Page 11 of Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE MEN EMORY has chosen for this mission are not Mithrandon’s best. There’s Joufren of Windbyrn, an old knight whose long career in the guild was remarkably undistinguished, and who one assumes was given a captaincy in his old age out of pity. Answering to him are Ferrel and Dewitt, two hotheads, almost like brothers in their temperament, more arrogance than ability. The last member of their party is Keltan, a sallow youth, a farmer’s boy who was thought to have the gift of the blood, but was never able to wield the holy weapons. To make up for that lack, he turned sharp-eyed for weaknesses and sharp-tongued to pick people apart at the seams. They regard the masked guildknight with a wariness that borders on resentment, preemptively accusing her of stealing their moment of glory. As they barrel into Emory’s room one after another, the air thickens with their oaths and chatter, and for the first time in months Yeva is surrounded by thoughts unapologetically expressed in Thrandish. Instead of filling her with nostalgia, it clogs her with dread. She is once again a child, alone in a room full of trainees whispering about her. She thought that old lesion of inadequacy had long scabbed over, but her months in Daqiao have softened and dissolved those scars, once again exposing her tender flesh. The guildknights are rude and dismissive of everything they’ve seen in the country, calling it primitive, a shithole, and other less polite things.
“Let’s just slay this beast and go,” Ferrel says. “I’ll do someone an injury if I am forced to linger here and eat the dung they call food.”
Keltan curls his lip and sneers, “That silken whore on the throne is ill, isn’t she? Now’s our chance,” and it’s all Yeva can do to keep herself from flying across the room and choking him until his speckled face turns puce.
“Enough,” Emory snaps. “Like it or not, the girl-king is sovereign ruler here and must be treated with the esteem afforded to all of her station. To disrespect one monarch is to disrespect them all. Do you understand?”
The men shrink like scolded schoolboys; even their captain seems cowed by Emory’s anger. For a cousin of the Sun Emperor, he is a meek man, who simply nods in agreement as Emory lays out his plans for the hunt, drawing up a formation. Keltan ahead, with Ferrel and Dewitt in the middle, and Joufren and Emory bringing up the rear. Leading them all will be Yeva, who knows the way.
“Once we reach the caverns,” Emory says, “the wyrmhounds will track our quarry down.”
“Oh, but Sage is unwell right now,” Yeva says, thinking fast. “She can’t hunt, we will have to wait.”
Keltan responds, smirking: “That’s all right. We’ve brought our own.”
As Emory lays out attack sequences for when they find their target, based on what he has learned about southern dragons, Yeva realizes that he had been quietly preparing this for months. The sense of betrayal bruises her in the ribs. She had thought they were in agreement, that they were both dedicated to the subtle task of directing the Sun Emperor’s covetous fingers away from Quanbao. Barring her one misstep, Yeva thought she had kept faithfully to this goal. Meanwhile Emory, it seems, had been preparing for war.
He turns to her. “Yeva, what do you think?”
She blinks and swallows. In the hurt and uncertainty of this revelation, all of her convictions dissolve into old brine. Old habit and comfortable structure rush to take their place. She is a blade of Empire, an obedient weapon that acts as she is directed. “I will do as you wish.”
SO TO THE ground floor the party goes, Yeva guiding them through the corridors, ushering them so they avoid the eyes of servants on the way, until they come to the library, the shelf, the hidden stairs that lead to the unseen depths. At the door stands Captain Lu with his spear, angry and watchful, and Yeva’s heart grows heavy. Emory had said, “Let me take charge of this part,” but she knows he will never convince Captain Lu to go quietly. Perhaps this is a good thing, their plans foiled before they can begin. But Captain Lu will see her, has seen her, and already his expression makes it clear how much further she has fallen in his estimation. His eyes narrow. “What is the meaning of this?”
Emory steps forward. He’s strapped the musket across his chest, and now he holds it in his arms, muzzle pointing forward, a clear threat. “We came to your country to investigate these tunnels. Let us through.”
Captain Lu’s grip on his spear tightens. “You dare?”
“Let us through,” Emory repeats.
Yeva’s stomach tightens and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Captain Lu is facing a hunting party of guildknights, fully armed, and their wyrmhounds. She watches that knowledge register in his eyes. But still they are in the palace itself, in the heart of the city, utterly outnumbered. Captain Lu draws a deep breath to summon reinforcements.
Quick as a snake Emory lunges forward and thrusts the muzzle of his weapon into Captain Lu. Blue light strobes like lightning and Captain Lu folds, a cotton sheet crumpling to the ground. Yeva shouts. “What have you done?”
