by Stephen Deas
You are wrong, old one. You have no time left at all.
‘And why is that, monster?’
Because the one you call Snow is coming, old one. Coming here. Coming now.
‘They happen to be coming, right here, right now?’ The old man shook his head and picked up another bolt. ‘You’ll not fool me as easily as that, monster. I’ll do it myself.’
Coming because I have called them as I called you. Look. They come. It is no longer necessary for me to distract you. The dragon let his thoughts fill with venom and glee. The old man couldn’t help himself. Looked over his shoulder, out into the expanse of open air beyond the cave mouth, past lake and fields and farms into the distant desert sky.
A dozen dragons were coming. They were close. Not close enough yet for the old man to make out what colour they were or whether they had riders. Human eyes. So dim.
No riders, old one. The one you call Snow comes.
The old man didn’t know what to do. Incomprehension fogged his mind. Disbelief. Confusion. Fear. Realisation. Alarm. Comprehension. Dread. Despair. The dragon revelled in them all. The last most of all. We are all dead.
Yes. You are.
The onrushing dragons split. Most climbed. One kept straight. By then even human eyes could have no doubt. All the little ones could see now. White riderless death.
The dragon called Silence soaked up their despair like a lizard basking in the sun.
‘Go!’ the old man shouted to the other men. ‘Go and get your hammers and do what you came to do. All of them! Smash them all!’ The old man took the weapon called scorpion himself and aimed. ‘You’ll not live to see this, abomination.’ Fired. Missed. The dragon laughed. Swords and arrows were wasted weapons, however big they were.
Outside the cave, the mouth of the white dragon called Snow opened. Claws reached for the edge of the cave. The rest of the little ones had fled. The old man tried to make his weapon work once more. Too late.
The cave filled with fire as another dragon voice crashed into the old man’s head.
I am home.
28
Valleyford
In the ruins of Plag’s Bay they sat together with the other dazed survivors, keeping close to the caves in the canyon walls. As if that would help, should the dragons return. High above on the edge of the canyon, fires lit up the evening sky. Kemir had watched the dragons pass over, spreading their wings, dipping their heads, flames bursting from their mouths. Hadn’t been able to do much else sandwiched between the Fury and a thousand-foot cliff. Three of them, that was all, dropping down from the dark cloud of a thousand beating wings. The rest had stayed high. Flying on to Watersgate, to the Hungry Mountain Plains, to the City of Dragons, to wherever their war called them. Three dragons. A town burned. They hadn’t even come back for a second pass; simply flew on up the gorge to Watersgate.
Smoke rose from what had once been houses and jetties. Half the town was burning. Still, it wasn’t all that big a place. Maybe that was the way to look at it. A few hundred people and most of them itinerant sailors. So in the big scheme of things Plag’s Bay hardly mattered, right? Made you wonder why they’d even bothered at all.
Whoever they were.
Boats drifted on the water, crippled and burning. Kataros clung to Kemir’s arm. She’d never seen this before, he supposed, never seen a town burn. That was the pampered sheltered life of an alchemist, right there. Alchemists didn’t get burned. Apart from the once.
No one moved, not unless it was to find a deeper cellar or a darker cave where they could hide. More dragons flew north, stragglers in ones and twos, and then the first horde came back, returning from whatever destruction they’d wrought. At least this time they stayed high. None of them came down to the river. For the rest of the day, dragons criss-crossed the sky in ones and twos, here and there. Kemir thought he saw another swarm far off to the west, but they were high and far away, little more than a distant blur in the sky.
Darkness fell. Reflected fire glittered in the black water of the Fury. They crept, dozens of them, the survivors, to the shores of the river. At the water’s edge, half-ruined boats lay among the wreckage. There had been more but they were gone now, floated off downstream. Kemir and the rest sifted in silence, working through the wrecks, looking for any that might still float. There wasn’t much else to do. Plag’s Bay was gone, dead, wrapped in a still-fierce heat. No one said but they all thought the same. Dragons only flew in the day; night-time was safe, and so they wanted to be gone before the sun rose once more, in case the dragons came back.
