The Dragonswarm (10 page)

I looked out through the mountain and saw the Chaos blackness waiting for me there. No...not blackness. I'd called it emptiness before, the void in reality that marked a dragon's presence, but now that I had tasted of its power, I understood. I recognized it. The thing was darker than reality, stronger than eternity, the perfect endless authority, and everything else went pale around it.

There were more like it behind me—a great and terrible swarm of them—but this one was mine. I grinned a cruel snarl and sprinted through a mountainside as though it were open air. I planted one foot inside the mountain, and the next on nothing, and ran on over both of them like crossing the village green.

A cliff fell away beneath me, a hundred paces down to a stony dell, and beyond that a sun-seared mountain range stretched out toward the sea. But there in the air before me was the black dragon Vechernyvetr. I could feel him in my mind, could feel the bond we'd made between us, and the night-black flood of power he was pouring into me, through me, as I took another step on empty nothing and flung myself into a leap over the great depth to land right at the base of his neck.

"
You came for me!"
I screamed in my mind, even as the dragon beat its huge wings and hurtled itself away and down. "
You've saved my life again. That monster—
"

Pazyarev
, the dragon said, bitter in the back of my head.
He is powerful. And cruel.

"
Not just one. He has an army.
" I twisted in place, clinging tightly to the dragon's neck while I tried to orient myself. I found the narrow cave high on the mountainside a moment before a pair of dark green dragons shot through on the wing. They turned opposite directions, moving fast, and it took only a moment before one of them caught sight of us.

Instead of giving chase, it banked away, but a moment later a roar like an earthquake shook the mountain beneath me. Then the cave mouth erupted, spewing dragons like hornets from a hive. The whole great swarm came out, speeding toward us like arrows.

"
An army
," I thought again, watching in awe as they flew in something resembling a military formation. Vechernyvetr beat his huge wings, neck outstretched and flashing over the earth faster than any racehorse, but the monster's swarm streamed after us. "
They obey it. All of them."

No
, Vechernyvetr said.
They
are
him. Pazyarev is an elder legend, one of the strongest among dragons. He has a swarm of nearly two thousand bodies.

I barely listened. My attention was on the creatures trailing us. Some of them were larger than Vechernyvetr. Some of them were catching up. I should have been afraid, but I could still feel the fire of the dragon's power blazing through me, and it burned fear for fuel. Instead of worry I felt anger and exhilaration. I focused on the dragon closest on our heels, the smallish green that had first spotted us, trailing maybe a quarter mile behind us and closing fast.

My lips peeled back. I let go of Vechernyvetr's neck with one hand and pointed it toward the green. I remembered a stone I had thrown in the Teelevon. I had no cobblestones here, but I did not need one. The dragon power was raw reality. I narrowed my eyes and looked out through the wizard's sight.

I could not hurt them with a wizard's magic. Magic was man's construct, and it drowned against the depthless infinity of a dragon's nature. But now I had that nature in my hands. I tapped into the rush of power, stretched out my will, and summoned a bolt of pure earth energy in the air between us. I saw the dragon's surprise, saw it swerve in shock, falter mid-flight, but it was coming on fast and it took no more than a thought for me to send my bolt hurling toward it.

I shaped it as it flew. A shapeless ball stretched into a spear-tipped blade that plunged into the beast just left of its breastbone and tore out the back, black with blood. The monster had half a mile to fall, but my attention was already roving, searching for another. I saw the gold beast that had watched me so closely, and I set my jaw.

"
Go slower, Vechernyvetr. I will answer for them.
"

I admire your hunger
, he answered.
But you are a fool. You slew one. Pazyarev will throw a thousand against us and suffer us a fate far worse than death
.

"
Let him try
," I growled. "
He has never seen anything like me before.
" My spear trailed along behind us half a mile back. I had trouble controlling it any farther away than that, and the dragons seemed to know it. The fastest of them hung just far enough back that I couldn't touch them.

