Page 32 of Among the Burning Flowers
The entire crowd stopped moving and fell silent. All eyes were on the sky, from whence the scream had come. No human could make such a sound, but Melaugo had heard something like it before. In the dank caves and abandoned mines where only sleepers dwelled.
So when it landed on the dome of the Great Sanctuary of Ortégardes, she was among the first to accept it.
She had seen Draconic creatures, but nothing of this cruelty or magnitude. Even longer than the lindworm in Triyenas, the horned monster was covered with scales, andits wings, torn and brindle, were like those of some immense bat. A bullwhip of a tail lashed behind it.
A fuckingwyvern, in broad daylight.
For five centuries, the people of Virtudom had been weaned on tales of the Grief of Ages. They knew what they were looking at – the foes that stalked their prayer books and their bedtime tales. Melaugo looked speechlessly at Liyat, whose terrified gaze was fixed on the wyvern.
And then the wyvern let out a roar, and it was as if a cannon had gone off.
Melaugo kept hold of Liyat. The icy calm of a culler kicked in, even as fear sparked in her breast and the streets erupted into chaos.
That roar had made the wyvern real.
They were standing at the edge of the crowd, else they would have been lost in the fray at once, unable to get clear. By instinct, they rushed the same way they had come. Just as they pulled free of the horde, a man slammed into Melaugo, and she hit the cobbles, tasting blood as she bit her own tongue.
‘Bastard,’ she spat. He was already gone.
‘Estina.’ Liyat was shouting with all her might, yet Melaugo could barely hear: ‘Everyone will be heading for the gates. The stables will be plundered. We have to use the drain to get there first!’
Melaugo allowed herself to be hauled to her feet. On the dome, the wyvern roared again. She looked up to see five more winging over the square, monstrous in size and aspect. Some of the city guards were loading their crossbows, while others had drawn their swords.
‘Where are the springalds, the cannons?’ Melaugo snarled. ‘What was thepointof building them?’
Liyat did not reply. Her gaze was darting around them, assessing their surroundings, coming up with a rational plan. In silent agreement, they started to run, buffeting past other Yscals.
Ortégardes was surrounded by a crenelated wall, built when the Yscali monarchs had been courting war with Lasia. It was lined with springalds, mangonels and cannons – weapons proven to kill wyrms – but none of them were being used. Though the wall had sixty round towers, it was far lower on gates, with only two wide enough for large crowds. A crush was forming on Cypress Street as thousands of people made for the nearest.
Melaugo stopped as another wyvern shot overhead. Next she knew, the crowd was covered in red fire.
The screams were deafening. She pushed Liyat into a doorway before a second eruption of fire, impossibly hot, rained down on another part of the crowd. Melaugo could hardly breathe, and not just because the air scorched in her throat. The implications of this were appalling. If the wyverns had their flames, then a High Western was either awake, or close to it.
A second Grief of Ages might be about to begin.
‘Open the gates,’ came the agonised shouts from the crowd. ‘For the love of the Saint, open the gates!’
‘They’re closed?’ Melaugo croaked. ‘Why the fuck would they be closed?’
‘You heard that disgrace of a knight,’ Liyat bit out. ‘King Sigoso is complicit in this madness.’
‘That is not possible. No wyrm hasevertreated with—’
‘Estina, we’ll question it later. We have to get out of here now.’ Liyat leaned past her to look at the street, hair clinging to the sweat on her face. ‘The other gates will be locked, too.The storm drain isn’t far. This time, we do not stop until we reach the stables. Are we agreed?’
Melaugo nodded. Together, they left the shelter of the doorway and took a narrow backstreet towards the city wall.
Liyat ducked into the drain first. Melaugo left its cover open, so a few lucky others could find their way out before the Knights Defendant sealed it. They barrelled down the smugglers’ tunnel, and soon they were back above ground, wading through the moat, almost falling.
On the other side of the city wall, they could see more wyverns approaching from the north. As Melaugo smelled burnt hair and flesh, she saw that the gates had not only been shut, but chained together. If she had been harbouring any doubts about human complicity, that sight banished them. There were no guards to be seen; no one from whom a key might be wrung.
On one of the towers that flanked the gate, a mangonel was mounted, with no obvious way to reach it from this side. Before Melaugo could improvise, a wyvern shattered the war engine with one blow of its tail, showering the moat with shards of wood and metal.
They kept running towards the stables. Inside, more panic-stricken people were claiming horses at random. Liyat went for her own mare, but a desperate man already had it by the reins. Seeing Liyat, he reached for his sword.
Before he could use it, Liyat shot him in the shoulder. The mare reared up. While the man writhed in pain and cursed Liyat, she stowed the gun and calmed the horse as best she could.
‘Where should we go?’ Melaugo asked her, heaving for breath. ‘The Lasian border?’
