by Paul Stewart
Hepzibar turned to Thrace. She saw the kinlance she and Asa had just finished held in the kingirl’s hand along with her own, and frowned uncertainly.
‘I . . . I’m sorry …’ She fell silent, fearful suddenly that Thrace might keep the lance as punishment for her outburst.
But Thrace smiled and held out the lance to her. Then she turned to Kesh.
‘You were lucky that time,’ she told him. ‘I would advise you not to push that luck.’
Kesh stared at the kinlance back in Hepzibar’s hands, his fists clenching and unclenching in his shame and humiliation. He’d been bested by a girl. A little girl. He looked up at Thrace’s face. It was hard and severe; her eyes bored into his. His own eyes narrowed to thin slits. Then, with a low grunt at the back of his throat, he turned on his heels and stomped off across the chamber and outside.
Thrace turned to Hepzibar, her appraising gaze upon the younger girl’s half-finished lance. ‘Looks like it’s ready to be primed,’ she observed.
Hepzibar turned to Asa and Aseel.
‘You know what to do,’ Aseel said, his voice rustling like fallen leaves.
Hepzibar nodded. She’d known that this moment would come. Thrace had told her about it.
To be truly effective, the tips of the kinlance had to be steeped in the venom of the kinrider’s wyrme. Afterwards, any kith so much as scratched by such a kinlance would endure slowdeath. Hepzibar knew that once her lance had been treated there would be no turning back. She, like Thrace, would be ready to defend the weald from the kith.
Under Aseel’s instruction, and with Thrace looking on approvingly, Asa sat back on his haunches and Hepzibar knelt before him. Asa opened his mouth. Hepzibar gripped the middle of the lance and placed one end between his gaping jaws.
‘Position the lance between the upper and lower fangs,’ Aseel told Hepzibar, then turned to Asa. ‘Bite down gently,’ he instructed.
Both Asa and Hepzibar did as they were told. The points of the upper and lower fangs pressed into the wood, then punctured the surface.
‘Now, bite harder,’ Aseel told Asa.
As the younger wyrme clamped his jaws shut, venom started to pump from his fangs. It soaked into the porous wood through the pinprick holes and trickled over the surface. And when the first end had been saturated, Hepzibar turned the lance around and they primed the second.
Hepzibar took the lance from between Asa’s jaws and climbed to her feet. Thrace stepped forward and placed a hand on the younger girl’s shoulder. She was smiling, though her eyes glittered with emotion.
‘Now you are true wyrmekin,’ she told her.
Fifty-Three
‘One of us must act as their guide,’ said Alsasse.
Aylsa and Alucius exchanged glances.
The leader of the whitewyrme colony turned from one to the other, his eyes narrowing. ‘Aylsa has consented to accompany the blueblackwyrmes,’ he said. The ancient creature’s barbels trembled. ‘As second of the host, Alucius, I cannot afford to let you go.’
It was just before dawn, and the three whitewyrmes were standing on the edge of the gorge of the blueblackwyrmes. The air smoked and the fiery glow of the molten lava, which ran deep down below the fissure of the rock, stained their whitescale bodies red.
‘I still think that, since Beveesh-gar is sending one of his own sons, I should go with them,’ said Alucius. His voice was soft, but the admonishment was clear.
‘You think that I am not up to the task, Alucius?’ Aylsa commented.
‘Of course I don’t think that,’ Alucius said softly. He turned his yellow eyes to Alsasse. ‘It is just … I miss the valley country so much, and I had hoped to see it again.’
Alsasse nodded, wisps of white smoke coiling from his nostrils. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I, too, pine for our home. But we must all make sacrifices …’ He paused. ‘And I will not be able to lead the host for much longer.’ His intense gaze remained on the second of the host until the younger wyrme looked away.
Alucius bowed his long graceful neck. ‘I understand,’ he said, his voice soft as trickling sand. He stared back across the dark broken slabs of rock to the east, his eyes glowing a deepening shade of amber. The sun was just breaking over the distant mountains. Back there, beyond this harsh landscape of fire and rock, was their abandoned home – the ancient wyrme galleries.
