Because in no reasonable world could that possibly be a dragon squawking and hawking and roaring above Feirdeen. And not just any dragon, but the lovable Grish. He looked terribly ferocious. Being from the Wryth Clutch allowed him to hurl plague from deep inside his belly—much like a Crimson Clutch dragon breathes fire. Despite this, he was actually quite cuddly. At least when Catali had seen him last.
“Y’know how you were chattin’ about running the opposite way?” Craw said, instinctively smoothing the strips of hairs along his temples. “I think we ought to take that, er, strategy into consideration right about now.”
“Craw,” Catali said, eyes fixed on the circling dragon. “Is that a dragon?”
“Ya, think so.”
“And it has green scales?”
“So far as I can tell.”
“And it’s circling. Right now it’s above a dome roof.”
Craw nodded. “Seein’ the same thing as I am.”
Well, that meant it wasn’t a hallucination. No two people have the same exact hallucinations. But what could Grish possibly be doing here? Catali ran to find out.
“Hey!” Craw hollered after her. “Are you mad?”
“He’s friendly,” Catali yelled back. “Trust me. Grish! Grish, it’s me, Cat.”
The dragon had been facing away from her. When he heard her voice, he swished his tail and arced around. His huge, oval eyes blinked once upon seeing Catali, and he roared.
Catali laughed, feeling the vibrations in her feet.
“He don’t sound nice,” Craw said, huffing. “And don’t run so fast. I can’t keep up. I’m an old—dammit!”
Catali was off again, through the portcullis and into the belly of the Free City. Grish lowered his head and tucked his wings, spiraling toward the ground.
“Oh, gods,” Craw said, cowering behind a squat vase. “He’s gonna burst right through—er, huh. Would you look at that?”
Grish turned sideways, thinning himself through an alleyway. He flexed his talons and dug them into the soil, ripping through hardened loam and kicking up clouds of dust.
“Hi there, big man,” Catali said, waving dust balls and rings away from her eyes.
As she approached, Grish turned his head up like a keyed-up infant. He let loose with a growlish-purr, as if he was trying to verbally communicate.
Catali touched his scales. They were the color of a deep summer forest. “Where did you come from, Grish?”
She didn’t expect an answer and didn’t receive one. Grish was still too young to verbally communicate.
Craw stuck his head out from behind the vase. “That’s a mighty gentle giant.”
“You can touch him, if you’d like.”
Craw showed her his hands and said, “No, no. I’m quite fine here, thank you very much.”
“You’re afraid, aren’t y—”
“Cat?”
That voice… that husky, heavy voice. She hadn’t heard it for nine long months. “Rol?”
From the palace, dressed in boots and pants that were rucked up to his knees, strolled Rol. He was bare-chested, swinging his tunic and undershirt in one hand and holding a pouch in the other.
He looked to the heavens and belted out a full-bellied laugh. “I say fuck the gods on most occasions, but good on them this time around. I’ve been searching for you.”
She offered him a pitied face. “Oh, Rol. Your chest… and arms… and stomach….”
“Huh? Oh. Nice shade of red, yeah?”
Catali smiled weakly. “I don’t think you’ll be saying that tomorrow.”
“Or tonight,” Craw put in, moseying his way over. He pushed himself in front of Catali and wrapped a hand around Rol’s shoulder. “They call me Old Man Craw, Crack-and-Smack, and Bed Creaker. You get that last one?” He winked and elbowed Rol playfully.
“Regrettably,” Rol muttered.
“Nice dragon you got there. I was tellin’ Cat here—”
Catali placed her hand over Craw’s mouth. “Back behind the vase with you. Did Oriana send you?”
“Good guess,” Rol said. “That’s what happens when you’re gone for nine months instead of six. She sent me to come get you. Did you forget you were supposed to sail back eventually?”
Catali rubbed her neck. “Right. Let’s get out of the sun and I’ll tell you about… some bad things, I’m afraid.”
Rol and Catali went inside a nearby shop, its arched windows providing some airflow and light. Craw followed them.
