Twilight of the Dragons (27 page)

Moraxx strode forward, and stared down at her sister.

Kranesh met her gaze.

“What have they done to me?”

“Secured you. I'm sure if you had a minute you could be free.”

Kranesh started to struggle, but Moraxx took a step forward and brought her claws down on Kranesh's head, a massive, sickening blow. Kranesh groaned. Moraxx beat her again, and again, and again, the final blow ending with a crunch. Kranesh slumped down, the chains forgotten, the flames around her snout diminishing.

“THERE! ON THE COUNT OF THREE, SPEAR THE FUCKER!”

Moraxx turned, and eyed the several hundred soldiers now gathered, many hefting spears and pikes, their faces grim.

“Really?” said Skalg, and grinned, inhaling, and screaming out a wall of fire that sent the soldiers sprinting for the second Desekra wall, many with their trews on fire, several crying for their mother.

Moraxx turned back to Kranesh, and Skalg stared down with her eyes.

No
, said Moraxx in his mind.

Please, you cannot do this, she is my sister, she is my own flesh and blood, you cannot do this, she cannot die thinking I murdered her!

Leave me to my work
, growled Skalg. His mind was filled with laughter, with joy, with an absolute utter and total rush of power. He was the most dominant creature on the planet. He was unstoppable. Immortal. A… god.

Please
, begged Moraxx in the caverns of this, their now shared mind. Only Skalg had control, and Moraxx was an unwilling passenger.
Please stop. You must stop. This is unholy. Think of… our babies… our Empire…

Skalg stared down at the weakened dragon before him. Blood drooled from her maw. Her eyes were still focussed, focussed on Moraxx, focussed on Skalg, and he
knew
that scheming bitch would leap up and rend him limb from limb if she so much as thought she had a chance.

“Time for you to die, Kranesh,” said the voice of Moraxx.

“How can you do this to me, sister?”

“How can I not?” said Moraxx.

“But… after all we went through.”

“You think Volak would let us live? You really, truly believe when the hatchings are done, Volak will stand by and say, ‘Yes, sisters, I trust you not to stab me in the back and take control of our newly built Empire.' You believe that?”

“There may have been arguments…”

“There may have been
murder
!” snapped Moraxx, suddenly.

“And you think murdering me is a solution?”

“Yes,” said Moraxx, with Skalg grinning inside the wyrm's skull. “How does it feel to be turned upon by one of your own? And not just one of your own – but your own blood? How does it feel to be stabbed in the back, sister? How does it feel to be utterly and truly
betrayed.
Not good, I expect. Not a pleasant place to be.”

Kranesh was staring up at Moraxx from her half-crushed skull.

“You are not Moraxx,” she said, finally.

“What?”

“You are not my sister. I do not understand how, but I know my own blood when I see it. So do your fucking worst, because I have been given some redemption; it is not Moraxx who takes my last breath at the final hour. It is an imposter. A weakling. By some twisted magick, it is a fucking
slave
.” The contempt in her voice was complete. She oozed disgust. She vomited mistrust. She pissed out
hate.

“You are wrong.”

“Kill me now, imposter. I await death. You are a worm. A slave. A fucking
human
.”

Screaming, Moraxx lurched forward and began to stamp on Kranesh's head, time after time after time, until blood oozed from her maw, from her broken eyes, from her nostrils. Slowly, agonisingly, the fire around her snout flickered, and played, and flickered, and finally went out. Bubbles of blood popped from Kranesh's crushed skull. Her great dark eyes had closed.

In a rage now, Skalg breathed in deeply, then ignited his fire glands, and blasted Kranesh in the face. For long minutes he raged against her, fire streamers turning from yellow to white to blue to a colour that was not even a colour, just pure heat.

Finally, exhausted, Skalg pulled back, and Moraxx looked down, and Kranesh's scales were untarnished. Fire could not harm her. A natural evolution had seen to that.

“Fuck it,” growled Skalg, as more hate, more rage, swamped him, and stepping forward, he lowered his head, and chewed, and bit, and chewed, and gnawed, and it took him some time, because despite his fangs being razor-sharp, and able to inflict damage on dragon scales, Kranesh was his sister, she was the elite, and she had not been willing to die.

Finally, there came a
thud
, as Kranesh's head fell free of the body. Inside the hole of her neck there raged an inferno. Out of curiosity, Skalg peered inside, and it nearly burned his eye out of its socket.

