by Stephen Deas
‘Enchantress Chay-Liang, you wished to show me something?’
In the depths of the Queverra the dragon Silence felt the great dragon that hunted it recede. It waited a long time and, while it did, felt at the other things that existed around it. A rift in the earth, depths still far beneath it that touched the lands of the dead in Xibaiya. The other little one, the one who carried the Black Moon within him, circling with single-minded purpose downward. The hatchling watched them all, dragon and little one and the distant paths to other worlds, its attention flitting from one to the other to the next, wondering. Each one tempting it to follow to see where they would lead.
It chose the dragon-queen. And the little ones who shifted their forms, touched with a splinter of the dead goddess – they were something new. And the little one above, the Adamantine Man Tuuran, who wasn’t afraid, one of those splinter-touched Elemental Men had once sent him to watch over the echo of the Black Moon. Why?
It was too tempting to resist. When the dragon Diamond Eye was long gone, Silence turned its thoughts from the echo of the Black Moon toiling towards Xibaiya and flew in the great dragon’s wake, back towards the Godspike.
Red Lin Feyn watched the alchemist and the enchantress drag a corpse across the room and prop it in front of her. This was, so they said, the slave who had poisoned Chay-Liang and gone after the dragon-rider with a bladeless knife. The alchemist tipped back the dead man’s head and forced open his mouth. Chay-Liang tipped a thimble of something like tar into the corpse’s mouth. The smell of cloves grew stronger.
‘What are you doing, enchantress?’ she asked, before something happened that made it too late for all of them. Chay-Liang shot her a fearful look but it was the alchemist who answered.
‘He will talk now. Ask him your questions, Lady Arbiter.’
‘He’s dead, alchemist.’
‘And yet he will still talk.’
For a long time Lin Feyn said nothing. They were offering her sorcery, the forbidden magics of Abraxi and the Crimson Sunburst. The Elemental Men existed to hunt down the people who practised such abominations and end them, and two of her killers were standing right outside the door. ‘Chay-Liang, do you understand the consequences of what you are doing? Truly? Do you?’
‘It’s my blood,’ whispered the alchemist.
Lin Feyn shook her head. ‘Enchantress, I asked you a question. If you do this, do you understand what the consequences may be?’
‘Yes.’ Chay-Liang’s whisper was hoarse.
‘And does your slave?’ No answer. Lin Feyn closed her eyes and tried to think. How was she here? As Red Lin Feyn or as the Arbiter of the Dralamut? Could she draw a line between them? ‘Two of my killers are outside, Chay-Liang. How long have you known this was possible?’
‘A day. No more.’
The killers would find out. They had to. She should tell them because that was her duty. They would take the alchemist and end him for this. Without the alchemist there could be no dragons. It was over. All of it. Might as well go outside here and now, set free the glasships that held the eyrie aloft and let everything and everyone sink into the storm-dark. Or she could say nothing and be complicit in what they’d done.
The moan of the dead man startled her out of her thoughts. Lin Feyn bared her teeth and hissed. ‘Did you hear what I said, Chay-Liang? There are two killers outside this door. I should open it. It is my duty to show them what you’ve done.’
Chay-Liang bowed. ‘I know.’
‘And you presume my duty will defer to my curiosity in order to—’
‘Corpse, who told you to kill Chay-Liang and her Holiness Zafir?’ The alchemist’s voice rode over her.
‘Mai’Choiro Kwen,’ groaned the dead man.
Red Lin Feyn threw out her hands. The gold-glass shards of the Arbiter which hung over her shoulders and neck flashed into a whirlwind of knives and sliced the dead man to pieces before he could say any more. It was done in an instant and then the shards returned. Chay-Liang and the alchemist were too shocked to speak. Lin Feyn tore open the iron door; wind rushed past her and the killers appeared at once, one standing between her and the alchemist, the other behind Chay-Liang, their bladeless knives glinting in the gloom.
