The Order of the Scales (42 page)

‘I am Quai’Shu.’ One of the Taiytakei reached out a hand to her. His hair was white and thin, his dark face wrinkled. His hands were knobbly skin and bone. The arm he held out to her was shaking. He looked frail and insubstantial enough that a good gust of wind would pick him up off his feet and throw him off the ship.

Zafir still held the knife she’d used to cut herself free. She reached out to accept the offer of help with her other hand and rose shakily to her feet. Behind her back, she gripped the blade. A cautious thought stopped her doing anything rash: the memory of the dragon beneath her, snuffed out like you might snuff out a candle. She might take this one and hold a knife to his throat and then what?

‘What do you want?’ she hissed.

‘Dragons, Your Holiness,’ said the old man. My, but it had been a long time since anyone had called her that. Certainly Tichane hadn’t. He’d called her lots of other things, but never that. He was probably dead now, and she was glad. Underneath he’d had all the spite of Jehal and almost none of the charm.

‘You can’t just
take
dragons!’ Zafir almost laughed. What were they going to do? Sail off with a hatchling in the hold? She steadied herself. She’d seen ships from afar when she’d been to Furymouth. They were always there, out in the harbour, the Taiytakei. Wheedling and begging and poking and prodding and trying to get closer to the one thing they wanted. Everything ached, but in front of the old man she felt strong again. The Taiytakei sailors wore thin open shirts and short skirts and not one of them held a weapon. ‘And when they hatch, to eat you or burn you or both, how will you control them?’ She was a dragon-queen, who lived and flew and commanded monsters. Armed when they were not. She would cut through them like dragon-fire.

She staggered slightly, catching herself as the pitching of the deck caught her unawares. One ankle was still weak from her duel with Lystra. Stupid girl.

Quai’Shu smiled at her. ‘As you do, Your Holiness. With your alchemy.’

‘No alchemist would ever sell you their secrets.’

He nodded. ‘We have taken one of your alchemists. We know your secrets.’ He cocked his head. As he did, she caught sight of a white silk strip knotted to his belt. There was a black one next to it, and others besides. The golden dragons. Jehal’s wedding gift. They have must have been planning this even then. Her lips drew back. She snarled at him. ‘Valmeyan? He gave you the dragon eggs from Jehal’s eyrie, I know that much. Did he give you an alchemist as well? What did you give him?’

The old Taiytakei looked sad for a moment. ‘He wanted to build an empire. We gave him you, Your Holiness.’

‘But I am not yours to give,’ she hissed. ‘Take your eggs and burn!’ She had her knife in front of her now, sweeping through the air towards his neck before she’d finished speaking. The Taiytakei seemed rooted to the spot.

NO!

The knife turned to dust in her hand and puffed away. Zafir lost her balance. She stumbled across the deck and almost fell.

Quai’Shu looked at her sadly. ‘I did not expect anything better,’ he sighed and turned his back on her. ‘Whoever she is, you can get rid of her now. Turn her inside out or something.’

‘Her life is ours. Do you presume to take it, Quai’Shu?’ The voices of the silver sorcerers startled Zafir. The words came from three mouths at ones. Aloud they still spoke as one, in a harmony that was almost musical yet still as twisted and discordant as it had felt in her head. The old man hesitated. Paused. Didn’t move, didn’t turn back, but for an instant he froze.

Zafir leapt at him again. They’d disintegrated the knife in her hand, but she still had the one in her other boot. This time an invisible force slapped her away. She stumbled back, lost her balance and fell to the deck.

‘Do with her as you wish.’ The silver men dispersed into glittering mist and drifted up into the air. She followed them with her eyes towards the other dragons she’d brought with her from the Pinnacles, ridden by her three most trusted riders. They now hung motionless, frozen in the sky as though time, for them, had stopped. The silver mists reached them and seemed to whisper in the dragons’ ears. Even the Taiytakei seemed transfixed, watching the alien sorcerers ascend to the sky.

The old Taiytakei turned now, looked at her. He was still shaking, but it was only his age, not nerves. Or maybe it was suppressed laughter. Another one, taller, younger, but still skinny and frail-looking whispered in his ear. The old man frowned. Shrugged. Then nodded. Smiled, looked at Zafir, looked at the other man again and nodded once more. Then he turned and walked slowly away across the deck. The second Taiytakei stepped towards her. His eyes ran over her, carefully and methodically. He smiled at her, all greed and desire. ‘A queen from the land of dragons. You will fetch a fine price.’

