The Order of the Scales

by Stephen Deas

  He saw dragons racing away too: terrified riders desperate to live. Saw others give vengeful chase. In that moment, he understood. Principles was a lie. There was no strategy here, no tactic to outwit the enemy, not in this sprawling shapeless horror. There was terror, that was all. It was who broke first, nothing more, nothing less. Whose riders fled in fear and whose gave themselves up to the dragon-fury, which was every bit as terrible.

  For a moment he watched appalled, for the few seconds he had to think before there was a war-dragon attacking from below. Wraithwing was already turning; Jehal could feel his desire to fight. Enough running and ducking. Enough of scorpions. Tooth and claw. The southern way. He could feel the other dragons around him answering, returning Wraithwing’s challenge with glee.

  The war-dragon almost caught him. Wraithwing let it, then slashed the air with his tail, slapped the other dragon on the nose and turned in the way that only Wraithwing could turn, flipping in the air. The dragons doused each other with fire while Jehal pressed himself flat, visor down, shielding his damaged hand from the flames and hoping not to die. Wraithwing shuddered. Tooth and claw and tail tore and lashed at the riders on the war-dragon’s back, and then they were apart and he was still alive. Safe.

  Safe until he felt a sudden sharp tug on the saddle and Wraithwing’s scales started to slide under his hands.

  No! He flipped up the visor. He was strapped to his saddle, but the whole harness was moving. No! No! No! His fingers fumbled with the straps. A dragon saddle and harness weighed as much as a man. And then what? Ride bareback? I hate to tell you, but that only works with horses. He almost shouted at Wraithwing to dive for the ground but bit his tongue. The dragon would do exactly that, and then what? It didn’t make much difference whether you fell off the back of a dragon from half a mile up or from fifty feet about the ground, the mess was still about the same.

  He cast a quick glance behind. The war-dragon was still there. Lots of ropes and bits of harness trailed behind it, but it hadn’t gone for the ground. Someone was still alive to tell it what to do. Any moment now that someone would come back for another go.

  Vishmir’s cock! The saddle slipped again. Wraithwing was flying in a straight line now, with long careful wingbeats, his body slightly twisted as though trying to help Jehal stay balanced. Which would have been all very well if they had lots of open space around and could glide very gently to the ground. Less helpful in the middle of a fight. Might as well have painted ‘Eat me’ on his back.

  A shower of stray scorpion bolts fell from the battle above. One punched a hole through Wraithwing’s wing. The dragon didn’t flinch.

  I’m going to fall.

  Now half a dragon-rider fell past him. A few seconds later a war-dragon followed, one without a painted belly, Jehal saw. Stupid thing, waste of effort, noticing that. Don’t have time, don’t have time! The saddle shifted again. Started to slide.

  Saddle straps were gone. Still no one was diving to finish him. All he had to do was pull himself forward out of the saddle slowly and carefully, wrap his arms around Wraithwing somehow and fall out of the sky a little way so everyone thought he was dead. And then, just maybe, if he was really, really lucky, slowly glide to ground and make a nice gentle landing without shattering every bone in his body.

  Right. And then Hyrkallan will land beside you and personally bend his knee and call you speaker. Because that’s just as likely.

  Wraithwing veered sharply. For a moment the sun turned off and everything went dark. Jehal squawked in panic as he and the saddle fell away, and then something enormous went straight over him, a vast black shape. Talons as long as a man’s leg snatched at the space where he’d been, tore a furrow in Wraithwing’s back, ripping scales and the muscle beneath, and pulled away what little of Jehal’s harness remained. Then the black dragon had passed, the sun came out again and Jehal was left hanging in the air. Alive and perfectly unharmed and with a sudden and dire shortage of wings.

  And then he fell.

  34

  The Throne of Salt

  Cities. She could smell them from a hundred miles away, except it wasn’t a scent that taunted her but thoughts. Human thoughts. Thousands upon thousands of them, faint and distant and intertwined, a filthy mass of gibberish.

  Cities. They stank. They intrude.

