The Order of the Scales (19 page)

‘What have you done?’ asked the Picker, still not moving. ‘Not something stupid, I hope.’

‘Stay very still,’ whispered Kithyr. ‘It’ll go better for you. I’m thinking I might not be taking the spear to Furymouth after all.’

‘That so, is it?’ The Picker sat up, very slowly, and adjusted his cloak. ‘Well if you changes your mind sharply, I might scratch my ear and wonder if I’d heard right. You might want to do your reconsidering quick-like though.’

‘No.’

‘Shame. You’re a wise and educated fellow, full of books and learning, so you’ve maybe heard a thing or two about the Elemental Men?’

‘Killers. Lots of mystic claptrap.’

‘About melding with the earth and turning into air and water and so forth. That sort of thing, aye?’

‘Yes.’ Kithyr felt his throat tighten. The watchmen were moving much too slowly, still not quite grasping the compulsion he’d placed into them.
Too many at once. I should have picked on one and then the next and then the next.
He concentrated his mind on the nearest, let the compulsion change and morph into something new. Into an order.
Kill him. Now.

‘Aye. Mystic claptrap.’ Abruptly the Picker sank into the ground and vanished. All that was left was his blanket, collapsing slowly to the ground. Kithyr felt a sudden shock of wind behind him, a presence right beside him and then something that burned gave his throat a fleeting touch. ‘Not as mystic as you thought.’ He felt movement, but he couldn’t move. His feet were stuck to the ground. He didn’t dare turn his head. The voice shifted to under the cart. ‘They tells us that every time we do it is a year off our life. A year, blood-mage. Take that on your soul.’ He could feel the blood running down his neck now, running down his throat. He coughed, only the slightest shake, but that was enough. The trickle turned into a flood.

‘Our blades are so thin the sun shines right through them. Cast no shadow. But one thing we can’t do is carry that wretched spear with us. Tried that already. Didn’t go well. No, so that were your purpose and well you served it, wizard. Annoying we got no further, but hidden in a wagon full of grain will do.’

Kithyr collapsed, all the strength rushing out of him in a red torrent.

No.

He was a blood-mage. Blood obeyed his commands, and so he commanded it now not to leave him. The flood stopped. Reversed. He turned his head. The Picker was there, crouched under the wagon that held the spear.

‘Strong you’ve got,’ he hissed.

‘Dead you’ve got,’ snapped Kithyr. He ran his hand across his throat, catching drops of the blood that still covered his skin and hurling them at the Picker. They would eat into him like acid. They’d consume him in seconds! They’d . . .

Kithyr blinked. The Picker was gone. Vanished. He looked frantically behind him, but the Picker wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

Gone. And good riddance.
He felt a coldness inside, though.
Surely the blood had touched him before he could vanish himself a second time. It must have . . .
Eyes somewhere nearby were watching him. Hairs prickled where their gaze lingered on his skin. He was out there, in the darkness. Not dead. Maybe crippled, but not dead.
The Elemental Men. There can only ever be ten. When one dies, the next five in line fight to the death to see who will take his place.
But those were Taiytakei stories, and Kithyr had no idea whether to believe them. Most likely he’d heard them from the Picker himself. Made them questionable, to say the least, but the Picker was clearly
some
sort of magician. A blood-mage then, or something else? From what little he knew, the Elemental Men were mostly a myth, but in those myths they were the most deadly hunters in the world. Only one man had ever survived them. A sorcerer who was also a sailor, who’d fled to sea and was never seen again. Because the Elemental Men, for some reason, couldn’t cross water . . .

The river. He can’t reach me if I’m on the river.

The river then. Right now. Never mind the wagons and the grain; they could sit and rot. He’d hold the spear in his hand if he had to . . .

He fought back the urge to run, right now. Running wouldn’t do him any good. The Picker had always found him before. But here . . . He looked around him at the watchmen moving uncertainly towards him. They had his blood in them, all of them, waiting for his call to serve. Well now they would. Not that they’d stop an assassin like that, but they might get in the way. They might die usefully. And if there were only so many times the Picker could use his power . . .

