by Mike Brooks
Rikkut thought it the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and he’d been roused from rutting with Kovra the Fair beneath furs in the Red Smile’s deckhouse when it had first been sighted.
“We must turn north!” Sarika bellowed over the rising wind. “We’ve got to run before this! We can’t face it down!”
“We’re not turning anywhere,” Rikkut laughed. He faced into the wind, letting the salt spray dash over the new scarring on his cheeks. “We’ve been given our task, Sarika.”
“The task’s all well and good, Fireheart,” Sarika replied, “but if we try to sail through this we won’t be finding the Brown Eagle clan anywhere, unless the Dark Father’s already taken them to the depths!”
Rikkut licked his lips, tasting the spray on them. “I never took you for a craven.”
“You might be raid-chief, but you’re no captain,” Sarika spat at him, pushing her hair back from her face, “and you’re certainly no Lodzuuk Waveborn. The sea isn’t a shieldwall you can break if you’re brave enough, Fireheart! We need to run north.”
Rikkut shook his head. “The Flatlands lie west.”
“The fucking Flatlands! There’s probably no such place!” Sarika actually spat this time, hawking a gob of phlegm into the air and letting the winds take it where they would. “They’re probably just some story Snowbeard put together to make himself feel important!”
“The Golden believed him,” Rikkut said firmly. “And if the Golden believes him, so do I. I’ve seen a Flatlander sword, Sarika; held it in my hands. It’s real, and the Brown Eagle clan have fled there.” He turned to face her directly. She stared back at him, high cheekbones and one milky eye, her straw-coloured hair whipping around her head like the tentacles of some frenzied beast pulled up from the depths on a longline.
“I gave you this ship, Sarika. The Golden picked me, and I picked you to be my raid’s First Captain. So pass the word: we stay heading west.”
Sarika shook her head sadly. “You’re touched by the Dark Father, Fireheart. You may be fell in battle, but you’re worse than useless on the sea. A thirst for glory gets everyone killed out here, and the Dark Father sings no songs for you. Go back to fucking Kovra; she’s better with a blade than a sail as well.” She turned away from him, drawing in breath to bellow at the crew, ready to tell them to twist the great steering oar in the water and turn north.
Rikkut’s swordfish-bill dagger took her through the throat, a high tide wound. She staggered, clawing for her own weapon even though she must have known her life was already over, but Rikkut ripped his dagger out, grabbed her by the hair and ran her to the deck’s edge. The yolgu was already starting to yaw as the waves grew, but he kept his feet well enough to dump her into the sea. The dark waters swallowed her body with no sign she’d even existed.
“Pass the word!” he roared at the rest of them. “We hold course! We’re heading west, and fuck the storm! Juhadzh! You’re captain now! If any of the raid breaks off, I’ll hunt them down myself once we’ve finished with the Brown Eagle clan! So pass the damn word!”
There was a moment’s hesitation, but only a moment. Ship crews didn’t have time for lengthy deliberations: they reacted fast, or they died. Sarika had been the Red Smile’s captain, but Sarika was gone, without even corpse-paint to speed her soul to Father Krayk. Rikkut was raid-chief, and appointed by The Golden.
Someone grabbed a pair of signal sticks and began waving them, passing the word to the raid stretched out behind them. Hold western course. Death to those that stray. It was the greatest raid Rikkut had ever heard tell of, some said the greatest raid ever assembled, and it was his. The responsibility might have overwhelmed a lesser man. It would have overwhelmed Rikkut, were it not for one thing.
He had been given this purpose by The Golden, and he could feel the draug’s eyes on him, even across the ocean.
SAANA
IT WAS THE first time Saana had been into the Naridan forest, and it would have been a strange experience even if she hadn’t been mounted on a dragon.
