by Stephen Deas
Tsen nodded. ‘To be truthful, I never thought you would let either of us live beyond this moment, no matter what.’
The shifter fingered his knife. ‘I’m surprised at you, T’Varr. I would have expected more . . . resistance. But I thank you for your help. We serve a greater purpose. I wish I could show you.’
Tsen shrugged. ‘I’m just an old fat t’varr – what can I do? Oh, and there really isn’t any need. I made contingencies before we left Vespinarr.’ He waited, unsure what would happen now. Whether he was about to live or die.
One of the desert men stabbed Sivan in the back. The shifter stumbled, turned and lunged but missed. All around, Sivan’s slaves were struck down.
‘I . . . paid you . . . so much,’ he gasped. ‘We were going to . . . bring them . . . down.’
‘I got a better offer.’ The desert man took a spear from someone behind him and rammed it through Sivan, pinning him to the side of the gondola. Tsen watched the shifter fall, waiting for him to change his features and get up again, but he didn’t.
‘Baros Tsen T’Varr?’ The desert man grabbed Tsen and looked him up and down. ‘You look like him.’
Tsen’s middle finger tingled; it had for several hours now. ‘Chrias has my thanks. I appear to owe him a favour. I would like to go now.’
‘You come with us.’ The desert man pulled Tsen out into the cold night air. They took Kalaiya and left the rest of Sivan’s slaves with their blood draining into the sand and bemused expressions on their faces. They hadn’t even had time to raise their blades.
Tsen sat with Kalaiya on the back of the sled, resting against the last dragon egg, as big and heavy as a horse, the sled skimming over the gentle rise and fall of the sand. In the desert near Cashax were dunes taller than the tallest tower in Khalishtor, as high as the cliffs of Xican, but here under the storm-dark the waves of sand fell away as if both they and the wind were afraid to come too close. Within the ring of the Godspike’s outer needles, the sand was like ripples on a calm sea.
Well, there’s a thing. Another useless fact. Maybe you have a future as a teacher.
The riders scattered leaving a dozen different trails behind them. The sled sped on through the night, through the Godspike’s outer ring of spires to an outcrop of rock surrounded by tents. As the desert men approached and slowed, Tsen saw bodies with arrows in their backs. Closer in, he saw marks where others had already been dragged away. A pavilion rose beside the outcrop and a dozen soldiers were hurriedly pulling it down. Tsen saw a gap in the stones behind it and a darkness that was more than the dark of the desert night. A cave, he thought at first, but the walls were too smooth and straight.
‘You. Off.’
The desert men threw Tsen and Kalaiya onto the sand as the sled slowed and then eased it into the gaping darkness. In the starlight Tsen thought he saw a tunnel ending in a shaft, then the sled was inside it and the soldiers were putting the pavilion back together, hiding cave, sled and shaft all at once. Strong hostile arms hauled him to his feet and dragged him away. There were bodies in piles, pits being dug, men cursing and shouting for the work to be done faster. The desert men hurried Tsen into the largest tent where a thick fug of Xizic filled the air, stifling, almost choking. A man sat in the gloom, naked from the waist down with two slaves oiling his skin. A handful of dim lamps flickered around the tent’s edges, enough light to see shapes and outlines but no more. But then Tsen didn’t need to see the man’s face.
‘Shrin Chrias Kwen.’ Tsen bowed. ‘From one servant of our sea lord to another, I greet you.’ They’d been enemies not all that long ago and yes, they’d probably been set to kill each other to see who would follow Quai’Shu as lord of Xican. But that was then, and now they were both hunted men with nooses waiting for their necks.
‘Baros Tsen T’Varr.’ The kwen’s voice was hoarse and rasping. There was nothing friendly in his tone. Much more of a vengeful, gleeful, about-to-murder-you sort of voice, really. Tsen squirmed. He tried to remind himself what exactly it was he had to offer his old rival right now. Not much, that was for sure.
‘Are you not well, Chrias?’ Be polite, tongue. For the love of the forbidden gods, be polite. We’re in this together, like it or not. And I’m still a sea lord’s t’varr.
‘I got your message, T’Varr. Are the Elemental Men not hunting you every bit as hard as they hunt me?’
