Northern Storm ac-2

by Juliet E. McKenna

  ‘What are you, some wizard? Then come and fight a real mage!’ Dev’s belligerent shouts didn’t distract the savage, intent on aiming another crushing swing at Kheda’s head. The mage’s hurled dagger had more success, slicing through the air to strike the wild man a glancing blow on one painted shoulder. The invader glared at the wizard, bellowing some incomprehensible challenge that echoed around the uneven walls.

  Kheda seized the opportunity to regain his footing, drawing his dagger from his belt as he did so, wincing as his hand ached viciously.

  Not as good as two swords but better than one empty hand. I’d rather have the sword in my leading hand, with the dagger us backup. Armour mould be better yet but at least I have blades and this invader is still naked. Let’s see how he bleeds.

  He feinted at the wild man, who dodged backwards with another swing of his stone-studded club in an attempt to knock Kheda’s weapon aside. He was dressed like every other savage the warlord had seen, in a worn leather loincloth. His bare legs and body were painted with red-ochre flames, the designs clear against his dark skin in the bright golden light filling the cave. More russet mud caked his bristly black hair

  Kheda moved carefully from side to side and watched the wild man’s black eyes track his every move with feral intelligence. ‘Dev, is this some savage wizard?’ he asked conversationally. ‘Can you tell if he has anyone backing him up?’

  Not that I can see,’ answered the wizard with vicious satisfaction. ‘And he’s no mage. He must just be in thrall to the dragon or serving it somehow.’

  ‘We’ll have to kill him to get to that egg.’ Kheda surprised the savage with a rapid thrust. The wild man recoiled before recovering an instant later to threaten Kheda with a crunching blow to his leading leg. Kheda evaded the strike with a sideways step, his shadow sprawling across a ridged wall of flowing stone. The wild man would have sidestepped with him but the barrier foiled him. Kheda dodged the other way and as he passed in front of the wild man, his shadow darkened his enemy’s face for an instant. A roar from outside made the whole cave tremble, stones tumbling down the scree in panic. The very air seemed to pulse with the sound. Crimson fire erupted behind Kheda and the brilliance filling the cave flared once more. Wild man and warlord alike flinched away from each other as their eyes closed irresistibly under the blinding assault.

  ‘I can’t reach him with any spells,’ spat Dev furiously.

  ‘The ruby devours all the magic’

  ‘Don’t try,’ Kheda snapped as he blinked through tears of pain. ‘Get between him and the light instead.’ What?’

  The wild man attacked before Kheda could explain, swinging his brutal club in a frenzy. Kheda ducked and dodged and slashed with his sword, leaving the savage’s arms bleeding from an array of deep cuts. The wounds didn’t seem to slow the wild man. He kept on coming, pressing Kheda ever harder as every new bellow of fury from outside seemed to goad him on.

  ‘Dev! Smash that gem!’ The warlord hacked at his foe with a flurry of strokes born more of fearful rage than swordsmanship. His dagger hovered ready, waiting for any chance to launch a fatal thrust. The savage landed a crushing blow on Kheda’s shoulder, the warlord barely managing to turn to lessen the impact. His whole ann went numb for a moment and the sword almost slipped from his nerveless fingers. The savage stepped forward, raising his club above his shoulder to bring it smashing down on Kheda’s unprotected head.

  ‘Hey! You with the shit in your hair!’ One of Dev’s swords came spinning through the air to slap against the wild man’s chest. The flat of the blade didn’t even break the skin and the blow barely gave him pause before the sword clattered to the floor. The savage switched his gaze from Kheda to Dev for an instant, lip curled in a sneer.

  As he did so, the mage dodged to one side, letting the full glare of the ruby egg’s magical fire fall on the wild man’s face. He flinched and blinked and Kheda thrust his dagger deep into his naked midriff. The wild man fell against him, dropping his club to fasten his strong hands around Kheda’s neck. They fell backwards, locked in a deadly embrace. Kheda landed hard on the ridged floor, back and ribs agonisingly bruised. He fought with the dagger still embedded in the wild man’s entrails, struggling to rip the blade sideways for a killing stroke. The savage’s fingers tightened around his throat and Kheda forced his jaw down into his chest, hunching his shoulders, fighting to save himself from strangulation. As it was, he was being rapidly throttled, the breath crushed in his windpipe.

  With a last effort as his vision blunted, Kheda threw the savage away with a twist of his hips. An insignificant gap opened between them and he managed to tear the dagger blade across the wild man’s belly. Blood and entrails flowed out of the gash to smother his hands. The savage collapsed across him with an incoherent gasp, rank breath foul in his face.

