by Jen Williams
‘I’m on your side!’ He looked round at the faces under the helmets. Every one looked tired, frightened, close to panic. ‘I’m here to help.’
There was a gasp as the griffin turned bird-sized once more and flew off into the roofs behind them.
‘Who are you? What is that?’ A man stepped forward out of the crowd. He’d had a red beard once but parts of it had recently been singed off. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’ve had rather enough of flying bloody monsters!’
As if to support his words there was a roar from the marshes beyond the walls, and an answering shout from the brood army. Sebastian swallowed hard.
‘My name is Sebastian, and I am a Ynnsmouth knight. I bring you a good sword arm,’ he drew his sword and held it up. ‘And I come to hold this city.’
The crowd began to lower their swords, looking at each other uncertainly.
‘A Ynnsmouth knight, aye? Your lot are beyond the gate, getting sliced to pieces. You want to go out there and help them, that’s fine, but we ain’t going nowhere.’
‘Will no one join me?’ Sebastian cast around the crowd. Those eyes that met his were terrified. Most looked away. ‘I will need some men just to get out of the gate.’
‘Well, you ain’t getting no help from us!’
‘He won’t need it.’
Sebastian looked down to see a slim white shape standing barefoot in the mud. Ip grinned up at him.
‘How are you here?’
‘Mysterious ways, my friend.’ She blinked, and for a second her eyes were filled with blood. Another blink and they were clear again. ‘I see that you have collected all the pieces of my armour. Do you know what happens when you wear them all together?’
‘No,’ replied Sebastian, a sour note in his voice. ‘You wouldn’t tell me.’
Her grin widened until it was a rictus, too wide and sharp for a human face.
‘Put the helm on, Sir Sebastian. Open the gate.’
The armed men were watching this exchange with increasing incredulity when there came a flurry of howls from beyond the wall, and the dragon passed directly overhead. A ball of flame as big as a loaded cart shot past them and exploded in the row of houses behind. All at once, everything was fire and chaos.
Ignoring the girl, Sebastian pulled the helm down over his head and headed for the gate. Whatever it did, he needed to get where the fighting was.
‘Remember, you kill in my name!’ called Ip. ‘The suffering you cause today is mine. And the Cursed Company are yours to command.’
It seemed to Sebastian that the sky grew dark, and he looked up, expecting to see the dragon, expecting to be boiled to pieces within the suit of armour, but there was a thick fog around him, growing darker by the moment. The crowd shouted in confusion, and the smoky fog drew in on itself, growing solid. As he watched, men began to form out of the swirling mists, grey men bristling with vicious-looking barbed armour. Every one of them was as tall as him, and every one as broad. They held huge battered broadswords and jagged metal shields like broken ice, and they lined up behind Sebastian in neat, precise lines. There had to be a hundred of them.
‘What are you?’
‘This is the Cursed Company,’ said Ip brightly. She walked up to one of the men and rapped her knuckles against his dusty breastplate. ‘They obey whoever wears my armour, and they will not stop until you tell them to. Many battles have been turned by the Cursed Company. More than history credits them for, that’s for certain.’
Sebastian peered at the nearest warrior; he wore a close-fitting helm and inside it there was a face. Of sorts.
‘These are … these aren’t men.’
‘Oh, but they were once,’ said Ip. ‘These are those left behind for the ravens. Whatever wasn’t nipped up by their clever little beaks was chucked into a pile by the victors and burned. You’ve seen that, haven’t you, Sebastian? Piles of the dead burning on the battlefield. I’ve claimed them. All through time I’ve claimed the ashes of the fallen and built them anew. No need to thank me.’
The face inside the helm was a crushed mixture of soot and bone, with the occasional ragged piece of charred flesh or pinkish sinew holding it all together. The warriors had no eyes – such tasty morsels were the first choice of any self-respecting raven – but Sebastian thought he could feel the man watching him anyway.
He turned away, and shouted at the men on the gate.
‘Open up and let us out! We fight for Baneswatch!’
