Justice and Vengeance

They stopped one more time, late in the afternoon and still a long way from the bottom. They were among the trees now but still above the snow line. There was an old ruin. Not much, just a few walls about as high as a man and a place where the path widened into a carefully laid circle of stones. Kemir watched this almost-alchemist search around, almost frantic, looking for something. Caves, probably. Shelter.

‘There aren’t any,’ he said. Every ruin in the realms had caves. Except in the mountains and the buildings put up before there were dragons. That’s what the old folk in the mountain villages said. Made before there were dragons, so there weren’t any caves. No need, you see. He said that to the woman. She looked at him for a moment as though he was mad and went back to searching. When you thought about it, probably he was mad. Before there were dragons? There had always been dragons.

Night was coming, came quickly down in the valleys. The deep cold would come with it. Kemir made a fire. Kataros brewed another potion and then they walked on. The potion and outsider bloody-mindedness kept him on his feet. Those and the certain knowledge that if he fell, even once, he’d never get up again, and the cold would kill him.

He had no memory of the night. Afterwards, all he could remember was the sunlight seeping lower into the valley again, down where a wide and shallow river ran through the trees. The snow was gone, the air almost warm and the path was still there, barely visible, overgrown and almost buried in grass and ferns and moss and vines. He remembered the sunlight because that was when his legs finally gave out. He collapsed by the river, dead on his feet, too tired to even light a fire. The burning from his arm was pushing through the woman’s potions. Steps. There had been steps too. Endless steps, steps, steps coming down the mountain, big and uneven and steep and filled with a malice that wanted to pitch him over and into the void below. Steps.

‘Make a fire,’ he groaned, but Kataros only stood and looked helpless. What does an alchemist know about starting a fire in the wilds? He just about managed to get one going, almost weeping with fatigue; that done, he wrapped himself up in a heap of furs and fell asleep. Warm.

He woke up again in the afternoon feeling almost as bad as when he’d fallen asleep, but they walked on anyway, through the evening, and gave up again when the sun set and darkness came. The moon and the stars were up, but the trees were thick now and little light reached through the leaves and branches. The path was too rough to follow blind, the stones too uneven, lifted up by tree roots, washed loose by water or simply gone. A broken arm was one thing; a turned ankle could be the death of them. Down here they had enough furs to keep warm. As long as it didn’t rain, which, this being the Worldspine it usually did.

As long as they kept going.

When he woke up again, he was shivering. Kataros was huddled next to him for warmth. She still wouldn’t speak, still seemed terrified of him, but at least she seemed to understand that he wasn’t about to rape and murder her. That day they passed a place where a slurry of mud had washed down from the mountain. The sluice and the lake? he wondered later. Or maybe something else. Were they anywhere near the eyrie still? He was having trouble thinking. Fatigue, that was it. He was simply too exhausted. They had food from the eyrie for a week or two. Water from the river. Shelter and furs enough that the cold wouldn’t kill them down here. Maybe they should rest. Build a shelter to keep the rain off and just rest.

He had strange dreams that night. Dreams of dragons. As though, fleetingly, he was slipping in and out of Snow’s thoughts again.

Why are you here? The dragon was flying high. Snow fields shone below in the moonlight. A dozen dragons flew around her. They were angry. No, annoyed. They didn’t like flying in the night.

You are dying.

He slipped away from them. A bit later, he slipped back. Now the dragons were settled in a valley somewhere. Could have been any mountain valley – they all looked the same. For no better reason than that, Kemir decided it must be the valley where all of this had begun. Where riders from some mad dragon-lord had attacked Queen Shezira’s party while the queen herself had been at the Adamantine Palace. Where he’d run from dragon-fire and Snow had first flown free. That was a Scales who’d done that. The Scales who’d raised Snow from an egg had urged her away and she’d taken him with her.

Daylight. Potions. He didn’t remember making a fire or breaking his fast, but he must have done both, since there was a fire and his belly was full. Then more walking. All blurred together. The next night Kataros might have tried talking to him, but if she did, he didn’t hear her. Too full of dragon-dreams. They came again, stronger this time. Snow and Ash and the others. All flying. Their joy of freedom and the simmering rage filled him. Made him smile.

There might have been another day. Another night. Kataros shaking him, he remembered that. No fire. Didn’t matter. Dragon-dreams were more real anyway.

They flew across the sea, Kemir and Snow and the dragons she’d freed. They flew across the sea and buried themselves in the high mountains by the coast, where titanic waves crashed against towering cliffs, and the cliffs vanished into the clouds. In the ice-bound high places where no dragon-rider ever flew, he pored over a map . . .

Snow flew in the dark . . .

. . . as close as she dared, Kemir on her back . . .

. . . eyries buried deep in the stone, guarded by hundreds of scorpions . . .

Frustration and rage.

A dozen horsemen, riding through the high valleys. The horsemen were unexpected and the dragons were hungry. They were always hungry. Kemir watched the slaughter, watched the dragons play with the horsemen. When they came back, they were gleeful. He thought it was the joy of the hunt, the taste of human fear, but no. The Mountain King was moving his dragons south, Snow told him. His eyries furthest from the sea were almost empty. Kemir hardly cared. He looked at the riders. The sight of them brought back every reason he’d ever had for every thing he’d ever done. Pain, hate, rage. Watching, helpless, as his cousin was killed. Watching, helpless, as his home had burned.

You are one of us, Snow said to him, and they were flying again up to the bleak icy heart of the Worldspine.

Memories?

‘What are you saying?’

