by Stephen Deas
6
Silence
The dragon Silence darted and danced through the underworld of Xibaiya until it found a waiting egg. It eased into the dormant skin as a man might slip on an old shoe and was reborn as flesh and bone. The sensation was a familiar comfort and yet always new. Every skin was different. What colours will I be? What sex? Will my tail be long? My neck? How many fangs shall I have? All these things were a joy of discovery with every hatching, yet this time it paused and held back the urge to writhe and smash its way to freedom. Inside its egg it opened its brand-new inner eye and let its senses roam, searching for thoughts and other things to which the little ones were blind.
Within its egg the dragon called Silence remained quiet. It found much and looked at all the things its mind could touch in this strange and wonderful place where it soon would be born, filled with alien thoughts. It found sorceries that were fresh and strange and one that was ancient and familiar and colossal and overwhelming, older than the dragon itself. Something made before its first ever dawn, remembered from a joyous lifetime more than a thousand years ago.
It looked and bided its time. Men with ropes and chains were always watching, waiting for an egg to hatch. Men with lightning too, which was new. It slid inside their thoughts and sang songs of faraway dreams. It watched and listened and waited with a patience that strained its nature for the moment to be free. While it did, it wove mysteries into the wandering memories of those who watched over it, lullabies to make them dull.
When the killers came, flying on their weaves of magic and sorcery, the dragon felt them first.
The Lords of Vespinarr
7
The Dark of Night
Zafir sat on a wooden stool, eyes wide, and stared at the door to her prison. The soft glow of the walls echoed the night, full and deep with the moon clear and bright. There had been places in the Pinnacles like this. Empty white stone halls inside the mountain where no one ever went because there was nothing there except pristine colonnades and arches carved into walls that led nowhere. Light came from everything in those places. Even in the Octagon, her mother’s throne room, the light had been like this. All of it left behind by the Silver King. So she knew it was night, the time of the deep dark, and that the moon was up and that everything slept, perhaps even her dragons.
Everything but her.
Her head throbbed with fatigue. Her brow was knotted. She yawned with every other breath but sleep had abandoned her to unwept tears, to frustration and despair. Always at this hour, always the same, ever since she’d let them bring her down here. Let them, and now every night she went through it over and over again in an endless loop she was powerless to stop. She could have gone anywhere after Dhar Thosis. Diamond Eye had burned its houses and smashed its palaces, rent their glass towers to ruin and crashed their glasships into myriad splinters. He’d killed the sorcerous assassin sent to stop her and she’d left the ground a-glitter like desert sand in the midday sun, awash in a sea of smoke and flames. With a storm of victory in her heart, she could have gone anywhere. She could have declared war on them all.
Yet when Tsen’s soldiers had come, she’d been shivering, dripping wet from his stupid bath and almost naked. She could have been six years old again. She hadn’t even tried to fight. What was the point? Over and over she ran the memories in her mind, wondering why. She touched a hand to her breast and murmured to herself, ‘No mercy for pretty Zafir.’
Her slaves came every day. They brought her food and water and a fresh chamber pot. Myst and Onyx, named after dragons she’d once owned. From the way their eyes brushed over her, she still had their hearts, but they never spoke, not here. When they came, they always came with others. Men, watching. Listening. Zafir never saw them but she felt their presence. And an absence too; for she always saw the hole where the third of her slaves had been. Brightstar, murdered by Shrin Chrias Kwen before she’d even set foot on Taiytakei soil. Shrin Chrias Kwen who’d sent his men to rape her so that she could understand what it meant to be a slave among the Taiytakei.
The air was thin now. They’d moved the eyrie somewhere high. She’d felt that and the headaches that came with it for a while.
