by Kari Cordis
He rode unhappily back to Cyrrhidean command, mind swirling with the chaos approaching. How was he going to get his lines to hold? If the dragons opened up the western flank, the Enemy was going to pour right through. He’d known it was coming—known as soon as he’d seen the innumerable swarms of Sheelmen from the Prow that they couldn’t hold them back forever—but he hadn’t thought it would be spear-headed by something that really, logically, shouldn’t even exist.
They waited in growing trepidation back at the cleared hilltop. A constant stream of Fox ebbed and flowed, bombarding Traive with data at twice the rate messengers were coming in for Androssan. Just as the General got the uplifting news that the Knights were in trouble and about to be breached, a shushurrah of excited cries swept through the clearing. His head snapped around—there was nothing he could do about the left flank anyway—and he saw, far out on the plains yet, the dragons break from the trees.
His heart seemed to shrink. Here it was, then. He turned back to the messenger awaiting instructions on Merrani, whose eyes were wide as saucers in his soot-smeared face. “Hurry that column of relief.” The 45th had been dispatched from the eastern center late last night, but they’d have to double-time it if they were going to reach the Merranics in time. He wasn’t sure it was going to matter.
The stallion under him pawed the ground restlessly, whether from the dragons or from the currents of excitement sweeping through the command area, it was hard to say. They were all mounted, Androssan quite certain it was going to be the best way to hold on to your horse in the next few hours.
You didn’t even need the spyglass to see them anymore, their being so advantageously huge, and everyone in the immediate area had their eyes glued on the ponderous, swaying advance. The dragons had wings, but they were still folded against their greenish-black sides. The second moved out from behind the first as they approached, and no longer greyed by distance could be seen to be a dull red-orange, like smoldering charcoal. It was a little smaller, too. The dark sea of massed Enemy flowed away from the oncoming monsters in a wave, though not fast enough. From farther away than Androssan would have thought possible (in all the time he spent considering such things), the lead dragon suddenly gave a roar and lowering its massive, wedge-shaped head, spewed a fan of flame out over 100 yards in front of it. Even from this distance, Androssan could hear the screams as men were roasted alive, leaving a charred, lumpy path of debris for the creatures to walk on.
“Our doom is upon us,” Khrieg whispered beside him. Androssan’s covey of aides stirred restlessly behind him…probably agreeing with the assessment. On his other side, Traive, a-stagback, was putting out a quiet, calm, steady stream of orders.
Closer they came, and closer. They both roared again, a deep, bass, reptilian kind of roar that froze the blood in your veins and brought the hairs up on the back of your neck. Horrible suspense filled the air. It would be better to be running, even running at them, than to be just standing, having to wait with this terrified certainty for the monstrous death walking so purposefully towards them.
Then, abruptly, the air crashed into thundering noise around them, a shrieking, unearthly bedlam of unidentifiable sound that seemed to fill every crevice of his body. Motion exploded over their heads, and Androssan’s horse went wild, rearing on its legs and screaming its own furious challenge. For a moment, the very prosaic necessity of having to keep his seat kept Androssan from mind-numbing terror, and it wasn’t until he had a chance to look wildly around that he located the source of all the noise.
There, winging away in front of them in a rapid air-borne wave, gryphons seemed to fill the sky. Their wings pummeled the air, stroking them into breath-catching speeds straight towards the monsters on the plain. Androssan’s eyes widened as he saw the riders, clinging unsupported and unprotected to all that brilliant, colorful, deadly motion leagues and leagues off the ground.
The gryphons screamed again in ear-splitting unison, the sound, now that he thought about it, exactly what one would expect if an eagle screamed in your ear at the same time a lion roared in the other. Again the stallion under him answered, swiveling in nimble agitation under him, and spinning him around in a circle so that he saw—that he was the only one left in the immediate vicinity. The Stags were being brought under control a short distance away, but his aides could only be seen far up the road to the North, their horses apparently on a dedicated course for Archemounte.
