Chapter 54

Thought and reason began to return to me when I sighted the foothills of the mountains that formed the outer border of Talgoth’s heartland. The sky beyond them was dark, and as I flew closer I began to comprehend the scale of the unnatural clouds that rose over the whole of the mountain range, as if he had bound a thousand hurricanes into one. This then was his outer defence. He’d had something similar in place the first time I had come here, but nothing on this scale, testament to how his power had grown.

At least this time I had the advantage of knowing what to expect, so I slowed and took some time to prepare some protection for myself, binding the names of the winds that I knew to me like armour to deflect the most violent gusts. I drifted in the sunlight, recovering some of the energy I’d spent in my furious flight here, then picked a point to enter the mass of clouds. It didn’t really matter where I went in as they extended as high and as far as I could see.

There was no way to avoid the maelstrom. All I could do was hope to keep flying in the right direction and not lose sight of the horizon. If that happened, I was lost. My strength would eventually give out and I would be torn apart like a gull.

I roared my challenge at the uncaring cloud and entered a world of madness. There was no time and no light within the cloud barrier, only darkness, howling winds, and the near constant booming of thunder, deep and loud enough to make my bones rattle within my flesh. The air pressure around me swelled and fell away with no discernible pattern; I dropped thousands of feet, wings beating uselessly while the power of my wind spells was instantly dispersed by the dozen or more hurricanes battering me from all directions. Sudden updrafts slammed into me like invisible fists, throwing me upwards again, tumbling through the sky with my only thought being how to prevent my wings from being torn from me.

Lightning flashed in the darkness with eye searing brightness, briefly revealing the night-black filaments of dark magic that ran through the clouds like a puppeteer’s strings. Hailstones as large as catapult shot and as sharp as caltrops hammered at my scales, chipping their newfound hardness away, forcing my eyes shut and drumming against the membranes of my wings, forcing me to fold them in lest they be torn and shredded. Up and down lost all meaning as the full fury of the imprisoned storms was unleashed on me. Fear and uncertainty were washing my bravado away with every passing moment. My concentration was slipping, and the potency of the wards that were deflecting the worst of the storm’s power were slipping away with it.

A shard of ice smashed into the side of my face and sent me spinning, and stupidly I opened my mouth to give voice to my pain. Sleet and hail instantly blasted into my mouth and throat, choking me and sending a sharp spike of agony into my mind, and with that the last of my wards evaporated. If I had thought the storm loud before, now it became a cacophony, the sound of it like the world’s ending. I couldn’t fight it, nor could I ride it out. I folded my wings in, hugged my arms and chin to my chest and fell, holding only to the hope that the stars would let me hit the ground without too much damage.

I woke to pain, cold, and a lungful of water. But I was yet alive, there was solid ground under me and I knew which way was up, so it was a victory of sorts. I pushed and clawed my way out of the icy torrent I was laying in, just far enough that I could cough, vomit water and even occasionally take some air in. Once the worst of that had passed I concentrated on pulling the rest of me out of the water, temporarily grateful for how the cold had numbed the injuries I’d taken from the fall, some of which looked quite terrible.

The stream was deep but narrow, the bed it ran in a sharp-sided crack where part of a mountain had been split away by ice. It was too narrow for me to have landed in cleanly, and the wounds in my hide and the fractured bones I could feel were testament to how I had been thrown against the mountain and slid down, the flinty edges of the shale cutting dozens of deep furrows in my flesh as I did. I pulled myself onto a shallow ledge and tried to tally my injuries, but blood loss and the persistent cold were fogging my mind, making cohesive thought as slippery as a greased eel.

I had to do something, but what was it? Something about a screaming woman. Perhaps I should sleep. Things are clearer after a good sleep. No! Why not? Not sure. It’s getting warm now, so much better. Was I looking for someone? It’s raining too much. Go to sleep. Sleep.

