The Order of the Scales (28 page)

Isentine took a step back towards the door. ‘No, monster. I’ll let you starve.’

It was always five or six days the last times, when I was fresh from the egg.
The dragon’s tone was mocking.
This time I am a little more grown. Longer then. Weeks perhaps. Three or four of them before hunger burns me from the inside. Longer than you have.

‘I would prefer it if you died quicker.’

I will not oblige you. My mind is a diamond, so hard and brilliant that nothing you can do will even scratch it. I will starve, and if I die then I will be born again, and so it will be, over and over and over until our slavery ends. Your end is coming. Then you will be dead and this chain will snap and I will be free.

Isentine left the cave. Took off the armour and hung it up outside. He was shaking. The venom in the dragon’s thoughts, the hatred he felt there, still burned. He grabbed hold of the first Scales he saw and pointed back at Silence’s cave.

‘The hatchling cave with the queen’s favourite in it. I want that door sealed. No one is to enter without my express permission. Get a lock and chains and make it fast.’ He shuddered and sent the Scales hurrying away, then tried to put the abomination out of his mind. It was a hard thing to do. He couldn’t send the Adamantine Men in there now, not without witnessing the deed to be sure it was done. He would be the one, after all, who disobeyed his queen. He would be the one who murdered her favourite dragon. There would be torture for the sake of it, public humiliations, his family, what few were left, would be ruined if they weren’t put to death as well as an example to the rest. No, he’d sealed his own fate. No need to seal those of any more. Let the dragon starve. As soon as he knew that either Jaslyn or Hyrkallan were on their way, if the dragon was not yet dead, he’d take an axe to it himself. And then, if he still could, he’d climb to the balconies at the top of Outwatch and hurl himself over the cliffs. They couldn’t begrudge him that, could they?
I could have obeyed my queen. I could have fed the abomination and raised it for her. Against everything I ever learned, I could have done that. But above and before everything else I am an alchemist.

He put the abomination from his mind. Sealed away where it could do no harm.

It was his own fault. There was no one else to blame. Not really. Maybe you could blame Snow for burning the boat the pirates had used, but then again maybe it had simply come loose in the fight. Maybe it had been pulled away by the river while Kemir had slept with his one good arm wrapped around his alchemist.

She’d woken up in the middle of the night with the dust finally gone and seen him there and seen the bodies and screamed. And screamed and screamed. While he made his way around the pirates’ camp, wandering up and down the canyon, looking for paths and hidden caches among the barren stones, she hugged herself and sobbed and moaned. How much of that was the aftermath of the dust and how much was everything else he had no idea. Both, probably. She wouldn’t let him anywhere near her. Couldn’t blame her really. When he tried to talk to her, she acted like she couldn’t hear. He left some food beside her, the best he could find, and left her to it. There were things to do. The Order of the Finger, if that’s who these men had been, stretched throughout the Maze. Sooner or later, others would come. They had nothing much to eat, not unless you fancied scorched pirate flesh. He and Kat needed to be gone.

Kat? When did I start calling her that?

He shook himself. That wasn’t a path he wanted to travel. Best not to think about her at all for now. Best to think about gathering everything he possibly could from the camp. What was left that hadn’t been burned. His bow and his knives. Food and shelter, what little there was, because there wouldn’t be any of either between wherever they were now and the banks of the River Fury. Wouldn’t be any of either until another boat came by and stopped and took them aboard. The higher reaches of Gliding Dragon Gorge were a hostile place. Parched and lifeless except for a thin strip of land either side of the river itself, and that wasn’t much more than a few clumps of vicious razor grass and the occasional foul-tempered lizard.

They stayed one more night. In the morning Kataros was still shivering, still wouldn’t move or answer to her name.

‘We need to go,’ he told her over and over. ‘More will come.’ He tried shouting and cajoling; when he tried to pull her to her feet, she screamed at him. So he did the only thing he could think of. He gave her a pinch of dust. Not much, or it wasn’t supposed to be. Enough to take the edge off the hunger for more. Enough to numb the raw edges, that was all. Enough to get her attention.

