The Dragon Engine (33 page)

Slowly, they knelt, one by one.

Dake was crying; uncaring.

Sakora had a poker face. She had accepted her fate.

Lillith lowered her eyes to the ground, filled with a great sadness.

Talon was filled with despondency. The world had turned against him once more, and now he was to die in this godforsaken place.

Only Beetrax stared up, defiant, a snarl on his face, hate in his eyes, hate in his soul. “Make it count, Irlax. Because I'm going to fucking slaughter you, in this life or the next! You hear me, you hateful piece of donkey shit?”

Irlax gave a short bark of a laugh. A light of insanity shone in his eyes. “I find that… improbable. Because shortly I will rule the entirety of the Five Havens. Skalg will be dead – I will have seen to that. The Church of Hate will be under my control! And I will be
all powerful
. So, feeble axeman, enjoy your invectives, because I am immortal. I am the resurrection of the Great Dwarf Lords! I am in complete control! Now bow your shameful heads, and ready yourself for execution. Beetrax, Talon, Dake, Sakora, and Lillith – I hereby sentence you to death. Guards? Take aim, and fire when ready.” He smiled. “I want at least ten bolts in each fucking body. Just to make sure.”

S
he awoke
.

She'd felt the passing of ages; millennia, tumbling away like crushed ice as her mind filtered through the atmosphere, tiny, microscopic particles finally released from their Equiem magick imprisonment. They rushed into her brain, and she gasped, and flames licked around her snout. She remembered.

She remembered it all.

The Chains of Skaltos.

The Iron Betrayal, with those huge machines like jaws…

The Great Dwarf Lords, those cunning bastards; and the fall of Wyrmblood, the isolation, the imprisonment, followed by thousands of years of half-remembered dreams, like so much black snowfall; fallout from a destroyed and burning city.

She felt the rage course through her.

She opened her eyes.

And roared…

T
he Dragon Pits
. Three shafts of monumental proportions, drilled down through the deepest rock of the Karamakkos; perfectly smooth cylindrical walls rising for five hundred yards. At the top were massive steel collector bowls and various funnels, heat exchangers and hundreds of pipes – so that every time one of the three wyrms
sang
, their fire could be collected, harnessed, stored to heat and power the five cities above. And when they sang, they could sing for
hours
…

Jael stood before the iron door, and another slave handed him a shovel. He was on a three-man shift to enter the base of the shaft and shovel the remains of former victims that had been fed to the great slumbering beasts, but also to scoop up their shit into thick sacks, so it could be transported away from this place.

“You've come up in the world, lad!” laughed a slave, an old, bent human with blackened, rotting teeth. He slapped Jael on the back.

“But – I'm just shovelling dragon shit, Hanno. How is that coming up in the world?”

Hanno lowered his voice a little, and thumbed the slave warden who sat against the far wall, picking his nose. “Beats working with the other slave wardens in the mines. At least this one doesn't whip us.”

Jael nodded, and hefting his shovel and handful of rough sacks which stank worse than any cesspit he'd ever encountered, he climbed rough iron steps with Hanno and Yailem.

“You have to listen for the beginnings of the song. If you hear them, then you know it's not safe to enter.”

“And what does this song sound like?” asked Jael, frowning.

“You get used to it. I'll teach you. Either that, or you'll be burned alive and they'll have to find another slave to replace you.”

“You there!” rumbled the nose-picking slave overseer. “Get on with your business.” He grinned through his food-encrusted beard. “Get in there and shovel the shit like you're supposed to.”

“We're just listening for the song, sir,” whined Hanno, voice rising several octaves in an affectation of submission. “After all, we wouldn't want to get burned to a crisp.”

“Well, one more dead slave matters to nobody down here,” the overseer grumbled, and went about inspecting his axe.

Hanno moved to the iron door and listened. There came a scraping sound from the bottom of the Dragon Pit. Hanno turned back to Jael and grinned, thumbing the door. “This one's Volak. The biggest of the three bitches.”

“Bitches?”

“Didn't you know? They're all female. Damned if I know how they used to reproduce. But yeah, female. And this bitch sounds like she's about to take a huge…”

The iron door exploded from its frame, tearing free with a screech of sudden, twisted iron and blasting across the space, missing Jael by an inch and spinning rapidly before thudding into the dwarf slave overseer, effectively cutting him in two. The door clattered to the ground with a heavy, deep clang. The dwarf, blood pouring from his mouth and from his two body halves, where he'd been bludgeoned in half just below his breast bone, slithered in opposite directions, slopping to the ground in twin heaps of pulverised bone and muscle and peeping organs.

