by Stephen Deas
The slaves finished their scaffold and set to work on the gallows. They were only erecting one gibbet. One noose just for her. Zafir slipped back off the wall to her little shelter and drew out the bladeless knife she’d taken from the Elemental Man she’d dropped into the storm-dark. It felt heavy in her hand. If you looked hard and close, the blade shimmered sometimes when it caught the light, sparkled when the sun touched it just so. It wasn’t bladeless at all, merely made of something so thin that it was all but invisible, yet so sharp and so hard that it would cut through glass and steel as though they were air.
She’d do it herself. In front of everyone, she’d kill her own alchemist.
The wind whipped across the wall, battering at her. It wouldn’t make any difference. The Elemental Men would snuff her out quickly enough, but a dragon-queen shouldn’t ever go meekly. She settled beside Diamond Eye again, using his bulk for shelter. The Taiytakei roundly cursed the ever-whipping gale by the Godspike, but to Zafir the wind was a friend. She liked it up here. The desert sun was hot and fierce, the air cold and fast, the contrast a delicious pleasure. Strong and pure and full of the energy of life.
The slaves finished their gallows and started on some wooden cages. Five of them. Bellepheros was still with the hatchlings, talking to the Scales, taking his time, dragging his heels perhaps, watching the last of the visiting gondolas fly away. The cages were quickly made, and as soon as they were, armoured soldiers dragged four chained men out into the sunlight. The cages were thrown open, the men hurled inside. Two of them almost had to be carried. Zafir tried to see who they were but they were too far away. She thought she knew, and Diamond Eye certainly did. Sea Lord Shonda. Sea Lord Quai’Shu. Mai’Choiro Kwen. He knew their thoughts and tasted their fear. He didn’t know the fourth. And the last cage is for me.
She looked around the eyrie and put her mind to the battle to come, made herself note the lightning throwers that hadn’t been destroyed, tried to make herself look up to the glasships that still flew overhead, to show Diamond Eye where each danger lay. Tried, but she knew the answers already. Instead she found herself looking at the knife again. Maybe it was better not to fight at all. The Taiytakei deserved what Diamond Eye would bring them but what point was there if she wasn’t there to see it? In the end what difference did it make? In the end they’d always win. Flames and death all around, but her heart wasn’t really in it. Even if she couldn’t quite admit it, she knew that must be true because she was still standing on this wall and thinking and not sitting on Diamond Eye’s back, screaming rage and fire.
Waiting for the Adamantine Man. That was it. Because he was here, and he would find her before she died.
She ran her finger along the flat of the blade, finding the tip. Tried hard to see it. Flexed her hand, felt its weight, looking for the flash of light where it caught the sun. It would be easy to drive it through her own heart. She had a strong heart, she thought. Made so by the dragons around her. It had needed to be strong to survive. She’d been stabbed through it enough times, but none of them had ever quite finished her. She could do it better. Do a proper job of it. For some reason that made her laugh even if her eyes brimmed and a tear trickled down her cheek. Betrayal everywhere, but she survived.
No mercy for pretty Zafir.
She turned the knife carefully back, tipping its lethal point away. The alchemist was leaving the hatchery, heading for the tunnels behind. He’d come soon now. He’d put out his potions for Diamond Eye to drink and she’d tell the dragon to wait. He’d come to the wall and she’d take him to the rim and they’d talk, and then she’d tell him she was sorry and kill him quietly and put on the last of her armour, her golden helm and her gold-glass gauntlets, and climb onto Diamond Eye’s back and . . . and they’d fly away? Just that?
Her eyes ranged over the dragon yard, looking for Tuuran, waiting for him to come to her, hoping he would before the alchemist made it all too late, and yet when he came up the steps and crossed the wall towards her, big and with the sun across his face and his hair all lank and straggly and his chin covered in a month of beard, she didn’t recognise him. Filled by an odd sense of familiarity she watched this stranger come, until he stopped twelve paces away, exactly as close as an Adamantine Man was allowed to approach the speaker of the nine realms, and dropped to his knees and pressed his head to the stone of the wall top. And then she knew.
‘Holiness. You told me to find my way back to you, Holiness. Here I am. I have passed your test.’
