We ate well on our last night in the hills, courtesy of a careless brace of mountain hares. I ate until it felt like my stomach would surely burst inside me, relishing the crunch of the bones that I so craved, albeit much to Tatyana’s evident disgust.
And yet, even with such a good meal inside me my sleep was fitful, plagued with strange dreams about magical nets trapping my wings and wizards hammering iron spikes into my head. They faded as swiftly as dreams do, only for shards of them to return whenever I settled once more. Eventually I gave up and sat watching the night dissolve into dawn while Tatyana snored behind me.
After a paltry breakfast we began making our way down along a mostly dry riverbed. What seemed to be rolling plains from above soon resolved into an uneven landscape that the tenacious grasses and gnarled shrubs that lived here failed to soften. The soil of the plains was thin, a bare scraping of dirt across the hard bones of the earth beneath, and it came as no surprise when Tatyana told me that the people who had lived here before the war took them had mostly been goat herders. She spoke of the cheese the area had been known for with such fondness that I began to yearn for it too, despite having never tasted or known of it.
The walking was at least easier now that we were away from the slopes, and it actually felt like we had made some tangible progress. Where we could, we followed the larger cracks in the land so that we were harder to spot if anyone was watching the area, which Tatyana assured me they would be.
We walked without pausing until sunset, heading towards a lone farmhouse that was the only real landmark in sight. I could smell ash and decay as we drew close, and a pulse of sorcery told me that there was no life amongst the blackened shell, at least nothing larger than field vermin. So forewarned, I eschewed Tatyana’s suggestion that we crawl forward on our bellies, leaving her to curse my apparent stubbornness. She eventually gave up and caught up with me as I entered the house, which had been hollowed out by a fire that had burned with a steady but unremarkable heat. I nudged a charred ribcage and human skull from the ashes, but Tatyana stepped over it and out into the courtyard without a word, which intrigued me enough to follow her.
Three corpses waited in the courtyard. Two had been impaled on spikes as thick as my arm, the tips protruding from the armpit of one and the mouth of the other, the weight of their bodies having stretched their skin in grotesque ways as their bodies slid ever downwards. The third body was that of a child, and was roped to the side of an overturned wagon. The white of its backbone and ribs clearly visible amidst the tattered strips of flesh hanging from its back.
‘Drogah have mercy,’ she said, waving away the flies we had disturbed. She stood there a while longer, grinding her teeth before she then strode past me and back into the shell of the house, the scent of her anger at odds with the flat tone of her voice.
‘We’ll rest here for a few hours, then head east.’
I lingered in the yard, fascinated and appalled by the savagery contained within such a small place. I had no doubt killed children in the fires of my past, but never like this, not with such obvious but pointless malice and cruelty.
I eventually followed her in and cleared some of the rubble until there was a clear space for us to sit. I pulled out the wiry rabbits I’d managed to snare during our walk and asked her to skin them.
‘You’re going to eat?’
‘I’m hungry.’
She shook her head but set to work with her knife. ‘No fires.’
I grunted my disappointment as she finished with the rabbits and set them on a salvaged plank. I’d have preferred a nice hot fire, but I was adept at improvising. I spun the fire construct out and pulled it through the meat, rather than over it, then released it. I watched it carefully, curious to see how the meat reacted. I liked a good charring, but that was easy to gauge when you could see it. I pulsed the heat through the meat, spreading it evenly and it wasn’t long before the smell of roasting meat rose from them in a gentle smoke, and I was gratified by how Tatyana’s eyes widened in wonder.
‘There,’ I said. ‘A hot meal, and no fire.’
‘God damn you.’
I drew back. ‘For what?’
‘For tempting me with that damned meat. How can I eat after that?’ She gestured towards the wall, but of course she meant the yard.
‘They’re dead,’ I offered. ‘Starving yourself means nothing to them.’
‘Being right doesn’t make you less of a shit.’
‘But I am right.’
She said nothing but cut one of the rabbits in half and settled into eating the haunches. I was too busy trying not to drool on myself to bother with niceties of sharing and quickly set to devouring the rest, gulping the rest of the meat down in shreds. The first of my replacement teeth were almost finished emerging, and while they were strong and sharp, they were never meant for a human jaw and made chewing difficult. It would be the blackest sort of irony if I survived all of this only to choke to death on a mouthful of rabbit.
‘How close are we?’ I asked once I was down to the last few bones. ‘To Aknak, that is.’
‘Three days, moving cautiously. And we are going to move cautiously, do you hear me?’
‘Yes. My hearing is fine.’
‘How’s your leg? I saw you were dragging it a bit earlier.’
‘It’s fine.’ It was far from that, but I didn’t need her sympathy compounding the worries that already dogged me.
‘It’s not fine, damn you,’ she said. ‘Do you understand how serious this is? We’re miles from help out here. One misstep, and we’re done for.’ She waved vaguely towards the north. ‘For all we know, Falkenburg has fallen and we’re doing this for nothing.’
‘I thought you were doing this for Lucien.’
