Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

A third whistle sounds, impatient, urging her forward. Sefi resists. Pax shoots her a glance. Seconds tick past. And then Sefi raises a clenched fist.

“Sljr,” she whispers, jumping off the ledge. A horn moans.

“Sljr. Sljr. Sljr,” shout the Valkyrie, and fifty women slip over the edge. Pax goes with.

“Hunt,” Xenophon parrots.

The Valkyrie disappear and a moment later a series of screams rises from the other side of the ridge. Sefi’s pale steed bursts off the ledge beneath. Pax rides in the archer’s saddle behind her, not out of place or afraid like I thought he’d be.

A rush of air forces snow into my mouth as several griffin banking overhead dislodge snowdrifts above. Two Red allies stumble into each other, laughing and marveling at the mounted Valkyrie careening down into the valley keening death. Bare-armed in the cold, Valdir steps forward and watches with a practiced eye, and a purity of awe, love, and jealousy. Anyone could see how much he wishes to fly upon the beasts of his people. I don’t like the man. He’s a closed book. But I feel for him. No longer a slave of Grimmus, but still not quite free.

“Your first hunt?” Xenophon asks me, taking a pause from the narration so the onlookers can collect themselves.

I nod. “Not yours, it seems.”

“My third. During the war, Her Majesty would return when she could to honor the sundeath. I believe she feared she would forget who she was if she spent too long away from the Ice. I advised her against this hunt, however.”

“Ozgard and Valdir seemed bullish enough.”

“They would. It may invigorate the spirit of the shaman and satisfy Valdir’s expectations of a queen, but such considerations are specious for a modern head of state, given the unnecessary exposure to risk. Not to mention the details of state which pile up in her absence. I designed her government to function with a monarch. Without one, it functions at fifty percent efficiency, not that Valdir or the madman would care for such trivialities.” Xenophon looks around. “Have you seen the madman?”

“He’s probably drunk in a cargo hold somewhere,” I say, growing annoyed. I want to watch the hunt.

“It is a high probability.” The sexless mammal squints to the west as Valdir points and calls out to the others. “Ah, the drake. Excuse me.”

I look west. Scales glint in the gloom, rippling low against the snowy boulders of the valley floor. The glint becomes a blur that becomes a leviathan of the ice. Though I know its ancestors were carved by mad Violets in conjunction with Yellow geneticists, the ice drake seems an ancient creature. Something older than we are.

I realize I’ve forgotten to breathe.

“This specimen is a black ice drake of the Níðhöggr strain—one of the rarest and most revered creatures in Obsidian mythology,” Xenophon explains to the guests. “?‘He Who Strikes with Malice’ is said to be the bringer of winter. This one is an old bull, as can be divined by the nine lateral tusks and triple horn, which mark his decades. Of course, the hunting of sows is forbidden, and punishable by the Blood Eagle.”

The guests whisper with awe, as if the creature were magical, and not thirty tons of lab-engineered death.

Pursued by Freihild and her chasers, the bull tears through the mountain valley. Even at our distance, I feel a chill. The Obsidian guards watch in appreciation, Valdir in pure love. Few would have ever seen a drake in flight, or slipped into a lair to kill and drink the blood of a hatchling to begin the Way of Stains.

The drake spots Sefi’s hunting band ahead and banks right, thinking to escape over the north side of the valley. Thunder crackles from the peaks. Obsidian youths, who summited the mountains with hooks and rope, light sulfur-based charges into their braziers, and launch them into the clouds with slings. Huge claps of sound frighten the dragon back and forth across the valley as it seeks some escape, only to be herded again and again by small explosions from surrounding peaks.

Someone screams as it banks our way. Amidst the guards, skuggi light fuses on the brazier and hurl the clay bombs into the air. They laugh as the pots explode. Gudkind tosses me two. I light them and hurl them skyward. Boom. Booom.

The rush of air from the drake’s wings nearly knocks me off my feet. It passes a stone’s throw from us. Debris and rocks the size of a man’s head are crusted in the ice along the wyrm’s belly. Attendants scatter, laughing in relief as it pinballs back down into the v

alley toward the Queen. Valdir rushes to the cliff’s edge to lean forward and watch. Scores follow him.

Above a frozen alpine lake, an inverted V of Valkyrie hunters forms around the drake. Sefi waits at the far tip of the V to deliver the killing stroke. But as the first arrows from the Obsidians fly from their flanks, the drake uses an updraft to go into a precarious climb. It knocks two griffins from the air. Their riders flail from the saddles, but their safety ropes snap them back toward their tumbling steeds. One recovers. The other collides with a mountainside below as her griffin is bisected by the razor tips of the drake’s wings.

The guests are horrified. Valdir touches his heart. A good death. His eyes search the chasers, young griffin riders with more spirit than experience, looking for Freihild, I reckon. My optics pick her up by the green plumes of her headdress. Electra sits in the archer saddle behind her, priming combustible arrows.

Sefi blows a horn, and the griffin V inverts as the riders kick their griffins into motion. The beasts bank upside down and race beneath the drake as Freihild leads the chasers to follow it to the higher altitude. Huge sounds rattle the valley as they shoot arrows with combustible tips to herd it back down. The sound scares the dragon off its ascent, forcing it back toward Sefi’s re-formed V nearer the ground. The first of Sefi’s hunters begin to harry the drake, soaring past to hurl spears or shoot arrows into its side.

Only Sefi continues flying away from it, pushing her griffin two hundred meters past the rest before she banks back around. Her wingsisters pull taut ropes connected to the spears and arrows embedded in the creases of the dragon’s scales. The first riders are jerked sideways by its mass, but soon more than twenty ropes are secured and together the skyhunters anchor the drake along its path toward their Queen.

“The weakest scale is just beneath the dragon’s eyes,” Xenophon explains as I switch to long-range optics. “A difficult shot for even the most skilled archer. Skyhunters aid their daughters in crafting their first bow from godtree wood and the gut string of leopard seals. Only when the daughters are strong enough to draw this bow do they begin to practice marksmanship. Two more bows will they make before they fashion their skybow from the horn of a tanngrisnir goat. In her time, Sefi killed six ice drakes with her bow, named in honor of her father Promise of Pale Horse. The same bow which slew two Gold overlords of this province on the Day of Breaking.”

Harnessed from the sides, the dragon continues its course toward Sefi, not yet noticing her. Two hundred meters, one hundred. Pax hands her the skybow from her saddle. It is twice as long as a man. She nocks a great arrow. “The drake will be slowing from the marrowfish venom in its veins,” Xenophon says, but the drake seems, if anything, even angrier. Sefi stands in her stirrups. The drake is at eighty meters. She draws back on the bow. And then…nothing. She seems to freeze. I zoom in with my hood’s optics. She draws back on the string again, and again stops halfway, unable to summon enough strength to draw the arrow back to her face, much less her ear.

Xenophon has gone silent. Valdir stands. Something is wrong.

The drake is fifty meters out, and sees only Sefi and Pax atop Godeater blocking his escape. Sefi’s given up trying to shoot, and veers Godeater swiftly down and to the left. The drake follows, lashing out with its wings and severing half the ropes, while hurling other skyhunters, including Freihild, through the air. Electra nearly falls from the saddle. Something’s gone terribly wrong. The drake closes on Pax and Sefi, extending its neck to impossible length. Its teeth snap off the back of their saddle, almost tearing Pax in half. Godeater slashes futilely against the hard scales. The drake coils its neck for another lunge when Freihild slashes past and buries a spear in its eye, just missing the sweet spot.