One sight of the look in his eye and she knew what was on his mind. What was on the mind of most men when they saw her. She wasn’t sure whether it made her want to laugh or cry.
Men. You’re all so pathetically predictable.
Slowly, laboriously, she pushed herself back to her feet. The old Taiytakei was gone now, vanished off the deck. The younger one turned his back to her for a moment, gesturing, shouting words she didn’t understand at the sailors around him. For one bizarre moment she found herself thinking of Jehal. Missing him. At least he’d made no pretence of being anything else. At least, until Evenspire, he’d lived up to his promise.

She palmed the other boot-knife up her sleeve. Sailors were coming over now. She watched the Taiytakei who thought he owned her and clasped a hand to her breast. His eyes tracked the movement. She saw them glint, but he didn’t move.

‘Hold her.’

The first sailor reached out and grabbed her. She jumped straight at him, knocking him back. The sailor gave a yelp of surprise and let go. For a moment she was free. She had no doubt about what came next. The whole world narrowed down to the one Taiytakei who presumed to own her. To own a dragon-queen. She sprang at him and knocked him over and they fell, locked together. By the time they hit the deck she had the knife back out of her sleeve and was busy stabbing him.

‘Not.’ Stab. ‘Yours.’ Stab. ‘To give!’ Stab. Flecks of spittle flew from the corners of her mouth. Bodies piled on top of her – one, two, a dozen maybe – trying to pin her down and hold her still. She stabbed a few of them too, and then something hit her arm and her hand went limp and a moment after that the whole ship got up and hit her around the head.

She wondered, briefly, why she hadn’t dived into the sea to drown instead of killing the Taiytakei. But that last moment of clarity didn’t last long enough to give her an answer, and then everything was loud and black.

Jehal and his dragons reached Clifftop in the middle of the day. Even from a distance, he could see it wasn’t worth the bother of landing. Everything was in ruins. The tower was a pile of blackened rubble. The rest was wiped away. Gone. He circled the remains of his eyrie three times in case Zafir had left anyone alive, but no one came out. Perhaps they had the sense not to show themselves when dragon-riders were about, but Jehal suspected it had more to do with them all being dead. Alchemists, servants, Scales, the lot. Zafir was like that. Nothing if not thorough.

A pall of smoke hung over Furymouth, but the city was largely untouched. The Veid Palace was burning. Zafir had been thorough there too. A few of the towers survived as gutted shells. The racing circus in the field outside was still there, Vishmir’s Column and the giant bronze dragon of Gorgutinnin too, As for the rest . . . Well the city was still there. An unexpected kindness that. Palaces and eyries could be rebuilt. Cities were a little harder. The harbour was gone, the whole Taiytakei quarter with it. Some of the bigger buildings were still recognisable. The Paratheus, one or two others. Most of the docks were a burned husk, everything reduced to charred skeletons and rubble. There was no smoke down by the sea and the ash was cold and dead. Old work. Meteroa’s leaving present for the Taiytakei.

No sign of Zafir, but then he’d hardly expected to find her waiting for him. When he landed and sent his riders into the city, the news they brought back made little sense. Dragons had come, a handful, no more. They’d burned his palace and then gone out to sea towards the fleet of Taiytakei ships that had arrived only days before. A dragon had fallen out of the sky and sunk beneath the waves. Zafir’s? No one could say. And then later that day, as the tide turned, the ships had sailed away and the last three dragons had gone with them. Maybe Zafir had been on the back of one of them, maybe not. He supposed, if he flew far and fast enough, he might catch up with the ships and burn them, but really what was the point? Zafir was gone. Despite what Meteroa had done, the Taiytakei had got what they wanted. They had dragons now. As far as Jehal was concerned, they were welcome to the cursed creatures. Let them be the ones to burn when the monsters awoke. If she was still alive, they were welcome to Zafir too. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

The thought came, and with it, still, a pang of regret.

