by David Guymer
Fredric howled his defiance, throwing off the scraps of his ruined shield and taking up his sword two-handed as he fought his armored body back to its feet.
Like a lion being attacked by a cub, Archerax cuffed the baron onto his back.
“Nevertheless, a part of me had hoped to face something greater. But I see now…”
From his stupefyingly great height the dragon looked down.
The malice and disappointment of ages filled his eyes with hate.
Fire flickered about his jaw.
“Humanity is weaker even than I had thought.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Greyfox
Castle Kellar, North Kell
Greyfox never would have thought it possible. She was tired of shooting Uthuk Y’llan.
The Uthuk had been thick over the Forest Road, and all over the hill country north of it. It was as if every land east of the Lothan had emptied itself into Kell. They had been too many even for a hero to fight through, effectively forcing them to head west instead of north and to the relief of Kellar town. Sibhard and a pair of Andira’s pilgrim-soldiers wrestled with a seven foot-tall creature made up of pink-pale rolls of skin and wobbling blubber. The rest of the company fended off the rest of the ragtag horde, battering them from the burnt road with flails and cudgels and clearing a path for Greyfox and Andira on their horses to get by.
The elf shifted on Starchaser’s bare back, drew her bowstring with a bored expression, and, for variety’s sake, lined up a shot on a yellow-scaled dragonkin that was fleeing the castle’s walls. The arrow fell woefully short and she cursed the peasant shortbows and the rushed craftsmanship that had gone into her borrowed quiver. Andira had destroyed her mother’s Latari bow and she had grieved the loss, but there had been no opportunity to properly miss it until now. She lined up a second arrow, but the dragonkin was gone behind a belfry before she could loose it. She sighed.
She had heard the old tale of the Dragon of the Whispering Forest, but no one, barring a few of the more superstitious locals from her former band, had ever given it much credence. She wondered if perhaps Sibhard had been right and that she was mad and did not really hear the voices of the forest at all.
She shrugged.
Something to think about.
“I see a way through to the castle,” Andira shouted to her. “With me, Milenhéir.”
Greyfox was starting to regret sharing her real name with Andira. The hero was surprisingly adept in Latari pronunciation, and when she said it, it reminded Greyfox too much of the only elf beside herself who had ever known it.
Starchaser tossed his mane and turned, hooves clattering on the baked flagstones, breaking through the disorganized packs of Uthuk and leaping over a culvert that had been cut through the main road by dragonfire.
“Lady Runehand!” Sibhard called out, wrapped up in the folds of the obscene thing as he struggled to stab at it with his knife. The demon-possessed Uthuk monster chuckled jovially, like an old man playfighting with a favorite grandchild, as the other pilgrims beat uselessly at it with clubs.
Andira ignored them. “Get me to the castle, to where Baron Fredric fights,” she said to Greyfox. “If this is where I am forced to be then let it be for good reason.”
Greyfox marveled at how the woman could adopt a position entirely contrary to her original intention, but then adopt it so wholeheartedly it was impossible to recall how it differed. It was a genuine gift.
“Yes, Lady Runehand,” she said, with a bow and a flourish and galloped on, clattering over flagstones strewn with charred rubble and bones.
The paths through Castle Kellar were no longer things that one could blindly follow, courses that one took to thread between the great stone frontages and monuments of a proud old city, but those patches of it where the ground had cooled enough to be ridden across. There was no ordering hand at work in its layout. It was woodland after a wildfire had raged through, or a village after a spring snap in the Dunwarr had caused the Lothan to burst and swept the majority of it downriver. If not for the castle ahead of her, high on its hill as though it had clambered there to escape the rising flames, she might have looked on it all and struggled to match it to the picture of privilege and power she had carried since she had been small.
It was almost funny: she had always wanted to see Kellar.
A flesh ripper with a spined frill and two rows of bone spikes running down its muscular back bounded out of the rubble. Its demonic hide was black with ash. Its eyes were bright with reflected hate. It closed on Starchaser with an easy, slobbering lope.