Daft, really, since the dragons could be anywhere, but a boat was a boat. A boat meant travelling further towards the sea. Towards Furymouth and far away. Where Kemir wanted to be.
They found a barge. Scorched but good enough to float. They climbed aboard, twenty, forty, fifty of them. Mostly men. Too many really, but they climbed in anyway and let the current take them away. Pushed themselves out into the water with makeshift poles and let the river take them. Kemir watched as they drifted past the husks and skeletons of boats that had fared less well. When the moon rose, he took Kataros down to the half-deck below, where passengers might have slept if any of them still could, and hid away with what little he’d managed to save. One of his knives. The bow that might have been his or might have been his cousin’s. A few pieces of armour. The last of the gold they’d taken from the river pirates. Not much else. The roof was low, too low to stand straight. The darkness was complete, so thick and solid that they crawled, finding their way by feel. Everyone else was up above, too scared to sleep. Not Kemir, though. He’d seen all this before.
There were a pair of windows at the stern. Tiny filthy things that let through meagre slivers of light. Good for telling the difference between night and day and not much else.
‘Here.’ He stopped and pulled her close, next to the boat’s hull.
‘How can you sleep?’
Kemir shrugged. There wasn’t much of an answer to that. After you’d seen your home destroyed by dragon-fire, you either could or you couldn’t. When it had happened to him, all those years ago, he’d found that he could. He closed his eyes. He’d see them again tonight. His old friends. His family. They always came into his dreams when he saw a place burn. Reminding him, he supposed, that they’d once had a life. He wondered if this time Sollos would come too.
‘We didn’t bring any blankets. Should we have brought some blankets?’
‘Don’t really need them now.’ In the mountains good blankets were more precious than gold. Down here they were just blankets and the trip down the river would be warm enough without. He set about arranging himself with his knife and his bow and his belt all close to hand. He bundled them against the side of the ship and them pressed his back against them, tying little loops of twine around each with the other ends around his wrist. Kataros squeezed herself down beside him.
‘Hold me tight,’ she murmured. ‘I want to feel like you’re all around me. Like you’re my skin.’
Dust talk. He told her so. Reached for his pouch. Still had it. That was something then.
She squirmed against him and shivered. ‘That was King Valmeyan flying to war,’ she whispered. ‘Incandescence. Avalanche. Unmaker. I’ve seen them before.’
The King of the Crags. Kemir gave a bitter snort. ‘Well that’s all right then, since I already wanted to kill him anyway.’
‘Why did they burn Plag’s Bay?’
He shrugged. That was what dragon-riders did, wasn’t it? Burned people? He might have said something, but as Kemir was thinking, he fell soundly asleep, and there weren’t any dreams of Sollos or of his brother or his sister or his father or his friends. No dreams of them at all. All he saw was desert, endless desert, dunes in waves and waves like the sea. A desert of ash and sand and a distant tower wreathed in flames.
And then Snow, rising out of the lake of glacier water in the Worldspine, only this time it wasn’t Nadira Kemir was looking for. This time it was Kataros.
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I did not eat this one.
It had been days, and he’d been thinking that whatever bond held them had finally broken. But no.
You are my eyes. My ears. Your thoughts are mine, Kemir, whenever I choose to see them.
I will run away from you. I will find a place so far that you can’t find me.
Then you must mean to die, Kemir, for that is the only place I cannot follow.
Then he was awake. Shards of daylight were sneaking in through the windows, enough that Kemir could see across the half-deck. Kat was shaking him. Her mouth hung open and she was shivering. He didn’t understand at first. When she clung to him though, the fingers gripping his arm were like claws. She was frightened.
‘Where were you?’ The air was stuffy and ripe.
‘Eh?’ He stood up, too quickly and forgetting where he was, and banged his head. ‘What do you mean where was I? Where is everyone? What’s happened?’
‘I was shaking and shaking you. You wouldn’t wake up.’
