“Maybe it’s not too late,” Lord Mythos said from where he balanced, gaining his balance after leaping onto the prow of the boat.
Tamerlan was already drawing his sword.
“Row!” Jhinn cried and Marielle stepped back, shoving the oar into the water and pulling against it.
But Tamerlan’s amazing prowess with the sword seemed to fail him now. The Lord Mythos lunged forward and Tamerlan barely smacked his thrust aside.
Jhinn steered the boat as he and Marielle desperately pulled with the oars, and now Marielle could see why. The water around them was rising, a wave coming up from behind. The dragon’s spine where the Seven Suns Palace perched was slowly rising. On one side of the little boat, the landscape fell away as they rose into the air.
Marielle’s eyes were fixed forward as she worked the oar. Lord Mythos’ next thrust was a hair away from piercing Tamerlan’s side when he dodged it. Lord Mythos pressed in closer.
What was wrong with Tamerlan? He’d fought like a master on the wall, but here he fought like an amateur, barely keeping his footing as he fought. Marielle could fight better. She gritted her teeth, hoping she was wrong and that he could recover and press the attack. She’d lost her own sword in the leap from the wall and the knife tucked into her boot wouldn’t be enough against a sword.
“Row!” Jhinn roared.
Their gondola shot from the moat into the canal, gaining speed. There was something about the little craft that made it faster than the others around it and they shot past family boats and passenger gondolas moving at five times their speed as Jhinn worked his oar at the back like a rudder, artfully dodging other boats with less than an inch to spare. When they got to close to one, Marielle stuck her oar out, pushing off from the other boat and barely saving them from a crash.
They were picking up speed still as the waves behind them rose. They hit the first lock, sailing over it like a thrown javelin and landing hard on the water on the other side. Marielle and Jhinn were braced for it, but Tamerlan slipped and Lord Mythos’ sword plunged into his shoulder just above his chest. He fell to the deck of the gondola with a moan.
Triumph flashed through Lord Mythos’s eyes. Tamerlan’s eyes were shut, face pale.
Marielle didn’t wait for a breath before she dropped her oar in the floor of the boat and scooped up Tamerlan’s sword, standing over him in the guard position she’d been drilled to take.
Lord Mythos kept his sword steady, but his eyes locked onto Marielle’s. “I’m a better swordsman than you, Marielle. Don’t waste your blood on this. Not when there’s still time. We can still save the city.”
“You must be joking!” the boy from the back yelled. “Look around you, fool! This city is gone!”
They passed the bridge that signaled the entry into the Alchemist’s District at the same moment that a building slammed down onto the canal wall beside them, breaking into pieces as it came apart from the impact. Marielle threw her arms up, covering her face and head, but the shattering debris still lacerated her arms and torso as it blasted across her. The thin, clinging dress she wore did little to protect her.
The sound of a building shattering and of the screams around her blocked out all sound. Puffs of scent exploded in every direction, their colors so bright and overpowering that Marielle struggled to parse one from another. She reached down for her scarf, but there was no scarf. She’d lost it somewhere.
Lord Mythos dropped his guard, his face pale with shock and then an oar snaked out from behind Marielle, under her arm, and hit him straight in the chest, shoving him over the side of the gondola into the canal.
Marielle blinked at the spot where he’d been, stunned. It was only Jhinn’s shout that brought her back to her senses.
“At any moment the locks are going to blow and we’ll lose the water. Row! Row for your life!”
39: Flotsam Hope
Marielle
They shot through the masses of gondolas and family boats choking the canals. The water raced as quickly as they did, a flow of rapids like the tightening of a mighty river.
“The Dragon’s wrath is upon us!” a woman in a neighboring boat wailed as they passed her frantic paddling.
People and furniture, horses and carts, homes and taverns and cobblestones rained from the sky like the wrath of the gods, narrowly missing them or hitting the tiny craft as they sped past. Like a rain of wrath from the Legends on high.
