Dust and The City of Dragons

After half a day on the road, they met a cart and hitched a ride. Outsiders. Old traders. Old was good. Sometimes young men would fight just because there was a fight to be had. Old men, on the other hand, usually wanted to grow older. Like the alchemists, for all the good it had done them. Kemir handed over some of the coin he’d taken from the eyrie. They eyed him up, eyed his clothes, his bow, his arm, his knife. Then they eyed his coin and the woman and decided they’d take his coin the easy way. They were headed for a camp by a river. Kemir had no idea what river or what camp they meant and didn’t bother to ask. Didn’t matter. All rivers went to the same place in the end. Furymouth. The sea.

‘Three days’less there be storms. Ye can share our fire. Water’s for free. Eats I don’t have to spare. Eats old Hanzen will have for ye at the river if ye have a gift for him. Ye live with a bit of hungry?’

Kemir nodded.

‘We get to the river, we go our own ways. Ye’ll be on ye’s own. Trail between here and there, that’s quiet enough. Empty mostly. River camp, though . . .’ The old man tutted and shook his head. ‘Two of ye looking like ye do, ye’ll find trouble, whether ye look for it or no.’

And that was that. As much as the men ever spoke.

The wagons rolled from one valley to the next, following the passage of the mountain rivers, which became ever more broad and swift, sometimes swelling out into great lakes. Now and then Kemir saw little boats out, fishing. Rafts really, nothing more. On either side, sheer walls of stone rose up towards the sky. They showed no sign of fading into hills, but the further they went, the denser the forests became, a heavy deep green, thick with scent, pines all packed so close together they could barely breathe and hardly ever saw the snow-capped peaks towering above.

When they camped, Kemir made a token effort at staying awake. Outsiders were a fickle lot. Chances were as good as anything they’d decide to murder him in his sleep. But really he couldn’t be bothered. He had a splitting headache. He gave Kataros the last of their food. Let them kill him. There was something to be said for being dead.

No. That wouldn’t do. He had to stay awake. Had to live.

He must have fallen asleep anyway, though, because the next thing he heard was Snow laughing at him.

Why do you want to live, Kemir?

Because that’s what outsiders do, and that’s what I am. We live. We do whatever it takes. Sometimes we do horrible, terrible things, but we fight so we can live. We fight so we can be free.

So do we, Kemir.

He tried to turn his back on her, tried to make her go away. Eventually she did. He felt her mirth ringing in his mind long after she was gone. When he woke up and discovered no one had murdered him after all, he wondered if he’d have been so generous.

For the rest of that day and all of the next it rained. Worldspine rain. No drama but steady and relentless. The carter sat impassively and watched the road roll towards them. Kemir sat at the back and watched it roll away again and with it the mountains. Rain trickled through the cracks in his stolen armour and glued itself cold to his skin. The road started to descend, a slight slope that grew steeper as the last day passed and they sank into a sharp-sided canyon gouged out from the heart of the Worldspine, a scar of mud, criss-crossed by a hundred rivulets jumping and dashing down the broken boulder slopes. The sun dipped towards the horizon, and this time the carter kept on going right into the night, until at last they reached the bottom of this gouge between the mountains. When he looked at the river in front of him, past the throng of tents and animals and people and campfires to the almost endless black wall of rock on the other side, Kemir knew where he was. The Fury.

The old carter drew his wagon to a halt. ‘Here ye be. Hanzen’s Camp. Be going no further, me. Boats be going from the water’s edge.’ He stared at Kemir, unblinking, as if he didn’t quite understand why Kemir was still there.

Kemir shrugged. He slid off the back of the wagon. He didn’t pull the woman with him. You choose, he thought. Them or me. They’re a better choice. They’ll look after you. At least until the dragons come. But by the time he’d finished thinking that, she’d climbed down and was standing beside him. The old man turned away, barked his animals back into motion and slowly vanished into the throng.

‘I knew this place existed,’ he said quietly. He was talking to his dead cousin, he realised, not to Kataros at all. Sollos would have liked it here. To him, it would have felt like home. Open fires everywhere. Noise, tents, huts. Enough people to fill up a town and, as best Kemir could tell, every one of them was busy getting drunk or singing songs. Quite a few were doing both.

