Akiri: Dragonbane Read online

  The fire coiled and licked around the windows, acrid smoke rising and spewing out through the half open door.

  Akiri pushed himself to his feet and ran as best he could, nursing his shoulder, sword in hand, into the street. He was alone. As Mallorie had guessed, they were after the boy. And he was far out of reach. But what now? He could flee with Seyla, run and run, but eventually they’d have to stop running and make a stand. He couldn’t run forever. That wasn’t in his blood. There was no way he was running for the rest of his life. So, if he couldn’t run, there was only one thing he could do: find Yarrow and kill him.

  He started toward the marsh. This had to end. And like it or not, he had no choice but to do it with the boy at his side. There was no one who could protect him, and no place to keep him safe. Not when he was a beacon to the restless dead. Wherever Seyla went, they would follow. That much was clear.

  Akiri stopped at the edge of the marsh and looked back. The buildings on either side of the warehouse were ablaze, and the flames were moving up the street, eating into the dry wood with a voracious appetite. It wouldn’t take long for the street to be reduced to ash, and beyond it the next and the next until all of Hart’s Cross was consumed.

  It was a fitting end for a town so rife with cowardice and deception. His mind told him that he should not blame them for buckling under Yarrow’s insidious evil. It was only weakness, and weakness was perhaps the most human failing of them all. But his heart was Acharian. And that heart felt no pity for cowards and fools.

  He faced the marsh. Somewhere in its depths was Yarrow. He could feel it. He had begun this journey out of a need for vengeance. Now there was more to consider: the life of his sword brother’s son. A lesser man would have simply abandoned the boy to his fate. But he was not a lesser man. He was Akiri. He had slain demons and laughed in the face of gods. He would not let this dark sorcerer rob him of his courage.

  “I am coming for you, Yarrow,” he said, and took a step forward.

  TEN

  CHAPTER TEN

  Akiri walked deeper and deeper into the marshes, Seyla perched on his shoulders, until walking became nearly impossible. Still he trudged on, with the water up around his knees and then his thighs as he waded forward. Kyra circled up above. The landscape was barren. Reeds grew up as high as his head, so he couldn’t see where he was going, and at times he stumbled into trenches and furrows in the marsh bed that had the water up around his throat. But still he carried on, into the night and out the other side.

  The glow of the sun lit the sky ahead of them. There was no trail to speak of. He found himself imagining faces beneath the water, blank and staring, but knew it was only his mind and exhaustion coming together to play tricks. Seyla said little. He would point occasionally at something he saw, or thought Akiri needed to see, but that didn’t merit words. Behind them the smoke still stained the horizon an inky black, but there was no village there left to burn.

  Kyra flew along the same invisible path, keeping them company all through the night. She stretched her wings, taking up watch along the marsh as they waded towards her, then took flight again to repeat the pattern. This was her natural environment, out in the wild, but rather than hunt, she chose to be close. Danger was never far away in the wetlands, but now, with Yarrow’s perverted acolytes crawling out of their graves, it could be anywhere, in every shadow and behind every stand of reeds. With her heightened olfactory senses, Kyra would sniff out the dead long before he could, particularly in a place as riddled with corruption as the marshland.

  Akiri had not slept in two days, though Seyla dozed quite often. He felt no urgent need for it, either. That could come later, when the sacrifices had been avenged. For now he had purpose: to kill Yarrow. Since leaving Acharia he had sought purpose – a meaning for his life. And though it would end with his foe’s last breath, it was good enough. At least for a time.

  And still the sky grew lighter.

  He told Kyra she could roam ahead, and put in her mind the thought of the necromancer’s lair being out there, somewhere, and warned her that with enchantments he could almost certainly hide it from her eyes if not her nose, so she needed to be vigilant. She looked at him like he was simple. Seyla giggled, and for a moment Akiri wondered if the boy could hear the fragmented conversation. It has to be close, he thought. It was the only logical conclusion he could draw from a village of sacrifices. You would want them close; close enough to feed from.

