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

‘The tunnels, Your Holiness. For you and your queen and your son. You will be safe there.’

‘What?’

‘You’ll hardly recognise them. If all does not go well, I dare say there are enough supplies for you and your household to last for some time. Months, perhaps.’

‘What are you talking about?’ The twinge of fear was turning into something more.

Vale took a deep breath and sighed. For once he turned to face Jehal and looked him in the eye. For once he looked tired. ‘There is a cage, Jehal. You can hang me in it if you want to, or perhaps I’ll hang you, but either will be a cause for celebration because it will mean we have survived. It will mean we are alive. It will mean it still matters. I don’t need to go anywhere to follow your orders. I am as ready as I can be. I have taken dragon poison and so have all my men. Up on the peaks by the Diamond Cascade are some thirty dragons and not one of them with a rider. One is white.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘They’ve been there for two days. I can only assume it’s you they’re waiting for. And now you are here.’ He turned briefly to look at Lystra. ‘Unless I am mistaken, the realms of the north are gone, Your Holiness. I am sorry.’ Then back to Jehal. ‘Go to the Glass Cathedral. You will be looked after. I have done everything I can.’

His face said the rest. Everything wasn’t enough. Not by a very long way. Jehal felt numb.

‘I have always kept lookouts on the edge of the Spur, Your Holiness. They are there to watch for dragons. Any who might threaten the city. They signal to me with mirrors, or with smoke and fire. They are still there. I think the dragons have chosen to let them live. They want us to know they are coming.’ He bowed, and for a moment looked old and tired. ‘Take what pleasure you can from the night, Your Holiness. In the morning they will come.’

Snow watched the dragons fly into the eyrie below. Such a number, she’d felt them coming from a hundred miles away and more. So had the others arrayed on the mountainsides around her.

Finally.

More to free.

A hundred.

More.

Excitement coursed through her. The other dragons felt the same.

We should wait.

Night comes.

Daylight is better.

But they were dragons, and so they tried and they tried but in the end they couldn’t wait. When one kicked itself into the air and spread its wings, the others followed in an instant, glad and gleeful. They fell through the air, looping and dancing through the spray of the Diamond Cascade until the City of Dragons rushed up to meet them.

They spread their wings and opened their mouths. Not like the other cities, this one. They had a fury inside them now, one that had been building up for two days on the mountainsides. For a week since they’d begun at Outwatch. For a thousand years and more since they’d last flown as a horde against an enemy who could actually fight them. They tore into the city, burning, smashing, clambering over walls, lashing towers to the ground, crushing houses underfoot, pouring fire through doors and windows and arches, savaging anything that crossed their path.

Don’t eat! Don’t eat! But the urge was irresistible. The rage had them hard, and when men and women ran screaming, it was impossible not to snatch them up with claw or tail and crush them and smash them and bite them in two and taste their blood. The city burned. Its flesh was delicious.

And then the scorpions began.

He saw them come. He was the Night Watchman, and seeing them come was the point of his being. It was hard to know whether the end of the world that was falling towards him was all Jehal’s fault or only mostly Jehal’s fault. But in the final reckoning it hardly mattered. He could almost have thanked Jehal, in a perverse way, for making this come to pass. It was the whole point of his existence, of every one of the Adamantine Men around him, of everyone who had gone before, the whole point of all of that was right here, right now, right in front of him.

He watched the City of Dragons burn. Patience. Patience was a weapon. Patience was the one thing he had that his enemy could barely understand. The city died and Vale watched. Tens of thousands of people. He supposed that others would expect him to feel something about that, some sort of sadness or regret, but that missed the point. That wasn’t his job. Let Jeiros weep and wring his hands for his beautiful city. I am the dragon-killer. No compassion, no mercy, no compromise. I am like them, but more.

The dragons were falling prey to their own passions. He could see it by the way they cavorted. They were ripping people out of their homes and eating them for the sheer fun of it. All good. A pity I couldn’t poison the whole city. I would have, if there had been a way. He’d already poisoned everything in the Adamantine Eyries. He and Vioros had seen to that long before Jehal returned. Vioros had seen to something else too, something that made Vale know his destiny was here.

When he thought they were ready, he gave the order to fire. The dragons were too far away for the scorpions to pick their targets, but they made up with that in other ways. Sheer numbers for a start.

Then he picked up the Adamantine Spear and went to wait outside.

Steel rain fell across the city. Bolts as long as a man fell almost straight out of the sky. They smashed through roofs and floors and buried themselves in cellar walls. They punched through chimneys and shattered flagstones. Here and there they struck dragons with enough force to drive straight through scales and deep into the muscles beneath. Dragons already teetering on the brink of battle lust dived headlong into it with a mad joy. Snow felt them roar with pain and then with merciless delight. At last a proper fight. She jumped into the air and spread her wings to be with them, powering up out of the smoke of the burning city towards the palace. Where I’m supposed to be. The eyrie could wait. Everything else could wait. It was wrong. They were being lured, pulled into a trap, but she didn’t even try to resist. There was no point. Why try to fight what you were created to be?

A second hail of metal spears fell around her. Two pierced her wings and passed straight through. A third struck her in the back, close to her tail. It hurt a lot more than the scorpions she remembered from the Worldspine. Angrily she twisted her neck and ripped the bolt out with her teeth. It snapped cleanly in two, leaving a foot of steel inside her. The pain grew suddenly worse. With a shriek she surged through the air. Poison, perhaps. Or acid. She didn’t care. A few poisoned bolts wouldn’t even slow her down. Wouldn’t slow any of them down.

She landed on the palace walls with a force that shook mountains, scattering men and scorpions around her like sand.

Vale could only be in one place at a time, so he started from the doors to the Glass Cathedral and worked from there. The palace would be destroyed. His men would be destroyed. His scorpions. He himself, most likely. None of that mattered. The dragons had to die, and that was all. Scorpions hailed overhead. The Azure Tower came crashing down, shattered lumps of stone as large as a house flying through the air. Boulders smashed against the hardened skin of the Glass Cathedral, exploding into shards, and then the earth shook beneath its feet as the first dragon landed in the Speaker’s Yard itself. A huge reddish monster, it raked the walls with fire and then rose up to tear at the needle-like Tower of Air.

The spear, it seemed, was singing to him, a soft choir of voices in ancient words that he didn’t understand and yet made perfect sense. He watched the dragon for a second and then another, feeling at the very last a tiny spark of what was perhaps fear, which flickered for a moment before he crushed it and ran out into the yard. No scream, no battle cry, but silent and swift, he plunged the Speaker’s Spear into the dragon’s leg.