Master of Dragons Read online

  In the elder ages when the world was young, elves and dwarfs lived in peace and prosperity. Dwarfs are great craftsmen, lords of the under deeps, artificers beyond compare. Elves are peerless mages, masters of the dragons, creatures of the sky and air. During the time of High King Snorri Whitebeard and Prince Malekith, these two great races were at the pinnacle of their strength. But such power and dominion could not last.Fell forces now gather against elves and dwarfs. Malekith, embittered by his maiming in the Flame of Asuryan, seeks to destroy them both but still darker powers are also at work. Already strained, disharmony sours relations between them until only enmity remains. Treachery is inevitable, a terrible act that can only result in one outcome... War.

  The dwarf High King Gotrek Starbreaker marshals his throngs of warriors from all the holds of the Karaz Ankor, whilst the elves, under the vainglorious and arrogant Caledor II, gather their glittering hosts and fill the skies with dragons.

  Mastery of the Old World is at stake, a grudge in the making that will last for millennia. Neither side will give up until the other is destroyed utterly. For in the War of Vengeance, victory will be measured only in blood.

  Chapter One

  Arian saw the three black, wedge-shaped sails on the eastern horizon and his heart went cold. They emerged out of nowhere, taut triangles of sable in the dawn sun-glare, moving fast against a running swell.

  ‘Full sail!’ he shouted.

  The crew were already complying. Sailors hauled to unfurl the buffeting mass of white sailcloth. The fabric filled out, catching the brisk easterly, making the ship jerk forwards in the water and cutting a line of foam through the waves.

  The Ithaniel was not a warship; she was a light cutter, a dispatch-runner, a jack-of-all-trades employed by Lord Riannon to pass missives and personnel between the hawkships of the main fleet. She was fast, but not the fastest. She carried two quarrel repeaters – one fore, one aft – and a complement of thirty spearmen amidships.

  None of that would make much of a difference, for Arian had seen the look of the sails coming after him. He knew the manner of ships they belonged to, and why they ran fast through the contested northern ocean.

  ‘How long have we got?’ asked Caelon, the master’s wind-bitten face screwed up against the glare.

  ‘We can beat west,’ said Arian, ‘hard as Khaine’s blades. Might stumble into one of Riannon’s patrols.’

  Caelon didn’t look convinced. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Move the bow-fixed repeater aft. We’ll loose a few as they close. Might even take one out.’

  ‘It will be done.’

  ‘They’ll come up fast,’ warned Arian. ‘I’ve seen this before. We’ll need to jig around like a hare or they’ll eat the wind from our sails before noon.’

  Caelon ran a nervous hand through his long brown hair. He was from Chrace, a veteran of many battles and didn’t quail easily, but the odds did not favour them and he knew it. ‘And the cargo?’

  Arian smiled coldly. ‘The cargo. Perhaps we’d better let him know. If he’s awake, that is.’

  Caradryel of the House of Reveniol was a light sleeper, easily disturbed by the sway and creak of a sea-going vessel. He habitually used the morning hours to recover his equilibrium; unconsciousness, as he was fond of remarking to himself and others, was his natural and optimal state. Involuntary assignment to Riannon’s war-staff had not succeeded in altering the habits of a short lifetime, something he was perfectly aware did not endear him to the duty-minded crew.

  For all that, by the time the captain had made his way down to his cramped cabin, Caradryel was awake to receive him. The prince pushed himself upright, smoothing silk sheets over his knees. His pale blond hair fell about his shoulders, stiff from salt and sun and badly in need of beeswax and lustre-oils.

  The barbarism of war, he reflected sadly.

  Arian had to duck as he entered.

  ‘Bad news, lord,’ he said, glancing sidelong at the crumpled sheets with poorly hidden disapproval.

  ‘I heard the commotion,’ said Caradryel. ‘The cause?’

  ‘Three druchii raiders, closing fast. We’re no match for them, I’m afraid, and they have the weather on us.’

  ‘Regrettable. How long have we got?’

  ‘A few hours. We’re bearing hard west, but unless Mathlann conjures something they’ll overhaul us before sunset.’