  The brackish water was warm through his trousers. It only came up to his ankles here, so he let the boy walk beside him. He decided to tell him the story of Horguth Pass, probably the single bravest moment of his father’s life. They had been outnumbered more than forty to one, with only thirty Dul’Buhar and a handful of archers set to task on the mountainside, and told they had to hold the pass. It was crucial they did. The Corvanii hordes filled the plains down below, but they couldn’t ride at them in full flight up in the mountains. The weather was vile. Torrential rain, thunder. It turned the ground to sludge and the mountainside to slurry. But they had to hold. The Corvanii came on, and even as they cut down the first wave, more streamed in behind them, Cammaric and Akiri building their own mountain of corpses. The morning wore on, and after six hours of fighting all thirty Dul’Buhar still stood. The Corvanii broke and retreated, licking their wounds, but the Dul’Buhar could not lower their guard. They would surely come again. And come again they did. The first of his sword brothers fell early in the afternoon. The second fell a few minutes later. They lost five of their number that day, but they held the pass. They lost eight the next day, but impossibly they held the pass. Sunrise on the third day brought the promise of death. They could not hold. Their ranks were thinned to nineteen men up against an army. Only the sheer stone walls of the mountain pass meant they could sell their lives for their proper worth. Akiri stood side by side with Cammaric as the Corvanii entered charged.

  “What happened? How did you win?” the boy asked breathlessly.

  Akiri smiled at the memory. “Your father.”

  Seyla grinned, hungry to hear more. “He saved my life. I was up against three Corvanii, and they were driving me back when the ground betrayed me. My boot came down on a flint of stone, nothing more, but it was enough to turn my ankle and unbalance me, giving the enemy the weakness they needed to press their advantage and open up a wound deep in the heart of our line. To make matters worse, Agrim, one of my brothers, moved instinctively to help me and left himself exposed. They gutted him. That should have been the moment that ended the siege of Horguth Pass, but your father was having none of it. Battered and bloody, he threw himself into the breach and drove them back single-handedly with the sheer ferocity of his attack. I had never seen such strength. Even so, by sundown the archers were dead and there were only seven of us left. It was the end, and we knew it. The Corvanii gave us the night to burn our dead and offer our prayers. They were an honorable foe. But it cost them the war. We woke an hour before sunrise to see thousands of reinforcements led by King Zemel himself, circling the Corvanii horde. They were put to the slaughter. And all because your father didn’t know when to die.”

  It was a good story.

  And it was mostly true.

  He looked up at Kyra, enjoying the simple pleasure of watching her fly. She let him in. And for a moment he reveled in it, experiencing the rush of warm air across his skin as she banked, gliding across the thermals. He caught glimpses of the landscape through her eyes. There was nothing – just endless reeds, bogs, and peat.

  She flew on, streaking through the sky.

  He had no way of judging the distance. It could have been a mile, it could have been one hundred; it was endless and identical. It was impossible to get a sense of scale. And then he saw it: a ripple in the air, like the heat rising off the marsh, but through her he knew it reeked of corruption and lies. The truth was hidden behind a shimmering layer of deceit. Kyra rolled, streaking low across the swamp, breaching the illusory wall.

  Ahe
ad of her Kyra saw a huge outcropping of stone, a jagged spur rising up out of the black peat bog. It was so utterly wrong, unnatural, as though the necromancer had somehow drawn the rock, layer upon layer, out of the earth to create an incredible tower that climbed like an arrowhead into the sky. And rising out of the rock, a breathtaking fortification.

  If ever a building could be considered the personification of its master, this was it. This was Yarrow. Twisted spires, black stone, beautiful and horrific at the same time, with brooding arches, towers sweeping upwards, stark, jagged stone walls stretching up to the heavens, flying buttresses holding the great weight of rock up. It was truly awe-inspiring.

  Akiri called for Kyra to return.

