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

Yes, said a little voice. Remind me. How well, exactly, is that philosophy working out for you right now?

It could be better. But I’m prepared to give it one more crack of the whip. Now shut up.

The rider was still there. Why? Shouldn’t you be running away by now? ‘Your Holiness, may I ask what the terms of our surrender might be if Queen Lystra and her son are still alive?’

Jehal threw back his head and howled with bitter laughter. As if that’s going to happen.

‘Why then you can all go free back to your families. I won’t even ransom you.’ He was looking at the sky, at the dragons still circling up there. When he looked back at the battlements, the rider was gone.

Bastard. That’s hope you’ve given me. However much I know better, I can’t turn it away. Hope is like Taiytakei poison. Hope eats you slowly from the inside and turns men into fools. I don’t want hope, but now you’ve given it to me we both know there’s only one antidote. When you don’t come back I’m going to make sure I burn you first, whoever you are. We all know that everything is ruined. We all know I’m getting exactly what I deserve. All my fault. Blah blah blah. Yes, ancestors, I know you’re all laughing at me. Let me guess. You guided my fate and landed me here, alive and crippled, just for this. You kept me alive just so that I never find Lystra, I never find out what happened to her. I hunt Zafir and Valmeyan to the ends of the world and hang them both, but they never tell me. I am what you always wanted, your Vishmir. I sit on the Adamantine Throne for thirty years and I am remembered as the best speaker the realms have ever known. And for every aching second I am torn apart with hope and despair and spend most of my time either wishing I was dead or wondering what tiny corner of the world is left to be scoured. What I don’t get is my wife back. That about right? Oh-

Even as he beat the hope away, there she was. On the top of the battlements while dragons fell out of the sky around them. An illusion of his deranged and damaged imagination.

Too much pain, too much exhaustion, too much madness. That must be what it is.

He wasn’t sure what happened after that. It seemed as though one moment she was there and the next she was gone, and the one after that she was beside him, in front of him, holding him so tightly that he couldn’t breathe.

‘My love, my love, my love!’ That was all she said.

It had to be a trick. Jehal pushed her away so he could see her clearly, but apparently he had something in his eye. Both of them. A trick. A doppelganger. An imposter.

No. The rather plain, bruised and battered woman in front of him was none of those. He felt his head spin. He staggered, tried to catch himself with his ruined leg and fell into her arms.

‘You’re alive,’ he murmured, filled with disbelief. And then he fainted.

Luck was a fickle mistress, Vioros thought. He watched the battle from afar with Jeiros and half a dozen other alchemists, sat on the backs of dragons circling safely away from the fighting. Seven dragons, all of them hunters, were all Jehal was willing to spare. The alchemists had loaded them with as much as they could carry and then quietly hoped and prayed they wouldn’t be called on to fight. Luck heard them. Vioros watched the hordes of dragons crash together, miles away, like two dark clouds blown together in a storm. He watched hundreds of them plunge from the sky, distant specks falling like soft black snow, chasing after their fallen riders. He watched survivors scatter and flee, other dragons pursue, and was left to guess which side had actually won. The answer eventually came as flashes of fire from the tops of the Pinnacles. Cautiously, the riders who flew the alchemists’ dragons approached. No one bothered to come and tell them that the battle was over.

Yes, luck. Luck had been busy today. Luck had kept Hyrkallan alive to revel in his victory while more than half his riders had died. Luck had made King Jehal the first to land on the Pinnacles, if land was a reasonable way to describe it. Luck had provided the alchemists with enough potion stored in the city eyries to keep the thousand and more dragons now encamped around the Pinnacles under control for a few days. After that, Vioros hadn’t the first idea what they would do. Sirion and Hyrkallan had brought most of what they had. The Adamantine Eyrie had been stripped bare. Zafir had denuded Furymouth. Outside Valmeyan’s hidden mountain eyries and whatever hoard Jeiros was keeping to himself, there was nothing left.

So now they were looking for more. The dragon-riders might dismount and run into the halls to feast and drink and sing of their victory, but for Vioros and the alchemists the real battle was about to start.

He went to Valleyford first because it was where the alchemists had long had a stronghold. The potions from the cellars there had been used to keep the dragons of Bazim Crag and Three Rivers docile, but there was always the chance that more had been squirrelled away. At least that was what Jeiros and Vioros had both thought before he left on his fool’s errand. As it was, he didn’t even bother landing. Valleyford had been obliterated. Arys Crossing too – whoever had burned it this time had done a much better job than Vishmir had in the War of Thorns. The Alatcazat monastery was gone. Gutted. So much for their fabled luck. Hammerford, sandwiched between them, had fared somewhat better in that the place had only been half destroyed. There were still people there.

Hammerford was a nothing place and certainly not likely to yield a secret coven of alchemists who just happened to have hidden a few hundred handy barrels of dragon-potion. The sensible thing was to go straight back to Jeiros, empty-handed. Maybe strike out for Clifftop and Furymouth and see what, if anything, Zafir had missed.

Sensible, but on the other hand the waterfront at Hammerford had acquired two giant dragon statues that hadn’t been there six months earlier, and Vioros was fairly sure he would have heard about something like that. So he circled and then landed after all because he was curious, and that was where luck struck again. The people of Hammerford didn’t know much about their new statues, but they had caught one of the riders who’d brought the fire to their town. They hadn’t got round to hanging him yet, and yes, Vioros could talk to him. Apparently he called himself Kemir, but that was obviously a lie since it was an outsider name and the man was clearly a dragon-rider. So said the folk of Hammerford, who were clearly itching to murder at least someone for what had happened to them.

By his reckoning, Vioros listened to Kemir for the best part of two hours. Truth be told, he lost track of time in the cellar where the townsfolk were keeping him. Everything the sell-sword said sounded so fantastic, yet there was no way he could have known some of the things he described unless he’d been there, and then there was the small matter of the blood-magic that Vioros had used to force the truth out of him. As far as Vioros could tell, the sell-sword hadn’t even tried to resist it.

Which meant that Jeiros was right and the white rogue had returned. Which meant that there weren’t one or two or four awoken dragons but more like twenty. Which in turn meant that he and everyone else were all as good as dead, and it was just a matter of time. All their fretting about how to eke out what potion Jeiros could make was a complete waste.

And then, at the end, the sell-sword told him about the spear.

When he was done, Vioros staggered for the doorway out of the cellar.

‘Alchemist.’ The sell-sword could barely speak. The beating he’d taken from the townspeople, well, Vioros counted himself lucky that the man wasn’t already dead.