The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  ‘Hello?’

  Her voice echoed from silent stone. No answer. She could see the iron-bound doors at the far end of the hall. They were closed. They have to be listening, surely! They have to be here.

  They see you, warned Diamond-Eye. They watch.

  ‘How many are you?’ she called. Her words rang out in the emptiness. The silence that came after swallowed her. ‘Are you few? Or are you many? I know the secrets of this place. I can help you.’ She took another step. ‘Princess Zara-Kiam? Is she here? She will know me. Does the name matter to you? Is she alive?’ It mattered to her. Her own sister. Of course it mattered.

  The quiet oppression of the walls squeezed tight, squashing the air out of her. The darkness. Her breaths came fast and shallow. She was panting like an animal. She raised her voice and made herself stronger.

  ‘I am Zafir of the Silver City, speaker of the nine realms, and this fortress is my home. I bring hope. I bring a half-god. I bring the Silver King’s brother. Is my sister here? Princess Zara-Kiam? Will you not parley with me?’

  Silence.

  ‘My dragon sits above. I am alone here but I will not remain so. Speak! I come with an alchemist, and all the martial glory of the Taiytak—’

  The first crossbow quarrel hit her in the head. It glanced off the gold-glass of her helm hard enough to knock her sideways. Perhaps that was what saved her when the second missed her throat as she staggered. It hit the pouldron on her left shoulder instead and shattered it. Zafir stumbled back, head spinning. She raised her arm and loosed a bolt of lightning at the wall, not with any hope of striking anything, but to stun, for in this shallow space the noise was deafening and thundered in her ears. Then she ran, the terror of being trapped in darkness an unruly riot inside her. The iron tip of another quarrel sparked off the steps, and then she was climbing and out of sight of the bowmen below. Step after step, heart thumping, eyes fixed firmly on each footfall while leering fear closed around her, until she pulled herself gasping back into rain and daylight and glorious space. She stopped a moment, bent over, hands on knees, breathing deep until the demons of the dark slunk away.

  Alchemists.

  ‘What do you mean, alchemists?’ she snarled, furious at her own frailty. A dragon-queen wasn’t afraid. Never, ever, afraid. Certainly not of the dark. That was for children.

  Alchemists are reviled here. Made into demons. Diamond Eye was almost smiling. Enjoying the sensations. Enjoying her discomfort, perhaps, but then all woken dragons had a special venom in their heart for alchemists.

  The eyrie was almost down now, the black stone of its underbelly not much more than a few dozen feet over her head, laced with glowering veins and flickering with violet lightning. The cages were on their way, winching down over the sides. Zafir pointed her dragons to the Queen’s Gate.

  ‘Clear that path,’ she told them.

  The cages reached the ground long before the dragons were done. Tuuran sidled up beside her, watching them at work. ‘Last time I came here was as guardsman to Speaker Hyram.’

  ‘And you left as a slave.’ Zafir brushed his arm. A fleeting touch, yet lingering. She didn’t take her eyes off the dragons. ‘Does it feel strange to be back?’

  Tuuran grunted. ‘Like the stab of a knife. Something like that. Don’t know how to put it into better words. A hard pang, and deep, and not what I thought it would be. Everyone gone or ­hiding, everything burned.’ He stared at the dragons, at the colossal bulk of Diamond Eye pulling boulders out of the entrance, flinging them over the side of the mountain. ‘No regrets though,’ he muttered. He glanced at her, dressed in her armour and ready for battle, and chuckled.

  ‘Regrets?’ Zafir shook her head. ‘Then I have them for us both, Night Watchman.’ She turned away. ‘I already went inside. I didn’t wait for you.’

  ‘I saw.’ She felt the silent admonishment.

  ‘I told them who I was. They answered with crossbows.’ She looked to the eyrie. ‘This was my home once. He should be here.’ She didn’t expect an answer. The two of them didn’t talk about the Crowntaker much these days. Not since Merizikat. Neither of them knew what to say.

  After a moment, Tuuran looked her up and down. ‘Are you hurt, Holiness? I don’t see any blood or anything sticking out that shouldn’t.’

  ‘No.’ But she was hurting, on the inside, and he wasn’t so stupid as to not see it. Made for two of them. Maybe that was how he knew.

