Fern raised a finger pointing. ‘Look there.’
Where the faint thread of the road disappeared into the maw of Molochite’s second line, there was a bristling movement.
Then a sun ignited in the heart of Molochite’s second line.
‘Osidian,’ Carnelian breathed, entranced.
Though the curving wall of Molochite’s dragons hid the fire, its glare was flung up stark into their towers. One at the centre flared into flames. Another joined it. Another two. They burned like torches as they veered away from each other. He and Fern watched, mesmerized, as more towers ignited, one after the other, outward from the centre as Osidian’s dragons incinerated Molochite’s line. Then the Black Face standard was lit up from below. The sun of Osidian’s attack had penetrated all the way to the Iron House. Its standard shivered like a thing alive, turned towards them, grimacing as it caught fire. Carnelian watched, stunned. The Iron House itself must be alight. Relief that Molochite would die was choked by a memory of the children he had with him. The standard fell like sputtering wax. As if this were a signal, the sky flickered, then released a booming roar. Instinct jerked Carnelian’s head back as the air above hissed. Then he had to close his eyes against the needle rain. A cool sheath slipped down over his skin. He gasped with delight as it scoured him clean of gore, then he was drinking the gift of the sky. He dropped his head, rubbed the water from his eyes and saw Fern gazing at him in wonder. For a moment they gaped at each other, then gave themselves over to laughter, that was not joy, but perhaps a release of terror.
The downpour diminished. The towers of Molochite’s second line had ignited like marsh lights as Osidian’s flame-pipes burned their way from its centre towards both flanks. Flying from the inferno, the monsters streaked the guttering torches of their towers through the gloom, but were soon enmeshed in the labyrinth of the sartlar dead. Here and there the burning towers lit the folds and creases of the corpse mounds. Sometimes one would detonate, its explosion dulled by the hissing rain. A flash, then gobbets of liquid fire would spill, strike the ridges with sparks, smear bright-backed smoulder over sinuous, crumbling contours, that would dull to pulsating scars, then nothing. Fallen dragons were left nestled among the dead as smoking boulders.
Though it was all happening some distance away, Carnelian and Fern eyed the path of Osidian’s fiery destruction as it burned nearer, glancing at each other, feeling exposed on their corpse hill. A dragon emerged from behind the last of Molochite’s line. It swept round the exposed flank belching flame. Its victim was soon alight and picking up speed as it fled with a ravening conflagration on its back. The ground quaked as the monster veered towards them. Carnelian felt Fern’s hand on his shoulder and put his own up to hold the arm there, for he judged they were safe. They watched as the monster lumbered south trailing flames and smoke. Its pursuer sailed after it, first one pipe then another snuffing out. The monsters disappeared into the labyrinth, then the pipes screeched back to life so that Carnelian and Fern could follow their progress by the smoke.
To the west the haze tore, thinning enough for them to be able to see, in the distance, something tilted burning among the smouldering mounds of the dragons that had pulled it half off the road. The Iron House seemed a child’s toy with a broken wheel, but Carnelian knew the truth of what he was seeing. ‘An oven,’ he muttered, imagining the fury of heat within its iron walls.
‘What?’ cried Fern above the rain.
Carnelian stared. Within that wreck people were being cooked alive. Not only Molochite, but the children of the Chosen; no doubt also the Quenthas and many of their brethren and who knew what others.
Then a harsh brazen cry echoed across the battlefield. Twice more it sounded, with an urgency that made Carnelian’s heart beat even faster. He glanced at Fern for some explanation, but he clearly had no idea what new horror this might presage. A rumble in the earth was causing the corpses upon which they stood to tremble. Casting around, Carnelian saw a boiling in the east like the rough edge of an oncoming flood. Molochite’s first line was returning. He swung his arm out, blindly feeling for Fern, even as he saw the horned heads rising and falling in time with the shaking earth. His hand finding nothing, he turned and saw Fern was staring in the same direction. Soon they were scrambling down to the ground as fast as they could.