Marielle’s stomach clenched in sick guilt as they barely dodged the plummeting body of an old man, already dead, his staring eyes telling the tale of horror all of Jingen felt.
“Shove him in the forward compartment!” Jhinn screamed.
Marielle looked back at him frantically and then at Tamerlan, lying still in the bottom of the boat, blood pooling under him. A piece of masonry had fallen on him as he lay, unable to dodge, wounding his leg.
She dropped her oar and crouched down, lifting the masonry and throwing it overboard.
The boat rocked as a fruit shop hit the canal, plunging five boats underwater in the blink of an eye. Marielle gasped. Her hands weren’t working. Her mouth wasn’t working. It was like a scream was stuck in her throat.
“Hurry!” Jhinn called over the screams and wails around them.
“Legends preserve us! Dragon have mercy! Mercy!” the voices wailed.
Marielle shook herself. The panic around them was overpowering – the scent of it thicker than the scent of magic had been in the Seven Suns Palace. It clogged her nose and threatened to wash her sanity away in a tide of awareness. With effort, she opened the hatch, dragging Tamerlan to it and then shoving him inside and closing the small door.
“Are you sure he is safe in there? He will drown if water gets in the boat!”
As she spoke, water washed over the bow, soaking her dress and filling her mouth and nose. Marielle looked up, a cry ripping from her throat at the huge wave swelling toward them. It swallowed the edges of the Alchemist District, raising the canals to street level and flooding the streets with a roar of river water.
Marielle risked a look up, up, up past the curve of the city, rising up above them like a wave to where the spine of the dragon was showing as the Seven Suns Palace slowly fell off its back like limescale chipped from a basin. The Sunset Tower hung precariously from the rest, attached by a single thread of metal gears before falling from the Palace and tumbling down, down, down to crash into the Spice District – or what used to be the Spice District. Now, it was awash with water, the boats usually lining its docks jettisoning from land like a flock of birds taking off.
She gasped, almost choking on her own vomit before retching over the side of the gondola. Nothing felt real. Not anymore.
She shuddered, willing her hands back into submission and grabbing her oar again and digging into the swirling water. Broken crates and bobbing barrels, sinking debris and screaming people filled the water.
“We need to stop,” she said through teeth chattering from the shock. Her hands shook and her heart pounded. “We need to rescue those we can.”
“Rescue?!” Jhinn’s cry sounded like a curse. “We stop and we die. Row! Row for your life!”
She opened her mouth to argue when the river erupted, sliding toward them and swallowing up everything around her in a massive swell. Their tiny craft bobbed to the surface, water splashing over the gunwales as it buoyed up on top of the swell.
“Drop the oar and bail!” Jhinn cried and as Marielle scrambled for a bailing bowl as what could only be described as a wing tore itself from under the river, mud, fish, human skeletons tied to heavy rocks, and sunken wrecks spilling from its leathery surface to pour back into the river.
Their craft was sucked into the depression in the water as Marielle bailed for all she was worth, filling the bowl with water and flinging it over the side again and again. She tried to focus on the motion and to block out everything else. It was too much. Too much for the human mind to comprehend.
The Jingen’s Glory Bridge sail
ed over them, shaken from the wing like an unwanted vine ripped up by a gardener. Marielle’s eyes rolled in horror as one of its massive girders passed inches over her head.
Thought had ceased. She could no longer plan, only react, no longer think about what she should do but only what she was doing. No longer hope for anything, not even to live. It was one breath to the next, one action to the next.
Water from behind them rushed into the depression, propelling them forward down the Albastru River. There were so many vessels on the river that it seemed to be its own city, alive with a crowd of people, but Jhinn’s tiny gondola sped past all the others, riding the rising water like a horse racing down a track.
A huge river barge loomed in front of them, when suddenly it rolled, spilling into the sea as the tip of a tail bigger than a canal skimmed a hundred boats off the river with a single flick.
