Bridge of Legends- The Complete Series

by Sarah K. L. Wilson

  His words cut off as the ground beneath them heaved and then lifted and his belly sank like a stone against the sudden upward pressure.

  Etienne screamed a curse, “Dragon’s spit!” His face was dark as he turned to Tamerlan and hissed. “Legends take your soul, Alchemist! We’re too late! We could have been free but we’re too late!”

  The dragon under them rose into the air, a cloud that had been in the sky above them only moments before settled into the streets, filling the night with sudden mist, distant screams, and the ragged sounds of Etienne’s foul curses.

  Tamerlan’s mouth went dry.

  You should have listened, Lila taunted. But I suppose I don’t mind. Now maybe you’ll let me loose. I can bring down King Abelmeyer the One-Eyed and The Lady Sacrifice before we land again. Smoke, pretty boy! Smoke and let me make all your dreams come true.

  Even the nightmares?

  They won’t feel like nightmares when you’re with me.

  He was knocked backward against the dam before he realized what was happening, blinking in the moonlight as a pair of hands grabbed his coat and drove him against the make-shift wall around the fountain.

  “I should have realized months ago what I had to do to you,” Etienne said coldly. There was a rasping sound and a dagger appeared in his hand, glinting in the moonlight. “I should have realized that at the beginning of every end was you. At the start of every disaster, that was where you were. If we get rid of you, then maybe this will all finally end. The Legends. The dragons. The events that ended everything I ever loved and swore to protect.”

  “That’s quite the speech,” Tamerlan said, swallowing down fear as he tried to be clever enough to save his own life. He would like to think this was the Grandfather taking over Etienne, but he knew the other man too well by now. He saw Tamerlan as a threat all on his own with no need of anyone else’s help.

  “True, every word of it,” Etienne said. “More than true. As the Lord Mythos, ruler of Jingen, I pronounce sentence on you –”

  “No!” Marielle shouted, darting to Tamerlan’s side and shoving herself between them. “Stop, Etienne! Think about this. You need Tamerlan. I need Tamerlan. Anglarok and Liandari are out there somewhere and they are killing people and waiting to kill us. And the dragon is flying again. What do we need? We need to get this dragon back down and then we need to trap it again. We need to either defeat or trap Anglarok and Liandari. Last time, they got to us first. We need people who can fight. We need people who understand at least something about the Legends and the dragons and we can’t have you killing one of the only ones who do.”

  It sounded so logical and well thought out – and so cold. Was he only a tool to her? Only a means to an end? Did she encourage him and work with him only because she needed him like she thought Etienne did?

  He watched her with his single eye, his heart breaking a little at her words. A tool. An ally. That’s what he was to her.

  And yet, he should be glad. He wanted her to stay away. He wanted her to be safe and that meant to be far from him. So why did it sting so much to think of her doing the very thing he desired?

  Because you don’t desire it, you pretty fool.

  “I think we should leave Tamerlan here,” Marielle said.

  A little stab of pain shot through him. She wanted to go somewhere and to go without him. He wasn’t sure if he was more worried that she would get into trouble without him there to help her or more hurt at her rejection. It stung like a slap across the face.

  She was still speaking to Etienne. “You and I will go and hunt Anglarok and Liandari. We’ll trap them ... or ... or whatever we have to do. And we’ll leave Jhinn and Tamerlan here and Tamerlan can read that book and figure out what the Legends want.”

  Freedom, Lila whispered.

  “Why the ones holding Anglarok and Liandari are so set against us. What Ram did to capture the dragons in the first place, and how we can use that to trap them, too.” Marielle concluded.

  Etienne was nodding. He shoved himself backward, away from Tamerlan and stalked into the night.

  “Read the book. Find the answer,” Marielle said, her hand brushing against Tamerlan as she drew back, too. He felt a burst of excitement at her touch followed by a stab of disappointment as he remembered that she didn’t share his feelings.

  She was gone before his dry mouth could form the words to ask her to be careful. If she died out there – if she was hurt –

  He cursed into the darkness, reaching for the book. They were right. He had to find the answers before they just kept on running blind forever.

