by Stephen Deas
‘Do you notice,’ whispered the Arbiter, ‘how everything revolves around the rider-slave? You see how she chooses who lives and who dies?’ The Arbiter smiled then, almost in admiration. ‘And you all call her a slave.’
‘I would have hanged her months ago,’ murmured Liang.
She didn’t notice when the Arbiter left, only that Red Lin Feyn was suddenly gone and that the light in her room had changed to the moonlight of the small hours. She must have fallen asleep, probably in the middle of answering a question. Hardly appropriate, but she struggled to feel any guilt. Arbiters, when they convened their courts at all, did so in the Dralamut, and mostly concerned themselves with arcane disputes about trade entitlements and access to storm-dark lines. For the most part the sea lords kept their arguments quiet or else settled them in other realms where the Arbiter and the Elemental Men didn’t see and didn’t care. That was how it had been for a hundred years and more.
‘Li? Are you awake?’
She started and sat up. Through the quiet moonlight glow of the walls, Belli was keeping watch over her – but instead of sitting beside her bed, he was hunched in the shadows in a far corner. He shook his hand and a light glowed between his fingers. He came closer. The smell of cloves was on him. The room reeked of it, stronger than she remembered.
‘Do you feel better now?’
‘I . . .’ Liang stretched and rolled her feet off the bed and sat up. ‘Actually I do.’ She stretched again. The aches and the fatigue had gone, almost as if they’d never been.
‘The blood.’ He came and stood over her. ‘Did you tell her?’
‘I told her everything, Belli. If it was Mai’Choiro Kwen who sent the poison, why did he do it? How did he know I was there? Belli, I never told anyone at all except you and one of her killers.’
The alchemist set down his lamp and stood over her for a moment, a silent shape in the gloom. He sounded subdued, almost hesitant.
‘Belli? Is something wrong?’
‘If you can stomach it then I have something to show you.’ He paused and then picked up the lamp again and looked about, nervous as a thieving child. ‘Are we alone? Can you tell?’
The iron door was closed. Other than that she had no idea. ‘Isn’t there a guard outside?’
‘I convinced him to let me in and leave us be.’ Something about the way he spoke sounded off. ‘Actually I needed his help.’ He came to her and took her hand. ‘I need you to put mistress and slave aside for a moment, Li. Do you trust me?’
‘Trust you?’ She brushed his hand away. ‘I did until now. What have you done, Belli?’
‘Nothing yet. But it’s what I could do. I never told you . . .’ He trailed off.
‘Told me what?’
He didn’t answer but walked off into the shadows. ‘Come.’
She took a few steps towards him and stopped. A hand flew to her mouth. There was a body lying face down flat on the floor against the far wall. When he put the lamp down beside it, she saw it was the slave who’d brought the poisoned wine. The dead man had a huge gouge in his back and his tattered tunic was covered in dried blood, presumably where Zafir had stabbed him. Liang jumped back. ‘What’s he doing here? How did you get him here?’
‘I . . . I convinced the guard to help me.’ She couldn’t see his face but she could hear the darkness in his voice. ‘Li, there are things we learn as alchemists. Knowledge we swear not to use but learn nevertheless. There are things I can do that I’ve not told you. I’m afraid you’re going to start to feel that now.’
‘What do you mean?’ He was scaring her.
‘You have my blood in you. It is a connection between us. I will know where you are if I choose to look for you. I will know how you feel. It may work a little the other way sometimes. I promise I will never pry. I only did it to save you from the poison.’
The pain in his voice at least was honest. She closed her eyes. ‘Very well, Belli. I trust you.’ Because in the end, yes, she did.
He looked around the room and bared his teeth the way he did when he was anxious and uncertain. ‘If I’m wrong and there are hidden eyes here to watch us, watch us well. You will not like what you see but watch to the end and listen.’ He looked at Liang and his face seemed haunted. ‘Li, you won’t like this either.’ He rolled the dead man over and lifted him so he was sitting against the wall and then opened the dead man’s mouth and upended a thimble of black treacle-like ooze over the dead lips until it fell in one sticky gobbet onto the dead man’s tongue.