The walls stared back at her, silent and still. The door to her room was an ill-fitting iron thing that didn’t belong, wedged into an opening in the soft glow of the white stone walls. She’d seen iron doors sprout everywhere before they took her, forced into places where no door was ever meant to be, but the stone never yielded. Never chipped, never scratched, smooth and pristine as if freshly polished, everywhere except for the scar in the eyrie wall where Diamond Eye had lashed it with his tail on the first day she’d flown him. Iron and stone everywhere, pressed up against one another, hostile and resentful but given no choice. Two parts that could never be one. Implacable foes without any means to fight but both with an endless will to resist. That was something she understood. They were her companions now.
A twelvenight and three days. She’d counted.
Her eyes wouldn’t even blink. The tears of wishing were enough to keep them moist. Now and then one tipped over and ran down her cheek, but only here in the depths of night where no one would ever know. They were going to kill her for what she’d done, but she wouldn’t let them see her weep because they’d think she was afraid or felt some regret, and they couldn’t have been more wrong. In the skies over Dhar Thosis, Diamond Eye had broken the last of her fear and taught her to be free. And as for regrets? Yes, she had plenty enough, but not for anything she’d done in this world.
I want to go home.
And as they always did, night after night, her thoughts turned to the nine realms she’d ruled as speaker, to the lands of the dragons. She roamed those memories, searching for something and never finding it. Surely there was something there to long for, to yearn to reclaim, yet all she found was a bitter emptiness. The Pinnacles, her home, should have brought memories of warmth and closeness and comfort, yet all she remembered was fear and doubt where the only escape had been the deep abandoned places found in long hours wandering alone. She’d tried to murder her fear there, stabbed it a dozen times and thought that might exorcise it but found she’d only changed its form. Not better, not worse, merely different. In the daylight, when the fire was inside her, she hated everyone who’d ever touched her for what they’d done. Here and now, small and alone in the dark, she only felt pity. Pity for them, pity for her. Pity for everyone. Hollow, that’s what she was. An empty shell. And as the tears ran freely down her cheeks, she knew exactly why she’d spared Baros Tsen T’Varr. Because everything she ever touched turned to ash. Because there was no point in anything, because nothing would make any difference in the end because nothing ever did. Because of Tuuran, the Adamantine Man she’d found again in Dhar Thosis, who was her only memory of any kindness.
Chay-Liang spent most of her nights up on the walls of the eyrie. She couldn’t sleep anyway and the cold and the wind helped clear her head when she was too tired to work on Tsen’s new armour. She paced back and forth, turning now and then to face the incessant gale in the hope it would blow the cobwebs out of her head and help her see more clearly. Maybe Tsen was right – maybe his cause was lost – but there had to be a way to bring the bastard mountain king down with him, didn’t there? It burned inside her, the injustice. The dragon-queen Zafir should hang or burn in her own dragon’s fire and the Vespinese with her, but the world didn’t work like that. Yet there had to be a way!
Low towers dotted the eyrie walls. Watchers scanned the eastern horizon for the pinpricks of light that would be their first sight of Shonda’s glasships when he came – and he would come. He had to – she couldn’t see any way Tsen was wrong about that. Shonda would come and wipe the slate as clean as he could, wipe away all trace of his own hand in what the dragon had done to Dhar Thosis. If he won, the truth would all be down to her.
She cursed. It frightened her. That’s what it was, all this pacing and grinding her teeth – fear. And fea
r burned into anger, and that made her snarl because that was how that witch of a rider-slave worked: fear crushed into rage. She hissed at the wind. She was an enchantress! A mistress of Hingwal Taktse! She had power. There had to be something! Again and again she ran defensive strategies through her head. That was a kwen’s work, and Tsen had a decent enough kwen supervising the eyrie defences, but he was out of his depth with this. They all were. As soon as we see the Vespinese glasships, we tow the eyrie to keep as much of the storm-dark between Shonda and us as possible. Make them cross over as much of it as we can. Maybe they will fear their glasships will fail and fall. Maybe they won’t dare . . . But of course they would dare, because everyone who mattered knew that glasships hardly ever failed and Shonda had hundreds. A few dozen men lost? So what? He’d drive them on regardless.