He swung his stallion back around to face front, just in time to see the gryphons closing on the dragons. The latter were definitely aware of them, acting more alert and engaged in the discord they were causing than Androssan had yet seen them. The big one up front trumpeted, a blast of noise and sound Androssan was sure he could feel ruffling his hair even almost a league away, and swung his head threateningly. Sure enough, within seconds he had opened that huge red maw and let loose a great spume of fire. The gryphons peeled out of its path, graceful and agile as dancers in the air, their great pinions expertly manipulating the invisible medium that held them up.
Androssan fumbled out his spyglass, focusing breathlessly in on the action. The gryphons snapped into sudden clear view through the glass, plumage bright as jewels, beaks open and claws extended as they broke into two groups. On their gyrating, shifting backs, Taloners in light-colored leathers seemed to cling in defiance of the laws of physics. Long, pale blue cloth floated from their arms, streaming through the air like guidons behind them.
Straight for the two dragons’ heads the groups of gryphons flew, their unworldly shrieks mixing in with the steady, irritated roars of their prey. There! One had struck! Folding his wings, he had dive-bombed that scaly head, and Androssan could see the claws catch momentarily before they were flung off. With a massive heave, the dragon had thrown his head up, and for a second Androssan was staring right into the dark yellow reptile eye. He shivered, hand shaking slightly with more than adrenaline. What terrible, dead, evil awareness…
Then the creature moved abruptly, crying out in fury as gryphons en masse attacked the softer scales of its throat. It threw them off, too, scrunching its neck down as if to crush any that couldn’t move quick enough…when it raised its head again, there were red rivulets running down the long neck.
Still the dragons were moving forward, relentless, implacable, the huge gryphons that buzzed around their heads looking like hummingbirds around a bear. They were a hundred times quicker than the dragons, but even Androssan could see that those fearful talons weren’t going to be able to do much damage to hard, unfeeling scales. Breathtaking as the action was, he had the sinking feeling they weren’t going to be able to stop them in time.
Suddenly, the lead dragon threw its head, snout spewing flames and catching one of the Taloners by surprise. They burst into screams, the man-gryphon pair, crawling with fire as they plummeted towards the earth.
“Ash—!” Traive burst out low and meaningfully next to him. Androssan didn’t have to look at him to see the angry helplessness. All commanders knew it.
“Ill we can spare that brave man,” Khrieg added funereally. Androssan barely conquered the urge to wallop him with the spyglass.
“They need to team up,” Traive said in his low, strong voice. Fortunately, given the difficulty of getting a message into mid-air, the same thing seemed to occur to the Talons. They could be seen suddenly grouping around the big black in the lead, clustering so thickly that for a moment his head was obscured. The smaller dragon beside him helpfully shot a modest spurt of flame at his head and more cries could be heard. Androssan sucked in his breath, but none of the Taloners fell out of the sky. Through his spyglass he could see several of them flying around looking singed, but the gryphons were all going strong, swooping and darting remorselessly.
The black dragon swiveled slowly to glare at the other, but Androssan, hoping ardently for an intra-monster fight, was disappointed to see only that one irritated look. The dragon stamped a huge, clawed foot with no warning, which seemed odd to Andr
ossan, expert as he was on draconic habits. But, scanning, he made out the bright figures of gryphons zooming under the low belly. They were tearing at it with their beaks, drawing blood. The dragon roared as apparently one of them hit home, and paused, lowering his head and throwing flame in a big semi-circle to his side and rear. When he began to move again, he was favoring one of his forelegs.
“He’s limping!” Khrieg cried, possibly the most optimistic thing he’d said in years.
“We’re running out of time,” Androssan remarked so that only Traive could hear. “Can we send any kind of reinforcements?”
“It’s madness to send ground troops against them,” he was answered, just as low. “We’ve put together harpoons, based loosely on the fire-launchers, but they tend to get scorched before they ever get in range.”
