rumble of tumbling stone.
He sniffed. Fresh air from outside too. Sand. The smell of sand and salt.
He smiled, but that wasn’t enough so he laughed, and even then he needed more. ‘You stupid dragon,’ he roared. ‘You actually did it. Vishmir’s cock!’ He stood up, filled with being alive. Filled with what felt like victory. Took a few steps back towards where the dragon had been before he stopped himself. Still couldn’t see a thing.
There was the other one. Somewhere.
Ought to slip off. Tiptoe between the eggs and hope another one didn’t hatch. Ought to. Really, really ought to. That’s what a man with an ounce of sense would do.
‘Vish? Skjorl?’
Jasaan? He tried to make out where the call had come from. He counted to ten and when there wasn’t a raging dragon coming after him he reached for his firebox. Mad. What am I doing? But by the time he’d asked himself that, the firebox was lit. Didn’t help much. All he could see was a thick mist of dust.
‘Skjorl?’ Jasaan’s voice was laced with pain.
‘Jasaan?’ Took a couple of steps. Stopped. Somewhere out there was still a dragon. Maybe more than one. Maybe the hatchlings too.
‘Jasaan?’ A second voice.
‘Vish?’
‘Yep. Still alive. Skjorl?’
‘Still got all my bits.’ Friendly voices in the dark gave him strength. ‘Can you see anything?’
‘I can see you.’
‘The roof caved in.’ Jasaan’s voice was strained but he wasn’t gasping.
‘And the dragon?’
‘It’s not moving.’
‘You can see it?’ He couldn’t make out any other light.
There was a pause. ‘It’s close. And I’m hurt.’
Skjorl frowned at that. Adamantine Men were never hurt. They kept going or they fell over and crawled off to die, and if that was what they were going to do, they did it on their own without bothering anyone about it. The creed of the Guard had no room for the sick or the injured, no time or space for helping the wounded. You stopped to help someone when there was a dragon about, you both wound up dead. That simple. ‘Where are you?’
‘Over here.’
‘What about the dragon. It moving?’
‘I think it’s stuck.’
What Skjorl should be doing, he decided, was leaving. What Jasaan ought to be doing, unless he had two broken legs and two broken arms, was crawling over to wherever that dragon was and tipping poison down its throat.
No. His company. So that was what he ought to be doing.
Crap.
‘Vish! You keep going. See if you can find another way out of here.’
‘Bollocks! You do that. I got me a dragon to slay.’
‘Where’s the other one?’
‘Can’t see.’
‘You keep away from that tunnel.’
‘You think I’m an idiot, boss?’
Skjorl growled. He started to move as quickly as he could through the haze of dust and the litter of rubble. Off towards Jasaan. By the time he got there, he could see the pile of fallen stone where the dragon had to be.
The floor shuddered again. The other dragon, the one that had burned Jex and Kasern and the others. It was somewhere behind the cave-in now. Or could be a third. No way to tell.
Jasaan was standing up, leaning against the broken stub of one of the pillars. He had one foot held off the ground. Ankle. Skjorl could see that straight away. Couldn’t walk. Could hop though.
‘You’re alive then.’
Jasaan nodded.
‘That way.’ Skjorl pointed back the way he’d come. ‘Look for a way out.’ Maybe there wasn’t one, but it was that or climb past the collapsed roof, over the top of one dragon and straight into the path of another.
‘Don’t know why you’re standing around gossiping. Got nothing better to do?’ Vish trotted past them both.
‘I can’t, Skjorl.’ There was that pain in Jasaan’s voice again. ‘I can hardly move.’
‘You just wait here then.’ Skjorl took a moment and then followed Vish. Through the settling dust he could see the edges of the collapse. It was huge. Some building or other had sat on top of the cisterns and the whole thing had come down. Great slabs of cracked brickwork, of tiled floor covered in mosaics. Stone pillars and old scorched beams that still smelled of ash.
Another rumble, a reminder that there was a second dragon around here somewhere.
‘Hey! Dragon! Are you already dead under there?’ Vish had his axe out, his own faithful mistress.
‘Still plenty of eggs to end if it is.’ Skjorl stared at the rubble. Looked up. He could feel a breeze. There was a way out here if they wanted it.
‘Ah. There you are. Tyan’s fury — if only I had a spear!’
The dragon was buried from the neck down. It’s eyes were very slightly open, but it didn’t move. Skjorl’s first thought was that it was dead, but then he saw it blink.
‘Spear through the eye,’ muttered Vish as Skjorl stood beside him. ‘That would do it. Right in deep.’
The head shifted slightly. Turned a fraction towards them. Despite himself, Skjorl froze for an instant. He had a dragon, right in front of him. A woken adult dragon. He took another moment to savour not being dead.
‘Poison. We have to poison it.’ There was always leaving it alone. Letting it starve until it burned from the inside. But no, couldn’t do that. Couldn’t leave a monster alive if he could leave it dead. Always the chance that some other dragon would dig it free.
The dragon’s lips curled back, letting them see its teeth. Vish weighed his axe. As he climbed close, it tried to snap at him, but it couldn’t turn its head far enough to reach, not with the stones crushing its neck. It sent a weak blast of fire at Skjorl, forcing him to shelter behind a shattered column, but then Vish was round behind it, and when it tried to reach him, Skjorl dashed up the rubble, and then they were both where it couldn’t touch them, halfway up and round the back of its head. It shuddered and closed its eyes and lay still.
From the far side of the collapse, stone smashed against stone. Skjorl set to work on one side, Vish on the other. Killing the dragon with their axes was hard, like chopping at stone, but the monster never made a sound. Its eyes opened towards the end, looking at them as they finally hacked their way through its scales to the sinew and bone beneath, and then slowly closed again. Skjorl stopped, panting from the effort. Vish kept chopping away until Skjorl raised a hand.
‘Enough. It’s dead. Let’s go.’
Vish grinned back at him like a madman. ‘We killed a dragon, Skjorl! We killed a dragon! With our axes! We killed a dragon and we’re walking away.’
‘And we’ve got eggs to finish. And there’s still the other one.’ The ground shook. ‘Can’t expect those stones to stop it for ever.’ The Night Watchman had killed more then ten on the night the Adamantine Palace had burned, but he’d had the Speaker’s Spear and the dragons still got him in the end. He and Vish, they’d killed an adult and they’d done it with steel and their bare hands. Not much chance they’d get back to the Purple Spur to brag about it, but Vish deserved his smile. They both did.
A stone the size of a child hit Vish square in the back with the force of a charging horse, arcing down from the top of the collapse. Vish sailed through the air like a thrown-away doll, arms and legs limp and loose. He landed like a sack of turnips. Skjorl stared in disbelief. Then jumped away and looked behind him. Just a pale white haze of dust and sand in the air lit up by his firebox. Beyond that: darkness. He could hear, though. Stones moving.
Vish!
He snuffed the firebox and dived sideways. Kept rolling until something stopped him. He felt the air tear as another stone hurtled past him in the dark, heard it bounce and smash. He knew what came next. Had enough time