And her heart was full of fire again.
Bellepheros had stayed in his laboratory after the trial, making poison for the dragons. It wouldn’t take long, surely. And then Li had walked in. She’d sat with him, and she wouldn’t say what the Arbiter’s judgement had been but nor did she need to. They’d come and tell him to kill the dragon. Her Holiness would die. He and Li would live. He could read it all in the set of her face and there wasn’t anything to be done about it, and so he asked Li to leave him be and quietly made a second poison to give to Zafir if she asked for it again. He couldn’t save her and wasn’t sure that he should, but he could give her that much. A quiet death of her own. Private and without spectacle.
The Elemental Man came early the next morning. He knocked on the iron door through which he couldn’t pass, and when Bellepheros opened it, he walked politely inside instead of vanishing and appearing somewhere else. ‘The judgement of the Arbiter has been given, alchemist.’ They’d quietly stopped calling him slave since the truth-smoke.
Bellepheros gestured to the tables against the far wall, what he’d been able to repair of his laboratory. ‘I told Sea Lord Quai’Shu, when he first brought me to his palace, that he would regret what he asked me to do. It ends then, does it?’
The killer bowed. ‘They are all to be destroyed. You can do this?’
‘I’ve been making this poison ever since I came here. I’m glad there’s one among you whose wisdom exceeds his greed at last. There’s still a missing egg. I trust you haven’t forgotten.’
‘It will be found.’
‘And if it hatches?’
‘It will be found.’
Well, that was surely true enough. They’d suffer for it but an egg was only an egg. No matter how big the dragon got before they stopped it, a single dragon couldn’t mate with itself and hatch more, and so, one way or the other, the plague would end.
When he was ready, he made his rounds, delayed by all the busy fuss in the dragon yard as the Taiytakei who’d come to witness the trial bustled away, their gondolas and glasships cluttering the sky. He dawdled, talking to the Scales about things that didn’t matter, but there was no ignoring it for ever. He had the poisons ready.
He was about to go when he saw the strangest thing. A man stood in the entrance to the tunnels behind the hatchery, short for a slave, his once-pale skin tanned brown by years in the open sun but not night-black like the Taiytakei. The man carried a naked knife, a strange-looking thing with a golden handle and a blade more like a cleaver in which patterns swirled like smoke in moonlight. He wasn’t Taiytakei but he wasn’t dressed as a slave either, and his eyes . . . There was light coming from them. For a moment they stared at each other. Then the man beckoned. Bellepheros wasn’t sure why but it seemed important. He frowned and walked over.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
The man looked up and Bellepheros gasped. His eyes were bright burning silver. ‘Hello, brother,’ he said, and drove the knife into Bellepheros’s chest.
Three little cuts, Bellepheros heard a distant voice say. You. Obey. Me.
After Bellepheros went off to poison the dragon and put an end to it all at last, Chay-Liang surveyed her workshop. She’d asked to be with him and he’d refused, and it rankled because she knew he was quietly punishing her for being so pleased with herself. She picked up a few pieces of unshaped glass and moved them from one bench to another. She put away a few lengths of gold wire. She started to tidy up a pile of books and then spotted a glass bea
ker still half full of cold qaffeh, left forgotten on the floor beside one of her benches long enough to be growing mould. She looked around the workshop to make sure she was alone and then looked at the beaker, but no, she couldn’t bring herself to drink it, not when it looked like that . . .
The rider-slave was finally going to hang. It pleased her immensely and she wasn’t hiding it very well and so Belli was punishing her.
Still, she wished he’d let her be with him for this.
Far beneath the earth and deeper still, across the divides between the world above and Xibaiya below, the dragon Silence circled the stuttering spirit of the Watcher, the Elemental Man once killed by the dragon Diamond Eye.
Earth-child. Silence spoke softly. The killer’s spirit was fading, part consumed into the fabric of Xibaiya from which it had been made. Hiding in forlorn wait for the dead goddess.
Dragon. Its memories were broken and scarred and as thin as cloud in places, but they were there, jumbled in their jagged pieces. The dragon called Silence, as it reached for them, was gentle.
