“Well?”

Valaric sat across the table. He had more scars than Jonnic remembered, most of them on the inside. The men with him were strangers, but they were clearly soldiers too. They’d all fought the Ljosir and lost. Jonnic reckoned you got a sixth sense for that sort of thing. They ought to have been friends, but something about them unsettled him.
Jonnic took a deep swig of ale. “There’s a lot of them. Two thousand or so and more coming every day. They’re eating everything and drinking the place dry.” He spat on the floor. “This lot are demonwhores, that’s for sure. With the demon himself sleeping in our keep.”

“Turns out the Widowmaker didn’t die at Lostring Hill after all, and never mind what–”

“You think that’s news here?” Jonnic hawked up a gob of phlegm and spat it onto the floor. “You’re getting slow, Valaric. The Widowmaker came through the gates this afternoon.”

The look Valaric gave him after that was odd. Shifty, maybe. Troubled.

“The Vathen are looking for him,” he said after a bit. “I was wondering whether to help them, or whether that was a bad idea. What’s this Medrin like?”

Jonnic spat again. “The demon-prince? Worst of the lot.” He looked around, nervous. You never knew who was listening. There were the good Marroc, the ones like Valaric you could trust. Then there were the bad Marroc, the ones who’d sell you for a handful of pennies. Most of the men sitting and drinking in the dockside tavern were men he knew, but there were always a few strangers. He leaned forward. “He’s the one whose been hanging people up in the square. So fond of his bloody ravens you’d think he was married to one. Funny thing is, even half the Ljosir don’t seem to like him that much, but they still do what he says. Don’t know if the Widowmaker’s any better, but he can’t be worse. Funny him showing up. Even the Ljosir thought he’d died at Fedderhun. Been drinking toasts to the end of his damned soul all week, we have.”

Valaric twitched. “Turns out he didn’t die after all. How many men here you trust?”

“In Andhun?” Jonnic shook his head. Fifty, maybe. Don’t know they’d take up arms against the Widowmaker though. Don’t know that I would either.”

“You’ve seen what they’re doing to us,” snarled Valaric. “You happy with that?”

“Course I’m not bloody happy!” Jonnic growled right back at him. “But what are you going to do with fifty swords, Valaric.”

“Make it two hundred.”

“And then what, eh? Against two thousand of them led by the Widowmaker.” He laughed. “I don’t mind swinging an axe for you, Valaric, but not when there’s no point. You’ll get us killed for nothing and then this prick Medrin, he’ll decimate the city. He’ll not baulk at murdering women and children, this one. You’ll have the streets swimming red with his bloody ravens.”

“You get your men ready for the call, Jonnic, and then we’ll see. There might be two thousand of them now but there won’t be so many when the Vathen are done with them.”

Jonnic shook his head. “They smashed the Vathen already, Valaric. You’re too late.”

“No. I’ve seen their army and that was just the start.” Valaric got up. “My money would be on the Vathen, if I had any. Doesn’t really matter though, does it? Whoever wins, you don’t suppose they’re just going to wave and go home. That’s not what they do. And this time it’ll be worse, because if it’s the Ljosir, we’ll just let them do it to us. Like we already are.”

Jonnic watched him go. That’s not what they do. He was right about that. Poor old Valaric. Man had had a family once. Wasn’t the Ljosir that had killed them either. Just a winter that had been sharp and harsh, a wasting disease among the animals, and the whole village had simply frozen and starved to death, every last one of them. There were whispers of an Aulian Shadewalker, but Valaric blamed the Ljosir. If he hadn’t been off fighting, he’d have been there to save them, or to die with them, one or the other.

He finished his drink and got up. When three fork-beards followed him out, it didn’t seem that strange, not with so many of them in the city these days. Not until he turned down an alley to the river and they still they followed him and then stopped to watch while he took a piss into the Isset. By then, he mostly knew he was going to die.

“So what do you ugly nioingr want then?”

They closed in around him. All three had knives at their belts and Jonnic had nothing, so he lunged at the nearest, pushed him backwards and pulled out the man’s knife for himself. The other two grabbed him as he did it, one from each side. He stabbed backwards with the knife. One of the forkbeards grunted and fell away. The other one pulled him hard, spinning him around, and head-butted him. Jonnic staggered back. For a moment, the night was filled with stars.

Arms tackled him from the side, lifting him up and throwing down. He stabbed out with the knife, but this time they caught his arm.

“Maker-Devourer! The little mare’s killed me!” He caught sight of a flying boot in time to turn his face away. It smashed into the side of his head in an explosion of noise and light and pain. Someone stamped on his hand and he dropped the knife. He screamed as they broke his fingers. When he looked up, he could see one of the three demonbeards was clutching his side, blood seeping through his fingers.

He lay curled in a ball while they kicked him and stamped on him and cursed. Traitor! Bare-face! Nioingr! Feeble-finger! Mare! Caught one last glimpse of the stars as one of the forkbeards lifted a stick of wood and brought it down, and then nothing until a shock of cold water roused him again.

They’d thrown him in the river. In the Isset. He felt the pull of the water, dragging him towards the sea, dragging him down, sucking him under.

And then the darkness again.

Now he lay on the top of a low hill, squeezed between two rocks and half hidden beneath a thorn bush, old and dead and dried. The river had found its way through the dragon dam in time, but not until everyone here was long dead. Nonetheless he kept absolutely still. There was one other thing at Bloodsalt. There were dragons.

His fingers tightened around the haft of his axe, closer to him and cared for with more tenderness than any lover. He squinted. Two adults. The same two adults he’d seen every day for more than a week now as he and what was left of his company of men eased their way along the Sapphire River valley towards the lake and the ruins of the old city. Two adults and perhaps a score of hatchlings. More dragons than any of them had ever seen in the year since the Adamantine Palace had burned.

The Adamantine Men had done their duty when the dragons first awoke. To eyrie after eyrie, the word had come before the dragons did. Quietly and without fuss, the alchemists had slipped poison into the potions they fed to the dragons, adults and hatchlings alike. Quietly and without fuss, the dragons had burned from the inside and died. And while they were burning, the Adamantine Men had taken their hammers and their axes. They’d marched into the hatcheries and the egg rooms, and they’d done what needed to be done. In some places, there had been fighting between the Adamantine Men and soldiers loyal to the eyrie masters or the dragon-king or queen who owned him. Always and without exception, they were fights that the Adamantine Men won. Across the realms, eggs had been smashed, dragons poisoned.

Except here. Here and Outwatch. Had Bloodsalt had any warning? They’d had seconds at Outwatch. Seconds and that had still very nearly been enough.

“Any kills boss?” whispered a voice in the thorns beside him. “I don’t see any kills.”

“No.” Skjorl shook his head. There was nothing to eat near Bloodsalt for anything larger than a sand-lizard, much less a dragon. The adults probably flew out up into the Oordish Moors to feed, hundreds of miles away, but they always came back. The hatchlings? He didn’t know if they’d go so far. He was hoping not, otherwise they were all wasting their time.

“Bollocks.” The thorns rustled angrily. Skjorl stayed silent. No kills. No kills meant nothing to poison. Until there was something to poison, they’d stay where they were, hiding in the dust and the salt, drinking brackish water, eating their own boots and being bitten to death by sand flies. He could live with that if it meant taking down a dragon. Skjorl had his own cask of dragon-poison, more than enough for a full-grown adult. He had his axe, too, in case they got as far as the eggs. Yes, he could wait right enough.

They’d had a hatchling in a cave at Outwatch. A rogue the Mad Queen had made. The old greybeard who ran the eyrie had let slip what it was and that had been good enough for Skjorl, good enough to kit up in dragonscale armour, dismantle a scorpion and carry it down to the hatchling caves. The dragon had strained at its chains and spat fire at them but the chains had held. They’d carried the scorpion in pieces to the far end of its cave, to the hole in the cliff-face where the sunlight and the open air poured in. They’d carefully built it back together while the hatchling watched them like a hawk. Somehow the first shot had missed. Then he’d looked outside and he’d seen the white horror gliding through the sky towards them. Riderless. Coming home. The greybeard had taken the scorpion for himself. Skjorl hadn’t waited. He’d run, shoving his men out in front of him, last one out, slamming the door as he went. Didn’t pause to see what became of the eyrie master. Death walked beside every Adamantine Man. When it came, it came quickly and you went one of two ways, crispy or crunchy. They’d run and run, all through the tunnels under Outwatch as the citadel came smashing down. They’d taken their hammers and their axes. Eggs smashed. Hatchlings murdered, the little ones butchered, the bigger ones fed poison. He’d taken servants and slaves and Scales and battered them and strapped skins of poison to them, then thrown them to the howling monsters to be devoured. They’d have been dead anyway if he hadn’t. And amid the screaming and the blood and the fire that came after, an unexpected smile had stretched across his face. The dragons had awoken. The end of the world had begun. It was what he’d been made for.

The same smile was still there. Crispy. The eyrie master had gone the crispy way. For ordinary men there was a third way, the starving to death under the ground way. That was something that would never happen to him, but he didn’t mind a bit of waiting, not if there was a reason for it. He’d have gone face to face with the dragons of Outwatch if there’d been a purpose to it, but there hadn’t. So he’d waited them out, and they’d left. Left him and his company, what remained of them, stranded in the middle of the desert, a hundred miles from anywhere, surrounded by ash and ruin.

It had been a lot like this.

The sun slipped below the horizon and darkness wrapped the salt plains. Skjorl eased himself out from under his thorn bush and crept back down the hill and into the chaos of rock-heaps where the other Adamantine Men were waiting, still and quiet. There were seven of them left, a poor shadow of the fifty-odd that had left the Purple Spur three months ago. There was Jex, who’d been with him in Outwatch and ever since. Vish, too. Jasaan he’d picked up on his way south, in what was left of Sand after the dragons had finished with it. Kasern, Relk and Marran, they’d come later when he’d trekked his way from Sand all through the dead Blackwind Dales as far as the Silver River and finally found what passed for the remains of civilisation, hiding out in the caves and chasms that reached from one side of the Spur to the other. Jex and Vish, they were his squad. They’d spent the best part of a year together, struggling every day not to be dead. The rest, they were all Adamantine Men and three months creeping up the length of the Sapphire River had told him everything he needed to know. They were alive while everyone else wasn’t. They were survivors. The best.

“Stay alive?” Vish tossed over a skin half full of water from the river. It tasted warm and foul. Everything out here was too hot. He drank, though. The taste was something he’d come to know. The bitterness and nausea and blood-iron tang of the powders the alchemists had given them. Mix with water and drink at least once a day so the dragons don’t find you. Skjorl had no idea what that meant or how it worked, but it was true that dragons usually had a way of knowing where you were, no matter how well you hid. They’d found that out the hard way crossing the Blackwind Dales.