The dragon shifted on its perch. It gleamed in the moonlight. It had been staring up at the Godspike all night without moving and she found its stillness unsettling. She’d come to know the dragons as restless creatures, but coming here had changed them and she didn’t know why. Nor did Bellepheros. Even the hatchlings spent hours doing nothing but staring at the Godspike, stock still, giving an impression of thinking that made her skin crawl. Dragons weren’t supposed to think. Bellepheros had been adamant about that. As long as he fed them his potions, they were stupid and dull, and that was still quite bad enough! A massive indestructible fire-breathing monster the size of a small galleon, with wings as wide as a glasship and a bad temper? Yes, even the hatchlings were quite bad enough indeed when no one but the rider-slave could control them. Thinking, though . . . Liang shivered.
The great dragon Diamond Eye turned its head to the western horizon and stared at that instead. Chay-Liang frowned and raised her farscope to one eye but saw nothing. Her frown deepened. She might not be able to see anything but the perhaps the dragon could. The Vespinese would come from the west. She shifted uneasily from foot to foot. Or maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s bored with the Godspike at last.
‘Get the alchemist.’ Maybe it’s nothing wasn’t good enough. She looked at the dragon hard. ‘What do you see?’ she whispered. Pointless, and she didn’t dare go up close to it, but Bellepheros had told her that when they weren’t kept dull by his potions, they spoke straight into your head, although mostly only very briefly when they weren’t burning and killing and eating anything that talked back. Maybe they’re like cats. Maybe it’s nothing at all. Another flicker of lightning from the storm-dark and now it’ll stare for hours waiting for it to come again?
It turned and looked at her then. A lazy glance straight at her that near as anything stopped her heart, as though Bellepheros was right and it had been reading her mind. When it looked away again, her chest thumped fit to burst. For a moment she couldn’t move and almost toppled in the wind. She backed away from the dragon and kept on going, looking at it and nothing else until she reached one of the little towers on the wall. Even then she was too frightened to do much except stay where she was until she saw Bellepheros crossing the dragon yard towards her. He was in his sleeping hat and had a thick cloak wrapped around him. Stupid. I’m jumping at ghosts. The look didn’t mean anything. It couldn’t, could it?
Damned wind. It was incessant, a remorseless roaring across the eyrie that wore them all down and frayed her edges, as if they weren’t already frayed enough. It kept pulling the alchemist’s cloak away as he walked and he kept having to tug it back. He yawned when he reached her and didn’t smile. From the look of him and the way he kept rubbing his eyes, he’d actually been asleep for once when the soldiers had roused him.
‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, since sleep was a rare enough thing for either of them these days. He looked at her, frowned as though he hadn’t heard what she’d said over the wind, then shrugged.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ he shouted.
‘It looked . . .’ This wasn’t going to work. She pulled him close so she wouldn’t have to yell. ‘It looked at me, Belli. I want to know what it’s thinking! Has it seen something?’
The alchemist gave a wry smile and chuckled. When her face didn’t change, he took her hand between both of his. ‘It’s thinking that it’s hungry, Li. It’s thinking that it wants to eat us. It’s thinking that it wants to fly. It’s thinking that it hasn’t seen its rider for far too many days. It’s restless because . . .’ His words trailed off and Liang knew why. It was restless because dragons were always restless, but that wasn’t true any more, not since they’d come to this place. Beside the Godspike, the great dragon was the most tranquil she’d ever seen it.
‘I think there’s something out there,’ she said. ‘It keeps staring across the storm-dark. I want to know what it sees. Is there a way? Is it Shonda’s glasships? Even with my farscope I don’t see them. I don’t know, Belli – it just seemed odd.’
‘Dragons have senses other than sight.’ Bellepheros sighed. ‘It’s her Holiness you need, not me.’
