The Order of the Scales

by Stephen Deas

  Vioros walked back towards the riders waiting to take him back. They were supposed to be his to command, but they weren’t really. To them he was nothing more than a glorified passenger. You see, that’s the problem. Can’t do it.

  Coward. You have the powers of a blood-mage. You could bend a few dragon-riders to your will easily enough.

  Slippery slope, though. He smiled grimly. He was going to stay, that was what he was going to do. Stay until the bitter end, because that was what was right. When he reached the riders, he stopped. There was a group of disconsolate townsfolk sitting in the ash and rubble, kicking their heels and poking at the ruins with sticks. The sticks gave him an idea.

  ‘You folk!’ he barked. ‘I need your help.’

  They looked up, apathy in their eyes.

  ‘I can pay.’ Yes, see how their backs straighten, they turn to face you and their eyes meet yours. ‘Somewhere near the stone dragon on the riverbank there is a spear. It fell out of the dragon’s mouth. It looks as though it’s made of silver. It isn’t, but when I return tomorrow I will take its weight in silver and divide it between any who have a part in finding it. There was a woman there too. A Scales. Find her.’

  There. With a bit of luck, when he came back the spear would be here. He could take it to Jeiros and ask him how, in the name of all the gods, you turned a dragon into stone.

  37

  Hanging in the Balance

  A thousand dragons. More. Jeiros shook his head in disbelief. He ought to have felt awe when he looked out over what had once been Zafir’s eyrie, but he didn’t. He didn’t feel much of anything. A thousand dragons. In a few days they will run out of potions. In a week their only food will be what we can scavenge. In a month they’re going to start waking up and they’re going to be hungry. We barely have enough riders left after the battle to ride them all, if we had a place to take them. Which we don’t. He didn’t know how many dragons had escaped. They’d found King Valmeyan’s body, apparently. Queen Zafir had fled with some small number of riders and only the ancestors knew where she’d gone. No one knew whether Prince Tichane was dead or alive either. Hyrkallan and Sirion were still out hunting down survivors, one by one, bringing back their dragons. They’d been prowling the plains all night; now that the sun was up again, they were on the chase once more. Dragons circled high in the sky; dragons whirled back and forth not far overhead. Wherever he looked, his vision filled with them. He should have been dizzy with all that power, but instead all he felt was a bemused despair. And I will do what I have to do, even if every alchemist pays for it when they realise what I’ve done.

  He sighed. Part of what he had to do was to listen to Vioros. Vioros, whose errand to Valleyford had proved even more futile than either of them had expected. Vioros, who had reported that Valleyford and Arys Crossing and Hammerford were as good as dead, and yet had some absurd tale of dragons turned to stone spilling out of his mouth. ‘Tell me again. From the start.’ Vioros wasn’t one for flights of fancy, so he was probably telling him things that mattered, but still . . . He tried to listen this time, but his mind simply wouldn’t sit still. A thousand dragons. And we can’t control them any more.

  Vioros was keeping something back, Jeiros could tell that much. He waited patiently and then put a hand gently on his shoulder. ‘Dragons turned to stone? And how, old friend, with all that we know, is such a thing possible?’

  Vioros shook the hand away. He was pacing. Fast and agitated. Not himself at all. ‘The Adamantine Men call the Speaker’s Spear the Dragonslayer. Why?’

  Ah. So that’s what this is. Jeiros shook his head. Why does it have to all happen now? ‘It’s a story, Vioros. There’s no truth in it. The dragon Narammed slew was poisoned. The spear struck dead flesh. It was myth made by the likes of you and I to put Narammed on his throne.’

  ‘Then there are two vast statues newly built in Hammerford that I saw with my own eyes and that I cannot explain.’ Vioros took a deep breath. Jeiros watched him struggle with himself as he sat down again. ‘After I saw Valleyford, I thought for bit that I might not come back.’ He gestured at the sea of dragons scattered across the plains in the shadow of the Pinnacles. ‘There are woken dragons in the Worldspine. We can’t even control the ones we have. We’re torn apart by war. I thought I might go to Furymouth. I could sell myself to the Taiytakei. They’d pay for what I know, wouldn’t they? Or for what you know, for that matter.’