“Bored now…” Greyfox sighed and shot it through the neck.
It carried on running, until Greyfox gave a reedy whistle and Andira’s yellow-white Carthridge courser, galloping behind her, veered abruptly sideways to slam the demon hound into what remained of a corner wall.
“Never do that to a horse I am trying to ride again!” Andira yelled, struggling to regain control.
Greyfox yipped and the bigger horse thundered after her and Starchaser, fighting off Andira’s pull on the reins and leaving the hero to shout her curses into the wind. She grinned.
She had found something that Andira Runehand was not good at.
But the hero had been right about one thing.
She had been wrong to lead Andira astray, and it was an error she did not intend to repeat. They would ride into Castle Kellar and save the baron.
Because there was no way Greyfox was following her into a fight with a demon king without an army in front of her.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Andira Runehand
Castle Kellar, North Kell
Andira clung grimly to the saddle pommel, Hamma’s horse pounding enthusiastically after the dart-swift shape of the Greyfox. The road steepened markedly as the elf led her on. The ground became hotter, its destruction all the more recent, their hooves kicking up flurries of sparks as the horses flew across it. The broken walls of Castle Kellar reared from the smoke. A huge dragon, gnarled and green as an ancient tree, lay slumped in the wreckage of the outer rampart, like a Stormlord beached on the rocks of Tigh Higard, cloaked in the ash and debris of its ruin.
For one reason or another, her adventures had always taken her to the most desolate corners of Terrinoth. Abandoned castles. Forsaken woods. She wondered now if it had been deliberate, to spare her from seeing sights like these: the human cost of her devotion to her quest. The Greyfox’s mount scrabbled up the heaped spoil around the fallen drake, as agile and as eager as a Joulnar goat up a rockslide. Andira did not have to urge her own steed to follow. She simply held on tighter as it climbed. The smell became acrid.
The smoke was burnt meat and charred rock, burning the back of the throat as soon as it entered the mouth and stinging the eyes. The rune in her hand shone with a clear blue-white light. It burned a hole in the pall. Dust shimmered in the air around her. The ground beneath her glittered. Pale debris. Dark ash. Discarded metal reflecting her light. A field of fallen soldiers stretched out beyond the reach of her light, flowers poking out from volcanic soil. They had been crushed, burned, brutalized by teeth and claws. The ground steamed like a sulfur lake. The shattered earth groaned.
Ahead of her, and high, high above, the dragon rumbled.
Fire wreathed its titanic maw, drawing the huge wedge shape of a head like a god revealing itself from the clouds. The greater bulk of the behemoth was a fear of black, obsidian and glittering, shrouded in a meeker, subservient dark.
The ache in her hand became a pain.
This was not the foe she had set out from the Bloodwood to challenge: it was of an entirely different breed although, she sensed, of similar standing within the great hierarchy of Mennara’s powers.
She quailed before it and then smiled.
So, she could feel fear after all.
The Greyfox let go a cry and
veered, loosed an arrow that vanished into the smoky pall to no discernible effect, and then peeled off to one side. Divorced from the elf’s guiding hand, Andira’s mount shied, but even in his most abject terror some instinct told him that it would go ill for him if he were to throw Andira Runehand. She raised her poleaxe like a battle standard and the rune in her hand blazed with a sudden brilliance, throwing its light out over the entirety of the courtyard. Daqan soldiers and dragon hybrids, freshly exhumed from the pall, tussled in the gritty light at the illumination’s edge, but there at the dark heart of the storm all was terrible and calm.
The dragon reared up before her in all its awful majesty.
Its scales were glossy and black and steamed with heat. Long spines curled from the sides of its body and the backs of its limbs, less like the malignant outgrowths of the Uthuk Y’llan than the jeweled ornaments of a monarch. Horns and barbs crowned its vast head, limned in turn by an effervescent flicker of fire and a halo shimmer of heat. It exhaled slowly, menacingly. The inner heat brightened, turning from a ruddy orange to a fierce yellow, as if in counter to the growing strength of Andira’s runelight.
