None of the new dragons could claim to be old, but this one looked it. Its grey scaled hide was scarred and crossed with wounds that had healed without quite closing. Its long snout was crumpled by some great blow that had struck it close to one nostril, carving out a handful of teeth that had not regrown. The yellow eye it turned on them was narrow and cunning. Most dragons had been little more than bright beasts—Vermarod had been almost mindless, a terror to his own side whenever he got turned around in the battle. This one was staring at the newcomers with a calculating patience surely more dangerous than mere ferocity.
Heno rumbled, deep in his chest. “Look at its throat,” and then, when the thing lifted its man-length head, “Nails and fire, look at its other eye.”
There were cysts at the hinge of its jaw, bloating out and shouldering aside the smaller scales there. The dragon’s far eye was swollen and pearly, the shadowy shape of a grub curled tightly there as though within the egg.
“Its blood killed them,” Meddig whispered. “But they got far enough. It’s like me. It’s not part of them, it’s its own thing, but it speaks to them.”
“Does it speak for them?” Kait asked. She was very tense, one hand constantly twitching over her sword hilt. Dragons were engines of destruction, vomiting corrosive venom, poisoning the air, spraying forth sheets of fire that could incinerate whole squads of soldiers. Each one was different, hand-crafted by the Kinslayer. And yet it just crouched there about the stone, plainly its resting place of old, for its scales had carved a spiralling track into the monolith’s edge.
Meddig was blinking furiously, trying to understand. At last he threw his hands up in frustration, prompting alarmed reactions from the nearest Kelicerati. “I can’t tell. I think they were frightened of it? Only, frightened doesn’t mean the same to them as it does to us. It doesn’t know what it is. There’s never been a thing like it before. The Kelicerati don’t have words for it even in their own way, let alone ours. But it is part of them. And everything of them speaks for them. It’s—oh, gods.” He clutched at his head. “It’s trying to make me know what it’s like, to be it. I can’t understand. My head’s full!”
“Enough!” Kait took a furious step towards the dragon and the spider-creatures. “Stop it, you’re hurting him!”
The dragon’s sharp snout was levelled at her immediately, and it drew in a colossal breath. Celestaine yelled and caught the Hegumen by the waist, throwing her aside and out of the way of whatever devastation was about to ensue. She ended up lying uncomfortably on the woman, Kait’s pauldron jabbing into her armpit, and everyone had their swords out. Heno’s hands were ablaze with barely contained power, and all the Kelicerati had clubs and sharp wooden spears, their fangs gaping in threat.
“Stop!” The word seemed to roll out from the dragon’s very bowels and then off into the trees. “Hvar!” which meant the same to the Yorughan. Celestaine rolled off Kait and came up with a hand on her sword hilt. The dragon’s head swung dizzyingly above her, regarding her first with its living eye, then with the dead orbs of the parasite in its other socket. She saw the muscles of its long throat ripple and compress like a bellows, and the words “Sao yoragh nor na!” echoed from it, formed without need for lips or tongue, but plainly with enormous effort.
“They are not here for war,” Heno translated.
Yoragh was war, then. She hadn’t appreciated that the Yorughan were just, what—warriors, war-makers? “Then what does it want?” she demanded. Her mind was consumed with thoughts of those jaws lunging forward just a little and biting off everything she owned above the waist.
“They don’t want to fight,” Meddig said, stepping forwards until the dragon’s breath ruffled his hair. “They want to live. The dragon wants to live. The spiders want to live. They’re…” He shuddered. “They’re a thing, a single thing. They’re a web.” Emotions fought over his battered face: loathing, yearning. “I’m part of it, too. I made myself part of it. They think it’s good.”
“Well, then, we have a problem.” Kait pulled herself up, looking about at her fellows to ensure everyone was ready to sell themselves dearly. “Because we don’t. We don’t think it’s good to be part of the colony. I’m sure it’s perfectly lovely, but no.” Her eyes were very wide, and no doubt she was thinking of the many Kelicerati hiding in the trees all around them, unseen.