  Jeiros nodded.

  ‘But we took an oath to protect the realms no matter what the cost. If not you and I, then who will do it? The Night Watchman? He has the courage and the will but not the means. The kings and queens of the realms? They have the means but not the will. The joke that passes for our speaker? If he has the will, I doubt he has the courage. So if not us, who? Who protects the little folk? That’s why I came back. That’s why I didn’t run away. Master, there is something in Hammerford that kills dragons. What can you do here that can’t wait another day?’

  Jeiros got up. Nothing at all, that’s the honest answer. I’ve got nothing to look forward to except a day spent sitting around fretting, twiddling my thumbs. Waiting for the night to fall so that I can do what needs to be done when no one will see.

  Given what he had in mind for the night, there was a good chance this would be his last day alive. One more flight on the back of a dragon might be nice. Even knowing what he did, they were still magnificent creatures, mastery of them the greatest achievement in the history of the realms. He might as well enjoy it while he still could. He let Vioros lead him out to the eyrie, where perhaps a hundred Scales were struggling to manage ten times their number of dragons and slowly failing. Jeiros could see the irritation beginning to creep into the beasts, the ones who hadn’t been fed. They could smell the slaughter in the air but there simply weren’t enough animals to feed them. No one was even bothering to try and save the city; it had been burning ever since the battle. Jeiros distantly wondered who’d set it on fire, whether it had been Hyrkallan’s dragons or Zafir’s. Zafir seemed to have been scorching the earth around her, so probably her then. To the people who lived there, he supposed, the who really didn’t matter. There were a lot of angry and homeless folk milling around the edges of the eyrie, raising their fists in mute hostility. They were probably getting hungry too. Jeiros looked down on them as he soared up into the air. Hundreds. Thousands. Half a city full of angry people congregating around a legion of hungry dragons. Stupidity like that made you want to shout at someone, but that probably meant he’d have to shout at himself.

  He didn’t want to think about the other half. With luck they’d had the sense to melt away. More likely they’d burned in the fires. No, best not to think about that. He closed his eyes for a few long seconds and then looked at the sky and the sprinkled shreds of cloud. Flying could be so peaceful. Sometimes he could even forget what it was that was carrying him. It wasn’t far to Hammerford. Sixty or seventy miles in a straight line from the Pinnacles, a hundred miles by road. Half a twelvenight on foot or by cart, three or four days on the back of a horse, or a couple of hours on the back of a dragon. A couple of hours with nothing to do but savour the world, to feel what it was to be alive. He lifted his visor, then took off his helm and threw it away, let the wind tear at his hair and blow tears into his eyes. The sky was a deep blue, the sun bright and warm, the wind cold and fresh. From this height the world seemed so quiet and still, as long as he didn’t look back at the brown smudge of smoke that hung between the Pinnacles. The rolling fields of the Harvest Queen shone in vivid greens and yellows. Blotches of darker woodland sat scattered among them. Even from a dozen miles away, the valley of the Fury was clear, the wide waters gleaming in the sun. To the north the land rose towards the Gliding Dragon Gorge and the Hungry Mountain Plains beyond, all too far away and lost in the haze.

  For those who travelled by land, the Fury was a vast obstacle. Jeiros stared at the river as they flew over it. On the ground it seemed enormous. From the back of a dragon it di
dn’t seem that big at all. Further north, where it came out of the Worldspine and carved its massive scar across the realms, it looked impressive. Here? Half a mile wide? Nothing. To the south the air seemed clearer. He fancied that with a Taiytakei farscope that actually worked, he would have been able to see the hill of Purkan more than a hundred miles away, maybe even Valin’s Fields beyond. Peaceful and quiet, all of it. For a while he chose to forget that most likely they would all soon burn.

