Part 26 (1/2)

And yet the power was closing in on them, fast- 'Dyan!' Stranger cried. Her voice rang out in all directions, too loud for a normal cry; she had to have cast something to enhance it.

'Kill her!' Blain snapped. 'Quick, get her out of the water and do it!'

A rush of wind knocked him backward and off his feet. He stayed down under the water's surface, waiting till his breath ran out. Fast, so fast. How had the beast come so fast?

When Blain rose Stranger was not in sight. Thaun's body lay in two twitching pieces on the ground, spilling guts like the stuffing from a torn doll. The Hunter's face showed surprise.

Blain could hardly believe the little lurking spell had saved him from a dragon. Quickly he pulled from the corpse all charms and wards, except of course for those melded into or tattooed on the Hunter's skin. Up in the tower, at the uppermost window, was the tall, bald silhouette of the magician staring down. No magic had won out this time; no illusion, no spell work at all. Simple trickery. Potential ally indeed, ah the little chord he'd struck, the note he'd known Blain had wished to hear. Had he also known Dyan would hear Stranger's cries and rescue her? Had he meant for the dragon to kill them both?

Blain tipped his walking stick in a gesture as though to say well played. The bald head did not, as he'd half hoped, nod in a gesture of reciprocal respect to a fellow illusionist; the tower's magician just stared down at him as he limped away from the water, with a last regretful look at the corpse of his finest Hunter.

IN FLIGHT.

1.

The drake's beating wings had soon put the tower far behind them. Gusts of air both warm and cold blew at them so hard it felt like they'd be knocked out of the saddle-like grooves between the upright nubs on Case's leathery back. The heat always burning deep in his belly kept them warm. It was too dark to see much of the landscape pa.s.sing below but for the odd lantern-lit window or campfire in fields which looked like oceans of blackness. At times Case tilted forward like a roller-coaster cart heading for a plunge straight down, as though he every now and then lost control of his wings or wished to very briefly rest them. What seemed hours of uneventful flight went by, the wind flicking Aziel's hair in Eric's face all the while. Their winding flightpath veered toward a distant gang of unnatural-looking mountains shaped like pillars. Then a voice spoke from the gloom right beside them: 'Your wish?'

All three pa.s.sengers aboard the drake screamed. Loup nearly fell, and clutched Eric's waist to stay seated. They were descending through a blanket of cloud and could see little but cotton whiteness. The powerful animal stink of war mages carried to them even through the headwind they flew into. Shapes could be heard b.u.mping into Case's wings. The drake grunted in confusion and dropped more alt.i.tude. 'Your bidding,' said a machine-deep voice from the other side.

'I'm yours,' said another.

'Your will.' A chorus of such voices intermingled with declarations of servility.

'You're Shadow,' said one visible directly above them when they had come free of the cloud. Amongst a s.h.a.ggy dangling nest of hair, cat-yellow eyes peered luminously down. Smoke trailed from the tips of its horns, its staff clutched to its chest with long-clawed hands. Its beard strands brushed Eric's head like friendly but unwelcome fingers. 'Among foes,' it said. 'A servant.'

'No! These aren't foes,' said Eric, knowing what it meant to do. 'Don't attack them! Go! Leave us.'

'Your word?' it said, frowning as though confused. Others descended through the clouds and flew shoulder to shoulder with the first.

'Yes, that's my word. Leave us! Fly east. Go! East! f.u.c.k off!'

'A servant,' said a dozen voices in acknowledgement. Each of the creatures veered away.

'Tell em to go and fight that dragon,' Loup whispered in his ear.

But the flock had already departed. Their shrieking was soon far distant till it faded from earshot altogether. Unperturbed, the drake beat its wings harder, steering a course through the clouds as though all the skies were mapped out neatly in its mind. They stopped to take shelter from a heavy rain-shower in a cliff-side cave, its floor covered in smooth white pebbles. The drake set himself heavily down, seeming to announce with a huffed sigh that he had flown quite enough for one day. Loup dug through the smooth pebbles and gathered up bones buried beneath them. He fondled them in his gnarled hands. 'Drake bones,' he said. 'Not dragons, just little drakes. No wonder he brought us here. An old drake nest, this.'

