Master of Dragons Read online

  In time the riverbed narrowed to a gorge. The sun sailed westward, still horrendously hot. Drutheira’s mouth became too dry to open without pain. Her lips cracked and bled, and she breathed through her nostrils as sparingly as possible.

  The passing hours gave her no fresh indication of where she was. She remembered vague rumours of a vast land to the south of Elthin Arvan. Malekith had been interested in it, saying that he sensed some strange and potent magic brewing there, but that had been decades ago and Drutheira suspected he didn’t truly understand what he was speaking of. As far as she was concerned the place she was in had no magic about it at all, let alone strange and potent magic. It was a forgotten land, a between-place wedged amid greater realms, no doubt destined to remain barren forever.

  She caught sight of bushes clustered in the lee of the nearside gorge-wall. They were harsh, dense things – black-leaved, bristling, no more than five feet tall – but it was a hopeful sign. It might even mean water.

  She picked up her pace, ignoring the protests from her strained leg-muscles and forcing herself to keep going. She had another day, perhaps two, before the thirst would get her, and she had absolutely no intention of meeting her end in such an undistinguished place.

  It was then that she sensed it, hovering close, barely noticeable but wholly unmistakable.

  Drutheira crouched low, hugging the rock wall once more and letting its shadow slip over her. She scanned the landscape around her, sniffing, her eyes wide and her senses working hard.

  She is close, she thought, recognising the stink of the asur. She could not see or hear any sign of the dragon, but the aethyr-presence of the red mage was definitely hanging on the wind.

  The sunlight made it hard to see much at distance – dazzling out in the open, causing the air to shake and shimmer. Drutheira did not move for a long time, hoping her adversary would betray herself first.

  Can she detect me? she wondered. It was possible that, in her diminished state, Drutheira’s aura would be less obvious to a fellow magician than in the normal run of things. Dangerous to rely on the chance, but something not to ignore either.

  She crept onwards, hugging the shadow of the gorge, her eyes sweeping around at all times, her staff ready. The scent faded, replaced by the wearyingly familiar tang of burned earth. Perhaps she had been mistaken, or perhaps the dragon rider was still aloft, miles away now, her scent carried by the wind.

  Then she saw something else, lodged in the thick tangle of black-leaved bushes ahead – a flicker of red, barely visible, quickly withdrawn. Drutheira tensed, wondering if she had the strength for a summoning.

  The asur mage was there, somewhere, crouching or lying among those dark branches. Was she waiting for her? Or was she, too, lost in the wilds and seeking some respite from the beating sun?

  The more Drutheira watched, the more her conviction grew. She screwed her eyes up, letting a little sorcery augment her already-sharp vision. Something was hidden in the bushy cover, clad in red, prone on the ground as if exhausted. Drutheira tasted the nauseating tang of Ulthuan mingled with the hot metal aroma of dragon.

  Drutheira broke into a lope, going as silently as her training enabled. She flitted across the gorge-floor, body crouched low and robes whispering about her.

  She was soon amongst the bushes, ignoring the sharp jabs from the thorns as they ripped through her clothes. She raised her staff quickly, kindling dark fire. Ahead of her, only half-obscured by a tight lattice of thorns, was her enemy: out cold on her back, her pale freckled face staring up at the sky, unmoving.

  Drutheira pounced, forgetting her fatigue as she crashed through the final curtain of spines, jabbing her staff-heel down at her enemy’s heart.

  The metal tip hit the ground hard, jarring Drutheira’s arms. It bit into nothing – where Drutheira had seen a body, there was now just a stained patch of earth, as dry and desolate as every patch of earth in the whole Khaine-damned place.

  Too late she caught a fresh stink of magic, tart in her nostrils like acid.

  Illusion!

  She felt something hard crack into the back of her head and staggered to her knees. She tried to get up again, to twist around and bring her staff to bear, but another blow followed, flooring her.

  Tasting blood in her mouth, she rolled over, feeling the staff slip from numb fingers. Her vision was swimming, already shrinking down to blood-tinged blackness.