Would they ever be able to return to them? he wondered.
Certainly, Alucius had to concede, the blueblackwyrmes had been generous. They had accepted the whitewyrmes into their territory without rancour. The colony had been allowed to scrape roost-holes out of the hard black rock beside the algal lakes, and to hunt and graze in the rock crevices to the north. So long as the whitewyrmes kept themselves to themselves, the blueblackwyrmes had tolerated their presence.
But when fullwinter had slipped into halfsummer, Beveesh-gar had summoned Alucius to the hive nestin the gorge. Surrounded by his clan, the old blueblackwyrme had turned his one good eye on the whitewyrme before him.
He had made a decision, he’d growled in the harsh glottal voice that Alucius still had to strain to understand. He wanted to examine one of these so-called two-hides for himself. So, now the thaw had come, he intended to send out a hunting party to get one – dead or alive, he didn’t care – and they needed a guide.
This wasn’t a request, Alucius knew. It was a command. So he had returned to the leader of the host and volunteered …
Alucius looked up. The sun had broken free of the mountains that seemed to be anchoring it, and had risen into the pink and grey streaked sky. Alucius heard gruff voices behind him. He glanced at Alsasse and Aylsa, then turned to see four of the hulking blueblackwyrmes emerging from the gorge. They pulled themselves up on their powerful foreclaws in that way they had, before standing up straight, their thick necks braced and wings spread out behind them, towering above the smaller whitewyrmes.
‘You are ready?’ said Hasheev-gul, sixth son of Beveesh-gar.
Alsasse nodded. ‘Aylsa will be your guide,’ he said.
Beveesh-gar turned and looked the female whitewyrme up and down, and for a moment, Alucius thought that he might object. But the leader of the blueblackwyrmes merely nodded.
‘The flight is long?’ he growled to her.
‘Many dawns,’ Aylsa replied.
‘Then let us begin.’
The blueblackwyrme flexed his mighty wings and stepped back over the lip of the gorge with his three companions. They disappeared from view down into the fiery abyss for a few moments, before soaring back up on the furnace-hot updraughts.
Aylsa turned to Alucius and Alsasse, a tremor passing through her long sinuous body. Then she spread her wings wide and, with rapid wingbeats, took to the early morning air.
‘Good fortune,’ Alucius called after her, his voice like a windwhisper through a wyrme gallery.
‘There,’ said Aylsa, raising her head and pointing ahead.
The four blueblackwyrmes flying on either side of her followed her gaze. They had flown for days, through night after starlit night, the sun rising before them each morning as they’d continued east. Aylsa was nearing the end of her strength, though the blueblackwyrmes seemed untroubled by the long flight. Now they were high up in the sky among thin wispy clouds. Far below them was a deep rift valley, the sides steep and orange-red and pocked with shrubs – and at the far end of the valley were the tell-tale twists of smoke from a fire. A kith fire.
As they came closer, Hasheev-gul turned to Aylsa, his sapphire-blue eyes narrowing to slits. ‘That smell,’ he growled. ‘Pungent. Sour. Rank …’
‘That’s the taint of the two-hides,’ Aylsa replied, her nostrils flaring. ‘The entire valley country reeks of it.’ A shudder passed through her long slender body. ‘The smell of death.’
The blueblackwyrmes beat their powerful wings
with long slow movements, their massive heads steady on their short necks, and their great forearms flexed and raised, the curved talons ready to strike. Aylsa spread her own wings wide and rose above them as they started down the valley.
There were five of them – two women and three men. They were sitting round the fire, cooking; cooking wyrmeflesh. As the four blueblackwyrmes barrelled towards them, one of the men turned and shouted an alarm; others raised their heads and looked up. One of the women climbed to her feet and stood staring, her face white with shock.
Hasheev-gul swept back his burnished blueblack wings, slashed at the air with his talons and went into a dive. The others went with him.
Aylsa hovered above, her heart pounding. They were dangerous – all two-hides were dangerous – yet the blueblackwyrmes had chosen to ignore her warnings. She watched the four huge creatures home in on the two-hides seated round the fire, their jaws wide and dazzling white flame roaring before them.
