The dragons were not invincible. Several had been completely destroyed by the creatures of darkness and many of the others were taking frightening amounts of damage.
Haerwal still shuddered to recall the death-screams of the downed firedrakes. It was the worst, most chilling sound he had ever heard. In those screams were aeons of experience being ripped from the world, a near eternity of irreplaceable wisdom and guile suddenly stamped out. The death-throes of a thousand mortals were insignificant next to such profound loss. It had been horrific.
Inthalgar banked suddenly left to avoid an incoming flock of razor-winged flyers with stretched, elongated heads. Haerwal had become used to the sudden shifts in orientation, and threw his weight to the right to compensate. Despite this, his body still leaned far out over the drop and he held tight, feeling the heavy pull of gravity drag at him.
He looked down, just for a moment, wondering how far the drop to the water was and whether he’d survive it if his grip was somehow shaken free.
But there was no water under him. Where there had been wind-lashed waves just moments ago, there was now dry land.
Haerwal’s eyes widened in shock.
Inthalgar righted herself, seeking fresh targets. Haerwal remained hunched over the ridge of her thick neck, staring down in wonder.
The sea was roaring away from the fulcrum. In colossal walls of thundering foam, the ocean itself was being withdrawn from the land beneath it. A vast circle had opened up in all directions. The fulcrum stood in the centre of it, suddenly towering even higher than it had been.
The scale of the change was staggering. Even as swirling ranks of dragons and daemons fought one another to the death, the waters were being hauled apart. No power Haerwal had ever seen, not even that awakened by Rathien in the Dragon Spine Mountains, could come close to what he was witnessing.
Haerwal righted himself and searched the skies for Rathien. Khalathamor was some way off, locked in aerial combat with a massive bull-headed daemon, too far away to hail.
Haerwal stared down again, unwilling to believe the evidence of his senses.
They hadn’t lied. The seabed was fully exposed in a vast, expanding disc. There were markings across that disc, regular markings. For all the world, they looked like streets, the shells of temples and the ruins of pyramids.
Down on the newly isolated land, something was stirring, something more alien and esoteric than anything he had ever seen.
“Isha’s tears,” murmured Haerwal, held rapt by the unfolding scene below, distracted even from the fire and slaughter all around him. “What new madness is this?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
No trace of Anlia’s body remained visible within the daemon’s massive frame. It had consumed her utterly, latching on to the magic she’d unleashed and drawing the necessary power from it. The suave pretence at subterfuge it had once employed was nothing more than a memory and its true form was unveiled in a welter of gore and fizzing aethyric residue. It bellowed with a primordial anger, stoked by the bleeding vortex above it. It was raw, bestial, unstoppable.
The daemon’s flesh was the colour of old blood and as tough as beaten bronze. It had a bull’s head, though the muzzle had been stretched and bulked by the warping power of its ascension. Four sets of long horns curved down from its tattooed brow and chains of iron swung from its vast shoulders. Two sets of wings beat the air, tattered and marked with rips. It was almost as much at home in the skies as Khalathamor was, and just as strong.
When it roared, the air shook. When it swung its flame-edged sword, the trails of oil-black smoke lingered in its wake, acrid and bitter.
In every sense, it was hellish.
Coming in close, Rathien could sense the raw potency bleeding from the abomination. The daemon leaked magic with every movement and coils of glistening fluid rolled down its muscular torso.
Khalathamor kept moving, circling around it, using his superior control to dart in for rapid, fire-stabbing attacks. Rathien augmented those sorties with bolts of flame. The orbs of fiery energy crashed into the tough hide of the creature, each time knocking it back and enraging it further.
But the daemon was no witless beast. It knew how to feint, how to draw in the attack and then respond. Twice already, its sword had bitten deep into Khalathamor’s flesh, carving through the scaly hide and drawing out blood the colour of molten lead.
The two massive creatures circled around one another, plunging and wheeling through the press of fighting, dodging lances of fire. Streaks of ash and smoke spiralled around them as each combatant parried vicious swipes from claw and blade.