  Standing above her, real this time, loomed the red mage, her hair hanging limp in the hot air, her face streaked with dust, smoke and gore. She looked half-dead. Her right hand clutched a fist-sized rock, one that dripped with Drutheira’s own blood.

  ‘I–’ started Drutheira, not knowing what to say, her voice cracked and empty.

  That was all she managed. The red mage slammed the rock down again, this time into Drutheira’s forehead, snapping her skull back against the ground and making her mind reel in pain.

  The last thing she heard before passing out was Eltharin, the hated tongue of her enemy, but one which she unfortunately understood all too well.

  ‘At last,’ hissed Liandra, her voice heavy with exhilaration, readying the rock again. ‘At last.’

  Imladrik stood alongside Salendor at the summit of the inner parapet, watching grimly as the dwarfs assaulted all along the eastern walls. The two of them had said little for a long time.

  The dawi had assaulted Tor Alessi three times in the past and had been driven back three times. In the early years of the war, though, the armies on both sides had been smaller and expectations different. The dwarfs had expected to demolish the walls; the elves had expected to defend them with ease. In the event the walls had always held, but at terrible cost in desperate defence and hurried counter-attacks. The proud dawi infantry had been mauled by the volume of arrows, while the equally proud asur knights had been hacked apart whenever they had been caught in the open.

  Other cities and holds had suffered, but both sides knew that Tor Alessi was the key to the war. While the deepwater harbour endured the Phoenix King could land fresh troops in Elthin Arvan at will; if it fell then the remaining elven Athels and Tors would be vulnerable, each one ripe to be picked apart in turn. So it was that the dwarfs had come for it again and again, scarcely heeding what it cost in blood and gold.

  ‘Will they break in this time?’ mused Salendor, watching as more siege engines were hauled into range through a veritable hail of arrows. Some of the asur darts were flaming, and where they kindled the massive war machines collapsed in columns of burning ruin. The battlefield was studded with them, like sacrificial pyres to uncaring gods.

  Imladrik shook his head. ‘Not while I command.’

  Far below them, a heavily armoured column of dwarf infantry was getting bogged down as it tried to force a passage to the gates. The dawi held their shields above their heads, making painful progress with admirable determination, but still they came up short, choked by their own dead and mired in the bloody mud.

  ‘Arrows will not hold them forever,’ observed Salendor.

  A volley of bolt throwers on the second level opened up, hurling their payloads through the smoky air. The bolts ploughed into the advancing infantry ranks, or lanced into war engines, or collapsed trebuchets in welters of splintered timber.

  ‘Trust to the walls,’ said Imladrik calmly.

  Salendor looked sceptical. ‘Perhaps.’

  Even as he spoke, the first stone-throwers reached their positions. Imladrik watched dwarfs run out bracing cables and hammer them into the yielding soil. They threw up massive bronze shields in front of the delicate mechanisms before loading rough-cut stones into the cages and pulling the iron chains tight.

  Three of them loosed, almost together. Their lead weights thumped down and their hurling-arms swung high. Three rocks, each the size of a hawkship’s prow, sailed through the air before crashing into the parapet of the outer wall.
One exploded into fragments without causing much damage. The second smashed a rent in the outer cladding before sliding down the smooth exterior. The third punched straight through the ramparts, dragging dozens of archers with it and careering on into the towers and winding streets beyond.

  ‘That’s just the start,’ said Salendor bleakly. ‘They have bigger ones.’

  ‘Then you had better instruct the mages to take them out, had you not?’

  Salendor gave him a significant glance. ‘Dragons would do it faster.’

  ‘Yes, they would.’ Imladrik did not look at Salendor as he spoke. The plain was pressed tight with bodies, punctuated by rains of arrows and returning strikes from the war engines. Soon the dawi would gain enough ground to install bolt throwers of their own. They might even force their way to within axe-range of the stonework.

  ‘Will you go aloft, then?’ asked Salendor, doing well to control his impatience.