“Hope you got something for me about the Conclave,” Rol said, kicking a stool free from under a table. He swatted a spider off the seat.
“They’re mostly dead, if that’s what you want to hear.”
“Probably wholly dead by now,” Craw added.
Rol cocked his head. “I don’t know if that’s what I wanted to hear, but it’s not what I expected to hear.”
“They’re being hunted,” Catali said. “By these, I don’t know what to call them. Fiends.”
“Demons,” Craw said. “Call ’em demons.”
Rol threw his head back. “Ah, shit. Here too? Guess that means the Conclave didn’t make ’em. That’s too bad—at least we’d know what we were dealing with.”
“They’re on Avestas too?” Catali asked, sickened that her worries weren’t unfounded.
Rol dragged his fingers through his beard. “I need to cut this off. Anyways, they’re not on Avestas. They’re sitting in the Glass Sea, strange as that might sound.”
“That sounds strange,” she admitted.
“Ori fished one up by accident. She took it down eventually, but boy it required every sorcerer and some dragons, from what I heard. The damned beast—or demon, as you call ’em—was huge, bigger than anything I’ve ever seen. And made of stone.” He shook his head. “Stone. It doesn’t seem real sometimes.”
Squinting, Catali had a slack-jawed, confused look on her face. “Huge and made of stone? No, these fiends had red flesh. Imagine ripping open a blister and digging around in there with a needle. That kind of rawness—that’s what they look like.”
“Then we’re talking about two entirely different creatures,” Rol said.
Craw cleared his throat in a pay-attention-to-me manner. “Colossi. Told ya I’d heard they’d arrived. They can hibernate for hundreds of years, and in water to boot! Somethin’ about storin’ air in the pores of their rocks. Anyways, listen—I don’t want to break up the riveting conversation here, but whether we got demons, colossi or some other godless beast on our hands, the mutations are our only hope.”
“Mutations?” Rol asked.
Catali told Rol most of what she knew about mutations, which wasn’t much. Craw chimed in on occasion, but his explanations were long, rambling and confusing.
Outside, Grish clamored excitedly. He was in the air again, circling.
“Told him to look for food,” Rol said. “He’s hungry. I figured they’d have something in this city, but it’s damned empty.”
“Did you check the larders?” Catali asked.
“Don’t know where they are. Haven’t been here very long, and from the sounds of it I won’t be staying. We need to get these, er, mutations back to Ori.”
Grish let out a series of yips and yowls.
“He seems happy,” Catali said. “All right, carry some of these, will you?” She gave Rol three satchels’ worth of mutations.
“Hells,” Rol complained, “what are these made of? Stone?”
“There’s one that’ll turn ya into stone,” Craw said.
“From what I hear,” Catali said, “you don’t want that one. You think Farris will help? Convincing her to lend aid against the clutches was one thing. But giants made of stone and demons?”
Rol pulled at his earlobe. “Oh, er. I don’t think Farris will be helping Ori anytime soon.”
“Why?”
“Long story. As long as everything goes as planned, we won’t need Farris help. ’Cause Ori’ll be a queen.”
Catali threw a palm against her forehead. “Oh, gods. What have you people done while I’ve been gone?”
Grish made another noise, this one a long, drawn-out roar that Catali felt rumble down her entire body and out her toes.
“That didn’t sound very happy,” she said.
Rol booked it outside. Catali was hot on his heels, and Craw… well, Craw didn’t move from his stool.
Grish hovered in place, furiously batting his wings. He looked out over the western approach—from where Catali and Craw had come—puffed out his chest and let loose with another ground-trembling roar.
Rol and Catali looked at one another, a shared expression of panic. They ran to the gate, Catali arriving first. She made it through the first portcullis before stopping dead.
“What is—” Rol didn’t finish his question because the answer was readily apparent what it was.
A horde. A vast, endless roiling sea of tall and rangy hoofed beings with raw flesh. They did not walk, nor did they run. They scuttled. On all fours they bounded toward the forty-foot mudbrick walls of the Free City.