  Caradryel drew in a long breath. He would have to put in an appearance on deck, which was an irritant. ‘Thank you for informing me,’ he said. ‘Given the circumstances, I think the best we can do is put up a creditable fight. Do you think we’ll take one down with us?’

  ‘I’ve mounted the repeaters aft,’ said Arian. ‘If they fail to spot them we might get a scalp.’

  ‘Very good. I’d have done the same. And I assume we’re now bearing full sail?’

  Caradryel enjoyed seeing the look of exasperation on Arian’s face when he enquired about nautical matters. Both of them knew that his experience of commanding a ship of any kind was somewhere less than negligible, though the game of pretending otherwise amused Caradryel almost as much as it annoyed Arian.

  ‘Of course,’ said Arian stiffly. ‘We have archers in the high-top and spearmen arming in the prows. If you have any further recommendations, though, do be sure to pass them on.’

  Caradryel bowed. ‘I certainly will. Now, if you will give me just a few moments I will join you on deck. It may take me a while to choose a robe.’

  Arian stayed where he was. ‘You realise, lord, how serious this is?’

  Caradryel gave him a steady look. ‘I do indeed.’

  ‘I cannot see a way out of this. The druchii are not merciful captors. You may wish to make… preparations.’

  Caradryel smiled. ‘Captain, you deserve better than ferrying princelings between the fleets. Calm yourself – I have no intention of dying under traitors’ blades.’

  Arian looked unsure how to reply. Caradryel maintained the smile – the polished, courtly smile that had carried him smoothly through a hundred encounters and came as easily to him as sleeping.

  ‘For they are such grotesque blades, are they not?’ Caradryel added. ‘No taste, our fallen kin. No taste at all.’

  The hours did not pass quickly. The three dark-sailed hunters steadily hauled the gap closed, sailing with reckless skill through a wind-chopped sea. Arian drove the Ithaniel as hard as he had promised to, straining the rigging and almost losing the mainsail twice. The crew worked as hard as he did, for they all knew the odds; only at the very end would they take up bow, blade or spear, ready to fight to the last, knowing that captivity would be far worse than a clean death in combat.

  Arian leaned over the railing of the ship’s sloping quarterdeck, watching the foam-edged wake zigzag away towards the enemy. On either side of him stood two big repeater crossbows, each one wound tight with iron-tipped bolts. The shafts were huge – as thick as his thigh and longer than he was tall.

  By then he could make out the detail on the lead druchii corsair: a rune of Khaine on a satin-black ground, elaborate and gauche. It looked like a spatter of blood on dark glass, glistening wetly in the strong sun.

  Like most of those now serving in the Phoenix King’s navy, Arian was not old enough to remember the time before the Sundering. Horror and grief had thinned the ranks of those who had been there at the time, eight hundred years ago during the dark days when his race had cracked itself apart. Arian could, though, remember the subsequent years of horrific bloodshed. He could remember believing, long ago, that a reconciliation would somehow be found.

  Now he entertained no such dreams. He knew, a
s all on Ulthuan surely knew, that war would now be with them for as long as any could foresee. Most of the druchii who crewed the corsair ships would not have been born in Ulthuan and would have only a sketchy knowledge of their ancient home. Most of the crew he commanded had never known a world in which the druchii were not mortal enemies from a frozen land across the oceans. The two sundered kinfolks now looked at one another and saw nothing more than an enemy, as alien now as the greenskin had always been.

  How far the sons of Aenarion had fallen.

  ‘They sail like maniacs,’ observed Caradryel.

  Arian hadn’t heard him approach. He remained poised on the railing, eyes fixed out to sea. ‘They know what they’re doing.’

  ‘If you say so. Why not explain it to me?’

  Arian pointed out the lead vessel. It was still too far out for a bolt-shot, but every buck of its prow brought it closer. ‘That’s the one they want to close first. Caelon’s spied grapples in the bow and it’s stuffed with troops. I’d guess fifty, maybe more.’

  ‘And the two others?’

