by Simon Morden
Stanislav was right behind, a shifting mass of pseudopods dragging itself over the last ledge to the unforgiving bleakness of the top.
The clouds roiled and seethed, and there was nowhere else to go. Dalip had brought them all up here. It only remained to see who would descend again.
The knife was hot in his hand, glowing with a blue aurora. Bringing metal up here, in the middle of an electrical storm? What was he thinking?
This. He started to run, not away across the broad shoulder of the summit, but towards Stanislav. He jumped, flinging his arms high, and brought them down again as hard as he possibly could, plunging the blade deep into the central mass. He couldn’t stop himself from falling on to him, turning his head at the last moment but landing square on.
It was like hitting a balloon full of jelly. Soft, yielding, somehow firm and rubbery. It was vile, and even more so as mouths opened up under him to suck him in, tentacles wrapped around him to feed him into the waiting maws.
Dalip let go of the knife, only to find his arm held tight. He kicked hard, then harder still, and the ropes of flesh gripped hardest of all. Eyes flickered at him, reflecting the bright sky. He needed to get away, and yet there was no way of doing so, no way that Mary could intervene without getting trapped herself.
For a moment, one hand was free, and he gouged at an eye. It tried to sink back into the skin, and his fingers followed it, dragging it up from the depths, pulling it away until it was only attached by a thin cord. That seemed to cause Stanislav discomfort, enough that he was lifted clear, then thrown like a discarded toy.
Towards the cliff. He bounced and rattled. The sheer drop behind him yawned, and he teetered, winded, his legs sliding over the edge as he scrabbled for purchase.
The clouds overhead were almost white.
Mary ran to him, reached over his head to grab his boilersuit at the neck, tried to pull him back on to solid ground. That wasn’t what he wanted. Instead, he reached up and fastened his hand on her arm. Her eyes flashed wide and she started to rear away, but he wasn’t going to let go.
Stanislav was right behind her, tentacles flailing across the rocks, dragging himself closer. He was almost within reach, his bright eyes fixed on her legs.
Dalip leaned backwards, planted his feet firmly on the cliff edge, and pushed.
He and Mary tumbled out into space together, just as the lightning spat down, drawn by the irresistible lure of the knife.
31
They fell. Mary, blind and deaf from the sudden explosion of light, felt the wind start to tear at her and the one point of contact with Dalip falter and slip away. She could blink, and that was all. Her skirts tangled into her legs and her hair covered her face. She was bent like a bow, hands and feet above her, spine curved so far she could almost touch her toes.
The ground, when it eventually came, would be very hard. Even the storm-tossed surface of the lake would be enough to shatter her into a thousand pieces.
Then she remembered.
The transformation seemed to take both forever and a mere second. She was falling, then she was flying, time stretching out long enough that she could experience her skin erupting in feathers, the constricting clothes melting away, her hood of hair disappear and all her senses become as sharp as her talons.
She wheeled away from the orange figure fluttering below her.
She remembered again. The raggedy twist of limbs was worth catching, but she’d left it very late. Her wings, hard against the updraught, folded against her body and her neck craned forward. Not so much falling as diving, faster than anything in the sky, able to outrun even the lightning.
Here he came, flailing in the roaring air, closer and closer, and though the lake was topped with white foam fingers that were reaching up to embrace him, she was quicker. Her legs swung down and her claws opened like traps.
They closed around him, a black keratin cage. Now they were both going to strike the water together. She unfurled her wings to their furthest reach, and her dive became an arc. All her flight feathers strained, and her tail spread wide.
Her speed became unfathomable. There was the water, and there was air, and it passed her in a single blur of steel grey. She lifted her legs as high as she could, because she was that close to dragging them, and her precious cargo, through the surf.
And finally, the curve turned upwards. There was a hair’s breadth between her and the rushing ground. Then a hand’s breadth. Then more, but no, here came an obstacle, a wall, Down-made but already ruined by the storm and the vagaries of nature – she soared through the gap and managed to gain enough height to crest the opposite side.
