He kept to his hands and knees and crawled towards the high prow. He heard the aft repeaters loose again, followed by the crack of wood splintering. For a moment he thought Arian had scored a hit, but then the Ithaniel bucked like an unbroken stallion and slewed round hard.
Caradryel was thrown over to the nearside railing, still ten paces short of the prow. He stared back down the length of the ship. Spearmen were running towards the quarterdeck. The lead corsair was now right on the Ithaniel’s stern and loosing grappling hooks.
Caradryel gripped his sword two-handed and wished he’d paid more attention to the expensive lessons he’d been given back in Faer-Lyen. For all that, fear still eluded him. He’d never found it easy to be afraid. The overriding emotion he felt was irritation, a nagging sense that something was wrong – that dying in the middle of the ocean on a nondescript errand-runner was not how he was meant to leave the world.
‘Repel boarders!’ came Arian’s powerful voice from the quarterdeck, followed by a commendable roar of determination from the spearmen around him. Caradryel watched them form a knot of resistance, their speartips glinting in the sunlight. ‘For Asuryan! For the Sacred Flame!’
Then, as the Ithaniel fell away and the corsair warship rose up on a rolling wave-front, he saw the foe revealed – ranks of druchii swordsmen, four-thick along the pitching railing of the enemy decking, poised to leap as the grapple-hooks pulled tight. Caradryel saw them jostling to get to the forefront – they outnumbered the asur by at least two to one, and that was before the other two ships drew alongside.
Caradryel started to stagger back the way he’d come, teetering along the tilting deck with sword in hand, certain he’d be no use but belatedly determined not to cower in the prow while fighting broke out at the other end of the ship.
Such a waste, he thought, gripping the blade inexpertly and thinking of the fine silks of his robe, the ancient towers of Faer-Lyen in the mountains, the future he’d planned out in the courts of Lothern, Caledor and Saphery. Such a stupid, terrible waste.
He made it less than ten paces before falling flat on his face, slammed down against the deck by sudden wind and movement. He tasted blood on his lips and heard an echoing rush in his ears. He cursed himself, angry that he’d already tripped over his own feet.
But then he lifted his head and saw the reason he’d fallen.
He had not tripped. Amid the sudden screams he had just enough wit to realise that his role in the combat had suddenly become entirely irrelevant, and that no one else – druchii or asur spearman – had any further part to play in what now unfolded. The battle had been snatched away from them, swatted aside contemptuously by power of such splendour that it made the world itself around him seem diminished into nothingness.
Caradryel hardly heard the sword fall from his fingers. He barely noticed that his jaw hung open stupidly and his eyes stared like a child’s.
It had all changed. In the face of that, and for the first time in his short, privileged life, Caradryel at last learned the heady rush of true, undiluted fear.
Arian didn’t see it coming. Caelon didn’t see it either, nor did the sharp-eyed archers in the masts. Very little escaped the eyes of the asur, so it must have moved fast – astonishingly fast, faster than thought.
The druchii were slow to react, but even when they did it was painfully inadequate. Whoops of relish changed into screams of terror just before it hit them, snapping the grapple lines and whipping the rigging into tatters. Arian saw some of them leap into the water rather than face it. He’d fought druchii before and knew they were no cowards, but he understood the panic. What could they do? What could they possibly do?
He barely held on to his wits himself. Part of him wanted to bury his head in his hands, cowering against the decking until it shot clear again.
‘Fall back!’ he shouted, somehow dragging the words out of his throat. ‘Man the sails and pull clear! Pull us clear!’
He didn’t know if anyone heeded him. He didn’t even turn to look. All he could do was watch, gazing out at it as if newborn to the world and ignorant of all its wonders.
As long-lived and mighty as the children of Ulthuan were, some powers in the world still had the heft and lineage to overawe them.
‘Dragon,’ he whispered, the word spilling reverently from his cracked lips. It might have been the name of a god. ‘Holy flame. A dragon.’
Caradryel pressed himself up against the railings, trembling and useless.
The wind itself had changed – it was as if the elements of air and fire had suddenly burst into violent union. The ships rocked crazily, thrown around like corks by the downdrafts from splayed wings.
The noise was the most terrifying thing. The Ithaniel’s spars shivered and the water drummed as if under a deluge. The sound was unforgettable – the mingled screams and battle-cries of a thousand mortal voices, locked together and blended into a pure animal bellow of rampant excess.
After the noise came the stink, a charred-metal stench like a blacksmith’s forge, hot, pungent and saturated with the wild edge of ancient magic.
And then, finally, how it looked.
Its body was taut like a hunting hound, ribbed with steely plates, vivid, glistening, a shard of a jewel hurled into the heavens. It twisted in the air, flashing a long sapphire-blue hide. Its wings shot out like speartips, splayed with membranous skeins of bone-white
