The Red Mother by Elizabeth Bear

Author:Elizabeth Bear
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

* * *

The slope leveled as we came close to the top of the volcano. We stopped to drink at a spring that bubbled up from a cluster of stones, clearing some of the ash from our throats. I splashed water on my face. It was lukewarm and fizzed like surf, full of bubbles. It reeked and tasted of brimstone, but at least it wasn’t boiling. The horse drank, snorted to clear the fumes from his nostrils, and gave me a look before drinking again as if to say, “Yeah, I’ve seen worse.”

When I lifted my head, I realized we were nearly to the vent. The horse grew increasingly restive as we came up the final slope, and with a couple furlongs to go he planted his feet in their ridiculous leather bags and refused to walk another step.

I chirruped to him and shook the lead. He planted his hind feet, rocked back, and reared. Not a dramatic, sky-pawing rear, but a clear declaration that he was not moving.

It was honestly surprising we’d made it this far. “Good lad,” I told him, and turned him around to face downhill. I wound the fragile-seeming traces around a head-sized piece of pumice and tied them off.

Careful not to loop the lead rope around my hand, I stepped up beside the twitching horse and unfastened his halter. I stroked his sweating, ash-gritted shoulder as I slid the straps off his nose. He stood harnessed in sorcery, fate-threads, and kin-duty, leaning against the yarn-spun traces as if against a plow stopped by thick turf.

I stepped away and tossed the halter onto the cinders before turning back uphill. I cupped my hands to my mouth and used a little twist of luck, a scrap of thread wound ’round my fingers, to shift the wind so that my voice would carry. I took the deepest breath I could, tightened my diaphragm, and bellowed.

“Here, dragon, dragon! Nice fat pony. Lame, too! An easy dinner!”

For a long moment, nothing. The reek of fumes swirling on the breeze I’d conjured up; the steam rising from the cinders. The vast silence of the lifeless mountainside.

Then came a rumble, and a long hard clatter like a bag of armor bits and chopped-up candelabras dragged over stone. The scraping of stone on stone. I levered my neck back, peering through streaming vapors, blinking away the fume-begotten tears.

A great head that only seemed small because it was on a neck as long as a ship’s mast poked over the rim of the crater. The head was hammer-shaped, and scaled, and horned, and fanged. I could have called it red or orange in color and not been wrong, but the rough scales seemed translucent, and refracted rainbows in their depths, like the planes of light struck within an opal. Even under the dim overcast of smoke and the haze of fumes, it dazzled.

The owner of the head—and the neck—sniffed deeply. Once, twice. Then it reared back and struck with surprising speed.

I threw myself to the side, cinders bruising my palms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.