by Steven Poore
No, Cassia realised as she turned again and saw the shapes that rose from the shattered hills of the Lyrissan borders. Even at this distance, obscured by the mists and the great clouds of fire and smoke and earth erupting around them, there was no mistaking the sweeping wings and the sinuous bodies of the beasts. No, these were not gods that terrified Lyriss.
They were Feyenn and Alcibaber.
Dragons.
“In all the gods . . .” Arca swore. The blade of his sword dropped to scrape a line in the dirt of the market place. “That can’t be . . .”
Cassia knew how he felt. She had not believed her own eyes when she first saw Craw drop from the night onto the roof of Malessar’s dhar. Teeth and claws that tore through her reality. It had been the start of the end of that life. Or the next beginning. It was rather late in the day for Arca to have the scales drop from his eyes in so dramatic a fashion, however.
If Lyriss had merely seemed deserted before, it was being abandoned now. The mob fled from the square, through the streets and into the fields beyond, to be swallowed up by the mists that surrounded the town. The hammers, hoes and other tools they had wielded against Cassia’s small party lay scattered across the square, along with the dead, the wounded, and the mutilated. Men gasped and cried; pain and horror pooled together like blood.
Now the temple did not appear so pathetic. It loomed up out of the mists as though it was itself a living beast. Surely Dorias would have appreciated that.
The priest must have known his gods were nothing of the kind. Cassia watched, fascinated, as one of her shieldmen stepped over to retrieve her sword. It peeled the severed hand from the hilt and let it fall. A pause, perhaps a heartbeat, and it held the sword out to her. Cassia forced herself to take it. The hilt was still warm.
The air above the town bloomed brighter than the sun. Flame rolled across the skies and screams of fear echoed between the buildings. Arca pressed a hand to his forehead, squeezing his eyes closed and shaking his head as if to wake himself from a nightmare.
“Damn it, no, I didn’t know – how could I?” If it was an argument, then Cassia could hear only one side of it. “You can’t say that. Nobody can say that. Stay out of this!”
Suddenly Cassia was very glad for the presence of the shieldmen beside her. “Arca?”
More flames. More screams. It appeared the dragons were enjoying their newfound freedom.
“Arca. Listen to me,” Cassia tried again. “We shouldn’t stay here. Not in the open.”
The aging soldier laughed at that, a bitter, fragile sound. “No, not in the open. Certainly not. Dragons – gods above!” He raised his head again and peered around the abandoned square, seeming oblivious to the bodies slumped at his feet. “Over there. That’ll do. No, I need a drink. You can’t stop me.”
Cassia watched him stump away, in two minds as to whether she should follow him. The arrival of the dragons must have caused something inside him to snap. He had been vulnerable already, dragged from his slow decline in the city into a campaign he wanted no part of, and the mistreatment and death of his old friend had battered the strength from him. Now he was more like the ale-soaked wreck she had met on her first visit to Hellea. If not for the corpses he left behind him, Cassia would have thought him an entirely different man.
She shivered, and decided to follow her own advice.
A pair of the shieldmen followed her across the square, their weapons still unsheathed, though there was nobody left to stand in their way. The others remained outside the temple, silent sentinels awaiting new commands. On remembering that they were unlikely to use their own initiative, Cassia almost turned back, but she could not think what orders to give them. Better, perhaps, to leave them where they stood. They would keep the horses safe.
The mists enveloping the town smothered sound as well as light and wind. Even the earthy roar of dragonfire was muffled. Cassia had no intention of attempting to leave the town in such horrible conditions, despite her dislike for the place, and especially not while the dragons still flew overhead. She saw the building Arca had made for, recognised it for what it was, and nodded to herself. A tavern – where else?
The walls were uneven, and the space inside was dingy and stale, old rushes spread thinly across the floor, but it was shelter nonetheless. Benches lined two of the walls, and a brick stove occupied much of the middle of the room, raised off the ground upon a ring of squared-off stones. If it had been lit it might have added some warmth to the tavern. The best Cassia could say of it was that the roof appeared intact.