  Kheda struggled uselessly for a moment, throwing his head from side to side to get free of the dead man’s clinging fingers. Dev!’ he yelled hoarsely.

  The wizard neither answered nor came to his aid. Kheda drew a deep breath and heaved the wild man’s corpse off himself. Wincing at his bruises, he staggered to his feet, breathless, looking as if he had been the one disembowelled with the blood and foulness on his midriff. The cavern reverberated at another deafening roar from outside.

  ‘Best keep clear,’ Dev called over his shoulder as the final echoes of fury ran away to be lost in the labyrinth of stone.

  The mage scuffed his bare feet through the drifts of gemstones, brushing them aside as he approached the brilliant ruby egg. He would have been hard pressed to encircle it with his arms. The golden flame burned in its scarlet heart, white hot at its incandescent centre. Kheda hesitated and stayed where he was. This is wizard’s work, so leave him to it. What could you possibly do to help anyway?

  Dev rubbed a hand thoughtfully over his bald head, beams of sweat glistening like the diamonds scorned beneath his feet. Slowly he drew his remaining sword and extended his arm back and sideways. With sudden violence, he brought the blade up and around in a flashing arc to smash down into the top of the egg. The steel exploded into a shower of burning splinters that ripped through the air to bury themselves in the stone walls all around.

  Kheda had ducked away as soon as Dev launched the strike. Hiding his face in his forearms, he winced at the sting of a handful of vicious slivers biting deep into his back and shoulder. He looked up cautiously. ‘Dev?’

  The wizard was staring over towards the black hole that had been their way into the cave. His tunic was bloody, torn in countless places. Sparks of steel shone in the wounds to his hands and face. He didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘This really could all go horribly wrong,’ he remarked conversationally. Looking back at the egg, slowly, painfully, he knelt beside it and rested his cheek gently against its shining shell. His dark eyes glowed with reflected red fire and his mouth curved in a slow smile of ecstasy. He laid one hand palm down against the curved surface of the egg and, turning the other over, he cupped his palm and summoned a frail scarlet flame.

  ‘Dev.’ Kheda’s voice was puzzled, pleading, even though he had no notion what to say or ask of the wizard. He shivered as a sudden chill shook him, gooseflesh raised on his bloody arms. His bruises and lacerations ached viciously and his damp and foul clothes clung coldly to his shrinking flesh. The flame in Dev’s hand burned taller and brighter and the light filling the cavern turned to an ominous scarlet. The golden flame within the egg glowed more fiercely, writhing and twisting. Dev’s flame spilled over the edges of his hand and flowed across the egg, dimming that inner radiance. The scarlet fire ran around the mage’s face, still pressed to the surface of the ruby, and down the sides of the egg to pool around the wizard’s knees. His dagger was melting in its scabbard, drops of metal burning their way through the wood and leather. Stray diamonds and sapphires cracked and shattered where the burning magic touched them. Dev didn’t react. His eyes were open but fixed, as if he stared into some unimaginable distance. Scarlet fire burn
ed in his pupils and the rapturous smile on his face widened. Kheda shivered. All around the chill was deepening, biting deep into his bones. Ahead, the egg burned with a ferocity that he could feel drying his lips and eyes, scorching his exposed skin. He tried to take a step backwards but could not do it.

  I cannot leave him. I must see this through. The golden flame was filling the egg now, expanding from its white heart. Dev’s scarlet fire was still pouring from his hand, coating the ruby, stifling the incandescence within.

  ‘Dev!’ Kheda took a pace forward and the scarlet fire flared, heat striking him like a physical blow. He winced and stepped back, rubbing at tears provoked by the piercing light. He squinted painfully and saw a horror that froze the breath beneath his breastbone.

  Dev’s hand was burning: not merely holding the blood-red magic, but being consumed by it. The skin of his palm was gone, revealing the white bones beneath. As Kheda watched, his hand became a skeletal lattice wrapped in scarlet flame. The skin of his wrist began to peel back, tendons shrivelling to nothing, fibrous muscle laid bare, glistening, before the creeping tide of magic devoured it to leave blood-smeared ivory. The twin bones of his forearm were revealed, finger-width by finger-width.

  It’s like some nightmare of ulcerating rot in a wound. Can I save him, if I can get to him? If I cut off the arm before it devours the rest of him? At the elbow? At the shoulder?

