The Crippled God

gale, Yedan stood suddenly alone.
    Yan Tovis felt ice in her veins. Dragon breath —
    A massive shape looming in the breach, filling it, and then out from the fulminating light snapped a reptilian head, jaws open in a hissing snarl. Lunging down at her brother.
    She screamed.
    Heard the jaws impact the ground like the fist of a god – and knew that Yedan was no longer there. Her own voice now keening, she slashed forward, barely seeing those she cut down.
    Manic laughter filled the air – Hust! Awake!
    She broke through, staggered, and saw—
    The dragon’s head was lifting in a spray of blood-soaked sand, the neck arching, the jaws stretching wide once more, and then, as if fromnowhere, Yedan Derryg was directly beneath that enormous serpent head, and he was swinging his laughing sword – and that glee rose to a shriek of delight as the blade’s edge chopped deep into the dragon’s neck.
    He was a man slashing into the bole of a centuries-old tree. The impact should have shattered the bones of his arms. The sword should have rebounded, or exploded in his hands, spraying deadly shards.
    Yet she saw the weapon tear through that enormous, armoured neck. She saw the blood and gore erupt in its wake, and then a fountain of blood spraying into the air.
    The dragon, its shoulders jammed in the breach, shook with the blow. The long neck whipped upward, seeking to pull away, and in the welling gape of the wound in its throat Yan Tovis saw the gleam of bone. Yedan had cut through to the dragon’s spine.
    Another gloating shriek announced his backswing.
    The dragon’s head and an arm’s length of neck jumped away then, off to one side, and the yawning jaws pitched nose down and hammered the strand as if mocking that first lunge. The head tilted and then fell with a trembling thump, the eyes staring sightlessly.
    The headless neck thrashed upward like a giant blind worm, spitting blood in lashing gouts, and on all sides of the quivering, decapitated beast black crystals pushed up from the drenched sand, drawing together, rising to form faceted walls – and from every corpse that had been splashed or buried in the deluge ghostly forms now rose, struggling within that crystal. Mouths opened in silent screams.
    Dodging the falling head, Yedan had simply advanced upon the trembling body filling the breach. Using both hands, he drove the Hust sword, point first, deep into the beast’s chest.
    The dragon exploded out from the wound, scales and shattered bone, yet even as Yedan staggered beneath the flood of gore the blood washed from him as would rain upon oil.
    Hust. Killer of dragons. You will shield your wielder, to keep your joy alive. Hust, your terrible laughter reveals the madness of your maker .
    Yedan’s desire to trap the corpse of a dragon in the breach was not to be – not this time – for she could see the ruined body being dragged back in heaving lunges – more dragons behind this one, crowding the gate .
    Will another come through? To meet the fate of its kin?
    I think not .
    Not yet .
    Not for some time .
    The Liosan on this side of the wound were dead, bodies heaped on all sides. Her Shake stood atop them, two, three deep under theirunsteady feet, and she saw the shock in their faces as they stared upon Yedan Derryg, who stood before the wound – close enough to take a step through, if he so desired, and take the battle into the enemy’s realm. And for a moment she thought he might – nothing was impossible with her brother – but instead he turned round, and met his sister’s eyes.
    ‘If you had knelt—’
    ‘No time,’ she replied, shaking the blood from her sword. ‘You saw that. They know what you would seek to do, brother. They will not permit it.’
    ‘Then we must make it so that they have no say in the matter.’
    ‘They were impatient,’ she said.
    He nodded, and then faced the fighters. ‘They will clear the gate and re-form. Captains! Draw your units back and reassemble to the rear. Sound the call to the Letherii. Shake – you have now stood the Shore, and you stood it well.’ He sheathed his weapon, silencing its chilling chuckle. ‘This is how we shall measure our last days. Here, on this border drawn with the bones of our ancestors. And none shall move us.
    ‘Shake! Tell me when you have come home – tell me when that truth finally comes to you. You are home .’
    The words horrified her, but more horrifying still was the answering roar from her people.
    Yedan seemed