The rider-slave. Zafir. There’d been a moment after Zafir had come back from burning Dhar Thosis when Belli had been set on poisoning her. Sometimes Liang wished she hadn’t stopped him. Heartless callous manipulative vicious murdering horror of a human being, that’s what Zafir was. Liang growled and gritted her teeth. ‘Get her.’ The dragon was still peering intently into the night. There was something there. She swore with such venom that Belli took an alarmed step back. ‘If Shonda’s out there then your stone-hearted queen can tear his glasships out of the sky. She’ll like that.’ Yes. She’ll like that far too much. She watched as Bellepheros hurried away, and quietly swore again. Best send someone to get Baros Tsen out of his bed too, eh?
She sent a soldier to do that too and then paced the walls, staring out at the night, trying to spot whatever it was that the dragon could see, snarling to herself at her own foolish anger. The dragon-slave. Nothing but poison from the very start, a slave who refused to be enslaved, who walked about the eyrie as though she owned it, who treated Bellepheros as though he was her own personal minion – and yes, that rankled. Who had two slaves of her own who danced at her every whim even though slaves should never own other slaves. Tsen should have locked her up right at the start and broken her properly but instead he’d let her get away with it. He’d tried to be her friend! Unbelievable! She should drag the soulless witch out of her cell and throw her off the edge of the eyrie before Shonda got hold of her, that’s what she should do. Should have done that a long time ago . . .
‘Glasships!’ The lookouts on the south tower raised the first cry. Liang put her farscope to her eye again and this time she saw them, bright specks like drifting stars, far off in the night and coming from the south instead of the west. Dozens of them, although they were still so far that they were hard to separate from the stars on the horizon. Her heart jumped to a faster beat. Xibaiya! They come! A mile below them the maelstrom of the storm-dark flashed and flickered, dull sparks of purple lightning arcing deep inside it. She’d known for days that this moment waited; now her blood turned to ice and her bones to water.
She barked at another soldier, fear adding a sharpness to her voice, ‘Get Baros Tsen T’Varr now! Tell him Shonda comes!’ Belli hadn’t come back. No matter – they had time yet. The glasships were miles away. It would be another half an hour at least before the eyrie came in range of their lightning cannon. Plenty of time to set a dragon in their midst.
The dragon’s eyes, though, remained set firmly to the west. For a moment it turned its head to look at her a second time. A glance, that was all, freezing her thoughts and pinning her feet to the stone. It met her eye and, Charin help her, curled back its lips to show its fangs, and she could have sworn it was smiling, as though it knew something it cruelly chose not to share. And then it turned back, leaving her reeling, back to where it had been looking before, only now its head turned as though it was following something that was rising and getting closer and closer and . . .
Every hair on her skin prickled. She felt suddenly sick and
clutched at a wall beside her. ‘Holy Charin . . .’ She ran.
Lightning lit up the eyrie in a flash of stunning brilliance. Liang gasped and whimpered at the shock of it. The thunderclap staggered her. On the eyrie rim a black-powder cannon exploded. She reeled, dazzled and dazed, and then a wave of air and light smashed across the dragon yard and knocked her off her feet. As she tried to blink the light out of her eyes and shake the ringing from her ears, darkness fell again; and then she saw the vast shape of a glasship rise slowly past the eyrie rim, over the wall, huge and glittering, a monster from the depths, the golden rim of its outer disc glowing bright as it charged its lightning cannon to fire again. It was close, right on top of them. It had come up from beneath and they hadn’t seen it.
But Shonda’s glasships were still miles away, far out of range . . .
Decoys.
Lit up by the glow of the lightning cannon, a swarm of sleds rose around the glasship’s disc and danced like fireflies towards her. Liang closed her eyes as a scream built up inside her.
8
Silence and the Dragon-queen
The dragon Silence strained its senses, listening. Its mind felt sharp and bright, filled with a thousand years of memory. The taste of the thoughts around it changed. A sharp delicious tang of dread drenched them all, harsh and urgent. Strife. Conflict. Men were coming. They were distant but getting closer, fast and full of hostile hunger. The watchers with their pikes and chains set to stand over their precious eggs were looking away. The dragon Silence felt them reel and stagger; even inside its shell, through closed eyes, it saw the first dim flash of light.