Tell me, the dragon whispered. Tell me what it was you left undone. It showed the spirit a face: the Adamantine Man it had found in the desert. What was he looking for? What did you want of him? Why?
Flashes. Through the spirit’s eye, the dragon saw three figures in silver and white. The moon sorcerers of the Diamond Isles, echoes of ghosts of half-gods who’d stayed behind when they should have known better. Faded ashes of themselves, yet they had once hurled Silence to Xibaiya with a single sorrowful thought.
They gave me a task. Words spoken. Or thoughts. The grey dead come with the golden knife. They call the Black Moon to rise again.
The Black Moon, chasing the sun across the sky, a little closer with every dawn until the Splintering had come and ripped the world apart and the Black Moon had shattered and its pieces had fallen across the earth . . .
Silence wormed deeper. Other flashes. Memories. Little ones with white skin, with tattoos on their necks and faces and running down their sides. Strange words, old writing, sigils never seen except in places as old as time. The Azahl Pillar. The skin of a killer. The Adamantine Man had seen them in the living world where the men who mastered dragons lived, but not one of them knew those signs for what they were.
The grey dead have called the Black Moon to rise again. Do not let the splinters become whole, dragon. The spirit of the Watcher showed the future it saw. A terrible thing. Death and war and oblivion. The Black Moon reborn and rising from the southern sky to blot out the sun and smother the world in another age of ice and darkness. The dragon watched and wondered. It was a future that fed its hunger.
Why should I care? The glimpsed echo of the Black Moon that night in the desert, inside the little one whose eyes burned silver. Others existed in those thoughts. It had seen a different face that the little one claimed was his own and yet was not.
It will devour everything.
Silence turned from the stuttering spirit. The prison of the Nothing was broken. The splinters of the Black Moon were loose on the world.
You were once a half-god too.
The dragon Silence pondered the Watcher’s words and cast its senses around for a new skin it might wear in the land of the living. It found one egg alone, separate from the rest, and tossed its soul through the veil of Xibaiya, leaping eagerly into the call of waiting flesh.
Red Lin Feyn sat in her gondola where the killers couldn’t reach her, meditating and sleeping, thinking about the Queverra and what she might find there. She gave the killers most of the next day to clear the eyrie and do what needed to be done, and then she closed her eyes for a moment and with a thought set loose the enchantment to crush the dragon-rider’s skull.
The Dragon-queen and
the Unmade God
51
Blood and Dragons
‘Holiness. Here I am. I have passed your test.’ Zafir gazed at Tuuran. Out in the dragon yard, the alchemist was coming. The Adamantine Man’s friend was beside him, guiding him, the one Diamond Eye hungered for, the one who called himself Crown-taker though he really didn’t look like much. She’d ask him, maybe, whose crown he once took and who he’d stepped on to reach it and how he’d ended up as a slave. Maybe they could have a bitter laugh about that together.
The Adamantine Man stayed on his knees, head pressed to the stone. Zafir crouched in front of him and cupped his face between her hands and lifted him. Pulled him to his feet until he towered over her, yet she’d never felt so fierce. Her fingers dug into his skin.
‘You are no longer a slave.’
He hung his head and wouldn’t look at her until she forced him. The alchemist was dawdling ever closer, weary and slow, his old knees giving him grief again. Zafir’s other hand dropped to her side and gripped the bladeless knife.
‘You are not a slave.’ She wasn’t sure whether she was talking to herself or to the Adamantine Man.
‘Holiness . . .’ Behind Tuuran the Crowntaker bounded past the alchemist and up the steps to the wall behind the Adamantine Man. Diamond Eye lowered his massive head to rub the stone, showing his submission.
‘I waited for you. I should have come to find you.’
‘Holiness . . .’
The Crowntaker paused for a moment behind Tuuran. He looked at them both, Zafir then Tuuran then back again. He barely seemed to notice the dragon. Zafir had never seen anyone so unafraid. At the same time she felt a strange play of emotions from Diamond Eye, things she wasn’t used to. Submission. Acceptance. Resignation. Acquiescence. As though the dragon knew something was coming and was powerless. Helpless. Something was very wrong.
