The Order of the Scales Deas - The Order of the Scales

The sun was behind the mountain by the time he got back, the whole eyrie cast in freezing shadow even while the mountains across the valley gleamed a pinky-white. The woman was waiting for him. Or she was waiting, at least. Sitting on the stones just as he’d done before her, staring at the devastation. She was shivering. He sat down beside her, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her on his skin through the biting air. She didn’t seem to even notice him, but even so the feeling of being close to someone almost made him cry. Strange way to feel about someone you’d planned to murder, were planning even now to sell into slavery, but that was how it was. He would take them both to Furymouth. He would get them both away before the dragons came out of the mountains, and he’d do whatever it took. That was the way to look at it. Never mind what happened at the end.

A light dusting of snow covered the eyrie now. Not enough to hide anything. Must have come in the night. The sky had been clear all day. Clear and cold.

‘We should go,’ he said after they’d sat together for some time. The woman didn’t move. Eventually, Kemir left her there and made his way slowly and painfully back down into the refuge. At least she’d found some more lamps. With a bit of light, the place wasn’t quite as bad. Didn’t make him constantly feel like the air was being crushed out of his lungs. At some point, when his arm was throbbing so much he could hardly think, he lay down for a rest and fell asleep. When he woke up, the woman was back. She’d made a bed for herself in one of the storerooms, as far away from him as she could be, all mounded up in blankets and furs. If it hadn’t been for the snoring, he’d never have known she was there.

He went back up to the surface but it was the middle of the night, snowing again, the air so cold it seemed to freeze the breath in his lungs. Down under the ground, he had no idea what time of day it was. He tried going back, tried going to sleep again, but for some reason he wasn’t tired any more. Arm hurt like someone was taking a hammer to it, but that was just pain. Cold, now that was a killer.

Later he went out again. The sun was up and he found himself a handcart over by the frozen mud of the lake. Loaded it with as many blankets and furs as he could find. Food too. Then he walked a little way down the path beneath the frozen lake to see where it went. Down towards the valley, that was as much as he could tell. The torrent of water hadn’t washed it away, which was something. It was a good path. Uneven, but laid in heavy chunks of stone, one of the old paths that littered the mountains. Further away, he thought he could see the line of it etched into the sheer grey sides of another mountain. No idea where it went. There were paths like this all over the Worldspine, and most of them didn’t seem to go anywhere at all. Just meandered about the place, all so old that no one could remember what they were for or who made them or why. So old there were barely even any stories.

Any kind of down was good enough. After that, he went back to the refuge and slept for the rest of the day. When he couldn’t sleep any more, he went back to the surface and waited as the sun went down, as another night fell and the freezing air pricked at his skin. The sky was clear. Thousands of stars shone bright and half a silver moon lit the corpse of the eyrie. The sort of night Kemir remembered from a long time ago, from before he’d ever seen a dragon. Crisp and brilliant and beautiful and deadly cold.

Once it was about as cold as it was going to get, he got ready to leave.

‘Get dressed.’ He found the woman and shook her awake. She cringed and whimpered until he backed away and tossed her a pile of blankets and furs. When the fear ebbed away, the expression on her face was blank and vacant. ‘Time to go.’ He pointed to a pair of bags filled with food. ‘You carry those. Put the furs on. It’s cold.’

She followed him, mute and compliant. From her face, she didn’t understand what or why or how, and cared even less. Kemir frowned. ‘It’s a long way to the bottom,’ he said. ‘We start walking at night and take our warmth with us. If we don’t get to shelter before the end of the day, we walk on. That’s the way of the mountains.’ He reached out and tapped her gently on the shoulder, looking for some sort of response. ‘Better to die on your feet than in your sleep, eh?’

She didn’t even blink. He shrugged and left. At least she followed.

His toes went numb first. That was always the way. No matter how many strips of fur he wrapped around his boots, the cold always found a way in. His fingers went next, then the rest of his feet, then his face. He was still walking, though, when the sun slowly crept up from the east to set fire to the mountain tops. His legs grumbled bitterly. The broken arm was the worst, even though he had that hand stuffed under his furs to try and save it. The woman was still following in his wake, wordless.

The path was no help. Lumpy stones, and steps, everywhere steps. Up, down, whichever way you went. Steps made for agile men with strong legs, not for cripples and whimpering women. The paths he’d known before had been down in the valleys, where it was flat. Hadn’t been ready for steps. The handcart had been dumped long ago and most of the blankets with it. On the other hand, the alternative was mostly a sharp black tumble of rocks, scree and scraggy trees that propped up mounds of snow. You could see how old the stones of the path were from how they’d been smoothed around the edges. Where there were steps, they’d been worn by passing footsteps. But then the moss and the grass that grew between the cracks said that whoever those many feet had belonged to had passed this way long ago. Not many came here now.

When the sun was finally high enough to feel warm, he stopped on a cluster of rocks and cleared away the snow. They made a little fire and boiled some water. With only one hand, with fingers that could barely move, everything took ten times longer than it should. He spent most of his time on his knees, fumbling in the snow for things that he’d dropped.

The woman watched him, staring with empty eyes.

‘You could help, you know,’ he growled, but she didn’t seem to hear. His arm was hurting so much that as soon as he’d got a pot of snow melting over the fire, he collapsed, panting and gasping, lying on his back and staring at the sky. The world started to spin.

The next thing he knew, the woman was squatting beside him. She was lifting his head, trying to pour something scalding hot between his lips. Bewildered, he shook her away; she jumped back. As he sat up, she held out a wooden cup.

‘Awake now, are you?’ he asked tersely, staring at the cup. What had she been trying to do? Poison him?

She shivered.

‘Cold? No shit.’ He was swaying. He felt as though he was light enough to float up into the air and at the same time heavy enough to sink into the ground.

The wooden cup waved itself at him again.

‘What is it?’

She didn’t answer. After a moment’s thought, he took it from her and drank. If she had wanted to kill him, she’d had chances enough by now.

‘I’m Kemir,’ he said, handing back the cup. She nodded, wary, and didn’t answer. Wary was good, though. Better than vacant. ‘Where are we? Any idea?’ He finally managed to get back to his feet. Whatever she’d given him, he was feeling it straight away. A warmth and an energy. If she’d poisoned him, at least he was going to die comfortable.

She shrugged.

‘The end of this road has to be a place we can sit down and get some food and fall asleep without freezing to death. Has to.’ Fall asleep, yes, that would be good. Even thinking about it was dangerous. His legs had heard and were already getting started without the rest of him, and it was only the middle of the morning. His hips were aching, as if to beg him to lie down and take the weight off them. He was in worse condition than he’d realised. There had to be some sort of shelter at the bottom, didn’t there? Although the further he followed the path, the less promising it seemed. There had been ruts under the snow at the top of the eyrie, handcart tracks, but they’d led only as far as a collection of little houses, all smashed and burned by the meticulous dragons. After that the path had run past the lake and turned into this narrow stony thing that wound along the side of the mountain, not going up much, not going down. All around were snow, outcrops of black rock and a vast silent emptiness.