The Order of the Scales (35 page)

A flash of fire. He pulled his visor down. Still alive a few seconds later, he lifted it up again. He looked for other dragons with white bellies, but looking for anything was almost impossible. He could barely lift his head off Wraithwing’s neck for long enough to work out which way up he was. The dragon looped and spiralled down, trading height for speed to keep him alive among a hundred other dragons doing just the same.

Should have ridden a hunter. They might be meant for chasing snappers, but those sharp manoeuvres are just the thing for piling into a cloud of, oh, how many enemy dragons? A few hundred, was it? Now won’t we all have a laugh if Hyrkallan has changed his mind at the last minute and broken off the attack, and it’s just me in here.

The tip of a wing swept overhead. Wraithwing pulled up short, crushing the air out of Jehal’s lungs, made another loop. Jehal caught a glimpse of six riders on the back of a huge war-dragon, three of them manning scorpions, before Wraithwing flipped over and almost landed on the back of it, obliterating them all with one savage sweep of his claws. Jehal didn’t even know they were there, didn’t even know whose side they were on. Didn’t have time to care. It was all Wraithwing now, picking and choosing. He was just a passenger now.
Just keep me alive!

The war-dragon was plummeting towards the ground in forlorn pursuit of its riders.
There. I’ve done my bit. Three of the enemy down. Play the numbers. Three for one and we’re bound to win, even if there aren’t really very many of us left to appreciate it. Can I go now? Play dead and leave?

Two white-bellied dragons arrowed down either side of him, one after the other. Riderless. Most of the battle was above him now. Not good to be down near the bottom. Death comes from above. The first rule of
Principles
.

A war-dragon came at them from the side, mouth open wide, fire building up inside its throat. Wraithwing rolled Jehal away, took the fire on his belly. That only put him in the path of a second dragon, which swung its head around and raked Wraithwing and Jehal alike with flames. Jehal snatched for his visor again. He snapped it down as the first blast of scorching air licked his face, then screamed in pain. His palm was on fire. He couldn’t see anything because of the visor. His good hand gripped Wraithwing’s scales.
Burned. They’ve burned my hand off.
Terror gripped him. If the fire had been hot enough to burn through the dragon-scale covering his gauntlets, what had it done to his saddle, to the ropes and straps that kept him on Wraithwing’s back?

He lifted the visor. A part of him, some little bit of murderous primitive, didn’t care a hoot about his hand. A part of him was loving every moment of this, almost singing out of sheer joy. This was a part that came from the dragons, from Wraithwing and all the other dragons around him. A battle madness.
Principles
had never mentioned that.

He managed to focus on his hand. His gauntlet was still there, the dragon-scale intact. The soft leather on the inside of his hand was black and crisped. He’d been still closing his visor when the fire came. Hadn’t closed his fist in time. Simple mistake, easily made, and that was that. He had no idea what his skin looked like underneath and no intention of finding out.
Lobster-red with flakes of black most likely.
He cursed. The pain was excruciating.

A moment to breathe. A moment of clear air. He tried to look, tried to see what was happening, who was winning, but everything was a whirlwind of madness. Dragons falling from the air, scores and scores of them, a rain of monsters in futile pursuit of their fallen riders. They all looked the same. Dark. Colours all lost in the wind and the blur, in sun and speed. The battle had become a swirling cloud, as high as a mountain, spread out over the three peaks of the Pinnacles. In some places the sky was almost empty. In others, dragons looped and snapped at each other in such tight circles and in such numbers that he couldn’t tell one apart from another. Overhead, three dragons slammed into each other, all their riders crushed and killed together. He watched the dragons plunge past him. Dark streaks flashed through the air. Scorpion bolts. The spent ones fell like a deadly rain on whatever lay below. Dragons, riders, the Silver City beneath. Thousands of them.

He saw dragons racing away too: terrified riders desperate to live. Saw others give vengeful chase. In that moment, he understood.
Principles
was a lie. There was no strategy here, no tactic to outwit the enemy, not in this sprawling shapeless horror. There was terror, that was all. It was who broke first, nothing more, nothing less. Whose riders fled in fear and whose gave themselves up to the dragon-fury, which was every bit as terrible.

