by Stephen Deas
‘Where did you get your sorcerer, dragon-queen?’
Zafir tried not to laugh at that. She waved a hand as if he was nothing. ‘One of my Adamantine Guardsmen brought him. To be truthful, I haven’t had time to ask.’
Shonda roared with bitter laugher. ‘I curse your dragons, dragon-queen. Quai’Shu was a friend and they broke him. Vey Rin was my brother and they broke him as well.’ He gave her a little bow. The irony made Zafir chuckle and shake her head.
The lord of Vespinarr shuffled closer and sat cross-legged as close to her as he could get. ‘I did not get where I was, rider-slave, by kindness. Shall we bargain? A way across the storm-dark? No navigator will take you, not if they know who you are, but I can slip you aboard a ship so no one will ever know. It will be your ship, your crew . . .’
A bark of laughter came from the next cage. The unknown fourth man. ‘Save your words, Shonda of Vespinarr. You and I were better off when the Elemental Men merely meant to hang us.’ And Zafir smiled because she recognised him now. Shrin Chrias Kwen, whose men had raped her and then put Dhar Thosis to the sword while she’d burned it from above. He was changed. He’d lost a foot and the Statue Plague was working its way through the rest of him. His face was swollen, his hair ragged, but his voice gave him away, and eyes, now that she looked, yes, his eyes too. She turned her back on the cages and rested her hands on her hips. Underneath, she and Chrias were alike. He hadn’t had all his power simply given to him at every turn, he’d fought and bled and killed for it and worse. There were dark locked rooms in his past, she was quite sure of that, and they’d made him into a monster just as they’d made her into one too.
The slaves and the soldiers had almost finished stripping the bodies. The Crowntaker was with them now, taking pieces of Taiytakei armour and offering them about, though the slaves seemed reluctant to take them. Zafir looked deep inside to see if she could find any shred of pity for Shrin Chrias Kwen and what she’d done to him, but all she saw was Brightstar’s blood pooling across the floor of her little cabin on Quai’Shu’s ship the day they’d arrived in Xican, and then, much later, when he’d come to her with his men and told them to rape her, one after another. She turned her head to him. ‘Should I just let you go, Chrias Kwen? I’ve nothing left for you. I’ll not touch you, nor torture you, nor even notice your end. But I think you might stay in that cage a while so I can come out and see you and remember what you are. When you can give me a reason why my slave had to die, one that makes you more of a man and not less of one, I might ask my alchemist to ease your suffering.’
She turned away. Chrias spat at her back. ‘You have the plague as well! You gave it to me, so you must. Guard your alchemist then, lest I reach from beyond the grave one day and take him from you and laugh as you follow me to hell! Everything I am, you will become!’
Zafir left the cages. She would be with her slaves again, she thought, and set them free as well; but before she could cross the dragon yard, the Crowntaker cut her off. His eyes no longer burned silver and he was simply a man. Wiry and skinny and shorter than she was but with a face that looked as though it had walked through Xibaiya and back again, chasing ghosts for fun. She stopped and let him stand in front of her. ‘And you, Crowntaker? What do you want of me?’ She looked at the golden knife on his belt, closed her eyes and shook her head. ‘Shall I be your willing slave? You wouldn’t be the first to try it.’
The Crowntaker flipped the knife out of its sheath and offered it to her, hilt first. ‘A warlock stabbed me with this knife and made me his slave a while. A dozen years later I killed him with it. That day he cut me, he told me my future. “Dragons for one of you. Queens for both. An empress.” Those were his words. Are you an empress?’
‘I am a dragon-queen.’
‘I saw myself confronted by a man with own face but many years older. I had a javelin in my hand. I raised it to throw and the man spoke. Half a lifetime later I met myself on the road. I had a javelin in my hand. I raised it to throw and the man with my face spoke the words I’d heard more than twenty years before. You and I are meant for something, Dragon-Queen Zafir.’
Zafir cocked her head. ‘Men have wooed me in a lot of ways over the years but that one’s new. You’re the Silver King. You make the world as you want it. You’ve taken my dragons. If you don’t mean to use your sorcery on me then I’ll be away to my own realm, if I can. I would like to go home. I would like to find one. To have one. And it is not here.’ She stepped around him and walked away.
