The fire came. Skjorl threw up his arms to shield his face. Flames licked past them, around his gauntlets, searing the skin off his cheeks, burning them to the bone. They crept past the rim of his helm, under and around, burning his hair and scorching his ears. The pain was immense, but the rage was stronger. He ran faster. The heat found its way through the joints and cracks of his armour. His wrists were the first to feel it, facing the fire head on. His elbows next.
And then it stopped.
He pulled his hands away. The dragon was right in front of him, head down on the ground, staring at him, eyes gleaming with hate, jaws open and ready for him. He kept straight at it, as if he meant to run right down its throat. Pulled Dragon-blooded down from his shoulder. Swung.
Straight into the side of the dragon’s jaw. Used the force of the swing to push himself sideways. Careened off the dragon’s teeth and past its head. Pulled Dragon-blooded back out as he went.
The head reared up. The dragon took a step back. Skjorl ran on underneath. Dragons could run, and fast, but not backwards. Backwards they were clumsy. He ran between its forelegs as it lifted off the ground. Felt the bulk of the monster rising away from him. Shot between its back legs and then stopped. Turned. Changed direction as the dragon started to move. As it took a step and slashed its tail across the ground where he would have been if he’d kept straight.
‘Stupid monster!’ he screamed at it. ‘You’re too slow! Too clumsy.’ He swung Dragon-blooded into one of its legs as hard as he could. Felt her bite through the scales. Saw blood. A tiny wound for a monster like this, but he’d blooded it and his axe had earned her name yet again.
It tried to stamp on him but he was too quick for that. Claws as big as he was smashed into the ground, shaking the earth, but as they came down he was already in the air, leaping and swinging again. Another scratch. More of the dragon’s blood oozing out from under its scales. The monster roared. Not pain. Frustration.
‘Fly, you bastard! You won’t catch me down here! I’m too quick for you!’
He could almost hear the dragon’s thoughts. Overwhelming. The urge to crush, to devour, to burn! It turned away from the cave, faced towards the landing field and reared up, peering down between its legs. Murderous eyes as large as a man’s head glared and then it opened its jaws. Skjorl ducked behind the dragon’s own claws as the fire poured out once more.
‘Stupid monster!’ he screamed, though his voice was lost in the roar of flames. ‘You can’t burn me! I’m wearing another dragon’s skin!’ The pain was blinding, the bits of his face he couldn’t quite shield. ‘Go on! Run! Fly! Take me from the air and crush me if you can! Fly, you bastard!’
It was as though the dragon heard him even over the noise. Its head turned away. It dropped to all fours and started to run, launching itself across the field. Skjorl hurled himself away and dived flat as it lashed with its tail. The alchemist’s potions were still having some last effect. It knew he was there, it could sense the wash of his feelings, but it couldn’t quite pin him down. Neither in thought nor in flesh.
And that was how he was going to win.
He turned and ran even before he heard the air shudder as the monster hauled itself off the ground. He wouldn’t have long. As much time as it took for a dragon to build the speed it needed to turn. He raced away from the cave and back to the slope of scree and boulders and threw himself up it as fast as he could climb, all care thrown aside. There were rocks up there as large as houses all tumbled on top of one another. One of them, halfway up the slope, was as big as a barn. Plenty of space to hide round the back if he could reach it.
He risked a glance behind as he reached the base of it. The dragon was already turning. He could feel its desire, its single-minded purpose, bright and vengeful.
Kill! You!
He scrambled up the stones beside the rock. Bloody scree — every lunge up he slipped half a step back and he didn’t have any time, didn’t have any…
He looked back again. The dragon was coming straight at him. He wasn’t going to make it to the top.
Vishmir! There wasn’t even any cover.
But it might still work, if the dragon was furious enough. Might.
He cringed as it came, pressed himself against the rock, as tight against it as he could, and started to count in his head. Counting down the seconds to when the dragon would hit him and crush him into the stones.
Five. Four. He turned away, hiding his face, showing the armour of his back to the wall of fire hurtling towards him. Three.
The fire came and this time there was no escape from it. It scoured the stones. Two.
Scoured his face. Found every gap and crack in his armour. One.
He screamed, the pain tearing him to pieces as though someone was hacking the skin off his face with a thousand rusty knives.
