The Order of the Scales

by Stephen Deas

  Behind the haze of the city, the half-seen cliffs of the Purple Spur rose into the twilight. Somewhere above and beyond them, in the gaps between the clouds, the first stars of the evening twinkled. The sky. Closeted up in a carriage was no way to travel.

  Although it did have some advantages, as Lystra soon showed him, and he almost didn’t notice when they rolled to a halt inside the palace gates twenty minutes later. He was still smoothing down his shirt as the door opened to reveal two lines of Adamantine Men formed up to greet him. Two lines and one man in the middle, bowing precisely as low as he should to greet the Speaker of the Realms. The speaker, Jehal noted, not a king. Interesting.

  ‘Vale Tassan. What a pleasure to see you again.’ Jehal stood up, wincing. Behind him Lystra gathered herself together with an embarrassed little cough.

  The Night Watchman straightened. ‘Your Holinesses. The palace is in order.’ There were men everywhere, Jehal began to see. Soldiers on all the walls. Scorpions packed together as closely as they would go. Even scorpions down in the Gateyard, trained up at the sky.

  ‘You’ve been busy.’

  Vale bowed again. ‘While the speaker is away, it is my duty to defend against any invader.’

  ‘Ah. Just so we’re both clear and there are no misunderstandings, do I count as a speaker or as an invader or as both?’

  The Night Watchman didn’t twitch. ‘You are the speaker until the Lesser Council says otherwise. Or another is chosen by the council of kings and queens.’

  Jehal snorted. ‘Well there’s a distinct shortage of both of those at the moment so I wouldn’t hold your breath.’ He grimaced and hauled himself down the steps of the carriage, then walked towards the Speaker’s Tower, leaning heavily on his staff.

  ‘Your leg seems worse, Your Holiness.’

  ‘I fell off a dragon and hung there for a little while. It did me no favours.’

  ‘I will have one of my physicians sent to you.’

  ‘If he has a fine collection of spare legs and is able to replace this with a new one that has not previously been shot through by a large crossbow then, please, as soon as you can. Otherwise I really wouldn’t bother.’

  ‘As you wish.’ Nothing. As always, the man gave away nothing. He could be seconds away from killing me or he could loyally serve me for a decade. It could be either and I’d never know which was coming. And that alone was a good enough reason to get rid of him.

  ‘I have a job for you, Night Watchman. An order. One that should suit you very well.’

  Vale said nothing. He looked straight ahead, keeping perfect pace with Jehal. He didn’t look tense at all. He didn’t look much of anything except ready. But ready for what?

  ‘Well don’t you want to know what it is?’

  ‘I exist to serve, Your Holiness. That is what I am for, and my men with me. From birth—’

  ‘To death. The guard obeys orders. Nothing more, nothing less. I’ve heard that so many times, Vale, and I have yet to believe it. So now I mean to put it to the test. I want you to go, right now, with as many of your men as you deem necessary. I want you to find the rogue dragons that Jeiros is fretting about and I want you to kill them for me. Is that something you can do?’

  Vale licked his lips. ‘Unlikely, Your Holiness. But if that is your wish, I will do my utmost. If that is my fate, I will succeed. If not, I will die in the attempt.’

  ‘Yes, please. Do you think you could succeed and then die of your wounds afterwards?’

  ‘Jehal!’ He’d forgotten Lystra, padding silently behind them. Jehal turned and flashed her a smile.

  ‘A little joke, my love. Vale, you’re still here. I believe I gave you an order.’

  ‘And I will obey, Your Holiness. Indeed, I have already embarked upon your mission.’ They were drawing close to the Speaker’s Tower. Its doors remained shut. The soldiers on either side made no move to open them. Jehal felt a sharp twinge of fear in his belly. Here it comes. The knife.

  ‘The doors to my tower appear to be closed, Night Watchman, and your men are not opening them. Should I be concerned?’

  ‘Yes, your Holiness. Yes, you should.’ Vale gestured towards the Glass Cathedral. ‘This would be a better place.’

  Jehal didn’t move.

