The Adamantine Palace by Stephen Deas

queen’s white while the seventh circled high overhead, keeping lookout. Since the attack they’d not seen any dragons other than their own, and Sollos was quite sure that they were wasting their time. By now the queen’s white was far away.
    Still, if it meant waiting here until the dead dragon up the slope cooled down and there was a chance of looting some dragonscale . . .
    ‘He’s a bit early.’ Kemir was watching the arrival glide down towards the river. Sollos tore his eyes away from the forest and watched the dragon descend. Before it had even come to a stop, the rider on its back was standing up, unstrapping himself from his harness and sliding out of his saddle.
    Kemir belched and threw a stone towards the river. ‘You don’t suppose they actually found something do you?’ he said. ‘They’re not usually back for hours yet.’
    Sollos shook his head. ‘And there I was looking forward to another peaceful afternoon sucking on grass stalks and scratching my arse.’
    ‘Yeah, and staring up at that dead mound of dragonscale and charcoal up there.’
    ‘We’re not going to get our hands on it. You know that, don’t you?’
    ‘A part of me knows that. We could buy land, you know. Our own little village with our own little subjects. Our own little manor house. With a brewery.’
    ‘And a brothel.’
    ‘Aye, and that.’ Kemir sighed. ‘Like I said, are you sure we couldn’t poison them?’
    ‘Even if we did buy ourselves a title, we’d still answer to the queen.’
    ‘Oh bollocks to her! We could set up somewhere out here, in the mountain valleys.’
    ‘And serve King Valmeyan instead?’ Sollos snorted. ‘I don’t think so. Not him.’
    Kemir’s voice dropped to a growl. ‘No. Not him. Not him at all. Do you think . . .’
    The rider from the dragon was running towards them. A couple of the sentries were close on his heels.
    ‘Uh oh.’ Sollos let his hands drop to his sides and unconsciously fingered the knives at his belt. Kemir stooped down and picked up his bow.
    ‘You two!’ The rider from the dragon stopped a little short of them. ‘Sell-swords!’
    ‘Sell-swords with names,’ muttered Kemir. Sollos took a deep breath, gritted his teeth and bowed.
    ‘Rider Semian. How may we serve?’ Semian was the third or fourth son of Duke Semian. Sollos could never remember which, nor did he particularly care. There were some sisters too. They all lived in the vast tract of arid wasteland known as the Stone Desert and the duke served Queen Shezira as Guardian of the North. Sollos wasn’t quite sure exactly what the duke was supposed to be keeping at bay up there, other than perhaps the use of first names. This particular Semian was about twenty, skinny and buck-toothed. If he’d been born with a different name, Sollos thought it most likely that he’d have grown up as the village idiot somewhere. As it was he was a Semian, so he’d grown up as an idiot who rode a dragon.
    ‘We have found a town, of sorts. Hidden in the mountain valleys.’
    Sollos exchanged a glance with Kemir. ‘Then it most likely falls under the dominion of King Valmeyan, Rider Semian.’ It’s obvious why Queen Shezira didn’t take you south with her. Rider Semian’s helmet was slightly too big for his head, Sollos noticed. It kept slipping forward. Less obvious why she thought you fit to be part of the search for her precious white. Unless she already knows this is a waste of time.
    Now there was a thought. What if the queen herself had been the architect of the attack?
    ‘It is built on the edge of a lake. There is nowhere for a dragon to land. When I passed low over the place, they shot at me.’
    ‘And what did you do, Rider Semian?’ asked Kemir. ‘Did you burn them, Rider Semian?’
    The dragon-knight took a step back, clearly unsettled by the edge in Kemir’s voice. ‘Certainly not, sell-sword.’
    ‘Rider, there are, here and there, settlements among the Worldspine that claim freedom from the dragon