  Hammerford shattered all that. The town was worse than he’d imagined. The fires were out and the smoke was gone, but the air, even hundreds of feet above the ruins, still smelled of burned wood and ash. He could see the stone dragons, just about, after Vioros had done lots of pointing and shouting. They looked tiny, but as his dragon circled lower, Jeiros could see they were everything Vioros had said. One of a dragon rearing up on its back legs, tail coiled back over its head and around its neck, the last tip wrapped around in a circle as though it was holding something and had brought it closer to have a good look. The other dragon lay in the water at the edge of the river, wings outstretched. Its tail pointed up slightly while its head and neck disappeared into the water as though it had toppled forward. Shattered boats bobbed against it. All that was left of the waterfront was wreckage. Not burned, Jeiros noted. Pity you can’t say the same for the rest of the town.

  Vioros brought his dragon in to land as close as he could to the edge of what was left of the town. Jeiros thought he saw a few people moving in the streets, but they quickly scurried for cover. The smell almost made him retch. Dead people. Burned. Bits of them, hundreds of them. Scattered everywhere.

  Other dragons landed around him, the riders and soldiers that Vioros had brought as escort. Not to protect the townsfolk from anything, but to protect the alchemists from any angry mob that might form and demand to know who had destroyed their lives. Jeiros made himself take a good long look. This is what we swore to stop. These are the people we swore to protect, from exactly this. There were other towns like this, mercifully out of sight – Arys Crossing. Felporsford. Beeve’s Brook, Valleyford of course. All burned out. All towns as big as this or bigger.

  Should I count the Silver City? Ten, twenty, thirty thousand people? That was dragon-kings fighting each other. We never swore to protect the people from that. Does that make it any better? It didn’t really, but it made it Jehal’s problem and not his, and that was a distinct improvement. Dragon-kings could be reasoned with. Just about. Awoken dragons, well, you might as well reason with a mountain or the waters of the Fury.

  He shivered. Hammerford had been burned by a rogue dragon. Two rogue dragons, if the sell-sword’s story was right. Who was to say there weren’t others close by?

  Vioros slid down off the dragon’s back. ‘There’s—’

  Jeiros wagged a finger at him. Beckoned him close and whispered in his ear. ‘Whatever it is you’re not telling me, I’d like to hear it right now.’

  He let Vioros lead him through the rubble and ruin to the edge of the river while the rest of his tale came out. The sell-sword who the townsfolk thought was a dragon-rider. His fantastical stories. Rogues, blood-magi, men who appeared and disappeared like bubbles in a stream. All on top of the Adamantine Spear that had turned two riderless dragons to stone. Preposterous. Absurd. Beyond belief, except that the dragons were there, right in front of him, close enough to touch. Immense, far more impressive when you stood on your own two feet right in front of them than they had been from above. Fifty feet high, a hundred feet long. Life-size. He shook his head. The detail was exquisite and perfect. He’d never seen anything like it, even the dragon of Dragondale. The one reared up on its back legs even had a slightly surprised look. No craftsman had made these. You couldn’t have made something like that with the best sculptors from the City of Dragons, not even the best artist of the Taiytakei could even have come close. Easier to believe they were made by magic than by human hands.

  But.

  But for the love of the Great Flame, how?

  ‘I told them I’d pay them a lot of money if they found the Speaker’s Spear. If they have, we should rebuild their town for them. It can’t have gone far.’

  Jeiros shook his head. ‘You really think the spear did this? Don’t you think we’d know?’ Or was that some secret so dire that Bellepheros somehow neglected to pass it on to any of us. But what else could have? ‘Vioros, the dragon of Dragondale is a lie. You and I both know that. There is no other story I have ever heard of magics that turn living flesh into stone. Even the old stories of the Silver King say nothing about this.’

  ‘Touch them. They’re right in front of you.’

  Yes, they were. He touched them anyway, just to be sure they were real. Then he sighed. ‘You’d better take me to the sell-sword now.’ There, that feeling, right there. What was it? A glimmer of belief? A bit of hope? Don’t fool yourself.

  Vioros led him back again, almost running. They hurried along streets strewn with rubble and then into a part of the town that was almost intact. A fine layer of white ash lay on the ground, kicked into the air by their feet and turning their riding clothes slowly grey. The air stank of smoke. They came to a small square. Abruptly, Vioros stopped.

  In the middle of the square a makeshift gallows had been built. A man was hanging from it, a rider by the looks of him. Vioros, when he moved, walked very slowly towards the body. He walked around to the other side and took a good long look at the man. Jeiros watched his face.