The gatekeeper gestured them forward.
‘Keep close! I’ll be shutting this gate as soon as you’re through, so move quickly. I don’t want none of those green creatures getting past.’ He glanced at the army of smoke-wraiths, obviously unsure if they could hear or understand him. He caught Sebastian’s eye instead. ‘You hear me?’
‘Yes.’ Sebastian held his sword at the ready, and he couldn’t help noticing that it was the same ashen grey as those of the Cursed Company. ‘We heard you.’
The gates rumbled open, revealing the cold scrubland of the road beyond. The ground was thick with blood, and smoke rolled in ponderous clouds of black and grey, while here and there he could see the shadows of people running, fighting, dying. The shadows of people and monsters.
‘For Baneswatch!’ he called as he charged out onto the battlefield, hoping that perhaps one or two of the city’s guards would be inspired to join him, but there was no answering rally; only the eerie silence of the Cursed Company, pounding the ground next to him.
‘For me, you mean,’ whispered Ip in his ear.
‘You will get your blood, demon.’
Just before he met the throng of exhausted, ragged fighters, he glanced up. Y’Ruen was there, twisting and turning against the blue, and two black specks danced around her, looking impossibly small.
‘We’ll all be killed,’ he grunted as his blade sank home into the shoulder of the first brood warrior.
We’ll all be killed. But at least that will be an end to it.
80
Frith dug his fingers deep into the griffin’s feathers and urged the creature on. He and Wydrin were flying at a terrible speed now, racing to keep up with the constant movement of the dragon. The ground sped by in a blur, too fast to make out more than vague impressions of men and women fighting.
Wydrin was in front, her narrow back bent over the griffin, sword in one hand. The dragon was still circling the western gate and as yet it hadn’t noticed them. Its snout was pointing downwards, huge yellow eyes fixed on the fighting below. This close, Frith could see the glinting perfection of each scale, the wet precision of its teeth, the sheer physical weight of the creature. His stomach was clenching with a deep primal fear – I am small and hunted – but there was also a dizzying sense of dislocation. A creature that big, flying with such easy grace – it shouldn’t exist. He’d experienced a shadow of that feeling before when Jolnir had thrown off his mask and revealed the face of a god beneath it. The world he’d known had tipped crazily, like a boat in a storm, and shown him an underside crawling with things he didn’t understand.
The dragon snapped its jaws and flame crawled across the crowds below. The stink of sulphur and cooked flesh assaulted his nose.
‘This is it,’ cried Wydrin from just ahead of him. ‘Get ready to fly your arse off, princeling!’
He had a moment to think that they should have changed their weapons – Wydrin still brandished Glassheart, and a spear would have made more sense, of course it would – before Wydrin pressed her knees to the sides of her griffin and dived, dropping like a stone.
He could hear her shouting but couldn’t make out the words. For a terrible few seconds he thought she’d misjudged everything and was going to crash headlong into the giant beast, but she pulled up at the last minute, just behind the tangled cluster of horns that sprouted from Y’Ruen’s head. Leaning down, one hand holding fast to the griffin’s black feathers, she swiped Glassheart across the back of the dragon’s neck. The blade scraped harmlessly ac
ross the scales, but Y’Ruen gave an odd bark of surprise and whipped her head round.
It was almost all over in that instant. The great head whirled like a cobra striking and Frith heard Wydrin shout a very loud and very clear curse word, but the dragon just missed, teeth closing on empty air.
This was it, then. Frith summoned the words for Ice and Control and the Edenier leapt from his hands, crackling with energy. Two, three spheres of freezing ice crashed against the corner of Y’Ruen’s jaw, and Frith suspected that at least gave her a toothache, because she turned, baleful yellow eyes fixed on him. The enormous bat-like wings gave one huge lazy flap and she was up in the air with them. Frith clung to the griffin’s back as the wind from her flight threatened to unseat him; just being caught in the monster’s updraught was dangerous.
