by Stephen Deas
Abruptly the little man tucked the knife back into his belt. He took two quick steps closer to stand right in front of her and then reached out a hand to touch her face. The silver fire flared in his eyes again and his fingers against her skin were burning hot. She flinched. Pieces of her curled up into sobbing balls and others ran screaming in fear but she made herself stand firm, forced herself to face him eye to eye because that was what a dragon-queen learned to do, and if she could do it with a dragon then she could do it with a man, any man, however hard it was. She took his hand in her own and squeezed. She meant to pull it away but she didn’t. She could feel him searching inside her for something.
‘The Earthspear.’ The word crawled between his teeth. She had other names for it but she had no doubt what he meant. The Adamantine Spear. The Speaker’s Spear. He lowered his hand and the silver fire in his eyes burned ever brighter. ‘You serve the Earthspear.’
Serve? The word cut through her fear and tapped the anger, the deep lake of it that was the bedrock of who she was. Servant. Slave. ‘I am the dragon-queen Zafir,’ she hissed at him. ‘Speaker of the nine realms. Queen of the Adamantine Palace, carrier of the Silver King’s spear . . .’ Her mouth stayed open but the words stopped. The Silver King’s spear. For a moment again, all her anger wasn’t enough to drown out the fear.
‘Where is it?’
She had no idea. In the dragon-lands somewhere. Probably in the Adamantine Palace in the little cellar under the Speaker’s Tower or the room far below the Glass Cathedral where Aruch had taken her the day she’d become speaker. Someone else must hold it now. Some other speaker, and with that thought, even as the silver fire in the little man’s eyes held her transfixed, the tears began to well again. ‘I will take it back,’ she whispered, as if whispering might somehow make it true.
‘You don’t need to,’ said the Silver King. ‘It’s yours. You gave it your blood. You’re tied to it. It won’t drink from another while you live.’ He nodded sharply and took a step back. ‘Side by side it shall be then. You may carry it once more and be my vassal and share in my dominion.’ The silver flared brighter still then stuttered and vanished and the Crowntaker stood in front of her with his own eyes again, a bewildered frown on his face. He blinked a few times and then turned away, clutched at his hair and bared his teeth and let out a furious snarl. ‘Leave me alone!’
Zafir took a step closer. She reached out a hand and touched his shoulder. There was a man in there too, struggling and afraid. ‘Who are you?’
The Crowntaker jerked away. ‘Not who you think.’ He spun and looked up at the Adamantine Man. ‘Not who you think. Either of you. I’m not your Silver King or your issle ayer, but whatever it is I carry, it remembers that name and not kindly!’ He whipped back to Zafir. ‘I’m done with this. I want myself back.’ He bared his teeth and shouted, ‘I want my face back!’
At the foot of the wall the alchemist was preparing a trough of bloody water for Diamond Eye to drink. Every morning the same – blood and water riddled with alchemy – and every morning Diamond Eye waited eagerly for it, but not today. Today he only had eyes for the Crowntaker. Zafir forced herself to look away from him. Past him at Tuuran. ‘The alchemist. He’s about to kill my dragon. Give me your blade. I must stop him.’
The Adamantine Man nodded and looked pleased with himself, then remembered he was supposed to bow. ‘No need, Holiness. He won’t be any trouble.’ His eyes kept shifting to the Crowntaker.
‘How so?’
‘I think Crazy here is about to show you, Holiness.’
The Crowntaker lurched and threw back his head. He screamed as his eyes blazed silver again and he took his knife and stabbed it into Diamond Eye’s neck.
52
Silver King
Diamond Eye felt the knife strike but Zafir had no sense of pain from the dragon. She lunged for the Crowntaker’s arm but Tuuran caught her hand. ‘No, Holiness.’ Anger overwhelmed fear. She slapped him.
‘You dare touch me, Adamantine Man?’
He fell to his knees and bowed his head. He said something she didn’t hear. Thoughts and feelings washed over her, spilling from the dragon. They felt sharper. Sharper and sharper until they cut like knives and became memories. She didn’t see them but she felt the shape of their presence as though a cloud had pulled back from covering the sun, or maybe as if they’d been flying high with nothing but a sea of white beneath them, and the dragon had plunged and punched through and out the other side, and now there was the land and the sea with all its contours and wrinkles and familiar places. Unfamiliar ones too.
