Last Call (Next Time you See this Stuff, it’ll Be in a Book)

He woke from a dream of winter sunset out on the steppe, long, low spearing rays of reddish light that spilled and dazzled across his eyes as he rode, but failed to warm him at all.  He was riding somewhere important, he knew, had something to deliver, he thought, but there was a faint terror rising in him that whatever it was, he’d lost it or left it behind somewhere on this long cold ride, and now the remainder of his journey was a hollow act.  He should have been able to see the Skaranak encampment by now, the thin rise of campfire smoke on the horizon, or the dark, nudging mass of grazing buffalo herds at least.  He raised up in the saddle, twisted about, scanning ahead and side to side, but there was nothing, nothing out here at all. He was riding alone, into a rising chill and a dwindling red orange glow……

Egar blinked and found the fire sprite hovering in his face.

He flailed at its red orange radiance with a stifled yelp.  One blank moment of panic.  Then full wakefulness caught up.

He sat up in his blankets and stared around.  A pallid dawn held the eastern sky, pouring dull grey light across the sleep-curled forms in their bedrolls around him, the scattered packs and the blue radiant bowls now gone opaque and glassy, like so many big stones gathered from a river’s bed.  Across at the stairway entrance they’d come in, Alwar Nash waved casually from where he sat huddled at last watch.  Everyone else was still out cold.

“Early yet,” the Throne Eternal commented when Egar had stumbled to his feet and wandered over to join him.  “Another hour to full light at least.  But our friend there seems pretty agitated about something.”

He gestured and the Dragonbane saw how the sprite was now floating directly above Archeth’s sleeping form, flickering rapid shades of orange in her face.

“It tried her first,” Nash said.  “Guess she’s too wrung out to notice.”

Egar shook his head.  “Always been that way.  When she sleeps, she really sleeps.  Seen her snore right through a siege assault at Shenshenath once.”

“Must be that Black Folk blood.”

“Must be.  Had the lizards a hundred deep at the walls that time, couple of blunderers smashing their heads in against the stonework because they were too stupid to find the gates……”  Lost in the skeins of memory for a moment, and then understanding hit him in the head like a bucket of cold water.  “Shit!  Nash – start kicking them awake.  We got to move.”

“Move?  But-”

“Scaled Folk.”  He was already on his way to Archeth, calling back over his shoulder.  “Lizards don’t get up early.  Something to do with their blood; their heritage or…….  Look, just get everyone moving.”

Can’t believe you forgot that, Eg.  Not like the war was that long ago, is it?

  Is it?

And he had a couple of seconds to feel suddenly very old, as he realised that Nash, in common with most of the others, had not only not fought in the war, he had in all probability never even seen a living lizard before yesterday’s fight.

 

*

 

They got everyone awake inside a couple of minutes, gave soft instructions to load up and be ready to move out.  When Archeth blinked initial sleepy incomprehension at him, Egar gestured at the fire sprite’s agitated bobbing and flickering.

“Someone’s in a hurry here.  My guess?  It wants to get us someplace before the lizard hour.”

Her eyes widened.  “Oh, shit.  Got to be, yeah.”

She flung off her blankets.  Flinched as the movement caught the wound he’d stitched for her the night before.  Impatient grunt of pain held down, and the flare of anger in her eyes at her own unwelcome weakness.  She settled her harness and knives about her with a blunt lack of care that looked to the Dragonbane like punishment.  She must have tugged on the wound more than a few times in the process, but to watch her, you’d never have known.

“Alright, then,” she said tightly when she was done.  “Let’s go.”

They filed rapidly down the staircase behind the sprite and let it lead them out into the street.  Any actual sunrise was still a good way off, and down at ground level there was a lot of gloom.  The jut and slump of broken architecture around them worried at the Dragonbane’s attention, sketched hints of a thousand phantom enemies, crouched to pounce every few yards.  Every darkened gap in the rubble they passed seemed to promise an ambush, every glint of something shiny in the low light was a reptile peon’s eye.  Egar, yawning despite the heightened tension, marched with a prickling at the nape of his neck and tried to recall useful detail from the tactical lectures given by the Kiriath commanders during the war.