She drew a sharp breath and exhaled it as an obscenity. ‘You know I am, damn you.’
‘Then focus on that and stop trying to damn me more than I already am.’
‘That’s not the point.’ She gestured to the yard outside. ‘Those poor bastards out there are. You see what they did to them, even that little girl?’
‘My eyes are fine too.’
‘That’s not a patch on what they’ll do to us. I’m not going to end up on a pole or flayed to death because your ego wouldn’t let you move quietly.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘You know it’s true. Man or dragon, men are the same.’
I stood, gritting my teeth as pain fired down my back and legs. ‘Do you think this is a product of my vanity? Look at me.’ The words came out with the hint of growl behind them as the anger lit inside me. ‘My back is bent and my body twisted as that of a cripple. My mouth is a bloodied mess, torn by teeth that I fear will not stop growing. My hands are clumsy claws and my leg alternates between being numb and alight with a stabbing pain that never goes away. Look at me, damn you. Look at me, at what has become of my glory, and tell me that I choose not to run and hide because of my ego.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I clearly confused ego with self-pity.’ With that, she stood with an ease that simply made my anger flare hotter and walked away.
A dozen responses crashed together in my mind, but none felt right and in the end I vented my anger against a fallen beam of wood, splintering it with my now clumsy fists. It would have helped too, had I not tried to hurl the remainder of it against the wall. I was halfway through lifting it when the strength of my arm was stolen away by a wrenching sensation across my shoulders that sent me to my knees, the stump crashing to the floor next to me.
How was I supposed to face Navar like this? I could barely move my head, and now couldn’t even trust my own strength to throw a piece of wood. He would attack my sorcery first, so without my strength to support me, what hope was there? I pushed myself back until I could rest against the wall and closed my eyes as I slowed my breathing.
I needed to find a point of calm, to clear the anger and weakness clamouring within my mind. I turned my attention and sorcery inward, exploring my body as the deacon who had inadvertently saved me once had, but delving deeper than he had dared to. I needed to know what the magic had done to me. I drifted through my own body, the double thump of my hearts and the blow of my lungs comforting and reassuring in this otherwise silent world of merging colours and flashing nerves.
I followed my spine, and saw how the bones between my shoulders had grown, the largest of which was now many times the size it should have been, the very much inhuman mass of it pushing and against my ribs and trapping sinews and veins between them. It was a similar matter with the blades of my shoulders, the corners of each having thickened into cones that my wings would have anchored to, and the tip of the bone having lengthened and attached itself to my ribs, forming the framework my flight muscles would one day attach to. Those were meant for a dragon’s body, not a man’s, and so for now it had pulled my shoulders out of alignment and compressed other muscles and veins. My hands were as I saw them, the claws that curled from the tips having fused with my bones at the last knuckle of each finger. My jaw was a mass of teeth packed against each other, three score of them trying to emerge in a space that would barely fit half that many.
It was disheartening, and I brought my focus back to my mind and concentrated on the memory of my own real body, something which proved harder than I expected. It came together piece by piece, first into the shrunken size forced on me by Henkman’s wizard, and then finally in my true size. For several blissful moments I could almost feel my wings again and the sensation of my muscles stretching to their fullest, but it passed as it had to, and I slowly felt the idea of that body crumple into the sad reality of the mismatched flesh that now encased my spirit.
It was still dark when I opened my eyes. Tatyana was sleeping alongside me, her leg hooked over mine and her head on my arm. I stretched out my sorcery and settled it across her. She had recovered well from the trauma the necromancers had subjected her too, or at least her body had; the scars upon her skin were thin and silvery, as if they were years old, but scars from such torture went deeper than skin and bone. There was still some residual scarring on her organs from the dangerous amounts of magic she had fed off, but nothing that a lot more rest and good, fatty meat couldn’t fix. I twisted the pattern of the sorcery slightly so that it would deepen her sleep and gently eased myself out from under her leg.
I cursed the litany of aches and pains and snapping sounds that shot through my body as I stood up and made my way outside. The clouds were breaking up, and even though the moon was still swaddled, the stars shone brightly from between the widening gaps. I moved beyond the reek that hung in the courtyard and took several deep breaths, tasting the air. I could smell water close by, something that we’d been short of over the last day, and so began following the scent trail.
It made sense of course, for while goats were hardy creatures, even they needed water. The stream wasn’t far off at all, and from the neat arrangement of stones I expected that some farmer had re-routed it from its source. I’d been hoping for something a bit more substantial, but it was clean and certainly better than nothing. I knelt and drank, which is when I heard the voices.
I didn’t recognise it as a voice at first. It was just a moan that could have come from any manner of beast, but it was answered by what was unmistakably a man’s voice.
Intrigued, I sat back and tested the air again and, helped by a friendly gust of wind, tasted the miserably familiar trace of armed men. It was fainter than I expected it to be, but then sound did carry further at night. I followed the trace of their scent, and perhaps a quarter of a mile further on, the smell and noise strengthened sharply.