  Imladrik pressed his lips together calmly, and kept watching. Salendor had no idea what he was asking. None of them did.

  ‘Instruct the mages to take down the stone-throwers,’ Imladrik said coldly. ‘Leave worrying about the rest to me.’

  More war engines swayed into position. Several were blasted apart by strikes from the wall-mounted bolt throwers, others were fatally pinned by hundreds of flaming arrows, but more than a dozen made it to join the first three and then the onslaught began in earnest. Rocks, spiked iron balls, flaming phials of runesmith-blessed fire, all were flung at the walls in a swinging, pivoting barrage.

  The dwarf advance, though bloody, had not been reckless. The most heavily armoured infantry units had soaked up the earliest swathes of arrow-flights, risking casualties but secure in the knowledge that many of the iron-clad warriors would endure. That had bought time to establish the heavier wall-breaking engines. Now that the defenders had been forced to concentrate on multiple targets, the intensity of the dart-storms at ground level lessened, and the iron-clad battalions began to crawl forwards once more.

  Tor Alessi began to burn. As the sun wheeled westward, fires kindled by the rain of rune-fire projectiles erupted into life, resisting every effort to put them out. Explosions flared up on the walls where they impacted, adding columns of twisting smoke to the growing film of murk in the air; others burst out within the city itself, drawing troops away from the perimeter to fight the stubbornly persistent blazes.

  Morgrim watched the carnage unfold from his vantage in the centre of the plain. He could not lie – it made his heart swell.

  The bickering and hesitation was over. He didn’t know what he would have done if the elgi had not broken the ceasefire. He knew full well that warlords within his own host had been planning similar acts of sabotage, but remained confident he could have prevented them.

  Perhaps there was something to Imladrik’s fanciful tales. It didn’t matter any more. So many acts of cruelty had been committed that the need for grudgement was now overwhelming. Even if he had withdrawn his own army from Tor Alessi, others would have come in time. He knew of musters in the mountains to the east, each one already setting off toward other asur outposts – Athel Toralien, Athel Maraya, Oeragor. There was no way he could have stopped all of them even if he had wanted to.

  And he did not want to. He wanted the dwarf armies, all of them, to succeed. He wanted the elgi gone, banished back to their strange and unnatural island, their taint wiped from the honest earth of the dawi homeland. Only then could the wounds of the past be healed, old poisons withdrawn, new mines delved.

  It all starts here, he thought grimly. May Grimnir curse us if we falter now.

  Morek lumbered up to him, his staff acrid with discharged energies.

  ‘Tromm, lord,’ said the runelord, bowing low.

  Morgrim nodded in acknowledgement. As he did so, strange flashes of light lashed out from Tor Alessi’s summit. Morek and Morgrim watched as magefire in all hues – emeralds, sapphires, rubies – spiralled down into the dawi front lines, tearing them up like ploughs turning a field.

  Morek regarded the development sourly. ‘Their magic is as flighty as they are,’ he muttered.

  A siege tower, the first to come near the city’s gatehouse, ignited, its crown exploding as magefire kindled and bloomed on its protected shell. Flames raced unnaturally through the heavy leather shrouds and timber bracing-beams, streaking down the structure’s core. A few seconds later and it was little more than charred scaffolding, its deadly cargo leaping to safety as the wooden platforms and ladders disintegrated around them. More trundled onward to take its place.

  ‘Deadly, though,’ observed Morgrim.

  His voice was distracted. For some reason he couldn’t take the loss of a few siege towers and trebuchets as seriously as he ought. Something nagged at him, dragging his mind from the conduct of the battle.

  ‘Where are the dragons?’ he asked at last, out loud though not speaking to anyone but himself. Everything he had been led to believe, not least from Imladrik himself, told him that the drakes were the most potent weapon the asur had.

  Morek looked up at the walls contemptuously. ‘We have killed wyrms before.’