“Hvar!” the dragon boomed again. “Stop!” It shook its great head, and Celestaine recognised frustration, then: neither its own body nor Meddig were able to communicate its meaning.
“Ah!” cursed Meddig, as more alien concepts flooded his mind.
“Slow,” Celestaine said, looking into the dragon’s amber eye. “Be slow. One thought at a time. Do you—do they even understand what I’m saying?”
Her meaning must have got through, because Meddig gave out a long relieved breath. “Ah, gods,” he said. “They know. They have learned—from us, from me, from others—there are others in the forest that are their enemies, that have rejected their one-ness. They understand that what seems good to them makes enemies of others. They want to live.”
Celestaine stared at the dragon, unsure whether it was a willing part of this web of minds or just caught in it, like a huge fly. But then the wyrm had been made without kin, a solitary thing, abandoned by its creator and without a place in the world. Perhaps this communion that had been forced on it was better than being alone forever.
“Kait…?” she asked. The Templar opened her mouth to reply and a spear struck her across her helm, knocking her down again. Abruptly the trees were boiling with robed, hunched figures, shrieking and yammering.
Everyone there must have suspected Kelicerati treachery first off, but the spider-people and their dragon were no less the target of the attack than the Templars themselves. The newcomers had voices, and the air was filled with them, shrieks and curses, words of hate and death.
Celestaine had her sword out and was cutting, feeling the scabbard open up along one side and cursing the loss even as she lopped off one thin arm at the elbow. The attackers were smaller than human, grotesquely hunched, wielding clubs and spears and a handful of metal swords. They had no bows; the twisted wood of this forest would provide no useful staves. Only later did she realise how lucky that was.
They threw javelins as they came—of sharpened wood, or stone-tipped. Two Templars were struck down, the missiles finding the gaps in their armour with terrible precision. Three Kelicerati were dead as well, or at least pinned writhing to the ground by the shafts. Then it was close fighting against a desperate, keening host.
Celestaine assumed they were Grennishmen at first, though of all the Kinslayer’s minions they were the least suited to open violence. They were small and quick, these assailants, not strong but seemingly mad for blood. She concentrated on limbs, ducking the blows that came her way and disarming her foes with extreme prejudice. The Templars had formed up around Meddig and Heno, and the Heart Taker was holding his fire aloft, giving everyone the light they needed to fight. Nedlam had just gone straight in amongst the enemy with abandon, and elsewhere she heard the thundering bellow of the dragon as it gave vent to its true nature.
The next few moments were desperate. If everyone hadn’t already had a weapon to hand, then things might have gone far worse; but mutual suspicion apparently had its uses. The attackers broke against their swords over and over, trying to get to where Meddig was kneeling, clutching his head as the battle-hymns of the Kelicerati washed over him. The Oerni Wayfarer priest, Olastoc, stood over Meddig, batting aside spears with his staff, eyes almost closed as he focused on some ritual of his own. Celestaine took a stand between two Templar shields, lunging forwards on each stroke to avoid carving anything off her allies. The attackers were furious but undisciplined, getting in each others’ way. Soon enough, Kait gave the order and the Templars expanded their ring, pushing forwards to get more elbow room and drive the enemy out of the clearing.
“Stop! Hvar! Stop!” It was Nedlam’s cry. Sh
e was standing surrounded by broken bodies, Amkulyah sitting on her shoulders with his bow out. Neither were pushing the fight, though. “Stop killing!”
The sight of a huge Yorughan demanding less death was prodigy enough to stay the Templar’s advance, and the attackers fell back to the treeline, obviously willing for a second attack once they’d worked themselves up again.
“Ned?” Celestaine pressed.
“Look!” Nedlam reached down and hauled up one of the wounded, a skinny creature with one dangling, broken arm, bent almost double under its hunch.
But that hunchback was rippling and moving beneath its cloak. Celestaine had a sudden thought of more cysts, more embedded parasites, some rival Kelicerati nest, but no, it wasn’t that the movement reminded her of.