He tossed the skin to Jex. It was also true that on their trip up the Sapphire River, the dragons had seemed not to notice them. Maybe they’d been lucky, although seven left from more than half a hundred was an odd kind of luck. But he took his potion, however bad it tasted, and he’d keep taking it. Given how many of them were left, there wasn’t much chance they’d be running out any time soon.

“Waiting, is it?”

Skjorl nodded. Waiting. Three months it had taken them to get this far. They could do waiting. And then they’d be done and then maybe they’d spend three months getting back home again, and if that’s how it was, that’s how it was.
Jex tipped the skin and poured water into his mouth. He tossed it back towards Vish but Kasern snatched it out of the air. He picked up another one and held them out in one hand, dangling half-empty next to each other. “What’s that then?”

Relk shook his head and turned away. Jex and Vish were laughing.

“Tits,” Marran spat. “That’s what that is. I could murder for a good pair of tits.”

“That’s not just any tits.” Jex rubbed his crotch and nudged Skjorl. “That woman from Scarsdale, she had tits like that, eh? Old and saggy and wrinkled and yet oddly firm.” He chuckled to himself.

“More like two giant balls in a giant ball-sac, they were.” Vish wrinkled his nose.

“Didn’t see you minding at the time.”

“Didn’t see anyone minding at the time,” grunted Skjorl. Four months they’d been when they’d reached Scarsdale. Four months from Outwatch. Past Sand, black and smashed to bits. Past Evenspire, which just wasn’t there any more except the Palace of Paths, so big and so massive that even dragons couldn’t knock it flat. Four months and mostly all they’d seen were blackened corpses. Everything in the Blackwind Dales was dead even before the dragons. And then they’d got to Scarsdale. Twelve people they’d found there, hiding in the copper mines, creeping out at night for water from the Dragon River, eating fish and fresh-water crabs and whatever roots and leaves would grow by the river.

“Shit-eaters, all of you,” grumbled Jasaan. “And what about the other one? You remember her?”
Shit. This again. Skjorl tensed.

“Sweet Vishmir but she was ripe. If she was here now . . .” Vish leered.

“If she was here now you’d tie her up and show her your adamantine cock.” Jex licked his lips.

“Damn right.”

“Not before I showed her mine. Except I wouldn’t be needing any rope. She’d be begging for it.”

Skjorl punched Jex in the arm. “Old soldiers first, boy.” He scowled. “Marran, put them away. We’ve none of us had a woman for months. My balls are full to bursting.”

“Any more of this and I’m going to start wanting to fuck the sand flies!”

“Lai’s dick!” Jasaan waved his arms. His voice rode over the others. “You . . .” He had words to say. Anyone could see that, but they were old words and had been said before and no one else gave a shit about Scarsdale and all the things that had happened there, no one except Jasaan. “You’re . . .” But by then, Skjorl had slipped like an eel round behind him and clamped a hand firmly over his mouth.

“Shhh,” he whispered in Jasaan’s ear. “These lovely potions don’t make a dragon deaf, so keep your voice down. You got something to say to me, you say it. But quiet like.”

Jasaan glared at him. He shook his head.

“No, I thought not.”

The soldiers fell quiet, sitting still and alert as the sun sank and the sky darkened. They’d become night people in the last year and a half. The dragons flew in daylight and slept – or whatever it was they did – at night, and so the Adamantine Men learned to be otherwise. At night they moved. Never too far though, never so far that they couldn’t be sure of shelter come the dawn. Sometimes that meant they travelled for hours, found nothing and went back to where they’d been the night before. On the worst part of their trip up the Sapphire River they’d spent six nights in the same cave. And that had been trouble too. The longer you stayed in a place, the more signs you left. Dragons were good at spotting signs.

Back then they’d numbered more than twenty-five. Now they were seven. Seven was a lot easier to hide. The way back would be quicker than the way here. A month, Skjorl thought. Not three. He crossed his fingers and hugged his axe and thought a little prayer to the Great Flame.

“Fucking dragons,” spat Marran.

Skjorl closed his eyes. “Easy lads,” he murmured. “They’ll go hunting sometime. We just wait here until they do.” He stretched. “Then we slip in, slow and easy and do what Adamantine Men were born to do. We kill dragons.” He grinned and let out a little growl. “A month from now we’ll be back in the Sapphire Valley and Jex can stop making love-eyes at the sand flies.”

“Yeah.” Vish laughed. “He can make them at the snappers instead.”

“Snapper wants a piece of me, it’ll be a sharp one.” Relk gripped his spear.

“Yeah, but Jex’s got a spear that’s every bit as hard, just not quite as sharp.” A low rumble of laughter rippled among the men. Skjorl looked about. Jasaan was gone, moved off a little while back after Skjorl had told him to shut up. It was dark now, desert dark with clear air and a bright moon and a thousand stars. Still, he wasn’t about to get up and look. Man wanted to be on his own, that was his privilege, especially at night when there weren’t dragons overhead. He grinned to himself. Jasaan was probably thinking about sand flies too. Or of the woman from Scarsdale. Not the old one, but the young one. The one with the soft skin and the hair like fur. How grateful she’d been for an Adamantine Man.

Sometimes men did terrible things, Skjorl had come to realise. When they knew there was no one to hold them to account, yes, sometimes men did terrible things. And sometimes they enjoyed them, more than was right. And that was just the way of the world.

He sniffed, looked up, heard the slightest noise and was on his feet in a moment, sword half-drawn. But it was only Jasaan. He cocked his head.

“Feeling better? No harm meant. I know how it is.”

Jasaan shrugged. There was hate in those eyes. Skjorl didn’t even need to see it any more, he’d seen it so much. But Jasaan was a weak one. Too bothered with staying alive.

Jasaan looked away and spat. He tipped his head back towards the quiet rustling waters of the Sapphire river. “Went for a little walk. Know what I found? I found a tunnel half-filled with water. Want to know where it goes?” He pointed straight towards the distant remains of Bloodsalt, and to the dragons that stood between them. “That’s where. Right into the city.”

He tried not to look but he couldn’t resist. Three men had come in together. He couldn’t make out much through the press of his regulars but they had an air to them, the sort that said they were used to trouble. They didn’t look like they were local, either. Not city folk. Most likely they were sailors up from the docks, although the Barrow of Beer was closer to the market side of the Maze and not many sailors made it this far. The taverns and the Moongrass dens and the brothels and the muggers and the press-gangs saw to that.

The three of them settled into a corner near the door, crowding tightly onto wooden stools around a tiny table. An unspoken accommodation was reached and the mood in the Barrow sighed and relaxed back to its usual loudness. Three men who were used to trouble, but they weren’t here looking for it here and that was all that mattered. Kasmin finished what he was doing, wiping empty tankards and poured a couple more. Most of the men in here passed as friends, people who’d been coming to the Barrow for years. They were his family, his safe place. He took comfort from that. Strangers made him uneasy. He hadn’t always kept a tavern.

That done, he did what was expected of him and wandered across the floor, easing himself between the knots of drinkers until he reached the three strangers by the door.

“Evening, gentlemen . . .”

His words froze in his mouth. He’d never seen two of them before, but the third . . . the third he knew all right. It was a face ten years older than when he’d last seen it, but there was no mistake. If Kasmin had had a sword with him, there would have been a fight, right there and then, and one of them would have been dead.

He didn’t have a sword though and the three men had knives. Long curved knives, a sort he knew all too well. They were looking at him blankly, wondering what was wrong with him. The man he wanted to kill didn’t remember him!

“Ale or wine?” he asked brusquely.

The man he wanted to kill spat on the floor. “Wine.”

The voice. He remembered that voice, too. Shouting out orders across the deck of a ship and swearing murder over a narrow gap of sea. Kasmin had sworn something back, something about revenge.

“Wine.” He gave them a curt nod and pushed his way back to the other end of the tavern, almost stumbling in his own house. There was a fury inside him now, a rage he hadn’t felt for – how long had the emperor sat on the throne of Varr? Eleven years now? That long and a couple of years more. A killing rage. His hands were shaking. Men who’d known him for years were looking at him, brows furrowed.

“You all right, Kas?”

He shook them away and steadied himself, then took a bottle of wine and three cups from a shelf. He looked at the secret place where he kept his own long curved knife, exactly like the ones the three men had their hips. He hadn’t used it, not in anger, not for the same number of years since he’d felt this fury, but he still knew how. Straight into the neck of one of them, into the face of the second . . .

And and then the third man, the one with his back to the wall, the one sat in the corner with the table in front of him, the one Kasmin really wanted to kill, he’d be upon his feet by then, blade drawn and ready for a fight. It wouldn’t take much to go wrong for Kasmin to be the one who came off worse from that.

His eyes left the knife. He took a deep breath. There were other ways. Syannis – he’d have to tell Syannis. Then there would be blood, no two ways about it. Syannis would come like a hurricane and carve them into pieces.
He wormed his way back to their table and put the cups and the bottle down in front of them. “Half a crown.”
The man he wanted to kill tipped a handful of pennies out of his purse. Kasmin counted them. Too many. He left a couple behind. The man was watching him, peering at him, looking too hard for comfort.

“Better be good this,” he grunted. “Came here special we did. You must be right friendly with that weird old fellow down by the river. Said this was the best place in the Maze for a drink. Don’t look it.”

Kasmin shrugged. He took his pennies and backed away. So the witch-doctor had sent them here. Saffran Kuy, another refugee from a kingdom that didn’t exist any more. Syannis and Kuy, the thief-taker who hadn’t always been a thief-taker, the witch-doctor who hadn’t always been a witch-doctor. And him, the tavern-keeper who’d once been a soldier. They’d all come here because it was far, far away, because they had no home and nowhere was safe any more, and it was all thanks to one man. Radek of Kalda.

And here, sitting in the corner of Kasmin’s tavern was The Headsman. One of Radek’s lieutenants. The one Kasmin hated the most.

.

“Dragon! Dragon!” The cry broke the quiet. Lyna froze. She looked up. A few dozen yards away, Gerla stood frozen too. The cry came from further away, from the look-out standing in the long yellow grass at the edge of the forest, close to the line of trees that marked a little brook. If you looked hard enough, on a clear day, you could see for miles from there, on up the gently sloping fields towards the line of hills in the distance that were the moors. There were dragons up on the moors. There was a time when there had been dragons everywhere.

“Dragon!” The lookout was Lyna’s little brother, Pazile, although everyone called him Paz. She could see him now, running up through the grass, lifting his little legs up so high it looked like he was dancing. Paz was nine years old, and in places the grass was taller than he was. Gerla had already started to run, the other women from the village too, all of them bolting deeper into the trees, to the shelter they had waiting for them. Lyna should run too, she knew that, but Paz was her brother and he was only little. It wasn’t fair, when you were nine, to be the last. So she ran towards him, out into the fringes of the grass.

He waved frantically at her. “Lyna! Dragons! You have to run!”

“I’m waiting for you!”