“Close the portcullis!” Catali cried. “I’ll get this one, you get that one.”
This one was the inner portcullis and that one the outer portcullis. They were operated by two iron winches. The chains were rusted, and they hung up with each rotation of the handle. Catali wished she had some oil to pour on them, but that was the least of her worries.
The iron grates of the twin portcullises slowly lowered, until they sunk into and interlocked with inset grooves.
“Now what?” Rol asked.
Catali remembered Oriana telling her that Rol was a good man, but he wasn’t so much a leader as a loyal follower. She now experienced that firsthand.
“Getting Grish down here would probably be a good start.” She grasped the latticed framework of the inner portcullis and stared out. The fiend swarm seemed impossibly closer. They were faster than a team of wild horses and far deadlier.
Rol put the whistle from around his neck in his mouth. The ensuing high-pitched shrill captured Grish’s attention. The Wryth dragon narrowed its eyes on Rol, thin black slits surrounded by fiery jade.
Rol snapped his fingers, aimed them at the ground. “Get down here!”
Grish growled, whooshed his wings and circled around, preparing to land. He didn’t get very far before everything went to hell.
A thunderous explosion sounded off somewhere in the city. Catali put it at the front wall. She jogged that way.
“Cat,” Rol called. “What’s wrong?”
Catali had rounded the edge of a tavern and stopped. She stiffened, hands grasping the curved tavern wall. She turned to Rol, eyes seized by the horror of something she did not wish to see.
“Run,” she said. She took her own advice, tearing into a sprint. “C’mon!” she said, grabbing Rol’s hand. “They broke through the front gate. Craw!”
“I heard ya, I heard ya,” he said, emerging from the shop, holding four bags’ worth of mutations to his chest. “These legs are old and uncooperative. I can’t run very fast.”
“Nice to see you finally carrying your share,” Catali quipped. She pounded on Rol’s back, head turned the opposite direction. “Go, go!”
They were coming. Or rather, they’d arrived.
The demons skidded around the corner. Some lost traction, uncontrollably slamming into walls. Most dug their talons deep into the sandy soil, righted themselves and scuttled off in pursuit of their soon-to-be victims.
Catali chanced a look back. She wished she hadn’t. The fiends were gaining on them at an unbelievable pace.
“Where to?” Rol shouted.
Catali shot another glance behind her. Did it much matter where they ran to? They wouldn’t reach their destination, and even if they did, what then? These fiends, these monsters, had busted through an iron portcullis. What threat would a couple wooden doors pose?
A shadow converged on the three of them. In the sky, above the palace, glided Grish. His wings were outstretched, his immense framework of scales and muscle parallel to the ground.
Catali watched his belly pulse, as if a parasite had burrowed inside and planted eggs that were now hatching. She’d seen this before from a dragon of the Wryth Clutch.
“Inside there, now!” Catali cried, turning Rol’s shoulders toward a windowless and doorless shop. She grabbed Craw by his arms and shoved him in after Rol, then dove inside herself.
She couldn’t have spared another moment. Outside there was a spattering and a splash. It sounded like a bucket of water—maybe fifty buckets—being dumped into a pan of hot oil. Catali felt a sizzling warmth course over her legs and the back of her neck.
She crawled along the floor, farther inside. Chin on her shoulder, she looked back. Her eyes reflected a sickly green liquid bubbling up from sandy road that she and Rol and Craw had been on.
“I’ll be,” said Craw, shaking his head. “Never saw a Wryth dragon in action before.”
A plague of boiling poisons popped and snapped and spattered. It looked like a bog had emerged from beneath the Free City, intent on swallowing this place whole.
Catali poked her head out, hopeful it wouldn’t be taken off and eaten by a fiend who’d managed to escape Grish’s assault. That didn’t happen, but neither was she greeted by a hopeful and optimistic sight. Sure, a river of frothy green plague had consumed a good two hundred fiends—some of them were still writhing about in the streets—but there were another hundred standing at the edge of where the poisonous puddles ended.
It wouldn’t be long before they’d find a way around. And Grish, bless his heart, couldn’t hold them off forever.