The fire stopped. He gasped for breath. Still alive. The dragon hadn’t crashed into the stones to crush him, so it was still in the air. He threw himself flat on the ground, as low as he could get. The touch of the stones pressed into his ruined face was agony.
The dragon’s tail smashed into the barn-sized rock right above his head, hard enough to shake the whole slope. He felt it shift under the blow, felt the ground under him tremble. Loose stones jumped into the air around him. Dust choked his lungs. He started to slide. Gravel showered his back and pieces of scree rolled past him. He dug his toes in and the slide slowly stopped. He forced himself to his feet. The pain was almost overwhelming. He clenched his teeth and screamed, pulling himself up the slope.
‘I. Am. Adamantine!’
His sight wasn’t quite right. One of his eyes wasn’t working. He didn’t dare touch his face to see why. Too much skin had been burned away. Maybe he’d lost the eye too, or maybe there was simply a speck of dust in there. Couldn’t see right. Didn’t matter. Not now.
He hauled himself along the side of the boulder. At least his arms and legs were still strong. The dragon was in the air, circling over the old landing field, wings flapping with a ferocious wind that tore at the nearby trees. Beneath, he could make out a blurred shape running across the field, almost at the other side.
Jasaan. That was the first part done then.
He turned back. Sank his fingers into whatever nooks and crevices he could find and gave no mind to how his muscles screamed. Nothing could hurt as much as having the skin burned off his face. He reached the top. The dragon was flying at him, straight and level.
‘Come on, dragon! I’ve already won! I’ve beaten you! There were two of us! The other one’s away and you’ll never find him! Do your worst!’ He pulled Dragon-blooded off his back and held it over his head. A challenge. ‘Come on, dragon! Eat me if you can!’
He closed his eyes and waited to die. The dragon would pluck him off his rock with its claws. Ruled by its fury, it would crush him between its jaws and devour him. Him and the dragon poison that was soaked into his clothes, that was stitched into his armour, that ran in his veins, that was tattooed under his skin, that he carried in every possible way, every hour of every day, so that even in death he could be what Adamantine Men were for.
We kill dragons!
The earth shook. He felt the stone beneath his feet shift again, slipping ever so slightly. The claw didn’t come. When he opened his eyes, the dragon had landed. It was at the bottom, close to the mouth of the cave where he and Jasaan had hidden. It walked slowly to the base of the scree, eyeing him all the way, and then rose on its hind legs, balancing itself, stretching out its wings and its tail as far as they would go, blotting out the field and the river and the forest beyond so there was almost nothing else for Skjorl to see but dragon. It was immense. Magnificent. Its head reached as high as Skjorl on his rock, fifty, sixty feet above the ground where it stood. It stared at him.
You. Kill. Dragons.
Talking in his head. Thoughts all muffled and hard to hear, forced so hard through the remains of the potion Kataros had made that they came out mangled. But forced them through it had. If it could do that, it could hear what he was thinking. And he’d been thinking about the poison.
He’d given himself away.
Yes. The dragon cocked his head. They always looked the same to Skjorl. Hungry and angry. If they had any other expression, he’d never learned to read it. What was the point?
Nowhere. To. Go.
He knew what it wanted. It wanted him to be afraid. That was what they craved, more than anything. The chase, the bursts of fear, of terror, of despair. He’d seen them enough to know what gave them pleasure. And so he laughed, because there’d be none of that here. He was going to die the way he was supposed to. In battle with a dragon. He couldn’t have been happier; if only it didn’t hurt so much. Had to fight the pain back. Almost unbearable. Getting worse. Only way to fight that was with rage and glory and lust for the fight. He clenched his axe, the mistress who’d stood at his side since Outwatch and before, and roared, ‘I’m here, dragon! Eat me! Come on, eat me if you can! I’ll break your teeth and burn your guts. You’ll be so sick you’ll never forget.’
The dragon’s face didn’t change.
No.
It couldn’t reach him. He hadn’t seen that at first, but he saw it now. He was too high up the slope for it to grasp with its fore-claws. The slope was too shallow for it to lean forward and snatch him with its teeth without losing its balance, too steep for it to climb without bringing the whole hillside down.
He took off his helm and threw it away. ‘Burn me then!’
The dragon shifted and flapped its wings hard. Wind blasted up the slope, would have torn at Skjorl’s hair if he’d had any left.