  ‘He’s not coming down. He’s gone funny again. Trying to kill yourself would do that, I suppose. Can’t blame someone for feeling a bit funny after that.’ Sometimes Tuuran’s bitterness was enough to burn holes in the rain.

  The dragons had cleared the entrance enough for them to get inside. Zafir picked up a gold-glass shield and started for the hole. Tuuran put a warning hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Holiness, you don’t know who’s in there.’

  He gathered White Vish and a few others from Furymouth and Merizikat, a dozen soldiers like him, hard men with hard pasts, in dragonscale and glass and gold, with swords and lightning and the spiked ashgars of the Taiytakei knights. More men were coming down from the eyrie, lowered in the creaking wooden cages they’d built together a blue moon ago when they’d been adrift over the sea, and the cages had been for fishing.

  ‘Do you remember the way?’ Zafir asked him.

  ‘Do I bloody remember it?’ He scoffed and laughed through the rubble strewn across the Grand Aisle behind the Queen’s Gate. ‘Bright and clear, Holiness, even if it was a decade ago.’ One wall opened to the sky, letting daylight and rain sweep in through carved columns. The rest of the Grand Aisle lay thick with shadow. ‘I remember standing here while Speaker Hyram greeted your mother.’ Zafir didn’t remember it, though she knew she must have been there too, Tuuran at Speaker Hyram’s side, herself lingering reluctantly next to her mother. ‘I can still see the High Hall as it was that day, paintings and statues, layered with rugs and ­tapestries.’ Tuuran looked about as if trying to find them. The statues had survived, blackened and cracked, some of them broken. The rest was gone save a few charred shreds and stains of damp sooty ash. The wind whistled from the open colonnades, fleeting gusts catching Zafir with speckles of rain. Strands of ivy crept between cracks underfoot. In the shadows something skittered away.

  A sudden flutter of wings made her jump almost out of her skin. Two startled pigeons broke from cover and bolted for the open air. No one had been here for months. The Queen’s Gate had been abandoned to the dragons.

  A dozen steps led around the curve of the mountaintop to a second hall lit by shafts of daylight from above, as desolate as the first and damp with puddles of rain. Beyond waited the Grand Stair, and then the Silver King’s gate into the Enchanted Palace and the heart of the Moonlit Mountain; but at the bottom of the stair a block of stone the size of a barn barred their way. Zafir crouched. She took off a golden gauntlet and brushed at the dust with a fingertip.

  ‘They must have sealed themselves in a long time ago,’ she said. ‘A small band could live here almost for ever, if they were careful.’

  ‘So now what?’

  ‘We come from below, Night Watchman, and from the side.’

  She climbed back out and took to the air with Diamond Eye, urging him down to whatever was left of the Silver City. He dropped like a stone while she pressed hard against him, head pushed down, arms spread against his scales. He flared his wings as they neared the ground, crushing the air out of her, settling into a lazy orbit over the ruins. Shapes and outlines resonated with memories sparkling silver in the sunshine and busy with life. The long streets and wide open squares were mottled with weeds and patches of grass now. In places the canals lay choked with rubble or overgrown water plants; elsewhere they still shone with gleaming water. Trees sprouted in the burned shells of houses amid sprawled patches of thorns. The fields and meadows that had made her city rich were gnawin
g it away. Taking back what had always been theirs.

  ‘The Order of the Dragon once ruled here,’ she said as much to herself as to Diamond Eye. ‘There used to be gardens laced with rose bowers and dotted with splashing fountains. Peacocks. I remember there were peacocks.’ It was all gone, everything she’d known. When she touched the dragon’s mind, she found that he too was lost in ancient memories.

  After the Splintering when the Isul Aieha struck the Black Moon down we were cast into Xibaiya. When we hatched and rose anew, all we remembered was gone. Left amid the ruin they made, we searched for the half-gods, lifetime after lifetime, until one by one we abandoned their memory. And now the shadow of the Black Moon comes again, fumbling for what he was, great pieces yet missing, still burning to make the world as he sees it was meant to be.

  Zafir caught snatches of visions. Spires of stone, dragons filling the sky, and in that sky the darkness of a silver moon, hard and hostile and violent.

  This is how it was, murmured Diamond Eye. That is what he brings.