‘I don’t know who I am, dragon-queen.’
‘Then I’m the last person in the world you should ask for help,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘If you ever find the answer, tell me how you did it.’
Slaves and soldiers alike were gathered around the dead, men trying on armour, cracks of lightning as the wands from the fallen were tested. A steady trickle of men walked up to the walls and over them, each carrying a body. She didn’t see what they did with them. Tipped them into the abyss below? But that was a waste when there there were hungry dragons to feed. She climbed up to an empty stretch of wall out in the teeth of the wind and looked across the storm-dark to the Godspike. She sat in her armour, filthy and sticky, flaking crumbs of cooked and crusted gore whenever she moved, and stared out over the roiling clouds and the far-off desert. Twinkles in the sky marked glasships floating not so many miles away. Dozens of them. The Taiytakei.
‘They’ll come back, you know,’ she sighed to the wind. Or maybe she was talking to her dragons. ‘They will. Will our Silver King come out to fight them again when they do?’
He is the Black Moon, whispered the dragons in her mind, and Zafir laughed because here was a thing that no alchemist could know, no Adamantine Man, but she did because she’d seen it deep within the Pinnacles, in the murals on the walls in the places forbidden to any but the queen of the Silver City. Pictures of the Silver King carrying the Adamantine Spear to war against a man of two faces, and one of them was the moon.
‘Tell him to take me home and I will show them to him.’ The murals had a sadness to them. A regret, as if of something gone terribly wrong.
The wind shifted. Zafir shivered. Out of the wind the heat was wilting, but in it . . . Even under her armour she had goosebumps. She sat a while and watched the sun slowly climb across the sky. Off in the distance the tiny stars of the glasships were moving. Zafir got up, turned and looked down to the dragon yard, at the slaves and the soldiers working dutifully as though nothing had changed and the morning of slaughter had never happened.
‘Where’s the witch?’ she asked, but the dragons had no answer. She’d find out for herself then. She went looking for Tuuran.
54
Stowaway
Tuuran bowed as his speaker came to him. When she held out her hand, he touched his lips to the ring on her middle finger, the Speaker’s Ring of the Adamantine Palace. As he did, she touched the back of his head. It felt odd. Off, and his hair was greasy and stiff with dirt and sand. ‘In this realm there are no others,’ she told him. ‘I have you alone. You are the first of what will become a new ten thousand. I name you Night Watchman.’
She released him and he fell to his knees and pressed his head to the ground in front of her feet. ‘I cannot, Holiness. I cannot take this honour. I am not worthy.’
‘Worthy or not, this is what you have become. There is a price.’
‘Holiness?’
‘I know the creed of your kind. You are the swords. You sate yourselves in flesh and move on. You will not sate yourselves in the flesh of any slave from this eyrie. There are women here who were bred and taught for no purpose but to moan beneath fat uncaring men. They are not whores to be had as the fancy takes you. There are no slaves any more, and I will make a cage for any who act otherwise. You will see to this.’
Tuuran slowly got back to his feet. Erect, he towered over her, a full foot taller. A strange play of emotion flickered though him. Hope and passion and . . . was that adoration? No, not that. Pri
de. An Adamantine Man’s pride in his speaker and in himself.
‘Take what joy you can, Night Watchman.’ Zafir’s words sounded bleak and cold. ‘It won’t last long. Joy never does. Now find the witch Chay-Liang. The night-skins will come back for us soon enough.’ She walked off and Tuuran watched her go, wondering how to become what she’d asked. Crazy Mad did it by stabbing people with his warlock’s knife and disintegrating anything that annoyed him. This had its merits, he supposed, chief being that it scared the living shit out of everyone who saw it. Her Holiness got things done by burning people with her dragon if they didn’t do what she said, the old-fashioned dragon-rider way of doing things, tried and tested. His old oar-master had been very fond of his whip. All struck him as the same thing: obey or be hurt. Which was fine until some pissed-off slave whacked you on the head in the middle of the night and tipped you into the sea.
