Chapter 21

I woke not long after sunrise to find Crow nudging me with a stick.

I swatted it away. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Just being careful. No one’s ever told me how to wake one of you before.’

The fire had been relit, and a sweet smell rose from it. I sat up and peered into the pit, where a lattice of sticks supported what looked like a number of very large spiders.

‘You like crab?’ asked Crow, sitting down opposite.

‘I don’t know. They smell better than they look, I think.’

I had once been forced to eat goblins in order to survive, and while it was an experience I had sworn never to repeat, it had given me a far broader perspective to how bad things could taste.

‘Freshwaters aren’t as nice as salties, but they’ll do.’

As it turned out, I liked the crunchiness and sweetness of crab. Crow tried to teach me how to crack the shells, and laughed when I simply ate them whole. Like eating hooves and bones, the shells fed a growing need within me, and were all the more satisfying for it. He was even kind enough to give me the broken shells from his portion.

We set off towards the west soon after, and even though the ground sloped gently downwards once more, it stayed firm and more or less dry underfoot, letting us keep a good pace. The food and night’s rest seemed to have revived Crow and, despite his fragile appearance, he neither balked nor complained at the pace I set. Even more surprisingly, he still found the breath to ask me more questions as we walked, many of which were variations of ‘Where’s your tail?’

I ignored him as much as I could, something made easier by the grave nature of what Fronsac had told me. He had heard reports of the Lance from pitifully few survivors of the siege of Aknak, but had never dared to believe that the stories were true. Their stories of torture had been common enough to be believed, but amidst these piteous accounts were several about the strange rituals they had been forced to participate in. These rituals had involved a descent into a great pit beneath the cathedral, where they were bound with silver chains and forced to chant and dance about a terrible artefact that had pierced the heart of the city and gradually sucked the lives from those who approached it.

It was the reports of this artefact that had put the fear in Fronsac’s mind, or at least the placement thereof, for the heart of that city was the great cathedral, a monolithic structure that had been built over a grove that was considered ancient long before men lost their tails and started building houses. When the ‘heart’ was pierced a strange gloom had fallen across the city and the countryside beyond its walls, and Fronsac had felt the current of the Songlines change, their thunder subsiding as if somehow dammed or diverted, something they had yet to recover from.

I knew enough now to realise that the heart of the city was also what he called a spirit well, but what I knew as a node or nexus, a junction of the Songlines that ran through the earth itself, mirroring the invisible currents above. The Lance that had been driven into it had somehow broken the flow of the energies, and it clearly continued to do so. There were no living witnesses to this final act, and scrying did not work either; by his account the last wizard to try that had been found with his eyes burned out and his body a dried husk.

If the lances were imbued with the power to disrupt or even permanently damage the nodes, the implications were even more terrifying than Fronsac’s worst projections. He was considering the matter from the academic perspective of a wizard, an approach I felt precluded an appreciation of the real damage that poisoning the Songlines with negative energy could do. They weren’t the linear conduits for magic that wizards envisaged when they drew their very neat and impressive geometric charts, but an essential component of life itself. Like a worm eating an apple from the inside out, their corruption would silently spread throughout this world, undermining everything until all that was left was ruin and death.

A dead world. The very thought stirred nothing but revulsion in me, but what would it be to a necromancer? Was that the dream that greeted Navar Louw whenever he closed his rancid little eyes? In a world where death was the rule and life the exception, he and his kind would be gods. It was insane, but then so was he. I had seen and felt it burning within him on the day I bested him for the first time.

I practised mimicking Navar’s magical signature for the rest of the night, no easy task when the ward stones nullified any trace of magic, forcing me to rely on my own hearing and memory to perfect it. The signature was only one part of his magic, and without the other components it was like knowing the song of a thrush and then expecting to be able to fly like one. Our bodies were simply too different for me to try and replicate his magic as a whole. He was a lute, whereas I was a drum. We could play the same tune but it would always sound profoundly different, and that difference was what the wards were targeting.

What I had been hoping for was that his signature would blind the wards to the nature of my magic long enough for me to draw on it, like a fanfare from a marching band temporarily blending the sound of all the band’s musicians into an whole. That had not happened yet, so either I was off key or I had simply been cut off from the Songlines for so long that I could no longer summon the meanest spark of energy. If that was true, my best chance would lie with me imposing myself into his spell as he cast it, creating enough of an echo that I could draw his own magic to me, effectively stealing it away from him.

