The Empire of Ashes (The Draconis Memoria)

by Anthony Ryan

  Her words were drowned out as Lutharon let out another roar, wings flaring once more as he sank into a threat stance. Clay noted how the drake’s eyes were focused on the now fully expanded crystal. It revolved slowly, resembling some kind of hole in space in the way it exuded no light save for a small glimmer on the tips of its spikes.

  “Stop,” Clay said. “He doesn’t like it.”

  “He doesn’t have to . . .”

  Lutharon gave a sudden intake of breath followed by the throaty rattle that told of disgorging combustible gas. Clay lunged towards Kriz, dragging her aside. Lutharon let out a fierce and sustained jet of flame, aimed not at Kriz but at the crystal. With Kriz’s focus distracted the stream of Black keeping it in the air vanished and it fell to the ground, a dark smudge amidst the torrent of flame.

  Lutharon’s fire died, leaving a sizable blaze in its wake. Clay squinted through the flames to make out the jagged shape of the crystal. It seemed to be completely undamaged, the centre of it still as dark as before but the spikes glowing brighter. Lutharon evidently found this unacceptable and began to take another large breath.

  “Don’t!” Clay shouted, moving to stand in front of the Black, arms raised.

  “Clay . . .” Kriz said. “It’s active.”

  “What?” He turned, blinking in confusion at the sight that confronted him.

  The crystal hung in the air once more, risen from the flames. Its jagged spikes now glowed with a fierce white light, though its centre retained the same absolute darkness.

  “You doing this?” he asked Kriz.

  “No. The fire. Energy, remember?”

  Clay took a step back as the crystal drifted closer, finding himself backing into Lutharon. The Black didn’t move, Clay glancing up to see that the drake’s gaze was now fixed on the crystal, not with rage, but rapt fascination.

  “How do we shut it down . . .” Clay’s voice trailed off as his gaze returned to the crystal, finding it snared by the dark, light swallowing void at the centre. Like a hole in the world, he thought before he fainted. Something you can fall into . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  “You look older.”

  Clay blinked, finding his eyes filled with bright sunlight and his head buzzing with disorientation. He staggered a little, steadying as a hand gripped his elbow. “Quite a trick you’ve pulled this time, Claydon,” a young female voice said. “Making your way in here. You must tell me how you did it.”

  He blinked again and his vision cleared to reveal the small, oval face of a diminutive woman about his own age. Despite her youth he knew her instantly. It was the eyes, as bright, open and inquisitive as he remembered, and the half smile playing on her lips. It held a hint of mockery but betrayed mostly the simple affection of greeting a valued friend.

  “Miss Ethy,” he said, the name emerging in a laugh as he drew her into an embrace.

  “Just Ethelynne will do,” she said, voice muffled against his shoulder. “As I told you before.”

  She drew back, eyes searching his face as a frown put a single line in her otherwise smooth forehead. “How long has it been since . . . ?” She grimaced and shrugged. “Well, you know.”

  “Months,” he said, his joy muted by the knowledge that this was a trance. Another ghost, he thought. Like Silverpin.

  He looked around seeing a tall mountain range. It wasn’t the grim majesty of the Coppersoles or the jungle giants of the Carnstadts. Here the air was far colder, and the peaks not as tall and placed closer together to create a maze of deeply weathered stone. The landscape had a gnarled, twisted appearance conveying an impression of ruin, even though there was no sign of civilisation.

  “Only months?” Ethelynne asked, gaze still roaming his face. “You really need to take better care of yourself.”

  “A lot happened after you . . . left.”

  “And not for the good, I assume?”

  He shook his head and gestured at their surroundings. “I’ve never been here,” he said. “Wherever it is. How can I craft a trance from somewhere I’ve never seen?”

  Her smile returned, the mockery more in evidence now. “You haven’t. This isn’t your mind, it’s Lutharon’s.”

