The Order of the Scales

by Stephen Deas

  Alive!

  Jehal sat up. Pain burst through him again as though he’d been shot. But alive! He took a few shallow breaths and then leaned forward and reached for his feet. Another bolt of pain stabbed him. Always in the same place. Always where Shezira had shot him. But still, alive! Deep breaths this time. His ankle hurt but his foot wasn’t at some funny angle. His knee felt like someone had had a good go at ripping his shin-bone out of its socket. Which probably wasn’t that far from the truth, but nothing was obviously broken or twisted. He poked and prodded himself to be sure, but the rest of his leg looked like it was going to work again one day. He lay back on the stone and started to laugh. Alive! See that, ancestors! You don’t get me yet after all! He lay still, whimpering, weeping and laughing all at once.

  Wraithwing shifted and growled. Soldiers were up on the battlements again. They had dragon-scale shields. Crossbows too. Pointing at him. The dragon belched fire; the soldiers hid behind their shields, but as soon as Wraithwing paused, they raised their crossbows. No asking him who he was or offering to take his surrender or any such nonsense; they simply wanted to kill him. The first bolt went about ten feet wide. The second hit Wraithwing in the foot and stuck, and then they didn’t have time for any more before the dragon roared fire back at them again. Jehal tried to ignore them. He rolled, squealing, behind Wraithwing’s legs, pulled the knife out of his belt and set to work on the legbreaker. He felt rather than saw Wraithwing’s fire burst out again. Cut the rope. Don’t look at the archers. Just cut the rope.

  Alive! He still couldn’t stop laughing.

  The sun went out. It took him a moment to realise that Wraithwing was shielding him with his wings, blotting out the light but blocking the arrows too.

  Clever. The legbreaker yielded to his knife. Jehal took a deep breath and collapsed again, too drained to move. Now can we just stay here until they all go away? As long as he stayed still, the pain was almost bearable. If he moved, that was a different matter, but with a dragon standing watch over him, he couldn’t think of any reason why he should. He closed his eyes. Only for a few minutes, he thought. Only until I can summon some sort of energy. He felt almost delirious. Alive! He’d fallen off his dragon and he was alive. For those few moments nothing else mattered.

  He wasn’t sure how long he lay there. Might have been a few minutes or might have been a few hours. He drifted, floated, swayed up and down, tossed from wave to wave of joy and pain, until the light suddenly crashed in again and there was a voice. Jehal opened his eyes and blinked. The light, it seemed, had become quite fierce. The sun was back again.

  ‘Hello?’

  He took a deep breath, which hurt, and sat up, which hurt a lot more and quite enough to convince him not to try and stand up. On the battlements where the soldiers with crossbows had been there was now a single rider, arms spread wide. I surrender.

  ‘Hello?’

  With agonising slowness, Jehal crawled out from under Wraithwing. Just far enough to look. Even that was almost more than he could do. He looked at the rider. Had no idea who it was. What a sight I must be, peering up at you on my hands and knees, barely able to move. But I have a dragon and you don’t. Far above in the bright blue sky there were lots of specks. Or maybe he was imagining them. Either way, it didn’t help him tell whose side had won.

  ‘Well?’ he croaked.

  The rider peered down at him then shouted, ‘In the name of King Valmeyan, King of the Crags, I submit my person and all those here to the authority of the Speaker of the Nine Realms.’

  Jehal beamed through the pain. He managed to get as far as kneeling. ‘Does that mean I won?’

  The rider stiffened. ‘I am offering my surrender to anyone who serves the speaker.’

  ‘Oh. Pity. I don’t serve the speaker, you see.’ The scale of what fate had handed him slowly dawned on him. I was the first to land . . .

