The Court of Broken Knives

A man came in low, driving his sword into the dragon’s side, ripping down, glancing off the scales but then meeting the softer underbelly as the thing twisted up. Drove it in and along, tearing flesh. Black blood spurted out, followed by shimmering white and red unravelling entrails. Pretty as a fountain. Men howled, clawed at their own faces as the blood hit. And now it had two swords sticking out of it, as well as its own intestines, and it was redoubling its shrieking, twisting, bucking in circles, bleeding, while men leapt and fell out of its way.

‘Pull back!’ Tobias screamed at them. ‘Get back, give it space. Get back!’ His voice was lost in the maelstrom of noise. It must be dying, he thought desperately. It might be a bloody dragon, but half its guts are hanging out and it’s got a sword sunk a foot into its head. A burst of flame exploded in his direction. He dived back onto his face. Found himself next to new boy Marith again.

‘Distract it!’ Marith shouted in his ear.

Um …?

Marith scrambled to his feet and leapt.

Suddenly, absurdly, the boy was balanced on the thing’s back. Clung on frantically. Almost falling. Looked so bloody stupidly bloody small. Then pulled out his sword and stabbed downwards. Blood bursting up. Marith shouted. Twisted backwards. Fell off. The dragon screamed louder than ever. Loud as the end of the world. Its body arched, a gout of flame spouted. Collapsed with a shriek. Its tail twitched and coiled for a few long moments. Last rattling tremors, almost kind of pitiful and obscene. Groaning sighing weeping noise. Finally it lay dead.

A dead dragon is a very large thing. Tobias stared at it for a long time. Felt regret, almost. It was beautiful in its way. Wild. Utterly bloody wild. No wisdom in those eyes. Wild freedom and the delight in killing. An immovable force, like a mountain or a storm cloud. A death thing. A beautiful death, though. Imagine saying that to Gulius’s family: he was killed fighting a dragon. He was killed fighting a dragon. A dragon killed him. A dragon. Like saying he died fighting a god. They were gods, in some places. Or kin to gods, anyway. He reached out to touch the dark green scales. Soft. Still warm. His hand jerked back as if burnt. What did you expect? he thought. It was alive. A living creature. Course it’s bloody soft and warm. It’s bloody flesh and blood.

Should be stone. Or fire. Or shadow. It wasn’t right, somehow, that it was alive and now it was dead. That it felt no different now to dead cattle, or dead men, or dead dogs. It should feel … different. Like the pain of it should be different. He ached the same way he did after a battle with men. The same way he did the last time he’d got in a fight in an inn. Not right. He touched it again, to be sure. Crumble to dust, it should, maybe. Burn up in a blaze of scented flame.

If it’s flesh and blood, he thought then, it’s going to fucking stink as it starts to rot.

There was a noise behind him. Tobias spun round in a panic. Another dragon. A demon. Eltheia the beautiful, naked on a white horse.

New boy Marith. Staring at the dragon like a man stares at his own death. A chill of cold went through Tobias for a moment. A scream and a shriek in his ears or his mind. The boy’s beautiful eyes gazed unblinking. A shadow there, like it was darker suddenly. Like the sun flickered in the sky. Like the dragon might twitch and move and live. Then the boy sighed wearily, sat down in the dust rubbing at his face. Tobias saw that the back of his left hand was horribly burnt.

‘Pretty good, that,’ Tobias said at length.

‘You told me to draw my sword.’

‘I did.’

There was a long pause.

‘You killed it,’ said Tobias.

‘It was dying anyway.’

‘You killed a bloody dragon, lad.’

A bitter laugh. ‘It wasn’t a very large dragon.’

‘And you’d know, would you?’

No answer.

‘You killed it, boy. You bloody well killed a bloody dragon. Notoriously invulnerable beast nobody really believed still existed right up until it ate their tent-mate. You should be pleased, at least. Instead, you’re sitting here looking like death while Rate and the other lads try to get things sorted out around here.’ Wanted to shake the boy. Moping misery. ‘At least let me have a look at your hand.’

This finally seemed to get Marith’s attention. He stared down at his burns. ‘This? It doesn’t really hurt.’

‘Doesn’t hurt? Half your hand’s been burnt off. How can it not hurt? It’s the blood, I think. Burns things. It’s completely destroyed my sword. Damn good sword it was, too. Had a real ruby in the hilt and all. Bloke I got it off must have thought it was good too, seeing as I had to kill him for it.’ Rambled on, trying to relieve his racing mind. At the back of his racing mind this little voice basically just shouting ‘fuck fuck fuck fuck’.

