The Order of the Scales

by Stephen Deas

  Shouting – questioning at first, then angry. He thought he heard Kataros laugh, but that must have been his ears playing tricks. As more of the men lurched their way out into the daylight, a whooshing rush of air shook the cave. Two more screams, just two, men this time. A figure in the mouth of the cave was silhouetted against the brightness outside. For a moment he seemed frozen, then some huge shadow came down behind him and he was hurled away. The last few men in the cave stood paralysed. One of them swore; one whimpered; one fell to his knees and clutched his head. The rest said nothing at all.

  The cave went dark. For a moment Kemir thought he’d gone blind, but no, this was the dark of something enormous poking its head into the cave mouth and blocking out the light.

  Dragon. Kemir sighed and closed his eyes and waited for the fire. Riders came to the Maze to clear out the pirates from time to time. Not often, and not for many years, but it happened. It suited the sort of luck he’d been having that they’d choose to come now.

  There was no fire. Instead, the dragon backed away and its tail snaked into the cave. The river men yelled and cowered against the walls, but the tail ignored them. It picked Kemir up, gently but with immense power, lifted him through the air, and then he was outside. He opened his eyes a crack, but now everything was too bright to see. He could feel the air move, though, feel the heat of the sun on his skin, hear the water of a river almost close enough to touch.

  The dragon pushed its head back into the cave. Kemir heard the roar, the crack of stones shattering in the heat. Felt it, the backblast of scorching air from out of the cave around the dragon’s head. Smelled the stink of burning men.

  Snow?

  Yes, little one.

  Why?

  She laughed at him and put him gently down by the edge of the river. There is no why, little one.

  22

  Kataros

  Snow was gone by the time he could see, but the others weren’t. The three they’d stolen from King Valmeyan’s riders almost three months ago he recognised. More must have come from the Mountain King’s eyrie. They stayed for long enough that he saw them, perched high up on the walls of the canyon around him. They looked down at him and then, one by one, they launched themselves into the air and flew away, as if all they’d been waiting for was for him to open his eyes.

  ‘Why?’ He wanted to shout, but his throat was parched and swollen and all he could do was croak. He was lying on bare stone, which was almost painfully warm in the sun. The pole to which he’d been tied had been broken, carefully and precisely. It took him a minute to get his hands past his legs and to where his teeth could start work on the ropes that held him. A minute more and he was free. His arm hurt more than ever.

  There were men all around him, a dozen of them. Or rather, there were bits of men. A few of them had been burned to stumps, but most had been smashed and broken. Tooth and claw and tail. He couldn’t see Kataros, but she’d doubtless been the first.

  Bastard! For the second time he found himself wanting to shout. With luck the dragon was still listening to his thoughts. If she was, though, she didn’t answer.

  Bastard.

  He’d look for her. He owed her that. For a moment a sadness burned him from the inside, hurt him even more than his ruined arm. His fault. He was the one who’d brought her here. She could have stayed in the eyrie. Probably would have lived. And now she’d spent the last two days of her life being raped by pirates and then been burned alive by a dragon. All because he’d wanted her to sell to the Taiytakei. Yes, he’d look for her and then later, if he found her, he’d tell her how sorry he was. For what little that was worth.

  Unless they’d eaten her. If they’d done that then he’d simply never know.

  He crawled to the edge of the river and scooped a few handfuls onto his face, wetting his lips and his tongue. The water here was warm. Either side of the river were narrow strips of yellow sand scattered with pale grey boulders. After that, the canyon walls, maybe a hundred feet of sheer pale sandy stone. The sort of cliff that could be counted on to kill you if you tried to climb it. Not that there was any reason to. The Maze was dead, except for the rivers that ran down from the Purple Spur.

  Her body couldn’t be very far then. He wasn’t sure he wanted to look.

  A few hundred yards downstream, the river rushed past a shallow swirling pool. Kemir lurched to his feet. That would do. He ran to it, peeling the few rags he had left from his skin as he went, flinging everything aside except for his shirt. He splashed into the water and with an ecstatic sob, he threw himself in. He rolled his shirt into a ball and started to scrub himself. Clean. I need to be clean.

