by Stephen Deas
Bellepheros was getting impatient, fretting about his hatchery. Liang left the reliefs for another time and walked up the ramp. As soon as she stepped inside the gondola itself, she knew it belonged to Mai’Choiro. The entire space was a monument to his vanity. Three portraits hung between the windows; everything was wrought in Vespinese silver and studded with emeralds; dragons and lions peered at her from every nook and yet it was clearly the design of a kwen. The windows lining the curved silver walls were staggered, some of them looking down, others looking up. Much of the floor was gold-glass spoked with gold. Liang wondered for a moment if the gondola even had its own lightning cannon, but no, the gold-glass was simply to observe directly below. Fitted into the walls either side of the golem pilot’s cabinet, two small black-powder guns pointed out. Liang paused to run her fingers over them. The best Scythian steel. Vanity or did they really have the power to hurt another glasship? She knelt down beside them to see if she could discern any mechanism to turn them and then stopped short. Fascinated as she was, now was hardly the time or the place.
The centrepiece of the gondola was a huge round table of polished obsidian. The gondola had been empty as she and Bellepheros entered but now she heard the air pop and felt the touch of a breeze. When she looked back, seven Elemental Men sat around the table, all in identical black robes edged with entwined strands of red, blue and white and impossible to tell apart. They beckoned to her to sit, and for the rest of the evening they asked about the dragons, on and on, what they were and where they came from and what they did. They pressed Bellepheros for everything he knew on their nature. Had there always been dragons? He didn’t know. Where had they come from? He didn’t know that either, but they continued on into the night until Liang thought she knew as much about the history of Belli’s world as he did himself. The killers asked how dragons were restrained, about the potions he made, about what a dragon would become without them – Belli couldn’t help himself when they got to that and ranted for some time about the hatchling that had gone missing and the dire threat of it and how everything else must stop until it had been found and destroyed, but the Elemental Men seemed barely interested. They let him exhaust himself with pleas and threats and exhortations and then calmly asked how much poison he would need to kill all the dragons and how long it would take to make it. One of the Elemental Men spent the entire time furiously writing down everything that was said.
A t’varr and some slaves came with food and water, but the Elemental Men touched nothing. When Bellepheros and Liang had eaten, they told her to go out and make a gold-glass shelter for Zafir up on the wall so she could live beside her dragon for now. After that they sent the two of them to rest for the night but the questions resumed in the morning, this time about dragons, their nature and their origins and the taming and keeping of them. For a while they asked about alchemy and blood-magic; and when it came to the Silver King, the half-god who’d tamed the dragons in the first place, they asked about nothing else for two straight hours.
On their way out that second day, Liang and Belli passed Tsen’s slave Kalaiya walking across the dragon yard to take their place in the gondola. She looked shrivelled and smaller than Liang remembered. Her face was puffed but she held herself stiffly straight. Liang tried to catch her eye but Kalaiya stared pointedly into the far distance until the gondola swallowed her up. When the Elemental Men were done with her, the dragon-rider’s slaves came next. Liang had stayed in the yard to watch and glanced across at the dragon. It wasn’t looking at the Godspike any more. It was looking at the gondola.
‘Kalaiya!’ Liang called. Kalaiya stopped. She turned and took a deep breath and then slowly lowered herself to her knees. She must have been younger than Liang but she moved like an old woman. Tsen’s death had done that to her.
‘Mistress.’
Liang shook her head and quickly pulled Kalaiya back to her feet. ‘No, no. None of that.’ She offered an embrace but Kalaiya simply stood wrapped in Liang’s arms like a lump of dough. ‘I told Tsen that I’d look after you,’ Liang said. ‘When they came for him. If there’s anything—’
‘He’s dead.’ Her voice was flat and lifeless.
‘I know, and—’
‘They’re going to take Sea Lord Quai’Shu to Khalishtor for trial. They’ll hold him in the Elemental Palace at the foot of Mount Solence. We’re not allowed to talk to him. He’s forbidden to speak to anyone.’
Liang snorted. ‘Quai’Shu lost the last bits of his mind months ago. He’s as mad as Zaklat the Death Bat. What’s the point of talking to him, for pity’s sake?’
‘They’ll hang the rest of us here.’ Kalaiya turned away and then looked back. ‘Tsen said you would be a friend. They killed him days ago.’ A sob shook her. ‘I heard them talking. They said it was poison. They think he killed himself but he didn’t.’ Her face set hard. ‘He was going to face them. He knew they’d hang him anyway but he was going to face them’
‘I know.’ Poison. That’s why Liang hadn’t seen any wound.
‘They stabbed him in the back. Those bastards.’ Abruptly Kalaiya burst into tears, and this time when Liang held her she shook and shuddered with her grief until she pulled away and for a moment her eyes blazed. ‘You were a friend to him, Chay-Liang. Give me a wand. They mean to bring Mai’Choiro Kwen to the dragon yard to hear their orders for the eyrie. Give me a wand that a slave can use and I’ll see he never hears them. Or a knife to make him bleed.’
‘You’ll never get close. They’ll kill you.’
‘I don’t care! I have nothing left!’
