by Stephen Deas
‘The dragons are gone.’ He stumbled down the passage as fast as he dared, over the mound of rubble, up the stairs and into the glorious freezing air, and never mind how much it all hurt to get there. Outside, the early morning sun had crept high enough to light up the eyrie. Most of the valley below was still in shadow. He stood amid the ruins, taking deep breaths, staring up at the sky. Better. Better to be outside. The cold took away the worst of the pain. Took the edge off it at least. He was right. The dragons had gone. He squatted among the broken stones, rocking back on his heels, wondering what to do. He’d lost his sword, lost his bow. When he looked, he didn’t even have a knife with him any more. Must have left it down with the woman. Didn’t matter. There’d be more lying about, if he looked hard enough.
I will take my sleeping brothers and sisters far away, where we will not be found until they awake. That is how long you have to run before I will come. And how long was that? Weeks? Maybe a month? Never mind swords and bows. He had a purse full of coin and a pouch full of Souldust. Should be able to have a lot of fun with that in a month. He could at least die with a smile on his face. Had a lot more appeal than spending his last days trying to dodge swords and arrows. Especially with a broken arm.
And then what? Roll over and burn just like everyone else?
A boat down the river to Furymouth then. Away on a Taiytakei ship by whatever bargain it took, to whatever lands lay beyond the Sea of Storms. The Taiytakei had to come from somewhere, right? They couldn’t just live on their ships. And Snow had found those islands. And if even if they did live on their ships, that had to be better than being burned and eaten, right? What did the Taiytakei want? He had money and Souldust, but somehow that didn’t seem enough. They traded in slaves, but that was too much like being a dragon-knight. Dragons. The Taiytakei wanted dragons. Everyone knew that. Or failing that, they wanted the secrets of the alchemists . . .
Alchemists. He couldn’t help but laugh. With one hand, the fates pissed on him, with the next they showered him with gold. The woman. He could make her up as an alchemist, even if she wasn’t. She had to know something to have been in those tunnels with the rest, right? He could trade her for passage. Or maybe there were other bits and pieces hidden under the ground. Potions. Recipes. Anything.
Dragon-riders, alchemists, same difference. There was that mantra again. Wasn’t really working.
Most likely he’d wind up a slave. But slavery was better than dead, wasn’t it? Slaves could always dream of breaking free.
He glanced up at the sky. The dragon was gone but she was up there somewhere, off into the lifeless glaciers at the heart of the Worldspine or the arid peaks of the Purple Spur. If I was a dragon, that’s where I’d go. Nothing there.
The start of the long road up to the ruins of the castle wasn’t much more than a track, a path wide enough enough for a man on a horse maybe but no bigger, certainly not wide enough for a wagon. It wound up the slope down which Snow had thrown him the day before, cutting though the black trees, gloomy and overhung. The snow was clean, unmarked. No one had come down here for days. There was probably a stair, somewhere underground. Or a shaft and a cage on pulleys for lifting loads up from the eyrie. No need for a road at all really. At least not until some passing dragon smashed your stairs and ate your slaves.
He sighed. On the one hand, he didn’t have the energy for climbing mountains. On the other, his arm wouldn’t stay that way for ever. Sooner or later he was going to need a sword and a bow again. Chances were he’d be good for that around about the same time that Snow came back to set fire to the world. Perfect. Still, he could always take his mind off how much his arm hurt by thinking about how much his ribs and spine hurt instead. Or his legs, or his knees, or the windburn on his neck or the creeping numbness in his toes. Plenty to choose from there.
By the time he reached the first bend in the road, he felt as though he’d spent the whole day running. He leaned against a tree, caught his breath and listened. Nothing. Not a sound. Not even a bird. Not even the rustle of the wind in the trees. Just a stillness. Silence, muffled up in a blanket of snow.
