But they were dragons, and so they tried and they tried but in the end they couldn't wait. When one kicked itself into the air and spread its wings, the others followed in an instant, glad and gleeful. They fell through the air, looping and dancing through the spray of the Diamond Cascade until the City of Dragons rushed up to meet them.

They spread their wings and opened their mouths. Not like the other cities, this one. They had a fury inside them now, one that had been building up for two days on the mountainsides. For a week since they'd begun at Out.w.a.tch. For a thousand years and more since they'd last flown as a horde against an enemy who could actually fight them. They tore into the city, burning, smashing, clambering over walls, lashing towers to the ground, crushing houses underfoot, pouring fire through doors and windows and arches, savaging anything that crossed their path.

Don't eat! Don't eat! But the urge was irresistible. The rage had them hard, and when men and women ran screaming, it was impossible not to s.n.a.t.c.h them up with claw or tail and crush them and smash them and bite them in two and taste their blood. The city burned. Its flesh was delicious.

And then the scorpions began.

He saw them come. He was the Night Watchman, and seeing them come was the point of his being. It was hard to know whether the end of the world that was falling towards him was all Jehal's fault or only mostly Jehal's fault. But in the final reckoning it hardly mattered. He could almost have thanked Jehal, in a perverse way, for making this come to pa.s.s. It was the whole point of his existence, of every one of the Adamantine Men around him, of everyone who had gone before, the whole point of all of that was right here, right now, right in front of him.

He watched the City of Dragons burn. Patience. Patience was a weapon. Patience was the one thing he had that his enemy could barely understand. The city died and Vale watched. Tens of thousands of people. He supposed that others would expect him to feel something about that, some sort of sadness or regret, but that missed the point. That wasn't his job. Let Jeiros weep and wring his hands for his beautiful city. I am the dragon-killer. No compa.s.sion, no mercy, no compromise. I am like them, but more.

The dragons were falling prey to their own pa.s.sions. He could see it by the way they cavorted. They were ripping people out of their homes and eating them for the sheer fun of it. All good. A pity I couldn't poison the whole city. I would have, if there had been a way. He'd already poisoned everything in the Adamantine Eyries. He and Vioros had seen to that long before Jehal returned. Vioros had seen to something else too, something that made Vale know his destiny was here.

When he thought they were ready, he gave the order to fire. The dragons were too far away for the scorpions to pick their targets, but they made up with that in other ways. Sheer numbers for a start.

Then he picked up the Adamantine Spear and went to wait outside.

Steel rain fell across the city. Bolts as long as a man fell almost straight out of the sky. They smashed through roofs and floors and buried themselves in cellar walls. They punched through chimneys and shattered flagstones. Here and there they struck dragons with enough force to drive straight through scales and deep into the muscles beneath. Dragons already teetering on the brink of battle l.u.s.t dived headlong into it with a mad joy. Snow felt them roar with pain and then with merciless delight. At last a proper fight. She jumped into the air and spread her wings to be with them, powering up out of the smoke of the burning city towards the palace. Where I'm supposed to be. The eyrie could wait. Everything else could wait. It was wrong. They were being lured, pulled into a trap, but she didn't even try to resist. There was no point. Why try to fight what you were created to be?

A second hail of metal spears fell around her. Two pierced her wings and pa.s.sed straight through. A third struck her in the back, close to her tail. It hurt a lot more than the scorpions she remembered from the Worldspine. Angrily she twisted her neck and ripped the bolt out with her teeth. It snapped cleanly in two, leaving a foot of steel inside her. The pain grew suddenly worse. With a shriek she surged through the air. Poison, perhaps. Or acid. She didn't care. A few poisoned bolts wouldn't even slow her down. Wouldn't slow any of them down.

She landed on the palace walls with a force that shook mountains, scattering men and scorpions around her like sand.