“By the Seven Sisters!” said Hanno, eyes wide, staring at the overseer. Then his gaze whipped back to the Dragon Pit, and the huge whipping tail as wide as any house, the length of it containing huge spines, each spine the size of a warrior's spear. The tail whipped again, and there came a deep, reverberating
whump
and the sound of crumbling rocks.

“It sounds…” began Jael, but was cut off by the unbelievable, deafening, roaring scream that slammed up from the base of the Dragon Pit. The noise was greater than anything Jael had ever experienced, and he dropped to his knees, arms wrapped around his head, face contorted in pain as the noise seemed to go on, and on, and on…

Suddenly, the noise ended.

“… awake,” finished Jael.

The flat of Hanno's hand slammed into Jael's chest, sending him sailing back from the platform. That saved Jael's life. Flames roared in the chamber, a huge bright ball of fire which soared upwards, turning from orange to green to blue. Flames spat from the smashed iron doorway, a jet of pure blue like no fire Jael had ever seen. Hanno hit the ground beside him, covering his head. Jael's mouth hung open, and suddenly the fire stopped.

The world seemed suddenly crisp and black.

Inside the Dragon Pit, Jael saw movement. Matte black limbs and a mammoth tail, circling around, like huge tentacles in oil. Then there came a deep, slamming
thud
. And another. And a third. The whole chamber shook under each impact, and stones and dust trickled down from unseen high recesses above…

God, it's big,
he thought, panic settling through his chest.

He turned to Hanno, whose face was a frozen rictus of terror.

“It's… climbing,” said Jael.

“It should be sleeping!” screeched Hanno.

“Well, she's awake. Awake, and climbing…”

“By all the gods, we need to run,” said Hanno, and he looked over to the pulped body of the slave overseer. Then he looked at Jael. “Listen, lad. Things are going to turn bad. If that dragon has woken up, after being imprisoned for thousands of years…”

“Yes?”

“Well, she's going to be pretty pissed. Wouldn't you be? Go, lad. Run. Escape! There'll be no fighting this when it kicks off proper.”

V
olak climbed the Dragon Pit
, fury swamping her mind like a red-hot brand through the centre of her huge, elongated skull. She shook her long, tapered head and snout, then looked up, slanted black eyes squinting as they made out the collectors and pipework above.

Kept as a slave for thousands of years.

You killed my children!

Destroyed my world.

Now, you betraying dwarf fuckers, it's my turn...

The Dragon Pits had been designed to be massive, smooth, vertical shafts set deep down through the hardest of granite, with the idea being if ever one of the wyrms awoke – Great Dwarf Lords forbid! – the sheer size and smoothness of the walls would be an imprisonment in itself. The reality of the matter was that Volak simply smashed her claws into the walls, gouging holes, creating her own steps, in the same way an ice-climber kicks steps into a frozen waterfall. Up she moved, a creature so vast she could eat a Shire horse with a single bite, her body from snout to tail perhaps a hundred yards, her wings when fully unfurled nearer to two hundred. Volak was big, her armoured skin a dull, matte black, with curved horns atop her head and spear-like spines running down her back and long, barbed tail. This was not some cuddly dragon from a child's illustrated story book; this was a machine built for killing, for slaughter and death on a grand fucking scale. This was one evil bitch. This was a creature at the top of its food chain.

Volak lifted her leg, and with three blows punched a hole in the wall. Another leg up, claws grinding through granite, and bang, another hole created. She continued to climb, and suddenly paused, huge head tilting to one side.

A crooning sound reverberated around the deep shafts in the bowels of the mine. Volak breathed deeply, for she knew now that her sisters were awake – Moraxx and Kranesh, shaking themselves into wakefulness after centuries of enforced slumber.

Volak sent up a cry, her throat ululating, and this was returned with similar high-pitched screeches, some of the notes way beyond human hearing. And they spoke to one another, these ancient dragons; communicated in a language tens of thousands of years old.

With renewed vigour Volak surged her way upwards, tail thrashing, and smashing extra holes in the walls of the Dragon Pit which had been her prison for so long. Huge chunks of granite tumbled down, thudding on the ground far below, amidst the bones of a hundred thousand corpses, amidst her own faeces, crushing her recent cell.

You think to control me?
she thought.

You think your world will EVER be the same again?

Above, various engineers and guards had gathered. They watched in horror as the vast black dragon surged up towards them, tail whipping.

