The Copper Promise (56 page)

But all it would take was one mistake and Wydrin would be torn to pieces, her guts scattered to the sky.

Frith leaned back on the griffin, ignoring the eye-watering drop below, and threw a wave of force behind him, a crackling curtain of violet light. It hit the dragon square in the face, and there was another of those ear-splitting roars.

Wydrin laughed again, delighting in Y’Ruen’s rage. But he could feel the dragon looking at him now, a huge pressure on the back of his head. He could feel her mind pushing at his; questing, curious.

I have her attention
, he thought, his mouth dry as dust.
She sees a mage. And the last mages she saw were the ones who sealed her in the Citadel.

Damn.

It was a frantic flight to Relios.

The sky was filled with the fury of the dragon, the griffins soaring and dipping and sometimes just plain scrambling out of the way. More than once Frith felt the heat of the fire so close that the ends of his hair started to crisp and every now and then he would have to pat down the griffin as the occasional feather caught fire. He did his best to keep Wydrin in the corner of his eye, throwing back sheets of ice and lightning when he could so that the dragon was always torn between two targets.

Perhaps it was the god’s curiosity that saved them, or perhaps she was bored of chasing distant targets on the ground. Eventually the landscape beneath them changed from the cool grasses of Ynnsmouth to the reddish clay soil of Relios, and they began to pass over signs that the dragon had already been this way; streaks of soot that had once been villages, and fields of mud churned under the feet of the brood army.

When he saw the ruins of Gostarae in the distance, Frith felt a small tremor of relief in his stomach. Under the mess of old grey stones there was a network of tunnels that, if you were looking down on them from above, would spell the word for Stillness. According to the information O’rin had left them, anyway.

‘This is it,’ he shouted across to Wydrin. She waved in acknowledgement before diving to one side to avoid a lunge from the dragon.

The ruins were underneath them. The Edenier churned within Frith’s chest, as though sensing what was about to happen. Y’Ruen flew on, almost passing completely over the stones below, but Wydrin spiralled back and up, flying up towards the clouds in a complicated corkscrew, and the dragon followed.
Now or never, then.

Frith summoned the word for Stillness in his mind, picturing it as clearly as he could. The corresponding binding on his right hand grew cold, and then colder, so cold it was painful. A ribbon of light shot from the end of his fingers, bright as lightning, and rippled down to the ground, faster than his eyes could follow. There was a tugging in his stomach, and his arms and legs grew numb as though the spell were draining all his strength.
It could be, for all I know,
thought Frith, staring down at the jumbled ruins. Above him Wydrin and the dragon hung suspended in the air, and …

‘Nothing’s happening!’ he yelled, knowing full well Wydrin couldn’t hear him. ‘Nothing …’

… Deep within the red earth, the faces carved into the walls of the tunnels were licked with a pale and ghostly light, silvery and god-touched. One by one their eyes and mouths opened, and a shout issued forth …

Frith saw the word briefly, inscribed in light below him as clearly as it had been in his mind, and then shards of light so bright that they were almost solid leapt up into sky, shooting past them like pillars of impossible marble. The griffin screamed, high and panicked, and Frith had to hold on tight to avoid being pitched from its back. He wrenched his head up, half blind but needing to see, and saw the shards of light pass up and through the dragon, appearing to illuminate the monster from within. For the barest second he thought he could see its bones, twined with violet lightning, and there was a roar so loud it was like the world crying out in furious pain.

And then the light was gone.

Wydrin sped towards him as, above them, the dragon writhed like a nest of snakes.

‘Better get ready to fly, Frith,’ she said, blinking furiously. ‘I think we’ve really pissed it off now.’

The air was thick with misted blood. The brood army, the Order, the Cursed Company; all were little more than churning shadows amongst the chaos.

Under the helm Sebastian blinked sweat away from his eyes. He could taste salt on his lips, and it seemed that every muscle sang with energy. The battle lust he’d felt in the demon’s ruins was with him again. How much of it was Bezcavar’s influence he couldn’t tell, but it hardly mattered. He moved through the crowd of soldiers with relentless efficiency, and his sword left a trail of green blood in its wake.