It really shouldn’t have taken him more than an hour to get to the castle, but instead it took half a day, wading through the snow and the scattered lumps of stonework that littered the road and the forest, tossed aside in the destruction of the castle. When he got to the top, his bow was right there where he’d dropped it, still in once piece. He gave a murmur of thanks to his ancestors for that. It was a nice bow, carved from the wing bone of some long-dead dragon. It was the kind of bow that a dragon-knight would have, and in fact had had, right up until Kemir had slit his throat. They’d had one each, him and his cousin Sollos. The second one was carefully wrapped and padded and, for all Kemir knew, still tied to Snow’s back. The bow that he’d taken from his dead cousin’s still-warm body on the same day that he’d first met Snow. The bow he’d sworn he’d use to kill the dragon-knight who murdered him. Or was that the one he was holding in his hand, and was it his own bow left on the back of the dragon?
Yeah. That was something else he could do. He could spend his last few months hunting down one last dragon-rider while around them the world burned.
He shook his head. He needed to rest, to lie down, to go back to sleep, preferably for days, but up here there was nowhere. Bright brilliant mountain sun, gleaming off the slopes around the ruins. Smashed blackened stone. Churned-up earth, ripped and and torn by dragon claws. The charred skeletons of a few trees, caught in Snow’s fire. All the snow for hundreds of yards had melted and then frozen again in the night. Everywhere hard and cold and bright and glistening and unforgiving. He sat down on a flat rock for a while and slumped into a doze, soaking up the feeble warmth of the sun until the shadows of the broken trees and stones started to grow long again. Then he forced himself up, forced himself to look through the ruins, even though all he wanted was to lie down and sleep. Didn’t find anything more either, so that was all a waste and in the end he trudged away, back down the road between the trees with just the bow. A sword could wait. Arrows he could find on the way. Make, if he had to. A knife, though. Couldn’t do without a good knife. Best get his old one back from the underground refuge. Best get as much food and whatever else they had down there too, since he wasn’t going to be doing much hunting for a while. Couldn’t stay up here for ever. Sooner or later, people would come. Wasn’t sure which was worse, people or dragons.
The sun was behind the mountain by the time he got back, the whole eyrie cast in freezing shadow even while the mountains across the valley gleamed a pinky-white. The woman was waiting for him. Or she was waiting, at least. Sitting on the stones just as he’d done before her, staring at the devastation. She was shivering. He sat down beside her, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her on his skin through the biting air. She didn’t seem to even notice him, but even so the feeling of being close to someone almost made him cry. Strange way to feel about someone you’d planned to murder, were planning even now to sell into slavery, but that was how it was. He would take them both to Furymouth. He would get them both away before the dragons came out of the mountains, and he’d do whatever it took. That was the way to look at it. Never mind what happened at the end.
A light dusting of snow covered the eyrie now. Not enough to hide anything. Must have come in the night. The sky had been clear all day. Clear and cold.
‘We should go,’ he said after they’d sat together for some time. The woman didn’t move. Eventually, Kemir left her there and made his way slowly and painfully back down into the refuge. At least she’d found some more lamps. With a bit of light, the place wasn’t quite as bad. Didn’t make him constantly feel like the air was being crushed out of his lungs. At some point, when his arm was throbbing so much he could hardly think, he lay down for a rest and fell asleep. When he woke up, the woman was back. She’d made a bed for herself in one of the storerooms, as far away from him as she could be, all mounded up in blankets and furs. If it hadn�
�t been for the snoring, he’d never have known she was there.
He went back up to the surface but it was the middle of the night, snowing again, the air so cold it seemed to freeze the breath in his lungs. Down under the ground, he had no idea what time of day it was. He tried going back, tried going to sleep again, but for some reason he wasn’t tired any more. Arm hurt like someone was taking a hammer to it, but that was just pain. Cold, now that was a killer.
Later he went out again. The sun was up and he found himself a handcart over by the frozen mud of the lake. Loaded it with as many blankets and furs as he could find. Food too. Then he walked a little way down the path beneath the frozen lake to see where it went. Down towards the valley, that was as much as he could tell. The torrent of water hadn’t washed it away, which was something. It was a good path. Uneven, but laid in heavy chunks of stone, one of the old paths that littered the mountains. Further away, he thought he could see the line of it etched into the sheer grey sides of another mountain. No idea where it went. There were paths like this all over the Worldspine, and most of them didn’t seem to go anywhere at all. Just meandered about the place, all so old that no one could remember what they were for or who made them or why. So old there were barely even any stories.