Liang took another step away. She’d never seen Belli like this. Anxious snakes squirmed inside her. ‘What are you doing?’
‘All the alchemy I do with dragons is done with blood, theirs and mine. Everything becomes a matter of blood in the end.’ Bellepheros waited another moment and then crouched in front of the dead man. ‘Hello, corpse,’ he whispered as its head suddenly twitched.
Liang jumped away, shaking her head, crying out, ‘No! No no no!’
The dead man’s gummy eyes opened one after the other. His lips parted and a quiet moan eased between them. Liang backed further away. ‘No! Belli! What have you done?’
‘He will tell you.’ The alchemist’s voice was a hoarse whisper. ‘Ask him, Li. Ask him who put the poison in our wine. Ask him who told him to do it. Ask him who tried to murder you. Ask him and he will tell you everything.’
Even as something broke between them, she knew he was doing it for her. She knew that, just as she knew that she could never look at him the same way ever again.
27
Orders
Back in her gondola, Red Lin Feyn pored over what she’d heard and picked it apart, sorting fact from opinion, evidence from circumstance. She found she was inclined to believe the enchantress. Nothing about Chay-Liang struck her as deceptive, and she’d grown exceptionally good at knowing when she was being deceived. It was odd then that the enchantress claimed to have told the gist of her story to a killer and yet none of her killers had thought fit to relay it. Remiss to the point of treason.
She sighed. The killers were hiding things. So be it. She would sit in her gondola and hold her court, and one by one they would stand before her. All of them. She was the Arbiter of the Dralamut, with power of life and death over everyone and anyone until the question put before her was resolved, and the Vespinese needed to understand this with a clarity to put the waters of every mountain stream in the Konsidar to shame. So did the Elemental Men. She snapped her fingers. Two of the killers materialised beside her and bowed. ‘Fill this table with food,’ she told them. ‘Things that may sit here a while. We begin.’
Mai’Choiro Kwen came first. Lin Feyn asked her questions and listened to what he said. She’d half-expected lies, for Mai’Choiro to protest his own meek innocence and for the blame to be placed squarely on Baros Tsen T’Varr, but instead he admitted freely everything that the enchantress claimed. Yes, he’d given the rider-slave her orders. Yes, he’d told her exactly what to do and how the city’s defences lay and in what order she must subdue them. Yes, yes and yes. But as to why? Because Baros Tsen T’Varr had threatened him with the most dire and terrible death if he didn’t reveal all he knew of Dhar Thosis – murdered under the ground and his body left in an unmarked cave. He’d spoken under duress, and there was no order given to burn the city. He’d balked at that.
Lies. Some of it. Not all, but someone had reached him. Lin Feyn watched his eyes as he spoke, and his hands and his knuckles, his brow and the way, just sometimes, his upper lip tightened as if trying to pull his nose to cover his mouth. He had a bitterness to him and an anger but not much fear. He knew he was doomed but he was trying to save something and she wondered who or what and why. She played with him a while, seeing if she could tease it out of him, but no. Eventually she let him go. By then it was dark and so she busied herself writing notes on everything she’d heard and sorting them into piles. When she still couldn’t sleep, she left the gondola and walked the eyrie walls, looking down at the s
torm-dark and then up at the dim gleam of the Godspike, at its monumental reach disappearing up among the stars. Everything changed at night, everything except the wind which still howled across the walls. The white stone of the empty dragon yard turned silvery-grey while every shadow seemed blurred and restless as if tossing in dream-filled sleep, about to awake and race away into the night. She was alone except for the two killers who drifted through the air around her, unseen. She felt the Godspike wanting to crush her with its size, the storm-dark calling out, luring her towards it, begging her to try and bend it to her will. Charin’s daughter of daughters . . . Where no one would see, she smiled and wagged her finger at it.
One day.
She took her time circling the walls, gazing up at the bright glitter of the glasships above, counting them, counting the stars, looking to see if they were the same. Maybe tomorrow she’d call only a few to be questioned and then fly her own glasship around the rim of the storm-dark and look at the lesser monoliths that bound it. She might examine the one that was cracked. Others kept watch on it, documented and recorded the slow creep of the storm-dark out of its cage and wrung their hands without the first notion of what to do or what it meant, but it would be interesting to see it for herself.
