Strong hands gripped her, pulled her up. ‘Relax, ma’am. It’s only your ankle.’
The itching became a strange prickling sensation. Ida’s heartbeat quickened.
She heard Creedy’s voice. ‘That wasn’t our fault. Hu can’t blame us for breaking that.’
‘There she is,’ said another man. ‘She’s splashing through the stuff.’
The prickling sensation in Ida’s foot intensified. She began to shiver with fear. Was this shock? How long did she have before her skin began to change? ‘I need fresh water,’ she said. ‘I need to-’
‘The guns aren’t working, sir. Our shots don’t have enough mass. We’re going to have to overwhelm her.’
Ida pulled off her slipper and stared at her ankle. She couldn’t see any damage yet, but the skin on her heel felt like it was tightening over the bones inside.
‘… for something her size?’
‘Five or six tons. But, like I said, it’s a hell of a risk. Hu is still looking for an excuse to bury us. A hole in his city pretty much fits that bill.’
Ida tried to swallow her revulsion, but visions of sharkskin assailed her. Was she turning into one of the Drowned? She felt nauseous, dizzy, as though racked by the effects of some hideous drug. The Trove Market whirled around her in glittering wheels of gold and silver. She leaned over and vomited.
From nearby came a long low wail. The sharkskin woman lying at the bottom of the smashed tank was beginning to dry out. She was writhing about, scooping up brine and rubbing it into her leathery grey flesh. Ida tore her gaze away from the unfortunate creature. Her own ankle was nipping quite fiercely now. So soon? She needed fresh water to clean the wound. She searched around frantically for something, somewhere…
‘Take Swan and Tummel and find the breach. It’ll be a small hole, child-sized. If we scare her enough we might just manage to steer her back there.’
‘We’re supposed to kill any escapees. Hu was very specific about that.’
‘Emperor Hu is not here.’
‘Right, sir.’
‘Creedy, you’re with me.’
‘They can’t blame us for that mess, can they, sir?’
‘Ma’am?’
Ida looked up.
The colonel was holding out a bottle. ‘It’s wine,’ he said.
She gazed at him dumbly.
‘Use it on your ankle. It’ll help.’
Ida took the bottle and poured pink wine over her ankle. Had her skin already begun to toughen and change? Wasn’t that a patch of grey, there, on the side of her heel? Hurriedly, she massaged the wine into her foot, then felt a jab of panic as her fingers began to itch. ‘Colonel,’ she began.
But the colonel did not reply. He was looking past her.
A hundred paces beyond the smashed tank stood a man. He was aiming a bow at the colonel. He was dressed up like a noble from a bygone era: a jewel-studded black jerkin spun about with a platinum sash, black breeches over white hose and sandals of soft dark leather. Rouge coloured his cheeks, but the powdered make-up did little to dampen the sharpness of his features. His out-thrust chin and dagger-like nose were too severe to be considered handsome. He wore his long grey hair in a tight plait pulled back from his face and he glared at them with sharp violet eyes. Ida found him strangely mesmerizing. He seemed somehow more solid than the world around him, a fixed point in a spinning world. She felt her nausea diminish.
The Unmer child had her arms wrapped around the bowman’s leg.
And behind them both stood a berserker dragon.
The beast was small for its species, perhaps sixty feet from its snout to the tip of its tail. It wore a suit of glazed white armour chased with silver, each plate exquisitely shaped to hug its serpentine body and its short, powerful limbs. Shards of crystal glinted on its gauntlets and again on its long, tapered helmet, wherein burned blood-red eyes. It nuzzled the Unmer child until she giggled.
Like all dragons, it had been human once – a warrior remade by Unmer sorcery into this new and bestial form. It unfolded great nacreous wings that glittered like rainbows, and then it lowered its equine head and began to lap at the poisonous brine. In creating this species for war, the Unmer had given it unholy addictions. The seawater would be acting like a drug, fuelling its rage in preparation for battle. When it raised its head again, brine dripped from ranks of bared white teeth.
The bowman smiled. ‘Do you enjoy tormenting children?’
Creedy said, ‘Fuck.’
Now the colonel hefted his own hand-cannon. ‘The child was in no danger from us,’ he said. ‘Take her back to the ghetto, and we’ll allow you to leave here unharmed.’
‘Allow me to leave?’ the archer said incredulously. ‘In what way do you suppose you can harm me? Your weapons are like those of ghosts.’ Behind him, the dragon growled words in a strange, guttural language. The archer listened and then replied in the same twisted speech. Finally he turned back to the colonel. ‘Yva is hungry,’ he said. ‘She has begged me to allow her to remain here, so that she may devour you at her leisure.’ He smiled again, inclining his head towards the sharkskin woman writhing on the ground. ‘Of course Yva is lying. She wants that Drowned woman and is too ashamed of her addiction to admit it.’
‘Who are you?’ Ida asked.
The bowman looked at her with utter disdain, as though the question was one that ought to have required no answer. ‘I am Argusto Conquillas,’ he said, ‘Lord of Herica and the Sumran Islands.’
‘I know who you are,’ the colonel said. ‘You’re a long way from Herica.’
Creedy grunted. ‘He’s Lord of shit now, a dragon fetishist and a Haurstaf toy.’
Conquillas shot him.
Creedy tried to turn away. He was fast, but not fast enough. The arrow tore through the air like a thunderbolt, crackling with black fire. It passed clean through the bridge of Creedy’s nose and then out of the right side of his skull behind his eye, before disappearing into the vaulted wall sixty yards behind with a sudden bang. Ida gaped at the spot where it had vanished. She could still hear a furious snapping sound receding into the distance as it continued on its path beyond that wall and through the foundations of the city itself.
In the heartbeat before Creedy howled and clutched at his face, Ida glimpsed a bloody mess where his right eye had been.
The colonel’s men reacted with uproar. Banks grabbed Creedy, who was screaming and worrying his head with bloody fingers. The crows yelled and lifted their hand-cannons. Wheellock dogs clicked back.
‘Hold your fire!’ the colonel shouted.
Conquillas was holding up a green glass bottle the size of his thumb. It had a small copper stopper wedged in its neck. An arrogant smirk formed on his lips. Behind him, the dragon leaned closer and purred deeply.
‘You know what this is?’ Conquillas said.
Ida’s moistened her lips. Was that a sea-bottle? One could buy an apartment in Valcinder with one of those.
The colonel lowered his gun. ‘There are innocent people in here.’
‘No human is innocent.’ Conquillas unplugged the stopper and threw the bottle high into the air, towards the soldiers. Great arcs of dark green brine sprayed out of its open neck – too much liquid, far more than such a tiny container could possibly hold. The bottle bounced three times, then clattered across the ground and, still spewing brine, disappeared under one of the shelves.
The colonel hissed. The liquid had splashed his shoulder, soaking his uniform. He jumped down, his whaleskin boots slapping into the wet floor, then turned to his men and said calmly, ‘Find that ichusae and seal it, please.’
Banks clambered down after the officer and was quickly joined by the two crows. The colonel was already on his knees, crawling across the ground as he tried to reach under the opposite bank of shelves. But then he muttered in frustration and stood up again. ‘Give me a hand to push it over.’ He pressed his body against the shelf, heaving at it with his shoulder. The other three men joined him, and together they pushed.