WYRM XII

                                                             The Sunken Isle

Lizzie circled high above the burning city, clinging tightly to the pommel of Chauntecleer’s saddle. There were fires in Cheapside and along the waterfront. Westminster was burning. She had seen the new wyrms come up out of the sea, surfacing along the Ark’s still-smoking bulk and swimming to shore with sinuous power. Huge. Monstrous. Shaking themselves dry like ostri coming in out of the rain. Dozens of them driving knives of blind, blood-maddened terror into the city’s guts as they left the mouth of the Thames and stalked onward into London proper. Lord Thomas’s scattered soldiers blocked alleys and boulevards with refuse, forming walls of spears and shields. Londoners poured into the streets in panicking waves. The wyrms went through them and left whole squares slicked in blood and piled with the dead. Raptors feasted.

Will, thought Lizzie, passing over the ruins of Westminster. Fire crawling up the towers. Wandering along the galleries. It made no sense. Where had the wyrms come from? Why were they doing this? There were tricornes stampeding through Gracechurch, smashing market stalls and plowing through the lower levels of tenements. Mallards and ostri running wild through the streets in a blind panic. The Thames choked near Westminster with wrecked and sinking barges. Something huge and hungry in the water, thrashing it to bloody froth as men tried to swim for the banks. There was no sign of Edie Claire or Tristram, though Lizzie had flashed her lantern high in the clear sky until the oil ran out.

Will.

She had to find him. Her uncle was down there, too. Her mother’s lover. Her sisters’ father. But she knew in her heart that he was dead. Will might live still. He had survived so much already, her strange, delicate boy. She adjusted her flight mask with cold-numbed fingers, wincing as the frigid bronze bit into her cheeks. She urged Chauntecleer lower. If Will lived, he would head for open water or the Tower. She would find him. She would take him with her.

Please, she prayed, not to God, for she hadn’t believed in Him since the age of six, but to the roaring wind and the vast bowl of the sky above. Please, please. I need him.

I need him.

Will sat hunched against the rail as freezing water sluiced over the deck of the Imloth. Pale had given him an oilcloth to keep off the worst of it, but out on the river the wind was bitterly cold and bit deep with each gust. He gripped the bowl of steaming broth the chancellor had brought him, his wounded arm throbbing, each ache answered by the heat and pounding in his ruined cheek. Pale sat a yard or so away on the bench at the little ship’s tiller, his raptor curled in his lap, his cloak and hair bedraggled and soaking. Rope creaked. The hull groaned. Ahead, the open ocean waited.

“Did you do this?” Will asked at last, perhaps an hour after they’d cast off from the pier.

“Yes,” said Pale simply.

A black weight swelled at the bottom of Will’s stomach. He felt sick. He felt an urge to throw himself over the rail. He sipped his broth, not tasting it. Tears wet his cheeks, but the spray hid them. “Why?”

“Ah,” said Pale. “It’s something of a story.”

Will closed his eyes. He drank another swallow of broth, the warmth spreading out like a fever through his chest and stomach. After a time, over the boom of the water and the howling of the wind, the chancellor began to speak.

“My people come from an island that was mighty, once, before this land had come into its power. We tamed lightning, mastered mathematics undreamt of by the Arab sages, soared the skies, and even learned to breathe the spark of life into dead matter. To quicken things long dead and turned to stone. But the greatest secret of our rule, closely guarded and known only to a few, was the art of seeing. Not in the common sense, not as you and I see one another now, but across vast gulfs of space, and of time. With strange devices we divined the future. Our own. The world’s. We held our secrets close.

“Then, five hundred years ago, another island came to our attention. Yours. A little spit of goats and stones. A sour, dismal place already trampled by the Romans, by the Saxons, by the Danes. We saw what would become of you. We saw you spread like a plague across the circle of the world. Whole peoples clapped in irons to slave for you. Whole nations raped to death for cotton. Spices. Silk. Disease like a scythe cutting down uncounted lives in places not yet named or known by any of your ilk. We saw you steal babes by the millions and use their soft flesh for your pleasure even as you taught them they were worthless, dirty, degraded — the dullard spawn of mongrel races, lucky even to be chattel, or less than chattel. We watched as your depraved obsession with the purity of blood spread its jaws wide enough to hold the future poised between its teeth, as you poisoned men with poppy smoke and currency, and with hatred.

“There was a war. Not here, but on the island of my forefathers, over the fate of yours. Would we stand back and allow the future as we saw it to unfold? Or would we intervene, attempt for the first time to sway the course of history on a grand scale? Many thousands of my people died. We unleashed such horrors on each other as you and yours can scarcely dream of, and our isle was lost, and sank beneath the sea. A few of us, a very few, escaped in our last vessel. The ark that now lies spent and smoking on your shore. Even among that little band there was murder, strife, a struggle to determine what would be and what wouldn’t, what lines we would cross and what horrors we would allow to come to pass. By the time we reached your island we were spent. A bare two dozen, half-mad from starvation, armed only with a dying ship and the engines in its gullet with which we had begun to sketch a plan.

“Since we lacked the strength to subjugate you by brute force, the wyrms, we decided, would be our gambit. Our last hope. We gave them as a gift, knowing their power and terror would entrance you, knowing that your kings would use them for the gravest and most terrifying ills. It took us many generations to achieve our work, the knowledge passed down in secret from mother to daughter, father to son, the conspiracy never greater than a dozen. As we built your stud books and bred your weapons of war, we made our own records of your precious bloodlines. We took samples. Skin and hair. Flesh and bone. We fed the final, precious children of the growing tanks within our ark on a diet of your royals, your nobility, your chieftains and your priests. Now my dragons have come forth.”

