‘Are you hurt?’
Fern frowned, clearly dazed. Carnelian spat on his fingers and gently began to wipe Fern’s face clean. A metallic screaming echoing beneath the rumbling sky made Carnelian rise and look in the direction from where the sound had come. There the sartlar envelopment was thinning. Through the gaps he could see that, in the centre, unopposed by aquar, the sartlar had continued to advance to well behind his current position. Beyond them dragon towers rose as a crenellated rampart. Another blast sounded even as, beyond the sartlar, a violent dawn erupted that caused him to shield his eyes. Feeling the coruscation dim, he peered over his arms. Thick sooty smoke had risen like a fog. Flashes sliced through the writhing billows. He froze with horror. Molochite’s first line was advancing, vomiting fire. Oceanic surges of terror were rippling back through the sartlar mass as the creatures tried to escape the holocaust. Their numbers choked their flight. He thought it was their shrieks he was hearing, then he recognized the whine and scream of the fire jets as they scythed through their ranks.
As he watched, he saw their flank shivering, vibrating. With each moment, a tremor in the ground was growing stronger. He realized the creatures were fleeing in the only direction they could: towards the flanks. He and Fern were right in the path of their stampede.
That brought him back to life. He spun round. Fern was still lying prone upon the ground. Carnelian cast around for even a single aquar, but all those he could see were dead or dying. The sartlar rout was almost upon them. He stooped, thrusting an arm under Fern’s right shoulder and head, pulling with his other hand on Fern’s left. He managed to sit him up. Still frowning, Fern’s gaze strayed to meet Carnelian’s.
‘You’ve got to get up!’ Carnelian shouted in his face.
Fern’s brow creased deeper as if he did not understand but, clutching at Carnelian, he scrabbled up onto his feet, the tatters of pale leather falling from him. Carnelian dug his shoulder under Fern’s arm, pulling it like a yoke over his neck, then grabbed hold of the hand on the other side. They stood unsteadily for a moment. He could make out bestial shapes hobbling and stumbling towards them. He manoeuvred Fern round and began striding, half carrying, half dragging him. When the sartlar flood smacked into them, it almost lifted them off their feet. Saturated with the odour of fear, the stench of the sartlar further quickened Carnelian’s heart so that he became too frantic to think. Constantly buffeted, he threw everything he had into keeping his footing and steadying Fern. He was slow to become aware of a deeper thunder in the earth. The shrieking of the flame-pipes was now sliding in pitch like a blade whipping past his ear. Ahead the sartlar flood was mounding as it flowed over some obstruction. Then the flow grew turbid; heads were dropping suddenly, arms flung up were then sucked down. He tried desperately to slow down, but the rout swept him and Fern inexorably towards the pile-up.
Closer and closer they were driven towards that bank of threshing limbs. Then his feet were catching in the mesh of bodies. Bones cracked under his heels, flesh slipped under his toes, warm wetness mouthed his bruised feet. He was stumbling, lowering his head, ramming through hard and soft obstructions, screams and yells, elbows arcing into him like pick-axes, thuds and shudders as bodies crashed into him, his arm yanked nearly from its socket as he pulled Fern towards him and, together, on all fours they scrabbled up a writhing slope of struggling flesh. Torrid breath wafted over him, laced with naphtha, thick with the stench of cooking meat. Desperation gave him new strength, but they were hopelessly enmeshed in flailing limbs and maned heads. The whole mound of bodies was quaking. He was engulfed in the aura of the monster. It avalanched towards them, red up to its knees. A footfall like a meteor strike. Another sent a concussion into the earth that shunted Carnelian hard against the sartlar among whom he was embedded; his bones jellied, his brain rattled in his skull. He had an overwhelming impression the Horned God was lunging to crunch them in His maw.
Then an arch of sun erupted so that he was blind to everything save its coruscating arc. Vibrating incandescence forced through his slitted eyes. Its odour a pure, bitter promise of death. His mind, like crystal, resonated to its shrill, terrifying song. He clung to Fern, wanting that they should die together. Among the shrieks of those set alight, he could hear the crackle of their flesh crisping. A bonfire whoosh. The heat intensified and he screwed his eyes closed, waiting for the unbearable touch of fire on his naked skin. Then its scream changed pitch and he opened his eyes and saw it pass, dancing over the arms and legs above him, skin peeling back from chests and faces, hair igniting in quick bushes of flame, all suddenly lost among thick black blossoms. Tar smoke rolled hot over him, oozing an acrid burn into his lungs. Then he was drowning, choking, coughing so hard he could taste blood. Iron in his mouth; iron infusing into his being. Stretching his neck up until he was sure his throat would tear, straining for breathable air. Then a sweet draught, another, another, until he surfaced, eyes raw, blinking, feeling the thunder almost upon them, saw the dim lantern of the high cabin in which a Master sat and, beneath him, the swelling monstrous dragon. Hawsers pulling on its horns caused it to drop its head, so that it was the flat of its skull that rammed the sartlar pyre. Carnelian was aware of the corpses rising round him in a bow wave. He was rolled in tumbling bodies, heavy blows from heads like clubs, a mass sharp with knees and elbows, lubricated with blood, reeking from smouldering flesh and sinew.
Buried alive. Terror consumed him as he lay there, smothered. Bodies sheathed him. Writhing in gore and shit and piss. He was one worm among many. He managed to turn his head to find a pocket of air to suck at. Among the moaning, the rustle, the gasping, he found the sound of his own breath. He listened to it, slowed it, deepened it, fighting for calm. Fern’s warm body under his arm. He managed to work this up his chest. He squeezed his hand up to the side of Fern’s neck, his jaw. A finger pressed up over the angle of his lips. Moist breath against his skin. Carnelian let out a sob of relief. For a moment all he could think about was how to save Fern. Eventually he realized that, to help him, he must first free himself. Focusing on his body, he became aware his left hand was cooler than the rest of him. He lay for a moment gathering his strength, then pushed towards that coolness through the press, wriggling like a maggot in flesh. His arm came out into space, he worked his shoulder free, then his face. He gasped at the air as if he had swum up out of the deep. He used his free arm to lever himself out, sliding more skin out with each try. When his right arm came free, he shoved down with both hands and slid out in a rush. Then he was tumbling and hit the ground with a stunning thud.
He came to feeling the good earth cradling him. He rose, groaning at the ache that was his whole body. A ridge of limbs and bodies and lolling heads rose up before him that twitched and slid against itself. The ridge ended abruptly at a gaping wound as if it were a gum from which a tooth had been torn. On the other side of the gap, the ridge continued. The edges of the gap were ripped and bloodied, but its floor was raw with a dark paste squeezed from sartlar bodies by the dragon’s feet. Carnelian stared in horror and the horror stared back: eyes gaping at him from a mangled, branded sartlar face. A mane clotted with gore. The creature propped up on a crooked arm. Her breasts sagging gourds. Her body squeezing to gore and skin merging into the quagmire of blood.