Chris Wraight - Master of Dragons

Morek looked at him with surprise. To contradict a runelord was rare.

‘What do you think will happen when we return?’ Morgrim asked, speaking slowly, almost sonorously. ‘We could assemble a host three times the size and the result would be the same. The drakk are too strong. I should have listened to Imladrik. I took it for boasting, but he was too noble for that. Grimnir’s eyes, he was trying to warn me.’

The other thanes looked at him warily. They didn’t like talk like this.

‘We cannot fight them like this,’ Morgrim said. ‘We must find another way.’

Frei laughed bitterly. ‘And what way would that be? Can you now fly in the air? Can you shoot flame from earth to sky?’

‘Don’t write that off,’ said Morgrim, utterly serious. ‘But for now? We must forswear Tor Alessi. We must, for the moment, forget the oaths we took there.’

The thanes began to mutter amongst themselves. Even Morek looked perturbed. ‘We cannot forget them,’ he warned.

‘We can let them rest. There are other ways to hurt them.’ Morgrim never took his eyes off the flames. They were reassuringly alive to him, like flickering remnants of the ancestor gods he had worshipped his whole life. ‘How many drakk do they have? I saw six. If others exist, they are over the sea. In one place, those six can destroy any army we create.’

As he spoke he lifted his eyes from the fire and studied the reaction of his surviving thanes. ‘That is the key: one place. They cannot be everywhere. They cannot defend Tor Alessi and Athel Toralien, Athel Maraya and Sith Rionnasc, Tor Reven, Kor Peledan or the hundred other fortresses they have built. If we cannot defeat them in one battle then we shall defeat them in a thousand small ones. We must split ourselves, fracture our armies into pieces. Every King shall lead his host, every hold shall work on its own; no grand host will be assembled, not until the very end.’

Morgrim’s jaw clenched. ‘This is our land . Why do we fight like they do, out under the sky, lined up to face their magics? We are tunnellers . We can melt into the stone, sink back into the soil. We need no hosts pulled together in the open for the drakk to fly at.’

His eyes went flat as he envisioned it.

‘We can mount endless attacks, one after the other, directed at every fortress they possess. They will turn most of them back. They will kill many more of us. But some will get through. One by one, the walls will fall. We can make this world a hell for them, one in which the suffering never ceases. They fight well, the elgi. They fight better than any warriors I have ever seen. But do they suffer well? No one suffers like the dawi. We will make this the battleground — they will be broken on the anvil of our suffering.’

He finished. The silence was broken by the low roar of the fire and the murmur of the dirges. The thanes listened. They digested. They reflected.

Morgrim leaned back, clasping his hands together. They would need time. The High King would need time, as would the other warlords and captains who were already marching towards their future battles. Word would spread out, travelling like wildfire along the mud-thick lanes of the deep forest, gradually spreading from mouth to mouth until the whole world was running with it.

Morek shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he muttered.

That was good. A runelord would never simply agree; there needed to be deliberation, debate, rumination. As a start, given the circumstances, Morek’s stance was admirably open.

Morgrim determined to say no more that night. He would listen to the others, knowing that in time his counsel would prevail. He had seen the way the war must now be fought. In time the others would too.

A thousand tiny battles, each one grinding into the bedrock of the earth, each one a new wound on the weary face of the elgi empire.

He was already planning his next move. Before dusk the following day he would be marching. His army would splinter, each shard heading in a different direction, and he would make his own way among them, no longer the leader of many holds but the warlord of one.

He could see the spires of his prey in his mind, rising from the dry lands to the south, the fragile citadel created by his enemy.

For revenge, for the deaths of Tor Alessi, that one would be the first to burn.

Sunlight angled into the marble chamber from high glass windows. Low beds ran along the walls, dozens of them, each occupied by a wounded highborn. Incense burned in suspended thuribles, a soft fragrance of lavender and marjoram designed to mask the underlying tang of blood. Attendants came and went, feet shuffling on the stone, pale robes brushing.

Thoriol lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. His whole side throbbed with a dull pain, worse when he moved. His chest and stomach were swathed in bandages, some of them bloody.

He had only sketchy memories of how he had arrived there. He didn’t remember falling during the battle; he had pushed to the forefront, determined to avenge Baelian’s death. He’d loosed two, maybe three, arrows, thinking that they’d all found their marks.

After that, very little. The dwarfs had been massing in numbers and one of them must have loosed a crossbow bolt at him. He had dim recollections of a burning night, of shouting and hurrying. He’d awoken briefly in a crowded chamber, its floor strewn with bloody straw and smoking candles. Someone had leaned over him, pulling his face around to get a better look. He remembered the pain being much worse then.

Then he’d awoken in the marble chamber with very little idea how much time had passed. His dressings had been changed and healing oils applied to his wounds. The attendants had treated him with the sort of unconscious respect he’d enjoyed as a dragon rider’s acolyte in Tor Caled, not with the peremptory instruction an archer enjoyed.

He tried to pull himself further up in his bunk, to ease some of the discomfort in his side. As he did so he saw two figures approach, and his heart sank.

‘Awake, then,’ said the first of them. The Master Healer was an old man from Yvresse, bald as an infant, prone to smiling, his fingers stained from the herbs he crushed during the night hours. ‘I do not think you will be with us much longer.’

Thoriol ignored him; his companion was another matter.

‘How did you find out?’ Thoriol asked his father.

Imladrik looked tired. Incredibly tired. His skin was raw, as if scrubbed hard with pumice to remove some terrible stain, and his long hair hung listlessly around his face. ‘Draukhain recognised you,’ he said. ‘He can sense the Dragontamer’s bloodline.’

Thoriol winced. ‘Then you brought me here.’

‘Others took you from the walls. I sent for you once I knew you lived.’

‘You should not have taken me from my company.’

‘If you had not been brought here you would have died,’ said the Master Healer placidly. ‘Two quarrels pierced your flesh, one deeply.’

Imladrik turned to the Healer. ‘Thank you, Taenar. I think I might have some time alone with my son now.’

The Healer bowed and withdrew, his slippers padding on the marble. Once he was gone Imladrik sat at the end of the bed. As he did so his whole body seemed to sag.

‘Why, son?’ he asked.

Thoriol had dreaded the question ever since he had awoken on that first morning, out at sea with his head hammering. It was all so random, all so unplanned. Not for the first time, he had no good answers.

‘I was deceived, at the start,’ he said, opting to be as truthful as he could. ‘Then I thought I’d been given another chance. Where is the rest of my company?’

‘I do not know. I can ask Caradryel to bring them to-’