She wasn’t supposed to and they both knew it, but she could see the relief on his face. He was terrified. Paz had never seen a dragon before. Neither had Lyna, not close enough to be anything more than a dot in the sky, but some of the village men had. Dragons had come once, with men on their backs, right to the edge of the forest. The stories of that time were the most terrible stories Lyna knew, of fire and murder, of men and women dragged screaming from their huts and the whole village set on fire. Dragons were death. Them and the men who rode them.

Paz reached her. He clutched at her shirt and bent over, catching his breath. After a moment, he half turned and pointed up at the sky and looked at her, all at once.

“Dragon!” he said.

He had good eyes, that’s why he’d been chosen, but Lyna could see them now. They were coming from the moors, high up in the air, and not just one or two, which was how dragons usually came. No, today there was a whole cloud of them, a swarm. There must have been a hundred, a haze of distant dark specks in the air.

“Come on!” Paz pulled Lyna’s arm. “They’re coming this way!” And he was right, they were coming straight towards the forest. They were miles away, but dragons flew fast. Lyna turned to run.

Lyna’s village was, if it wanted to be, invisible. A man on the ground could walk right through it, and if the ladders to the tree-houses had been pulled up and the trapdoors down to the tunnels pulled down, he wouldn’t even know it was there. There were plenty of reasons why the forest-dwellers would want to hide. When men came, more often than not it was with swords and nets and cages, and they came to take slaves. The worst menace were the snappers, the man-eating lizards that tore through the forest in packs. Too fast to flee, too strong to fight, so Lyna and her kin hid up in the trees, out of their reach and out of their sight, and if a snapper pack came through, that’s where they stayed until the lizards moved on. Dragons, they were another matter. Dragons didn’t come into the forest much, not unless men led them and that hadn’t happened for years. The towering trees, hundreds of feet high and as wide as a house were too large even for a dragon to push down. The canopy above was a single unbroken sea of leaves and branches. A hard place to land and hard to get around, but that didn’t mean that dragons never came, and if they did, they could simply reach up with their long necks and pluck Lyna’s tree-house out of the branches. So for dragons, the village had tunnels. They were old and dark and smelly and hardly ever used, but Lyna’s kin had a long memory, and dragons in the forest hadn’t always been so rare.

When Lyna and Paz reached them, there were still men up on the surface, the village hunters, the handful strong enough and fast enough and brave enough (or stupid enough, if Lyna listened to her mother), to leave the forest and go foraging in the grasslands. They stood together, wary but not afraid, holding their long spears.

“Come on! Hurry!” they snapped at her, then saw Paz. “Was he your watcher?”

Lyna nodded, and when the men smiled, even if it was a grim smile, she knew that that meant everyone had come home. There wasn’t anyone missing, left out there, either lost or hurt or else strayed far enough that they simply hadn’t heard the warning. If there were women left behind, it was these men who would have gone searching.

“There were hundreds,” gasped Paz. The nearest of the men rolled his eyes and cast a glance at Lyna. He didn’t say a word but he didn’t have to – his eyes did it for him: how many really?

“He’s right!” Which wasn’t what they wanted to hear, so Lyna quickly added: “Well, maybe not hundreds, but there were lots, too many to count. They were coming off the moors and they were heading this way!”

The nearest man snorted and pushed Lyna and Paz towards the trapdoor. Lyna scurried down the steps. They were old and made of stone, worn by feet over countless years. All the tunnels were like that, lined with stone except in some places near the surface where tree roots had made cracks and split them apart and sometimes even crumbled them to bits. Where that had happened, the tunnels had been repaired with wooden beams by Lyna’s clan, the people who’d lived in the village here for more time than any of them could count. The stone – that had been there even before. As far as Lyna knew, it had been there when the world was made.

“Is it true?” whispered Paz. “Are the fire-times coming?”

Lyna held his hand and squeezed. Down in the tunnels there wasn’t much light – wasn’t any at all when the trapdoor was closed. “Who told you that?”

“Uncle Bedev.”

The trapdoor closed above them. Lyna had to feel her way down the rest of the steps, but she’d been down here enough times to know where things were. The steps were all the same, down and down, until there was a wonky one that wobbled a bit and then a few steps later they’d come to the bottom; then a passage to the right to get to the big hollowed-out place where everyone simply sat and waited for however long it was they needed to wait. By the time she reached the wonky step, she could hear the murmur of voices. Quiet. In the dark, everyone whispered.

“Uncle Bedev spends too much time out on the plains, that’s what it is. Fire-times?” Lyna laughed. “That’s just stories. Dragons burning the world? That’s silly. Everyone knows that dragons only come with men sitting on their backs and it’s the men who says what’s to burn and what’s not. Dragons, I reckon they’d be nice and friendly creatures if it wasn’t for their riders making them so mean.” The last bit was said for Paz. Secretly, Lyna hoped it might be true too, but no one had ever told a story with a dragon that was nice.

She whispered her way through the darkness and the huddle of villagers until she found their mother and their little brother and settled in beside them, all squashed together. The village was getting too big for the tunnels.

“The fire-times were long ago,” she whispered to Paz. “Not like now. That was when men were fighting men and they’d fly their dragons to war. There used to be great castles, huge things, with walls as high as the trees and thick as houses and towers as tall as mountains, and there were knights with shining silver armour and lances that gleamed in the sun, but all of that was nothing when the dragons came, because they just flew right over those walls and landed inside and they knocked down those towers with the lash of their tails, and they picked up the knights in their shiny armour and squeezed them tight in their fierce claws. Like squishing an egg, it was, when you hold it your fist and you give a bit of a squash and nothing happens and so you clench a bit tighter and there’s still nothing and so its bit tighter still and then squish splat and there’s all egg running over your fingers. Only it wasn’t eggs and bright yellow egg yolk but knights and dark red blood . . .”

“Lyna! Enough!” That was her mother. “You’ll frighten him.”

“Paz stood dragon-watch and he’s seen dragons too. Nothing frightens him now.” Paz gave a little snort of agreement. That was the way it was when you were children. You got bigger and faster and bolder and then one day they set you to dragon-watch and after that they all treated you a bit different, like you were more grown up.

“Still! Enough!”

“It’s just a story,” sniffed Lyna.

“You ask your uncle Bedev what happens when dragons come,” growled a voice in the dark. She couldn’t tell who it was. One of the old men who’d seen dragons close, back when the village had burned in her grandfather’s time.

“People die,” rumbled Bedev. Lyna jumped. She hadn’t heard him come down and settle close by. The hunting men were like that, almost like they could see in the dark.

“Bedev! Don’t frighten Paz,” snapped Lyna’s mother.

“He’s not a boy any more, Lianna. Dragons come, people die. Yes, maybe when the old dragon-knights fought each other then it was like Lyna says, but mostly they don’t fight, they come here, to people like us, and then it’s them in their armour with their swords and their monsters against us with nothing to do but scatter and run. You youngsters, you’d be the lucky ones. They’d take you as slaves to sell to those black-skinned bastards from over the sea. Pazile, they’d chain you to the oars of a galley and whip you every day . . .”

“Bedev!”

“They’d take you too, Lianna. But your aunt, your little brother, all the ones they can’t sell, do you know what they do? They round them up and murder them and then they have their dragons burn the bodies. It’s a smell you don’t forget, not ever, that burning.”

“Bedev! Enough!”

For a while, a silence fell. Then Bedev spoke again. “You want to know what we saw? Little Pazile was right. There were maybe a hundred of them. They were coming this way. And they were fighting. Dragons fighting dragons, even as they flew. I saw a pair of them fall together. It’s all changed out there. Something’s happened. The potion men don’t come any more. We saw their place last time we left the trees. It had been burned. They’re fighting each other again.”

There was thunder in the air the next morning. Dark clouds scurried overhead, barely seen past the canopy of leaves. The sun didn’t shine and the forest floor was cast into gloom. Rain and low clouds meant there wasn’t much chance of a dragon-watcher seeing anything until it was too late, and so Lyna and the other village women stayed away from the edge of the forest. Instead they went the other way, deeper in among the trees. There was plenty of food to be gathered that way too – hamberries later in the year and sometimes they’d work together to scale one of the mighty trees. Took half the village and all the rope they owned to do that, but when they came down again it was with basket after basket of delicious sweet sunfruit. Other times of the year they went looking for the dragonnut trees. This time of year there wasn’t much to be had up in the trees and so Lyna and the women kept their eyes on the ground. There were mushrooms – goldcaps and the like – and if you were lucky, the rare treat of a nest of spider-ants and the sweet syrup they fed to their grubs, if you didn’t mind the stings.

A distant rumble growled above the canopy of leaves. The air was thick and dim. Lyna walked quickly, following trails she’d learned as a child. There were places to go for mushrooms, over by the great caves where a stream twisted its way out from the depths of the forest. She never liked the caves because they were large enough that almost anything could have gone in there looking for shelter and a place to sleep. A bear was one thing, a pack of wolves she might have faced down, but there were snappers out here and nothing faced a snapper down except maybe a dragon, and even then Lyna wasn’t so sure.

There were fallen branches on the trail today, a few small ones at first, then getting bigger, as though there had been a raging storm the night before. The storm was coming right enough but it would be tonight – last night had been still as a mirrorpond; but as she came closer to the caves, she saw what had happened. One of the giant trees had fallen.

No, that wasn’t right – what she was seeing were still branches, but they were the massive branches that sprouted from the tops of the trees, still fifty feet long and as wide as uncle Bedev’s belly.

It started to rain. Under the canopy that didn’t matter much. The trees caught the water. Here and there, fat splats fell around her. She looked up. The canopy was ripped open as though some lightning bolt had been hurled from the sky and smashed through the branches up above. She could even see the scars on the trees, the long bright marks where branch and bark had been ripped away.

Closer still to the cave, the path petered into nothing. The rain was coming down steadily now, the distant thunder getting closer. In front of her, the ground had been ripped to shreds. Fresh earth lay scattered for dozens of yards either side of two great furrows, each as deep as a man and a hundred yards long. A huge gouge had been taken out of the trunk of one of the trees.

A dragon. A dragon on the ground! They’d have to hide in the tunnels for days! Weeks! What would they eat? But that didn’t matter because there was only one thing for it when a dragon came by and that was to hide. She turned back the way she’d come, the first shout on her lips . . . And froze. Back through the trees, fifty paces away, no more, a snapper was staring at her. Long strong legs, vicious sharp claws, all scales and fangs and muscle, bigger and faster and stronger than any man.

She screamed. Turned back and ran. That’s what you did. With a dragon, you hid. With a snapper, you ran and you climbed. She bolted for the caves, for the rocky crags above them. If she could reach them and climb . . . but she couldn’t – as the largest of the caves loomed in front of her, she could hear the ground shaking as the snapper pounded after her, gaining with every step, and she knew it was so close that she could never climb high enough before it reached her and so she went for the cave instead. She knew these caves. There were places she could hide. Nooks and crannies too small for a snapper to reach inside.

