by Jeff Seymour
“May I see it, please?” she asked.
Litnig hesitated and looked at Cole. Cole shrugged. The elder Jin brother handed the great dark sword he’d brought with him to Pyell.
The Magister’s arms bunched, and she carried it to her writing table, cleared a space for it among the papers, and pulled it halfway from its sheath. It was deep purple—the color of the night sky or a panther’s eye—and it looked translucent, as if it was made of crystal rather than metal.
Obsidian, Dil thought. Or maybe the black, glassy substance that had once imprisoned Sherduan in the north. Where did you get that? she wanted to ask.
But it was Pyell who asked the questions in Nutharion.
The Magister looked up from the blade and slid it into its sheath. “It’s well made,” she said. A wisp of hair fell over her eyes. “Have you named it?”
Litnig’s face looked stony. Dil could smell the storm of emotions swirling inside him. Embarrassment. Fear. Loneliness. Pride. Anger. So many she was surprised he hadn’t burst.
“No,” he replied.
The Magister pulled the hair from her eyes. “A good name,” she said.
A gust of wind kicked up. Dil’s arms broke out in goose bumps.
Litnig picked up the sword, then swung the long strap of its sheath over his shoulder and let it settle on his back. He didn’t say a word.
Dil rocked from foot to foot, clutching her dress, nervous for no reason she could place, while Litnig and Pyell locked eyes over the writing desk and its sea of missives.
Something’s wrong, she thought. Like it was in the mountains up north. Something’s wrong.
But she couldn’t figure out what.
“Why’d you call us here?” asked Cole. He rubbed a hand over his face. He looked almost as tired as Litnig.
Pyell closed her eyes. The world hummed around her, crackling with energy. She huffed a long, deep sigh.
“Because,” she said softly, “I wanted to draw it out.”
“‘It’?” Litnig asked.
Pyell pointed north.
Dil followed the line of her finger to the thick bands of angry clouds, building and shifting and building and shifting and drawing ever closer. The air bristled with the expectation of storm, of thunder, of lightning.
Dil saw it first.
“Yenor’s third fucking eye,” she whispered.
There was a thin black line ahead of the clouds. It undulated through the sky like a cracking whip, flashing from spot to spot almost faster than Dil’s eyes could track.
And she knew—knew the head that capped its sinewy body, knew the claws, the teeth, the red eyes, the deep and bone-cold voice.
My bow, she thought. Her heart flapped against her lungs. Her legs went as soft as jellied lamb, and she reached for the piece of wood on her back and felt only soft, crushed silk. She felt Cole tense up next to her and knew he’d just had the same thought about his daggers.
Not that our weapons would do us much good.
Dil opened her eyes to the Second River’s golden flow. She wrapped her hand around Cole’s and squeezed tightly.
The Magister pursed her lips.
“Sherduan,” she said.
Dil ran like a rabbit.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Minutes before the destruction of Nutharion City
The stairs raced by, cold under Dil’s feet; she’d kicked off her silly Nutharian shoes as soon as she could. Visions of the dragon ran through her mind in an endless loop. Her lungs felt as if they were about to take flight through her mouth, and her heart as if it might beat so fast she would die.
Cole squeezed her hand.
The visions faded. Her heart slowed down.
She squeezed back.
Bells rang out in the city. First one near the northern limits, then more and more, until their calls filled the air. There would be movement out in the opulence of the Skylevel—candy-robed soulweavers rushing from estates and pouring up ramps from the city below. They would be flowing like a river toward the Cityhall.
Litnig, pounding down the stairs behind her and Cole, sounded angry. “Cole?”
“I didn’t think it would work,” Cole grunted. He looked haggard and gray, and his hand was cold.
Dil reached the roof of the Cityhall and stopped. The first soulweavers were pouring into the courtyard from below, and rain had begun to fall over the city in heavy, shifting curtains.
The dragon came on.
