The dive was a scream of scorched air and tearing smoke.
Cinder plunged through the ochre haze above the bay like a fragment of obsidian ripped from an erupting volcano. The sulfurous smog parted before the colossal drake’s armored snout, revealing the crimson surface of the harbor three hundred feet below, where eighty bone-and-lead Grave-Buoys bobbed among the three defensive crescents of the Imperial Home Fleet.
On the decks of the hundred and twenty dreadnoughts below, lookouts screamed in blind panic.
Brass horns blared across the water—a chaotic, frantic chorus of alarms echoing off the sheer basalt bluffs of Sun-Grave. Heavy solar ballistas were hastily cranked upward, their gunners struggling to traverse the colossal weapons against an aerial predator that flew faster than an imperial falcon.
"They're traversing the batteries on the outer ring!" Gideon roared into Lyra's ear, his colossal arms locked around her waist, holding her steady in the high saddle against the violent G-forces of the dive.
"Let them traverse!" Lyra snarled back.
She didn't aim Cinder at the dreadnoughts.
She aimed him at the water.
At fifty feet above the surface, Cinder flared his sixty-foot wings, leveling off in a terrifying, low-altitude sweep that kicked up a rooster-tail of pink foam behind his tail.
The drake opened his massive jaws.
A torrent of cobalt-blue volcanic fire—heat forged in the subterranean belly of the northern magma vents, burning at four thousand degrees—roared from his throat, sweeping across the surface of the bay like an apocalyptic scythe.
The volcanic flame struck the first line of Grave-Buoys.
The imperial necromancers had enchanted the rotting leviathan carcasses with alchemical preserves designed to dissolve living timber and flesh on contact.
They had not accounted for the alchemical properties of volcanic dragon-fire.
The moment the cobalt flames touched the necrotic fat and sulfur-soaked bone, the chemistry reversed.
Instead of rotting into acid, the volatile oils inside the bloated carcasses detonated.
BOOM!
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
A catastrophic, rolling chain-reaction of concussive fireballs ripped through the water.
Eighty Grave-Buoys exploded in rapid, simultaneous succession, throwing pillars of boiling crimson spray and green alchemical fire three hundred feet into the air.
The shockwave traveling through the water was an earthquake.
The concussive pressure slammed into the submerged rudders and keel-plates of the outer crescent of dreadnoughts. Iron plates four inches thick buckled with agonizing screeches of tearing rivets; twenty ships listed violently to port, their alchemical boiler systems rupturing beneath the water line as the red sea rushed into their furnace holds.
The field of corpse-acid was gone.
In its place was a boiling, smoking graveyard of shattered bone, burning pitch, and sinking iron.
"THE CHANNEL IS CLEAR!" Lyra shouted, her voice ringing across the sky with the dual-harmonic frequency of the Ash Throne.
Two miles out, on the forecastle of the Iron Sovereign, Varis saw the pillar of green-and-blue fire breach the smog.
The ancient commander raised her curved executioner's blade to the sky.
"RAMMING SPEED!" Varis’s voice carried over the signal horns of the Ash Court vanguard. "FOLLOW THE QUEEN!"
The thirty captured dreadnoughts surged forward, their oars thrashing the water into white froth, their blackened steel rams aimed directly at the shattered center of the imperial fleet.
And behind the dreadnoughts, the four Sun Wyrms smelled the burning of the necromancy.
With a unified, triumphant roar that shook the sea-cliffs, the four golden sea-gods dove beneath the surface, swimming through the boiling water at sixty knots, heading straight for the harbor slips.
High above the chaos, Cinder banked hard, ascending through the pillar of smoke toward the sheer, thousand-foot volcanic bluffs overlooking the port.
Perched upon the highest terrace of the bluffs was the Grand Bastion of Sun-Grave: an imposing citadel of black basalt and polished copper that housed the imperial command staff, the master shipwrights, and the grand barracks of the two hundred thousand legionnaires.
Standing on the battlements of the bastion, surrounded by fifty elite guards in gilded scale armor, was High General Korvus.
Korvus was a legend in the southern empire.
Seven feet tall, with skin like beaten bronze and hair cropped into a tight military crest, his massive chest was covered in battle-honors won in forty campaigns across the southern ocean. He wore heavy armor of dark meteor-iron, and across his back rested a colossal, two-handed war-hammer whose head was carved from a single, pulsing ruby sun-stone.
The general watched his outer fleet burning in the bay, his jaw clenched so tight the muscles in his neck stood out like iron cables.
"Cowards!" Korvus roared at his fleeing officers, his voice booming over the rumble of the furnaces below. "Bring up the heavy sun-mortars! Level the lower slips! Burn our own ships if you must, but do not let that northern lizard reach the high terraces!"
Before his artillery crews could wheel the massive bronze mortars into position, a colossal shadow fell over the bastion courtyard.
Cinder descended like an avalanche.
The drake’s massive talons slammed down onto the paved courtyard, crushing two heavy sun-mortars into twisted scrap metal, his armored tail sweeping twenty gilded guards off the battlements to plummet a thousand feet into the burning bay below.
Cinder lowered his snout, venting a cloud of superheated, sulfurous steam that sent the remaining imperial guards scrambling for the inner archways.
Gideon sheared their safety straps with a flick of his blade.
The warlord vaulted from the saddle, landing heavily on the shattered stones of the courtyard, his star-iron claymores clearing their sheaths with twin roars of singing steel that cut through the thunder of the burning fleet.
Lyra dropped lightly beside him, her antler-handled skinning knife resting in her hand, her star-iron circlet blazing with celestial violet starlight, her hazel and violet eyes locked onto the towering figure of the High General.
Korvus did not run.
The old general unhooked the massive, ruby-headed war-hammer from his back, resting the two-hundred-pound weapon across his armored shoulders with effortless, terrifying power.
He looked at the two monarchs—at the scarred, blood-stained northern warlord and the small, wild queen with the eyes of the void.
A slow, grim, soldier's smile touched Korvus’s lips.
"So," Korvus spoke, his voice deep, gravelly, carrying the harsh authority of forty years of war. "The Ashhound and the Drake."
He swung the war-hammer down, cracking the paving stones beneath his boots, the ruby sun-stone head humming with dangerous, volatile heat.
"You broke our fleets, children," Korvus said, stepping forward. "You broke our atolls. But you are standing in the garrison of the Golden Dawn. And two hundred thousand legionnaires are marching up the cliff road behind me."
Gideon stepped past Lyra, placing his massive body squarely between his mate and the General.
His amber-gold eyes burned with pure, unyielding savagery, his lips curling into a feral snarl that showed his lengthening fangs.
"Then they're going to need a new General," Gideon rumbled.
And the warlord charged.