He blinked. He was in a valley surrounded by trees, next to a river, walking along a trail. He had no idea how he’d got where he was but, for a moment, everything was clear. Kataros was standing in front of him, shaking him.

‘What’s wrong with you? You’re raving.’

‘What am I doing here? This isn’t right?’

And then that moment of clarity slipped beneath the waves. Pain. He was in pain.

Still dying.

Night again. More dragons.

I see you, Kemir.

Come and get me then.

Night changed to day. Kataros drifted through his dreams, dragging him by the arm. Trees. Lots of trees. And mud. The path changed under his feet. No more uneven stones. Slick and smooth now. Mud. Something warm and bitter in his mouth. None of that seemed real any more. Snow, that was what felt real.

I have something. A gift. Ride with me.

He seemed to fly. Fast, impossibly fast, flitting from one place to another. Leaping and dancing through the dragon’s memories. He roamed the emptiness between the Worldspine and the Maze and the Purple Spur. Dry dead stone peaks drifting below or else furious torrents of water between a cage of dark sheer walls. Nothing lived here, nothing at all; there were only titanic spires and curtains of ruddy stone where even dragon-riders had no reason to fly.

Come! See!

Between flashing peaks, away into the Worldspine, where the mountains were capped with snow again. Far-away words echoed through the cold air and the untouched peaks. They came, carried on the silence, flecked with a fusion of anger and despair.

‘Kemir!’

Rider Semian. He knew, not from the voice but from the way the thoughts tasted inside his head. The cold was so bitter that he was surprised it didn’t freeze Semian’s call to his lips. There wasn’t even a breath of wind. Semian had bawled out his challenge and it had rung clear. The mountains and the Worldspine scorned him with their silence.

‘I have a destiny!’ he screamed again, and Kemir heard him clearly.

He jumped off the mountainside from where he sat and slid out into the void, gliding silently, searching for the rising air that would carry him upwards. He felt the call to war. Saw men and dragons, eyries and castles and cities and palaces, all aflame. It would not be long. He gave a few lazy flaps of his wings and then stretched them out and soared up towards the mountain peak. He could see Rider Semian clearly now. He was standing, arms outstretched. He must have been looking the other way. He will have nothing. Be nothing. Kill! Burn!

‘Kemir!’

He seemed to float towards Semian, drifting with easy deadly purpose. The sun shone behind him, brilliant and cleansing. Perhaps it was his shadow falling over Semian that made the dragon-rider turn as Kemir rose up the side of the mountain to meet him. Huge, wings outstretched, filling the sky. The sun cast a halo of fire around him. Semian didn’t move, but Kemir heard his thoughts, over and over, the same. Out of the sun there shall come a white dragon.

He swooped closer, grinned wide. His jaws opened, a hundred bone-swords sharp and gleaming to carry Semian to his destiny. And the dragon shall be Vengeance.

‘Kemir! Kemir!’

Kill! Kill! He bit down. Thoughts fluttered and died and the glorious taste of salt and iron took their place.

And yet there, in his moment of ecstasy, in his final triumph, something was pulling him away, away from death and the clear blue sky. Away to somewhere dirty and blurred that tasted foul. He suddenly couldn’t breathe.

Kill! Snow! Kill him!

Be at peace, little one.

His own voice sounded faint. Weak. Distant.

‘Kemir!’

The red rider and the white dragon. Justice and Vengeance.

‘Kemir!’

Hands were shaking him. Hard. His mouth tasted of earth and blood. The air smelled of fire. He was lying on his back. Kataros was crouched over him. The hands doing the shaking were hers.

‘Kemir!’ Hers was the voice he’d heard on the wind. The voice that had pulled him back. Gentler now, but the same nonetheless. ‘Thank the ancestors.’

He sat up, dazed, bemused. Horrified to see they were somewhere far away from the last place he remembered. Lower. The eyrie mountain was somewhere far behind them, lost to sight.

They were beside a road. Not some never-used valley trail, but a proper road made of mud and hoof-prints and the ruts of cartwheels.

‘Where . . . where are we?’

The woman shrugged.

‘How long . . . How long have I been here?’

She sat back. ‘You’ve had a fever for days. Then you were walking and you just fell over. I thought you were going to die.’

Would probably have been best for both of us. He rubbed his head. He felt woolly inside but otherwise strangely well. His arm barely hurt at all. It was in a sling. When did that happen?

‘I was with the dragons. The dragons from the eyrie.’

Kataros looked at him askance. ‘How do you know they were from my eyrie?’

‘The dragon was white. One of the dragons from the eyrie was white.’ He shrugged.

‘And did you see who rode them?’

‘They didn’t have any riders.’

‘When you were at the eyrie, you drank water from the lake.’ She shrugged as if that was the end of the matter. ‘You can fly with the dragons if you do that.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Then you’ve become feverish from your injuries. You’ve been having visions. I’m not surprised. I barely brought you back.’

She looked different. Sounded different. She was talking to him for a start. Not staring into space. Not vacant and empty or wide-eyed and frightened.

‘How long since we left the eyrie.’

She shrugged. ‘A week. More. I’ve lost count.’

‘A week!’

‘We followed the path. We found a road. You made fire and shelter. But now our food is nearly gone. People use this road. Outsiders. You have to talk to them. I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘What did you do to me, alchemist?’

‘I kept you alive. I kept the cold at bay and I broke your fever. What caused it I can’t say.’ She shrugged. ‘Since you say you didn’t drink dragon-water.’

There wasn’t much to be said to that. They’d kept each other alive. As for Semian, Kemir wasn’t sure whether what he’d seen had been real or a dream.

Let Semian be dead, he decided. That was for the best.