Like any reptiles, the Scaled Folk like heat better than cold, but they seem to have adapted beyond this in ways their smaller cousins on this continent have not. They do not depend on warmth to the same extent, and can function quite sufficiently well in cooler conditions.  Yet their ancestry tells upon them in a number of ways which may be helpful to us.  They are drawn instinctively to warmer climes and to discrete heat sources; they appear to accord some sacred significance to the roasting pits they build and ignite; and they do not stir early in the day if they can avoid it.

  Sounds like me, muttered Ringil to him in the back rank where they stood, and Egar tried to stifle an explosive snigger.

They’d both been a lot younger back then.

  You have something to contribute?  Flaradnam, seamed black features glaring into the ranks.  He waited a beat, got no response.  Then shut the fuck up and listen, all of you.  What we tell you here today could save your life.

Across the shattered pre-dawn city, then, threading through empty streets and plazas, picking their way up and over mounds of rubble bigger than any intact building he’d ever seen, even in Yhelteth.  Once again, the fire sprite led them a crooked, seemingly senseless path through the ruins.  They backed up and twisted and turned.  They followed thoroughfares straight as arrows for miles, then turned abruptly off them into tangled, broken ground, worked difficult, meandering routes, only to spill out onto what Egar would have sworn was the same thoroughfare an hour later and head onward as if they’d never left it.  Once, some way along a broad boulevard similar to the one they’d been attacked on the night before, the sprite led them directly off the street and up a punishingly steep rubble slope, then along a windy, exposed cliff face of ruined facades that ran for at least half a mile and tracked the boulevard directly.  It was tricky work, and in some places involved clinging and edging their way forward with the risk of a lethal fall, while all the time below them, the boulevard stretched on, devoid of apparent obstacles and utterly deserted.

“You think,” he asked Archeth, breathing hard, as they rested at one of the infrequent safe sections.  “That this thing has a sense of humour?”

She looked out to where the sprite hung blithely suspended a couple of yards away in empty space and a hundred feet off the ground.

“Either that, or it thought we’d like the view.”

“Yeah.  Well worth the climb.”  Egar glowered out across the fractured landscape, and the pale grey wash of another cloud-shrouded morning.  “Like Gil would say if he was here, I’m particularly enamoured of the……”

She glanced round curiously as he trailed off.  He squinted, wanting to be sure, then pointed outward, what he estimated had to be north-east from their position and a dozen miles off or less.

“You see that?  Past that torn up pyramid thing?  Where the three boulevards cross, then back a little and left.  See the……..what is that?  Looks like…..”

  Talons.

As if a broad expanse of the city’s structure had broken like pond ice under the weight of some vast, lumbering black iron creature, which now clung to the ragged edges of the hole it had fallen through with huge claws sunk in, struggling not to go down into an abyss below.  As if several gargantuan black spiders out of one of his father’s tales hung suspended in a shared, irregularly shaped ambush burrow, only their limbs extending up and out to grip the edges of the gap on all sides, poised to spring.  As if dragon’s venom had splattered on the city’s flesh in overlapping oval pools, had eaten its way in and left splayed black burnmarks all around, or……..

It dawned on him then, full force.

It looks like Kaldan Cross.

As if the Kiriath had laboured here as they had at Kaldan in Yhelteth, delving down into the bedrock for their own obscure purposes, reinforcing the sides of their pit with outward clamping iron struts, but on a massively larger scale.

“Look familiar?” he asked.

“Well, it’s Kiriath built, that’s for sure.”  Archeth, shading her eyes against the glare the rising sun had put into the clouds.  “And whatever it is, it goes down.  Aerial conveyance pits, right?”

“You reckon?”

“I reckon it’d be a pretty huge coincidence otherwise.”  She propped herself carefully upright against the facade at their backs.  “Come on, let’s see if our flickery friend there feels the same.”

