the tower, looking at him as though he was mad. For some reason he'd assumed he'd be the last one out, that everyone would have heard his shouts, dropped everything and run as fast as they could, but clearly not. He shouted at them to get out of the way, that dragons were com-ing, but that only made matters worse. They got in his way instead of stepping aside, shouting things back. They didn't understand, or if they did, they either froze in stupid panic or simply didn't know what to do. He could almost feel the dragons outside, bearing down on them.
Vioros barged a woman out of his way. I'm the speaker's senior alchemist. Queen Zafir gave me my orders in person. I'm supposed to be the most important person here, even above the eyrie-master. Not that any of the riders would acknowledge that, but still I could show some dignity. His limbs begged to differ. Two servants ran out of a door onto the stairs in front of him. They looked at him, wide-eyed, before he crashed through them, knocking one to the ground. 'Run!' he shouted as they hurled curses after him. 'Run or burn, you witless fools!' There. How about that for some leadership. Now get out of my way!
All the way down he knew he wasn't going to make it. Even if there hadn't been other people on the stairs, he'd never have reached the bottom in time without breaking his neck. He was two thirds of the way when the tower gave an almighty shudder. The stairs shook, sending him sprawling, tumbling on downwards in a tangle of bruises and snapping bones. The walls spun crazily around him. Part of the staircase above his head collapsed and slid down after him. His wrist hit something and exploded in pain. Something else struck his head, knocking him almost senseless. He felt himself sliding on, bumping, every impact making his wrist shriek even more, then his shoulder slammed into a solid wall and he crunched to a halt.
The world was filled with a rushing, roaring noise. His head was agony. For a second he didn't move, didn't dare even twitch. Then a tide of rubble and broken staircase tumbled onto him, crushing the breath out of his lungs, and he couldn't have moved even if he wanted to. His face was pressed into a slab of stone. He couldn't see. He was trapped – everything except for one hand sticking out through the rubble. The hand with the wrist that still worked.
He had another moment to think about his situation, to start to guess how broken he was, and then a silent thunderclap shook what was left of the tower. His ears popped and everything sounded suddenly muffled; then, a moment later, a searing wind filled with blistering heat howled around him. It singed the hair and scorched the skin on the back of his good hand. After that everything fell quiet.
For a while Vioros lay very still, wondering what would happen next. There were still sounds, bad sounds of roaring and shouting and fire, but they seemed very far away. As far as he could tell, he wasn't bleeding too much. He could still breathe. His legs, unlike the rest of him, still seemed to be in perfect working order. He felt a strange urge to giggle.
I'm alive! They burned the tower and I'm still alive! And I was right, and they weren't reinforcements from Speaker Zafir, and I don't have to feel stupid for shouting and screaming at everyone.
He checked himself. He was half trapped in a heap of rubble and surrounded by hostile dragons and riders; feeling smug about being right was something to be saved for later. Instead he tried to move. He didn't have any expectation that it would work, since it felt like he had the weight of a small mountain resting on him. He tried because he thought he ought to, and then, when he found that he could, he kept on trying more out of duty than out of any desire to get free. Apart from his legs everything hurt unless he lay perfectly still, and anyway what was the point of hauling himself out only to be killed by the Red Riders?
Best to stay exactly where I am and wait for them to go away. Except that didn't work either. What if they didn't go away. He ought to at least try to see what was going on. He didn't have to do anything, after all. He was an alchemist of the Order, not a soldier. The Order was neutral, always neutral. The Order kept the dragons in check, nothing else. Never anything else. Even the Red Riders knew that. Didn't they spare alchemists and Scales?
Most of the stones, it turned out, had landed around him and on each other, rather than on top of him. They'd trapped him in a little rocky nest. By bracing with his head and kicking with his legs, he managed to push the rest of the rubble out of the way. A minute of excruciating wriggling and squirming later and he'd pushed himself backwards up the stairs, or what was left of them, and out of the pile. He was free.
He stood up and felt an immense sense of victory. His left wrist was twisted at a horrible angle and badly swollen. His left ankle hurt but worked. He was bruised from his knees upwards, and his left shoulder twinged horribly whenever he moved it. So did several ribs. In fact, his whole left side was a bit of a mess. His head throbbed.
But he was alive. And he could stand. At a pinch he could even run.
There wasn't much point trying to go any further down the stairs. They were blocked with rubble and the remains of the people who'd been ahead of him. He limped laboriously up instead. The air around him smelled unusually fresh; even though the stairs were in the middle of the tower, bright daylight poured down the steps. It took Vioros what felt like an hour to climb each step, but in the end he was back at the top of the tower.
Or what was left of it. The bottom half was still standing. The rest was lying, mangled and broken, on the ground below. In his head Vioros could see exactly how it must have happened. A war-dragon had lashed the tower with its tail. Maybe more than one, knocking chunks out of it, until the tower had given up and toppled over. And then another dragon, most likely a long-necked hunter, had poured fire into the broken stump.
On the ground below, he could see people lying still, scattered among the rubble, limbs twisted, black and burned. The urge to burst out into hysterical laughter ambushed him again. He peered out at the rest of the eyrie. The forest was still there, sweeping away from the slopes of the hill. The mountains, the chasm of the gorge, they were all exactly as they were, basking in the sunlight. But everything else… Everything around the tower that hadn't been burned the last time was burning now. The landing fields were too far away to make out any details but the gist was clear enough. Any fighting that had happened was already over. There were several dragons down on the ground who hadn't been there before.
They're doing it again. They're stealing our dragons! The realisation hit him as surely as one of the stone slabs from the staircase. No. They're stealing the speaker's dragons. The gates to the Adamantine Palace still had the remains of one of the speaker's cousins dangling nearby, stinking in his cage. He'd lost some dragons too, hadn't he? There. Now you're a part of a moment of history. Someone will write about this one day, and when they do, they'll say that Vioros the alchemist was there and saw it all. The Theft of the Speaker's Dragons. The Slaughter of Drotan's Top… Perhaps I can console myself with that when I'm swinging in one of the speaker's cages and the crows are peeking out my eyes.
He glanced up, suddenly uneasy. Several Red Rider dragons were circling overhead, keeping watch. They were looking for other dragons though, and were too high to see him, slumped where he was and covered in dust. Some Red Riders were moving through the remains of the tower below, but they weren't looking up. Occasionally they'd stop and pick something up out of the rubble. More than once, he saw a sword flash as they put some crippled survivor out of their misery. Vioros shrank away from the edge when he saw that and huddled out of sight. Finally the riders on the landing fields finished their work and called the others away. Vioros didn't know how many dragons they'd had when they arrived, but they were leaving with exactly five more. Which, at a rough guess, would increase their numbers by half and make them about twice as dangerous as they'd been a few hours ago. He pursed his lips and hoped for a moment that the eyrie-master had died in the attack. If he hadn't, he'd wish he had when the speaker got hold of him.
There will be cages for all of us.
One by one, the dragons took to the air. They circled once, setting fire to the last of the wooden barns and outbuildings that surrounded the eyrie, and then flew leisurely away. Vioros dimly watched them go. All his euphoria at the simple fact of being alive had gone now. He felt miserable and sick and yet still he couldn't stop himself from laughing. At least he didn't need to make up some story about the speaker's farscope any more.
If he'd still had it, and if he'd looked in exactly the right place, he might have seen another dragon fly off out of the ruins in careful pursuit. He would have seen that it was no bigger than his hand, that it was made of metal with glittering ruby eyes, and was, in all respects, immeasurably more interesting than the farscope.
But he didn't. Instead, he curled up amid the thickening smoke, whimpering in pain, and waited for someone to come.