It swam through the air like a snake, snapping its long body back and forth, surging forward on the wind. Even so far away she could feel its eyes. She remembered cowering before it underneath Sherdu’il, remembered breaking and running and knowing that all hope was lost, that nothing would remain of them or anything else when it was done.
Breathe slowly, she told herself.
Cole squeezed her hand again. The soulweavers were lining up in ranks. Officers wearing white sashes rode red horses among them, barking orders over the hiss of the rain.
Pyell’s face had twitched just once as Dil turned to run, as if the Magister had swallowed something particularly bitter—an unripe olive maybe, or the wrong kind of greens. And suddenly Dil had known that Pyell didn’t think the soulweavers would succeed. That she was sacrificing all of them—hundreds of people—for the sake of an encounter with the dragon and the hope that she would learn something from it.
Her heart twisted. It wasn’t right that anyone should act like that, but it seemed especially wrong for someone as young as Pyell to.
The dragon sailed over the darkened, empty slums to the north, then disappeared beneath one of the lower plates.
“We should go,” Cole said.
“Go where?” muttered Litnig.
Dil listened to the heavy movements of her lungs, of Litnig’s, of Cole’s. She heard not one bird, one mouse, one insect. Ahead of her, the soulweavers shifted nervously, their officers muttering on their proud horses.
Her throat closed up again.
Cole’s right, she thought. We shouldn’t be here. She opened her eyes to the Second River. We shouldn’t be here, none of us—
The crack of thunder sounded, and the roof of the Cityhall shuddered. The golden souls of the Second River slid northward and rebounded.
A shriek like the screaming of a thousand horses split the air.
White light poured over the lip of the courtyard from the plates below. The clouds turned a terrible shade of swirling green. The city rumbled. The wind roared against Dil’s face, her lips, her hair. The rain intensified, soaking her flimsy dress, pooling against her eyebrows and running down her face.
Consternation showed on the faces of the soulweavers. Something was happening in their River—had to be. Litnig stepped in front of her. His sword was in his hand, purple and black, and his eyes had turned bright white.
What—
The Cityhall roof blew apart before her eyes.
She ducked away from the explosion. Chunks of rock and dust spattered her. Cole tugged her down, trying to shield her with his body.
When she looked back, people were falling from the sky amid the debris.
And in the center of a geyser of flame and smoke and rock, she saw the dragon.
The air around Sherduan lit up spectacularly. Lightning crackled from the hands of soulweavers in red, purple, green, and blue. Streams of flame warred with the nightmare shadows of the dragon’s body. Spears of light shot toward its head. Balls of kinetic force made loud claps as they concussed around it.
It plunged into the Nutharians, and they began to scream.
And, finally, it was time to act.
The Cityhall shook when the dragon landed. Men and women in robes hurtled through the air as cart-sized claws swept through them. Sherduan’s tail and body rolled left and right in coils, leaving crumpled corpses and smears of blood on the crumbling roof.
Dil stepped forward, combing the Second River for a soul to channel—something big and strong, like a dire bear or a tunnelworm or a k
raken.
She found it. A bear, big and old, a mother. She breathed in deep, felt it fill her, grew as big and as strong and as angry as she’d ever been.
In front of her, the dragon savaged the Nutharians.
Around her stood her family. Her cubs. Two boys. To be protected.
She snarled, lowered her head, and charged.
There was no fear; she had no space for it in her brain. There was only her need to do something and the bear’s need to protect and the strength of that whole life lived in mountains and forests where survival was a constant battle.
She hit the dragon’s leg running as fast she could, shoulder first, with all the force of a thousand-pound creature behind her.
It didn’t budge.
Her shoulder crunched, but the bear was strong, didn’t care. The dragon was still tearing at Nutharians, and Dil reared up and slashed at it, clamped down on its skin with her teeth and ripped and rent.
The shadows came apart in her mouth, inky darkness that tasted of death and worse than death. She jerked back and gagged, retched, spit them onto the Cityhall roof and watched them wisp back toward the dragon’s body. Her vision blurred, and she pawed at her tongue, her lips, her teeth, trying to get the shadows away.
