by Jen Williams
‘And us?’ demanded Jessen. Aldasair could feel the scrutiny of her gaze – she knew what it would mean to all of them if Bern didn’t survive.
‘We would slow them down. Bern has one chance now, and there’s little I can do about it.’ Aldasair turned back to the dragon. ‘You. What were you planning to do?’
‘To take him outside,’ said Celaphon. ‘That is all. The queen will be angry, but . . .’ He shifted his enormous bulk. ‘For the sake of the small voice that links us, I would have done that much.’
For a moment, Aldasair could think of nothing to say. This was a creature he had only ever met in battle. He could not understand where this new kindness had come from, if that was even what it was. Jessen growled low in her throat, although Aldasair recognised it as a noise of discomfort rather than anger.
‘And what will you do now?’ she asked Celaphon.
‘When I meet you next on the battlefield, I will fight you,’ the dragon said without hesitation. ‘There is no changing what they have made me, it seems. But . . .’ He lowered his head and shook it slightly. ‘I long for battle, to fight. What the queen did to Bern the warrior was not battle. It is something else. He was a weapon, and she made him into a tool.’
There was a rumble from beyond the Behemoth, moving through the walls and the floor. Celaphon lifted his head up again like a dog finding a scent.
‘You are causing trouble, it seems,’ he said. ‘The queen will not be pleased about that, either.’
Aldasair climbed back into Jessen’s harness, trying to ignore the smears of Bern’s blood on the floor.
‘Come on, we need to get back out there. I imagine Tor will need our help by now.’
‘I’m having the time of my life!’
Somewhere behind him, Kirune roared in irritation at that, but Tor kept moving, slicing his way merrily through the insectoid hordes. He had jumped down from Kirune’s harness when the big cat had refused to leave him, and was now attempting to get as deep into the mess as he could. He had taken several cuts and scratches, including a reasonably deep wound on his arm that had soaked his sleeve in clear blood, but nothing yet had come close to taking him down. He had to find something bigger.
Kicking the remains of a spider-mother aside, he finally spotted something with potential. It looked a little like a scorpion, the strange, fast little beasts they had in the high grasses of Yuron-Kai, but it was the size of a horse, and several whip-thin tentacles waved like seaweed from its shining carapace. Eagerly, Tor ran towards it, his heart beating rapidly in his chest. This could be it, his final moments, impaled on the end of its spear-like stinger, or trampled under by its needle-legs.
But before he reached it, there was another bright cough of flame from across the cavern, and the place was briefly lit up as bright as a summer’s afternoon. In the same moment, a tall black spidery shape slid down from the side of one of the Behemoths – it was the Jure’lia queen, stretched and long, her mask-face a thumbnail of white balanced on the confusion of her almost-humanoid body. She was looking towards the egg cavern, where a huge conflagration was now burning out of control.
‘What have you done?’ Tor heard her words clearly despite all the chaos. ‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?’
The strange waxy substance had dropped like a curtain across the entrance, and they were seconds away from colliding with it, seconds away from the fire consuming them. Vintage reached for Helcate with every part of her being, but the small war-beast was already taking action. His body convulsed and he spat a long stream of acid straight ahead, spattering against the waxy curtain and burning a hole straight through it. Almost immediately the stuff began to heal itself in sticky white strands, but it was enough of a gap for them, and they shot through, closely followed by the fell-witches on their bats. A second later and the full force of the explosive fire hit the curtain and it dissolved into nothing, while flaming chunks of egg and fluid flew out into the wider cavern space. As one, the witches began to fly up towards the strip of sky, while Vintage found herself hanging back, desperately scanning the teeming mess below. What she saw clutched at her heart.
‘What is it?’ demanded Chenlo. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘Look!’
Vintage pointed. Below them the floor of the cavern was carpeted with Jure’lia creatures, and in the very midst of them was Tor. His face was shining with battle joy and his sword was thick with greenish blood, yet it was obvious that at any moment he would be overwhelmed – even as they watched, some sort of abomination armed with a huge piercing stinger turned its attention towards him.
‘I can’t leave him there . . .’
‘You have to – look!’
