‘Is this the Land of the Dead?’ she rasped, with her thick sartlar voice.
Carnelian managed to free his gaze from her and saw around him a landscape ridged and rutted by corpses. Perhaps she was right. His finger remembered Fern’s warm, living breath. Soon he was scrambling up the slope, clasping at the fleshy flowers of hands and feet, treading on thighs and heads. He heard a moaning rising from his chest and knew it was fear he would not find Fern. He clambered, peering, into the nest of bodies, interspersing his moans with barks of ‘Fern, Fern.’
And then he saw a brown leg. He slid his fingers between its warm skin and the matted hair of a head that lay upon it like a boulder, past the ear to the stomach underneath, shoving his hand up then over, following the ridge of the rib cage until he had a good grip of him. Then, digging his feet in, he leaned back and tugged and slowly, one heave at a time, the body came out and then the face. Fern, eyes filled with wonder, as if he were being born. His brows contracted, his lips opened in a circle. ‘What…?’
Carnelian ignored the question, putting his strength into freeing him completely, then propping him up upon the slope.
‘What…?’ Fern said again, but Carnelian hardly heard him, his gaze snared by another in the heap. The small, bright eyes of a child. Its little hand reached out for him. He avoided the grip, caught the tiny wrist, slid his other hand in seeking an armpit, aware of nothing but the desperation in those eyes. He managed to work the morsel of a body free, but it was still attached by a thin arm. He reached in to prise its grip loose, but it shook its head in violent distress repeating a sound, a word, over and over: ‘Mya, mya…’ And feeling along that bony sliver, Carnelian found the tiny fist held fast in a larger one and soon he was working to free their owner and was struggling to loose her, when two strong brown arms came to help him: Fern was there beside him. Together they fought to free the child’s mother.
A remote detonation brought Carnelian’s head up. As the sound reverberated under the sky, he and Fern looked at each other. After freeing the sartlar mother, they had gone back for more. Even though she had been dead, there were many still alive among the corpses. Carnelian had become hardened to their fear of him and blind to their deformities. All he had been able to think of was that they were trapped as he had been. He had laboured ceaselessly, ignoring the pain in his muscles, finding in the work a way to avoid looking into that dark place deep inside in which lurked the conviction that all this carnage was, in great measure, his doing.
A harsh trumpet blast shocked him to stillness. His arms hung, his grip on a sartlar leg slackening. He bent his strength once more to pulling out the creature. He registered its wide-eyed horror as it saw him. He could feel the creature’s muscles knotting under his touch. Only when he knew the sartlar had no more need of his help did he finally gaze in the direction from which the trumpet call had come. His view was blocked by another ridge of corpses. He turned back to the slope and began to clamber up, trying not to tread on any moving limbs, his feet remembering the rootstairs of the Koppie.
When he reached the summit, he saw the dragon that had trampled them was, with the rest of Molochite’s first line, spreading a sickle of fire through the sartlar into the east. He followed the flickering round to the south, where it thinned with distance. All along its curve the blade of fire was going out. Only at its most southern extremity did it burn brightly. He squinted at the conflagration that seemed a star fallen to earth and realized it marked the intersection of the sickle curve with the Great South Road. He swung round. Molochite’s second line, still in position, though now exposed, was folding like jaws towards its centre from behind which rose the standard of the Iron House. He was certain it was from there the trumpet signal had come. As he watched, the two halves of the line of dragons continued to close as if seeking to devour some morsel. It was while searching for what this might be that he became aware of the lurid, churned landscape that lay between Molochite’s two, separated lines. The air was too hazy with smoke, the black ceiling of the sky too dark to allow him to see clearly, but fires burning all across the land hinted at how it had been transformed. He had the impression of ridges, of snaking curves as if a labyrinth had been ploughed into the earth. Then he knew that what he was seeing was a vast tract of land patterned by the mounds and ridges of the piled-up sartlar dead.
Fern came scrambling up the corpse logjam to join him. He cursed, stumbling, and they grabbed each other for support. Carnelian watched him gazing out as he had done and saw the unbelieving horror come into his face.
Fern raised a finger pointing. ‘Look there.’
Where the faint thread of the road disappeared into the maw of Molochite’s second line, there was a bristling movement.
Then a sun ignited in the heart of Molochite’s second line.
‘Osidian,’ Carnelian breathed, entranced.
Though the curving wall of Molochite’s dragons hid the fire, its glare was flung up stark into their towers. One at the centre flared into flames. Another joined it. Another two. They burned like torches as they veered away from each other. He and Fern watched, mesmerized, as more towers ignited, one after the other, outward from the centre as Osidian’s dragons incinerated Molochite’s line. Then the Black Face standard was lit up from below. The sun of Osidian’s attack had penetrated all the way to the Iron House. Its standard shivered like a thing alive, turned towards them, grimacing as it caught fire. Carnelian watched, stunned. The Iron House itself must be alight. Relief that Molochite would die was choked by a memory of the children he had with him. The standard fell like sputtering wax. As if this were a signal, the sky flickered, then released a booming roar. Instinct jerked Carnelian’s head back as the air above hissed. Then he had to close his eyes against the needle rain. A cool sheath slipped down over his skin. He gasped with delight as it scoured him clean of gore, then he was drinking the gift of the sky. He dropped his head, rubbed the water from his eyes and saw Fern gazing at him in wonder. For a moment they gaped at each other, then gave themselves over to laughter, that was not joy, but perhaps a release of terror.
The downpour diminished. The towers of Molochite’s second line had ignited like marsh lights as Osidian’s flame-pipes burned their way from its centre towards both flanks. Flying from the inferno, the monsters streaked the guttering torches of their towers through the gloom, but were soon enmeshed in the labyrinth of the sartlar dead. Here and there the burning towers lit the folds and creases of the corpse mounds. Sometimes one would detonate, its explosion dulled by the hissing rain. A flash, then gobbets of liquid fire would spill, strike the ridges with sparks, smear bright-backed smoulder over sinuous, crumbling contours, that would dull to pulsating scars, then nothing. Fallen dragons were left nestled among the dead as smoking boulders.
Though it was all happening some distance away, Carnelian and Fern eyed the path of Osidian’s fiery destruction as it burned nearer, glancing at each other, feeling exposed on their corpse hill. A dragon emerged from behind the last of Molochite’s line. It swept round the exposed flank belching flame. Its victim was soon alight and picking up speed as it fled with a ravening conflagration on its back. The ground quaked as the monster veered towards them. Carnelian felt Fern’s hand on his shoulder and put his own up to hold the arm there, for he judged they were safe. They watched as the monster lumbered south trailing flames and smoke. Its pursuer sailed after it, first one pipe then another snuffing out. The monsters disappeared into the labyrinth, then the pipes screeched back to life so that Carnelian and Fern could follow their progress by the smoke.