‘You have one chance, Meteroa. Send out my sister and Queen Lystra. If you do that, I will give you a day to gather your riders and leave. I don’t care where you go. I don’t recommend Furymouth. You’ll not find a friendly welcome in Three Rivers or Valin’s Fields or Bazim Crag for that matter. The south is ours, Meteroa. You have lost. It is pointless to fight. I have no particular reason to kill you. Yet.’
‘Tell me, Zafir, is Valmeyan’s hand up your skirt or is yours up his? I’ll speak with the puppet master, if you please.’ And now, time to run.
He might have stayed to shout something else. Something defiant. A last few insults. Then dozens of soldiers would charge though the High Hall, crazed half with fear and half with blood-lust, ready to chop to bits anyone they found at the other end. Instead, he slipped away as quietly as he could. Once he thought he was far enough away that no one would hear his footsteps, he ran. Eventually they’d realise no one was there and they’d follow him anyway, but this way would take them longer. It wasn’t exactly the honourable thing, and missing out on a good insult was always a disappointment, but at least this way skipped the part where he was chopped to bits, if only for a while. There were certain things he had to believe. That Jehal sat on the Speaker’s Throne. That hundreds of dragons still filled the Adamantine Eyries: their own, Zafir’s, Almiri’s, Narghon’s. That if he held out for long enough, Jehal would come. Yes, at times like these a man had to pick a thing, crush his doubts and believe in that thing as he believed in the rising of the sun. He could hold the Pinnacles for ever. So that’s what he would do.
Beyond the Grand Stair, where Meteroa would make his stand, lay Zafir’s Enchanted Palace. Beyond that, the fortress spiralled down and down. Past the Hall of Mirages where every exit led you right back where you started. Now there was a thing. Before he’d seized the place, he’d assumed it was a child’s fairy tale, but no. Real. Place made his skin crawl. And that was just the start of what the Silver King had left behind.
Yes, best not to delve too deep.
At the top of the Grand Stair Jubeyan was waiting for him. He looked flushed and out of breath and was holding a loaded cross-bow. Gaizal and Xabian were with him.
‘You weren’t supposed to wait for me,’ snapped Meteroa. Even if I’m glad that you did. He didn’t wait for an answer, but bounded down. The steps were huge, each one some twenty feet across. They must have spiralled down at least two hundred feet into the rock. No time to stop and admire the workmanship, though, not with Valmeyan’s soldiers on his heels. He could hear them, if he stopped to listen. They weren’t far behind. Not far at all…
Beyond the arch at the bottom of the stairs was a vast vaulted hall. There were no windows here, no sun and no sky, yet a warm yellow light filled the room from above, and it was just an atrium, the gateway to Zafir’s Enchanted Palace. Beyond it lay the colossal Octagon, Zafir’s throne room, the largest in the realms, where the Kings and Queens of the Harvest Realm held their court, where the blood-mages had held court before them, all the way back to the Silver King himself. A place of eerie beauty. Of walls that grew light and dark of their own will, mimicking the rise and fall of the sun and the moon outside. Of clean cool damp air, empty of any taint of woodsmoke. Sleeping in the halls of the Pinnacles was like sleeping out on a fresh and warm summer’s night.
He shuddered. Everything about the Fortress of Watchfulness, right from the Reflecting Garden and its Endless Fountain at the top, down to whatever lurked a mile beneath his feet was all wrong. And it had him trapped.
Don’t think about it. He ran through the arch and pointed up. ‘There.’ The ceiling here was different. Lower. A great stone slab was poised over his head. He’d known it was there before he’d even left Furymouth. What he hadn’t believed until he saw it now with his own eyes, until he stopped to actually look at it, was the scale of it. A block of stone the size of a large barn and massive enough to crush a dragon flat. It was simply hanging in the air.
Pulleys. It has to be pulleys. He shivered. Don’t think about it! However it worked, the principle was the same. Stone comes down; no one gets in. He’d made it his business to understand the fortress when he’d been planning his own attack, and now that knowledge would cut nicely the other way. Speed, that was the key. Valmeyan had already been too slow.
‘Your Highness, there are men on the stairs. I hear voices.’
Beyond the arch, hidden behind the hangings on the wall, there was a hole in the wall. He reached inside, felt something cold. His fingers closed around it…
And paused. He could see Princess Kiam, Zafir’s sister, staring at him. They’d barely spoken since he’d taken her surrender and brought her back to the fortress, but they’d spoken that day, standing right here under the great hanging stone. He remembered the look in her eye, clear as a mountain lake, full of hate, blood oozing from a broken lip that she did nothing to wipe away. No one built this place. It grew. On its own. It was always here. Mock me of you like, Prince, but this palace is alive and I am its mistress and I will have it eat you. She’d spat out a gobbet of blood. Meteroa looked down. There was nothing on the floor, no trace of a stain. He didn’t remember anyone cleaning it up.
There were other shapes carved in the wall behind the hanging. When he pushed the hanging aside, he saw that they were archways, sealed up and leading to nowhere. They were everywhere. The place was littered with them. Whispers said they opened sometimes, once in a lifetime, on to some inexplicable and unknown realm.
‘My Lord! They come!’
You could argue all day about ghosts and old magics, but Valmeyan’s men were real enough. Meteroa reached in again and pulled. His hand came out clutching a silver rod about as long as his forearm. The stone quivered. A grating noise filled the hall and then the stone came down, fast. It smashed into the floor and shook the room so hard that Meteroa fell to his knees. Dust filled the air. The archway was gone. Blocked completely. He stared at the piece of silver in his hand. His riders looked shocked. Understandable, but even if he felt the same, he couldn’t let them see it.
‘I appear to have the key.’ Then he smiled. ‘They won’t be getting in that way then.’
‘My Lord, how do we get out?’
A good strategy for questions you couldn’t answer, Meteroa had found, was to ignore them. Further down, below the marvels of the Enchanted Palace, there were balconies and storerooms. Food and water for years. Beyond that… Meteroa gave half a shrug. He didn’t know whether Jehal was dead or alive, but that really didn’t matter any more. Trapped was trapped. The fortress gave him nightmares, but still it was hard not to feel at least a little gleeful. They’d either find a way out or they wouldn’t.
Until they did, there was always the other thing that had made the three peaks of the Pinnacles famous. Scorpions, giant crossbows big enough to hurt even a dragon. Hundreds of them. Buried in the walls of the most impregnable dragon-proof fortress in the world.
With a grin and a crack of his knuckles, he turned to face his waiting riders. If someone out there wanted a war, so be it.
The Dragon
There is an order to the world that you have perverted with your ways. It will not last; and when the natural shapes of things return, your pleas for mercy will not be heard.
3
Freedom
For all they were about to do, there was no joy to be had in it. Kemir lay at night beside Snow, eyes wide open, the dragon keeping him warm. He saw Sollos, his cousin, face up in the shallows of a river, lifeless, the water stained with his blood. He saw Nadira, the last time he’d seen her alive. And he saw Snow, rising from the lake of freezing blue glacier water. Sometimes he imagined he saw the rider who’d killed his cousin, Semian, head hacked off in a bed of bloody ice. It gave him no pleasure any more.
He didn’t see anything else.
During the day, when they were on the move, he still saw the same faces. Ghosts. Too many of them. He ate because his stomach told him he was hungry, drank because his throat was dry, pissed when his bladder demanded it. For the rest of the time he was numb, shifting aimlessly between emptiness and a rage of such intensity it seemed it must surely melt the stones beneath his boots. Those were the times when he traded insults with the
