by Stephen Deas
As you wish.
He took a deep breath. “Snow?”
Kemir?
“If you ever eat someone I call a friend again, I will find a way and I will kill you. I don’t care how much they don’t mind. I don’t care if they’re positively trying to claw their way down your throat. Never again. Am I clear?”
You are clear, Kemir.
She was laughing at him. He could tell.
ONE
THE RED RIDERS
Out of the sun there shall come a white dragon, and with the white dragon a red rider. Thieves and liars shall quiver and weep, for the rider’s name shall be Justice, and the dragon shall be Vengeance.
1
THE PROPHET
He was running through a forest, between trees beside a river, wearing nothing more than a shirt. He was soaking wet and the water was icy. Here and there patches of snow lay on the ground but he didn’t feel the cold. He was much more afraid of the heat. In the skies above the treetops, two dragons laced the world with fire. They were past rage, past fury. They were dying. He’d killed them and they knew it. They knew where he was too.
He’d tried to hide deep amid the darkness, beneath layer upon layer of leaf-shadow and branches, but they always found him. He’d tried to run, but the fire always followed him and the forest turned to flames and ash behind him. He’d tried the freezing waters of the river and the dragons had simply boiled it dry. Somehow they never quite caught him. He knew exactly why. They were slowly dying and so was he. When the trees ran out, they would all burn together. Was he afraid? He wasn’t sure. Angry? Yes. Desperate? Yes. Willing to do almost anything to stay alive? Yes. But afraid? No. He’d done what needed to be done. Jaslyn would survive. The princess had been saved from the dragon. The knight had done his duty. Now the trees were running out and the end was coming, but no, he wasn’t afraid.
“Stop!”
He felt the voice more than he heard it. It wasn’t a real voice, not even a human voice. It boomed like a thunderclap, shaking mountains and felling trees. The air filled with ash shaken up from the ground and the dragons fell from the sky and were still. The forest and the river were suddenly gone. Where they’d been, only bare stone remained. Bare stone and a man, standing waiting for him not more than twenty paces away.
Semian stopped. He looked the man up and down. Long robes the color of blood. A craggy face. Long white hair and a long white beard, braided, that reached almost to his waist. Every inch a dragon-priest. Except for his skin, as pale as ice, and his hands, which were black and cracked, his fingers burned to stumps. And his eyes, which blazed with bloody fire.
“Stop!” said the priest again. This time the world didn’t shake. Semian looked behind him. The old dragons were gone now. There was no sign of them or of the river or the trees, or even the smoking ruins of the alchemists’ stronghold. Only the mountains were the same. Rising among them, taller than even the highest peak, a single massive crimson dragon filled half the sky. It lifted its head and stared lazily at him with eyes the size of lakes. Semian fell to one knee and bowed his head. The priest and the dragon were somehow the same. He didn’t know how he knew, didn’t know how that could be, but he knew it as surely as he knew the feel of his own sword in the palm of his hand.
“Rise, rider.”
Semian didn’t move. “I am dead, am I not?”
The priest said nothing.
“You taught us that we would join the great dragon whose fire is the sun. That we would be taken into that fire and our souls would be forged anew.”
“You are not dead,” said the priest.
“I followed with the other Embers with dragon-poison in my blood, and in our dying we did what we left our caves to do. The dragons are slain.”
“No, they are not, and nor are you,” said the priest again. “You drank the dragon-poison and you survived. You are one of us now. One dragon too survived. One and one, balanced against one another. A harmony of fire.”
“I . . .” Joyful tears filled Semian’s eyes. He felt the heat of passion explode inside him, filling him until there was no space for anything else and then growing still greater.
“You have always been a loyal servant of the church,” said the priest. “You have always stayed true. Your heart is pure. Now you shall have your reward. Kneel. And remember. Remember the stories. Remember the myths. Remember the legends. Remember what only we priests and our faithful care to preserve. Remember the beginning and remember the end.”