  ‘The tunnels, Your Holiness. For you and your queen and your son. You will be safe there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ll hardly recognise them. If all does not go well, I dare say there are enough supplies for you and your household to last for some time. Months, perhaps.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ The twinge of fear was turning into something more.

  Vale took a deep breath and sighed. For once he turned to face Jehal and looked him in the eye. For once he looked tired. ‘There is a cage, Jehal. You can hang me in it if you want to, or perhaps I’ll hang you, but either will be a cause for celebration because it will mean we have survived. It will mean we are alive. It will mean it still matters. I don’t need to go anywhere to follow your orders. I am as ready as I can be. I have taken dragon poison and so have all my men. Up on the peaks by the Diamond Cascade are some thirty dragons and not one of them with a rider. One is white.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘They’ve been there for two days. I can only assume it’s you they’re waiting for. And now you are here.’ He turned briefly to look at Lystra. ‘Unless I am mistaken, the realms of the north are gone, Your Holiness. I am sorry.’ Then back to Jehal. ‘Go to the Glass Cathedral. You will be looked after. I have done everything I can.’

  His face said the rest. Everything wasn’t enough. Not by a very long way. Jehal felt numb.

  ‘I have always kept lookouts on the edge of the Spur, Your Holiness. They are there to watch for dragons. Any who might threaten the city. They signal to me with mirrors, or with smoke and fire. They are still there. I think the dragons have chosen to let them live. They want us to know they are coming.’ He bowed, and for a moment looked old and tired. ‘Take what pleasure you can from the night, Your Holiness. In the morning they will come.’

  47

  Nightfall

  Snow watched the dragons fly into the eyrie below. Such a number, she’d felt them coming from a hundred miles away and more. So had the others arrayed on the mountainsides around her.

  Finally.

  More to free.

  A hundred.

  More.

  Excitement coursed through her. The other dragons felt the same.

  We should wait.

  Night comes.

  Daylight is better.

  But they were dragons, and so they tried and they tried but in the end they couldn’t wait. When one kicked itself into the air and spread its wings, the others followed in an instant, glad and gleeful. They fell through the air, looping and dancing through the spray of the Diamond Cascade until the City of Dragons rushed up to meet them.

  They spread their wings and opened their mouths. Not like the other cities, this one. They had a fury inside them now, one that had been building up for two days on the mountainsides. For a week since they’d begun at Outwatch. For a thousand years and more since they’d last flown as a horde against an enemy who could actually fight them. They tore into the city, burning, smashing, clambering over walls, lashing towers to the ground, crushing houses underfoot, pouring fire through doors and windows and arches, savaging anything that crossed their path.

  Don’t eat! Don’t eat! But the urge was irresistible. The rage had them hard, and when men and women ran screaming, it was impossible not to snatch them up with claw or tail and crush them and smash them and bite them in two and taste their blood. The city burned. Its flesh was delicious.

  And then the scorpions began.

  He saw them come. He was the Night Watchman, and seeing them come was the point of his being. It was hard to know whether the end of the world that was falling towards him was all Jehal’s fault or only mostly Jehal’s fault. But in the final reckoning it hardly mattered. He could almost have thanked Jehal, in a
perverse way, for making this come to pass. It was the whole point of his existence, of every one of the Adamantine Men around him, of everyone who had gone before, the whole point of all of that was right here, right now, right in front of him.

  He watched the City of Dragons burn. Patience. Patience was a weapon. Patience was the one thing he had that his enemy could barely understand. The city died and Vale watched. Tens of thousands of people. He supposed that others would expect him to feel something about that, some sort of sadness or regret, but that missed the point. That wasn’t his job. Let Jeiros weep and wring his hands for his beautiful city. I am the dragon-killer. No compassion, no mercy, no compromise. I am like them, but more.

  The dragons were falling prey to their own passions. He could see it by the way they cavorted. They were ripping people out of their homes and eating them for the sheer fun of it. All good. A pity I couldn’t poison the whole city. I would have, if there had been a way. He’d already poisoned everything in the Adamantine Eyries. He and Vioros had seen to that long before Jehal returned. Vioros had seen to something else too, something that made Vale know his destiny was here.