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Because I am the speaker. I am King Jehal, King of the Endless Sea, Lord of the Adamantine Palace and Speaker of the Realms, and I will accept your surrender on one condition. You will bring me my son and you will bring me my wife, and you will bring them to me in exactly whatever state they are to be found, since, as you can see, I can’t really go looking for them at the moment.’ With an enormous effort, he gripped Wraithwing’s wing and pulled himself onto his feet. Or onto the one foot that would bear any weight. ‘And if you can’t do that because Zafir took them away with her, then I don’t want your surrender. You can all burn. If they’re dead and she left the bodies here for me, then whoever has the courage to bring them out can live and everyone else dies. Unless I suffer a sudden fit of uncontrollable rage, in which case maybe it’ll be the other way round.’

  Jehal stared across the open space and grinned, although inside he only wanted to curl up and cry. For a little while he’d been too busy with his own misery to think about Lystra. Now she was back. It didn’t hurt quite as bad as hanging upside down from his ruined leg being battered by the wind against the belly of a dragon – he doubted anything could ever hurt as much as that – but it hurt a lot, nonetheless. Enough, maybe, to burn Zafir’s home to ash along with everyone who lived there. Not exactly fair, really. It’s not as if they all took turns to murder Lystra. But it’s the principle. That’s how you teach people not to throw in their lot with the wrong side.

  Yes, said a little voice. Remind me. How well, exactly, is that philosophy working out for you right now?

  It could be better. But I’m prepared to give it one more crack of the whip. Now shut up.

  The rider was still there. Why? Shouldn’t you be running away by now? ‘Your Holiness, may I ask what the terms of our surrender might be if Queen Lystra and her son are still alive?’

  Jehal threw back his head and howled with bitter laughter. As if that’s going to happen.

  ‘Why then you can all go free back to your families. I won’t even ransom you.’ He was looking at the sky, at the dragons still circling up there. When he looked back at the battlements, the rider was gone.

  Bastard. That’s hope you’ve given me. However much I know better, I can’t turn it away. Hope is like Taiytakei poison. Hope eats you slowly from the inside and turns men into fools. I don’t want hope, but now you’ve given it to me we both know there’s only one antidote. When you don’t come back I’m going to make sure I burn you first, whoever you are. We all know that everything is ruined. We all know I’m getting exactly what I deserve. All my fault. Blah blah blah. Yes, ancestors, I know you’re all laughing at me. Let me guess. You guided my fate and landed me here, alive and crippled, just for this. You kept me alive just so that I never find Lystra, I never find out what happened to her. I hunt Zafir and Valmeyan to the ends of the world and hang them both, but they never tell me. I am what you always wanted, your Vishmir. I sit on the Adamantine Throne for thirty years and I am remembered as the best speaker the realms have ever known. And for every aching second I am torn apart with hope and despair and spend most of my time either wishing I was dead or wondering what tiny corner of the world is left to be scoured. What I don’t get is my wife back. That about right? Oh—

  Even as he beat the hope away, there she was. On the top of the battlements while dragons fell out of the sky around them. An illusion of his deranged and damaged imagination.

  Too much pain, too much exhaustion, too much madness. That must be what it is.

  He wasn’t sure what happened after that. It seemed as though one moment she was there and the next she was gone, and the one after that she was beside him, in front of him, holding him so tightly that he couldn’t breathe.

  ‘My love, my love, my love!’ That was all she said.

  It had to be a trick. Jehal pushed her away so he could see her clearly, but apparently he had something in his eye. Both of them. A trick. A doppelgänger. An imposter.

  No. The rather plain, bruised and battered woman in front of him was none of those. He felt his head spin. He staggered, tried to catch h
imself with his ruined leg and fell into her arms.

  ‘You’re alive,’ he murmured, filled with disbelief. And then he fainted.

  36

  A Little Help

  Luck was a fickle mistress, Vioros thought. He watched the battle from afar with Jeiros and half a dozen other alchemists, sat on the backs of dragons circling safely away from the fighting. Seven dragons, all of them hunters, were all Jehal was willing to spare. The alchemists had loaded them with as much as they could carry and then quietly hoped and prayed they wouldn’t be called on to fight. Luck heard them. Vioros watched the hordes of dragons crash together, miles away, like two dark clouds blown together in a storm. He watched hundreds of them plunge from the sky, distant specks falling like soft black snow, chasing after their fallen riders. He watched survivors scatter and flee, other dragons pursue, and was left to guess which side had actually won. The answer eventually came as flashes of fire from the tops of the Pinnacles. Cautiously, the riders who flew the alchemists’ dragons approached. No one bothered to come and tell them that the battle was over.