He collected his bow and his belt and his knife and everything else. Frowned. The light outside was more than the dim light of dawn. He peered at the windows. ‘Eh?’
‘It’s the middle of the day. You slept like the dead.’
Still half asleep, Kemir followed her up and out into the open air. The deck was full. Almost everyone was simply staring across the water, and when Kemir managed to find himself a place where he could see, he knew why. They were staring at the carnage on the riverbank. Plag’s Bay might have been little more than a collection of huts and jetties, Watersgate not much more, but the smashed, charred, smouldering scar on the land he was looking at now had been a town, and a big one. They were at the mouth of the Fury gorge, the terraced cliff walls still visible upriver behind them, so there was only one place it could be.
‘Valleyford.’ He blinked, almost expecting the town to suddenly reappear as he remembered it. It had been completely destroyed. He shivered. He’d liked Valleyford. It had been his sort of town. A huge glorified marketplace really, but still enough for thousands to live there, swapping goods travelling down the river from the Worldspine and from the Evenspire Road with cargoes sailing up from Furymouth, Farakkan, Purkan, places like that down the river. Caravans fresh from the Pinnacles crossed the river here on their way to Bazim Crag, while weary merchants from as far away as Bloodsalt finally reach the end of Yinazhin’s Way at Valleyford. If there was anything you couldn’t get in Valleyford, there was a good chance you couldn’t get it anywhere, at least not outside the Taiytakei markets in Furymouth, and that was one place Kemir had never been.
All gone. Wiped into a black and scorched smear of nothing, the last lazy wafts of smoke rising from the ruins. Maybe five thousand people had lived in Valleyford.
‘There were alchemists here,’ murmured Kataros.
‘And the speaker’s soldiers too.’ Kemir’s head felt numb. No one in their right mind would do something like this. Burning alchemists was worse than any mere treason. And yet here it was, done.
No human in their right mind. He shivered again. ‘Why are we stopping?’ Other boats were here too, some of them already moored against the shore, others milling about in the shallow waters away from the main current, not sure what to do. Some of them were lumbering cargo barges like the one Kemir was on. Most were little river skiffs.
A loud voice broke the stillness. One of the refugees from Plag’s Bay had declared himself captain. ‘Right. Enough lollygagging. Form a shore party.’
For a few minutes, Kemir thought they meant to lend a hand with things like looking for survivors, digging them out of the wreckage, looking after the injured, that sort of thing. It was only when the barge started jockeying for position with two other barges at one of the surviving jetties that he realised his mistake. There was shouting and swearing, and he heard it in the curses. Plunder. They were there to take whatever they could get away with. And if we find some survivors, we might just help them, but only if they can pay for it, eh? And all this less than a day after your own homes were burned to cinders.
The barge won its battle for a place at the waterfront, Kemir pushed past the sailors and jumped ashore. He wasn’t sure why it bothered him so much – not all that long ago he’d have been at the front of the queue if there was any plundering to be done – but if there was anyone he could find still alive then he was going to take them with him, back on the barge, whether they had money to pay for his help or not.
‘Hoi! You!’ The self-proclaimed barge captain. Kemir turned and shot back a glance of such venom that he saw the man flinch. He let his hand flicker to the hilt of his knife and made sure of his bow too. Anyone could sail a barge down a river with the current, Kemir reckoned. Didn’t need to be any one particular person at all.
He cocked his head. ‘Problem?’
The man pinched his lips. ‘We sail when we sail. We’ll not wait on stragglers.’
‘I bet you won’t.’ Kemir turned away, muttering under his breath.
The barge had arrived too late. There must have been a hundred or more river folk already picking through the skeleton of the town. Kemir, as he walked deeper into the smouldering ash, saw at least one body, stripped bare, with a fresh knife wound. Further still and the heat of the embers drove him back. He turned away. No survivors here. Instead he tried a little further down the river, away from the main harbour, where a small cluster of river skiffs had pulled up to the bank and men were busy at work. In the midst of them a group of men, poorly armed but armed nonetheless, stood around a strangely familiar figure, almost as if they were supervising the looting.