The two-hides scrambled to their feet and scattered. But not fast enough.
The first of the blueblackwyrmes lashed out with a taloned hand, slicing through the neck of the oldest of the men. The second pursued a fleeing young woman, his fiery jet of flame setting her outer hide and hair alight. Hasheev-gul seized the second woman in his claws, soared back high into the air – then let go of her, and she tumbled back down to the ground, screaming …
Aylsa dropped down lower in the sky, willing the attack to be over. The stench of blood and burning flesh rose up to meet her.
Soaring back up into the air, flanked by his companions, Hasheev-gul threw back his head and roared at Aylsa, ‘Are these the puny creatures from which you fled?’
Just then, from below, came the strange metallic crack of the two-hides’ weapons. The thorns of the two-hides flew past the startled faces of the blueblackwyrmes before, with a soft meaty thud, one of them found its target.
Aylsa’s cry of pain rang out, loud and anguished, but the blueblackwyrmes did not hear it as they rose and scattered across the sky. Nor did they see her left wing collapse, or the metal bolt from the powerful crossbow that had severed the flight-tendon lodged in the scales at its base.
The whitewyrme flapped her right wing as hard as she could in a desperate attempt to remain aloft. But it was hopeless. She went into a spin, and tumbled over and over, buffeted by the wind, down, down.
The last thing Aylsa remembered was a blur of green and brown, and vicious scratching at her skin as she crashed through the upper boughs of a stunted tree …
Aylsa opened her eyes.
It was late. The sun had travelled across the sky and was down by the horizon, a red ball quivering above the jagged mountain ranges in the distance.
Aylsa turned her head and looked awkwardly round. She was lying on her front at the bottom of a tree: the tree that had broken her fall – and saved her life. Broken branches lay about her, jabbing into her side. She pulled herself up on all fours, untangled herself from the mess of twigs and foliage, then limped out from the shadowsof the tree. Her wing was throbbing, and she remembered the two-hides’ thorn that had struck her.
She glanced round, wincing as she did so. And there it was, grey and hard, still lodged in the bone at the base of her wing. Twisting her neck round, Aylsa opened her mouth and clamped the end of the thorn with her fangs. She pulled. The pain made her yellow eyes deepen to a glowing red. She pulled again, harder. The thorn moved a fraction. With her eyes shut, she clenched her jaws and tugged at the thorn which, with a soft grinding sound, abruptly came free, and she tossed it aside.
With her head raised, she tried to flap her wings. The right wing lifted and braced and swept back and forth; the left wing remained limp at her side.
Aylsa sighed miserably. It would take time to heal.
She looked round for the blueblackwyrmes, but they were nowhere to be seen, and for a moment she was furious that they had abandoned her. But then her gaze fell upon the tree.
Perhaps they had looked for her, she wondered. Looked, but not found …
With her left wing dragging on the ground, she started walking. Every step was an effort. Her body felt as though it had been pummelled with rocks. She looked about her as she went, but there was no sign of the blueblacks, nor of the two-hides. She cocked her head and sniffed at the wind.
But she could smell them.
Cautiously now, she kept walking. Then she saw it. A body, broken and bleeding, wrapped over the top of a boulder. A second body lay beside it, the skull caved in where it had struck the rocky ground. A soft sad clicking sound trilled in the back of her throat. She came to the fire, set in a circle of rocks and all but spent. A third body lay burnt and smouldering beside it.
Aylsa turned away, and was about to leave this place of death, when she heard something. She paused. The sound stopped, then started again. It was a soft whimpering noise, weak and plaintive, and it was coming from a pile of backpacks and belongings stacked up together on the far side of the fire.
The great whitewyrme stepped cautiously towards it. The whimpering grew louder. She dipped her head and nuzzled at the heap. She sniffed. Whatever was there smelled sweet, like milk, like dry hay. She sniffed some more, and her nose drew her to a blanket, which she took in her mouth and plucked it away, and chittered with surprise.
It was a two-hides, small and shivering. A male. He looked up into her face with large green eyes and let out a little cry. And his body shook again, uncontrollably. Aylsa trembled. She opened her mouth and exhaled, her breath warm and sweet. The two-hides closed his mouth and, wide-eyed, stopped shivering.