“Get some weapons!”

“What kind of weapons?”

“I don't know, any kind of fucking weapons!”

“Get crossbows!”

“Crossbows won't fucking work ON THAT!”

“Get spears!”

“They'll have to be BIG FUCKING SPEARS!”

Some wardens were throwing rocks, huge heavy cobbles, which bounced from the accelerating dragon's hide without effect. Five dwarves manhandled a huge boulder, and heaved it up onto the lip of the Dragon Pit shaft. They timed it with care, and rolled it off. It fell, weighing perhaps the same as three or four horses, and bounced from Volak's long tapered head, bouncing free and tumbling down the shaft.

Volak paused, glancing up, her black eyes narrowing. She breathed in, absorbing oxygen, and fire blasted out, scorching up the shaft and setting various dwarves on fire, their beards and hair going up as if they were soaked in fish oil.

Volak continued, and reaching the lip, snarling and growling, she bit and snapped and chewed at the heat exchangers and fire collectors. Her great fangs tore through huge pipes that would take a hundred dwarves to lift. There were screams of high pressure steam, blasting out. Boiling water rained down the shaft, tinkling, and pipes gurgled and emptied. Snarling, Volak heaved her bulk upwards, front claws grabbing the lip of the shaft, crushing granite, and her huge head reared up, coming face to face with perhaps thirty dwarves.

Silence fell like a widow's floating veil.

Volak grinned at them. “Surprised, you little dwarf fuckers?” she growled.

They screamed, and as one mass, ran away, pummelling and smacking one another to fit into the corridor leading from the chamber.

Volak dragged herself into the tight space at the top of the Dragon Pit. Her head swept around, hissing through air, as understanding filtered through.
They got me in here. But then they closed up the tunnels? I will find those tunnels again. They must still exist. Hidden, like my mind.

She took a deep breath, and fire roared. Her lungs worked like bellows, and the fire turned into fierce blue jets. The stones of the wall started to glow, and Volak moved forward, claws smashing through stones and rocks until she uncovered an ancient, disused tunnel. It had indeed been sealed up, by those who had imprisoned her, and dust lay thick on the ground, amidst piles of rubble. Thick webs swung from above, and one single blast of purifying fire cleansed the tunnel of ten thousand years of debris.

Volak stood there, panting, her black eyes glowing like molten coal.

Then she strode forward, down the tunnel through which she had entered her imprisonment, her claws raking the rock through ancient grooves she had left on her way in, trapped within a huge iron cage of the Great Dwarf Lords' devising. She remembered. Oh
how she fucking remembered.

She could hear her own screams, now.

And the screams of her murdered babies, freshly hatched from eggs, writhing pitifully as the oil swirled around them. But the pitiful sight had not stopped the dwarves with huge war hammers, striding amongst her babies, the heads slamming down, crushing baby dragon skulls, pulverising the brains of the newly hatched into so much egg yolk. And then the fire. Flames, as her babies burned…

I remember,
thought Volak.

I remember.

Her head twitched left, and she heard Kranesh fighting her way up from the Dragon Pit in exactly the same way Volak had escaped.
Come, sister. Come to me
! And then more cries, and she heard the soothing croons of Moraxx
…
Moraxx,
so many years, so much time lost, but now we are free, now we will bring back our sovereignty, now we will show these fucking dwarves who are in charge of this world...

Ahead, in the wide, ancient tunnel, twenty dwarves ran towards her. Many carried crossbows, but three wheeled a heavy, mounted crossbow – a siege engine, effectively, with bolts as thick as a dwarf's thigh.

They stopped, and crossbow quarrels fired at her, pinging from her heavy armoured scales.

Volak strode forward as the dwarves fought with the industrial siege machine, all three sweating as they dragged back wrist-thick cables and wound several tensioners with clacking ratchet sounds.

Volak stopped, and her head tilted to one side.

“Unleash the Beast!” screamed one over-enthusiastic dwarf.

A lever was pulled.

The massive bolt thundered towards Volak, who simply shifted, moving her right shoulder, her right, folded wing, and the bolt slammed past, and brought down part of the roof. Rocks fell, amongst small tumbling stones and an inverted mushroom cloud of dust.

Volak looked back to the gathered dwarves, who stood, dumbstruck that they had missed.

“You will have to do better than that,” rumbled Volak, and the dwarves thought they saw the black dragon grin, although it shouldn't be able to grin because it was a dumb, mindless wyrm and it shouldn't even understand humour, let alone fucking
speak...