They crept along a valley. Mounds of corpses rose up on either side, striped black by the passage of dragonfire. The rain had quenched most of the burning, but furtive, lurid flames still flickered in the depths of the piled-up dead. The rain pummelled their backs, forcing them to bow their heads, though they still had to blink away drops to see. Horror would have been enough to stoop them and they would rather have walked blind were it not that they feared snagging their feet upon an arm, a leg, a crushed head, then falling into the foul mud. Earth mixed with rain and gore and shit, churned by panicked sartlar, formed a treacherous, sucking mire. Everywhere streams ran like arteries exposed to the air. Everywhere sartlar like crushed shellfish were extruding pastes, leaking fluids. Wounded sartlar crawled over the slopes and dragged themselves in clumps through the marshy flats, unsteady on their bony legs, sliding, slipping, holding on to each other with desperate knobbed hands. Even at this extreme, they found the strength to pull themselves from Carnelian’s path. He regretted adding to their agony as they scrabbled to avoid him but, try as he might to keep his distance from them, there was no other way through. Most cowered as he passed, but some sneaked glances, squinting at him as if he were a dazzling flame.
Raw wounds gaping in the corpse ridges showed where Molochite’s first dragon line had crushed through. Carnelian and Fern had already crossed swathes of fiery destruction that might have been left by meteors crashing from the sky, when they came across the pitiful sight of a dragon of the second line run aground upon a reef of bodies. Exploding, its tower had scattered around it a pale field of bone splinters, at the centre of which the hump of the dragon’s back formed a halo of pulverized meat around the black crater of its body cavity. As they crept past, Carnelian regarded the concentric rings of destruction and saw in it a sinister representation of a wheelmap.
Further on, another dragon, front legs buckled, had plunged its head into a corpse mound as far as its upper horns. Its beak had gouged a bow wave of earth and carcasses. The ruin of its tower, still restrained by some girdle ropes, leaned over the mound like a half-fallen tree, its flame-pipes snapped like branches against the sartlar dead. The monster’s flanks and rear had been burned through to the bone by the conflagration that had spilled down from its tanks. The tower, eaten away by fire, exposed a blackened interior where the stump of its capstan was still manned by its charcoaled crew. Sitting like a shadow high in his command chair, the remains of a Master.
On they walked, clambering where they could through gaps in the mounds, shutting their hearts to the horrors to which they could not shut their eyes, each imprisoned in his own mind. Carnelian was remembering their flight through the limestone runnels on their way down from the Guarded Land, but was haunted too by memories of the Isle of Flies, of the Labyrinth.
The clump of sartlar seemed like others they had seen, except that they stood so still. Above them loomed a broken dragon tower that had been hurled some distance from where the monster that had borne it lay fallen. Carnelian and Fern were forced to draw nearer to the sartlar because they and the tower almost blocked the way. When one of the creatures turned its gore-encrusted head, Carnelian expected it to cower away, taking its fellows, trembling, with it, but the head turned back and the sartlar remained where they were. Carnelian and Fern glanced at each other, sharing their unease. As they edged round the sartlar, they became aware the creatures were in a ring looking down at something in their midst. Though Fern signed against it, Carnelian was drawn to look. Something pale but smeared with black lay upon the ground. The sartlar seemed to sense his interest and several heads came up. They regarded him with their dark eyes. For some reason he felt they wanted him to look. A
s he stepped forward, they moved aside. It was a Master on the ground, his body twisted into an unnatural shape. He stared, feeling how incongruous the expression of terror and surprise seemed upon that beautiful pale face, upon those pale, dead Chosen eyes. He saw the mask that had come loose and saw himself reflected in it like a crack of light in a winter dawn. The sartlar were gazing at him. Steadily they gazed at him and he grew afraid. He tried to rationalize his fear away, reminding himself of how much they had suffered and that they were victims. He told himself it was suffering he was seeing in their eyes, but he knew it was something different. At the very least, a lack of fear. At worst, a slow-burning, cold hatred.
It was Fern who pulled him away. Carnelian managed one last glance back before Fern drew him out of sight behind a buttress of sartlar dead.
Beyond a gateway framed by corpses, the open plain seemed the land of the living. As they moved through, nervous of the tottering walls on either side, Carnelian relived the passage through the gutter of the purple factory. Though then he had been riding an aquar. Still, it was easier to pretend he was wading through crushed shellfish than acknowledge what it actually was.