The dragon was remembering. Understanding stabbed through her. She lunged again and seized the Crowntaker’s arm to pull him away, too fast this time for Tuuran to stop her, but the moment she touched the Crowntaker she froze and couldn’t move. Whatever he was doing to Diamond Eye, it sucked her in. She saw the ghostly shape of a second dragon, and within that dragon a web of silver strands as intricate and complex as the whole of history, woven together in impossible detail. She cried out and tried to pull away but instead moved helplessly deeper within the web to places where gossamer curtains hung. Everywhere she went, she cut those curtains down.
The Crowntaker was making Diamond Eye remember.
You want your alchemist gone? There will be no need for alchemists after I’m done.
Stop! She tried to draw her thoughts away but nothing worked. She was powerless.
Stop? Why? I will have them as I made them. All of them.
Who are you? Stop! Let me go!
As each curtain fell away, she glimpsed the memories that lay beneath. A thousand years, dozens upon dozens of lifetimes. Hundreds of years of servitude, dimly remembered. The great betrayal of the Isul Aieha, the silver half-god who carried the Earthspear – her spear, when she saw a flash of it. Before that, hunting and searching and eating. Glimpses of something lost and forgotten, growing stronger as the memories went back ever further. Searching for a purpose. Searching for their maker and for the enemies they were created to destroy. A world broken. Knowledge of that. A desire to change it but they couldn’t. Anger. A place called Darkstone. Flying but never reaching it as the land shuddered and shifted and was rent apart, as an impossible wall of black cloud and lightning spread up to the sky with no end, too high for even a dragon to pass and the touch of which meant death for ever.
She reeled. She was seeing the Splintering.
And then before – the battles, the war, the towers of white stone and the rivers of steel-clad soldiers, lakes of fire, the earth torn open, the sky split apart. And back further – the very first awakening in a quiet place. A familiar presence. Its first sensations. The Crowntaker welcoming Diamond Eye into the world at his very first hatching, except the Crowntaker had borne a different name:
The Black Moon.
There. That part is done.
Rage seethed through the dragon, washing through Zafir. Rage and hunger and fury, an incandescence as it understood what had been done to it for lifetime after lifetime.
One more thing. Three little cuts that even the sun-child within me knows. You. Obey . . . The knife paused and then seemed to change its mind. Her. My gift to you, spear carrier. Take me to it. Carry it at my side and we shall cross the world and I will be whole again and everything will be as it was before and this time there will be no mistake. We will heal this world and cast the old gods aside for ever. We will shape it to our vision.
Who are you? Whole again? She didn’t understand anything except that he’d woken Diamond Eye and made the dragon remember who and what it was and how terrified she was of that; and then she was back on the walls of the eyrie, wind howling and tearing at her, staggering away while the Crowntaker’s eyes burned silver bright. He was whispering words in the dragon’s ear, words she couldn’t hear, but she understood them anyway because Diamond Eye understood, and everything the dragon knew so did she with crystal clarity. She clutched her head and gasped at the size of what was inside her
.
‘Go, dragon. Burn those here who would do us harm. Spare those who would serve.’
In her mind’s eye she saw the who. The Elemental Men. The Taiytakei soldiers. Diamond Eye was awake. She felt the ferocity of his thoughts, the sifting of his returned memories, the outrage as he jumped from the wall and slammed into the dragon yard. The whole eyrie shook with his landing. He stamped on the trough of blood and water and potion, spattering Bellepheros with his own concoctions. Zafir heard Bellepheros cry out. She ran to the edge, expecting to see Diamond Eye crush him into bloody ooze, but the dragon passed him by, tail swishing back and forth with suppressed murder, and stalked across the yard straight at the Scales. The hatchlings, clustered around their food, tearing at the meat like vultures, stopped and backed away, huddled together, uncertain like cubs before a furious mother. The Scales looked up too, as dull and stupid as their dragons. Slaves hurrying across the yard on their errands paused to stare and then turned to run. Soldiers stopped their pacing and their gossip and touched their hands to the wands at their hips. It seemed that even the wind held its breath. For a moment there was stillness . . .
