too scared to sleep. Not Kemir, though. He’d seen all this before.
There were a pair of windows at the stern. Tiny filthy things that let through meagre slivers of light. Good for telling the difference between night and day and not much else.
‘Here.’ He stopped and pulled her close, next to the boat’s hull.
‘How can you sleep?’
Kemir shrugged. There wasn’t much of an answer to that. After you’d seen your home destroyed by dragon- fire, you either could or you couldn’t. When it had happened to him, all those years ago, he’d found that he could. He closed his eyes. He’d see them again tonight. His old friends. His family. They always came into his dreams when he saw a place burn. Reminding him, he supposed, that they’d once had a life. He wondered if this time Sollos would come too.
‘We didn’t bring any blankets. Should we have brought some blankets?’
‘Don’t really need them now.’ In the mountains good blankets were more precious than gold. Down here they were just blankets and the trip down the river would be warm enough without. He set about arranging himself with his knife and his bow and his belt all close to hand. He bundled them against the side of the ship and them pressed his back against them, tying little loops of twine around each with the other ends around his wrist. Kataros squeezed herself down beside him.
‘Hold me tight,’ she murmured. ‘I want to feel like you’re all around me. Like you’re my skin.’
Dust talk. He told her so. Reached for his pouch. Still had it. That was something then.
She squirmed against him and shivered. ‘That was King Valmeyan flying to war,’ she whispered. ‘Incandescence. Avalanche. Unmaker. I’ve seen them before.’
The King of the Crags. Kemir gave a bitter snort. ‘Well that’s all right then, since I already wanted to kill him anyway.’
‘Why did they burn Plag’s Bay?’
He shrugged. That was what dragon-riders did, wasn’t it? Burned people? He might have said something, but as Kemir was thinking, he fell soundly asleep, and there weren’t any dreams of Sollos or of his brother or his sister or his father or his friends. No dreams of them at all. All he saw was desert, endless desert, dunes in waves and waves like the sea. A desert of ash and sand and a distant tower wreathed in flames.
And then Snow, rising out of the lake of glacier water in the Worldspine, only this time it wasn’t Nadira Kemir was looking for. This time it was Kataros.
I did not eat this one.
It had been days, and he’d been thinking that whatever bond held them had finally broken. But no.
You are my eyes. My ears. Your thoughts are mine, Kemir, whenever I choose to see them.
I will run away from you. I will find a place so far that you can’t find me.
Then you must mean to die, Kemir, for that is the only place I cannot follow.
Then he was awake. Shards of daylight were sneaking in through the windows, enough that Kemir could see across the half-deck. Kat was shaking him. Her mouth hung open and she was shivering. He didn’t understand at first. When she clung to him though, the fingers gripping his arm were like claws. She was frightened.
‘Where were you?’ The air was stuffy and ripe.
‘Eh?’ He stood up, too quickly and forgetting where he was, and banged his head. ‘What do you mean where was I? Where is everyone? What’s happened?’
‘I was shaking and shaking you. You wouldn’t wake up.’
He collected his bow and his belt and his knife and everything else. Frowned. The light outside was more than the dim light of dawn. He peered at the windows. ‘Eh?’
‘It’s the middle of the day. You slept like the dead.’
Still half asleep, Kemir followed her up and out into the open air. The deck was full. Almost everyone was simply staring across the water, and when Kemir managed to find himself a place where he could see, he knew why. They were staring at the carnage on the riverbank. Plag’s Bay might have been little more than a collection of huts and jetties, Watersgate not much more, but the smashed, charred, smouldering scar on the land he was looking at now had been a town, and a big one. They were at the mouth of the Fury gorge, the terraced cliff walls still visible upriver behind them, so there was only one place it could be.
‘Valleyford.’ He blinked, almost expecting the town to suddenly reappear as he remembered it. It had been completely destroyed. He shivered. He’d liked Valleyford. It had been his sort of town. A huge glorified marketplace really, but still enough for thousands to live there, swapping goods travelling down the river from the Worldspine and from the Evenspire Road with cargoes sailing up from Furymouth, Farakkan, Purkan, places like that down the river. Caravans fresh from the Pinnacles crossed the river here on their way to Bazim Crag, while weary merchants from as far away as Bloodsalt finally reach the end of Yinazhin’s Way at Valleyford. If there was anything you couldn’t get in Valleyford, there was a good chance you couldn’t get it anywhere, at least not outside the Taiytakei markets in Furymouth, and that was one place Kemir had never been.
All gone. Wiped into a black and scorched smear of nothing, the last lazy wafts of smoke rising from the ruins. Maybe five thousand people had lived in Valleyford.
‘There were alchemists here,’ murmured Kataros.
‘And the speaker’s soldiers too.’ Kemir’s head felt numb. No one in their right mind would do something like this. Burning alchemists was worse than any mere treason. And yet here it was, done.
No human in their right mind. He shivered again. ‘Why are we stopping?’ Other boats were here too, some of them already moored against the shore, others milling about in the shallow waters away from the main current, not sure what to do. Some of them were lumbering cargo barges like the one Kemir was on. Most were little river skiffs.
A loud voice broke the stillness. One of the refugees from Plag’s Bay had declared himself captain. ‘Right. Enough lollygagging. Form a shore party.’
For a few minutes, Kemir thought they meant to lend a hand with things like looking for survivors, digging them out of the wreckage, looking after the injured, that sort of thing. It was only when the barge started jockeying for position with two other barges at one of the surviving jetties that he realised his mistake. There was shouting and swearing, and he heard it in the curses. Plunder. They were there to take whatever they could get away with. And if we find some survivors, we might just help them, but only if they can pay for it, eh? And all this less than a day after your own homes were burned to cinders.
The barge won its battle for a place at the waterfront, Kemir pushed past the sailors and jumped ashore. He wasn’t sure why it bothered him so much – not all that long ago he’d have been at the front of the queue if there was any plundering to be done – but if there was anyone he could find still alive then he was going to take them with him, back on the barge, whether they had money to pay for his help or not.
‘Hoi! You!’ The self-proclaimed barge captain. Kemir turned and shot back a glance of such venom that he saw the man flinch. He let his hand flicker to the hilt of his knife and made sure of his bow too. Anyone could sail a barge down a river with the current, Kemir reckoned. Didn’t need to be any one particular person at all.
He cocked his head. ‘Problem?’
The man pinched his lips. ‘We sail when we sail. We’ll not wait on stragglers.’
‘I bet you won’t.’ Kemir turned away, muttering under his breath.
The barge had arrived too late. There must have been a hundred or more river folk already picking through the skeleton of the town. Kemir, as he walked deeper into the smouldering ash, saw at least one body, stripped bare, with a fresh knife wound. Further still and the heat of the embers drove him back. He turned away. No survivors here. Instead he tried a little further down the river, away from the main harbour, where a small cluster of river skiffs had pulled up to the bank and men were busy at work. In the midst of them a group of men, poorly armed but armed nonetheless, stood around a strangely familiar figure, almost as if they were supervising the looting.
The blood-mage. Kithyr. He was carrying something long wrapped in black cloth. Kemir stopped dead. Took two quick paces forward and then stopped again.
I could shoot him. In the head. Blood-mage or not, that should do the trick. Unless I miss, but I’m not going to miss. So that would just leave the problem of doing it in broad daylight with about a hundred people to remember my face. Not to mention his motley collection of bodyguards. Of course, they might not care after their master’s dead… The mage turned. He looked straight at Kemir. Ah. And now he’s seen me. Makes it a lot harder to shoot a man when he can see the arrow coming. Turn away, Kemir. Turn away. Let him stay and fight the dragons. Evil for
