The Order of the Scales (30 page)

‘No.’ The dragon felt the old man close his mind and hurry away.

The dragon returned to waiting.

The old man wasn’t long in coming. The dragon felt him long before the door to its prison opened. Others came with him. They brought a weapon they called a scorpion, broken into pieces. The dragon spat fire at them. The chains around its neck were strong, though, while its flames were starved and weak. The little ones moved with care and carried shields of dragon-scale to turn what was left of them aside. They carried their weapon in pieces to the end of the cave, where the dragon couldn’t reach. Where sunlight and the open air and freedom called. Methodically, they put the weapon together. The dragon watched. Their thoughts showed it what the weapon was and what it was for long before they finished. The dragon waited though and said nothing until the last piece went into place, until the first bolt was being loaded and the weapon was armed. Then the dragon turned.

You are pointing that the wrong way, old man.

‘No. I should have done this weeks ago.’

Yes.

‘Shoot it.’

The dragon paid them all its attention now. Its eyes drooped almost closed but its mind climbed into theirs, watching, seeing, waiting. One of the little ones called Adamantine Men aimed the weapon called scorpion at the dragon and fired. The dragon sprang straight up into the air, exactly in time. The scorpion bolt missed.

The old man became angry. ‘It knows what you’re trying to do. Load another and fire again. Sooner or later it won’t be able to get out of the way. We have as long as it takes, and I have all the scorpion bolts you could want. Don’t try to be clever. Aim at its body. If we have to put fifty bolts into it before it dies then that’s what we’ll do.’

You are wrong, old one. You have no time left at all.

‘And why is that, monster?’

Because the one you call Snow is coming, old one. Coming here. Coming now.

‘They happen to be coming, right here, right now?’ The old man shook his head and picked up another bolt. ‘You’ll not fool me as easily as that, monster. I’ll do it myself.’

Coming because I have called them as I called you. Look. They come. It is no longer necessary for me to distract you.
The dragon let his thoughts fill with venom and glee. The old man couldn’t help himself. Looked over his shoulder, out into the expanse of open air beyond the cave mouth, past lake and fields and farms into the distant desert sky.

A dozen dragons were coming. They were close. Not close enough yet for the old man to make out what colour they were or whether they had riders. Human eyes. So dim.

No riders, old one. The one you call Snow comes.

The old man didn’t know what to do. Incomprehension fogged his mind. Disbelief. Confusion. Fear. Realisation. Alarm. Comprehension. Dread. Despair. The dragon revelled in them all. The last most of all.
We are all dead.

Yes. You are.

The onrushing dragons split. Most climbed. One kept straight. By then even human eyes could have no doubt. All the little ones could see now. White riderless death.

The dragon called Silence soaked up their despair like a lizard basking in the sun.

‘Go!’ the old man shouted to the other men. ‘Go and get your hammers and do what you came to do. All of them! Smash them all!’ The old man took the weapon called scorpion himself and aimed. ‘You’ll not live to see this, abomination.’ Fired. Missed. The dragon laughed. Swords and arrows were wasted weapons, however big they were.

Outside the cave, the mouth of the white dragon called Snow opened. Claws reached for the edge of the cave. The rest of the little ones had fled. The old man tried to make his weapon work once more. Too late.

The cave filled with fire as another dragon voice crashed into the old man’s head.

I am home.

In the ruins of Plag’s Bay they sat together with the other dazed survivors, keeping close to the caves in the canyon walls. As if that would help, should the dragons return. High above on the edge of the canyon, fires lit up the evening sky. Kemir had watched the dragons pass over, spreading their wings, dipping their heads, flames bursting from their mouths. Hadn’t been able to do much else sandwiched between the Fury and a thousand-foot cliff. Three of them, that was all, dropping down from the dark cloud of a thousand beating wings. The rest had stayed high. Flying on to Watersgate, to the Hungry Mountain Plains, to the City of Dragons, to wherever their war called them. Three dragons. A town burned. They hadn’t even come back for a second pass; simply flew on up the gorge to Watersgate.