‘We’ve got her attention! Let’s move!’ Wydrin was flying at him and, madly, impossibly, she was laughing.
And she was right.
Y’Ruen had turned away from the burning city below and was coming after them.
Frith put his heels to the griffin and turned south. As the one who’d memorised the maps he had to lead them to Relios and beyond, which meant keeping his eyes ahead much of the time. Immediately, the skin on his back began to crawl as he imagined death eyeing his unprotected flesh.
Glancing over his shoulder he saw Wydrin circling the dragon like a bee around a hive. The dragon would dart her head forward every now and then, teeth long and yellow against a black tongue, but Wydrin was dodging like she’d been flying griffins all her life. Intermittently she would swoop in, now a bee with its stinger, and drive her sword at the dragon’s enormous bulk. And always she was moving forward, drawing the creature on. The city of Baneswatch was falling behind them.
But all it would take was one mistake and Wydrin would be torn to pieces, her guts scattered to the sky.
Frith leaned back on the griffin, ignoring the eye-watering drop below, and threw a wave of force behind him, a crackling curtain of violet light. It hit the dragon square in the face, and there was another of those ear-splitting roars.
Wydrin laughed again, delighting in Y’Ruen’s rage. But he could feel the dragon looking at him now, a huge pressure on the back of his head. He could feel her mind pushing at his; questing, curious.
I have her attention, he thought, his mouth dry as dust. She sees a mage. And the last mages she saw were the ones who sealed her in the Citadel.
Damn.
It was a frantic flight to Relios.
The sky was filled with the fury of the dragon, the griffins soaring and dipping and sometimes just plain scrambling out of the way. More than once Frith felt the heat of the fire so close that the ends of his hair started to crisp and every now and then he would have to pat down the griffin as the occasional feather caught fire. He did his best to keep Wydrin in the corner of his eye, throwing back sheets of ice and lightning when he could so that the dragon was always torn between two targets.
Perhaps it was the god’s curiosity that saved them, or perhaps she was bored of chasing distant targets on the ground. Eventually the landscape beneath them changed from the cool grasses of Ynnsmouth to the reddish clay soil of Relios, and they began to pass over signs that the dragon had already been this way; streaks of soot that had once been villages, and fields of mud churned under the feet of the brood army.
When he saw the ruins of Gostarae in the distance, Frith felt a small tremor of relief in his stomach. Under the mess of old grey stones there was a network of tunnels that, if you were looking down on them from above, would spell the word for Stillness. According to the information O’rin had left them, anyway.
‘This is it,’ he shouted across to Wydrin. She waved in acknowledgement before diving to one side to avoid a lunge from the dragon.
The ruins were underneath them. The Edenier churned within Frith’s chest, as though sensing what was about to happen. Y’Ruen flew on, almost passing completely over the stones below, but Wydrin spiralled back and up, flying up towards the clouds in a complicated corkscrew, and the dragon followed. Now or never, then.
Frith summoned the word for Stillness in his mind, picturing it as clearly as he could. The corresponding binding on his right hand grew cold, and then colder, so cold it was painful. A ribbon of light shot from the end of his fingers, bright as lightning, and rippled down to the ground, faster than his eyes could follow. There was a tugging in his stomach, and his arms and legs grew numb as though the spell were draining all his strength. It could be, for all I know, thought Frith, staring down at the jumbled ruins. Above him Wydrin and the dragon hung suspended in the air, and …
‘Nothing’s happening!’ he yelled, knowing full well Wydrin couldn’t hear him. ‘Nothing …’
… Deep within the red earth, the faces carved into the walls of the tunnels were licked with a pale and ghostly light, silvery and god-touched. One by one their eyes and mouths opened, and a shout issued forth …
Frith saw the word briefly, inscribed in light below him as clearly as it had been in his mind, and then shards of light so bright that they were almost solid leapt up into sky, shooting past them like pillars of impossible marble. The griffin screamed, high and panicked, and Frith had to hold on tight to avoid being pitched from its back. He wrenched his head up, half blind but needing to see, and saw the shards of light pass up and through the dragon, appearing to illuminate the monster from within. For the barest second he thought he could see its bones, twined with violet lightning, and there was a roar so loud it was like the world crying out in furious pain.