She’d come out into the night half-dressed. Not as the Arbiter, because the winds out here would catch her firebird robes and the headdress like a pair of sails and whisk her off into the sky. She might raise a shell of glass around her, but even the Arbiter of the Dralamut had no power over the wind. Tonight she was Red Lin Feyn, nothing more. Apart from her and the killers who flitted around her, the only other living things up here in the night were the dragon and the slaves who slept at its side.
Her walking was taking her towards them. The dragon had already turned to watch, letting her know she was seen. In the moonlight its golden-red scales were silvery black. She stopped at what she thought was a properly respectful distance. ‘I mean you no harm tonight, nor your mistress,’ she told it. As far as she knew, the creature couldn’t understand her and she was wasting her time. It seemed a harmless gesture nonetheless.
The dragon cocked its head and then looked away as though losing interest.
Curious.
She walked on, wary now. Behind her a killer became flesh. ‘Lady, we cannot protect you from the monster.’
‘Nor could you protect me from it when I came, nor can you protect me from it in the morning. So tell me, killer, what difference does it make? The creature can move, you know. No.’ She waved him away. ‘I make my own protection.’
The killer looked unhappy. ‘We will be close, lady.’ He furrowed his brow a little as he returned to the air, as if concentrating hard. As if it was an effort.
Also curious.
She found herself wondering to which killer Chay-Liang had told her secret, and the seed of an idea appeared in her thoughts. She walked on, faster, until she was at the dragon’s side by the gold-glass shelter Chay-Liang had made for the rider-slave and the two girls who served her. She tapped on it and then tapped on it again when no one woke. When still no one moved, she crawled inside and touched the rider-slave to shake her, and in that moment Zafir had a knife in her hand and leaped with such speed that she had the tip at Lin Feyn’s throat in a blink.
They stopped, both of them, the point of the knife pressed to Lin Feyn’s skin, her own fingers halfway to her mouth, ready to blow and crush the rider-slave’s skull. Her killers, she noted, were conspicuously not here and not doing what they were supposed to do.
‘I could cut your throat,’ hissed Zafir.
‘Really?’ Red Lin Feyn met her stare. ‘Are you sure? If you are sure, why don’t you? I am sure you will not.’ She let her hands fall to her sides.
‘Take this thing off me.’
Red Lin Feyn smiled back at her. ‘No. Because if I did that, then you would cut my throat to make sure I couldn’t put it back on again.’
Zafir snarled. The knife flicked across Lin Feyn’s skin. She gasped, thinking for a moment that the rider-slave had called her bluff, but no, that wasn’t the look in the slave’s eyes. Sullen resentful anger, not vicious glee. Zafir had marked her, that was all.
One of her killers appeared at the entrance, red-faced and sweating. ‘Lady–’ Red Lin Feyn slapped the palm of her hand against the air in front of her. The killer flew backwards, hurled away with enough force to kill a normal man.
‘You should leave us be,’ she called after him, ‘since you clearly cannot be of use. We will have words about this in the morning.’ She smiled at Zafir. ‘See. We are alone.’ Although of course they weren’t. Both killers would be lurking silently as the air around them. Or they should be.
‘I wear your mark, you wear mine.’ The rider-slave sneered. She sat back and put the knife away. ‘Well? Was that worth it?’
Through the gold-glass, the dragon never moved, never flinched. You see? You know, don’t you? You know I don’t want to hurt you, not today. Red Lin Feyn touched a hand to her neck. The cut was a deep one. There was going to be a lot of blood and there wasn’t much she could do about it. The killers would be mortified and so they should be. We cannot protect you from the monster? Perhaps next time they might be a little more specific as to which monster they meant.
‘Tell me what I want to know, dragon-queen.’
Zafir cocked her head. ‘If I do that then I have nothing left and you’ll hang me. Or at least you’ll try.’
‘Mai’Choiro has already confessed.’ Blood from her neck was running down her shoulder now, turning tacky and starting to itch. She looked about the tiny shelter for something she could use to wrap the wound. ‘It is true though: if you have nothing to tell me then I have no use for you, dragon-queen.’
