‘We shall go high, with your permission, Mistress,’ whispered the dragon. It was Baazalanan speaking. ‘Then drop fast, too fast for bolt or spell to strike us.’
‘Like a kite upon a vole,’ said Mogget, licking his lips. ‘The osprey upon an unsuspecting fish.’
‘Yes, let us do that,’ said Clariel. ‘Look ahead, Mogget. What can you see of the Palace? Does the royal banner fly above the gatehouse?’
‘The smoke is too thick,’ said Mogget. ‘I cannot see.’
‘Faster,’ mumbled Clariel. She said it again, and wondered why her mouth was dry. Then she remembered that she had neither drunk nor eaten since dinner the night before, and now it was the fourth or fifth hour of the afternoon. But she was not hungry, or thirsty, and in a moment she forgot the dryness of her mouth and throat.
She also wasn’t tired despite her very short sleep of the night before. But as they flew faster and higher, and the cold gripped her more tightly, Clariel found herself drifting into a kind of fugue, where she was neither asleep nor awake. She knew where she was, in the iron chair on the back of a dragon. But at the same time she imagined herself to be in the Great Forest. In the wintertime, when the Forest canopy above was sparse, snow covered the greensward, and ice glazed the edges of the stream where she liked to fish. It was too cold to tickle trout in winter, but there were rabbits to snare, and wild honey to be gathered from sleepy bees without competition from even sleepier bears. She would have a snug forester’s hut, with a stove bought from the town red-hot upon its rough-fired clay plinth, a stack of wood as high as the turf-covered roof outside, a larder full of autumn’s harvest; winter in the Forest could be comfortable indeed …
‘We are ready to descend, Mistress,’ whispered the dragon. ‘On your command …’
Clariel awoke fully, the wintry forest landscape banished in an instant. They were in the high waft of the smoke, not so thick that it choked, but enough to cause half-waking dreams of comfortable stoves. As the smoke swirled beneath them, Clariel caught glimpses of the Palace far below, and the sea next to it. There were some people on the walls, but she could not make out whether they were fighting, or who they were.
‘Brace yourself, Mogget,’ she said. Crouching down herself, she set her shoulders against the back of the chair, and her feet hard on the footrest. She placed the sword between her knees and gripped it there, her hands tight on the metal arms of the chair, which for the first time she noticed were lightly rimed with ice.
‘Take care not to harm me or throw me out,’ she said sternly to the dragon. ‘But descend as fast as you can!’
The dragon pushed its head down, its body following, and folded its wings. Clariel slid down the chair a fraction and her stomach flipped up towards her throat in a moment of fear. She pressed herself even flatter into the iron seat and gripped harder. Mogget was somewhere under her legs. She felt his claws cutting through the overshoes around her ankles, but she couldn’t look. The dragon was nearly vertical now, and they were plummeting to the earth, the wind howling past so that their previous speed paled in comparison, as if they had been sauntering across the sky and now were sprinting.
A hundred paces above a broad stretch of the Palace wall they came suddenly out of the thickest smoke into afternoon sunshine. The dragon flung out its wings; there was an almighty crack like thunder, and had they been of normal flesh the wings would have been stripped from the dragon’s body by the sudden shock. But they were not normal flesh. The dragon slowed. It reared backwards, wings beating, Clariel sliding up the chair back, so she had to arch and twist her legs to keep the sword safe between her knees. Then they were down, the dragon rampaging along the wall till it came crashing to a complete stop by colliding with the door of one of the seaward-looking towers.
Clariel took up the sword and jumped down, Mogget close behind her. With a flash of white light, a wave of heat and the stench of burning metal, the dragon divided into its two components. The iron chair fell from the back of Baazalanan, hit a merlon with a resounding clang and fell into the sea.
The door opened, and a frightened man in the livery of the Cobblers’ Guild looked out, a spear held unsteadily in his hand, unready for any foe. Clariel opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything Aziminil lunged past her, her taloned, three-fingered hand piercing almost all the way through the guard’s neck. Blood sprayed, Aziminil withdrew her hand. The guard fell choking to the ground, and died a few seconds later.
