The Last Dragon Chronicles: Dark Fire (39 page)

“Here,” said a voice.

David Rain materialised at Lucy’s back.

Gawaine roared and instantly retrievedher tail. With fury bleeding into her eyes,

she looked set to chop the intruder in half for a moment. But as Lucy turned round and sank into his arms, the dragon paused and concentrated hard on David. In him

she had a new challenge to unravel: how anything in the shape of a human could possess the scalene eyes of a dragon or resonate so strongly with the auma of her dynasty.

“There is no time to explain to you,” he said, speaking her dialect, nodding with respect, “but you will know that a mother cannot flame her young. This girl is your kin, through Gawain, your son. His auma is bound to this Earth and we to it. You

must leave here, Gawaine. Fly north to the ice lands. The Wearle await you.
 
He
 
awaits you.”

“Ohh… ” Lucy’s head suddenly rolled

on David’s shoulder.

Gawaine’s eye ridges shortened at the

sound.

“Lucy, what’s the matter?” David said. He put her head between his hands and looked into her eyes.

“They’re here… ” she whispered.

And Gawaine knew it too. Rising up to her full height, she turned and looked back towards Glissington Tor.

Hrrrrr
, she went.

A long, low snarl, and yet the translation was very short.

Ix.

Mirror, mirror

A second adversary. A female. A savage. Radiating hatred. Seeking revenge. Howterrifying must it have seemed to a solitaryraven, with a solitary hostage, to witnessthe release of a foe more threatening thanthe hunter which had slain the rest of its

flock? It must have been counting its remaining wing beats no greater than the number of claws on its feet. How could it

escape or expect to cheat death? Its chances were nil. Hopes of mercy, none. Expectations of surrender, zero. For driven as it was by an irreversible mania to morph into a darkling and possess dark fire, there would have come a moment of reckless exposure when it would have put

its evil life in peril. And that life would have been rubbed out in a snip. For vicious as it was, evolving in strength and cunning as it was, it was still no match for a champion like Grockle, and compared to Gawaine it was nothing but a gnat.

But it was due for a change of luck. Fortune was about to glint in its eye.

When Grockle had arrived in the

garden of the guesthouse, the raven had escaped, still holding Glade, and flown to the far side of Glissington Tor. It had witnessed the hunter come down near the

cairn and all the events that had followed, culminating in the release of the queen.

The one thing it had not seen was Gawaine’s attack on Lucy. The reason for this was simple: when the Tor had

erupted, the bird had experienced an urgent need to flutter out of hiding (from underneath a hedgerow, of all things). The displacement of earth was no threat to it, but a hundred pounds of broken cairn flying through the air and landing with a twig-shattering thump certainly was. The bird had given a malicious squawk and turned to spit venom at the fallen stones. That was when it saw the eye of the cairn, and Lucy’s tear still glistening across it.

Hopping onto the ledge of the eye, it tilted its head and studied its reflection.

What it saw was the profile of a raven. Blueberry-eyed. Severe. Feathers lackinggloss. Harsh, but not frightening. Mean,but not cruel. Large, but not brutal. Basically,   a   gnat.   It   hissed   in

disappointment. Something was wrong. It was losing strength. Reverting to its dismal genetic origin. It shuffled its feet and felt Glade drag against the rough grey stones. Angered by her presence, it hauled her up, almost throttling the life from her for fun as it held her over the shimmering tear. Not for the first time, it  pecked at her ivy. Why was it black when the rest of the pathetic little object was green? It spat into her eye.
 
Cry
, it carked. But Glade turned her head and merely let the bird’s saliva run off her snout. It dripped onto the tear below. And that was when everything changed.

There was a fizz as the fluids met. The

raven switched its gaze in a flash and saw what appeared to be a battle for

supremacy between the glob of spittle and the surface of the water. The water was

victorious. It rapidly assimilated the spit, burning the impurities out of it before the surface calmed again.

The raven waggled its tongue. Though its experience of dragons and their auma was minimal, it sensed power in the water and took a step nearer. It remembered how this mirror had been touched by the moon, energised by its feeble light. Could it be a weapon to be used against the dragons?

Those hopes were reinforced when it noticed that Glade was extending her tail and trying to dip her isoscele into the water. It immediately lifted her and squeezed her throat again, this time until her head had lolled and her breathing had

stopped. It tossed her into the grass.

Strangely, the moment the bird let her go it felt a surge of energy, a new rush of growth. Checking its  dark reflection again it saw that its ears were already swelling, back towards the bunched-up size they’d been when it had captured Glade from the car. Had the miniature dragon been drawing its strength? It snarled and would have stepped across the grass and slit her throat, had it not believed she was already dead. It stared once more at the glistening film, and this time dipped its toe.

Once   again  there  was   a  minor conflagration. But on this occasion the raven sensed that the tear was trying to resist invasion and did not have the means

to overpower it. A strange, primeval lust

for power began to juggle with the bird’s senses. What would happen if it
 
drank
 
the water?

A roar came down from Scuffenbury Hill. With it came the scent of a gallon offire. The bird grizzled. What did it have tolose? It plunged its beak into the tear –and sucked.

Right away, the water came together ina droplet, as if it was nothing but a silkenhandkerchief being plucked off a table top. Down the raven’s throat it went. And

there, in the stomach of one bird’s small alimentary system, the birth of a darkling began.

It happened largely by association. The evil that had stained the bird on Farlowe

Island instantly connected  to the auma

trails   defining   Lucy’s   heritage.   It recognised   Gawain.   It   recognised Guinevere. It found memories of a cold

obsidian knife and the flame inside, which it coveted so much. Above all, it homed in on a part of Lucy’s auma she had never been able to remove or cleanse: her

encounter with the agents of darkness, the Ix. As fast, ironically, as the speed of light, the raven formed a conduit to them.