She sprinted into the gloom. The air was warm and damp. She didn’t dare slow down, and so she didn’t see the ridge of rock that lay across the flat bottom of the cave. It caught her foot and sent her flying and she screamed because she knew the snapper must be right behind her now and she’d never get back to her feet quickly enough . . . She closed her eyes but the bite didn’t come. When she opened her eyes again, the snapper was standing back at the cave mouth, staring at her. It took a step towards her and then danced nervously back again. Lyna watched it, didn’t dare take her eyes off it as she backed away.

Her hands touched the stone behind her. It was warm, almost hot.

There shouldn’t have been any stone behind her. She’d been coming to these caves since she was a child. She knew them, but how could they change? A rockfall?

The snapper started to come towards her again, slow and cautious steps. Lyna looked frantically around her. The cave was blocked! All the cracks and crevices she remembered, they were gone!

The snapper came on, still strangely wary. It stepped over the ridge that had tripped her. A ridge of stone that hadn’t been there the last time Lyna had come this way.

The ridge moved. She saw it clearly, rising up into the air behind the snapper, a silhouette against the light coming in from the mouth of the cave, slowly slowly lifting off the ground. She screamed again, and as she did, the hot stone behind her quivered and the ridge of stone that was now floating in the air whipped like a striking snake and grabbed the snapper around the neck. The snapper shrieked and scrabbled at the ground, but the thing coiled around it lifted it up now so it was hanging, twenty feet away from Lyna, and now the stone wall behind her was shifting. Lyna jumped away. She didn’t dare run out of the cave because that meant going past the thrashing snapper, but the rocks were moving. They were falling!

The snapper rose higher, and that was when Lyna saw that the moving rocks behind her weren’t rocks at all. They were the dragon. She’d walked right into a sleeping dragon, and the ridge that had tripped her up hadn’t been a ridge at all but a tail, and now the monster was rising up. She could see the shape of it, dark shadows within the gloom, a long neck, the endless tail, the huge head with the opening jaws, fangs as long as her arm, eyes like moons, towering over her.

It’s tail carried the squirming shrieking snapper to its mouth. It bit the monster in two and ate it. Lyna couldn’t move.

I will not eat you, little one, said the dragon. Lyna didn’t know how the dragon spoke – it’s mouth was still full of snapper, but the words were clear as though it had whispered them into her ear. Go. Run away. I do not wish to devour you, little one. The dragon moved again, lowering itself down, settling its head back onto the cave floor. Go! I am dying. Leave!

She bolted for the forest, too witless to even think, but at the edge of the cave, she stopped. Out of reach of the dragon’s tail, she paused. It was a dragon, the most terrible thing in the world, but it hadn’t eaten her. It had saved her from the snapper. And there was something about snappers that every forest girl knew. When you saw one, the first thing you did was look for its friends, creeping around behind you, because there were always more, never just the one. She hovered by the cave mouth, lingering, uncertain what to do. There would be more snappers between her and her home. That was almost sure. And there was a dragon behind her. She sat back against the stone and held her head in her hands.

“I don’t know what to do!” she cried to herself.

I do not wish to eat you, little one. Not today. So go!

“Well the snappers do wish to eat me,” she said. “So no.”

Do not come any closer. I am hungry, little one. As hungry as ancient mountains. My last days are here and it will do me no service to eat you, for I will die nonetheless, but we are as our makers intended, and the hunger cannot be denied for long.

“My name’s Lyna, not ‘little one’.” Lyna sat and shivered. If she didn’t look back into the cave, she could pretend that the dragon wasn’t quite real, that it was something she’d half-imagined, even if she knew that wasn’t true. That made it easier not to be scared of it. The snappers stayed real, though. They were out there. Everyone knew snappers and everyone knew someone who’d been eaten by one. There were plenty of people in the village who’d seen it. The dragon – much easier to pretend it wasn’t real.

I am Irresistible Song of the Wind Through the Waves, not ‘dragon’.

“Are you the dragon that fell out of the sky?”

Yes.

“Why? Why did you fall.”

We fought. My wings were broken and so I fell, and now I die. The dragon must have sensed the twinge of sadness to Lyna’s thoughts. You mourn for me, little one? That is foolish. We are not like you. Already, a new egg awaits me. I will travel through the realm of the dead and find that egg and give my spark of life to the flesh within it and be reborn. Death for us is not as you know it. It is not the end. Save your tears for your own kin, little Lyna. You will need them in the years that are to come.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The Black Moon is coming. Some will try to stop it, but it will come nonetheless. Your kind will find a way to call it. It will be the beginning of the end of the world. All will fall to the dark and the cold. Even us, though we may be the last.

“I saw you. Coming off the moors. There’s never been so many dragons.”

There are more, little one. We are called to war, as we were made. But our guides are gone. Some chose the Black Moon, others do not, but the Black Moon will prevail. It is written in the stars, little one. Soon there will be none of our kind in this land.

“No dragons?”

None.

The dragon seemed to sigh. Lyna turned away from the cave, put her back to its darkness and scanned the forest. High above, the rain was forcing its way through the canopy. The light between the trees was grey and the air damp. She couldn’t see any snappers but that didn’t mean much. Could be anywhere. When they stayed still, they were hard to spot at the best of times, with their stripped skin that seemed to merge with the endless tree trunks. And snappers excelled at staying still.

They are out there, little Lyna. There are four of them.

She jumped. “What? Snappers? How’d you know?”

I feel their thoughts. They are watching you. They know I am here, so they do not come close.

“How do I get home?”

I do not know, little one. Wait until they are gone.

“That could be ages!”

They are patient. It is their nature. They are not like us.

She pulled at her clothes. If there were snappers out there, she ought to be warning people, but if she shouted a warning, it would get lost over the hiss of the rain on the leaves overhead. Or maybe someone would hear something, but they wouldn’t hear what and then they’d come looking and the snappers would eat them.

A rumble of thunder rolled overhead.

They do not like the dark. In that way we are the same. They become sluggish and slow.

“If I wait until it’s dark, I won’t be able to see past my own fingers,” Lyna snapped. “Have you seen what it’s like under these trees at night?”

Yes, I have. I will make a bargain with you if you like, little Lyna.

“What bargain?”

I am dying. If it were not so, I would have eaten you and these snappers too. I feel others of your kind are here and I would have torn their hiding places from your thoughts as I devoured you. But the little death comes. I feel the heat inside me and I welcome it. I feel hunger too, but I do not wish to die alone, little Lyna. Stay with me a while and I will tell you stories of the world as I have seen it. When the darkness is full, I will guide you to your home. Stay with me, little one. I will not forget.

So Lyna stayed where she was, sitting against the mouth of the cave, staring out at the trees as twilight fell, watching in case the snappers came, and sometimes she would ask the dragon if they were still there and the dragon would say yes, they were, but mostly she listened as the dragon told her tales of the world as the dragon remembered it. It told her of the life it had led, this life, filled with fire and death, of all the men it had eaten, the towns and cities it had burned, the fearsome ire that raged within all dragons against the races of men. It told her of awaking, as if from an almost endless sleep, of lifetime after lifetime of dreaming, dull-witted by the potions of the alchemists, the very same men who had once come to the forest and sold knives and arrow-heads to Lyna’s people as they foraged among the plants and mushrooms. It told of a time before, of a creator clad in silver. It told her of the realms of the dragon-kings, of their places of power and what they held, back and back, lifetime after lifetime until the world was much as it was now and men hid in caves and among trees and dragons ruled the skies, and then back further still, back to the beginning, to the war that broke the world, to the Silver Kings, the half-gods, the sorcerers who walked the land and raised mountains with their breath and the war they fought between them that had split earth apart. It told of battles beyond imagining, of creatures like hills that walked, or armies that flowed like rivers across the fields and blackened the skies with their numbers. It told stories of gods that Lyna had never known, stories that made no sense, so strange that she could barely understand what the dragon was saying, never mind perceive any meaning. But she listened because there was nothing else to do, and the last light of the day had yet to fail and there were still snappers among the trees. She listened until it was quite dark. The dragon’s thoughts, she realised, had changed. They were losing their strength. It seemed to forget, now and then, that it was speaking.

“I think I can go home now,” she said, when the air was chilled and it was so dark that she could no longer see her own hand in front of her face. She had to wait before the dragon answered.

Yes.

She walked straight for a bit and then a bit to the right. Each step was slow and cautious, her hands held out in front of her. Sometimes, the dragon seemed to fade right away, but it was always there, in the end.

No. Go a different way. There is a beast ahead of you.

So she went a different way, feeling her way in the night, as good as blind, sure she was going to die, or else walk all night and find she was lost and far from home; and yet the dragon kept its word, and it guided her, and as the first light of the morning touched the trees above and she began to see again, there was her home, there in front of her.

I will not forget, little one, that you stayed.

“You saved my life,” she said, and felt strange and a little silly that she was talking to the empty air. Maybe there were no snappers at all. Maybe the dragon had made them up. She didn’t know. It didn’t really matter, did it? She started to run, towards the tree that was home. Towards Paz and her mother and her little brother and uncle Bedev. Shouting their names.

The Black Moon comes, little Lyna. Do not return to me, for in the end, the hunger will always win and I will eat you. But when I am reborn, when the final battle is done and the earth is dying, I will find you here again and I will bring you a gift.

“Corn cobs! Bring me corn cobs!” She laughed as Paz’s bleary face peered out of the tree-house home above her. Laughed for joy as she saw his face light up.

“Lyna!”

“Paz!”

Good-bye, little one.

The dragon was almost forgotten. Uncle Bedev lowered the ropes and she climbed up and they all held each other, sobbing and laughing.

“We all thought you were dead,” sighed her mother. “There were snappers. Another girl taken. And then you didn’t come back.”

“I hid,” said Lyna. “In a cave. Until it was dark.” And she said nothing of the dragon, for she knew no good would come of such an unlikely tale.

It was the last time any of them saw a dragon. Seasons passed and then one day a Black Moon rose and blotted out the sun and cast the world into shadow. The forests grew dark, even the daylight no brighter than evening twilight. Food grew scarce and the air grew cold and the snappers grew hungry and bold. Many died, until in the end, Lyna and her kin abandoned their village and moved out onto the plains, cold and windswept.

It snowed. None of them had ever seen snow. Food was no more easily found in the failing grasslands than in the forest, yet Lyna found she had a knack of leading her family to places where relics remained, old shelters, safe places. Places from the dragon’s stories.

More years passed. Snow fell every day and for half the year, the land became lost under a blanket of white. Her uncle Bedev died hunting wild horses. Pazile grew into a man, eager yet bitter. And Lyna, who always knew where to go when winter came, became their leader and a warrior too. She took them to others and led them all, from one shelter to the next. To hilltop fortresses, to tunnels that ran forever under the ground, to caves and shelters, all of them under the earth and yet with blessed warmth and light.