  Clay took another survey of the mountain range, finding it as perfect a mindscape as he had ever seen. Even Lizanne would have had trouble matching the precision of detail, the slight variation in the chilled air. But he saw no vestige of drake perception in it. His trances with Jack and the drake memories Ethelynne had shared gave him an understanding of how they perceived the world, and it wasn’t like this.

  “No drake saw this,” he said. “This is a human memory.”

  “Quite right. How perceptive you’ve become.”

  She turned, moving to the edge of the broad summit on which they stood. “The Cragmines of western Arradsia,” she said, spreading her arms wide. “As captured by my very own eyes quite some time ago, when I was still spry enough to climb all the way up here. Fascinating geography, don’t you think? No one’s really all that sure how they formed. There is evidence of glaciation but that’s only a partial explanation.”

  “I got a new friend who might be able to help with that,” he muttered, fighting a sudden lurch in his chest as he watched her take in the view. She seemed so real, so alive it inevitably summoned memories of her death, a death he hadn’t been able to prevent. A ghost, he reminded himself. Living in Lutharon’s mind like Silverpin lived in mine.

  “The White . . .” he began but she waved him to silence.

  “I do seem to recall your doing your damnedest to ensure I didn’t follow you,” she said.

  “If you hadn’t maybe you’d be talking to my ghost just now.”

  “Ghost?” She pursed her lips. “A name that fits, I suppose. Though I would hate to think Lutharon feels he’s being haunted.”

  “It was you. You kept him by me after the White rose.”

  “Not entirely. I merely encouraged an impulse that was already there. He does seem to like you, you know. Thank you for making him leave, by the way. He would certainly have perished on the ice.”

  “Least I could do.” He looked around at the mountains once more. “Was it the heart-blood? Is that what kept you here?”

  “Lutharon and I shared minds for many years. I suppose I am the echo of that connection.” She beckoned to him and started to descend the steep, rocky slope below the summit. “Come on. I would like you to see something.”

  Clay followed her, traversing a series of narrow ledges and granite boulders protruding from the mountain side. Ethelynne appeared almost childlike as she hopped from ledge to boulder with all the sure-footed skill of someone who had followed this course many times. Clay was markedly more careful, forcing her to loiter with amused impatience as he navigated the often-damp rock.

  “You never did like heights, as I recall,” she observed. “It does rather make one wonder, though. I mean, would it make any difference if you fell? We are both just a collection of memories. It’s not like we have any bones to break.”

  “Feel free to try it,” Clay replied, inching his way along a ledge. “I ain’t too keen on finding out.”

  “No, me either.” She leapt nimbly onto a granite outcrop and paused to peer down. “But it’s strange that it hasn’t occurred to me before. All the time spent in this place and I’ve never been tempted to just jump and see if I go splat.”

  “Maybe Lutharon won’t let you. It’s his head. Guess he makes the rules.”

  A ten-minute descent brought them to a narrow crevice where the flank of the mountain levelled out. An infant Black crouched at the edge of the fissure, small wings and tail twitching as it peered into the depths, a series of soft plaintive grunts issuing from its snout.

  “This is where I found him,” Ethelynne said, moving to crouch a short distance from the keening infant. “All tho
se years ago.”

  The infant whirled at her approach, a warning hiss emerging from its mouth. It seemed to have no awareness of Clay, its gaze fixed on Ethelynne, jaws snapping as she extended a hand holding a morsel of meat. Clay moved to the edge of the crevice, looking down to see the large, crumpled form of an adult Black far below.

  “He was barely two days old when the Contractors killed her,” Ethelynne said. “I couldn’t just leave him to perish. But there was only one way to save him. And it scared me.”

  “Heart-blood,” Clay said, eyes lingering on the drake corpse. “I had my own taste not long ago. Ain’t got any plans to repeat it anytime soon.”

  “You drank heart-blood?” Ethelynne straightened, a mix of sympathy and fascination on her face. “What species?”