The beginning and the end.
Before there was time there was the void. Into the void there came the sun and the moon and the earth and the stars.
“And each created life.”
The shifting stone-creatures of the earth. The moon-children made of liquid silver. The ghost-forms of the star spirits. And us. The children of the sun.
“Of the Great Flame.”
The Great Flame.
“And each claimed to be the foremost of the gods.”
And war and strife and sorcery shattered the land.
“And in the cracks of creation the dragons were born.”
They tore the magic from the land. They scourged the earth with fire. They sought to return all things to the void from which they had come.
“For only then could they too return.”
And yet through blood-magic, the children of the sun cheated the end of the world. Through alchemy they called to them the Silver King, who chained the dragons and stilled the restless void.
“Thus spoke the prophet with the voice of the wind.”
Semian was already kneeling. He bowed his head again. The priest ran one ruined hand through the braids of his beard. It came out dripping red with blood. “Your reward for your faith.” The bloody hand waved over Semian, spattering him, and then pressed against his forehead. Semian could feel the blood running slowly down his face. “For then the prophet’s face became terrible to behold and he spoke with the voice of the desert. All chains break. Fire will sweep the bones of the world. Out of flames there shall come a white dragon, and with the dragon a red rider. Thieves and liars shall quiver and weep, for the rider’s name shall be Justice and the dragon shall be Vengeance.” The hand pressed harder against his brow. “Arise, rider. The end-times are coming. You have been chosen. You have taken the poison and you have lived. The white dragon flies free. The flames of destruction have come, and out of the flames the red rider shall be born. Be Justice, Rider Semian. Be the red rider and find the dragon whose name is Vengeance. Cleanse the world of its wickedness. Burn it away. Justice and Vengeance, Rider Semian, Justice and Vengeance. For I am the Silver King and I have set you free.” The priest and the mountains slipped away into dust. Only the priest’s hand remained, still there against his skin, and the voice.
Justice and Vengeance. Justice and Vengeance . . .
The priest’s words echoed for an eternity, yet even they decayed. Other voices, other words rose up, drowning the priest in mindless chatter. Familiar voices. People.
Friends?
Semian listened to them as best he could, but his mind was adrift and nothing made any sense. Nothing until three words pierced him like a lance.
The Red Riders.
2
TORCHLIGHT
A rider without a dragon is a like a one-armed swordsman.” Jostan was drunk. He was slumped in the darkest corner he could find of the worst drinking hole within walking distance of Southwatch. His words were slurred. He glowered at the table in front of him. The wood was stained and on the stains there were more stains. Where there weren’t stains there were letters or, more often, crude pictograms badly hacked into the wood by a hundred years of drunken knights determined to leave their mark. “No. It’s worse. It’s like a no-armed swordsman. With no legs.”
Beside him a rider was weeping. He didn’t even know her name. She’d found him there, glaring in the gloom, and simply sat beside him. She obviously knew the place well since she barely had to lift her eyes to
ward the tavern-keeper to summon another flagon of ale. She was already drunk when she’d sat down beside him and she showed no signs of slowing down.
“I’ve got a dragon,” she said suddenly. “I didn’t use to have a dragon, but I’ve got one now.”
“I used to have one.” Jostan sighed. “Then the Embers poisoned it. Now I haven’t got one anymore. Princess Jaslyn was supposed to give me another one. But she’s gone away.” Gone away having virtually dismissed Semian from her service. And, Jostan discovered, him as well, almost as an afterthought. Whatever Semian had said, apparently, had been spoken for them both.
Stupid little girl. That was what she was, after all. Almost a girl. To think he’d held a torch for her not long ago. And there was another thing. What was he thinking? A rider from a nothing family and a dragon-princess? I must have been wearing my stupid-cap.
“She used to look at me, though,” he mumbled. Little looks that made him wonder; and then Knight-Marshal Nastria had sent him with her to the alchemists and the dragons had come and burned everything and he’d held her in his arms, stopping her from running into the flames, and she’d liked it. For a moment at least, she’d liked it.
