Silus looked towards the star burning low on the horizon. Kerberos had said that Silus was to guide Illiun and his people towards a certain creature. Was it this that Kelos had sensed?
As Silus prepared to gather together the camp, he thought that he heard a low, distant keening.
Emuel barely had time to scrabble onto Calabash’s back before the dragon took to the air. Below them, Piotr sniffed at the ground where the last of the orcs had been destroyed, before following them. The dragon kept its distance, however, as though not wanting to intrude on Calabash’s grief. And was this what the dragon was feeling, Emuel wondered? Was this why the creature did not respond to his touch? He felt sure that he couldn’t know the mind of a being so alien, but he thought that he sensed a certain tension in Calabash, a certain heaviness in the way it held its head.
They followed the light of the setting sun as it retreated before them, and Calabash put on an extra burst of speed, as though trying to outrace the night. The temperature quickly tumbled as the stars wheeled above them and Emuel tried to pull his cloak closer about his shoulders. The wind that tore at him made this a far from easy task, and at length he had to sacrifice his cloak to the wind, lest he also lose himself. In shirtsleeves and tunic the cold bit deep, but though he shouted at Calabash to land, to seek shelter, the dragon flew on.
Emuel could see nothing below them now; there was only the dark, featureless plain. Kerberos hung low to their right and Emuel offered up a prayer to the god to intervene: to remind its creature of the passenger that clung on even against the gales and the cold that assailed him.
When Emuel lost the feeling in his hands, he gripped even harder with his knees. He found himself reminiscing about the mines he had worked in as a boy. How absolute and shocking the darkness had been the one time his lamp had run out of oil as he’d been operating a trap; the stink of guano and the small soft sounds of movement close by; the tickle of insects as they crawled across his exposed flesh…
Only when a brilliant flash shone through his eyelids did Emuel realise that he had fallen asleep. He snapped open his eyes and jerked upright, almost losing his hold on his mount.
Ahead of them a burning ball of rock was spiralling towards the earth, a tail of black smoke trailing from its rear to entwine the dragon and the eunuch. Emuel gagged on the stench of sulphur as the smoke rushed against his face. Calabash wheeled to follow the meteor, dipping its wings as it went into a dive, calling out to Piotr as it went.
The roar of the meteor grew louder as they followed it into a steep-sided valley, violet and emerald flames erupting from fissures in the rock, washing the scene below them in a strange, frenetic light.
Emuel could well guess at what lay within the heart of the burning stone, and Calabash and Piotr sang it down to the earth as it streaked low over a desert landscape. They landed almost at the same time as the meteor, the sand thrown into the air by the great rock’s impact falling around them in a glittering rain. Emuel slid from Calabash’s back and tumbled to the ground, where he waited for sensation to return to his limbs.
Ahead of him, the egg that lay in the centre of the glowing pit was bigger than any Emuel had yet seen. It rose over the dragons, its surface a pure obsidian that reflected their questing forms. Calabash moved in close, only to skitter back as the egg cracked with a sound like the breaking of a great slab. A single claw emerged through the rent, dripping with a pale viscous fluid, and Emuel was shocked by its sheer size. It withdraw as the egg shuddered again, the fractures marbling its surface multiplying in number as the creature within battered against its confinement.
Emuel and the dragons flinched as the egg shattered. There was a powerful downdraft as the creature within unfurled its wings, and they looked up as the stars were eclipsed by the dragon’s vast form.
The dragon howled, and the deep, bass sound of its call resonated in Emuel’s skull, bringing on a dizzying wave of nausea that threatened to take him to the edge of consciousness. He stumbled against Calabash, whose own voice harmonised with the monster; Piotr joined in, adding further depth to the song. The creature that now stood before them was more than twice the size of Emuel’s companions, its scaled flesh the same azure as the deity whose face seemed to race through the clouds above them, and indeed the dragon’s flesh appeared to move with the same urgency, the blue scales darkening and lightening in tandem with the god that looked down on them all.
The dragon brought the song to an abrupt end and looked down. Calabash and Piotr bowed their heads, and when Emuel didn’t do the same the azure dragon’s head snaked down — the graceful curve of its long neck reminding Emuel of a swan’s — until it was face-to-face with the eunuch. Emuel looked to either side of him, mentally urging his companions to give him a sign as to what he should do. He was about to reach out his hand and lay his palm against the dragon’s head in a gesture of friendship when — with a great intake of breath that sounded like the wind whistling in a deep cavern — the giant lizard roared.
A foetid wind blasted against Emuel’s face, seeming to sink into his flesh and insinuate itself throughout his body. The eunuch felt his bladder and bowels loosen. He cowered, expecting to be devoured at any moment. Instead, the dragon rose on its haunches, its head held to one side as though it was listening for something.
Hot piss trickling down his leg, Emuel heard it.
From every direction came the response as the dragons spreading across the globe raised their voices, joined by Calabash and Piotr, revelling in the call of their fraternity. The blue dragon grunted and took to the air. Emuel watched it go, amazed that something so vast, so obviously heavy, could fly. He was still watching it snake through the skies when Calabash nudged Emuel onto its back and, followed by Piotr, took off after their new master.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They had all seen the star finally fall to earth, had felt it as a deep bass thud that made the desert sand shiver. Silus knew, then — looking towards the column of smoke rising from just beyond the horizon — that he could no longer bear the weight of his guilt. If he was going to lead Illiun and his people to their deaths, then he needed confirmation that he was doing the right thing from someone other than Kerberos. Illiun’s story had shaken his faith in the deity, and every kind gesture from the settlers, every act that showed them to be nothing less than entirely human, no matter their origin, made his task all the more difficult.
So he approached Katya as she sat chatting by the campfire and said, “We need to talk.”
She nodded as though she had been expecting this, handed Zac into the care of Rosalind, and let him lead her out beyond the light of the flames.
Away from the camp, Katya turned and was about to open her mouth — let all her worries and fears flood out — when Silus held up his hand, silencing her.
First he told her that he loved her and Zac — no matter what happened to them, that would never change — and then he told her of the task that Kerberos had entrusted him to perform and everything he had learned about this world; explained to her that if it wasn’t carried out then the future history of Twilight would be unwritten.
“I’ve tried to justify it to myself,” Silus said. “After all, what are the deaths of tens of people, compared to millions? But this isn’t as straightforward as destroying the Chadassa; those alien creatures were demonstrably evil. No matter which way you look at it, these… these are people, Katya, human beings, and my god is asking me to murder them.”
Seeing the despair on his face, she took Silus into her arms, and though she still didn’t know how to respond to what he had shared with her, she said, “Shh, it’s okay. I still love you.”
“I don’t know what to do, Katya. How can I stand against a god? And how when the consequences of doing so would be so dire?”
Katya sighed. All the tiredness and the toll that the journey had taken on her were written on her face.
“I suppose that sometimes we just can’t fight against destiny,” she said. “Sometimes it’s impossible to understand the odds we’re up against. You were called, Silus. You told me that yourself. Last time you listened to that call, you helped save Twilight from the Chadassa invasion. This time the threat is harder to understand, but the stakes are higher. This will be our world one day, this is ourworld. We must make sure that nothing happens to interfere with that.”
Silus looked up at the great azure sphere that had set him on this path, and silently cursed the fact that there had to be a god at all. Without Kerberos, life would be so much easier.
A sudden pulse of light washed across the face of the deity and he knew that the time had come to put the
