Summernight

by Sarah K. L. Wilson

  She braced herself. Her eyes and nose were so flooded with magic that she could barely see or hear a thing. Her gift, in these last moments, was a mercy. She wouldn’t see the knife coming.

  There was a loud snap from beside her. Strange. Something must have broken. Whatever it was fell to the ground heavily.

  And then the wheel was turning, and her feet fell loose.

  Something must have gone wrong.

  Something must have stopped the ceremony and she was still so blind from all the magic that she couldn’t see it or hear it.

  Her teeth rattled in her head as she began to shake, rattling against the metal chair like a seed in a dry gourd. The magic was too much. The power was too strong. She couldn’t think, couldn’t control her own body.

  Another scent slid through the magic as her right hand was released. Gold. Gold and honey and cinnamon. She breathed it in, desperately trying to pull in anything other than the magic. It cleared some of the fog, and she saw a cloudy form wrenching the restraint off her other arm.

  Through the fog of her vision, she saw a dark shape rush at the golden form but he was tossed aside like a dry leaf. Marielle tried to stand, but she was shaken off her feet, falling painfully against the metal chair. The ground rolled like the river in a storm, marble and stone rippling like the sea.

  Her breath caught in her throat as she froze, uncertain what do next, but now she was being swept up and thrown over a shoulder. She blinked as something hard drove into her belly like a wooden beam. It knocked her breath out and just as she was gasping to try to release her spasming muscles it hit again.

  Again, it plowed into her and again and again.

  Her savior was running, and his shoulder was knocking the air out of her body. She felt them soar through the air, felt his muscles bunch as he delivered blows and flung enemies aside. It was like being blind in the heart of a tornado. But her vision was clearing now that the tentacles were gone, and her scent was clearing, too.

  Terror spiked bright and blaring from every direction. It pulsed harder when the earth shook – what was causing that shaking? Could it be an earthquake? – and seemed to spike wherever they passed.

  They were moving upward as if they were climbing stairs. Crashes and crunches around them suggested falling furniture and masonry. What was happening out there?

  And then fresh air hit her hard in the face and she could smell the open air. It cleared the worst of the magic and she could finally see clearly. She pushed up from where she was awkwardly slung across a shoulder. They were on the wall around the Seven Suns Palace.

  “Put me down!” she yelled. She was no Jing urn to be stolen from a palace. No precious ruby to make off with – even by her savior.

  The wall of the palace shook slightly, like a bowl wobbling after being set too roughly on a table. Below them, screaming crowds poured from the palace, screaming and fighting to leave, their decorations and costumes falling from them like the shed skin of a snake as they rushed from the palace. Wigs and hats, necklaces and capes, and trampled bodies fell in their hurried escape, landing on the moat below, under the feet of those fleeing, or flying through the breeze out across the Government District.

  A boy in a little gondola on the palace moat ducked as someone’s belt of skulls flew through the air, narrowly missing him.

  Perched at the height of Jingen, the entire city could be seen from the top of the Seven Suns Palace and for Marielle, it was painted in the rainbow hues of terror, mourning, and ecstasy.

  None of this made any sense. Why was the ground shaking so badly? Why was the city so full of terror? Perhaps she really had died, and this was the next life, and for her sins, she was paying in fear.

  She twisted to look up. But she didn’t need to guess who had saved her. She would have known his scent anywhere. Even without the glimpse of light-colored hair and broad shoulders as he whirled in a dance of death, sliding from one graceful sword form to the next, she knew exactly who this was – Tamerlan Zi’fen, the murderer of the Temple District. The man who had been so desperate to save his sister.

  He’d saved her instead.

  Was it wrong that her heart soared with joy? Was it wrong that she was so happy to be alive?

  There was some commotion she couldn’t hear and then a breathless Lord Mythos called out.

  “Put the sacrifice down. You can go if you do. But we need her.”

  “No.” The answer was a growl – a growl she didn’t recognize, but she knew this scent. She wasn’t wrong about who had saved her.

