Bridge of Legends- The Complete Series

by Sarah K. L. Wilson

  He leaned forward and bit, chomping down hard on the man’s nose and while the Legend’s jaw locked, twisting and pulling like a fighting dog, the Tamerlan inside screamed and screamed.

  He tried to pull away, tried to close his eyes, but he already knew it wasn’t going to protect his mind from the acid horror eating away at his sanity.

  On the sixth bong, the Legend spat the nose out of his mouth, turning from the agonized cries of his victim and spun, taking in the scene around him. Tamerlan didn’t know what he was looking at – what was important enough in his mind to warrant note, to react, to plan for.

  But what Tamerlan did see, changed everything.

  They were strapping a Lady Sacrifice to that torture chair anyway. It wasn’t Amaryllis of the dark eyes and bright gold hair. It was a woman with long dark hair, deep purple eyes, and tears streaming down her cheeks. Her huge eyes seemed to plead with him for help. He knew that face.

  Marielle.

  They were going to kill the Scenter who had saved his life.

  Bong.

  The Legend spun him into a complicated spin, scooping up a second sword as he moved and wind-milling between the guards with lightning-fast strikes so that they fell so close on each other’s heels that they seemed to die in a single stroke.

  Perhaps, perhaps this bloodthirsty monster could be convinced to save Marielle.

  The woman in white? Are they offering her to the dragon?

  The voice seemed as disturbed as Tamerlan at the thought.

  Yes! That was exactly what they were planning to do.

  Bong

  They finished fastening her last strap around her foot, tying her dress to the strap – strange that they still cared about how things looked with the crowd stampeding away like frightened animals. Her heavy boots, strapped in the chair, looked odd with her filmy white dress.

  The Legend leapt to one side, narrowly dodging an attack and then spinning in a complicated defense that slapped the sword from a guard’s hand with one sword while he ran the second sword under the arm of another guard.

  Tamerlan barely noticed the moans and cries of the fallen men anymore. They were all someone’s sweetheart or husband, son or father, brother or friend. And he took their lives like a child ripping daisies from the grass and he threw them away just as carelessly.

  Bong.

  But if they could just save Marielle...

  I do not wish to see her die.

  They’d have to hurry. There were only three more strikes and then it would be midnight and they would slit her throat.

  The Lord Mythos gripped a handle at the top of the ribcage-like chair and then with a powerful pull, he turned the whole chair on a wheel so that Marielle hung upside down, her mouth open in a cry of terror and her long hair falling to the floor.

  Bong.

  The Legend swung away from the last soldier. When had they killed the others? Tamerlan must have been distracted. He dodged the guard’s blow, kicking out with his foot and connecting solidly with the man’s knee as they ran by. The crunch of his breaking leg was loud enough to be heard even in this chaos.

  Bong.

  They leapt the rest of the way to the chair in a single bound.

  No one stands in the way of Ram the Hunter.

  Ram? Ram the insane? The Legend who was not to be spoken of? The dragon hunter?

  He reached out, snatching the knife from Lord Mythos’s hand with Tamerlan’s left hand and grabbing a lunging red-haired guard by the throat with the other hand.

  Insane? I don’t think so. Everything I do makes perfect sense to me.

  He broke the redhead’s neck with a crack.

  36: Flight from the Seven Suns

  Marielle

  Marielle felt thick bands of magic rising up from the floor, reaching for her. She could smell them – their intoxicating scent a mix of such strong lilac and vanilla mixed with a cedar musk that she could smell nothing else. They drew her so that even while she knew they were deadly, she wanted them to take hold of her.

  She thought she might be screaming, but she didn’t know anymore if she was screaming from fear, or rage, or from desperate desire to be swallowed up by the reaching magic.

  Her pulse pounded in her head as it hung down, close to the drain, close to where her blood would leak out and satisfy the magic. Were those other screams she heard? Probably not. She was probably just drifting so far on the intoxication of the magic scent that she was hearing her own screams. So drunk on it, that she thought she even heard the clash of steel on steel and roaring battle cries.

