The Masked City

She thought for a moment and then, using as much precision as she could, she said, ‘Collar around the dragon’s neck, unlock and part and open.’

Her voice sank through the air like ink into water, as the Language echoed in the room. She had meant to speak quietly, but something made the air tremble like a stifled drumbeat. She felt Vale recoil and step backwards, and Kai gasped in pain, his back arching as the collar tightened around his throat.

Irene had a moment to think I’ve killed Kai, in a heartbeat that seemed to stretch out into eternity. ‘COLLAR, OPEN!’ she screamed, throwing all the weight and focus she could into the words.

The collar shuddered, its surface rippling and shimmering like watered silk, and then flew apart. The fragments whirred outwards, a couple of them slicing Kai’s upstretched arms, and buried themselves into the stone walls and floor. Kai collapsed, hanging from the chains on his wrists, coughing and gasping. A fresh red band of pressure showed vividly around his throat.

Completely drained, Irene put a hand out to balance herself against the wall, swaying as she stood there. She was conscious of Vale dashing forward to check Kai’s pulse and mutter to him, but for the moment she could only concentrate on breathing and staying upright. There had been a purpose in that collar, and it had taken a lot of her strength to break it.

‘Irene?’ Kai’s voice. Ragged, but functional.

‘Let me take a look at those cuffs,’ she said, pulling herself together and walking over to join Vale and Kai. She hoped it didn’t look too much like a stagger.

‘Let’s hope they were meant to hold Fae,’ Vale observed. ‘If so, they should be less effective at holding Strongrock.’

‘For holding Fae?’ Kai said, looking at his wrists in disgust.

‘This is a Fae prison,’ Irene said. ‘You’re not the usual sort of inhabitant. All right. Let’s do this.’

It was an anticlimax when the cuffs came away without drama, after a single phrase from the Language. Kai fell forward onto his knees, but quickly dragged himself up, rubbing at his wrists where the metal had cut into his skin.

There was something else in the room now. It was linked to the growing anger in Kai’s eyes and the way he held himself. It was the same pressure that Irene had felt when Kai’s uncle had turned his full attention on her, only more raw, more dangerous and more likely to explode at any moment. They imprisoned a dragon. What happens when the dragon gets free? She thought she could hear a distant rumbling outside.

She had to keep him focused. ‘Kai,’ she said. ‘Stay with us. We have a plan to get out of here, but there are men on our trail. We need to get back through Venice to reach the Fae Train, our route in and out of there, but I don’t think you can tolerate that world in your proper form.’

Kai looked at her, his eyes suddenly all black. For a moment the fern-patterns of scales were visible on the skin of his cheeks and hands, and the lines of his face were something inhuman and terrifying.

Irene returned his stare. ‘Pull yourself together,’ she said. It would have been easier to take him by the shoulders and ask him to be the man she had come to trust. But it would have been treating him as a human, and at the moment he was a very long way from that.

‘You have no idea what you are asking of me,’ Kai whispered. There was an undertone to his voice, deep and resonant, like the leashed boom of distant waves.

Irene was conscious of Vale taking a step back, but she would not look away from Kai, would not break their eye contact. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I expect you to do it, in any case.’

Kai took a long gasping breath of air - and then something snapped and he was all human again, staggering forward to throw his arms around her shoulders and lean on her, his whole body shaking. Thunder shook the air outside, closer now. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, barely audible. ‘I’m sorry, Irene, I wanted to believe that someone would come, but I thought there was no way anyone could reach me here.’

The ground trembled under their feet. A slow, booming wave beat through the stone like a pulse or, Irene realized, like an alarm.

‘We have no time for this,’ Vale said curtly, a second before she could. ‘Can you walk, Strongrock?’

Kai pulled himself away from Irene, his breathing slowing. She patted him on the back, trying to be reassuring and mentor-like, rather than showing just how much she cared. ‘I think we’ve triggered an alert,’ she said.

‘Then we had better hurry,’ Vale said.

They stepped outside, and suddenly it became clear that the thunder in the air and the pulse through the rock hadn’t been some small atmospheric curiosity. Being inside the pillar had shielded them from the oppressive storm-wind that was now sweeping through the place. Tremors shook the ground. Irene had disliked the sterile quietness before, but this new brewing tempest was not an improvement. She quickly closed the cell door with the Language to cover their tracks, sparing a vengeful moment to hope that Lord Guantes would be shocked to find the cell empty.

Rocks fell in the far distance, and their hollow booming rang out across the landscape of bridges and arches like distant cannons. It felt as if the shaking was getting closer to them. No, she wasn’t imagining it. The shaking was getting closer to them.

‘We’d better run,’ she said, and they did.

Vale gave Kai a quick briefing on the last couple of days as they made the long trip back to the prison’s entrance. Irene put in a word here or there, but on the whole she saved her breath for running. It also gave her a better chance to scrutinize Kai. He seemed in reasonable physical health, with no serious injuries. His bruises didn’t look worse than a thug’s casual beating (something that had happened to Irene once or twice) - apart from the livid mark left by the collar around his neck. But he was still diminished. He lacked his usual self-assurance, his unthinking certainty that he was the most powerful thing in the vicinity. Possibly good for his health in the long term, but still … I wish it hadn’t happened. And I don’t know how he’ll hold up in a fight.