But the mighty creature was exhausted. The magics that had summoned him were old and strong, and such cantrips bound its will tightly.
With a bitter hiss of smoke and ash, ancient wings thrust down powerfully. The dragon flew fast and true, heading straight for the mage-priest on its platform. As he went, blood ran like tears down his flanks.
“Lord!” came Haerwal’s voice, desperate but far-off. “No more of this madness! Remember yourself!”
Rathien ignored Haerwal’s pleas. The manservant had always been craven counsel. It was time to put such timorousness behind him. The daemons had been banished. His rival lived, but was in disarray. The drakes still flew with him.
He was a Dragonmage, forged in the fires of war, the very embodiment of vengeance.
Everything was possible.
Valaris span round, raising his blade. The movement was clumsy. He was already tired and the sight of the creeping tide of undead lizardmen unnerved him, if anything, more than the daemons had.
Skeletons had reached the summit of the fulcrum. There were dozens of them, creaking and limping across the stone. They were bigger than the daemons had been, their shoulders crowned with spikes and ridges. Their dry jaws uttered no challenge, but their bony hands clutched blunt cleavers carved from black stone.
They advanced slowly, hauling their rattling bodies forwards with effort. Some of them were missing bones, even whole limbs, but that didn’t stop them. Like the rising sun, they advanced remorselessly.
The remaining Sword Masters didn’t hesitate. They swept into battle, whirling their blades in great arcs. Valaris watched the first one make contact. The blade was angled perfectly, aimed at the neck-joint of a huge, lumbering saurian creature. It hit the target with precision, aimed with all the speed and power of a peerless devotee of the art of Hoeth.
With a flash of jade energy, the blade bounced off the bones, shivering from the impact. The Sword Master reeled, his balance knocked away by the unexpected resistance.
By then it was too late. The creature lowered its spiny head and broke into a stumbling charge. A long horn of bone punched into the Sword Master’s midriff, ripping through the white robes and emerging on the other side. The warrior’s equanimity was broken with a scream, swiftly extinguished.
Valaris backed away. He’d seen enough. In front of him, the rest of the Sword Masters had fallen into combat and were faring similarly badly. Their swords were unable to penetrate whatever dire magic was sustaining the skeletal lizards. They fought on stoically, never taking a step back, but the outcome was in no doubt.
When Gilean fell, his head crushed into shards by a lumbering monster with a huge, stained skull, Valaris knew that all hope was gone. He retreated to the north side of the fulcrum. Over his shoulder there was nothing but the long drop to the ruins below. He could already feel the wind tug at him, beckoning him down to oblivion.
“You will not take me,” he hissed, watching as the undead lizardmen stalked towards him. He kept his blade raised in a futile gesture of defiance. “As Asuryan is my witness, you will not take me.”
It was then that the air was filled with the stink of hot metal. The chill of the sea-wind was replaced by the heavy thud of wings, and a blast of fire-flecked air rushed around him.
He whirled around and saw the vast body of a dragon hovering just feet away. The beast was dull red on the flanks with pearl-white wings. There was a rider perched at the junction of the mighty shoulder-spurs, beckoning to him frantically.
“Come!” the rider shouted. “My steed can bear you! Come away!”
For a second, Valaris hesitated.
He looked back over the fulcrum. So many bodies. Blood stained the stone where Anlia had stood. He remembered her vitality, the promise she had shown.
Giving up on the fulcrum was hard. Surprisingly hard. Perhaps the dragon could turn the tide of battle. Perhaps it could be persuaded to—
“I cannot wait!”
The Caledorian’s voice was shot through with fear. That, more than anything else, convinced Valaris. There was no more fighting to be had—the cause was lost.
Valaris sheathed his sword and turned away from the slowly advancing skeletons. Drawing in a deep breath, he gauged the distance between him and the hovering torso of the drake.
He leapt. For a terrible second, he was suspended over the void, arms cartwheeling. His heart raced and he saw the sharp edges of the ruins far, far below.
Then he crashed on to the creature’s broad back. The Caledorian grabbed him by his robes and hauled him up. Valaris scrabbled for purchase, finally managing to gain something of a seat behind the dragon’s rider.
By then the firedrake had pulled away from the fulcrum. It went fast, hurtling from combat.
“My lord Rathien has lost his mind,” said the Caledorian. His expression was tight and stricken with grief. “I acted so that something might be salvaged from this disaster. I should have done so sooner.”
“Where is he?” asked Valaris, moving his head warily. It took a while to get used to the sinuous, arching flight of the dragon, and he was still disorientated from the sudden leap across the gulf.
“Behind us,” said the Caledorian. The words were clipped. “He has chosen death, and this time I will not try to prevent him.”
Valaris looked over his shoulder.
The fulcrum was already far behind. The summit swarmed with skeletal lizard-forms. No dragon, elf or daemon remained to contest it. The inscrutable ancients had returned to preserve what had always been theirs.
For the first time, Valaris gained an appreciation of how pathetic his attempt to seize the pinnacle had been. Its true masters were far more powerful than he would ever be.
Anlia should have known better than to try. And he should have guessed what dark power had enabled her to master the magic within her. For every service rendered, there was always payment.