Other daemons circled around the duel—flocks of lesser creatures, smaller in stature but still possessed of spite, malice and cunning. They latched on to the dragon’s tail or wingtips, biting and clawing. Soon Rathien found himself working hard to protect his steed from such attacks, leaving Khalathamor alone to face the full wrath of the greater daemon. The dragon maintained the thunderous power of his assault, launching ferocious torrents of star-hot flame while raking with talons the length of a man’s arm.
Rathien twisted round, kindling fresh energy. A flock of biting creatures with spiked faces and diaphanous wings had latched on to Khalathamor’s tail. Rathien let the flames ignite in his palms before twisting his wrists in a flickering motion.
The fire exploded into a shower of sparks, moving and rolling like a flock of birds. The spinning points of light cascaded down Khalathamor’s torso, bouncing from the scales of the dragon’s hide and falling away.
When they reached the daemonic assailants though, they lodged fast. The searing sparks stuck deep into the unholy flesh, worming their way in further. The daemons screamed and let go of Khalathamor’s bucking flesh. Rathien whispered a word of power, and the sparks blew up into raging infernos, consuming the daemons in an orgy of blood and flame. Smiling savagely, Rathien searched the skies for the next assailant.
But then Khalathamor bucked violently and his whole body shuddered. Rathien spun round, only to see the twisted face of the daemon loom up, mere yards away from him. He had to choke back vomit as waves of sickening reek washed over him. The beast roared again, and gobbets of bile slapped across his armour.
Khalathamor had come in close, and the two massive creatures were now interlocked with one another like wrestlers. They raged and hacked at one another, tumbling through the air, ringed with long trails of smoke and ash.
The daemon swung with the long edge of its blade, looking for the bite that would punch beneath Khalathamor’s armoured shell. The dragon belched fire and raked his heavy claws, twisting to evade the sword even as it pressed for the kill. Gouts of thick, steaming blood—Rathien couldn’t tell whose—sprayed messily into the air and fell around them like crimson hail.
Disorientated by the whirl of movement, Rathien struggled to get into position. He cried aloud words of summoning, ready to let fly with fresh bolts of flame. Though sickened by the creature’s foul stink and deafened by its constant barrage of roaring, he held his defiant stance on Khalathamor’s back. Another rider might have been driven to terror by the inferno of combat, but Rathien remained focussed, locked on the task at hand, his mind working in seamless union with that of the dragon.
He never looked away. As he prepared to generate the next maelstrom of flame, he kept his eyes open and alert. It was then that, without meaning to, he let his gaze drift over to the daemon’s face.
Their eyes locked.
Rathien froze.
The daemon’s presence was immense. It was timeless and infinite, an unyielding well of malice. As Rathien struggled to look away, the daemon’s will clamped down on him, suffocating him. Khalathamor kept fighting, immune to the sorcerous mental assault, but Rathien felt himself reeling.
He couldn’t summon the spell. His mouth was sealed. With a growing sense of terror, he felt his lips begin to lock shut. He knew the daemon was doing it, but he was too weak to resist. Control slipped from his mind to the dread intelli
gence of the creature of Chaos. Deep within that intelligence, he had the faint impression of a young woman’s voice screaming over and over again, as if trapped within a nightmare without end.
With mounting horror, Rathien watched as his own limbs began to rise. The daemon, still grappling with the dragon, let the ghost of a smile ripple across its malformed lips.
You asur. So easy to control.
The mocking voice, smooth and urbane, bled into his mind. It was the mirror image of the daemon’s raging physical form. Rathien fought against the command, but his will was no longer his own. The flames he had kindled to use against the creature of Chaos flared up between his fingers.
He would use them. He would bring them down, burning through Khalathamor’s hide and burrowing under the scales. He struggled and the veins on his neck bulged. Sweat burst out across his face, running down the wounds inflicted by the chimera and making them flare up with pain.