Well, he didn’t have a dragon and he couldn’t disintegrate people who looked at him wrong, and he didn’t fancy an unexpected night-time plunge off the edge of the eyrie, so none of those. He watched the slaves and the soldiers. They did what they were told because Crazy had quietly gone round and stabbed them with his crazy knife before he’d freed the dragon and not left them with a choice, but that was just making slaves in a different way and her Holiness had said not to do it.
He collared a couple of Crazy’s tame soldiers and told them to find the enchantress Chay-Liang. ‘Tell her what’s happened. Tell her she won’t be hurt as long as she behaves. Tell her Tuuran said so.’ He didn’t have much doubt she’d remember him.
He watched the men go and sighed. Letting the hatchlings rampage was all very well and they’d done a fine job of shredding the last Taiytakei soldiers who’d wanted to fight, but it seemed more like luck than anything that they hadn’t slaughtered absolutely everybody; and now that her Holiness was done burning everything that moved and Crazy was done disintegrating everything that didn’t, the eyrie needed slaves to make it work, to cook and fetch and carry and shovel shit and build things and wash things and herd things and all sorts, and generally those slaves needed to be alive.
Generally. Of course, Crazy had once managed to find a place where that wasn’t so, and there were whispers of others too, but best not to think about that.
Since everything in the dragon yard seemed to be getting on well enough, Tuuran climbed to the wall and looked out over the distant desert and the maelstrom of the storm-dark. The wind in his face made him think of being at sea. He missed that. He’d had enough of the desert, thanks. Never enough to drink and when there was water it was tepid and stale, and sand in everything except when it was ants or scorpions. No, he’d definitely had enough of the desert. He glanced at the two of them, Crazy and then the dragon-queen: a starving shackled wretch he’d saved from the bilges and a princess he’d found pinned against a wall by a drunkard. Gave him a strange feeling. Odd, like they were his children, and that was just daft, wasn’t it?
There was a sliver of etched glass in his boot. The Watcher had given it to him, a pass to passage among the Taiytakei to take him anywhere he asked. He pulled it out and was about to throw it away, as far and hard as he could, then stopped. Zafir wanted to go home. But as far as Tuuran knew, Crazy couldn’t cross the storm-dark. He tucked it away again and set his mind to getting the eyrie in order. You never know, eh?
The dull thuds of the lightning cannon had stopped. A handful of slaves ran past Liang’s workshop, and then the eyrie fell into uncertain silence. After a while, when no one came, she limped to the door and looked up and down the passage.
Empty. She thought about heading up to the eyrie to find out what was going on and then imagined another hatchling lurking and went back for a second lightning wand instead. And maybe a sled. And maybe she could take several gold-glass spheres and make a shield around the sled, and then she wouldn’t have to walk any more. And rockets. She could put the bombs on the ends of rockets. They wouldn’t go very far but it would be better than throwing them. And she could sit inside the shield and stick wands out the front and rockets on the side and make a sort of sled for fighting dragons.
When she was done making her armoured sled, it crossed her mind that two lightning wands were all very well, but ten would be better; and it took a while, making all that, and she was still working when she heard new voices outside and another pair of soldiers came to her door. Not the soldiers she’d seen before, but at least they didn’t look like they were running for their lives this time. Even if they were both Vespinese. She’d given up hating the Vespinese – it was just too much effort.
‘Enchantress!’
‘Did the Elemental Men kill it? What’s happened to the dragon? Is it dead?’
The soldiers looked confused as if they didn’t understand what she meant. ‘Lady, you have to come to the dragon yard now. Night Watchman Tuuran gives his assurance you’ll be safe.’ The soldier sounded calm, almost asleep, as though he’d been chewing Xizic since dawn. No sign of the terror and the panic she’d seen in the others.
‘Tuuran?’ Liang shook her head, puzzled. ‘Where are the Elemental Men?’
‘Gone, lady.’ The soldier offered a hand. ‘Some were killed, others fled.’ Calm as anything, as though it hardly mattered. Liang had to lean on a bench. This was too much. Her voice broke to a whisper.
‘The dragon?’
‘The dragon serves the Black Moon. As do we all.’ They came towards her, arms reaching to take hold of her. As soon as they touched her, she reached her mind into the gold-glass armour they wore and froze it solid. She wrenched herself free. One of them toppled over. The other simply stood, stiff as a stone, an expression of bewilderment on his face. Liang shook her head.
