by Paul Stewart
Suddenly, from behind her, Zar heard a growl rise in Asa’s throat and felt a hand grip her shoulder and push her violently forward. She stumbled, fell. Her kinlance clattered to the floor just out of reach. She looked over her shoulder to see the kinboy, Kesh, his own lance in his hands, grinning down at her. Behind him, his wyrme Azura, another scarred and ancient female, had her claws poised at Asa’s throat, and Zar could see the helpless anger in his glowing amber eyes.
Kesh sniggered unpleasantly. ‘So you heard them too,’ he said. He spoke in the language of the great whitewyrmes, but his voice was guttural, challenging. ‘Allow me to introduce my kin. Finn, Baal, Timon, Ramilles,’ he said, gesturing to each of the four riders in turn. ‘This,’ he announced to them, ‘is Hep-zi-bar.’ He broke up her name like he always did, like it was something derisory. ‘Or Zar for short.’
Behind him, Kesh’s wyrme Azura greeted the other wyrmes in the soft clicking sighs of wyrmetongue, so much more resonant in the mouths of the great whitewyrmes than their riders.
‘Avaar, Amir, Aakhen, Aluris . . .’
The ancient females bowed their sinuous necks in turn, their eyes glowing a deep yellow.
Zar climbed slowly to her feet. The wyrmes suited the scale of the cavernous chamber, while she felt horribly small and vulnerable before them. And her face coloured as she looked at the wyrmekin in their yellow-tinged soulskin, who were staring back at her. At the one called Finn, with his dull hooded eyes and sticking-out ears. And at Baal, with his shock of black hair. At Timon, who had thin lips and small dark eyes that were impossible to read. And the one called Ramilles, who was bigger than the others, taller, brawnier, but whose face was hidden inside his yellow-stained soulskin hood.
She glanced back at Kesh. The gathering light gleamed on his jawline, his cheekbones, his greasy red hair.
He stepped forward and shoved Zar hard in the chest. Off balance, she staggered backwards, onto the upraised palms of Baal, who shoved her again. She tottered forwards, and this time it was Finn who pushed her away, shoving her at Timon. Like a bean in a hot skillet she bounced backwards, forwards, sideways, to and fro across the circle, hands pushing her away whenever she came close.
She felt dizzy. Weightless. Each time she was shoved, it jolted. But Hepzibar did not cry out. She would not give them the satisfaction. She clamped her lips together and kept her head held high, which only seemed to encourage Kesh and his friends in this rough game of theirs.
As she was thrown against Kesh, she looked up and smiled. ‘Coward,’ she whispered.
With an animal snarl, Kesh pushed her viciously away from him. She hurtled across the floor and struck Ramilles with such force that he was knocked backwards, breaking the circle. His hood fell back, and for a moment Hepzibar stared into his face. Blush-red cheeks. Curly black hair. Blue eyes – blue eyes that stared back at her with a curious mixture of pity and guilt, and admiration for her refusal to be provoked.
Ramilles did not shove her away. Instead he held her steady for a moment, then bent down and picked up her kinlance, which lay at his feet. He handed it to her and glanced over at Kesh for a moment, then back at her.
‘Any friend of Kesh,’ he said, his wyrmetongue softer and more lilting than Kesh’s, ‘is a friend of mine.’
Zar stepped back, gripping her lance and breathing heavily. There was contempt in Ramilles’ voice – Zar could hear it – but as she looked across at Kesh, she realized that the contempt was not directed at her.
A shaft of bright sunlight was streaming into the galleries and catching the kinboy’s red hair. Zar smiled at Kesh and was gratified to see him flinch at her gaze as if she’d struck him.
‘I’ll leave you to get reacquainted with your friends,’ she said.
Nine
Over the next few days, other wyrmes and their kin had started to arrive. Many of them. The once silent galleries now sighed and chittered with wyrmetongue.
There were whitewyrmes coiled round the spiral columns of the cavernous central chamber, their riders crouched beneath, conversing in low voices. Others stood in small groups around the walls, the wyrmes inclining their necks and wreathing the kin beside them in coils of aromatic smoke.