Amkulyah climbed halfway down Ned’s arm and tore away the shrouding cloak just as the thing ripped itself from the Yorughan’s hold. It dropped, half-naked, to the ground, and Celestaine saw a twisted Aethani, its huge round eyes turned on them all in hatred, its broken, knotted wing-limbs clawing at the air.
“Wait!” Kul shouted. “Talk to me!” but the creature shivered back from him, from all of them. Their gaze seemed to hurt it more than their swords or Ned’s club had. It shrank from them in a frenzy of self-loathing, clutching for something to cover itself. A moment later it had bolted and so had the rest, leaving only the half-starved, fragile bodies of their dead and wounded.
A lot of people were looking at Amkulyah after that, but he had no answers. Some of his people had not died or ended up in the Dorhambri, it seemed. They had lived, wingless and broken, in the Kinslayer’s very shadow, learning only to hate themselves and what they had become.
Meddig gave a halting explanation, as much as he could glean from the Kelicerati’s alien thoughtscape. To the spider-people, these Aethani were just more of the Kinslayer’s minions, some other race of underlings from within the earth. They had been slaves of the same master before. Now that master was dead, the maimed people fought everyone else, turning their hate outwards, unable to tolerate any eyes that might pick out their ruined state. They had fought the Kelicerati, and they didn’t want their enemies to gain new allies—or that was the gloss that the spider-people were giving the attack.
“They can be saved,” Celestaine assured Kul. “They can be brought back. Especially if we can do what we’re trying to. It’s… just one more thing the Kinslayer did, to spoil the world.”
Heno wore a doubting expression, when he thought Amkulyah couldn’t see. She bearded him later and he admitted he’d heard the rumours. “After they lost their wings, some went over. The Kinslayer promised to make them whole, probably.” And, when she asked why he hadn’t ever said anything, he shrugged. “It was just a story. I never saw them myself. Why is it relevant?”
He was not telling her everything. Something hung in the air over him, just as it had when she’d first suggested trying to restore the Aethani in the first place. From experience, she knew that questioning wouldn’t pry it from him. Heno kept his own council.
Both sides had taken losses to the Aethani and Kait wanted to get out of the forest with their wounded before the Kelicerati suggested any treatment of their own. “Meddig, can you tell them what I say?” she demanded.
“I’ll try,” he confirmed. “Where they even have words to match ours.”
“Tell them to come to the forest’s edge. Their spokesmen, their dragon, any other monsters that are of their party—not just this nest, but anything else that wants peace. Tell them to show themselves. I will go and tell the others how things are. We will try peace, and maybe the gods will be pleased. Perhaps they will come back to us.” That last was hers alone, and Celestaine had no idea if Meddig had passed the thoughts on or what the Kelicerati might have made of them.
The Hegumen checked that the wounded were either able to walk or assigned to a stretcher. She made sure the dead were carried out, too, because whether there was agreement with the Kelicerati or not, she plainly wasn’t going to leave any of her own as a peace offering. “Come on, now, form up!” she shouted, and then looked about for absent civilians. “Meddig, Olastoc, come on!”
The Oerni was standing beside the monolith, practically within the dragon’s coils. This was his holy place, for all that it had become a Kelicerati larder and a wyrm’s lair since. “There is something here,” he said slowly. “A leftover dream of my people. We used these Wayshrines to cache our devotion, our prayers, so that fortune’s favourites could leave gifts for those less lucky. Meddig has been speaking for me. He and I will stay.”
“No—” the Hegumen started, but he held up a big hand.
“Look for me when the Kelicerati come to the forest’s edge. If I live unharmed, that’s more evidence this is a true peace.”
“Meddig?”
The scout turned a face on her that had very little humanity in it. “You know I’m safe here. And if I am here, they will not forget that the priest is safe too. All is well.” He was smiling, but it was a fragile thing, from a man who didn’t truly know what he was, anymore.
Kait swore, obviously ready to argue, but the man’s eerie calm got through to her. “We’re moving,” she said. “Everyone else, let’s go.”