  Yes, luck. Luck had been busy today. Luck had kept Hyrkallan alive to revel in his victory while more than half his riders had died. Luck had made King Jehal the first to land on the Pinnacles, if land was a reasonable way to describe it. Luck had provided the alchemists with enough potion stored in the city eyries to keep the thousand and more dragons now encamped around the Pinnacles under control for a few days. After that, Vioros hadn’t the first idea what they would do. Sirion and Hyrkallan had brought most of what they had. The Adamantine Eyrie had been stripped bare. Zafir had denuded Furymouth. Outside Valmeyan’s hidden mountain eyries and whatever hoard Jeiros was keeping to himself, there was nothing left.

  So now they were looking for more. The dragon-riders might dismount and run into the halls to feast and drink and sing of their victory, but for Vioros and the alchemists the real battle was about to start.

  He went to Valleyford first because it was where the alchemists had long had a stronghold. The potions from the cellars there had been used to keep the dragons of Bazim Crag and Three Rivers docile, but there was always the chance that more had been squirrelled away. At least that was what Jeiros and Vioros had both thought before he left on his fool’s errand. As it was, he didn’t even bother landing. Valleyford had been obliterated. Arys Crossing too – whoever had burned it this time had done a much better job than Vishmir had in the War of Thorns. The Alatcazat monastery was gone. Gutted. So much for their fabled luck. Hammerford, sandwiched between them, had fared somewhat better in that the place had only been half destroyed. There were still people there.

  Hammerford was a nothing place and certainly not likely to yield a secret coven of alchemists who just happened to have hidden a few hundred handy barrels of dragon-potion. The sensible thing was to go straight back to Jeiros, empty-handed. Maybe strike out for Clifftop and Furymouth and see what, if anything, Zafir had missed.

  Sensible, but on the other hand the waterfront at Hammerford had acquired two giant dragon statues that hadn’t been there six months earlier, and Vioros was fairly sure he would have heard about something like that. So he circled and then landed after all because he was curious, and that was where luck struck again. The people of Hammerford didn’t know much about their new statues, but they had caught one of the riders who’d brought the fire to their town. They hadn’t got round to hanging him yet, and yes, Vioros could talk to him. Apparently he called himself Kemir, but that was obviously a lie since it was an outsider name and the man was clearly a dragon-rider. So said the folk of Hammerford, who were clearly itching to murder at least someone for what had happened to them.

  By his reckoning, Vioros listened to Kemir for the best part of two hours. Truth be told, he lost track of time in the cellar where the townsfolk were keeping him. Everything the sell-sword said sounded so fantastic, yet there was no way he could have known some of the things he described unless he’d been there, and then there was the small matter of the blood-magic that Vioros had used to force the truth out of him. As far as Vioros could tell, the sell-sword hadn’t even tried to resist it.

  Which meant that Jeiros was right and the white rogue had returned. Which meant that there weren’t one or two or four awoken dragons but more like twenty. Which in turn meant that he and everyone else were all as good as dead, and it was just a matter of time. All their fretting about how to eke out what potion Jeiros could make was a complete waste.

  And then, at the end, the sell-sword told him about the spear.

  When he was done, Vioros staggered for the doorway out of the cellar.

  ‘Alchemist.’ The sell-sword could barely speak. The beating he’d taken from the townspeople, well, Vioros counted himself lucky that the man wasn’t already dead.

  ‘I can’t save you, sell-sword. I’m sorry.’ Which was a lie – he wasn’t sorry at all. The man might not have been a dragon-rider, might not have burned half the town, but he could still hang. As far as Vioros was concerned, he deserved a death a lot slower than a rope. Rogues. The worst terror of all.