 

*

 

They followed the facade almost to its end before the sprite dived into a gap in the stonework and led them down through a series of collapsed and angled spaces that might once have been rooms.  They crowded in behind, relieved to get away from the sheer drop, but none too happy with the confined quarters and gloom.

Our scaly pals show up now, they’ll have us quicker than a shaman’s shag.  Egar’s gaze flickered about, making the odds.  Barely enough room in here to swing a fucking long knife, let alone a sword or axe.  And gaps on every side – floors, walls, ceilings, it’s all up for grabs.

Still, he slapped down any comments in that direction from the men at his back, told them to shut the fuck up and watch where they stepped.  While ahead and below him, Archeth’s lithe form braced its way downward with boots and elbows and arse, backlit into silhouette by the sprite’s onward beckoning fire.

Not bad, Archidi, for someone with a sewn gash across the ribs big enough to stick your whole hand in.  And not a grain of krinzanz to sweeten the ride.

He didn’t know if she’d used any of the powders they were gifted with at An-Kirilnar, but somehow he doubted it.  There was a gritted edge on Archeth right now – if anything, she seemed to be using her pain for something, maybe as a substitute for the fire the krin habitually lent.

“You alright?” he asked her, when they finally spilled out into the light at street level and he stood close at her shoulder.

She didn’t look at him, took no break from scanning the street ahead, for all that the sprite was already drifting steadily along it.  “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

“Stitches holding up?”

“Well, you should know – you put them in.”  She glanced round at him, face tightening up into a grimace as her body twisted.  “Stings worse than getting head from a cactus, if you really want to know.  But it’s some beautiful fucking work, Eg.  I don’t reckon Kefanin stitches my riding leathers this well.”

He shrugged, mask for the enduring bitter taste the skirmish the night before had left.  “All part of the service.  If I can’t keep you from getting hurt, at least I can patch up the damage afterwards.”

“Works for me.”

The last of the men dropped out of the gap in the masonry behind them and straightened up with vocal curses of relief.  Egar shut them up, got them formed into a loose wedge, and led them out once more behind Archeth and the sprite.

The rest was hard marching but uneventful.  They cut across the mounded rubble a few times more, leaving one boulevard in favour of another, trading plazas for streets and vice versa, but it was all open ground, ruined masonry packed solid underfoot or sections of stairway and raised platforms that had taken no more than superficial damage in whatever cataclysm had snuffed the city out.  Clear views on all sides now, no real risk of ambush, and their pace picked up accordingly.  Egar began to catch traces of a familiar reek on the wind.

He jogged forward, caught up to Archeth who was striding a few yards ahead.

“You smell that?”

“Yeah.  Like the stacks at Monal.  Must be getting close.”

Sometimes at An-Monal, the winds blew in from the south, and then you caught an acrid whiff of the chemicals at play in the Kiriath brewing stacks on the plain below.  The Dragonbane had never been very sure what it was Archeth’s people made in those towers, he’d only understood that they preferred to make it at some considerable distance from where they lived.  Watching at night as huge, unnaturally coloured flames leapt and gouted atop the miles-distant darkened towers, he didn’t much blame them.  Whatever they had trapped in there, you wouldn’t want to be standing very close if it ever got loose.

He remembered asking Flaradnam about it once, one banquet night out on the balcony shortly before they all headed out for Trelayne and then the Wastes.  He might as well not have bothered – as was so often the case with the Kiriath, any reply you got left you with more questions than you’d started with, and this time was no exception to the rule.  ‘Nam glanced around the table at the various commanders’ faces in the bandlight, then dropped some cryptic comment to the effect that most of the Kiriath’s more useful alloys had to be grown to full complexity or some such shit.  That it was in fact a process less like smelting and smithing, and more akin to raising crops or, in its finest expressions, breeding warhorses or – a fond side-smirk at an embarrassed Archeth – children.  What all that actually meant, Egar had no fucking clue and was too half-cut at the time to pursue any further.  And later there was no time, they were all too busy, and a couple of months after that, Flaradnam was beyond all asking.