He saw the battle in shattered moments, fire-vivid and fever-bright. One of Y’Ruen’s children rose up before him with a sword in each hand, her teeth bared. He traced where his blade would go in his mind – up and across the chest, where part of her armour had come away – and then his sword seemed to move of its own accord. Blood splattered his face and there was more salt on his lips.

The Cursed Company were an eerie patch of silence amongst the screaming and shouting. Sebastian caught glimpses of them, never far from him, moving with a precision and a relentlessness he thought oddly familiar until he recognised it as his own. They were wraiths of ash and bone, built in his image. Their ashen swords hacked and crushed and disembowelled relentlessly, cutting a great swath through the brood army by themselves.

Soon Sebastian found he was wading through a soup of green and red blood, thick with entrails and other body parts, and yet still he was not tired.

I could kill for ever.

‘Glorious, isn’t it?’

Ip appeared next to him, or something that looked like Ip, at least. She wore a simple white shift that came down to her ankles, impossibly clean against the carnage.

Sebastian paused, suddenly in the midst of a quiet spot in the battlefield. He suspected that was Bezcavar’s doing.

‘What do you want?’ He did not want quiet, or to stop.

‘Just surveying my glory.’ Ip raised her hands and spun in a slow circle. ‘All of this pain, death, fear. All in my name. I haven’t had a day this good in centuries.’

Sebastian lowered his sword slowly. How long had he been fighting? The smoke from the fires made everything dark and unknowable. How many had he killed? Now that he’d stopped he could feel the ache in his head again.

‘Did they lead the dragon away? Is she gone?’

Ip shrugged as though this were the least interesting question she’d ever heard.

‘Is that important? The joy is here, after all.’

‘Of course it’s important.’ Sebastian forced his fingers up under the helm, trying to wipe the sweat away from his eyes. It was important. He was just finding it difficult to remember why. ‘Wydrin’s up there, she’s in danger—’

‘And you’re down here. This is where your job is.’

Ip grinned and vanished as the battle roared back into life around him. Sebastian raised his sword and stepped back into the fray.

It was a relief.

The worst of the pain, Wydrin noted, was in her fingers. She was well used to gripping a sword for long periods of time, but gripping it and swinging it and taking care not to drop it at any point or you would never bloody see it again – that took rather more effort. Second to that pain was the dull ache in her knees and thighs, strained with holding on to the griffin. Let go of that at any point, and you’d never see anything a-bloody-gain.

The Yellow Sea glittered below them and she could almost make out their reflections in the water; her griffin, ducking and swerving and swooping, Frith on his, occasionally lit with magical explosions, and the dragon, coming on behind them with its neck stretched out like a dog with a scent. It was, she suspected, the sort of image you couldn’t look at for too long without going a little mad, so she ripped her eyes away from it and pulled the griffin up and up just in time to avoid another lance of fire. The heat from it licked at the bottom of her boots, making her feet uncomfortably hot.

‘That was an admirable try!’ she shouted into the wind. ‘But you have to get up earlier than that to catch the Copper Cat.’

Frith glanced up at her, his white hair flapping like a flag in a storm.

‘Litvania coming up!’

It was true. A great dark mass was speeding towards them now, and already she could see the trees crowded on the coast.

‘Let’s get this bitch where she needs to be.’

The dragon roared again, and without Wydrin having to tell it to, the griffin banked sharply to the right, so fast her stomach surged up under her throat. She looked out along the sharp point of its tapered wing and saw that they had fallen back alongside Y’Ruen, the great vast bulk of her stomach so close that she could have reached out and touched it if she wanted. She grinned. This griffin was her kind of animal.

‘Under we go!’

Holding her sword directly above her head, she nudged the griffin and they swept under the dragon’s belly, scoring a fine line across the creature’s shining scales. An answering roar and Y’Ruen twisted in the air, jaws snapping, but they were already speeding ahead once more. She caught up with Frith, who was throwing orange balls of fire over his shoulder towards the beast.

‘Do you have to do that?’ he shouted. ‘It’s annoyed enough as it is.’

‘We want to keep her interested don’t we?’