Emory’s face is very white, but the line of his jaw is set. “He’s not dead. He’s knocked out, he’ll wake with a headache, but nothing worse. Don’t worry, I’ve tested it.”
She stares at Captain Lu’s inert form, his jaw slack, his spear useless beside him, and grows dizzy. “Tested it? What on?”
Emory looks away. “Just open the door. Hurry, before someone comes.”
“What have you made?”
“Yeva.” He slings the musket over his shoulder. “Open the door.”
She should resist. If she had a mind of her own she would run, call for more guards, use her knowledge of the palace layout to escape Emory’s party and find help. But that’s not who she is. Within her armor her body burns with anger and uncertainty, but still she follows the orders given by her captain, tame as ever, well-trained if not well-bred. Pride of the Empire. The secret door opens, the secret pathway is revealed. The caverns deep beneath the earth await them.
“It’s dark down there,” Dewitt says. He sounds uncertain.
Emory is unimpressed. “Don’t lose your nerve. Ferrel, light a torch. Keep moving forward, soldier.”
Down, down, down they go. The atmosphere chokes them like a hand that rises from the grave. The guildknights’ wyrmhounds run ahead, their small talons clicking rapidly against stone as they gambol, sniffing the air. Yeva’s insides churn. She doesn’t need the wyrmhounds’ excitement to tell her that their prey is close: the blood sings in her veins, thrumming in concert with that of a nearby dragon’s. The creature whose traces she found a month ago is somewhere in this cavern, unaware that hunters are coming to cut it down.
She feels sick. A hundred hunts she has carried out in her short life, each one of them righteous. But this feels deplorable, an expedition built upon lies and riddled with transgressions. She’s seeing a side to Emory that is new to her, that she has already begun to loathe. Everything about what she is doing right now is a mistake. She takes them through the pathway she knows well, that she can navigate with her eyes closed, but she really shouldn’t.
The light warms into orange as they approach the lava falls, and the cool air turns hostile, agitated. Behind her Keltan makes noises of dismay. “How are we to make it past this inferno?”
Emory hushes him. To Yeva he says: “Lead the way.”
Yeva carefully treads along the lava’s edge toward the hidden crack in the wall. A wild thought seizes her, that she should push the rest of the hunting party into the boiling pits of molten firmament and flee before anyone can stop her. Who would register such a crime? But she keeps moving, one foot in front of another. Maybe the portal has been bricked over in the month since she’s discovered it.
But no such luck. There it is, a jagged sideways mouth in the black rock, and like a sheep Yeva leads the other knights through it, their wyrmhounds nipping at her heels as though it is she they are hunting. Behind her the knights make jibes about their situation to ease the tension, to substitute sarcasm for courage. Ferrel says, “So that was the danger that made these caverns impassable to all? A haze of fire? Pathetic, the worms living in this country are even weaker than I thought.”
Keltan snorts. “You speak like you wouldn’t catch fire if you fell in,” and in reply Ferrel slings at him an oath that would melt the skin off a person.
Dewitt says, uncharacteristically thoughtful: “These magma falls cannot be the reason the caverns were closed off, and with such regularity too. I suspect the whore queen must be hiding the passage of a dragon that visits regularly. Her beloved pet, perchance?”
“Be quiet,” says Captain Joufren.
Unease grows in Yeva. For once she agrees with the men: there was never any real danger here. The secrecy around the caves is for the sake of the dragon who lingers here, the dragon who passes through these hollows almost every month, like clockwork. That can be the only reason. The watchfulness of the palace staff, the protectiveness with which they keep people from entering the caves… an alarm builds in her mind, a scatter of thoughts coalescing into a single picture that trembles just out of focus—there is a story here, and she’s on the cusp of understanding it.
The walls of rock release them into the city-sized canyon that Yeva had discovered, studded with clumps of everstone. Sharp intake of air behind her as the hunting party take in the sight. Even old Joffrey cannot help himself, exclaiming: “Such quantity of the stone as I have never seen—!”
“Hush,” says Emory suddenly, and at that moment a strange wind howls through the air, as if in the distance something enormous moves through at terrible speed. Scenting prey, each wyrmhound darts forward with a single bark of warning, like arrows loosed from a bowstring.
“Look sharp,” Emory says. “Our quarry approaches!”
They run, following the hounds. Far above their heads, the silver roof of the cavern yawns. Yeva doesn’t need a wyrmhound to tell her where a dragon is: that knowledge keens in her blood, a sense of specific distance and speed, not seen but felt. But this time her perception of their quarry bears a particular terror that tweaks her recognition, a metallic tang that seems familiar and she doesn’t know why. The dragons she hunts are strangers to her but this one is not.