  Moments later, he saw the dark speck reappear in the sky.

  “We need to eat,” he told the boy, retrieving a few dried items from his pack. He offered Seyla a hunk of stale bread, a strip of cured meat, blue veined cheese wrapped in muslin, and an apple. It was hardly a feast, but the pair were ravenous and ate greedily.

  Yarrow’s fortress might have only been a few hours walk, but without an easy road to follow, it would be an exhausting trek, so right now rest was needed.

  The boy kept watching the sky, fascinated by the dragon.

  By the time they started moving again, Seyla’s mood had lightened considerably, the old stories having done their job. He even shared some stories with Akiri about life on the mountain and the father he’d grown up with. It was good to hear about the man Cammaric had become. Indeed, long before the fortress shimmered into view, Akiri felt the first pangs of envy at the choices his old friend had made. He was glad he’d found a life away from the sword, but even as that first pang flowered, he snuffed it out. He wouldn’t have traded places with Cammaric for a king’s treasury. He was doing what he had been born to do, even when he was serving the chaos of Zemel’s mad unquenchable thirst for power. While he didn’t put faith in the divine and paths being preordained, he was following the destiny inherited from his father, and those ties of blood that bound him had proven to be unbreakable.

  Talking had helped distract the boy. Though Akiri couldn’t imagine what was going on in his head, walking into the lair of the necromancer.

  Through Kyra’s eyes he saw shadows across the ground and realized they were from a causeway. He moved towards them, wading through the marsh until he reached the stone path that lay just below the surface.

  The ground beneath his feet was solid for the first time in what seemed like ages. The black water splashed over his feet as he walked on towards the shimmering wall of light.

  The causeway began to rise slightly, the gradual incline steady if shallow, and beyond the shimmering ripples, continued all the way up to the necromancer’s fortress.

  Akiri walked up to the limits of the enchantment, reaching out to touch the magical barrier tentatively, not sure what to expect from the contact. His fingers slipped through easily, seeming to disappear before his eyes. He pushed his whole hand through, all the way to the wrist and then the elbow. It was as though it had simply ceased to be; but when he withdrew his hand, it was very much intact.

  He breathed deeply, once, twice, three times, steeling himself.

  And then he stepped through. At once, he was faced with a fortress more imposing than even the flashes Kyra had shared with him could ever have prepared him for.

  This was a fortress built for defense. Getting inside was going to be more challenging than he could possibly have imagined. But he had breached defenses before. Enough times to learn that nothing was impregnable.

  As they approached, he got a better understanding of the sheer dominance of the fortress. A moat surrounded construction, but rather than the drawbridge being raised to prevent entry, it was shattered; the wood had rotted and slipped into the water. The portcullis had been lowered, and the other side of the metalwork defense, a curtain of boulders, had been put in place to block the gatehouse completely, denying any hope of entry. There was no obvious way in or out.

  Akiri considered how he could possibly get inside, looking for any sort of weakness in the lower reaches of the fortress. He then scanned the higher reaches of the battlements, but could see no signs of life. The lowest windows were barred. Swimming the moat should pose little in the way of a problem – assuming there was nothing lurking in it, and no additional defenses below the water line. But what would be gained from it? The walls appeared unscalable, and short of mining his way through the boulders, even if he could raise the portcullis, there was little joy to be had by direct assault.

  Or was there?

  He recalled the desperate fight against the reanimated warriors back at the monastery, where Kyra had proved that she had it in her to lift a man as she had broken the corpses by dropping them from a great height. These walls were much higher, but it was the only thing that Akiri could think of that might get him to the other side.

  Even as the thought touched his mind, he heard her growl a deep, resonant affirmation, stretching her huge leathery wings out wide. She pumped them slowly, each like the beating of a leather drum.

  “Stay here,” he told Seyla.

  Seyla nodded. His mind seemed to have drifted from the here and now, and he was no longer interested in conversation.

  “Kyra will come back and keep you safe. Do you understand? Don’t go anywhere.”

