“Her eyes are open.”
“I know, but look at them.” The sound of boots, one of them stepping closer. “She's not there.”
The humming was swelling and growing and it was everywhere in this misshapen world of shadow and mist and the unknown. The molecules of the air itself thrumming with it. Pulsing and turning. She opened her mouth and then closed it again and it felt like the sound was in her body and perhaps she was producing it. Her tongue numb with it.
“What did she say?”
“I don't know.”
Silence.
And then suddenly it all returned and everything was very clear and she felt herself sitting up. All about the sharp edges of the world, vibrant and brilliant and each edge glowing with some light of its own. In all the background that brooding darkness. The humming was gone and there was a dead silence and it felt like a lake of ice, the whole of the world about to shatter with the first plummeting stone and she felt if she looked up some burning horror would be falling on her to destroy that lake and everything would be shards with edges like razors and it would rip her apart, body and blood and all she was, cutting her to pieces. All of them shredded under this hailstorm, a torrent of wind, pelted with broken glass.
She could feel herself speaking and she could not hear the words. Her jaw working up and down and the cold stone floor below her, but she could not see the cave properly for the sheer brightness of it and everything else and she could not close her eyes.
And then there was a snapping sound like lightning falling at her feet, that cracking strike where the whole world was fire and so very bright and the acrid burning of the air and for just a second before it all went dark she could hear herself and she was screaming and she was saying over and over the ice, the ice, it's under the ice and it's so thin, it's under the ice.
Chapter Twenty-Two
He was bred for this and he felt in him the rising fire as he always did, walking across that plain toward the ruin of the city where the black dragon perched on the shattered tower, curled and serpentine and vile with those claws twisted into the stone, the eyes burning as it watched him. He felt it in his chest and in the sword before him and he gave himself to it.
There was nothing else but the dragon and not even himself. For a man worried about himself would die and the only one who could kill a dragon was the one who thought of nothing else but the slaughter. Who lived in this world of bone and blood and ash and carnage and who deep within himself loved it exactly as the dragon loved it. The two one and the same in that, their passion for this world of horror and death. For nothing else but the same depravity could rid this world of the creatures that haunted it, and if he must be so to end it, then he would.
And within that burning core of his body, of spine and heart, were he and the dragon both ripped open by the gods themselves, those gods would find no difference at all. When they met it would be as brothers to the same fire and the same destruction and they'd let all else fall as it may.
The dragon rose from the tower and he could hear its wings hammer the air and he did not look away from it as he began to run. Faster, his feet pounding the dirt and ash beneath his boots. He did not feel the sword in his hand for it was just the very metal of his body and his heartbeat as he ran was as even as if he slept. His breath measured in this smoke-tinged air.
It climbed before him and pivoted in the sky. The talons dark on the ends of the wings. Watching him as he came, one side of its face turned away. Holding there in the air as easily as it stood on the ground for it was a creature of every realm but the sea and moved effortlessly wherever it chose and then it threw its head back on that long neck and shrieked once, loud and ripping the air, and flicked its wings up to dive at him.
And then he saw her. In that brief moment as the beast turned in the air and came for him, he saw her standing impossibly small on the top of that tower. The very peak sheered off and smoke rising all around her and the drop endless below as she stood on what had once been the floor. Tall and straight and unafraid, her black hair curling behind her in the wind. Watching him as he ran and seeing these two sides of her fate rush toward each other to wage a war that would never end.
For one heartbeat, there was nothing. All the world holding still and silent. Air and smoke and the dragon itself.
And then it was between them, this shrieking beast falling toward him like a star torn from the heavens and teeth flashing in the firelight of the city it had killed. He blinked and he could see again the dead around him, on both sides. The bodies charred and mangled. Piled in the road and the yards. More no doubt beyond that tall stone wall before him as he neared the city, a wall made for men that could have withstood an army ten thousand strong and had meant nothing to this creature of the air. Archers and spearmen torn from the walls and thrown into screaming headlong flight, not knowing even as they fell whether they were whole or if their legs were gone to fuel this terror and the furnace within it that burned on blood.
It came down at him and he watched its face and thought for just a moment of how it had hung in the air. As it had pivoted and watched him before driving itself at him. And as it reared its head back to burn his body, to fuse him into the ground itself until there was nothing left, he threw himself to the side. Twisting, falling in the dirt and mud. The flashing of metal and a short stone wall. Pressing against it and the grit in his teeth.
And then the tide of fire flowed through, rolling and burning and the heat everywhere. Like a churning forest fire condensed into liquid, tearing into the ground and washing over the stones.
But it missed. The dragon thundered by, pulling its wings back to slow itself and then beating them hard, twice, as it rose and turned and screamed again that unquenchable anger into the air. To break perhaps the very sky.
Lying behind the wall that would never save him, Brack smiled. Pushing himself to his feet, pulling the bow and arrow from the body of the dead archer. This man not burned but missing his arm and the right half of his chest, the metal of his breastplate and his very flesh cut exactly the same, jagged edges and a deep red hollow inside.
He'd been bitten and thrown from the wall. His heart gone, turning in the air. Brack did not know if he'd lived long enough without that heart to feel the fall, the wind, the rushing ground. Or if he'd been a corpse already and merely raining into the dead below, his blood a red mist behind him.
But even in death he had held his bow, an arrow clenched in his fist. The next to be drawn, held as he'd been taught when he had to loose two as quickly as he could. Against this creature he'd not had the time, but the weapons had fallen with him, unbroken.
The bow simple and hewn with a taught string. Nothing like the power or reach of the crossbow that he should have carried but in his haste had not. But it would be enough against this half-blind creature that turned in darkness and fury, swinging around with only one burning eye left in its head. The other torn out generations ago on another field, ruptured and lanced as Brack had run forward to drive the sword into the open place under its wing.
Each time he'd seen it at a distance, the fire still burning in that socket, the illusion of life where nothing lived. The dragon a revenant, but incomplete. The scar about its neck where he'd cut the head off, the flesh crudely fused. But the eye, that ruined eye, still nothing but a gaping, smoking hole in the side of the beast's skull.
It circled again to come back at him but it took the turn wide and high, beating its wings against the air. Cutting far out around and calling once loud and like a hawk and then sweeping around behind the tower where Kayhi stood tall and straight and alive. He could see her face and her eyes wide and she was staring at him and only him, not following it as it circled, and he loved her more then than he ever had and he did not think of the dead but just of her. The last and youngest and the one he could save.