Vale could only be in one place at a time, so he started from the doors to the Gla.s.s Cathedral and worked from there. The palace would be destroyed. His men would be destroyed. His scorpions. He himself, most likely. None of that mattered. The dragons had to die, and that was all. Scorpions hailed overhead. The Azure Tower came crashing down, shattered lumps of stone as large as a house flying through the air. Boulders smashed against the hardened skin of the Gla.s.s Cathedral, exploding into shards, and then the earth shook beneath its feet as the first dragon landed in the Speaker's Yard itself. A huge reddish monster, it raked the walls with fire and then rose up to tear at the needle-like Tower of Air.

The spear, it seemed, was singing to him, a soft choir of voices in ancient words that he didn't understand and yet made perfect sense. He watched the dragon for a second and then another, feeling at the very last a tiny spark of what was perhaps fear, which flickered for a moment before he crushed it and ran out into the yard. No scream, no battle cry, but silent and swift, he plunged the Speaker's Spear into the dragon's leg.

The earth trembled. A blazing light lit up the night. A thousand voices roared in his head.

And the dragon turned to stone.

The Earthspear! Snow felt it, felt its roar of power, felt the death it brought. Bolts p.r.i.c.ked her skin. Fury ripped through her. She lunged at scorpions, crushing men and their machines in her jaws. The air filled with the roar of fire, the grind of breaking stone, the rage-filled cries of dragons. She tore apart everything around her, stamped and smashed all to dust, then leapt over a wall between one part of the palace and another, lashing a tower with her tail as she went. She felt the Earthspear roar again, a second dragon die.

Where are you?

A misshapen old building, its surface gla.s.sy from some ancient heat, loomed out of the darkness and the flashes of fire. Close. She was close.

The earth shuddered as a monster twice her size crashed down onto the roof of the Gla.s.s Cathedral and slid down its sides, spraying fire all around it.

Burn!

Vale could barely hear himself, could barely think. There was screaming and roaring and flames everywhere. Pieces of the Tower of Air showered the walls. Men were crushed, scorpions splintered. Something crashed to earth behind him so hard it knocked him over, but before he could turn, there was another dragon, a little one this time, not much bigger than a horse, barely out of its egg. It shot out of the flames towards him, and as it opened its mouth, he rammed the spear down its throat. The light again, blinding, the noise, but as he blinked, he felt the spear ripped out of his hands as the now-statue dragon ploughed past him through the rubble and slid to a halt. He ignored the huge black thing sliding down the Gla.s.s Cathedral and bolted for the spear. A ma.s.sive foot came down, crushing half the stone hatchling to rubble. He saw the spear. Then the dragon above him looked down and seemed to notice him for the first time. He lunged forward, but the great clawed foot came down again, smashing the hatchling's head into splinters and burying the spear beneath it. The impact rippled the ground and Vale staggered away.

No.

It was laughing at him.

The Earthspear! It is mine!

A volley of a dozen scorpions ripped into her flank, hard enough to almost knocked her off balance. The pain, the pain was something new, something almost forgotten. It took her away, drowned everything, for a moment, except the need to smash and burn and kill and destroy.

Vale raced straight across the middle of Speaker's Yard, weaving between the legs of the black dragon. Or maybe it wasn't black. Maybe it was just dark. They all looked black or grey in the moonlight and the flashing bursts of fire. It was staying where it was, burning battery after battery of scorpions, never once lifting the claws that held the Adamantine Spear trapped in the earth. He reached a ladder and hurtled up to the wall.

'Scorpions!' Fire forced his men behind their dragon-scale, but fire didn't kill. His precious scorpions were still there, behind their shields. 'Load! Aim! Fire! Take it down!'

Six or seven of the weapons fired, straight into the dragon's face. The monster s.n.a.t.c.hed its head away and staggered and shrieked. Keep shooting. That was all they needed to do. Nothing more. Sooner or later it would fall.

The dragon lunged, tried to jump up onto the parapet, smashed three scorpions with its fore-claws before the wall cracked and crumbled, half tipping the dragon off again. Its tail cracked like a whip along the top of the wall, shattering men and machines, flipping them high into the air. Vale winced. A dozen more destroyed, just like that. Then the dragon was gone, if only for a moment, tipped back down into the Gateyard in an earthquake of breaking stone.

Slowly, looming over their heads, the Tower of Air sheared and began to fall. The spear, though. The spear was free again!

