There was something odd in Tuuran's tone, something very off, but Berren was too busy watching the rock monster to pay much attention to anything else. ‘I think we should-’
A shape fell out of the sky, huge and dark against the morning sun. The dragon. It plummeted down and flared its wings, and the next thing Berren knew he was flying through the air as though a great hand had picked him up and thrown him away while a wind like a hurricane ripped at his skin. When he picked himself up again the dragon was rising into the air, the rock monster hanging from its talons. ‘Sun and moon!’
‘Do you remember them?’ asked Tuuran.
‘What?’
‘Do you remember them? The dragons?’
‘What?’ Berren snorted and shook his head and laughed. ‘Don't be daft. No dragons where I come from — even you know that.’ He peered around the street. The dragon flew up high over the island and then tucked in its wings and fell, arrowing towards the glass towers around the peak. At the very last it let the stone giant go and spread its wings. The air thundered and groaned, and even from so far away the shock was enough to stagger him; and then the ground roared and squirmed and shook as the golem smashed into the island. Berren almost fell, and then the air was full of flying stones again. The walls either side of him trembled and cracked. The bells in the towers clanged and the towers themselves groaned and started to sag. A third of the way up the nearer one a great split opened. Berren clutched his head and dropped, crouching against the wall behind him. The air still roared and now it was warm and then hot, hot enough to hurt his lungs. Tuuran took hold of him. They huddled together, making themselves as small as they could.
‘They're in your dreams, Crazy. I know they're there, and don't you try and pretend they're not!’
With a long rumble the tower fell. The air tasted of hot broken stone. Chunks of tortured masonry shattered around them. Grit and gravel fell like rain. As the shaking stopped and the roaring fell away, a haze of choking white dust swept over everything. Berren peered back into the street. No one was throwing stones any more. Where the defenders had been there was only a huge crater scattered with rubble, half lost in haze now. From what he could see almost everything from where he was right to the bridge up on the peak had been smashed to ruin. The dragon sat in the middle of it, a shape in the smoke and the dust. Here and there handfuls of figures were moving further up the slope. Not many. A small miracle that anyone at all was left alive. As Berren stared, the dragon spread its wings and leaped into the sky, churning whorls of smoke twisting in its wake. Tuuran stood at his shoulder. ‘Do you see now why the Adamantine Men have no fear? When that is the enemy and you have learned to face it, what else is there?’
Berren couldn't take his eyes off the monster.
Do you remember them?
He was the orphan boy from Shipwrights’ in the city of Deephaven and the warlock Saffran Kuy had just told him his future. Dragons for one of you. Queens for both!
He was Skyrie, a nothing farm boy from the edge of a swamp. Don't be daft. No dragons where I come from!
But he was something else too, and he did remember them because he'd made them. Forged them out of the souls of fallen half-gods and skinned them with his own will.
They're in your dreams.
Yes, and the air was black with them, thick with their cries, flying to war to burn the enemy once and for all. In their thousands, arrayed under the sun, the light gleaming from their scales so bright it blinded, massed among flawless white stone spires that scratched the clouds in the sky; and then in the darkness of the night the silver light of the moon shone down, hard and violent and it burned, and he clenched his fist but he would not bow, not ever, not even to the god that had made him because he knew, he knew what lay beneath and behind and beyond.
Isul Aieha? ‘He carried a spear, did he?’ he asked without really knowing why.
Tuuran nodded and there was that wary look back on his face in a flash. ‘Yes.’
Isul Aieha? That's not who I am. But I do remember you, and by another name too. I call you Worldbreaker.
79
Diamond Eye was beyond her reach once more. He smashed another of the stone giants from the sea into the ground with such force that the world shook, and even while Zafir was trying to find her breath he flared his wings and she was crushed against his scales yet again. Her armour was falling apart now, pieces breaking off with every dive and every turn.
She coughed, choking on the dust and the smoke that filled the wind. But there was something else, something in the air. From the very first day she'd flown with him from Baros Tsen's eyrie, Diamond Eye had been different, a frenzy inside him unlike any dragon she'd ever ridden before, but now there was something even more. He sensed prey, like a hunting dog catching the scent of a rabbit, bright and fresh and close, and yet he couldn't find it. She'd never known a dragon be so wanton. He drew her in with his abandon.
Another dragon?
Diamond Eye leaped into the air and soared away again, out over the sea without waiting for her command. His frustration seeped into her. Something was here. Something that meant more than she did. He was dulled by Bellepheros's alchemy and couldn't think but he was trying so very hard to remember something. But what?
She nudged him towards the last of the glasships and let him vent his rage, punching straight through the fragile heart of the first, lashing at another which tilted and spiralled away. A thunderbolt sundered the air and he reared and caught the lightning between his claws. Pain and rage seared into them both as sparks cracked over his scales but Diamond Eye devoured it, fed on the fury and shattered the glasship into a jagged rain that fell like spears onto the swarming battle below. He powered beneath another too low to reach the discs and so he snatched at the fragile gondola instead, tore it away and hurled it across the sky to plunge into the distant speckled sea. Nothing was enough. When the last glasship fell he turned back towards the golden bridge that joined the two islands. He flew under and then over it and around and around, oblivious to the battle that raged across it until Zafir almost screamed, ‘Burn! Burn them!’
Another glasship came, this one with a ball of fire hung beneath it. Diamond Eye tore it down and hurled a murder of glass and flames into the seething ground below. He turned his eye to the last stone giant, shaking the earth as it walked, crushing the dead beneath it. Turned away again. Somewhere near! Whatever the dragon was looking for was close, but he couldn't find it.
A chance. ‘The stone man then!’ howled Zafir.
Diamond Eye wheeled. With white burning towers of rage he fell on the last giant and snatched it up, pulled himself high and then dived, slamming the creature into the mass of towers and fighting Taiytakei and then followed it down, shrieking and burning, tail whipping in fury to tear down everything around him. And then on, half leaping, half flying in great bounds up the steepening sides of the island until he was in among the towers of glass and gold that grew together like a giant copse of gleaming trees. He barrelled into them, cracking and tearing until he brought them down, one by one crashing in shattered shards to the earth.