  ‘Hey.’

  He froze and then turned slowly around. Kataros was crouched at the edge of the pool, still as a statue, her long hair shrouding her face, the rest of her almost lost in the cliff shadows and the fading light.

  ‘I thought you’d be dead,’ he said, choosing his words carefully. He still half thought she was. Maybe this was her vengeful spirit come to make him pay.

  She looked at him and smiled, and he knew straight away that she must be alive, because no vengeful spirit ever smiled like that. Vengeful spirits didn’t take dust. He’d found a whore once, lying in the street outside a dust den. She’d been beaten by a gang of dragon-knights she’d sucked for a pinch of dust a time. She’d been so close to death that he’d almost left her, thinking she was gone. But she’d moved, and he’d gone to her because no one deserved to die in the street like that, and as he’d touched her, she’d rolled over and smiled at him, leering, eyes as black and wide as the night sky, and she’d put a hand on him and breathed, ‘Do you want me, lover?’ through broken lips with blood dripping down her face. And then she died. That’s what dust did.

  Kataros had that smile now. Deep in the dust, where nothing really mattered except someone to touch.

  He sighed and turned away. ‘You know the one good thing about having next to nothing to eat for the last few days? I’ve hardly had to crap. Ancestors! This feels so good! I’m covered in my own filth.’ There. That sounded about right. Felt about right too, although the filth was more on the inside than out. For a few seconds, as he scrubbed, he tried to forget everything that had happened since the day he and Sollos had flown with Snow. He tried to imagine himself back in the past, just the two of them out on another adventure, scrapping with dragon-knights, on the run in the wilderness of the Worldspine.

  The presence nearby didn’t answer, and when he looked back, it was Kataros who was still watching him, not his cousin. She was sitting at the edge of the water now, half dressed, picking at the grime in her hair, staring at him.

  ‘You should come in,’ he said. ‘You have no idea how good this feels.’

  She cocked her head, still looking at him and picking at her hair, still silent.

  ‘What?’ he asked when she didn’t say anything. She was wearing a soft leather undershirt that he’d stolen from some rider almost a month ago, before he’d found her. The shirt had holes in it exactly the size of Snow’s teeth. Underneath, her skin was pale. He wondered where she’d found it. Maybe his bow was around somewhere. His knives and his armour. Or maybe not his armour. Not much use for that any more.

  She saw him looking. Stared back for a moment, looked away, then looked back and held his gaze.

  ‘You’ve got a head full of dust.’ He gulped another mouthful of water. He was just about getting used to the idea that his tongue wasn’t glued to the inside of his mouth.

  She shook her head. ‘You’ve got a lot of scars,’ she said, her eyes still locked to his. They were wide and demanding, dust-black.

  ‘More given than received.’ He fingered the rough skin on the back of his left hand and then touched his neck. ‘Burned by dragon-fire when some knights came after us.’ He grinned. ‘We had to flee right across the realms, from Bazim Crag right out across into the swamps and bogs and moors way out to the east. No one lives there because it’s so shitty, and I can tell you
it’s no place to hide when there’s dragons after you. Bloody disaster that was.’ He looked down at himself. Scars criss-crossed his arms, the legacy of far too many knife fights. The backs of his hands were still shiny from when he and Snow had first crossed the Worldspine.

  ‘What’s that one?’ Kataros pointed at his chest.

  ‘Arrow.’ Kemir shrugged. ‘Punctured lung. Nearly killed me that one. Stupid mistake. Thought we’d killed them all but we missed one. He shot me; Sollos shot him. Managed to get me back. Got me to an alchemist who stopped the bleeding and somehow stopped me from being dead.’ He touched the little crater over his ribs. Talking was good. Talking made the madness go away, at least a little bit. For a moment he hoped Kataros might have a pinch of dust with her so he could take it. Dust numbed almost everything. Everything on the inside, at least.