'Scatter! Run!' When the dragons came for you with tooth and claw, that was all you could do. Scatter and run. Draw them away from the scorpions. Our lives don't matter. Vale took a gulp of scorched air, caught a glimpse of the rest of the palace. Dragons doing what dragons did. As he cranked the last scorpion on the Speaker's Wall, he watched one smash into the Tower of Dusk. Dragon and tower disappeared in a cloud of dust and masonry lit up from within by the dragon's fire.

There. The scorpion clicked and he reached for a bolt. The black dragon had rolled back to its feet. Adamantine Men ran in front of it, hurling futile javelins before they were crushed or burned, drawing its attention away from the walls. He could see where the spear lay. Ought to jump straight down there if his legs would take it, but he was up here on the wall now. Draw it away. You can't hurt a dragon but a scorpion can. And we don't have enough. He hadn't told his men that last part but it wouldn't have mattered anyway. They were Adamantine Men. They lived for this. Every one of them had drunk the dragon poison for two days now, ever since dragons had come to the Purple Spur, so most of them were as good as dead already. It all came down to how much damage they could do before they went. Vioros and the weapon of legends come to life once more, they were the only hope.

Something smashed into the wall. He didn't even see what or where, only felt the tremor. He stumbled and gripped the scorpion. The black dragon screamed and lunged at the men harrying its feet. Try to get eaten. Fill them with poison in any way you can. Make every death into victory.

The black had three or four soldiers in its claws. It stuffed them into its mouth and bit savagely down. Then it spat out the remains, showering the men around it with blood and gore and broken armour. For a moment it paused. Vale pivoted the scorpion around and up a notch and then shot it in the eye. He was already running when the bolt hit. He didn't bother to look back, only down.

The spear!

No no no NO!

She could feel the poison in her. She could feel the heat, the first warning surge inside her, and it made her want to fight even harder, to burn and smash even more. Which would make the heat worse, which would feed the rage, which would feed the heat, and on and on until everything was out of control and she burst into flames from the inside.

They couldn't be winning could they, the little ones? She half jumped, half flew up onto the broken stump of one of the smaller towers. The walls around her were breached. A few of the bigger towers were still intact, but the smaller ones were all smashed. Everything that would burn was in flames. The earth and the air trembled and thundered. A thin haze of smoke filled the night. She could see the shapes of the other dragons clear enough, but the little ones . . . The smoke hid them.

The Earthspear! She reached out for it with her thoughts. It had fallen silent, but it was near.

Yet another bolt slammed into her side. Then another. The rage flashed inside. Her head snapped around, looking for where they'd come from. But she couldn't see. Everything looked ruined or was lost in the haze.

Another bolt bounced off her head, leaving a burning scar. We should never have come in the night. She'd been hit by dozens now. So many she'd lost count. Little ones, little ones, she could taste their thoughts, so many, scurrying, running, but she couldn't see them!

She launched herself into the air. Defeat. She could taste it. Inconceivable defeat. And yet the rage drove them on and they were powerless against it. The dragons around her were all lost in the fury. It would never occur to them to stop until the fire took them.

No. Not now. Not this close. It can't be. I will not allow us to fail!

A tail as thick as a man whipped over his head and crashed into the remnants of the Tower of Air behind him. Shards of stone flew like shrapnel; larger pieces tumbled, crushing the ruined walls around him, breaking men and metal alike. The dragons shook them off. Much of the palace was bathed in fire. Dragons out of control, out of their minds, burning up with their own rage, pouring it out on everything around them. Vale sprinted straight through the middle of them, hurdling the bodies of the fallen, the burned and the crushed. The palace was awash with the ashes of the dead. In the end metal buckled. Men were roasted and died. Even dragon-scale wasn't perfect.

He raced between the legs of a young hunter that tried to bite him and missed. The more they burn, the more our poison will grip them. A tail slashed across the ground, throwing up a cloud of black ash, of stone and armour. Of blackened arms and legs and torsos and heads. Vale ran under the belly of another dragon, which didn't even seem to notice he was there. He'd lost track of where the spear was, but it must be buried in bodies and rubble by now. He'd done what he could. If there were any working scorpions left on the walls, they were too few to matter now and he couldn't tell them from the mangled remains of their cousins. Most of the Adamantine Men were dead. They'd never know whether they'd died in glorious victory or in defeat.

