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

His fingers touched something. Something slimy but wonderfully solid. His fingers clawed at it. Wood. A post. He pulled himself to it, wrapped his arms and then his legs around it and hauled himself up towards the light. His face broke the surface. He gasped for air and then coughed and spluttered, throwing up half a lungful of water. He blinked. His ears and nose were full of water. He couldn’t hear properly, just noise, a roaring, rushing sound.

Oh. Yes. Dragons. He shook his head, trying to clear his eyes, and there they were, a few hundred yards away, enormous, filling half the sky, mouths open and filled with fire.

He muttered a prayer, took as deep a breath as he could manage, forced himself not to cough it straight back out again and then pushed himself under the water. He wrapped himself around the post, closed his eyes and waited. The water seemed to spasm all around him. Waited. Another spasm. Waited until his lungs were on fire and then hurled himself back to the surface.

The air was hot. That was the first thing he felt. Something hard bumped his head and then drifted away. When he breathed, he tasted fire. Not smoke and ash and charcoal and all the things that came after fire, but fire itself, the dry hot taste of fresh dragon. He opened his eyes. A burning boat drifted across his vision less than a dozen yards away. Around him bits of wood littered the river, the remains of something smashed into splinters. The wooden walk-way above him was still there, but now the end of it was missing, the other jetties out into the river smashed to flinders. The barge that had brought them this far was ablaze from stem to stern, slowly being pulled away by the current. From down in the water he couldn’t see the town and he didn’t want to.

A few feet away, finally, he spotted Kataros, clinging to another post.

‘Are you all right?’ He had to shout to make himself heard over the noise of the flames. He didn’t hear whatever she said, but she nodded. He closed his eyes for a moment. See? See how useful you are when it comes to looking after her? Not very useful at all. Exactly who saved who just now?

He pushed himself through the water towards her, clutching at the jetty posts, from one to the next. She looked at him with big terrified eyes. That’s when he saw that she was shaking all over.

‘We just stay here,’ he whispered. ‘We just stay here until they’re gone. Hold on to me, hold on to this. However long it takes, whatever they do, we just stay here. Right here. Just here.’

And as the air filled with smoke and the screams of the dying, he held her, held the post, held them both as though his life depended on it.

For someone like the Picker, following Kithyr and the spear had been a trivial thing. If the blood-mage thought that crossing water was some sort of problem for an Elemental Man, he was mistaken. Killing him, that was going to be more taxing. Cutting a man’s throat wide open was usually enough or, failing that, something sharp through the eye socket usually worked. Mages were another matter. They came in all sorts of different shapes and sizes for a start, and you never quite knew what each of them could do. As far as he understood it, even chopping them up and then burning the bits didn’t always finish them. He’d been thinking about that at Valleyford. Plenty of fire, plenty of ashes. No one would know. He’d hesitated, though. The blood-mage obviously had designs of his own on the spear. The Picker had expected that. But he’d felt something from the spear itself, something not expected. Still did, whenever he got too close, a feeling he struggled to understand. Hostility, that was the best way to describe it. So in Valleyford caution and the spear itself had kept him away. Besides, the mage was still taking it the way he wanted it to go. Let him, the Picker decided.

Now there were two dragons gliding in towards a little river town full of screaming people, with the blood-mage and his blood-bonded guards staring slack-jawed at the death flying towards them. This, the Picker decided, was the best opportunity he was going to get. He flickered away, vanishing from where he stood and popping up again only a scant dozen yards from the mage. He’d lied before. Flickering didn’t cost him a year of his life; it barely cost him anything at all.

He felt the spear at once, the venom held tight within it. The anger, the glowering resentment. Timing would be everything. The dragons would come. Everyone would burn. He would flicker in the moment the dragons had passed. He’d take the spear. And then he’d have to do something he almost couldn’t remember ever having to do before. He’d have to run, while the spear stifled every power he’d learned. That much he knew, that much his clan had already found to their cost. The spear took your power. All of it.

He wrapped a cloth around his hand. The spear would be hot after the dragons had done. Then he waited. Watched. Tensed, poised to go. The first dragon, a gleaming amber like honey or liquid gold, screamed overhead and poured fire over the part of the town away from the river, but the Picker wasn’t paying much attention to that one. The other was the one that mattered – the big one, black like night. It dived towards the waterfront, almost straight at Kithyr, and opened its mouth…

And its wings billowed out and it stopped almost dead in the air and then crashed to the ground. Its wings flapped twice, carelessly smashing riverside inns and houses. An angry flick of the tail shattered the jetties. It reared up on its hind legs and sprayed fire in an arc, cutting the blood-mage and his men off from the rest of the town, hosing down the screaming waterfront. Then, when all the screaming stopped, it folded its wings and stared at Kithyr. The blood-mage was holding out the spear. He hadn’t even flinched.

‘You cannot touch me, dragon!’ he shouted, waving it in the dragon’s face. ‘You can’t touch me. You know what this is. You know what this means.’

The black dragon lowered its head and peered at the mage. The Picker coiled, ready to flicker and spring. He didn’t dare move. Why wasn’t the mage dead? What was the dragon doing?

‘You know what this is!’ shouted the mage again. His voice sounded different. Stronger. Deeper. Not really his any more, but a chorus of many voices, all speaking in unison, all snarling with hate. ‘The Spear of the Earth, that’s what we are. The Pain of a Thousand Voices, and we know you. Do you remember us, brother? Do you remember what we are?’

The Picker dropped his cloth and chose a short, sharp sword. The blade was little longer than his forearm, but it was thick and heavy. For cutting limbs. People pruning, as we called it.

The dragon shifted closer until its nose was inches from Kithyr. Then its tail arced over its head. It snatched up three of Kithyr’s screaming men at once, tossed them into the air, caught them one by one in its mouth and ate them.

The rest broke and fled. The blood-mage might have bound them to him, but there were limits, even to that sort of power. The Picker didn’t wait. He flickered. He vanished from where he stood and for an instant became the wind and the air. A moment later he appeared behind Kithyr. The sword flashed and the blood-mage suddenly didn’t have an elbow any more.

‘Who was it told you all them stories, eh?’ he whispered. ‘Who was it told you about us, what we does and doesn’t do, eh? Was me and I lied.’ He snatched up the spear, meaning to hurl it towards the water and flicker away again. All too quick for the dragon to do anything about, leaving it with the blood-mage and whatever else took its fancy. Except even as he thought it, the simmering fury of the spear crashed into him like a great wave and he felt himself drown under its force. And then something wrapped around his waist and lifted him up into the air. The dragon had him.