Arca was examining the small casks and the shelf of bottles that sat in one corner. He tossed several of the bottles aside after eyeing their contents, muttering imprecations against the landlord for the lack of quality in his wares. “Half the slophouses in Hellea would toss this rubbish into the gutters. The other half wouldn’t even wash their pots in it. No . . . damned if I’m going to drink that again.”
He came to the last clutch of bottles, lifted his hand to swipe them all onto the ground, and then paused, turning his hand instead to stare at his palm. He was trembling, Cassia saw, and not just with the weakness of old age.
She picked up a pair of thick clay mugs from where they had been abandoned near the door and went across to join him. “Sit down, Arca.”
He did, slumping onto one of the benches as if he belonged there. As if he had never left. Cassia filled the mugs from one of the remaining bottles, wincing a little at the consistency of the liquid, and carried them over to him. “Drink it.”
To her surprise, Arca laughed. “Oh gods, I can’t tell what will kill me first – the dragons, or that gut-rotting stuff. What a choice to make.”
He took the mug anyway, holding it in both hands. Even so, it shook so much that the thick fluid spilled over his fingers. Cassia held her own drink, but it did not go anywhere near her mouth.
“You must have known,” she said.
Arca’s shoulders twitched. “No. Guessed, perhaps. Feared. But I didn’t know.”
Or if he had known, he had done his level best to blot the knowledge from his mind.
“Bastards,” he muttered. “They had no right to do that to him.”
Did he mean the dragons, or the Lyrissans? Cassia could not tell. She watched in silence as Arca gulped down the contents of his mug, and then she refilled it for him.
“So, girl, what now?” he said at length, his voice steadier than before. He appeared to notice for the first time that his blade was bloodied, and he began to scrub it with his sleeve, using the dregs of his drink to wash away anything that had already congealed.
The drums were still quiet. They waited for something, Cassia thought. Just as she waited.
“I think it’s safest to stay in here,” she said. “Until those mists disperse.”
“Will they disperse? What are they?” Arca used slow, deliberate circular movements on the blade. A method of focus, Cassia realised. Distraction. She looked down at her own hands and tightened her grip on the rough cup. The clay was reassuringly solid beneath her fingers.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I think they are magical. I saw their like at Karakhel, but these . . . they are different. They don’t feel . . . malevolent.”
“Would it be safe to leave?”
She glanced up again. “I don’t know,” she repeated. “Perhaps not.”
“I have no wish to remain here. Guhl once said that some towns did not deserve the gift of his coin. This is such a place. We should go back to the March before the Lyrissans gather enough courage to come back and throw stones at us from a distance.” There was acid in his voice, despite his exhaustion.
“I don’t think they will be a problem again,” Cassia said. “But I think there is still something to do here.”
Arca grunted. “Then we wait.”
They did not have long to wait. Before Arca could finish the remainder of the bottle, there were sounds outside the tavern. Cassia rose and faced the door, her hand resting
on the hilt of her sword. Arca shifted on the bench behind her, his own blade still laid across his lap.
The man who came through the doorway caused Cassia’s flesh to crawl in recognition. A man she had never met before, yet it was impossible not to name him for what he was. Tall and sharp-featured, his grace and presence alone would have marked him as other than human, even if his skin had not been formed entirely of copper-coloured scales. Unlike Craw, Cassia saw immediately, he had not taken on a clothed form. She deliberately focused her gaze above his waist, refusing to think about the heat that crept slowly into her cheeks.
He had golden eyes and a disarming smile, but while the effect should have been overpowering it actually seemed quite unfocused. It took her a moment to realise why. The dragon had spent hundreds of years dormant beneath the hills outside Lyriss, and he was out of practice at smiling.