‘They’ve taken my eyrie but they think I’m dead.’
‘How convenient. Very soon they’ll be right.’
Tsen closed his eyes. Ah. Not that he’d really expected better. This was what you got with kwens. Big stupid brutes all full of shouting and holding grudges. At least Kalaiya would be safe. Chrias wasn’t mad like the shifter. Chrias was a pig and bastard, perhaps, but he had no reason to hurt Kalaiya, and wasn’t that the point of it all? All he’d ever wanted? ‘It was all Shonda. You know that, don’t you? You must, by now.’
‘Shonda betrayed me at sea. Of course he did. Ships and navigators across the storm-dark and a long and happy life in glorious luxury. Ha!’ Chrias laughed. ‘There is one thing that might keep you alive a little while longer. Where’s the alchemist?’
Tsen shrugged. ‘Still on the eyrie, I suppose.’ Wiped from existence on account of falling into the storm-dark along with everything else probably wasn’t what Chrias wanted to hear. Best not to mention that part. Unless Chrias had seen enough to work it out for himself. There was always that . . .
Chrias eased himself to his feet. He moved slowly, stiff and awkward like an old man or one in a great deal of pain. The anger building around him was a slow and massive thing. ‘Then what did you bring me, T’Varr?’
‘Four dragon eggs.’
‘And?’
Tsen held out his hands. ‘And me, Chrias. You have me. For what good that does either of us. But I will help you in anything that will expose Shonda for what he is.’ He closed his eyes, wondering why he’d even bothered to say that. Maybe he could offer Chrias something even more appealing? Like a few handfuls of desert sand to add to his already impressive collection? Or perhaps a simple punch in the teeth . . .
‘You?’ Shrin Chrias Kwen stooped to pick up a lamp and held it out in front of him. Tsen turned away so as not to be dazzled by the flame. ‘Look what she did to me, Tsen. Look what your rider-slave did!’
At last they were close enough for Tsen finally to see the kwen’s face. His skin was scabbed and hard and flaking, split raw in places with dribbles of dried blood where wounds had wept. Kalaiya gasped, but Tsen had seen faces like this before, had seen them every day. The alchemist’s Scales with their Hatchling Disease. Chrias had the Statue Plague. Well yes, he’d known that from the day the rider-slave had come back from Dhar Thosis, but not how bad it was, not how quickly it would take him without the alchemist to slow its course. He saw, and he knew that Chrias would kill him now, no matter what he said. Someone had to die, after all.
‘Stick a part of you in a place where it wasn’t wanted, did you, Chrias?’ he asked, just to make sure they couldn’t possibly come to any agreement. It wasn’t as if either of them deserved any better.
47
A Hanging
In the great list of all the crimes that would one day condemn her Zafir wondered where this would rank. Abduction of the most powerful of the Taiytakei sea lords. Branding him with the mark of his own slaves. Having a dragon dangle him upside down in the air by one leg. Shonda started off, as all men did, by telling her how great and powerful he was and how terrible her suffering would be for what she was doing, then moved on to how worse still it would become if she didn’t stop. She laughed in his face.
‘What could you possibly do?’ she screamed at him over the wind that whipped the eyrie. ‘What else could you possibly do?’
The threats carried on long enough to draw a crowd in the dragon yard. After everything that had gone on, none of the Taiytakei were in bed. Which was good. It was a humiliation that demanded an audience.
The thr
eats shifted to bribes. ‘I will give you anything you wish for! This eyrie will be mine. You will fly for me and I will make you the richest sword-slave ever to live, richer than a sea lord!’
Zafir lifted the brand high over her head and had Diamond Eye turn his fire on it until it glowed. The dragon let Shonda down and Zafir gut-punched him and threw him onto his face. She straddled him before he could get up and ripped the feathered robe off his flabby back. ‘I will never fly for you,’ she hissed. ‘No one will ever fly for you. You have nothing you could possibly give me.’ She stabbed the brand into his skin and listened to him scream. No one tried to stop her. The Elemental Men watched and did nothing.