The queen was surging towards them, a nightmare of grasping limbs and fury. Flaming debris from the eggs was now alighting on the Behemoths and, to Vintage’s shock, they were beginning to burn too. Very quickly the cavern was turning into an inferno.
‘Helcate!’ cried Helcate.
‘Sarn’s cursed heart. Fly, darling, fly!’
They shot upwards, barely avoiding the grasping fingers of the Jure’lia queen. Ahead of them they could see the fell-witches, silhouetted against the tiny piece of sky. Helcate stretched out his neck and picked up speed, intending to catch up with their allies.
The place was burning down. Tor could barely believe it. Vintage’s heartbright had proved every bit as lethal as she’d promised. All around, the Behemoths were burning with a bright, eerie flame, oily and yellow-green, and the heat and smoke were such that he could barely breathe. He grinned and wiped a hand over his face, turning back to the scorpion thing and raising his sword over his head. It was a ridiculous manoeuvre that bared his chest to the creature’s waiting stinger, but, he reflected, it hardly mattered.
‘Take this, you ugly, worm-infested piece of—’
His words were cut off as he was knocked back by a bulky shape landing in front of him. He looked up to see Aldasair lopping off the creature’s stumpy head with his axe, before turning Jessen towards him.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded his cousin. ‘We have to get out of here!’
‘Where’s Bern?’
‘He’s outside already,’ said Aldasair shortly. ‘Come on, Jessen can carry us both, if Kirune is –’
‘No!’ Tor took a few steps backwards, half falling over the bodies of the creatures he’d already killed. ‘I’m to stay here, this is where it ends, this is where it stops.’
There was a roar from behind them as part of a Behemoth collapsed in on itself, and Tor staggered, hit by a wave of heat. Aldasair and Jessen shrank back from it too, and Tor took the opportunity to turn and run away from them, only to collide with the solid form of Kirune. The big cat knocked him down as easily as a kitten batting a ball.
‘Wait, you don’t understand –’
‘I understand you are a fool,’ growled Kirune. The big cat lunged for him, grasping the back of his leather coat between his teeth, before forcibly yanking him into the air. The ground dropped away and they made their way up, joined shortly by Aldasair and Jessen.
Tor struggled briefly, thinking that perhaps he could wiggle out of his coat and drop to the ground, but he knew in his heart that Kirune would come after him – that the cat would keep coming after him, again and again, until they both died; torn apart by the Jure’lia or cooked by the fire that was burning out of control in every part of the cavern.
As they rose up, Tor saw something that chilled him: strands of the Jure’lia fluid were stretching from one side of the cavern to the other, clinging to rocks and outcroppings of stone like pieces of a spider’s web, and it was spreading, racing them up to the crevasse. It was the queen, he realised, the queen stripped down to her most basic form, and it was chasing the tiny figures of the fell-witches ahead of them.
‘It looks like we’re all going to die down here anyway.’
Chapter Thirty-eight
Vintage gasped as they cleared the crevasse, the air impossibly sweet and clea
n after the smoky nightmare of the cavern. Above them, the sky was blue and blameless and they were out, they were out. Below her, Helcate gave a strangled cry, and for a moment his own panic seemed to flood through her.
‘What is it, darling?’
Chenlo was already shaking her arm and pointing. Next to them the surviving fell-witches were shooting out of the huge crack in the ground, only for long tentacles of black Jure’lia fluid to follow them. As she watched, they were caught, the fluid flowing up and around the bats’ smaller back legs, catching them and pulling them back down. With her heart in her throat she leaned over and looked down. Helcate was similarly caught, the black fluid tangling in his legs and flowing across his fur with eager, possessive fingers. Already, the sky was receding as they were dragged back towards the fiery abyss.
‘It’s the fucking queen,’ Vintage spat through clenched teeth. There was a cry from below, and she saw that Jessen and Kirune had been caught in the same trap. Aldasair and Tor were both there too, their pale faces turned up towards her, but her relief at seeing them was short-lived. The queen herself, a strange distended spider shape with a white mask-face tossed in the centre, was howling with rage, a discordant strangled note that seemed to go on and on.
‘What do we do?’
‘Darling, I don’t know . . .’