Zafir shook with bitter laughter. ‘Hear it then.’
Lin Feyn listened to Zafir’s version with polite patience and found nothing to contradict what the enchantress had said. The rider-slave left bits out but nothing that mattered, simply the things she didn’t find interesting enough to remember. The aftermath in Dhar Thosis was there for all to see, those who cared to look. The exact hows and whos were unimportant. She’d never unravel which soldier had done what to whom even if she stayed at it for years, and it simply didn’t matter. Slaves weren’t punished for obedience to their masters’ orders and soldiers weren’t punished for what their kwens commanded them to do, and those were the laws by which all Taiytakei lived. She asked anyway. Thoroughness demanded it and sometimes one found the unexpected amid the simple and the mundane.
‘Did Tsen try to stop you, after you flew?’
Zafir laughed. ‘You mean did he send an Elemental Man to kill me?’ She sounded gleeful but then her voice changed and she became hesitant, a little distant, as if remembering something she preferred to forget. ‘Yes. He did.’
‘I’d like to know why he failed.’ That was the key.
The rider-slave smiled ruefully. With the twitch of a finger Red Lin Feyn called lightning from the shards that crossed her chest. It arced between her fingers. It made a pretty light, she thought.
Zafir’s look was scornful. ‘Really?’
‘The Arbiter is not your friend, slave, but nor is she your enemy.’ Lin Feyn let the lightning fade. ‘I will have the truth from every man and woman who comes before me, slave or sea lord. I will treat them all the same and I will not punish a slave who steadfastly obeyed her master, for that is what is expected of a slave. Others might and very probably will, but not the Arbiter of the Dralamut. Do you hear? That’s all the hope I have for you. Why did Baros Tsen’s killer not stop you?’
The rider-slave pursed her lips. Red Lin Feyn saw her weighing up the advantages of keeping her mouth closed no matter what against the trouble she might unleash by speaking of it. ‘He tried.’ She shook her head. ‘The detail doesn’t matter. The Watcher. He was there. He heard Baros Tsen and Mai’Choiro, every word, and he made that much clear to me. But who was I to disobey my master? And the Watcher was no
t my master.’ She spoke with a deep and bitter disdain, took a long breath, paused and waited, weighing things again, then snorted contemptuously. ‘I don’t believe in your hope or your mercy, but here’s the thing you want to know: he came to kill me, and so Diamond Eye stamped him into the ground, and as it happened I saw him try to change and I saw him fail. Diamond Eye made his magic not work and the killer knew how it might go before he came for me. I saw that in him. He was afraid of my dragon. They all are. They’d kill me if they could because of that fear and so I sleep where I do and Diamond Eye watches over me. That’s why your killers couldn’t stop me putting a knife to you. They were supposed to, weren’t they? That’s what they’re for?’
Red Lin Feyn kept her face perfectly calm. ‘Do you believe Baros Tsen sent him?’
The rider-slave shrugged. Lin Feyn watched her face, watched the play of emotion there, the understanding. Yes, she knew that Tsen had never meant her to burn Dhar Thosis. She’d done it anyway. That was what condemned her.
Red Lin Feyn left then and continued her walk until she’d trod the length of the eyrie walls and then went back to her gondola to dress the wound that the dragon-slave had given her, shooing away the killers whenever they came close and banning them from her presence. Alone, she looked up at the carved silver dragons over what had once been Mai’Choiro Kwen’s bed and at the jade and emerald lions that frolicked around them, trying to put it all together. The rider-slave was an enigma of self-destruction but her story of the killer . . . And a killer had heard Chay-Liang’s claims and yet she had not.
When she found it was dawn and that she was still awake, she dressed as the Arbiter and summoned the alchemist. He had nothing useful to add over the burning of Dhar Thosis but something important had changed in the night. She could read it from him. A suspicion proven true. Evidence uncovered. Something very wrong. Lin Feyn let him talk about Tsen for a while and then asked the questions that actually mattered, about dragons and alchemists and Elemental Men. When she was done with him, she closed the doors to her court and turned to the killers who loitered in the air around her.