  ‘Kill me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Snow. She knows I’m here. She’s coming. For the spear. She feels me.’

  Vioros ran. In the harsh sunlight outside he swayed and sat down heavily on a piece of broken wall covered in ash. Then he held his head in his hands. A tremor shook him. A lot of things made sense now, and none of them were good. How many dragons had turned when Prince Kazan had his moment of folly? No one had ever been quite sure, but it couldn’t have been more than ten, and it had taken, what? All the riders from three realms and the Adamantine Men to rein them in. Now there were twice that many. Twenty dragons. It would take all the riders in the world to contain twenty dragons. Hundreds of people would die, probably thousands, but if every king and every queen bowed to the command of the speaker and gave up their dragons to the hunt, they just might all get to see their children grow up.

  Yes, that was quite enough to make him give up hope, right there and then. Never mind everything else, never mind the dire state of the Order, never mind this stupid war. Never mind all of that, sooner or later Jeiros would have no choice but to order a cull. Never mind Jehal; even if they’d had a speaker like Vishmir, twenty free dragons might have been more than the realms could tame. The sell-sword had given him all that, and then at the end he’d given him the Adamantine Spear. A relic that had sat around in the Adamantine Palace, given the place its name even, and done absolutely nothing in all that time. A relic whose myths and legends had peeled off over the years like dead skin, until no one believed anything any more. And here it was, turning dragons into stone.

  And then, right at the end, the bastard had taken that hope and pissed on it, as casually as anything. Oh, I threw it at the dragon and then I lost it. Lost it? How do you lose something like the Adamantine Spear? Vishmir’s cock! I looked for it but I was mostly too busy looking for the alchemist I promised to protect. What was the spear doing here and not in the palace? A blood-mage had it and then someone cut his hand off. What was all that about? A blood-mage? Did Jeiros know? Did he even know the spear was missing?

  There was the spear itself too. Turning dragons into stone? Had it always done that? That would explain the legend of Narammed the Dragonslayer, but still . . . How could the Order not know something like that?

  Most of all, what did Vioros do now? Go back to the grand master and tell him that they were all doomed, except that they might be saved if only they could find a magic spear that they’d somehow lost without noticing they’d lost it which had never shown any sign of being anything special before?

  No one was going to believe him. Everyone had more important things to do. Or they thought they did.

  So. He could stay here until he found that blasted spear. Surely it couldn’t have gone too far, could it? It was made of metal, after all, so it could hardly have floated off down the river. Or he could go back to the speaker and his riders a
nd Grand Master Jeiros, tell them half the truth, trick them into coming back here to see it all for themselves and then they could do the searching. Jeiros could talk to the sell-sword. Hear it all for himself. All in all that sounded like a much better proposition.

  In his mind he got up and hurried to his dragon, keen to bring riders back here as soon as possible. His legs, though, didn’t move. There was a third choice, one they were quite aware of, and they weren’t going to move until he at least conceded it was there.

  Yes. Well, go on then. I could get on my dragon and fly to Furymouth and get on a Taiytakei ship and never come back. What of it?I suppose I’d do well enough.

  His legs, it seemed, wanted more. He frowned and forced himself to his feet. That was no way for an alchemist to think. He was sworn to protect the realms from exactly this.

  Think about it for a moment. There are rogues loose. Maybe all the dragon-riders in the realms could stop them, or maybe not. But we won’t get to find out, because the only way we can keep the rest of our dragons tame is to cull them. Which we’ll never be allowed to do because there’s a war on. So, are you going to die for no better reason than running away would make you look bad to your ancestors? Are they going to be happier that you stayed here like a good little alchemist and died with all the rest, honour intact? Or do you think they might secretly prefer it if you ran away while you still can, joined the Taiytakei, sold them everything you know about dragons, lived like a king and fathered about a hundred children for them. Yes, they might wag a finger or two at you for show, but let’s face it: deep down they’re positively pleading with you to go. Mull that over for a bit, and while you do have a bit of a think about how it felt at Drotan’s Top when the Red Riders brought the place crashing down on top of you.