In the half-light a shape took form nearby. Jehal swore and jumped back, lost his footing and fell back through the cathedral door. ‘Shit! Crap crap crap!’ He was staring at a dragon only a dozen yards away. Rather, he was staring at a dragon’s head. Lying on the ground. Still. Not moving. The size of a carriage.
He squinted, tracing the outline of the shape back into the gloom. Definitely a dragon. Dead.
An armoured hand reached down towards him. Held out to help him up. Jehal took it without thinking.
‘You should be underground.’ The voice was Vale’s, ground flat with fatigue.
‘Did you actually win?’
‘Bluntly? I don’t know. I don’t think so. We drove them off. That’s all.’
‘There’s a dead dragon in my palace.’
‘There are more than twenty.’ In his other hand, the one that wasn’t helping Jehal to his feet, Vale was holding something strangely familiar. The Speaker’s Spear.
‘You won, Vale. You actually won.’
The Night Watchman laughed in bitter choking hacks. ‘No. We didn’t get them all. And even then…’ He shook his head. ‘Do you want to see what victory looks like? I will show you. Come!’
Jehal pursed his lips. ‘Is this the part where you throw me off the top of a tall tower and then say I slipped?’
Vale slapped him so hard it made his head spin. The next thing he knew there were arms around his waist and he was picked up and thrown over the Night Watchman’s shoulder like a sack of corn. ‘All a joke to you, is it?’
‘Let me go!’ Panic and angry affront fought each other for Jehal’s attention.
‘No. Come and see your realms. Come and see what’s left.’
Jehal supposed he ought to be afraid, but he wasn’t. He was tired. Tired of fighting all the time. And he’s not going to do it. He’s not going to kill me. He can’t. However much he wants to, he can’t. It’s not in him. ‘Put me down, Vale. If you’re going to murder me, at least give me the dignity of walking to my doom, eh?’ Although, shameful to admit as it is, this is considerably less painful than walking would be.
‘You did this, Speaker Jehal. You and all your kind.’ Vale started to clamber over a heap of rubble that had once been part of the palace wall. In the half-light, draped over his shoulder, Jehal still couldn’t see much. What he could see looked a mess. ‘You don’t get to die. You haven’t earned that yet. I want you to see.’ Reaching the top of the wall, a section that was still intact, Vale dropped Jehal on the ground next to a shattered scorpion.
‘Ouch.’
Vale crouched beside him, gripped him by the throat and hauled him to his feet. ‘Do you see?’
‘Do I see what?’ All he could see were ruined walls. The jagged remains of charred wood and steel that had lined them. Smashed towers. When he peered, he could see men moving among the rubble. Now and then he heard a shout. They were clearing the walls of debris, he realised. Very slowly, but they were clearing the walls and putting new scorpions in place. ‘You never give up, do you? I’m impressed.’
Vale wrenched Jehal’s head around to the glowing embers that had once been the City of Dragons. ‘Are you impressed by that?’ he hissed.
Jehal pulled himself away. His leg gave way again and he stumbled towards the battlements. Vale caught him.
‘You don’t get away that easily, Jehal.’
For a few moments he didn’t know what to say. The city was gone. Totally gone. Torn to pieces and then set on fire. What hadn’t been smashed, burned. ‘Zafir,’ he whispered. ‘Zafir did this.’
‘No. You did.’
‘No.’ Get a hold of yourself. ‘No, I didn’t do this, and now I think of it, neither did Zafir. You can blame us for a lot of things, Night Watchman, but we never woke any dragons. It’s gone. So what? We’ll build another.’
Vale’s fingers tightened on his arm, gripping painfully. ‘Build another?’
‘Yes.’ Jehal shook himself free a second time, careful not to fall over. ‘That’s what we do. Build another. You won, Night Watchman. You have fulfilled your purpose. Your name will go down in history. You have averted catastrophe. Well done. Now piss off because I have a lot of work to do.’