Many of the trees were familiar, but here and there were scattered groupings of ones she didn’t know. She knew Narida was flat, of course—there was a reason her people knew it as the Flatlands—but up until this point she’d always been able to seen the Catseyes, rising into the sky in the west. Here in the forest, however, she could see nothing but tree trunks disappearing into the distance, sparse undergrowth here and there, and the thick green moss that carpeted the ground. No matter where she looked, and it seemed no matter how far they went, she could see no rise in the ground worth the mention, whereas on any of Tjakorsha’s islands you could barely walk a longhouse’s length without seeing a slope. Here there was just the subtly changing forest, the apparently endless road of packed earth, and the dragon’s steady, rolling tread beneath her. They were barely inside and already it felt as though they were a hundred leagues from another person.
It was like riding through a dream.
“Do you know why your corpse-painter came into the forest?” Blackcreek asked suddenly. He hadn’t spoken since Bastion had slowed from his initial gallop into a trot, and then to a walk that was still deceptively fast, given the length of the dragon’s stride.
“No,” Saana replied, shaking herself from her reverie. “Nalon did not say. This man does not think he knew.”
“It occurs to this lord that we do not know if she will be following the road,” Blackcreek said. “Why would she come this way? Surely she cannot be seeking another town? They would more than likely kill her on sight.”
Saana winced at the thought of Chara happening across wandering Naridans who weren’t from Black Keep, and what might happen to her. As Blackcreek had said, she’d surely be killed.
“We should call for her,” she said. “It is our best hope.”
Blackcreek looked around at her. “You wish for this lord to ride through his forest on his father’s war-dragon, calling the name of your clan’s corpse-painter as though he is some alewife calling her child in after dark?”
“Do as you please, Lord of Blackcreek,” Saana said stiffly. “You have done this much: this man would not wish for you to further dishonour yourself.” She took a deep breath. “Chara!”
Blackcreek winced, although to Saana’s relief Bastion appeared to pay her shout no mind. It would have been inconvenient in the extreme had the dragon decided to bolt. She filled her lungs and tried again. “Chara!”
In front of her, Blackcreek shook his head and muttered something too quietly for her to make out. Then, to her surprise, he too raised his voice. “Chara!”
They rode on like that, alternately shouting the corpse-painter’s name and listening for a reply. They must have shouted a score of times each as Bastion strode on along the road, but every time the sound died quickly in the damp, still air, muffled by the surrounding tree trunks, the moss, and the faint hiss of thousands of tiny droplets of falling water striking the forest’s near-infinite surfaces.
A larger drop fell from the brim of Saana’s borrowed helmet to splash onto the tip of her nose, and she rubbed it away irritably. Where was the blasted woman, and why had she decided to venture into this place?
Bastion abruptly came to a halt and made a rumbling sound deep in his enormous chest. The war-dragon sucked in a great sniff of air, and his massive horned head began to track from side to side.
“What is it?” Saana asked Blackcreek.
“He smells something,” the sar replied, patting the huge beast’s neck.
“This man guessed that,” Saana said, a trifle testily. “But what?”
“This lord is no witch, to converse with the beasts,” Blackcreek snapped. “It could be your corpse-painter, it could be razorclaws or a thundertooth, it could be a female of his kind for all this lord knows.” He reached out and took one of the hunting spears from the rack at his side. “It is something he was not expecting, to be sure. A dragon of Bastion’s size is not overly concerned by most things.”
&nbs
p; Saana followed the Naridan’s lead, plucking one of her own spears and holding it across her chest. The dreamlike forest had taken on a more threatening air, and she couldn’t be certain it was only her imagination.
A faint sound reached her ears, high and thin. Bastion’s head lifted for a moment: the dragon had heard it too.
“Was that—”
“A voice,” Blackcreek confirmed before she could finish her question. “But this lord cannot tell…” He raised himself up in his saddle slightly. “Hallo?”
“Chara?” Saana yelled again, just in case.
They both froze, unwilling to lose any sound in the creak of leather or the faint grinding clinks of the metal in their armour, and were rewarded when the voice called again.
