Master of Dragons Read online

  Bloodfang’s wings were ragged and punched with holes. Some bore the marks of hooks or iron rings. Its scaly hide was dull, as if caked with soot. Only its eyes still flashed with intensity – they were a white-less silver, and were painful to gaze at for too long.

  Black and silver: Malekith’s favourite colours. Truly, he had left his imprint heavily on the world.

  ‘Break!’ she commanded again.

  Purple-edge lightning forked out from the tip of her staff, crackling around the hovering dragon and causing it to roar in fresh pain.

  ‘You know my voice now,’ hissed Drutheira, applying more power to the halo of dark energy dancing around her. ‘Resisting will only bring you more pain.’

  Bloodfang screamed at her, flicking the barbed point of its tail within a few feet of her face. Pain was the only thing its ruined mind truly understood.

  Drutheira withdrew the sorcerous lightning, freeing Bloodfang from the lash of it for a few moments.

  ‘Come, now,’ she said, her voice softer. ‘This can end. What remains for you, should you resist? You cannot go back to your kind now – they would rend you wing from wing. We are your guardians now. We are your protectors.’

  That made Bloodfang scream again, though the strangled tone was different – almost a sob, albeit one generated from iron-cast lungs. Its wings beat a little less firmly; its body writhed with a little less frenzy. Its huge head, gnarled with tumours of black bone and horn, slumped lower.

  Drutheira smiled. ‘That is better. We may yet come to understand one another. Come closer.’

  Malchior and Ashniel were nearby – she could sense their sullen presence – but neither came out into the open, for they had neither the power nor the will for this work and did not wish to risk inflaming the dragon more than necessary.

  It hates us, thought Drutheira as the battered creature sank a fraction further in the sky. It hates us, and needs us. Truly Malekith has excelled himself with this: he has taken our self-loathing and given it form.

  She lowered her staff and the last of the lightning flickered away, dancing across the bare stone like scattered embers. Drutheira took a single step towards the dragon, which continued to descend even though its fear and anger had clearly not gone away.

  ‘Give in,’ Drutheira urged.

  Despite herself, she couldn’t resist admiring the beast’s damaged magnificence. Up close its sheer size was daunting. It stank of charred flesh and old blood, every downdraft of its wings sending a charnel mixture of ancient kills to waft over her. The thought of enslaving such power was faintly ridiculous – the beast could slay her with a casual twitch of its talons.

  But it wouldn’t. That was the genius of sorcery.

  ‘Give in,’ she breathed, watching the long neck bow in exhausted submission before her.

  It came closer. She saw long trails of hot tears running down its cheeks and almost let slip a cry of joy. Her whole body tensed, ready for the most dangerous moment – Bloodfang’s will had been ground down further, but the spark of rebellion had not been entirely extinguished.

  Just a little closer, she thought, inhaling deeply as the wings washed pungent air across her. A little… closer…

  Bloodfang’s jaws reached the level of her shoulders. She snatched the staff up again and it blazed into purple-tinged life. The dragon tried to jerk away but it was too late – snaking curls of aethyric matter locked on to its neck, lashing fast like tentacles.

  Drutheira launched herself into the air, leaping high and pulled upward by the crackling lines of force. The long whips of coruscation acted like grapple-lines, hauling her onto the creature’s bucking neck and over to the rider’s mount at the junction of its shoulders.

  It all happened so quickly; before Bloodfang could lurch away from the cliff-edge Drutheira had straddled its nape. She planted her staff firmly, driving the spiked heel into the dragon’s flesh. It screamed again, snapping its body like an unbroken steer’s, trying to dislodge the goading presence on its back.

  ‘Ha!’ roared Drutheira, her eyes shining. She held her position, hanging on tight to the wing-sinews that jutted out on either side of her.

  Bloodfang raced into the air, corkscrewing up into the heavens, screaming all the while in an incoherent mess of anguish. The wind raced past, pulling Drutheira’s white hair behind her and making her robes ripple wildly.