Zar made her way across the sandstrewn floor, with Asa, nervous and excited, skittish at her side. They snatched glances at the faces of the strange new arrivals, careful not to let their gaze rest too long, wary of drawing attention to themselves. Zar looked down, and she noticed her soulskin, so white and unsullied compared with those worn by the kin around her.
They had come from all parts of the weald, these wyrmekin, brought here by their wyrmes, who had answered Aseel’s call. And their suits of soulskin – fashioned from the sloughed skin of their individual whitewyrmes – bore the scars of the arduous journeys they had so recently endured. They looked around now. Bemused. Intrigued. None of them had ever seen this place before; a place their wyrmes had been excluded from when they had kinned with them.
Just ahead of her, a large wyrme exhaled a cloud of breath over her kin, a long-limbed youth with spiky blond hair, and Zar watched as the twisting smoke mended his torn and tattered sleeve, restoring it to pristine whiteness as it did so.
Within hours of their arrival, the soulskins of all these kin would be as white as Zar’s. But she only had to look into their eyes to know that they had been through things she could hardly even imagine. Beside her, she heard Asa chirr softly.
‘There are so many of them,’ he said, his yellow eyes glowing brightly.
Zar’s gaze fell upon two kingirls who had arrived from the jagged ridges a couple of days earlier. Their hair was up, pinned into place with forked slivers of bone, and each of them had a thick black band of sootgrease smeared across their faces from ear to ear, covering their eyes like masks. She watched as they scrutinized their reflections in a shard of polished silverstone and carefully applied fresh grease to their faces with the tips of their fingers.
One of them looked up, her eyes starkwhite against the black mask. Zar quickly looked away, her stomach fluttering.
Above the kingirls, their sleek wyrmes – two young males with daubed black patterns encircling their necks – were wound drowsily round the fluted pillars. Zar and Asa walked past them, their heads down.
Three more kingirls, who had come from the saltflats to the west the day before, stood in the centre of the chamber. They wore lengths of curved willowbark strapped to their feet, that protected their soulskin from the corrosive salt of their territory, but which here in the wyrme gallery clacked on the stone floors. Their wyrmes were old battle-scarred males; one with a splintered foreclaw, another with a jagged tear to his wingtip.
At the base of the columns next to them were four kin from the black pinnacles. They had arrived at the wyrme galleries close on the heels of Kesh’s friends from the yellow peaks. Three kingirls, their hair a mass of thin dark plaits, and an older man, who was short and wiry and, it seemed to Zar, never smiled. Their wyrmes – three young males and an older female – were wild-eyed and nervous-looking, and spent most of their time with their long serpentine necks bowed, deep in hushed conversation. Now, though, as Zar and Asa passed by, the wyrmes fell silent and watched them warily until they were out of earshot.
Arriving at the end of the chamber, Zar and Asa stepped between the fluted columns and out onto the broad ledge beyond. They looked up to see two whitewyrmes, riders upon their backs, gliding down through the sky towards the wyrme galleries on rigid outstretched wings.
As they came closer, Zar saw that one kin was a youth with dark hair; the other, a girl, had her hood up and what looked like a coil of rope over one shoulder. Both of them had a kinlance tucked under their arm that glinted in the early morning sun. Ruddering with their tails and judging the strength of the air currents with the barbels at the corners of their mouths, the two whitewyrmes came in to land on the largest of the
jutting rockslabs that lined the ledge.
Zar stepped forwards nervously, aware of Asa trembling at her side. She looked up at the two kin as they slipped from the shoulders of their wyrmes and jumped down deftly onto the ledge in front of her and Asa.
‘Welcome,’ she said, and heard the quaver in her voice.
The kingirl pushed back her hood to reveal a mass of long flaxen hair. She dropped down on one knee till her face was level with Zar’s, and Zar was struck by how beautiful she was, with her dark indigo eyes and golden skin.
‘I am Mara. And my companion here is Keel,’ she said, nodding towards the dark-haired youth. ‘And who are you, little one?’
‘This is Zar,’ came a voice. ‘And I am Thrace, from the speckled stacks of the valley country to the east. It was my wyrme, Aseel, who sent out the call.’
