. I have had dreams longer than mortal lifetimes.

Sleep to last for centuries, sang Liandra ruefully, settling into position and readying herself for Vranesh’s leap aloft. That would be nice.

The dragon pounced. A sudden rush of cold wind banished the last of Liandra’s sluggishness. She drew in a long breath, then shivered. It would have been prudent to have worn a cloak.

‘So what is this?’ she said out loud, crouching low as Vranesh’s wing beats powered the two of them higher. ‘Could it not have waited?’

Below them, Kor Vanaeth began to slip away.

It could have waited, but the mood was on me. You have not summoned me for an age, and I grow bored.

Liandra winced. That was true enough. She had been over-occupied with the rebuilding for too long and, in the few quiet moments she had had to herself in the past few months, she had known it.

Forgive me, she said, her mind-voice chastened.

Vranesh belched a mushroom of flame from her nostrils and bucked in mid-air. The gesture was violent; it was what passed for a laugh. Forgive you? I do not forgive.

Imladrik had told her that. Liandra remembered him explaining it to her, back when she had asked why the dragons suffered riders to take them into wars they had no part in.

‘They do not suffer us,’ he had said. ‘They have no masters, no obligations, no code of laws. They do what they do, and that is all that can be said of them. These things: blame, regret, servitude — they have no meaning to a dragon.’

‘What does have meaning to them?’ she had asked.

She could still see his emerald eyes glittering as he answered. ‘Risk. Splendour. Extravagance. If you had lived for a thousand ages of the world, that is all you would care about, too.’

I cannot remain here all night, she sang to Vranesh. I will freeze, even with your breath to warm me.

Vranesh kept going higher, pulling into the thinner airs. You will be fine. I wish to show you something.

The stars around them grew sharper. Wisps of cloud, little more than dark-blue gauzes, swept below. The landscape of Elthin Arvan stretched away towards all horizons, ink-black and brooding. Faint silver light picked out the mottled outlines of the forest — Loren Lacoi, the Great Wood. The trees seemed to extend across an infinite distance, throttling all else, choking anything that threatened their dominance.

You are changing my vision, sang Liandra.

Not my doing.

Liandra smiled sceptically. Vranesh had only a semi-respectful relationship with the truth.

Let us call it coincidence, Liandra sang.

Something had definitely changed. She could see far further than usual and the detail was tighter. She almost fancied she could see all the way to the Arluii range, or perhaps the Saraeluii, impossibly far to the east.

Tell me what you can see, sang Vranesh.

Liandra narrowed her eyes as the dragon swung around, giving her a sweeping view of all that lay beneath them. Stark sensations crowded into her mind. The intensity was almost painful.

‘I see lights in the dark,’ she said softly, speaking aloud again. ‘Just pinpricks. Are they watchfires?’

They are the lights of cities, sang Vranesh.

‘Ah, yes. That is Tor Alessi, along the river to the coast. And Athel Maraya, deep in the forest. How is this possible? And that must be Athel Toralien. They are like scattered jewels.’

What else do you see?

‘I see the forest in between them,’ said Liandra. ‘I see the whole of Elthin Arvan resisting us. We are invaders here. The forest is old. It hates us.’

Vranesh wheeled back round, pulling to the east. Her body rippled through the air like an eel in water, as sinuous as coiled rope. It does not hate. It just is.

Like the dragons, Liandra sang.

There are many things we hate. What else do you see?

Vranesh flew eastwards. The dragon’s speed and strength in the air were formidable. Liandra doubted any were faster on the wing, save of course the mighty Draukhain. Ahead of them, blurred by distance and the vagaries of magical sight, reared the Saraeluii. Liandra had visited them many times, always in the company of Imladrik. Those mountains were truly vast, far larger than the Arluii, greater in extent even than the Annulii of home.

They daunted her. The dark peaks glowered in the night, their flanks sheer and their shadows deep. She had never enjoyed spending time in those mountains — that was the dawi’s realm, and even before war had come it had felt hostile and strange. She looked hard, peering into the gloom. She began to see things stirring.

I see armies, she sang, slowly. As Vranesh swept across the heavens in broad, gliding arcs, she saw more and more. Huge armies. I see forges lit red, like wounds in the world. I see smoke, and fire, and the beating of iron hammers.

It was as if the entire range were alive, crawling like a hill of angry insects. Pillars of smog polluted the skies. The earth in the lightless valleys shook under the massed tread of ironshod boots.

Endless, Liandra sang, inflecting the harmonic with wonder. So many.

Vranesh swung around again. Now you see what your scouts have seen. You see why you are needed. The storm is coming. It will roll down from those mountains soon and it will tear towards the sea.

Liandra sighed. She understood why the dragon had shown her such things. Kor Vanaeth cannot stand, she sang.

I did not say that. But you should think on where your powers are best employed. You should see what choices await you.