By the time the men reached Kithyr, scratching their heads in confusion with a vague memory of something they were supposed to do, they were his.

After half a day on the road, they met a cart and hitched a ride. Outsiders. Old traders. Old was good. Sometimes young men would fight just because there was a fight to be had. Old men, on the other hand, usually wanted to grow older. Like the alchemists, for all the good it had done them. Kemir handed over some of the coin he’d taken from the eyrie. They eyed him up, eyed his clothes, his bow, his arm, his knife. Then they eyed his coin and the woman and decided they’d take his coin the easy way. They were headed for a camp by a river. Kemir had no idea what river or what camp they meant and didn’t bother to ask. Didn’t matter. All rivers went to the same place in the end. Furymouth. The sea.

‘Three days’less there be storms. Ye can share our fire. Water’s for free. Eats I don’t have to spare. Eats old Hanzen will have for ye at the river if ye have a gift for him. Ye live with a bit of hungry?’

Kemir nodded.

‘We get to the river, we go our own ways. Ye’ll be on ye’s own. Trail between here and there, that’s quiet enough. Empty mostly. River camp, though . . .’ The old man tutted and shook his head. ‘Two of ye looking like ye do, ye’ll find trouble, whether ye look for it or no.’

And that was that. As much as the men ever spoke.

The wagons rolled from one valley to the next, following the passage of the mountain rivers, which became ever more broad and swift, sometimes swelling out into great lakes. Now and then Kemir saw little boats out, fishing. Rafts really, nothing more. On either side, sheer walls of stone rose up towards the sky. They showed no sign of fading into hills, but the further they went, the denser the forests became, a heavy deep green, thick with scent, pines all packed so close together they could barely breathe and hardly ever saw the snow-capped peaks towering above.

When they camped, Kemir made a token effort at staying awake. Outsiders were a fickle lot. Chances were as good as anything they’d decide to murder him in his sleep. But really he couldn’t be bothered. He had a splitting headache. He gave Kataros the last of their food. Let them kill him. There was something to be said for being dead.

No. That wouldn’t do. He had to stay awake. Had to live.

He must have fallen asleep anyway, though, because the next thing he heard was Snow laughing at him.

Why do you want to live, Kemir?

Because that’s what outsiders do, and that’s what I am. We live. We do whatever it takes. Sometimes we do horrible, terrible things, but we fight so we can live. We fight so we can be free.

So do we, Kemir.

He tried to turn his back on her, tried to make her go away. Eventually she did. He felt her mirth ringing in his mind long after she was gone. When he woke up and discovered no one had murdered him after all, he wondered if he’d have been so generous.

For the rest of that day and all of the next it rained. Worldspine rain. No drama but steady and relentless. The carter sat impassively and watched the road roll towards them. Kemir sat at the back and watched it roll away again and with it the mountains. Rain trickled through the cracks in his stolen armour and glued itself cold to his skin. The road started to descend, a slight slope that grew steeper as the last day passed and they sank into a sharp-sided canyon gouged out from the heart of the Worldspine, a scar of mud, criss-crossed by a hundred rivulets jumping and dashing down the broken boulder slopes. The sun dipped towards the horizon, and this time the carter kept on going right into the night, until at last they reached the bottom of this gouge between the mountains. When he looked at the river in front of him, past the throng of tents and animals and people and campfires to the almost endless black wall of rock on the other side, Kemir knew where he was. The Fury.

The old carter drew his wagon to a halt. ‘Here ye be. Hanzen’s Camp. Be going no further, me. Boats be going from the water’s edge.’ He stared at Kemir, unblinking, as if he didn’t quite understand why Kemir was still there.

Kemir shrugged. He slid off the back of the wagon. He didn’t pull the woman with him.
You choose
, he thought.
Them or me. They’re a better choice. They’ll look after you. At least until the dragons come.
But by the time he’d finished thinking that, she’d climbed down and was standing beside him. The old man turned away, barked his animals back into motion and slowly vanished into the throng.