And sleep I did, the constant raging of the storm and shriek of lightning fading into the background. When I woke, it was again to pain and confusion. I was shivering uncontrollably, each shiver tearing a little more at the livid wounds that marked me and setting my cracked bones grating against each other. I licked the wounds that I could reach; it was all that my fogged mind would allow me to do. I don’t know how long I lay like that, panting and licking at my injuries like some common beast, but eventually the exertion began to generate some warmth, and with that a basic level of coherent thought returned to me, enough that I could take stock of where I was and what shape I was in. The storm had relented, perhaps due to the lack of a clear target, but the riverbed remained a deep and dangerous crevice to my right, effectively leaving me trapped on the ledge, at least until I was strong enough to leap to the other side.

I reached for my sorcery, intending to employ it for healing, but two things happened. First, I heard an immediate rumble of thunder and saw the clouds darken overhead, and second I felt a yawning void where the Songlines should have been. Even here, clouded by the Archmage’s construct, I should have been able to feel a sliver of it, but they were entirely gone. Perhaps I should have expected it, given what even Navar’s magic had accomplished, but this was a complete void, not just a mere absence. I pushed at it, ignoring the grumbling in the skies, but all that I sensed was an emptiness, like a river that had been dammed at its source. I stopped trying, and noted how the clouds seemed to thin out again. I tried it twice more, with the same result.

That was it then. The storm effectively hunted by magic. Cunning. If I could fly without relying on any sorcery, I might be able to keep low and break through the barrier before it could close on me again. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was a start, and I scraped away a few loose rocks and made myself a bit more comfortable on the ledge.

I wanted to hoard the sorcery that remained in my reserves, but as I saw it, having it wasn’t much use if my body gave out. I slowly wove it into a healing pattern, stopping whenever the storm reacted, and eventually found something like a middle ground where I could use it without the fear of attracting a lightning strike. I settled it across me, then closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on my breathing while the magic did its work. I had waited centuries for my vengeance, so what were another few days? If nothing else, it gave me more time to imagine all the ways I could kill Talgoth when I finally got my claws on him.

Eventually though, the tears in my hide were sealed under fresh new scars and my cracked bones had bonded once more. I was stiff, cold and very, very hungry, but the hunt was back on. I stretched as best I could, took a few deep breaths, and launched myself from the ledge with a growl. I barely made it to the far edge of the ravine, and for one terrible moment I thought my grip was going to tear loose and sending me plummeting into the icy depths yawning behind me, but my claws held. I stretched out my wings and leapt. The air was thin, and it took a thousand feet or more for me to level out, but the same sharp, steep valleys of the mountains that had hurt me before now worked to my benefit.

There was a pleasant ache in my shoulders and chest by the time that I had gained enough height again to rise over the jagged peaks. I could see the inside curve of the storm barrier now and was more than glad to leave it behind me.

And so I began my descent into the heart of Talgoth’s domain. It was still dark here, but it wasn’t the forced darkness of the storm but rather the more natural gloom of sunlight that had been made to fight its way through cloud and mist. There was still life here, despite the death that the Archmage seemed to surround himself with, and I followed the trails that man and beast had left until I came upon the first village of his lands. I had thought that it would be a poor collection of hovels, but instead found it to be far sturdier and inhabited by several families who kept dozens of lovely fat herd animals. I was not in the mood to waste time trying to scare them away and simply landed in the middle of the village, collapsing several houses and whatever was inside them. I ignored the screams and protests as I helped myself to half a dozen goats, a full churn of butter and an amazingly obese man with a feathered hat, presumably their chief. I was too hungry to pass up the soft bounty promised by his jiggling stomach, although I took the precaution of gutting him first so as not to ruin the creamy saltiness of his fat.

One or two enterprising males shot at me with their bows, but a lash of my tail left them bleeding their life into the dirt. The rest of the inhabitants fled, so I took the opportunity to check that my fire bile and reflex were ready; I wasn’t disappointed. The bile burnt fast and cleanly, and after the coldness left by my passing through the storm the feel of a real fire against my hide was glorious. I lingered there until the houses burned to ash, helping myself to whatever foodstuffs I could find, including a small barrel of treasured whale oil. Sated and refreshed, I endured the indignity of a running launch and, muscles straining as I gained height once more, I continued my journey.