For a moment he watched appalled, for the few seconds he had to think before there was a war-dragon attacking from below. Wraithwing was already turning; Jehal could feel his desire to fight.
Enough running and ducking.
Enough of scorpions. Tooth and claw. The southern way.
He could feel the other dragons around him answering, returning Wraithwing’s challenge with glee.

The war-dragon almost caught him. Wraithwing let it, then slashed the air with his tail, slapped the other dragon on the nose and turned in the way that only Wraithwing could turn, flipping in the air. The dragons doused each other with fire while Jehal pressed himself flat, visor down, shielding his damaged hand from the flames and hoping not to die. Wraithwing shuddered. Tooth and claw and tail tore and lashed at the riders on the war-dragon’s back, and then they were apart and he was still alive. Safe.

Safe until he felt a sudden sharp tug on the saddle and Wraithwing’s scales started to slide under his hands.

No!
He flipped up the visor. He was strapped to his saddle, but the whole harness was moving.
No! No! No!
His fingers fumbled with the straps. A dragon saddle and harness weighed as much as a man.
And then what? Ride bareback? I hate to tell you, but that only works with horses.
He almost shouted at Wraithwing to dive for the ground but bit his tongue. The dragon would do exactly that, and then what? It didn’t make much difference whether you fell off the back of a dragon from half a mile up or from fifty feet about the ground, the mess was still about the same.

He cast a quick glance behind. The war-dragon was still there. Lots of ropes and bits of harness trailed behind it, but it hadn’t gone for the ground. Someone was still alive to tell it what to do. Any moment now that someone would come back for another go.

Vishmir’s cock!
The saddle slipped again. Wraithwing was flying in a straight line now, with long careful wingbeats, his body slightly twisted as though trying to help Jehal stay balanced. Which would have been all very well if they had lots of open space around and could glide very gently to the ground. Less helpful in the middle of a fight. Might as well have painted
‘Eat me’
on his back.

A shower of stray scorpion bolts fell from the battle above. One punched a hole through Wraithwing’s wing. The dragon didn’t flinch.

I’m going to fall.

Now half a dragon-rider fell past him. A few seconds later a war-dragon followed, one without a painted belly, Jehal saw. Stupid thing, waste of effort, noticing that.
Don’t have time, don’t have time!
The saddle shifted again. Started to slide.

Saddle straps were gone. Still no one was diving to finish him. All he had to do was pull himself forward out of the saddle slowly and carefully, wrap his arms around Wraithwing somehow and fall out of the sky a little way so everyone thought he was dead. And then, just maybe, if he was really,
really
lucky, slowly glide to ground and make a nice gentle landing without shattering every bone in his body.

Right. And then Hyrkallan will land beside you and personally bend his knee and call you speaker. Because that’s just as likely.

Wraithwing veered sharply. For a moment the sun turned off and everything went dark. Jehal squawked in panic as he and the saddle fell away, and then something enormous went straight over him, a vast black shape. Talons as long as a man’s leg snatched at the space where he’d been, tore a furrow in Wraithwing’s back, ripping scales and the muscle beneath, and pulled away what little of Jehal’s harness remained. Then the black dragon had passed, the sun came out again and Jehal was left hanging in the air. Alive and perfectly unharmed and with a sudden and dire shortage of wings.

And then he fell.

Cities. She could smell them from a hundred miles away, except it wasn’t a scent that taunted her but thoughts. Human thoughts. Thousands upon thousands of them, faint and distant and intertwined, a filthy mass of gibberish.

Cities. They stank.
They intrude.

Other little thoughts popped up, scattered around her. Bright pinpricks of sentience. Humans lived everywhere. Even here in the barren deserts, they eked out an existence in tiny knots and clusters. Wherever there was water there were more of them. Water was one of the few things a dragon needed. Water to stay cool. Out here in the desert they might sleep at the bottom of a river or a lake to keep out of the midday heat.

Everything breathes.
It was an uneasy topic among the dragons. Everything breathed. Everything except dragons.

