more than men draped with an illusion of power. You have fought and killed such men. They are as small and fragile as the rest of you. Look at me, Kemir. Your arrows will not even punch through my scales. Your scorpions are to me as an insect’s bite is to you. LOOK AT ME! The thought thundered into Kemir’s head. His arms fell limp, almost dropping his knives. He stared at the dragon, helpless. Arrogant? This is not arrogance, Kemir. This is the natural order our creators intended, that is all. Arrogance is built on hubris. We do not imagine the magnitude of our strength, Kemir. We see it around us, in the ruins of this castle. Do not talk to me of arrogance, little one. Arrogance is thinking your kind have any say in your destiny. Arrogance is thinking you could do anything more than amuse us.
She lowered him back to the ground. He was shaking, still rooted to the spot, his feet refusing to move as Snow very slowly wrapped her fore-claw around him. ‘What about cruel? What about heartless? What about mercy?’ The words stuttered out of his mouth, kicked out between reluctant lips by the part of him that refused to crumble. Ever.
What of them? She picked him up and lifted him into the air, peering at him as she rose onto her back legs and towered fifty feet above the ground. We play when we are playful. We rage when we are angry. We eat when we are hungry. We pay as little attention to what our food is called as your kind do, Kemir. If that is cruel and without heart or mercy then that is what we are. I might wonder if we even understand the meanings you give to these words. With a languid, almost careless motion she dropped him and then caught him again, this time between her teeth. He could feel her breath blowing past him in heavy slow gusts. He’d once, before he’d learned better, imagined that dragons’ breath always reeked of rotten meat, but in fact there was usually almost no scent to it at all. Snow smelt warm and slightly acrid, with a whiff of fresh blood.
Tell me what you want, Kemir. Shall I let you go? If I do, one of us, one day, will find you.
For a moment he twitched and wriggled, unable to stop the animal instinct that screamed at him to tear himself free, even if he had to rip himself half to pieces to escape. Snow held him fast.
It is hard to be so gentle, Kemir. If I am distracted I might forget you are there for a moment. That is how little you mean to me.
Most of her teeth were like sword-edges, long and hard and sharp as razors, built for shearing flesh and bone and nothing else. Her larger fangs were the size of his thigh. He couldn’t imagine what prey they were meant to pin.
Oh the world was once full of many creatures that are now lost. A few were made like us. Others came when the world was first made. They are all gone now. We ate them. We are what is left.
With a soft gasp, Kemir pissed himself. He started to sob. Fear. That’s all it took. Enough of it would break anything, and he’d finally found what was enough to break him. The last little part, the part that had always held out no matter what the world did to him, cracked and fell to pieces.
There. Finally you understand what I am. With that, she took him back in her claws and casually tossed him away over the edge of the mountain.
11
A Nest of Snakes
Jehal slid languidly out of bed and hobbled to his dresser. Discarded silks littered the floor. Bright yellows and greens and blues. The best colours, the best dyes, the finest silk. It all came from the silk farms on Tyan’s Peninsula, close to his home in Furymouth.
‘Does it hurt?’ The voice came from somewhere under the tangle of soft furs piled up on the bed.
‘No,’ he lied. ‘Not at all.’ Three months had passed since Shezira had tried to neuter him. He threw on a robe and went to stand in one of the windows. Vale was out there somewhere, the Night Watchman who’d placed the crossbow in Shezira’s hands the day before he’d cut off her head. He’d be down below, stomping up and down and shouting at his men most likely. At any other time, Jehal would simply have had Vale hanged, drawn and left to die in a cage outside the gates, that old ritual that Zafir had so gleefully revived. But I need him, and he needs me, and however much we’d love to slit each other’s throats, neither of us can stand alone. Put him away for later. When the war peters out, they’ll either make me speaker or they won’t. If they do, I can do what I like with him. If they don’t, well then does it really matter? I should savour the view while I’ve got it.
He was back in his favourite room in the palace, in the bedroom at the very top of the slender Tower of Air, looking out over the Speaker’s Yard, the Glass Cathedral, the City of Dragons, the Mirror Lakes, the Purple Spur and the Diamond Cascade beyond, except today it was raining buckets and there wasn’t much to see of any of those. He’d tried Hyram’s rooms for a while, but they made him restless. Too gloomy for his taste. The air was too heavy. Too many ghosts and too much taint of failure and sickness and decrepitude. So he’d come back to the place that had been Zafir’s favourite as well as his own, the place that held all his best memories. It was hard. Strange. Ever since Evenspire, he’d missed her almost constantly. Far more than he’d ever missed her when she was alive.
What I mean, if I’m honest with myself, is that this is the place where I had all the best sex. Speaking of which…
He’d picked her carefully. She had lips and a tongue that worked miracles, they said, and so they had. The pain had been something like having a white hot and very long needle stabbed between his legs and pushed very slowly but surely deeper and deeper, but there had been more to it than that. Something had happened, at least. When she’d stopped and he was gasping, blind with something between ecstasy and agony, her tongue had brushed his lips. There’d been salt. He’d tasted himself on her. She was letting him know.
He still throbbed with the aftermath, pulses of pain enough to make him wince and that wouldn’t go away. Through it, he could hardly stop himself from grinning. I’m still a man. At last I know the answer. Shezira didn’t neuter me after all.
It was a good thing. Not least because it meant he didn’t have to throw the woman in his bed out of a window in order to keep his secret. On the contrary. Now they both knew, he could let her go to spread the word that the speaker was whole. He chuckled to himself and set about dressing. The sun had come up hours ago. There were probably things he ought to be doing.
Yes. All the trivial little palace things that Jeiros and Tassan haven’t dealt with because they’re too busy saving the realms. I’m hardly in a hurry, am I?
By the time he was thinking of putting his boots on, the waves of pain had faded into something that was more a reminder of something sharp than anything truly unpleasant. Gentle snores came from under the furs. Jehal pulled them back and let his eyes wander over the curves underneath. We could try again. Maybe the second time won’t hurt so much?
He was still pondering when someone started hammering at his door and a dragon shot through the air right past his windows, the wind of its wings ripping through the open balconies, staggering him. One silk curtain tore free and dived away into the void, sucked into the dragon’s wake. The woman in his bed was suddenly forgotten. Jehal was out and down the stairs before he could even begin to think. Are we under attack?
Vale was waiting for him at the bottom. Of course he was. He bowed, just a fraction late, just a tad too high and an instant too abrupt. ‘Your Holiness.’ He smiled thinly, reading Jehal’s face. ‘No, we are not being attacked. If we were, I would be on the walls, supervising our defence.’ He glanced at Jehal’s bare feet. ‘Shall I find you some shoes?’
‘Only if you have nothing better to do,’ Jehal snapped. ‘Why is a dragon flying so close to my bed? Whoever was guiding it should be hanged.’
Vale gave the faintest of shrugs. ‘As you wish. They are your riders, Your Holiness. I have asked them before to avoid the palace. There is always the risk that my scorpioneers will not recognise them. I’d be disappointed if we had some sort of an accident. My men have been practising, Your Holiness, and they are really quite good.’ Which was certainly true. Day in, day out, Vale had men on horseback charging around the palace flying target kites from their saddles. The parts of the Hungry Mountain Plain that were in range had become so littered with scorpion bolts that when they’d stopped for a day and offered a penny for each bolt returned to the palace, they’d come in by the cartload.
‘The dragon was a messenger, Your Holiness. There are dragons massing north of the Purple Spur,’ said Vale,
