NEWGATE, LONDON: six o’clock in the morning
Swirling ashes choked the dawn air, giving all the light a sullen red glow, as if cast by the fire. The rising sun was a flat disk through the haze, comfortable to the naked eye, though Lune had precious little attention to spare for it. She had to pick her way carefully across the smoking debris, the embers roasting the soles of her boots until she wondered how Jack could stand it. He kept close by her side, one hand always prepared to steady her elbow, though she had dressed herself once more in the clothes she’d worn in retaking the Onyx Hall.
Not the armor, though. It would do her no good against the Dragon, and make running much, much harder.
Running, they would likely have to do. She had never felt so physically vulnerable in her life. Not even when making her stand at the Stone—perhaps because she had thrown herself into that confrontation before she had time to think. Now, wandering the ruin of her City, she felt the Hall’s power breathing in her flesh. Hers, and Jack’s, and the two of them out here, offering themselves to the Dragon.
Not alone, at least. All around them, slipping like ghosts through the gray air, their companions spread out in search of their enemy. Prey sighted, they would give the cry, and then all would try to harry the beast toward the nearest gate. Fire still raged in the liberties and elsewhere, but on this side of the Fleet it was mostly burnt out. They hoped to make their stand on the near side of the river.
“What sort of sound does one make to call a Dragon?” Jack muttered at her side. “I hear tell there are different calls for cattle, and pigs, and sheep…”
Lune’s hands tightened around the staff. She often enjoyed his levity, but not now. Not with winter itself sending lances of cold through her bones.
The Cailleach’s staff was knotted black wood, cold and hard enough to be mistaken for iron. Nor was it much less unpleasant to Lune: all the effects of the wind were nothing compared to this. Jack could not carry it for her; one touch, and he had dropped it screaming. “I saw my death,” he whispered, eyes raw, and would not tell her what it was.
So Lune had to bear the staff, and with it, a thousand dreams of what her own death might be. One might expect nineteen of twenty to give the Dragon a prominent role, but in truth they were of all kinds, which was almost a comfort. Every time she imagined drowning or being stabbed through the heart, it distracted her from the very real death that might be just moments away.
For as right as Jack was to suggest the two of them as bait, Lune knew very well the risk they embraced. One or both of them might not survive this encounter.
Her own death was not the only one dancing before her eyes.
“Do you suppose that might kill it?”
Wrapped up in her dismal thoughts, Lune did not understand him at first. Concentrate. You cannot afford to be distracted. Following Jack’s nod, she glanced down at the staff. The Cailleach was powerful—perhaps even more so than the Dragon—but only the weapon was here, not the Hag herself. “I do not know.”
He shrugged, as if it did not especially matter. “If it does, splendid—we shall go and get drunk. If not, we still have this.” Jack patted the empty box cradled in his arms. He carried it as if the iron sides were as fragile as the shell of a blown egg, as if too much pressure from his hands might shatter their one real hope. Lune had spent bread with a prodigal hand, armoring herself and everyone else coming above until their coffers were all but bankrupt, but she remembered what happened the last time she touched iron.
So instead I have the weapon, which I scarcely know how to use.
The gloves on her hands did no good at all. The burned flesh on the left ached from the cold, and the unhealed wound in her shoulder throbbed in response. But the staff was hope, and so she clung to it.
Through the drifting ashes, she heard the whispers. “Do you see it?” “No.” “Perhaps it’s moved on…”
It could be anywhere. The Onyx Guard had glimpsed it near Newgate, but the Dragon might have gone across the City since then. It could be at the Stone. Or in the liberties, where the fire still raged. Or planning some assault against the Tower.
In this, the City she knew so well, Lune was lost. The streets had vanished beneath fallen timbers and tile; only occasionally did one stumble across a clear patch of cobbles, even that dusted with a layer of cinders and ash. But up ahead she saw the remnants of an arch across the street, and beyond it the corner where the wall turned north from its eastward path. They must be on Foster Lane—such as it was—and the blackened, smoldering wreck on the right was the Goldsmiths’ Hall, where generations of the Ware family had learned their craft, and generations more, members by patrimony, had exercised their influence on London life. Lune’s throat closed at the sight. I have tried to fulfill my promise—but without much success.
The charred timbers shifted, sending sparks into the air.
Jack halted her with one hand on her arm. The tottering chimneys might yet crumble into their path. But by the tightening of his fingers, he realized at the same instant she did that the debris was not collapsing.
It was rising.
The black, searing bulk of the Dragon rose from its lair.
Liquid gold and silver, the lost treasures of the company hall, dripped from its sides like blood. The jagged head swung around, skin cracking where it bent, exposing the fiery substance beneath. Hellish wind blasted them both as the beast exhaled, and then it opened its eyes.
Pinned beneath that gaze like mice beneath a hawk, neither of them found the voice to speak. They needed no words: the instant their muscles could respond, they fled.
But the flight Lune had imagined was nothing like what they faced. There were no streets to run down; instead they staggered across a treacherous plain, twisting their ankles with every third stride. Lune planted the staff for footing, and the ground cracked beneath the sudden frost. Jack clutched her shoulder to save his own balance. They swerved around a chimney, then heard the bricks crash down behind them a moment later. Bereft of all their landmarks and paths, Jack and Lune sought the gate by instinct, and behind them the Dragon gained.
Shouts in the choking air. The others had noticed their flight, and harried the beast’s flanks, as if it needed encouragement to follow. A scream: someone perhaps had come too close. Lune dared not turn to look. They’d passed Aldersgate in their terror, but the unburned houses lay too near outside that wall; Newgate would be safer.
If they could reach it in time.
The shattered bulk stood up ahead, all the prisoners of its jail fled. Gasping for want of clean air, Lune flung herself at it; Jack coughed out something that might have been an oath. They passed through the shadow of its arch, and she thought, We made it.
A snarl came from above.
The Dragon coiled atop the scorched and crumbling structure of the gate. Its long neck thrust downward, maw wide to reveal the inferno within. Lune screamed, and then Jack had her sleeve and jerked her to the side. The serrate teeth snapped shut where they had been.
They had meant to go down Snow Hill, and make their stand at Holborn Bridge over the Fleet, where Blacktooth Meg might still lurk. But in their panic, they were running north, along the line of the wall, while the Dragon’s bulk thundered down from the gate, shaking the earth with its landing. Up ahead—far too close—sat an unbroken line of houses, preserved with terrible effort from the calamity that even now pursued Lune and Jack.