Diamond Eye reared up and spat a torrent of fire. He swept it over the hatchlings, the Scales, the feeding troughs, the chains, the potion buckets, everything, on and on. Maybe the Scales screamed, but if they did then Zafir didn’t hear over the roar of fire and the wind. The men around the scaffold and the cages bolted for the safety of the tunnels. The soldiers on the wall faltered. Some ran. Some turned on the dragon. Some turned on their comrades as though they’d been waiting for this all along. Zafir saw a flash and heard the first futile clap of lightning as the crystal order of the eyrie shattered into howling burning chaos.
*
Chay-Liang looked at the beaker with the mould growing inside. Still didn’t know what to do with it. She collected the books scattered about on chairs and benches and even the floor and arranged them on her shelves.
The rest of the mess was all still there, resolutely not tidying itself. She started on her tools: tongs and blowers and pincers, the tiny hammers and the wickedly sharp little knives with enchanted glass blades that she used for the fine work of cutting gold. Once they were all back in their rack on the wall she swapped a few about and looked at them again and sighed. The thing she really ought to be getting on and dealing with was the wire. Seven different metals and alloys and probably the same number of different thicknesses of each, and there were bits of it scattered absolutely everywhere. The pig of it was putting each piece away in the right drawer.
A tremor shook the eyrie.
An Elemental Man appeared on the battlements. His bladeless knife pointed straight at Zafir. ‘Make it stop or you die here and now.’
Could she? Diamond Eye’s fury ran though her whether she wanted it or not, crushing every fear. Stop him? Even if she could, why would she? He had woken; and it dawned on her then that this was exactly what she’d wanted, only instead of sending Diamond Eye away to waken weeks after she was dead, now she could see it with her own eyes. Not for long, but she would see the terror unleashed.
She spat back at the killer, ‘Instead of tomorrow when you decide to hang me?’ And then she laughed and shook her head, carried off with a gleeful madness. ‘Diamond Eye! This one wants to kill me. Will you let him?’ Maybe Diamond Eye would hear and obey and move with a speed that even an Elemental Man couldn’t match. Maybe not. It didn’t matter any more.
The Elemental Man vanished. She felt the air pop behind her and the slight touch of something at the base of her spine before she could even start to respond. Then nothing and she was miraculously still alive. She turned. The Elemental Man stood frozen, his face a mask of rigid pain. The Crowntaker was behind him, eyes ablaze, one finger against the side of the killer’s head. Zafir looked down. On the tip of the bladeless knife was a touch of blood. Her blood. Straight through the gold-glass of her armour as though it was air.
‘Would you like him, spear carrier?’ asked the Crowntaker. Zafir staggered back a step, trying to feel how deep the killer had cut her. She felt no pain, only a head full of dragon-rage. She shook herself, shook her head. ‘No.’ And the Crowntaker shrugged, and the killer jerked and burst into a cloud of black dust and smoke. The Crowntaker turned away and jumped over the wall after the dragon and its fire, into the terror and the lightning and the screaming men and women with no thought in their head but to run away.
‘Holiness!’ Tuuran took her hand and pulled her towards the steps. His eyes were wide. He ran, dragging her with him. ‘You have to hide, Holiness. We have to hide!’
At the bottom of the steps she shook him off. Hide? ‘Dragon!’ she cried. ‘Come to me, dragon!’
Diamond Eye turned. The burning stopped. There was nothing left of the hatchery but black shapes and the cluster of hatchlings pressed together, their wings raised to shield themselves. The Scales were stumps, not even things you could see had once been men. Screaming slaves in the dragon yard vanished into the tunnels, fighting with each other to get away, t’varrs and kwens and other Taiytakei with them, swallowed by mindless panic. The soldiers on the walls, the few with the courage or stupidity to hold their ground, were running for the lightning cannons. Diamond Eye took two huge steps and towered over Zafir, eyes ablaze and furious. Tuuran was still trying to pull her away. She slapped him. ‘Are you mine, dragon?’
