The Order of the Scales
Also by Stephen Deas from Gollancz:
The Adamantine Palace
The King of the Crags
The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice
16 Dust and The City of Dragons
19 The Dragon-Queen and the Beast
25 Sealed Away Where It Could Do No Harm
39 That Which Determines Destiny
For Michaela. Wife, lover, friend, muse.
They hate us.
They fear us.
They revile us.
They outlaw us.
And as they do these things, they forget what we truly are.
But we do not. We remember. For we tamed dragons.
The blood-mage Kithyr slipped out of the Glass Cathedral and hurried across open ground to the Speaker’s Tower. Speaker Zafir and her lover Jehal were gone to war at Evenspire. Tomorrow the battle would rage. Tomorrow Zafir would destroy Almiri and her eyries and then Jehal would turn on her and destroy her in her turn. That was what he had foreseen. That was what the blood-pool had told him.
None of that mattered. What mattered was today. Tonight. His heart was beating fast. A part of him was afraid that he would be caught. Another part urged him onward.
Night-time shadows filled the Speaker’s Yard. Men with lanterns walked the walls, but the walls were wide and far away and their eyes looked ever outward. Two men of the Adamantine Guard stood at the doors of the Speaker’s Tower, but if anyone looked closely, they might have seen that something wasn’t quite right. Even though the guards stood with their eyes staring open into the darkness, they were fast asleep. Kithyr had done that to them before he left the shelter of the Glass Cathedral, the black misshapen lump of stone that rose behind him They were only ornamental anyway, those guards. He stepped past and forced the huge doors behind them open, just wide enough to slip inside. He closed them again and then stood in the pitch darkness and waited to catch his breath. His heart was pounding even faster now.
He moved quietly, each step taken with care. If he was caught now, inside the tower, the Adamantine Men would kill him. He had enough magic to deal with them in twos and threes, but once the alarm was raised, they would come in tens and twenties. If they saw him, they’d catch him. If they caught him then they’d find out what he was. If they found out what he was, they’d kill him. They’d do it quickly too, no waiting for King Jehal or the speaker to come back from their war.
They’d find out what was waiting for him in Furymouth.
At the end of the Chamber of Audience, a huge open staircase rose towards the higher levels of the tower. Kithyr crept behind it to where a second staircase, hidden behind the first, sank into the vaults below. The blood-mage paused as he approached it and closed his eyes. He reached out his senses, searching for any guards that might be waiting for him, listening for their heartbeats, sniffing for the smell of their sweat. With the doors closed, with the speaker away and no torches lit, the huge emptiness of the Chamber of Audience was almost black. Moonlight filtered in though the high windows to cast dim and eerie shadows, and that was all.
The vault was empty too. Four legions of the Guard had marched to war. With the speaker away, the rest were far more concerned about being attacked from the air by dragons than they were about nasty people like Kithyr sneaking around in the palace at night.
He started down the stairs. They weren’t a secret, merely hidden and not very well known. At the bottom were a few small rooms. The place was a sanctuary, a place for the speaker to hide away, where he or she could mysteriously vanish for a few moments and then appear again. If Zafir had been here, there would always be soldiers at the bottom of these stairs. But she wasn’t, and so the rooms were empty.
Almost
empty. At the bottom, certain he was alone, the magician lit a candle. An entire wall of the first room was covered by bottles of wine racked on top of each other. Several cloaks and robes hung on another, each one meant for a different ceremony and with a different meaning. Unlike the bottles, they were covered in dust. Zafir hadn’t worn any of them since she’d come to the throne. Kithyr spared them a glance then ignored them and moved on to the second little room. This was where the guards should have been. This was what he’d come for. There were weapons here. Ornamental, ceremonial and deadly real. Vishmir’s war-axe. If you looked hard enough you could still find flecks of blood, or so they said. The scorpion bolt that killed Prince Lai. Half a dozen other swords and knives that had killed or been carried by speakers over the ages. Kithyr wasn’t interested in any of those; he barely even noticed them. What he wanted was hanging on the wall at the far end. Kithyr snuffed out the candle. He didn’t need it now. The spear glowed with a very faint light that pushed away the utter darkness that filled the rest of the room.
The Adamantine Spear. The Speaker’s Spear. The Spear of the Earth. As old as the world.
He stood in front of it, hardly daring to touch it. No one knew where it had come from. The dragon-priests said that the power of the dragons was bound into it. The alchemists claimed the Order had forged it. Others believed it had been made to tame dragons. All lies. Like the blood-mages, the spear came from a time before there were priests, before there were alchemists, before there were dragons even. The Silver King, the Isul Aieha, had brought it into the realms, but the spear was older than that, older than anything.
For a moment Kithyr couldn’t move his hands. They simply refused. The spear was a glittering silver, glowing with a soft inner glory. The blood-mages had stories of other things crafted from silver. No, not stories, stories was wrong. Maybe legends. Myths. Yes, myths, that was it. Sorcerers forged of silver who had had the power to change the world on a whim; not just the one who’d come to the realms all those centuries ago, but hundreds, thousands who had once been. The spear came from that time. It had their power and more. In those myths, almost lost now, it could raise volcanoes from the ground, had once shattered the very earth. Trapped within lay something immeasurably potent, or so Kithyr had come to believe. And now that he was standing before it, he was paralysed, as though the slightest touch of it would burn him to ash. Stupid, since every speaker since Narammed had touched it and none of
them
had been burned to ash.
None of them had been blood-mages, though. None of them had had the old power coursing through their veins.
In an instant of will, he closed his eyes and reached out with both hands to take the spear. His fingers brushed the cold metal of the shaft. He didn’t burn to ash. Apart from the chill of the metal, he didn’t feel anything at all. After all the anticipation, he felt almost . . . disappointed. There should have been
something
, shouldn’t there? Or were all the old stories just that? Was it just a spear and nothing more?
He took the spear off the wall. Still not a flicker.
Perhaps that was for the best. Maybe it had had power once, but maybe that was long ago. Maybe the years had sucked it dry. Nothing lasted for ever, after all. If the spear was dead, he’d still done his part of the bargain. Or maybe it wasn’t the real spear at all. There had always been other stories. How the Silver King had taken the real spear away with him to his tomb. To the Black Mausoleum, if such a place even existed. Or maybe Vishmir . . .
No, that couldn’t be right, could it? He’d know, wouldn’t he?
The doubt nagged at him, tugging the corners of his mind. He brushed his fingers over the head of the spear. The tip was as sharp as a needle. Two flat-bladed edges ran down the shaft, as long as Kithyr’s forearm. They were like razors. Kithyr ran a fingertip along one. He felt it cut him, felt the blood dribble out of him onto the spear. Instinct made his mind reach into the blood, and through the blood into the spear . . .
Kithyr staggered and gasped and almost dropped it. The snuffed-out candle fell to the floor. The light in the spear died, plunging him into darkness absolute. He hardly noticed. There was no mistake. The spear had a power to it all right. Something hard and bright and unbelievably immense, buried deep within it, so deep that Kithyr wasn’t sure that anyone would ever get it out. Something that would surely consume whoever woke it. He was like a moth, drawn to the light of a lantern and suddenly gifted with a full understanding of the fire that lay at its heart. Fire and moths. He shivered and sucked his finger until it stopped bleeding. Cursed. That’s what it was. That or it was the most powerful thing in the world.