  Zafir looked at the ruins of her city, grey and dull in the falling rain. ‘And who will stop him, dragon? You? Me?’ She guided Diamond Eye away. ‘There are tunnels under the mountain. This was my home, and I will have it back, and it will be the way it must be, as violent as your remembered moon.’

  5

  The Throne of the Harvest Queen

  Five days after landfall

  Across the sheer cliff-face sides of the Moonlit Mountain the eyrie came, carried by dragons of venom and anger. Tuuran huddled his men behind a wooden barricade on the rim as it reached the first of the scorpion caves that riddled the bluffs. Veils of green vines trailed over a mouth of darkness until Diamond Eye swooped in and scoured it with fire, on and on, hot enough to melt stone. Scorching air billowed out of the cave, rank with the tang of red-hot iron and laced with piteous wails. Tuuran cut the rope holding the barricade. It tipped, rattled down like a drawbridge and crashed against the lip of the cave. Wisps of smoke and cooked ash plumed.

  He took a moment then. An instant to savour the seven shades of unholy shit he was about to rain down on anyone who got in his way.

  Right then.

  A scream to curdle blood. He launched himself. A haze filled the cave, smoke and steam. Hastily roped wood shuddered under his boots, eyes too busy peering through the scalded air for whatever would try to kill him to be worrying about the dizzying drop below. Across the gap and in, men bellowing behind him, howling themselves on, fear cowed by roars, burned air searing his throat with every breath.

  A harsh metal rasp echoed ahead. Something shot past him. Huge. A scorpion bolt skewered one of his men on the eyrie rim, picked him up and threw him a dozen yards through the air. The bolt flew on, a rope of blood trailing in its wake. It sparked off the sloping stone of the eyrie wall and ricocheted into the sky. Tuuran unleashed a curse, teeth bared, axe already swinging its song. No regrets, no retreat, no time to think …

  Two men ahead, scrambling from the scorpion at the back of the cave, bolting deeper into the mountain. He leaped after them like a thunderstorm.

  ‘For speaker and spear!’ Past a man on the floor, burned to the bone, screaming in agony, not quick enough behind the scorpion’s dragonscale shield when Diamond Eye had let loose hell. The air stank. He hurdled another corpse, burned black. Then into the tunnel, shoulders ricocheting off the walls, so damned dark he could barely see, a few feeble remnants of sunlight creeping from outside. At least the clouds had broken, a pause in the endless bloody ­monotony of rain. He couldn’t see the two bastards ahead, but he heard them. He flicked at the enchanter’s torch strapped to his arm. Light flared, dazzlingly bright. Too much, but he saw flashes and flickers of movement in the crazed dance of shadows it birthed. One man stopped. Turned to face him. Tuuran crashed into him in a strobe of light and dark, a flash of a shape, a face, wild whites of eyes and bared teeth, the waiting sword not even seen as Tuuran smashed his shield straight onto the point of it and knocked the blade aside. He ran the man down, size and strength and speed his victory. His boot stamped on something, an arm maybe. He staggered, almost tripped. The man he’d flattened cried out.

  ‘Live one!’ He stumbled. ‘Someone finish the shit rag!’ Caught himself, raced on, hard, fast, trying to get to the last man before the alarm could spread.

  The tunnel sloped down, the air laced with a smell of stale smoke. Woodsmoke and so dark he couldn’t see a thing outside the beam of his light, flashing all over like a maddened wasp. He held his shield in front of him, stumbled again and again on the uneven floor, caught himself each time, careened off the walls and finally crashed headlong into solid stone where the tunnel forked. His shield saved him from breaking his face, but he couldn’t tell which way the other man had gone.

  He stopped. Swore.

  ‘On me!’ Zafir had shown him how the scorpion caves were laid out. Drawn him a nice little map of the tunnels beyond and how to find his way to the heart of the fortress, but he was buggered if he could remember anything except the way straight in to the heart of it. He’d know it when he saw it, she said.

  ‘Sticks of shit!’

  ‘Boss?’ Halfteeth, right behind him. Full of shit-eater tenacity. A bastard wolverine with a bad attitude.

  ‘One got out. They’ll know we’re coming.’

  ‘Never the easy way, eh, boss?’ Halfteeth had a grin on him like a dead man.

