One step at a time, moving carefully, Rathien crept forwards. The stone beneath his boots was greasy with lichen and rainwater.
He couldn’t see the far end of the bridge. He could barely see a dozen feet ahead of him. As he went, an eerie sense of travelling without moving overtook him. He took a step, and then another, but nothing seemed to change. The stone was the same dank, mottled grey; the sky the same morass of gently churning vapour.
It was almost silent. His footfalls were muffled, though there were deep, rolling booms from somewhere far below him. The mountains were always making some noise or other, like a creaking hold of a giant ship.
Rathien took a deep breath, feeling the wet air in his lungs as he pulled it in deep. It smelled clean. It had the raw abrasiveness of snow-washed rock, of old mosses, of sea-born winds stiff with brine.
But there was something else there, something his Caledorian senses were quick to pick up where others might not have. An undertow of something more earthy, more elemental.
He smiled and pressed on. His heart was beginning to beat harder. His face still throbbed with pain, and he could feel the skin tightening up. The black marks left by the chimera were permanent and he knew they would scar him forever.
That didn’t concern him. In a strange way, he had come to relish having them. They were a mark of the change in him, the mark of his passage from one world into another.
Ahead of him, the mist parted slightly, revealing the end of the stone bridge. It was hard to know how far he’d walked. It must have been over a hundred yards, up into the heavens like a god of myth.
A shallow incline ran from the bridge’s end, a mix of gravel and loose rock from the peaks above. Beyond that was an opening in the stone cliff. An immense dolmen, dank and blotched with dull orange lichen, formed a doorway into the mountain. On all sides of the narrow ledge, the rockface soared away, both up and down.
As Rathien approached the doorway, he saw writing on the face of the lintel. Some of it was eltharin. Other sections, more badly faded by the passage of time, were in anoqeyån, the obscure tongue understood only by the loremasters.
He stood for a moment, his cloak lifting in the wind, reading the warnings, panegyrics and hymns carved there.
As he did so, his pulse quickened. There were curls of smoke at his feet, darker and more pungent than the mist that surrounded it.
He knelt, and closed his eyes. His hands touched the earth.
Then, slowly, working hard to remember the words of power, fragments of a language more ancient even than those on the lintel, words which had once been part of the only tongue of any kind spoken in the world, he began to speak.
There was a mind, older than the bones of the mountain in which it slumbered. It glowed in the dark like an ember, almost cold, red-brown against infinite dark.
No thoughts stirred in that mind. No movement registered against the cloak of dull, dormant shadow. It was on the hinterland between life and death, the grey shade-realm between energy and inertia.
It had lingered there for centuries. Perhaps longer. It was deep in the great sleep, buried faster than pearls in the lightless trenches of the ocean.
There was no self. No presence. No heartbeat, no breath.
Just a faint glow, ash-warm in the heart of the darkness.
It didn’t sleep as a mortal slept. A mortal mind dreamed. A mortal mind expected awakening. Mortal flesh twitched and moved, stirring in advance of the dawn.
This sleep was a finger’s breadth from oblivion. It was the sleep of an intelligence that did not expect to see the dawn. It had seen so many that the rotation of night and day, year on year, had ceased to be any more meaningful than the void in which it lingered.
It was the sleep of vastness, the sleep of a being whose age had passed in flame and for which the residual world was a fragile ghost-image.
Rathien reached out, gingerly extending the flicker of light that was his own mind. For a moment, there was something. A stirring, a sigh, a wisp of air.
Then nothing. The mind was cold.
The world was not his own. Stars in the sky wheeled, burning like shards of frost on a velvet ground.
They were not stars he knew. They were younger, fiercer.
There were shapes against the stars. Wings flashed out, veined and splayed, sweeping down through the air of ancient nights.
The wings passed over primordial seas, dark and deep. Over mountains, lit only by the starlight. Over plains, jewel-hard and smooth like glass.
There were more of them than birds. Great flocks of them, barring the diamond light of the heavens.
No, not flocks.
Herds? Gatherings?
There were no words in eltharin for what he was seeing. There were no colours in that place, only light and dark.
Wings beat over dead earth. No sound but the beat of those wings, leathery and heavy. It was pure. A dreadful, severe purity. Saurian intelligences moved across the unlit lands, indulging in unearthly duels and following inscrutable policies, masters of ash and bare rock.
Only light and dark.
They had done this for millennia.
The mind that had been Rathien’s wavered, weakened by the vision. He knew there was something missing, but he’d lost the words to describe it. He knew this world no longer existed, but he had no idea what had taken its place.
Somewhere close by, his body endured.
The magic still pulsed, throbbing like a heart.
And the mind before him, the mind that lay in shadow but had existed for uncounted aeons in a world of flame and war, stirred.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They burst out from the waves like the tentacles of some gigantic monster, writhing and snapping in a flurry of foam. But the churning tendrils were not aspects of a single living thing; they were individuals, great serpents of terrible power and speed, driven up from their icy homes by the unbound magic raging through the waters.
“To the rails!” roared Valaris, marshalling the Sword Masters and hurrying to take up his own place.