‘I can’t, Kalaiya. Go back inside.’ It almost crushed Liang to send her away without giving her some sort of hope.
Mai’Choiro, though . . .
Liang ran back inside, ignoring Belli’s indignant protests about the hatchery. She wrapped black silk across her eyes, the silk that let her see through the eyes of her little enchanted glass dragon, and waited to see what would happen.
18
Warlocks and Other Things Best Forgotten
At night the dragon Silence watched. Through the day it flew along the coast for hundreds of miles. It found the edge of the desert where it blurred into smudges of green that grew and then sprawled into a thick jungle of emerald trees laced through with silver ribbons of water. It found clouds and lush hills that drew the rain out of them before they could reach the desert beyond. All these things but no cities of the little ones.
It hunted and returned, perched on a rock in the night and listened to the thoughts and memories of the little one who carried the splinter of the Black Moon. It poked a little and prodded, but only with the lightest touch. Before the sun rose it flew away, out to sea until it found another curtain of the storm-dark, stretched out, endless to the eye. It dived beneath the water, down until it reached the bottom, and in the depths there purple lightning flashed, dim and distant and full of sullen purpose, lighting the black water. There were no fish, no crawling things on many legs scuttling in the darkness, no glow-eyed jelly creatures. Life knew better than to be close to the Nothing. The dragon Silence rose again and burst into the air, long and sharp and hard in glittering spray, and returned to seek the little ones once more. It drew out their thoughts and divined their destination – the Queverra – and when the dragon sought to see this place in their memories, it saw a scar across the earth, the bottomless chasm it had crossed some days before.
It found the Crowntaker once more. It dug into his thoughts, peeling the layers of his life like an onion.
‘Did I ever tell you about Utthen of Merizikat?’ Berren walked with his hands tied to a pole. Five other slaves had their hands tied to the same pole in front of him and three more followed behind. Tuuran was on another pole beside him. Their feet were tied too, with ropes loose enough for walking but too short to run.
‘I’m not listening to you.’ Tuuran made a big show of looking somewhere else.
‘Utthen of Merizikat! Name not mean anything?’ They walked like tha
t, night after night over hard-baked earth, dry and dusty. Tufts of hostile spiny grass and stunted thorn bushes ambushed them in the twilight now and then, tearing at legs and feet.
‘I think I am hearing some noises. Might it be a large dangerous animal? I hope so – then it might eat someone.’
‘Merizikat. In the Dominion. They have some catacombs there. They hang people under the ground. The worst sorts. They take them from all across the provinces. Thousands of miles some of them come. They hang them underground and then leave their bodies in the catacombs so their souls can never reach the sun.’ They walked in the mornings as the sun rose and the heat of the day began to build, rested and hid in what shade they could find from midday until late in the afternoon, then walked again until long after dark and then slept, the same every day.
‘Or is that noise the wind? Come to think of it, it does sound like a lot of hot air.’
‘Utthen of Merizikat. Pretended to be a necromancer. Came from somewhere in the far south. Claimed he’d murdered more than a hundred souls. Entire villages. So they locked him up and took him a thousand miles to be hanged in Merizikat. But it turned out he wasn’t a necromancer at all. He just had business there and was too tight to pay for passage.’ Berren’s legs ached. He was hungry and tired and thirsty but most of all he was numb inside, as though all the colour had drained out of him and every memory was a washed-out grey. Fasha stayed, a slowly dimming pain, the memory of her face blurring, the sharpness of remembered feeling leaching out every day.
‘Did they hang him anyway?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Bit of a crap story then.’
Tuuran went back to ignoring him. The slavers made their next midday camp in the lee of a great cliff. They propped up shelters and walked among their captives, giving each a meagre cup of water and a wedge of dry stale bread. Berren dozed, woken again when it was time to go by sharp shouts and prodding feet. The slaves pulled wearily at each other, all having to get up at once along the pole that bound them together, tripping over the ropes around their feet. Some were close to the end of their endurance. Berren had no idea what would happen when the first one fell. It wouldn’t be him. That was all that mattered.
They trudged on, the slavers exhorting them to a faster pace with threats and now and then the crack of a whip. They followed the base of a cliff, the sun behind them now as they headed ever eastward. The world around Berren narrowed to the heat on his back, the pain across his shoulders from the wooden pole, the aches in his legs and his feet and the cracked-dry earth in front of him where each next step would fall. The reluctant sun sank to the horizon, darkness fell and a full moon rose. They passed the cliff and headed into open ground and a breeze swept across from the north. A light puff of wind but delicious nevertheless.
The dead of Merizikat. Stupid story, although that reminded him of even more stupid stories from the galley back when he’d been a slave. Stories of how the dead men lying in the catacombs had started getting up and walking again these last few years. And that was simply ridiculous, or so he’d thought until he’d gone back to his old home of Deephaven and found the streets he used to know had become a necropolis, crawling with the walking talking bastard dead. He shuddered at the memory. With their eyes stitched shut – what was that about?