  Perhaps, this was what death felt like. Perhaps it wasn’t a quiet slip into another world, but a riotous roar as the life rushed out of you.

  She braced herself. Her eyes and nose were so flooded with magic that she could barely see or hear a thing. Her gift, in these last moments, was a mercy. She wouldn’t see the knife coming.

  There was a loud snap from beside her. Strange. Something must have broken. Whatever it was fell to the ground heavily.

  And then the wheel was turning, and her feet fell loose.

  Something must have gone wrong.

  Something must have stopped the ceremony and she was still so blind from all the magic that she couldn’t see it or hear it.

  Her teeth rattled in her head as she began to shake, rattling against the metal chair like a seed in a dry gourd. The magic was too much. The power was too strong. She couldn’t think, couldn’t control her own body.

  Another scent slid through the magic as her right hand was released. Gold. Gold and honey and cinnamon. She breathed it in, desperately trying to pull in anything other than the magic. It cleared some of the fog, and she saw a cloudy form wrenching the restraint off her other arm.

  Through the fog of her vision, she saw a dark shape rush at the golden form but he was tossed aside like a dry leaf. Marielle tried to stand, but she was shaken off her feet, falling painfully against the metal chair. The ground rolled like the river in a storm, marble and stone rippling like the sea.

  Her breath caught in her throat as she froze, uncertain what do next, but now she was being swept up and thrown over a shoulder. She blinked as something hard drove into her belly like a wooden beam. It knocked her breath out and just as she was gasping to try to release her spasming muscles it hit again.

  Again, it plowed into her and again and again.

  Her savior was running, and his shoulder was knocking the air out of her body. She felt them soar through the air, felt his muscles bunch as he delivered blows and flung enemies aside. It was like being blind in the heart of a tornado. But her vision was clearing now that the tentacles were gone, and her scent was clearing, too.

  Terror spiked bright and blaring from every direction. It pulsed harder when the earth shook – what was causing that shaking? Could it be an earthquake? – and seemed to spike wherever they passed.

  They were moving upward as if they were climbing stairs. Crashes and crunches around them suggested falling furniture and masonry. What was happening out there?

  And then fresh air hit her hard in the face and she could smell the open air. It cleared the worst of the magic and she could finally see clearly. She pushed up from where she was awkwardly slung across a shoulder. They were on the wall around the Seven Suns Palace.

  “Put me down!” she yelled. She was no Jing urn to be stolen from a palace. No precious ruby to make off with – even by her savior.

  The wall of the palace shook slightly, like a bowl wobbling after being set too roughly on a table. Below them, screaming crowds poured from the palace, screaming and fighting to leave, their decorations and costumes falling from them like the shed skin of a snake as they rushed from the palace. Wigs and hats, necklaces and capes, and trampled bodies fell in their hurried escape, landing on the moat below, under the feet of those fleeing, or flying through the breeze out across the Government District.

  A boy in a little gondola on the palace moat ducked as someone’s belt of skulls
flew through the air, narrowly missing him.

  Perched at the height of Jingen, the entire city could be seen from the top of the Seven Suns Palace and for Marielle, it was painted in the rainbow hues of terror, mourning, and ecstasy.

  None of this made any sense. Why was the ground shaking so badly? Why was the city so full of terror? Perhaps she really had died, and this was the next life, and for her sins, she was paying in fear.

  She twisted to look up. But she didn’t need to guess who had saved her. She would have known his scent anywhere. Even without the glimpse of light-colored hair and broad shoulders as he whirled in a dance of death, sliding from one graceful sword form to the next, she knew exactly who this was – Tamerlan Zi’fen, the murderer of the Temple District. The man who had been so desperate to save his sister.

  He’d saved her instead.

  Was it wrong that her heart soared with joy? Was it wrong that she was so happy to be alive?

