Now, now they’d chosen to fall to fighting. ‘Dragons!’ he shouted, pushing his way onto the jetty. ‘Dragons!’ A knot of panic threatened to burst in his stomach. He glanced over his shoulder. The monsters were still coming straight for the town. Come on, Kemir, you know how fast they fly. Running is a waste of time. So try and think of something better than standing here and looking gormless for the last thirty seconds of your life.
Someone shouted. Around him, people stopped fighting and turned to stare. Some of them screamed. Kat’s fingers dug into his arm, pulling at him.
‘No.’ He shook her off. ‘Running won’t save you. Not now.’ Nor will anything else. He calmly drew out his bow and strung it, his hands working quickly without needing to be told. He could probably get off two or three shots before the dragons burned him in his boots. Not even enough time to put an arrow into each of their eyes. Which would never actually happen anyway. He took out an arrow and aimed. The arrow, for some reason, was shaking. Which confused him until he realised that so was he. All of him. He didn’t even notice whether his arm was still hurting.
Well, so much for shooting them both in the eye. He lowered the bow and lowered his head. Around him people were pushing and shouting, barging each other out of the way. Most of them were running. A few of the sailors were jumping into their boats, trying to push out into the river, far, far too late to get away. A couple fell in, thrashing and splashing in the water. They’ll burn first, he decided. They won’t have time to drown.
‘Kemir!’ Kat was pulling at him again. Waste of time. ‘I’ve seen what they do,’ he whispered, as much to himself as to her. ‘I’ve seen what they do.’ But I’m going to stand and face them and look them in the eye before I die. Although my ancestors know that even that’s hard enough. And if I fell on my knees and wept and shat myself, exactly who would live to remember it?
Someone rammed him from the side, pushing him towards the river. He took a step and then another. He shook himself, tearing his eyes away from the dragons, looking behind him. Kataros.
‘What are you-’
She threw herself at him. He stumbled back, and then there was nothing under his feet any more and he was falling, past the jetty and its wooden pilings and into the river. He had enough time to open his mouth before the Fury wrapped itself around him and dragged him down. Water filled his mouth and poured into his throat. Kataros crashed into the water beside him and grabbed his arm. She was pulling him. His arms and legs thrashed, searching for purchase. Strange. A moment ago he’d been all ready to give up and die. Now suddenly he wanted to cling to life again. Presumably so he could take one last breath before he burned after all. Or perhaps some primitive part of him had decided that drowning was more painful than burning, which was odd, because he would have thought it was the other way around.
His fingers touched something. Something slimy but wonderfully solid. His fingers clawed at it. Wood. A post. He pulled himself to it, wrapped his arms and then his legs around it and hauled himself up towards the light. His face broke the surface. He gasped for air and then coughed and spluttered, throwing up half a lungful of water. He blinked. His ears and nose were full of water. He couldn’t hear properly, just noise, a roaring, rushing sound.
Oh. Yes. Dragons. He shook his head, trying to clear his eyes, and there they were, a few hundred yards away, enormous, filling half the sky, mouths open and filled with fire.
He muttered a prayer, took as deep a breath as he could manage, forced himself not to cough it straight back out again and then pushed himself under the water. He wrapped himself around the post, closed his eyes and waited. The water seemed to spasm all around him. Waited. Another spasm. Waited until his lungs were on fire and then hurled himself back to the surface.
The air was hot. That was the first thing he felt. Something hard bumped his head and then drifted away. When he breathed, he tasted fire. Not smoke and ash and charcoal and all the things that came after fire, but fire itself, the dry hot taste of fresh dragon. He opened his eyes. A burning boat drifted across his vision less than a dozen yards away. Around him bits of wood littered the river, the remains of something smashed into splinters. The wooden walk-way above him was still there, but now the end of it was missing, the other jetties out into the river smashed to flinders. The barge that had brought them this far was ablaze from stem to stern, slowly being pulled away by the current. From down in the water he couldn’t see the town and he didn’t want to.
A few feet away, finally, he spotted Kataros, clinging to another post.
‘Are you all right?’ He had to shout to make himself heard over the noise of the flames. He didn’t hear whatever she said, but she nodded. He closed his eyes for a moment. See? See how useful you are when it comes to looking after her? Not very useful at all. Exactly who saved who just now?
He pushed himself through the water towards her, clutching at the jetty posts, from one to the next. She looked at him with big terrified eyes. That’s when he saw that she was shaking all over.
‘We just stay here,’ he whispered. ‘We just stay here until they’re gone. Hold on to me, hold on to this. However long it takes, whatever they do, we just stay here. Right here. Just here.’
And as the air filled with smoke and the screams of the dying, he held her, held the post, held them both as though his life depended on it.
31
The Spear of the Earth
For someone like the Picker, following Kithyr and the spear had been a trivial thing. If the blood-mage thought that crossing water was some sort of problem for an Elemental Man, he was mistaken. Killing him, that was going to be more taxing. Cutting a man’s throat wide open was usually enough or, failing that, something sharp through the eye socket usually worked. Mages were another matter. They came in all sorts of different shapes and sizes for a start, and you never quite knew what each of them could do. As far as he understood it, even chopping them up and then burning the bits didn’t always finish them. He’d been thinking about that at Valleyford. Plenty of fire, plenty of ashes. No one would know. He’d hesitated, though. The blood-mage obviously had designs of his own on the spear. The Picker had expected that. But he’d felt something from the spear itself, something not expected. Still did, whenever he got too close, a feeling he struggled to understand. Hostility, that was the best way to describe it. So in Valleyford caution and the spear itself had kept him away. Besides, the mage was still taking it the way he wanted it to go. Let him, the Picker decided.
Now there were two dragons gliding in towards a little river town full of screaming people, with the blood- mage and his blood-bonded guards staring slack-jawed at the death flying towards them. This, the Picker decided, was the best opportunity he was going to get. He flickered away, vanishing from where he stood and popping up again only a scant dozen yards from the mage. He’d lied before. Flickering didn’t cost him a year of his life; it barely cost him anything at all.
He felt the spear at once, the venom held tight within it. The anger, the glowering resentment. Timing would be everything. The dragons would come. Everyone would burn. He would flicker in the moment the dragons had passed. He’d take the spear. And then he’d have to do something he almost couldn’t remember ever having to do before. He’d have to run, while the spear stifled every power he’d learned. That much he knew, that much his clan had already found to their cost. The spear took your power. All of it.
He wrapped a cloth around his hand. The spear would be hot after the dragons had done. Then he waited. Watched. Tensed, poised to go. The first dragon, a gleaming amber like honey or liquid gold, screamed overhead and poured fire over the part of the town away from the river, but the Picker wasn’t paying much attention to that one. The other was the one that mattered – the big one, black like night. It dived towards the waterfront, almost straight at Kithyr, and opened its mouth…
And its wings billowed out and it stopped almost dead in the air and then crashed to the ground. Its wings flapped twice, carelessly smashing riverside inns and houses. An angry flick of the tail shattered the jetties. It reared up on its hind legs and sprayed fire in an arc, cutting the blood-mage and his men off from the rest of the town, hosing down the screaming waterfront. Then, when all the screaming stopped, it folded its wings and stared at Kithyr. The blood-mage was holding out the spear. He hadn’t even flinched.
‘You cannot touch me, dragon!’ he shouted, waving it in the dragon’s face. ‘You can’t touch me. You know what this is. You know what this means.’
The black dragon lowered its head and peered at the mage. The Picker coiled, ready to flicker and spring. He
