by Stephen Deas
The old Silver King’s Ways. A deep scum of litter, of leaves and stones and a few sticks and bones, lay scattered underfoot. Dirt. Detritus left by some recent flood. In places it had drifted almost knee-deep.
‘We’re being watched,’ warned Vish. ‘There are survivors here.’
‘Half feral,’ murmured Zafir. ‘Diamond Eye has seen their thoughts. We’ll be back for them soon enough. Let them be for now.’
A distant bone-jarring howl echoed through the tunnel. White Vish moved suddenly away, heading towards it.
‘Stay—’ Snacksize started after him. A flailing windmill of arms and legs burst from a drift of litter on the floor, and crashed into White Vish with the savagery of a wolf pack. Another howl went up, much closer, whooping and hooting. A dozen feral creatures in rags exploded from hiding, waving sticks, laying into White Vish, mobbing him. He went down hard. Zafir ran, kicking her way through the litter, damp dead leaves swirling into the air around her. She raised an arm to loose lightning at the creatures, then paused. They had been men and women once. They still were. They had lived in her city. They were hers to protect, and she’d failed them. Carpenters and potters and masons and barrow men …
Snacksize bolted past her, lightning thrower raised to fire. Zafir knocked it aside.
… carters and livery men and millers and smiths. Even priests. She fired her own lightning into the tunnel wall instead, a thunderclap that shivered stone and echoed and roared loud enough to make her gasp. The feral who’d knocked Vish down squirmed and twisted to his feet and fled. The others jumped back and away, startled and dazed. White Vish scrabbled upright. Zafir held out her hands, showing them empty.
‘Stop!’
A dozen men in rags, that was all they were; but they wavered only a moment, and then one of them lunged, a hurled volley of curses, and the rest crashed on like a wave. Five jumped back on Vish, hauling him down again. The rest sprang for Zafir. She battered the first aside. The next swung an old thigh bone at her head; it shattered on her helm hard enough to flash lights in her eyes. She blocked the third, but he grabbed her shield and pulled. She let him tear it away, staggered on, still trying to reach Vish even with one of the feral men clinging to her arm. Vish was thrashing under the weight of too many for him to throw off. They were clawing at his helm, trying to pull it away so they could batter him to death.
‘Get away!’ Zafir kicked one in the head, knocking him down. She went for her sword, thinking the sight of it might be enough to scare them, but only got it half out of her scabbard before another grabbed her. She threw herself sideways, meaning to smash them both against the wall, but the curve of the tunnel caught her, and she lost her balance and flailed. A hand grabbed her leg, pulling. She let the sword go, arms clutching at the air to stay on her feet as another feral jumped onto her back. He raked at her visor and her throat, and she tipped and fell. Vish raged in fury. Zafir rolled and kicked and punched. There were three of them on her now, wrenching at her armour, trying to find a way in. Someone with a stick was raining blows on her. She kicked and heard a howl as her foot slammed something soft and yielding. Hands grabbed at her throat, pulling at her helm, tugging it loose, lifting the visor open. She grabbed them, tried to pull them off her, but there were too many. Her helm came away and she saw a face in the moonlight gloom, lips drawn back over bared teeth, wild mad eyes. Fingers closed around her throat, throttling her. She clawed, tearing them away. A feral woman lifted a stick over her head; Zafir raised an arm to protect her face …
The air bellowed with the voice of a thousand gods. It lit with the incandescence of the sun, dazzled and deafened. The feral woman with the stick spasmed and flew into the air, hurled away. The biting fingers around Zafir’s throat fell slack. Zafir clutched her hands over her ears and rolled away, screwing up her eyes against the light and the noise, blinking hard, trying to see. Lightning. Someone had thrown a bolt of it, murderously hard and as harsh as a lightning thrower could be. When she blinked away the dazzle stars, the feral men were gone, as fast and as suddenly as they had come, fled and vanished into the Silver King’s labyrinth. Snacksize stood over her, bloody sword in one hand, bloody knife in the other.
