by Jordan Reece
“I don’t understand,” Elario said, his mouth watering from the sight of those molasses cakes. Westen dragged him on past another line of windows.
“That is the Lady Rothshale,” Westen said. “The dervesh closed in upon the remainder of their party, on this very road, cutting them down. The last act of the lord was to shove his gravely injured wife through that door to spare her life at the expense of his. By doing so, he condemned her to a far longer torture than the death by blade to befall him. That part was not in the ballad. Better the havok struck her down with a sword than to be forever trapped in there.”
She was screaming beneath her singing. The smiling faces of the listeners were strained if one looked closely. To be in there was bringing them pain. Several handfuls of them were madcaps to fall into this trap, dressed in work clothes and burdened with packs and weapons. The rest were people from the fall of Nevenin. The men banged their walking sticks in rhythm with the song, wincing and smiling and wincing again. And Red Guard, there were Red Guard clustered around a table from some past campaign to quell the Wickewoods. The eight of them roared with laughter and agony as they clashed their mugs together.
The circlet kept them alive and dined upon their pain. And still . . . still part of Elario was drawn back to that door. Just for a little while, a slice of cake, one mug of ale, a song or scene . . . If not for Westen’s implacable grip, he might have lost control of himself and doubled back.
The urge faded with distance, until they were a quarter-mile past the tavern and he had no idea why he ever wished to go inside. Westen released his arm, saying, “Does your dragon’s eye sense any bones?”
“No,” Elario replied. “Do you think I should yet?”
“We will be at the pass shortly. I believe that they are most likely on the other side, but there is a small chance they could be on this one. In the pass itself, or around it, too. Now is the time to pay close attention to what the eye senses.”
It sensed nothing. Elario looked over his shoulder. The aerial was entering the airspace over Nevenin, its nose turned to the pass. The soldiers intended to guard it. In frustration, Elario said, “We can go at midday again. Use the flight of the fades to our advantage.”
“They are not as thick upon Prinzio’s Pass as they are the bridge,” Westen growled up to the advancing aerial. “We must get over the pass before the aerial blocks us! Run!”
They ran hard down the road, leaping the fallen trees that striped it. Leaves crunched and rocks scattered with every footfall, creating a small ruckus of unavoidable noise. Something lurched in Elario’s peripheral vision and he swung out his pistol to a gray, sinewy creature, which hurtled out from a hollowed trunk. The bullet blasted it apart before his mind identified it.
“A yorsa!” he said, his voice almost a squeak.
“Now all heads are turning to us,” Westen said, not as a condemnation but in agitation. “Faster, Elario!”
They sprinted over the remaining distance to the pass. At last the break in the cliffs appeared, the road splitting so that one branch continued on to the river, and the second branch cut south to the break. The light from the lantern shined into the mouth of Prinzio’s Pass.
The sense of chaos was nearly as prominent here as it had been upon Achen’s Bridge. Rock walls fifty feet high surrounded a passage gridlocked with overturned carriages and wagons, collapsed rickshaws, and landslides from the eroded walls. Smaller obstacles were plentiful in trunks and metal boxes and other debris. Proof of the pandemonium extended up the gentle slope to the crest, and presumably over it. Elario was startled to see that far; he had not noticed until now the lightening sky.
They did not run so much as flounder through the wreckage from the failed escape. For every five steps of forward progress into the pass, they took two back and several to the side. Wading slowly through it, they swerved about wherever an avenue permitted them to advance.
The dragon’s eye stayed still. How far was its range in sensing bones? A quarter of a mile or a little more? Whatever the exact measurements, the bones were not in or near this pass.
A fade flickered into sight, the man throwing open a phantom carriage door right in front of Elario. His trigger finger acted before his brain could interfere; he shot the man in a blind panic. The bullet passed harmlessly through his midsection.
The man continued to look back to the city of Nevenin and then disappeared. Elario said in embarrassment, “Fade,” as Westen whirled around ready to fire in his aid.