‘The blood is acid,’ Marith said absently. ‘And boiling hot. Once it’s dead it cools, becomes less corrosive.’ He turned suddenly to Tobias, as if just realizing something. ‘You stabbed it first. To rescue me. I did nothing, I just stood there.’

Absurd how young the boy seemed. Fragile. Weak. Hair like red-black velvet. Eyes like pale grey silk. Skin like new milk and a face like a high-class whore. Could probably pass for Eltheia the beautiful, actually, in the right light. From the neck up at any rate.

Couldn’t cook. Couldn’t start a fire. Couldn’t boil a sodding pot of tea. Could just about use a sword a bit, once someone had found him one, though his hand tended to shake on the blade. Cried a lot at night in his tent. Emit had ten in iron on him one day breaking down crying he wanted his mum. Eltheia the beautiful might have made the better sellsword, actually, in the right light.

‘You just stood there. Yeah. So did most of them.’ And, oh gods, oh yeah, it’s the squad commander pep talk coming unstoppably out. Let rip, Tobias me old mucker, like finally getting out a fart: ‘Don’t worry about it. Learn from your mistakes and grow stronger and all that. Then when we next get jumped by a fire-breathing man-eating dragon, you’ll be right as rain and ready for it and know exactly what to do.’

Marith shook himself. Rubbed his eyes. ‘I could really, really do with a drink.’

Tobias got to his feet. Sighed. Boy didn’t even need to ask things directly for you to somehow just do them. A trick in the tone of voice. Those puppy-dog sad eyes. ‘You’re not really supposed to order your squad commander around, boy. And we haven’t got any booze left, if that’s what you mean. There’s water for tea, as long as it’s drawn well up river of … that. Seeing as you’re a hero and all, I’ll go and get you some.’ He started off towards the camp. ‘Want something to eat while I’m at it?’

An attempt at drinks and dinner. Get the camp sorted so someone with a particularly iron stomach could get a bit of sleep in that wasn’t mostly full of dreams of blood and entrails and your tent- mate’s face running off like fat off a kebab. The final butcher’s bill on file: Jonar, the man who had hacked the thing’s stomach open, had disappeared completely, his body totally eaten away; four others were dead including Gulius; one was dying from bathing in fire and hot steam. Skie finished this last off cleanly by taking off his crispy melted black and pink head. Another four were badly wounded: Tobias suspected two at least would be lucky to survive the night. One, a young man called Newlin who was a member of his squadron, had a burn on his right leg that left him barely able to stand. Tobias had already decided it would be a kindness to knife him at the earliest opportunity. One of the other lads was bound to make a botch of it otherwise.

They’d only lost three men in the last year, and they had largely been the victims of unfortunate accidents. (How could they have known that pretty farmer’s daughter had had a pruning hook hidden under her cloak? She hadn’t even put up much resistance until that point.) Losing ten was a disaster, leaving them dangerously approaching being under-manned.

Piss poor luck, really, all in all, sitting down for lunch in front of a convenient bit of rock and it happening to have a dragon hiding behind it. Even if it wasn’t a very large one.

They were still pitching the tents when Skie’s servant Toman appeared. Reported that Skie wanted to see Marith Dragon Killer for a chat.

‘Hero’s welcome,’ said Tobias with a grin. Though you never could tell with Skie. Could just be going to bollock the boy for not killing it sooner.

Marith got up slowly. Something like fear in his eyes. Or pain, maybe.

Tobias shivered again. Funny mood, the boy was in.

Chapter Three

Skie’s tent was beautiful old leather, well cured, unlike the smelly, greasy cloth things the men slept under, embossed with a design of looping flowers. The colours of the paint still showed in places, even some touches of gold leaf. Looted from somewhere, Marith was certain. Probably part of a lady’s hunting pavilion. Although they usually had a little jewelled flag on the top. Skie’s had a skeletal hand.

Skie himself was a small, thin man, grey and hard, his head bald. A straggly grey beard, which he’d look much better without, a scar across the bridge of his nose. Nothing exceptional, until he moved, and you saw he had lost his left arm at the elbow. Marith looked down at the ragged burns on his own left hand.