  “She cares about you,” Jhinn said through chattering teeth, but his words were hollow. It was Marielle Tamerlan was longing to hear them from, not Jhinn.

  “We’ll make a fire,” Tamerlan said. “I’ll find a brazier to warm you and sit with you in the gondola so I can use the light to read. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds like a good way to survive the cold,” Jhinn said through chattering teeth.

  Well, he had a purpose. A purpose and a broken heart. He’d just have to let that pain propel him to do what he had to do so that all of them could survive.

  13: What the Histories Say

  Tamerlan

  By the time Tamerlan set the brazier up and built a large enough fire that it had burned down to strong embers, and by the time he’d gathered enough wood to keep feeding it, two hours had passed. He placed the brazier and piled the wood carefully in the gondola.

  Jhinn was in desperate need of the warmth. He huddled in his wool blanket next to the red embers, teeth chattering uncontrollably.

  Tamerlan sat on the other side letting the warmth wash over him with the bitterness of his freshly broken heart. But though he felt a stab of pain every time he thought of Marielle, he couldn’t help but think of her constantly. Was she cold out there on her hunt? Did Etienne treat her with more respect than he’d treated Tamerlan? Would she smell danger before it came at her?

  “She’s different than you, that’s all boy,” Jhinn said through chattering teeth as if he could read Tamerlan’s mind. “She’s hard in ways that you are soft. Logical in ways that you are emotional. You just don’t understand. I saw you slump after she left, but it’s not like that. She has a job to do, that’s all.”

  “What do you know of it?” Tamerlan asked roughly, but he gave the boy a smile to take the edge off.

  “Just read your book,” Jhinn said. Some color was coming back into his face as it warmed up.

  Tamerlan brought the book out, careful with each page as he found his place.

  “What does it say?” Jhinn asked.

  It was complicated and long. Whoever had written the book had been very keen on flowery language and a little less keen on specifics.

  “After the death of much of his party, Ram and those left with him renewed their vows of faith and penitence, and continued their climb in the mountains,” he read. He frowned, skimming the pages as he summarized. “There’s more here. The story of how they brought down a large wild cat that attacked in the night. The story of a huge lake with crystal shores in the mountains. A waterfall led from it and became the Alabastru river.”

  “That sounds nice,” Jhinn sighed.

  “It was a warm lake somehow – though the edges were crusted with ice – and the writer goes to pains to describe the bright blue color. Water was warm as a bath.”

  “Now you’re just teasing me,” Jhinn grunted. “Let me guess, you’re imagining yourself showing this warm-as-a-bath lake to Marielle.”

  Tamerlan felt his face flush. “I’m just reading the book.”

  “Mmhmm. Keep reading.”

  “So, they come to a pathway of caves and this is where they get stuck. There’s a great bridge here, but it’s crumbling and to be able to cross it they need some kind of power. Oh yuck. Ram thinks it’s a blood sacrifice, so he kills one of the young women who are on the quest with him and pours her blood over the bridge.”

  “Figu
res,” Jhinn said. “Why do your kind always want to pour girls’ blood over everything?”

  Tamerlan paused, “You know I hate that.”

  The sun was coming up in the distance and the golden rays were just beginning to make tracks across the city, leaving long inky cold shadows in stripes across the ground. Here in this gondola, in this tiny pond that bobbed on the back of a circling dragon, with a brazier of warm charcoal and a small fire – it felt almost like a temporary haven against the madness.

  Sacrifice. Blood for magic. Magic for blood.

  As if Ram could defend such foolishness. It was indefensible.

  It was foolishness. But it didn’t exactly happen as described in the book. Nothing ever does.

  And was he going to tell Tamerlan what really happened?

  No.

  Great. He’d just have to keep reading.

  The book is not accurate.

  Or maybe Ram just didn’t want him to know what had happened.

  Both things can be true at once.

  “Was that really your brother – Rajit?” Tamerlan asked Jhinn gently.