Trumpets blared from the lead vessels, but in truth there was no need to sound the alarm. The sea had turned from a placid, white-tipped paradise into a boiling, seething maelstrom of violence. The wind itself was whipped up into a violent rage by the onset of the serpents and the hawkships plunged and rolled through the growing swell.
They had raced out of the south, coursing across the waves and leaping high into the air. They were huge creatures, each at least four times as long as the Tiranien and with necks over twenty feet in diameter. Their long, dark green torsos were scaled and shiny, crowned with a spinal ridge of barbed spikes. Every movement they made gave away the sleek musculature beneath the hard outer skin. They were masters of their realm, and swarmed up from the waters with a frightening speed and power.
Valaris grabbed his blade and unsheathed it. The deck pitched and yawed wildly, nearly throwing him over. Up in the rigging, sailors frantically tried to furl the sails in as the winds howled into a gale. Sword Masters thronged along the railings at the edge of the deck, their faces set like flint carvings, calmly adjusting their stance and waiting for the first of the serpents to come among them.
Anlia stood in the prow alongside Valaris. Her hair streamed out behind her, lashing in the wind.
“What is this, girl?” demanded Valaris, watching grimly as the swarm of sea snakes raced towards them.
“They are drawn by the magic,” said Anlia grimly. “They will not suffer us to approach the fulcrum.”
The lead serpent reared up out of the sea, exposing its gaping jaws. A sleek reptilian face leered at them for an instant, showering water over itself in a dazzling cascade before plunging back down below the surface. Its body followed it down in a long arc, sliding through the waves with an eerie, frictionless ease.
“Do something about this,” snapped Valaris, grabbing hold of a line of rigging and bracing for the coming impacts. “And do it now.”
But it was
too late. The serpents swept among the ships, surging into their midst like a pack of wolves tearing into a flock of prey animals. They went dazzlingly fast, hurtling along in the flurry of spray and swell, corkscrewing and darting through the walls of moving water.
As soon as they came within range, arrows flew at them from the hawkships. Archers had climbed into the rigging and hung precariously, legs braced and locked around the cords.
The darts enraged the beasts further. Those that were hit issued a strange bellowing cry of pain, and dived down to avoid the onslaught. Others reared up from the water, their snakelike jaws snapping in fury before lunging back towards the ships.
The masters of the hawkships were phenomenal sailors, able to swing their vessels round in the tightest of curves. Some of them managed to veer around the serpents’ attack, using their momentum running down the mountainous waves to shoot clear before hauling back round to let the archers loose more shots.
Others were less lucky. As Valaris watched, a brute of a serpent shot up from the depths almost vertically, spearing close to the Ramortien. Its body rippled as it emerged, shedding water as it powered into the air. Arrows flew at it, but did nothing to halt its progress.
Its long body arced over the reeling vessel before hurtling down on the far side of the ship. The head cleared the end of the decking and dived back into the waves. Then, like a bridge collapsing under its own weight, the great scaly torso crashed down on to the middle of the hawkship, smashing the wood beneath and toppling the rear mast.
Sword Masters on the ship raced to hack at the exposed flesh, using their long blades to devastating effect. The glossy skin broke open, carved into ribbons by the expert blows. Oblivious to its wounds, the serpent slid on, dragging the ship over on to its side.
With a huge, lingering crack, the hull split open. Water gushed up from the breach, pearl-white and furious, washing away the warriors still trying to close in on the serpent’s body. For a moment longer, the hawkship somehow stayed afloat. Valaris saw desperate crewmembers leaping from the rigging and into the churning waters below.
Then it broke in two, severed by the serpent’s cutting movement. The line of dark green scales sunk beneath the sea, dragging the remnants of the ship down with it. Cries of terror were just audible over the tumult as the crew were sucked into the whirlpool of destruction. In a cacophony of creaks and snaps, the remaining masts broke apart, toppling like trees and sending up plumes of foam as they crashed into the water.
The serpent’s tail flicked contemptuously, and then was gone. In its wake lay nothing but broken spars, ripped sailcloth, and blood hanging in the water.
By then other ships were being attacked. The entire flotilla was under assault, tormented and harried by the huge, deadly creatures of the deep.
Valaris spun round to face Anlia, and his face was livid.
“Use your magic!” he demanded. “Destroy them!”
But Anlia didn’t look back at him. She remained perched over the prow gazing keenly into the south. The serpents seemed almost irrelevant to her.
“They are beyond me,” she said. “Order the master to maintain speed and course.”
Only then did she look at him, and there was something like excitement in her eyes.
“We are almost upon it,” she said. “Bring me to the fulcrum, my lord, and I shall yet deliver us all.”
He opened his eyes. He was shivering uncontrollably.
He was crouched over, his head on the stone, shaking against the ground.
Pain had woken him, the pain of ice snaking over his limbs. His skin was cracked and bleeding, rigid with the cold.
In all the pain, he didn’t remember his name for some time. When it came to him, his lips were too parched and blackened to say it.
Rathien. My name was Rathien en elien Morvenna. I was alive.
And he was still alive, though only barely. The wind tore at him, ravaging his tortured flesh. He couldn’t move. He was clenched tight, locked in a rictus of shivering, agonising cold.