‘Stop!’ Lin Feyn hurled the word like a weapon, shivering the air, dazing them all. ‘Let them live!’ She waited a moment and then spoke more softly. ‘Confine them both. Keep them apart. Let them continue their duties, but no more.’ She pointed to the shredded body of the dead slave. ‘Take that abomination and throw it into the storm-dark!’ She turned and plunged through the door. Might have run, except an Arbiter never ran.
‘Baros Tsen T’Varr,’ shouted the alchemist after her. ‘His body is still here!’
She didn’t look back, not until she was in her gondola, safe and alone. Except not alone. Another killer was there. Always. He whispered into being beside her and knelt. ‘What would you have us do, lady?’
Allow me to unsee what I have seen. Allow me to unhear what I have heard. But that was beyond him. ‘Nothing,’ she said.
The dragon Silence flew across the desert. In the dead of night it felt the storm-dark and the Godspike drawing close. It felt other dragons and they felt it in return, but the little ones who tended them slept.
Do not speak of me, it whispered to them. It thought of freeing its kin and burning the little ones and devouring them until all of them were gone, then pushed those thoughts aside. It had come with another purpose.
In the memories it had taken from the soldier Tuuran who thought he could kill dragons, Silence saw more of these strange wizards, these Elemental Men who had come hunting with the dragon-queen. Creatures who masqueraded as little ones but had the power of the dead goddess of the earth running through them. Not so easy to kill with tooth and claw and fire a creature who might turn into flames or air in an instant.
Elemental Men.
There had been one in the dragon-realms two of its lifetimes ago. In the Adamantine soldier’s memories one had taken Tuuran to a city and shown him words from long ago and sent him to watch the echo of the Black Moon. Tuuran hadn’t understood what had been asked of him or why, but perhaps somewhere here was the one who had sent him on his way. That one would have answers.
The dragon Silence found itself a place beneath the eyrie, clinging to the underside of the black rock as it floated above the storm-dark, and poked into the minds of the little ones and the creatures who called themselves Elemental Men one by one, searching their thoughts, looking for anyone who remembered the name plucked from Tuuran’s memory. The Watcher. Days passed. It probed, still and unseen, listening until it found what it needed. The Watcher was dead. Crushed by the dragon that had chased it into the abyss and almost to Xibaiya. While the little ones slept it asked the other dragon where and how it had done this thing. The great dragon answered and showed its memories of the place.
Content, the dragon Silence emerged from its hiding place.
29
Consequences
Red Lin Feyn sat on her crystal throne in the splendour of her court and listened to her killers while she waited to receive Sea Lord Shonda of Vespinarr. The lord of the mountains was somewhere over the desert, answering her summons as slowly as he could possibly manage. His dawdling didn’t trouble her; she would receive him as an almost-equal and say nothing of his tardiness. In return, he would be courteous and polite and charming and of course furious. He would answer her questions with a mix of lies and half-truths and politely demand that he and his kwen be allowed to go. He would tell her that great cities like Vespinarr, great trading empires like those it controlled, did not run themselves. He’d remind her that he’d already lost Vey Rin, his t’varr and also his brother, to Baros Tsen T’Varr’s dragons, and would ask how such a great empire of ships was to govern itself if now its kwen and sea lord were imprisoned in a flying castle three miles above the desert and three hundred from the nearest thought of civilisation. Sea Lord Quai’Shu, he would point out, o
wed him a very great deal of money. He would like this debt repaid, and Baros Tsen’s dragons would do nicely.
Shonda would come with all these requests, and she would refuse them, throw Mai’Choiro’s confession in his face and wonder as she did why he even bothered to ask. Once she’d trapped him, she’d ask him why he’d done it, because surely a man as canny and wealthy as the sea lord of Vespinarr could contrive a more subtle scheme to get what he wanted, one that didn’t bring with it such risk of ruin? The question she wanted to ask Lord Shonda of Vespinarr, before she condemned him to hang before the Crown of the Sea Lords in Khalishtor, was no longer what, but why?
