Akiri: Dragonbane Read online

  This is it, he thought. The moment. All his life and every death he had caused had led inexorably to this moment in time, this clifftop, this fight. He had one chance. Misjudge it and he was dead. The timing must be perfect. He took a deep breath and spread his arms wide, calling out to the storm as though it were a living thing.

  And it responded.

  More than anything, the storm hungered to be one with the elemental magic surging all around it.

  As the beast drew closer, he felt doubt creep in. His heart thundered erratically in his chest, no rhythm to the beats. He welcomed it, focusing his mind on each lightning crack and roll of thunder, willing the magic to rise inside him, burning away at his flesh, begging to be unleashed. The dragon’s stare bore down on him with primal fury. Its shade loomed larger with each breath, filling the sky above him until he could see naught but its massive body and sickly yellow eyes.

  At last, the moment came.

  He clapped his hands together, unleashing every single life force he had gathered into his being, every soul he had drained, every corpse he had consumed, all of it, the true essence of his power.

  A streak of lightning lit the entire night sky as it tore into the heavens, a deafening sonic boom feeding the raging storm. The bolt scorched by the dragon to merge with the welcoming force of the vortex of churning thunderheads, its energy leaping down to meet it like an eager lover. The eye of the storm opened blackly over the dragon. The clouds churned faster and faster, the vortex opening into the funnel of a wild tornado as the elements of life and the magic of death comingled, and the diametric opposites tore each other apart in a brutal, blinding explosion.

  The shockwave sent him sprawling backwards. He hit the ground hard, staring up at the dragon.

  It hadn’t slowed its dire descent.

  It was coming for him.

  “Kill me,” he breathed, “if you can.”

  In a sublime moment of pure silence, a lifetime’s worth of death magic amassed in the air above the fell beast, coalescing into a huge ball of white lightning that flashed and sparked and sizzled, burning away the eye of the storm.

  The dragon finally understood.

  It heaved its body toward the sea, banking away from the necromancer on the clifftop, massive wings beating furiously at the howling winds, trying to break free.

  But it was too late.

  The ball of lightning plummeted, enveloping the great serpent, which thrashed and roared its rage and fear, battling the walls of its prison with all of its strength, but to no avail. It was trapped and being drawn inexorably toward its demise.

  He allowed himself the slightest of smiles, finally, as he pushed himself back to his feet. The dragon was a thing of beauty: a creature unlike any that had lived before it, or would likely after. It was the mother of all dragons. The first. The greatest. And she was at his mercy. The words of power were dry on his tongue, ready to come to life in the air as he gave voice to them. All it would take, just as with his father, was the right words, the icy caress of the invocation across his lips, the knife to the dragon’s heart more ethereal than the one that had claimed his father’s life. He would absorb the spirit and power of the Elder Dragon, and in doing so would achieve more than any mortal had ever dreamed possible. He would be as a god – immortal and all-powerful. All who lived would bow to his will.

  He watched in eager anticipation as the dragon continued to beat its wings against its magical prison.

  The seconds felt like hours.

  Finally, the incantation touched its spirit.

  He let out a soft gasp.

  So unimaginably powerful.

  More so than he ever thought possible. So much more. So deliciously potent. So full of life. So ancient.

  The energy that seeped into him through their connection was little more than a filament, and yet it was much more potent than any life force he had ever fed upon. He savored its sweet caress. He wanted nothing more than to reach out and touch it in return, his heart swelling with a lust he had never known. Nothing could compare to this. Nothing. It made the spirits and magic of man and beast seem trivial.

  Then, as though the ties that bound them had been cut, the contact was broken, leaving him with an immeasurable sense of loss.

  A wave of fury and hatred struck him with such vehemence it all but threw him from his feet again. He understood then what was happening: the dragon was fighting back.

  Rather than struggle against the combined magics, the dragon had turned and tucked its wings tight against its body, diving like a cormorant intent on plucking its next meal from the surf. He felt the cold grip of panic. He unleashed a fresh wave of power, fusing the lightning strikes with the eddying air to form a shield within the air itself, and ran with all the speed his aging legs could muster, hurling himself at the beast.

  Pain lanced up his leg as savage talons pierced his flesh.

  He did not cry out.

  He accepted it.

  Pain was as close to death as any emotion; he channeled it, using it to focus his fury.

  This was far from over.

  The pounding of wings lifted him skyward. Before he could break free, he was hundreds of feet above the raging sea, dangling precariously by one leg in the clutches of the dragon. The storm raged all around them. The beast seemed to be flying into the dead center, the eye where the vortex and the howling winds were becalmed, where silence was king, as though it could hide from his magic there.

  There could be no hiding. Not now. Not ever.

  Another word drew down the ball of lightning so that it enshrouded him. It chased across every inch of his flesh, alive, endlessly sizzling and sparking and arcing from hand to hand, his hair standing on end, his entire frame locked rigid.

  The dragon thrashed its head, its crown of bones dripping with sea spray, and lashed out with its talons, trying to dislodge him. But the spell had already bound them together; fight as it might, drawing on every ounce of strength the ancient creature possessed, there would be no letting go.