Zar and Asa turned to see Thrace standing behind them, her soulskin a dazzling white in the morning sun and fragrant with wyrmesmoke. Her corn-silver hair gleamed and her skin was radiant. Only the delicate smudges of blue below her eyes betrayed the strain she was under.
The black-haired kin looked at Thrace, his eyes as dark and penetrating as his partner’s. ‘The call took time to reach us,’ he told her. ‘Our territory is far to the south – the grasslands where the greywyrmes breed.’ He shook his head. ‘Kith gangs have been raiding the wyrmetrails to the east and the herds are thin in number this season.’
Zar and Asa exchanged glances. Each of the wyrmes and their kin had arrived with similar tales to tell.
‘There are reports of gangs in the saltflats,’ Thrace told them. ‘And of scouting parties ranging from the black pinnacles to the yellow peaks.’ Her brow furrowed and, as she continued, a hard edge came into her voice. ‘And as for the speckled stacks, they have been overrun, and the wyves of the great whitewyrmes that had been laid there are lost.’ She swept her arm round in a wide arc. ‘The colony has abandoned this place,’ she said.
Keel tutted grimly, his dark eyes smouldering.
‘But we shall not,’ Thrace added defiantly. ‘That is why Aseel has called you.’
The kingirl, Mara, straightened up. ‘When the fullwinter snows thawed and the returning greywyrmes were so few in number, we went off in search of the cause. And we found it,’ she said, her voice hushed. ‘In the passes through the grey mountains. Entire herds, slaughtered and left to rot, and for nothing more than their flameoil.’
Asa growled deep down in his throat and twists of smoke rose up from his quivering nostrils. Zar reached out and laid a hand on his neck.
‘That was when we saw the kin of the yellow peaks flying high overhead,’ Mara continued, her grip tightening on her kinlance, ‘and they passed on your wyrme’s call. So we came.’
‘And Aseel and I thank you for that,’ Thrace told her.
Mara and Keel looked around at the gathered wyrmes and their kin. Behind them, their own wyrmes chittered softly to one another, their eyes amber-flushed with expectation.
‘Up until now we have defended our own territories, and hunted those kith who have encroached upon them,’ Thrace went on. ‘But now they are too numerous to resist. Unless we act as one.’
‘But that is not the kin way,’ Mara objected, and her wyrme inclined his head and opened his jaws.
‘We have always hunted the kith down when and where we’ve found them,’ he breathed huskily. ‘Seeking to deter others from following in their wake . . .’
‘Yet, unlike kith,’ the female wyrme broke in, ‘we have never gloried in death and destruction for its own sake.’ She looked across at the male wyrme, then back at Thrace. ‘What you are proposing will mean a great and terrible price shall be paid by the kith when our kin’s’ – she hesitated – ‘bloodfrenzy is awakened.’ The wyrme’s voice was as soft as rain plashing on screefall, but insistent. ‘Are you prepared for that, Thrace of the speckled stacks?’
Thrace trembled, and as the wyrme’s eyes glowed a deepening red she could not hold her gaze. Zar saw the muscles in the kingirl’s cheeks twitch as her jaws ground hard together.
‘It is something we must all decide,’ Thrace said at length, and she turned and walked away.
Ten
Zar followed Asa up the dark sloping passageway, trailing her fingertips along the clawscratch lines and interlocking circles carved into the walls. The shadows receded behind them, and they emerged into dazzling sunlight.
It was silent, and the heatshimmer air was still. For a moment, Zar thought they were the only ones up there at the top of the wyrme galleries. But then Asa inclined his long neck and Zar turned to see her friend, Thrace.
She was at the far side of the great flat clifftop, staring out across the scrubland towards the mountain ridges far beyond. She was alone.
Zar suddenly felt as if they were intruding and she turned to Asa, who nodded. The pair of them were on the point of slipping away when Thrace spoke.
‘Bloodfrenzy,’ she said. Her voice was soft and soughing. ‘It is not in the nature of the great whitewyrmes . . .’
Zar and Asa exchanged glances.
‘But it is in the nature of humans.’
