But Mag’s fire still burned him. It did not stop-it was not a simple missile of elemental fire, but a master craft of cold anger and human subtlety by a woman who could plan and execute every stitch in an embroidered coverlet. She had not forgotten anything.
Shaken, Ash banked, and went for her. In the aethereal, he reached for her and found-another golden wall. He roared, and threw pure ops at her-great uncontrolled balls of the stuff, and she stood his assault undiminished, and then struck him again.
This time, he had her measure, and turned all but the slightest singe of her strike.
Four miles were nothing to his great wings-less than a minute. But for a minute she stood the whole force of his will, the whole of his wrath, the overwhelming and yet impotent force of his unchanelled might.
For that minute, Mag’s fire burned in his side, and she struck back six more times, at an increasing tempo.
Almost, he was afraid.
But in time-seventy beats of his great wings-he was above her, and in a single hiss of his bright breath she was burned to ash, her shields overcome, her will extinguished.
He had come far down in the air, from the heights above, and now that he was almost at the level of the river he could see the rout of his rearguard-something had smashed his boglins flat.
But there were always more of them. The woods were still full, despite the triumph of some maggot lordling and his cattle, and he turned on one wingtip and roared his destruction into the upper camp, and Lord Wayland was burned, and the Grand Squire was badly scorched, and two hundred knights and half a generation of Brogat farmers died, breathing fire into their lungs.
He winged back over the battlefield west of the Hole and breathed again, and a generation of Hillmen cattle died, roasted. And then he turned to find the men. In his rage, he turned, and burned, losing altitude with every strike, until his vast wings blotted out the sun and he seemed to skim the very tops of the trees.
Tom Lachlan raised his sword over his head as the dragon appeared like a dark storm over the treetops, and suddenly there were faeries all about him.
The dragon was bigger than a castle. It was longer than the biggest building in Liviapolis-and it flew, like a great warship in the air, and it pushed before it a prow of invisible terror consequent to its size. Red Rowan and Willie Hutton, hard-faced killers, fell on their faces, Daud the Cow’s great axe fell from his nerveless fingers, and Donald Dhu cursed God, but Tom Lachlan raised his head.
“By the oath we swore to you, Wyrm! Now I demand ye! Avenge my kin! We stand inside the Circle!” he roared.
His voice was unheard in the wind of Ash’s passage-unheard, but not unfelt. He stood his ground, almost alone, against a creature a thousand times his size. But all around him came the faeries-a rush of them, like a coloured wind-and they suddenly flared like fire in new birch bark-exploding in all directions.
Hector’s voice said, Avenge me.
It was merest chance-or the will of God-that the dragon had just spent its breath, and was inhaling-and looking for a far more fearsome foe than the single, puny man. His great wings beat, he raised his head, and he flinched, unwitting, from the burst of colour and potent souls that the faeries mimicked-and his armoured belly almost touched the ground along the road as he tried to rise.
Bad Tom leapt from the back of his horse as high as he could reach, and his great sword, given him by the Wyrm, struck. The winged faeries bore him up for five beats of his great heart. The wound should have been no more than a flea bite to a man, but Tom’s arm was strong and his eye sure, and the great blade went deep and cut forty feet of belly flesh as the dragon swept on.
Tom fell to earth and rolled. Then he was back on his feet, sword over his head as great gouts of black blood fell to earth. He roared, “I hit the thing!” and then, “Lachlan for Aye!”
But the dragon had a new prey in his mind, and swept away. Because in answer to Tom Lachlan’s call, another great dragon was rising over the battlefield.
There was nowhere on the battlefield of Gilson’s Hole that men like Nita Qwan, moving carefully from tree to tree on the ever expanding envelopment of Thorn’s column-or boglins, like Sleck, now trying to keep his feet in the push to save the ridge top, or irks like Tilowindle, trying to make sense of the death of everyone about him, or bears like Flint, paw to claw with a stone troll at the very crest of the great ridge-nowhere that they could not see the two dragons rolling in massive aerial combat over the battle below and around them. Ash glowed black, and a blue fire still burned, undimmed by Mag’s death, and the smaller, sleeker Wyrm of Ercch, steel grey and brilliant scarlet, turned inside Ash’s bulk.
Both vast behemoths breathed, and the sky caught fire.
Thorn grunted as the Red Knight’s spearhead penetrated deep into his fiery shadow form, and he stumbled.
Then, with a twist, as the Red Knight prepared his last working, Thorn tore the spear from his cloak of shadow, dripping fluid, and cast it aside.
“My heart is not there, either,” he said, but his voice was ruined, and he stumbled forward.
“Simple lightning,” Gabriel said to Prudentia.
She obeyed. The statues whirled and the astrological signs lined up.
“Watch,” he said.
Catching up the thread he’d saved for weeks-the connection that had tethered Thorn to his great moth-Gabriel passed his simple working down it, like water down an aqueduct to a thirsty town.
“Like to like,” he said.
Thorn shuddered as the damage ripped through him under his shields, and fell, and his great wings of fire smote the earth, and the leaf mould caught-smoke rose from his ruin, and there was a scream like that of a woman giving birth and when Gabriel pushed forward Thorn’s form had vanished. But his staff fell with a sharp clatter, and his fiery wings burned a moment longer and then went out.
Gabriel put a hesitant foot on the staff-unsure of his victory-in the very moment that Ash struck the Faery Knight’s end of the line. The great serpent’s fire fell to earth and all but blinded him, and then he’d raised his shields-three of them-and covered the household and part of the red banda as the monster’s fire swept the ridge, killing a fifth of the company in four beats of his heart and then sweeping unchecked into the south. Gabriel was knocked to one knee by the sheer power of the bombardment of ops. But then the dragon turned away south, and he pushed his tired legs to lever his armoured body up. He could feel the sweat of fear like a cold, slimy hand on his back and guts. Something was wrong.
He was a few strides from the top of the ridge, and he ran forward, scooping his spear off the ground and discovering-to his shock-that his left hand was-gone. Along with much of his forearm. Simply-gone.
He fought the shock. It was all shock-the size of the dragon, his hand…
At the top, he could see.
At his feet writhed the vast bulk of an army still many times bigger than his own-already beaten to the ridge top, it had just been flayed by the dragon, who had cut a wider swathe through his own unprotected ranks than he had done to the company. His army had islands of hermetical defence-the Faery Knight, Duchess Mogon, Harmodius, Lord Krevak, Morgon Mortirmir and the Red Knight himself had all covered portions of their line.
“Oh, my God,” Gabriel said aloud. Even as he spoke, the dragon was struck-burned blue, and turned away, flying down the ridges and south.