Any kind of down was good enough. After that, he went back to the refuge and slept for the rest of the day. When he couldn’t sleep any more, he went back to the surface and waited as the sun went down, as another night fell and the freezing air pricked at his skin. The sky was clear. Thousands of stars shone bright and half a silver moon lit the corpse of the eyrie. The sort of night Kemir remembered from a long time ago, from before he’d ever seen a dragon. Crisp and brilliant and beautiful and deadly cold.
Once it was about as cold as it was going to get, he got ready to leave.
‘Get dressed.’ He found the woman and shook her awake. She cringed and whimpered until he backed away and tossed her a pile of blankets and furs. When the fear ebbed away, the expression on her face was blank and vacant. ‘Time to go.’ He pointed to a pair of bags filled with food. ‘You carry those. Put the furs on. It’s cold.’
She followed him, mute and compliant. From her face, she didn’t understand what or why or how, and cared even less. Kemir frowned. ‘It’s a long way to the bottom,’ he said. ‘We start walking at night and take our warmth with us. If we don’t get to shelter before the end of the day, we walk on. That’s the way of the mountains.’ He reached out and tapped her gently on the shoulder, looking for some sort of response. ‘Better to die on your feet than in your sleep, eh?’
She didn’t even blink. He shrugged and left. At least she followed.
His toes went numb first. That was always the way. No matter how many strips of fur he wrapped around his boots, the cold always found a way in. His fingers went next, then the rest of his feet, then his face. He was still walking, though, when the sun slowly crept up from the east to set fire to the mountain tops. His legs grumbled bitterly. The broken arm was the worst, even though he had that hand stuffed under his furs to try and save it. The woman was still following in his wake, wordless.
The path was no help. Lumpy stones, and steps, everywhere steps. Up, down, whichever way you went. Steps made for agile men with strong legs, not for cripples and whimpering women. The paths he’d known before had been down in the valleys, where it was flat. Hadn’t been ready for steps. The handcart had been dumped long ago and most of the blankets with it. On the other hand, the alternative was mostly a sharp black tumble of rocks, scree and scraggy trees that propped up mounds of snow. You could see how old the stones of the path were from how they’d been smoothed around the edges. Where there were steps, they’d been worn by passing footsteps. But then the moss and the grass that grew between the cracks said that whoever those many feet had belonged to had passed this way long ago. Not many came here now.
When the sun was finally high enough to feel warm, he stopped on a cluster of rocks and cleared away the snow. They made a little fire and boiled some water. With only one hand, with fingers that could barely move, everything took ten times longer than it should. He spent most of his time on his knees, fumbling in the snow for things that he’d dropped.
The woman watched him, staring with empty eyes.
‘You could help, you know,’ he growled, but she didn’t seem to hear. His arm was hurting so much that as soon as he’d got a pot of snow melting over the fire, he collapsed, panting and gasping, lying on his back and staring at the sky. The world started to spin.
The next thing he knew, the woman was squatting beside him. She was lifting his head, trying to pour something scalding hot between his lips. Bewildered, he shook her away; she jumped back. As he sat up, she held out a wooden cup.
‘Awake now, are you?’ he asked tersely, staring at the cup. What had she been trying to do? Poison him?
She shivered.
‘Cold? No shit.’ He was swaying. He felt as though he was light enough to float up into the air and at the same time heavy enough to sink into the ground.
The wooden cup waved itself at him again.
‘What is it?’
She didn’t answer. After a moment’s thought, he took it from her and drank. If she had wanted to kill him, she’d had chances enough by now.