  ‘That one?’ She was looking at his leg now, and the long jagged line that ran up the inside of his thigh from just above the knee.

  ‘That one.’ Kemir’s smile faded. ‘That’s an old one, that one. Very old and very stupid.’ He looked at himself. There wasn’t a part of him that hadn’t been cut, slashed, bashed or bruised over the years. ‘You should see my back.’ He chuckled, then turned around in the water. ‘Most of that’s a flogging I got half a dozen years ago. The rest of it is another flogging I got a couple of years before. I’m a mess.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  Kemir rolled onto his back and spread out his arms, floating. The cool air blowing down the canyon from the mountains of the Purple Spur chilled his skin. He squinted. She looked good, he thought. He was noticing that a lot at the moment. A part of him was horrified at himself, but it was a part that was losing.

  She turned her back to him and peeled off her shirt. Her back was a mass of scars too. Healed but still recent, still red and shining. He stared at her.

  ‘Flogging is for thieves,’ he said, bemused.

  ‘Yes.’ She didn’t move.

  ‘I used to steal all the time. Stealing from kith and kin is one thing. Stealing from the dragon-lords and their servants doesn’t count. Although . . .’ He shrugged and grimaced and scratched at the scars on his back. ‘They don’t quite see it that way, and the flogging hurts much the same either way. But how does an alchemist get to be a thief?’

  Kataros turned around. She stood, naked, at the edge of the pool.

  ‘I didn’t steal. They flogged me anyway.’

  ‘Who.’

  She laughed, the dust killing any bitterness. ‘My family. My brother and sister alchemists.’

  ‘For what, if you didn’t steal?’ She was an alchemist then. Alchemist, Scales. Same difference, wasn’t it? They all had everything they could possibly want simply given to them, didn’t they?

  ‘They did this because I took a man to my bed for my own pleasure and told him secrets I was not supposed to tell. They said I must stop, but I didn’t. They said I couldn’t be an alchemist after all, that I would have to be a Scales, and I still didn’t stop. So they flogged me. Dragons, that’s what a Scales serves, not men. I was stealing too, you see. Stealing secrets and a little pleasure I was not meant to have. That’s why they whipped me.’

  Kemir looked her up and down. Dirt streaked her arms. Her skin was red and raw in places. Her face was pinched and hungry. Her breasts were full, though, and her belly pleasantly round. No one would ever call her beautiful, but men would hunger for her nonetheless. As Kemir looked at her he felt himself stiffening, even as he remembered her screams of the last two nights, before the river men had silenced them with dust. I make myself sick.

  ‘I can live with that,’ he lied.

  ‘So I see.’ Kataros didn’t move. She was staring right through him, as though weighing him up. She had a slight smirk on her face.

  ‘Sorry. It’s been a long time, that’s all.’ Why am I apologising?

  She must have read his mind. She arched her back and stretched her arms. ‘I never wanted to be a Scales. I wanted to be an alchemist.’ She licked her lips.

  Kemir shrugged again. ‘Never struck me as much of a way to live.’ He couldn’t help looking her up and down, searching for any sign of Hatchling Disease. It was there, if you took the trouble to look. The beginnings. A little roughness to the elbows and to the knees. Always the joints that went first.

  She took a step into the water. Kemir didn’t know what she wanted from him. He wasn’t even sure what he wanted himself. Well, that wasn’t quite true. A part of him knew exactly what he wanted.

  ‘I took myself to my dragon-rider lover’s bed again too, after the wounds had closed enough for me to lie on my back.’

  ‘Because he gave you no choice?’

  ‘No. There’s always a choice.’ She took another languid step closer and smiled. ‘Because I liked it.’