I had never tried anything like it, and had no idea whether it would work, and spent no little time debating it with myself. It was the kind of theory that my beloved Anakhara would have loved to debate. She had always been far more curious and adventurous when it came to sorcery than me. I considered it a function of our bodies, as natural as breathing or flying, but for her it was always so much more. I remember how exasperated I would get when she would lie in the nest in the winter months, constructing endless chains of glowing lights and binding them to the walls until it looked like we were sleeping on the floor of some strange ocean of light. She would rest her head on my chest and stare at me with that smile until I couldn’t help but laugh and let myself be swept away all over again.

I reluctantly shook the memories from my mind and concentrated once more on Navar’s signature, sending it out in the fading darkness time and time again until at last, the doors swung open and the mages entered amidst a thick beam of morning light. My primary heart skipped with excitement and I had to force myself to remain calm.

Navar walked in front of his chattering coven, his staff tapping against the floor with every other step. It might have been the anticipation, or perhaps another side effect of the priests’ crumbling enchantments, but everything seemed more vivid that morning. The colours were brighter, edges and shadows more sharply defined, the sounds crisp and clear. The mages took up their usual positions, their conversations tapering off as they set out their books and ink-pots for another day of dragon torture. Their scent was thick with excitement, which was similar to fear but not as heady an aroma. If my courage held and my theory was sound, all of that would be changing before the day was out.

‘Good morning,’ boomed Navar, silencing the remaining chatter.

‘Good morning, Master,’ the new mages chimed in reply.

‘Before you stands, or rather sits, the infamous Beast of Nagath, also known as the Dead Wind. I would warn you against passing beyond the warding posts; while intelligent, this creature retains a feral streak and has already killed two students and injured several more.’

I heard their indrawn breath and could almost feel their attention sharpen as they regarded me with renewed interest and, I hoped, awe.

‘However, sometimes the pursuit of knowledge carries risk, and we are all here because we have accepted that fact.’ He was pacing along the perimeter now, trailing his fingers across the whorls carved into the ward stones. ‘Now. Consider the histories you have studied, most notably the descriptions of the Night of Fire, wherein the scribe Castell describes the creature as “a vast shape with wings twice the length of a dromadar. ‘For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it simply refers to a very common type of trading ship, the forerunners of today’s clippers.’ He turned to me. ‘Beast, spread your wings.’

I hesitated, then complied. It gave me a chance to warm my muscles for what I hoped lay ahead.

‘So. The beast before you, while undoubtedly the same as he was describing, is neither vast nor gifted with wings twice the length of a ship.’

Not for much longer, I thought, making sure that my smile did not reach my face. Navar was starting his lesson in earnest now, the topic being of course transmogrification. Or, ‘how to trick a dragon into fitting into an enchanted cage’. A lesson which I hoped would shortly be followed by ‘how to be killed by a dragon that is no longer transmogrified’.

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, calming myself. I desperately wanted to test my theory, but as much as I wanted to make that bid for freedom, I was also beset by a plague of worries about the possible consequences if my timing was off, or my theory was flawed. Should I build my strength and practice a bit more, risking further injury and humiliation at Navar’s hand, or did I gamble everything there and then and save myself months, perhaps years, of further torment?

If I waited, there was a chance that familiarity and false kindness would become a more effective prison than these ward stones would ever be, quietly erasing my dreams and memories until I was little more than a cumbersome pet.

‘Beast! Pay attention!’ Navar’s voice snapped me from my thoughts and I turned towards his voice.

‘I asked you to extend your arm. Now do it.’

I obeyed, stretching my arm out to the side, then stared at him as he crossed the boundary and stepped into the pit. He was talking about measurements and compression ratios, but I wasn’t paying any real attention.

He was in the pit, and my decision had just been made for me.

My heartbeat surged and my senses sharpened as they hadn’t in the centuries of my imprisonment. A hundred scents flooded my nose and I could hear the soft crump of the sawdust compressing beneath his feet and my bulk, the rasp of turning pages and a dozen whispered conversations from the watching mages. I had to act now. This was the moment.

It was crucial that Navar used his magic while he was in the pit. I couldn’t initiate any of my own, not while I was cut off from my sorcery. His magic was the spark my kindling needed. If he stepped beyond the ward stones before he cast, their nullifying field would most likely distort the tenuous connection I was hoping to create, leaving me exposed and quite likely never to have the same chance again, assuming of course that I survived the punishment that would follow.

Navar was close enough to rap his staff against the ridge that protected my forearms, hard at work talking comparative mass, his arrogance almost tangible. He was close enough that he wouldn’t have had much chance of avoiding what I did next even on a normal day.

I twitched my arm inward, hard enough to rip the staff from his hands – I needed him to use his magic, not the staff’s – and to send him sprawling another few precious feet away from the perimeter.