“Dragon! Dragon!” The cry broke the quiet at the edge of the snow. Lyna froze. She looked up. A few dozen yards away, Gerla stood frozen too. The cry came from further away, from the look-out standing at the top of the white-crested hill behind them, close to the line of trees that marked a frozen brook. If you looked hard enough, on a clear day, you could see for miles from there, on up the gently sloping snowfields towards the line of hills in the distance that were once the moors.

“Dragon!” The lookout was Lyna’s little brother, Pazile the warrior, whom no one called Paz anymore. She could see him now, running up through the snow, lifting his long legs up so high it looked like he was dancing. Pazile was nineteen years old and in places, the snow was deeper than he was. Gerla was standing still, looking up, the other warriors from the village too, all of them searching the skies. There was no shelter waiting for them. They should run, Lyna knew that, but there was nowhere to go and there hadn’t been a dragon in this world for ten years, and Pazile was her brother and if they were going to burn, they’d burn together. As least, for a moment, they’d be warm.

Pazile reached her. He clutched at her furs and bent over, catching his breath. After a moment, he half turned and pointed up at the sky and looked at her, all at once.

“Dragon!” he said.

He had good eyes, always had, even as a boy and that’s why he’d been chosen, but Lyna could see it now too. It was coming from high up above the moors. One distant dark speck in the air.

“Come on!” Pazile pulled Lyna’s arm. “It’s coming this way!” And he was right, too, it was coming straight towards her. They were miles away, but dragons flew fast.

“No,” she said, and pulled Pazile close to her. “No, we don’t run. Not this time.”

She stayed where she was, with Pazile beside her, as the dragon drew closer. As it spread out its wings and beat at the air and slowed. As it landed on the hillside and a storm of snow swirled around them all.

Little one, it said, and it came closer and closer until it towered over Lyna and she could feel the warmth of it, glowing on her face.

It opened up one of its claws and some dirt trickled to the ground. And then it lowered itself and offered her what it was holding.

None of that mattered. What mattered was today. Tonight. His heart was beating fast. A part of him was afraid that he would be caught. Another part urged him onward.

Night-time shadows filled the Speaker’s Yard. Men with lanterns walked the walls, but the walls were wide and far away and their eyes looked ever outward. Two men of the Adamantine Guard stood at the doors of the Speaker’s Tower, but if anyone looked closely, they might have seen that something wasn’t quite right. Even though the guards stood with their eyes staring open into the darkness, they were fast asleep. Kithyr had done that to them before he left the shelter of the Glass Cathedral, the black misshapen lump of stone that rose behind him They were only ornamental anyway, those guards. He stepped past and forced the huge doors behind them open, just wide enough to slip inside. He closed them again and then stood in the pitch darkness and waited to catch his breath. His heart was pounding even faster now.

He moved quietly, each step taken with care. If he was caught now, inside the tower, the Adamantine Men would kill him. He had enough magic to deal with them in twos and threes, but once the alarm was raised, they would come in tens and twenties. If they saw him, they’d catch him. If they caught him then they’d find out what he was. If they found out what he was, they’d kill him. They’d do it quickly too, no waiting for King Jehal or the speaker to come back from their war.

They’d find out what was waiting for him in Furymouth.

At the end of the Chamber of Audience, a huge open staircase rose towards the higher levels of the tower. Kithyr crept behind it to where a second staircase, hidden behind the first, sank into the vaults below. The blood-mage paused as he approached it and closed his eyes. He reached out his senses, searching for any guards that might be waiting for him, listening for their heartbeats, sniffing for the smell of their sweat. With the doors closed, with the speaker away and no torches lit, the huge emptiness of the Chamber of Audience was almost black. Moonlight filtered in though the high windows to cast dim and eerie shadows, and that was all.

The vault was empty too. Four legions of the Guard had marched to war. With the speaker away, the rest were far more concerned about being attacked from the air by dragons than they were about nasty people like Kithyr sneaking around in the palace at night.

He started down the stairs. They weren’t a secret, merely hidden and not very well known. At the bottom were a few small rooms. The place was a sanctuary, a place for the speaker to hide away, where he or she could mysteriously vanish for a few moments and then appear again. If Zafir had been here, there would always be soldiers at the bottom of these stairs. But she wasn’t, and so the rooms were empty.

Almost empty. At the bottom, certain he was alone, the magician lit a candle. An entire wall of the first room was covered by bottles of wine racked on top of each other. Several cloaks and robes hung on another, each one meant for a different ceremony and with a different meaning. Unlike the bottles, they were covered in dust. Zafir hadn’t worn any of them since she’d come to the throne. Kithyr spared them a glance then ignored them and moved on to the second little room. This was where the guards should have been. This was what he’d come for. There were weapons here. Ornamental, ceremonial and deadly real. Vishmir’s war-axe. If you looked hard enough you could still find flecks of blood, or so they said. The scorpion bolt that killed Prince Lai. Half a dozen other swords and knives that had killed or been carried by speakers over the ages. Kithyr wasn’t interested in any of those; he barely even noticed them. What he wanted was hanging on the wall at the far end. Kithyr snuffed out the candle. He didn’t need it now. The spear glowed with a very faint light that pushed away the utter darkness that filled the rest of the room.

The Adamantine Spear. The Speaker’s Spear. The Spear of the Earth. As old as the world.

He stood in front of it, hardly daring to touch it. No one knew where it had come from. The dragon-priests said that the power of the dragons was bound into it. The alchemists claimed the Order had forged it. Others believed it had been made to tame dragons. All lies. Like the blood-mages, the spear came from a time before there were priests, before there were alchemists, before there were dragons even. The Silver King, the Isul Aieha, had brought it into the realms, but the spear was older than that, older than anything.

For a moment Kithyr couldn’t move his hands. They simply refused. The spear was a glittering silver, glowing with a soft inner glory. The blood-mages had stories of other things crafted from silver. No, not stories, stories was wrong. Maybe legends. Myths. Yes, myths, that was it. Sorcerers forged of silver who had had the power to change the world on a whim; not just the one who’d come to the realms all those centuries ago, but hundreds, thousands who had once been. The spear came from that time. It had their power and more. In those myths, almost lost now, it could raise volcanoes from the ground, had once shattered the very earth. Trapped within lay something immeasurably potent, or so Kithyr had come to believe. And now that he was standing before it, he was paralysed, as though the slightest touch of it would burn him to ash. Stupid, since every speaker since Narammed had touched it and none of them had been burned to ash.

None of them had been blood-mages, though. None of them had had the old power coursing through their veins.

In an instant of will, he closed his eyes and reached out with both hands to take the spear. His fingers brushed the cold metal of the shaft. He didn’t burn to ash. Apart from the chill of the metal, he didn’t feel anything at all. After all the anticipation, he felt almost . . . disappointed. There should have been something, shouldn’t there? Or were all the old stories just that? Was it just a spear and nothing more?

He took the spear off the wall. Still not a flicker.

Perhaps that was for the best. Maybe it had had power once, but maybe that was long ago. Maybe the years had sucked it dry. Nothing lasted for ever, after all. If the spear was dead, he’d still done his part of the bargain. Or maybe it wasn’t the real spear at all. There had always been other stories. How the Silver King had taken the real spear away with him to his tomb. To the Black Mausoleum, if such a place even existed. Or maybe Vishmir . . .

No, that couldn’t be right, could it? He’d know, wouldn’t he?

The doubt nagged at him, tugging the corners of his mind. He brushed his fingers over the head of the spear. The tip was as sharp as a needle. Two flat-bladed edges ran down the shaft, as long as Kithyr’s forearm. They were like razors. Kithyr ran a fingertip along one. He felt it cut him, felt the blood dribble out of him onto the spear. Instinct made his mind reach into the blood, and through the blood into the spear . . .

Kithyr staggered and gasped and almost dropped it. The snuffed-out candle fell to the floor. The light in the spear died, plunging him into darkness absolute. He hardly noticed. There was no mistake. The spear had a power to it all right. Something hard and bright and unbelievably immense, buried deep within it, so deep that Kithyr wasn’t sure that anyone would ever get it out. Something that would surely consume whoever woke it. He was like a moth, drawn to the light of a lantern and suddenly gifted with a full understanding of the fire that lay at its heart. Fire and moths. He shivered and sucked his finger until it stopped bleeding. Cursed. That’s what it was. That or it was the most powerful thing in the world.

Fire and moths. He could feel his hunger for it even so. Raw unthinking craving.

Quickly, before he could change his mind, he wrapped the spear in a blanket of black silk, smothering his hunger as he smothered the silver. He climbed softly back up the stairs and reached out his senses into the Speaker’s Tower. The Chamber of Audience was still empty. The guards standing outside were still asleep. He slipped between them and pulled the darkness of the night around him like a cloak, hugging it to his chest. A faint light seemed to creep out of the spear again, out of its silk wrapping as if it knew his purpose and was trying to betray him. He felt his heart beating as he ran. He was exposed. A hundred guards walked the walls around him, above him, looking down on him. They must see me. They must . . .

They didn’t. He slipped from the Speaker’s Yard into the Fountain Court and then into the Gateyard. He stopped by the stables there to catch his breath, to tell himself his fear was foolish. The guards on the walls wouldn’t see him. Their eyes were cast towards the City of Dragons and the black mass of the Purple Spur beyond, looking for dragons. On a night like this they’d be pressed to see even one of those. I’m afraid of my own fear, jumping at shadows . . . That wasn’t right. He was a blood-mage. He had the power to literally rip men apart, to turn them inside out. He could barely even remember the last time he’d been afraid.

Was it the spear?

No. Whatever was inside it had been asleep for a long time and slumbered still. Awake, an edge of fear was the least it would bring. He waited until his breathing eased. His heart still pounded, but that was good. That meant blood flowing fast, that his power was at its strongest. In the stables he had a horse already saddled. He mounted and crossed the Gateyard. People would see him now, or if they didn’t, they would hear him. That was to be expected. Under his skin, blood shifted, sculpted, arranged his features in subtle new ways. When he reached the gates, the Adamantine Men were already coming out of their guardhouse. They shone lanterns in his face and peered at him.

‘Who’s there?’

Kithyr threw back his hood. The face they saw now was that of alchemist Grand Master Jeiros. A fitting disguise, Kithyr thought. One that amused him, alchemists and blood-mages viewing each other as they did.

‘Grand Master.’ The soldiers bowed. They looked a little confused.

‘The gate, if you please,’ mumbled Kithyr. His face was that of the alchemist, but his voice was his own. He was counting on the soldiers not knowing the difference.

‘We are at war. The gates are closed at night,’ said one of the soldiers. Presumably he was the one in charge. Kithyr pulled a flask out of his cloak and held it out to the man.

‘Cold night eh?’ he muttered.