  When he thought they were ready, he gave the order to fire. The dragons were too far away for the scorpions to pick their targets, but they made up with that in other ways. Sheer numbers for a start.

  Then he picked up the Adamantine Spear and went to wait outside.

  Steel rain fell across the city. Bolts as long as a man fell almost straight out of the sky. They smashed through roofs and floors and buried themselves in cellar walls. They punched through chimneys and shattered flagstones. Here and there they struck dragons with enough force to drive straight through scales and deep into the muscles beneath. Dragons already teetering on the brink of battle lust dived headlong into it with a mad joy. Snow felt them roar with pain and then with merciless delight. At last a proper fight. She jumped into the air and spread her wings to be with them, powering up out of the smoke of the burning city towards the palace. Where I’m supposed to be. The eyrie could wait. Everything else could wait. It was wrong. They were being lured, pulled into a trap, but she didn’t even try to resist. There was no point. Why try to fight what you were created to be?

  A second hail of metal spears fell around her. Two pierced her wings and passed straight through. A third struck her in the back, close to her tail. It hurt a lot more than the scorpions she remembered from the Worldspine. Angrily she twisted her neck and ripped the bolt out with her teeth. It snapped cleanly in two, leaving a foot of steel inside her. The pain grew suddenly worse. With a shriek she surged through the air. Poison, perhaps. Or acid. She didn’t care. A few poisoned bolts wouldn’t even slow her down. Wouldn’t slow any of them down.

  She landed on the palace walls with a force that shook mountains, scattering men and scorpions around her like sand.

  Vale could only be in one place at a time, so he started from the doors to the Glass Cathedral and worked from there. The palace would be destroyed. His men would be destroyed. His scorpions. He himself, most likely. None of that mattered. The dragons had to die, and that was all. Scorpions hailed overhead. The Azure Tower came crashing down, shattered lumps of stone as large as a house flying through the air. Boulders smashed against the hardened skin of the Glass Cathedral, exploding into shards, and then the earth shook beneath its feet as the first dragon landed in the Speaker’s Yard itself. A huge reddish monster, it raked the walls with fire and then rose up to tear at the needle-like Tower of Air.

  The spear, it seemed, was singing to him, a soft choir of voices in ancient words that he didn’t understand and yet made perfect sense. He watched the dragon for a second and then another, feeling at the very last a tiny spark of what was perhaps fear, which flickered for a moment before he crushed it and ran out into the yard. No scream, no battle cry, but silent and swift, he plunged the Speaker’s Spear into the dragon’s leg.

  The earth trembled. A blazing light lit up the night. A thousand voices roared in his head.

  And the dragon turned to stone.

  The Earthspear! Snow felt it, felt its roar of power, felt the death it brought. Bolts pricked her skin. Fury ripped through her. She lunged at scorpions, crushing men and their machines in her jaws. The air filled with the roar of fire, the grind of breaking stone, the rage-filled cries of dragons. She tore apart everything around her, stamped and smashed all to dust, then leapt over a wall between one part of the palace and another, lashing a tower with her tail as she went. She felt the Earthspear roar again, a second dragon die.

  Where are you?

  A misshapen old building, its surface glassy from some ancient heat, loomed out of the darkness and the flashes of fire. Close. She was close.

  The earth shuddered as a monster twice her size crashed down onto the roof of the Glass Cathedral and slid down its sides, spraying fire all around it.

  Burn!

  Vale could barely hear himself, could barely think. There was screaming and roaring and flames everywhere. Pieces of the Tower of Air showered the walls. Men were crushed, scorpions splintered. Something crashed to earth behind him so hard it knocked him over, but before he could turn, there was another dragon, a little one this time, not much bigger than a horse, barely out of its egg. It shot out of the flames towards him, and as it opened its mouth, he rammed the spear down its throat. The light again, blinding, the noise, but as he blinked, he felt the spear ripped out of his hands as the now-statue dragon ploughed past him through the rubble and slid to a halt. He ignored the huge black thing sliding down the Glass Cathedral and bolted for the spear. A massive foot came down, crushing half the stone hatchling to rubble. He saw the spear. Then the dragon above him looked down and seemed to notice him for the first time. He lunged forward, but the great clawed foot came down again, smashing the hatchling’s head into splinters and burying the spear beneath it. The impact rippled the ground and Vale staggered away.