The dragon took in the tavern with a single glance before focussing his attention on her. His smile broadened. “Cassia Cat’s-Paw, blood of the North. You have called us awake.”
She hoped the dragon could not see her surprise. “You know who I am.”
“Of course.”
Cassia bit back the question foremost in her mind. “And you know why I awoke you.”
“Of course.”
The silence between them threatened to extend from heartbeats into minutes. Cassia stared into the dragon’s eyes, and all the tales of the Age of Talons poured through her thoughts, jumbled into an unintelligible whole. Advice, warnings, and old wives’ tales. She struggled to pick them loose.
“Then you know more than I do,” Arca muttered behind her.
The dragon’s gaze snapped away from her and Cassia realised she had been holding her breath. “Three true statements. Man is rarely so honest, Arca the Brave.”
She heard Arca’s sharp intake of breath and she held out a hand in warning, praying he had enough sense not to rise to the dragon’s provocations. Questions, she told herself. She should try not to ask questions in case she incurred more debts to these damned creatures. Craw alone was bad enough.
“You must have longed for company these past years,” she said at last. “You should join us for a drink.”
The dragon’s attention moved back to her again. “A noble invitation. But unnecessary. My appetite is diminished, and I have eaten my fill. My cousin Feyenn still hungers, however.”
Cassia allowed herself the small victory. She had learned the dragon’s name without first having to ask it.
“And, now we have been correctly introduced,” Alcibaber continued, shattering that conceit immediately, “perhaps you will explain why you have allowed our rest to be disturbed.”
“Me? It was not my doing – it was Baum’s fault. His idea. He wanted Caenthell to rise again.”
“He did,” Alcibaber said. “But so did you. And Baum is not here, and Pyraete will not answer for this, so you must.”
The dragon’s words bit into Cassia’s courage. Who was she to demand the service of even a single dragon, let alone a pair that had lain dormant for whole centuries? A mere girl, carrying weapons she had not earned, had no right. But the drums beat at her temples and drove her to respond and, remembering the story as Meredith had told it, Cassia knew what her reply must be.
“I ask nothing for myself,” she said. “I make no demands of you.”
Alcibaber’s eyes glittered mockingly. “Indeed? Then I wonder what price you must pay for your intrusion. One does not lightly awaken Feyenn from dreams of the void and eternal life.”
Arca muttered a curse under his breath. Cassia sensed him readying himself to stand and place himself between her and the dragon. A noble, but pointless gesture, she thought, for Alcibaber would surely sweep the old man aside with a single blow. She thrust her hand out at him again, praying that he would trust her. And she prayed that the rest of Meredith’s tale was also true. A slender hope to pin upon such a long shot.
“But I ask on behalf of Lyriss itself,” she said. “A country that you promised to defend.”
Was that a flicker of surprise in the dragon’s expression? She wasn’t certain, but Alcibaber took a moment to consider her words and that, she thought, had to mean she’d hit her target.
“A promise?”
“A contract,” Cassia replied. “Between you and Feyenn, and the Lyrissans. Against the North.”
Again, the moment of silence. “Lyriss asked, and so we came. We were tired of war, and the land was good, so the contract was agreed.”
“What did they promise you?” she asked.
Alcibaber smiled. “I will be interested to hear you answer that question yourself.”
She thought for a moment. Perhaps Alcibaber was testing her. What could a dragon want from a land such as this? A land with no real riches, a land that had faded so far into history that most of Hellea and the North had forgotten it existed? Where, by the look of the town’s temple, even the gods themselves had been set aside?
Ah – that was the answer. “The temple,” she said aloud. “It was dedicated to you. Lyriss made you into gods. And in return you promised to protect it against Caenthell’s invasion.”
“The girl learns,” Alcibaber said. He seemed to speaking past her, Cassia noted in annoyance.
“Aye. She does that.” Arca’s voice was guarded.
“But it didn’t work out.” Cassia drew the dragon’s attention back to her. “The contract required you to defend the land against attacks from the north, but Caenthell attacked from the east – along the road that we took from the March. And you did nothing.”