The students reacted with a sharp, indrawn breath, such a uniform reaction that anyone listening from the outside would have sworn that it came from a single creature. Navar rolled to his feet, shock and anger contorting his face beneath its coating of sawdust. He reacted with all of the anger I had hoped to rouse, his face contorting as he called one of his electrical barrage spells into being. The sensory pits in my jaw felt the current of his magic swell. He snapped the spell into being and I vocalised his spell signature.

Too late. I knew I’d missed the timing as soon as I spoke it.

Lightning raked my shoulders, the intensity of it shocking. I had not realised it before, nor credited him with any real finesse, but it was clear that up until now he had been holding back as to what his full capacity was. The barrage rolled over me with several times more force than anything he’d unleashed previously. This was his full, killing magic. There would be no second chances after today.

I gritted my teeth and fought the pain. Once it might have crippled me, but as his magic had grown stronger, so too had my tolerance. Even so, I would not be able to withstand much punishment at that intensity. I had to stay sharp. He was drawing more magic, and it was a fair guess that his students would start defending their teacher at any moment too. His magic gathered, and I had to fight hard not to be distracted by the weird colours that were bleeding into his aura.

He loosed his spell, and I coughed out his spell signature.

Time seemed to slow. I felt something tug at my mind and heard a strange buzzing sound like a thousand ruptured wasp nests, then I felt it. Magic. Like desert sand absorbing the rain so long denied to it, I pulled the magic from Navar. Through him. I felt it course into me, both familiar and strange at the same time. It wasn’t as pure as sorcery, but it was magic. Power.

I saw the construction of the spell unfold in my mind as it broke apart into its constituent parts before coalescing into the shape he’d crafted once more, but now under my control. And in that moment, I felt the press of his mind against my own, the touch of it cold and utterly alien, the thoughts that filled it a cacophony of gibbering and howling voices. It was gone as quickly as it happened.

I turned, pointed my arm at the standing stone closest to where his students were standing, and released his spell. A trio of force bolts flickered into being in my palm and flashed through the air. The first missed the stone and found one of his students instead, bursting him like a grape. The second and third struck the stone. It swayed, but remained standing; the wards anchored upon it rippled but remained intact, the dead student’s blood sizzling against the now glowing whorls upon it.

Navar was circling away from me, his brows furrowed. I knew that I couldn’t give him time to think, and so bared my teeth and lunged towards him, the very real desire to kill him making the feint entirely believable. He reacted by reflex, firing off another of his prepared spells.

I snatched the spell from him, his signature spilling from my lips with more confidence now. I channelled it along my arm and sent the energy whip he’d prepared snapping forward, wrapping its glittering length around the same ward stone I’d loosened with the force bolts. With a single, hard pull I ripped the menhir from the ground like a rotten tooth from a gum, almost crushing him with it.

Yellow-green lightning flashed and crackled between the remaining stones as the circle was broken, jagged lines of power discharging into the air and scything through his students. Chaos erupted around me, and amidst the smoke and flames I launched myself from the pit and landed amongst the remaining students. Using Navar’s magic had left a slippery nausea in my gut, a shadow of the revulsion I had experienced when he’d used his mind control to move me into the pit, but I forced it away. This wasn’t the time for introspection.

I hit the students with the full measure of my current strength, laying into them with balled fists, teeth and tail. I found Abyon amongst them, desperately trying to organise a defence. He soiled himself as I snagged him by the ankles and lifted him high.

‘Time to die,’ I growled, taking a leg in each hand.

I tightened my grip and, twisting slightly, pulled him apart from anus to ribs and tossed him aside to die in his own filth. They all screamed then, and kept screaming as I broke their bones and hammered them with my fists and tail, the smell of blood and faeces swamping the glorious scent of their terror. Hot lightning scored a hissing groove across my flank and I spun towards my attacker. Navar!

A dozen or so students stood behind him, their voices droning as they prepared their most deadly attacking spells. To reach them, I would need to enter the pit again, something that I wanted to avoid at all costs. Armed guards and yet more mages were pouring into the building from a side door. I couldn’t risk being cornered, and as much as I wanted to even the score with Navar, it was nothing compared to my bone deep need to escape.

I turned and ran towards the doors, trampling a few more men before I smashed the doors open and stumbled out into the glorious warmth of the sun, protective membranes sliding over my eyes, muting the sudden glare. There were a dozen or so men outside the building, all staring at me with open mouths and wide eyes.

I didn’t wait for them to gather their senses and instead turned towards the east and began to run. My muscles weren’t used to this level of effort but I had to get as far from the university as I could before they could organise a pursuit. I was perhaps a league from the university when I realised that I was free. The sun was shining, and I was running free.

 I threw my head back and roared at the glory of it, sending a nearby flock of fat little sheep running in all directions, bleating for all they were worth. I snatched three of the slower ones up and loped eastwards.