'We're putting a lot of trust in Case,' said Eric, peering out the cave's opening, where dropping off a little ledge was a sheer cliff side. Far beneath, huge square blocks of stone waited patiently to thump falling bodies. 'If he took off and left us here there's no way we'd be able to climb down.'

'He won't leave us. A good old drake, he is,' said Loup, running a hand over the beast's scaled head. It made a noise more like an old man snoring than a cat's purr, but it seemed to denote satisfaction. Loup said, 'Strange, though. He doesn't act like people have trained him, but he's not wild, not at all. Funny old feller! I wonder if a mage got inside his head somewhere along the way and tinkered around.' He peered closely into the drake's large gem-like eyes and squinted as though reading fine print therein. Case gazed back impa.s.sively.

'How many drakes have you known?' said Eric.

'This is the first! And I like him,' said Loup. He brought the old drake bones to Case. 'Hungry?' Case sniffed the bones, took one of the smaller ones in his mouth and crunched it languidly into splinters with a noise that filled the little cave. 'They share memories like this, eating each other's remains,' said Loup, patting Case's hide. 'When two meet up they'll each trade a scale to eat. That's like having a long conversation, for drakes. Case will be learning things his long-departed friend knew, once he digests those bones. The old one crawled here when he knew he was going to die. He knew others of his kind would one day come find him, I reckon. Nice old race the drakes, oh aye they are. Even if they do eat expensive necklaces.'

'Arch has one in a cage,' said Aziel, breaking a long, sullen silence which Eric guessed was to protest Loup having invited himself along.

'What's he do with it?' said Loup.

'Nothing. It just sits there,' she said.

'Fine man, he is. Not enough cages in the world for his liking. Guess that's why he's put so many folk in the ground, eh? That's a cage too, with a lock that never opens. The stuff of his sweetest dreams, la.s.s. And part of you knows it.'

Aziel went red but didn't answer.

They slept that night curled around Case, the heat in his belly like coals in a fire.

After an hour or two Eric woke at the cry of a war mage, surely the same flock of them seeking him out for new orders. To his great surprise Aziel had her head resting on his shoulder. She'd tested their patience with complaints about the lack of hot baths, inadequate food, her little aches and pains. All of it code he supposed for 'I'm scared'. Only when he'd told her fables from Otherworld, such as Snow White, had she settled down. Loup had listened with equal enthusiasm.

He looked down at her faintly Oriental face. He could not deny that she was beautiful. He imagined ripping her dress off while she peevishly complained and whined ...

A faint gleam ran about her necklace. Her face creased with pain as the light grew stronger. She moaned in her sleep, cried out and sat up gasping. Loup and the drake did not stir.

'Everything OK?' Eric asked her.

She discovered she'd leaned on him in her sleep. Her eyes would not have shot wider had she found a Tormentor beside her. 'You're not to touch me!' she whispered fiercely.

'I have no interest in touching you,' he lied.

She frowned. 'Why not?'

'Huh?'

'I mean you're not to! But you're allowed to ... to want to.'

He laughed.

She grabbed at the necklace, trying to dig her fingers between it and her skin. 'I wish I hadn't picked this up. I had bad dreams again.'

'What sort of dreams? Was Shadow in them?'

'He was choking me with a big piece of chain. He kept saying he had a mountain to lift up, but I wouldn't let him. And he couldn't do it till I'd died.' She shuddered. 'There was more but I don't want to think about it.'

'Do you want another story, then?'

Her face lit up at the prospect before she shrugged with feigned indifference. 'The others weren't very good.'

'Let's see if I can do better. Here's one I wrote called Jack and the Beanstalk.' Not long into the telling, Aziel slept again, and again her body leaned into his. He stroked free the hair that fell across her cheek, wondering why he should feel this compulsion to look after the daughter of an abomination and a tyrant.