  Once again, he began the incantation. The words were burned into his soul. In such intimate proximity, what had been a tiny trickle binding them became a relentless flood.

  This time it was more than magic and spirit flowing through him. The mind of the dragon fused with his own, probing at first, then battering at the barriers he’d thrown up to protect himself as the dragon sought a way to dislodge both the enemy gored onto his talons and the foul magic draining his essence. It knew what was being done…and why.

  A voice thundered through his skull: I will not allow this, little man.

  “You cannot stop it,” he promised, even as he felt the dragon resisting. More than that: the ancient wyrm fought back, attempting to reverse the direction of the flow, drawing his mind out of him, his thoughts into it, his soul into its flesh, his magic, his deaths, the many of them, into its wellspring of power. And it was succeeding. Only slightly at first, the edges of memory escaping him. But the dragon’s strength was a match for his own. Each struggled to draw the strength from the other; brutally, subtly, ruthlessly, fastening onto the essence of the power they held within them, neither willing to submit.

  The dragon raced higher and higher into the black eye of the wild storm as each spirit battled for supremacy. Forks of lightning flashed all around them; sheets of raw energy tore through the thunderheads. And still they rose. Torrents of rain stung his face and hands. His entire body was blasted by the gale force winds. The air became thinner and thinner the higher the dragon climbed, each breath growing labored. He couldn’t draw the precious oxygen out of it, so thin was the air up here. Unaffected, the dragon beat its monstrous wings evermore vigorously.

  He knew that he needed to do something before it was too late. He clung tenuously to consciousness, black lines sparking across the limits of his vision as his body threatened to betray him. Should he black out, his magic would fail, and he would plunge to his death. It was as simple as that. He concentrated his mind on t
he filaments of magic in the air, channeling them to fill his lungs. It would work for now, but he could not breathe magic for more than a minute or so. It was a temporary salvation.

  Then, as they breached the very eye of the storm, the clamor ceased. They emerged above the vortex of swirling, relentlessly churning clouds into the brilliance of the sunlight. And still the dragon climbed, until not even the rumble of thunder could be heard over the beating of wings and the rush of wind.

  “Surrender yourself to me,” he said, though he was unsure if he had actually spoken the words.

  Never, came the reply.

  “I am your match. Together we could rule this world in place of the gods.”

  You are a man and all men must die. I am eternal. You are nothing.

  The beating of wings stopped, and for a moment the silence was pure.

  And then they began to fall.

  Neither could possibly survive the impact. Not from this height, not at this velocity. He could not believe the great wyrm was willing to destroy itself just to spite him.

  “You fool!” he shouted. “You will kill us both.”

  A tidal surge of emotion poured through him, suffusing his mind.

  The dragon had seen into his heart and had chosen death for them both.

  And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  After so long, so much toil, amassing so much death and claiming so many souls, it was over. He had lost. He heard the mocking laughter of his father ringing out across the years, savoring his inadequacy. He latched onto it, real or not, allowing that self-loathing to fill him with pure burning-bright rage.

  He cast his eyes downward.

  The swirling mass of the storm obscured the ground.

  He had no way of knowing whether they would crash into land or sea; not that it mattered. Either would kill them as absolutely as the other. The wind tore at his flesh, pummeling him, battering his body; he could not give voice to a single word of power. And still their momentum increased.

  Pain was to be his final sensation.

  Pain and suffering.

  For the first time, he noticed the heat radiating from the dragon’s hide. He reached out the flat of his palm, resting it on a black scale. It was hard as iron, yet smooth and yielding. The memory of desperately wanting to touch the beast as a child crept into his mind, only to be chased away by his father’s vile laughter.

  The world around them erupted as they re-entered the storm. Lightning lashed out at the great beast – no mere lightning this, but fueled by the hatred passed on through the conduits of magic and time, from his father through him into the lightning and in turn into the beast.

  The strike seared a white-hot brand across the scale.

  The heat from the dragon’s body intensified dramatically, as though a furnace burned beneath its flesh. It let out a deep bellow of a cry. A death knell. The dragon accepted its fate. But there was something else. The heat rose, incandescent, undampened by the storm or the lashing rain.

  The dragon’s scales smoldered.

  Curls of smoke thickened.

  The scales blistered, the black darkening still, before they burst into flames.

  In a sudden panic, he tried to free himself, but in the descent their roles were reversed – he was trapped.

  The fire licked at his face and arms.

  He winced against it, expecting the sudden agony of flame to consume him, but there was no pain. His initial relief vanished when the world turned to black, his eyesight failed, only to return a split second later.

  No, not his eyesight.

  Somehow, in this final moment, the dragon had fused their spirits.

  They were one.

  A single being streaking down through the sky in a fiery ball, death waiting to take them together.