  Kheda stepped forward again but the heat was a physical bather now. Bathed in ruby light, his hands and face ached ferociously. Try as he might, he couldn’t bring himself to force his way any closer through the excruciating pain. In the shadows behind him, his back was colder than he had ever known, knotted with fierce pain to counterbalance the searing agony before him.

  Is this all I can do? Just watch?

  Dev still smiled with that beatific stillness. Where his face was laid against the surface of the egg, the skin had burned away and the flesh beneath with it, his jaw and teeth exposed in a deathly rictus. The fiery glow spread, consuming his weather-beaten cheek and his thin lips, peeling back his eyelids to expose the socket beneath. In the hollow of bone, his eye was a ball of sweating flame. His other eye, as yet untouched, glowed ever brighter with scarlet fire.

  The fiery gold within the egg pulsed, its brilliance fading with every labouring beat. The flame still flowing from the calcined bones of Dev’s hand darkened to a clotted crimson even as it burned ever more fiercely. The air in the cavern was throbbing and somewhere on the very edge of hearing, a piercing note was building.

  Dev drew a long, shuddering breath. The fire had devoured his nose, leaving a ragged pit in the middle of his face, and his mouth was entirely gone. What little remained of his expression was still euphoric but that might just have been the curve of his naked, charring jawbone.

  There’s no saving him now.

  The wizard spoke, startling Kheda horribly. His voice was no different, no trace of the barbarian in his mocking tone as he spoke, his eloquent Aldabreshin speech unaffected by the grotesque min of his face. ‘I really think you’d better get out of here, my lord.’ His words were slow and languorous and the breath rasped in his throat. As Dev blinked his remaining eye, the burning of the other socket was momentarily quenched. He shuddered like a man trying to hold himself back from the cataclysmic throes of passion. ‘This really doesn’t concern you.’

  Never underestimate the wisdom of a dying mans words. With that long-held truth forcing him back, Kheda retreated in what he hoped was the direction of the tunnel out of this inferno. He tripped and stumbled but could not look away from the sight before him. The crimson flame was spreading outwards now, wrapping Dev entirely in its lethal beauty. The mage twisted this way and that as it consumed him with its incomprehensible delights, greedy crackles stifling his groans of ecstasy. Slowly, resolutely, the blackened bones that were all that was left of the hand where this deadly fire had first kindled began to close into a fist.

  Kheda saw the fiery gold within the egg crushed to a dull thread writhing at its heart. With every breath, it shortened, halved and halved again. He looked for the way out. There was no way he could reach it before that tarnished light died.

  And that’s going to do something horrendous.

  He flung himself behind a ridged conglomeration of stone flowed from the cave’s roof and grown from its floor. He buried his face in his hands and drew up his legs like a cowering child.

  With a soft sigh, the crimson fire exploded outwards, setting the very air of the cavern ablaze. The whole crag shuddered with the anguished howl ripped from the tormented dragon outside. Stone tapers crashed from the ceiling to smash the ripples of the floor into ruin.

  The darkness was total. When Kheda opened his eyes, he could see no difference. He could not see his trembling hand in front of his face. All he could feel was his shaking breath on his scored and bloody palm. His ears were still ringing from the deafening noise. If anything else was going on outside, he couldn’t hear it.

  If you can’t see and you can’t hear, you can still feel. You haven’t come this far, at such a cost, to give up now. Move!

  He got to his handstand knees and felt shards of stone viciously painful under his tender skin. Slowly, he knelt upright and waited, eyes instinctively closed the better to concentrate, rejecting the darkness all around.

  Just a breath of movement in the air, that’s all I ask for. There it is. And a green smell with it, of life and hope, among ill this hideous reek of scorched death. And swords to fight with, if there’s still an enemy out there.

  Sheathing his dagger, he fumbled around in the darkness where his sword had fallen, as best as he could tell. He found a blade and won a cut across his thumb for his pains. Clutching the naked sword, he crawled towards that wisp of air promising escape. Carefully, he swept his empty lacerated hand across the mute stone, shuffling to protect his knees. After every few paces, he halted, waiting until his heart was calmer, trying to ignore the dreadful echoes still reverberating in his ears. His head throbbed, the pain somehow worsened by the strengthening scent of normality waiting for him beyond the confines of the cavern.