He reached the doors of the Gla.s.s Cathedral. Walls thick enough to stand even dragons welcomed him. As he ran, the doors flew open. Behind him, a dragon turned and lunged. Vale threw himself to the ground, sliding the last yard on his belly across stones sticky with cooked blood. Behind the doors, a dozen scorpions all packed together spat out a final volley.

'Run!' he shouted. No time to load and fire again. No point in losing more men. Tomorrow's Night Watchman would need them. He tried to get back to his feet, but for once his strength failed him. He stumbled and fell in the doorway. Someone else would take the fight to the dragons after today. He'd done the best he could.

He rolled onto his back. 'Come and get me!' There were sacs of poison strapped to his armour. Too much for a man to drink and survive. Enough, perhaps, to kill a dragon. And there it was, the dragon that had taken a face full of scorpion bolts, towering over him, eyes ablaze, flames licking out between its teeth, insane with fire and fury. 'Come on!' he screamed at it. 'Eat me!'

Its head swayed from side to side, almost mocking him, as though it could read his mind. And then, very slowly, it toppled over and crashed to the ground. Fire sputtered around it. Flames flickered on its tongue. Even through his armour Vale could feel the heat. He lay there and stared.

And I thought we were going to lose.

He started to laugh. Once he'd started, he couldn't stop.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a single dragon, pale as a ghost in the moonlight, take to the skies and fly away.

The Morning After Jehal couldn't put his finger on when the battle ended. The noise, the rumbles and thunder as the dragons smashed down the Adamantine Palace went on most of the night. He sat awake in bed, listening to it. Eventually it faded away and stopped. He might have dozed after that. He wasn't sure. Lystra slept, and he watched her. Looked at her by the light of a single tiny candle. He stroked her face and her hair, gently so as not to wake her. After a while, after the noises had stopped and everything was still, he very carefully climbed out of their bed and dressed.

'I'm sorry, my love,' he whispered in her ear, 'but these particular caves don't agree with me.'

The caves under the Gla.s.s Cathedral were still and quiet. There were no guards on his door, none to keep him safe and none to keep him from leaving either. He hopped and hobbled through the silent tunnels. Frightened faces glanced at him and turned away. Servants, scared witless, knowing they were doomed to die down here. But starving is better than burning, isn't it? Or is it?

He didn't find any soldiers until he reached the stairway to the Gla.s.s Cathedral itself. Until he climbed them, one excruciating step at a time. And at the top there's going to be a dragon waiting for me. And then what? He didn't know. What he knew was that kings didn't hide in cellars while their kingdoms burned around them. Kings faced their enemies. Even if they couldn't win. Kings died in daylight. In the open.

He reached the top of the steps. He'd expected bodies, but the cathedral was almost empty. The wreckage of a dozen scorpions lay scattered around the door. The air stank of smoke, of burned wood and scorched flesh. No bodies though. None alive, none dead.

He heard voices. Men, calling to each other. Outside. Not screaming and dying calling, but the matter-of-fact shouts of men busy at work. He hobbled to the door, blinking. No dragons? Was that possible?

A grey glimmer of dawn lit the horizon. Not much light, and at first he couldn't see the damage. The Tower of Air was a stump. The Speaker's Tower was still there, although it seemed to be missing several large pieces. He scanned the silhouette of the palace, looking for anything else that was familiar and finding little. The Tower of Dusk, the Tower of Dawn, the Humble Tower, the Azure Tower . . . all gone.

'h.e.l.lo?' he called. 'Did we win then?' There were dim figures moving in the darkness where the walls ought to be. They had bits missing, he began to see. Quite a lot of bits missing. It was warm outside too, strangely and almost uncomfortably so.

In the half-light a shape took form nearby. Jehal swore and jumped back, lost his footing and fell back through the cathedral door. 's.h.i.t! c.r.a.p c.r.a.p c.r.a.p!' 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 p.i.s.s 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.