  Dust. He could smell it on her breath even. Her eyes were enormous. It was making her this way. Kemir stood up. He had a lump in his throat and a lust like he couldn’t remember. He’d happily have forced himself on her right there and then except that was probably what she wanted. Likely as not, Snow was probably still watching them from somewhere. But that only made him want her more. ‘Look, I really don’t care. I’ve spent half my life selling my sword, and when I had money, I spent it on women and drink. Sometimes I spent it on boys. Give me money and I’ll do the same again. But you’re being this way because you’ve got a head full of dust. I’d like to fuck you, alchemist, as you clearly see, but I’m not what you’d want if your head was right. We’ll get this done and then you can find yourself a man who’ll look after you, because I won’t.’

  Her eyes didn’t move from his erection. ‘I don’t want to be looked after. And I’m not an alchemist any more.’ Kemir hesitated, and in that moment he lost. Kataros took a step forward. ‘I don’t even know you, sell-sword. All I know is that dragons came when you called and they had no riders. I don’t know what you are, but they came. I just want you . . .’ She reached out towards him.

  ‘Listen, woman. All I want is to go out in as big a blaze of glory as possible and take as many dragon-riders with me as I can. It’s been like that for a long time, and that’ll never change. I’ll not be trading my sword for a farm and a field full of pigs, never would, never will. Those dragons you saw, they didn’t come because I called. They came because they felt like it, and they’ll be burning the realms to ashes soon enough. You know why I helped you? I was going to take you to Furymouth and sell you to the Taiytakei and use the money to buy me a ship to somewhere else before that happened. Now?’ He shook his head. ‘I still might. Either way I’m gone. Done here. Even if I have to sell myself into slavery, it’s Furymouth and a ship to somewhere far away.’

  His words flew straight through her and out the other side, unheard, as if she was a ghost. She took another step. ‘Maybe that’s what I want too.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ He took a step as well. Couldn’t help himself. He stopped in front of her and ran a rough and eager hand down from her face to her belly. ‘Don’t burn with me when I go. No need. You leave and you make your own life whenever it suits you. I won’t try to stop you. You know that.’ Words going in and out again, but then he was saying them as much to make them said as anything. As if saying them would somehow make them come true.

  She touched a hand to his face. ‘You’re trembling.’

  ‘The air’s cold.’

  She grinned. ‘Then we’d better warm you up.’ She pressed herself against him and reached between his legs.

  Kemir gasped. ‘From the inside,’ he growled. He ran his hands down her back and pulled her even closer. She bit his ear.

  ‘I’ve seen bigger,’ she whispered. ‘Even on dragon-riders.’

  ‘You must be talking about those scars again.’ Kemir grunted as he pushed Kataros back to the edge of the pool and then to the ground. ‘The ones with the biggest scars are the ones who met me. The lucky ones, that is.’ She pulled him down with her, opened her legs and pulled him ins
ide her. They clung to each other, silent but intense. There was nothing gentle about either of them, but when they were done they held each other for a long time, until Kemir finally rose and returned to the pool.

  ‘I think I have more scars than when we started,’ he muttered. Kataros gave a throaty laugh, but the smile that flicked across her face was a blank one. She set about building a fire, scavenging from among the dead river men, oblivious to the slaughter around her. Then she built a nest of blankets and fell asleep. Kemir, when he was done with the pool and the sun had dried him, lay beside her, sharing her warmth. He stared up at the sky, high above the canyon walls. If he was honest with himself, he didn’t feel quite as empty now. He should, should have felt even worse, but he didn’t.

  Yes. That’s right, whispered a voice. Don’t think about it. Just drown it all in drink and whores like you always used to. Best thing really, under the circumstances.

  He jumped, looked around. The voice had sounded an awful lot like his cousin. That’s certainly where the words had come from, once long ago. He half expected to see Sollos standing there. He growled, ‘Go away, ghost.’

  The voice went away. Kemir sat back down by the fire. He sat there for a long time, rocking slowly back and forth. He sat there trying to remember everything he could about Sollos. Every word he’d said, every place they’d ever been together, every thing they’d ever done, every time Sollos had saved his skin. There were a lot of those. His eyes gleamed in the firelight.

  Eventually Kataros’s snores drove the memories away. Eventually he fell asleep. Later, he couldn’t have said whether it had really been Sollos or if it had all been a dream.