  He slowly nodded his understanding, but again it seemed like he wasn’t hearing Akiri’s words.

  The dragon beat her wings once, twice, just enough to build up a cushion of air, and then took to the sky.

  Akiri walked along the causeway until he reached the edge of the moat to make sure that she had to carry him as short a distance as possible. Can you do it? he thought, earning himself an angry rebuke. He wouldn’t ask again. Akiri watched as she circled around, bracing himself for the impact as she approached, fast, from behind. No amount of deep breathing could have prepared him for the sudden sensation of the world sweeping away beneath him , as Kyra’s claws sank into his wounded shoulder and snatched him up. It took all of his will not to kick out as her talons gouged into him. Pain rippled through him until he was able to wrap his arms around her scaly hind leg to relieve the pain as she climbed. Perhaps she felt the pain through their symbiotic link, but almost immediately he felt her hold relax and the pain lessen. He could still feel her talons pressing against his skin through the thickness of his leather jerkin, but they weren’t threatening to pare his muscles from the bone.

  With each beat of her wings they rose higher and higher, each taking more and more strength from Kyra, who was struggling long before they were even twenty feet off the ground. There was no way she’d be able to take him up high enough to set him down on the wall. She had already lifted him much higher than the monastery walls and there was still a long way up to even the lowest parapet.

  She veered alarmingly, jerking hard against the pull of gravity trying to drag them both down.

  It was a long way to fall.

  Kyra struggled valiantly, but there was just no way she could control her flight with the added burden. They were still over the moat. He willed her to drop him, knowing he’d survive the fall, but she refused. He saw why a moment later: movement in the water.

  Whatever was lurking down there, it was going to be hungry. That was the way his luck had been going these last few months. If something could go wrong, it would.

  Each fresh wingbeat was a struggle for Kyra, but she wasn’t letting go.

  She seemed to be flying into the wall. He braced himself for impact, then saw what she intended; a flying buttress offered a way. She was giving him a chance, but he’d have to take it – and that meant somehow leveraging his precarious position to jump from her clutches and catch hold of the stone. Miss, and the fall would cripple him at the very least.

  Do it, he urged, and Kyra responded by swinging him in her talons, like a mongrel breaking the neck of a rat by shaking it to death. It was dizzying. Jarring. But she had no choice. She
loosened her grip and for a heartbeat, two, Akiri seemed to fly.

  And then he fell.

  He reached out desperately, his entire body cannoning into the bulk of the buttress, scrabbling frantically for any kind of purchase before he slipped and fell again. His right hand curled around the grinning skull of a gargoyle. His left foot found resistance. And for a moment longer he hung there, buffeted by the wind from Kyra’s wings as she sought to stabilize her flight.

  He reached up with his left hand and found a hold, grasping at the elaborately carved stone and clinging on for dear life. It took all of his strength to rise, first a few inches, then a few feet, always looking for a new handhold or foothold, until he could haul himself up onto the top of the flying buttress and, arms out wide for balance, shuffled across its length until he reached the castle wall.

  It was a short climb to the lowest parapet, made easier by the iron cross set into the blind window that allowed him to push himself up and grab for the top.

  A moment later, Akiri hauled himself up and dropped over the wall, lying on his back on the walkway, struggling to catch his breath. After a moment, he rolled over onto his stomach and took in the lie of the land. There were no obvious signs of life inside the walls. He couldn’t see a living – or dead – soul rushing around the courtyard to challenge them. And Kyra’s troubled flight had hardly been stealthy. They would have been seen.

  Everything about the place promised that it was deserted.

  Akiri rose carefully to his feet. The light from a single flickering candle came from the window of one of the turrets. He’d almost missed it in the red of the sun, but there, at least, was proof that there was someone alive here, and a good chance that the light had betrayed the necromancer’s position.

  He moved quickly, running along the walkway, eyes fixed on the window and that flickering light, locking it in his mind.