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

‘Hey there, Grand Master! Are you still alive out there?’

Jehal. Jeiros couldn’t help himself. He wept. He tried to speak but found he could only croak.

‘I know exactly what you did to get yourself strung up like this. I’ve got one of your people here. Very keen to tell me all about it. I think he thinks I’m going to cut you down. Have to say I’m quite tempted to leave you there and push your little friend here off the edge. I can quite see Hyrkallan’s point, you know. If you murdered my dragons, I dare say I’d be more than a little put out.’

‘It was…’ Cursed voice. Angrily Jeiros hacked and coughed. It didn’t help much. ‘It was for the good…’ The good of the realms, that’s what he was trying to say. The rest came out as an angry grating sound.

‘What was that? I can’t hear you.’

Jeiros tried again.

‘Nope. Still can’t. Look, I don’t think I can ask my riders to fly around in circles all night while I get some sleep, and I’m not sure this is the best place for that anyway. Shall I come back in the morning?’

‘Nargh!’ The worst of it was that he couldn’t even see Jehal. He was hanging with his feet towards the fortress and he couldn’t twist his head enough. He could almost feel Jehal turn and walk away. Bastard. Then the crane started to move. He had a moment of panic at first, thinking they were dropping him into the void below. Then an absurd sense of joy.

They swung him in slowly then lowered the wheel and turned it over so that Jeiros was staring up at the sky. Up at the man he’d made speaker.

‘Oh dear, look at you.’ Jehal wore his usual sneer of practised disdain. ‘If I let you go, are you going to kill my dragons too, Jeiros? Honestly now. Please don’t lie.’

Jeiros bit his tongue. The right answer was obvious. No. His lips shaped to say it.

‘Honestly now.’ Jehal’s expression didn’t flicker, but there was something hard in his eyes. A fierceness that hadn’t been there a few weeks ago.

‘Only if I have to.’

Jehal frowned. ‘Well that’s not the answer I was looking for. A simple no would have gone down much better.’ He sighed.

‘You asked… for honesty.’

‘So I did. And you did help me after Shezira tried to un-man me. I suppose that should count for something.’

‘I saved your life,’ Jeiros croaked. Jehal snorted.

‘Oh I don’t know about that.’ He put his hands on his hips and struck a pose. His weight was all on one leg and he looked like an idiot, but he was presumably long past caring what a mere alchemist thought of him. ‘But since Hyrkallan put you there and since he’s such a tedious arse…’ He made a cutting gesture. Jeiros winced as hands touched his wrists. ‘If you do ever want to kill my dragons, Grand Master, I’d appreciate it if we could have a little chat about it first, eh?’

Jehal leaned against a well near the edge of the Adamantine Eyrie. Jeiros sat with his back to it, his useless legs stretched out on the muddy ground. Finding chairs for two cripples was proving to be a problem.

‘The trouble with dragons,’ Jehal mused, ‘is never the monsters themselves.’ Keeping the weight off his damaged leg was making his back stiff. It was tempting to sit in the dirt with Jeiros, but that wasn’t what a speaker should do. Wasn’t what a grand master alchemist should do either, for that matter, but Jeiros didn’t have much of a choice. He’d be lucky to ever walk again. ‘The trouble always comes from the people who ride on the back of them.’ Jehal’s leg hurt whatever he did with it, a steady throbbing that never went away. The alchemists would have something for that, now they were here. Herbs, potions, anything, something that was stronger than Dreamleaf. He watched wearily as the last of his riders came in to land. The sky above the Mirror Lakes was a deep grey, like the slate roofs of the city. Evening rain clouds, carried up by the wind from the Raksheh and the sea beyond.

Eventually Eyrie-Master Copas conjured up a litter from somewhere. Jehal climbed in, slowly and laboriously. Jeiros sat beside him, lifted in by two of the bearers. The alchemist didn’t say anything and his eyes were closed. Most probably he was asleep.

‘We could have flown all through the night, straight from the Pinnacles, and been here in the morning, bright and early. The dragons wouldn’t have minded. I know they don’t much like flying in the dark but they’ll do it if you tell them. No, it’s the riders. Needing sleep and food and rest and to empty their bowels. We lost the whole day.’ He prodded Jeiros and waved a pouch of Dreamleaf at him. ‘Can dragons fly for ever? Do they actually need to rest at all? Does anyone know?’

Jeiros had a faraway look, either because his thoughts had been miles away or because he really had been asleep. ‘No. And yes and yes.’ He took a pinch of leaf and started to chew on it. ‘We did experiments on that sort of thing a long time ago. They don’t exactly wear out. But if they don’t rest and eat and drink, then eventually they overheat and then they burn up from the inside and die.’ His eyes came into focus on Jehal’s face. ‘The trouble with dragons, Jehal, is that they exist.’

Jehal. Not Your Holiness, just Jehal. After all they’d been through he couldn’t hold it against the alchemist. He watched the dragons. They were hungry and irritable and were tearing with zeal into the terrified animals that the Scales had herded out of their pens. Those like Wraithwing who’d sated themselves were already curled up to rest. ‘They do make a mess.’

‘A mess? Pray we don’t see what a mess they make.’ Jeiros stretched and then winced. Every movement was pain. Jehal knew how he felt. Look at us. A pair of cripples. ‘We should have wiped them out when we had the chance. It took a sorcerer, a true half-god sorcerer. Thousands and thousands of people died. Probably tens of thousands. We gave ourselves up with the poison in our veins. We killed them and we tamed them and we hunted out their nests and smashed their eggs. Perhaps we could have destroyed them. But no. We tamed them. We thought we were so clever.’ He spat bitterly. ‘Why did you keep me alive, Jehal? All I want to do now is kill every dragon here.’

‘Yes, well you won’t be doing that just yet. I kept you alive because you kept me alive. Besides, the realms need their alchemists whether I like it or not.’ And let’s not forget that you’re probably the one person who’ll stop the Night Watchman sticking my head on a spike the moment I hobble through the palace gates. But we won’t mention that, eh?

‘They won’t thank you for it.’

‘Yes, yes. The apocalypse is coming. Tell me, Jeiros, because it’s been bothering me for months, this potion of yours – why don’t you just make more?’

‘If only it was so easy. Truth is we’ve never been able to make quite enough. We get by. Now and then, when there is a strong speaker, we have a quiet cull, spread over two or three years. We don’t tell the kings and queens, just let them think it’s some sort of disease. It goes by unnoticed. We did it with Vishmir, Ayzalmir, a few others. So then most of the dragons are hatchlings, and we can stockpile potion. As they grow into adults, we very slowly start to run out. In time we have to do it again. The rogues who attacked the Redoubt didn’t affect what we could make, but they destroyed what we had stored. Ruined the lot. And then there was the war. The Red Riders. Evenspire.’ He wrinkled his nose.

Jehal waited. ‘You didn’t actually answer my question,’ he said.

Jeiros actually laughed. ‘I won’t tell you what goes into it, Speaker. Even Vioros doesn’t know that. Outside those who actually live in those caves, there are three of us who know, and only because we’ve done it ourselves. I’ve made that potion, Jehal. It’s simple enough. There’s just one thing that goes into it that matters, but that one thing…’ He shook his head. ‘We bleed for it, Jehal, we alchemists, and if our blood was all that mattered we would bleed ourselves dry. Only then there would be no more alchemists. Some harvests only yield what they yield and there is simply nothing more to be done.’ He laughed again. ‘Perhaps we should have bled ourselves to death for the rest of you. Perhaps we have. Not that it would make any difference.’