After a while, his sobs and whimpers grew annoying. Bellepheros hadn’t given her much, but no dragon-rider flew without a salve for burns. She dabbed it over the brand mark. Not that it made it go away but for an hour or so the pain would ease. Then she had Diamond Eye dangle him again. ‘You want me to be your slave, is that it? All this because you want me to be your slave and not Quai’Shu’s slave? I’d taken you for a clever man, Sea Lord. Do you see Quai’Shu here? No. Because a dragon held him as mine holds you now and his mind broke in two. Then again, that dragon was awake. But I faced that dragon too, fat old man, and I did not break. Why should I be your slave? Why should you not be mine? Except what use would you be?’
Shonda screamed into the night, ‘I will give you whatever you desire.’
‘But you have nothing that I want!’ She spat at him.
‘Your freedom, slave. I will give you your freedom. Set me loose and I will take you on my ships and your monster too and sail you back to your own land!.’
Maybe she hesitated for a moment, because if there was anything she wanted more than a simple end to it all, fiery and unforgettable, it was that. Home. But of course he couldn’t deliver. The Elemental Men were letting her do this to him because they knew he was done. He had no power any more, and even if he had, he wouldn’t ever have given her what she wanted. He couldn’t. No one could. It had never existed.
She took a deep breath and sighed. When she looked away, she saw the alchemist hurrying across the dragon yard. She held up the brand and waved it in Shonda’s face. ‘Why, fat old man? You had your kwen Mai’Choiro tell me to burn that city. What was it for? All the money in the world still not enough for you?’ She held up a hand. ‘No, don’t answer. Don’t fill the air with lies because I’ve sat higher than you ever will and I already know what it was for.
‘Fear. Fear that you’ll lose it. Fear that someone, somewhere, is better than you, or richer than you, or cleverer than you. Fear that they’ll take it away again, that you’ll slip behind and the men who used to quiver and tremble at your passing will laugh instead. Fat old man with all your power and your wealth, and what did you ever do with it? My dragon? That’s what this was for? Then be happy, for you are closer to him now than Baros Tsen T’Varr or Quai’Shu ever got!’
She listened to him babble and squirm and wail and storm a little longer, paying scant attention to what he said. They were the same, he and she, or they had been once, clawing their way over the backs of those above them as fast as they could and always afraid of those clawing in their wake, and then she’d reached the top and had had no idea how else to be. She told Diamond Eye to let Shonda down. He crawled away and she let him be, empty of any idea of what to do with him any more.
The Elemental Men took him. Diamond Eye watched him go. The dragon wanted to eat him. It was, Zafir thought, an admirably simple desire. My mother didn’t give a fig for me or my sister beyond what we’d be worth to her in some dragon-prince’s bed. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been fond of princes and their like. Except it was more likely her father who’d drilled that into her, her father, who wanted to be very sure that his pretty princesses knew what to do once they’d been sold. Oh yes, very kind and loving when they did the right thing. Not so much when they didn’t. Liked to keep us locked in a dark room when we were naughty girls. Still made her heart knot thinking of that, but not like it used to. She stroked Diamond Eye’s nose. But we’ve been there together now, you and I.
The Adamantine Man drifted into her thoughts again. Tuuran. He came to her most days, ever since she’d seen him in Dhar Thosis. Always the same memory. The Pinnacles. That moment of selfless kindness, coming to her aid when her own father had had her pinned against a wall; and she’d taken that moment and killed with it, taken Tuuran’s knife and stabbed her father, and someone had had to take the blame and be hanged for the death of a prince of the Silver City. Let it be him, let it be his fault, his knife. Make it go away and pretend it never happened. And she’d been afraid, but she was a dragon-rider destined to be a queen, and a dragon-rider knew better than to let fear grow and fester. So she’d taken what she’d done and faced it down and picked through the reasons and the causes, pored over everything that had been done to her, every day caged in the dark and the far worse thing that passed for love that came after. She’d looked at it all and given herself the choice of swallowing it whole or breaking into pieces, for what use was a dragon-rider who was afraid? None at all.
Her little sister, Kiam, just coming into bloom. She would have been next. I spared her, she told Diamond Eye. But she had no idea. She just hated me for what I’d done. And in time I hated her back for not seeing the truth. For never seeing what he was.