“There!” Blackcreek said decisively, pointing through the trees to their right. He slapped Bastion’s left flank with his spear haft and tugged on the reins to direct his huge mount off the road. The war-dragon rumbled in response, and set off at a steady trot that was still faster than Saana suspected she could have run through such terrain. Bastion was huge, but undoubtedly sure-footed, and he picked his way over dead branches and around fallen tree trunks with ease.
“Chara!” Saana shouted again. She didn’t yet know if the voice they’d heard was her corpse-painter, but who else would be out in this forest so far from the town? The Naridans would surely know of the dangers, and there were apparently no other settlements of any size nearby.
“Help!”
Now she could make out the answering shout, and while she never would have recognised Chara’s voice, she could just understand the word.
“It is a Tjakorshi,” she told Blackcreek. “It must be her!”
“What does she say?” Blackcreek asked.
“She calls for help,” Saana told him grimly.
“This lord hopes she has not encountered some of his countrymen from farther north,” Blackcreek muttered, “else this is going to get very complicated.”
A stream appeared ahead of them, a sudden dark dip in the forest’s green ground. Saana felt Bastion accelerate and realised the dragon was going to jump, so she wrapped her free arm around the largest solid thing she could, and held on desperately.
There was a jolt, a brief moment of weightlessness, and then a second, larger jolt as Bastion touched down again and thundered on. Saana guiltily released her hold on Blackcreek’s torso as the sar twisted around in his seat to look at her with shocked eyes.
“What are you—?”
“This man would have fallen!” Saana protested, feeling her cheeks heat, then pointed as she saw a flash of blue in a tree. “Look! There!”
The mighty pines largely lacked branches on their lower trunks, so climbing them would not have been easy, but Chara had found an entirely different sort of tree. Its trunk was wider than any Saana had seen before, and although its uppermost twigs reached up nearly as tall as the surrounding conifers, that trunk forked into a multitude of mighty branches only an arm’s length or so above head height. Chara hadn’t stopped there, though: she’d climbed on into the thinner boughs, some twenty cubits up.
“Chara!” Saana shouted up to her, blinking drizzle from her eyes. “What in the name of the Dark Father are you doing?”
“Saana?” The corpse-painter’s face was only a small, pale oval at that height, but Saana thought she saw Chara’s eyes widen in shock. She supposed she must look very strange, in sar’s armour and mounted on a war-dragon.
“Chara, it’s dangerous out here,” Saana called, painfully aware that it looked like Chara had just climbed the tree and got stuck. “I don’t know why you’re up there, but—”
“Saana, look out, they’re coming back!” Chara interrupted her, pointing desperately.
Bastion was already moving. The war-dragon spun without any touch from Blackcreek, frighteningly nimble for a beast of his immense size, and let out a bellowing challenge at the creature charging at his rear. He reared up and one of his steel-clad horns met the onrushing predator head-on, sinking deep into its body.
All of which would have been far more reassuring to Saana had she not been thrown entirely clear of Bastion by his abrupt movement, and if the attacking creature had been alone.
She scrambled up, her borrowed spear clutched in two sweaty hands, and bolted towards the thick trunk of the tree as multiple sets of footsteps approached and she saw shapes closing on her in her peripheral vision. She set her back against the dark, gnarled bark and turned to face this new threat.
Razorclaws.
Tavi’s warning hadn’t done them justice.
There were three of them, nearly as tall as she was. They moved swiftly, almost delicately on two taloned feet, but their bodies were held nearly upright in grotesque parody of a person’s gait, and balanced by a tail held out rigidly behind them. They were mostly covered in fur-like tawny feathers with darker markings, but their heads and necks were bare, red-scaled skin above a black ruff. Their eyes were golden discs with hairline black slits, their muzzles were long, narrow and topped with bony ridges, with larger equivalents atop their skulls, and their teeth were plentiful and sharp.
