Page 62 of Among the Burning Flowers
Her riding boots slewed on loose fragments of rock. Ermendo steadied her as she began to slip. ‘I must go alone. Fýredel did not summon you,’ she said to him. ‘Will you wait for me?’
‘As long as it takes.’
He offered her a lantern from the coach. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but I read in a bestiary that fire can become … unpredictable in Draconic lairs. I trust there will be a safe path.’
‘Very well.’
Above loomed the Fell Door, dwarfing her. Relying on the full moon for light, she clambered up the wooden ramp that had been constructed, each step hard on her feet, even with boots. She was used to the smooth floors of the palace.
At last, she stepped into the cave. The cave from which many Cárscari had never returned.
Fýredel must have set humans to work in here. There were pickaxes and ladders around the entrance, as if someone had been trying to widen it. Not only that, but iron braziers and torches blazed, lit with red fire. Out of their reach, it was black as pitch. She nerved herself and stepped forward.
A hiss stopped her in her tracks. A grey beast emerged from the nearest shadows, its forked tongue lashing out. A culebreya – a winged serpent, like the amphiptere, with a hood like a cobra. They were believed to have come from Afelayanda Forest, hence the Yscali name.
Marosa managed to keep still. The culebreya retreated a short way, eyes aglow with hatred, before it moved its head into the light again. This time, its hiss was louder, scraping down her spine. When it repeated this swaying motion a third time, she realised that it wanted her to follow it. Praying her instinct was right, she placed herself at the mercy of a monster.
When she came near, the culebreya did not strike. Instead, it turned and slithered into a tunnel. Marosa shadowed it, keeping a safe distance. It was hard to keep her veil on, such was the overpowering heat. She could already see another brazier, but when they reached it, she wished for darkness, for the ground was strewn with bones. She had almost convinced herself they were animaluntil she noticed a human skull, bloody and missing its jaw.
Marosa began to shake uncontrollably. She had known the creatures fed on flesh. Bartian had guessed the fate that must have met the Cárscari who came here, but she had denied it to preserve her sanity.Surely not all of them, she reasoned with herself.They would not eat their own labourers.She forced herself to walk after the culebreya.Please, let some of them have lived.
Now she could hear a hammering. It distracted her and she misplaced her boot, stepping on something that caused her foot to roll. When she instinctively looked down, she saw the mound of bones she had disturbed, and then a human arm on the ground, still fresh, torn off at the elbow. She pressed her lips together, sweat trickling down her face.
A hot roar of light drew her attention back to the hammering. In a vast cave to her left, two wyverns lay alongside each other, surrounded by humans.
Marosa glanced at the culebreya, which had stopped to lick the blood from a skull. While it was distracted, she squinted into the cave again. Several of the humans were climbing on a wyvern, cloths over their faces. As Marosa watched, two women lowered a sheet of metal over a deep hole in its hide.
Her heart was beating harder than it ever had. The Cárscari were mending the wyverns’ injuries from the Grief. Taking away those few hard-won weak points in their armour.
She tore her gaze away and looked across the rest of the cavern, straining to see through a haze of dust and smoke. A burly man was using hot water and a stiff broom to clean the filth off a basilisk, while another scrubbed rust from itspatches of iron armour. It hissed at them both, but seemed to endure their ministrations. The sight of that great serpent chilled Marosa. If its venom touched either of those men, they would disintegrate, like Rosarian.
Even farther away, a group of Cárscari were chipping at the wall. The Fell Door was large enough for wyverns and Draconic creatures. These people could only be excavating more beasts.
The culebreya snapped at her. Marosa flinched and went after it, hot tears on her cheeks.
Her people were being forced to act as agents of their own destruction. To make worthless the sacrifices of their ancestors.
At last, her guide brought her to another cavern, where a hot wind made her veil flutter. A faint glow – lava, flowing somewhere nearby – lit its walls. She walked to the end of a long spear of rock, reaching the edge of a pit that seemed bottomless. The culebreya let out a harsh sound, which echoed through the darkness.
For a long time, Marosa could only shiver at the precipice. At last, she heard movement. A low rumble, followed by earth-shaking thuds, shards of rock skittering.
It took some time for her eyes to tell rock from scale, and to pick out the face of the wyrm.
The face of Fýredel.
A thousand stories could not have prepared her for a High Western. Even after reading eyewitness accounts, she had never imagined that he could be so immense, nor to look exactly as volcanic as he was. His scales were obsidian, though his throat was reddish, as if stained with blood. She could not even see all of him, but what little she did see dwarfed her.
The wyrm that had almost destroyed humankind. An abomination of the highest order.
If this was only an underling, she could not imagine the Nameless One.
Did Fruma look this way to Oderica?
His fiery gaze was nailed to her. A wonder that he could even see a small human. Marosa sank to her knees, unsure if she had done it on purpose, or if her joints had failed her.
‘Who comes?’
His voice was so deep, it took her a moment to realise he was speaking Inysh.