Aylsa sniffed at him again, then looked up at the sky. Stars were twinkling in the deep indigo darkness.
She looked back down at the small two-hides, her barbels trembling. Then she lay herself gently down, her body wrapped around the small defenceless creature, who had started to cry.
‘Hush, little one,’ she purred.
Fifty-Four
The keld mistress slowly eased apart the folds of scorched wyrmeskin curtain to reveal the figure concealed inside.
The head was hideously burned. The hair had turned to soot and the scalp below was blistered; the skin of the forehead and temples had melted like tallow-wax. With delicate fingers, the keld mistress opened the swaddling wyrmeskin a little more. The nose had gone, and the lips were red and black like strips of raw meat.
‘Oh, sister,’ she whispered, her honeyed voice soft and soothing, as if talking to a young child, ‘what happened to you?’
She bent down, bringing her hood-shadowed face closer to the blackened figure.
‘Carafine,’ she whispered. ‘Can you hear me?’
The small chamber was completely burned out, scorched by the explosion and flash fire that had ripped through it. Her sister had managed to wrap herself in the wyrmeskin curtain as the inferno struck, but even this had not been enough to save her.
The keld mistress stared at the burned wreck of the face. It looked like some kind of effigy; like a grotesque molten image fashioned from wood and leather and wax. Then the lips moved.
The keld mistress leaned closer.
Her sister’s breath was warm, but faint. A soft gurgling rattle came from the back of her throat, then a single rasped word.
‘Kith …’
The keld mistress drew sharply back. ‘Slake!’ she called, her voice strident with imperative. ‘Slake, where are you? Bring the bloodhoney …’
Blue Slake was in the larger chamber, hunched up in a woven basket that was harnessed to the back of a hefty broad-shouldered kith, who was wearing a heavy lakewyrmeskin cloak and bleached bone mask. The air was hot and still thick with smoke, and the poisoner was finding it hard to breathe through the ragged hole where his nose had once been.
In the shadowy alcove beside him was the eel-mother, her two leashed crevicewyrmes squealing a
nd growling as they tore into the charred remains of what looked like three dead redwings. Her own bone-masked kith stood beside her, passive, breath rasping.
Cutter Daniel, four dead-eyed slaves in attendance, stood on the other side of the smoke-blackened chamber. He was poking thoughtfully at a large heap of ashes with a length of iron, occasionally pausing over the hoops of metal he found among them. Then he reached up and ran a finger over the sweaty rock above it. Something red and sticky gathered under the nail, which he sniffed, then tasted.
‘Their entire stock must have gone up in flames,’ he mused.
‘Bloodhoney!’ The keld mistress’s voice was insistent. ‘Now, Slake!’
Cutter Daniel looked round. ‘Slake,’ he hissed. ‘The mistress wants bloodhoney.’
Stirred from his reveries, Blue Slake tore his eyes away from the remains of what, to his expert eye, looked like an extremely impressive liquor still. He had to hand it to young Carafine; by the look of it, she must have been producing an excellent yield of bloodhoney. Before the fire …
The black-cowled figure of the keld mistress appeared in the mouth of the small cavern and beckoned to him.
‘Coming, mistress,’ he called, his voice slurfing through the hole in his face.
He kicked his heels viciously into the sides of the kith carrying him. The kith dropped obediently to his knees. With fumbling fingers, Blue Slake unshouldered the leather straps, then clambered out of the basket. He limped across the sooty, debris-strewn floor, past charred bodies, pulling a bottle of bloodhoney from the inside of his tasselled jacket as he went. Entering the cavern he paused as he saw the keld mistress bent down over the charred body.
‘Carafine …’ he murmured.
‘Just give me it,’ the keld mistress hissed, reaching up.
And when Blue Slake made no move, she snatched the bottle from his hand and tugged out the cork stopper with her teeth. Then, spitting it aside, she turned back to her sister. With her hand beneath the wyrmeskin, she gently raised her sister’s head; she put the bottle to the burnt swollen lips, and tipped it.