He left Wraithwing at the edge of the city and limped with some of his riders a little way into its streets. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. A dozen years ago and probably more, in a heavy disguise, trying to evade his father’s guards as much as any of his own people. After that they flew away. Out into the Raksheh, where no one would find them. One more night of freedom. Out to the little eyrie by the Moonlight Garden and the Yamuna Falls and the Aardish Caves, where Vishmir’s ashes had been hidden. Somewhere here, if you believed the stories, was the Silver King’s Black Mausoleum.
If
you believed the stories.

‘It’s finished,’ he told Lystra as night began to fall and they held on to each other, watching the stars gleam into existence overhead. ‘Zafir’s gone. Valmeyan is dead. Tichane is dead. They’re all gone. The war’s over.’
And I’m still alive.
Rather to his surprise, what mattered more was that his queen and his son were still alive, that his city was still alive. Pity it had left him a cripple. From the look of things, he’d be in pain and chewing Dreamleaf for the rest of his life.

He shrugged to himself. Could have been worse.

Lystra glanced at little Calzarin, wrapped tight between them, snoring and snuffling softly. ‘Do you really want to name him after your brother,’ she said after a moment or two of silence.

‘No.’ Jehal wasn’t sure when he’d realised that, but he knew it to be true. ‘I don’t. I want to call him Vishmir.’

His wife held his hand and squeezed it. ‘It’s not really finished, is it?’

‘Oh, let Hyrkallan have the Adamantine Throne. Now that I know what it’s like, he’s welcome to it.’
I could let it go if I had to. Couldn’t I?
It certainly hadn’t been what he’d hoped it would be, back when he’d set out to take it. Ancestors, but that seemed such a long time ago. He stretched and winced. There simply wasn’t a way to make his leg comfortable. ‘Let him deal with the rogue dragons. Him and the alchemists. I’m sure they’ll find a way. We can live here by the sea. Just the two of us.’

‘The two of us and about a thousand servants.’

‘Yes. In a palace that we haven’t built yet.’ He chuckled. ‘It’s not going to be easy, you know. Zafir and Valmeyan probably looted the treasury. We have a palace to build and an eyrie too, no money, and I can’t see the Taiytakei coming back in a hurry after what my uncle did to them.’
Not now they’ve got what they want.
His voice trailed away.
I’m going to miss you, old schemer. Who do I hatch my plans with now?
He looked at Lystra and smiled.
Certainly not you.

He almost didn’t leave in the morning. It would have been easy to go back to his city and start building, right there and then. Let Hyrkallan and Sirion and Jeiros and perhaps even the Night Watchman live in peace. Let them worry about dragons on the rampage in the north.

‘We’ve got no alchemists though,’ he whispered to Wraithwing as he climbed up onto the dragon’s back. ‘Don’t want you getting frisky on me. Don’t think that would be much fun.’ He wrenched his crippled leg into the saddle, gritting his teeth at the pain. The legbreaker had lived up to its name. His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘And for better or for worse, I’m still the speaker.’

Sand. This one is called Sand.

Another city of the north filled with little ones. An oasis surrounded by nothing. The same vast rivers flowed out of the World-spine and slowly died in the sun until they expired in the desert of salt, but the river here still ran strong. Not a city that could be starved and strangled. A city that met them with stones and scorpions. Brave but futile.

They flew in circles around the city walls, pouring fire inside it, building a whirling storm of flames, an inferno with a life of its own. Nothing was allowed to leave. It took a day, and then they stopped while the flames burned on and on, licking at the skeletons of stone that remained, searching for food. Some of the humans had sought shelter underground. Snow could feel their thoughts. She listened curiously as the few survivors slowly cooked to death in their cellars. The dragons didn’t feed here. They were already fat.

When the city was dead, they turned to the eyrie beside it. The little ones had long since disappeared deep under the ground. What would burn was burned. What could be crushed or smashed was ground to dust. When there was nothing left to do, they let Silence and the other hatchlings loose in the tunnels that remained. In Bloodsalt they had freed younglings and found eggs. Silence had carried them out, one by one, and the dragons had taken them and cradled them and stolen them away into whatever dark hidden places they could find. Here Snow already knew it would be different. There were no dragon thoughts. This was like Outwatch. Hatchlings all poisoned. Eggs smashed. Nothing left.

The dragons splashed around in the Last River, cooling themselves.