“I doubt there will be any more neat victories ahead,” Sirus said aloud in Eutherian, nodding at the mountains jutting above the southern horizon. This town was the last settlement of reasonable size to be found north of the peaks marking the boundary between the Corvantine Empire proper and its lost dominion of Varestia.
“The passes,” Morradin grunted, Sirus feeling his mood darken. “Where, if our enemy has any brains at all, they will seek to kill as many of us as they can, if not halt us completely.”
“How would you defend them?”
Morradin’s lip curled in the sardonic grin of a professional suffering the questions of an amateur. “I wouldn’t. I’d block them, force us to waste time clearing them or make for the coastal route to the east. Numbers won’t count for much there. Mountains on our right flank and the sea on our left with only a few miles frontage. No room for manoeuvre, for us or them. If they choose to fight us there that will be a bloody day indeed.”
Sirus summoned his fear at this last statement, using it to conceal the mental communication that followed, speaking aloud as he did so. “We’ll use Reds to drop Spoiled, seize the heights covering the largest pass.” Have you thought any more about my proposal?
“We can expect some nasty surprises waiting for them.” A proposal is one thing, boy. A plan is another. As yet I see no prospect of one emerging.
“Scouting parties will go ahead. We’ll only commit to the assault when we know the way is clear.” She’s afraid, so is He. Something’s coming, something that will change our fortunes, I’m sure of it. But we need to buy time.
“It might be better to avoid the passes altogether, or at least mount a feinting attack. Make them think we’re heading for the mountains whilst we steal a march by immediately making for the coast.” One more failure and she could well kill one of us, or both. And you can bet it won’t be quick.
“We’ll put both options to her. She can decide.” I saw something the other day. He shared the memory of the old man inciting his fellow doomed left-behinds to engage in one last act of defiance. A man who accepts the necessity of sacrifice need never be afraid.
Easy to say when it’s not you doing the sacrificing.
Sirus cast another glance at the distant peaks before turning away. He started back to the village where the screams of the captured children were rising into the morning air, determined to witness it all. It will be.
CHAPTER 34
Clay
The glowing eyes of the mountainous drakes shone like search-lights in the misted air as they converged on Clay. Then they waited, emitting a low, expectant rumble as he gaped up at them in blank-minded silence.
“Who are they?” he asked Ethelynne.
“Memory accrues over time,” she replied. “Like sand washed onto a beach where the tide is unending. Over thousands of years all those countless grains of sand will come together”—she smiled, raising her arms to the rumbling giants above—“to form mountains. You might want to say something. Old as they are, they can get a little grouchy if you keep them waiting.”
Clay’s gaze shifted from one glowing-eyed behemoth to the other, feeling much as an ant must feel when confronted with a vast creature beyond its understanding that might crush it on a whim. “You know me,” he began. “At least Lutharon does, and I’m guessing you know everything he does. So you know I’m his friend, which makes me your friend.”
The rumbling rose in pitch, one of the giants giving a shake of its head that resembled a horse fidgeting in irritation.
“Getting a little too human for their liking,” Ethelynne warned. “Drakes don’t really understand friendship. There is enemy and non-enemy and family. That’s all.”
“What does that make me?”
“If you want their help, you need to be family.”
Clay sighed in frustration, mind wrestling with the gulf between his needs and his knowledge. “I travelled far with Lutharon,” he began again. “We saw and risked much together. He was bound to me but I let him go. To save his life I let him go. So you know you can trust me. And you know what we found beneath the mountain.”
He summoned the memory of his encounter with the White in all its fiery, terrorised glory. The giants reared back from the vision of the White bathing the eggs in the waking fire, eyes blazing in distress as their rumbling became a snarl.
“You’ve seen this before,” Clay went on. “You fought it before. Now it’s back. It will remember you, and you know it won’t forgive.”
The giants swung their heads back and forth, eyes flickering in confusion, and Clay quickly realised forgiveness was another concept beyond drake understanding. “Your kind are still a threat to it,” he said. “It will want you dead. All of you. You know this.”
He summoned another image, Jack’s memory of the battle at sea where Reds and Blues fought Blacks with human riders. “Once we fought together. Once there was trust between us.”
The giants settled at the sight of his shared memory, their search-light eyes converging on him once more. One of them dipped its head, averting its gaze to focus the beams from its eyes on the ground close by. The light flickered and Clay saw images playing out in the beam: an infant Black lying dead beside the corpse of its mother, both with blood leaking from bullet-holes to the head . . . passing mountains viewed from behind the thick bars of a cage . . . two-legged creatures approaching with knives and gouges and buckets . . .
Clay winced at the pain and distress leaking from these images, but forced himself to share it, despite a certain dreadful expectation building in his breast as the memories played out. When the last sequence came he viewed it with a wrenching sense of inevitability.
. . . thrashing against the chains clamped to his limbs . . . crying out in rage as the harvester enters the vat to thrust the spile into his neck . . . pain and anguish as his blood leaks out . . . the female two-legged creature lands in front of him, clutching an infant . . . his chains are shattered . . . a glory of vengeance as he tears the harvesters apart, demolishes walls and houses, feeling his life seep away but determined to visit all the pain he can on his tormentors before it’s gone . . . assailing ships in the harbour until something freezes him in place, holds him tighter than the chains until a sudden final jolt and blackness.
Clay let out a gasp and sank to his knees as the memory ended. “It was you,” he breathed. “One of you . . . all of you.” The rage was unjustified, irrational, but he couldn’t help it. “You bastards killed my mother. You know that?” He looked up at them, teeth bared in fury and loss. “You killed my mother! Do you know what you did to me?”
“You lost a mother, Clay,” Ethelynne said. “But Lutharon lost his father that day. He was only half-grown when he felt it, his father’s memories slipping into his, all that rage. He came close to killing me, and I had raised him. But he didn’t, for our minds were linked and he saw my guilt and my grief.”