Ahead of us, and there was an answering sort of dust and steam rising from the pass through the Masaka. Instantly, my heart hammered as I thought about how long we had gone from the battle. Abioye? Tamin? Montfre? I thought with worry, leaning forward as Ymmen lent as much speed as he could to our flight.
“Still alive. Abioye injured.” Ymmen said, before sharing with me the dragon-sense image that he could detect of Abioye. The world of the dragon senses were, as I had thought before, so very different from our own. But through the mixture of sounds, sights, smells, and even stranger senses that I did not fully understand, I suddenly could taste blood in the back of my throat, and hear the grunt and gasp of a young man’s voice – Abioye’s voice, I knew – as he sought to pull himself back to his feet, and Ymmen’s delicate ears could isolate and recognize the sound of him snatching up his longsword from the gritty dirt—
“Abi—” I half cried in alarm. Ahead of us the steam over the pass were shot through with plumes and mushrooms of dark, black, greasy smoke as Inyene’s dragons had released their own oil-based, toxic dragon fire. There was the screeching of tortured metal which could have been the voices of the mechanical dragons or the scrape of my brave Daza attempting to twist and lever their metal hides apart…
It was hard to make out what was going on in the murk. I heard shouts, screams, and clashes of metal. Did Inyene have foot soldiers too? Had she managed to amass a mercenary army just as she had tried to do with the Red Hounds?
“Skreyargh!” But suddenly Ymmen snarled in pure, unadulterated rage.
“What is it?” I said, feeling his upset and terrible certainty. This was something bad. Something worse than it had been.
“The metal queen—” I heard him whisper as he once again flicked his wings, one up and one down, to turn a wide circle in the skies high over the pass.
He turned just in time for me to see a vast, black cloud burst from the filled earth of the ravine that we had just so recently flown out of. The cloud rose, but it did so slowly, with its heavy top appearing to want to fall back over and over itself. And – rising after it came a flare of crimson and orange flame, laced with green tendrils and shot through with purple tracers.
Wait – is that Inyene’s mechanical steed exploding? I thought, remembering just how dangerous the mining chemicals and machines that Inyene had created were. Over the four years that I had spent in her servitude, I had seen her wheel strange contraptions down to new galleries and areas of the Masaka underlands. They were bulky and inept, juddering on heavy iron wheels with pistons and bellows and gurgling brass and glass tubes, leaking foul-smelling ichors and liquids, and had proved just as likely to blow up and take out half a work crew than they were to create new avenues or fissures in the rocks—
“No, she is not dead,” Ymmen said, just as the heavy black cloud finally managed to rise high enough to start to dissipate, and the flames following them to fade against the rest of the rocky Masaka—
And there, clawing up through the burnt and burst-out crevice in the ground, came the vast bulk of Inyene’s dragon – bigger even than the golden Older Brother had been who had guarded the Stone Crown upon my head.
“Dear Stars…” I breathed, suddenly realizing just how powerful Inyene actually was. If she doesn’t even die when Ymmen drops a mountain on her – what under the skies can we do to stop her!?
We circled, both human and dragon hearts pounding in agitation and confusion as Inyene and her steed freed themselves from the collapsed ravine and leapt in the air, once again heading straight towards us. In my mind and in the play of his muscles that I could feel against my own, I could sense Ymmen’s growing tiredness. Even though he had been clever and cunning – as all dragons naturally were – and had held back on expending every ounce of his strength – he had still given his all when collapsing the ravine walls and flying hard back to the battle. I could feel the dragon’s own exhaustion start to rise like a cloying, gray fog at the edges of my mind…
“We can’t beat her,” I whispered in horror, earning a snort of flames in my mind.
“There is no enemy under the sun and moon that I, Ymmen the Great, cannot defeat!” Ymmen promised me, but his thoughts were more desires than they were promises right now. The black dragon was tired. Exhausted even – and so was I.
But it wasn’t just the approaching hurricane-fury of Inyene, was it? It was the fate of the battle that was raging below us, as well. I spared a look to catch glimpses through the columns of black smoke and haze of rock dust – there were two of the mechanical dragons down and sprawled in awkward-looking heaps on the ground—
But still at least ten or twelve more were trying to force their way through the pass to overwhelm my warband. The Daza and the Red Hounds had congregated around the collapsed forms of the dragons they had managed to bring down, using them as makeshift barricades around which they jumped out to spear and attack the abominations attempting to push past – and clamber over the bodies of their fellows. The only saving grace for my defenders of the Plains was the fact that not all the mechanical dragons could fight at the same time, given the width of the pass that they battled in. Rather horribly, those metal abominations in the back were attempting to walk and climb over their fighting colleagues in front, causing more mayhem and destruction.
But despite all of that – my people looked small and surrounded. It wouldn’t be long before the mechanical dragons managed to break through just by dint of a few Daza or Red Hounds being too exhausted to act quickly to trip them up or push them back.
And then all of the warband that had chosen to accompany me – even the recalcitrant Red Hounds – would be facing mechanical dragons on all sides… I thought in alarm.
And there was Abioye, leading the defense from the mechanical body-barricade that had fallen in the center of the Pass, with a motley band of Daza and Red Hounds around him. As Ymmen swept around, keeping an urgent eye on the charging Inyene – Abioye shouted and led a knot of fighters to where one of the mechanical dragons had broken around the barricade. They used spears and swords and axes to attack its snout and front legs, hitting it so hard and so often that it couldn’t get enough space to fire it’s foul and toxic oil-fire breath—
“Sister!” Ymmen warned me, just as there was a thunderclap of noise.
It came from Inyene. She was sitting in her gated-saddle with her hands above her in the air, holding what looked to be some kind of orb or pendant. Her scepter had been stashed at her side, and from this orb there glowed a hazy green light, as—
BOOM! Another sound like a clap of a god’s hands—
The milky orb flashed green once again, and this time the green spread like a wave outwards from her, rushing over the sides of the mountain like a haze—
What was it? I couldn’t quite see what effect it was to have, unless the fierce green wind was supposed to blow away the smoke of the battle, allowing her mechanical dragons to see and attack better?
But what need does a metal machine have of sight? I thought, as the wave flowed over the sides of the Pass and down, into the battle—