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

He had strange dreams that night. Dreams of dragons. As though, fleetingly, he was slipping in and out of Snow’s thoughts again.

Why are you here? The dragon was flying high. Snow fields shone below in the moonlight. A dozen dragons flew around her. They were angry. No, annoyed. They didn’t like flying in the night.

You are dying.

He slipped away from them. A bit later, he slipped back. Now the dragons were settled in a valley somewhere. Could have been any mountain valley – they all looked the same. For no better reason than that, Kemir decided it must be the valley where all of this had begun. Where riders from some mad dragon-lord had attacked Queen Shezira’s party while the queen herself had been at the Adamantine Palace. Where he’d run from dragon-fire and Snow had first flown free. That was a Scales who’d done that. The Scales who’d raised Snow from an egg had urged her away and she’d taken him with her.

Daylight. Potions. He didn’t remember making a fire or breaking his fast, but he must have done both, since there was a fire and his belly was full. Then more walking. All blurred together. The next night Kataros might have tried talking to him, but if she did, he didn’t hear her. Too full of dragon-dreams. They came again, stronger this time. Snow and Ash and the others. All flying. Their joy of freedom and the simmering rage filled him. Made him smile.

There might have been another day. Another night. Kataros shaking him, he remembered that. No fire. Didn’t matter. Dragon-dreams were more real anyway.

They flew across the sea, Kemir and Snow and the dragons she’d freed. They flew across the sea and buried themselves in the high mountains by the coast, where titanic waves crashed against towering cliffs, and the cliffs vanished into the clouds. In the ice-bound high places where no dragon-rider ever flew, he pored over a map…

Snow flew in the dark…

… as close as she dared, Kemir on her back…

… eyries buried deep in the stone, guarded by hundreds of scorpions…

Frustration and rage.

A dozen horsemen, riding through the high valleys. The horsemen were unexpected and the dragons were hungry. They were always hungry. Kemir watched the slaughter, watched the dragons play with the horsemen. When they came back, they were gleeful. He thought it was the joy of the hunt, the taste of human fear, but no. The Mountain King was moving his dragons south, Snow told him. His eyries furthest from the sea were almost empty. Kemir hardly cared. He looked at the riders. The sight of them brought back every reason he’d ever had for every thing he’d ever done. Pain, hate, rage. Watching, helpless, as his cousin was killed. Watching, helpless, as his home had burned.

You are one of us, Snow said to him, and they were flying again up to the bleak icy heart of the Worldspine.

Memories?

‘What are you saying?’

He blinked. He was in a valley surrounded by trees, next to a river, walking along a trail. He had no idea how he’d got where he was but, for a moment, everything was clear. Kataros was standing in front of him, shaking him.

‘What’s wrong with you? You’re raving.’

‘What am I doing here? This isn’t right?’

And then that moment of clarity slipped beneath the waves. Pain. He was in pain.

Still dying.

Night again. More dragons.

I see you, Kemir.

Come and get me then.

Night changed to day. Kataros drifted through his dreams, dragging him by the arm. Trees. Lots of trees. And mud. The path changed under his feet. No more uneven stones. Slick and smooth now. Mud. Something warm and bitter in his mouth. None of that seemed real any more. Snow, that was what felt real.

I have something. A gift. Ride with me.

He seemed to fly. Fast, impossibly fast, flitting from one place to another. Leaping and dancing through the dragon’s memories. He roamed the emptiness between the Worldspine and the Maze and the Purple Spur. Dry dead stone peaks drifting below or else furious torrents of water between a cage of dark sheer walls. Nothing lived here, nothing at all; there were only titanic spires and curtains of ruddy stone where even dragon-riders had no reason to fly.

Come! See!

Between flashing peaks, away into the Worldspine, where the mountains were capped with snow again. Far-away words echoed through the cold air and the untouched peaks. They came, carried on the silence, flecked with a fusion of anger and despair.

‘Kemir!’

Rider Semian. He knew, not from the voice but from the way the thoughts tasted inside his head. The cold was so bitter that he was surprised it didn’t freeze Semian’s call to his lips. There wasn’t even a breath of wind. Semian had bawled out his challenge and it had rung clear. The mountains and the Worldspine scorned him with their silence.

‘I have a destiny!’ he screamed again, and Kemir heard him clearly.

He jumped off the mountainside from where he sat and slid out into the void, gliding silently, searching for the rising air that would carry him upwards. He felt the call to war. Saw men and dragons, eyries and castles and cities and palaces, all aflame. It would not be long. He gave a few lazy flaps of his wings and then stretched them out and soared up towards the mountain peak. He could see Rider Semian clearly now. He was standing, arms outstretched. He must have been looking the other way. He will have nothing. Be nothing. Kill! Burn!

‘Kemir!’

He seemed to float towards Semian, drifting with easy deadly purpose. The sun shone behind him, brilliant and cleansing. Perhaps it was his shadow falling over Semian that made the dragon-rider turn as Kemir rose up the side of the mountain to meet him. Huge, wings outstretched, filling the sky. The sun cast a halo of fire around him. Semian didn’t move, but Kemir heard his thoughts, over and over, the same. Out of the sun there shall come a white dragon.

He swooped closer, grinned wide. His jaws opened, a hundred bone-swords sharp and gleaming to carry Semian to his destiny. And the dragon shall be Vengeance.

‘Kemir! Kemir!’

Kill! Kill! He bit down. Thoughts fluttered and died and the glorious taste of salt and iron took their place.

And yet there, in his moment of ecstasy, in his final triumph, something was pulling him away, away from death and the clear blue sky. Away to somewhere dirty and blurred that tasted foul. He suddenly couldn’t breathe.

Kill! Snow! Kill him!

Be at peace, little one.

His own voice sounded faint. Weak. Distant.

‘Kemir!’

The red rider and the white dragon. Justice and Vengeance.

‘Kemir!’

Hands were shaking him. Hard. His mouth tasted of earth and blood. The air smelled of fire. He was lying on his back. Kataros was crouched over him. The hands doing the shaking were hers.

‘Kemir!’ Hers was the voice he’d heard on the wind. The voice that had pulled him back. Gentler now, but the same nonetheless. ‘Thank the ancestors.’

He sat up, dazed, bemused. Horrified to see they were somewhere far away from the last place he remembered. Lower. The eyrie mountain was somewhere far behind them, lost to sight.

They were beside a road. Not some never-used valley trail, but a proper road made of mud and hoof-prints and the ruts of cartwheels.

‘Where… where are we?’

The woman shrugged.

‘How long… How long have I been here?’

She sat back. ‘You’ve had a fever for days. Then you were walking and you just fell over. I thought you were going to die.’

Would probably have been best for both of us. He rubbed his head. He felt woolly inside but otherwise strangely well. His arm barely hurt at all. It was in a sling. When did that happen?

‘I was with the dragons. The dragons from the eyrie.’