She registered that the top of the tower was on fire, but that was all. Its significance eluded her for a moment, as she dropped down into the valley, speeding up again, standing on one wing to pass through the gorge and up back towards the mountain-top.
Now she slowed, her wings wide as she skipped over the shoulder of rock and into the col behind, down towards the lake shore. She flapped once, twice, to kill her forward movement, then fluttered gently as she lowered Dalip to the ground.
He didn’t move. He lay just as he was placed, flopped, boneless, lifeless, amongst the shale rocks at the water’s edge. She might have killed him, but the blame wouldn’t be hers. He was the one who’d thrown himself backwards over the edge of a cliff, knowing that only one of them could fly. It wasn’t like he’d discussed his plans with her beforehand: if he’d died, it would have been only because she hadn’t quite managed to save him, and with the smallest chance of success at that. He’d known the risks – or at least, decided that using the storm to get rid of Stanislav took priority over his own life.
She turned her head left and right, examining him. Then she reached down and nudged him with her beak. It wasn’t the most sensitive of tools, designed for ripping and tearing: her tongue – what was she supposed to do, tell how he was by licking him? She could smell nothing off him but stale sweat and fear, and he looked … dead.
She changed back. Where had the dress gone? Where did it reappear from? No matter, for she now had hands to wrestle it back under control as the storm crackled its last above her.
‘Dalip? Dalip?’
The tower was properly alight now, burning brightly enough to cast shadows. She felt anxious, but she could only deal with one thing at a time.
She pressed her hand against his cheek. He felt cool, but not cold; that wasn’t a definitive sign of either life or death. She knew there was such a thing as a pulse, but not how to confidently feel for it. His heart was in his chest: she gathered her hair to one side and awkwardly knelt down next to him, pressing her ear to him.
It took her a moment – longer than that, because she held her breath until she struggled to contain it. There was the faint, rhythmic, welcome thud of valves opening and closing. All well and good, but she couldn’t carry him to shelter, out of the wind and the noise.
‘Dalip, you fucking idiot. Wake up.’
She’d seen how it was done on the telly. Her first slap was pathetic, weak and tentative. Her second was barely better, but she didn’t want to be out there all night, so she gave enough to make her palm sting.
His eyes opened, and he caught her wrist before she could backhand him too.
‘You hit me.’
‘You pulled me backwards off a fucking mountain.’
He blinked. ‘Did it work?’
‘How the fuck should I know? If I go back up there to check, I’m going to get fried by the storm too, right?’
Dalip screwed his face up. ‘Everything hurts.’
‘The tower’s on fire. I don’t know what that means.’
‘The geomancer?’
‘I don’t know! This isn’t exactly flying weather, is it?’
He reached up and hooked her neck. He did two things, at the same time: pull her down, and tw
ist his body on top of her.
Claws raked the stones beside them, raising a shower of flinty sparks. Then they were gone, away and into the night.
‘Bell disagrees,’ he said, searching the sky for her.
Mary threw him off, and he was too weak to stop her.
‘It was always going to come to this, wasn’t it?’ A flash of movement on the cliff face caught her attention. A long neck, a long tail, broad leathery wings against the rock, then out again into clear air. ‘Fuck. She’s coming back.’
‘What, precisely, do you want me to do about that?’ He raised himself to a half-crouch, but seemed to lack the strength to go any further.
‘Run?’
‘Where? How?’
She couldn’t spot Bell any more. Dalip was right: he couldn’t do anything, but she could. She coiled her legs under her and leapt. With a strong sweep of her wings, she was aloft in amongst the turbulence. Her sight, pin-sharp, spotted her quarry immediately. Out over the castle and heading straight for her.
