The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy Omnibus (227 page)

I took a deep breath, walked to the end of the row, and lifted the first powder vessel. I dropped it into the first burning kettle and sparks flew up around it. The second likewise; the third landed badly and had to be nudged deeper into the flames. I heard the watchers mutter as I did so. The fourth was easy. The fifth stuck to the ice and it seemed to take a year before it gave way to my tugging. Its lid came loose as it did so, and a small quantity of powder leapt from the mouth of it. I put the top back on and brushed it clean. As I set it into its firepot, the flames licked eagerly at the powder-smeared side, sparking and burning white. I reminded myself that quite a lot of time had elapsed before Chade’s original flask had exploded in my fireplace. The sixth was as easy as the first, and then I gave in to my impulse and burst into a run. I fled up the ramp and joined the others on the edge of the pit. The fifth pot suddenly burst into a fountaining roar of flames, sparks and sulphurous fumes. I heard
gasps of amazement and fear from the watchers, but as I gained the lip of the pit, the leaping white fire grew less and subsided. The pot that had held it cracked loudly and we heard a hiss as melted water met fire.

When I reached Chade’s side, he was shaking his head. ‘That is one wasted,’ he said tersely. ‘El’s balls! I wish I’d had more time to test the powder and devise the right sort of container for it. But again, consider how the flame travelled up the powder to reach the main dose of it. Could we use that? I had believed that the powder had to be inside a vessel for it to …’

And then the first explosion went off. It wasn’t in the first pot. I think it was the second, that perhaps that container had burned through more swiftly. It was hard to tell, for as shards and lumps of ice burst up from the floor of the pit and rained down around us, one of the other pots, or perhaps two, burst simultaneously.

The second blast was much louder than the first, deafening me. I had never experienced anything like it. The very air seemed to slap my skin and my ears felt as if they had been boxed. Fine ice stung my face. I blinked, thinking I’d been blinded, but it was a mist of impossibly fine snow hanging in the air.

Around me, men were yelling, deep-voiced cries of anger and dismay as they retreated from the lip of the pit. Civil’s terrified cat bolted past me, his master in frantic pursuit. From the buried dragon, I felt a wave of outrage.
We’re trying to free you!
I Skilled at him, but felt no response. Beside me, Burrich gripped my shoulder and stared about frantically, his face twisted with panic.

I seized Burrich’s arm to guide him back from the lip of the pit but he twisted free of me, crying, ‘Swift! Where is my son?’ as the next explosion slapped the earth against our feet. I found myself driven to my knees and Burrich prone beside me. The air was thick with drifting crystalline ice, and Burrich choked and spat and shouted out, ‘Swift! Swift, where are you, boy?’

‘I’m here, Papa!’ the boy cried out, and he came bounding to us through the hanging fog, hurtling into Burrich’s embrace. His eyes were huge.

‘Thank Eda, you’re safe! Stay close by me, now. Damn my eyes.
Fitz, what is happening? I expected flame and sparks and smoke, not this! What has that mad man done?’

‘It’s like a log bursting apart in the fire, Burrich, no more than that. The powder has burst, breaking the ice that surrounded it. I did not think it would be like this, but it’s over now. Be calm.’ But even as I spoke the words, seeking to reassure myself as much as him, the earth heaved a second time under our feet. At the same moment, I felt a furious mental onslaught.

You will pay, you puny treacherous grubs! Your blood will be shed, a bucket for every loosened scale on his flesh. I come! Tintaglia’s wrath is upon you! All of you will die!

‘
We’re trying to help him, not harm him!
’ I flung the words wide, voice, Wit and Skill. She made no reply.

But as I blinked the clinging mist of ice from my lashes and peered down into the pit, something stirred there. The settling flurry of ice crystals concealed it, but within that haze, something dark bucked and heaved, showing above the settling mist like a breaching whale. I heard the squeal and crack of breaking ice, and a smell came to me, a stench of trapped and scabrous flesh, a reptilian stench. I scrabbled to my feet and then ventured closer to the edge of the pit, peering down.

