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run. That was all that mattered. Getting away. Everything else came later, if it came at all, with the dazed knowing that you were still
alive.
    The mouth of the canal was about the size of a dragon’s head. The rest wouldn’t fit. It would have to smash its way in. He had time. Time to get away.
    Jex had been up there. Relk, Marran, Kasern. All dead. A snap of fate’s fingers and gone, just like that.
    A storm of warm air tore at his clothes. The dragon was too far away to hurt him. Yet. He tried to think about where each foot was going, in between the chaos of broken stones and dragon eggs.
Just that. Nothing else.
    Then he saw the second one. Down in the cisterns. A huge wriggling shape, a shadow in the distant haze, weaving between the columns. Saw a flicker of it, hundreds of yards away, coming towards
him before the fire from the first dragon stopped, plunging them all back into darkness. Jasaan and Vish? He had no idea where they were, whether they were alive.
    He kept moving. The alchemists said that dragons talked in your head sometimes, but he’d never had that. Kill, eat, burn, that’s all a dragon was.
    The ground shook again, now with the crash of tumbling stone. That was the dragon worming its way towards him, given up on not smashing down the columns that held the cisterns together. A mad
grin swept across his face. Maybe they’d all end up buried alive. Entombed together. A fitting end for an Adamantine Man.
    His foot caught on something. Hurled forward, he curled up before he even hit the ground, rolled and let his armour take the impact. First thing he did when he was back on his feet was check the
pouches of dragon poison wrapped around him. Instinct, that was. There wasn’t much else you could do about a dragon except be eaten, and there wasn’t much point in that unless you were
going to take the monster with you. All burn together, him from the outside, the dragon from within. What else was the point?
    Thing was to get to an edge, a wall, somewhere that would give shelter when the roof came down. Then hunker down and pray.
    Shudders rippled through the ground. More tumbling stones and the cisterns lit up with fire again. He didn’t look back, took what he could get and sprinted. There was no running from
dragons, but that didn’t stop a man wanting to try, not when there was one right behind you.
    A deeper rumble shook the earth. The dragon behind him roared. The stones answered. A huge hand of air plucked Skjorl off his feet and threw him across the floor, bouncing between dragon eggs.
He thumped into a step and cracked his head hard enough to make the world waver, even through his helmet. He blinked hard. Everything went dark again. The fire had stopped. The air was ripe with
dust, rich with the smell of falling masonry and the rumble of tumbling stone.
    He sniffed. Fresh air from outside too. Sand. The smell of sand and salt.
    He smiled, but that wasn’t enough so he laughed, and even then he needed more. ‘You stupid dragon,’ he roared. ‘You actually did it. Vishmir’s cock!’ He stood
up, filled with being alive. Filled with what felt like victory. Took a few steps back towards where the dragon had been before he stopped himself. Still couldn’t see a thing.
    There was the other one. Somewhere.
    Ought to slip off. Tiptoe between the eggs and hope another one didn’t hatch. Ought to. Really, really ought to. That’s what a man with an ounce of sense would do.
    ‘Vish? Skjorl?’
    Jasaan?
He tried to make out where the call had come from. He counted to ten and when there wasn’t a raging dragon coming after him he reached for his firebox. Mad.
What am I
doing?
But by the time he’d asked himself that, the firebox was lit. Didn’t help much. All he could see was a thick mist of dust.
    ‘Skjorl?’ Jasaan’s voice was laced with pain.
    ‘Jasaan?’ Took a couple of steps. Stopped.
Somewhere
out there was still a dragon. Maybe more than one. Maybe the hatchlings