‘Now there’s a lesson for you,’ she muttered, wincing at the pain in her leg. ‘I could make that armour of yours squeeze until your ribs burst, but why not tell me without all that messiness, eh? What in the name of Xibaiya and the unholy Rava are you talking about?’
They told her that a silver sorcerer of the moon had come, one of the half-gods to whom the smiths of Scythia quietly prayed when they thought that no one was looking. Belli’s half-god, who might once, if you believed in the rumoured words of the forbidden Rava, have ruled everything and everywhere. It couldn’t be true but that was what the soldiers believed. The worst was how it didn’t seem to bother them.
When they were done, Liang dragged the two of them in their frozen armour into the far corner of her workshop and hobbled away to hide.
Tuuran headed into the tunnels with a few of the soldiers Crazy had stabbed with his knife. He found slaves barricaded in their dormitories to keep the dragons out and told them he’d keep them safe; and they came out because some of them remembered him and what a pain in the arse he’d been. The night-skins he found now and then generally threw lightning at him, but there were a few who remembered him from back when he’d been the alchemist’s bodyguard, who did at least say hello before they tried to kill him. He herded the survivors up to the dragon yard and Crazy Mad quietly stabbed Taiytakei and slave alike and handed them back over to Tuuran, heart, mind and soul; and it was like his old galley – Crazy and her Holiness the galley masters, and him with a band of frightened slaves left to make sure that stuff got done.
‘That’s your dragon-queen, is it, big man?’ asked Crazy. Tuuran nodded. ‘This eyrie. It’s hers now. Make it work.’
Out over the storm the glasships were coming. Her Holiness was shouting something, pitting her lungs against the wind. Tuuran listened for a bit, thinking she didn’t sound much like a speaker of the nine realms and that old Vishmir the Magnificent or Narammed the Great would have given a much finer battle speech. He climbed the walls and looked around the rim at the cannon. Right then.
Liang limped across the ice-cold morgue of what had once been Baros Tsen T’Varr’s bathhouse into the spiralling passages where the slaves lived. The tunnels were quiet and empty, the rooms deserted. She stepped around scorched bodies
and pieces of men, some so mangled as to be unidentifiable. A few rooms here and there had been gutted by fire but most were simply empty. She went to where the kitchen slaves slept, found a stained white tunic and rubbed some of their cheap perfume over her skin to make herself, as best she could, seem just another slave. She returned the way she’d come and started looking for Belli. He wasn’t in his laboratory so she tried his study and found him sitting on the end of his bed, his head in his hands, rocking gently back and forth. For a moment he didn’t recognise her. Then his eyes sharpened and he jumped to his feet. ‘Li! You’re hurt!’
‘I killed a dragon,’ she said and then giggled a little shrilly at how ridiculous that sounded. And yet it was true. ‘It was only one of the little ones,’ she added sheepishly.
Belli might not even have heard for all she could tell. Just like the last time. He was on his hands and knees already, looking at her leg. She’d wrapped a piece of cloth around it to try and stop herself spattering blood all over the floor of her workshop, and it was saturated. A trickle of red dribbled along her calf and dripped from her ankle. Belli shook his head and tutted. ‘You never look after yourself, Li.’ He tried to untie the knotted cloth and merely ended up with her blood all over his fingers. He went to get a knife.
‘Why didn’t you kill it?’ she asked.
‘Kill what?’
‘The dragon. Was it because of her?’
‘Zafir?’ He shook his head as he cut the bandage. ‘I would have argued for her life with my own, but the dragon? The Elemental Men told me it must be done and they were right. It was the slave who said I should not.’ He looked up at her and there were tears in his eyes. ‘The Silver King, Li. The Silver King! How could I not obey? He returns. Or so I thought . . .’ He looked down again and shook his head. ‘And then Zafir tried to kill him, and, Flame help me, I think she was right! Somehow she had a knife from an Elemental Man. She tried to kill the Silver King. The Silver King, Li! With a killer’s blade but it turned to ash in her hand.’ He was trembling. ‘Only this is not the Silver King I thought to serve.’ He shook his head and shuddered. ‘He set them free, Li. He woke the dragons with a snap of his fingers and set them free.’