“What about them?” Nedlam asked, loud enough to stop everyone in their tracks.
“Them who?” Kait glanced around to see Nedlam pointing at a huddle of Aethani too wounded to flee but still alive. Celestaine had the distinct impression the Hegumen had been well aware of them, but doing her best to ignore them.
Amkulyah was down off Ned’s shoulders, looking like he wanted a fight. “We’re not leaving them for the spiders,” he said.
“The…” Kait looked from him to the Kelicerati, who were surely looking at the downed Aethani with a certain amount of anticipation.
“The gods say peace and mercy. Your gods, our gods,” Kul told her. “Mercy for the spiders, fine. But as you can see, it’s not all spiders in these trees. You want peace with these, my cousins, my kin? Tend to their wounded. Talk to them. They even use words, like you. It’ll be easy.” He was defiant, fists balled.
Celestaine cast a worried eye over at the dragon and its spidery acolytes. The great reptile watched her thoughtfully, and she had the sense of a great mind working, that meshed with that other mind, shallower yet broader, spread between all the Kelicerati. Once again she wondered that the beast was so much more aware than the dragons she had seen in the war. Was that because it had been smart enough to get free of the Kinslayer before it met her? Or were there still dragons left from the dawn of time, hiding from the wrath of the Guardians and their mortal allies both?
Its throat clenched and heaved out a single word, “Shtok!”
“Take,” Heno translated.
“Then everyone carries,” Kait said. “Grab a body, no need to be too gentle. I want out before they come back or these ones change their great big mind.”
Celestaine took one arm of a bloody-cloaked Aethani, and a Templar took the other. Nedlam just slung two of them over her shoulders. Almost everyone ended up burdened and slow, sitting ducks if anything in the forest had an ambush planned. Only Heno and Amkulyah himself weren’t carrying anyone: Heno because he was being superior and distant, which at least left him free to deploy his magic against any trouble; Kul because he was a prince.
She heard him passing his name up and down the line, speaking to any of the injured enemy conscious enough to listen. He took their curses and their spittle and stayed calm; regal even. For a youth who had seemed so angry in the time Celestaine had known him, it was quite a transformation. With his own people, even these twisted remnants, he had a stock of patience he didn’t deploy for humans or Yorughan.
For their part, the curses petered out before they reached the fort, leaving a deep shame amongst the prisoners—not for their attack, but for what they were. Celestaine had the impression they had been broken and tormented by the Kinslayer’s people far more than those sent to the mines.
Their bodies were crooked, hollowed out by hunger, lop-sided and out of proportion. Life on soil poisoned by the Kinslayer’s experiments had changed them, maddened them; most of all it had reinforced how much they had lost.
When the fort was in sight, Amkulyah broke from them and came back to Celestaine.
“You had better fetch the bard,” he said.
She frowned at him, giving her wounded burden over to some of the Templars. “You have something he needs to hear?”
“I have somewhere to go,” Kul told her, then scowled at her expression, all that chained anger abruptly back in place. “You think that talk was just indulging myself? You saw we weren’t getting any word from the Crawlies? No way even to ask them what we wanted to know. But my people saw, my blighted kin. They saw a big man in armour come through. They attacked him and he killed five of them with his hammer. He killed some Kelicerati too, they said, and more. He went through the forest and slowed for nothing, and they followed him to the dry lands beyond.”
“And where did he go from there?” asked Celestaine, thinking, Yet another link, but the chain never ends.
Amkulyah’s eyes blazed. “According to them, he’s still there.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
THEY WERE GONE from the fort before noon, despite the Hegumen’s obvious preference to hold on to genuine witnesses of the Ilkand Miracle, as they were calling it. Celestaine reckoned she’d only been witness to someone else’s reaction to something that might have been entirely the work of the very mortal Doctor Fisher. She didn’t want to be anyone’s ancillary prophet. And Amkulyah had a good picture of where the mysterious thief had finally holed up, and was plainly about to explode if he had to sit on his hands any longer.
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