The Stone Man

He didn’t get very much further before he had to stop. In front of him was a frozen lake, presumably the place where the eyrie dragons took their water. Kemir had never been to this particular eyrie, but he’d been to others and knew how they worked. The alchemists kept the dragons pliant and dull with their potions, which they gave to the beasts either in their food or in their water, usually both. So if this was where the dragons took their water, the lake was probably laced with dragon poison. Or dragon-make-stupid potion or whatever the alchemists happened to call it.

He thought about walking across it – keep on going, never come back – but you never knew with frozen lakes whether the ice was as thick as your leg or as thick as your fingernail, and there was really no reason to go and find out. Instead, he turned to follow the edge of the ice as it arced towards the valley below. A few run-down old buildings lay ahead of him that way, perched by the edge of the lake. Thick snowdrifts sat between them, more on the roofs. Half buried and half frozen. The sort of place to put unwanted sell-swords and the like. Not a part of the eyrie where dragon-knights would live, but still, they sometimes turned up in the most unusual places . . .

Almost as he thought it, he caught a glimpse of something moving. Someone. He tensed, nocked an arrow to his bow and dropped to a crouch. Whoever it was, they weren’t likely to be friendly. He tried to remember what he’d seen from the air as Snow had approached the eyrie. Nothing useful. Most of the time his eyes had been screwed shut, and even when they weren’t, he’d had a snowstorm blowing in his face. He drew the arrow back a way as warmth filled him. It would be good to kill a dragon-knight again.

Somewhere behind him one of the dragons let out a mighty shriek, loud enough to make him flinch. The sharp tang of smoke was starting to taint the air. By the end of the night you’d be able to smell what had happened here right across the mountain.

Whoever was there, they’d vanished among another collection of shacks towards the edge of the mountain. Kemir peered into the gloom. He shouldered his bow and let his hands drift to the knives in his belt as he crept a little closer. Knives were better for close work.

His feet were starting to hurt. The cold.

A scuff of leather on stone and a half-imagined glimpse of movement alerted him again. He peered into the fading twilight. The sun was behind the other peaks now, the sky still lit up in purples and orange on the horizon, nothing but the dark grey snow clouds above. The air was turning bitter. His toes were starting to go numb.

‘Who’s there?’

At the voice, Kemir leapt into the air and took a step back. He still couldn’t see anyone. Not a dragon-knight though. The voice had a quiver in it. A dragon-knight wouldn’t sound like that. A dragon-knight would come out with a roar and a drawn sword. An alchemist? Now that would be precious, wouldn’t it? What would I do with an alchemist, I wonder?

‘Who’s there?’ The voice called out again, louder. ‘What’s going on? Do you know what’s happening?’ Still no movement. Kemir’s ears thought they knew where the voice was coming from, but his eyes weren’t pulling their weight.

All right. Let’s pretend I’m one of you. Let’s pretend I didn’t come gliding in on the back of those monsters. Let’s pretend I have nothing to do with this. Wouldn’t that be nice? ‘My name’s Kemir. I’m a scout. A tracker. I been helping hunt bandits in the deep valleys.’ The sort of work he’d done with Sollos for a time, before they’d grown sick of it. ‘Ancestors! What is happening?’

Movement. He saw the man again now, closer, coming towards him ‘I thought you might . . .’ The man took a deep breath and blew it out. ‘Are we being attacked?’

They both glanced up to the castle. Two dragons were still up there, merrily setting it alight. You couldn’t see them, but you could see the flames against the darkening sky. ‘Are we being attacked?’ Kemir arched an eyebrow. How stupid, exactly, did you have to be?

‘But that’s . . . that’s not possible.’ The man finished quietly, shaking his head. ‘Not possible.’

Kemir let him come closer. He couldn’t help glancing at the man’s feet as he crunched through the snow. Good boots. Warm boots. He quietly slipped one of his long knives out of its sheath. ‘Yeah. Who’d do a thing like that?’

‘The Red Riders, I suppose. They say they kill even alchemists and Scales.’