Despair scrabbled desperately at the back of Androssan’s mind. He hated just sitting and watching, hoping things would turn out. “How about sending up crossbows—”
“Ah,” Traive interrupted him in a hiss of delight, and Androssan turned swiftly back to the field of battle. The black dragon had come to a complete stop and was holding that forefoot up off the ground. In the elbow, looking like squabbling carrion birds, several gryphons were ripping the soft flesh. Meanwhile, the angry head was almost buried in the rest of them, as they darted in heart-stopping courage right at the tooth-filled snout, at the eyes, at the lightly scaled throat. He was far from dead, but the black dragon was definitely distracted, and hurt.
The red dragon, however, seemed almost to have picked up speed and was now moving with marked purpose right for the Daroe and the Imperial troops scattering in front of it. Androssan felt sick to his stomach. He was no expert on such things, but he suspected one dragon would be perfectly sufficient to destroy the Empire. What could they do? What could they do????
Tumult suddenly exploded overhead, raging, trumpeting noise and the sonic boom of intense, frenetic action. Again the world seemed consumed by incomprehensible uproar; the stags bolted away from either side of him, and his stallion rose on his hind legs to fight. Panting with the surging adrenaline, Androssan looked wildly around, then up, his eyes focusing on…another talon!?
Staring, absently patting the plunging stallion, who, if he was not mistaken, was trying to pull him towards all the action, Androssan gaped at the confusing sight winging away towards the dragons. Where had they come from? Traive had said there were only four talons. When the Lord Regent came up beside him in a few moments, his face, livid with disbelief, confirmed his ignorance.
They were black, these new gryphons, the one flying point as black as a raven, its wings darkly iridescent and winking like black opals in the overcast sky.
“Black,” Traive whispered beside him. His eyes were intense, trying to cipher out the origin of the relief with much more interest than Androssan, who quite honestly could care less what color they were.
The dark gryphons were fast, turning so quickly in the air once they reached the red dragon that Androssan grabbed his glass again just to see them better. Their riders were in black leather, too, so tight and low to the swinging, arcing lion bodies that they could hardly be seen with the naked eye. Their beasts’ trumpeting screech seemed to shatter the sky as they dove at the surly head, and when the dragon lifted it, searing the air with one big half-circle of jetting flames, they folded their wings and literally rolled across the sky out of the way. Androssan’s jaw gaped in amazement. He had thought the other gryphons fast and fearless!
The pure black gryphon in the lead was the swiftest of them all, and he came back now out of his roll like a bolt shot from a crossbow. He did a flyby, the dragon ducking and rumbling an angry complaint, and then something happened in the busy air over the Empire that Androssan would never have believed if he hadn’t seen it himself. Those darting, quicksilver, utterly fearless creatures got into formation. So fast that the dragon had barely gotten his head raised from the flyby, they were zooming right at him, shrieking like bloodhawks on the kill, wicked talons extended and beaks wide in screaming challenge. Even Androssan, admittedly an amateur in air warfare, could see they were actually in the form of a giant talon, four spread out in an arc coming in from above, and one, that smallest, nimblest black one, shooting in silent and smooth underneath. The four above dive-bombed, shrieking in fury and rolling out of the way just as the dragon vomited flame at them.
And the swift, soundless black shot in under its view, dipping under the sheet of fire and coming up fast, somehow contorting itself at the last minute so that it was flying talons-first—right into that snarling yellow eye.
A screaming bellow of agony and rage rent the air, the sound waves making Androssan want to clamp his hands over his ears. The red was throwing his head around, the empty eye-socket pumping torrents of dragon blood, the huge clawed feet stamping in pain and frustration. The unrelenting gryphons, like black harbingers of death, took full advantage of that visionless side. Soon that whole side of the dragon’s neck and jaw were a lacerated mass, but only when they finally got through to the life-giving neck arteries did the dragon start to slow its wild, infuriated flailing. It still took several moments to sink to its knees, flames gushing out of its helpless snout, roars still trembling on the air.
Androssan was laughing. “They did it!!” he cried with fierce joy. Traive was grinning beside him, but his eyes were still narrowed, focused on those dark, triumphant figures swooping over the vanquished red.