Reaching the edge of the red pools, they clambered out onto clean, solid ground, their toes gouging into the good earth. They took several half-running strides and then Carnelian bent to scoop mud, using it to rub his legs clean, to scrape the muck from between his toes. Glancing up he saw, through tears, Fern was doing the same, his face a mask of disgust. When they had done what they could, they turned their faces up to the heavens, letting the rain wash their tears away. Carnelian lowered his head, rubbing water from his eyes, and looked back the way they had come. Gory footprints led to the carnage in the gateway through which they had escaped the corpse labyrinth.
He saw how the ridge of bodies resembled some vast breaker. ‘So many dead,’ he muttered.
He was possessed by the act of imagining how that great ridge had come about. The panic of the sartlar as the earth shook beneath their feet. Their terror as they saw the wall of dragons lumbering towards them. The animal imperative to flee. The front ranks pushing back into the unyielding mass of those behind. Stumbling, people were shoved down, trampled, tripping those that had pushed them, falling, crushing those beneath who continued to struggle for air, for life, but the receding tide of flesh could not be denied. At these obstacles, the fleeing fell and those behind scrabbled over them, in wave upon wave, building the ridge of the fallen ever higher, burying alive those beneath, until the screaming fire gushed and trickled down to light infernos among the matrix of the struggling. Carnelian closed his eyes, remembering being trapped; living their dying.
A firm grip upon his shoulder made him open his eyes with a gasp. He saw Fern’s concern for him, but also that he was pointing at the ridge. Carnelian looked up at it, at first aware only of the dead, but then realizing that the crest was lined with sartlar, like citizens manning a city wall. Turning, he saw what it was they all were watching: the Iron House smouldering.
Across the mud-glazed plain a dragon lay collapsed, its tower heeling over so that it seemed a ship left stranded on the mud by a receding tide. Then they heard paired trumpet screams, scratching from the south. As the sound repeated, Carnelian and Fern lurched into a lope, breathing hard against the strain of running through the mud. They reached the island of the fallen dragon. Dangling above were the brass mouths of its flame-pipes. They walked round the monster, keeping an eye on the tower leaning towards them. Up past the boulders of the dragon’s knees and thighs, the brassman had fallen onto the rear haunch, one of its chains broken, dangling from one ankle. Carnelian was the first to advance under the shadow of the tower. He halted at the back knee, glancing up warily. He reached out to touch the hide. It was still warm. He scrambled up onto the monster’s shin, then scrabbled up its rain-slicked thigh, grabbed hold of the edge of the brassman. It rattled as he pulled himself up onto it. He smelled the burnt thing before he saw it. The charred remains of a man cooked to the brass. Fern was waiting to come up. Carnelian eyed the gaping maw of the tower entrance, then climbed towards it. The brassman gave a shudder as Fern came up onto it. Carnelian approached the doorway, wrinkling his nose against its charcoal breath. He reached up, caught hold of some of the rigging, then pulled himself up to stand to one side of the doorway. The brassman juddered with each step as Fern climbed it to take a place on the other side of the door. They both leaned in.
A black cavity sloped down into a pit where the deck should have been. At first they could make no sense of it but then Fern pointed and Carnelian saw the arch in the bottom of the pit with its individual stones and knew it was the exposed backbone of the monster. How fierce had been the inferno that had eaten its way down through decks and tank and flesh? The tower rose black and hollow like a chimney to the sky. Everything inside had been consumed.
Another doubled trumpet blast made them look south, but they could not see over the corpse ridge. Using the rigging, they clambered up the remains of the tower. As he pulled himself up onto the ledge around the topmost tier, Carnelian peered through a porthole. The command chair and the Master who had sat in it had fallen into the conflagration below. Using a guy rope, he pulled himself up the mast onto the narrow ledge that was the remains of the roof. There was just enough space for Fern to join him. It was only then they gazed out over the land. Dark ripples stretched away behind the first corpse ridge like those a tide leaves in sand. Here and there tiny dragons with their towers gave scale. Both stared, appalled, unable to comprehend how many dead there must be to make up such a landscape. A flashing in the midst of this carnage drew Carnelian’s eye. There upon the thread of road, a fire was burning. It died. Its smoke spiralled up, thinning into a haze, and he saw the dragon on the road and more behind it in a long column. The flame-pipes spoke again, the fire igniting against the road just before everything was obscured by naphtha smoke. At the root of that boiling black column, fire pulsed.