However, the features that had named them were tucked up against their chests. Both of their long, well-muscled forelimbs were tipped with three talons as large as those on their hind feet, but the middle claw was hideously enlarged to the size of a dagger, and curved like a sickle. Saana had little doubt one slash could open someone up as effectively as a sar’s longblade, given the ferocious power apparent in the dragons’ limbs.
“Blackcreek!” Saana yelled desperately, not daring to look around, but Bastion was bellowing so loudly as he attacked the other dragon, she had no idea if the sar could hear her. The three razorclaws in front of her hissed angrily, but didn’t retreat. The one on her left crouched slightly, and Saana aimed her spear at it.
The one on her right leaped for her.
Saana screamed, a feral, wordless shout of fear and anger as she stabbed at the beast while scrambling to her left. Her swing came up short and the metal skittered off the tree bark as the dragon landed where she’d been standing a second ago. It swayed its head back from the leaf-shaped blade jabbing at its face, but Saana had to snatch the weapon back around to menace the other one as it made a testing rush towards her. By the Dark Father, the things were fast! The second razorclaw pulled up just out of reach of her weapon and swatted at the spear blade with one of its forelimbs.
Saana pulled the spear back desperately: she couldn’t afford for it to be knocked from her grasp, not when the only other weapon she had was the axe tucked in her belt. She might get the chance to bury that blade into one of their skulls, but the other one would surely have her—
Wait. The other one?
“Behind you!” Chara screamed from above. Saana tried to turn, but she was too late to avoid the third razorclaw, which had circled the tree to pounce on her from behind.
The impact bore her face-first to the floor and knocked the spear from her grasp. There was moss and leaves and dirt in her mouth and a huge, heavy weight on her back keeping her from rising. Her axe was trapped under her. Something clamped down on the back of her helmet and hot, fetid breath gusted around her. She smelled the rancid stink of rotten meat as her face was pushed further into the dirt and then there was a wrenching, a tugging on her back, and she felt the layers of cloth in her coat of nails rip and tear and give as the razorclaw started to dig down towards her spine. She could see the feet of the other dragons coming closer. At any moment one would find a part of her unprotected by armour—like her face or the backs of her legs—or the one on top of her would manage to rip the metal plates aside, and then—
What little breath she had left was driven out of her as something crushed her from above. What had it done? The beast was gurgling now, almost as though it were in pain…
“Fuck! Chief, get up, get up, I think I’ve broken my fucking leg and this thing’s not dead yet!”
Saana managed to
roll out from under the weight on top of her, literally wrenching her helmet free of the jaws gripping it—only they weren’t really gripping it now, and the dragon that had been trying to kill her was laying on its side and twitching, with Chara draped right across it with her leg twisted under her because she’d just jumped out of the fucking tree onto it.
Still two razorclaws left. They’d backed off momentarily, startled by Chara’s unexpected arrival, but were closing in again. Survive.
Saana dived for the spear, clawed it up out of the moss and dead leaves as one of the dragons ran at her snarling, and jabbed desperately with it. Survive.
That razorclaw backed off, but the other one came in immediately and Saana had to switch her focus to it. Survive.
She couldn’t keep this up. Sooner or later she’d slip or be too slow. She had to change the game. She had to trust the Naridans knew what they were talking about.
She batted back the first razorclaw with the spear again, then hurled the weapon at the second. She didn’t wait to see if it hit, she didn’t have time: she pulled her axe from her belt and swung for the first one, already coming for her now she was distracted.
One of those murderous sickle claws swept down across her breastbone as the dragon lunged at her, raking downwards.
The outer cloth layers gave, but the metal plates in the coat of nails held. The razorclaw’s feathered, scaled hide—struck by an axe of Naridan steel powered by all the strength in the right arm of the chief of the Brown Eagle clan—did not.
Her blow took the beast in the ribs and the axe head sank to the shaft into its flank. The dragon screamed and wrenched itself away from her and her weapon, spilling a gout of dark blood onto the forest floor. It lashed out at her again, but weakly, its only concern now to escape.