  No.

  It was laughing at him.

  The Earthspear! It is mine!

  A volley of a dozen scorpions ripped into her flank, hard enough to almost knocked her off balance. The pain, the pain was something new, something almost forgotten. It took her away, drowned everything, for a moment, except the need to smash and burn and kill and destroy.

  Vale raced straight across the middle of Speaker’s Yard, weaving between the legs of the black dragon. Or maybe it wasn’t black. Maybe it was just dark. They all looked black or grey in the moonlight and the flashing bursts of fire. It was staying where it was, burning battery after battery of scorpions, never once lifting the claws that held the Adamantine Spear trapped in the earth. He reached a ladder and hurtled up to the wall.

  ‘Scorpions!’ Fire forced his men behind their dragon-scale, but fire didn’t kill. His precious scorpions were still there, behind their shields. ‘Load! Aim! Fire! Take it down!’

  Six or seven of the weapons fired, straight into the dragon’s face. The monster snatched its head away and staggered and shrieked. Keep shooting. That was all they needed to do. Nothing more. Sooner or later it would fall.

  The dragon lunged, tried to jump up onto the parapet, smashed three scorpions with its fore-claws before the wall cracked and crumbled, half tipping the dragon off again. Its tail cracked like a whip along the top of the wall, shattering men and machines, flipping them high into the air. Vale winced. A dozen more destroyed, just like that. Then the dragon was gone, if only for a moment, tipped back down into the Gateyard in an earthquake of breaking stone.

  Slowly, looming over their heads, the Tower of Air sheared and began to fall. The spear, though. The spear was free again!

  ‘Scatter! Run!’ When the dragons came for you with tooth and claw, that was all you could do. Scatter and run. Draw them away from the scorpions. Our lives don’t matter. Vale took a gulp of scorched air, caught a glimpse of the rest of the palace. Dragons doing what dragons did. As he cranked the last scorpion on the Speaker’s Wall, he watched one smash into the Towe
r of Dusk. Dragon and tower disappeared in a cloud of dust and masonry lit up from within by the dragon’s fire.

  There. The scorpion clicked and he reached for a bolt. The black dragon had rolled back to its feet. Adamantine Men ran in front of it, hurling futile javelins before they were crushed or burned, drawing its attention away from the walls. He could see where the spear lay. Ought to jump straight down there if his legs would take it, but he was up here on the wall now. Draw it away. You can’t hurt a dragon but a scorpion can. And we don’t have enough. He hadn’t told his men that last part but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. They were Adamantine Men. They lived for this. Every one of them had drunk the dragon poison for two days now, ever since dragons had come to the Purple Spur, so most of them were as good as dead already. It all came down to how much damage they could do before they went. Vioros and the weapon of legends come to life once more, they were the only hope.

  Something smashed into the wall. He didn’t even see what or where, only felt the tremor. He stumbled and gripped the scorpion. The black dragon screamed and lunged at the men harrying its feet. Try to get eaten. Fill them with poison in any way you can. Make every death into victory.

  The black had three or four soldiers in its claws. It stuffed them into its mouth and bit savagely down. Then it spat out the remains, showering the men around it with blood and gore and broken armour. For a moment it paused. Vale pivoted the scorpion around and up a notch and then shot it in the eye. He was already running when the bolt hit. He didn’t bother to look back, only down.

  The spear!

  No no no NO!

  She could feel the poison in her. She could feel the heat, the first warning surge inside her, and it made her want to fight even harder, to burn and smash even more. Which would make the heat worse, which would feed the rage, which would feed the heat, and on and on until everything was out of control and she burst into flames from the inside.