The man looked askance at the flask. Then he shrugged, accepted it and took a swig. ‘Still can’t open the gates at night. Night Watchman’s orders for as long as the speaker’s away.’ The soldier wiped his lips on his sleeve and handed back the flask. Kithyr waited a few seconds. The liquid in the flask was mostly brandy, as strong and as vicious a spirit as he could find. What wasn’t spirit was blood. His blood. He waited and then he felt the connection form, felt himself reaching inside the soldier.

‘I am Jeiros,’ he said softly. Who he sounded like didn’t matter any more. ‘Even now, I may pass. That is my authority.’

The soldier nodded. ‘Very well. Open the gate.’

His men looked confused and didn’t move. ‘Sir?’

‘Come on, lads! This isn’t just anyone. This is the grand master himself, and that makes him the man who gives the orders around here until the speaker returns. So if he wants to go out moonlighting into the city in the middle of the night, who are we to stop him?’ The soldier leered. Annoying.

‘I have business of the realms, man. If I wanted whores I’d have them sent.’ There’s no love lost between the Adamantine Men and the alchemists either, he reminded himself. Tolerate it. We’ll soon be gone.

The gates started to open. Kithyr feigned patience. One of the guards was missing. The soldier hadn’t gone back into the gatehouse either. A silver to a copper he’d gone to wake up the Night Watchman. Kithyr offered his flask around to the other soldiers while he waited. A few of them took it, which would help if it came to a fight. Others looked at him with a deep suspicion and shook their heads. As soon as the gate was open enough, Kithyr kicked his horse into a canter. He was out of the palace in a flash, on his way down the hill to the City of Dragons. He didn’t linger. The Night Watchman had a suspicious, devious and thorough sort of mind and wasn’t the sort to let little things slide. He’d come down to the gate. It was entirely possible that he’d go and bang on the grand master alchemist’s door even in the middle of the night just to make sure he was really gone. Kithyr might have hours or days or he might have a mere handful of minutes before his deception was unmasked. Once that happened, they’d know him for what he was. There was only one way for even a grand master alchemist to be in two places at once. The cry would rise up. Blood mage! And the hunt would begin.

He had long enough, though. Long enough to get from the palace to the City of Dragons. Long enough to leave his horse in the stables of an inn. Long enough to hide the spear under the straw, change into some clothes that were hidden in the saddlebags of the next horse along and walk a street or two to the house of a wealthy grain merchant. Long enough to knock on the servants’ entrance and be let inside by a man he’d enslaved months ago. Half the merchant’s house was under his power now. The other half had no idea who or what he was. He was just another assayer, a man who occasionally weighed out their grain and checked their measures.

‘Master weigher.’ A man stirred from where he’d been dozing by the kitchen fire. This one didn’t move and bow like the servant, and his eyes cut the gloom like knives.

‘Master Picker,’ murmured Kithyr. ‘It’s done. Go, if you want to see it.’

The Picker grumbled something and unfolded himself from his chair. He went outside without another word. In the morning Kithyr would find the spear again. He would take it, wrapped in its silk, and in King Jehal’s city he would hand it over for what the Picker and the Taiytakei had promised him they would bring. The power of the Silver King himself. For the spear, they said, that power could be his. Years of planning. Years of learning. Years of preparation, and only one last chasm to cross.

Between here and Furymouth, there was the small matter of a dragon-war in the way.

The thief ran through them with practised ease. The crowd barely noticed he was there. He slipped between the larger bodies around him like an eel between a fisherman’s fingers, finding space where none seemed to exist. If anyone had asked him how old he was, he might have said twelve or he might have said sixteen, depending on who was doing the asking. The truth probably lay somewhere in between. The truth was that he didn’t know and he didn’t much care. He was small for a boy who might nearly have been a man, and his name was Berren.

He’d come for the executions like everyone else, but he’d come for the crowd too. A watcher, perched on one of the rooftops around the square and taking an interest in his progress, would have seen him pause now and then amid all his motion. Each pause marked the crowd as a fraction poorer and Berren as a token richer. The same watcher, if he stared for long enough, would have seen that Berren was slowly meandering his way towards the front of the crowd. When the executioner and his charges finally emerged, Berren had every intention of watching from as close as he could be.

After a time the crowd began to hush. At one end of the square stood a wooden platform, built especially for the occasion. For the last few hours, a succession of dancers and jugglers and other petty entertainers had paid for the privilege of using it and the crowd had largely ignored them, talking amongst itself. The coming of quiet meant a change. Berren began to worm his way further forwards. He was a head shorter than most of the crowd, and navigated by the simple expedient of watching where everyone else was looking, and then heading that way. Now and then, he caught a fleeting glimpse of the platform. A man in yellow robes was standing there, making slow gestures with his hands. Berren had an idea this made him a priest.

As he reached the front of the crowd, his progress slowed. He changed direction and edged sideways until he reached the corner of the square. Four Winds Square was in the centre of the Courts District of Deephaven city. The buildings around it were high and made of stone, with tall doors made of heavy wood and glass in their windows. Each of the doors had a stone lintel, protruding a good six inches from the wall. Boys smaller than him filled them, jostling for space, squeezed up precariously close to the ends but never quite falling off. Berren spotted a space on the corner of one of them. He scaled the wall, and made it his own. It was too narrow to be properly comfortable, but from up there he could see everything, and that more than made up for having to constantly push himself against the stone and the grumbling boys next to him.

The priest was gone. The executioner had ascended the platform now, a big brawny man, standing with his legs braced apart, holding an axe that was almost as tall as he was. Behind the executioner, three men stood in chains, surrounded by guards. Another man, dressed in fine clothes, was making a speech of some sort. The crowd wasn’t very interested. It hadn’t come for speeches and it was talking restlessly so that Berren couldn’t hear anything that was being said. Snatches reached him, the occasional two or three words, not enough to make any sense. He didn’t care any more than the rest of the crowd. Executions were a rarity. He was here to see people have their heads cut off, not listen to boring speeches.

He wondered briefly what the three men had done. Berren knew a thing or two about how the city punished thieves. Boys like him caught cutting purses usually got a beating and that was that. Berren had had plenty of those. If the watch knew your face and you got unlucky then you got a branding or maybe had a finger cut off. He shuddered to think about that sort of thing. Losing a finger, that was… Well, something he didn’t want to have to think about. Just as well Master Hatchet kept things sweet with the watch around his patch of the city

He’d heard of people losing their whole hands, but he’d never seen it happen. Mostly, if the city decided it couldn’t stand to put up with you any more, you were loaded onto a barge and shipped off up the river to the imperial mines. The mines were somewhere hundreds of miles away in the north, where it was always raining and cold and no one ever came back. He didn’t know what you had to do to have your head cut off. Every now and then the city just decided to put on a show and that was that. They didn’t do it very often, which was why there was such a crowd come out to watch.

The boy on the lintel next to him nudged him. “S’cuse me. You ever seen one of these before”

Berren looked at him with all the scorn he could muster. The boy must have been eight. “Course I have,” he lied. “Lots.” He snorted and shook his head as though it was the stupidest question in the world, but the boy didn’t give up.

“What happens then?”

“Wait and see.”

“Is there lots of blood? I hope there’s lots.”

“Did you know that the heads, after they get chopped off, they can still move their eyes and wrinkle their nose and talk and things like that for hours before they die?” Hatchet himself had told him that.

The boy’s eyes grew wide and his jaw dropped. “No! Really? Can you go and talk to them afterwards?”

Berren shrugged. “I suppose. If you want to. If they don’t take them away.” Then the man on the platform did something that got Berren’s full attention. He stopped talking and held up a purse. The crowd’s murmuring subsided, enough that Berren caught a few words of what he said next. Something about a reward. Something about ten gold Emperors.

A man came forward from behind the executioner. From what Berren could see, there was nothing particularly special about him. He didn’t have particularly rich clothes. He didn’t have a fancy sword or anything like that. If Berren had seen him in the street, he would have thought him a shopkeeper, or maybe a foreman from the docks. But now…

Now he had a purse, given to him by the man with the fine clothes. Now Berren would think of him as a man who had ten Emperors in his pocket…

“What’s happening?” asked the boy beside him, craning his neck and squinting to see. Berren cuffed him silent. Ten Emperors! His eyes went wide even thinking about it. He felt himself wobble and almost tumble off the lintel. He’d never heard of such a fortune.

The man who now had this fortune stepped back while the executioner stepped forward. The prisoners were dragged to the front of the platform so that everyone could see. The executioner made a big show of his axe, holding it high so everyone could see that too. He span and twirled, the axe head tracing wild arcs in the air, until he brought it down on a thick lump of wood and split it so that splinters showered all around. The crowd roared. The three prisoners were brought forward and forced down into the three blocks that waited for them. Berren barely noticed. He was watching the man with the ten Emperors, lurking in the shadows at the back of the platform.

Suddenly, the executioner brought down his axe again. The boy beside him let a soft whistle of awe. Berren’s heart leapt. One of the prisoners had been beheaded and he hadn’t even seen it! The body was still there but the head was gone. He noted the dark spattered streaks across the planks and the stain where the head had fallen. The executioner was holding it up in the air now, gripping its hair, making sure everyone got a good look at his handiwork.

Berren’s eyes began to dart back and forth, from the man in the shadows to the executioner and back again, back and forth, back and forth. He didn’t dare lose track of the man with ten Emperors in his pocket, but he wanted to see the head, too. He squinted, trying to see if it was still moving. A waning trickle of blood still dripped from its neck.

Abruptly the executioner turned tossed the head away into a large basked lined with straw that was on the platform behind him. He stood beside his second victim and raised his axe. The man in the shadows hadn’t moved. Berren held his breath, and let his eyes settle on the axe. He watched it start to fall, slowly it seemed. His own heart thumped in his chest, slow and hard and he felt a tightness in his guts. As the axe struck flesh, a thrill of glee burst inside him. Skin and bone parted. Blood sprayed further than Berren could spit. He was almost rigid with exhilaration.

One of the dead man’s legs twitched with such force that it almost twisted the body off its block. The executioner shied away in surprise. One foot slipped in the pool of blood. When he caught his balance, he gave the severed head a hefty kick. The head rolled away and fell down somewhere under the platform. The crowd laughed, but by then Berren was already searching for the man in the shadows.

The man hadn’t moved. Berren sighed with relief.

For the last execution, he allowed himself to relax and soak in everything the executioner did. He appreciated the careful preparation, the cleaning of the axe head, the touch of a sharpening stone. When it fell, he watched, and grinned. The second one was every bit as good as the first. Not as much blood as he’d hoped, but still, quite a bit. When the executioner picked up the last head and held it up for the crowd to view, Berren strained his eyes to see whether anything was still moving. He squinted, and then he saw the dead head blink.

He turned to the boy beside him, overflowing with excitement. “Did you see that? He blinked! Did you see it?”

The younger boy’s goggling eyes stayed riveted to the head. “Yeh yeh, it did, yeh.”

