Kei

  I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

  --Death, in a Fable

  The Hound tears at me with his immense fangs and claws as we fall into the nothingness that awaits us.

  Endless emptiness, save for the vast clockwork mechanisms and, of course, the mech battling Dragons far below.

  But the Hound being a Hound, he didn’t care about dying so much as savaging me while still carrying out his mission. Though at some point he’d realize dragging me back to Kestrel would be tricky when falling eternally in another universe, since neither of us could fly.

  He keeps trying to tear me down into more manageable chunks. I can’t blame him, as I drive my own hands and Gift into his ever-shifting substance, and try to return the favor.

  The one thing keeping me from mindless panic is this berserk creature in my face trying to break me so I can’t escape. I don’t have time to worry about my inescapable doom while the Hound is trying to remove a few non-essential limbs from my body.

  His claws and teeth tear into the sleeves and shoulders of my jacket, which seems to be as impossibly tough as Emily’s. I feel pain rip through my body, but nothing’s missing, yet. And my hands plunge into his eye sockets, and coldfire follows.

  My desperate rush of power pushes straight into him. Then, straight through him.

  I’ve got his head. But I can’t push away his giant jaws. They slip under my arms, close on my neck, and…

  My coldfire rushes through every fiber of his body like geyser of pure force. And suddenly, the Hound is blasted into a ribbon of seething blue plasma stretching out from my hands. The unstable sheet of energized matter widens slightly from my fingers to the end of it, some forty feet away.

  And then I’m hanging in midair, not daring to shut off the flow of my Gift lest the Hound pull himself back together and go for my throat.

  On the positive side, I have time to think about falling to my death, or just an eternity of falling until I dehydrate or something. So there is that.

  I twist and turn to look at the battle raging far below. And as I do so, the strip of flattened Hound tips to one side, and as I fall, I begin to spin.

  As I do so, I suddenly remember watching maple seeds fall with my father, their tiny wings making them twirl like tiny helicopters.

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  ‘Samara’ he called them.

  I spun faster and faster, reaching dizzying speeds. There’s some kind of karma, here, given how my power spins loose things around me. And now I’m the seed, trying to fall to fertile ground.

  I look down again, despite the nauseating view as the world whirls beneath my feet. ‘Fertile ground,’ right now, means anywhere I can stand upright. Which means the Library and the area right around it, including the space where the mech is making its stand.

  Working on instinct and using my temporarily boosted abilities, I angle my makeshift propellor and tilt the angle of my descent towards the absolutely most dangerous place I can see. Because I’m dead anywhere else, in the long run.

  I think Anton may have had a similar idea, as tiny dots which could be human figures are moving around the fight below.

  I realize I may be fleeing one danger to head, or spin, headfirst into a worse one.

  There’s also a story about a servant who borrowed a fast horse to escape Death by fleeing to Sammara. Who was actually surprised to see him in the marketplace in Baghdad because he had an appointment with the man in Sammara.

  The good news? I won’t be making that mistake.

  The bad news? Falling forever may actually beat getting toasted by Dragonfire.

  Well, I’ll know the truth in a minute.

  The rigid smear of Hound twitches slightly as I fall, and I redouble the energies surging through it. Not just to keep the still quivering creature subdued, but because coursing as much of my power through it as possible may keep my Gift from stirring up more trouble around me.

  I think I’ll settle for the Mech vs. Dragons matchup below us, for now. Call me timid.

  I look all around us as we fall together. Partly this is because my literal death spiral makes me look over all 360 degrees around us – unless I close my eyes out of fear or to fight the nausea or something – and because I keep checking to see what else might fall on my head or what worse things I might be about to land on.

  At some point, it’s not so much paranoia as bitter experience, I think.

  So I drop what, a mile? More?

  For all my talents when my Gift is raging, I’m having trouble holding it together through the drop, but I keep my eyes open and manage to put together a 360-view of the battlefield. Err, battlespace.

  Two blue-green Eastern-style Dragons, moving like incredibly fast serpents as they circle and strike the mech, who responds with plasma from one hand and with a wrecking ball rotating rapidly on its chain in the other.

  And more importantly, with a whole array of weapons embedded in its armor, which constantly fire barrages whenever the Dragons get to close. The mythical creatures respond in turn with blue-green plasma fire from their jaws. One tries to tangle the mech in its coils while the other darts in with more Dragonfire – going for the mech’s face – but an eruption of lightning over its body hammers the grappling creature hard while the mecha pilot pounds away with its own plasma and its ball and chain.

  The beast finally tears itself away, looking shaken, as traces of blue-green fire fall away from it like a flower shedding petals or a sandcastle crumbling in the surf.

  I think the mech is winning, especially as most of those wisps of the Dragon’s substance seem to get pulled away. But then I see some which didn’t go far, and I realize they aren’t fading.

  But rather, are moving. And then I see it.

  Bits of the Dragon, torn away, have reformed themselves into tiny dragonettes. And these are circling the battlespace just out of the mech’s line of sight, though probably not out of the range of its sensors, and look posed to pounce like a vast swarm of mini-dragons when the pilot least expects it.

  And so I fall. As I get closer, I can see the mech also looks like it’s been dragged through a giant woodchipper, and someone who looks like Anton and maybe another, darker kid are swinging on lines around the central fight. Each one snaps out a second line, hurtling them around the withdrawing, injured dragon as they do so. There’s some heavy weight on the end of each line, but I can’t make it out as I rotate.

  And then I turn to look back again, and each line’s package explodes.

  The twin thundercrack of the detonations is deafening even at this range, and the flash is blinding, though fortunately I’m turning away again almost faster than I can blink. When I turn back, the wounded Dragon looks mortally wounded, and the mech hurls its own line to snag it – the full length of a long chain, with the wrecking ball wrapping around and snaring its serpentine length.

  The mecha yanks back hard, pulling the Dragon closer before it can escape. It’s partner shoots in and unleashes a dazzling burst of Dragonfire with a sound somewhere between a hiss of escaping vapor and an outright scream.

  And I spin straight towards all of this, a guest late to a party to which she was never invited.

  And I brought my dog, too. Or at least Kestrel’s.

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