He was a threat. To her dragon.
The Crowntaker eased past them. Zafir let Tuuran go. A certainty surged through her, a certainty she’d been missing for far too long.
‘I shouldn’t have waited,’ she said, and lashed out with the bladeless knife. The strike was good and the edge went through the Crowntaker’s throat as though there was nothing there at all. Zafir stepped back, waiting for him to fall.
A tiny cloud of black dust swirled around his neck.
Her hand closed on empty air. She opened her fingers and looked at them. The bladeless knife was gone. All that was left was a fine film of sweat-streaked black ash across her palm like the greasy soot she’d found in the gondola under the storm-dark. The Crowntaker wasn’t dead, wasn’t bleeding, his head wasn’t falling off his shoulders. He wasn’t even looking at her, but his eyes burned pure bright silver . . .
Silver! Zafir let out a little gasp and staggered back a step. Her legs almost failed her, empty of any strength. ‘Isul Aieha!’ The Silver King, and now she was going to die or something far far worse.
The Silver King had a knife in his hand now, a small cleaving thing with a golden handle. Patterns shimmered in its steel blade. He raised it and then stopped and looked at her. The fire in his eyes faded. He was a man again, ordinary and small, but Zafir knew she’d not forget what she’d seen, not ever. ‘What did you call me?’
Diamond Eye. The dragon knew. That was why he behaved as he did.
The Silver King cocked his head. ‘What did you call me?’ he asked again.
Zafir pulled herself together as best she could. She was shaking. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been afraid, not truly and helplessly afraid like this. ‘Isul Aieha,’ she whispered. She forced herself to look at him. He had little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the first signs of age creeping up on him. His skin was weathered by the sun. He was darker than she was but not by much, not black like the Taiytakei. He had old scars on his hands and his skin there was hard and calloused. He held himself a little awkwardly, favouring one leg. His eyes, now they’d stopped being silver, were grey like the sea under a storm.
‘You ride the dragon.’ It wasn’t a question. The knife turned towards her and she knew she should do something, kick out or try to get away, but she couldn’t make herself move. Scared like a child, made helpl
ess by a quiet voice full of pity and contempt at how pathetic she’d become. A dragon-queen, about to die, squealing inside like a little girl? Whimpering like a newborn? You’re better than that. We taught you better! We made you strong! Her mother, contemptuous as ever. But the thrust didn’t come. The little man froze. The bulk of the Adamantine Man loomed behind him and the big man had a sword too and now it was at the little man’s neck. ‘You don’t touch her, Crazy. Not her.’
Zafir couldn’t pull her eyes away. He didn’t look like much – scrawny and tough in the way of any slave who spent their days hard at work and didn’t get enough to eat. Yet he looked at her with eyes that had conquered worlds and didn’t flinch at the Adamantine Man’s sword against his skin. ‘Why’s that?’ he asked, still looking at Zafir.
‘Because I say. Does there have to be more reason?’ For another few moments none of them moved. Then the Adamantine Man took a deep breath and slowly let it out and lifted his sword away. ‘Because I’m asking, Crazy. That better?’
‘She tried to cut off my head, big man. You have to concede that’s . . . well . . .’ He looked at Zafir, right though her, it seemed. She tasted the sweat dripping down her face, rolling into the corners of her mouth, mixing with the tears that had come before. Salty. It was hot in the lee of the dragon with the sun above, but it wasn’t that hot. The armour. Must be. That was why she was sweating . . .
The Silver King. For a moment she’d seen the Silver King, the half-god who’d tamed the dragons, standing right in front of her. It was hard to look away, to stop searching for another glimpse of those burning silver eyes. She wondered if she was wrong. Some trick perhaps, but Diamond Eye knew better.
The Silver King didn’t move, though he still had his knife pointed at her, still had Tuuran standing behind him. He was shorter than her. Not by much but it helped. Somehow that made him less dangerous. She reached out a hand to steady herself and touched Diamond Eye’s scales. They were warm and rough under her fingers the way they always were. Reassuring. ‘Isul Aieha,’ she said again, because she knew she must be right. ‘I am . . . I mistook you for someone else.’