Berren stared intently back at the head again, peering in case there was more. Finally, when the executioner turned to go, Berren sent his gaze back in search of the man in the shadows.

He was gone.

Dragons.

Thirty tons of lightning-fast, fire-breathing winged terror. In the myths of ash from which the realms arose, they flew wild and untamed. They had the power to destroy armies, burn cities, render castles to dust. Nothing could stop them. Nothing at all.

Those days, though, are all but forgotten, for the dragons have been tamed. Kept dulled and pliant by the potions of the master alchemists, they remain the ultimate weapon, but now they are wielded by the Kings and Queens of men. They are flown for sport and bred for the brightness of their scales. A return to the wars of the past is unthinkable, for to unleash the dragons once more would be to unleash the end of the world.

Now it is a time of change. The stewardship of the Adamantine Palace shall pass from the old to the new. There will be love and joy, and one Prince will seek a path to greatness…

- o O o -

In a long dark room, lit only by the embers of a hearth, Prince Jehal sits by his father’s bed and takes his father’s hand. He leans towards the old man’s ear.

“I know you can hear me,” he whispers, soft as silk. “I know your mind is still alive in there, even while your body wastes away. I’m going to kill Queen Aliphera. I’m sorry. I know you liked her. She has a daughter, too. Zafir. She squeals like a pig when we… Oh, I’m sorry.” Jehal gently wipes his father’s brow. “I suppose I shouldn’t speak of such things. Do the women I send to your bed still give you any pleasure? I hope so. I pick them myself.”

He pauses and squeezes his father’s hand, stretching his senses for any response. He thinks he feels a twitch, but that could simply be his father’s condition. It could be anything. Most likely it’s nothing.

He whispers again. “Hyram’s time as master of the Adamantine Palace is nearly done. You’re going to be my key to him, father. You and Zafir. He thinks he’ll appoint Queen Shezira to succeed him, but I’ll change his mind. I’ll do what you never could, and you’re going to help me. In fact, father, I couldn’t do it without you. All I ask, is that you be the pathetic, drooling, shaking, empty shell of man that you are. Let him see what time has in store for him. Let him fear it in his bones. Let the dread of it gnaw at him. Let the terror of age and impotence and helplessness eat his heart until he will do anything, anything, for the cure.”

Jehal rises and grins. “And please don’t tell him that it doesn’t exist.” He takes a step towards the door, then turns back and holds his father’s hand one last time. “I’m sorry, father, I really am, but I had to do what I’ve done. I know you understand, but I do wish you could tell me, just once, that you’re proud.”

With a skip in his step he walks away. He has a Queen to murder, a King to poison, a Princess to bed and another to wed, and his heart is singing with joy.

- o O o -

In the midst of the dragon-realms, the Adamantine Palace gleams, a prize and a poisoned chalice. It is a place where daughters are sold and alliances broken, where nests of vipers plot their paths to greatness, where the villainous dream designs of deceit and death. Friendships will be bartered and sold. There will be treachery and lust and betrayal. Kings and Queens will die.

There will be murder.

Above all, it is a place where all eyes should look to the skies, for amid the schemes and deceptions, one tiny flaw will go unnoticed. There will be the slightest of mistakes, and one dragon will slip the alchemists’ grasp.

It will remember.

And there will be fire.

Angry fists hammered on the door. “Open up! In the name of The Speaker! Open up!”

Vale Tassan, commander of the Night Watch of the Adamantine Guard looked on. Already, other guardsmen were bringing up a ram. If that’s what it took, they’d smash in the door. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but he was quite prepared to be disappointed. He’d given them a few minutes to decide what to do, and so far, the door had stayed resolutely closed. He felt a slight twinge of sadness. It’s a good door on the Tower of Dusk. I remember us putting it there, twenty years ago, after we smashed in the last one. Why does every accession end like this? Why does this always have to happen?

No, no, no. He wasn’t supposed to ask questions like that. He wasn’t supposed to ask questions at all. That’s not what the Adamantine Guard did. Besides, he was one of the handful of people who knew the answer. Because it draws attention away from others.

He could see the ram, hurrying across the vast darkness between the great towers of the Adamantine Palace. Before it reached him, the door to the Tower of Dusk swung open.

I need more men. He could see that straight away. There were a lot of riders inside the tower. They hadn’t had time to get fully armoured but they all had weapons ready. He had enough guardsmen to win if it came to a fight; victory would be bloody, though. A mess. Not what he wanted.

His own men already had their swords in their hands. They held their ground. The riders inside the tower didn’t move. Tassan watched through narrowed eyes for a second, trying to guess what they would do. He knew his men well enough. He didn’t need to order them to hold. That’s what the guard did best. They wouldn’t move unless he told them to. When they did, though…

The riders inside the tower parted and a woman strode out from among them. Queen Shezira. One of the two queens he’d been sent to arrest. Two queens and one king. Well I’ve got the king and that was bloody enough.

Shezira walked out of the tower. She wasn’t wearing her armour and she wasn’t armed. Two riders came out with her. The Adamantine Guardsmen moved aside to let her pass. Tassan quietly moved around the back of them, until he stood in her way and forced her to stop. He bowed as deeply as he could without taking his eyes away from either her or her riders.

“Your Holiness. By order of the speaker you are charged with treason. Your men will surrender your arms. They will return to their lands. You and your dragons will remain as guests of the speaker until a council of kings and queens shall determine your fate.”

Queen Shezira blinked once. The look she gave him was fierce enough to make a lesser man quiver in his boots; Vale, however, was unmoved. He’d seen a lot of kings over his years in the guard and may of them had tried to be fierce. Then the hint of a smile settled on the queen’s face. “I know you, Vale Tassan, and you know me. For ten years, you took your orders from Speaker Hyram. For every one of those years, you’ve known that I would follow him.”

“Yet you have not. So whose orders do you follow now? Still Hyram’s?”

Vale was offended. “We are the Adamantine Guard, Your Holiness. The speaker commands us. None other.”
The queen nodded. “So Speaker Zafir has ordered this madness. But Night Watchman, she is not yet properly our speaker.”

“Your challenge failed, Your Holiness.”

“She has not been anointed by the dragon-priests. A worthless, pointless ceremony we might all agree. But still, it has not yet been done. Until it is, she is not your mistress.”

For a moment, Vale hesitated. “It is true,” he admitted. “But the guard has always considered the decision of the council of kings and queens to suffice.”

“It is said, is it not, that my knight-marshal has attempted to murder the new speaker.”

Vale nodded. “Speaker Zafir has been wounded, Your Holiness. Lady Nastria remains at large, but I will find her, Your Holiness, and she will hang.”

“I have heard, too, that you have already imprisoned King Valgar. That you killed his riders.”

“His riders resisted.” Vale pursed his lips. He hadn’t wanted a fight.

“Yet his queen escaped you. Very careless. Now what do you think will happen, when his queen returns to her realm?”

“She will not, Your Holiness. You are sheltering her in your tower. She will face the council of kings and queens at her husband’s side. As will you.”

Shezira leaned towards him. Her face, which had been pleasant and amiable, filled with sudden stormclouds. “She is my daughter, Vale Tassan, and you will not have her. I am going to see Hyram, who is doubtless pulling our new speaker’s strings, and we will resolve this lunacy between us, as a speaker to a queen.”

He’s not the speaker any more. The look on the queen’s face, though, kept Vale silent.

“If you try to stop me, my riders will defend me. I have a lot more of them than King Valgar did. In the fight, you will kill me, because I will leave you no choice. There will be a bloodbath but that will be just the beginning. If you win, you may take Valgar and my daughter Almiri, but my second daughter is out of your reach. Jaslyn will become queen. Some call me the Queen of Flint, although only when I am very far away, but should Jaslyn take my throne, you will come to think of me as the Queen of Feathers by the time she’s done with you. She will bring a dragon-war down around your head, Vale Tassan. Valgar’s realm will side with her, and so will King Sirion. She might win or she might not, but in the end you will all lose. I do not say this to threaten you, Night Watchman, for I have no doubt you would face such a war as fearlessly as you face me now. But I know my daughter as well as you know your duty to the Realms.”

Tassan held his ground. “I have no intention of killing you, Your Holiness.”

“I’m sure you don’t.” The queen’s expression softened for a moment. “But as I have already said, that is not a choice I’ll be giving you.” With the flick of her wrist, she had a knife in her hand, the point placed to her breast. “I know you and your soldiers are far too disciplined to kill me by accident, no matter what I do. But I doubt you’re quick enough to stop me, in the middle of a melee, from doing it myself.”

Tassan nodded. It was hard not to smile. If he’d been allowed an opinion, Vale would have said that Queen Shezira would have made a much better speaker that Queen Zafir. The council of kings and queens disagreed, however; and the guard were not entitled to opinions, only orders.

“I am going to talk to Hyram. Vale Tassan, I know it’s not your place to think, but I’ve known you for long enough to know that you do it anyway. Speaker Zafir is teetering on the brink of war. That is not something any of us should want, you above all. I will go to Hyram. Send as many men with me as you wish. My riders will hold their peace in the Tower of Dusk. When I’ve spoken to Hyram, you may follow whatever orders you have, and I will see that my riders do not resist.”

Vale shook his head. “Those are not my orders, Your Holiness.”

Queen Shezira raised an eyebrow. “Your orders are to prevent me from talking to Hyram?”

“My orders, Your Holiness, are to disarm and disperse your men and to ensure you remain in the Tower of Dusk until a council of kings and queens decides your fate.”

Shezira gripped the knife. “Then one way or the other you will fail to fulfil them. Do you want peace or a bloodbath?”

She meant it. He’d known Queen Shezira, if only from afar, for fifteen years. She’d married King Antros, who was destined to be speaker. She’d struggled to hold on to her power when Antros had died. She’d succeeded, and now she ruled with a hand of iron. She had more dragons than any monarch except the King of the Crags. On top of that, she had daughters married to one king and one prince who might as well have been. She was not one who made threats very often, but when she did, as far as Vale knew, she meant them. They called her the Queen of Flint for many good reasons. If you struck her with steel, his soldiers joked, you would not hurt her, but there would be sparks and everything around you just might catch fire.

Orders. The guard obeys orders. From birth to death. Nothing more, nothing less.

But he was the Night Watchman, the commander of the Adamantine Guard, and surely that entitled him to consider what she had to say. He looked her in the eye. “On your word as the Queen of the North. As the Queen of Flint. As the Speaker of the Nine Realms that you should have been. You will do nothing to harm anyone, you will return without resistance to the Tower of Dusk, your riders will hold their peace while you are gone and will surrender their swords when you return?”

She gave him the slightest of smiles. “On my word as Queen of the North, Vale Tassan. You may escort me in person if you want.”

This time Vale smiled back. “And leave the rest of your riders unattended? I don’t think I should do that, Your Holiness. I have plenty enough guardsmen to spare. And they will obey their orders, nothing more, nothing less.”

