The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,221

rising but rather falling …

Tiamat swerved as something big came roaring past. At once, all was confusion. Buffeted within the cage of the dragon’s claws, Quare saw flashes of ground and sky and what might have been a living shadow, night poured into flesh. The air rang with shrieks and bellows until he thought his eardrums must burst.

Then Tiamat stopped dead in the air and hung there, her body eeling slowly, the movement somehow keeping her aloft. Streaks of a silvery liquid trickled down her blue scales. An angry hiss escaped her massive jaws.

Hovering a hundred feet away or less was a black dragon even bigger than she was. It exuded age and power. Silver ichor dripped from its claws. Its head was like a sun-blasted mountainside scored with fissures and ravines. One eye was a pearlescent orb whose surface rippled like the placid mirror of a lake disturbed by the movement of some hidden swimmer. Where the pair of that eye should have been was a dark, gaping pit into which Quare thought he might fall for ever without touching bottom. To gaze into its abyssal depths was to already be falling into them, or so it seemed. He felt himself stiffening despite his terror; then he was coming again, burning with humiliation at his helplessness, hating his human frailty, this flesh that responded without his leave, slave to masters he did not know.

Neither dragon paid him the slightest heed.

‘Where is it?’ the black thundered. ‘What have you done with my eye?’

Or was it ‘egg’? Quare, half deafened, was not sure what he had heard.

‘I do not have it,’ Tiamat replied. ‘Sister, move aside.’

‘You lie,’ the black raged. ‘You reek of time and generation! Give back what is mine – or I will take it!’

Before Tiamat could answer, the black struck. The two dragons twined together in a murderous flux, slashing, biting. They rose entangled, knotting and unknotting. The noise of their roaring was a physical thing.

The claws caging Quare came open; he fell.

He watched the dragons, still locked together, dwindle above him to a single speck. Then he began to tumble. The air swaddled him in a rough silence all its own. A flash of blue sky and sun gave way to the tawny pelt of a brown landscape leaping to meet him. Then he saw blue sky again, only a different sky, in which two suns blazed; but in the blink of an eye, this impossible vision was replaced by a slate-grey ocean stretching endlessly, wave upon wave. Another blink, and he was gazing at a night sky spangled with strange stars. Blink: a city greater than London lay buried beneath a blanket of unspoiled snow. Blink: a fleet of great ships depending from greater balloons, like Magnus’s Personal Flotation Device on an immense scale, glided through the air.

With each revolution of Quare’s tumbling body, the scene changed, as if he were flipping between worlds. But then it came to him that he wasn’t falling at all, that he was hovering in place as the dragons had done, and the sights he was seeing were glimpses of what lay beyond the spinning windows of the standing stones between which Tiamat had carried him. For all the time he had been here, for all the distance Tiamat had carried him, still he was somehow at the very centre of those stones. And if that were so, why couldn’t he just, as he had done the last time he’d been in the Otherwhere, choose a path out of it? The windows … or doors, rather, were here before him, offering themselves in swift succession. Were their shapes in some way symbolic of what they led to, like the alchemical symbols of planets and stars? If so, it was a code he could not decipher. He would have to trust to luck.

Now, without understanding what he was doing or how, as if in the grip of an instinct he hadn’t known he possessed until the moment came for its exercise, Quare groped towards a doorway, not caring where it might lead. He only knew, with a blind, animal certainty he did not question, that he could not remain here. He must escape or die. He reached out with his mind, or some aspect of his mind, like a drunken man fumbling to fit a key into a door. He thrust, thrust again. Felt himself slip in. He turned, or the world did.

All was darkness. And cold. And then it was

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