The Order of the Scales (26 page)

‘Alchemist,’ he hissed. ‘Alchemist.’

She didn’t move.

‘Alchemist! Wake up! Kataros!’

Now she stirred. They’d tied her ankles and her wrists, Kemir saw, but she was moving. She rolled clumsily across the floor of the cave. She was dirty and bruised. Her face was puffy. Streaks of dried blood ran down her legs. Her eyes were glazed and wouldn’t focus. The aftermath of too much dust.

‘Please . . . help.’ She looked at him, eyes drifting back and forth.

‘Yes!’ He tried to roll over but couldn’t. ‘Can you untie me?’

She shook her head. ‘Hands.’ She showed him her hands, tied together behind her back. Kemir gritted his teeth. If they’d been so lax with him, he’d have chewed his way through the ropes in the night and slit all their throats. It would have been easy.

‘Fine. Curl up in a ball.’

‘What?’

‘Curl up in a ball. Get your hands round in front of you. Use your teeth to free your hands. Then untie me!’

‘I don’t . . .’

The light changed. Someone was standing in the cave mouth.

‘Well well. It lives. Lads!’ Two of the river men came in. They weren’t drunk or dust-addled this time, so the kicking they gave Kemir was more methodical than the one he’d had in the night. ‘You know, I think we should just kill you. You and your woman.’ When they were done with Kemir, one of them grabbed Kataros by the hair and started to pull her to the cave entrance. She screamed and bit and fought, but there wasn’t much she could do to stop them.

‘Dust,’ Kemir shouted at her. ‘Take dust. It numbs the pain.’

The river men laughed. ‘Oh we’ll give her your dust, dragon-man. We did that already. Couldn’t get enough of us, could you?’

‘Dust!’ he shouted as they pulled her out. Dust. Lots and lots of it. Made you forget everything. She’d be all right as long as they had dust. With enough of it, the pirates would probably start buggering each other.

And then he lay there and pulled at his bonds and got nowhere as he listened to Kataros sob and the river men laugh.

Snow.

His throat hurt with thirst. The air that blew in from the Maze was dry and parched. There was a river right outside the mouth of the cave, though. He could hear it.

It might as well have been across the Endless Sea.

They didn’t bother dragging Kataros back in that night. Then again, half of the river men didn’t come in either.

He didn’t want to die. He was fairly sure of that. Otherwise why was he on the river in the first place, running away from a monster he ought to be trying to stop, planning to sell the only person left in the world who seemed to give a damn about him into slavery to save his own skin? Someone who didn’t much care about being dead wouldn’t do something like that, would they?

Monster, Kemir?

It took him seconds, whole seconds, to realise the last thoughts hadn’t been his own. The dragon was back in his head. Come to gloat at his dying, he supposed.

No.

He opened his eyes. It was light outside. Daylight again. Middle of the day? Bright sun in the canyon, reaching its very roots. There were men stirring around him, dazed and half asleep.

From outside, the loudest scream Kemir had ever heard split the air. It echoed around the cave. It was the sort of scream that should have tumbled rocks from the stone walls outside. It was Kataros, and it pierced his heart like a knife. It could only be the scream of someone who was about to die. River men stumbled to their feet, still dazed with last night’s dust, grabbed whatever weapons they could find and staggered outside. Kemir’s heart pounded. Five beats, then twenty. He strained his ears, trying to hear.

Shouting – questioning at first, then angry. He thought he heard Kataros laugh, but that must have been his ears playing tricks. As more of the men lurched their way out into the daylight, a whooshing rush of air shook the cave. Two more screams, just two, men this time. A figure in the mouth of the cave was silhouetted against the brightness outside. For a moment he seemed frozen, then some huge shadow came down behind him and he was hurled away. The last few men in the cave stood paralysed. One of them swore; one whimpered; one fell to his knees and clutched his head. The rest said nothing at all.

The cave went dark. For a moment Kemir thought he’d gone blind, but no, this was the dark of something enormous poking its head into the cave mouth and blocking out the light.

Dragon. Kemir sighed and closed his eyes and waited for the fire. Riders came to the Maze to clear out the pirates from time to time. Not often, and not for many years, but it happened. It suited the sort of luck he’d been having that they’d choose to come now.

