Dogfighters: Under the Hill Read online

  Chris rolled to a halt on the road. Sawing through his sleeve at the elbow with his pocketknife, he made a makeshift bandage while he watched them pour through the breach between worlds. Jesus Christ Almighty! What to do?

  The woman on the dragon put up her helmet mask and looked at him. Nothing as sharply beautiful as that face should exist in this world. He heard her voice in his head like glass chimes even as she smiled her closed-lipped smile. We have been waiting at the portal for some days now, but howsoever hard our greatest mages tried, we could not get through. Now you, by your own actions, have opened your world to us. Ironic eh?

  It was not perhaps the word he would have chosen himself.

  Chapter Seven

  “We’ve got to find the skipper before she does.” Geoff scarcely waited until the queen’s long skirt had swished round the archway of the door. Certainly her footsteps had not faded before he was pulling again at the interlacing metalwork of the cage, trying to untangle the individual strands of thin copper. It bent under his onslaught but would not part enough for him to slip a shoulder through.

  “Stop that and give me the wand.” Sumala touched his shoulder and it was as though he’d shocked himself on an electric light—a moment where he couldn’t move even to breathe, and another, following, of racing heart, cold sweat and coughing.

  He dug the thing out of his pocket as hurriedly as he could with benumbed and tingling hands and scowled. “Just asking politely would have done.”

  “I’m tired and hungry and I miss my home. I miss my country where I am a princess and free to do as I like, and never treated like this or spoken back to by rude commoners. And you are so stupid sometimes that I could cry…” Her voice trembled as she turned the wand over in her hands, pressed it to her forehead as if trying to see within it with her inner eye.

  There was indeed a glitter of tears caught in her lashes, and her face had taken on a gaunt look, a thinness that added waiflike poignancy to her beauty, but that he should have realised was a sign of famine.

  All at once he felt like a cad. “I’m sorry.” She was, after all, a princess, and she’d been a complete brick over all of this, kidnap and imprisonment and starvation. Flynn couldn’t find it in himself to distrust her any more, and with the distrust gone, he was reminded again that she had chosen to stay by his side when she might have got through the portal scot-free. She was entitled to behave like a woman every now and again and have a good sob.

  Another time and he would even have been glad to offer his shoulder to cry on, but this was not that time. “I’m just worried about the skipper.”

  “I know you are.” The curl of her lip shifted from wobbly to contemptuous in an instant, but then she said “ah!” and pointed the wand at the cage door. All the metal tendrils began to unravel, drawing themselves inwards like a snail withdrawing his eyes from a hostile world.

  “You beauty!” Overcome with relief, Flynn caught her up and spun her in a wild jangle of bells. Kissed her on the cheek, in a moment of exhilaration and softness, enveloped in a clean scent. Her hair smelled like jasmine, and her skin like sandalwood. The slap didn’t register until a moment later, but then it made him back off, raise his hands in surrender and, laughing, say, “I’m sorry. I was just happy. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Don’t do that again.” Her glare could have pared diamond. They stood trapped in it for what seemed a very long time, before he said again, seriously now, “You’re right. I am sorry.”

  She shook the memory off her like a dog shaking off water, eeled out of the remaining tendrils of the cage and stood in the quiet stone room, head tilted, listening.

  He picked up his helmet from the floor and slid it on, tiptoed out after her. “What?”

  “Do you hear that?”

  It was already so silent that he thought he could hear the slow shhh of the dust piling up, but at Sumala’s words he half-guessed at a vanishingly faint sliding noise. He followed her, and it, as she stalked the sound, still with that graceful gait he had noticed in the meadow, still moving as though the survival of the universe turned on the perfect placing of her feet. She walked as though she was dancing.

  But we’ve already established she’s not for you. She’s just made that perfectly clear. He tucked the thought away into the same mental oubliette where he’d stowed his future. Better not to think, better just to listen. Even he, with his mortal ears, had begun to guess at the sound of flowing water now, and he knew what that meant.