A slow and mammoth struggle was taking place down there. Parts of the dragon’s emaciated back were exposed. His tail humped and twitched, almost a separate creature as it strove to free its lashing tip from the ice. One immense hind leg was free, the overgrown claws of the long-captive dragon scoring deep gashes in the ice as it strove to free the rest of his body. Then a wing unfolded, clumps of ice flung wide as it lifted like the tattered canvas of a derelict ship. It flapped desperately, and the waft of unhealthy animal gagged me. Icefyre struggled there, his head and neck still encased in ice. As the mist of ice crystals settled, the humans straggled back to the edge of the pit and stared down, some gawking, some transfixed with horror. Chade’s face was a picture. I could not decide if his awe was for the destruction his powder had wrought or for the size of the creature he had partially bared.

Burrich spoke first. ‘That poor beast.’ He lifted both his hands, the fingers wide, and pushed gently at the air before him. So often
I had seen him gesture as he approached an uneasy horse. Now I wondered if quelling calm emanated from his hands. He raised his voice suddenly. ‘He needs our help. Shovels and picks, but I want you all to go carefully. It would be as easy to harm him now as to help him. Don’t encourage him to struggle.’ One hand clamped onto Swift’s shoulder, and the other stretched out a little before him as he stumbled toward the edge of the pit. ‘Easy, easy down there,’ he was already calling, and his words, freighted with soothing Wit, were for the dragon. ‘We’re coming. Still your struggles, you’ll only hurt yourself. Or us. Be easy now. We’ll help you.’

Again, I was aware of the flow of comfort that went with those words. The dragon, too, seemed affected by them. Or perhaps it was exhaustion that made his struggles slow and then cease.

‘Mind the edge of the pit, man. The ramp is this way. Swift, guide your father down there. We’ll need him.’ Web’s brow was bleeding from a glancing blow from a chunk of flung ice. He strode past us, unmindful of his own hurt, shovel in hand. For the first time, I became aware that the blast had injured some of us. One Hetgurd man was down, unconscious in the snow, blood trickling from his nose and ears. One of his fellows knelt by him in bewilderment. Civil had caught his hissing cat and held him in an awkward hug, trying to calm the struggling animal. I looked around for Dutiful, and saw him already hurrying down the ramp toward the trapped dragon, using a pry bar as a stave as he descended. The floor of the pit had been broken, reminding me of ice floes on a restless sea.

‘My prince! Be careful! He may be dangerous!’ Chade bellowed after him, and then he went hastening down the ramp and into the pit. Witted and unWitted alike converged on the trapped creature and began removing the loosened chunks of ice. It was hazardous, for the dragon continued to buck and heave as he struggled to free himself.

The stench was terrible. Starvation and dormant snake fouled the air. Burrich seemed unfazed by it as he stepped forward and then set his hands calmingly on the creature’s black and scaly hide. ‘Be easy. Let us clear away the loosened ice before you struggle any more. Breaking a wing now will not help you.’

He stilled. It was not Skill but Wit that carried to me the dragon’s
panicky suffocation. I sensed Icefyre’s attention was focused elsewhere now, and suspected that he communicated with Tintaglia. I hoped he would tell her that we were trying to help him.

‘We need to get his head free. He can’t get enough air to struggle,’ Burrich told me as I came closer.

‘I know. I feel it, too.’ I tried not to smirk as I added, ‘I am Witted, you know.’

I had not realized that Swift would overhear me. Perhaps, because my ears were still ringing, I had spoken more loudly than I thought. But he stared at me, avid and intent. ‘Then you are FitzChivalry, the Witted Bastard. And it’s true that my father raised you in the stables?’ There was a strange lilt in his voice, as if he had suddenly discovered a link to fame and legend in his own family. I suppose he had, but I did not think it was healthy.

‘We’ll discuss it later,’ Burrich and I said at almost the same instant. Swift gaped at us and then gave a strangled laugh.

‘Clear that loose ice from around his left shoulder,’ Web called as he strode by, and men hastened to obey him, Swift among them.

But Web halted beside us, pick in hand. A sharp motion of his hand halted Swift beside him. Quietly he observed to Burrich, ‘Later will not wait forever, for either of you. A time will come when both of you will have to explain yourselves to this lad.’ Yet his words were not a rebuke, and I almost thought that a small smile played across his face when he spoke to us. He bowed to Burrich and went on, ‘Forgive me if I offend. I know that your sight is failing you, but your shoulders and back still look strong. If your son guided you, you could be most useful helping to pull the sleds full of ice chunks away from the work site. Would you help us, Burrich?’