The smell was growing stronger, there even in the gaps between the bluster of the wind.  He sneaked a glance at Archeth, wondering if it kicked her back as thoroughly to memories of her father.

But in the grey morning light, her face was as impassive as the flat of a blade.

They came over steeply-piled mounds of rubble the size of hills, started a descent through isolated crags and outcrops of architecture that looked like the drowned upper levels of buildings once dizzying in height.  And then, abruptly, they were looking down at the edge of the Kiriath earthworks from not much more than five hundred yards away.  The holes gaped there, larger than some lakes he knew back on the steppe, but empty, shadowed and dark.  More than ever, it looked as if these were wounds the city had sustained, and the vast black iron protrusions that sprouted from them on all sides some kind of surgical clamps to prevent healing.  As if the Kiriath had dropped something from a great height on their enemies here, and then left it in place to grow and sprout, just the way all those complex alloys were supposed to grow in the stacks at An-Monal.

The fire sprite came to a flickering halt just past a standing ruin a handful of storeys high, paused there perhaps to give them time to take in the view down across the rubble.  The air was warmer now.  Even the occasional gusts of wind carried some stale-tasting heat along with the brewing stack odours.  Egar fetched up at Archeth’s shoulder again.

“See a way down inside?”

She cupped both hands above her eyes to shade them, peered for a while.  “Not from here.”

“At Kaldan Cross, you got those things like big mason’s hods running on cables, but they’re sort of tucked away, under the lip.”

“Yeah, I know.  I was there when they built it, remember.  This is a fuck of a lot bigger than anything at Kaldan.”

“Well,” he shrugged. “Bigger hods and cables then.  Maybe.”

The warm wind came and went, gusts and gaps, blowing directly across the open plain and the huge iron-clamped holes in it.  The acrid chemical reek rolled in again, but it brought something else with it this time, another note to the mingled odours that -

  Sandalwood…..?

Or not.  He’d lost it again, in the buffet and gust of the wind.  He turned his head, breathed deep trying to get it back.  He cast about, a sliding sense of doom behind his eyes.  Saw the fire sprite turned jumpy and irresolute, slipping back and forth in the air beside them.  Archeth, lost in peering down at what her people had built here……    

Sudden, sharp spike of aniseed in his nostrils.  The wind came banging back, brought with it the sandalwood again, stronger now, no room left for doubt.  He heard comment murmur among the men, men too young or too lucky to know what it meant.  He stared down at the gaping holes ahead of them.  Felt the warmth in the air again, as if for the first time, and understanding fell on him like the ruin at his back.

  Oh no…..

But he knew it was.

And now the stealthy chill, waking and walking through his bones.  The grinning skull of memory, the bony beckoning hand.

  Well, well, Dragonbane.  Here it comes, after all these years.

He grabbed Archeth by the shoulder.  “Snap out of it, Archidi.  We got trouble.”

“Trouble?”  She blinked, still lost in thought  “What’s the…….”

She caught the blast of spices on the breeze.  Her eyes widened in shock.  Egar was already unslinging his Warhelm-forged staff lance.  He shed the soft fabric sheaths at either end, let them drift to the ground without attention.  Plenty of time to chase them up later.

If there was a later.

“Clear your steel,” he snapped to the men at his back, as they gathered in around him.  “And get back inside that ruin, find yourselves some cover, fast.”

“Is it the lizards again, my lord?” someone asked.

He had time to offer one tight grin.  “I’m afraid not, no.”

“Then-”

Across the wind, out of Kiriath pits below them, it came and split the air.  A shrieking, piercing  cry he’d thought he’d never hear again outside of dreams.  A cry like sheets of metal tearing apart, like the denial of some bereaved warrior goddess, vast, immortal grief tipping over into the insane fury of loss.  Like the drawn-out, echoing rage of some immense, stooping bird of prey.

“It’s a dragon,” he told them simply.  “Pretty big one too, by the sound of it.”