  “Here,” she said, pulling on the sculpted arm of one of the dancers carved on the wall. “I can’t get it open. Can you?”

  Flynn couldn’t see any evidence of a door, but he took hold of the stone nevertheless and tugged with all his might. The stone ground outwards, grittily cushioned on a layer of fine sand, and a burst of colder air billowed in, set the tapestries waving on the walls, bringing their colours to light—faded madder reds and turquoise blue.

  The air smelled of dragon dung, metallic sweet, and of algae and damp. The sound of the river was unmistakable now. Geoff set his feet down and brushed off his hands. Where he’d touched the carving, its layer of dust had come away. The arm showed glossy black beneath the handprint.

  Returning with the room’s single lantern, Sumala went ahead of him into the dark. The globe of light about her showed rough-hewn stone passages intersecting one another, steps down and up.

  “It’s a regular warren.” Flynn felt in his pocket for his notebook and pencil, began mapping the way they had taken, all the turnings they had passed by. “Why does the queen need all of this, when everyone else in the city gets by with a single street?”

  “She needs to be able to move about secretly.” The lantern flickered in Sumala’s hand, its flame guttering wildly. Brown misshapen shadows flitted about the walls. Before her feet lay a square of blackness, and from it the cold blast came up, setting her headdress ringing. “She can’t walk down the main street without an escort of thirty-three nobles, ninety-nine knights and five hundred and twenty men at arms.”

  She looked back and smirked. He guessed he was forgiven.

  “Also conjurers, jugglers, minstrels, fire eaters, griffons, dragonets and human slaves.”

  “Ah, all the pomp and ceremony.” Geoff grinned back, though the words “human slaves” had not improved since he heard them last.

  “Also because she fears assassination.” Sumala set her foot into the square of darkness, and the light she held just touched the single step beneath her with dismal grey. “All rulers fear assassination, but some have more cause than others. At any rate, I knew the tunnels must be here. The last queen and she before her, they have all feared assassination and been unable to move freely about their realm except in secret. It is one of the ways in which power takes away our freedom.”

  It was an interesting thought, and had Flynn been sitting in the Rose and Crown at home he’d have been willing to debate it. Here, however, he just gestured her forward and said, “Shall we?”

  At the bottom of the ladderlike steps, they came again to the slow, black river. A little jetty jutted into the water, making the river eddy just enough to give it a voice. It was the sad gurgle and sucking noise as the smooth-flowing stream curled around the pillars of this which they had heard, up in their prison. There was no boat.

  Flynn contemplated going back, trying to find another route through the maze of passages, the chances of coming out in some public area where they’d be spotted and caught. “We’ll have to swim.”

  “I can’t!” Sumala dipped her toes in the water, her reflected anklet shining bright. She drew her foot back as if the water had stung her.

  “God bless the RAF,” said Flynn, unbuckling his life jacket. “Take all that gold off and put this on. We’ve only got to float downstream until we’re out of the city. I’ll keep hold of you and get us both to shore.”

  She bit her lip, tested the water again with no more enthusiasm than last time. He waited for her to suggest that they
take another passage—he knew, after all, that she couldn’t care less if he made his rendezvous with the skipper or not. Half an hour extra here or there was nothing to her.

  But then she reached up and unpinned the crown from her head, disentangling the strings of golden bells and birds from her fine black hair. She held it in front of her as lantern light made the little ornaments seem to stir with fugitive light, and then she drew her arm back and flung it into the middle of the stream. A brief glitter showed beneath the surface as it plummeted through the first transparent layers of water, then it was gone. She followed it with the massive collar, bracelets, anklets, armlets and earrings.

  Flynn understood that she had to leave them at the bottom of the river, where no one would find them. She couldn’t risk having something so personal to her as her clothing found by a mage, who could use it to establish a magic link to her, influence her from afar, even kill her from afar with it.