There was no fire. Instead, the dragon backed away and its tail snaked into the cave. The river men yelled and cowered against the walls, but the tail ignored them. It picked Kemir up, gently but with immense power, lifted him through the air, and then he was outside. He opened his eyes a crack, but now everything was too bright to see. He could feel the air move, though, feel the heat of the sun on his skin, hear the water of a river almost close enough to touch.

The dragon pushed its head back into the cave. Kemir heard the roar, the crack of stones shattering in the heat. Felt it, the backblast of scorching air from out of the cave around the dragon’s head. Smelled the stink of burning men.

Snow?

Yes, little one.

Why?

She laughed at him and put him gently down by the edge of the river.
There is no why, little one.

Snow was gone by the time he could see, but the others weren’t. The three they’d stolen from King Valmeyan’s riders almost three months ago he recognised. More must have come from the Mountain King’s eyrie. They stayed for long enough that he saw them, perched high up on the walls of the canyon around him. They looked down at him and then, one by one, they launched themselves into the air and flew away, as if all they’d been waiting for was for him to open his eyes.

‘Why?’ He wanted to shout, but his throat was parched and swollen and all he could do was croak. He was lying on bare stone, which was almost painfully warm in the sun. The pole to which he’d been tied had been broken, carefully and precisely. It took him a minute to get his hands past his legs and to where his teeth could start work on the ropes that held him. A minute more and he was free. His arm hurt more than ever.

There were men all around him, a dozen of them. Or rather, there were
bits
of men. A few of them had been burned to stumps, but most had been smashed and broken. Tooth and claw and tail. He couldn’t see Kataros, but she’d doubtless been the first.

Bastard!
For the second time he found himself wanting to shout. With luck the dragon was still listening to his thoughts. If she was, though, she didn’t answer.

Bastard
.

He’d look for her. He owed her that. For a moment a sadness burned him from the inside, hurt him even more than his ruined arm. His fault. He was the one who’d brought her here. She could have stayed in the eyrie. Probably would have lived. And now she’d spent the last two days of her life being raped by pirates and then been burned alive by a dragon. All because he’d wanted her to sell to the Taiytakei. Yes, he’d look for her and then later, if he found her, he’d tell her how sorry he was. For what little that was worth.

Unless they’d eaten her. If they’d done that then he’d simply never know.

He crawled to the edge of the river and scooped a few handfuls onto his face, wetting his lips and his tongue. The water here was warm. Either side of the river were narrow strips of yellow sand scattered with pale grey boulders. After that, the canyon walls, maybe a hundred feet of sheer pale sandy stone. The sort of cliff that could be counted on to kill you if you tried to climb it. Not that there was any reason to. The Maze was dead, except for the rivers that ran down from the Purple Spur.

Her body couldn’t be very far then. He wasn’t sure he wanted to look.

A few hundred yards downstream, the river rushed past a shallow swirling pool. Kemir lurched to his feet. That would do. He ran to it, peeling the few rags he had left from his skin as he went, flinging everything aside except for his shirt. He splashed into the water and with an ecstatic sob, he threw himself in. He rolled his shirt into a ball and started to scrub himself.
Clean. I need to be clean.

‘Hey.’

He froze and then turned slowly around. Kataros was crouched at the edge of the pool, still as a statue, her long hair shrouding her face, the rest of her almost lost in the cliff shadows and the fading light.

‘I thought you’d be dead,’ he said, choosing his words carefully. He still half thought she was. Maybe this was her vengeful spirit come to make him pay.

She looked at him and smiled, and he knew straight away that she must be alive, because no vengeful spirit ever smiled like that. Vengeful spirits didn’t take dust. He’d found a whore once, lying in the street outside a dust den. She’d been beaten by a gang of dragon-knights she’d sucked for a pinch of dust a time. She’d been so close to death that he’d almost left her, thinking she was gone. But she’d moved, and he’d gone to her because no one deserved to die in the street like that, and as he’d touched her, she’d rolled over and smiled at him, leering, eyes as black and wide as the night sky, and she’d put a hand on him and breathed, ‘Do you want me, lover?’ through broken lips with blood dripping down her face. And then she died. That’s what dust did.

