He felt as if he had been transported to another world, another time, a distant past from before the day when the Great Dragons cast the humans into this frozen land and set up the laws of the Taiga.
“Say something, savage,” the Aloue prodded him mockingly.
“I’m not a savage!” Berec cried. “I wield iron!” He raised the dagger to the sun in a gesture which commanded respect of everyone in the forest. But here everyone wielded iron. What a mad place he found himself in…
“There, there, I don’t want you to fall. I need you. Iron is good — more so if you know how to use it. Maybe together we can leave this place at last.”
“I still don’t trust you,” Berec said as they crawled quietly in the darkness. They had been lucky enough to avoid any patrols so far, and had ventured quite far away from the hills.
He felt the need to say it. He was thinking about everything he had learned in these few days. Both versions of the story sounded true enough. The Squirrel seemed more trustworthy — a fellow traveller like himself — but Taiga was not a place where trust was worth a lot. A stab in the back was the usual price.
He thought of accepting the governor’s proposition. Even if the Squirrel was right, the Owl Marsh was far enough away not to fear the Greatking’s armies. Besides, in the deep forest he would lose any escort, of that he was certain. But then, what tale would he tell back home? A tale of cowardice, of lack of hope…
He imagined his old father shaking in anger. “So you didn’t even think of checking who was right? You accepted somebody’s words just like that? And you call yourself a Red Fox? You’re nothing but a lazy Marmot!”
No, if he was ever to face his father again, he had to see the Gates of Eden for himself — or the place where they were supposed to be. Either way, it wouldn’t take long. He could spare a few more weeks to learn the truth.
Aloue stopped and raised his hand. Berec froze. He could hear steps and the light of a lantern that Aloue called “The Finder” — a copper shield focusing the light of the candle in one direction. He stopped breathing. The light passed them by, the patrol walked away.
Soon they reached a place the Squirrel had told him about earlier. A thick net was thrown over the tree branches and thorny bushes, forming a border not even Aloue could penetrate. Berec had no idea how he had missed it coming into the hills in the first place, but it didn’t matter now. Once past this hedge, they would be free to run away.
Berec drew his dagger — this was the advantage he had over Aloue. He approached the net quietly. He only had to cut through a few feet of the net…
“The Finder” flashed straight ahead. Berec dropped to the ground immediately, but Aloue was too slow. The guards cried and shot a few bolts — high into the air, just to frighten the Squirrel.
Two black-clad men ran up to Aloue. They seemed more bemused than angered.
“Eh, Tree-climber! Trying the net again? Why don’t we walk you home.”
“All right,” said Aloue, his shoulders slumping. The three men turned away from Berec. It was all he needed. He leapt at the guard standing on Aloue’s right side, pushing the Squirrel onto the other man at the same time. He grabbed his opponent by the head and pulled sharply, twisting the man’s neck. He looked to Aloue; the other guard fought better; the Squirrel was lying on the ground and the black-clad man was raising his sword to deal the final blow. Berec threw his dagger. The man fell down without a sound.
“The others will be here,” whispered Aloue, picking himself up.
“I know. But now we have these,” Berec replied, grabbing one of the swords. It was easy to slice through the net with its sharp blade. Once they were on the other side, however, he cast the weapon away.
“It would only get in the way in the forest. Are you as good a runner on the ground as you are in the trees?”
“No,” admitted Aloue with a smile, “but I can try.”
“Here,” Berec gave him one of the long knives the guards carried alongside the swords, “take this and follow me. Now I’m in charge.”
Aloue whistled quietly. A small squirrel leapt from the tree and hid in the pocket of his brown jacket, sniffing suspiciously.
They ran for four days without rest — a feat only seasoned travellers were capable of — before Berec finally decided they had lost any pursuit from the hills. They camped alongside a dark stream. Aloue caught a couple of fat birds with his bare hands, which astonished Berec. The Squirrel shrugged.
“Your people know how to do iron-magic. That’s much more impressive.”
They even dared to make fire and wash themselves in the stream. As they sat watching the flames roast their supper, Berec heard a distant thunder, then another.
“A storm?”
Aloue looked up. “The sky is clear, and the air is cold… maybe an avalanche. The mountains must be near.”
They walked straight south, the shortest possible route to where Aloue thought the Gates of Eden were. The forest of empty. There was no trace of the war the Squirrel had mentioned, nor any sign of people. No villages, no roving tribes, no fellow travellers.
“I don’t understand,” said Aloue. “Where is everybody? Let’s find the tree village, they would know what happened.”
There were a few signs of animal life. It was as if all of the forest had fallen quiet in anticipation. Only the thunders in the distance grew more frequent. By the end of the day Aloue cried out, pointing into the trees.
“It’s here! What’s left of it…”
The village in the trees was ruined, burnt, deserted. The inhabitants had disappeared without a trace. There were holes in the ground around the trees, but neither of them could guess what could have dug them.
“This was no ordinary war,” whispered Aloue, sifting through the remains. “This was the beginning of something much more terrible.”
“Whatever it was, we can still take a rest here,” said Berec. To him this was just another ruined village, one of many he had encountered on his journey. “How long until we reach the foothills?”