She amused it. But in the fact that it had not yet slain her out of hand she deduced that it was wary of her too. For all its unknowable might the idea of encountering an equal was not entirely beyond its imagination.
And it knew one when it saw it.
“A frightened little girl on a frightened little horse,” its voice rumbled. “Which shall I devour first?” It sniffed, nostrils flaring, and the horse clattered backwards in panic. In the Greyfox’s absence it was all Andira could do to keep him from bolting. The dragon chuckled.
“I smell you, little girl. I smell the power in you, and I know whence it was taken. Mine is greater. It was bestowed upon me in ancient days by beings you can scarce imagine and by right is mine alone. Go, child. Flee from me. The Ynfernael rises and it is the duty of all to challenge its power or concede. Do this and I will be gracious and tell you where your nemesis’ earthly throne might be found. My sole promise to you in exchange is that I will end this one swiftly.”
One colossal toe of one gargantuan foot raised, briefly revealing a body draped in a rich purple surcoat, and then lowered again. Andira gripped the reins tightly. It was Baron Fredric. He looked dazed and half-conscious. His armor was scorched. His shield arm looked unnaturally bent. His face was reddened and hairless, beard and brows replaced with burns.
“And after I have devoured his wife and his daughter and any others I deem precious to him, after I have plundered his treasuries and gathered to myself all therein that I judge desirable, then I will depart this city and bring ruin to no other. On this you have my word.”
Andira paused briefly, surprised only by how little she was tempted.
She was no storybook hero, she knew. Although she had had no recollection of ever reading or hearing those old tales herself, somehow she knew. To lack a past was to be without the inner voice and moral guidance that directed most folk, whether they chose to accept that direction or not. Instead, she had her quest. Whether it was wresting perilous relics from the hands of vile necromancers in Roth’s Vale, scouring the Bloodwood of the Tangle, or bringing retribution upon the legions of Baelziffar, whatever she decided it must be it was all that she had. That was her moral code. She had forsaken innocents before. Gwellan had not been the first. Surrounded now by devastation on an inhuman scale she was most disturbed to find that she was not in fact so heartless as she had always supposed.
She dismounted.
The horse bolted the moment she was clear of it. But Andira no longer cared. She had not been trained to fight properly from horseback in any case.
She gripped her poleaxe.
The dragon rumbled with mirth.
“So be it.”
With a deafening roar, the fire buried under its black scales growing fierce, it threw its bulk towards her.
Andira drew her hand from her poleaxe.
The runelight withdrew from the air and returned to her hand, hardening in her grip as steam would turn into water and then into ice. She clenched her fist and then swiped it across the dragon’s jaw. The blow connected with a crack like thunder. The dragon’s head snapped to one side, the endless length of its body turning across her as its smoking jaws ploughed into the stone girth of the castle gatehouse. The structure had been standing firm despite the destruction of its supporting towers and the onslaught of dragonfire, but it fell then. Thousands of tons of stonework tumbled over the dragon.
It did not stay buried for long.
The mountain of rubble shifted, avalanches sliding off the dragon’s back as it lifted itself up and turned its long, dust-grayed neck around.
Fury lit the night-dark rings of its eyes.
“You were not made to contest with one such as I. Not with the borrowed might that you possess. The power to make and break worlds is my birthright. The will to bend them is in my blood.”
It opened its jaws wide, fire igniting in its throat and issuing forth on a gale as it threw its jaws towards her.
Andira raised her hand up to the onslaught, her mind tracing the outer circle of the rune to throw out a rippling shield against which the dragon’s fire blasted and burst. Andira gritted her teeth and leant into it. The heat, even from behind the rune-barrier, was ferocious. She felt the ground beneath her shift as the fury of the assault ground her ankles back.