They hurried on, as much as one could hurry in this obstacle course of a road. It grew even worse farther up the slope, a roadblock stretching nearly wall to wall. Vehicles had crashed together here, forming a tangle of remains over three-quarters of the pass, and a recent landslide claimed the last quarter for itself. When Westen put a foot to the dirt to test it, his boot sank in past the ankle. They retreated from the slide to seek another way through.
Light intensified above them. Then they heard the hum.
The war aerial was arriving at the pass. Elario threw himself down and crawled beneath a carriage, his satchel rasping against the underbelly. Closing the shutter of the lantern, Westen rolled under a wagon to hide.
The aerial flew over the pass, its searchlight pointed straight downwards. A woman’s voice spoke brusquely in Elario’s ear. “-come round, I say, come round! What do you see?”
“Nothing, Captain!”
“Ready the bucket for drop. Squad One, respond below-decks.”
Elario crawled closer to the wagon and hissed, “They’re planning to drop soldiers, Westen! I just heard the captain say to ready the bucket.” The beam of light slid up the pass and over the crest, the hum reducing as the aerial flew off.
The sky was gray now. Dawn was approaching. “They’re checking the far side of the pass,” Westen said. “Let’s get as far as we can up this slope, but carefully. Don’t move until you’ve spied a place ahead that will give you cover. I’ll go first.” Wriggling out from under the wagon, Westen scuttled away and crouched down beside a carriage. He checked its interior, and then beckoned to Elario.
It felt like a game of cat-and-mouse. Elario crawled out and ran over as Westen abandoned his hiding place for another. They crept onwards from carriages to wagons to piles of trunks, Elario watchful for the aerial’s return and Westen alert for dervesh. A shape standing beside another pile of trunks almost startled Elario into shooting again, but it was neither dervesh nor fade. A woman was trapped within a cracked slab of ice. Her mouth open in a scream, she had her arms out to a man and boy caught within another slab.
Dead. They were dead in there, but protected forever from decay. Along this part of the road, many people had died in dervesh ice, animals too. There was a dog caught in mid-run, trotting horses, and a farmer leading a cow. Babies and wrapped objects were still clutched to people’s chests; satchels hung heavily from shoulders; vespers were strapped as oxen to carts, each of which contained a totem. They had tried to save the gods, but the gods had not saved them.
Elario was skirting through the slabs when the hum began to tickle at his ears. “Be still!” he whispered to Westen, who was several paces before him.
They froze. The spotlight burst over the crest.
Elario and Westen stood as statues among the dead. The light slid down the pass and directly over their heads, where it stopped. We’re caught, Elario thought in despair, holding his breath, and then the light moved away slowly with the aerial’s rotation.
Voices, true voices, were calling to one another. “Over! Over!” “Put us on the wall!”
The bucket was swinging in the air below the aerial. The light inched to the side, first leaving Westen, and then Elario in darkness. They peeked around the slabs encasing the dead. Pebbles and sifts of dirt were plunging down to the road.
The aerial had dropped the bucket upon the very edge of the wall, part of it jutting over the side into thin air. Two dozen soldiers disembarked in haste to get to solid ground. Once the
last man stepped off, the bucket was retracted. It was engulfed into the belly of the aerial, which rotated to the city of Nevenin and motored away.
The soldiers spaced themselves out along the wall of the pass. All of them wore headlamps, which put out brilliant beams. The beams rendered them faceless, but when the lights illuminated one another, they revealed holstered pistols and tan-and-greens. A male voice crisply directed the soldiers to increase the space between them and to watch the pass below.
A beam pierced down, paces behind Elario, and held steady.
This night was at its last. If they did not move now, dawn was going to reveal them. “We must keep going!” he whispered to Westen. They slipped along the road, using for cover the slabs that had captured more than one person, and the bulk of the cow.