‘So.’ Skie fixed him with cold eyes. ‘The dragon killer himself. I suppose we all owe you our lives.’ He gestured to Marith to sit down opposite him outside the tent entrance. ‘Rather more than I assumed you were capable of when I first encountered you, I must admit. Out of interest, how’d you know where to stab it?’

‘I know how to kill dragons.’

‘That seems unarguable. I was asking how you knew. Not a common piece of knowledge.’

‘I’d have thought that was obvious.’

Skie made a snorting sound, possibly a laugh. ‘You’re either a very determined liar or the worst fool I have ever met, dragon killer. And watch how you speak around me, lad.’ Marith shrank for a moment under his gaze. The dark eyes stared at him, measuring him. Mocking him. The look his father used to give him. Judging. Knowing. Scornful. Don’t judge me, he thought bitterly. You’ve not exactly made much of life yourself, from the look of you.

There was a small leather book on the ground between them, very old, battered and ripped in places, the thick leather cover faded to an indeterminate shade of brown-green-grey. Skie licked his fingers, began thumbing through it carefully. Some of the tension between them released; Marith looked at the book with interest, breathing in its musty scent. A memory: curling into a chair with a pile of old books, stories, poems, histories, travelogues. Simple pleasures. Good, honest things. He shook his head and the memory faded. At least the geography might finally start coming in useful, he thought. Almost laughed in pain.

Skie expertly manipulated the book with his one hand until he found the right page. He produced a pen and an ink stone from his pack. Licked the pen to begin.

‘What is it?’ Marith asked.

The grey face creased in an angry frown. ‘You don’t ask questions of your commander, boy. You need to remember that. Speak when spoken to. Otherwise, shut up and obey. It’s a record of the company’s more notable deeds. Battles won, cities looted, that kind of thing. It’s not been written in much in the last few years. “Small village pillaged, two old men killed” isn’t exactly the stuff of legends. The Long Peace hasn’t been kind to the likes of us. But I think a dragon and a dragon killer deserve noting.’

Skie’s writing was blotchy, the careful, uncertain script of a man who was only semi-literate. Though, actually, thinking about it, that was perhaps unfair. Perhaps impressive he could write at all, especially one-handed. Marith’s own hand itched with impatience watching the shaky progress of the words across the page.

‘Lundra, twenty-seven Earth,’ said Skie slowly, sounding out every word. Marith pulled his mouth closed over the misspelling of the word ‘Erth’. ‘On this day, did Marith, the newest recruit to the noble Company, valiantly slay a dragon in the deserts east of Sorlost. Reward: six iron pennies’. Should be a silver mark, but we’re down on provisions and there’s nothing to spend it on out here anyway.’ He smiled coldly at Marith. ‘Certainly nothing that would interest you, boy. Go and see Toman about the money. He might even give it to you.’

I killed a dragon, Marith thought bitterly as he walked back to his own tent. I killed a dragon, you ungrateful old man. You should be thanking all your gods and demons for it. Not laughing at me. There was an itchy feeling in his body, he felt raw and sick. Shut his eyes, breathed deeply. Keep calm, he thought. Just keep calm. Everything will be all right. When he opened his eyes again the light was brilliant, leaving him momentarily blind. Blinked, staring, rubbed at his eyes. It’s all right. It’ll be all right. It’s better than it was. It is. The harsh dun landscape seemed almost unreal. He looked around the encampment. Fires were being tended, more soupy porridge prepared. Someone with more luck than Alxine had caught and butchered a crow and was trading it for tea and salt. Two men sat dicing in the shade of a scrubby thorn tree; another two argued heatedly over the price of a battered cook pot. The six iron pennies were sticky in his hand. He sighed and shoved them into his jacket pocket. There was indeed nothing to spend them on out here.

When he got back to his tent, he found that Alxine had kindly cut him a square of the dragon’s skin as a souvenir.

They marched the next morning, walking fast to get as much distance as possible between themselves and the dead dragon. In the morning heat, it had indeed begun to stink, rotten and rancid and with the dry pungency of boiled metal, and had started to draw crows. Insects. Even a scrub eagle. Small corpses now littered the ground around it.

‘You’d think they’d have some natural aversion to it,’ said Rate curiously. ‘Smelling like that and all. Things round my cousin’s farm know to avoid bad meat.’

Tobias gestured around at the empty landscape. ‘Isn’t exactly too much to eat around here. Probably desperate for anything with blood in it. Meat smells like meat, if you’re hungry enough. Besides,’ – a grin and a wink at Marith – ‘I don’t suppose they’ve encountered a dead dragon very often, them being notoriously difficult to kill.’