‘A signal,’ Carnelian and Fern said together. Carnelian looked further south and saw the ripples of the dead growing fainter and a scattering of ruined dragons like pebbles. He glanced east and saw a line of dragons there. There was another in the west. The two flanks of Molochite’s first line turned inwards, facing each other across the labyrinthine ripples of the dead and at its heart those flame-pipes signalling.
Sitting with their backs against the mast, Carnelian and Fern were frozen together like two blocks of ice. The rain pouring over them had drained their flesh of life, their minds of thought. Their eyes might have been glass as they gazed towards Heart-of-Thunder and Osidian. Who else could it be? In response to his signals, the two surviving wings of Molochite’s first line had exchanged communications by means of torches. As a result of all those firefly signals, a dragon from each wing had wound its way through the corpse labyrinth to meet Osidian on the road. By means of the torches their attendants lit, Carnelian and Fern had watched the commanders descend to the road and, there, in the shelter of Heart-of-Thunder’s belly, they had spent a long time, no doubt negotiating terms. After this the emissaries had returned each to his wing, where, after more torch signals, they had all moved south and had, a long while past, disappeared into the rain haze.
A light came suddenly from the west, shocking Carnelian and Fern to life. The curves and windings of the corpse labyrinth were thrown into sharp relief with a texture of piled-up fishbones.
A growl emitted from Fern’s throat brought Carnelian’s head up to see Heart-of-Thunder was turning. Shadows moved and melted upon his tower, and soon Osidian and his dragons were marching south along the road. Watching this, Carnelian felt a yearning to follow him, but as quickly as he felt this, he rejected it. He looked at Fern. For a moment his face seemed that of a stranger, but when Fern’s eyes came alive surveying the scene Carnelian’s heart jumped. It was then he determined that, come what may, he would share Fern’s destiny.
A bleak warmth upon his cheek made him turn to see the sun fallen
beneath the ceiling of black cloud, already westering. Beneath its orb, the wheeled box of the Iron House was all burnt out. Imagining its oven horrors was not enough to deter his need to go there. He lingered for a while, examining without success the motives of his heart before he turned to Fern. ‘We must find shelter for the night.’ The words seemed spoken by a stranger. Fern was looking back at him, a question in his eyes. Then he must have seen Carnelian had no answers, for he shrugged. They broke their immobility with difficulty. Their limbs and backs felt stiff enough to snap off at the joints. Like old men, they began the descent to the earth.
The wreck loomed black against purple sky. Above hung the gory clot of the sun. They were weary from the long slog through the mud. Chilled to the bone by the rain, at first they welcomed the warm aura of the ruined Iron House. Until, that is, they began to smell its funeral-pyre reek. Half off the road it lay, like a ship run aground upon a reef. Carnelian imagined how it had happened. In pain and panic, the two blind draught dragons had pulled it off the road so that one side had tipped, a wheel rolling for a moment in the air before landing heavily enough on the earth below to buckle. In all, three dragons were piled up against the wreck like foothills. The nearest, having lumbered completely off the road, had avalanched down, shattering its forelimbs, plunging its massive head into the rubble of the demolished leftway. One of its lower horns had snapped off at the skull, from which a pool of blood had oozed. Its beak had buckled as it punched into the ground. Its rump and back formed a fleshy buttress crushed beneath the toppling mass of the Iron House. The second dragon had crashed down into bloody ruin and now lay slumped half on, half off the road. The third was one of Osidian’s that had been caught up in the disaster. Its head lay hidden, but by the way the body lay, it must somehow be wedged between the wheel still on the road and the further wall of the Iron House. The monster sloped up from its collapsed haunches, suggesting its head was lying upon the axle. Its tower, angled back, was blackened but had not burned, so that perhaps its crew had been able to abandon it. The same fire that had licked the tower had burned furiously upon the backs of the two draught dragons. The summits of their backs were black craters ringed about by ashen flesh. Charcoaled gashes and clefts cutting deep into the meat showed where the wooden housings and the yokes as large as bridges had been consumed in the holocaust.
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