The dragon was an order mightier than the Greyfox. He was greater even than Prutorn had been, and the demon of Sudanya had come closer than anyone to besting her and ending her quest.
The pain tore a scream from her throat. Whatever came for her after this battle, whether the glow of triumph or the oblivion of defeat at the last, after this she would finally rest. Just as she sensed the approach of her long-theorized limits, the moment at which she could bear to resist no longer, the onslaught of flame guttered away, the storm of fire petering to nothing across her wobbling shield.
Her hand dropped to her side and she gasped.
The dragon grumbled.
It drew another breath.
Gathering her own body’s last strength on a shuddering breath, Andira swung her poleaxe high and leapt.
The dragon was too vast a target to miss. It relied on size, the crippling terror it inflicted upon all mortal creatures, and unassailable power to destroy its foes utterly. Against those foes, vanishingly few, against whom that was insufficient it could count on armor scales thicker than a man’s hand and harder than dwarf-made metal. Andira’s blade smashed into its shoulder like a pickaxe into stone. Scales chipped and flew from the wound.
The dragon bellowed in pain.
Andira screamed in more.
Power spat from her hand and arced the weapon’s length blasting a crater of meat from the dragon’s thigh. Half mad with pain, it swiped at her. As it had been too big to avoid her blow, so was its foot too large to miss her. She threw out her hand to block it. The dragon’s foot impacted her barrier, encompassing her in rippling lines of energy and doing nothing at all to prevent her being hurled like a pebble a hundred yards across the bailey yard and through the thin walls of a stable block. Her shield fizzled and disintegrated as the roof came apart around her.
The pain was indescribable.
With a staggering statement of power, the dragon dragged itself back into the air. Every sweep of its wings brought more of the ruined stable down on Andira’s head.
“You will pay for this injury.” Its voice boomed like the anger of the black sky. “With the blood of your kin you will repay me a thousand-fold.”
Andira struggled back up, pressuring the agony back into her by clenching it tight around her poleaxe. “I have no kin. None that I know. Direct your wrath wherever you see fit.”
“And this is what the Land of Steel would call a hero.”
“Many have. It
is nothing I have ever claimed to be.”
“You were born into the wrong skin, Runehand. You should have been dragon, with cold blood in your veins and dark scales over your unfeeling bones.”
There was a twang, as though the tension in the air had caused it to snap, and an arrow sprouted from the underside of the dragon’s wing.
Andira turned, expecting, or perhaps hoping, to see the Greyfox returned. But the elf was long gone. Instead she saw Baron Fredric, swaying on his knees over the armored body of a woman, leaning over her in order to aim up at the dragon with a crossbow that was still strapped around her neck.
The dark sky pealed with mirth as the dragon laughed.
“Stay down, Dragonslayer’s Heir. Play dead. There is a real hero now in Kellar. She may yet salvage something of your kingdom if you allow her. But I think not.” It gathered its fire to it, as Andira stood amidst the wreckage of the stables. She stared defiantly up at it. Her entire body felt as though it burned. “I think not!”
Flame spiraled from the dragon’s throat, blasting like a calamity from above.
The joints in Andira’s hand cracked and protested as she forced her fingers wide and re-conjured her shield.
It manifested this time high up in the air, and the dragon roared in surprise as his fire erupted into white heat against the barrier mere feet from his gaping jaws. Andira clenched her jaw and moaned, the pain multiplied many times over by the effort of projecting the barrier so far from the source of her power. The shield fizzed and crackled under the onslaught. Streamers of irreplaceable strength squirmed off from it as the dragon bent his inconceivable might and the prodigious well of his fire towards its destruction. She felt it buckle and, through it, herself. She had tasked herself too harshly. The bar of this final challenge had been set too high. Another might have surrendered and seen an end to it. Andira raged on regardless. It was all that she knew to do. Her thoughts had become heat and flame. The walls burned and sparks rained down. Old memories emerged from buried chambers and fled the collapsing halls.