Drutheira was in even worse shape. When Liandra stopped the witch fell to the ground and stayed there. Liandra couldn’t be sure she was breathing and couldn’t be sure that she cared. She sank to her knees, wondering just how long it would take for the sun to fry her into wizened ashes. There was no shelter, no moisture, just open miles of horrific, bleary, seamy heat.
She closed her eyes. After a while, oddly, she began to feel better. The heat on her shoulders felt a little less intense, the air a little less stultifying. Perhaps, she thought, this was what dying felt like.
She opened her eyes again and looked up, half expecting to see the skies unravelling into waves of pure sunlight. Instead she stared straight up into the jaws of a huge creature, hovering above her on massive wings like a golden eagle’s. A cruel curved beak snapped at her less than an arm’s length from her face. She smelled the tart scent of animal breath on the wind.
For a moment she thought she was hallucinating. Then she saw the rider mounted on the back of the beast – asur armour lined with black and bronze – and realised what it was: a griffon, magnificent in leonine splendour.
‘I would have slain you for a dwarf,’ called the rider, shading her with his beast’s wings. He landed and dismounted, bringing a gourd of water with him. Liandra saw the sigil of Oeragor – a black griffon rampant on an argent field – embroidered on the fabric, and would have smiled if her mouth still worked.
She drank, just a little, letting the griffon-rider hold the gourd for her. The water was cool, almost painfully so.
‘We do not see many travellers out in the Blight,’ he said. ‘If I had not been aloft–’
‘Don’t,’ croaked Liandra. ‘I do not wish to think on that.’
‘And your companion?’
‘Druchii.’
The griffon rider started, hand leaping to the hilt of his sword, but Liandra shook her head weakly.
‘Captive,’ she rasped, forcing the words out. She began to feel dizzy again, and struggled to keep her poise. ‘Bringing… to the city. Take us there. Lord… Imladrik…’
That was all she got out. Black spots appeared before her eyes and she felt her head go thick.
The griffon-rider gazed at Drutheira doubtfully, then back to Liandra.
‘I can take you to the city,’ he said, tipping the gourd up for her again. ‘Though Imladrik is not here, nor has been for many years.’ The rider had a young, lean face, one that was both serious and mournful. ‘Would that he were. I fear you have not found much sanctuary here.’
Liandra drank greedily. She barely heard the words; all she knew was that she had cheated death – again. That made her happy, almost deliriously so.
‘There is little time,’ she said painfully. ‘Use it well. Take us both.’
A fire burned in the heart of the forest, as tall and broad as the great oaks that crowded around the edges of the clearing. It roared and crackled, sending sparks trailing high up into the night sky and skirling above the treetops.
During the journey west the dwarfs had lit no fires, mindful then of the need for stealth. Now that need had passed.
Morgrim’s surviving thanes sat around the blaze, their armour limned a deep orange. Grondil had gone, last seen charging into the path of a golden wyrm, swinging his warhammer wildly around his head and yelling obscenities at the top of his voice. Frei had survived but his arms were both broken, rendering him furiously weaponless. Many others were lost.
Those who remained stared moodily into the flames. Morgrim could see the wounds they had all sustained – deep wounds from speartips or dragon-claws. Frei had lost almost all of his incredibly finely crafted armour, ripped from his back by one of the beasts. He’d been lucky to survive, broken arms or no, though Morgrim knew Frei didn’t see things quite like that.
They were consumed with shame. Their cheeks glowed red, their hands rubbed one another, knuckle over knuckle, wearing at their anguish. The dirges had not stopped; even now Morgrim could hear them from the trees, murmured around lesser campfires by the warriors he had brought to the face of ruin.
As for himself, Morgrim felt nothing but resolution. He had felt it ever since leaving the mountains – only Imladrik’s doomed attempts to halt the violence had shaken that certainty. There was a kind of purity in adversity and, now that they had been so comprehensively ravaged, all that remained was to fight on. There was nowhere to go, no further questions to ask, nothing left but unbreakable stubbornness.
Which is, after all, what we are known for.
‘And so what now?’ asked Frei, his voice thick with weariness.
Morek spat on the earth. ‘Back to the holds. Muster again, then we strike. Like a hammer on the metal, they will break eventually.’
‘No, rhunki,’ said Morgrim quietly. He remained staring at the flames, appreciating the heat of them against his exposed skin. ‘We will not go back.’
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,’
