Figures on the plain. Walking, dust roiling up behind them like wind-tossed shrouds. Weapons impaled them. Limbs hung from shreds of tendon and muscle. Sightless eyes and expressions twisted with fearful recognition – faces seeing their own deaths – blind to his own presence as they marched past.
Rising up within him, a vast sense of loss. Grief, then the bitter whisper of betrayal.
Someone will pay for this. Someone will pay.
Someone.
Someone.
The words were not his, the thoughts were another’s, but the voice, there in the centre of his skull – that voice was his own.
A dead warrior walked close. Tall, black-skinned. A sword had taken most of his face. Bone gleamed, latticed with red cracks from some fierce impact.
A flash of motion.
Metal-clad hand crashed into the side of Udinaas’s head. Blood sprayed. He was in a cloud of grey ash, on the ground. Blinking burning fire.
He felt gauntleted fingers close about his left ankle. His leg was viciously yanked upward.
And then the warrior began dragging him.
Where are we going?
‘The Lady is harsh.’
The Lady?
‘Is harsh.’
She awaits us at journey’s end?
‘She is not one who waits.’
He twisted as he was pulled along, found himself staring back at the furrow he’d made in the ashes. A track reaching to the horizon. And black blood was welling from that ragged gouge. How long has he been dragging me? Whom do I wound ?
The thunder of hoofs.
‘She comes.’
Udinaas turned onto his back, struggled to raise his head.
A piercing scream.
Then a sword ripped through the warrior dragging Udinaas. Cutting it in half. The hand fell away from his ankle and he rolled to one side as iron-shod hoofs thundered past.
She blazed, blinding white. A sword flickering like lightning in one hand. In the other, a double-bladed axe that dripped something molten in its wake. The horse-
Naught but bones, bound by fire.
The huge skeletal beast tossed its head as it wheeled round. The woman was masked in flat, featureless gold. A headdress of arching, gilt scales rose like hackles about her head. Weapons lifted.
And Udinaas stared into her eyes.
He flinched away, scrabbling to his feet, then running.
Hoofs pounded behind him.
Daughter Dawn. Menandore-
Before him were sprawled the warriors that had walked alongside the one dragging him. Flames licking along wounds, dull smoke rising from torn flesh. None moved. They keep dying, don’t they? Again and again. They keep dying-
He ran.
Then was struck. A wall of ridged bone smashing into his right shoulder, spinning him through the air. He hit the ground, tumbled and rolled, limbs flopping.
His eyes stared up into swirling dust, the sky behind it spinning.
A shape appeared in its midst, and a hard-soled boot settled on his chest.
When she spoke, her voice was like the hissing of a thousand snakes. ‘The blood of a Locqui Wyval… in the body of a slave. Which heart, mortal, will you ride?’
He could not draw breath. The pressure of the boot was building, crushing his chest. He clawed at it.
‘Let your soul answer. Before you die.’
I ride… that which I have always ridden.
‘A coward’s answer.’
Yes.
‘A moment remains. For you to reconsider.’
Blackness closed around him. He could taste blood in the grit filling his mouth. Wyval! I ride the Wyval !
The boot slipped to one side.
A gauntleted hand reached down to the rope he used as a belt. Fingers clenched and he was lifted from the ground, arching, head dangling. Before him, a world turned upside down. Lifted, until his hips pushed up against the inside of her thighs.
He felt his tunic pulled up onto his belly. A hand tearing his loincloth away. Cold iron fingers clamped round him.
He groaned.
And was pushed inside.
Fire in his blood. Agony in his hips and lower back as, with one hand, she drove him up again and again.
Until he spasmed.
The hand released him and he thumped back onto the ground, shuddering.
He did not hear her walk away.
He heard nothing. Nothing but the two hearts within him. Their beats drawing closer, ever closer.
After a time someone settled down beside Udinaas.
‘Debtor.’
Someone will pay . He almost laughed.
A hand on his shoulder. ‘Udinaas. Where is this place?’
‘I don’t know.’ He turned his head, stared up into the frightened eyes of Feather Witch. ‘What do the tiles tell you?’