“Stay quiet!” she whispered as the morning sunlight dimmed.
“What witchcraft is this?” Hezekiah shouted. “Where have you vanished to, Bant Bitterwood?”
Bitterwood started to speak, uncertain of what was happening, but Jandra placed her fingers on his lips and whispered, “Shh.”
“There,” Hezekiah said. He hurled his axe in the direction of Jandra’s whisper. The tool raced more swiftly than an arrow. Bitterwood tried to push Jandra from its path but succeeded only partly, for the steel tip grazed her ear, spinning her around. Her body went limp and she fell into Bitterwood’s arms. Bitterwood lowered her to the ground and looked up, expecting to see death hovering overhead. Instead, Hezekiah had turned his attention toward the pinned dragon, wrapping his thick hand around the hilt of the sword.
“It’s best you not speak of what you’ve witnessed,” he said, and effortlessly drew the buried blade from the dragon’s shoulder. He lowered the blade again, swinging sideways, silencing the dragon’s sobs suddenly and permanently.
Bitterwood went numb as if the sword had pierced his own throat. The dragon was his only lead, his sole hope of learning Recanna’s fate. He turned and raced to where the hurled axe had fallen. His muscles strained to their limits to move the heavy weapon. Perhaps its weight would tilt the scales toward the justice due him.
He looked over his shoulder and gasped as Hezekiah stood mere feet from him, raising the sword above his head. Bitterwood leapt sideways as the demon drove the blade down in a savage blow that left a long crack in the packed earth of the street. Before Hezekiah could recover his balance, Bitterwood struck, bringing the axe down with all his strength into the center of his opponent’s back.
Sparks leapt into the air. The axe clanged and quivered as if it had struck metal, numbing Bitterwood’s hands with the vibration. The blow was sufficient to knock the sword from Hezekiah’s hands.
The black-robed prophet needed no weapon. Hezekiah struck sideways with his fist, catching Bitterwood in the chest, sending him spinning. The axe flew from his grasp. He landed on his stomach, skidding in the dirt. He blinked through the dust of his landing, looking sideways. He spotted the fallen axe and extended his arm toward it.
As his fingers touched the handle, a heavy black boot dropped onto Bitterwood’s hand, grinding a cry of pain from him as Hezekiah’s incredible weight crushed down. He tried to pull free but he was pinned and could only watch helplessly as the prophet bent over and lifted up the axe.
Bitterwood could hear the beating of the mighty wings of the Angel of Death. The dust around him rose in a cloud as Hezekiah raised his axe heavenward. With a surge of fear-driven strength, Bitterwood pulled his hand loose and rolled to his back, hoping to avoid the blow, but knowing the cause was lost. Hezekiah towered over him, the axe held high in both hands, his body tensed to deliver the killing blow.
The moment lingered, frozen in time, with Hezekiah waiting to strike, his body motionless, as if he considered the perfect placement of the axe-head. The dust in the air began to settle. The axe did not lower. Hezekiah stood still as a statue. Bitterwood scrabbled back from his enemy. Hezekiah’s eyes didn’t follow.
Bitterwood could see a trio of glowing threads floating in the air behind Hezekiah, writhing like snakes striking at an unseen opponent. The air beyond their reach shimmered like heat over hard ground on a summer day, then broke into countless tiny shards that vanished as they fell. In their place stood a sky-dragon, his eyes fixed upon a small silver sphere no larger than an acorn that he held in his talons. The dragon wore a silver skullcap similar to the one worn by the dragon that Jandra had asked him to spare. His wings were studded with jewels in an identical pattern. Nonetheless, this dragon’s blue belly didn’t have a scar on it. This couldn’t be the same creature.
“Intriguing,” said the dragon, snaking his neck forward to closely study Hezekiah’s frozen face. “I haven’t encountered one of these since I escaped Atlantis.”
“Atlantis?” Bitterwood said. The word triggered memories. The southern rebellion… The dragon’s tongue beneath his fingertips… The kudzu-draped grove… His eyes widened as he studied the face of the sky-dragon before him. “You were in the cage,” he said, “in the City of Skeletons.”
“What a small world,” said the dragon, glancing toward Bitterwood. “I wouldn’t have recognized you. You’ve aged poorly. In retrospect, you did me a favor not opening the cage.”
CHAPTER TWENTY: SKELETONS
Glancing over his shoulder, it seemed as if the whole world was on fire. Bitterwood whipped his horse to have it run faster along the cracked, vine-covered stones of the ghost line. He looked back once more, still clinging to the hope that he might see one of his men following. All that lay behind him, though, was the black tower of smoke rising from the fort. No living thing traveled the cursed ground with him. Most likely, everyone he’d fought beside was dead.
For the last few years, Bitterwood had stirred up rebellion in the southern reaches of Albekizan’s kingdom. It hadn’t been difficult. The king’s unreasonable taxation had planted the seeds of the resistance. Bitterwood’s tale of the king’s injustice and cruelty, which he’d told from town to town, had helped bring the rebellion to harvest. Albekizan’s tax collectors for the last two years had faced an increasingly hostile population, until at last the town of Conyer had built a wooden fort and declared its independence from Albekizan completely.
Now, Conyer was burning. Albekizan’s dragons had swarmed the place in unimaginable numbers, ruthlessly slaughtering men, women, and children. Bitterwood had fought as long as he could until a small band of his fellow rebels had announced a plan to fall back and retreat to the ghost lines. They would reband and continue the fight on more favorable grounds at the City of Skeletons. Two dozen of them had fled on horseback. One by one, in the dark of night, dragons had swooped from the sky and picked off Bitterwood’s companions. Now, Bitterwood alone raced into the twisted, rusting towers of the City of Skeletons.
This was haunted ground. Legend said it had once been a great city of men. Now it was deserted, a maze of ruins countless miles across covered in avenues of cracked concrete and crumbling, oily-black stone. The shells of countless buildings still stood, walls of brick and glass, over towering frames of rust-red beams. Thick blankets of kudzu covered much of the remains, softening the edges, hiding pits and jagged glass and snakes. Bitterwood rode into the heart of the city, the one place he hoped the dragons wouldn’t dare follow.
A shadow passed over him. He recognized the leading edge of the shadow as that of a wing. He knew then that he’d been wrong about any safety the city might offer. There was no place in the world Albekizan’s forces wouldn’t follow.
Suddenly, a talon dug into his left shoulder. He was jerked up from his horse. His leg tangled in the stirrups. With a yank so forceful it lifted his horse, Bitterwood was snatched upward. His ankle snapped as the dangling horse twisted around. His knee felt as if it were torn from his body entirely. Bitterwood rose, a dozen feet in the air, two dozen, three… Then the talon released his bloody shoulder and he plummeted feet first toward the gray ground below. He looked up to see the bright red plumage of a sun-dragon pass over him. He glanced down in time to see his horse crumpling against the ground and his own feet inches from impact.
A moment of darkness followed. The heavy thump of giant wings woke him. He was propped against a mound of torn meat. His legs lay twisted before him, as limp and boneless as the limbs of a rag doll.
Twenty feet away, a sun-dragon stood.