Fear builds in her heart. She runs with Varuhelt gripped in her sword hand, the claw that poets call the talon of the Empire. It is too late to turn back. Their target has realized this too: at some point in their pursuit it had stopped fleeing and turned around. The distance between them closes rapidly. Is it coming to attack them? Or cornered, has it decided to put up a fight? Yeva thinks it’s neither. Resignation saddles the connection between them, hunter and her prey. The creature they chase is tired of running, tired of hiding. It is turning to meet its fate.
Keltan shouts, a noise of fear: they’ve spotted it. In the gloomy distance, rapidly growing huge, a tangle of white writhes and loops through the air. A southern dragon like the one depicted in the tapestry. The air turns frigid and violent; lightning crackles in the air as their lungs fill with stinging ice. A storm dragon, harbinger of tempests. Yeva has hunted creatures that were masters of elements, but nothing like this: a force of nature, brushing against godhood, shimmering in the same blues and pinks of the royal seal Yeva has come to know so well. Those branching horns glow white and yellow as though made of the lightning itself. The beast has the size and strength to topple walls and crush towers by winding around it, and yet its body could easily fit through the eye socket of the giant skull Yeva was shown.
The dragon arcs in high circles around their heads. The hunting party clumps in terror, buffeted by the sudden gales. “Do something,” Keltan howls at her. “Aren’t you the famous masked guildknight?”
At this point Yeva realizes none of the party have any experience hunting full-grown dragons. Emory’s battle plan, conceived and explained in dry, light-filled rooms, dissolves in the face of vicious reality, rimed with ice and howling with wind so loud it blots out all thought. The men grip their weapons, frozen by terror. Only Emory has his musket raised, buzzing with harsh light, eyes flickering frantically as he watches the dragon’s wild passage, unable to find a good shot.
“Do something,” Keltan shouts again, but this time full-throated in his uselessness. Worse than useless. He doesn’t understand. Yeva never fights dragons in the air, where they are the masters and she at a disadvantage. If they won’t come down, her gryphons and wyrmhound work in concert to ground them, tearing at wing and limb until they have no choice. It’s dangerous work, but quite rarely required: dragons are ferocious beasts who leap at every challenge to their territory. They come to Yeva, drawn to the sapphire scent of her blood. But this one is different. It swoops over them, freezing air as it goes, and there it stays, out of reach. Yeva hasn’t brought her gryphons, or Sage. Neither has she brought her bow. She would have prepared far better for her own hunts, but this is not a hunt she wanted. But the dragon does not want to fight either. A wailing, terrible impasse has set in.
And then she sees it. Curving along the dragon’s side: a long, slashing scar. Distinct even in the unstable light of the cavern. Yeva recognizes its shape. She knows this particular knot of flesh.
The last piece of the mystery slides into place. Yeva sucks in freezing air as the ground falls away in her mind, tipping her into a polar ocean that is so clear, so bright, and from her new, upside-down refracted perspective everything suddenly makes sense, it all makes sense. The dragon—I know you, I know who you are. She bursts forward, running, her limbs having a will of her own. She must see the scar clearly. She has to make sure.
But in her heart, she already knows. The truth—the final truth, the thing that Lady Sookhee was about to confess to her the night before, the thing she was about to say before they were interrupted.
Behind her Emory screams something that the wind swallows; his muffled syllables are just sound, only sound. Yeva races ahead, away from the party, away from whatever she should care about. The striated belly of dragon soars above her head, and she wants to shout, come down here, show me who you are, show me now! Her blood calls to the dragon, or is it the other way around? Hasn’t their blood pulsed in concert as they lay together at night?
Behind her noise and thunder erupt. Emory sets off his musket and the cavern fills with lightning whiter than the blue flame. Not the small jab he’d felled Captain Lu with but a burst of divine wrath. The storm dragon shrieks and tilts as a blue bolt strikes it, but in the charged air it is not just the dragon that gets hit. The blue fire arcs from rock outcrop to rock outcrop, shattering stalactite and fracturing the cavern’s vault. Stone cracks and the roof of the cavern collapses with a horrible roar. The ground shakes as if splitting to swallow them whole, and Yeva stumbles, crashing into the dirt.
But death doesn’t come for her in jaws of falling rock or whipping tongues of lava, and Yeva regains her feet to find only mounds of rubble behind her, no sound or sight of the hunting party. Waves of nameless emotion roil through the length of her body. She moves as though in a dream, and perhaps she is in a dream, a nightmare of her own making. She is not sure which way is up or down anymore.
Ahead of her, wounded but still alive, the shimmering dragon flees into the dark. That way lies the real answers to all the questions she has been asking. That way she must go. Yeva picks up her feet, makes her body respond to her again. She runs after the thing she has been hunting.