  She grabbed the golden chain that ran from the dragon’s huge neck and yanked as hard as she could. Bloodfang’s collar jerked back, wrenching the drake’s head up and slowing its ascent.

  Drutheira felt a hot surge of elation. The beast’s scent filled her nostrils; its agony filled her mind. She could almost hear the creature’s inner voice echoing in her own thoughts – a jumbled, maddened stream of half-thoughts and half-words.

  ‘You know your master!’ she cried, seizing the staff again with her right hand and twisting the spike in further.

  Bloodfang roared in pain, but its spasms grew less violent. It came around, swinging back towards the cliff edge. Below them the land fell away in a steep drop towards the range’s northern fringes. Drutheira caught glimpses of huge swathes of land spreading out into the distance – tracts of forest bisected by the grey ribbon of a mighty river snaking west towards the sea. The view thrilled her. Never before had she seen so far. It felt like she was the queen of the earth.

  Far below, she saw Ashniel and Malchior creep from their hiding places to stand and gawp at her. She laughed to see that – they looked tiny, like insects crawling across dirt.

  ‘And what do you say now?’ she cried, hoping her voice would carry over the continued bellowing from her enraged mount.

  They said nothing. Perhaps they could not hear her, or perhaps they had nothing to say. Drutheira turned away from them, uncaring. She had the vindication she needed: the dragon had been broken again. It would take time to learn how to command it properly, to force it to fight again, to trust it to respond to her commands.

  In the meantime, the ascent into the heavens continued to make her heart beat with elation. She yanked on the chain, forcing Bloodfang to climb higher. The mountains extended out below her, a rumpled landscape of broken granite and snow-streaked summits. The wind around her was as cold as Naggaroth, as pure as hate.

  Unbreakable, she thought to herself, sensing the massive power undulating beneath her and already planning what she would do with it. Unstoppable.

  Sevekai crouched low, feeling his boots sink into the soft earth. They had been badly worn by the months he had spent in the wilds – the leather had split along the soles, letting in water and irritating the sores that clustered on his feet.

  He was still sick. His chest gave him spasms of pain every time he breathed and his left leg was badly swollen. Vision had only properly returned to one eye; the other wept constantly. He was famished, chilled, often delirious.

  For all that, things had improved since his awakening at the base of the gorge. Water had been plentiful in that dank, sodden chasm, so his strength had returned in gradual slivers, eventually enabling him to drag himself down under the cover of the trees. Refusing to countenance even the possibility of dying, he had grimly pulled himself like a worm along the forest floor, sniffing out anything that looked remotely edible.

  He had had some successes – a thicket of wild rythweed that he’d been able to chew on, followed by a collection of sour crab apples left rotting under wind-shaken boughs. He’d made some mistakes, too: an appealing clump of milk-white fungi bulging in the shadow of a rotting log had made his stomach turn and given him blinding headaches and two days of vomiting.

  Still, with every tortured step he’d taken since then a little more of his native strength had returned. His ordeal had begun to feel almost like purification – his body had been driven down to a whipcord-lean frame of sinew. When he stooped to drink at a stream, he saw a sunken, cadaverous visage
staring back at him from the water and only slowly recognised the reflection of his own face. Everything came to him vividly, as if the world had been scrubbed clean and somehow made more real.

  When not travelling he slept for long periods, drained by even the most mundane tasks. When he slept his dreams were lurid. He saw Drutheira in them often, and imagined they were still together.

  ‘I am glad you survived, my love,’ she told him.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Far away,’ she said. ‘Keep moving. Keep walking.’

  Sevekai did as his dreams commanded. Sometimes crawling, sometimes limping, he picked his way down from the gorge. The landscape of the Arluii never stopped being unforgiving: as soon as he negotiated one rock-filled defile he would be faced with a fresh wall of broken cliffs. Get around that, and he would have to plunge back into thick tangles of knotweed or negotiate treacherous, icy river-courses. A circlet of blunt peaks reared over him the whole time, vast and uncaring, cutting off the light of the sun and making his bones ache from the cold. He began to hate them.