And then the light was gone.
Wydrin sped towards him as, above them, the dragon writhed like a nest of snakes.
‘Better get ready to fly, Frith,’ she said, blinking furiously. ‘I think we’ve really pissed it off now.’
81
The air was thick with misted blood. The brood army, the Order, the Cursed Company; all were little more than churning shadows amongst the chaos.
Under the helm Sebastian blinked sweat away from his eyes. He could taste salt on his lips, and it seemed that every muscle sang with energy. The battle lust he’d felt in the demon’s ruins was with him again. How much of it was Bezcavar’s influence he couldn’t tell, but it hardly mattered. He moved through the crowd of soldiers with relentless efficiency, and his sword left a trail of green blood in its wake.
He saw the battle in shattered moments, fire-vivid and fever-bright. One of Y’Ruen’s children rose up before him with a sword in each hand, her teeth bared. He traced where his blade would go in his mind – up and across the chest, where part of her armour had come away – and then his sword seemed to move of its own accord. Blood splattered his face and there was more salt on his lips.
The Cursed Company were an eerie patch of silence amongst the screaming and shouting. Sebastian caught glimpses of them, never far from him, moving with a precision and a relentlessness he thought oddly familiar until he recognised it as his own. They were wraiths of ash and bone, built in his image. Their ashen swords hacked and crushed and disembowelled relentlessly, cutting a great swath through the brood army by themselves.
Soon Sebastian found he was wading through a soup of green and red blood, thick with entrails and other body parts, and yet still he was not tired.
I could kill for ever.
‘Glorious, isn’t it?’
Ip appeared next to him, or something that looked like Ip, at least. She wore a simple white shift that came down to her ankles, impossibly clean against the carnage.
Sebastian paused, suddenly in the midst of a quiet spot in the battlefield. He suspected that was Bezcavar’s doing.
‘What do you want?’ He did not want quiet, or to stop.
‘Just surveying my glory.’ Ip raised her hands and spun in a slow circle. ‘All of this pain, death, fear. All in my name. I haven’t had a day this good in centuries.’
Sebastian lowered his sword slowly. How long had he been fighting? The smoke from
the fires made everything dark and unknowable. How many had he killed? Now that he’d stopped he could feel the ache in his head again.
‘Did they lead the dragon away? Is she gone?’
Ip shrugged as though this were the least interesting question she’d ever heard.
‘Is that important? The joy is here, after all.’
‘Of course it’s important.’ Sebastian forced his fingers up under the helm, trying to wipe the sweat away from his eyes. It was important. He was just finding it difficult to remember why. ‘Wydrin’s up there, she’s in danger—’
‘And you’re down here. This is where your job is.’
Ip grinned and vanished as the battle roared back into life around him. Sebastian raised his sword and stepped back into the fray.
It was a relief.
The worst of the pain, Wydrin noted, was in her fingers. She was well used to gripping a sword for long periods of time, but gripping it and swinging it and taking care not to drop it at any point or you would never bloody see it again – that took rather more effort. Second to that pain was the dull ache in her knees and thighs, strained with holding on to the griffin. Let go of that at any point, and you’d never see anything a-bloody-gain.
The Yellow Sea glittered below them and she could almost make out their reflections in the water; her griffin, ducking and swerving and swooping, Frith on his, occasionally lit with magical explosions, and the dragon, coming on behind them with its neck stretched out like a dog with a scent. It was, she suspected, the sort of image you couldn’t look at for too long without going a little mad, so she ripped her eyes away from it and pulled the griffin up and up just in time to avoid another lance of fire. The heat from it licked at the bottom of her boots, making her feet uncomfortably hot.
‘That was an admirable try!’ she shouted into the wind. ‘But you have to get up earlier than that to catch the Copper Cat.’