He walked further into the chaos, weaving between the fires. In one place there were snappers, tame ones. That was a thing he’d never seen. They yawned and growled and stretched their necks. They had bloody claws and bloody muzzles, and around each one was a little cluster of men, fussing and cooing over them. Strange-looking men with painted faces and feathers wandered to and fro among them, receiving little nods of deference as they passed. They carried bags of powder on their belt. Now and then they stopped to sprinkle some on the slabs of rancid meat that the men fed to the snappers.

Alchemists. They’re like alchemists. The snappers are their dragons and the powder is the potion to keep them docile. He had no idea if it was true, but it seemed to fit. Idly he tried to imagine the same scene without the feathered men, with the snappers freed from whatever dulled their urge to hunt. All the men he could see, all gone. He’d killed a couple of snappers in his time, when the ground had favoured him and his arrows had flown true. He had no illusions about how lucky he’d been.

Now give them wings and fire and make them a hundred times bigger. He shook his head. It was hard, even thinking about it, not to be afraid. He tried looking at the men camped around him. Bandits, vagabonds, dust traders. What will you do when the dragons awake? What will you do when Snow comes out of the mountains? Will you fare any better than the rest? No. You’ll be food, just like everyone else. He tried imagining them as dragon-knights when Snow came. The carnage in his mind’s eye looked much better that way. Then he went and found himself a good place to sleep. The woman followed him, mute, like a lost dog. That would end soon enough. They’d get a boat and it would take him into the heart of the realms and she’d abandon him the first chance she got. For some reason the thought made him sad. Alone again.

Never that, Kemir.

The dragon, still there now and then. Neither of them, it seemed, knew why. She mostly left him alone now, ever since Kataros had fed him whatever potion had pulled him out of his fever. But he could feel her, always, still there, a tiny feather-tickle against his skull.

As soon as the sun rose, Kemir shook the woman. They picked their way through the confusion on the banks of the river to where a cluster of boats had appeared, waiting to take anyone who could pay in gold to the City of Dragons. He held Kataros’ hand without thinking much about it, almost dragging her through the mass of men and crates. Picked a boat on a whim, haggled without any real enthusiasm. Then sat and stared at nothing very much until the river sped them on their way. The Fury was riding fast and high, swollen with snowmelt. The river knows what’s coming, he thought. Even the water wants to get away. Now and then he opened his mouth to speak, but he couldn’t find any words. What was he going to say? That in a few weeks the world would end? That they were all going to die? Beg her to stay with him so he could sell her as a slave to the Taiytakei?

Eventually she got bored and wandered off among the other passengers. She always came back, though, never strayed far, always sheltered close as the sun began to set. He even saw her smile when she thought he wasn’t looking. It had been a long time since he’d seen anyone happy, if that was what it was. No, he didn’t have the heart to tell her what was waiting for them both.

‘Are we going to the City of Dragons?’ she asked as she sat beside him on their first night afloat. ‘I grew up in the City of Dragons. In the Palace of Alchemy. I never saw much of the city. Then they took me away to the mountains.’

He could smell her, and that made him want her. He tried not to think about that. ‘You can go wherever you want. I’m going to Furymouth.’

‘Oh.’ She sounded disappointed.

‘I’m going to see the sea.’ He laughed, in spite of himself. ‘If you’ve got any sense, you’ll come with me. We can find a great ship to take us to another land where there aren’t any dragons. Or any dragon-knights. I’ve been to the City of Dragons too. It’s not for me.’

She was looking at him. Asking him with her eyes to say more.

‘What’s to say? It’s a city filled with rich men who despise anyone who is beneath them and grovel at the feet of any lords or princes that happen to pass them by. And there are a lot of those.’ Far too many. He could remember the first time he’d been there as though it was yesterday. The first time he’d flown on the back of a dragon. ‘Well, that’s how I saw it.’

She didn’t reply. In her face he saw how bitter he sounded.

