He threw himself flat as a tumbling glasship spun out of the sky and smashed into the city ahead. It exploded into slivers of glass that flew like scorpion bolts. A splinter shattered off his armoured shoulder and a piece as long as a horse fizzed over his head, then glittering daggers showered around him, pinging off his helmet and rattling over his back. He winced. He was feeling the burns from the fire now. Skin burns, nothing deep, but they stung like he'd been whipped. The backs of his hands, the backs of his legs. The back of his neck, that was the worst.
He hauled himself up again and then stopped, transfixed. Everything around him was smashed. The wide stone-paved street was covered in debris, littered with destruction. The buildings either side, whatever they'd once been, their thick stone walls had been ripped apart and tumbled and their roofs were simply gone, disintegrated by fire and lightning. Above him, the glasships were falling one by one and there was a dragon among them. They were throwing lightning at it but the dragon was too fast and too agile. It was a big one too, huge, bigger even than the glasships when it stretched out its wings, with claws like lances and a head filled with teeth like scimitars. As the dragon leaped away from one stricken glasship and passed another, it lashed with its massive tail, smashing the ship to pieces. Tuuran watched as it shattered another and then jumped onto the last of them. It opened its mouth and fire poured out, on and on and on until even Tuuran on the ground could feel the air turning hot. The glasship shuddered and then started to fall. Its glass heart was glowing a dull throbbing red and there were drops of bright golden rain in the air. It came down behind the buildings shattered by the fire bomb and the tortured ground shook again. The monster shrieked. For a moment, as it turned, Tuuran caught a glimpse of a rider on its back.
He was grinning like an idiot. He knew it but he couldn't help it. A dragon! ‘See, Crazy Mad? See that! That's what they made me to fight! A dragon! Flame, but isn't that a sight to make your heart sing?’ A decade, more or less, since he'd seen one, and the feeling was like warm cream and honey.
Crazy Mad snorted. ‘Yeh, but whose side's it on?’ Somewhere nearby but out of sight another explosion shook them; and then pieces of burned wood showered across the street and the hot dry air filled with a rolling cloud of choking smoke. Tuuran ran straight on, Crazy Mad keeping up beside him. He didn't know where he was going but for now any direction away from the fire would do. Now and then he glanced back at the sky, looking for the dragon.
Once they got out of the docks, the destruction was less. Most of the houses, shops, temples, guild houses, whatever they were, were still intact. They crossed a small square. In the smoke and the half-light Tuuran saw people moving on the street ahead of them but couldn't tell whether they were Taiytakei or slaves. Mostly they were stumbling about dazed or else simply staring at the sky; some were running. Tuuran didn't stop but he kept glancing over his shoulder, couldn't help himself. They were away from the fires now but more flames were rising from deeper in the city. The rockets, perhaps, or the fallen glasships. They'd blown apart into glowing pieces as they crashed, setting fire to everything they touched. The golden rain he'd seen really was gold, melted by the dragon's breath. He caught a glimpse of the monster as it swept low across the city, dousing the docks with more flame, pouring fire out of its mouth in an endless stream.
Crazy Mad shook his head. ‘So if it's with us, why is it burning where we were?’
Tuuran laughed. ‘It's a dragon. It's not with anyone. It's got a rider, though. He might be.’
‘That's still the docks done for. How we going to leave?’ Leave? Tuuran hadn't even thought about that.
The dragon shot out across the sea, low enough to skim the waves with its claws, and Tuuran lost sight of it. He shrugged. Anyone still by the waterside had been dead long before the dragon came. The glasships had seen to that with their lightning. ‘And it'll burn the ships. All of them probably, ours and theirs. Dragons hate ships.’ He pulled Crazy Mad into a narrow alley and stopped to catch his breath. His lungs felt raw from the smoke and the heat. ‘So here we are, Berren Crowntaker Bloody Judge Skyrie. Leave? We only just got here. The place you wanted to be, for which you can thank me later. Now how do you propose to find these warlocks of yours?’
Crazy Mad smirked and pushed him. ‘Thank you? You had no idea this was where those ships would be heading!’
Tuuran grinned back. ‘Well if that's so, Mister Crazy Bloody Judge then you'd best thank me for being so bloody lucky!’ His grin faded. Not so lucky if you lived here. Here, away from the worst, people were standing at their windows full of disbelief, but that wouldn't last when they saw what was coming. They'd be on the street soon, running — should be doing that right now if they had any sense, fleeing for the safety of the hills, although there was no safety there, not from a dragon. Stay and hide until the fighting was all done, that was probably best, unless the dragon decided to remain and burn every house until the stones cracked. You couldn't be sure it wouldn't. No quarter! The Taiytakei had shouted that a lot. They were here to wipe out this whole city then, were they? Every man, woman and child killed and every building burned to ash? Was that how the Taiytakei fought one another? He had no idea. As far as he'd been able to make out, mostly they did their fighting by getting other people to do it for them and putting wagers on the outcome.
‘The warlock,’ said Crazy Mad. ‘Vallas Kuy. He's here. I can almost taste him in the air.’
‘Daft bugger! All I taste is smoke and ash. So where is he?’
Crazy Mad shrugged. Tuuran laughed. There was no way Crazy Mad was going to find anyone, not in the middle of a battle, not when he didn't know where to look. ‘Good luck with that, then.’ He walked down the alley into a small yard and climbed a pile of empty crates up onto a roof. Crazy Mad watched him and smiled.
‘Takes me back to Deephaven. Before I was the Bloody Judge. When I was a thief I did this sort of thing all the time.’
‘What? Burn cities to the ground?’
‘No, you ox, this!’ He scrambled up from window to rooftop as though it was the easiest thing in the world, vaulting past Tuuran. ‘Gods but you're so slow, big man.’
They stood side by side for a minute watching the city burn. Smoke blew over them, thick and acrid. Here and there amid the flames were scars where whole streets had been smashed by the fire bombs or by the dragon or the falling glasships. Tuuran reckoned it didn't much matter which if you were underneath. He could see broken glasship skeletons, a few of them, some of their great discs still intact and sticking up high above the ruins. He swept his arm over the destruction and then out to sea where a hundred ships were burning. The dragon was out there. He could see it by the bright columns of fire that lit up now and then inside the pall of smoke. They moved like a dragon, sweeping through the air. ‘This.’ He grinned. ‘I came here for this.’
‘Well, good for you.’ Crazy Mad rolled his eyes. ‘Now that you've got it, you can help me hunt warlocks. If you don't mind, though don't let it stop you from a good bit of smashing and looting and burning, of course.’ As they watched, another stream of rockets shot out from deep in the city, arcing towards the sea. Tuuran squinted. There were still lots of little boats riding the waves to the shore. The rockets landed among them. Crazy Mad squinted up and down the coast. ‘Do they have fishermen here?’
‘It's a city by the sea so it'd be pretty strange if they didn't.’ Tuuran shrugged and looked back to where the dragon had gone now, to the island with its flashes of lightning. ‘Over there, maybe?’