  ‘Oh why would we ever do that? Listen you, if you die, you do it where her Holiness won’t find your body and know I let you out, eh?’ Should have left him to stew in his own shit after what he’d done back over Farakkan, but a murderous bastard like Halfteeth, this was right up his alley, and just now Tuuran reckoned he was about to need all the murderous bastards he could get.

  Zafir waited in the Silver City’s heart, beside Pantatyr’s Golden Temple, surrounded by its overgrown gardens, its esplanade, its lake and canals, its livid green dome now half staved in. For a long time she simply sat on Diamond Eye’s back, looking at the rain-sodden ruin. The golden doors that had given it its name were gone, a gaping hole in its side like a wound. She watched the rain through the shattered dome. It seemed unimaginable that she’d been here before. An old other life that was more like a dream than anything real.

  She watched, but she kept an eye on the eyrie’s descent too. She knew every cave and every crevice of these mountains, and when the eyrie closed on the first of the scorpion caves she urged Diamond Eye into the air and across the ash-stained ruins of the Silver City to where the sheer cliff of the Moonlit Mountain burst from the plain, and then sent him away to where Tuuran could use him.

  How many survive in there? she asked as he climbed and soared away.

  Hundreds, little one.

  Why are there no other dragons here? Where have they gone?

  Diamond Eye laughed, mocking and dark. They watch from afar, little one. Lifetimes we spent looking for the Black Moon. Scores more since we gave up that search. They wonder at his return and remember his brother, the Isul Aieha, and what he did to us.

  She followed his rise towards the eyrie until he was a speck, then turned away. The soldiers Tuuran had left down here were waiting for her. White Vish from Furymouth. Other men and women whose names she’d come to know, the last few slaves left standing at Tuuran’s side as they’d crashed into the storm-dark around the Godspike back in Takei’Tarr. A few black-skinned Taiytakei from the deserts. A handful of deeply tanned fishermen from the coast of the Dominion. A pale-faced hulk from the north of Aria. The Outsider woman, the one Tuuran called Snacksize, taken and sold years ago by King Valmeyan as though harvesting a useful crop, grumbling about her lover Halfteeth left behind on the eyrie.

  Zafir beckoned them to follow and led them through the rubble-strewn streets. There were no walls surrounding the Silver City, pointless things among a people who lived and died by dragons, but there we
re tithe houses on each road in and out, and the tithe houses had cellars, each with a bronze door above a shaft that sank into the Silver King’s Ways, with winches and pulleys. Zafir took them to the closest, where both cellar and shaft lay open to the sky. Diamond Eye had cleared the rubble the night before. Now White Vish levered open the bronze door, and Zafir lowered one of Chay-Liang’s torches tied to a length of silk rope. The shaft went down a hundred feet, white stone walls smooth as glass and slick with slimy water. The old winch and pulley were long gone, smashed to pieces, but the soldiers had brought their own. She watched them piece it together; when it was done she stepped forward, thinking that of all of them she should be first.

  The Outsider woman planted a hand on Zafir’s chest. Zafir supposed the other soldiers called her Snacksize because she was so short, but they treated her with a profound respect nonetheless. ‘Tuuran would kill me.’ Snacksize glanced at White Vishmir. ‘Let your big man go first. He looks keen enough.’

  Time was Zafir would have hung any woman for touching her, for talking to her like that. Old days, different days. Bad days. Today she simply nodded to White Vish. ‘Go.’

  She watched his descent. It seemed achingly slow, and for all she knew the tunnels at the bottom might be flooded or teeming with waiting foes, but Vish reached the bottom and didn’t sink or drown, and no one tried to kill him. Zafir peered down, getting in everyone’s way. Vish disappeared from sight. She could see a little light flickering about. Enough to know he hadn’t gone far, but that was all.

  Snacksize went next, and then the hulk from Aria. The winch creaked under his weight. When it came back Zafir took it, dropping into darkness, skin already crawling as she felt the walls close around her until they opened again into a wide tunnel of white stone, straight as an arrow towards the root of the Moonlit Mountain. It was the same stone as the tunnels that spiralled from the dragon yard into the bowels of her floating eyrie, and the same shape too, though bigger in every dimension.