Speaking of Grish… Catali felt a whipping wind across her bald head and a familiar shadow coming over her. Grish landed on the dusty street ahead, where it widened into a three-pronged fork. One of the forks, she knew from her brief exploration of the city, wrapped around to the front wall.
She took Rol by the shoulders and said, “Listen to me. Take Craw and get these mutations to Ori. All right?”
Rol’s sweat-slicked hair clung to his cheeks and neck. His bangs were clumped together. “Where are you going?”
Catali ran a hand over wet scalp. She eked out a smile, mostly for Rol. No, all for Rol. She’d already accepted her fate, had come to terms with it. “I hope the afterlife, if there should be one. If not, I had fun here. Not the first half, but the second half was enjoyable. Goodbye, Rol.”
Rol’s head flinched back. “What are you talking about? You’re comin’ with us. Let’s go.”
She resisted the tug on her arm. “Grish isn’t big enough to carry three of us. Craw’s far more important than I am—he knows what each mutation does—so you’ll take him.”
“Cat—”
She put a finger to his lips and shook her head. “Not another word. Tell Ori I’ve always thought of her as a sister, and I’ve loved her like one.” The latticed portcullis anchored into the western wall fell, and hundreds of demons poured in. “Go, now!”
Rol grimaced. He cursed under his breath. He wanted to say a few words to Catali, but they never quite formed on his tongue.
“Just go, Rol. Please.”
Rol gave her a firm nod. He grasped Craw by the arm and shoved him toward Grish. “Come on, move those legs of yours.”
Catali sighed. The end comes for us all, she thought, struck somewhat by melancholy but mostly by pride. She’d always told herself that she’d not cower when Death came for her. And she’d stayed true to her word.
Grish beat his wings, stirring up whirling clouds of dust. Catali choked and coughed, putting an arm over her mouth and closing her eyes. When the debris settled, she could hear the scrambling of demon hooves pattering nearby.
The horde emerged onto the forked road. Their jaws shifted from one side to the other, unhinged and seemingly unattached. They came for her not quickly on all fours, but slowly and meaningfully on their hooves. Their arms swung in disconnected fashion,
like the limb of a tree struck by lightning but still clinging on by a fibrous thread.
Catali looked at the blue sky once more. For the last time. She saw green in it—a beautiful, if baleful considering the circumstances, shade of green, deep and dark.
Grish’s stomach pulsed and churned. Catali smiled.
She hadn’t told Rol to do it, because she didn’t want the burden to sit heavy on his shoulders. She hoped he would, though. Better for it to end abruptly than to be served as a meal for these fiends.
She watched the phlegm-like ball of mustard-green plague hurl from Grish’s mouth. She took one final look at the sun, and then closed her eyes and waited.
She never even screamed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Prior to the willful submission of the clutches, Gynoth had never mounted a dragon. He hadn’t realized what a boon these creatures were. In the time it would have taken him to spread plague and disease through one city, Osseus had enabled him to bless ten with the gift of death.
One month was what he had given himself. He couldn’t know if he had even that long—or maybe he had considerably longer—but one month would allow for a sizable army, if he made efficient work of the North.
And he had. Over five cities, forty villages, more than seventy but less than a hundred small manors which housed mostly slaves, and only a few dozen at that—he’d managed to take them all.
It was difficult at times. He’d been struck with two arrows, one in the calf and another in the elbow. He’d caught a dagger across the cheek and an unexpected hoof in his jaw.
The worst of it, however, came from reaching into the realm of death. Every plague he borrowed and every disease he seized from that realm, bringing them into the living world, stripped him of energy, of mental capacity. These were temporary setbacks, mostly, but he’d almost deprived himself of life entirely on numerous occasions.
When Gynoth returned breath to the last fifty villagers and trapped their souls in the amethyst he carried always, he ordered them—as he’d ordered all risen before them—to make haste for his fortress in the Ancient Lands. And then he climbed onto Osseus, utterly spent.
Reign of Gods (Sorcery and Sin Book 2) Page 25