  “Blue. A great and fearsome Blue of terrible reputation . . . He died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Clay nodded, casting a final glance at the dead drake and moving away. “We got things to talk about,” he said. “Plans to make.”

  “Plans?”

  “Yeah. War plans. The White’s got itself an army now, and they’re killing a lotta people. Those they don’t kill they turn into Spoiled. We’re fighting it, but things ain’t going so well.”

  “And you want Lutharon to join your war?”

  “Not just him. The Blacks. All of them. They fought it before, we know that. We need them to fight it again, and finish it this time.”

  Ethelynne folded her arms, her head tilting and lips pursing in an expression he knew indicated her fearsome mind was hard at work. “Just how did you get in here, Claydon?” she asked. “You still haven’t told me.”

  He looked down, exerting his own will in a brief experiment as he wasn’t sure he possessed any power here. The rock beneath his feet obligingly turned to moon-dust, a portion of which he raised and moulded into the Black crystal.

  “What is that?” Ethelynne asked, moving closer to extend a finger to one of the glowing spikes. Clay assumed it had been quite some time since she had seen something so completely unfamiliar.

  “Be easier to show you,” he said, expanding his will further. The surrounding mountains transformed into the forest that greeted him when he first stepped into the strange world beneath the ice. “Welcome to the last enclave of the Philos Caste . . .”

  * * *

  • • •

  “Incredible.” Ethelynne let out a small laugh as the enclave faded around them, shifting back into the Cragmines. He had shown her all of it, every scrap of memory he could summon regarding the enclave, every morsel of information he had acquired.

  “All those years in the Interior,” Ethelynne went on, shaking her head. “I had no idea, no clue whatsoever. I thought the temple builders must have been the first people to walk this continent. But all the wonders they crafted were just an echo of something greater.” She paused, summoning the vision of the Black crystal he had shared. Ethelynne’s gaze darkened as she stared at the glowing spikes revolving around the void. “Or perhaps,” she said, “it was something worse. Something best consigned to the past.”

  “We need it,” Clay insisted. “We need it to ally with the Blacks . . .”

  “Ally? Or enslave? The ancients did remarkable things, but committed the most vile acts in the process. There are memories in here, deep and very old. So nightmarish and confused it’s hard to make sense of them, and they’re so painful I only tried once. Were I to delve deeper would I find your friend there, scalpel in hand?”

  Clay saw little point in denial. “Yeah,” he said. “She’d be there. But she ain’t what she used to be. None of us are. And it don’t change the fact that we got a war to fight. When the White’s done with us you know it’ll come for them. It remembers and it don’t forgive. Lutharon and all his kin will have to fight it anyways. With us they got a better chance.”

  The rock beneath their feet began to shudder and the sky darkened from misty grey to red-tinged black. A cacophony of fracturing rock assailed Clay’s ears as the mountains began to twist and grow. Cliff-faces became wings and boulders claws. What had been a jagged ridge slowly revealed itself as the spiny neck of a huge drake. They rose all around, wings spreading, tails and necks uncoiling. The crescendo of shattered stone subsided into a low murmur, reminding Clay of distant thunder as the host of giant drakes lowered their heads to regard him, eyes shining with a bright red glow.

  “It’s not me you need to convince, Claydon,” Ethelynne told him. “It’s them.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Lizanne

  “Remarkable,” Alzar Lokaras said, looking at the photostats arrayed on the Viable’s ward-room table. They had been taken by a nervous young man who had emerged from the ranks of the Mount Works employees some days before, camera in hand, to offer his services. He was an apprentice photostatist who increasingly found the life of a manufactory worker less than pleasant. It had been Captain Trumane’s notion to pack him onto the Typhoon for a reconnaissance flight to the north. The aerostat was able to hover in place long enough for an exposure of decent length and Jermayah provided the required chemicals and equipment to develop the plates. The result was a visual record of northern Varestia far more accurate than any map, Imperial cartographers having neglected the area through fear of banditry for many years.