“From birth to death.”

Vale bowed and watched as Queen Shezira walked on, away into the darkness. A dozen Adamantine guardsmen surrounded her. He’d done the right thing, he was sure of it. She was the Queen of the North and she’d given him her word. In his heart of hearts, he knew she was the rightful speaker. There should be a chance, shouldn’t there? One last chance for peace?

The guard obeys orders. Yours were to confine her to the Tower of Dusk.

He looked around at his soldiers, born and bred for dragon-war. If he asked them, any of them, they would have told him he was wrong. They were younger than he was. An Adamantine Man generally didn’t live as long as Vale had done. Most of them probably wanted a war. It was all they knew, after all. Still, if they knew what he’d done, if they knew what his orders hard been, they’d turn on him. He’d never command their respect again.

Worth it, though. For peace in the realms. That’s what we’re for. When this night is through, I’ll go to the speaker and tell her what I’ve done. I will be dismissed, but inside I will know that what I’ve done was right.

He was comfortable with that. He might even have relaxed, if an Adamantine Man was able to do such a thing. All he had to do was wait for the queen to come back, and the rest of the night could pass in peace and calm.

Half an hour later, he heard what the Queen of the North had done. Or the start of ta, at least; he didn’t quite hear the rest over the roaring of his own rage in his ears. Betrayed and fooled! My Lord! My mistake! My fault!

Vale Tassan, commander of the Night Watch of the Adamantine guard screamed with fury. He pointed at the Tower of Dusk and roared out his orders. “The Queen of Flint is a traitor and a liar! So’s her daughter, and she’s in there! Get her out and bring her to me. If anyone tries to stop you, kill them!”

The Adamantine Men charged at the tower. Queen Shezira’s riders met them at the doors, and whatever peace there might have been, it died in screams and swords and blood.

Then came the fire. She swept her head from side to side, sweeping the trees with torrents of flame. The knights, if they were quick enough, would cower behind their dragon-scale shields and the heat would pass them by.

But if they were cowering behind their shields, they weren’t running. Snow sprang out of the river and up the bank, to the forest edge. The fire came again, and this time her tail cracked into the trees. She plucked out one knight, cartwheeling him a hundred feet into the air, and then another, this one smashed head first into the stones of the river bed. Kailin whimpered and covered his face. He couldn’t bring himself to watch. He heard men scream, branches crack, tree trunks bend and break…

Sprinting footsteps splashed through the water towards him. He heard a voice: “What are you doing? Are you mad?”

Arms roughly pulled him up out of the water and gripped him tight. Raw steel touched his throat.

“You tell that dragon to fucking stop, right?”

Kailin screwed up his face. “I… can’t…” I can’t stop her. She’s not listening to me.

The man with the knife at his throat tensed, as if preparing to make his killing cut. “Well then you’re coming with us then.” He started to drag Kailin out of the river. “If it’s going to burn us, it’s going to burn you too, you bastard.”

The man was doomed. They were all doomed. Kailin knew it as soon as they started to move. He could feel the dragon, as though she’d sensed his plea. She wasn’t done with the other knights yet, but as soon as she was…

“Shit!”

They almost made it when the dragon exploded out of the inferno on the other side of the river, showering ash and embers and burning branches all around them. The fire flashed again, and the other man, the one who didn’t have a hold of him, shrieked. The man with the knife stumbled and the two of them went down together, falling in the soggy grass. He didn’t let go, but rolled, so that he was lying on his back with Kailin on top of him, both of them staring up at the sky. The dragon was staring back down at them. Her teeth were bloody, her eyes blazed, and she had someone caught in her tail again. Through the haze of smoke and gibbering terror, Kailin thought he recognised one of Knight-Marshall Nastria’s sell-swords.

“Let him go!” Roared the man with the knife. “Let him go or I’ll kill your rider.”

WHERE ARE THE ALCHEMISTS? The thought hit Kailin like a hammer. WHERE ARE THEY? BURN THEM! I WILL BURN THEM ALL!

The Snow Fox

“Lady Katharine!” Nikolai exclaimed, jumping to his feet as she swept into the room, almost tripping in his haste to pull back her chair. “I am honoured, as always, that you accept my invitation.” Lord Brasil’s steward clapped his hands, and servants swarmed into the room, weighting the small elegant dining table with exotic and wondrous foods, the names of which Nikolai could only guess. He waited patiently until they were done.

“Please, allow me.” He poured Lady Katharine some tea. She glanced at him, sipped, then sat patiently, her arms in her lap, smiling faintly. Nikolai beamed happily and helped himself to a plateful of sandwiches.

“Lord Brasil has found yet another exquisite setting for us, don’t you think?” He looked across the room, through the far wall, to where a sickly green moon glimmered over a dark and golden sea. Sleek black shapes, indistinct of form, slid silently through the sky, extinguishing the stars as they went. Here and there, dim meandering patterns burned through the ocean as though spasms of lightning racked the murky depths. Countless delicate ripples crossed the surface, writing nameless symbols where they crossed, and far off on the horizon, a black column, darker than the night, raked the sky.

“It is strange. I wonder where he finds these visions.” Lady Katharine sipped her tea again and did not reply.

“I shall tell you of my journey here,” said Nikolai, tearing his eyes away at last. “I have come alone, with only the Snow Fox for company. I know you have not seen her, but she is beautiful beyond compare, a pale quicksilver phantom, shifting through the seas as though she could fly if I would but let her. One day you shall sail her, and when you stand at her prow, the waters will bow before you and summon forth a great wave to carry you to the land of your desire. Her timbers are clothed with silver bark that shines at night with a light of its own to guide me to you; her silken sails are gossamer white, woven through with gold, and shimmer in the sunlight. Her figurehead is a fox, slender and graceful, carved silver and white of ice that does not melt.

“For a week I sailed her day and night, not thinking or caring to search for land, for such is her speed that not even the fastest storm could catch her. When at last I sighted shore once more, I found I was in a desolate place, the reek of fire stifling the air. By day the sky was dark as night, by night as black as death; the obsidian cliffs were rent and seared, and the sea churned its discontent. I tarried there awhile to wonder, ’til bloody flames lit up the sky and thunder tore the land, and a great wind blew down from the shore and cast me back to the ocean. For days I rode that wind, and when it died I found myself in a frozen land, where vast shards of ice reached up like great towers of glass to shake free the shackles of the earth. Gliding high above me, great white birds hooted, their mournful cries echoing through the frosty crags. Here I put to shore, at last a safe harbour for the Snow Fox, and wandered through the snow, staring at these frozen spires, wondering what they dreamed with their heads so pillowed among the clouds, until at last I could resist them no more. For a day and a night I climbed, one hand one foot, the ice wall always in my face, until I thought I could climb no further, but by then the ground was a mile below and I had little choice but to go on. I climbed another day, my limbs burning like fire and my face dead with cold, yet when I reached the summit, Oh what reward! Below me clouds arrayed themselves like island mountains in a milky sea, while above, wispy strands of grey scarred the darkening sky. As I sat and stretched my aching muscles, I watched the setting sun, never so bright, colour the sky with fiery bronze. Entranced, I could not bring myself to move until dark was full upon me.” Nikolai sighed. “Alas, I fell asleep before the dawn, and shall never know what majesty I missed there. When at last I awoke, the phantom islands and their ghostly sea were gone, and in their place a pale desert, flat save for the rippling of its dunes. And in the distance sat an implacable grey anvil of thunder, driving like a chariot towards me, whipping a white flurry at its heels. If it had not been for that, I would have stayed on my airy perch for another day and perhaps watched the dawn, but though the storm was many leagues away, I feared for my life and for my ship if I did not descend.” On the horizon through the wall, a brilliant light flared between the flickering moon and the black tower. One by one, the shadows that moved across the sky fluttered and fell silently into the golden sea. Nikolai stared until the light faded, and poured himself another cup of tea. Lady Katharine’s, he noticed, had been left to go cold.

“I left those spires behind me, and sailed the frozen seas yet a month before once more I entered the realms of men. Ah! I will not tire you with my adventures there, though I did not stay long. Suffice to say the sight of my fellows was a welcome one, as was the warmth of their fires and their hearths. I left replete with good cheer, yet barely were the harbour lights extinguished from my sight when I was beset by the raiders of the Taiytakei. By night I heard them on my track, their distant hooting and jeering taunting me across the still waves, their fleet hard upon my back. Wherever I flew they followed on, and though none may outspeed the fox, yet when the morning sun rose, ever they remained at my heels. By day I watched their crimson clippers, by night I heard the rattle of their sail, and still I could not vanish them from my sight, until at last, sat in squat menace upon the horizon I spied another storm. Straight and true, headlong as a wintry stream I sailed for its bleak heart, until the ocean gave way around me and the skies spun like a drunkards reel.

“He who dies can die no more, but he who lives may face death a thousand times. Tossed and torn by the storm, I felt my senses come and go as the maelstrom boiled and the endless waves heaved and hurled my tiny ship across the sky, her sails rent and cast away. For a week or maybe two the mighty winds raged; I saw one of the hounds that dogged me fail, its mast split asunder, and of the others? I can only guess their fate, for when the sea fell silent and life reassured its lingering hold, there was no sight to be had of them.

“I shook down the torn sails and made on with what remained, looking for a friendly shore where I might beach and make more extensive repair. It was not long before I came upon an island, awash with verdant green, and in its centre the tallest of mountains, capped in white, its jagged summit tearing wispy threads from passing clouds. The sea was calm and clear, the sky brilliant and blue, and when I had finished stitching my sails, I swam naked with the fishes, and ran mile upon mile over the creamy sands of the shore, intoxicated by the heady freedom to roam as I wished. Yet as I wandered through the trees, or sat in serenity and watched the gentle waves, ever did I turn my eyes towards that mountain. Hour on hour I stared its dizzy heights, until I knew I could not leave without a part of it in my heart.

“I climbed through wild forests, strewn with great boulders from high upon its jagged face, passed gushing falls plunging through ravines so deep I could not see their end through mist and spray. I drew higher, the slopes grew sharper, until naught but rocks and ravens remained. When I turned back to look from where I had come, I saw only a green ocean of leaves, rolling gently away to the sea. The climb grew steeper still, yet I could not stop, until at last I reached the mighty summit, the sun blazing warm and bright in a field of deepest blue, so high that even the ravens had long since given up their chase. Can you but imagine the feeling, to skate upon the sky, the clouds coiling at your feet? Such freedom! Such Joy!” Nikolai turned, his face radiant with the memory. “Oh Katharine, one day I shall take you there, and we shall fly together.” She returned his gaze, half sad, half wistful. Then she folded her napkin, stood up and walked to the door.

She turned for a moment, a longing smile on her face, but he was gone. She saw only the cobwebs of a house she would never leave, only dust in the space where he was supposed to be, her lover, lost these last ten years at sea.

“Thank you,” she said.