  Finding the wall by grazing his knuckles against it, he clambered awkwardly to his feet. He flattened his free palm against the water-smoothed stone and eased himself along, stubbing his toes here and there against the invisible malice of the floor. Finally, his hand slipped into a void and the fresh scent of the forest outside steadied him as he stumbled. He rounded a corner and light forced its way down the tunnel to draw him on. Kheda blinked and squinted as the light strengthened, stabbing at his eyes. He reeled out of the cave mouth and collapsed against the cliff face, mind and senses in turmoil. The light had seemed so bright but there was no clear sun above him, only the cold grey of the storm clouds he had left behind earlier. The punishing pain in his ears wasn’t merely the echo of the fighting dragons. They were still roaring high in the sky above, tearing at each other in frenzy. Kheda looked up, appalled, despairing.

  After all this, after Dev ‘$ death, and such a death, and it still isn’t ended?

  The fire dragon was struggling to free itself from its new foe. The cloud dragon Velindre had summoned from the storm was a very different creature from the white innocent she had sent against it before. This was a bigger beast, longer and stronger, vigour in every line of it. Its spines were the dark blue-grey of a rainy season tempest, paling just a little to armour its head in twilight blue. Cloudy white gleamed beneath its jaw and down the front of its neck but back and flanks were armoured with scales the hue of a leaden overcast. Its underbelly was the colour of the dirty foam lashed from the sea by a whirlwind. Its storm-blue legs were thick and muscular, tipped with talons brilliant as lightning as its hind feet ripped at the dull crimson of the fire dragon’s hide. The ruddy beast was held by the cloud dragon’s dark, brutal tail entwined with its own.

  Both creatures were grievously wounded, each bleeding from great gashes ripped by teeth, claws and magic along their flanks. They
had torn the scales from each other’s breasts, the flesh beneath lacerated bone deep. Bite marks showed plainly in the cloud dragon’s mist-tinted wings, the holes shimmering with rainbow light. The fire dragon had suffered appalling injuries to one of its wings in turn. The membranes between the long, splayed bones had been cut to bloody scarlet ribbons by claws and teeth.

  It flapped frantically with its remaining sound wing to save itself from falling, all the while fighting to defend itself. Pulling the stricken creature mercilessly down with its weight, the cloud dragon brushed away its flailing copper foreclaws with contemptuous ease. Every blow of its own that landed sent a burst of blue magic crackling through the fire dragon’s hide, warping and splintering its scales, racking the creature rigid with agony. The cloud dragon’s broad head weaved from side to side on its long, corded neck. It gaped, teeth like crystal knives vicious in its dark blue mouth. Only its eyes were the same as those of the creature that Velindre had first sent against the fire dragon. They shone, living sapphire beneath its bristling brow ridges, as it darted its head forward to tear at the fire dragon’s throat. Ruby blood poured down the red beast’s neck and hissed to steam on the cloud dragon’s dark scales.

  The fire dragon’s struggles subsided to no more than token defiance and its feebly flicking tail brushed the tops of the tallest ironwoods. The cloud dragon untwined itself with a convulsive twist and soared upwards with a thunderous sweep of its wings. The fire dragon fell, too exhausted to recover itself. At the cloud dragon’s cry, a spear of lightning shot from the turbulent clouds above to stab deep into the fire dragon’s side. The beast’s back arched in such agony that its lashing tail almost struck its own screaming head.

  The red dragon fell to the ground, smashing the forest beneath it as it rolled down the slope, helpless. Trees held it for a moment before breaking under the strain and letting it roll free once more. Its flailing tail swept aside the bushes and clinging vines trailed from the chipped and broken spike. The beast scrabbled at the ground with ungainly claws in a vain effort to slow its rolling tumble. It could not find purchase in the loose soil, merely gouging great furrows in the dark, pungent earth. All along the trail of destruction, the crushed, sodden foliage was ablaze. Birds sprang frantic from their roosts, screeching their tenor. Some escaped but the slowest died in plummeting bursts of flame, devoured by elemental fire. Where’s the wizard woman? Where’s Risala? As Kheda stood, transfixed by fear, the cloud dragon carved a lazy circle in the sky, crowing its triumph. It stooped like a falcon as the red dragon moved, struggling to rise to its feet amid the flames that rushed to succour it. With a shattering hiss the cloud dragon breathed out a cloud of vapour that snuffed the fires, leaving the chanted stumps of the broken trees coated with ice. It circled again and this time a wind rose to follow its bidding, ringing the fire dragon around with splintered branches and ripped-up tree roots, showering the hapless creature with earth and leaf mould. The wind whirled faster and faster, narrowing into a spiral, pulling in broken wood and soil and even rocks from an ever-widening circle. The cloud dragon circled ceaselessly above. Every time it raised its gaping head to the clouds above and roared, a shaft of lightning shot down to pierce the whirlwind