  Other little thoughts popped up, scattered around her. Bright pinpricks of sentience. Humans lived everywhere. Even here in the barren deserts, they eked out an existence in tiny knots and clusters. Wherever there was water there were more of them. Water was one of the few things a dragon needed. Water to stay cool. Out here in the desert they might sleep at the bottom of a river or a lake to keep out of the midday heat.

  Everything breathes. It was an uneasy topic among the dragons. Everything breathed. Everything except dragons.

  When she thought about that the other dragons tried not to listen. But everything breathes. She could feel them, distancing their thoughts from her, but they could never hide them, not completely. Just as she couldn’t hide hers as she remembered the alchemists and the naked men with painted skins and poison in their blood who killed dragons as they gave their lives away.

  She spread her wings over the landscape. A wide riverbed snaked through little hills of jumbled earth, dead and dry except for tufts of thorny grass. A trickle of water glistening. This was a land of snakes and spiders. Dragons didn’t belong here. Here was too hot. She missed the mountains and their snowy crags and their glaciers and their freezing lakes. The city drew them on, though. The stink of it. The cacophony of thoughts, reaching out across the miles, a constant thorn in the mind.

  They found it a day and a night of flight from the smoking ruin of Outwatch. The home of the last little one who had called himself king of all the realms. She didn’t know the name of it. She’d never asked. It was an ugly place. Glaring white stone, low squat buildings, sat beside a huge flat lake of shallow tepid water. Beyond, salt flats stretched out to throttle the horizon, blinding in the sun. There were towers, but not very many. Walls, but little and low. No army would ever march out here, or if it did, would die of thirst and heat before it could arrive. That was this city’s defence. Against men it might have been perfect. Against dragons, it was useless.

  They started with the eyrie. When they were done, they burned the lake dry and then flew a hundred miles along the sluggish river that fed it and made it flow another way. Heat and thirst.

  When they were done with that, they flew back. They hunted and they feasted. As night fell they stretched out to cool and to doze. Sated and surrounded by ash.

  In the morning that followed, when the city that happened to be called Bloodsalt was nothing but blackened stone and scorched earth, when the dragons had all eaten their fill and there was nothing left alive for a hundred miles save the few little ones who’d managed to hide in the deepest of the caverns, they heard a cry. As one, the dragons stopped, paused from their feast as a thousand voices raged in fury among the spirits of the dead.

  The Spear of the Earth. The horror that had almost destroyed the world, awake again. Snow reached out for it, sought it. She caught a second dragon’s thoughts, a fleeting glimpse of what he saw before the spear snuffed him out.

  A glimpse, but a glimpse was enough.

  Kemir!

  35

  The Lovers

  Jehal fell twenty feet and then stopped with a wrenching shock of pain. He screamed and whimpered and then swung around, helpless as a puppet, thumping into Wraithwing’s belly. He bounced off again, dangling, still attached to the dragon by the last rope, the legbreaker, the one that was supposed to save your life when exactly this happened, but rarely did.

  Legbreaker. They called it that for a reason. He screamed again. His whole back was roaring agony. His leg, the leg where Shezira had shot him, felt as though he’d almost ripped it out of its socket. He’d thought the wound was healed, at least as healed as it would ever get, but apparently not.

  Wraithwi
ng tucked in his wings and dived through the cloud of fighting dragons. The wind picked Jehal up and tossed him around like a doll, battering him against the dragon’s scales. Jehal yelled and screamed and shouted but he couldn’t hear himself over the storm of air, invisible fingers clenched around him like a giant hand, smashing him over and over against the dragon as though he was a nut and it was trying to crack him open, each blow slamming the life out of him piece by piece. Not for long, though. They’d get to the ground; Wraithwing would spread his wings and stop, and then either the rope would be too long and he’d be dashed to pieces on the ground, or else his leg would rip clean off and then he’d be dashed to pieces on the ground. He’d have found it ironic if he wasn’t too busy drowning in waves of pain and a wind that tore the air right out of his lungs.