Soon your soul will join the one I already own. Your agony will be joined to hers.
Even as the golden dragon swung through the heavens, locked in deadly combat with this mightiest of monsters, Rathien saw himself preparing to plunge his burning hands into Khalathamor’s back, ready to murder the great soul he himself had roused from an eternity of slumber.
Tears rolled from his eyes, and he screamed aloud from the pain and horror. He was going to do it. Slowly, shaking, Rathien’s hands came down. The flames burst out, piercing and lethal.
Then, suddenly, the pressure withdrew.
Rathien gasped for air and wrenched his hands back. He nearly fell from his seat, rocked by the sudden loss of pressure.
The air before him disappeared into massive, rolling ball of green-tinged energy. A huge boom shot out from where the daemon had been, throwing Khalathamor back across the skies in a rolling, flailing arc.
Rathien gripped tight, able to do nothing but hold on and weather the storm. Huge fronds of dazzling green light lanced past him, hissing as they went. The sound of terrified screams echoed through the heavens, punctuated by more massive explosions.
Khalathamor righted himself, beating his wings hard to haul himself back aloft. Rathien stared back the way he’d been thrown, poised to discharge the power that still fizzed in his hands.
The daemon was gone. The bull-headed beast had been ripped from the skies. There were a few scraps of blood-coloured flesh spinning in the air, but nothing else.
“What happened?” he gasped, struggling to make sense of it.
A new power rises.
Khalathamor’s mind-voice was strained and weary. Only then did Rathien see the jagged wounds in the dragon’s long neck. Some of them looked like bite marks. Blood ran freely over the creature’s hide, dripping down its hanging limbs.
Rathien looked out over the aerial battlefield. In all directions, daemons were being ripped apart in mid-air, their bodies torn open and flung into scraps. Blood of every hue—purple, crimson, yellow, green—fell from ruined bodies. The surviving daemons were wailing now, lost in their own world of pain and terror.
“Holy Asuryan,” Rathien murmured, held rapt by the sight of such butchery. It was almost sickening. “What power could—”
Then he stopped speaking. He saw the architect of the new carnage, and his face went white.
Valaris pulled his blade back, ready to stab the point into the chest of the creature before him. At least, he thought it was the chest—it was little more than the bloated juncture of about a dozen jointed legs. Above that, something like a mouth, or maybe two mouths, stretched wide, exposing rows of hooked teeth and several lashing tongues. The daemon leapt wide, scampering like an insect and ready to spring.
Then it was gone—suddenly blown apart in a spinning orb of flesh and bone fragments. The pieces showered Valaris, lashing him with stinking gobbets of body parts, most of them lurid pink and still throbbing.
He staggered back, wiping his face free of gore. All across the summit, other beasts were ripped open in an orgy of splattered ichor. The rain of flesh subsided, slapping to the ground and slipping into the cracks in the stone. A slurry of viscous slime ran over the platform.
The Sword Masters were mostly still on their feet. Many had died, but Gilean remained stalwart among the survivors. The warriors of Hoeth re-formed their circle of protection around Valaris. Their expressions remained watchful, their movements tight.
The daemonic horde had been destroyed, swept aside like so much fodder. Droplets of blood and fragments of warped flesh continued to rain down from above, bouncing from the stone and into the puddles of gore. The dragons still flew, weaving through the storm of corrupted flesh like sharks cruising through the remnants of a ravaged shoal of fish.
Valaris pushed his way to the edge of the fulcrum. He was suddenly aware of a vast, nebulous sound—the rushing echo of the tide coming in.
Except, when he reached the lip of the stone, he could see that the tide wasn’t coming in.
It had gone out. A long way out.
The ocean had been peeled away and was now pinned back in a vast circle perhaps half a mile in radius. At the limit of the great arc, the waters raged and roared in boiling cliffs of ivory-white, desperate to rush back over the land and drown it again.