I. Will. Crush. You.
Because fire was too easy. Fire was quick and gave little to savour. Fire took a living man and turned him to ash if he had no dragon-scale to shield himself. Fire took something and made it nothing, just like that. In a flash. No lingering, nothing to relish. Taking a man between your claws, though, holding him high up in the air, letting him feel the strength that could snap him at any moment, letting him truly know how puny, how helpless, how insignificant he was, letting that sink right down into his bones, that was the way. No will could survive that. You snapped his spirit and then you snapped his spine.
Skjorl didn’t move. He understood. They were the same, the two of them. He laughed again. ‘You can try, dragon. You can try.’
Anger pulsed from the monster, overwhelming anger. It bared its teeth at him. As if that was going to make any difference now. Skjorl bared his own back.
‘Better be quick. Before I die of laughing at you.’
It shuddered. Reached forward with its head but then withdrew, flapping its wings. Skjorl took a few steps back. The dragon could burn him any time it wanted, but that would be a defeat now. Throwing his helm away had done that. It had to hold him in its claws.
It took a tentative step onto the slope. Skjorl couldn’t see, but he heard the stone move below, felt his own boulder tremble. The dragon lurched and stepped back again.
He was laughing. Laughter and pain, the drowning pain that had tears streaming down his cheeks, what was left of them, and each tear stung like a hot knife drawn down his face. ‘You can’t,’ he screamed. ‘You can’t win! You can’t possibly win!’ He wasn’t even goading it any more.
The dragon tried the slope a second time and again the boulder trembled. It let out a shriek of fury and frustration, quivered, threw back its head, hurled a torrent of fire into the sky and then stared at Skjorl once more.
Crush! You!
It was up on tiptoe, wings stretched out wide again for balance. Teetering towards him, lost to the need to smash him. It withdrew a fraction and then it lunged.
Skjorl jumped away. Its head hit the boulder where he’d been standing, a yard short. He gave it a long cold stare. It looked… It looked almost comical.
‘The trouble with your kind,’ he said, as he lifted his axe high over his head, ‘is that you are so stupid.’
It flapped its wings furiously, trying to draw away from the slope. It pushed its head against the boulder to lever itself off. Dragons had good necks. Strong. Full of muscle. It drove itself away from Skjorl’s axe.
But Skjorl wasn’t bringing the axe down, had never planned to. He jumped away. Sideways. Off the boulder.
The dragon finished heaving itself back, pushing its weight into the slope as it wrenched itself away. Into the boulder Skjorl had been standing on. And as it did, the boulder tipped and began to slide, and with it came half the hillside, backed up behind it, enough loose rock and stone to build a castle. Skjorl ran, but the tumbling stones swept his feet away as easily as a child plucking a blade of grass. At the last he jumped, as high in the air as he could, trying to get away from the worst. No use. The stones under his feet were rolling over each other and he might as well have tried to walk on water. A rock flew at him, pitched from higher up, as big as he was. It caught him a glancing blow, spun him around and knocked him down. No chance to get up again. All he could do was curl up, wrap his arms around his ruined face and trust to his armour and his ancestors to protect him as stones rained over him.
Something hit him in the hip, hard. Another blow to the head. The next was on his ankle, smashed. Then another round the head, and then, for a time, merciful darkness.
Light. That was all he could see when he opened the one eye that still worked. Light. There wasn’t any pain any more. Numb. Everything. Couldn’t feel his hands, couldn’t feel his legs, couldn’t feel anything.
Couldn’t move.
He blinked. He could still do that.
The light slowly separated into shades. Bright sky. Dark earth. Stones everywhere. Littered across the end of the field. And a dragon, darker still.
Lying on the ground ahead of him. Head turned. Looking at him.
Pain. He felt it now, but not his. Pain and a fading futile fury.
One broken wing. One broken leg. Half buried in the fallen rubble, neck crushed by the stone that had been holding up the mountain.
The dragon. Lying beside him, a little way away.
It stared at him.
I will come back. You will not. And then the light slowly went out of its eyes. Skjorl tried to laugh. His lungs shook. Not much else.
He stopped breathing. Took a moment to notice. It was as though he’d simply forgotten how.
Vish, you better have kept a woman and good bottle of something strong ready and waiting for me.
He winked at the dead dragon. ‘Got you both.’
I’m coming, Vish.
The shades merged together again. The light faded.
Was gone.