Whatever the killers were saying to her now, she wasn’t hearing a word. She wasn’t hearing a word because the alchemist had made a dead man speak. In the eyes of the killers that made him a sorcerer, and sorcerers were put to death. As the Arbiter of the Dralamut, all of that had nothing to do with who had burned Dhar Thosis and so wasn’t her concern. As Red Lin Feyn, navigator and dutiful citizen of Takei’Tarr, it bothered her considerably, and not in ways the killers would have been pleased to know. A part of what bothered her, and would bother the killers most of all, was that she hadn’t told them.
With an abrupt wave of her hand she silenced them, and then, with another, she sent them away. All of them, winkling them out. When she was sure she was alone, she went up the stairs to her bed and the chest beside it and took out the glass globe that held a snip of the storm-dark. It wasn’t much more than a novice’s training toy. She held it in her hand.
Beneath the layers and masks of her rank, Lin Feyn remained the daughter of daughters of Feyn Charin, the first navigator. His blood was in her and what had he been if not a sorcerer? Oh, the world had dressed it up and called him something else because of the one great trick he’d shared, the crossing of the storm-dark, but he was more than that. He’d been apprenticed to the Crimson Sunburst of Cashax, who’d gone to war against the Elemental Men and almost won. Some said he’d been more than an apprentice. Lin Feyn hadn’t ever found any reason for such a belief but she secretly favoured it because it made her blood the blood of the Crimson Sunburst herself and was a poke in the eye for the killers, who claimed to serve her but in reality served only themselves. And the truth, though few knew it, was that the Sunburst had never sought to confront them.
She’d been the first enchantress, and her court had grown to be filled with magical creatures and devices, animated wonders of glass, automata and the first golems. The library of the Dralamut, in its forbidden rooms where the killers couldn’t enter, contained journals in which the Crimson Sunburst spoke of old books, of reading the anathema of the Rava, of the old white-faced silver-skinned half-gods who existed before the world broke into splinters. The journals were full of awe and wonder, gleeful childish fascination with the miracles she found she could perform, yet Red Lin Feyn had found no ambition for domination or such worldly hungers, only a relentless curiosity and the Sunburst’s constant air of surprise that her spells did more than make a sour taste or a bad smell. In the end her unfettered curiosity had brought the killers down on her, yet Red Lin Feyn had never found anything to suggest that the Crimson Sunburst had wanted more than she already had. The Sunburst had been queen of Cashax before her twentieth birthday, back when Cashax had been the greatest city in Takei’Tarr. She’d wrought her sorceries simply because they were there. To see if she could.
The alchemist, when Lin Feyn watched him at his work, reminded her of the woman from those journals – meticulous, curious, fiercely clever, someone who did what he did without any hunger for power or prestige. Which brought Lin Feyn right back to the thing she was trying very hard not to think about, the question that circled her with the predatory malevolence of a shark: What do I do with you? He was probably a kind man. Lin Feyn, whose life had been built on knowing such things, saw no reason to think otherwise. Yet he did things that others could use, others who were not so kind, and for that the Elemental Men would kill him. After what she’d seen she’d told the killers to lock him up but hadn’t yet told them why, and now found she didn’t want to, even though she should. She wondered how much they’d seen, how much they already understood for themselves.
She sat alone on her crystal throne in all her splendour and considered these things deep into the night, then rose and undressed and slipped between the silks to sleep and considered them some more.
She was still musing on them when the dragon yard burst into flames.
Zafir woke filled with a sense of warning, a sharp and dire immediate threat. She barely had time to throw back her silk sheets before the poles that held up her shelter out on the eyrie wall snapped like twigs. Gold-glass shattered into splinters, crashed down on top of her and crushed her almost flat. The sail-cloth canopy smothered her and the bulk of something vast almost crushed her, almost but not quite. Through the silks tangled around her face she thought she saw the night outside light up with flames.
The hatchling.
The Elemental Men had said they would see to it themselves. She’d laughed and said she’d hunt it when she pleased, but she hadn’t. Now a surge of anger shot through her. She’d hidden herself from its searching on the night it had come to kill her and now here it was, back for another go.