‘Never heard of them.’ Kemir held the knife so the man could see it now. ‘That’s close enough, thanks. What’s your name and what are you doing out here?’

‘I . . . I was looking for some heavy rope. For the new hatchling. It needs rebinding.’

Kemir lowered the knife. It was hard to feel particularly threatened by someone who seemed so completely unaware that he might have his throat cut at any moment. ‘All right. Come closer so I can see you.’ Whatever rebinding is.

The man came obediently closer. Kemir could see him more clearly now. The man’s face was lumpy and hard, the skin cracked and weeping in places. A Scales.

‘Look at you,’ grunted Kemir. ‘You’re almost a statue.’ Ancestors! The world outside was ending and this idiot was out looking for a piece of rope? Why aren’t you running away?

The Scales bowed awkwardly. ‘It’s the new hatchling.’ He looked out across the flat shoulder of the mountain where the bulk of the eyrie was now ablaze. ‘Did you see them come?’ He cringed as two huge gouts of fire lit up the night. The snow had stopped now, clearing the air so you might have been able to see properly, except that everything was now shrouded in warm mist instead. Everywhere buildings were burning. The Scales wrung his hands but he still seemed to be more confused than anything else. As if none of this actually mattered. ‘Whose riders are they? Are they from the speaker?’

Kemir licked his lips. By the look of things, the worst that this Scales was going to do to him was give him a dose of Statue Plague. And if he lived long enough to die of that, well then that would be a lot longer than he’d been expecting. ‘Do you really want to know?’ He shrugged. ‘No one’s riding them, Scales. There are no dragon-knights giving the orders here. The dragons are doing it themselves.’ It was hard to read the expression on the Scales’ face. Hatchling Disease had him well enough in its grip that he almost didn’t have one at all, just a hard mask of skin like stone. ‘I think after this they have some ambition to destroy the world or something like that.’ He shrugged and stepped closer so he could look the Scales in the eyes. ‘If you’re wondering what you should do, I recommend running away. Not that it’ll do you much good. Or you could wait until it’s all over and then hope the dragons aren’t hungry any more. Which is pretty much just as futile, since, as far as I can make out, dragons are always hungry. So what’s in all these huts then?’

The Scales looked about. ‘Empty barrels. Rope. Crates. Bit of firewood. The alchemists use them to store all the things they don’t need any more.’

Kemir pointed out into the gloom, away from the glowing mists and the fires and the shadows of the mountainside and towards the great empty space of the valley below. There was nothing there, no shape, no silhouette, just the edge of the mountain and then a big grey nothing. And the path around the lake. ‘Where’s that go?’

The Scales shrugged. ‘The sluice at the end of the lake. Then I suppose it goes on down the mountainside. I never looked.’

‘That way then. I recommend you run that way.’

He turned away, one knife drawn just in case. Past the huts was the place where the dragons came to take their water. The snow was thin, a light frost of white. The ground beneath had been torn into a great sea of mud, filled with huge craters now frozen hard, uneven, begging for a man to trip and twist his ankle. Beyond, an embankment rose up to the edge of the lake, while the path itself dropped below the level of the water. On the other side, Kemir could see the edge of the mountain, not far away and getting closer with every step. He twitched, uneasy. The sun was setting, the eyrie was already in shadow. The darker it got, the more chance he had of being ambushed.

Or of escaping.

The Scales was following him. He wondered briefly whether he should just put a knife between the man’s shoulder blades and keep on walking. Be done with it. Get back to being on his own, wandering, wondering what in the name of all his ancestors he was doing here. Didn’t seem fair really, though. The only other Scales he’d really come to know had been nice enough. Not that that had saved him from being eaten by his own dragon.

He reached another cluster of sheds, sandwiched between the slope up to the lake and a sheer drop into the valley far below. The snow between the huts came up past his knees. Kemir waded through it; the drop down to the valley was every bit as sharp as it had looked.