Or that was what he’d thought. Maybe he was fooling himself. Deluded. She was made of the same heartless flint as her mother. “No dragon. Thrown away. Semian’s no better. Spent days sitting with him trying to make him not die and now that he’s come back, he’s gone crazy. Had some stupid vision while he was in his coma and now all he talks about is the Great Flame and the Red Riders.”
The rider beside him lifted her head and turned toward him. “Red Riders? You know where they are?”
Jostan shook his head. “No. No idea.”
The other rider slumped and promptly lost interest in him again.
“Semian says we have to find them and join them. Says that’s where he’s meant to be. Not that he’s got a dragon either. Fat lot of use either of us would be. Justice and Vengeance without any dragons.” He spat on the floor. “I suppose we could tend the campfires while the real riders fly. I’ve done that before.”
“Hyrkallan leads the Red Riders,” slurred the other rider. “He’s the greatest there is. Was there too. He was.” Her head lolled sideways and she looked at him. “Who flies with the Red Riders?”
Jostan shrugged. “I don’t know their names. The riders who fought their way out of the Adamantine Palace on the Night of the Knives. Knights who served Hyram or Queen Shezira. Who see through the speaker’s lies. Her and Jehal. We could have . . . We could . . .” The thought petered out in disarray. We could have what? Stopped Lady Nastria from trying to kill Queen Zafir? Stopped Queen Shezira from pushing Hyram off a balcony?
The other rider slowly slid sideways, slumping against him like a sack of potatoes. Her head lolled on his shoulder. Jostan sighed. That’s all I need.
“Can I come too?” She sounded ready to pass out. Jostan pushed her away. She grumbled and groaned but managed to stay upright.
“Leave me alone.”
“But I want to come with you.”
“I don’t even know you.” Jostan started to get up, but now the other rider grabbed hold of him and pulled him back down with all the fierce strength of the very drunk.
“Nthandra of the Vale.”
Jostan sat slowly back down. He looked the woman carefully up and down, wondering if she was lying. Nthandra of the Vale. Everyone in Southwatch knew the name. Nthandra of the Vale, whose father was King Valgar’s knight-marshal, whose brothers and sisters were his honor guard, whose betrothed was his adjutant. Nthandra of the Vale, whose entire family had died at King Valgar’s side on the Night of the Knives. Nthandra of the Vale, who was said to roam Southwatch like a ghost.
“Nthandra . . . ?”
She fell across the table and then turned her head to leer at him. “You know what they say about me?”
“Your brothers . . . your father . . . your husband . . . They all died.”
“All dead, all dead, all dead. So what else do they say about me?” She reached out a languid arm and stroked his cheek. Jostan swallowed hard.
“I don’t . . . I don’t know.”
“Don’t they say that I gave myself to the man I was to marry before we were wed?”
“I . . .”
“Don’t they say that I’m carrying his child inside me?”
“Um . . .”
“Don’t they say I’m a drunk who’ll give herself to any man who takes her fancy as freely as the autumn wind plucks leaves from the trees?”
A strange feeling crept over Jostan, starting from his feet and rising slowly. A numb sort of paralysis. “I haven’t heard such things . . .” He couldn’t take his eyes off her. That was the drunk inside him, throwing care and caution to the wind.
“Don’t they say that I lay with three riders in one night on the day that I learned my betrothed was dead?”
“I . . .” Jostan didn’t know what to say, but that didn’t seem to matter. Nthandra’s face screwed up and she started to sob.
“When I’m alone, all I think of are the dead.” The hand on his cheek moved to his shoulder and gripped his shirt. “Don’t leave me alone. I can’t be alone. Use me like a whore or hold me like a baby, I don’t mind, but please, please don’t let me be alone.”
Jostan’s tongue seemed to have swollen so it didn’t fit in his mouth anymore. He had to work hard to make words come out. He took hold of her hand. “There’s a place we can go.”