She flapped hard, building momentum. Someone was playing chicken with an East End girl, and she was determined not to flinch. They closed on each other, and at the last moment, she drew in her wings and turned her whole body. For the brief second of contact, they slashed at each other, and then they were apart, the distance between them widening.
Mary turned the right way up and banked hard, wheeling around the blazing tower and heading back towards the lake.
Here came Bell again, dead ahead, jaws wide, feet raised to strike. And again, Mary flipped over and tried to close her claws on something substantial. Missed. Gone.
They could do this all night until one of them made a mistake, this passing joust. Most likely, because she was less familiar with her skin, it would be Mary who would fall. So she had to change the game. What could she do better than a dragon?
Rather than fly at her – she could see Bell lining up her next pass – she started to climb. The dragon tried to match her, but flew harmlessly underneath.
Mary dipped a wing and gave chase.
The shallow dive she put herself in took her to within touching distance of Bell’s scaly back. Bell’s serpentine head twisted around and a slight adjustment left Mary with nothing beneath her but the speeding ground. She pulled up, turned in a tight circle and set off after her again.
Now this, this was what she was good at, the dive and strike. She was faster and more manoeuvrable, and the dragon’s drum-taut wings, already ragged and lacy at the edges from the previous battle they’d had, were particularly vulnerable. As long as she could stay away from those teeth and keep the fight in the air, she might even win.
She flapped hard, drawing up behind. Bell put some effort into jinking left and right, and Mary overshot. She angled her wings and rose almost effortlessly up again. The dragon stayed closer to the ground than her. Perhaps she was afraid of the lightning. With good reason, too, but the storm seemed to have blown itself out against the twin mountains and was grumbling away over the plains behind. Having claimed one victim, perhaps it was sated. Mary risked a little more, and a little more than that.
Bell looped the tower and started back towards the lake, earnestly pushing air with great beats of her wings. Mary angled her flight and began her descent.
Dalip, doggedly crawling back towards the castle, was directly in the dragon’s path.
Mary folded her wings and dove down.
There was a moment when she thought she’d be too late, that the dragon would get Dalip because he had nowhere to hide. That moment passed because her approach was both furious and unnoticed. She dipped down with her claws even as Bell did with hers, but it was the bird’s talons that struck first, tightening around the bat-like forelimb, puncturing the leathery membrane and dragging the great beast off-course.
She let go and skimmed the lake to kill her speed. Behind her, the dragon pinwheeled into the ground, bouncing once, twice, and skipping into the water like a spinning stone. The ruined wings spread out over the surface, the sinuous body thrashed, and then it began to sink.
Mary was flying directly at the cliff. She had no room to bank left or right: instead, she flew up, almost to the top, before flipping over and circling back around. Dalip was still struggling over the loose rocks towards the collapsed gatehouse, but he stopped for a moment as she flew overhead and raised his hand to her.
She turned at the tower, taking a good long look at it. The upper floor was burning – all the wood was alight, with fire jetting out of not just the windows, but gaps in the roof where supporting beams had collapsed underneath. The balcony was simply a forest of flame, and nothing in the room beyond was going to survive. Whether Mama, Elena and Luiza had escaped was something to find out soon, but it was going to have to wait for just a moment longer.
Mary flew back down to the lake, settling her huge clawed feet into the damp grit at its edge. She waited, and was rewarded by the crown of blonde hair surfacing just beyond the shallows. Bell coughed and choked, her tattered dress rising up around her like a pale moon. Mary changed too, confident that, if it was needed, she could call on the rocks around her to defend her.
‘I knew I hadn’t killed you.’
Bell slowly waded towards the shore. Her left arm hung uselessly by her side, a kink in her forearm the reason why.
‘You bitch,’ said Bell. ‘You’ve ruined everything.’
It wasn’t what Mary expected to hear. She had a right to be angry, but to be so resolutely, stupidly, stubborn? ‘I don’t get it, and I don’t get you. Why won’t you just give up?’