Liandra’s mind-voice fell silent. She had always known that hard decisions would come again. Like water returning to the boil, she felt her ever-present anger rising to the surface.

They killed thousands at Kor Vanaeth, she sang bitterly.

They did. We both saw it.

Liandra clenched her fists, just as she always did. The gesture had become habitual. I wish for nothing but to see them burn.

The druchii first, sang Vranesh. Now the dawi. Can you really kill them all?

The night seemed to gather itself around her as the dragon soared. It toughened her resolve, helped her to see things clearly. Salendor was already preparing to march, to bring the war back to the stunted ones before they could seize the initiative. Perhaps he was right to.

I cannot, she sang savagely, feeling the lava-hot energy of the beast beneath her. But you can.

Sevekai awoke.

For a long period he didn’t try to move. The spirals of pain were too acute, too complete. More than one bone was broken, and he saw nothing from his left eye. A vague, numb gap existed where sensations from his limbs should have been.

At first he thought he might have been blinded. Then, much later, the sun rose and he saw that he had awoken during the night. Little enough of the sun’s warmth penetrated down to the gorge floor, though — the difference between night and day was no more than a dull, creeping shade of grey.

When he finally summoned up the effort to shift position, the agony nearly made him pass out. He tried three times to pull himself to his knees. He failed three times. Only on the fourth attempt, dizzy with the effort, did he drag himself into something like a huddled crouch.

He was terribly, horribly cold. The shade seemed eternal. The rocks around him were covered with thin sheens of globular moss. Moisture glistened in the underhangs, dripping quietly. When he shivered from the chill, fresh pricks of pain rushed up his spine.

Awareness came back to him in a series of mismatched recollections. He remembered a long trek into the mountains with the others. He remembered Drutheira’s black-lined eyes staring into his, the raids on trading caravans deep in the shadow of the woods and then the dull-faced visage of Kaitar.

Kaitar.

That name brought a shudder; he couldn’t quite remember why. Something had been wrong with Kaitar. Had he died? Had something terrible happened to all of them?

Sevekai’s forehead slumped, exhausted, back against the rock. He felt his lips press up against moss. Moisture ran into his mouth, pressed from thick green spores. It dribbled down his chin, and he sucked it up.

It was then that he realised just how thirsty he was. He pushed himself down further, ignoring flaring aches in his back and sides, hunting for more water.

Only when he had trawled through shallow puddles under low-hanging lichen and licked the dribbling channels from the tops of stones did he feel something of a sense of self-possession begin to return. He lay on his back, breathing shallowly.

He had fallen a long way. He could see that now, twisting his head and gazing up at the sheer sides of the gorge. A hundred feet? Two hundred? He should be dead. The rubble that had come down with him alone should have finished him off.

Sevekai smiled, though it cracked his lips and made them bleed. It was all so ludicrous.

Perhaps this is death, he thought. Perhaps I shall haunt this place for a thousand years.

He looked up again. As his senses became sharper, as his mind put itself back together again, his thoughts became less fanciful.

For fifty feet or so below the ruined ledge he’d fallen from, the rock ran straight down, a cliff of granite without break or handhold. Then, as it curved inwards towards the gorge’s floor, it began to choke up with a tangled mess of briars, scrub and hunched trees. Down in the primordial gloom, a mournful swathe of vegetation had taken hold, clinging on grimly in the perpetual twilight. It was dense and damp, overlapping and strangling itself in a blind attempt to claw upwards to the light.

For all its gnarly ugliness, that creeping canopy was what had saved him. As Sevekai gazed upward he could see the path he had taken down — crashing through the branches of a wizened, black-barked shrub before rolling down across a clump of thornweed and into the moss-covered jumble of rocks where he now found himself.

It was still unlikely. He should still have died.

He let his head fall back again. He could feel the heavy burden of unconsciousness creeping up on those parts of him that still gave him any sensation at all. Night would come again soon, and with it the piercing cold. He was alone, forgotten by those he had trekked up into the mountains with. He knew enough of the wilds to know that strange creatures would be quick to sniff out wounded prey in their midst. He was broken, he was frail, he was isolated.

A crooked smile broke out again, marring the severe lines of his thin face. He felt no fear. Part of him wondered whether the plummet had purged fear from him; if so, that would be some liberation.

I will not die in this place, he mouthed silently. He did not say the words to encourage himself; it was just a statement of belief. He knew it, as clearly as he knew that his body would recover and his strength would return. The scions of Naggaroth were made of hard stuff: forged in the ice, sleet and terror of the dark realm. It took a lot to kill one — you had to twist the dagger in deep, turning it tight until the blood ran black.

He had killed so many times, had ended so many lives, and yet Morai-Heg still failed to summon him to her underworld throne for reckoning.

Even as the light overhead died, sending Sevekai back into a dim-lit world of frost and pain, the smile did not leave his face.

I will not die in this place.