She’d taken what she wanted. Anyone who got in her way, she crushed them exactly as her mother had done. She’d had the Adamantine Man sent to Furymouth to be sold as a slave. Done it behind her mother’s back and paid dearly for it, but at least it was better than letting him hang. She wished now that she could see him one more time before she died to tell him she was sorry. Not to ask for forgiveness, because that was too much. Just to say sorry.
After the killers took Shonda away, Zafir went to her shelter where no one would see her and curled up inside it. She slept a little while, a fitful doze full of dreams of her treacherous lover Jehal, of being her own mother. She woke up sobbing beside Diamond Eye and somehow couldn’t stop, and so that was how Bellepheros found her, huddled up tight in a corner in her nightclothes, shaking.
‘Holiness?’
When she looked at him, she wanted to rip the concern off his face with her bare hands, strangle him for seeing her this way, but she couldn’t make herself move. She looked up at him with tear streaks down her cheeks. And he bowed but didn’t go away, didn’t turn, didn’t stand outside. He just stared right back at her as though he’d never known that a dragon-rider could cry.
‘It’s done, Holiness,’ he said. ‘It’s all finished.’
She had no idea what he was talking about, and then the only thing it could be hit her like a soft ripping-out of her stomach. ‘You’ve poisoned Diamond Eye,’ she said, knowing she would be next.
Bellepheros looked confused for a second and then shook his head. ‘No, Holiness. Sea Lord Shonda has confessed his part in what you did. I gave him truth-smoke. Everyone was there to hear.’ He hung his head. ‘I took it myself and now they know everything there is to know about what I am. I will not be with you much longer. The Elemental Men say we must all wait for their Arbiter to return and hear it all again, but it’s done. They will kill us all now. I am sorry.’
‘Not as sorry as I am, alchemist. Go! No, wait!’ It took a huge effort to force herself to stand. She was still shaking. ‘Do one more thing for me. Do you have Frogsback? Blue Midnight?’
The alchemist shook his head. His mouth opened as if to speak. No words came out but she saw in his eyes that he understood. ‘They took everything, Holiness. Everything I have.’
‘Something else then. I will not be their toy. Let me go with my Diamond Eye. Together side by side. You must find something! Painless and quick if you can.’ And say yes, alchemist. Do it quickly before I decide to go the other way, with fire and fury and death to all around me.
Bellepheros closed his eyes. ‘Holiness, I—’
‘One last s
ervice for your speaker, Grand Master. I hunted the hatchling down for you, and you owe me for that. Diamond Eye bit off his head brought back his body. You took an oath, alchemist.’ For once not for me, alchemist. For once I ask for others.
‘I took an oath to Speaker Hyram.’
‘You took that oath to whoever sat in the Adamantine Throne.’ But already the moment was slipping away. Poison? Really? She took his hands and gripped them tight. She might have begged if she could have brought herself to, but no, a dragon-queen couldn’t ever beg. ‘Neither of us knows who sits on the throne in the City of Dragons now, but for a time it was me and I am here.’ She held out her trembling hand with the speaker’s ring still on her finger. ‘Bring me what I ask for and be released from your duties to me.’ She took a deep breath. Forced the word out. ‘Please.’
The alchemist was shaking as well. ‘As you wish, Holiness. I will try.’ She let go of him and he bowed, and then he ruined it. ‘I will do this if I may ask a favour in return.’
No! No, no, no! She could have cried. ‘Do not ask favours of me, alchemist, not for this. Little good comes to those who do. Haven’t you seen that?’ Just give it to me and go before it’s too late. I can’t beg for it, I simply cannot.
‘Four eggs were stolen in the night.’ He had no idea how hard it was for her to ask for death, for a way out that was easy for everyone. None; and now she was back to having to keep herself from strangling him. Fire and ash, alchemist. Smoke and blood. So be it. ‘The Scales say I ordered them loaded into a gondola but I did not. Go, Holiness, with Diamond Eye, and bring back those eggs. I cannot allow them to hatch unwatched. Do this, Holiness, and I will find you a poison no matter what I must do.’
Zafir snorted. ‘Do the Elemental Men approve, alchemist?’ She could have screamed in his face, Why should I even care?
‘They are searching too. But Diamond Eye will find the eggs far more easily. You know this.’