  As they broke through the clouds, he expected the world to coalesce into either rocky ground or churning sea. He saw neither – only a void of complete blackness. He struggled uselessly against whatever sinister magic the Elder Dragon had conjured, but he was no longer free. They were bound together as a single being. He cursed the dragon as the darkness surrounded them. But the dragon did not reply. All light from the world was gone.

  And still they were falling.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The snow lay thick and heavy on the ground. Akiri knew that he should have waited until spring before making the perilous trek into the mountains. The well-worn trail through Erdagorn Pass was closed to all but the most determined and reckless. Even during the summer months, this far north, the journey would have been taxing. But in winter, especially one as bleak and bitter as this, it was nothing short of suicide.

  Akiri’s fur-lined leather boots carved out a channel, foot by foot, as he walked relentlessly on, eyes focused on a destination he couldn’t see. From the outset, the snow had continued its savage assault. The north lived up to every cruel nickname it had earned and then some. Most men would have succumbed to the cold, curled up on the side of the mountain and waited for death to win the race to be with them, or turned back to die again another day.

  But not Akiri.

  He was anything but most men. He had endured worse. And would endure worse still. That was his life. He would not be beaten; not by something as ordinary as the mountain’s wrath. But that did not change the fact that the journey was taking much longer than he had anticipated, and every day winter was worsening. Each slow step was frustrating. There was need for haste. But not even his iron will could melt the snow.

  His mount toiled behind him since the ice made riding too perilous. Winds whipped in around the pass, calling out balefully to all foolhardy enough to hear them. The animal was skittish. He could hardly blame it when every footfall was potentially lethal, the dizzying drop to the valley below not something he wanted to contemplate. It seemed that the gods were bloody-minded enough to hinder his every step, which was yet another reason to hate them, as far as he was concerned.

  Akiri figured that he must be nearing his destination, but up on the mountain the difference between a day and an hour was sometimes hard to grasp. It was also lethal.

  The snow bit at his face, pulling the skin tight.

  He walked on.

  Up ahead, he could barely make out a darker blur amid the swirling snow. Arms flailed in a flurry of excitement and the words, “Uncle Akiri! Uncle Akiri!” carried down to him.

  He smiled despite himself.

  The white furs the boy wore blended in almost perfectly with his surroundings. The illusion would have been perfect if he had hunkered down. The snowfall was an agitated, constant motion, but the boy’s frantic waves were repetitions of the same movement, giving him away. As he neared, he saw the features of the tiny red-raw face beaming down at him from a snowdrift. He would not have recognized the boy in a crowd, but then he had been little more than a babe in arms when Akiri had last seen him. Now he was a willowy stripling of ten summers or more and growing fast. He was tall but moved gracefully, with a sureness of foot even on this treacherous ground that said that he had inherited his father’s agility to go along with his lean frame.

  Had it really been a decade since he had last seen the boy’s father? Ten years? It seemed impossible. They had been sword brothers, fighting side by side in countless battles. He had always imagined that was how they would end their days, too – side by side. But Cammaric had made a decision that changed everything, putting his wife and child ahead of his service to the Dul’Buhar. Akiri recalled the anger he felt; the sense of betrayal toward the man he had always thought a brother. Had it been any other man, he would have likely killed him on the spot. But Cammaric was no coward, no deserter. He never acted rashly, and in all the days they had been together had never faltered in his commitment to his duty. As a warrior, only Akiri was greater, and even then there was nothing between them. Cammaric was special. He had greatness in his veins. He could truly have been the very best of them if he had stayed. All Akiri could do was trust that Cammaric was making th
e right choice; though it took him years to accept it. But looking back now, considering everything that had happened with the Sorcerer King and how Akiri had come to be here, perhaps it had been for the best after all.

  It was good fortune that Cammaric’s message had been able to reach him at all; a man being hunted by a mad king was not an easy man to find. But Cammaric was nothing if not resourceful. He of all people knew the places Akiri was likely to seek out, trying to disappear. In all probability, only Borlon knew him better, but only because he had known Akiri longer. Even so, the message was months old when he received it. The contents were vague, but unmistakably a call for help, and Akiri had set out immediately.

  The boy, Seyla, bounded down the slope toward him. Akiri waved in return. “Stay there, boy,” he called.

  But Seyla would not be deterred. “You’re here! I told Father today was the day. He didn’t believe me. But I knew you’d come.” The boy surged through the snow, which on him was almost waist-high in places, until finally he stood in front of Akiri, breathing hard and bending down on his knees. Akiri sighed and shook his head. He was glad Kyra was far to the south on a hunt. He doubted the boy had ever set eyes on a dragon, and even a youngling like Kyra could instill terror in the heart of a child. “You, my boy, are every bit as stubborn as your father.”

  Seyla grinned. “Mother says that, too. Whenever she’s angry with me, it’s always, ‘You’re just like your father.’” His face turned solemn. “After a month went by and you didn’t come, he said I should stop looking. He didn’t think his message would find you. I heard him tell mother he wasn’t sure you were there to be found, after everything that had happened… But I knew he was wrong.”

  “Are you sure? I could be someone pretending to be Akiri, could I not?”