  Time passed in a strange way. He started to suspect he was sleeping for much longer than he ought to. Sometimes he would awaken and the world around him would look altered, as if too much time had passed, or sometimes not enough. Whenever he saw more clumps of mushrooms he ignored them; even his ever-present hunger did not make him desperate enough to risk more sickness.

  Gradually, painfully, the severity of the mountains began to lessen. He staggered into a hinterland rising from a bare land of blasted grass and tumbled boulders. The wind moaned across them, snagging at the stone. He stumbled onwards, barely noticing which direction he was heading in, his feet falling in front of one another in a numb, automatic procession.

  When he finally dropped to his knees he was faintly surprised to feel soft earth under his flesh, not rock. He lifted his head groggily and saw a hillside running away from him, fading eventually into a wide valley studded with scraggly vegetation. He twisted his neck to peer over his shoulder, back to where the outriders of the Arluii loomed up hugely against a darkening horizon.

  Where am I? he asked himself, knowing that he had no means of answering.

  He looked back down the slope. Ahead of him, a few hundred yards away, the scrub began to thicken into the tight foliage of Elthin Arvan’s forest country. The further he went, he knew, the thicker it would get. Elthin Arvan was covered in forest, a cloak of wizened and grasping branches.

  Such landscape was all he knew of forests – few trees grew in Naggaroth, and he was too young to have witnessed the blessed glades of Avelorn. When Drutheira had scorned the ugliness of the east, Sevekai had seldom understood her; next to the icy wastes of home, Elthin Arvan was teeming with life. Something about the smell of it appealed to him – the mulchy, sedimentary tang that never left the air.

  He curled his fingers into the earth, watching the black soil part between them.

  I can barely remember Naggaroth. And if I could… He smiled grimly, making his swollen gums ache. Would I want to go back?

  A sudden noise ripped him from his thoughts. He instantly adopted a defensive crouch, ignoring the protests from his tortured limbs. For a few moments, he couldn’t see what had made it.

  He screwed his eyes tight, scanning the scrubland before him. His left hand reached down for the throwing dagger strapped to his boot. He hadn’t heard the sound of a single living thing since waking. The sensation was strangely unnerving. His heart raced; his hand trembled slightly.

  Then it came again, from ahead of him and to the left, a hundred yards away, lodged amid the jumble of bushes and boulders – like a hoarse cough, but far lower and richer than a druchii’s voice.

  Slowly, Sevekai crept towards the sound, keeping low, staring hard at the thicket of branches ahead. The lessons of his long training returned to him. His heart-rate slowed; his hands stilled.

  Then he saw it: a stag, standing still amid a thicket of briars. It was young, its limbs slender and its flanks glossy. It looked directly at him, antlers half-lowered in challenge, nostrils flaring.

  Sevekai froze. He could smell its musk and the scent made him salivate – it must have been weeks since he’d eaten more than berries. He clutched the hilt of his dagger tightly, preparing his muscles to throw.

  Something nagged at him. Something was wrong. The stag just stood there, watching him. It should have bounded away, darting back into the cover of the trees.

  Sevekai reached down gingerly and pulled a second dagger from his belt. A blade in each hand, he slunk a little closer, keeping as low and silent as possible.

  He needn’t have bothered. The stag stayed where it was, perfectly aware of his presence. Two black, deeply liquid eyes regarded him steadily. Its ribcage shivered as it breathed.

  What are you waiting for?

  Sevekai paused. Everything felt disconnected, as if he was in a dream. He sniffed. He picked up no taint of Dhar, but then he hardly had Drutheira’s facility for sensing it.

  A few more steps and he was into throwing range. He hesitated for a moment longer, perturbed by the creature’s lack of movement.

  Something is wrong.

  Then, sharp as a snake-strike, he threw. The first dagger went cartwheeling through the air before thunking heavily into the beast’s shoulder. The stag buckled, baying, and at last kicked free of the briars.

  By then Sevekai was already moving. One hand loosed the second dagger, the other reached for a third. Every throw was perfectly aimed: one after the other, the long steel blades bit deep, carving through the beast’s hide.

