by Paul Stewart
Occasionally, if one of the young wyrmes showed signs of exhaustion – wingbeats slowing, neck drooping, tail losing its sinuous ruddering shape – a powerful male would glide beneath it and support the yearling’s weight until it had recovered sufficiently to continue. But even with this watchful care, the young and the old among the host had suffered cruelly in this fullwinter exodus.
‘Storm ahead!’
Alsasse’s words rippled back through the formation, and were confirmed a moment later when the entire host plunged into the darkness and bitterchill of a swirling bank of snowdense cloud. They kept wingtip to wingtip, their eyes fixed on the swishing tails of the whitewyrme ahead. They did not waver …
Many weeks had passed since Alsasse had led the colony out into the brooding skies of the weald, his eyes set on the horizon to the west. They had abandoned the magnificent wyrme galleries which had been home to their kind for countless centuries, and set off into the unknown.
It was a heavy responsibility, but Alsasse had had no choice. The two-hides were already in the valley country and, judging by their taint on the wind, there were many of them. The deep weald, beyond the range of even the most adventurous of the great whitewyrmes, was the only answer. The two-hides could never follow them there, of that Alsasse was certain. And Alucius had agreed.
But it had been hard, this exodus in the teeth of fullwinter. When they’d left the wyrme galleries, the first snows were falling, and it had soon got worse. Over the smoke ridges, the host had been pursued by unrelenting blizzards. They’d flown on through the ravines beyond, finding shelter of sorts, but little food. The first of the whitewyrmes had begun to die in the jagged peak country further on, with the young dropping out of the sky with exhaustion and the very old seeking out ledges and crannies in which to curl up and die of cold.
With a heavy heart, Alsasse had kept the host moving. He sent out the ablest hunters to forage as they continued, but the pickings were meagre. Several females laid wyves, but the host could not stop to prepare nests for them, and the precious eggs were lost. Alsasse grieved, but still he drove the whitewyrmes on.
Beyond the peaks were more mountain ranges, then more, each higher and more desolate than the ones before. And still they had kept on.
Eventually, the host had got used to the terrible rigours of the exodus, accepting losses when they couldn’t be avoided, but cleaving to each other in an ever-closer bond. The skein formation became tight, efficient and all but unbreakable. The forages became more skilful, even as finding food in the fullwinter snows became harder.
No one complained and the sorrow in Alsasse’s heart had eased as he saw their courage.
But now they were hungry and thin, and even the strongest of the males was finding it difficult to maintain the steady wingbeat in the face of exhaustion. They had to find somewhere to rest up, and soon, Alsasse realized, or the host risked catastrophic losses.
Yet the bank of stormcloud continued. Mile after mile. Hour after torturous hour. Above them, the blurred grey sun slipped down slowly in the sky, then disappeared beneath the horizon. It seemed as though the flight through the chill opacity would never end.
But then, as abruptly as it had enveloped them, so the cloud cleared. The whitewyrmes emerged from the stormclouds and entered the dark twinkling clarity of night.
Behind Alsasse, Alucius stared down at the landscape beneath, desperately searching for a possible roosting place. They had left behind a pleated labyrinth of high valleys, jagged ridges and pointed summits, the sharp angles of the rocks softened by thick snow. Now, the land below them had changed utterly. Black basalt slabs and glass obsidian flows created a dark brooding rockscape that was cracked and haphazard, the blocks of rock glowing infernal red from the molten lava that flowed in the depths of the cracks and crevices that cut through them.
It looked, thought Alsasse, like a world only half-finished in its creation, and as they flew over it, the flock fell into fearful silence. Alsasse dipped his head and surveyed the primordial desolation, and was aware that behind him, the whitewyrmes could sense his growing unease.
Where in this terrible landscape were they to land?
To the north, Alucius’s keen yellow eyes spotted the glint and gleam of water. He called ahead to Alsasse in that soft screeslide sigh of a voice of his, calm and steady and reassuring to the host and its leader.