For a moment the Night Watchman seemed lost in thought. He was staring at the Adamantine Spear. ‘I slew six dragons in the night. There.’ He pointed at something that looked like a dragon turned to stone and broken into pieces. ‘There.’ Another, much the same. ‘There.’ The third was largely intact. The look in Vale’s eye was of a man in deep thought. Which wasn’t what Jehal wanted at all.
‘Go find some builders who can clear up this mess.’
Vale didn’t move. His face didn’t flicker, but there was a tear in the corner of his eye. ‘The sun is coming up,’ he murmured.
‘Yes. Valuable working time is about to go to waste, eh?’ And there I was, thinking for a moment of keeping you alive. Letting you see me have my victory, day after day after day. Letting that be my revenge. But no. You’re too dangerous for that. He turned away.
‘Jehal.’
‘I am your speaker, Night Watchman. Address me properly or I’ll have your tongue cut out.’
‘Your Holiness.’ Vale sneered. ‘How many dragons went missing, Your Holiness?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I was too busy putting down Zafir. Ask the alchemists.’
‘The alchemists are largely dead, Your Holiness. The Adamantine Eyrie is gone. Look.’
Jehal squinted. All he could see was a thin haze of smoke that smothered everything. ‘I see nothing.’
‘I know. You were ever thus. The eyrie is gone. Your dragons are gone. Your palace is gone. Legions of my men are gone. Six hundred scorpions lined these walls last night. Perhaps a dozen have survived. We have more, of course. But we won’t get them ready in time to make a difference. Go back to your tunnels, Jehal. Live in the filth and the darkness where you belong. For what little time you can.’ He sighed. ‘No, Jehal, I did not win.’ He was staring at something behind Jehal’s shoulder.
Jehal spun to face him, furious. ‘That is the last…’ The words died in his mouth. Instinct made him follow the Night Watchman’s gaze. On the furthest corner of the palace, away towards the Mirror Lakes, a white dragon sat staring back at them, barely visible in the haze of smoke but clear nonetheless. Another smaller shape sat beside it. Dark. A young one. And then he saw another adult, and then another, squatting on the walls. As he watched, a fifth and then a sixth dragon glided silently out of the gloom and settled to watch. Then a seventh and an eighth. Three were hatchlings, barely out of the egg.
‘What are you waiting for?’ roared Vale, shattering the stillness and almost making Jehal jump out of his own skin.
I ought to run, Jehal thought. Right now. He glanced down towards the doors to the cathedral. A fit man, strong and agile, could get there in time. Pity that’s not me.
The young dragon moved. Sprang down from the wall and streaked like lightning through the rubble. Jehal had never seen anything move so fast. Hunting cats, maybe. And maybe a fit man couldn’t have reached the doors in time after all.
He was shaking. The dragon was a lot bigger than it had seemed over on the wall next to a full-grown adult. It ran up the side of a small half-toppled tower at the end of the wall in front of Vale, spread its wings and hissed.
Your fear is delicious, little one. The voice erupted out of nowhere inside Jehal’s head. His heart tripped and then hammered in his chest, and a cold settled over him like a blanket of snow, suffocating, silent and deathly. He stared at the dragons and the dragons stared back. He could see something different in their eyes, in the way they held themselves, even across the distance between them. The hunger and the desire, the impatience and the sheer raw force, they were all there just like any other dragon. But these had something else. They fixed him with their eyes and held him fast. There was a coldness to them. An intelligence. A relentless determination. He could feel them, feel them in his head, reckoning him.
The dragons stared, and in their gazes they showed him exactly what he was. Small and shallow and worthless. Crippled and useless. With two working legs, he might have tried to run anyway. As it was, all he could do was… nothing.
Where are your words now? How will people remember you, Jehal? Jehal the great? Jehal the brave? Jehal the strong?
The young dragon jumped from the tower and swooped. The Night Watchman held up the Adamantine Spear,