  The grip around the city tightened. Morgrim saw miners finally reach the base of the walls just south of the gatehouse. He saw more war engines pull into position and begin to unload their deadly contents. He saw fires burst into life on the parapets, sending smoke boiling up into a wearing sky. The light was beginning to wane and turn golden as the sun began its long slow descent towards the ocean. As the shadows lengthened, Tor Alessi looked battered, proud, and doomed, ringed by a veritable sea of ground-deep loathing.

  ‘So we have,’ he said softly. ‘But keep your runesmiths aware, rhunki. The drakes will fly. Only then we shall truly see Imladrik’s mettle.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘They’re coming!’

  The shouts of panic were superfluous – Thoriol could see perfectly well that they were coming. Everyone along that section of the parapet could see that they were coming. That didn’t stop the shouts, though. Loosing arrows into the skies was one thing; going face to face with the enemy was another.

  Magefire rippled through the air like strands of crystallised starlight, spinning and flickering in the dying day. Arrows still flew, though less thickly than they had done. Thoriol wondered just how many thousands of darts had been loosed – how many warehouses had been emptied and how many quivers discarded. His own arm muscles were raw with effort despite the increasingly frequent breaks the company had been forced to take. Using a longbow was not like twanging a hunting bow – it was exhausting, back-bending work.

  The endless flights had hurt the enemy. He could see the piles of dead on the flat below, bent double, twisted. No enemy, no matter how well armoured or disciplined, could march through such a storm without taking damage.

  But the advance had not been halted. The dwarfs had come closer and closer, wading stoically through their own dead, shrugging off the slamming impacts of mage-bolts and quarrel-shots, all the while hurling their strange guttural abuse up at the defenders.

  Now the outer walls were reeling. Some sections had been shattered by the stone-throwers, opening breaches that were desperately reinforced by thick knots of spearmen. The dwarf vanguard brought ladders and grapnels with them; once the parapets were blasted clear by the trebuchets a hundred hands would start to climb and a hundred pickaxes would begin to swing. As soon as one ladder was knocked back another two would lurch up again, propelled by burly arms from the boiling mass of bodies on the plain.

  Thoriol’s own wall-section had weathered the storm. No impacts had shaken their parapet and no rune-magic had been slammed against the foundations. Throughout it all, several hundred archers had been able to maintain regular volleys against the throng below with only their own exhaustion to fight.

  It couldn’t have lasted. The next big impact was less th
an a hundred yards from Thoriol’s position. He felt the whole wall shudder as the battlements were shattered by a tumbling ball of rock. Cracks snaked like lightning along the stone, and a massive chunk of masonry toppled inwards, breaking up and raining down on the buildings below. The screams of those caught in the disintegration were mercifully short-lived.

  Dwarfs homed in on the damaged section. Bolt-thrower quarrels lanced into the crumbling stonework, smashing more pieces free. Arcane-looking caskets crashed amid the residue, bursting with the hateful fire that seemed to kindle on anything. Grapnels followed, some thrown up to haul warriors onto the walls, others used to drag more slabs of facing stone away. With terrible speed the breach was widened and lowered, enough for siege-ladders to start clattering into position against the trailing edge.

  The asur defenders were not idle, though. Spearmen from the city’s interior clambered up across the ruins, forming dense spear-lines just in the lee of the breach. They spread out across the rubble, overlooked on either side by the still-standing wall-ends. Soon asur and dawi were fighting furiously amid collapsed stonework, just as they were doing across a dozen other breaches.

  ‘For Ulthuan!’ roared Baelian, rushing along the parapet to gain a vantage over the broken section. Other archers did the same, eager not to let the spearmen down below take the brunt of the dwarf assault unaided.

  Thoriol was swept along in the crush. He barely had time to snatch his quiver before he was standing on the brink, his boots grazing the edge of the precipitous drop. His companions closed by on either shoulder, all drawing their bows.

  ‘Aim well!’ cried Baelian.

  The wall had not come down cleanly, and long slopes of detritus lay on either side of the breach, serving as a ramp for troops of both sides. Dwarfs clambered up one side, spearmen the other.