Alsasse gave the word to descend. The mighty flock dipped in the sky and the skein broke formation as the wyrmes came in to land. They wobbled down through the air on hot sulphurous upcurrents, their wings outstretched, then lowered their legs and touched down in this new and unfamiliar land.
Coils of souryellow smoke streamed out evenly from clefts in the expanse of black rock on which they’d landed, while all around them, from dips and basins that were filled with algae-choked pools, plumes of steam exploded intermittently into the air. Crusty lichens of orange and red, bright in the molten fireglow, clung to the rocks at the fringes of the pools. Long diaphanous filaments of cottonweed swayed in the swirling water like sheets in the wind. Skimming the bubbling surface were saltbugs and sulphur flies and plump lacewing damsel flies – and there were small unfamiliar wyrmes of bright blue and gold feeding on them.
Alsasse raised his long neck and looked around. He noted the warmth which seeped up from the rock. He noted the water, the vegetation and the insects. He breathed in the air, long and slow, sifting through the patchwork of odours. Brimstone. Charwater. Hot rock. Ferrous, sour, brackish …
It was the smell of a landscape newly formed – and free of the taint of the two-hides.
He turned to Alucius, his eyes shining brighter than they had in a very long while. ‘I believe we have travelled far enough.’
But Alucius made no reply. Instead, his gaze was focused on the lip of the nearest glowing crevice – a great crack in the black rock that seemed to descend into the fiery centre of the earth.
Alsasse twisted his sinuous neck and followed the second of the host’s intense gaze. Around him, the rest of the flock did the same.
A massive taloned hand gripped the lip of the crevice. It was blueblack and gleamed like burnished pewter.
As the whitewyrmes watched, the razor-sharp talons dug into the rock for purchase and powerful muscles flexed at the wrist and knuckles. Another hand appeared, and then a crested head, a massive body and broad dark wings.
Slowly, deliberately, an enormous male blueblackwyrme pulled himself from the crevice and stepped out onto the sleek rock. He was broad-chested, thick-necked and blunt-snouted, and he looked to be twice as big as the largest of the whitewyrmes. His dark scales shimmered in the orange fireglow of the crevice; his sapphire-bright eyes, small and glinting in his brutal face, regarded the host narrowly.
He opened his jaws and the sound the blueblackwyrme released was grinding and heavy and bubbled like the molten lava flow in the crevice depths. It sounded dark. Unfamiliar. But it was recognizable. Just. And when it was repeated, the words were unmistakable.
‘You are not welcome here.’
Twenty-Four
The girl raised the horn to her mouth and blew. A deep mournful sound boomed and throbbed, then faded away. The girl lowered the horn.
‘Follow me,’ she said, turning away. ‘If you have need of shelter.’
Micah turned to Eli. The cragclimber had made no move, but remained where he was on the snowcapped outcrop, the rockspikes clenched in his fists. His eyes were dull and sunken, his stubbled cheeks hollowed out, and as Micah watched, he saw him begin to sway slightly on his feet.
The cragclimber was every bit as exhausted as Micah himself.
‘What shall we do?’ Micah whispered.
‘Don’t seem like there’s a whole load of options open to us,’ Eli muttered gruffly, his eyes fixed on the back of the girl in the long grey cloak and wide-brimmed hat as she made her way down th
e side of the valley.
She was agile and sure-footed, Micah observed, stepping lightly from rockslab to boulder, neither slipping nor hesitating.
‘This haven’s occupied, that much is clear,’ Eli was saying. ‘But if we retreat back up there …’ He glanced back the way they’d come, and shook his head. ‘We do that, we’ll freeze to death for sure. Reckon we’re gonna have to follow her, Micah,’ he concluded. ‘But I ain’t fixing to surrender my weapons.’
Micah nodded, and followed the cragclimber as he lurched forward and stumbled down after the girl. Dislodged rocks skittered before them, and their halting breath fletched the cold air.
The sides of the ravine became steeper the further down they went, and began to close up. The freezing fog thinned and lifted. It hung in the air above them, creamy and opaque, and with the weak sun shining through, looked like folds of muslin.