She paused and turned. Her dark eyes were stormy and intense. ‘Which is why, when they sought a means to fight back against the human invasion of their lands, the most far-sighted of the whitewyrmes kinned with us.’
Thrace returned her gaze to the distant mountains.
‘You see, we wyrmekin are theirs. Body and soul. They find us, the lost or abandoned children of their enemies, and they raise and nurture us. They teach us their ways and their speech. They offer us the gift of flight on their backs, and banish all fear from our lives . . .’
Zar and Asa crossed the clifftop and stood beside Thrace at the edge of the precipitous drop.
‘And in return, we show them how to kill.’
She looked down, and Zar saw how Thrace’s lower lip trembled. When Thrace spoke again, her windsigh voice had taken on a hard edge, as though a gale was approaching.
‘Not as a whitewyrme kills,’ she said, ‘for food – quickly, cleanly. But as humans do. With cunning and cruelty and a lust for destruction. A frenzy for’ – Thrace paused for a moment – ‘blood.’
She turned away and stared back into the vastness of the weald. Her hair hung down over her face.
‘When I think of what Aseel and I are capable of, what all of us kin and wyrmes, acting together, might be capable of . . .’ Thrace bit her lip. ‘It frightens me, Zar, and yet I can see no other way.’
Zar reached out to take Thrace’s hand, but the older kingirl flinched at her touch, shrugged her away.
‘I need to talk to Aseel,’ Thrace said, her voice constricted and thin. ‘Find Aseel for me.’
Zar and Asa left her standing on the cliff-edge, head bowed, back pokerstraight, kinlance gripped in her hands, and headed back down into the galleries. They descended through the high-ceilinged chambers, with their grooved pillars and slanting shadows now occupied by wyrmes and their kin who quietly tended to them.
Some kin were oiling their wyrmes’ feet; others were holding out grubs on the end of their lances for their wyrmes to toast with fiery breath, while still more sat beneath the pillars around which their wyrmes were coiled, and conversed in quiet whispers of wyrmetongue.
There was no sign of Aseel.
Zar and Asa took care to avoid the chamber Kesh and Azura and the yellow peaks kin had made their own, and took the sloping clawscratch tunnel down to the store chambers beneath. At the arched entrance to the stores, Asa craned his neck forward into the darkness and exhaled softly.
Flamelight flickered on the walls as they entered.
It was the first time Zar had been down here since halfsummer had filled the weald outside with such an abundance of fresh food. It was cooler than she remembered, and she had forgotten the sweetsour fr
agrance of smoke and vinegar that laced the air. The ceiling towered far above her head; the walls were rough-hewn and unadorned.
Zar looked at Asa, and the wyrme nodded. They should go a little further.
They crossed the floor of the cavernous underground chamber, the shifting air echoing softly with the sounds of the wyrme galleries above. They walked along the broad storage grooves gouged into the rock that ran the length of the underground cavern, where leathergrubs and flame-dried meat lay stacked in geometric patterns; they picked their way between the deep brine pits cut out of the rock floor and containing pickled stipplebeet and soused damselfly larvae.
Zar paused and peered down into one of the pits. These stores, carefully stocked by the colony, then abandoned, had kept her and Asa alive through that last bitter fullwinter, and she silently gave thanks to the greatwyrmes before continuing.
At the far end of the cavern, they came to a tunnel that led down even deeper below the store chambers. Despite spending the whole of fullwinter in the wyrme galleries, Zar had never ventured beyond this point. The inky blackness of the tunnel had always intimidated her, and did so now, even with Asa beside her.
The young whitewyrme cocked his head to one side, barbels quavering. He stared down the tunnel, then back at her.
‘Can you hear it?’
Zar listened, then frowned. She could hear something. Her skin clammed up and goosebumped with unease, and she was relieved to have Asa with her.
Wyrmesounds. Soft breathy whispers. Chittering, like a soft breeze blowing through riverreeds.
Asa turned to Zar, his eyes glowing amber. There were wyrmes down there somewhere, and they were talking. Asa closed his jaws and the flamebreath was extinguished, plunging them into pitch darkness. Zar reached out and took her wyrme’s claw in one hand, and Asa led her down the tunnel.