Marielle’s eyes followed the length of it to where it pulled free of the Trade District, spilling docks and cargo, ships and businesses into the mud nearby. Please, Legends grant her mother safety in the Trade District! Her home was on the mudflats there. There was a chance it wouldn’t be devastated by the tail uprooting from the ground. But even as Marielle thought that, the water of the river surged across the flats, swallowing the buildings up in the river’s ravenous swell.
Her heart was in her throat and nausea swelled through her as the little boat shot out through the supports of the tottering hulk of the Sea Breeze bridge. On one side of it, the tail of the dragon swung, clearing buildings and ships in its path. On the other side, where once the Spice District had been was now nothing but muddy, swirling water.
She bit down hard on her lip, tasting blood as they cleared the bridge and spat out into the brackish water beyond where the Albastru flowed into the Queen Mer Ocean and the currents beyond.
Behind them, the city continued to fall, piece by piece, life by life, destroyed by the dragon her blood was meant to appease.
Lord Mythos had been right.
Carnelian – the traitor! – had been right.
If she had only died, none of this would have happened at all.
The moon shone brightly above them, lighting the debris, picking out the silhouette of the dragon as his wings finally pulled fully free and he flapped them, sending the little gondola spinning with the force of air from his wings while he lifted up from Jingen and into the air.
Legends help whoever was still alive in the houses and streets on his back! Gods above help any living souls still clinging to life there.
Marielle could not help. But she sobbed helplessly as if her many tears could fix the horror she had caused. Her tears fell into the sea and swirled with the brackish water and in the depths below, something stirred.
Epilogue
Marielle
“He’ll survive,” Marielle said. “I think.”
She worked on Tamerlan’s wound with gentle hands. He looked so young as he slept, his head resting on the blanket Jhinn had pulled from one of his hidey holes. They’d cleared the hull of debris and water before pulling him out of the air-tight cabinet at the front and cleaning his wound. It wasn’t the first stab wound Marielle had tended or seen tended. Even before she was a Scenter there were wounds among her mother’s friends. She had a deft hand for stitching and Jhinn was surprisingly well stocked.
Jhinn paused along one of the river banks as she sewed by the light of his small lantern, pulling a few carefully wrapped packages out of a hole along the bank and stuffing them into the space Tamerlan had occupied.
“What are those,” she asked.
“The source of all that trouble,” he said before tying a small bobbing craft behind them with a thick rope.
“A dragon?” Marielle teased. She was starting to like his intense manner and clear fondness for his friend.
“The magic that Tamerlan used back there. The magic of the Legends.”
“Magic of the Legends?” she asked, preparing a poultice from the herbs in Jhinn’s store. It was hard to do it well in the lantern light. Even from so far downriver, the sounds and smells coming from the city kept her on edge and ill. Her head swam with the licorice black despair wafting downriver and the heliotrope of agony swirling with it.
“He called it the Bridge of Legends. Smoke the right ingredients, and a Legend will take you over and use your body – for good or ill. He was using it to save his sister. Is that you? Are you Amaryllis?”
Marielle shook her head as she wound a clean cloth around the wound.
“Then he failed,” Jhinn said. He cleared his throat. “Not that I’m sorry he saved you. But that sister meant everything to him.”
They were both silent for a long moment as Marielle bandaged and Jhinn put his head in his hands, his first break in hours. He smelled of seaweed and cedar, of ash and salt, of hope and determination.
“I wish I had a brother like that,” Jhinn said.
“So do I,” Marielle agreed, trying hard not to think of her mother in the Trade District and of Captain Ironarm in the Government District, of Carnelian who she thought was probably dead and of the Lord Mythos who was a better person than her – who, it turned out, loved the law like she never did.
She pulled the cloak Tamerlan wore over his body like a blanket, gently stroking his cheek. She wasn’t his sister. He didn’t need to risk everything to save her, and yet he had. And he was both beautiful and monstrous in her eyes because of it. Both the savior of her life and the demon who had ruined her city.