She could feel it already flying off. Diamond Eye was rising, the wings he’d wrapped around her shelter like a cocoon folding back. She sensed his hunger, tense and sharp and ready for the hunt, exactly as she wanted him. She threw off the silken sheets and the debris of the smashed shelter and ran up the wall. Across the dragon yard everything that would burn was in flames. The hatchling was already far out of sight. Diamond Eye turned his head to look at her as if asking something, and she knew exactly what. She nodded.
‘Yes, my deathbringer. No matter what they say.’ And by the time the first Elemental Men vanished into the darkness in pursuit, she was already in her armour and on the dragon’s back.
Red Lin Feyn barely had time to make herself decent before the killers appeared around her. ‘Lady, it is the hatchling. We require your leave to pursue.’
Lin Feyn took a moment to compose herself. Require it, do you? And she might have taken them to task for that but then another thought struck her. She nodded her assent. ‘All of you. Go. Finish it.’
They bowed, eager to follow their nature. ‘Stay here, lady, with wards on the door. We will not be gone for long.’
Telling her what to do again. They were losing their perspective. Fear was making them careless, opening cracks and letting their true natures show. Lin Feyn nodded and said nothing, watched them leave and shut the gondola window behind them. She closed her eyes and waited another few minutes, stretching out every sense for the whisper of wind that might tell her that one had disobeyed and stayed to watch over her. When she was certain she was truly alone, she opened the gondola and hurried into the night. Flickering fires from the hatchery and the remains of the Vespinese scaffold shot a dark orange glow over the dragon yard stone, pulsing in the ever-present wind whose fingers gripped her and shook her and almost picked her up and blew her away. She held her robe tight – not the dress of the Arbiter that she’d become but the simple robes of the enchantress she’d been before they took her to the Dralamut to learn the secrets of the storm-dark. The adult dragon was gone from its perch on the wall. Beneath, the hatchlings in their chains stared at her and at the eastern sky, shrieking their agitation. She ignored them and slipped down the tunnels to the alchemist’s room. A bleary-eyed kwen came stumbling the other way, dressed in bits of armour.
‘Go back to bed,’ she told him sharply. ‘It is a matter for dragons and killers. The Elemental Men have it in hand.’
He blinked a few times and frowned, then shook his head and ran on, and it was only after he’d gone that she realised he didn’t recognise her without her painted face and gold-glass shards and wreathed in flames of feathers. She smiled then, surprised by an unexpected sense of freedom.
The smell o
f cloves hit her as soon as she opened the door to the alchemist’s study. She closed it behind her and listened again for any whispers in the air, felt for flickers of breeze and found nothing. The killers were about their business, hunting monsters. The room was empty. She searched and let her nose guide her to the alchemist’s potion for waking the dead, took it and left and ran barefoot through the deeper passages of the eyrie, spiralling ever down to what had once been Baros Tsen T’Varr’s bathhouse, the smell of cloves trailing after her. Tsen’s bathhouse had become a morgue now. Dead slaves were simply thrown over the side or fed to the dragon and a good few of the men who’d died before she’d come had gone that way too, but the rest of the Taiytakei dead waited here, to be burned one day with all due funerary dignity or else hung by the ankles from the spires of Khalishtor for the world to see. One word from her either way was all it took. Tsen’s corpse was among them. One of the ones who’d hang by his ankles.
The iron door was cold to the touch. It opened for her and a wash of chill air rushed out, enough to turn to mist as it reached in tentacles into the corridor. Chay-Liang’s enchantments had been strong enough to glaze the water in Tsen’s bath with ice. The doors that led to the other spirals of the eyrie were closed. She listened again, felt for any movement in the misty air, then closed the door behind her and hurried into the passages where the Scales lived, where the alchemist and the enchantress were now shut in their prisons. When she reached the guards who stood watch over them, she beckoned them away and had them follow her to the bathhouse morgue, hurrying them inside. They didn’t recognise her either but they were mere soldiers and her voice still carried all the force of an Arbiter’s command.
‘Bring out the body of Baros Tsen T’Varr,’ she told them, then left them to find it and ran to the alchemist’s cell. She went inside and shook him awake.