The soldiers above moved into position with thirty to forty paces between them. One by one, their beams trained upon the pass. The beams behind Elario and Westen were no worry; it was the ones before them that were going to present a challenge.
Several roving beams traveled back and forth behind the flank along the edge. Those soldiers were on the prowl, watching for dervesh. They would come, Elario trusted, and soon. Now that the orders were given, and many of the soldiers were in place, they had quieted. But those lights, especially the moving ones, made them very conspicuous.
“Ssst!”
Westen had gone on, and was currently crouching beside a cart full of totems. They were roped together and to the slats of the cart to prevent them from falling out. Four hunched vespers were hauling the load, all of them encased within a singular slab of ice. Elario quit his hiding place to run for it.
Something cracked under his boot, sounding like a shard of glass, and a beam jerked over in his wake. Hunkering down near Westen, they stayed very still as light swept over pieces of a broken vase upon the pavement, and then pierced through the narrow spaces between the totems.
“Did you see something?” a soldier called. A second light swung over to the cart. The beams slid over the statues and vespers. Then they backtracked to the shattered vase, and the bodies of the farmer and cow. “It was probably just a fade.”
A pistol cracked distantly and the beams jerked away to the topside of the wall. Elario peered through the crooked arm of a goddess. The pair of soldiers were shining the lights behind them.
He looked back to Nevenin. The hum of the aerial was gone. A dark blob in the gray sky over the city, its spotlight was pointed down to the rooftop of a tall building. The bucket was lowering again to drop off another squad of soldiers. Elequa, Elario swore in his head. It was going to be difficult enough to locate the bones in a land teeming with dervesh. Difficult would become impossible if they had to do so with squads of soldiers everywhere!
All that separated Elario and Westen from the crest of the pass was a quarter-mile of road hopscotched with beams and bodies. Marking the litter on the ground, they quit the cart and vespers for an overturned carriage. From there they dodged fallen totems and potholes to shelter at a metal case. Arriving at a stationary beam, Elario searched for a way around. There was nothing to conceal them in getting past it.
Westen was drawing the same conclusion. He scooped up a rock and juggled it in his palm. In a low voice, he said, “Be prepared to run.”
Then he lobbed it at the soldier above. With a cry of pain, the man stumbled away from the edge. The beam went with him, wrenching off the road.
On the heels of his cry was a scream.
It hailed from no human throat. Shrill and ululating, it made Elario’s eardrums bulge. Even worse was the sudden alarm to cross Westen’s face.
Something white was unfurling in the sky beyond Prinzio’s Pass, like a giant ball of thread unraveling into skeletal wings the width of acres. The body connecting the wings was a fathomless dark. Not a body so much as an absence that swallowed the sky and fading stars. The bones of the wings were radiant, however, illuminating the world below with the strength of sunlight, exposing everything but that dark body.
The massive wings beat in the air, and the creature started for the break in the cliffs.
“Go,” Westen whispered to Elario. “Go!”
“But the sold-”
“Never mind them!”
They sprinted out of hiding without heed to the Dragons of the Blood on the wall. Their footfalls revealed them, several soldiers shouting and rushing over to illuminate Elario and Westen with their beams. A pistol raised but Westen shot first, the soldier collapsing as the jolt of aithra overcame him.
The creature in the air was still coming. The other soldiers swung their pistols to confront it, but the dervesh screamed so piercingly that many of them dropped their weapons to cover their ears. Pain lanced through Elario’s head as he ran, his clamped hands over his ears still letting the scream through.
Cracks appeared in the slabs from the power of that scream. Then the encased bodies disintegrated to chunks of ice and ash, which scattered over the road all around Elario. Losing the frozen horses, carriages tipped over and wagons rolled backwards. Totems spilled off carts and struck the pavement to roll. Elario and Westen broke apart as a freed wagon sped for them, its wheels crushing the chunks into smaller pieces and kicking the ash upwards into choking clouds.
“Stop! Stop! Fire on the dervesh!”