  “You can see the passes clearly,” Alzar went on, finger tapping three points on a series of photostats that had been aligned to produce a continuous image. It captured the central span of the mountain range dominating the region the Varestians referred to as “the Neck.” There were three channels through the mountains, each separated by a ten-mile gap with the largest and most easily traversed one in the centre. This was known as the Grand Cut, whilst the eastern pass was the Small Cut and the western the Little Cut.

  “The gateways to the peninsular,” Alzar went on. “They used to be fortified but the defences were destroyed by the Corvantines during the occupation. No one’s bothered to repair them since.”

  “Meaning the enemy’s line of advance is wide open,” Trumane said.

  There were only three of them in the ward-room, Alzar acting as the sole representative for the host of Varestian captains who had deserted Ethilda and Arshav’s authority. A dozen pirate vessels and armed freighters had arrived in Blaska Sound that morning. Alzar duly came ashore with a delegation to inform Lizanne that he was now Admiral of the Varestian Defence League before enquiring as to the progress of his niece’s education.

  “She does very well,” Lizanne assured him, gesturing to where Morva waited near by. “Feel free to ask her yourself.”

  “Business comes first,” he said after the briefest glance in Morva’s direction. “Here,” he went on, handing Lizanne a folded document. “I know how you corporate types like your contracts.”

  The contract terms were sparse and simple: The Mount Works Manufacturing Company would supply weapons and personnel to assist in the defence of the Varestian Peninsular in return for continued safe harbour within Blaska Sound and provision of food and medical supplies guaranteed by the Varestian Defence League. There was no mention of patents, shares or allocation of future profits. Lizanne thought it a clumsily worded document but, as she doubted it would ever require scrutiny before an arbitration court in any case, was happy to sign it there on the wharf.

  “Not necessarily,” she told Trumane now, sliding another photostat across the table showing a magnified view of the Grand Cut. The image had been captured at a slight angle, giving an impression of the steepness of the cliffs rising on either side of the track that snaked through the pass. “Even without fortifications, the terrain would seem to offer a singular opportunity to a defender.”

  “With your aerial contraption we could shift some cannon onto the cliff-tops,” Alzar agreed after a moment’s consideration. “And your newfangled guns. Any army that tries to make it through will suffer a fearful
toll.”

  “You forget their command of the air,” Trumane said. “We know the enemy is far from stupid. They’ll send drakes to secure the cliff-tops before marching through.” His gaze narrowed as he turned it on Lizanne. “I believe Miss Lethridge has another stratagem in mind.”

  “I do,” Lizanne said, playing a hand across the three passes. “We use explosive to block the Small and Little Cuts, leaving the Grand Cut open.” She pointed to the northern end of the pass. “We will still have to mount a meaningful defence, but it will take the form of a fighting withdrawal so as to draw the White’s forces in, and we’ll need all the Blood-blessed in our ranks and all the product we can gather to make it work.”

  “I brought twenty-three Blood-blessed,” Alzar said. “But only half can be spared. The rest are needed to power the few blood-burners we possess. As for product.” He grimaced and shrugged. “Stocks are thinner by the day and those that hold them loath to sell except at extortionate prices.”

  “Write promissory notes,” Lizanne advised. “Make the Mount Works Manufactory the guarantor if you like. If that fails the stocks will just have to be seized. The time for observing the legal niceties of trade is over.”

  She turned back to the photostats, her finger tracing to a point two-thirds of the way along the Grand Cut. “The pass is at its narrowest here,” she said. “And overlooked by a promontory. I propose that we prepare the promontory with explosives and once the bulk of the White’s army reaches this point we bring it down. All three passes will be blocked and we will have killed a large number of enemy troops.”

  “It won’t stop them,” Trumane said. “The passes can still be cleared. And the White will be sure to gather more strength to clear the rubble.”

  “It will buy us time,” Lizanne replied. “As for the White’s ability to gather strength, I have an idea about that.”