Slowly, he picked up the head in his jaws, then leapt into the sky.

Darkness had fallen.

A billion stars twinkled.

A few errant spears followed him,
her
, up into the velvet black. All lacked enthusiasm.

Moraxx reached several thousand feet up, where the sky was filled with ice, where the night was ebony, where only the cold hydrogen of space offered any sort of conversation, investigation, contemplation.

Moraxx held out her sister's head, and with a sigh, allowed it to fall back to the grey pastel landscape of the starlight-crusted world below.

V
al crept forward
, boots crunching softly on the shells underfoot. He winced with every footfall, cringing, wondering if it would bring a sudden onslaught of unseen violence. But it did not. So, with each cracking footstep, he welcomed the lack of attack, the lack of screams, the simple peace of not having a violent axeman offering a series of axe-blows to his skull.

Crayline, however, was the polar opposite. She smiled as she remembered.

It wasn't that she had been brought up on war or battle; that would be a gross misrepresentation. Basically, she simply hated…
people
. Anything that walked or crawled, from a very early age, she had despised. So, in effect, she despised
life
. She'd killed many people during her years of efficient service, from ministers to poets to politicians, royalty, bureaucrats, doctors, teachers, market traders, stonemasons, miners, and the one common denominator she could see that linked all these chance meetings (
shhhh, chance murders
) was the fact she'd turned them all from the living into the dead.

Of course, it never began like that.

First, she killed animals. Bugs. Cats. Dogs. Pigs.

Just to see what it was like.

Crayline never even blinked, not even during the most atrocious animal slaughter. After all – they were just animals, right?

And then she met a handsome dwarf.

Swept her off her feet.

Romance.

Wedding.

Pregnancy.

Twins.

Twin dwarves, two girls!

It had been a dream for a while, and Crayline had revelled in her new-found role. No more killing. No more murder. No more extermination of innocents. A normal family life, with a husband, and children. Her maternal instincts had come to the fore. Until, one night, for no reason whatsoever, Crayline walked to the kitchen and stood there, listening to the children crying, listening to her husband shouting,
what the fuck are you doing you useless fucking bitch? I need a fucking packed lunch for tomorrow when I'm down the mines, get on it bitch, I haven't got all night…

She was tired of him. Tired of his petty outbursts. His ridiculous demands. Tired of his small-minded rantings. Just…
tired.

Crayline picked up a bread knife.

She looked down the length of the blade.

It gleamed, reflecting in her eyes.

“I actually despise you,” she said to herself, watching those dark reflected eyes. “You are somebody I helped. Somebody with whom I laughed and joked. I came to the hospital with you. I helped you when you discovered you might be dying. But then – you betrayed me. Snake in the grass. Backstabbing cunt. And I realised; there's a lot of you out there. And you know what?”

The wind sighed, like a discarded lover.

“Some people might call it unnecessary. But I call it retribution.”

The cool breeze chilled her skin.

She looked down at the blade.

“Because, if you live by the sword, then you die by the sword. That's only fair, right?”

And she stood.

And she moved through the house.

Her husband was in bed, attempting to get to sleep.

He got it first.

It was messy, as was to be expected.

But necessary.

And then Crayline stood, staring at her two sleeping girls. Their breathing was regular, rhythmical, and yet a shard of glass pierced her heart, and she thought, and she
knew.
She knew she was going to die. So what would their life be like without her,
her
, their mother? So there was only one answer, right? She had to kill her little girls. She had to kill her own flesh and blood. Because nobody else was ever going to have them; nobody was going to experience the ecstasy she'd felt creating her own children.

I created them
, she said.

They are mine
, she said.

I own them
, she said.

So. They are mine to destroy.

She stepped forward, and the blade came down. A hundred years of blood. It sounded like a river. She stabbed over and over.
Over and over we die
, she thought.
One after the other.
And she kept on stabbing. Kept on killing. Kept on murdering. And, although
enjoyment
wasn't the right
word, the right concept, it was indeed the necessary word; the necessary concept.

And so she stabbed her little girls.

She stabbed them to death, and watched the deep pools of crimson well up in the deep, wide wounds.

She watched them sigh, and deflate.

Their eyes opened.

Why, mummy? Why did you do this?

And she couldn't answer. They would never understand.

But she knew in her heart.