  She looked a hundred percent more naked without them all, but no smaller, no less dignified. She’d kept back a single golden chrysanthemum that lay on a slender gold chain along her parting. It troubled him to see her without the ornaments, without the glimmer that accompanied every movement. She looked suddenly too vulnerable to be traipsing around the place in nothing but a see-through skirt. “Here,” he said, stripping off his overalls and offering them first. “This’ll stop the straps from chafing.”

  She picked the coveralls up with a little smile. He hadn’t said thank you for her decision to face the river for his sake. So now she didn’t say thank you for the gesture of trust, just put his clothing on and followed it with the life jacket.

  The river was icy cold. They broke through a skin of it at the surface and were chased down the flow by fragile sheets of ice, hair thick. Sumala lay back, eyes closed, trusting her weight to the float and her destination to Flynn. He clung on to her webbing and fended them off the walls until the entrance passed gold above them and they burst out into the gorse thicket at the base of the slope where the mound of the city rose up from its surrounding meadow.

  The roots dipping down from the bank were slippery, but together they managed to cling on, pull themselves out and lie in hiding under the stems of gorse, looking out while they made sense of what they saw.

  On the plain outside the city, Oonagh’s bodyguard were assembling. The ground shivered with the tread of dragons, and the sky was dark with circling eagles, each with their rider in the saddle, and each trailing great nets that brushed along the ground.

  As the companies of guards formed up, they would run to the nets and climb up. Then when the nets were full, the eagle would beat its wings furiously, wheel and speed away downriver, presumably to where the portal lay. Already the advance guard was nothing but specks against the hazy white sky.

  About five hundred yards away, farther up the grassy slope that was the outer shell of the city, Oonagh stood and gleamed like the sun in her bronze mail. The banner that streamed out above her was worked of cloth of gold, and figured with two fighting stallions, rearing to kick out at one another, their legs intertwined. It gave Geoff pause. He looked out again at the small army that continued to draw up and depart. They looked whimsical to him, like something out of a vanished age—a medieval wall painting come to life, and the sense of wrongness twinged again in his stomach, stronger even than hunger.

  “Does that look like the same army to you? I thought the one Kanath showed us was bigger and better equipped.”

  “Let’s ask him.” Sumala had plaited her wet hair and tied it off with a bit of string she found in her overall pockets. Now she nodded at where the black dragon lay next to Oonagh’s nobles, in his own patch of sunshine, drowsing.

  He turned his head slightly, as though he felt their gazes, and behind the long snout Flynn saw Ben, still with that crown on his forehead. He was being buckled into armour that had obviously been made for him—it fitted him like a second skin.

  Flynn thought, I should get him back, for Skip, and for Sumala, but he couldn’t see how. Besides, the priority right now was somehow to find Liadain, get her to oppose this invasion. Concentrate on the fate of the world first and worry about everything else later.

  But how to find Liadain? Would she be back at the little landing where he’d met her first, standing as a tree opposite the portal? And what could she do about this, even if they did find her? Would she care enough to oppose it, or would she just use the chance to stage a coup while Oonagh was away?

  “That’s right,” Sumala was saying to herself. “Come to us. I know you want to.”

  Kanath opened his eyes and raised his jaw from the scorched grass. He swung around to watch them, and it felt as though the whole army must know they were there, lying in a spiny thicket of gorse, yellow flowers above them and oil-slick-like sewage drying on their backs. Flynn felt in waking life now the disorienting tug just beneath the belly button, the multiple viewpoints of a conversation between shared souls.

  His lungs filled up with fire, warming him through, and he could hear, at a distance, the conversation on which Kanath was eavesdropping—the low-voiced and urgent conversation between Ben and Oonagh.

  “Here is your sword, and your bow. You were a famous archer. It will come back to you.”

  Silence, and then Ben’s voice, thick and muzzy sounding, as if it struggled up through layer upon layer of sleep. “Why…why should I fight for you?”

  Sweet patience in the queen’s voice, as like the real thing as powdered eggs. “Because I am not your enemy. I am riding to the defence of your world and your friends. Can’t you trust me as you once used to?”