“According to the expedition diaries — four days. Two if we hurry.”
“Good. Let’s try to get some sleep before that.”
But it was impossible to sleep. At night the sporadic thunders grew into a cacophony of rumbling noises, as if there were not one but a hundred storms all around them.
In the morning they found the first dead body. It was mangled, barely recognisable as human. A few hours later they saw more bodies lying in strange positions around another deep hole in the ground. They looked at each other but said nothing. The thundering noises continued through the next two nights as well.
At last, the forest ended at a line of charred stumps and torn tree trunks. Berec looked out onto the vast plain spreading between him and the great mountains in the distance. He could not understand what he was seeing.
There were people as far as he could see. Warriors. Tents. Camps. Entire tribes. Nations. It seemed as if all of Taiga was here. Hundreds, thousands, more — his ability to count did not stretch so far. Not only warriors. Carpenters, lumberjacks — everywhere on the plain were craftsmen, constructing strange machines of wood and rope, digging ditches, piling up boulders and dirt into ramps. Beyond, lay a belt of stone fortifications and beyond that — it took Berec even more time to figure out what it was — a numberless army charged against the Gates of Eden. It seemed as if the entire mountainside was covered with a living, breathing carpet. Like ants swarming over a dead elk, the warriors swarmed over the mountain range.
It seemed there was a line they could not pass: a line of explosions thundering constantly along the frontline. This was the source of the strange noises they had been hearing over the previous days. Wherever the mountainside exploded, an avalanche of stone rubble poured down, smashing everything in its path. Nothing seemed to deter the climbing warriors. Slowly but steadily the line of the charge moved ever upwards.
“All tribes of the Taiga must be here,” said Aloue. B
erec could barely hear him over the noise of the battle. “They are charging the Eden.”
Nobody noticed when they mingled into the column of workers returning to one of the war camps. Nobody asked Berec’s name or tribe when he sat down by the common cauldron. The soup was hot, but tasteless.
“What now?” he asked.
Aloue stared into his bowl. His shoulders twitched with every explosion.
“I have no idea. We can’t get into the Eden now, that’s for sure. Not until one side wins the war. You’ve seen it — every single pass is under attack, every fortress is besieged.”
“Who do you think will win?”
“I don’t know. I have never seen anything like this. I don’t know what weapon is capable of such destruction, what is its power… what is the ammunition? Can it run out of ammunition, or will it simply keep firing until everyone here is dead?”
“What do you think caused this madness?”
Aloue shrugged. “They must know something we don’t know. These tribes have been living in the shadow of the mountains for generations. Maybe somebody figured out how the defences work. Maybe the supplies of the Eden are limited. We have to wait and see. We’ve reached so far, we can’t possibly turn back now.”
At the first light of dawn the mountains roared. A thunder greater than any before shook the entire plain. Boulders rained from the sky at the besieging army, the mountainside burst into flames. A river of molten rock flew down into the valley.
“Wake up!” cried Aloue, shaking Berec by the arm. “The Eden sallies forth!”
Berec looked up. The warriors of Eden poured from the open gates of the fortress. The attackers hesitated for a moment, but then they saw how few defenders they had to deal with and renewed their assault, despite the flames and explosions wreaking havoc in their lines.
Suddenly, the wave of the charging warriors faltered and broke. Soon the forest people were all running away, pushing each other out of the way, into the precipices and ravines.
“We have to go, Red Fox,” Aloue said, but then stopped. “What is it?”
Berec pointed to the sky, his face filled with awe. Great leathery wings appeared above the mountain fortress. A giant golden shape loomed over the walls.
“The Great Dragons! The Great Dragons are coming to punish us all!”
The men around them panicked. Some started for the forest, some dropped to their knees, begging forgiveness. The charge turned into a total rout. The dragon soared above the battlefield, spewing flame and smoke. As the Taiga warriors retreated, strange dark, angular shapes appeared over the passes, spitting flaming arrows.
“We really should go now,” Aloue insisted, but Berec stopped him. The sight of the dragon inspired him. He no longer feared death — only failure.
“No,” he said. “I have an idea. Come with me, it’s our only chance.”
DRAGON NORTH
If the old maps were telling the truth, the Pride of Astvar was only a few days away from the shores of the Dragon North. The usual navigation charts did not reach so far, but every Archipelago captain worth his salt had in his possession the ancient Map of Pervaar, a geographer who claimed to have sailed along the shores of the Dragon North to Maichaev on the other side of the Swirling Sea.
Ayaris and Sonnai were sitting inside the Duke’s cabin; it was already too cold outside to stay on deck. He was drinking the last bottle of wine from the ship’s stores; she was playing with dried apricots lying on a silver plate in front of her.
“Tell me this, then,” the Duke started, “how come, if there were so many of you gathering for the flight north, you never thought of bandying up against me? Surely you didn’t think I would manage all of you together. Why did you choose to fly rather than fight?”
The girl rolled a slice of apricot in her fingers.
“I think what it comes down to is that we, dragons, are fatalists. We strongly believe in things like fate and destiny, signs, prophecies. I have heard… stories… but I did not believe them until I saw you…”
Her voice trailed off.
