Ach! I bit my teeth in frustration and pain. How could I be asked to make this choice? To decide whether to let my people die now, at Inyene’s hands – or to forever live in fear of this woman?
Maybe it would be just easier to give it up, I thought, tears welling in my eyes as I reached up once more to the edge of the Stone Crown, to find it easy to move under my hands. Maybe I could give my family, my friends, and my people a few years of peace at least, I was telling myself—
“No!” Ymmen’s voice of alarm suddenly tore through my mind when I realized what I was about to do, and his body convulsed as he released his dragon fire.
“Ymmen – what are you doing!” I shouted in panic. The inferno of flame spread out to flare across the pass as the black dragon sprung into the air, snapping his wings to pull us away from the danger. Didn’t he want me to get rid of the Crown!?
“Not like this!” Ymmen was snarling. “High Queen Inyene would be the torment of the world. Maybe the end of the world!”
“But—”
The pass below us exploded into noise and action, and I spun around, looking down at what was happening behind us as I jammed the heavy Stone Crown once again further onto my temples.
Ymmen’s spreading fire ball had engulfed the first line of the mechanical dragons, wreathing them in smoke and flames – but of Inyene and her monstrous dragon-behemoth, there was no sign. Amongst our forces I could see Abioye, Tamin, and Montfre racing back to the forward positions of the Daza as the plains hunters crouched with their long spears raised. The Red Hounds appeared to be holding for the most part, but their double line convulsed with agitated soldiers—
“They’ll die! They’ll all die!” I was shouting, as Ymmen wheeled me higher and further from the action.
“You cannot trust the Crown! Even near to Inyene it will betray you!” Ymmen was shouting in my mind, stubborn and angry.
And then, as if things couldn’t seem much worse – they suddenly did. Ymmen’s plume of flame was evaporating from the Pass, and out of the smoke, with metal parts glowing like hot coals and with bodies steaming, stepped the mechanical dragons. Their stuttering legs were moving faster. They were charging.
Ymmen’s fire hadn’t been enough to ruin them – and now they looked unstoppable.
“BWAR!” And there was that ringing, discordant shriek of the work horns, as a gigantic, monstrous shape skewered through the steam and smoke. It was Inyene astride her dragon, which had leapt into the air before Ymmen’s flame could reach her—
And the Metal Queen was flying straight for me and Ymmen.
Chapter 9
Poison, Fire, and Flame
There was a terrible screeching sound from the gigantic mechanical dragon that pursued us, sounding like tortured metal. In response, Ymmen bunched his muscles, before—
“Hang on!” the mighty black dragon hissed into my mind, and I threw myself forward to wrap my arms around his neck, finding easy grooves between his scales into which I could dig my fingers.
Ymmen flared his wings and kicked out with his back legs at the same time, causing us to bodily flip over in the high air, the momentum pulling me away from the dragon’s back. I clutched with both knees and hands desperately, but the lift was only for a moment as Ymmen righted us, coming down around behind Inyene and her monstrous mechanical dragon.
“Imposter!” Ymmen roared, although that was just how my mind translated the dragon word into something that I could understand. In actuality, I received a sense of wrongness, and fakeness, and poison. At the same time that Ymmen roared – and I heard both his draconic screech in my ears and his words in my mind – he also released a plume of his dragon fire. It was weaker than the mighty blast he had fired at the army of mechanical dragons, but it still grew in the air between us like a second sun.
I watched as the fire engulfed the dragon ahead, with Inyene frantically pulling at the levers and cogs used to control the mechanical dragons. Ymmen’s ball of fury and smoke rolled forward over the mechanical dragon, being easily repelled by the dragon’s scales – but that was not the part I held my breath for—
The flames obscured my vision of Inyene, and my heart froze for a moment. Maybe this horrible torment was going to be over – but a part of me dreaded the sudden screams of agony that I would hear from my nemesis—
There was a flash of purple-blue light from amongst the dark smoke, and as they cleared, evaporating around the form of the twisting and swerving beast – there was Inyene the Queen of Metal, still sitting in her fenced saddle, as a shimmer of blue light faded from around her.
“Argh!” I growled, realizing that somehow Inyene had increased her magics to a new and worrying degree. But she was no natural mage, was she? I thought as Ymmen beat his wings to close in on our enemy. I saw the thickened, giant tail of the mechanical dragon just a few meters ahead of Ymmen’s snapping jaws.
No, I agreed with myself. Inyene had never been trained to be a mage at the Academy of Torvald, as far as I knew. And she had certainly never spent the long years and decades that the occasional Imanu out here on the plains did, searching the wilderness for arcane wisdoms…
With a terrible crunch Ymmen managed to seize the mechanical dragon’s tail in his mouth, and there was the grinding stress of metal, and the snap and crackle of the riveted-on dragon scales.
I held on fast to Ymmen’s neck as he savaged the mechanical one, his powerful head thrashing back and forth as he bent more and more of the metal struts in the way, scattering more of the stolen dragon scales down into the Plains below, finally returned to the natural world where they belonged.
But, even though Ymmen’s foe shuddered and started to fall downwards, the mechanical dragon was strong, and beat its wings with a powerful thunderclap, surging upwards…
With us still attached to its tail. Instead of unbalancing the mechanical dragon’s flight, somehow we were now being dragged upwards, and were struggling to maintain out equilibrium.
A blinding flash of purple light seared past my shoulder, and I felt a shudder as it hit Ymmen’s shoulder. “SKRARGH!” Looking up, I saw that Inyene had twisted backwards in her saddle and was gesturing with her strange three-pointed staff, holding the largest Earth Light that I had ever seen in its grasp. From this staff came another flash of purple light—
Ymmen, look out! I gasped, connecting with the dragon through my mind and my heart far faster than it would have ever taken to shout aloud the words.
The dragon beneath me released his jaws and flung himself to one side and we were rolling through the cold skies of the Masaka mountains as another blast of Inyene’s magic shot through the space where we had been.
The gigantic mechanical dragon above and ahead of us turned in a wide circle, ready to come back to us. Its tail was scattering scales and looked oddly flattened – but I could clearly see that there was no real damage done to the contraption.
Ymmen clutched his wings close to his bulk, speeding our roll through the skies, and there was the flash of cold blue-gray skies, gray-white rocks, blue-gray, gray-white… We were going to crash into the mountains, I swear it!