Mark Chadbourn - Destroyer of Worlds

'The Enemy hope to break our ranks with their war engines. They do not yet realise what weapons we wield, and neither do you. Watch.'

Decebalus raised his eyes to the heavens, ignoring the heavy rain. Despite numbering almost a hundred and fifty, the Army of Dragons was a small knot of resistance compared to the seemingly never-ending ranks of the Enemy. The Dacian barbarian was proud of his troops, huddled together in the face of such overwhelming opposition. They came from more civilised times than he knew, and he had feared their softness of muscle would hamper them in the coming struggle, but they had shown a deeper seam of hardness than he could ever have hoped. Warriors, tacticians, mystics and magicians, they were individuals with a group mind and a spirit that could never be broken. In their eyes, he could see their fear, but still they stood firm. Heroes, he thought. No wonder the Devourer of All Things was afraid of what they could achieve.

Under the clouds, the day became like night. Forty feet away, a bolt of lightning raised a shower of burned earth, and although he could feel its heat, he did not flinch. Instead, he started to laugh heartily, celebrating the storm.

'Pardon me, sir,' Ronnie said, 'but the boys and girls will probably think you've gone mad. Madder.'

'Let them! Mad, yes! Mad with joy at the horror the Enemy will feel when they see how they have underestimated us! See!'

As if on cue, the glamour disappeared and the ranks of the gods were revealed. All around the small clump of Brothers and Sisters of Dragons, like a sunlit mirror at the heart of the storm, the powerful beings dazzled their mortal comrades.

'Crikey!' Ronnie exclaimed. 'Is that why you wouldn't let us see them before?'

'The gods exist to make mortals mad,' Decebalus replied. 'The less you have to do with them, the better it is for you.'

Two gleaming figures ran from the ranks at speed, arching their backs as they threw themselves into a glide just above the ground before soaring up on the air currents. One appeared to Ronnie to be flipping back and forth between two forms: a man with an ornate gold helmet and a coiled beast that appeared simultaneously to be bird, serpent and something constructed of lush foliage.

'That one goes by the name of Quetzalcoatl.' Decebalus rolled his tongue around the syllables as though it had taken him a long time to learn the word. 'All those gods are strange, but he was the strangest of all. Until the last, I could not tell if he even understood me.'

The other figure began to glow like the sun as he flew upwards. His hair was wild, like a beggar's, but he wore golden armour that gave him majesty.

'And that one also hails from the Great Dominion of the southern Americas. His name is Viracocha,' Decebalus continued. 'His melancholy is breathtaking to see. And also irritating. He claims that his tears will wash away the world. But then they all say something like that.'

Caught in the turbulence near the Riot-Beasts, the two gods fought to maintain their stability. Lightning flashed around them as the three monstrous creatures drifted towards the figures they dwarfed.

'They won't stand a chance!' Ronnie said.

When a lightning bolt finally found its way to Viracocha, he lit up like a star. It took Ronnie a second or two to realise that the flash had actually invigorated the god. Sparks fizzed from his fingertips and every follicle of hair until a corona surrounded him. From nowhere, he summoned a micro-weather system. Rain lashed like bullets at the nearest Riot-Beast, and winds buffeted it so it drifted untethered across the plain; and yet still Viracocha burned like a sun, the light growing more intense with each passing moment.

In contrast, Quetzalcoatl swooped like a raptor on a Riot-Beast, raking with claws and beak that came and went every time Ronnie could see him past the glare of Viracocha. Finally, with a sound like shattering glass, the Riot-Beast careered into another before crashing down, those dumb eyes rolling upwards one final time.

Before the creature fell onto the plain, the blazing sun that had been Viracocha threw back its arms and a blast of the purest, hottest light seared the Riot-Beast that had been throwing lightning at him in a ceaseless rain of crackling energy. The light tore through the Beast and continued across the plain to explode in a starburst over the heads of the Enemy, for the first time illuminating their dark ranks. Burning chunks of the Riot-Beast rained down onto the plain, setting the grass ablaze.

'Holy Mary, Mother of God,' Ronnie gasped. 'If we'd only had those at Flanders, sir, the world would be a happier place.'

At an unheard summons, the third Riot-Beast turned and drifted back towards the Enemy lines. Their energies spent, Viracocha and Quetzalcoatl swooped down to the gods, amidst the cheers of the Army of Dragons and a tumultuous welcome from their fellows.

'And that is what two of the gods can achieve,' Decebalus said with a grim smile. 'At our backs we have more than a hundred. The odds have evened considerably.'

On a day hotter than any they had experienced so far, the Court of Endless Horizons reflected a brassy light that made eyes ache and turned the streets into furnaces. The sluggish diaspora sought out the shade of alleys and porches, fanning themselves with the fronds of jungle trees, praying for dusk to fall but dreading it just as much. In the inns and markets, there had been talk of several slayings during the course of the night, beyond the usual bloody results of arguments caused by too many people with too little in too hot a place. Some of the bodies looked as if they had been mauled by a jungle beast; others wore expressions of outright terror frozen into their features at the final moment. Most agreed that something had arrived in the city that would only heap more misery on their suffering.

Aware of the rising tension, the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons moved efficiently from group to clump, beggar to prince, quietly asking about the female Fragile Creature who had last been seen racing through the streets in fear.

In the marketplace, amidst the smell of dried fish and charcoal-grilled meat and the din of people haggling for supplies from dawn to twilight, Church and Ruth debated leaving a note on the enormous wooden post where refugees separated from their loved ones tacked pleas for information regarding their whereabouts, or notes for clandestine meetings that were rarely attended.

'We could search this city for weeks and never stumble across this woman,' Ruth said. She was uncomfortable in the heat and wore a white cotton scarf on her head fastened in a Middle Eastern style with a gold band, which served the dual purpose of keeping her cool and obscuring her identity to casual eyes. 'If you really want to find her, we have to make some waves.'

'If we do that, we're going to draw the Enemy straight to us.'

'I don't understand why they haven't just descended on the city in force, anyway, if they know we're here.'

'This has the Libertarian's fingerprints all over it. He has to play a careful game. He can't risk me getting killed, or badly hurt, but he has to stop us doing anything that might change the established pattern.'

'He's not going to be so concerned about killing the rest of us.'

'No.'

'You know, it's weird how you talk about the Libertarian as if he's a completely different person.'

'He is.' The fleeting disbelief in Ruth's face stung him. 'All right,' he accepted, 'there's a continuity. But something's broken in him, and until I know what it is I can't do anything to prevent it.'

'But you think it's something to do with you and me.'

'In that flash of precognition I had in the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Libertarian suggested I threw everything away because of my "pathetic, doomed love".'