A mountain struck her.
At least that was what it felt like. There was a crushing impact, and then she was sailing through the air, not sure where she was or how she’d gotten there. She hit the roof again with another crunch; her chin bounced and her teeth smashed together. The taste of blood crept in among the death and the shadows.
The bear didn’t care. She jumped to her feet again, roared, turned around to face the dragon and prepared to charge a second time.
A hand grasped her arm.
Someone was screaming.
“Dil! Stop, dammit!”
Cole, grabbing her, trying to hold her back. His brother stood next to him, grinding his teeth and watching.
Dil blinked.
“We have to run!” Cole shouted. “We can’t beat this thing. Look at it!”
She did. A jagged hole the size of a small arena was missing from the Cityhall’s roof, and Sherduan was perched on the edge of it, coiled like an enormous black spring. Nutharian soulweaving hammered against it impotently. A sea of bodies lay in front of it.
Its lizardlike lips edged into a smile.
Cole’s right, she realized. There’s no fighting this.
She let the bear go.
Without the soul of the bear to embolden her, Dil’s fear grew like a living thing. She felt it in every pore—a heaviness settling over her bones, a cloying muck of death and decay in her lungs. No matter which way the dragon’s head turned, it was looking at her—waiting for her.
Her shoulder was on fire. One of her teeth was a searing agony. Her mouth still tasted of death and destruction.
“Come on!” Cole barked.
She turned and ran. Cole turned with her, and Litnig started to move as well. There was a rush of wind and a clap of thunder—
—and then the dragon was in front of them, blocking the stairs down into the Cityhall.
The mangled torso of a blue-robed Nutharian fell from its jaws.
The smile split its lips again. It padded forward like a lion, powerful shoulders bunching and relaxing. Its claws scraped the stones. Its torso swung from side to side. Its tail flicked back and forth.
Dil couldn’t move.
The dragon was unlike any creature she’d ever seen and somehow like all of them, as if the most frightening parts of each had been mashed together into an unholy miscellany. She remembered the shadows, the taste of them in her mouth, and had the terrifying thought that beneath its black scales there was nothing—no muscle, no bone, no flesh at all. That what she was seeing wasn’t truly Sherduan, but the closest approximation her mind could muster, and that before her was an entity of a different plane, a part more of the mechanisms that underlay her world than of her world itself. The weight of its presence was stifling—it pressed on her shoulders, filled her nose, her mouth, her lungs. Her eyes watered. She could barely breathe.
Scarcely a dozen yards from her, it stopped.
Its smile disappeared. Rain spat across the roof. Dil felt like a mouse trapped in the corner of a darkened attic, looking desperately for a way out and seeing none.
The dragon’s chest rose and fell, but no steam escaped its lips. Its scales shone in the stormy light.
Two figures moved within the shadows on its back.
People, Dil realized. She licked the rain from her lips with a dry, burning tongue. Those are people.
They seemed to be riding it, anchored by the shadows. A man with dark hair in front. A woman with white hair behind. They carried swords at their hips.
The dragon’s eyes caught hers. Its voice filled her mind.
One of you is going to die here, little Wilderleng. Would you like to pick who?
Its grin grew fiercer, and its eyes flicked over Cole and Litnig. Her heart hammered. She didn’t want to die.
You won’t choose yourself, will you, child?
Its tongue of fire licked its lips.
No one ever does.
“Eshan!” shouted Litnig.
The rain intensified. Cole shuddered. Dil wrestled with fear and shame and pain.
“Eshan!” Litnig screamed again.
The two on the dragon’s back didn’t reply, but their attention went to Litnig. The one in front gripped the reins tighter. The one behind smiled.
Litnig swept back his rain-soaked hair with one hand. The veins bulged in his neck.
“Eshan!”
The hair on Dil’s head rose up. A painful flash filled the sky. A blast of thunder burst in her ears.