  “Put me down,” she whispered. “I can fight, too.”

  He ignored her.

  “Can’t you feel the dragon waking?” the Lord Mythos asked. His voice was ragged with emotion, desperation carrying through the wind in orange ginger pulses. “Only her blood can stop it. Only her blood can save us all.”

  Tamerlan set her gently to the ground, shoving one of his swords into her hands while she was still gasping in surprise.

  They were surrounded by guards, swords held out in a guard position. And at the center of the ring, a breathless Lord Mythos held a black-gloved hand up, his beautiful face torn with anguish and his dark eyes violent.

  “Please,” he begged.

  She risked a glance at Tamerlan’s face. He looked older, harder. His broad shoulders and strong chin jutted out like he was prepared to fight the entire world to save her.

  “I don’t appease dragons,” he said in a low voice. “I destroy them.”

  “Then you will destroy us all,” Lord Mythos said, and his voice sounded like a man who had just been set on fire. “Take her from him.”

  37: Wake the Dragon

  Tamerlan

  THESE FOOLS WILL PAY.

  One thing about Ram the Hunter was that he didn’t mince words.

  This body and mind are adequate for dragon slaying. We will not assuage this dragon. We will let him rise and then we will make him fall.

  It was strange how his confidence buoyed Tamerlan as the guards rushed forward. His sword spun expertly before him and he danced under their swords and over their reaching arms to lunge and slash and parry. Ram fought as easily as breathing, his movements almost a dance as he worked his way through the guards.

  Tamerlan kept his concentration on watching what was happening around them. Was Marielle okay? Was Ram keeping her safe while he fought? He hadn’t expected to be saving her today – but he wasn’t sorry that he had. At least this time he hadn’t killed innocent bystanders. At least this time he was doing something good. Or at least sort of good. The tremors in the earth were troubling.

  A blast of fire as thick as his wrist plunged through the air toward them from the open hand of the Lord Mythos. His face was twisted up like he was concentrating, but Ram dodged the bar of fire easily and it disappeared with a blinding flash.

  He took that fire from the dragon.

  He could do that?!

  Why do you think he keeps it chained here instead of dispatching it as any man of valor would? Have no fear. Magic is a deadly thing but no match to a sword, a strong arm, and courage.

  Tamerlan’s heart raced. That magic certainly looked like a match for him.

  Marielle grunted from beside him and Ram spared her a look, noting that she’d slain the man attacking her and then returning to the battle. She was good with that sword. That was good. Right?

  It is good.

  And then everything shifted.

  The landscape began to change. Out toward the sea, past the smoking wreckage of the Temple District and across the University District to the highest point of land there where the Queen Mer Library stood, the land seemed to lift into the air, curling up toward them. Tamerlan almost choked as the Temple District of Jingen shook, people, buildings, trees and paving stones falling off of it like scale from a rock. They were far enough away to appear small. Close enough to be seen in the full horror of what was happening.

  The land looked as if it had come alive, as if a rock-cru
sted head had lifted up and was slowly looking back and forth as the buildings and roads that had once adorned it fell off, crashing down into the burnt Temple District and the yawning blue ocean. Canal water poured off like rain on a roof, flooding the canals below and making sudden wave surges that washed across the locks and out to the river, carrying boats and debris with the surge of water.

  The world teetered awkwardly and a grinding sound of stone on stone drowned out every other sound.

  Tamerlan’s heart was pounding. This couldn’t be real. It couldn’t possibly be real.

  Dragon.

  The head did look like a dragon. And as he watched, the Queen Mer Library – stretching out horizontally from the ground instead of towering over it - popped off the surface of the rock, falling down the slope and bouncing off the ground, breaking into pieces as it tumbled. Tiny bits of debris – books, he realized – fell like dust into the Spice District. All those books, gone! All those priceless treasures and grimoires and carvings. Sian and the librarians and the book with his bloody thumbprint in it. Gone.