I grinned. With a thought I broke the paces-long spear into half a dozen splinters. They drifted apart into a loose line at the full extent of my reach. I watched the chasing dragons as they shifted and bobbed, trying to keep wary eyes on Vechernyvetr and on the strange structures hovering so much closer to them.

I raised the spearheads up, all at once, maybe a pace higher than the formation of dragon. I frowned, weighing them in my mind, then went another pace higher still. Then I gave them a shove back, as far as I could reach, and I released my will.

In an instant, six sorcerous constructs became simply six sharp-edged stones hanging half a mile above the earth. Momentum and affinity flung them like catapult shots into the formation of dragons, and I imagined the sick wet
thud
s as four of the six struck home. Four adult dragons were ripped from the air, flapping and spinning and falling away toward the surf.

I reached for the power again, manifesting earth in bolts like arrows of solid steel. I made a score of them at once and flung them as I had the stones, and though I saw no dragon fall, I heard the roars of anger and pain as my weapons struck home. I threw another volley and another volley, and on the third I saw a red plunge to earth. Another had to break away and curl back toward the lair. I couldn't fell the yellow, though. My eyes fixed hard on that one, and I tried another volley, another, but it always dodged away.

"
Go back!
" I screamed. He tried to object, but I ignored him. "
I am a match for them all. Pazyarev has a debt to pay.
" I forgot the little arrows and instead fashioned myself a blade. I had done something like this before, calling up dusty earth and shaping it by the strength of my will, but now I made it of nothing but power. It was blacker than obsidian, harder than steel and as light as the wind within my fingers. I made another, too, a perfect match, and released the dragon's neck to hold a sword in each hand. "
I will carve them from the sky
."

You will burn yourself to ash,
Vechernyvetr said.
It is good to thirst for blood, but you must know when and where to strike
.

"Here and now
," I said. The swords felt hungry in my hands, perfect weapons for this fight, and I could already imagine the taste of the dragons' blood on the air. "
In violence and blood. Take me back to them.
"

For a moment Vechernyvetr said nothing. He did not slow. If anything, he strained harder beneath me. Then he banked right, flashing through a wide, low pass, and broke out over the arid plains of the Southern Ardain. I saw the world of men spread out below me, a swarm of dragons hard on my heels, and I imagined the glory of slaughtering such a force where men might actually see.

I rose up, balancing on my toes, and bent my knees. The cloud of Pazyarev's dragons was still nearly half a mile behind us, but I felt an incredible urge to jump, to throw myself at them, and somehow the whole distance between us seemed trivial. So, too, the hard earth far below. I shifted in place, trying to find the right footing, and Vechernyvetr screamed in my head,
What are you intending
?

"
If you will not take me to them, I will go without you
."

You do not have the strength. You will fall. One way or another, you will fall.

I laughed into the rushing wind. "
What have I to fear from earth or wind? I am no more concerned with the fall than with the nightmare monsters on our heels. In all the world, I want only to rend their hides and spill their blood
."

Still so small
, he said.
And still so stupid. You're weak as a worm
.

I wanted to laugh again, but I felt him reach through my mind again as he'd done before. My fingers opened and I watched the perfect Chaos blades fall away through the empty air. My body twisted in place. My knees bent, and I was distantly aware that they screamed in agony. That they had no strength left.

The dragon drove me forward, back to the base of its neck, and flung my arms up to grip his scales tight. There, too, I noticed the protesting muscles in my shoulders. My head was throbbing. My body ached. I could no more
feel
the pain than I had the weight of the mountain crushing me. The searing fire of the dragon's power obliterated it, but in that moment I became aware of it. The dragon caused me to hook my knees beneath the joints of his wings, until I was stretched out as securely as I could have been anywhere on his back, and then he said,
You will not like this
.

Even drunk on the dragon's power, I had felt enough in the last few moments to guess what was coming. I had no time to brace myself, though. I could not have braced myself against this. In an instant, between one beat of those great wings and the next, the power went away.