A few of the fell-witches had turned in their harnesses and were attempting to throw fireballs down at the queen, but for every one that landed, more of her flowing elastic body appeared, stretching and oozing to fill the space. Helcate gave a yelp of frustration as they were yanked backwards, closer and closer to the crevasse.
‘Chenlo, you can jump.’ Vintage was staring at the ground, trying to calculate how much of a drop there would be. ‘Just before she takes us inside, jump for the side – you might make it.’
‘Are you out of your mind?’ Chenlo looked, for some reason, deeply insulted. ‘And what of you?’
‘I’m not leaving Helcate, we’ll—’
There was a chorus of cries from below, and something, some instinct that they were now sharing the sky with something else, made Vintage look up.
It was Vostok. The white dragon, half dream-like to Vintage’s smoke-sore eyes, turned in the sunlight, her scales glittering like a shower of gold coins. She banked around, meaning to come around closer to them, and Vintage saw that there was a figure on her back – a young woman with untidy black hair, her face set and determined.
‘Noon! Oh Noon!’
The dragon and her girl came on fast, the dragon’s jaws opening to release a terrifying blast of violet fire. The beam hit the queen dead in the centre of her spidery body, and a second later it was followed by a blast of pure war-beast-fuelled winnowfire, green as emeralds and bright as hope. There was another howl from the queen, and abruptly Helcate surged forward – he was free, the clinging ropes of Jure’lia fluid abruptly severed. The fell-witches flew up into the sky and away, and then Jessen and Kirune were with them too.
‘What is happening?’ called Aldasair.
Vintage shook her head. She didn’t trust herself to speak. Belatedly she saw that rather than riding in Kirune’s harness, Tor was dangling from the big cat’s mouth – the expression on the Eboran’s face was one of complete and total shock.
‘She’s alive,’ he said. ‘Noon’s alive.’
As if to prove him right, Vostok and Noon flew past for another attack, both viciously intent on their target. This time they followed the remnants of the queen down, blasting the stringy portions of her body with an endless stream of twinned fires. The elastic fluid bubbled and boiled and stretched, clearly looking to escape, but behind her was the inferno of the cavern, and above, the relentless fury of the dragon.
‘Helcate,’ Vintage leaned over the war-beast’s neck, ‘take us closer, darling, as close as you dare.’
The queen wilted, falling back against the ragged edge of the cliff face like a splash of spilled ink, and still the dragon came on. Noon’s face was still and composed as she poured her winnowfire down and down, beating the Jure’lia queen into a smear, a stain. Eventually, there was a shudder that seemed to move through the ground, as if Sarn itself were sighing, and the queen stopped moving. Her mask-face clattered onto the rocks, blistered and cracked, and only then did the dragon stop. Noon sat back in the harness, looking vaguely confused about where she was; she looked older to Vintage, with a few more careworn lines at the corners of her eyes.
Vintage urged Helcate forward, unable to keep from grinning.
‘Noon, darling! What time do you call this?’
Noon looked up and as her eyes met theirs, something seemed to come back to her. She smiled, and a ragged cheer from the fell-witches floated down towards them.
Kirune dropped Tor to the ground, although he barely felt it. He stumbled a little, caught by the strange suspicion that he was in a dream. There seemed no earthly way that they could have escaped the cavern, that they could have been pulled from the jaws of a fiery death by a dragon . . . or that Noon could still be alive. Yet there she was. Her hair was a little longer, and she looked a little like she had been living under open skies for months – the tops of her cheeks and the bridge of her nose were sunburned – yet it was undeniably her. Vostok was standing proudly, her long tail lashing back and forth behind her as they perched on the edge of the crevasse. Vostok was right all along, he thought, still trying to get the idea to fit into his head. She wasn’t dead at all.
‘Noon?’
She glanced over to him, and then untied the straps on her harness before climbing down. He watched her do it, still half in wonder – the busy efficiency of her neat, tanned hands. Nearby, Vintage was standing with her hands pushed into her wild cloud of hair, laughing softly to herself.
‘Noon,’ he said again. ‘We thought you were dead. I thought you’d died. I . . .’
