Description: Chapter 1 Clay It was like drinking liquid fire, the heart-blood sending a searing bolt of agony through him the instant it touched his tongue. Somehow he managed not to lose his grip on the vial, keeping it pressed against his lips until the entire contents had made a fiery progress from his throat to his gut. He convulsed as the pain blossomed, thrashing in the water as it grew, banishing all other sensation, turning his vision grey then black. He wondered if the pain would kill him before Last Look Jack could send a stream of flame down to boil him as he thrashed. Either way he knew with absolute certainty he had barely seconds to live. Then it was gone. The pain vanished in an instant. Clay blinked and the black void filling his eyes cleared. He was still in the water, floating weightlessly below a shimmering surface. The water was cold but the chill was muted somehow, a distant thing beyond the confines of his body, a body he quickly realised had grown to huge proportions. The view ahead was a mlange of colour, cool azure shades shot through with smudges of orange and the occasional small flutters of deep red. They see heat rather than light , Ethelynne Drystone had said when she shared memories with him in the ruined amphitheatre. Once again, he was seeing the world through the eyes of a drake. He saw that these colours were not so vibrant as those captured by the doomed Black all those centuries ago, but any sense of limited vision was more than dispelled by the sound that filled his ears. It was a constant vibrating echo, varying in pitch from one second to the next. It meant little to him but he could sense an understanding somewhere in his mind, an instinctive knowledge possessed by the one who had captured this memory. The conclusion was as inescapable as it was terrifying. I''m trancing with Last Look Jack . The view shifted as the soundscape changed, a sharp pealing cry cutting through the echo. The shimmering surface above blurred as Clay was propelled through the water, moving with a speed that was beyond any human engine. He could feel the great drake''s pulse quicken from a steady, ponderous thrum to a rapid drum-beat as the pealing cry came again. It was plainly a distress call, shot through with panic and terror. Clay could sense Jack''s increasing alarm as they raced through the water, the understanding afforded by the trance enabling him to recognise it as parental concern. Somewhere his child was suffering. Abruptly the distress call rose to a scream, piercing enough to send a shiver of pain through Clay''s mind, then it was gone, cut off in an instant. Another sensation seeped through his consciousness as the scream faded, not a sound this time, a scent. It was a smell that would usually stir hunger in the belly of this monstrous predator, but now stirred only despair. Blood, but not prey to be hunted down or a drifting whale carcass to be scavenged. This was the blood of a Blue drake. Last Look Jack gave voice to a cry of his own then, a deep throaty roar of grief that seemed to shake the sea. His speed remained undiminished, however, his massive body coiling with furious energy to propel him on. The scent of blood grew more intense until Clay saw a dark billowing red fog ahead, cooling to pink as the warmth leeched into the water. Jack slowed as he neared the cloud, Clay making out a dark matrix amidst the billowing warmth, a net stretched tight around something large and limp. He could see the dark barbs of several harpoons jutting from the dead Blue, a juvenile judging by its size. Blood bloomed with fresh intensity as the net shifted and the body rolled in its snare as it was drawn up towards the surface. Jack''s gaze followed the black lines of the hauling ropes, finding two long dark shapes interrupting the surface above. He knew these shapes, knew they brought danger and normally the sight of them would have caused him to dive for the security of the depths. But not today. He tore the net apart first, triangular, razor-like teeth tearing it to pieces, freeing the slaughtered juvenile inside. Jack paused to regard the slowly descending corpse, falling away into the cold black depths in a shroud of blood. A new memory filled Clay''s mind. A small Blue struggling free of her mother''s womb to coil against her father''s massive flanks as he curved his body around them both in a protective embrace, voicing a soft song to soothe her distress. The memory faded and Clay found Jack''s gaze had returned to the two dark shapes above. He roared again, his despair merging with rage. It was a rare emotion for a Blue, conserved for the mating season and defending territory from aggressive young males. Now it bloomed to unprecedented heights, filling every fibre of Jack''s body. Clay felt something give in Jack''s mind, a jolting shock that banished his last vestiges of