“The last trance didn’t do him much good,” Weygrand pointed out. He had prepared a syringe of Blue, high-quality Ironship product provided by Alzar Lokaras, but seemed reluctant to push the needle into the cork seal at the base of the bottle. “Who’s to say the next one won’t kill him?”
“He’s already dying,” Lizanne said. “And we need him. Please proceed, Doctor.”
Weygrand nodded, swallowing a sigh as he depressed the plunger on the syringe, sending a cloud of amber fluid into the bottle. Lizanne waited until the product had faded, indicating it was all now running through Tinkerer’s veins, then gestured for Makario to play the tune once more. She unstoppered her own vial of Blue and kept careful watch on Tinkerer’s face as the melody filled the room. At first there was no reaction, then she saw the faint circular shadow on his closed lids as his eyes began to move—a clear signal of a dream state.
“This may take some time,” she said, raising the vial to her lips.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Makario promised, which made her smile just as the room disappeared and she found herself in darkness.
At first she thought she had been cast into a void, some blank vacuum left by Tinkerer’s vanished mind, but then she saw a burst of yellow flame directly ahead. It was bright enough to illuminate the uneven walls of the tunnel in which she stood, at the same time filling it with a roar of pain and rage of sufficient volume to force her to clamp her hands over her ears. The flame faded along with the roar, although this time the darkness wasn’t so absolute. The flames had evidently found a target judging by the flickering glow rising from a dark shape lying at what she recognised as the end of this tunnel.
Lizanne started forward then stopped as her foot came close to tripping over something. Looking down she saw the disordered and scaled features of a Spoiled, slackened in death. Alestine’s friend from the clearing, she realised, recognising the monochrome war-paint on the Spoiled’s face. Tree Speaker.
Another gout of flame snapped her gaze to the end of the tunnel, although the roar that accompanied it was far weaker now. As the flames faded she heard a ragged rasp of indrawn breath followed by a high-pitched rattle that told of a drake in immense pain. Remembering Alestine’s warning about the real risk of injury in this trance, she waited until the rattle had died away before starting forward again. Sinking to her haunches at the end of the tunnel, she crouched close to the wall and peered out at a huge cavern, the floor of which featured a tower of some kind.
Bone tower, she surmised, recalling Clay’s shared memories of the White’s lair and Arberus’s tale of his expeditions to the Interior. The tower rose from the centre of a scorched circle on the cavern floor. Slumped against its base was a White Drake, blood seeping in a thick stream from the large iron spike protruding from its rib-cage. It let out a plaintive moan as Lizanne stepped out from the tunnel, but seemed to show no sign of noticing her presence, tail coiling in twitches of diminishing intensity. Lizanne judged its size as perhaps half that of the beast Clay had found beneath the Coppersoles, which still made it larger than an adult Red and comparable to a youthful Black. The only light came from the flaming corpse lying a few yards within the scorched circle. The flames had consumed it so completely it was impossible to tell if it had been human or Spoiled.
Lizanne gave a start as a cascade of dust descended from above, along with a shower of displaced stones. Her gaze jerked upwards to the roof of the cavern, her ears detecting the sound of claws frantically skittering on stone.
“We thought there would only be one.”
Lizanne spun in alarm as Alestine stepped into the light, offering a grin of welcome that seemed impossibly broad, too many teeth gleaming in the glow of the fire. Burned, Lizanne realised as Alestine turned her gaze upward. Much of the flesh around her lower jaw and upper neck had been seared, along with her left ear. The impossible grin was in fact the result of half her lips having been burned away.
“Actually, there were two,” Alestine went on, speaking in a wet rasp. “A male and a female, and she was pregnant. I had hoped her wounds were fatal.” She pointed at a stream of blood visible in the continuing cascade of dust and stone. “That she would crawl away and die somewhere along with the egg growing in her womb. But in my heart I knew it could never be that simple.” Her gaze settled on the dying male White. “I had to know. Excuse me a moment.”
Alestine abruptly collapsed onto her hands and knees and began a slow painful crawl towards the dying White. It lay almost immobile now, chest rising and falling in ever-slower and more laboured breaths. But its eyes were still bright, Lizanne recognising the hate in its gaze as Alestine crawled near.
“One of my last inventions,” she said upon reaching the beast’s side, her voice free of the pain that made her arm tremble as she raised it to grip the iron spike protruding from the rib-cage. “Or rediscoveries to be fully accurate. The ancients had an alloy that could pierce anything if fashioned into a point and projected with sufficient force. I had enough Black for a killing thrust, but we only had one spear.”
She gripped the spike tighter and jerked it, provoking a convulsive thrash from the White. Blood steamed in the heat blossoming from its maw as it raised its head, neck coiling in a final attempt to roast its tormentor. Alestine raised herself up, grunting with the effort of twisting the spike then driving it deeper. The White’s last flames subsided into smoke, its head thudding onto the stone floor. The tail and the wings continued to twitch but the dull, empty gleam of its eyes told the tale clearly.
“Tree Speaker’s people carried the old stories,” Alestine said, slumping against the dead drake’s flank. “Treasured them throughout the ages. At first, I could scarcely believe what they told me. The White was real, and once it came close to burning this continent to ash, perhaps the rest of the world into the bargain. So great was its malice that it twisted the people here, made them into deformed two-legged versions of itself, a whole continent of willing slaves. But there were those who resisted, kept the kernel of humanity burning within themselves, and in time they fought back, with the help of the Blacks.”
“How?” Lizanne said, moving closer to crouch at the Artisan’s side. “How did they beat it?”
“The White could control all drakes but the Blacks. It could control humans it Spoiled, but not the Blood-blessed. It needed something to match them, match their abilities, but it never found it. Through battle and guile and courage the Blood-blessed freed enough Spoiled to ally with the Blacks and bring it down, though by the time the war was won their civilisation that once flourished here had fallen to rubble. The enslaved Spoiled, maddened by the loss of their god, hunted their free enemies mercilessly. After decades and centuries of persecution, only Tree Speaker and his tribe were left.”
Alestine cast a stricken, wet-eyed glance at the burning corpse lying close by. “Meeting me sealed their fate. When I told them I had deciphered writings telling of an ancient White sleeping in the caverns beneath this temple they had no choice but to follow me. Every warrior they sent died here, meaning their young will be defenceless. The other Spoiled will destroy them now. But what else could I do?” She turned to Lizanne, tears streaming from her eyes into her ruined flesh. “It couldn’t be allowed to rise again. They knew that.”