  Where the Queen Mer Library had been there was only a dark hole in the rock. And then the hole opened. A brilliant golden-irised eye with a pupil like a cat’s opened wide and then blinked.

  “It’s too late,” the Lord Mythos said, his voice quivering with horror. “Too late.”

  They needed to run. They needed to get into Jhinn’s gondola and run!

  Gondola?

  In the moat!

  Ram spun, jamming the sword in his sheath in a single fluid motion and scooping a startled Marielle up by the waist. He took three long strides and on the third stride, he leapt over the wall and fell through the air.

  As they fell, Tamerlan heard him screaming.

  Death to all dragons! Death to –

  His voice cut off as they hit the tepid water of the moat.

  38: Gondola Dash

  Marielle

  MARIELLE FELL THROUGH the air, her breath catching in her throat. Her emotions were bubbling and surfacing so quickly that she couldn’t process them. Had that been a dragon? The dragon?

  Because now the pleading of the Lord Mythos – of Etienne Velendark – didn’t feel so strange. He really hadn’t been pleading for her death – though, of course, he had been. He’d been pleading with her to help him save Jingen.

  She was shaking now, but not because the earth beneath them – the dragon beneath them – was, but because of the tiny distant people she had seen raining from the windows and doors and streets of the University District. They were only a tiny fraction of the people who were already dead there. How many more would be crushed by masonry, die from falls, or be washed away by the draining canals? Her heart felt like it was stuck in her throat, like she couldn’t breathe. A hollow feeling – too empty to hold her sudden grief and shock – welled up inside her, choking out her life.

  She was under the water, the sounds and smells of the disaster above insulated from her mind by the murky water. Bits of plant and algae floated in the thick murk. Safe things. Things unaffected by the frights above.

  She could stay down here with them and wait until the world ended above.

  A hand seized a fistful of her hair and dragged her painfully to the surface.

  “I think the fall knocked her breath out,” a young man’s voice said, concern in every tone. She knew that scent. She leaned into it, breathing in the golden honey like it was her salvation, sucking in deep breaths of the wicked tinges of cinnamon and celery like they could scour out the terror of Jingen. She inhaled life and hope in his scent. She clung to it.

  “Help me get her in,” he said.

  Tamerlan. Her salvation.

  A second set of hands grabbed her under the arms – seaweed and cedar, flickers of strawberry genius. “What? You’re stealing party girls now?”

  “I’m not sure now is the time for joking, Jhinn,” Tamerlan said mildly as they tugged her into the boat. She coughed, spewing water across the deck of a small boat. Her dress was too clingy. Her mind whirling too fast. “Look above us. Do you happen to see a large eye?”

  “Mer’s spit! Come on! We’d better hurry.”

  Marielle shook herself, pulling herself up to her hands and knees as the gondola lurched forward.

  “Are you okay?” Tamerlan’s voice was gentle – so different from how it had been on the walls of the Seven Sun’s Palace that she paused for half a breath.

  “Why did you save me?”

  The muscle on the side of his jaw clenched and the golden honey scent of him flared so strongly that it seemed to overwhelm him for a moment.

  “I went there to save a sister, but when my sister was safe, I didn’t see anyone there to save you.”

  He quivered slightly, as if haunted by some awful memory and then he stole a glance behind him at the dragon head stretching in one direction and then the other in the distance behind them.

  “Now is not the time for sentiment or explanations! Row!” the boy in the back of the boat – Jhinn – said.

  Marielle stood up, searching for an oar when Tamerlan’s fell to the floor. She stumbled as the boat rocked, dipping low enough into the moat that water trickled over the gunwales before it popped back up again.

  “Maybe it’s not too late,” Lord Mythos said from where he balanced, gaining his balance after leaping onto the prow of the boat.

  Tamerlan was already drawing his sword.

  “Row!” Jhinn cried and Marielle stepped back, shoving the oar into the water and pulling against it.