reason. The great Blue''s roar died. He had no need to voice his rage now. He was rage. The two dark shapes had begun to move, the water on either side of them frothing white and a rhythmic thrum sounding through the ocean. Clay saw soft yellow globes burning in the centre of each shape as the Blue-hunter''s engineers stoked them high. Unnerved by the sudden loss of their catch, these sailors had clearly opted not to linger. It wouldn''t save them. Jack made for the shape on the left, making a steady but unhurried approach from below. Although the rage still boiled in his mind, his predatory instincts held true and he knew the wisdom of preserving his energy for the final rush. When he was some fifty yards from the spinning blades of the Blue-hunter''s starboard paddle, he struck. A single thrash of his massive tail shattered the paddle-blades into splinters, causing the ship to veer off in a ragged circle, tilting from the force of Jack''s blow. Small, dark figures plunged into the water around him, sailors cast from the deck of the stricken vessel. Jack took his time, snapping each struggling figure in half and spitting out the remnants, finding he disliked the taste of these tiny monsters. Their blood was bitter and their flesh too full of bones. In any case, he was not here to feed. He thrashed his tail again, an explosive release of power that propelled him free of the sea. The ship passed beneath him as his massive body soared over it, sailors gaping up at him in terror then screaming as he opened his jaws wide and unleashed a torrent of fire. The flames swept the ship from stern to bow, incinerating men and fittings alike, flooding the holds and setting light to anything that would burn. Jack plunged back into the welcoming chill of the ocean, circling the ship as it burned and killing the charred and barely alive sailors peppering the surrounding waters. A sudden, hard vibration pulsed through the sea as something gave in the ship''s vitals, probably a stock of gunpowder from the size of the explosion. Jack watched it break in two and slowly subside into the depths, trailing a dark cloud of blood from its sundered holds. The scent of his kin''s blood stoked Jack''s rage to even greater heights, Clay feeling the already fragile structure of his mind crumble yet further. The huge Blue returned to the surface, raising his head above the waves to see a second ship several miles to the north, smoke billowing from her funnels and paddles churning as she piled on the steam. It wouldn''t save her. The trance fragmented then, Clay experiencing a jolt of pain as the shared memories flitted through his head in a kaleidoscope of wrecked ships and slaughtered sailors. Jack''s existence had evidently become an unceasing epic of vengeance, days and nights consumed by the hunt, the endless search for more monsters to kill. He preyed upon whales or giant squid only when his hunger grew into pain; otherwise, he scoured the oceans for ships, destroying all he could find, but there were always more. Then came a change, a shift in the torrent of rage and tireless hunting. Jack had shunned the company of his own kind for years, ignoring their songs of greeting whenever he passed close to a pack. He knew on some basic level he was no longer one of them, their songs of bonding and play or the joy of the hunt were echoes of something forever lost; Jack had only one song, the rage song. But then came the day he heard something new, not a plaintive cry drifting through the depths, but a song within his mind. Clay felt another jolt of pain as the song enveloped him, alien and dislocating, and yet dreadfully familiar. The White . The depth of malice was unmistakable, although he found it impossible to fully comprehend the intricacies of the beast''s thoughts. But he could feel them, the new sense of purpose seeping into Jack''s mind, merging with his rage. Clay could sense the Blue struggling against this intrusion. He had a purpose of his own and wanted no other, but the White would not be denied. Soon a fresh torrent of images accompanied the sensation, another ship viewed through the eyes of another Blue. This ship was different however, a warship judging by its guns. Also, it had no paddles. The Superior, Clay realised, watching a young woman raise a pair of revolvers on the deck below. Loriabeth, the day the Blue attacked us . The image changed as Loriabeth''s bullets struck home, filling it with a red mist that obscured much of what came next, although Clay was able to discern the sudden halt in movement, recalling how he and the Varestian Blood-blessed had used Black to hold the Blue in place whilst Captain Hilemore and Lieutenant Steelfine readied the cannon. There was a flash amidst the red mist and the vision turned instantly to black. The sense of purpose flooding

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