The titanic wings bucked and roiled. From the dark body, a bar of blinding white light shot down to the opening of the pass. The cracking of the pistols upon the wall there suddenly stopped, and the headlights froze in place. The dragon’s eye awakened, yanking Elario from within the pass to hovering over it, where he looked down into new slabs of ice containing soldiers. The bar of white was traveling over the top of the cliff, and rapidly extinguishing from the ends of the bar inwards.
A frantic ensigno was fleeing it, too panicked to notice how it was falling apart at the ends. If he just ran to the side, the still-whole center would pass him by. But in his fright, he stayed the course until it caught him in ice. As the soldier stilled into death, Elario came back to himself.
His body had thankfully had the sense to keep running during the seconds he was gone from his mind. He glanced about for Westen, who was within arm’s reach of him and leaping an open trunk. An empty cart came rattling down the slope from a higher point in the pass, Westen swerving away once he was over the trunk to stand right in its path.
“What are you doing?” Elario shouted.
Westen braced himself on the road and held out his hands. The cart slammed into him, shifting him back two entire paces with its weight before it stopped. “Get in!”
Elario climbed through the broken slats upon one side where a totem had fallen out. With a grunt, Westen began to push the cart. It rolled up the slope, Elario on his knees and grasping a slat for balance.
An aithra bullet flew past so near to Elario’s face that he heard its crackle. The squad from the aerial was in pandemonium on the wall, some of them running away from the dervesh, others running for it and shooting. One soldier among their company, however, was still intent on Elario. His beam stubbornly followed the progress of the cart.
Elario took aim at the figure below the beam, but his shot went wild when Westen shoved the cart out of the way of a carriage tumbling end over end down the slope. Packages were spilling out of its gaping windows, its doors broke away, and the driver’s seat snapped off in its wild revolutions. Then all of it came apart, its pieces slamming into other vehicles. A bar skittered under the cart, the back wheels bumping over it.
“Take cover! Take cover! It’s going to attack!”
Elario looked both up and down, seeing through his eyes in the cart and the dragon’s eye far above. As the flying creature reeled back, and as the soldiers realized all of their bullets were passing between the narrow bones of the wings and causing no harm to it, they fled en masse. But there was nowhere upon the wall to take cover, not so much as a single tree.
The bar of searing white light roared down. The man who had shot at
Elario was struck in the act of turning to fire upon the dervesh. Ice grew outward from his skin. His last movement was a lurch, which carried his still-forming slab over the side of the wall. Plummeting down to the pass, he burst into shards and ash upon the road.
Westen was running as fast as he could for the crest, his eyes full of panic. Giant wings passed over them, kicking up a furious wind. Then the creature screamed, Elario deafened by it and doubling over in agony.
It ended and the creature flew on. He picked himself up just as the cart burst over the crest and increased its speed. The road was level here at the top of the pass, though only for a short distance before its steep descent down the other side of the cliffs. No beams shined upon it anywhere. All of the soldiers, those who remained alive up on the wall, were running away from the dervesh.
Elario blinked ash from his eyes and rocked against the slats as a front wheel hit a pothole. The impact caused Westen to stagger and lose hold, the cart speeding on alone. There was no way to slow it down. Elario shoved his pistol away and thrust out his hand through the broken slats to Westen, who was sprinting to regain the cart.
Once the wheels hit that decline, they would have no chance of Westen catching up. “Hurry! You have to get in!” Elario cried.
The beast flew overhead again. Westen swiped for Elario’s outstretched hand and caught hold. Hauling him into the cart, they ducked and covered their ears as the creature shrieked and fired down to the wall. Soldiers froze in place, their headlights shining eerily through the ice.
The cart hit the slope, and started down. The failed escape of Nevenin’s people had been largely halted on the climb up the pass. There were few vehicles on the downward side to waylay them, a small mercy since they had no control of the cart. Faster and faster it rolled with the sharpening grade.