Smoke rose from what had once been houses and jetties. Half the town was burning. Still, it wasn’t all that big a place. Maybe that was the way to look at it. A few hundred people and most of them itinerant sailors. So in the big scheme of things Plag’s Bay hardly mattered, right? Made you wonder why they’d even bothered at all.

Whoever
they
were.

Boats drifted on the water, crippled and burning. Kataros clung to Kemir’s arm. She’d never seen this before, he supposed, never seen a town burn. That was the pampered sheltered life of an alchemist, right there. Alchemists didn’t get burned. Apart from the once.

No one moved, not unless it was to find a deeper cellar or a darker cave where they could hide. More dragons flew north, stragglers in ones and twos, and then the first horde came back, returning from whatever destruction they’d wrought. At least this time they stayed high. None of them came down to the river. For the rest of the day, dragons criss-crossed the sky in ones and twos, here and there. Kemir thought he saw another swarm far off to the west, but they were high and far away, little more than a distant blur in the sky.

Darkness fell. Reflected fire glittered in the black water of the Fury. They crept, dozens of them, the survivors, to the shores of the river. At the water’s edge, half-ruined boats lay among the wreckage. There had been more but they were gone now, floated off downstream. Kemir and the rest sifted in silence, working through the wrecks, looking for any that might still float. There wasn’t much else to do. Plag’s Bay was gone, dead, wrapped in a still-fierce heat. No one said but they all thought the same. Dragons only flew in the day; night-time was safe, and so they wanted to be gone before the sun rose once more, in case the dragons came back.

Daft, really, since the dragons could be anywhere, but a boat was a boat. A boat meant travelling further towards the sea. Towards Furymouth and far away. Where Kemir wanted to be.

They found a barge. Scorched but good enough to float. They climbed aboard, twenty, forty, fifty of them. Mostly men. Too many really, but they climbed in anyway and let the current take them away. Pushed themselves out into the water with makeshift poles and let the river take them. Kemir watched as they drifted past the husks and skeletons of boats that had fared less well. When the moon rose, he took Kataros down to the half-deck below, where passengers might have slept if any of them still could, and hid away with what little he’d managed to save. One of his knives. The bow that might have been his or might have been his cousin’s. A few pieces of armour. The last of the gold they’d taken from the river pirates. Not much else. The roof was low, too low to stand straight. The darkness was complete, so thick and solid that they crawled, finding their way by feel. Everyone else was up above, too scared to sleep. Not Kemir, though. He’d seen all this before.

There were a pair of windows at the stern. Tiny filthy things that let through meagre slivers of light. Good for telling the difference between night and day and not much else.

‘Here.’ He stopped and pulled her close, next to the boat’s hull.

‘How can you sleep?’

Kemir shrugged. There wasn’t much of an answer to that. After you’d seen your home destroyed by dragon-fire, you either could or you couldn’t. When it had happened to him, all those years ago, he’d found that he could. He closed his eyes. He’d see them again tonight. His old friends. His family. They always came into his dreams when he saw a place burn. Reminding him, he supposed, that they’d once had a life. He wondered if this time Sollos would come too.

‘We didn’t bring any blankets. Should we have brought some blankets?’

‘Don’t really need them now.’ In the mountains good blankets were more precious than gold. Down here they were just blankets and the trip down the river would be warm enough without. He set about arranging himself with his knife and his bow and his belt all close to hand. He bundled them against the side of the ship and them pressed his back against them, tying little loops of twine around each with the other ends around his wrist. Kataros squeezed herself down beside him.

‘Hold me tight,’ she murmured. ‘I want to feel like you’re all around me. Like you’re my skin.’

Dust talk. He told her so. Reached for his pouch. Still had it. That was something then.

She squirmed against him and shivered. ‘That was King Valmeyan flying to war,’ she whispered. ‘Incandescence. Avalanche. Unmaker. I’ve seen them before.’

The King of the Crags. Kemir gave a bitter snort. ‘Well that’s all right then, since I already wanted to kill him anyway.’

‘Why did they burn Plag’s Bay?’