‘It goes down there, Scales. Gets steep by the looks of it. Go easy on the running. Won’t do you any good if you go over the edge.’ He stopped as he came to a bridge, so small he barely noticed it, half buried in the snow and covered in ice. ‘Did you say a sluice?’

There it was, right beneath his feet. A channel for the water to run off and down the rock. Little more than a ditch really, frozen and covered in snow, with a metal gate set into the base of the embankment, almost lost in the darkness and shadows of the twilight. A sluice. Which meant that . . . There. That was what he was looking for. A crank to lift the gate, tied in place by a very old and thick piece of rope, bound in a knot that probably hadn’t been touched for years. He scrambled off the bridge, floundering through the snow. He didn’t even bother trying to undo it, but set to work with a knife.

‘What are you doing?’ asked the Scales.

‘Opening this. What does it look like.’

‘No!’ The Scales came at him, arms flailing, floundering in the snow. Kemir swatted him away, knocking him to the ground. The Scales sat where he fell, face full of shock and disbelief. ‘The dragons will have nothing to drink!’

Kemir burst out laughing. ‘The dragons will have nothing to drink? This is the Worldspine, you idiot! What isn’t rocks is either trees or water. Close your eyes for a minute or two, walk in any direction and you’ll wind up wet. And probably fall off a cliff. That’s a little joke we used to have among ourselves, us outsiders.’

‘You’re an outsider?’ Even through the slabs of hard dead skin, the look of horror on the Scales’ face was obvious. Kemir rolled his eyes.

‘What? What is it they tell you about us? We’re the ones your dragon-lord masters harvest for slaves to sell to their Taiytakei friends in Furymouth. Or else they burn us for the simple pleasure of it. I can believe that now. I always used to think they must have a reason, some cause I simply didn’t understand, but I realise now that no, they do it simply because they can.’ The Scales was still looking at him aghast. Kemir stopped and then sneered. ‘What? Have I grown horns?’

‘They’ll die!’

‘What?’ It took a moment for Kemir to understand what on earth the Scales could possibly mean. ‘The dragons?’

‘Yes!’ The Scales was almost in tears.

Kemir stared at him in disbelief. ‘Die?’ he burst out. He laughed again, then held up a finger. ‘Do you want to know how to kill a dragon? You kill a dragon the same way you kill a man. You take away all his freedom, and then if that’s not good enough you can feed him full of poison. For dragons that means those lovely poisons that the alchemists have hidden away in their houses. For us outsiders it’s a little easier. Dust and cheap spirits usually do the trick. Then you just stand back and watch us burn until everything inside is dead and all we are is a hollow shell. Kill a dragon?’ He shrugged, laughing to himself. ‘I saw some soldiers shoot one with oversized crossbows once. I think that probably hurt it at least a little. Certainly annoyed it. Now get up!’

Without any protest, the Scales got to his feet. His movements were clumsy and difficult, as though he was an old man. Hatchling Disease did that. In the deep snow he was pathetic, almost comical.

Kemir finished cutting the rope that held the sluice handle. ‘You can still run off if you want. I won’t try to stop you. Not sure where all this water’s going to end up though. Probably worth thinking about that before you scarper down the mountain.’ He started to turn the crank. For a moment it wouldn’t move. Ice cracked and groaned but nothing happened. Wood began to creak and metal moaned.

‘Don’t!’ The Scales voice was a whisper. ‘The dragons . . .’

‘Yes. The dragons.’ Kemir smiled grimly as he turned the handle again. There were some more grinding sounds, a loud crack from down by the metal gate, and a trickle of water began to run past the Scales’ feet, melting away the snow. Kemir’s grin grew wider. He turned the crank some more. It moved freely now. The trickle of water turned into a surge; he gave it another few turns. Water sprayed out of the sluice in a torrent. There were more groaning noises from the gate.

‘Right.’ Kemir danced away from the spraying water as a part of the bridge shook and then collapsed under the force of the rushing water. ‘I think now we’d better start running after all. It’s going to get a bit wet.’

When you had a big empty hole inside, there was nothing quite like smashing stuff up.