They trudged down into a narrow defile that steepened further, the cliffs almost vertical on either side of them, stumbling, steadying themselves with their hands against the rock. The pinched trail turned sharply, and Micah looked up to see that the way ahead was barred by a wooden stockade that spanned the tight gap between the rockfaces. Stout pinelogs, stripped of their bark, had been carpentered and set in line, then braced and latticed with crossbars that were riveted into place.
The girl came to a halt in front of the wall of wood. She looked up, cupped her hands to her mouth.
‘It’s Cara. Midwatch sentinel,’ she called. ‘Did you not hear the horn? I bring strangers to Deephome.’
As if in reply, a rope ladder sailed over the sharpened jags that fringed the top of the stockade, and tumbled down till it dangled in front of the girl. She reached out and seized it, and climbed up the wooden rungs with swift efficient movements. Below her, Micah and Eli exchanged exhausted looks.
‘I’ll go first,’ said the cragclimber. ‘You watch my back.’
Micah nodded.
Eli pocketed the rockspikes and began pulling himself up the rope ladder. When he’d reached the top and clambered awkwardly over the stockade, Micah followed. He had his catapult gripped between his clenched teeth, and two sharp flints were wedged up his shirt sleeve. His arms and legs ached and, with the air in the ravine growing warmer, feeling was returning to his fingers and toes, setting them to a painful and fiery throbbing.
Micah grasped the top of the stockade and braced himself for a moment, his face bathed in a film of clammy sweat. His stomach grumbled and nagged.
Almost there, he told himself.
With his jaws clamped, he hauled himself over the sharp spikes. His body was shaking and his head swam, and when the wyrmepelt cape snagged and he slipped and almost fell, Micah knew that he had expended the last of his strength.
Two hands reached out and grabbed him by the arms. The girl was on one side of him, Eli on the other, and Micah found himself tripping and stumbling as they supported him down a wooden staircase that was lit up by lanterns fixed to the inside of the stockade wall. At the bottom, on a broad apron of rock that had been swept clear of snow, there stood a tall figure, dressed in a grey cloak that matched the girl’s and a broadbrim hat of woven straw, lacquered with a varnish of deep red.
Micah tried to focus on the figure’s face, but all he could see was the deep red swimming before his eyes in the flickering lanternlight. He reached up and took the catapult from his mouth with fingers that throbbed and cramped and were all but useless. Beside him, Eli swayed on his feet, his jaw jutting out defiantly and his hands reaching into his pockets for the rockspikes.
‘Return to your watch, daughter,’ said the figure in the grey cloak and red hat.
Behind him, in some kind of vast vaulted space, Micah was dimly aware of other grey shapes moving about, smudges of red and flashes of white shimmering in the background.
‘I am Kilian, prophet of Deephome.’
Deephome. The word repeated inside Micah’s head. Deep home.
He forced his eyes to focus. The voice that had spoken was kind and lulling, and belonged to a tall firm-jawed man who stared at him from dark deepset eyes that were shadowed beneath tufted eyebrows, and which rose sympathetically as he spoke.
‘It is the heart of fullwinter, a hazardous time to be wandering the weald …’
‘We ain’t no den squatters,’ Eli said gruffly, ‘and our business is our own. We were making for a refuge when a snowstorm drove us off course.’
‘No one is turned away from Deephome,’ said the prophet, extending a smooth hand, uncalloused by rough labour, from the folds of his grey cloak. ‘You are welcome to shelter among us.’
Micah was waiting for Eli’s reply when he felt his legs begin to buckle. The red hat swayed and shimmered before his eyes, and the last thing he remembered was the catapult slipping from his burning fingers and clattering to the ground.
Twenty-Five
There were people down at the bottom of this great gash in the rock. Lots of people. Grey-cloaked figures in red straw hats and starched white bonnets, going about their business in the vast vaulted chamber. And as he watched them, Micah realized with a jolt just how cut off he, Eli and Thrace had been in the winter den – and how unused to the company of others he had become.