‘I knew this place existed,’ he said quietly. He was talking to his dead cousin, he realised, not to Kataros at all. Sollos would have liked it here. To him, it would have felt like home. Open fires everywhere. Noise, tents, huts. Enough people to fill up a town and, as best Kemir could tell, every one of them was busy getting drunk or singing songs. Quite a few were doing both.

He walked further into the chaos, weaving between the fires. In one place there were snappers, tame ones. That was a thing he’d never seen. They yawned and growled and stretched their necks. They had bloody claws and bloody muzzles, and around each one was a little cluster of men, fussing and cooing over them. Strange-looking men with painted faces and feathers wandered to and fro among them, receiving little nods of deference as they passed. They carried bags of powder on their belt. Now and then they stopped to sprinkle some on the slabs of rancid meat that the men fed to the snappers.

Alchemists. They’re like alchemists. The snappers are their dragons and the powder is the potion to keep them docile.
He had no idea if it was true, but it seemed to fit. Idly he tried to imagine the same scene without the feathered men, with the snappers freed from whatever dulled their urge to hunt. All the men he could see, all gone. He’d killed a couple of snappers in his time, when the ground had favoured him and his arrows had flown true. He had no illusions about how lucky he’d been.

Now give them wings and fire and make them a hundred times bigger.
He shook his head. It was hard, even thinking about it, not to be afraid. He tried looking at the men camped around him. Bandits, vagabonds, dust traders.
What will you do when the dragons awake? What will you do when Snow comes out of the mountains? Will you fare any better than the rest? No. You’ll be food, just like everyone else.
He tried imagining them as dragon-knights when Snow came. The carnage in his mind’s eye looked much better that way. Then he went and found himself a good place to sleep. The woman followed him, mute, like a lost dog. That would end soon enough. They’d get a boat and it would take him into the heart of the realms and she’d abandon him the first chance she got. For some reason the thought made him sad. Alone again.

Never that, Kemir.

The dragon, still there now and then. Neither of them, it seemed, knew why. She mostly left him alone now, ever since Kataros had fed him whatever potion had pulled him out of his fever. But he could feel her, always, still there, a tiny feather-tickle against his skull.

As soon as the sun rose, Kemir shook the woman. They picked their way through the confusion on the banks of the river to where a cluster of boats had appeared, waiting to take anyone who could pay in gold to the City of Dragons. He held Kataros’ hand without thinking much about it, almost dragging her through the mass of men and crates. Picked a boat on a whim, haggled without any real enthusiasm. Then sat and stared at nothing very much until the river sped them on their way. The Fury was riding fast and high, swollen with snowmelt.
The river knows what’s coming,
he thought.
Even the water wants to get away.
Now and then he opened his mouth to speak, but he couldn’t find any words. What was he going to say? That in a few weeks the world would end? That they were all going to die? Beg her to stay with him so he could sell her as a slave to the Taiytakei?

Eventually she got bored and wandered off among the other passengers. She always came back, though, never strayed far, always sheltered close as the sun began to set. He even saw her smile when she thought he wasn’t looking. It had been a long time since he’d seen anyone happy, if that was what it was. No, he didn’t have the heart to tell her what was waiting for them both.

‘Are we going to the City of Dragons?’ she asked as she sat beside him on their first night afloat. ‘I grew up in the City of Dragons. In the Palace of Alchemy. I never saw much of the city. Then they took me away to the mountains.’

He could smell her, and that made him want her. He tried not to think about that. ‘You can go wherever you want. I’m going to Furymouth.’

‘Oh.’ She sounded disappointed.

‘I’m going to see the sea.’ He laughed, in spite of himself. ‘If you’ve got any sense, you’ll come with me. We can find a great ship to take us to another land where there aren’t any dragons. Or any dragon-knights. I’ve been to the City of Dragons too. It’s not for me.’

She was looking at him. Asking him with her eyes to say more.

‘What’s to say? It’s a city filled with rich men who despise anyone who is beneath them and grovel at the feet of any lords or princes that happen to pass them by. And there are a lot of those.’
Far too many.
He could remember the first time he’d been there as though it was yesterday. The first time he’d flown on the back of a dragon. ‘Well, that’s how I saw it.’