‘I’m Kemir,’ he said, handing back the cup. She nodded, wary, and didn’t answer. Wary was good, though. Better than vacant. ‘Where are we? Any idea?’ He finally managed to get back to his feet. Whatever she’d given him, he was feeling it straight away. A warmth and an energy. If she’d poisoned him, at least he was going to die comfortable.
She shrugged.
‘The end of this road has to be a place we can sit down and get some food and fall asleep without freezing to death. Has to.’ Fall asleep, yes, that would be good. Even thinking about it was dangerous. His legs had heard and were already getting started without the rest of him, and it was only the middle of the morning. His hips were aching, as if to beg him to lie down and take the weight off them. He was in worse condition than he’d realised. There had to be some sort of shelter at the bottom, didn’t there? Although the further he followed the path, the less promising it seemed. There had been ruts under the snow at the top of the eyrie, handcart tracks, but they’d led only as far as a collection of little houses, all smashed and burned by the meticulous dragons. After that the path had run past the lake and turned into this narrow stony thing that wound along the side of the mountain, not going up much, not going down. All around were snow, outcrops of black rock and a vast silent emptiness.
‘No one comes this way much, do they.’ He looked at the woman, but she’d withdrawn again. ‘Bring everything up by dragon? But where are the farms? Where’s the food for the dragons themselves?’ He walked off a little way to peer down the slope. There wasn’t much sign of life down in the bottom of the valley. Not civilised life, anyway. Trees and trees and more trees. Probably a lot of rocks and little rivers too. For a moment he wondered if they should go back, but when he looked that way, he could see that they had in fact come down, and quite a way, and the thought of trying to climb back up again made him want to sink to his knees and cry.
On then. Like it or not. He’d lived half his life in valleys like these, survived and prospered in them. Could even carry the weight of a useless woman if he had to. But not with a broken arm. Dragging what he’d saved from the handcart down was wearing him out, but if he left it, they’d have no food, no firewood, no shelter and no means to get any.
The path was still a path, even if no one used it any more. It had to go somewhere.
‘Want to go back?’ he muttered, glancing at the woman, as much to see what she’d say as anything. Go back to what? To wait for another dragon to come and hope it was one with a rider on its back? They’d kill him anyway. Certainly if they knew who he was.
‘No!’
Speech. That was good. ‘What?’
She was staring at him. ‘No! Not back!’
He nodded slowly, wondering. ‘I don’t want to die down there. If there’s no shelter and no help, that’s what’s going to happen.’ He looked meaningfully at his arm.
‘Give me your knife!’
‘What?’
‘Give me your knife!’ She thrust out her hand as though punching someone. Slowly and carefully, Kemir gave her his knife. He watched as she mixed herbs and mushrooms and bits of what looked like dried black flesh in boiling water. The last thing she did was cut her hand and bleed into the infusion. She put the bowl on the ground and pushed it towards him.
Kemir wrinkled his nose. ‘What is it?’
‘Drink!’
‘I’ve seen your sort do blood-magic before, to make a dead man talk. Well, I’m not dead and I can already talk, so what is it, alchemist?’
‘I’m not an alchemist,’ she hissed.
Kemir looked at the bowl. ‘Could have fooled me.’
‘For your arm. It will heal much quicker with this.’ She looked ready to run away. When Kemir still didn’t move, she took another step away from him. ‘There are people. In the woods. There is shelter along this path. Old places. You mustn’t tell them we come from the mountain. Say nothing.’
In a flash Kemir understood. Her fear gave her away. Her fear of him. ‘Outsiders, are they?’
Her face was answer enough. Yes. ‘Your dragons feed on them. You hunt them.’
She held the knife out, pointing it at him. Even with a broken arm, it was hard to be scared of someone who was shaking so much. For a second or two he thought about killing her again, but he needed her to sell to the Taiytakei. Which wasn’t really even the start of why he couldn’t kill her, but it would do for now.
In the end, he reached out, took the bowl and drank the potion that she’d made for him. It tasted foul. He sat down and regarded her.
‘If that was poison, how long do I have to wait?’
She watched him, torn between staying and running away. Eventually he’d had enough.