Two more men had died in the night from the unfortunate complication of not being able to walk well enough to keep up with the troop. One of them was Newlin. Marith felt rather sorry for him, especially as they’d been sharing a tent, but perhaps it had been for the best. Also the man had been asleep at the time, so it wasn’t like he’d realized what was happening.

Alxine seemed surprisingly upset about it though, his deep copper-coloured face dark with concern. ‘He was a comrade,’ he said repeatedly. ‘We shared a tent. He trusted us.’

‘He wasn’t a comrade, he was a member of my squad,’ said Tobias shortly. ‘And he was a liability, state his leg was in. It would probably have gone bad anyway. Spared him, like.’

True enough. Made more space in the tent, too.

Mid-afternoon, they crested a small hill and found themselves looking down on a small, scrubby village, five houses huddled around a central barn. The largest population centre they’d encountered for days now. Several of the men cheered.

After much discussion, Skie sent a handful of men down into the village to buy or trade for provisions. They returned with a particularly scrawny dead goat, a sack of onions and five good-sized clay bottles of something liquid. As nobody in the village spoke Immish, the last five hundred years having apparently entirely passed them by, and almost nobody outside the Empire spoke more than the most basic Literan, its grammar and syntax being possibly the most complex things known to man, the drink’s exact nature remained a mystery. It was brownish, frothy and smelled alcoholic so was declared to be beer, though it might equally well have been weed-killer from the taste of it. Though, as far as Marith could see, they were lucky to have managed to acquire anything, the foraging party having been reduced to the well-known language of pointing at their bellies and holding out a couple of coins while shouting ‘food’ and ‘money’ in Immish, Pernish and even Aen. If they were really, really unlucky, the stuff in the bottles was a local cure for the gripe.

‘Couldn’t buy more,’ Tobias pointed out to them in the face of grumblings, ‘village is too big to raid without drawing notice, this near, and it would rather give the game away if we start buying supplies for forty men.’ He seemed to think for a moment. ‘Thirty men, I mean.’

The probably-beer was carefully divided up between the men in a makeshift wake for the dragon’s victims. Disgusting, but surprisingly strong: the small cup Marith had gulped down was making his head feel pleasantly muzzy after several weeks of brackish water and tea. His eyes began to itch again. Breathe, he thought desperately. It’s all right. Just breathe. He clenched his hands tightly. Concentrated on the feel of his nails digging into the skin of his palms. Pain. Calm. Breathe.

He must have made some kind of twitching movement, because a couple of the other men turned to look at him.

‘You all right, lad?’ Alxine asked. Sounded genuinely concerned.

‘I’m fine.’ Clenched his hands more tightly, took a long sip of water.

‘Boy can’t take the taste of proper beer, that’s all,’ said Emit. He couldn’t be more than five years older than Marith. I’ll kill him one day, Marith thought. I’d kill him now, if Skie wouldn’t have me beheaded for it.

He rubbed his eyes again, harder this time. Pain. Calm. Breathe. Everything will be all right. Just stop thinking these things.

Rate burst out laughing. ‘Oh, come on, Emit, drop the whole “real beer” shtick. The stuff tastes like donkey’s piss and you know it. Goat’s ready, anyone wants some.’

‘Going begging, is it?’

‘Think this goat was past begging long before we started on it. Worse state than the porridge, this goat.’

‘Delicacy, in Allene, slow-roasted goat guts.’

‘I’m not entirely sure that’s its guts …’

Alxine carved them all portions, serving them elegantly on beds of thin oat porridge flavoured with rotten onion. It tasted debatably worse than the beer. ‘Gods, imagine living out here, drinking donkey piss and eating rancid goat’s dick every day of your life,’ he said cheerfully. ‘At least we’ve got violent death to look forward to in a few days’ time.’

‘I think the beer’s making you maudlin,’ said Rate. ‘Lucky for everyone, it’s run out. Anyone know any thank-all-the-gods-I’m-no-longer-drinking songs?’

Such empty things. Pointless. That they could live so fiercely, in the shadow of the certainty of their death. That they could live at all, and feel contentment in it. Marith got up, walked a little away from the others, out into the dark. The air was very cold, pure and dry in his mouth. He breathed it in in great gulps. Stars blazed overhead, a thousand blind eyes. Gods. Beautiful women. Dead souls. The Crescent. The White Lady. The Dragon’s Mouth. The Fire Star.