Khrieg’s voice was warm as he said, “I didn’t know we had a Black Talon.” His creased face was in a rare smile. Androssan was somehow quite sure that the Lord Regent, head of the largest intelligence gathering force in the world, hadn’t known it either.
The bigger, lead dragon was not as surely dead, but it, too, had sunk to its belly, the flames coming weaker and more infrequent from between its wavering jaws. Most of the gaily colored gryphons that had brought it down were circling above it, jewel bright butterflies at this distance, making sure it went no further and helpfully trying to speed its passage on to the next world.
Androssan thought that the sun should come out, pour its rays on this scene, it was such a glorious moment. They had literally been saved at the last minute…and there, flying right toward them, was one of the black gryphons that had done it. They all watched it come in, that smallest, most agile one, watched in wonder and a touch of respectful awe as the sleek creature, black as night and enormous up close, landed a couple dozen yards away.
Khrieg and Traive both quickly dismounted, so Androssan did, too, and they all crossed over to meet the Talon rider that had slipped off the gryphon’s back. He walked, athletic and bold, towards them, loosening his black leather helmet as he came.
And out from under its revealing cover, to their collective shock, spilled a long, silken waterfall of hair the color of platinum. It fell in fine waves around a fine-boned, blood-spattered face from which hard, challenging, pale green eyes stared.
“Kindri,” Khrieg said in shock. Androssan looked from one to the other. Wasn’t that the Skyprincess? Her face was mutinous, angry, flushed with open rebellion as she came to a taut halt in front of them. Androssan, lost, looked surreptitiously at Traive for some clue as to what was going on here. The Regent’s face was inscrutable, eyes riveted on the belligerent little creature in front of him.
“How did you..?” the Skylord said weakly. He seemed to shrink in on himself before all that vibrating anger.
“How?” she snapped. “By force of WILL, that’s how. By refusing to give up! That’s how! By not sitting around moaning about the end of the world without taking a step to stop it, THAT’S HOW!” She was furious, pupils tiny black dots in eyes as flat and pale as the jaguar’s that had run in that morning. A crowd of awed Cyrrhideans were gathering, careful to keep away from the great black beast panting a short distance away.
Suddenly she leaned closer, vengeful and graceful as a serpent. “Give me the Crown,” she hissed. Androssan’s eyes widened i
n his military face and he felt more than saw the sudden, complete stillness of their little windblown tableau. Khrieg’s face had gone white under the lined brown tan, sorrow temporarily displaced by true, deep shock.
“No woman can lead Cyrrh!” he objected.
“No man leads it now!” she shot back, vituperative, seething. “You forfeited the right to the Throne of Trees when you lost Mother, when you gave up on life, gave up on me, gave up on your Realm!” She leaned closer, pearly teeth showing in a cat-like snarl. “Now, give me the Crown!”
Fox were gathering close, silent as grass puffs caught on the wind. Unlike Imperial troops, who would have been wondering which side they were going to have to support, whose allegiance they would have to proclaim, and whose wrath they might have to risk if they picked the wrong side, the Fox stood impassively, faces showing only that quiet readiness common to the Cyrrhidean ground forces. Khrieg was frowning doubtfully. “You are barely of age,” he mumbled in procrastination, “even if you were a man and suitable—”
“You do not have the right to proclaim suitability!” she almost screamed at him, eyes flashing lightning as pent-up energy found release. Her slender frame was tense with malignance. “For decades you have sat, unsuitable, in the Skypalace, ignoring the needs of your people, ignoring the surety of what was rising from the Sheel! Ignoring the preparations which could have made this day unnecessary! It is not for you to deny me the right of my blood because I am unsuitable!!!” Pure fury twisted her face, and Androssan had the overwhelming urge of most men in the face of uncontrolled feminine emotion…to be somewhere else. The last thing he wanted was to turn the attention of all that savage, arresting beauty on himself, though, so he stood still.
Tension mounted unbearably. Khrieg looked torn, sad and horrified and beaten all at once. But tradition was obviously bolstering him somewhat; whenever he looked around at the gathering people, his chin came up a little as if he knew what he should say.