Deephaven and the dead. Made him think of warlocks, of Saffran and Vallas and Skyrie; out of nowhere they bloomed inside his thoughts, unexpected, unwanted and unwelcome. Skyrie had stopped fighting him years ago. The warlock’s memories were dead things, passive and still, but they remained. Memories of the memories of another man, now escaped somehow from the closets in which he’d put them. He remembered walking into the Pit under the castle of Tethis, knowing what Vallas Kuy meant to do. He remembered being Berren on a field a few miles away with sigils scribed in blood pressed to his chest in the heat of battle. He remembered the horror as he was ripped out of himself and Skyrie’s horror as they merged, for that wasn’t how Vallas had meant it to be.
He’d never stopped to think much about this other man Skyrie. All that had counted back then was that they were trapped together, that only one of them could win and that it had to be him. Skyrie had been a warlock, a minion to the soap maker. Little else. It was all that mattered.
But no, there had to be more.
No. Nothing that mattered.
Remember it anyway.
A farmer then. A poor village boy from somewhere. Berren had never heard the name of the place, only knew that it was on the edge of a lake beside a swamp, surrounded by reed beds. Didn’t even know what kingdom. He’d had a sister. Men had come to his village. Soldiers on horses. Raiders who took whatever caught their eye. One year they came twice and something bad had happened and . . .
He could see the scar on his leg. Cut to the bone across his thigh, it was a savage wound. The skin had closed in time, twisted and warped and folded but healed. The leg worked well enough now.
The second time they came, they killed every man, woman and child. They burned Skyrie’s village to ash and he was the only one who lived because he’d already crawled out into the reeds to die that night. The leg had gone bad. And yet he hadn’t died after all and he’d come back in the morning and found everything gone. He’d followed the tracks of the soldiers but lost them. Then he met an old man with a half-ruined face, scarred by pox or fire and with one blind milky eye, who claimed he’d seen some soldiers come by not long ago, a villainous-looking lot, and he knew who they were too. The Bloody Judge’s men.
A lie. A lie a lie a lie!
Something about the old man. He’d travelled with Skyrie a little way. Only a few days. The soldiers were long gone by then, beyond his reach, but there were men who would help him, the old man said. Men in Tethis. He should look for the soap maker. And so he did, and told his story and learned everything there was to learn about the wickedness of the Bloody Judge, the mercenary lord who took his band of outlaws up and down the little kingdoms and answered to no one and left a trail of wailing women and fatherless children behind him. The greatest evil north of Kalda, but in Tethis something would be done. Queen Gelisya meant to bring an end to his reign of terror.
He remembered Vallas, the soap maker. Remembered him both as Skyrie and as Berren the Bloody Judge, years before on a ship and years later, a few days ago when Berren had finally found him in Dhar Thosis and killed him.
Aria, Skyrie, where the Ice Witch keeps him in a gilded cage. He gave you a gift. One that not even she knows. The warlock’s last words. He had no idea what they meant.
A gift?
He’d never understood.
Saffran Kuy’s last apprentice. The man with one eye. The man with the half-ruined face.
You ask me who you are, Skyrie, but that’s not the question. The question is what?
A man with a half-ruined face. He’d seen a man like that before. The old man who’d sent him to the soap maker. But somewhere else as well.
Where?
In Skyrie’s memories. The ones that came out in his dreams. He pushed deeper.
Bloodied and broken and crawling to his death in the swamps while the stars above winked out one by one. With a man standing over him in robes the colour of moonlight, his pale face scarred ragged by disease or fire, one blind eye milky white. Fingers that traced symbols over him. Air that split open like swollen flesh. Black shadow that oozed from the gashes left behind.
There was something out of place in Skyrie’s memories. He hadn’t seen it before because he hadn’t looked or cared. But Skyrie had crawled away into a swamp to die with one leg festering and ruined beyond repair and in the morning he’d walked out again. Walked out . . .
The wound in his leg. There were marks within the scar, impossibly intricate, silvery lines and whorls like runes. Like the sigils of the warlocks. The man with the one eye . . .
But he’d met the old man with the one eye afterwards, not then. The one who’d told him about the soldiers, who’d sent him to Vall
as . . .
Show me!
For a moment Berren stumbled. Show me?
It fills the hole, you see. Words Gelisya had spoken to him once. The Dark Queen before that’s what she became. Like the Black Moon and the Dead Goddess fill the hole in the world. He showed me. You have to keep it closed. Otherwise something will come through. Not yet but one day. Before you both come back for the very last time. You have to keep it closed. Even with her lips almost touching his ear, her whisper was so quiet he could barely hear her. He’s making us ready. To let it in when the Ice Witch brings down the Black Moon.
And then Skyrie again, that night in the swamp where everything changed. What will you give? the one-eyed stranger had asked.
Anything, he replied.
And everything?
Everything.
Anything and everything.
The hole was there. For the second time he looked inside and saw that he was not alone. He saw that something looked back.
The Black Moon.
The stranger with the half-ruined face and the milky eye had put it there. Inside Skyrie. Inside him. And he saw too that all along there had been other eyes behind his own, peering with a quiet hunger over his shoulder at every vision and every memory, pushing and nudging and guiding him towards revelation.
The Black Moon saw too.
I see you, little worm.
Destroyer! Who let you loose?