  As they plunged away from the roiling battle everything broke into pieces. He saw flashes of this, flashes of that, found himself lost in memories of far-off places with lovers now dead, then jerked back to pounding smashing roaring agony. Eventually he stopped screaming. He wasn’t sure when because the wind roared so loud he couldn’t hear anything else.

  Wraithwing levelled out, circling towards the closest of the three monoliths that made up the Pinnacles, and the wind lost its will to shatter Jehal against the dragon’s side. Even the pain seemed to give up, reduced to agony that was merely like having his leg hacked at with a rusty saw. Which, compared to what it had been before, was as good as no pain at all.

  He couldn’t see much of the battle any more. Didn’t matter. Hadn’t made much sense when he’d been the right way up, so it wasn’t going to make any now. They weren’t alone, that’s all he knew. Dragons were falling all around him. Riderless. Some with white bellies, some without. Half and half. Hard to tell who was winning. If you could count slaughtering almost an entire generation of dragon-riders in a single battle as winning at all. What if there aren’t enough riders left to collect all the fallen dragons, eh? Jeiros isn’t going to like that very much, is he, eh? Nothing like someone else’s misery to take your mind off your own. He watched with a dull interest. Still need to ask him why he can’t just make more of his bloody potions.

  Yes. That helps. Let’s make a mental list of all the things I can crack on with once I’m on my feet again.

  Nice try. But how exactly is that going to happen? Are we going to hover over the ground while I dangle helplessly, waiting for someone to come and cut me loose? Every dragon-rider was taught what you were supposed to do in this situation, but always with a twinkle in the eye from their teacher, as if to say, Don’t bother with this. Nothing ever gets this bad without you being already dead. First choice was to pull your knees into your chest, grab hold of the rope with your hands and pull yourself up hand over hand until you reached the place where the rope was tied around the dragon’s neck. Then haul yourself up onto the back of the dragon and ride it bareback to the ground. Jehal struggled to count how many things were wrong with that. Climbing a rope hanging from a beam in a nice sheltered learning hall is all very well, but not much like climbing one with a dragon and the wind both trying to knock you off. Not quite the same thing, uncle. Silvallan once said that they took his riders out to a bridge across a gorge in the worst storms of the year, tied a rope around them and threw them off. Seemed like idiocy at the time. And then there’s the bit about riding the dragon bareback all the way home. Has anyone ever actually done that? Because if they have, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it. How does that work, exactly? How do you stay on? And even if you can stay on when it’s flying, how do you stay on when you land, eh?

  All of which would be interesting to find out about and a vast improvement over his current position. His main problem was the first bit, the bit about pulling your knees to your chest to get your hands on the rope. He simply couldn’t do it. He could get about halfway and then the pain was so much that even screaming wasn’t any relief any more and he thought he might pass out. After the third effort, he had to admit defeat.

  Second choice. Wait until you’re almost down, then cut the rope with a knife to fall and land in something soft, water being the obvious option. Pity we’re over a hundred miles from the sea. A lake then or a river. The Fury wasn’t all that far away, was it? There were canals too, in the Silver City. Oh, but wait. I’m wearing dragon-scale armour, as a rider always does. So, let’s suppose for a moment that there is some water, what happens when I fall in it? Oh yes. I drown. Marvellous. Thank you for that one, uncle.

  They were falling towards Zafir’s capital, the Silver City, which spread out between the three Pinnacles. Dragons still rained from the sky. Can’t be nice to be down there. First you get a few thousand scorpion bolts raining down. Then bits of rider and saddle and the scorpions themselves falling around your head, and then a couple of minutes later there’s dragons everywhere, stomping about looking for the remains of their riders, wailing and shrieking their heads off. How long do they keep looking? Hard to imagine they’re particularly careful about what they tread on either.

  He didn’t know, and if anyone else did, they weren’t here to ask. Not that it made any difference. The Silver City hardly counted as a soft landing.