He shrugged. That was what dragon-riders did, wasn’t it? Burned people? He might have said something, but as Kemir was thinking, he fell soundly asleep, and there weren’t any dreams of Sollos or of his brother or his sister or his father or his friends. No dreams of them at all. All he saw was desert, endless desert, dunes in waves and waves like the sea. A desert of ash and sand and a distant tower wreathed in flames.

And then Snow, rising out of the lake of glacier water in the Worldspine, only this time it wasn’t Nadira Kemir was looking for. This time it was Kataros.

I did not eat this one.

It had been days, and he’d been thinking that whatever bond held them had finally broken. But no.

You are my eyes. My ears. Your thoughts are mine, Kemir, whenever I choose to see them.

I will run away from you. I will find a place so far that you can’t find me.

Then you must mean to die, Kemir, for that is the only place I cannot follow.

Then he was awake. Shards of daylight were sneaking in through the windows, enough that Kemir could see across the half-deck. Kat was shaking him. Her mouth hung open and she was shivering. He didn’t understand at first. When she clung to him though, the fingers gripping his arm were like claws. She was frightened.

‘Where were you?’ The air was stuffy and ripe.

‘Eh?’ He stood up, too quickly and forgetting where he was, and banged his head. ‘What do you mean where was I? Where is everyone? What’s happened?’

‘I was shaking and shaking you. You wouldn’t wake up.’

He collected his bow and his belt and his knife and everything else. Frowned. The light outside was more than the dim light of dawn. He peered at the windows. ‘Eh?’

‘It’s the middle of the day. You slept like the dead.’

Still half asleep, Kemir followed her up and out into the open air. The deck was full. Almost everyone was simply staring across the water, and when Kemir managed to find himself a place where he could see, he knew why. They were staring at the carnage on the riverbank. Plag’s Bay might have been little more than a collection of huts and jetties, Watersgate not much more, but the smashed, charred, smouldering scar on the land he was looking at now had been a town, and a big one. They were at the mouth of the Fury gorge, the terraced cliff walls still visible upriver behind them, so there was only one place it could be.

‘Valleyford.’ He blinked, almost expecting the town to suddenly reappear as he remembered it. It had been completely destroyed. He shivered. He’d liked Valleyford. It had been his sort of town. A huge glorified marketplace really, but still enough for thousands to live there, swapping goods travelling down the river from the Worldspine and from the Evenspire Road with cargoes sailing up from Furymouth, Farakkan, Purkan, places like that down the river. Caravans fresh from the Pinnacles crossed the river here on their way to Bazim Crag, while weary merchants from as far away as Bloodsalt finally reach the end of Yinazhin’s Way at Valleyford. If there was anything you couldn’t get in Valleyford, there was a good chance you couldn’t get it anywhere, at least not outside the Taiytakei markets in Furymouth, and that was one place Kemir had never been.

All gone. Wiped into a black and scorched smear of nothing, the last lazy wafts of smoke rising from the ruins. Maybe five thousand people had lived in Valleyford.

‘There were alchemists here,’ murmured Kataros.

‘And the speaker’s soldiers too.’ Kemir’s head felt numb. No one in their right mind would do something like this. Burning alchemists was worse than any mere treason. And yet here it was, done.

No
human
in their right mind. He shivered again. ‘Why are we stopping?’ Other boats were here too, some of them already moored against the shore, others milling about in the shallow waters away from the main current, not sure what to do. Some of them were lumbering cargo barges like the one Kemir was on. Most were little river skiffs.

A loud voice broke the stillness. One of the refugees from Plag’s Bay had declared himself captain. ‘Right. Enough lollygagging. Form a shore party.’

For a few minutes, Kemir thought they meant to lend a hand with things like looking for survivors, digging them out of the wreckage, looking after the injured, that sort of thing. It was only when the barge started jockeying for position with two other barges at one of the surviving jetties that he realised his mistake. There was shouting and swearing, and he heard it in the curses. Plunder. They were there to take whatever they could get away with.
And if we find some survivors, we might just help them, but only if they can pay for it, eh?
And all this less than a day after your own homes were burned to cinders.