It wasn’t a great plan. It was barely a plan at all. And it’d be far easier with Crows’ help than his recurring lament that he’d already fought his battle and lost.
The wind on top of the mountain was starting to batter her and make her cold. She decided that she’d go away and think about things again. She had one last look, and the more she looked, the less likely it seemed that she’d be able to get anyone out at all. Maybe one or two, if they were quick and quiet, hidden beneath shadow-cloaks woven from her own fingers.
That wasn’t going to be good enough, though. She wanted everybody: her lot, and anyone else who would come, free of the person who’d enslaved them.
She glanced behind before she backed up.
And saw a dragon, perched on a rock near the summit, staring at her with its hard, black-marble eyes.
There was nowhere to run to, and nowhere to hide. The only way down the mountain not barred by a giant winged lizard was straight over the cliff.
‘Fuck. Me.’
Crows hadn’t warned her about this possibility, and he really should have. Or perhaps he had, and she hadn’t been listening. Though casually mentioning that there might be dragons ought to have got her undivided attention. It flexed its wings and blotted out the half-moon. The gust of wind it caused raised a hail of grit, and she had to blink it out of her eyes.
Its scales glinted in the silver light as it loosely folded its wings against its sinuous body. Its two clawed feet rasped against the joints of the stones, and its snake-like head danced on its neck, tasting the air with its tongue.
She placed her hands firmly on the rock and shuffled around on her knees to face the beast. She had no idea what to do. The East End had many dangers. Massive fuck-off dragons wasn’t one of them.
Perhaps it would just fly away. Perhaps it didn’t see her as food, and if she wove a shadow-cloak around herself and crawled away, it’d leave her alone. Perhaps it was a tame dragon, and she could coo to it until it let her scratch it behind its ears. She couldn’t see any ears, though. Its head was smooth and dart-shaped.
In the absence of anything else to try, she swallowed hard against the brick in her throat.
‘Good dragon?’ She knelt up, very slowly, holding her palms out in what she hoped was a calming, non-threatening way. She was a fair way away from it, and if it got lairy, she could stop and back up again.
The dragon opened its mouth very wide and lunged at her. Its teeth were like rows of knives, except for the incisors, which were swords. It covered the distance between them in a single leap, and its jaws snapped shut, just where her hands would have been if she hadn’t snatched them back and dropped to the ground.
Not a friendly dragon, then.
Its head wound back in, coiled for another strike, and she still had nowhere to go. Her hand closed on a frost-edged shard of stone that cut into her fingers as she instinctively picked it up. The dragon’s mouth gaped wide and she threw the rock, as hard as she could. She didn’t think she could miss from that range, but she did. It sailed out of sight, over the creature’s head, and again she had to press herself to the mountain to avoid being swallowed whole.
It seemed surprised that it hadn’t got her, impaled on its teeth. Not as surprised as Mary was. The next time for sure.
It flapped its great wings again, rising into the air and battering her with a gale that almost hurled her over the edge. She grabbed another saucer-sized chunk of rock from the ground and half rose from her crouch.
And just when the dragon was settling again, claws closing against the loose surface, head rearing back and wings cupping the air, there was a clatter of falling stones from behind that distracted it.
It twisted sharply around, fearing an attack and, in that moment, Mary stretched her legs like a sprinter from the blocks. The moonlight wasn’t sufficient for what she was going to do, but she didn’t have a choice. No matter that she was on top of a mountain, she was going to die if she stayed there a second longer. She ducked under the outstretched wing and ran.
It was downhill all the way. She could feel the wind in her face, the wind at her back, and the roaring in her ears was either the speed she was moving at or the dragon’s displeasure. Whichever, she was going too fast to stop, the ground bending away from her feet and forcing her to take larger and larger strides.
She realised her descent was out of control at the same time she knew she couldn’t choose to avoid the drop-off formed by a ledge of rock. She’d climbed up it on the way. She knew how high it was. She could only guess how much it was going to hurt on the way down.
She sort-of-jumped, arms and legs wheeling. She landed in the scree beneath it, feet first but overbalancing. Then she was over. The mountain rose up and smashed her in the face.
It hurt, but more disorientating was seeing the land and sky becoming interchangeable. Moon and mountain passed each other. With each rotation, the dragon hanging above her grew closer, a silver outline against a black sky.
She stopped, eventually, abruptly, catching herself around a boulder like a ragdoll, all the air in her lungs forced out by the impact. The shadow deepened around her in a rush, and her back opened up to cold air and hot blood.
The most remarkable thing was that she was still alive enough to register the pain. She reached up a ragged hand and pushed herself away from her anchoring rock, rolling over and staring at the darkness of the sky and vastness of the moon.
Apart from her own heart, she could hear the steady pulse of beating wings. The dragon was coming around again. This was it. Could she stand? Could she work out how? Nothing seemed to be responding properly. She had one arm, one hand, and the rest seemed useless.
Not like this. She turned over again, on to her front, and somehow managed to wedge a knee under her. Here it came, all night and teeth, and she was determined she would face it. As she half-rose, because that was as much as she was able to manage, the stones of the mountain rose with her.
The dragon, full of pomp and arrogance, checked its advance, uncertain as to the threat. Mary didn’t dare look away, in case the slowly turning rocks fell. If this was her doing, then breaking her concentration as well as her bones would be the end of her.
Whatever instinct or intelligence drove the dragon on told it that it would come to no harm. It bent its head low and clawed at the ground, then rushed her.
She willed the rocks to stop its charge, and they flew at it, a solid storm of stone, battering its scales and membranous wings. The dragon stumbled and fell, and still the stones kept coming. It turned, lashed its tail, and ran.
The rattle of falling stones like rain marked the end of her resistance. She was alone in a world that was not hers, more than half-dead, halfway up a mountain she’d just fallen down.
‘Enough,’ she said. ‘Enough.’
20
Something had changed, possibly because the guards now realised that they were no more valuable, and no more protected, than the prisoners they were keeping. The man who’d died◦– Dalip heard him referred to as ‘Charlie’ or ‘Old Charlie’◦– had been, if not well liked, not so unpopular that his singling out by the geomancer made any sense. His fate could have been theirs: they knew it, and resented it.
The harsh regime the prisoners had been kept under relaxed by degrees. Inside the cell block, the individual cells were only barred at night. They could talk to each other freely outside those times, as long as it didn’t interfere with their chores. The women were made to work in the vegetable plots inside the walls, fetching and carrying water, doing laundry in vats of boiling water, from sunrise to sunset. It was back-breaking, exhausting labour that would have been hard if it had been done for themselves or with the promise of pay.