didn’t dare move. Why wasn’t the mage dead? What was the dragon doing?
‘You know what this is!’ shouted the mage again. His voice sounded different. Stronger. Deeper. Not really his any more, but a chorus of many voices, all speaking in unison, all snarling with hate. ‘The Spear of the Earth, that’s what we are. The Pain of a Thousand Voices, and we know you. Do you remember us, brother? Do you remember what we are?’
The Picker dropped his cloth and chose a short, sharp sword. The blade was little longer than his forearm, but it was thick and heavy. For cutting limbs. People pruning, as we called it.
The dragon shifted closer until its nose was inches from Kithyr. Then its tail arced over its head. It snatched up three of Kithyr’s screaming men at once, tossed them into the air, caught them one by one in its mouth and ate them.
The rest broke and fled. The blood-mage might have bound them to him, but there were limits, even to that sort of power. The Picker didn’t wait. He flickered. He vanished from where he stood and for an instant became the wind and the air. A moment later he appeared behind Kithyr. The sword flashed and the blood-mage suddenly didn’t have an elbow any more.
‘Who was it told you all them stories, eh?’ he whispered. ‘Who was it told you about us, what we does and doesn’t do, eh? Was me and I lied.’ He snatched up the spear, meaning to hurl it towards the water and flicker away again. All too quick for the dragon to do anything about, leaving it with the blood-mage and whatever else took its fancy. Except even as he thought it, the simmering fury of the spear crashed into him like a great wave and he felt himself drown under its force. And then something wrapped around his waist and lifted him up into the air. The dragon had him.
I can still go, he thought. I can drop the spear and flicker away. The fury in the spear was like someone screaming in his ear, constant and relentless. The second dragon, the golden one, paused from its destruction of the town and thundered towards them, burning timbers tossed up into the air by its wake as though they were paper. The black dragon lifted him higher, holding him close, staring at him with amber eyes the size of a man’s head.
Why are you here, Elemental Man? Why have the silver ones come back?
The Picker squeezed his eyes shut.
We have felt them. Why have they come back?
Silver ones? The half-man, half-god wizards that the Taiytakei sea captains had brought with them, was that it? The Moon Sorcerers from the Diamond Isles. He shook himself. It didn’t matter. He was an Elemental Man. Even a dragon couldn’t kill him if he didn’t want to die. He tensed. This would have to be quick.
Do you know what you hold there, child of earth?
Enough. The Picker raised the spear and aimed straight at the dragon’s head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly, ‘what this spear will do to you.’ He threw the spear straight into the black dragon’s face and flickered away. The spear struck true, straight in the dragon’s eye. The dragon roared and screamed. The spear erupted in a flash of light so bright that the Picker had to turn away to shield his eyes. When he looked back, the dragon was still there, but now it wasn’t moving any more. The spear had turned it to stone.
He flickered again. Snatched the spear out of the dragon’s eye. It came away easily. His hands tingled. He dropped it, flickered, caught it before it hit the ground, turned towards the gold one and threw again with all his strength. ‘Die, monster!’ Flickered behind it…
Except the golden dragon jumped at him. It batted the spear aside, tumbling it away towards the river. The dragon’s tail lashed like a whip. As the Picker reappeared, it caught him square in the side, shattering one arm, caving in his chest and throwing him through the air like a rag doll.
‘How…?’ He tried to say. How did you know where I was? How can you be so quick? He tried to flicker again, but it was a weak and futile effort. It didn’t work. Slowly he stood up. The golden dragon turned and gazed at him.
The Spear of the Earth, it mused. You are dying, earth-child. If you knew what you were, if you knew what you held, you would not have done this. Do you really not remember? The monster seemed truly puzzled. Do they poison you too, so that you forget what you are?
‘I don’t…’ Don’t know what you’re talking about. Breathing hurt far too much to talk. He coughed and his mouth filled with bloody foam. He tried to stand. His legs at least were still working.
Nothing can stand against the power of the spear. That was always its strength and its curse. Why do you seek it, earth-child? What is it to you?
The Picker couldn’t answer, but he could feel the dragon rifling his head, searching for the answers.
The silver ones. They want it back. Is that why they have returned? Why do they want it? Why now, after all this time?
He tried to flicker one last time. Instead of turning into air, though, he merely lurched forward and then slowly rose. He looked down. The last three feet of the dragon’s tail were sticking out of his belly. He felt himself gag and his limbs go slack. The dragon lifted him up, high into the air. He could feel himself sliding off the dragon’s tail towards its open maw below. The pain still hadn’t hit him when he fell.
How can you be so quick?
A voice spoke in his head. Because I can hear your thoughts, strange one, and so I know where you will go before you even move. And then there was a crunch and everything went black.
32
Dragonslayer
His bow floated past. Kemir let go of the jetty support long enough to snatch it and drag it through the water towards him. The gold dragon had already flown past. The darker one, though, the black one, crashed into the shore at the end of the jetty. More fire. More screams, short, snuffed out in a blink.
‘You cannot touch me, dragon!’ Someone was shouting loud enough to be heard over the explosions of fire from around the town. ‘You know what this is!’
The blood-mage?
There were times when curiosity and valour were both fine things, but, as Sollos used to say, more often than not they both got you killed. Heroism or bravery were for fools; what usually got Kemir in trouble was the curiosity bit. That and getting up and doing things without thinking beforehand. One moment he was bobbing up and down in the Fury, trying not to swallow any more water than absolutely necessary, watching burned bits of people bob about in the water beside him; the next he’d just finished shimming up a slippery pole and was hauling himself up by his fingertips onto the splintered stub of what had once been a wooden jetty. He dropped into a crouch, as low as he could manage without actually lying down. The crowd on the waterfront was a mass of blackened bodies at his feet – those that weren’t down in the water. The market stalls were splinters and ash.
Fifty feet away from him was a dragon, a black one he’d never seen before. The dragon was nose to nose with the blood-mage Kithyr.
‘You know what this is!’ roared the mage. At least the words came from the Kithyr’s mouth, but they didn’t sound anything like him. He held the spear high, poised to throw it. ‘Do you remember us, brother? Do you remember what we are?’ There were other men around the mage, slack and stupid-looking. For some reason they weren’t running away. Kemir couldn’t for the life of him imagine what that reason could be. Climbing to his feet, he slowly took an arrow and nocked it. The arrow flights were wet. The string was wet. Not good.
The black dragon lifted its tail, reached over its head, picked up three of Kithyr’s men and ate them. The rest, at last, ran away, and the blood-mage faced the dragon alone.
No, not quite alone. Suddenly there was another man standing next to him. Kithyr screamed and his hand, the one holding the spear, just seemed to fall off his arm. He crumpled to his knees and toppled over.
So much for that then. An arrow saved.
No, wait. That’s… That’s the Picker.
Bastard.
Kemir lifted his bow and aimed as best he could with a buggered arm, but by now the dragon had its tail