  But Tamerlan’s amazing prowess with the sword seemed to fail him now. The Lord Mythos lunged forward and Tamerlan barely smacked his thrust aside.

  Jhinn steered the boat as he and Marielle desperately pulled with the oars, and now Marielle could see why. The water around them was rising, a wave coming up from behind. The dragon’s spine where the Seven Suns Palace perched was slowly rising. On one side of the little boat, the landscape fell away as they rose into the air.

  Marielle’s eyes were fixed forward as she worked the oar. Lord Mythos’ next thrust was a hair away from piercing Tamerlan’s side when he dodged it. Lord Mythos pressed in closer.

  What was wrong with Tamerlan? He’d fought like a master on the wall, but here he fought like an amateur, barely keeping his footing as he fought. Marielle could fight better. She gritted her teeth, hoping she was wrong and that he could recover and press the attack. She’d lost her own sword in the leap from the wall and the knife tucked into her boot wouldn’t be enough against a sword.

  “Row!” Jhinn roared.

  Their gondola shot from the moat into the canal, gaining speed. There was something about the little craft that made it faster than the others around it and they shot past family boats and passenger gondolas moving at five times their speed as Jhinn worked his oar at the back like a rudder, artfully dodging other boats with less than an inch to spare. When they got to close to one, Marielle stuck her oar out, pushing off from the other boat and barely saving them from a crash.

  They were picking up speed still as the waves behind them rose. They hit the first lock, sailing over it like a thrown javelin and landing hard on the water on the other side. Marielle and Jhinn were braced for it, but Tamerlan slipped and Lord Mythos’ sword plunged into his shoulder just above his chest. He fell to the deck of the gondola with a moan.

  Triumph flashed through Lord Mythos’s eyes. Tamerlan’s eyes were shut, face pale.

  Marielle didn’t wait for a breath before she dropped her oar in the floor of the boat and scooped up Tamerlan’s sword, standing over him in the guard position she’d been drilled to take.

  Lord Mythos kept his sword steady, but his eyes locked onto Marielle’s. “I’m a better swordsman than you, Marielle. Don’t waste your blood on this. Not when there’s still time. We can still save the city.”

  “You must be joking!” the boy from the back yelled. “Look around you, fool! This city is gone!”

  They passed the bridg
e that signaled the entry into the Alchemist’s District at the same moment that a building slammed down onto the canal wall beside them, breaking into pieces as it came apart from the impact. Marielle threw her arms up, covering her face and head, but the shattering debris still lacerated her arms and torso as it blasted across her. The thin, clinging dress she wore did little to protect her.

  The sound of a building shattering and of the screams around her blocked out all sound. Puffs of scent exploded in every direction, their colors so bright and overpowering that Marielle struggled to parse one from another. She reached down for her scarf, but there was no scarf. She’d lost it somewhere.

  Lord Mythos dropped his guard, his face pale with shock and then an oar snaked out from behind Marielle, under her arm, and hit him straight in the chest, shoving him over the side of the gondola into the canal.

  Marielle blinked at the spot where he’d been, stunned. It was only Jhinn’s shout that brought her back to her senses.

  “At any moment the locks are going to blow and we’ll lose the water. Row! Row for your life!”

  39: Flotsam Hope

  Marielle

  THEY SHOT THROUGH THE masses of gondolas and family boats choking the canals. The water raced as quickly as they did, a flow of rapids like the tightening of a mighty river.

  “The Dragon’s wrath is upon us!” a woman in a neighboring boat wailed as they passed her frantic paddling.

  People and furniture, horses and carts, homes and taverns and cobblestones rained from the sky like the wrath of the gods, narrowly missing them or hitting the tiny craft as they sped past. Like a rain of wrath from the Legends on high.

  Marielle’s stomach clenched in sick guilt as they barely dodged the plummeting body of an old man, already dead, his staring eyes telling the tale of horror all of Jingen felt.

  “Shove him in the forward compartment!” Jhinn screamed.