The smile stayed in place. The dragon shrugged. “The contract did not require us to act. We were not at fault.”
Cassia doubted the Lyrissans would have had any sympathy with that point of view. The land had been razed, according to the story, and it seemed that only the new gods had remained. She could imagine what had happened after that. The dragons must have spent centuries dormant and alone, unworshipped, until the ground was at last fertile once again and men returned to Lyriss. Then Feyenn and Alcibaber had reached out to find and speak to those men who most resembled them; men who were ruthless and bloodthirsty, who wanted to be dragons themselves. They drew such men to Lyriss, alternately bullying and beguiling, as dragons had always done in the Age of Talons, and told them to rebuild their temple from its wrecked foundations.
And those men had remained in Lyriss as priests of a sort, bound to the temple as the dragons themselves were bound to the land. But these new gods were not worshipped with love by Lyriss’s new population. Their original forms might have been forgotten in the interim, but people remembered that Feyenn and Alcibaber had let Lyriss down, and they were mistrusted as a result of that lack of faith.
As were their priests, Cassia thought.
“It was your fault Dorias was beaten and left in torment,” she told the dragon.
Arca cursed again, this time with real anger.
Now Alcibaber’s smile fell away. “I see no fault.”
“You failed your people once already,” Cassia said. “And they remembered it. When Malessar’s curse wards were broken, the evil spilled into the air. You can see it out there, blackening the sky. The Lyrissans came to the temple and demanded your protection, didn’t they? Or else they believed that you would fail them again. And so they beat Dorias and ransacked his stores.”
“Mankind is ever faithless,” Alcibaber said. There was a sharpness behind his words too, and a small, urgent voice at the back of Cassia’s mind warned her that angering a dragon was a terrible idea.
She ignored that voice, drowned it out with the beating drums. “You could have saved that poor old man from such agony. But you did not. And after the townsfolk left him for dead, you could have eased his pain, ended his torment. But you did not. You kept him alive. You knew I was coming here – you knew what was happening in Caenthell – and you knew you would be held to your contract with Lyriss. Yet you waited. For what? In case I would not ask? So tha
t you could ignore your promise and lie under those hills until the world itself ended? You say mankind is faithless, but those men – they only wanted to be like dragons.”
Alcibaber took a step towards her. Cassia flinched instinctively. “Your promise to Lyriss still stands. I will hold you to it.”
The dragon tilted his head. His eyes had narrowed, and the golden pupils glowed fiercely. “Will you? Alone, but for an old man who should already be dead?”
Cassia forced a smile onto her lips. “Are dragons so faithless after all? Or merely afraid?”
Alcibaber bared his teeth. It was not a smile. For one breathless moment Cassia feared she had overstepped the mark completely. She felt Arca step up alongside her, his sword held ready.
The dragon seemed to draw the very air around him into his body, becoming more solid by the second. Despite her own fear Cassia refused to back away any further. If it had come to a fight, then this was where she would stand.
Suddenly Alcibaber blinked and smiled once more, and he was the same size he had been before, no longer quite so threatening. He turned back to the door as though nothing at all had happened.
“Not alone, then. You have the right of it, Cassia Cat’s-Paw. We and Lyriss are bound together. We will hold to that bond to the very letter, as we did before. No more, and no less. Yet you do not have the right to judge us for what we have done within the realm of that bond.” He glanced over his shoulder at her, making sure she understood his point. “We shall speak again on that subject. Mark my words well.”
Cassia did not know what to say to that. Dumbfounded, her heart pounding fit to burst her chest open, she watched the dragon stride from the tavern into the sorcerous mists that had descended upon the town. The door swung back into the uneven frame.
Arca breathed a soldier’s curse. His profanity broke the spell and Cassia sank onto her haunches to keep from falling over completely. Her limbs trembled with the force of accumulated terror.
