Oh.'
Jehal spun around. Meteroa was in the doorway. He had the audacity to disturb him here instead of waiting outside. Jehal put a trembling finger to his lips. 'Not a word, Eyrie-Master, not another word. In this moment and this place, you're a sneer away from losing your head to the sharpness of your own tongue.'
Meteroa's face was a mask hidden under a mask. For a long time he stood stock still, staring at the dead king. Then he bowed. 'You're going north?'
Jehal nodded. 'Lystra stays here, under your protection. Whatever happens to her happens to you. As before.'
'He was my brother, Your Holiness.' Meteroa's face was still blank. Jehal barely heard him.
'I'm leaving right now. From this room I will get my white horse. I will ride to Clifftop as fast as it will carry me and I will fly tonight, in the dark, whether Wraithwing agrees with me or not.'
'And what shall I tell your queen?'
'Tell her what she needs to know. Tell her that I am sorry, but that sometimes a prince has to do what a prince has to do. Now get out! When I'm gone, see to my father.'
Meteroa backed away, vanishing into the shadows outside the door. Jehal spared his father one last look, and then followed as fast as he could. All the way to the palace, and I will not look back, for now I am a king and my voice will be heard.
15
Jeiros, acting grand master alchemist, cracked opened his door, peered into the empty passageway beyond and slipped out like a schoolboy. A little voice in his head mocked him for his stupidity. This wasn't going to achieve anything. Someone was going to see him sneaking around in the dark like this and get suspicious. If he'd just gone where he was going in broad daylight, no one would bat an eyelid.
The little voice didn't stop him though. It only made him even more careful. You forget, he told himself, that I've done things life this before.
When you were ten years old, snapped the voice. When you were a little boy and it was what all little boys did.
He reached the end of the passage where it opened out into a stairwell. The Gatehouse was actually two towers, one either side of a pair of wooden doors called the Dragon Gates. The gates themselves were bigger than some castles. They were close to fifty feet high, which made them twice as tall as the walls around most of the palace. They were bound with iron, and when closed and locked it took a hundred men about an hour to open them. When they were fully open, they were large enough for any dragon in the realms to walk through.
He chided himself. That's an exaggeration. He peered into the blackness of the stairs and opened his ears, listening for any footsteps. When he didn't hear any, he tiptoed down. The alchemists lived on the upper levels of the east stair. Where he wanted to be required that he went all the way down to the bottom, across the gates, and then all the way up the west stair. And all of it without being seen.
Back to the gates. The gates gave him something else to think about. They were, in their own quiet way, a miracle. They weren't hinged because no one had ever made a hinge remotely big enough or strong enough. Instead, they pivoted on a bearing, with huge iron and lead counterweights balancing the mass of the doors. Except even that wasn't enough, because no one could make a bearing that would take such a weight without collapsing, so most of the weight of the doors and the counterweights was held up by a series of steel ropes that then rested on a pair of massive stone pilings either side of the pivot. It was said that when the palace was built, some three hundred years ago, the gates took as long to build as the rest of it put together. The Gatehouse towers were as large as they were because they had to be to support the gates. Sometimes the alchemists joked that the maze of rooms and passages and staircases the towers contained were just something to fill all the spare space.
There. He was at the bottom of the stairs and no one had seen him. So far. He unlocked the door into the Gateyard, opened it, locked it again and slipped into the warm night air. No one was watching, but still, this was where one of those mythical potions of invisibility would have come in handy.
He hurried across from the east tower to the west. There was no avoiding the guards who stood by the gates – the gates within the gates that allowed people and horses and even carts and wagons to come and go without ever having to open the Dragon Gates themselves. But in the darkness, with his hood pulled up, they wouldn't know who he was. He steered a wide course around them and no one challenged him. Pitiful, sneered the little voice. As if any of this mattered.
Except it did matter. It mattered a lot. He opened the door to the west stair. That was one door that was never locked, for it led into the quarters of the officers and senior staff of the Adamantine Men, and no one would be daft enough to go into a place like that unless they had a very good reason to be there. Jeiros ran up the stairs as fast as he could, almost to the top, and banged on a door. He was afraid that he might have to bang several times, given the hour, but the door swung open of its own volition. It wasn't even shut.
'Grand Master.' The Night Watchman was sitting in a hard-backed chair, tilting back with two bare feet up on a little table, squinting at a book that he was holding at arm's length from his.
'I thought you'd be asleep.'
'We never sleep, remember?' Vale Tassan slowly leaned forward, took his feet off the table and replaced them with the book. Jeiros wasn't sure whether he meant it as a joke or whether he was serious.
'You need a Taiytakei eyepiece,' he said, to change the subject.
'No, I don't.' A slight smile played across Vale's face. 'I need books to be scribed with bigger letters. The Night Watchman cannot wear an eyepiece.'
'He can in the privacy of his own chambers.' Jeiros stepped in and closed the door behind him. When he turned back, Vale was giving him a very pointed look.
'And what, exactly, is this privacy to which you refer, Grand Master? As you see, my door is always open to my men and my friends.'
'Well it's shut now.' Jeiros looked for a bolt or a lock but there wasn't one. 'I require a moment or two of your attention, Night Watchman.' His scowl softened and he bit absently on a knuckle. 'I need an ear, perhaps.'
'Then go and see Aruch.' Vale shook his head and made to settle back down with his book.
'No. I need your ear, Night Watchman. Who do you serve?'
'What an odd question.' Vale cocked his head and then rose slowly to his feet. 'I serve the speaker, Grand Master. I am her sword and her shield. I execute her will and her enemies. That is my whole and only purpose. Would you like a drink? I don't myself, but I sometimes have visitors who do. I have a collection of fruit wines that I'm told is very good, and it seems a shame for them to go to waste.'
'No!' Jeiros took a few quick steps into the room and looked around for a place to sit down. All he could see was a chair by a table covered in maps. He took another step towards it and felt a hand on his arm, turning him, pulling him away.
'That table is for Adamantine Men,' said Vale quietly. 'Have my chair. I will squat on the floor. I'm quite used to it.'
'Do they teach you history when they make you a soldier? I don't suppose they do.'
'They teach you how to fight and how to die for your comrades,' said Vale mildly. Then he looked up at his walls, covered in bookshelves, books and scrolls, and made a gesture with his arm. 'However, I have undertaken extra study over the years.'
'Do you know how the Order of the Scales came to be?'
Now Vale smiled. 'No. I know at least half a dozen different stories which claim to be of how the Order of the Scales came to be. All of which disagree, and all of which are provably false, at least in part. Do you know, Grand Master? Which story have you come to sell me tonight? Is it the one where the alchemists are nothing more or less than blood-mages with a different name? Is it the one where you slew them or the one where you chased them away? What are you today? Are you noble heroes or dark villains?'
Jeiros clenched his fists. 'Let me tell you who we are. We are the ones who keep the dragons at bay. Not you,
