“Let them out,” said Kemal.
“You’re not even worm enough to make me,” said the gatekeeper, with a laugh.
Perhaps the night’s fraught events had worn Kemal’s mild temperament threadbare, but I thought it more likely that he responded as a young man might who feels he has been insulted in front of a woman he wants to impress. Kemal punched him up under the ribs with a strong undercut from his right, followed by a swift uppercut to the jaw from his left. The man went down.
“That was bruising!” said Rory, shaking out of his anxious slouch. “Have you studied the science of boxing?”
A horn shrilled from the road. Behind, the leviathan trumpeted in answer to its challenge. Heat grew at our back. The dragon was dragging itself closer.
“Hurry!” Kemal pushed us through the open door of the gatehouse. Even in such dire straits, I could not help but notice that the hearth fire burned unstintingly as Vai passed. We tumbled out on the other side of the gate as the gatekeeper skittered back into the safety of the gatehouse and slammed and locked the doors. The bellows breath of the dragon sucked in and out like the rhythm of the forge. It was definitely larger than it had been before it had eaten the last claimant.
Worst, the soldiers were closer than we had realized.
“There is the Diarisso mage!” In the aura of the gate lamp, soldiers clattered out of the night even as the cold fire guiding them vanished as though blown out.
The mage House troops spread into a semicircle that pinned us in front of the gate. We were caught between the claw and the teeth, as in the old tale of the slaves fleeing ancient Kemet who were trapped between the pharaoh’s army and an uncrossable sea.
“How could you abandon us like this!” Bee cried accusingly at Kemal.
Rory muttered, “Eaten or shot, which ought I prefer?”
Vai swore out of bitter frustration as his magic failed him.
I could barely lift my cane.
“I can’t reach my magic!” cried the mage riding with the troop. “What power traps it?”
“Kill all but the Diarisso,” shouted the captain.
Soldiers dismounted and swarmed forward with swords raised. Anger kindled in Kemal’s face, like buried light cutting through a concealing veil. He feared for Bee, certainly, but the knowledge that he had unwittingly walked her to her death surely scoured his pride as well. Or maybe it was only years of frustration at being told he must not desire what was so completely out of his reach and which was now to be torn from him forever.
He forgot himself.
And became what he really was.
First a pale man flashed as if he had become mirrors all catching tomorrow’s sunlight. The iron of the gates crumbled and, in a rush as of wind, poured into an eddy that he began absorbing. The substance filled and changed him. A creature formed as of polished iron swelled out of the vanishing figure of the man. It grew so monstrously fast that as I took in a breath I still saw the man, and as I exhaled a dragon filled the open gateway. Its mouth could have swallowed a pony. Whiskers like ropes lashed in a wind I could not feel. A crest rippled along its ridged spine in a delicate lacework of steel. Its tail whipped around and toppled several of the cypress trees. Its roar crackled like the fury of a blazing fire sweeping over us.
The soldiers fell over each other in their haste to retreat. The horses scattered as one rider sounded the alarm on a horn: Ta-ran-ta-ta! A distant horn answered, echoed by a third.
Close at hand a trumpet cry shook the air. Huddled against the door of the locked gatehouse, we turned to see the black dragon rise to confront this new challenger.
31
Once I had feared the fury of a magister powerful enough to rule as the head of a mage House more than I had feared the frightful tales of the great powers that lie invisible to us.
What a naïve girl I had been.
Two monstrous dragons reared up to attack each other, heedless of the tiny mortals scrambling away beneath them. Heat poured off them in battering waves. The tops of the cypress trees caught fire.
I grabbed Vai’s arm, for Bee’s comment had jogged my memory at last. “There’s a rowboat at the river’s edge. Bring everything. Rory, hurry!”
We dashed past the ruined gate and the closed doors of the gatehouse, heading toward the house. With a shrill scream the black launched itself against the smaller iron dragon. When their bodies collided, the ground actually shook.
Ash and burning needles spun down over us as we ran down the drive. Vai was cursing; he was a man unaccustomed to being rendered impotent in such a devastatingly comprehensive way. When I looked around, Bee wasn’t with us.
“I have to go back and look for her!” I shouted.
“Rory, find the boat, make sure there are oars.” Vai shoved the bag he was carrying to Rory. His apron of carpentry tools wrapped him like armor. “Catherine, I won’t leave you, so don’t ask it of me.”
Heavily laden, Rory staggered toward the river. Vai and I hunkered in the cover of the trees as the two dragons came rolling past in a frenzy of talons, teeth, and lashing tails. They broke apart. The dragon who had been Kemal beat its wings, the draft driving us to the ground. A thread of blood trailed past my hand with a stench like the forge. The black dragon rose onto its hind legs; its body blocked out half the sky.
A small person ran into the gap between them.
“Bee!” I screamed.
Vai threw me onto the ground, and himself on top. I squirmed and poked but his weight and that of the laden apron trapped me. “Hate me if you wish, but you can’t save her this time. She can only save herself.”
She was refulgent with anger. “Enough, Your Excellency! You have triumphed over all your challengers! Now go and do what things your kind do when all this rending and roaring is over!”
As she spoke she retreated until she stood beneath the iron-gray dragon. It could have crushed her with its talons or snapped her up in one gulp, but fearlessly she pressed a hand on its belly.
“Please, Kemal. You don’t need to challenge him. Turn back into a man, and I’ll give you a kiss.”
“That will work,” said Vai, his mouth against my ear.
It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t being sarcastic.
The black dragon inhaled so deeply that the sparks and smoke swirling around us were sucked into its nostrils in a prelude to a fresh attack. Hail peppered down. Vai took the brunt of the impact but uttered not a sound.
The hail ceased, leaving the ground covered with iron pebbles. Vai rolled off me, rubbing his head and cursing under his breath.
The gleam of the black dragon’s scales cast a hazy light over the two figures on the gravel drive. Kemal had become a man again. He knelt, head bowed, his left arm and leg streaked with blood.
“Come with me,” Bee said coaxingly. She helped him to his feet and toward us along the drive. Their shuffling progress spun in the mirrors of the dragon’s eyes as it watched them go.
I would have run forward but Vai held me back. “Catherine, there are times when you must stop and think and not just leap. If you rush out there, your movement or whatever scent you have of the spirit world may startle it into attacking.”
“Thank Tanit!” Bee staggered up. She listed heavily to one side with Kemal leaning on her. “Help me. He’s injured, and stunned.”
Vai got an arm around him, and Bee let go.
“I was so frightened!” I hugged Bee so hard she grunted.
“Ouch! Cat! Let me go. Where’s Rory?”
“We sent him ahead to secure the rowboat.”
The dragon bellowed so loudly we all cringed. A horn cry answered, followed by a second and a third. Drums pulsed from the heart of the city. Was the Treverni prince raising his militia?