The chancellor’s eyes blazed. He leaned forward, the rude slash of his mouth curling in righteous anger. “No man from this wretched isle will ever again raise so much as a hunting knife against another,” he bit out. “Your warring days are done. Your great lords and generals are marked for death by the blood they so coveted. Their wives and daughters are barren. Their lines will end. No ship will leave this place or dare its shores for a hundred years. It is done.” The anger left his face. He looked suddenly very old, and very tired. “It’s done.”

“Do you mean to rule us?” asked Will, once he had found his voice again. “What do you mean? Why did you do this? How can a man see the future? You make no sense, sir. My friends. My companion. My liege lord, and my master—”

“I can say no more,” said Pale, nudging the tiller as they neared the mouth of the river where it spilled into the sea. Dark clouds gathered out over the open water. “Nothing that would set your heart at ease, at least. But no, Will. I do not mean to rule you. I will not wear a crown. That time is done, and it is good to let things die.”

“Then what will happen to us?” Will swallowed past a lump in his throat. His hands were shaking. He spilled broth on himself and didn’t feel it. “What will happen to me?”

The chancellor shrugged his massive shoulders. “Do what you will,” he said. “It is my gift to you. A future of your own.”

“A gift,” Will repeated, the word leaden on his tongue. “Has this happened everywhere? Wherever there are Englishmen? Are those beasts killing them?”

“It has,” said Pale, smiling sadly. “Or it will soon. Once the dragons have exterminated your nobility, most will die, or enter hibernation. At least I hope they will. My knowledge of the tanks was far from perfect. You will have no kings. No masters.”

The boat rocked as waves slapped against its hull. Everyone at Framlingham is dead, thought Will, and even through the sodden pressure of the past day’s horrors it was like a heated iron driven through his chest to think of it. They were bearing to port, following the coast. He was very cold, and the spilled broth had scalded his hands. He drank the rest of it and let the cup fall from his nerveless fingers. It rolled away across the deck, the white raptor hopping after it and nudging it with her snout.

The sun rose bloody as they came under sail. Will slept for a time. He woke stiff-necked and aching to the sight of something huge pacing the Imloth a few yards from where he sat. Through the rails he could see its glistening blood-red back, its mottled pale belly as it rolled and sported. It was near as long as the ship, and even through the water he could see its dreadful teeth. It blew a spout of mist and water and went under, diving with a great sweep of its oarlike flippers. In a moment it was lost to sight.

“We’re being followed,” said Pale.

Will looked. High above the water, perhaps a half a mile behind them, a kite soared on the morning thermals. His weary heart leapt. “I know her,” he said, shrugging off the oilcloth. It was still cold, but the sun was shining now. The damp had gone out of the air. “Bring me ashore. I don’t want — I — I’m grateful to you, sir, but I have to go.” He rose, his legs stiff and shaking. “Please, let me go ashore.”

Pale rose without a word to trim the sail. His raptor rejoined him, perching on his shoulder as he brought them about and, as they approached the sweep of muddy gray sand, dropped the stern anchor. The waves carried them in until the hull crunched over sand. Will went to the port rail. He hesitated, looking down into the cloudy surf. “What if it only makes things worse?” he asked. “Stopping the future your people saw, I mean.”

“Then I will have failed,” said Martin Pale, his sad smile fading. “Goodbye, William. And good luck.”

By the time Will slogged ashore, Pale had put out to sea again, and before long the Imloth’s sale was no bigger than his hand, and then the nail of his thumb. He let himself cry a little as he watched it fade into the mist hanging over the sea. By then Lizzie had circled down low over the beach. Chauntecleer hit the ground at a rolling gallop and before he’d come to a stop Lizzie vaulted from the saddle, boots leaving deep furrows in the sand. She ran to Will and flung herself headlong into his arms, already crying. She beat her head against his breast. She took his face in her hands, her touch almost unbearably tender, and looked into his eyes, and kissed him on the cheeks and on his brow and lips. She held his face against her shoulder, rocking him gently and hushing him, although he hadn’t made a sound.

“Don’t you ever do it again,” she sobbed. “Don’t you ever, ever, ever.” She kissed him again, on the bruise where he’d struck his head. “Are you well? Are you safe, Will?”

Chauntecleer ambled past them, wading into the shallows to hunt. Lizzie pulled back, holding Will at arm’s length. Her narrow, pointy face was red and windburned. She was shivering, and he thought how warm it felt to be loved by someone who burned so fiercely, and how clearly she saw him, and how much he longed to kneel and press his face into the musky, sweat-damp front of her hose, to her let have him and keep him, twist her fingers through his hair. His heart ached.

“Who brought you here?” she asked.

“A man,” said Will. He didn’t know when he’d decided not to tell her. “A merchant. He took me from the city. I saw you following and told him, and he put in and let me come ashore.”

It would only hurt her. There’s nothing anyone can do.

She pulled him close again, and as Chauntecleer speared a fish and swung it glittering through the air to flop and gasp upon the muddy strand, she stroked his hair. “Where will we go now?”

Will closed his eyes. He let the rhythm of her breathing quiet  him, and he thought of Martin Pale out there on the flat gray sea, sailing into the teeth of a storm, sailing away from the secret he’d kept for his father, and his father, and his father before him. A secret he understood, Will realized, no better than the rest of them.

“Away from here.”