She blinked.
Cole flinched.
When she looked again, Litnig was standing in front of them with one hand raised. Little sparks of electricity crawled over an otherwise-invisible dome in front of him.
A river of flame glowed into being around the man on the dragon and raced forward, only to turn before striking as if batted away by an invisible hand.
The Second River swirled and tumbled. The rain fell. Litnig shifted his stance, his legs wide and low, his sword held near his knees, parallel to the ground.
“Come on,” he grunted. His eyes never left the man on the dragon. “Come on…”
Dil wrung Cole’s hand.
Those flames, her mind whispered. Those flames were meant for us, not for Litnig—for me, for Cole.
The man on Sherduan’s back said something to his companion, kicked one leg out of the shadows, and slid to the roof. He stalked forward and pulled a sword from the sheath at his hip. It glowed red-orange in the rain, like liquid fire.
Dil’s head swam. The burning on her tongue was getting worse. It began to spread down her throat.
Two trails of white light whipped from the man’s companion toward Dil and Cole. They struck something invisible in the air and cracked back.
“Come on,” whispered Litnig.
The dragon moved.
Its face turned toward Pyell’s tower. The thousand-horse scream assaulted Dil’s ears a second time, and the man who’d been coming toward them spun and ran back the other way. A ball of light as large as a fishing boat formed in the dragon’s mouth.
The Cityhall began to tremble.
Oh no, whispered Dil’s mind. Oh no ohnohno…
The screaming grew louder.
Run, she thought. Her legs felt free again. Run now, it’s time to run. Run anywhere—
The ball blew apart in a burst of liquid light that soared toward the tower.
The air cracked again. Hot wind rushed over her.
Dil flung her arms over her eyes to shield them. She heard more cracking, more thunder. A terrible splitting noise filled the air, like there’d been when the mountains had tried to crush them so long ago.
She looked up in terror.
The top of the tower had sheared off, and it was hang
ing in the air above them, falling. The man with the red sword had climbed onto the dragon’s back, and it was taking to the sky.
No… her mind whispered again. She threw her arms around Cole and dug her fingers into his shoulders.
One of Litnig’s long arms wrapped around her and Cole and crushed them against his body. His skin felt as if there was a furnace burning beneath it.
The tower drew closer. The earsplitting, world-filling rumble of a landslide crackled across the sky. The world went black. The floor dropped out.
Dil grabbed a handful of Litnig’s white jacket. The burning dropped deeper, through her throat and into her heart. It clenched. Flared. Disappeared.
And then she was falling in the darkness.
THIRTY-EIGHT
During the destruction of Nutharion City
A moment later, all was still.
Dil stood at the heart of a well of darkness. Her heart ached and thundered, but the fire was gone, as if something else had drowned it. Litnig’s arm pressed against her, and one of her hands was still twined in the leather of his jacket. Her other hand held tight to Cole. Their feet were smushed together.
Litnig’s arm relaxed. So did Dil’s grip. She listened to the brothers breathe.
In the darkness, it was hard to tell one from the other.
White light flared in front of her and swam around Litnig’s hand. His eyes were glowing again. He let go of her and Cole and took a few steps forward.
The space around them looked completely alien. It was wide and dark and open. Shelves stretched as far as the light went in every direction. Large casks sat between them, barely lit by Litnig’s hand. A ragged hole gaped in the ceiling. A pile of rubble at Dil’s feet led up to it like a ramp.
We fell, she realized. We fell and the tower fell on top of us. Litnig protected us, like he did from the fire, from the lightning. She rubbed her chest, touched her mouth, her tongue. She’d broken a tooth, and it was bleeding. But everything else seemed normal.
“Are you all right?” Cole asked. He was looking closely at her, still holding tight.
Slowly, Dil nodded.
She was, she thought, though the tooth hurt like hell and her chest felt loose and warm, as if something had been opened in her heart—a crack, maybe, though not a physical one.