  There was some commotion she couldn’t hear and then a breathless Lord Mythos called out.

  “Put the sacrifice down. You can go if you do. But we need her.”

  “No.” The answer was a growl – a growl she didn’t recognize, but she knew this scent. She wasn’t wrong about who had saved her.

  “Put me down,” she whispered. “I can fight, too.”

  He ignored her.

  “Can’t you feel the dragon waking?” the Lord Mythos asked. His voice was ragged with emotion, desperation carrying through the wind in orange ginger pulses. “Only her blood can stop it. Only her blood can save us all.”

  Tamerlan set her gently to the ground, shoving one of his swords into her hands while she was still gasping in surprise.

  They were surrounded by guards, swords held out in a guard position. And at the center of the ring, a breathless Lord Mythos held a black-gloved hand up, his beautiful face torn with anguish and his dark eyes violent.

  “Please,” he begged.

  She risked a glance at Tamerlan’s face. He looked older, harder. His broad shoulders and strong chin jutted out like he was prepared to fight the entire world to save her.

  “I don’t appease dragons,” he said in a low voice. “I destroy them.”

  “Then you will destroy us all,” Lord Mythos said, and his voice sounded like a man who had just been set on fire. “Take her from him.”

  37: Wake the Dragon

  Tamerlan

  These fools will pay.

  One thing about Ram the Hunter was that he didn’t mince words.

  This body and mind are adequate for dragon slaying. We will not assuage this dragon. We will let him rise and then we will make him fall.

  It was strange how his confidence buoyed Tamerlan as the guards rushed forward. His sword spun expertly before him and he danced under their swords and over their reaching arms to lunge and slash and parry. Ram fought as easily as breathing, his movements almost a dance as he worked his way through the guards.

  Tamerlan kept his concentration on watching what was happening around them. Was Marielle okay? Was Ram keeping her safe while he fought? He hadn’t expected to be saving her today – but he wasn’t sorry that he had. At least this time he hadn’t killed innocent bystanders. At least this time he was doing something good. Or at least sort of good. The tremors in the earth were troubling.

  A blast of fire as thick as his wrist plunged through the air toward them from the open hand of the Lord Mythos. His face was twisted up like he was concentrating, but Ram dodged the bar of fire easily and it disappeared with a blinding flash.

  He took that fire from the dragon.

  He could do that?!

  Why do you think he keeps it chained here instead of dispatching it as any man of valor would? Have no fear. Magic is a deadly thing but no match to a sword, a strong arm, and courage.

  Tamerlan’s heart raced. That magic certainly looked like a match for him.

  Marielle grunted from beside him and Ram spared her a look, noting that she’d slain the man attacking her and then returning to the battle. She was good with that sword. That was good. Right?

  It is good.

  And then everything shifted.

  The landscape began to change. Out toward the sea, past the smoking wreckage of the Temple District and across the University District to the highest point of land there where the Queen Mer Library stood, the land seemed to lift into the air, curling up toward them. Tamerlan almost choked as the Temple District of Jingen shook, people, buildings, trees and paving stones falling off of it like scale from a rock. They were far enough away to appear small. Close enough to be seen in the full horror of what was happening.

  The land looked as if it had come alive, as if a rock-crusted head had lifted up and was slowly looking back and forth as the buildings and roads that had once adorned it fell off, crashing down into the burnt Temple District and the yawning blue ocean. Canal water poured off like rain on a roof, flooding the canals below and making sudden wave surges that washed across the locks and out to the river, carrying boats and debris with the surge of water.

  The world teetered awkwardly and a grinding sound of stone on stone drowned out every other sound.

  Tamerlan’s heart was pounding. This couldn’t be real. It couldn’t possibly be real.

  Dragon.