When she thought about that the other dragons tried not to listen.
But everything breathes.
She could feel them, distancing their thoughts from her, but they could never hide them, not completely. Just as she couldn’t hide hers as she remembered the alchemists and the naked men with painted skins and poison in their blood who killed dragons as they gave their lives away.

She spread her wings over the landscape. A wide riverbed snaked through little hills of jumbled earth, dead and dry except for tufts of thorny grass. A trickle of water glistening. This was a land of snakes and spiders. Dragons didn’t belong here. Here was too hot. She missed the mountains and their snowy crags and their glaciers and their freezing lakes. The city drew them on, though. The stink of it. The cacophony of thoughts, reaching out across the miles, a constant thorn in the mind.

They found it a day and a night of flight from the smoking ruin of Outwatch. The home of the last little one who had called himself king of all the realms. She didn’t know the name of it. She’d never asked. It was an ugly place. Glaring white stone, low squat buildings, sat beside a huge flat lake of shallow tepid water. Beyond, salt flats stretched out to throttle the horizon, blinding in the sun. There were towers, but not very many. Walls, but little and low. No army would ever march out here, or if it did, would die of thirst and heat before it could arrive. That was this city’s defence. Against men it might have been perfect. Against dragons, it was useless.

They started with the eyrie. When they were done, they burned the lake dry and then flew a hundred miles along the sluggish river that fed it and made it flow another way. Heat and thirst.

When they were done with that, they flew back. They hunted and they feasted. As night fell they stretched out to cool and to doze. Sated and surrounded by ash.

In the morning that followed, when the city that happened to be called Bloodsalt was nothing but blackened stone and scorched earth, when the dragons had all eaten their fill and there was nothing left alive for a hundred miles save the few little ones who’d managed to hide in the deepest of the caverns, they heard a cry. As one, the dragons stopped, paused from their feast as a thousand voices raged in fury among the spirits of the dead.

The Spear of the Earth.
The horror that had almost destroyed the world, awake again. Snow reached out for it, sought it. She caught a second dragon’s thoughts, a fleeting glimpse of what he saw before the spear snuffed him out.

A glimpse, but a glimpse was enough.

Kemir!

Jehal fell twenty feet and then stopped with a wrenching shock of pain. He screamed and whimpered and then swung around, helpless as a puppet, thumping into Wraithwing’s belly. He bounced off again, dangling, still attached to the dragon by the last rope, the legbreaker, the one that was supposed to save your life when exactly this happened, but rarely did.

Legbreaker. They called it that for a reason. He screamed again. His whole back was roaring agony. His leg, the leg where Shezira had shot him, felt as though he’d almost ripped it out of its socket. He’d thought the wound was healed, at least as healed as it would ever get, but apparently not.

Wraithwing tucked in his wings and dived through the cloud of fighting dragons. The wind picked Jehal up and tossed him around like a doll, battering him against the dragon’s scales. Jehal yelled and screamed and shouted but he couldn’t hear himself over the storm of air, invisible fingers clenched around him like a giant hand, smashing him over and over against the dragon as though he was a nut and it was trying to crack him open, each blow slamming the life out of him piece by piece. Not for long, though. They’d get to the ground; Wraithwing would spread his wings and stop, and then either the rope would be too long and he’d be dashed to pieces on the ground, or else his leg would rip clean off and
then
he’d be dashed to pieces on the ground. He’d have found it ironic if he wasn’t too busy drowning in waves of pain and a wind that tore the air right out of his lungs.

As they plunged away from the roiling battle everything broke into pieces. He saw flashes of this, flashes of that, found himself lost in memories of far-off places with lovers now dead, then jerked back to pounding smashing roaring agony. Eventually he stopped screaming. He wasn’t sure when because the wind roared so loud he couldn’t hear anything else.

Wraithwing levelled out, circling towards the closest of the three monoliths that made up the Pinnacles, and the wind lost its will to shatter Jehal against the dragon’s side. Even the pain seemed to give up, reduced to agony that was merely like having his leg hacked at with a rusty saw. Which, compared to what it had been before, was as good as no pain at all.