It had been a long time since he’d looked up at the stars like this. He and Carin used to watch them sometimes, lying back side by side on mossy grass or the damp sand of a beach, hands circled together, hair entwined. Carin had known all their names. In the starlight his hair had been pale as ashes. Stars reflected in his eyes.

‘There’s your star, Marith, and there’s mine. Look! And there’s the Worm, and the Maiden, and the Crown of Laughing, and that big green one is the Tear. You see it?’

‘I see it.’ Spinning, flickering in his vision, a blizzard of light. His star.

But he mustn’t think about Carin.

The weight of the stars felt crushing on his body, the endless remorselessness of them, the sheer number of them. Looking up into them was like a death, an annihilation of the self. The great abyss, yawning over everything. The dark. All there really was was the dark. The one true thing. He could feel it, deep inside his skin. It knows you. Knows what you are. Stared upwards, letting his mind empty. Utterly silent, the desert. A man could walk forever out here until he went mad from thirst or loneliness. A man could live out here, in peace, away from everything. Just sit and stare up at the stars until his mind gave way. A man could die out here, slowly, painfully, burnt up by the heat of the sun and the dry dust. He pressed his hand into his pocket, where the six iron pennies still sat. I killed a dragon yesterday, he thought. The words exalted him. I killed a dragon.

He walked back towards the campfire. In his tent, he wrapped himself in his cloak and settled down to sleep, gazing up again through the tear in the canvas at the stars. The others were still sitting by the fire talking; he could hear their voices without understanding, as though in delirium or dream. It was strangely comforting. Like being a child again, hearing voices murmuring across the room as he slept.

Woke with a start to the feel of water. He sat up in a confused panic, momentarily uncertain where he was or why his face was wet. His movement woke Alxine, who sat up too, his hand going instinctively for his sword.

‘It’s only me,’ Marith hissed. ‘It’s all right.’

Alxine muttered something unintelligible, lay down, then sat up again. ‘What’s that sound?’ he asked, a note of fear in his voice. They were all on edge, after the dragon.

‘Rain. It’s rain.’

‘Rain?’

Astonishingly, gloriously, it was raining. Great, heavy, thick drops of summer rain, warm and fragrant, pounding on the walls of the tent like horses’ hooves. Marith crawled out and stood still, letting the water stream down his face and soak into his clothes and hair. Almost dawn: the sky was pale with the light coming. Men stumbled out of their tents, staring at the rain, laughing or cursing where the dust was turning to mud beneath them. They looked like ghosts in the half-light, veiled by the sheet of water. A little gulley burst into life, water rushing down it, carrying stones with it that knocked together as they went.

Rate leapt out of his tent with a shout of delight. He knelt down by the newly made stream, pouring water over his head and shoulders, threw himself backwards, soaking his head and torso, clambering out again a moment later shivering in the cold air but gleaming clean. Some of the other men joined him, so that the stream was filled with shouting, shivering, jostling bodies. Alxine, who had crawled out of the tent grumbling at the noise, stood and watched them with a grin.

‘You’re not going to bathe?’ Marith asked him. After time spent sharing a tent, the idea of Alxine washing was remarkably appealing. The great advantage of Newlin dying was that there’d been a bit more space last night between his head and Alxine’s feet.

‘Maybe once they’re done.’ Alxine retreated under the cover of the tent, lay down wrapped in his cloak. ‘Rain madness, the desert folk call it.’ He shook his head. ‘Never thought I’d see grown men so excited about getting wet.’

The sun rose, and plants began to unfold in the desert. The thorn bushes unravelled, releasing tiny green leaves soft as kittens’ ears; coarse patches of sickly yellow delft grass put forth brilliant pink flowers with crimped edges like torn silk. A flock of jewel-green birds descended to bathe and drink in the puddles. Insects burst out from the cracked earth, iridescent beetles the size of a man’s thumb, yellowish grasshoppers with huge brown eyes. Even a couple of small dark-coloured frogs that splashed frantically in the shallows of the pool.

Marith stared at it all in wonder. So much life. So much life in this dead place. The air smelled of life. The stream sang of life. The sky was luminous with life, colourless, liquid. He felt a wild peaceful happiness inside him, like when he was a child, standing on a high rock looking down into the sea, arms raised aloft in triumph.