It was the right thing to do.

Because it was all about
control.

And here, and now, Crayline Hew had the control.

T
hey moved across the shells
, as if traversing a broken shore.

“Everything is dead,” observed Val.

Crayline held up a hand, and didn't even qualify it with a patronising
shh.

The soldiers, warriors, mercenaries, guards, miscreants, vagabonds, they all stopped. Ahead, something glittered. It was intricate. Detailed. Impossibly complex.

“We've found the eggs,” hissed Crayline.

“What eggs?” said Val, head tilted to one side.

Crayline smiled. “Don't worry about it. Dwarves, to me!” and she charged forward, boots crunching shell segments, her mind somewhere else, her mission paramount, and behind her came Val, running with a crossbow cradled in his arms, and he couldn't help thinking
what the fuck is happening? I don't understand
, but he realised suddenly this was all out of his control somehow – and he couldn't work out how. He'd been played for a fool, lied to, used, for a greater purpose maybe, but still
used
; passed over in some bureaucratic lottery. His employer had fucked him over by offering reduced information. In all reality, Crayline was in charge. She had been from the start. That fuckbitch.

The dwarves surrounded her, bristling with weapons.

Crayline nodded, as if giving her approval.

“Ahead,” she said, voice hard.

Again, the group moved forward, and they could see a chamber, a vast chamber. And there stood a woman. She was tall, almost athletic. Her hair fell in dark braids. She had her hands raised, as if in the middle of some mystical incantation.

Crayline and Val stepped forward, ducking a little under a barrier they could barely comprehend, to survey a world of miniaturised machines affixed to the vast array of walls, a huge vista of machines, they were everywhere, spinning and clicking, shunting and twisting.

Crayline brought about her crossbow.

Val stared ahead, then turned.

“What are you doing?” he said. And he frowned. For in this moment he had no understanding.

Crayline levelled her crossbow. She gave a narrow smile, looking sideways to Val.

“Some reflect,” she said, and sighted down the stock. “And some shine.”

She pulled the crossbow trigger.

And Val screamed, realisation kicking him in an instant. Because Val, and most of the others,
reacted.
It was a natural response state. One couldn't unload a crossbow in a dwarf's face. That was killing. That was
murder
. Most dwarves could not do that. It had been proved. To
react
was normal. To
proact
was abnormal.

Which is what made Crayline's actions so bizarre and unusual. So unexpected, to the rest of the group.

She stunned them with her immediate action.

Crayline's quarrel left her crossbow, and hummed across the space.

As if sensing the assault, Lillith turned, eyes fixing on Crayline.

And the crossbow bolt entered her chest, blossoming in a shower of red, and punching the white witch from her feet. She flew back from the walkway, and was absorbed by the eggs, by the mist; effectively, she vanished.

Jael held up his hands, cowering. “Please… please…”

“Any other cunts want a fight?” snapped Crayline, scanning left and right. She stepped forward, boots clacking. She could see no more enemies, other than the young lad. “Get in here, you fuckers!” she growled, face breaking into a grin like punctured yolk, and pointed towards Jael.

The dwarves tramped in, crossbows at the ready, and scanned the thousands of dragon eggs, the intricate machinery; silver machines hissed and clicked and ticked and tocked across the walls. It was an ocean of clockwork technology. And yet here, now, it mattered for nothing.

Survival.

Survival was what mattered.

Hanging in the centre of the chamber, Lillith's magick suddenly dissipated. With cries, Beetrax, Dake, Talon and Sakora dropped like stones down a well, and Crayline's eyes went wide as they suddenly entered her vision – then hit the ground, hard, cracking several eggs and sending them spinning off in all directions, before the mist rolled over them.

Jael ran for it, heading for the far side of the chamber, boots slipping and sliding on the polished walkway.

“Kill them all!” screamed Crayline, cutting down with her hand, and the thirty dwarves levelled their crossbows and began firing.

Crossbow quarrels twanged and whined, hissing across the chamber, cutting slits in the mist and punching into objects within…

Two dwarves turned on Jael, sighted down their weapons, and pulled triggers. Two bolts hit him in the lower back, and he folded, slowly, stumbling, then hit the walkway on his face, momentum carrying him sliding forward until he lay, unmoving, blood leaking out onto the slick, black, polished walkway, where it ran to the edge, and dripped down into the chilled valley of the dragon eggs.