‘I suspect we’ve done that.’ Frith kept looking back. ‘I think it’s the Edenier that’s drawing her on now – she wants to know where it’s coming from.’

‘Either way, we’re here.’ Wydrin pointed. The sea had given away to the forests of the Blackwood, and in the distance there was a walled town. Frith had the maps memorised, but she recognised Pinehold well enough. She’d helped to blow half of it up, after all. ‘Get ready.’

Dreyda left the temple at a run, her arms still full of the ceremonial incense papers she intended to burn that evening. The roar had shaken the very stones of the building, causing a fine layer of dust to drift down from the ceiling onto the pews and the townspeople sitting there.

Sometimes in Relios the earth itself would shake, causing huge cracks in the ground and a flurry of newly devoted worshippers to the temples, but she had never heard of such a thing happening in Litvania. Besides which, this roar sounded as though it were coming from the
sky
.

She looked up, squinting into the sunshine, dimly aware of other people doing the same. At first all she saw were birds, lots and lots of them flying madly in all directions as though they didn’t know where to get to first, and then something huge flew into view, casting an enormous shadow over the town.

Dreyda dropped the papers, and they danced around her feet in the sudden wind caused by the dragon’s wings. She felt very small, very small indeed, and she remembered the man who had been looking for Sebastian. The man with blond hair and grey skin, and what had he said to her? Relios is burning, and all the tales are true.

‘What is it?’ Alice was clutching at her elbow. ‘What is it?’

‘You can see what it bloody well is,’ she snapped, wrenching her arm out of the younger woman’s grasp. ‘Get everyone back inside before we’re all—’

The ground shook again, and this time it was so violent that Dreyda struggled to stay upright.

‘Get inside! Everyone, go back inside your houses!’

Light leapt up from the cobbles beneath her feet, light so bright that it was like suddenly being struck blind. Dreyda felt her arms rising towards the sky of their own accord, as though she were being dragged up with the beams.
Time,
she thought,
time passing and moving us forever onward, like a river you can never swim against or a tide that will always crush you against the shore …

The light vanished. Dreyda fell to the ground, scraping her knees painfully against the cobbles. The incense papers were all burning, sending up slim swirls of smoke that smelled of cinnamon and scorpion oil.

‘By all the gods …’

The dragon flew off to the North, its long tail flicking. Dreyda watched it go with the smell of smoke in her nostrils, muttering the words for Peace and Protection, over and over.

Frith slumped forward on the griffin, pitching dangerously over to one side.

‘Woah! Stay with me now, princeling!’

Urging her own mount as close as she dared, Wydrin reached across and gave Frith’s arm a shake. The dragon was reeling too, curling in on itself like a snake poked with a stick, and she estimated that they had no more than a few seconds of safety before it was back on their heels. She shook Frith again, and he groaned, his eyelids flickering.

‘Get offa me …’

‘Frith, wake up! We have to get to the Horns.’

He sat up straighter. Wydrin was relieved to see some sense starting to return to his face.

‘It worked?’

‘It’s definitely doing something.’ There was a pressure in the air that wasn’t there before, some sort of gathering force pushing down on her eardrums and making it difficult to focus. The sky was full of magic.

‘Just twice more,’ said Frith. It sounded as though he were trying to convince himself as much as her. ‘Two more words to go and then I can rest.’

She squeezed his shoulder, fixing his grey eyes with her own.

‘We can do it.’

They flew on, and with a roar and a blast of flame, the dragon followed.

Things started to go wrong when he realised he recognised their faces.

Sebastian knocked another blade out of his path and buried his sword in the belly of the brood soldier in front of him. She vomited blood over his arm and looked up, her forehead creased into an expression of confusion and pain, and her eyes widened slightly. She started to say something, but Sebastian dragged his sword free again and blood gushed from the wound in a flood that soaked his boots. Sebastian frowned. What could she have been trying to say? And more importantly, why did he feel like he knew her?

The battle raged on around him. There were piles of bodies from both sides now, and half the fight was getting to the enemy to kill them. The knights that were left were starting to tire, and wherever he looked he saw faces strained with exhaustion and fear. How much longer could this go on for? Would he be left to defeat the brood army alone?