Kataros had that smile now. Deep in the dust, where nothing really mattered except someone to touch.

He sighed and turned away. ‘You know the one good thing about having next to nothing to eat for the last few days? I’ve hardly had to crap. Ancestors! This feels
so
good! I’m covered in my own filth.’ There. That sounded about right. Felt about right too, although the filth was more on the inside than out. For a few seconds, as he scrubbed, he tried to forget everything that had happened since the day he and Sollos had flown with Snow. He tried to imagine himself back in the past, just the two of them out on another adventure, scrapping with dragon-knights, on the run in the wilderness of the Worldspine.

The presence nearby didn’t answer, and when he looked back, it was Kataros who was still watching him, not his cousin. She was sitting at the edge of the water now, half dressed, picking at the grime in her hair, staring at him.

‘You should come in,’ he said. ‘You have no idea how good this feels.’

She cocked her head, still looking at him and picking at her hair, still silent.

‘What?’ he asked when she didn’t say anything. She was wearing a soft leather undershirt that he’d stolen from some rider almost a month ago, before he’d found her. The shirt had holes in it exactly the size of Snow’s teeth. Underneath, her skin was pale. He wondered where she’d found it. Maybe his bow was around somewhere. His knives and his armour. Or maybe not his armour. Not much use for that any more.

She saw him looking. Stared back for a moment, looked away, then looked back and held his gaze.

‘You’ve got a head full of dust.’ He gulped another mouthful of water. He was just about getting used to the idea that his tongue wasn’t glued to the inside of his mouth.

She shook her head. ‘You’ve got a lot of scars,’ she said, her eyes still locked to his. They were wide and demanding, dust-black.

‘More given than received.’ He fingered the rough skin on the back of his left hand and then touched his neck. ‘Burned by dragon-fire when some knights came after us.’ He grinned. ‘We had to flee right across the realms, from Bazim Crag right out across into the swamps and bogs and moors way out to the east. No one lives there because it’s so shitty, and I can tell you it’s no place to hide when there’s dragons after you. Bloody disaster that was.’ He looked down at himself. Scars criss-crossed his arms, the legacy of far too many knife fights. The backs of his hands were still shiny from when he and Snow had first crossed the Worldspine.

‘What’s that one?’ Kataros pointed at his chest.

‘Arrow.’ Kemir shrugged. ‘Punctured lung. Nearly killed me that one. Stupid mistake. Thought we’d killed them all but we missed one. He shot me; Sollos shot him. Managed to get me back. Got me to an alchemist who stopped the bleeding and somehow stopped me from being dead.’ He touched the little crater over his ribs. Talking was good. Talking made the madness go away, at least a little bit. For a moment he hoped Kataros might have a pinch of dust with her so he could take it. Dust numbed almost everything. Everything on the inside, at least.

‘That one?’ She was looking at his leg now, and the long jagged line that ran up the inside of his thigh from just above the knee.

‘That one.’ Kemir’s smile faded. ‘That’s an old one, that one. Very old and very stupid.’ He looked at himself. There wasn’t a part of him that hadn’t been cut, slashed, bashed or bruised over the years. ‘You should see my back.’ He chuckled, then turned around in the water. ‘Most of that’s a flogging I got half a dozen years ago. The rest of it is another flogging I got a couple of years before. I’m a mess.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

Kemir rolled onto his back and spread out his arms, floating. The cool air blowing down the canyon from the mountains of the Purple Spur chilled his skin. He squinted. She looked good, he thought. He was noticing that a lot at the moment. A part of him was horrified at himself, but it was a part that was losing.

She turned her back to him and peeled off her shirt. Her back was a mass of scars too. Healed but still recent, still red and shining. He stared at her.

‘Flogging is for thieves,’ he said, bemused.

‘Yes.’ She didn’t move.

‘I used to steal all the time. Stealing from kith and kin is one thing. Stealing from the dragon-lords and their servants doesn’t count. Although . . .’ He shrugged and grimaced and scratched at the scars on his back. ‘They don’t quite see it that way, and the flogging hurts much the same either way. But how does an alchemist get to be a thief?’