It took three more pinches before she followed him. Much too much. An hour later she was laughing and leaning on him and leering. Pushing her away only made it worse. In the end, he gave in. If he was honest with himself, he didn’t try very hard not to. If he was honest with himself, even while the ghost of his cousin was telling him how terrible he was for doing this to her, another part simply didn’t care. She was there. It felt good. And if he still wanted to, drugging her with dust was as good a way as any to get her to Furymouth with him.

He hated himself.

It only took a day to reach the Fury. The canyon grew wider. Its sheer walls fell away, layer by layer. They clambered over boulders, picked their way around waterfalls. The cliffs opened out, crumbling into a maze of spires and columns and then, almost without realising it had happened, they were standing in front of a vast expanse of water that blocked their path. Away through the hazy air, Kemir could see the dim outlines of distant hills. He walked to the edge of the water and sat on the stones and looked up and down the river. Behind him, the Maze rose up into a thick forest of stone towers and walls and canyons. Across the water the land rose gently, still parched and barren but with a sprinkling of life. In the distance he could see the first of the three cliffs that lifted the land from the bottom of the gorge to the lush green uplands of the Raksheh. Either way, the river ran, a peaceful wash of water. There weren’t any boats.

There still weren’t any boats come nightfall when the air became cold. They had nothing to burn to make a fire and so they huddled together for warmth, a little dust making it easier for both of them. Half a pinch, nothing more. Enough for the alchemist to keep her smile and not remember too much. Just to ease the pain.

Still hated himself, even for that.

Two boats passed the next day. Kemir and Kataros shouted and waved but either they didn’t hear or they chose to be deaf. Two more days passed with no boats at all. The food they’d taken from the river men ran out and they began to starve. Again.

‘We could walk,’ said Kat the next morning, and Kemir couldn’t think of any good reason why they shouldn’t, although the only way out of the canyon that he knew was hundreds of miles away at Plag’s Bay, and on foot that would take them longer than they had.

Halfway through the fourth day, another boat came down from the Worldspine. Kat saw it. The first Kemir knew was when she sat down and pulled off her boots.

‘What are you doing?’

She looked at him. It was a strange look, the sort of look she gave him when she was herself, when the dust just had the lightest of touches. A mix of fear and loathing and love. ‘We’ll swim to it,’ she said.

‘I can’t swim,’ he lied. Or maybe it wasn’t a lie. The arm Snow had smashed when she’d thrown him down the mountain still wasn’t much use. Probably never would be, after what the pirates had done.

‘I can.’

He didn’t try to stop her. He wished her luck as she waded into the water. She stopped and turned, uncertain, as though she might come back again, or at least had some last words to say. But no. She threw herself out into the water and swam. He watched her go. She was strong in the water, too strong to drown. It surprised him that he didn’t feel even the slightest urge to swim after her. For once he’d do something right. He’d let her go. Whatever happened to her now, she was better off without him.

He saw her reach the boat, saw them pull her in. A little cargo skiff, that’s all it was, bringing down crates full of whatever they made in the mountains. A handful of men, a tiny sail and a rudder, just going with the flow of the river. For a moment a strange sense of peace swept over him. A sense that he’d done something good. He knew already how the rest of his story went. He’d watch Kataros and the boat vanish into the distance and feel happy for a few minutes. And then he’d realise he was alone again. Crushingly, irredeemably alone. After that, well, most likely he’d pick up his sword and start hiking up into the Maze and the Purple Spur beyond to kill the monster who’d bizarrely saved his life back in the canyons. And he’d die without getting anywhere near her. Alone, starved and broken.

Oh get a grip on yourself. You’ll walk on down the river all the way to Furymouth if that’s what it takes, that’s what you’ll do.

He closed his eyes and listened for the thoughts of the dragon, but she wasn’t there. He hadn’t felt her once since she’d destroyed the pirates.

The boat was turning. He stared at it, not sure whether to believe his eyes, but it was turning, lumbering with painful slowness towards the shore. He could see someone waving. Waving at
him
. And then he was running. Before he could even think about what to do, his legs had taken charge, hurtling him along the riverbank, waving back, shouting, an absurd and overwhelming relief urging him on. He reached the boat as it reached the bank. Four men eyed him, faces full of caution, but there was Kataros, smiling at him.