Clariel felt him die, felt his spirit enter Death. She knew she could catch that spirit, and her hand went to her chest as if to draw a bell. Then she remembered she had left the bells behind, that she was not a necromancer, and didn’t want to be one. Neither did she want to kill Guild guards who undoubtedly had no idea that Kilp was really a traitor to the King.
‘Do not kill,’ she croaked. She had to look away from Aziminil, who was licking her fingers clean, a tongue of red fire coming out of the featureless void that was her face. Clariel wished she hadn’t seen that.
‘No killing, save on my order.’
Neither creature replied.
‘It is their nature,’ said Mogget. He jumped up on the battlements and looked back towards the south. The Paperwing was close, perhaps minutes away, coming down in a long, fast glide. It couldn’t land on the wall like they had, but there was a terrace not far below, out of sight.
‘I know,’ said Clariel. She shut her eyes for a second, then hefted her sword and entered the tower. ‘But I want the next one alive. I need to ask questions.’
The ‘next one’ was a woman as young as or younger than Clariel, wearing the badge of the Fishmongers. She came up the stairs calling out to someone, her sword still sheathed. She saw Clariel first and stared, agape, before fumbling at the weapon on her side. When the two Free Magic creatures loomed up as well, she stopped and raised her shaking hands.
Clariel lowered her own sword. It was shifting in her hand, trying to move of its own accord, wanting to taste blood.
‘What is happening?’ she rasped. ‘Does Kilp control the Palace?’
‘Almost, yes, I think so,’ blurted out the young woman. ‘There is still fighting in the Great Hall, and the … the leopard-creatures … but this side is taken –’
‘Does the King live?’
The woman looked confused.
‘The King was killed by the rebels, a week since or more,’ she said. ‘Least, that’s what we were told …’
‘Where is Kilp? And his son Aronzo?’
‘I don’t know,’ sniffled the woman.
‘Where?’ snapped Clariel. She unconsciously drew on Aziminil’s power, her voice compelling an answer. White smoke billowed out of the mouth-hole of her mask as she spoke, though she did not notice it.
‘Probably the Great Hall,’ sobbed the woman. She sank to her knees on the steps, tears gushing down her stricken face. ‘The Goldsmiths’ Company, they were the only ones allowed to go there. The Great Hall!’
‘Where is that?’ asked Clariel, but the woman could only sob and shudder, her voice taken away by terror.
‘I know,’ said Mogget, causing another shriek. He jumped past the woman. After a moment, Clariel followed. She didn’t look back, and so did not see Baazalanan effortlessly twist the guard’s head off her shoulders as the creature passed by.
‘Through here,’ said Mogget, indicating a door on the next landing down. ‘Along the corridor beyond, that will come out in the musician’s gallery of the Great Hall.’
Clariel almost opened the door herself, then thought again, and gestured to Aziminil.
‘Open it,’ she said.
Aziminil didn’t bother to turn the ring. She raised one spiked foot, leaned back and smashed it through the centre of the iron-studded, Charter-Magic-reinforced door. Oak, iron and magic shattered under the blow. The creature laughed, an eerie, high-pitched chuckle, then reached in to pull entire planks out, the wood screeching as it bent. Clariel caught a glimpse of several Guild guards
hastily retreating down the corridor beyond, and heard their shouts of alarm.
‘Go ahead,’ she instructed Aziminil. ‘Do not kill them.’
Aziminil bent down and rushed through the broken door, spiked feet clattering on the floor, a terrifying sound as she charged after the fleeing guards. Baazalanan followed swiftly on her heels, bent almost double, using its hands like forefeet as it ran. Clariel and Mogget came more slowly behind, Mogget pausing often to look over his shoulder.
‘What … what can the creatures be confined in?’ asked Clariel. Aziminil and Baazalanan were smashing down another door ahead. Aziminil was laughing again, the sound making the bones in Clariel’s face ache under the mask. ‘Without Charter Magic. Or did you lie about that as well?’
‘If you could compel them into a dry well that would hold for a time,’ said Mogget. ‘Capped with a heavy stone. A silver bottle, stoppered with melted silver, might last a day or two. Or they could be chained under a river, or a tidal flow, though again that would not last long without Charter Magic.’