Free of the dragon, Noon marched over to him and reached up – half standing on tiptoes to do it – and kissed him hungrily on the mouth. It took Tor a moment to respond – he thought of when he’d been recovering from the battle over the mountains, when he’d been so close to telling her, and she had walked away – and then he bent his head and kissed her back. She tasted of salt and fire, somehow. Dimly, he heard Vintage laughing, more loudly now, joyfully, and even heard a couple of whistles from the fell-witches. The kiss broke into a disbelieving smile, nose to nose.
‘It’s good to see you, bloodsucker.’ Noon touched the scarred portion of his face, as if framing it.
‘What happened to you?’ He meant her disappearance, but all at once the question seemed to have other meanings: the Noon he had known would never have kissed him so passionately in front of others; the Noon he had known did not look so haunted. Noon opened her mouth to answer, when Vintage appeared at their elbows.
‘My darlings, as utterly romantic as this is, I think we need to get moving. The ground under our feet is feeling less than stable, and I suspect there are lots of places in Sarn safer than this one.’
For the first time, Tor noticed that the earth was trembling slightly, and an ominous rumbling from the crevasse was growing louder all the time. Gouts of oily fire were sticking bright fingers up through the broken rock. With some reluctance, he let Noon go, although she squeezed his hand before they parted.
‘I told Sharrik to take Bern to Deeptown.’ Aldasair was still with Jessen. He looked shaken and pale, but he spared a smile for Noon. ‘I suggest we go there and gather ourselves.’
‘Excellent, lead the way.’ Vintage jumped back onto Helcate, and waved to the fell-witches who still hovered above. ‘All of us back together under the same roof – that’s a bloody good end to this mess if you ask me.’
Aldasair nodded, although to Tor he looked ill with worry. One by one they left the clearing, rising into the air and turning north. Tor glanced down before the crevasse dropped out of sight, and the blackened mess that had been the queen of the Jure’lia was still there, steaming on the broken rocks. H
e fixed the image in his mind: the worm people, beaten. It was possible after all.
There was a group from Deeptown waiting for them when they arrived, along with Sharrik, who looked tense and alert. Tor recognised the woman Treen, with her three dog-sized ants at her ankles, and as they landed she went straight to Vintage.
‘Your friend is with our pathfinder now,’ she said. ‘They’re doing their best to help him.’
Aldasair, who had jumped down from the back of Jessen, marched over to her. ‘Can you take me to him?’
‘Aldasair?’ Vintage looked worried. ‘How badly was Bern hurt?’
Treen took them below, with the war-beasts and bats staying above ground. Quickly they were enveloped into the world of Deeptown, with its softly lit corridors and earthy scent. Tor saw people standing around watchfully, their faces tense and worried, and eventually they were led into a small, rounded chamber brightly lit with small, round lamps. Bern was there, lying unconscious on a low bed, and the pathfinder knelt with him, her old bony knees in the dirt. Tor’s stomach turned over; Bern’s arm ended in a ragged mess, a horror of flesh and bone and blood splotched here and there with a rubbery black substance.
‘Roots save us, what happened to him?’
Aldasair and Vintage had gone straight to Bern’s bedside, while Noon hung back in the doorway, her eyes wide.
‘Celaphon the dragon bit his hand off, the one the crystal was grafted to,’ said Aldasair bitterly. ‘He was already weak, and he has lost so much blood.’
‘That bastard dragon,’ said Vintage, with feeling. She took Bern’s remaining hand and pressed it to her cheek. ‘I can hope it burned to death in that cavern, but I doubt I will be that fortunate.’
‘The dragon thought it was helping Bern, I think.’ Aldasair pursed his lips and shook his head slightly. ‘I’m still trying to understand it, but Bern was desperate to be free of the Jure’lia, and . . . and he was dying anyway, as Celaphon put it.’
‘A bite from such a beast explains a lot,’ said the pathfinder. ‘It’s made a terrible mess of this young man’s wrist – turned the bones into pulp, shredded the muscles – and this stuff –’ she picked with tiny shrivelled fingers at the shreds of black material – ‘this stuff is evil. It has saved his life by stopping the bleeding, but it is evil. Already it is poisoning his blood.’
