Drutheira felt a hot surge of elation. The beast’s scent filled her nostrils; its agony filled her mind. She could almost hear the creature’s inner voice echoing in her own thoughts — a jumbled, maddened stream of half-thoughts and half-words.
‘You know your master!’ she cried, seizing the staff again with her right hand and twisting the spike in further.
Bloodfang roared in pain, but its spasms grew less violent. It came around, swinging back towards the cliff edge. Below them the land fell away in a steep drop towards the range’s northern fringes. Drutheira caught glimpses of huge swathes of land spreading out into the distance — tracts of forest bisected by the grey ribbon of a mighty river snaking west towards the sea. The view thrilled her. Never before had she seen so far. It felt like she was the queen of the earth.
Far below, she saw Ashniel and Malchior creep from their hiding places to stand and gawp at her. She laughed to see that — they looked tiny, like insects crawling across dirt.
‘And what do you say now?’ she cried, hoping her voice would carry over the continued bellowing from her enraged mount.
They said nothing. Perhaps they could not hear her, or perhaps they had nothing to say. Drutheira turned away from them, uncaring. She had the vindication she needed: the dragon had been broken again. It would take time to learn how to command it properly, to force it to fight again, to trust it to respond to her commands.
In the meantime, the ascent into the heavens continued to make her heart beat with elation. She yanked on the chain, forcing Bloodfang to climb higher. The mountains extended out below her, a rumpled landscape of broken granite and snow-streaked summits. The wind around her was as cold as Naggaroth, as pure as hate.
Unbreakable, she thought to herself, sensing the massive power undulating beneath her and already planning what she would do with it. Unstoppable.
Sevekai crouched low, feeling his boots sink into the soft earth. They had been badly worn by the months he had spent in the wilds — the leather had split along the soles, letting in water and irritating the sores that clustered on his feet.
He was still sick. His chest gave him spasms of pain every time he breathed and his left leg was badly swollen. Vision had only properly returned to one eye; the other wept constantly. He was famished, chilled, often delirious.
For all that, things had improved since his awakening at the base of the gorge. Water had been plentiful in that dank, sodden chasm, so his strength had returned in gradual slivers, eventually enabling him to drag himself down under the cover of the trees. Refusing to countenance even the possibility of dying, he had grimly pulled himself like a worm along the forest floor, sniffing out anything that looked remotely edible.
He had had some successes — a thicket of wild rythweed that he’d been able to chew on, followed by a collection of sour crab apples left rotting under wind-shaken boughs. He’d made some mistakes, too: an appealing clump of milk-white fungi bulging in the shadow of a rotting log had made his stomach turn and given him blinding headaches and two days of vomiting.
Still, with every tortured step he’d taken since then a little more of his native strength had returned. His ordeal had begun to feel almost like purification — his body had been driven down to a whipcord-lean frame of sinew. When he stooped to drink at a stream, he saw a sunken, cadaverous visage staring back at him from the water and only slowly recognised the reflection of his own face. Everything came to him vividly, as if the world had been scrubbed clean and somehow made more real.
When not travelling he slept for long periods, drained by even the most mundane tasks. When he slept his dreams were lurid. He saw Drutheira in them often, and imagined they were still together.
‘I am glad you survived, my love,’ she told him.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Far away,’ she said. ‘Keep moving. Keep walking.’
Sevekai did as his dreams commanded. Sometimes crawling, sometimes limping, he picked his way down from the gorge. The landscape of the Arluii never stopped being unforgiving: as soon as he negotiated one rock-filled defile he would be faced with a fresh wall of broken cliffs. Get around that, and he would have to plunge back into thick tangles of knotweed or negotiate treacherous, icy river-courses. A circlet of blunt peaks reared over him the whole time, vast and uncaring, cutting off the light of the sun and making his bones ache from the cold. He began to hate them.
Time passed in a strange way. He started to suspect he was sleeping for much longer than he ought to. Sometimes he would awaken and the world around him would look altered, as if too much time had passed, or sometimes not enough. Whenever he saw more clumps of mushrooms he ignored them; even his ever-present hunger did not make him desperate enough to risk more sickness.
Gradually, painfully, the severity of the mountains began to lessen. He staggered into a hinterland rising from a bare land of blasted grass and tumbled boulders. The wind moaned across them, snagging at the stone. He stumbled onwards, barely noticing which direction he was heading in, his feet falling in front of one another in a numb, automatic procession.
When he finally dropped to his knees he was faintly surprised to feel soft earth under his flesh, not rock. He lifted his head groggily and saw a hillside running away from him, fading eventually into a wide valley studded with scraggly vegetation. He twisted his neck to peer over his shoulder, back to where the outriders of the Arluii loomed up hugely against a darkening horizon.
Where am I? he asked himself, knowing that he had no means of answering.
He looked back down the slope. Ahead of him, a few hundred yards away, the scrub began to thicken into the tight foliage of Elthin Arvan’s forest country. The further he went, he knew, the thicker it would get. Elthin Arvan was covered in forest, a cloak of wizened and grasping branches.
Such landscape was all he knew of forests — few trees grew in Naggaroth, and he was too young to have witnessed the blessed glades of Avelorn. When Drutheira had scorned the ugliness of the east, Sevekai had seldom understood her; next to the icy wastes of home, Elthin Arvan was teeming with life. Something about the smell of it appealed to him — the mulchy, sedimentary tang that never left the air.
He curled his fingers into the earth, watching the black soil part between them.
I can barely remember Naggaroth. And if I could… He smiled grimly, making his swollen gums ache. Would I want to go back?
A sudden noise ripped him from his thoughts. He instantly adopted a defensive crouch, ignoring the protests from his tortured limbs. For a few moments, he couldn’t see what had made it.
He screwed his eyes tight, scanning the scrubland before him. His left hand reached down for the throwing dagger strapped to his boot. He hadn’t heard the sound of a single living thing since waking. The sensation was strangely unnerving. His heart raced; his hand trembled slightly.
Then it came again, from ahead of him and to the left, a hundred yards away, lodged amid the jumble of bushes and boulders — like a hoarse cough, but far lower and richer than a druchii’s voice.
Slowly, Sevekai crept towards the sound, keeping low, staring hard at the thicket of branches ahead. The lessons of his long training returned to him. His heart-rate slowed; his hands stilled.
Then he saw it: a stag, standing still amid a thicket of briars. It was young, its limbs slender and its flanks glossy. It looked directly at him, antlers half-lowered in challenge, nostrils flaring.
Sevekai froze. He could smell its musk and the scent made him salivate — it must have been weeks since he’d eaten more than berries. He clutched the hilt of his dagger tightly, preparing his muscles to throw.