There was a long stretch of featureless scrubland between the village and the fortress, a good few hundred miles. I flew steadily, chasing my shadow at a decent pace but without tiring myself. It was quiet here, unnaturally so. Nothing stirred except dry, dead things that the wind toyed with in a desultory manner. Such was the unbroken monotony of it that scores of miles passed by without me really being aware of their passing, nor of what was bearing down on me.

I didn’t see them until it was far too late, and even when I did it took me precious moments to shake off the stupor that had settled on me. By the time my almost hypnotised brain matched the outline of the wyverns to their cat-like shrieks they were on me. There was no time to wonder how they were even here. The first slammed into my ribs and vanished with a scream, having broken its wing in the mistimed attack.

But the second and the third hit me like thunderbolts, digging their eagle-like talons into the soft membranes of my left wing, collapsing it and sending me into a deadly spiral. The rest of the flock were following us down, waiting to strike after the impact rattled my senses and, they hoped, left me too injured or stunned to defend myself.

But I still had time, though not much. I stretched my neck through underneath my wing and clenched my chest muscles in. There! I lunged as soon as the move brought the rump of the first wyvern within biting distance. Wyverns were a bastard breed, a misbegotten experiment in solitary reproduction by those who had come to this world before Anakhara and I had. They lacked arms and looked like nothing more than the overly large offspring of bats and swamp lizards, and as the one in my mouth had just discovered, the price of their unmatched aerial dexterity was a lightweight frame and leathery skin rather than the robust skeleton and hide of a true-born.

I bit down and felt its pelvis collapse. It shrieked in agony and, as I had hoped, tried to flee; its talons tore my wing as it yanked them free, but with it gone I could bring the rest of my wing into view. I couldn’t reach the last one, but I didn’t need to. I spat a thin stream of bile into the wind, and a moment later the spin we were in sent the wyvern through the centre of the dispersing stream, gobbets of it clogging the miserable creature’s nose and mouth. Its yip of confusion turned into an almost human scream as the bile combusted, burning its skull out from the inside as the wind pushed the fire up its snout. It spun away streaming smoke but the ground was now rushing up at me in a blur. My teeth squeaked as I clenched my jaws and fought to tilt my wings enough to widen the arc of the spin I was in, flattening the angle I would hit the ground at and turning what would have been a bone breaking impact into a tumbling slide.

Dead grasses and sand exploded around me, filling the air with a fine dust that I would be digging out from between my scales for decades to come if I survived. The dust-cloud was a blessing though, for it hid me from the rest of the swarm for precious moments, giving me a chance to clear my senses.

I could hear them calling out as they followed the trail I’d left, swooping down from alternate sides, their razored claws extended and eager to find my flesh. Given the unnatural absence of the Songlines in the area, I was still loathe to tap into my inner reserve of sorcery for fear that I wouldn’t be able to replenish it before I confronted the Archmage, so this fight would be with teeth and talons.

Their hunting calls rose in pitch as they saw me, then faltered as I leapt into the air to meet them. The first died with the fighting talon of my left arm rammed entirely through its chest, splitting both spine and heart. As we dropped back to the ground I lashed my tail into the second, the knotted bone and horn catching another under the wing and smashing its ribcage. The others broke off and circled me, suddenly unsure.

That’s when I felt it. After the absence of any type of magical presence, the sudden pulse of dark magic that stabbed through the air was staggering in its potency. I felt the force of it tug at my own sorcery, but this time I wasn’t the target. As one, the wyverns’ shrieking ended, and I saw their eyes darken from amber to black. With blood streaming from their eyes and nose from the force of the compulsion that had crushed both their fear and free will, they attacked in a swarm of teeth and razored claws.