The Order of the Scales Deas: The Order of the Scales

‘I appear to have the key.’ Then he smiled. ‘They won’t be getting in that way then.’

‘My Lord, how do we get out?’

A good strategy for questions you couldn’t answer, Meteroa had found, was to ignore them. Further down, below the marvels of the Enchanted Palace, there were balconies and storerooms. Food and water for years. Beyond that… Meteroa gave half a shrug. He didn’t know whether Jehal was dead or alive, but that really didn’t matter any more. Trapped was trapped. The fortress gave him nightmares, but still it was hard not to feel at least a little gleeful. They’d either find a way out or they wouldn’t.

Until they did, there was always the other thing that had made the three peaks of the Pinnacles famous. Scorpions, giant crossbows big enough to hurt even a dragon. Hundreds of them. Buried in the walls of the most impregnable dragon-proof fortress in the world.

With a grin and a crack of his knuckles, he turned to face his waiting riders. If someone out there wanted a war, so be it.

The Dragon

There is an order to the world that you have perverted with your ways. It will not last; and when the natural shapes of things return, your pleas for mercy will not be heard.

For all they were about to do, there was no joy to be had in it. Kemir lay at night beside Snow, eyes wide open, the dragon keeping him warm. He saw Sollos, his cousin, face up in the shallows of a river, lifeless, the water stained with his blood. He saw Nadira, the last time he’d seen her alive. And he saw Snow, rising from the lake of freezing blue glacier water. Sometimes he imagined he saw the rider who’d killed his cousin, Semian, head hacked off in a bed of bloody ice. It gave him no pleasure any more.

He didn’t see anything else.

During the day, when they were on the move, he still saw the same faces. Ghosts. Too many of them. He ate because his stomach told him he was hungry, drank because his throat was dry, pissed when his bladder demanded it. For the rest of the time he was numb, shifting aimlessly between emptiness and a rage of such intensity it seemed it must surely melt the stones beneath his boots. Those were the times when he traded insults with the dragons, told them they were useless, that they were cowards to be scared of a few scorpions. Always got a rise out of them, that one, particularly Snow. He didn’t know why he taunted them. Because that was who he was. Because, perhaps, deep down he hoped they would tire of him. Would eat him and send him on his way.

They didn’t, though.

Your drear is tiresome. The dragons had settled along a ridge of black rock, steep and sharp and speckled with snow. Either side and all around, white-capped mountains rose around them. A thick blanket of cloud lay across the eastern edge of the Worldspine and it was snowing. Not heavily, but enough to blur everything more than a valley away into a featureless white.

Around Kemir, steam rose from the scales of the dragons. The snow melted as soon as it touched them, water running in tiny little rivers and pooling in the hollows of their neck and shoulders. The ridge looked down over a typical mountain valley, steep and damp and lush and green, or it would have been if it hadn’t vanished into a haze of grey and falling snow. Behind him, on another day when it wasn’t smeared away, he would have seen the northern edge of the Raksheh, the great forest of the western realms.

Across the valley lay another mountain, dark blotches of stone barely visible through the thickness of the air. A mountain much taller than the ridge where they sat. The dragons had finally reached their destination. An eyrie.

‘Bite me.’ They’d picked the northernmost eyrie of the Mountain King’s realm. Something to do with the king moving his dragons to the south. Kemir had no idea how they knew what Valmeyan was up to, but they did. From what he could tell, they could sense the other dragons heading south. Sensed them from dozens of miles away. Maybe hundreds.

The temptation grows ever stronger, little one. Snow sat back on her hind legs and pointed a front claw into the whiteness across the valley. It had taken three weeks to meander their way this far without being seen and now they were where the dragons wanted to be, at the little mark on the map that Kemir carried and read for them, the map that was perhaps the only reason they tolerated him. They were waiting for twilight. Their impatience was a tangible thing, crackling the air between them. They endured it, though. They knew they would not have long to wait.

Three weeks in the company of four impatient and bloodthirsty dragons.

‘What’s stopping you?’

Your nest-mate who wanted to die.

Nadira. Yes, Kemir remembered her well enough. ‘That’s what you said after you ate her. Convenient that she wasn’t around to disagree, eh?’ An old wound between them, that. One that would never go away. ‘What about her? Guilty conscience?’ A dragon with a conscience? What was he saying?

I have eaten many of your kind, Kemir. Many have died between my teeth and in my claws. I am curious to know where you go. I try to follow your spirits as they flee, but I cannot. Your journey through the realms of the dead is more fleeting than ours, yet your destination is somewhere other, somewhere I cannot reach. Is it not unsettling to have such uncertainty before you? For our kind it is simple. Death, rebirth, death, rebirth, over and over and over again. But for you? You have such a mystery to face. Fear comes to your kind so easily, yet rather than fear this, you yearn for it. Why do you wish to die, Kemir?

The finality of Snow’s question punctured Kemir’s apathy. For a moment he did feel afraid. For a moment, until he realised that no, she didn’t meant to eat him there and then. She was still pointing to the eyrie.

We go.

Kemir snorted. Smirked. Almost laughed. ‘Sun’s not set yet. Got bored of waiting, did you?’

She sounded almost embarrassed now. The snowfall will hide us. Kemir?

‘Dragon?’

If this is your time to die, what is it that awaits you? ‘My ancestors, I suppose.’ He shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’

And yet you go without fear. She spoke with wonder in her thoughts. It is… surprising.

‘Disappointment is it, knowing you’ll just come back and try again, eh? Not exciting enough for you? Think you’re missing out, eh?’

If I die, my destiny is certain. I will return as a hatchling. I will be bound and I will have the choice to starve or take the potions your alchemists place into my food. There is no mystery to my fate. Yours, though, it is… It is a curiosity. Come. We are here. The beginning and the end. She lowered herself to let him climb onto her back. I will not die today.

‘That’s good to know, dragon, because I don’t plan to either.’ Kemir paused for a moment before climbing onto the dragon’s back. He could refuse. Just say no. Then maybe she’d eat him despite what she said and they’d be finished. Was that better or worse than flying into battle with her? He was her slave, when all was said and done.

But then slavery was still life and life meant being not dead, and anyway they were about to bring down a whole skyful of pain on some dragon-knights, and he hated dragon-knights. It was a dull hate, shorn of its old sharpness, but it was still there. He settled on Snow’s back. For a moment he thought he caught a flash of some other thought from her, something far more laden with purpose than vague musings on what might happen if they failed. Only a flash, though; then Snow lunged forward and spread her wings, and the other dragons were moving beside her, kicking themselves off the mountainside, gliding across the open space of the valley, straight towards the eyrie with the setting sun somewhere behind the cloud. For a moment, suspended high over the valley, Kemir could see nothing at all. Nothing except whiteness, everywhere. Snow powered through the sky as fast as she could fly, the wind howling in Kemir’s face. Then he caught a glimpse of a dark shape and then another. If anyone from the eyrie had seen them coming, Kemir wouldn’t have known anything about it. He supposed they must have though, since he felt the familiar sharp spike of Snow’s anger that came as a scorpion bolt found its mark. She’d taken enough of those with Kemir on her back that he knew the sensation exactly. The flash of fury, the desire to turn at once and lash towards whatever it was that had caused the pain.