The blood-mage. Kithyr. He was carrying something long wrapped in black cloth. Kemir stopped dead. Took two quick paces forward and then stopped again.
I could shoot him. In the head. Blood-mage or not, that should do the trick. Unless I miss, but I’m not going to miss. So that would just leave the problem of doing it in broad daylight with about a hundred people to remember my face. Not to mention his motley collection of bodyguards. Of course, they might not care after their master’s dead . . . The mage turned. He looked straight at Kemir. Ah. And now he’s seen me. Makes it a lot harder to shoot a man when he can see the arrow coming. Turn away, Kemir. Turn away. Let him stay and fight the dragons. Evil for evil. Not your fight now, not any more.
With an effort, Kemir turned his back on the mage. He was wasting his time. Should have stayed on the boat. As he walked back, he thought he saw the Picker too, watching him. Another man I’d like to kill. Pay you back for the scar you put on me. Well you can both stay and fight dragons. Good luck to you.
He stopped for a moment where a small cluster of sad-looking men and women sat around in clothes stained with ash and smoke. Survivors. Six of them. Two old men, a boy who was close to being a man but hadn’t quite made it yet and a women with two small children, a little family miracle. They didn’t have anything, so the looters from the river had ignored them.
The old Kemir would have raised an eyebrow, shrugged a shoulder and walked on by. But that old Kemir was dead, drifting in the water somewhere back up the Fury like the old shed skin of a snake. The new Kemir took a deep breath and stepped closer.
‘Dragons?’ Why am I asking? What else would burn a whole town flat?
No one answered. No one bothered to even look at him. He could see their point. Whatever they’d had had long been taken from them.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can get you down the river to the next town.’ What was that? Arys Crossing? If it was still there. ‘You’ll have food until we get there.’
One of the old men slowly looked up at him. ‘And then?’
‘And then you get to thank me for my kindness. You have to work the rest out for yourselves. I have my own troubles. Stay if you want.’ He shrugged and turned away.
‘Wait!’ The woman with the children. No surprise there. He waited.
‘Any more?’
Both the old men shook their heads. The boy thought
about it, then nodded. Too young to be a man, really, but that’s what you’ll have to be. That’s what war does. Turns boys into men because it’s kinder than calling them orphans.
‘Dragons,’ he said again, as he led them back to the barge. ‘Did they have riders on them, the dragons that did this?’
The woman spat. ‘Don’t get dragons with no riders.’
She hurried her children past Kemir, but he saw one of them turn and look at him with big wide fearful eyes. The boy shook his head.
No. No riders.
29
Snow
Home.
Snow shuffled into the cave. It was small and cramped, pressing down on her. There was no space to spread her wings. Caves were no places for dragons. She could see the one she was looking for, though, tucked away into the body of a hatchling.
She brushed past the charcoal statue that had once been the master of Outwatch. It fell and smashed on the flat stone floor.
I am chained, Beloved Memory of a Lover Distant and Lost.
I do not bear that name now. Snow squeezed further in. She stretched out her neck and peered at the little hatchling. Black. How dull.
The hatchling hissed at her. White. How gaudy.
Lazily, Snow took the chain around the hatchling’s neck and tore it from the cave wall. Then she nuzzled gently with her teeth at the links around the hatchling’s throat and bit the metal delicately in two. There. You are free. Outside, the air filled with the roars and shrieks of the other dragons. Her dragons, the others she had freed. They would not forget that. A debt was a debt.
The stone of the cave trembled and shook, distant impacts striking the ground above. Snow felt them tug at her, pulling her away to join in the destruction. There was the tower to be toppled. Farms filled with little ones to be burned. Food, lots and lots of joyous food, roaming in the fields. They would gorge themselves when they were done here. As long as they didn’t touch the little ones. The Embers at the alchemist caves with their poisoned blood had taught her that lesson.