When the shadow passed over him, he couldn’t lift his head to watch it. He could hear roaring, the constant thunder of the wind.
Then there was a sudden burst of something as hot as molten lead, rolling back the mists and bathing the mountainside in violent orange.
It hurt even worse, the warmth. Rathien felt his limbs scream in protest, unable any longer to tell the different between extreme cold and extreme heat.
There was more of it, coursing out and washing over him until it seemed the air had turned into a sea of magma.
The warmth allowed him to scream from his own lips. He rolled over, still screaming, wrapped in the cloak he’d worn in Lothern, over and over in the mud.
There was something in the air above him, out over the bridge. The sound of leather thrusting against air rolled over him, repetitive and heavy. Everything stank of hot metal.
He pushed himself up on to all fours, and his elbows and knees felt as if they had been impaled with rusty pins.
Rathien stopped screaming, and tried to look up.
There was no mist around him. There were no shifting clouds of vapour. The sky was open, burned clear by columns of vivid flame.
In the distance there were shouts of alarm. Voices he recognised were whooping and crying out, whether from joy or terror he couldn’t tell.
He had no idea how long he’d been out. His belly was yawningly empty. The pain made him groggy and nauseous. He was still seized by shivering, even though the air was now as hot as a blacksmith’s forge.
Rathien only had time for one glance upwards before he passed out again. It was a single glimpse, a blurred impression of what he’d done. Then his body gave up, wracked with talons of agony.
His face crunched against the gravel as he fell. His cloak sunk over his body like a shroud. He was dying again, just as he had done before.
But this time, like any mortal of the earth, he knew he would live to see another sunrise.
Magic was everywhere, rippling in the air, thrumming in the earth. It would sustain him, just as it had already done.
And he had the vision now, the vision of what he had done.
The sky!
He had seen it. He had witnessed the creation of the storm of magic.
The sky!
He didn’t feel the hands come for him, dragging him back across the bridge. That, like so much else during his ordeal on the mountain, was forgotten and never recovered. But the vision remained, the sight of his accomplishment.
More, much more than he’d dared to dream.
More, much more than had been done for thousands of years.
The sky was full of dragons!
CHAPTER EIGHT
Another ship went down, smashed apart and dragged to the bottom of the sea. A swarm of serpents rolled and pounced in its wake, sweeping up the struggling mariners within their serrated jaws before diving down into the icy depths.
Huge waves crashed against the sides of the Tiranien, threatening to dash it apart before the creatures could complete their deadly assault. Noreth steered the vessel with impeccable skill, weaving at full tilt through the cracked and listing hulls of other ships. He had already evaded the attacks of half a dozen sea snakes, judging their angles of attack to perfection and making use of every last breath of wind in his ragged sails.
Time was running out though, even for him. The flotilla was being torn apart. Ahead of them, the ocean boiled with fury. There was no escape.
Anlia smiled, and breathed in the raw energy all around her. Her pulse was fast and heavy, and her palms ached from effort of withholding the potency within. She felt intoxicated by the mix of aethyric currents whirling around her.
She knew, as none of the rest of the crew could know, that they had reached their destination. The onrush of the serpents had failed to prevent them. Now the fulcrum was within range and her strength was magnified a thousandfold.
“The storm has broken,” she whispered, feeling the awes
ome energy uncurl within her. This was what she had come for. This was what Anaphelox had promised her and what all the years of patient, secret labour had been in aid of.
Ignoring the lurching of the deck, ignoring the screams of the wounded and dying, Anlia let her arms rise and began to murmur the words of command.
They came easily to her, just as they always had done. She’d enjoyed an instinctive control over the Winds since childhood. A long time ago, she had even been proud of that fact.
It was pride that taken her to the Tower so young, to refine and augment her innate ability. But the loremasters hadn’t refined it. They had attempted to suppress it, to restrict it to age-old patterns that crushed her spirit. At first, she’d tried to respect them. She’d worked hard at the rites, sincerely believing she could learn to use them.
But she couldn’t. Her gift was too raw, too resistant to control. So the accidents happened, the ones that had killed Pelean and Erwen and the others. Her too, nearly. And after that there were the trials, the questions, the accusations and the death threats from vengeful families. At that point, she’d believed that her life was over.
But then Valaris had taken her into his protection, seeing the potential in her that others had missed. And after that, unknown to any but her, Anaphelox entered her life and showed her another way to master the huge potential within her.
Ah, blessed Anaphelox. He’d unlocked the full ambit of her reach. She’d learned so much from him in Loedh Anlyn, and now this moment was the reward.
She closed her eyes, remembering what he’d taught her. The noise of the sea battle receded into blurred and muffled thuds. Behind closed lids, she heard the constant whisper of her protector.
Good girl. Concentrate now.
She saw the fulcrum, still deep beneath the waves. It glowed white, like a heated tong in the fire. The waters raged around it, boiling away and hissing their impotent displeasure. Lines of force, shimmering like strands of golden hair, radiated out across the cold depths.
[Storm of Magic 02] - Dragonmage Page 6