The transformation was swift. The bird

gave a
 
caark
 
of triumph, but that was the last it would ever utter. As the Ix streamed

in and formed a Cluster within it, the raven’s beak was forced wider and wider, until the delicate skin at the corners tore

through and the bones of its jaw simply cracked apart. Its throat ripped open in

zags, like paper. The ears it had grown so fond of shrank. One of its startled eyes popped out. The split, once started, continued under the creature’s wings, along the sides of its breast to its tail. Blood welled in pools beneath its feathers. A squirt of urine dampened the grass. One clenched foot came vertically upward, shuddering as it tucked itself against the body. For ten seconds the bird remained balanced like this. Then, with black bile spurting from its seams, the body toppled over and divided into husks.

In the remains was a hunched-up gargoyle, covered in  mucus and slithering innards. It too remained balanced for

several seconds. Then its wings went out with a click, like blades. Rocking forward

it  let  itself  stand  on  bowed,  but deceptively brawny, legs, unwrapping with them a sinuous body that was somewhat ape-like in its suppleness. It jolted any stiffness out of its shoulders, setting off a ripple that vivified most of its cross-hatched scales. Unlike a dragon’s they did not change colour, but their semifoiled blackness glinted at the moon as if they were somehow tainting its light. With a slapping noise the monster turned its head. Its hideous face, thickened by stubs at the frontal lobes, looked with disdain at the mess it had grown from. And then it

ate
 
the mess it had grown from, sucking the corpse into an ‘o’-shaped mouth haunted by a filter of needle-shaped teeth.

The last thing it did before it took to the

air was to swing across to Glade, who was nestling, barely alive, in the grass. In one dreadful deed of malice, it stripped the ivy from around her neck. But this was much more than a vicious sneer of

senseless cruelty, it was an act of war. Kicking  poor  Glade   right  into  the hedgerow, the darkling tied the ivy around its wrist. Then, just like the raven had done before it, it tapped into Lucy’s family history, this time via a Pennykettle dragon.   With  consummate   greed,   it gathered in their means of parthenogenesis and absorbed their capability for selfreplication.

Thus were the Ix made manifest upon the Earth.

Like this it began:

And then there were two.

The battle of Scuffenbury Hill

There were four by the time they chose toshow themselves. By then, Lucy hadreported her sensations to David, and Gawaine was turning back towards the Tor. The darklings, already highly attunedto the auma trails pouring off Scuffenbury Hill, were soon aware that their presencewas known. Between them they swiftlyassessed their enemy, dismissing anythreat from the unicorn. It intrigued them,yes, but its pacifistic tendencies werehighly transparent. Likewise, their respectfor the matriarch was minimal. She was

old, poorly-sighted and had surrendered her wits to her wild fury. Her judgements, as a result, would be rash. They were

confident of killing her first. Then there was the agent of the Fain and his dragon. Him they feared, for his mind was trained. They suspected he might be newly illumined to the juvenile dragon at present making its obeisance to the queen. He would be hard to infect with the darkness, though his weakness might be found in the dragon-human hybrid he was so clearly keen to protect. All this they picked up at the speed of thought. Yet, as the moment arrived when they were forced to cease their replication and engage in battle, there was one auma  source they had failed to measure or readily identify. It was unlike   anything   the   Ix   had   ever encountered. A tiny nucleus of dark

energy,   wrapped   inside   a   skin  of

malleable… clay? Intrigued, greedy and a little frustrated, the alpha darkling sent out an impulse to the others: find that energy, scan it – and absorb it.

Then they rose.

The moment David saw them cominghe called to Gawaine not to battle them

without him. But the Ix had read the

matriarch correctly and she lifted off the hill without paying heed. David gripped Lucy by the shoulders, shook her and told her what was going to happen.

“Take the tusk,” he said, pressing the narwhal bone into her hand. “Think of

home and shake it three times. Tell Zanna

there are darklings here and I’m sending a message to the dragons in the North. They’ll come for Alexa. Zanna
 
must
 
obey

their will.” He pulled her forward and kissed her head. “Your work is done, Lucy. Now go home – to your mum.”

In the Vale, Gawaine’s fearsome roars cracked the air. The darklings had surrounded her like a flock of bats.

“What about Tam?” Lucy said, her eyes full of pain. In her pocket she could feel Gwendolen quaking.

“No time,” David said, as Grockle whooshed in and  posed, wings spread, at

David’s back.

Lucy shook her head in fear. “W-what’s happening?”

Go
 
,   David   mouthed,   steppingbackwards and raising his arms high andwide. His eyes had turned scalene; theiririses, violet. He retreated for two more

steps, until Grockle’s wings looked like a huge vampiric cape. And then, right before Lucy’s eyes, he merged into Grockle’s body.

They were in the air before Lucy could gasp, moving so fast that she’d lost them before she could complete a half-turn. A mile away, a belt of flame ripped across the Vale. One part of it flared up and blew into a fireball. That was one darkling fewer, she guessed. Despite her loathing of all things gruesome, she found her spirits cheered by its death.

But then the contest switched the other

way. Gawaine let out a piercing scream and began to lash her head back and forth with great force, as if some demon had squirmed into her brain. She rolled into a

dangerous spin, with one wing locked and her tail in spasm, her volatile claws turned firmly in. Lucy saw the queen drop a good thirty yards and feared she would break her twisting neck on the hard, unremitting fields below. But just when the matriarch’s life seemed doomed, from nowhere Grockle swept under her body and joined the  descent, fixing himself to Gawaine’s undersides as if he intended to