  Poor bastard, thought Geoff, and was tempted just to snatch the boy and take them both home. Then he could step off and let the hundred years he’d traded with the old crone snap back on him all at once, leave Ben and the skipper to handle everything else. It would be a gentle way to die, surely, and overdue.

  But Sumala had not let herself be distracted. He could feel her will like a golden chain fastened in the dragon’s nose. Just as if he was indeed being tugged, Kanath rose, shook himself, and began to pace down the slope towards them.

  “Where are you going?” Oonagh asked him, sharp behind him, and Geoff sucked in a nervous breath of oily air and almost choked on it.

  Kanath gave her the dragon equivalent of a smile, his mouth gaping and flickers of purple fire running along his narrow lips. “Somewhere that will please you.”

  “I mean to make you my steed for the battle.”

  “Change your plans.”

  Through the dragon’s colour-blind eyes, Flynn could see Oonagh pause and think. Her smell flushed rose and indigo with suspicion and possibilities.

  “You could be more convincing,” Flynn said, and felt amusement and contempt echoed back from the cold and alien mind.

  After a final hard stare, Oonagh inclined her head. “It is a poor queen who does not know when those about her are acting out of love for her. Go then and please me, for I have always been pleased with you.”

  Flynn waited and watched as Oonagh and Ben turned away, and their attendants hastily saddled a smaller blue dragon, whippier and with less of an ironic glint to its eye. When the two of them had taken off, and Kanath began to wind his cumbersome girth down the limewashed side of the hill towards them, he said, “Is it me or was that a bit suspicious?”

  Sumala shrugged a shoulder, managing to make the movement look like poetry despite the baggy blue serge of her overalls. “Does it matter? Get on. For whatever reason he will take us to the portal. Once we’re through, I will call my father, you can help your friend, you can jam the thing open so that Liadain can come through and stop her. What does it matter why he’s doing what we want, as long as he is?”

  The dragon rumbled in his throat and the pitch of his flames grew almost ultraviolet. They looked cool, those blackish ripples of fire along his teeth, but they dried Flynn off in a single breath and with the second singed his hair.

  “Now,”
he said, easing gingerly past the gape of teeth, “you see why I don’t understand any of you. Of course it matters why you do what you do. It can be the difference between innocence and guilt, murder and accident, salvation and damnation.”

  “That’s why you are so confused all the time.” Sumala set herself down in a spine ridge with a smug air, as though she’d earned the right to criticise from so long spent inside his head. As the dragon lumbered across the lawn, built up speed and launched himself in pursuit of Oonagh and her army, he felt a surge of exhilaration that said she was right. What did it matter that he didn’t know who to trust? Or that he didn’t know what to do for the best? He was going home, and for the moment that was enough.

  Chapter Eight

  Rolling his plane away from the dragon, Chris fired up the radio again. He could have cheered when the panicked voices of the two Typhoon pilots came through, high pitched and incredulous.

  “…believe it either, but do you see it?”

  “You mean dragons coming out of the side of the hill? Yeah, I see it. Control…we’re going to have abort. There must be something dodgy in the air mix. We’re both seeing things.”

  Craning his neck up, Chris could see both planes as arrowheads in the sky, far above him, circling. He tapped his microphone and fell back into old habits with a feeling of relief. “Typhoon pilots? Are you reading me?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  Oh, poor lads, they were having a bad day. Chris dubbed the voice Laurel, and his silent partner Hardy. Laurel was a smart lad, Chris felt—he was the one who had come up with the air-mix theory to explain what they both were looking at. Chris gave him his best official tone. “This is Wing Commander Christopher Gatrell, in the Mosquito you’ve been following.”

  “The ghost Lanc?”

  “That’s right. Now listen to me. I need you to pass on a message to Air Vice-Marshal Henderson. Tell him from me, the invasion is started. Relay these coordinates, get him to scramble anything he can get in the air and fly it here pronto.”