Marie Brennan - In Ashes Lie

The charred timbers shifted, sending sparks into the air.

Jack halted her with one hand on her arm. The tottering chimneys might yet crumble into their path. But by the tightening of his fingers, he realized at the same instant she did that the debris was not collapsing.

It was rising.

The black, searing bulk of the Dragon rose from its lair.

Liquid gold and silver, the lost treasures of the company hall, dripped from its sides like blood. The jagged head swung around, skin cracking where it bent, exposing the fiery substance beneath. Hellish wind blasted them both as the beast exhaled, and then it opened its eyes.

Pinned beneath that gaze like mice beneath a hawk, neither of them found the voice to speak. They needed no words: the instant their muscles could respond, they fled.

But the flight Lune had imagined was nothing like what they faced. There were no streets to run down; instead they staggered across a treacherous plain, twisting their ankles with every third stride. Lune planted the staff for footing, and the ground cracked beneath the sudden frost. Jack clutched her shoulder to save his own balance. They swerved around a chimney, then heard the bricks crash down behind them a moment later. Bereft of all their landmarks and paths, Jack and Lune sought the gate by instinct, and behind them the Dragon gained.

Shouts in the choking air. The others had noticed their flight, and harried the beast’s flanks, as if it needed encouragement to follow. A scream: someone perhaps had come too close. Lune dared not turn to look. They’d passed Aldersgate in their terror, but the unburned houses lay too near outside that wall; Newgate would be safer.

If they could reach it in time.

The shattered bulk stood up ahead, all the prisoners of its jail fled. Gasping for want of clean air, Lune flung herself at it; Jack coughed out something that might have been an oath. They passed through the shadow of its arch, and she thought, We made it.

A snarl came from above.

The Dragon coiled atop the scorched and crumbling structure of the gate. Its long neck thrust downward, maw wide to reveal the inferno within. Lune screamed, and then Jack had her sleeve and jerked her to the side. The serrate teeth snapped shut where they had been.

They had meant to go down Snow Hill, and make their stand at Holborn Bridge over the Fleet, where Blacktooth Meg might still lurk. But in their panic, they were running north, along the line of the wall, while the Dragon’s bulk thundered down from the gate, shaking the earth with its landing. Up ahead—far too close—sat an unbroken line of houses, preserved with terrible effort from the calamity that even now pursued Lune and Jack.

She dragged him to a halt in the embers. “We cannot go farther! It must be here!”

Jack spun to face the oncoming worm. Lune wrapped her aching hands around the staff and did the same. But not quickly enough, for the Dragon was upon them, and a claw of black heat snapped tight around her body.

PIE CORNER, LONDON: seven o’clock in the morning

Jack leapt without thinking, grabbing hold of Lune’s leg. The iron box clanked into the ashes, and for a moment Queen and Prince alike swung in the air, dangling from the Dragon’s claw. Then something ripped and they fell. Jack slammed his hip badly against the box, but worse, he heard the staff clatter away.

He inhaled, caught a lungful of dust, and spasmed in a cough. Only instinct made him roll, and an instant later something crushed the ground where he had been. Blind and choking, he scrabbled away, repeating to himself, This is not the death I saw. This is not the death I saw. But was the vision he’d seen when he touched the Cailleach’s staff prophecy, or merely one possibility out of many?

Through his own coughing he heard other voices. They were not alone. As his streaming eyes cleared, though, he saw that no one could get past the Dragon’s lashing tail; he and Lune were the sole prey for its claws and teeth. Lucky us.

His back hit some fragment of wall, and Jack reached for a hold that could help him to his feet. But before he found anything, his body locked in new paralysis.

Above him, the seething face of the Dragon rose.

It was a horror beyond fire, beyond plague, beyond war. Those did not have eyes that transfixed a man, that blazed down upon him and hungered for the power his flesh bore. Jack could not breathe; his lungs convulsed, unable to draw air past the constriction in his throat.

Then came a scream unlike any he had heard. Lune—the elegant faerie Queen of the Onyx Court, the silver statue who played politics like chess but knew nothing of battle—had the staff in her hands once more, and she swung it full-armed at the Dragon, fury taking the place of skill. “I shall not lose two!”

The Dragon hissed when the staff struck its leg, not from its throat, but from the steaming flesh itself. The Cailleach’s winter chill blackened the surface and stiffened the joint. But it didn’t slow the beast’s other limbs; the undamaged claw slapped Lune down, sending her sprawling across the ground, before seizing her once more in an unbreakable grip.

The staff, knocked from her hands, skidded within Jack’s reach.

For one horrific instant, his arms would not move. They refused, knowing the pain that awaited them. But Lune screamed from above, and it turned out that loyalty trumped self-preservation.

Clenching his jaw so hard a tooth split, he grabbed the staff of the Cailleach Bheur.

I know how I will die.

Roaring, Jack thrust the end of the staff at the underbelly of the Dragon, at the place where the heart might be if this were an ordinary creature. The impact made no mark on his numb, insensate hands, but the force traveled through his arms and into his spine, staggering him back a step.

And this time the Dragon screamed.

A crack opened through the chest and belly of the Dragon, like stone contracting beneath a harder frost than the world had ever known. At the very root of that fissure burned a tiny sun, light and heat beyond the ability of the human eye to bear. The Dragon’s heart was there for the taking—but it would annihilate mortal flesh at a touch.

He had seen his death twice, and this was not it.

A shadow eclipsed that terrible light. Lune plunged her left hand into the fissure, sinking her arm in up to the shoulder, and when she pulled out again, the sun was in her hand.

The box!

Jack dove into the ashes. He felt but didn’t hear his body strike the ground; he couldn’t tell whether all the world had gone to clamor or silence, in the dreadful inaudible sound of the Dragon’s agonized bellow. The box, where is the box—Lune will have no hand left at all—

His fingers stubbed themselves against the iron, then found a corner and pulled.

More ashes flew to choke him as he lurched to his feet, snatching the lid open as he went. Above them, the black mass of the Dragon writhed. Wounded, but not dead. It could live without its heart. He ducked as a claw snatched blindly above his head, and ran for the Queen.

Lune blazed as if the sun had lent the moon all its glory. No time for transmutation now. Jack shoved the iron prison at her. Christ Almighty, I can see the bones of her hand. They spasmed just above the black opening, as if Lune could not make her fingers release. Her face was a rictus of agony.

Forgive me—

Jack drove the iron edge against her wrist.

Blackness swallowed the sun. So great was the light of the heart, Jack thought for a moment the light in the sky had gone out. But he didn’t need his eyes to feel the metal in his hands, and he slammed the lid shut.