  ‘They’ll eat our wind,’ said Arian grimly. ‘They’ll swing out as they get closer, cutting our sails flat. When we’re hooked by the lead corsair they’ll close back for the kill.’

  ‘I see. Anything you can do about that?’

  Arian had to hand it to the prince: his tone was one of amiable curiosity, unmarked by the slightest tremor of fear. He might have been discussing the merits of the wine from his father’s vineyards. ‘Caelon knows this ship better than his own wife,’ said Arian. ‘We’ll slip the trap for as long as we can, praying the wind drops or we spy ships of the fleet.’

  ‘And what, do you suppose, are the chances of that?’

  ‘I would not lay money on it.’

  ‘Then we are hoping for the miraculous.’

  ‘You could say that.’

  Caradryel laughed. It was a light, unaffected sound, and it made several of the deck-hands turn from their labours. ‘I should not fret, captain,’ he said. ‘The miraculous has a way of following me. Always has. Should you wish to, you might give thanks to the gods for having me amongst your crew this day. In any event, try not to look so worried – it is not, as they say in Lothern, good form.’

  Caradryel could only watch as the corsairs did exactly what Arian had predicted. They ran fast, dipping through the pitch of the waves before crashing up again with spiked prows. More details became visible – curved hulls glossy as lacquer, black pennants fluttering around bone-like mastheads, ranks of warriors in ebon armour, crowding at the railings, eager for the boarding to come.

  Caradryel withdrew from the quarterdeck and walked unsteadily towards the prow. As he did so he scoured the western horizon. The sky was clear, the wind remained strong, the seas were empty.

  Dying here will annoy my father, he thought to himself as he drew his sword from its scabbard. That, at least, is something.

  His blade had not been well cared for and showed signs of rust along the edges. Caradryel had never been a warrior. He had never been much of anything, though that had never shaken his inner confidence. He had always assumed that his time would come and his path would open up before him like the petals of a flower.

  ‘Bolts!’ came a cry from the high-top, and spearmen on either side of him crouched down low. Caradryel followed suit, pressing himself to the deck. A second later the air whistled with crossbow quarrels, some of them thudding hard into the wood, some sailing clear.

  Before Caradryel could react, the Ithaniel opened up with its own bolt throwers and the recoil shuddered down the spine of the ship. Spray crashed up over the prow, salty and death-cold. He pushed his head up from the deck and saw two black sails standing off, eating up the wind just as Arian had predicted. The other one had tacked in close, bursting through the heavy swell like a pick hammered through ice.

  Another volley of bolts screamed across the deck at stomach-height, barely clearing the rails. Caradryel saw a spearman take a quarrel in the midriff, another catch one in the thigh. Several shots scythed through the sailcloth, slashing it open and cutting the ship’s speed. Archers mounted in the masts let fly in return. Caradryel couldn’t see the results of their shots, but he guessed they would be meagre.

  He kept to his hands and knees and crawled towards the high prow. He heard the aft repeaters loose again, followed by the crack of wood splintering. For a moment he thought Arian had scored a hit, but then the Ithaniel bucked like an unbroken stallion and slewed round hard.

  Caradryel was thrown over to the nearside railing, still ten paces short of the prow. He stared back down the length of the ship. Spearmen were running towards the quarterdeck. The lead corsair was now right on the Ithaniel’s stern and loosing grappling hooks.

  Caradryel gripped his sword two-handed and wished he’d paid more attention to the expensive lessons he’d been given back in Faer-Lyen. For all that, fear still eluded him. He’d never found it easy to be afraid. The overriding emotion he felt was irritation, a nagging sense that something was wrong – that dying in the middle of the ocean on a nondescript errand-runner was not how he was meant to leave the world.

  ‘Repel boarders!’ came Arian’s powerful voice from the quarterdeck, followed by a commendable roar of determination from the spearmen around him. Caradryel watched them form a knot of resistance, their speartips glinting in the sunlight. ‘For Asuryan! For the Sacred Flame!’