Lightning cracked across the open sky, lancing through the destroyed remnants of the daemonic incursion. There were no stormclouds to generate it; the bolts emerged from nothing. He looked out over the landscape of devastation. Hundreds of feet below, the land was now as dry as desert sand.
“What did this?” asked Valaris. His voice was unusually humble.
“I sense something…” began Gilean, before trailing off. “By the gods.”
“What is it?”
“A little to your right, lord. Just look.”
Then he saw it.
The bones were moving. They had lain immobile since the last great alignment, many thousands of years ago as a mortal would reckon it. Now they were moving again, stirred by ancient magics and driven onwards by the raising of the fulcrum.
Bones clinked as they reassembled into skeletons. Some were vaguely man-shaped; others had the size and profile of beasts—horses, a man might have guessed, or cattle.
They were neither. No skeletons of anything warmblooded marched among them. They were the heavy bones of lizards, great saurian beasts of the steaming jungles. All had been dead for millennia. Now, awkwardly and ponderously, they were animating again.
The cadavers moved unsteadily, lurching on unbalanced limbs. They crawled almost silently, their approach only punctuated by the tap of bone against rock. In crowds of dozens—then hundreds—they drew close to the fulcrum. Some were already scaling the foothills.
Above them, gently rising through the lightning-raked sky, was another skeleton. This was this one that Gilean had seen from the pinnacle. This was the one that Rathien and Haerwal had witnessed from their high vantage. This, it was clear, was the one that had banished the daemons.
The dragons came nowhere near it. For those with the skill to see, magic shimmered in the air around it. The very elements seemed to make themselves subordinate to it. As it ascended, it was easy to imagine the entire world sinking to accommodate its whim.
Like the skeletons in the lost city below, it had the outline profile of a lizard. A huge, heavy skull sat atop a hunched, desiccated ribcage. Emaciated hands lay in a shallow lap of crossed legs.
It slumped on a stone platform. The base of the platform had carvings on its square sides, carvings very much like those at the summit of the fulcrum.
The seated figure was huge. In life, it would have been bulbous and bloated, possessed of sleek folds of green flesh. Now it was bleached white and empty, though none of its awesome presence seemed to have been drained away by the mere fact of its death.
In a battlefield full of wonders, it dominated all else. The dragons, those magisterial beings of fire and talon, seemed diminished by its arrival. The daemons it had destroyed were like a memory of a nigh
tmare banished by the rising sun. It could have been the centre of the universe. For those watching its ascent, it might as well have been.
It didn’t move any of its bony fingers. It looked incapable of normal physical movement, locked as it was in calcified paralysis. But its will—that was a different matter. That will still lingered, deep and old and calculating. Its sentience alone was sufficient to drown out the magical aura of the dragons.
The tear in the sky’s fabric rippled a little, then shrank, folding up and out of existence. There was a long wail from somewhere, a howl of spectral frustration. Lightning cracked across the sky again, fierce and vital.
Then it was gone. The corruption was gone. What remained was the world’s air, free of taint, cold and with a tang of salt.
The slann had come to claim its own.
Rathien watched the skeleton rise. For a while, exhausted by the clash with the daemon, he had been unable to do anything but observe it. But then, as the creature continued to ascend, he felt his pride stir.
So much had been sacrificed. The fulcrum still lay before him, vast and powerful. His army of firedrakes was ravaged but intact.
The scars on his face fizzed with pain. They goaded him, reminding of his failures.
“We can still possess it,” he urged, bringing Khalathamor around for a new attack.
The dragon, his mind sluggish from the many wounds he had taken, resisted him.
This power is beyond me.
“No power is beyond you, great one,” Rathien insisted, feeling heat blossom from the creature’s iron hide. He was ready to summon the fires of acqshy again. “We have bled for this fulcrum. I will not surrender it now.”
For a moment longer, Khalathamor opposed the will of the Dragonmage. The long golden body remained immobile, suspended over the dry city, clearly unwilling to return to the rock tower where magic still stained the air.
[Storm of Magic 02] - Dragonmage Page 10