  The head did look like a dragon. And as he watched, the Queen Mer Library – stretching out horizontally from the ground instead of towering over it - popped off the surface of the rock, falling down the slope and bouncing off the ground, breaking into pieces as it tumbled. Tiny bits of debris – books, he realized – fell like dust into the Spice District. All those books, gone! All those priceless treasures and grimoires and carvings. Sian and the librarians and the book with his bloody thumbprint in it. Gone.

  Where the Queen Mer Library had been there was only a dark hole in the rock. And then the hole opened. A brilliant golden-irised eye with a pupil like a cat’s opened wide and then blinked.

  “It’s too late,” the Lord Mythos said, his voice quivering with horror. “Too late.”

  They needed to run. They needed to get into Jhinn’s gondola and run!

  Gondola?

  In the moat!

  Ram spun, jamming the sword in his sheath in a single fluid motion and scooping a startled Marielle up by the waist. He took three long strides and on the third stride, he leapt over the wall and fell through the air.

  As they fell, Tamerlan heard him screaming.

  Death to all dragons! Death to –

  His voice cut off as they hit the tepid water of the moat.

  38: Gondola Dash

  Marielle

  Marielle fell through the air, her breath catching in her throat. Her emotions were bubbling and surfacing so quickly that she couldn’t process them. Had that been a dragon? The dragon?

  Because now the pleading of the Lord Mythos – of Etienne Velendark – didn’t feel so strange. He really hadn’t been pleading for her death – though, of course, he had been. He’d been pleading with her to help him save Jingen.

  She was shaking now, but not because the earth beneath them – the dragon beneath them – was, but because of the tiny distant people she had seen raining from the windows and doors and streets of the University District. They were only a tiny fraction of the people who were already dead there. How many more would be crushed by masonry, die from falls, or be washed away by the draining canals? Her heart felt like it was stuck in her throat, like she couldn’t breathe. A hollow feeling – too empty to hold her sudden grief and shock – welled up inside her, choking out her life.

  She was under the water, the sounds and smells of the disaster above insulated from her mind by the murky water. Bits of plant and algae floated in the thick murk. Safe things. Things unaffected by the frights above.

  She could stay down here with them and wait until the world ended above.

  A hand seized a fistful of her hair and dragged her painfully to the surface.

  “I think the fa
ll knocked her breath out,” a young man’s voice said, concern in every tone. She knew that scent. She leaned into it, breathing in the golden honey like it was her salvation, sucking in deep breaths of the wicked tinges of cinnamon and celery like they could scour out the terror of Jingen. She inhaled life and hope in his scent. She clung to it.

  “Help me get her in,” he said.

  Tamerlan. Her salvation.

  A second set of hands grabbed her under the arms – seaweed and cedar, flickers of strawberry genius. “What? You’re stealing party girls now?”

  “I’m not sure now is the time for joking, Jhinn,” Tamerlan said mildly as they tugged her into the boat. She coughed, spewing water across the deck of a small boat. Her dress was too clingy. Her mind whirling too fast. “Look above us. Do you happen to see a large eye?”

  “Mer’s spit! Come on! We’d better hurry.”

  Marielle shook herself, pulling herself up to her hands and knees as the gondola lurched forward.

  “Are you okay?” Tamerlan’s voice was gentle – so different from how it had been on the walls of the Seven Sun’s Palace that she paused for half a breath.

  “Why did you save me?”

  The muscle on the side of his jaw clenched and the golden honey scent of him flared so strongly that it seemed to overwhelm him for a moment.

  “I went there to save a sister, but when my sister was safe, I didn’t see anyone there to save you.”

  He quivered slightly, as if haunted by some awful memory and then he stole a glance behind him at the dragon head stretching in one direction and then the other in the distance behind them.

  “Now is not the time for sentiment or explanations! Row!” the boy in the back of the boat – Jhinn – said.

  Marielle stood up, searching for an oar when Tamerlan’s fell to the floor. She stumbled as the boat rocked, dipping low enough into the moat that water trickled over the gunwales before it popped back up again.