  Then, as the Ithaniel fell away and the corsair warship rose up on a rolling wave-front, he saw the foe revealed – ranks of druchii swordsmen, four-thick along the pitching railing of the enemy decking, poised to leap as the grapple-hooks pulled tight. Caradryel saw them jostling to get to the forefront – they outnumbered the asur by at least two to one, and that was before the other two ships drew alongside.

  Caradryel started to stagger back the way he’d come, teetering along the tilting deck with sword in hand, certain he’d be no use but belatedly determined not to cower in the prow while fighting broke out at the other end of the ship.

  Such a waste, he thought, gripping the blade inexpertly and thinking of the fine silks of his robe, the ancient towers of Faer-Lyen in the mountains, the future he’d planned out in the courts of Lothern, Caledor and Saphery. Such a stupid, terrible waste.

  He made it less than ten paces before falling flat on his face, slammed down against the deck by sudden wind and movement. He tasted blood on his lips and heard an echoing rush in his ears. He cursed himself, angry that he’d already tripped over his own feet.

  But then he lifted his head and saw the reason he’d fallen.

  He had not tripped. Amid the sudden screams he had just enough wit to realise that his role in the combat had suddenly become entirely irrelevant, and that no one else – druchii or asur spearman – had any further part to play in what now unfolded. The battle had been snatched away from them, swatted aside contemptuously by power of such splendour that it made the world itself around him seem diminished into nothingness.

  Caradryel hardly heard the sword fall from his fingers. He barely noticed that his jaw hung open stupidly and his eyes stared like a child’s.

  It had all changed. In the face of that, and for the first time in his short, privileged life, Caradryel at last learned the heady rush of true, undiluted fear.

  Arian didn’t see it coming. Caelon didn’t see it either, nor did the sharp-eyed archers in the masts. Very little escaped the eyes of the asur, so it must have moved fast – astonishingly fast, faster than thought.

  The druchii were slow to react, but even when they did it was painfully inadequate. Whoops of relish changed into screams of terror just before it hit them, snapping the grapple lines and whipping the rigging into tatters. Arian saw some of them leap into the water rather than face it. He’d fought druchii before and knew they were no cowards, but he understood the panic. What could they do? What could they p
ossibly do?

  He barely held on to his wits himself. Part of him wanted to bury his head in his hands, cowering against the decking until it shot clear again.

  ‘Fall back!’ he shouted, somehow dragging the words out of his throat. ‘Man the sails and pull clear! Pull us clear!’

  He didn’t know if anyone heeded him. He didn’t even turn to look. All he could do was watch, gazing out at it as if newborn to the world and ignorant of all its wonders.

  As long-lived and mighty as the children of Ulthuan were, some powers in the world still had the heft and lineage to overawe them.

  ‘Dragon,’ he whispered, the word spilling reverently from his cracked lips. It might have been the name of a god. ‘Holy flame. A dragon.’

  Caradryel pressed himself up against the railings, trembling and useless.

  The wind itself had changed – it was as if the elements of air and fire had suddenly burst into violent union. The ships rocked crazily, thrown around like corks by the downdrafts from splayed wings.

  The noise was the most terrifying thing. The Ithaniel’s spars shivered and the water drummed as if under a deluge. The sound was unforgettable – the mingled screams and battle-cries of a thousand mortal voices, locked together and blended into a pure animal bellow of rampant excess.

  After the noise came the stink, a charred-metal stench like a blacksmith’s forge, hot, pungent and saturated with the wild edge of ancient magic.

  And then, finally, how it looked.

  Its body was taut like a hunting hound, ribbed with steely plates, vivid, glistening, a shard of a jewel hurled into the heavens. It twisted in the air, flashing a long sapphire-blue hide. Its wings shot out like speartips, splayed with membranous skeins of bone-white flesh. Its tail was prehensile, snapping and flicking; its jaws gaped, blurry from heatwash and snarls of smoke, lined with teeth the length of a mortal’s arm, crowned with drawn-back horns and tapers of ridged armour.

  It was immense. Its shadow compassed the druchii corsair-ship, and its wingspan alone dwarfed the slack sails, turning what had been a daunting hunter into a drifting hulk.