“What stories?”
“When you came to kill me… on the Winter Isles… I thought I saw a great shadow behind you. The shadow emanated despair and resignation. It seeped my strength to fight you; I knew I would lose.”
“You could have tried.”
“What do you know about evolution?” she asked. He shook his head. The word meant nothing to him. “It’s one of the few things I remember from before my first Forgetting. One of the main tenets of our faith that the dragon wise men came up with aeons ago. I’m… not sure how to explain it, but a part of it is belief that only the fittest survive any change in the environment.”
“What does it have to do with me?”
“We saw you as the change we could not survive. Not just you — all humans. You have finally become stronger than us. Oh, we could have killed you — but we knew others would come sooner or later. There was no point fighting our destiny. Instead of facing extinction, we’ve decided to run away.”
The Duke nodded. “I think I understand. But now… I’m coming after you. I’m sailing to where your kin hoped to escape from their destiny and this, how you call it, evolution. What do you think will happen when they see me?”
“I don’t know. We might manage to talk to them, explain why we have come… or we might be torn apart in an instant.”
“What would you have done in their place?”
“I…” She stopped.
“What am I to you? Do you ever think of me as anything else than the dragon slayer, the doom of your kind?”
He reached out his hand, but before he could touch her, there was a knock on the door. It was the Captain.
“Land ho, Your Highness!”
The air around them was filled with a strange, sweetly-sour smell. Over the sheer cliffs rising from the sea, Ayaris saw something he thought at first to be a low-hanging cloud, but as the ship sailed closer he realised it was thousands of birds, circling.
“Perhaps you should go under deck,” he said to Sonnai, “until we make sure what it is.”
“I’m a dragon,” she scoffed.
They all saw it at the same time. She screamed and dropped to the ground. A few of the less hardened sailors vomited, others turned away. Only the Duke stared straight ahead, his fingers wrapped around the hilt of his sword.
All along the coast, on the rocks, the sand dunes and in the shallows, lay the twisted, mangled, decomposing bodies of hundreds of dead dragons. The odour they smelt was the foul stench of rotting meat; it had brought carrion feeders from miles around in droves.
The cliffs rose for many hundreds of feet. Snow and ice glimmered at their tops, hidden in the clouds. The mountain-sides were shattered and torn; the Duke guessed the dragons tried to claw their way up them and when they fell, they broke the cliffs with their bodies.
“What power did this?…” he whispered.
“Your Highness…” the Captain approached, “your orders…”
“Take us north-east, find a sheltered place to anchor. These accursed cliffs have to end somewhere.”
“What about the girl, Your Highness?”
The Duke looked down. Sonnai was kneeling in a stupor. “Damn it, she’s going to Forget for the third time. Take her to her cabin! Take good care of her. Gods, that smell!…”
By the end of the next day the cliffs ended and so did the dragon cemetery. There was now a line of tall hills rising along the coast, falling gently towards the sea. The ship anchored for the night near a shingle beach, but a boat sent to investigate the area found no trace of any inhabitants, human or dragon.
In the morning, Sonnai appeared on deck. Her face was still frozen in permanent despair, but she seemed healthy otherwise. She made no mention of the dragon cemetery and Ayaris didn’t ask.
The ship was preparing to set sail again. She walked up to the Duke and then past him, staring at something. Ayaris turned around, following her gaze.
&
nbsp; “What is it? I can’t see anything.”
“Not on the sea. Over the hills.”
The others noticed it too. Whistles of alarm sounded throughout the deck. A black dot appeared beyond the hills to the north-east. It was flying slowly in an odd, wobbly manner.
“Is it a dragon?”
“It must be,” the girl said, “it’s much bigger than any bird.”
The dot soon grew to a shape. If it was a dragon, it was unlike any Ayaris had ever seen.
“There’s somebody sitting on top!”
He could now see that it was some kind of machine made of wooden rods tied with rope, with wings of leather. There were two men inside, turning the twin propellers with a great effort of their arms and legs. As the vehicle flew over the sea it was buffeted by the breeze back and forth, nonetheless, it moved towards them at considerable speed.
Ayaris watched with growing curiosity as the machine circled above the ship once and then landed on board with a grinding sound. Now he could finally observe its crew closely. They seemed almost human, slim and muscular. Their faces were a bit too long, their finger nails a bit too claw-shaped. Their eyes were narrow, golden, with vertical pupils and no eyebrows. Their skin was a monotone shade of grey and their hair was the colour of steel.
“What do you see?” he asked Sonnai.
“I see a man in the shape of a dragon.”
“And I see a dragon in the shape of a man. These must be were-drakes. So the legends were true…”
One of the strangers spoke in an archaic version of the dragon tongue.
“Welcome, Ancestors. Welcome to Eden.”
Ayaris noticed Sonnai clenching her fists.
“Greetings, masters of this land,” he spoke gently, “I hope you are here to guide us to your harbour?”
The two were-drakes looked at each other.
“There are no harbours on the coast of Eden. But I can lead thee to a place where thou can safely cast anchor of thy… boat.”
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