The sobs went away and her eyes gleamed. “There are lots of places we can go.”
“No. There’s a place for forgetting.” He staggered to his feet and pulled her up after him. She could barely walk so he put one of her arms around his shoulders and half dragged her away to the door. Eyes watched him go. Other riders. He didn’t care what they thought. All the time he’d spent serving one mistress and then another. He’d nearly died, back in the caves with Jaslyn. Yes, could easily have died. And what does she do? She throws me away. Whatever Semian said or did, I didn’t do anything. I just held her when she needed to be held. When that mask of stone cracked for a moment. And the thanks I get?
He looked at Nthandra of the Vale, glassy-eyed, head flopping from side to side, barely even conscious. She didn’t look much like a princess, but somehow he saw Jaslyn’s face anyway.
“I’m not just going to hold you,” he muttered.
“I don’t care.”
You should. So should I. But he didn’t. He took her to the door of another place. A place where drunkards lay sprawled in the street and two heavy men in thick leather coats lounged by the door. A place where he knew, from the smell of the air, that they could both forget.
One of the men stepped away from the wall and blocked his path. “Rider.” He nodded. Jostan nodded back, not knowing what he was supposed to say. The other one was standing straighter now, only pretending to be bored.
“Got gold?” asked the first. Jostan nodded. He leaned forward and fumbled in his boot, where he kept a few gold dragons. Nthandra slipped off his shoulder and fell gracelessly into the dirt. The men in the leather coats both laughed.
“You sure you need to go in?” asked the second one. Jostan shot him a filthy look and gave the first one a coin. That wasn’t enough, so he felt around and fished out a second one.
“Gold,” he said. The man nodded again and went back to propping up his wall. Jostan hauled Nthandra to her feet. She was gone now, completely gone. He took her in anyway. As soon as he walked through the door, the smell of Souldust hit him like a brick in the face. Souldust fresh from Evenspire where men freely offered it in the streets. Semian would never speak to him again if he found out, but as much as anything that was why Jostan was doing this. You can all screw yourselves. I don’t have to do anything for any of you anymore.
Inside, he could barely see a thing. A single dim candle lit each room. Bodies lay strewn about, some of them sleeping, some of them sitting, eyes glittering in the candle flame, o
penmouthed and motionless. Some of them seemed to be naked, but in the darkness he couldn’t be sure. From a few rooms deeper in came the grunts and moans of some couple. Here and there, as he stepped over legs and arms, faces glanced up at him. They were all empty. Empty, yes, and he wanted to be exactly like them.
He eventually found a room that was a bit less crowded than the rest, where there was space to sit down. This was where the sounds of the man and the woman were coming from, growing louder as they slowly approached their climax. The air smelled of sweat and musk. Only, as he realized after a few minutes, it wasn’t a man and a woman but a man and another man. They ignored him, lost in their own world, and Jostan did the same. He propped Nthandra up beside him and held her tight, sucking in deep breaths of the dust-laden air. It didn’t take long before the drug and the gallon of ale he had inside him took him away, far away.
Sometime in the night he became aware of something moving, and then a sensation of exquisite pleasure. He wasn’t sure when he opened his eyes, for the candles had long gone out and the room was as black as pitch. Filled with snores too. Something soft brushed his lips. His skin was tingling, his heart thumping. He was intensely, painfully aroused. As he shifted, he realized that someone had their hand in his trousers.
He jumped, thinking of the two men who’d been there when they’d come in earlier.
“Shhh.”
Nthandra pressed her lips to his, while her hand continued to work. Jostan moaned.
“Did you mean what you said?” she whispered. “About the Red Riders?”
His hand reached out and touched skin. As he explored her, he found she was almost naked, her clothes hanging loosely, every button and fastening open. He reached between her legs, but she batted him away.
“Did you mean what you said?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I don’t have a dragon.”
“But you can find them.”