  ‘That your sell-sword?’ he asked when Vioros didn’t say anything. The other alchemist nodded.

  ‘They were going to hang him. They thought he was the rider from one of the dragons.’ Very slowly Vioros shook his head. ‘I didn’t think they’d be so quick.’

  Jeiros gestured to the riders around him. ‘Cut him down.’ He looked at Vioros. ‘You’re sure this is your man? The one who said he killed a dragon by turning it into stone.’

  Vioros nodded, mute.

  ‘Narammed said that the Speaker’s Spear cuts both ways. Whatever you do with it will come back to you. Use it to kill and death will stalk you. Use it to rule and you will be ruled. Protect it and it, in turn, will protect you. That’s why it became the speaker’s weapon. Kill the speaker and the spear’s curse falls on you, or so they say. Unless you get someone else to do it for you. Worked for Zafir.’ Jeiros shrugged. ‘I always assumed he meant that as a metaphor, not literally. Ancestors! I don’t think I know any more which stories about the speaker and the spear we made up to suit ourselves, which we heard from somewhere else and decided to keep, and which have their root in some truth.’ The riders had the dead man down from the gallows now. Around them a spectral crowd of townsfolk was starting to form, eyes peering from the shadows, around corners. ‘Do you suppose they mind us cutting him down?’

  ‘Not as much as they’re going to mind when you make him start talking again.’

  ‘Then we’d better take him somewhere else.’ Jeiros winced. ‘Not back to the Pinnacles though. Too far.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Actually, this could work out to our advantage. Here.’ He took a gold chain from around his neck and gave it to Vioros. ‘While our escort are busy, get some people to find some barrels and fill them with water from the river. When we come back, we’re going to make a discovery.’

  ‘We are?’ Vioros looked blank.

  ‘Yes. We’re going to find dozens of barrels of potion. The secret cache we’ve kept here since the wars started, in case it was ever needed. The one you came here looking for. One of several in fact. Fortunate for us that this one survived the attack.’

  ‘What?’

  Jeiros lowered his voice, mindful of the riders cutting down the body. ‘Barrels of water, Vioros. We’re going to lie about some barrels of water, and I want these riders to hear. The barrels must not be sealed, mind. I will need to inspect them myself. Do you understand?’

  Vioros shook his head. ‘Not really. Why would we lie about potions?’

  ‘To buy our
selves some time. Let the riders and their kings and queens think all is well. It will give us the day or two to do what we need to do.’ There was quite a bit more that Jeiros might have said, but he kept it to himself. A burden shared was sometimes a burden halved, but when it meant trusting someone with a secret, sometimes a burden was just a burden to be lived with. Vioros really didn’t want to hear the rest. Just another few days, old friend, and then you can fly to Furymouth and take that ship, if that’s still what you want.

  38

  In Victory and Defeat

  Jehal hobbled slowly to Wraithwing’s side. He needed a staff now, even to walk. Everything hurt, from his hand wrapped in bandages all the way up his arm, down his back to his foot. The whole of one side.

  The Night Watchman and his men stood guard over the Adamantine Palace. Jeiros had vanished off to some trivial little town to hunt for potions. Hyrkallan and Sirion were chasing down survivors. It was almost as though they’d all forgotten about him.

  I’m only the speaker after all. If they’d forgotten about him then they’d also forgotten that he was still a king, that he had hundreds of riders who followed his every wish and a good few dragons as well. He toyed with the idea of making some minor adjustments to the balance of power by having as many of the northern riders murdered in their sleep as he could manage, but in the end he left them to their dreams. One Night of the Knives had been quite enough, and besides, even if he had enough men to kill them all, he certainly didn’t have enough to fly their dragons. And then what? Where do I take them? There’s nothing here. Narghon’s dead; Zafir’s probably razed Furymouth to the ground; the Adamantine Eyries haven’t got a drop of potion between them; and I could hardly take them back to the north after I’ve just murdered their riders, could I? The idea made him laugh. Steal the dragons of Outwatch from Jaslyn’s knights and then take them back to their own eyrie to be fed? No, that was hardly a recipe for a happy outcome.