Free The Demon Horsemen by Tony Shillitoe Page B

wondered. Then a voice yelled and, as he looked west, cheering erupted again. The airbird rose above the cliff, wobbling and dipping perilously, and the stuttering of its twin drivers was carried to the watchers on the breeze.
    The sudden appearance and noise startled the horses and they bolted from their handlers, but Shadow felt only elation at the chaos and laughed. The little craft drifted lower as it approached the landing area, until it was barely high enough for the windwheels to avoid scuffing the earth, and then the drivers were cut, the windwheels snapped into the horizontal and the airbird glided to the ground. As its landing wheels touched, the machine slewed sideways, spun and flipped over, crumpling into a mess of broken wood, tangled wires and metal.
    ‘Jarudha be merciful!’ Word muttered as he rose from his chair.
    Acolytes and soldiers sprinted towards the airbird, but before they reached it, Hope scrambled from the wreckage and held up his hands to show that he was unhurt. ‘Jarudha be praised!’ Word cried.
    ‘Praised indeed,’ said Shadow, pleased that he’d witnessed the creation of a means to discourage Ranu avarice and aggression.

C HAPTER E IGHT
    A loft in his dragon egg, A Ahmud Ki observed the battle unfolding across the desert. The Kalan army had taken the high ground along a ridge of bare hills to the north-east, intent on pushing the Ranu invaders back towards the port of Mayed. His scouts and spies estimated the Kalan army at more than seven hundred thousand, a mixture of trained soldiers and tribal warriors banded together under a common banner to fight the Ranu. The size of their army was the Kalans’ only advantage against the fifty thousand-strong Ranu invasion force, but technology tilted the balance heavily in favour of the Ranu and A Ahmud Ki was quietly confident the conflict would not last a full day.
    The battlefield was also a testing ground for two new inventions: a motorised carriage with a multi-barrelled peacemaker mounted on the front, protected by a metal shield; and a squad of flying soldiers, each man suspended by his own tiny dragon egg. The flying soldiers could hover above the enemy lines, out of bow and spear shot, dropping bombs or firing at their targets. Their effect was more demoralising rather than seriously damaging, but a broken-spirited enemy was much easier to rout.
    After Kala fell, he would turn his attention to Ma-Tareshka and then to Jaru, systematically dominating the southern continent before marching into the northern lands. His ambassadors had established footholds in every nation of the eastern continents, via trading routes that had been opened for decades—centuries, in some cases—and his plan to bring the entire world under the rule of the Ranu people was unfolding inexorably.
    He smiled at the prospect of being the president of all nations. A thousand years ago he had aspired to become the most powerful being in existence—a Dragonlord—only to have his ambitions thwarted by another Dragonlord. For a thousand years he had languished in a magical prison, mocked by the concept of immortality actually meaning his imprisonment in a hellish eternity. Then fate had brought Meg and his release, only for him to discover that the power he had craved had all but vanished from the face of the world. The Dragonlords, the Elvenaar and the Aelendyell, the old kings and the dragons, were long dead. In their place were inventors, politicians and a strange practice called democracy. He had tried to retrieve his power by returning to Se’Treya, only to narrowly avoid death by escaping through an old unused portal. That portal had taken him into the modern Ranu Ka Shehaala nation, where he had learned, mastered and applied a wholly new set of powers—political, military, technological. Exotically handsome because of his Aelendyell heritage, uncommonly versed in the ancient history and language of the Ranu culture because he had lived in and studied it a