Then he looked more closely. Not all the dragons had fled. There was one remaining, streaking into combat like an air-bound comet, trailing flame and clouds of ash. The beast was golden, and its wings beat like the drums of a whole army. There was a figure mounted on its back, clad in bronze armour and wreathed in tongues of flame. The rider flew fearlessly, desperately coaxing more speed and fury from his wounded mount. The mage-priest, that eerie floating mass of rock and bone, turned slowly to meet it.
The rider’s command was perfect. His profile was majestic against the open sky. Though his flight was surely doomed, there was a nobility in his bearing that he had never possessed as a leader of mortal troops.
Rathien of Tor Morven would die in the manner of his fathers. He would die a Dragonmage.
Valaris looked away. Despite all that had passed between them, he had no desire to witness the final clash. Ahead of him, the surviving dragons were beating a path northwards, back across the unquiet seas, back to their haunts in the mountains. Though their flight still possessed a heavy, graceful power, many carried terrible wounds along their jewel-like flanks.
For all their magnificence, they had been led into defeat.
“You can take me to Ulthuan?” asked Valaris, suddenly feeling weary to his bones. The heavy pall of defeat was beginning to sink in.
“I can,” replied the Caledorian.
“Lothern?”
“If you wish.”
Valaris nodded.
“And what will you do after that?”
The Caledorian stared straight ahead, his expression unreadable.
“I will return to Tor Morven. I will serve. What else is there?”
Valaris paused for a moment. There was something impressive about the dragonrider. He didn’t hide his fear, but there was a certain solidity to him. Perhaps if his master had shown similar sense, things would have gone better for him.
“You could serve another master,” said Valaris. “Such things are not unknown. You have saved my life, and I know how to reward those with a sound head on their shoulders.”
The Cal
edorian let slip a single, bitter laugh.
“Oh really, lord?” he said. “And what could you offer me that I do not already possess?”
“To serve the Phoenix King, Caledorian. To serve the mightiest monarch of the world. Does that prospect do nothing to stir your blood?”
The dragon rider looked over his shoulder then, straight into Valaris’ eyes. There was a look of weary humour on those long-suffering features.
“Do you know how long I have listened to words such as those, my lord? No, you cannot use that bait to entice me. I am sick of the aspirations of nobleborn. I will return to Caledor and find another way to restore the fortunes of my house.”
He turned back, resting a hand on the neck of his steed, his cloak rustling in the sharp wind.
“And in any case,” he said, his voice laced with a wry fatalism, “I do not believe you will be successful. As I tried to tell Rathien, it does not matter how many dragons answer your call if the mind of the Phoenix King is already made up.”
Inthalgar wheeled left, gradually reducing speed as the cursed fulcrum fell away towards the horizon. There were huge, rolling booms in the distance, and flashes of green light on the southern horizon. Around Inthalgar, the surviving drakes matched pace, their wings stretched taut. Though battered and bleeding, they were still magnificent, still beautiful.
“While you have pursued your wars of ambition, wiser heads have been looking to the future,” said Haerwal, steering the flight of dragons north, back towards home. “You asked if I would serve another master. Maybe I will, in time. When this folly has been forgotten, I shall send word to Finubar of Lothern.”
Haerwal smiled then, though the expression was dry.
“I sense great things ahead for him.”
EPILOGUE
The eastern horizon glows nightshade-blue, then lavender, then ochre. The world turns. The Orb of the Makers rotates gently through the void, tracing the pattern of the Great Dance, just as it has done since the steps were laid down by those long departed.
It all moves. It all changes.
The watcher’s eyes are on the horizon, just as they are every morning.
The colours have receded. The storm has passed across the world, and blown itself out. The imbalances have been corrected. The edges have been smoothed.
The pyramid is silent. It has been silent for more than a century. The great magic conceived in its cool depths has run its course. Its blue-skinned priests have retreated back into the depths of the jungle. The watcher is alone again, squatting in the courtyard, waiting for the sun to warm its blood, watching the insects rise.
It knows what happened in Azatlatlan. It knows that the invading warmbloods were killed. It knows that the ancient pinnacle was restored to its proper place, and the seas drawn back over the pyramids. If it takes satisfaction from that knowledge, there is no sign.
It also knows that there were fire angels present. There has not been strife between the watcher’s kind and fire angels for many thousands of years.
The watcher did not foresee the fire angels. It did not foresee the golden one, the one that dared to assault Venerable Lord Khatmaq. That one had been powerful, steeped in energies birthed in aeons long past. It had taken a long time to die, as had the warmblood who had ridden it.
The warmbloods did not understand the fire angels. If the watcher had been capable of astonishment, it would have been astonished that warmbloods never noticed the similarity between those ancient beings and the saurians that still populated the jungles of Lustria. Warmbloods never made the link between them, nor inquired into what terrible events must have taken place to sunder such creatures from one another.
They did not see patterns. They did not see the Great Dance. The mathematics of cause and effect were opaque to them. They would ever blindly pursue their foolish dreams, driven by desires and emotions that had no significance in the wider scheme of the universe.
They would be greedy. They would be weak. They would be defeated.
The watcher blinks.
Heat is already rising from the stone, bathing the friezes in shimmer-haze. The cries of the birds still break from the trees.
The watcher is motionless. Unperturbed. Silent.
There will be crises again. There will be disturbances of the Great Dance. When they come, the watcher will act again.
But not now. The alignment is as it should be. The storm of magic is over.
For now, there is nothing to do but wait.
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[Storm of Magic 02] - Dragonmage Page 11