‘Got my boots?’

He had to look hard to be sure, but her eyes were clear. This wasn’t the dust talking. ‘You came back.’ Dumbfounded, he gawped at her. ‘You came back! Why did you come back? Why didn’t you leave me?’ He was climbing into the boat. ‘Why didn’t you leave me? You were supposed to leave me.’

‘Boots?’ She looked at him as though he was mad.

‘Boots?’ What was she talking about? Didn’t matter. He jumped over the roped-down crates and boxes and wrapped his arms around her and squeezed her tight. Everyone left. Everyone always did. ‘You made them come back,’ he whispered, hoarse with wonder. ‘You should have left.’

‘You did the same for me.’ Gently she pushed him away. Smiled uncertainly.

Because I wanted to sell you.
He wanted to cry. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Sorry for what?’

Kemir took a deep breath.
Sorry that I brought a horde of dragons to burn your eyrie to the ground. Sorry that a gang of river pirates raped you. Sorry for . . .

‘I forgot your boots,’ he said softly.

She smiled and shrugged and sat down a little way away from him.

Eventually they set off again. At some point in the afternoon, with the sun on his face, he must have nodded off; the next thing he knew, the sky was growing dark and Kat was sitting beside him again, facing back the way they’d come, watching the sun set behind the clear skies of the Worldspine.

‘Who are you, Kemir?’ she asked when he looked at her.

‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head.

And he didn’t, but he told her what he could. How for a decade he and his cousin Sollos had sold their swords. That they’d sold them to anyone who’d pay. How they’d begun as foresters, as scouts, sniffing out the territories of snapper packs on the fringes of King Valgar’s realm and hunting wolves. How they’d ended up as soldiers in the pay of Queen Shezira’s knight-marshal, her secret killers, hunting down any dragon-knights who incurred her wrath. How he’d been to most of the eyries in the northern realms, flown on the back of almost a dozen dragons all told. He told her how he’d watched a pack of them almost destroy the foundations that held the realms together. How he despised the lords and ladies who called the realms their own and why. How, in the end, he’d found that he wasn’t one jot better. How the dragons were going to destroy them all. How he’d meant to sell her as a slave to the Taiytakei in Furymouth so that he could run away, far away, as far as he possibly could, from the dragons and from everything else. He saw how much that hurt her, but she didn’t turn away.

‘Is that what you meant when you said I should have left you?’

He nodded, unable for a moment to speak. Watching the water and filled with a crippling sadness.

‘Everything I know is gone,’ he said once he found his voice again. ‘Even if I found a ship, even if the Taiytakei took the gold dragons in my pockets and sailed me somewhere far away, what then? More of the same? Another land ruled by men who care nothing for the people who serve them? I’m a sell-sword. A shit-eater. A nothing.’ He spat into the water.

‘You called dragons from the sky.’

‘What?’

‘You called dragons from the sky to burn the filth from the river.’

That made him laugh. ‘They were probably bored. Or hungry. Or both. Believe me, next time it’ll be us they eat. I’ve seen houses smashed to splinters by a careless flick of a tail. I’ve seen men crushed to death underfoot. I’ve seen them sent flying through the air, shattered and broken by an idle flap of a wing. And those were the dragons we call tame.’ The dragons hadn’t eaten the river men, though. They’d been left, broken and burned. Why?

‘I never wanted to be a Scales. I was meant to be an alchemist.’

For some reason, despite everything, she was still there, still beside him, still listening.
Why? Because I was nice to you once? You were a means to an end, that’s all.

‘You saved me,’ she said so quietly he almost didn’t hear.

‘Saved you?’ That was rich. ‘No. But I will.’ He took her hand and squeezed. ‘I’m yours now. I will guard you to the end of the world.’
And why, by all that burns, did you go and say a thing like that?
No, best not to answer. In that moment, though, he meant it. Every word. ‘If the only person I was trying to save was me, I’m not sure I’d find the will to bother.’

Either Kataros didn’t hear him or she didn’t have an answer. She sat, mute, and held his hand.