  Jhinn nodded. “He was a heretic. Just like my mother. Her they sunk in the water with stones chained around her feet. They were coming for him, too. My father put him in a barrel to try to change his mind – to get him to renounce his beliefs.”

  “What beliefs?”

  “That those on the land live.”

  Tamerlan snorted. “You still don’t believe that? Even after all of this?”

  “Water is life. If you know where the life is and stick with it, then you live, too.”

  “And you still think that my life isn’t real when I’m on the land?” Tamerlan asked.

  “On the land, you’ve destroyed everything you love except Marielle and you’re losing your mind. It doesn’t look like a great life to me. It looks a lot like being walking dead.”

  Tamerlan snorted. Jhinn made a good point.

  “Did you hear Rajit? Did you see how twisted he has become? Perhaps I didn’t do what was best for him when I set him free that night. I thought that saving his life would be a good thing. Even if I was saving it for life on land.”

  “And it’s not?”

  “I felt better about it. Even if he lived in the lands of the dead – well, he didn’t see them that way, so it seemed to me that it was good for him. But maybe I did that for myself. Maybe it wasn’t good for Rajit at all. He is twisted with bitterness and anger. When I saw him – my heart leapt. It was like my dead had been returned to me. But that was not how he felt.”

  “Then he’s the fool,” Tamerlan said quietly. “He doesn’t know what a good brother you are. You’ve been one to me when no one else wants anything to do with me.”

  “Only because I know what is real and I don’t let illusions blind me. There’s a world beyond this one – this temporary shell – and it calls to me, Tamerlan.”

  “And how will you reach it?”

  He shrugged. “Through water. That’s all I know. There’s life in water.”

  Tamerlan turned back to the book. Jhinn thought there was a world beyond this one. Tamerlan thought there was a way to save this one.

  Maybe they were both mad, but Tamerlan wasn’t going to accuse Jhinn of madness when he knew he was so close to it himself.

  He looked back at the book, reading again as Jhinn draped his fur cloak close to the brazier to dry it, adding a little more wood to the fire and propping up a kettle on the coals.

  “So, after they bathed everything in blood, what happened?” Jhinn asked.

  “It turned out there was a way across the bridge,” Tamerlan said. “But whoever wrote this book doesn’t seem to know what it was. He says, ‘And forsooth, did not Ram the Hunter disappear into the shadows and from hence a cry came up from the belly of the earth and then the bridge did shimmer as if in sun and we walked over it safe to a man, but none dared cut down sweet Anamay in fear that to loose her spirit would loose them all.’”

  “Pleasant bunch. And what was over the bridge?”

  Jhinn brought two battered tin cups out of the back of his gondola hatch carefully putting tea into a small mesh holder and pouring the hot water over it. He handed Tamerlan one of the steaming cups.

  “Thank you,” Tamerlan said, still scanning and reading. “He talks about wonders – it’s typical legend stuff. Singing swords. Caves of gemstones. Caverns of riches. Spirits. Warnings. And then this is interesting. It says, “And they lay there frozen under the mountain, their blood paying the price to lock the great serpents in place.”

  “That sounds promising. And then?”

  “And then a chunk of pages are torn out.”

  Tamerlan swallowed. Whoever had torn out these pages must have realized that they contained the only important part. The part that might explain how to trap dragons. He could hear Ram laughing in his head. Maybe the Legend tore them out. Maybe that’s why he knew Tamerlan couldn’t find answers there.

  He started reading on the next page.

  “He brought magical horns down from the mountains. And metal by which he built cages. Five cages. There’s the drawing of a horn and it looks a lot like the shell Marielle has – the yellow one. Hmmm.”

  “And?”

  “And then it gets lyrical about his journey home. Down the river, meeting people, trying to bring back the wealth he gathered. And everyone asked where it came from and he told them it all it came from slain dragons.”

  That’s true. It did.

  “But not dragons he killed?” Jhinn asked. He was making small cakes in a pan with some flour he had squirreled away in a waterproof packet in the hatch in his boat. “There’s not much of this flour, but I need to use it while I can.”