The sun rose in the east, kissing the water with glimmers of gold and shining warm hope over them. And far in the distance, it caught on hints of white on the horizon.
“Sails,” she breathed. “Perhaps they bring help with them.”
“I don’t think so,” Jhinn said, watching under a shading hand with tired eyes.
“Why not?”
“Those are Queen Mer’s people.”
“Waverunners?”
“What Waverunners wish they were. The Retribution. The scourge of the land.”
That didn’t sound like help at all.
“Prepare for the rise of the Legends,” Jhinn said. “Prepare for the sifting of souls.”
Marielle shivered, looking down at Tamerlan. She owed him her life. However much she might regret him saving it. She looked over her shoulder at the crumbled ruins of the city tumbled in ragged heaps far behind them and then back to the peaceful, innocent looking face of the sweet man lying on a blanket at the bottom of the boat.
She owed him. And whatever came next, she would protect him. Maybe together, they could repay the debt they owed to Jingen, to the law, to life itself.
Appendix
Diagram of the Sunset Tower in the Grand Hall many thanks to Harold Trammel for his work on the creation of this diagram of the Sunset Tower.
Dawnspell
Book Two
“Dawn spells the end of fast, the cleansing of water, the newness of the coming year.” – Legends of the Dragonblooded
1: Adrift
Marielle
Marielle flinched before thinking – before realizing the shadow she saw was nothing more than a swooping gull. Not the dragon. Nothing more than a carrion-eater.
Marielle’s head spun under the hot sun. It wasn’t the heat so much as it was the smell. Two days after the dragon Jingen had risen into the air and destroyed Jingen City, and the dead were still bobbing up to the surface of the sea. Two days and the brackish water still stank of chaos and fear, rising in horrible puffs of red and black scent that filled Marielle’s nose with vinegar and smoke. She coughed – again – adjusting the scarf Jhinn had given her and breaking her rhythm with the oars. The scarf wrapped around her nose and mouth wasn’t enough to break the scent – not even to mask it.
“You got to keep your oar in the water or we’re never gonna get free of this mess,” Jhinn said from the back of the gondola.
But he was on edge, too. They weren’t the only boat to have narrowly missed the drago
n’s flaming rage that first night. They’d barely managed to beat the flames from the gondola. Luckily, they hadn’t been the target. It had been another raft of people fleeing the chaos of Jingen that the dragon had targeted, another raft of desperate survivors who had gone up like a lit torch in the water.
The gondola swayed in the high, frothy waves as water broke over its low bow. And Marielle flinched, the memories still too strong not to make her shy away from the smallest violence. The gondola wasn’t made for big water.
“If we row far enough, a current will catch us and we can drift south of the cities.” Jhinn had been saying that every hour for a day.
Marielle pulled harder on her oars. Anything to avoid thinking about returning to the five cities. She couldn’t face them. Every bloated body that drifted by was her fault. The clouds of squawking gulls fighting bitter battles over the remains of the dead were because of her. If she had only died back there, everyone else would have lived. If she had only died back there, they wouldn’t be fleeing a raging dragon, an easy target for him as they bobbed on the rough sea.
If Tamerlan hadn’t saved her life...
Not that she’d had much choice when he threw her over his shoulder and fought his way to the top of the Palace.
Her gaze drifted to where he lay on the floor of the boat, sea spray soaking him, muttering under his breath as the sweat of a fever beaded across his pale forehead.
“Dragon,” he muttered, barely audible over the crashing waves as the little boat swelled up on the top of one only to come crashing down on the other side, jostling them all and clattering Marielle’s teeth together, intensifying her headache. “Must kill the dragon.”
If only he’d killed the dragon back at the Seven Suns Palace. If only he’d done that instead of setting her free. Then maybe all these people wouldn’t have died.
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