Resentment poured from him, a river in full flood that fed a fury of her own. His thoughts were as clear as polished sapphire. The alchemists of the Adamantine Palace had shown her a woken dragon on the day they’d made her speaker. She’d felt that dragon’s thoughts like angry knives but never as clear as these.
I am.
‘Then we do this as one. You will not hurt this one.’ She jerked a thumb at Tuuran. Then, as an afterthought, at Bellepheros. ‘Or him.’
And what then, little one? Such anger, piled on itself over and over for a dozen lifetimes. The dragon’s tail slashed the air back and forth and then slammed straight at her, so fast and sudden that she hardly saw it. The spear-sharp tip lashed through an Elemental Man as he materialised beside her. His head and torso exploded in a shower of gore and splintered bone. The rest of him scattered in bloody pieces across the yard around her. Zafir launched herself at the legbreaker hanging from Diamond Eye’s neck. The soldiers on the walls were turning the lightning cannon.
‘Those,’ she said. ‘You remember those?’ She climbed onto Diamond Eye’s back. No helm. No gauntlets. No time for that.
I remember.
‘Preserve them but kill those who man them!’ She turned back to the Crowntaker and Tuuran and cried out to them, ‘Side by side? Then this moment is mine! We will need men, Tuuran! Find those who will side with us against whatever this world will throw against us! Look to the slaves!’ A madness filled her, the dragon’s fury. This was always how it would end, in flames and ruin, and whether she lived another day or another hour or merely a minute, it no longer mattered a whit.
Diamond Eye picked up the mangled remains of the Elemental Man and launched it through the air. He surged forward, one mighty flap of his wings powering across the eyrie. The Crowntaker was among the hatchlings now, moving from one to the next, stabbing each with his knife, making them remember and setting them free.
‘Who is he?’ Zafir shouted. ‘What is he? You know, don’t you?’
Names come and names go and he has had many. He is not whole.
‘But who is he?’
The Black Moon. Diamond Eye smashed into the eyrie wall beside one of the lightning cannon as its glass disc glowed bright. Cracks spread through the pure white stone. He reached inside the cannon’s cradle. Two Taiytakei scrambled away, falling onto the wall. A spray of fire and they screamed and crisped. Pieces of glass-and-gold armour glowed cherry-red. Molten gold smeared and ran and the men inside flared and burned. Gusts of scorched air brushed Zafir’s skin, mixing with the cold of the roaring wind. Diamond Eye was burning hot under her and everyth
ing was fire.
*
Chay-Liang paused a moment in her workshop, then went back to putting pieces of wire in a heap on a bench. Some pieces jumped out at her – that, for example, was obviously a length of half-finger gold and could be put away at once, and the copper was obvious enough too, except that when she started looking at it, the end was skewed by where pincers had cut it . . .
Two armoured soldiers burst through her door and crashed into the workshop, knocking over a stack of unfinished gold-glass. They looked terrified. One of them was a kwen.
‘Enchantress, you are needed! The hatchlings are loose. The dragon has turned on us!’ The soldiers ran back out and vanished into the tunnels. Liang stood open-mouthed. Surely, surely the killers had been ready for this?
Taiytakei soldiers ran out of the tunnels from the barracks. Diamond Eye’s head whipped round. Fire scoured the top of the wall and then down the sides and into the yard, scattering them, sending them scurrying back. A thunderous crack of cannon lightning arced and struck Diamond Eye in the leg. Zafir felt its sting, felt him buckle as the leg turned limp. The dragon launched himself off the wall and poured fire around him. Waves of heat blew across her face. Smaller lightning bolts cracked into his side but the soldiers’ wands were insect bites, nothing more. He landed again and ran along the wall, hosing fire down its length. Taiytakei howled and ran. They jumped into the dragon yard or tumbled down the shallow outer slope to the craggy edges of the rim to hide in the rubble and mounds of rubbish, and Zafir could only laugh because a dragon could pluck out your very thoughts, and only the alchemist had a remedy for that.