  “According to this, he was considered to have been the Slayer of Dragons, and those who were with him were treated with great respect by all the people and it was told that they captured the dragon with the help of Anamay and her sacrificial death.”

  “Nice lie,” Jhinn snorted and then put on a fake high voice, “‘Oh no, we didn’t kill her for no reason, she was a sacrifice to the great dragon. Don’t believe us? Take a look at these lovely riches! Maybe some can be for you.’”

  “Yes, that seems to be the sum of it, but Ram seemed dark and angry to the people and when he found King Abelmeyer there was a very public dispute. It’s hard to tell from the text – a lot of it seems to imply that we’d already know what it was about and the rest of it is very flowery. In the end, it seems to suggest that the King agreed to help, provided Ram trap a dragon for him. So, a criminal was led out. An old man who had been involved in an uprising of some kind. Oh, it looks like he was the founder of a cult, maybe? A group that worshiped the seasons? Or maybe that’s poetic. A group that worshiped time?”

  “Timekeepers?” Jhinn suggested, handing Tamerlan one of the small cakes.

  He ate it hungrily, not caring that it burned the tips of his fingers and tongue. “These are good. Maybe we lucked out being trapped here in this pond.”

  He shared a half-hearted laugh with Jhinn and drank down the rest of the hot tea before continuing.

  “Okay, so he grabs this head of the Timekeepers and they drag him up on a hill to where Ram has this cage made and they chain him inside. And Ram blows the trumpet and the dragon comes down and everyone is shocked. Ram is blowing, blowing and then it looks like magic grabs the dragons and shakes it and the old man in the cage is screaming and everyone is running in terror and then the dragon seems to be trapped in place, its eye open but the rest of it motionless and Ram grabs a girl from the crowd – or maybe they bring her to him, that part is fuzzy – and they pour her blood all over the dragon. And the dragon’s eye shuts.”

  “I’m telling you, there has to be a better way to do things than to kill all the pretty girls,” Jhinn said, sipping his own tea.

  Tamerlan swallowed, looking out at the city. There was a pretty girl out there somewhere who he was very worried about. Would she stay safe?
Would she be okay?

  He tried to clear the lump from his throat.

  “I guess the people thought so, too. They didn’t even like this cult leader being used like this. So that night, they tried to break him out, and King Abelmeyer used his eye to put him back in the cage and he killed everyone who came close to the cage, but even that didn’t quell them until Ram stood up and he promised this entrapment was only temporary and that someday their leader would return to them. That his sacrifice would buy them hundreds of years – or something, the text isn’t specific on the exact measure of time – but that if they were willing to let him save them from the dragon, his sacrifice would keep the dragon bound – for now.”

  “Why didn’t he just kill it? It was lying right there? Why not just chop its head off or rip its heart out or something?” Jhinn asked.

  It wasn’t so simple as that, Ram said. We tried swords and axes. We tried magic. The most we ever managed was ripping off a single scale and opening up a wound – but that never killed the beast. They were not made of this world and they will not die in this world. The most we can hope for is to trap them – no matter how temporarily.

  “Well if that’s true then what about that mountain range,” Jhinn asked and Tamerlan nearly jumped. He forgot that Jhinn could see the Legends who haunted him as easily as he could hear them. “Why do those dragons look dead?”

  They only sleep. What I did was replicate what was done to them. And that is why I can assure you that going there will not help you. Trying to kill the dragons will not help you.

  Then why was he always screaming about killing dragons?

  Oh, I want it. Make no mistake. I want it like I want to breathe. It consumes me this ancient desire to be rid of them and I will do anything in my power to quell them forever.

  So he chanted ‘Kill the dragon’ when he knew they couldn’t be killed?

  Your mind is one long stream of thoughts of passion for that girl. Why can mine not be dedicated to a higher thing?

  Tamerlan wasn’t sure. This Ram speaking now seemed more articulate – less of a knuckle-dragging specter dressed in furs. Why? Had he missed something along the way? Had Ram changed – or was Tamerlan just hearing him more clearly. And why only him? Why that?