  The stag managed to stagger on for a few more yards before tripping over its buckling legs and collapsing heavily to the ground. Sevekai caught up with it, grabbing it by its shaggy nape and using the last of his blades to slit its throat. He pulled the knife across its flesh viciously and a jet of hot, wine-dark blood gushed out, drenching his clothes.

  The smell of it intoxicated him. He grew dizzy, both from the exertion and from the thick, viscous musk enveloping him. He reeled, falling down against the animal’s heaving shoulders.

  Blood splashed against his chin. Almost unconsciously, he sucked greedily on it. As soon as the hot liquor passed his lips he felt a sudden swell of energy. He plunged forwards, cupping his hands under the torrent and gulping more blood down.

  The thick, earthy taste of it made his vision swim, but he kept going – it felt as if life were flowing into his limbs again, heating him, strengthening him. He drank and drank, tearing at the wound’s edge with his teeth, gnawing at the raw flesh in his famishment.

  He did not stop until the flow had slowed to a dribble and the stag’s eyes had gone glassy. Then he pulled free, his hands shaking again, chin sticky with residue.

  He felt nauseous. He sank down on his haunches and stared about him. The empty land gazed back, still scoured by the wind, still as broken and grey-edged as it had been. In the distance loomed the Arluii, a wall of solid darkness against the low sky. Behind him, the land fell away into the bosom of the gathering woodland.

  It took a long time for his breathing to return to normal. Practical thoughts began to enter his head – to make a fire, to butcher the carcass, to preserve more for later, to clean the blades.

  He did none of those things. He just sat, his face and hands as bloody as Khaine’s. Something like vitality had returned, though it was bitter and hard to absorb.

  The blood of the land.

  He didn’t know where those words came from. They entered his head unbidden, just as so much had entered his head unbidden since the fall.

  Now you have drunk the blood of the land.

  He began to shiver again, and wondered if some of the poison from his blades had got into the stag’s bloodstream. His stomach began to cramp, and he curled over, coiled up next to the corpse of the stag in a bizarrely tender embrace. A cur
tain of shadow fell across his eyes. The shaking got worse. He tried to still his teeth’s chattering, and failed.

  So cold.

  His eyes fluttered closed, his fists balled, his neck-cords strained. Cradled amid the limbs of the beast he had killed, Sevekai screamed. Then he screamed again.

  It was hard to tell how long the screaming lasted. He nearly blacked out from it, but when the spasms finally eased he found he could lift his head. Lines of saliva hung, trembling, from his bloody chin.

  Ahead of him, no more than ten paces distant, a crow was perched on a briar. It stared at him just as the stag had done, eerily unmoving.

  Sevekai looked at it for a long time. Then, without quite knowing why, he held up his hand. The crow flapped across, alighting on his wrist and digging its talons in.

  ‘Well met, crow,’ said Sevekai, his voice cracked and hoarse. It sounded like someone else’s.

  The crow nodded its sleek head. Then, unconcerned, it began to preen.

  Sevekai got to his feet. His head was light but the worst of the blood-agony had passed. He stood for a while, looking down into the valley, holding the crow like a falconer holds his hunting-bird.

  For the first time, perhaps, in many years, something like certainty descended over him.

  ‘It has changed,’ he said, surprising himself. ‘Blood of Khaine, everything has changed.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The chamber was dark, lit only by a few wall-mounted candles. Four bare walls enclosed an empty stone floor, a single door served as entrance and exit, and there were no windows.

  Liandra waited impatiently. It was hard to resist the urge to pace up and down, like some prisoner in a cell. It wasn’t just her current surroundings; ever since arriving at Tor Alessi she had felt confined. The huge city bore down on her, shutting her in, cramping her movement. Every so often she had fled the walls for a short time, taking Vranesh out on the sudden, vigorous flights the dragon loved. They had circled high up, going as far east as they dared, hoping against hope to see the first glimpse of the dwarf army marching through the forest.