Three men were sitting with wyrmebone quills and pots of sootblacking, labelling large jars of salted and pickled produce; a fourth was climbing up and down a ladder set against a vast stack of open shelves, fetching and replacing the jars as required. A little way off, two women were beating thick plaid rugs that hung from a long line slung between more shelfstacks, while another two were shuffling awkwardly across the floor of the cavern, a large liquor barrel swaying between them.
And in among them all, playing some kind of game of tag – and using the silently labouring adults as cover – were half a dozen children, all dressed in miniature versions of the grey cloaks, red hats and white bonnets of their elders. One of them noticed Kilian standing over by the strangers, who were seated at the foot of the stockade stairs.
‘Brother Kilian!’ she exclaimed, and the others interrupted their game and joined in.
‘Brother Kilian! Brother Kilian!’
The adults paused and looked up, then returned to their tasks as the children clustered around him, jumping up and tugging at the folds of his cloak. Kilian beamed down at them benevolently.
‘Who are they? Who are they?’ the children clamoured, pointing at Eli and Micah.
‘This is Eli Halfwinter,’ Kilian told them, refilling the cragclimber’s beaker with honey-coloured liquor. ‘And this,’ he said, turning, ‘is Micah.’
Micah smiled and took another gulp from his beaker. He still felt shaky after his fainting spell, but his head was beginning to clear, and the liquor glowed in the pit of his stomach, warm and soothing.
Kilian looked around at the excited faces of the children, his unblinking gaze resting on each of them for a moment, then raised his hands for quiet. ‘The two of them have travelled a long way and are sore in need of food and rest. So stop pushing, stop shoving – Mattie, that means you too – and accord them the respect that we always accord our guests. That clear?’
A harsh edge had crept into Kilian’s voice. The children fell back and lowered their heads.
‘Yes, brother Kilian,’ they muttered. ‘Sorry, brother Kilian.’
Kilian nodded, but his mind had already moved on to other matters, and he turned to Eli and Micah.
‘If you’ll both excuse me,’ he said, ‘I have business I must attend to. Cara will be back shortly. Since you arrived during her watch, she’ll be the one to look after you.’ With that, he turned and strode off into the cavern, disappearing through an entrance in the far wall.
Micah shook his head. ‘This cave’s got to be twenty times the size of our den,’ he marvelled, gazing up at the vaulted ceiling. ‘And with a hundred ti
mes the stores …’
Beside him, Eli shifted on his haunches as he eyed the foodstuff and liquor shelves lining the vast chamber. ‘I ain’t never seen nothing like it,’ he admitted. ‘Such abundance gathered together in one place.’ He frowned and rubbed a hand over his grizzled jaw. ‘Though don’t it strike you a might odd?’
‘Odd?’ said Micah, turning to look directly at Eli.
The cragclimber put down his beaker on the stone floor. ‘Odd that, with riches such as these to defend, they ain’t more wary of strangers.’
Micah looked at the contented faces of the grey-cloaked people around them, calmly going about their tasks, and at the happy smiling children playing at their feet. Just then there came the sound of footsteps on the stairs behind them, and looking round, Micah saw that the girl, Cara, had returned.
‘Perhaps,’ he conceded. ‘Though I sure am grateful for their hospitality.’
As he watched, the girl descended the stairs and handed the horn she was carrying to a tall youth in a grey cloak and red hat, nodding to him as she did so. Then, as he set off up the staircase for latewatch, she turned away, undid the clasp at the neck of her cloak and slipped it off, before hanging it on a hook beneath the stairs, next to a row of others.
Without the shapeless outdoor garb, Cara looked slimmer, almost slight. She wore a skirt of heavy homespun that stopped just below the knee, long thick stockings and moccasins. Her blouse was blue and long-sleeved and buttoned high at the neck. And when she removed the heavy broadbrim hat, which she hung up on top of the cloak, Micah saw the skulltight bonnet she wore beneath – a starched folded piece of headgear that held, but did not entirely conceal, a mass of auburn curls.
Unaware of Micah’s gaze upon her, Cara smoothed down her skirt and, with movements that were graceful and lithe, reached for a dry cloak and put it on. When she turned back, Micah found himself staring into her clear blue-green eyes.