The fire died, and with it went my strength. My pain returned. My weariness and weakness and everything that had been done to me. I still felt the thirst for blood, the animal fury calling me to lash out at the ones that had hurt me, but without the buffeting buffer of the dragon's power, I saw it for the frantic and senseless thing it was.

Pain. I had felt the pain right away, but it took time for my mind to process it. It hit me again, some seconds later, like a wave crashing down and crashing down and crashing down. I kept expecting it to end, and it kept coming harder. It crushed my breastbone to my spine. It twisted at the bones of my arms and legs. It thrummed inside my skull and crackled along my skin. I gasped. I grunted. And then I cried. I screamed myself breathless in the rushing wind, and still the pain grew harder and harder and harder.

And then I slipped. Between one moment and the next, I lost my grip. I slipped down the dragon's back and spun sideways for a moment before slamming my head hard against the long, powerful arm supporting the dragon's left wing. Lights flashed behind my eyes, and I washed up and down and head over heels. I tumbled along the dragon's body as though I were suspended in breakers, churning with the current. I dropped a short distance then cracked my right side hard against a talon. It stopped me for a moment, and then I fell into open air.

I heard the dragon shouting curses in my head. I felt the grinding pain and wrenching stop as its talons closed hard around me. I felt a blast of flame that singed my whole side. Then destruction and darkness and exhaustion buried me, and words I could not quite hear chased me to my grave.

I woke again on hard, cold stone, the taste of sulfur and stale water in the air. Darkness, too, stained gray by the spill of sunlight through a gap in a distant wall. I felt a moment's crushing despair, remembering the dream of my escape. I tried to heave myself to my feet, to go for a drink, but my muscles screamed protest, and I didn't make it off the ground.

Frail human body
, a voice boomed in my mind. I felt its sneering contempt...and still I breathed a happy sigh of relief.

"
Vechernyvetr
," I thought. "
You are real.
"

More real than you
. He landed on the floor before me, resolving like a darker shadow from the gray light.
Two nights beneath the silver moon and still you groan like a child
.

"
Our bodies do not heal like yours
," I thought. I tried to sit up, to meet his eyes, but I could not even do that. I ached all over.

Blistering red light tinted the darkness as fire began to roil in the back of the dragon's maw. He made a sound, too, an avalanche rumble like the growl of an angry dog.

Be still and let your body mend
, he snapped.
Day and night you sear within my mind like an unhealing wound
.

"
You feel my pain
?" I asked. And then the things he'd said before struck home. "
Two moons? I've been here days? And all the dragons hunting us
—"

Are gone
, he said. I felt his weary calm within my mind, and it eclipsed my sudden fear.
So many fell, they would not chase me past the edge of Pazyarev's territory
.

"Pazyarev," I said, tasting the name. And then I remembered our mad flight, soaring miles over the earth, past trackless mountains and well out over the southern plains. I frowned. "
Just...where is his territory
?"

The dragon knew no names of human cities, nor the roads or river names that defined our borders, but he showed me more clearly than any words would have. He drew an image within my mind, a manufactured memory more detailed than any map.

From high above and far away, I saw the green lands around Tirah in the heart of the fertile Ardain. I saw the hair-thin line of the river Teel and the lands around Isabelle's home. I saw the dusty fields to the south and the impassable mountains to the west, towering over the stormy sea. I saw the sheltered cove beneath the city of Whitefalls that no army could ever take. I saw a third of the continent, hundreds and hundreds of miles square. I waited for him to move the image closer, to define Pazyarev's territory within it.

Instead, he said,
Here. These lands belong to him. We are outside his domain now, in a territory all my own
. The image swam in my mind, spinning dizzily, and showed me the smaller range of worn-down mountains that sprawled along the barren eastern coast. Now he moved in, narrowing the field of view to one mountainside of rough rockfalls and scrawny trees. I saw perhaps two miles square, of little more than dry, cracked stone, and felt the vast imbalance between Vechernyvetr and the massive broodlord.