‘It would have worked.’ Bell kept coming. The splashing water was up to Bell’s knees, then her shins, now her ankles. ‘It would have worked if it hadn’t been for you.’
‘Your plan? To scare open a door back to London? Fucking hell, mate: we’ve had the shit scared out of us so many times tonight, it’s pretty obvious it’s never going to work.’
Bell was getting uncomfortably close, her feet slipping on the loose rock just under the surface.
‘Everything had to be just right. And it was, until you showed up.’ She was a miserable sight, her dress all but falling off her, rags held together by a few stitches. White and gold cloth, once rich, like her, just dropping away, piece by piece.
‘Was that … Was that a wedding dress?’
They were face to face.
Bell wiped the water out of her eyes. ‘Yes. It was mine.’
‘You just happened to be wearing it, when, what? You were attacked by bears or something?’
‘Don’t pretend to understand. Don’t pretend to know what it’s like, to be married off, like some prize cow.’
‘Okay. I don’t know what that’s like. But fucking hell, whatever happened to you, why can’t you just leave us alone? You’ve done all this – all this, everything – to yourself. By behaving like a, a …’
‘A dragon.’
Crows was a snake, sneaky and slippery. Stanislav had been whatever he’d become, that primal chaos she’d first witnessed down by the lake that lay at the heart of everyone. Bell was a dragon, cruel and hard. And she, she was an eagle. What did that say about her?
‘Sounds like some bloke had a lucky escape.’
‘If I could, I’d—’
‘What? Hit me? Is that it? Is that all you have?’ Mary leaned in. ‘It’s your answer to everything, and you’ve got nothing left.’
‘I have everything,’ said Bell. ‘I still have everything.’
‘You can’t keep us here. Your guards are gone, you’ve lost all your maps and all your weird cog-machines. You’ve got what you stand up in, and that’s even less than me.’
‘You thought you’d beaten me on the mountain, and then in the tower, and now, here. You’re wrong. You’re so very wrong.’
Mary shrugged and rather than using her fists again, she t
urned away. ‘It doesn’t matter what you think, I don’t have to do this any more. We’ve won the right to walk away from the crazy girl.’
‘Come back. Come back here. I order you.’
Mary raised her middle finger.
The air behind her puffed out, like something huge was suddenly present.
She knew what it was. She raised her hands and dragged the darkness out of the sky so that when she confronted the dragon, it had no idea of where she was. Its wounded wing dragged across the ground, the wing-tip claw scraping up the stones into a ridge. Mary should have been in plain sight; there was nothing sophisticated about her hiding, yet the dragon couldn’t see her. It turned its smooth scaled head this way and that, in darting movements, and it tasted the air with its forked tongue.
Mary stepped forward, reached up and took hold of the broken wing beyond the fracture. She gave it a tug, and found herself holding a pale, limp arm. Bell staggered and fell, barking her knees on the stones, putting her good hand down in amongst the shale. She retched and heaved. The pain had to be overwhelming.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary. She was, too. This brought her no pleasure, and though it was necessary, she felt ashamed for having to do it. ‘You have to stop.’
‘I will not.’ Bell hissed through clenched teeth. She tried to get up, shivering through the cold and pain. ‘I win. I win every time. I take what I want. I’m born to rule. This is my destiny. I decide what happens, not some grubby half-caste whore.’
Mary spun Bell around so she was facing the lake again and, letting go of the arm, she shoved her hands into the woman’s back. She stumbled forward and into the water, the splash closing over her head before she half-heartedly raised herself again.
Mary walked into the water after her, and kicked her backside hard enough to send her sprawling again.
‘Is that it? You can’t stand being beaten by some common street-kid? If I talked posh and was dripping with diamonds, it wouldn’t be so bad? You think I should be kissing your arse instead of kicking it? Or are you just fucking nuts because you know you should have stayed in London and told your parents to fuck off? When did it happen? Before or after the wedding?’