‘I went there with Sollos,’ he added quietly. ‘My cousin.’ It felt as though half a lifetime had passed since he’d died. ‘We had an errand to run. A bloody one that ended badly and gave me one of my prettier scars.’ Without thinking, he touched his chest. ‘No, nothing much I want to remember about the City of Dragons. It’s pretty, I’ll give it that.’ Hard to forget, though, that first sight of it. Sitting on the back of some war-dragon, finally seeing the mountains of the Purple Spur fall away into the empty space that was the Hungry Mountain Plain. At the far tip of the Spur, water, glittering on the ground. The fabled Mirror Lakes. Kemir’s voice dropped low. ‘I’d never been to the City of Dragons before, never seen the Adamantine Palace, but we’d sold our swords around dragon-knights for long enough to know all the stories of how beautiful the city was from the air. And it was.’ Nestled against the southernmost foot of the mountains, backed into a sheer wall of rock that must have been at least half a mile high, it had still gleamed in the sun. High above, the waterfalls of the Diamond Cascade pitched over the edge of the cliff. A fine spray of water kept the city permanently fresh and cool, and if you looked for it, you could always find a rainbow on any sunny day, hovering somewhere among the low towers. He smiled thinly. ‘Yes, from a distance, it’s probably the most beautiful place in the world. But under its pretty skin, it’s ugly.’ The towers of the city had shimmered and shone their best that day, snatches of rainbow colours floating in between them. Yet the silvery jewel of the Speaker’s Palace had put them all into shade.

But that’s her world, he reminded himself. Not yours. He tried to remember that he was supposed to be dragging her to Furymouth with him. Making her a slave in exchange for passage away.

Sounds like the sort of thing a dragon-knight would do.

Oh shut up.

He stood up, pushing Kataros away. Seeking out his own space to clear the memories from his head. ‘Beautiful on the outside, rotten on the inside. After the arrow I took out in the swamps the year before, I suppose I should have known better.’ He shivered. ‘We went there to kill a man. Turned out he was bonded to a blood-mage. We were lucky to live. And you know what? After we’d failed to get rid of him, after we winkled out a blood-mage in the middle of the city, what does Queen Shezira’s knight-marshal do? Does she expose him? Does she have the mage hunted down and hanged? No, she pays him the queen’s gold instead.’ He sat down and raised a hand in mute apology. ‘I saw him, a year later, at Outwatch. Both of them, in the queen’s eyrie, the blood-mage masquerading as an alchemist. The Picker. That’s what they called him.’ He sighed. ‘Creepy bastard.’

‘I don’t want to be a Scales,’ she said, but he didn’t really hear.

Early the next morning, the boat stopped at another riverside shanty town. Kemir and Kataros got off while the boatman busied himself getting ready for the long haul through Gliding Dragon Gorge to Plag’s Bay, where the only road for hundreds of miles wound its way up and out of the gorge and eventually to the City of Dragons. Kataros would get off there. Kemir didn’t think he’d be stopping her.

Oh well. Just have to sell myself into slavery then.

He looked back up the river. The valley was already deep and steep here, but you could still see the peaks of the Worldspine in the distance. Back there they were mountains. Here they were more craggy hills. Ahead lay the Maze. A dozen or more rivers, each carving their own way down from the heights of the Purple Spur. The mountains stole all the clouds, and so the Maze was a barren hard mess of hard rock, sand and dusty earth where it never, ever rained. Of towering mesas and stone pinnacles, of canyons, rivers, rapids, waterfalls and flash floods. No one lived here. No one except bandits.

Absently he looked at his fingers. No rings. That was good. The Order of the Finger hid away in the Maze. They had a liking for rings, or so he’d heard.

The dragon was out there too. Snow. Didn’t know how he knew, but he did. Even thinking about her, he could feel his connection to her stir. Maybe she’d fly out of wherever she was hiding, burn them all and be gone again. And no one would ever know.

Well bring it on, dragon. You know I’ll be waiting.

As the boat pulled out from the bank once more and the current took hold and dragged it away, he found it hard not to look back. With a force of will, he pulled himself away and marched to the bows, staring ahead at the wide expanse of water ahead. Kataros came to stand beside him.

‘It’s all there behind me,’ he said quietly. The woman surely couldn’t care less, but some things needed to be said, if only to the wind. ‘Everything I was is gone. All that matters is whether I can run fast enough to get away. Nothing else.’ Nothing else at all.

To his surprise, she took his hand in hers. He wondered what that meant. ‘I know,’ she said, and squeezed.

‘Do you think there’s much to see between here and the sea? I’ve never been south.’

‘I think there’ll be a war,’ she said.