I thought Burrich would refuse. I knew he still wished to avoid Web and all he stood for. But the request had been made courteously, and it was a way in which Burrich could be genuinely helpful. I could guess how it chafed him to stand by a trapped animal while others laboured to free him. Web’s offer was also putting Swift right at Burrich’s side, under his paternal authority. I saw Burrich make a difficult compromise. He spoke, not to Web, but to Swift, saying, ‘Guide me to the sled, lad, and let’s put our backs into it.’

I was left standing alone as Swift and Burrich, father and son,
departed to do Web’s bidding. I watched them take up the hauling lines alongside Civil and Cockle. They leaned into their work, and despite Burrich’s bad leg, his brawn was much the greatest there. The laden sled moved steadily up the ramp and out of the pit. It had been neatly done, that throwing together of them, and I think Burrich welcomed it as much as Swift did not. Did Web try to mend the rift between them, even as he sought to mellow Burrich’s attitude toward the Wit?

I was still pondering the permutations of that when the final blast went off.

I now believe that the little kettle I had carelessly left burning when I retreated from the dragon’s head had continued to burn. Did it eventually ignite the hides it rested upon, spreading fire to the oil flask and to the powder container? Or had the flask of oil spilled when the earlier, smaller blasts overset it on the hides near the powder and kettle? I have spent far too much time wondering about such useless questions.

It was a larger charge of powder, intended to kill. The explosion from it burst the icy roof of the tunnel up into the air at the same time that it blew loose chunks of ice out of the tunnel’s mouth and into the pit where we all worked. Men and ice were flung in the slamming concussion of that blast. I myself was thrown across the excavation. In the wake of that blast, ice sharper than arrows rained down and pierced some of us. I felt the falling chunks, but all was white before me. I thought I had been blinded as well as deafened. Then the fine ice mist began to settle, revealing a soundless chaos. I saw Web stumbling past me, his hands clasped over his ears. I saw Eagle crumpled in a broken heap under immense chunks of ice. I saw men screaming but did not hear them. I wondered if I would ever hear anything ever again.

I lifted my eyes and saw Chade and Dutiful looking down in horror. They had not been in the pit, and an instant later I realized that the men dragging out the sleds would also have escaped the worst effects of the blast. But just as I found my feet and decided that none of my bones were broken, a second trembling shook me. The ground beneath me shifted, pieces of ice heaving beneath my feet, and new cracks gaped wide and then
suddenly gave way. Black flesh heaved to the top through broken fragments of ice.

Free!

It was the most coherent thought I had received from Icefyre, and it was more a sensation of triumph than a word.

His immense black head lifted on a serpentine neck. His wings, half opened, served him as additional limbs as he levered his way up out of the clinging ice. The sight of his long trapped body woke pity in me, even in the midst of my horror at what had befallen my fellows. His flesh barely coated his bones, and his scaled skin was tattered and sagging like badly-sewn garments. When he opened his wings, there were rents and gaps in them, a fine cloak snagged by brambles.

He wallowed up from the ice, pausing several times to roar and struggle to free a leg and then a wingtip. He was heedless of the men who lay dazed about him, but that did not reassure me, for his sudden great hunger radiated like heat from him. For the first time, I knew on an instinctive level that I was prey to this far larger predator. My words to him would have no more effect on his thoughts than the wild frenzy of a rabbit had on a wolf’s thoughts. Nighteyes and I had never tried to speak to our meals while they were alive; neither would this creature. ‘Fool, what have you turned loose on this world?’ I groaned.

The dragon gave another lurching heave and emerged more fully from the tumbled ice. His size only became more impressive as he did so. As Icefyre gained footholds on the shifting wreckage of his tomb, he drew his tail up and out of the ice. It just kept coming, impossibly long, until it lay around him on the broken surface like a whip’s curled lash. He threw back his head suddenly and let out a wild cry that began as a deep roar and then climbed until it was beyond reach of my hearing. It was my first perception of sound since the blast, and it seemed a new sense to me as the creature’s trumpeting shook the lungs inside my body.

Then I saw his nostrils flare, and his wedged head dipped down toward Eagle’s body. Even though the man was dead, what was about to befall him appalled me. Icefyre nosed the body, dislodging it from the ice boulders that had crushed it. He lipped it carefully,
and then lifted Eagle up and shook the remaining ice fragments from him, like Nighteyes worrying dead leaves from a fish. The dragon ate like a gull, tossing the meat that had been a man up into the air and opening his maw wide so that the falling body was halfway down his gullet before he gulped. Then Eagle was no more than a lump sliding down that long throat.