  He checked his belt for a knife. He had that at least. And then it occurred to him that to cut the rope he’d have to reach it with his hands. Which meant pulling his knees to his chest, that thing he couldn’t do, and he was right back to where he started. Dead. He tried to be philosophical about it, but that turned out to be really hard when it felt like someone had beaten you from head to toe with a hammer and was now busy rubbing various ends of broken leg-bone against each other. Shouting and screaming didn’t really change anything. Cursing didn’t help either. Felt rather futile. A bit like shouting at a dragon.

  He was a bit blurry on how the afterlife was supposed to work. Your ancestors supposedly hung around in some sort of limbo, keeping half an eye on you, offering a little guidance here and there, maybe making subtle adjustments to fate and destiny. This had always seemed to Jehal at best a hobby for a few of the newly dead who really needed to keep themselves busy for a while, and most likely something that would be neglected entirely. Wouldn’t the dead have better things to do? Although he’d never given much thought to what those things might be.

  Zafir has probably murdered Lystra. This way maybe I get to see her again.

  The ground came slowly closer. Wraithwing was now gliding in gentle circles and the wind had let go of him. It was almost quiet. Almost peaceful. Almost. If he ignored the distant falling dragons and the fires starting in the city below.

  All the people I murdered, will they be waiting? Hyram, Aliphera, are you watching me now? My father. My brother, my sisters, my mother, my ever-loyal uncle, Meteroa. I’m sure he’s told you all that I was the one who played with Calzarin’s madness. Are you all waiting for me? What about all the people who died at Evenspire? The Red Riders? The people dying here and now? Are you there?

  No. Maybe he didn’t want to die just yet. Prayers were for fools – he’d believed that for as long as he could remember – but he prayed now, prayed to any of his ancestors who might be in the mood to listen and forgive him. Prayed to the old gods that no one except the dragon-priests worshipped any more. Prayed to anyone who might listen.

  The only response was a sudden jerk on the legbreaker, sending whole new spasms of pain through his hip and down his spine. Above him, Wraithwing clenched his claws. The dragon’s head whipped back and forth, searching. Jehal had enough time to catch a glimpse of something sticking out of the dragon’s side.

  Scorpion bolt. And then the dragon pitched down and hurtled towards the nearest of the Pinnacles.

  ‘No!’ Jehal screamed. ‘Don’t!’

  Another scorpion bolt shot past and then another. Jehal whimpered. Couldn’t be bothered to argue though. A scorpion bolt through the head would be a mercy, wouldn’t it?

  The top of the Fortress of Watchfulness loomed up towards them. Exhausted, Jehal put his hand
to his visor. He could see Wraithwing getting ready to douse the irritating little stinging things in flames to shut them up. He could see the scorpions, the men behind them starting to back away, turning, running for cover . . .

  Here it comes.

  He flipped his visor shut, closed his eyes. Instinct really, as Wraithwing belched flames and washed the top of the fortress clean. No reason to add a singed face to his list of woes. Although with the ground racing up to smash his bones, it hardly made a difference, did it?

  The fire came again and again and again. Jehal felt each blast ripple and tremor down the legbreaker. Then he felt a long steady pull and something very hard and solid but curiously not as bone-shattering as he had expected clocked him around the head. He gasped and swore and braced himself for more. Cringed. He could almost feel the spirits of the dead rubbing their hands in gleeful anticipation. Here he comes . . .

  A huge wave of something that wasn’t pain surged out of his leg. It took him a moment to realise that it was relief. The simple absence of pain, or at least a good lessening of it. The pull was suddenly gone. For a moment he had the mad idea that the rope must have snapped – he was falling, that was why the rope wasn’t killing him any more. Except that wasn’t right either. Something huge had taken hold of him.

  Wraithwing. The dragon’s claws were wrapped around him.

  He opened his visor. He was lying flat on hard stone. Wraithwing was standing over him, one fore-claw unwrapping itself from him. The dragon roared and again hosed the battlements with fire; then it looked down between its legs at Jehal and made a clumsy grab for the legbreaker. Its talons were too big and crude to do anything more than move it about. Wraithwing gave an angry snort.