The ground trembled as the dreamspinner’s body struck it. Rui shoved the remains slightly with his foot so that they fell outside the “pool” of gravel and crumpled against the bottom of the standing stones that were wet with the young man’s blood. Rui looked me over with a wide smile and a gleam in his eye and yanked me back to my feet, my aching hands still caught behind me, unable to drop into the Grey while the pang of death still dazed my mind and crippled my body.
Rui resumed his place beside me, staring into the circle that began to burn around the straining shape of the luminous dragon within. A line flowed swiftly from one monk to the next and the shaking of the ground increased.
I heard three quick shots, and the truck by the bridge exploded as I folded once again over the stabbing torment of death, barely keeping my feet.
Everyone turned their heads. All the men who weren’t in the circle ran outward, searching for Quinton, turning into black silhouettes against the brightness of spell and flame. In the momentary distraction, the white fire that connected the mages in the circle around the bones began to dim and the shape of the dragon trembled like the surface of a pond. I pushed myself toward the circle, hoping I could break the edge, but Purlis swept his cane across my legs, so I twisted and fell onto my injured hand, screeching in pain.
“Go on!” Rui screamed at the mages as he stepped into the dreamspinner’s place and reached for the incantation, closing his eyes. The white lines of the circle folded him in, and he seemed to burn, adding greater light to the fire of the spell.
Purlis hooked his cane through the loop of my arms and hauled me backward until I was lying facedown in the dirt in front of him. He rested the tip of the cane against my spine and leaned on it, letting me know he could break my back in a heartbeat.
The bone mages had turned their attention back to the circle, singing and spreading their arms wide so the white lines of magic seemed to pass through them. Light shot upward, then rushed back to them, spreading into the circle and crawling along the bones. Burning light shot from each rune to shine on the eldritch dragon’s skin from the inside, mixing with the gleam of moonlight and lending the eerie appearance of living, rippling flesh that glowed from within as if lit by a growing bank of candles. As they illuminated, each bone sang. More notes joined the bone mage’s song, building into a complex melody that coiled in minor keys around my spine.
This was the moment Carlos had spoken of and there was only one thing I could do. I tried to concentrate on the odd feeling of the ghost bone, hoping to have the same strange, aching sensation that had linked my finger with Carlos’s. . . .
Above me, Purlis turned his head from side to side, shouting, “J.J.! J.J.!”
Another, smaller explosion disrupted my concentration and sent the black shapes of Purlis’s men scurrying and shouting. More gunshots punctuated the singing of the bones like drumbeats and I convulsed in a knot on the ground as someone died.
Purlis yanked me up with the crook of his cane. “Where is he?” he demanded.
“I don’t know!” I spat back, shaking with fury as much as pain and barely making myself heard over the growing noise in the circle. “Try looking at the next thing that’s on fire!”
He slapped me so hard, I crashed back to the ground and he staggered, barely catching himself with his cane. He leaned against the edge of the nearest stone and slashed his cane at me. “Don’t toy with me!” Each word brought the cane down in a crashing impact on my body.
I squirmed away and ran into Rui’s foot. He moved within the edge of the spell and flipped me over onto my back like a beetle. “Let me deal with her,” he said. “I know what will bring your son running. . . .”
The light from the circle was intense, searing white around a core of yellow fire, the incantation’s song a mighty roar of sound, shivering on the verge of something. . . .
Rui thrust one shining hand down at me, and I felt my ribs arch toward him, the bruises Purlis had just inflicted burning like napalm. I screamed in agony, and I could see the sound flow out of me and into the spell through Rui’s outstretched hand.
The sound clashed with the song of the conjuration, and Rui made a sour face. He moved his hand over my body, his dissatisfied expression turning to smiles as the timbre of my screaming shifted along the scale, shivering against the music of the bones.
Quinton bolted from the darkness, straight for me and Rui.
His father, still leaning on the stones beside us, drew a gun from under his jacket and aimed it at Quinton’s face.
Chest heaving, Quinton skidded to a halt, the small pistol wavering toward his father, but useless—the slide was locked back and it was empty.
“You may not have had the balls to do it, Son, but I do,” Purlis said, just loud enough to be heard over the sound of the spell yearning toward resolution. “You move, and I’ll shoot you in the head. And then her.”
Rui drew his hands over me again. The tone of my screams blended to the voice of the incantation and the world shouted fire into the sky. All other sounds fell away and I sagged to the earth, aching.
From the column of flame a shape emerged, flapping massive, blazing wings of nightmare sinew and ghost-stuff stretched over fire-limned bones. It flew upward, and all of us, even Rui and his mages, stared after it, struck with awe or terror. Everyone stopped to watch it, and the stars vanished in the glare of the monster as it raced to swallow the moon.
Then the Hell Dragon arched down, turning as it fell away from the apex of its flight, graceful as a falling leaf. Someone shouted and the rattle of automatic gunfire broke the awestruck stillness beside the river.
The beast opened its mouth and roared a gout of flame, for a moment illuminating the silhouettes of men with rifles trained on it before they vanished in the conflagration. The bellow of the dragon was a bass chord that shook the ground and blew trees aside, a sound like mountains shouting. The thing, like living flame, swept across the dry grass, setting fire to the hillside where I’d lain beside Quinton in the sun. I jerked into a ball around the agony of several fiery deaths.
More shouts and screams came from the still-burning truck near the bridge as the dragon bore down on it. It slapped the truck aside and snapped at the men who had been moving behind it, snatching one up in its mouth. The victim screamed, the sound trailing as the Hell Dragon leapt back into the sky with a clap of wings and a sweep of its tail that set the river steaming and flung burning trees and the charred bodies of men into the air to rain down again in the farther fields. It circled into the air and turned, sweeping for a moment over Monforte and setting the hillside village aflame.
I couldn’t hear them, but I felt the panic and death of the people in the town and those on the ground nearby as the drache burned a turning path back toward us. I couldn’t think or concentrate enough to do anything through the haze of anguish and death. I felt our failure crushing my chest and twisting through my guts as I tried to hear anything of the bones, do anything . . . but it was beyond me.
I lay immobile on the ground, barely breathing, sick from pain, remorse, and the continual shocks of death. Then cold flowed over me, drawing the anguish from me as darkness that did not give way before the fires of the Hell Dragon emerged from the shadow of the standing stones.
“I’m late. I apologize.”
I almost sobbed in relief at the rumbling, impossible sound of Carlos’s voice beside me. His presence seemed to draw death away from me, like a lightning rod attracts the fury of the sky. It did nothing for my other pains, but at least I was able to move and breathe again.
Rui laughed and turned to make a mocking bow. “Hah! The very last Count of Atouguia. I thought you were dead.”