Three ragged corpses lay dead, two cut apart, the third a scorched charred ragbag of splayed smouldering limbs. A fourth feral lay gasping, clutching a bloody hand to his chest. Snacksize finished him without a word. She wiped her knife on one of the corpses, sheathed it and then offered Zafir a hand.
‘Injured at all?’
Zafir shook her head. She stared at the bodies. Only a day since her feet had touched the ground of her old home, and already people were dead.
Snacksize went to White Vish. ‘What about you? Hurt?’
‘No.’ Vish shook his head. Snacksize kicked him in the shin. Hard.
‘Pity. Stupid sod.’
The rest of Tuuran’s soldiers came down. Zafir waited, crouched beside the corpses. ‘I didn’t want this,’ she whispered.
But you knew, said another voice, and it might have been Diamond Eye or it might have been some dark reflection of herself, she wasn’t sure. You knew it would be this way. And you do want it. You pretend that you don’t, but look deep and you know better. When Snacksize nudged her to tell her they were ready to go, Zafir closed her visor. No one would see the glisten in her eyes.
They walked on, cautious and tight together, lightning throwers held ready until the Silver King’s Ways converged under the Pinnacles in the vast cavern of the Undergates, whose white stone glowed with the same inner light. Water plunged from the cavern roof here, crashing to the stone floor, brushing the air with cold mist, tumbling in rivulets and channels and torrents all the way from the top of the mountain and the fountains of the Reflecting Garden. Zafir watched it fall, the clean fresh water from the fountains that spilled throughout the Silver King’s palace. It kept men alive, drained into the canals of the Silver City, mixing with rainwater from the little streams and brooks that wound among the surrounding meadows and fields; but it all came back and ended here, draining away down the old white stone tunnel to the Ghostwater near Farakkan. The Undergates were the only way in and out of the mountain unless you came on a dragon, and they were barred by dragon-rider guards and traps and deadfalls and barricades, and old sorceries worse than any imagination.
Unless, of course, you knew their secrets.
Zafir crept around the edge of the cave, keeping away from the gates themselves. Rafts – not much more than a few lumps of wood strung together – were drawn up at the water’s edge where the underground river flowed off towards Farakkan. She crept into the shallows and crouched there. Of all the hidden entrances to her palace, this was her most secret. Hands pushed beneath icy water, brushing aside sand and gravel and slime until she touched the white stone beneath. Her fingers felt the contours of it, the outline of a sigil etched under the dirt.
‘They’ve seen us!’ Snacksize raised her lightning thrower. Armoured dragon-riders ran from the gates, fanning across the cave.
Zafir traced the outline of the sigil under the water with a naked finger.
‘Come close!’ A silver light shimmered beneath her feet. She pulled her Adamantine Men – if you could call this motley band that, but Tuuran did and she wasn’t about to argue – into a huddle and raised her arm, lightning ready. Light built around them. Her heart fluttered as the first rider from the gates closed, slowed and lifted his helm. Zafir saw his face. She knew him, if not his name. He stared in puzzlement, then disbelief as she raised her own visor, as the silver light grew ever brighter beneath her. She took off her helm and met his gaze, eye to eye, strength to strength, defiance to defiance.
‘I am Zafir,’ she said and lifted her bare hand so he might see the Speaker’s Ring still on her finger. She saw in his face that at last he knew her. Shock and loathing twisted him. He lunged.
‘You will not—’
The light
flared silver-bright. They were gone, lifted away by the magic of the Silver King, deep into the Pinnacles’ sorcerous heart.
The Undergates, the only way in and out of the fortress unless you knew better.
Light dimmed to dark. Tuuran smothered his torch, feeling his way through the tunnels in the pitch black, fondling the stone like it was the skin of a woman. Hadn’t ever liked this place even when it had been filled with light and noise, with chatter and laughter and the belly-rumbling smells of hot grease and mead. A fortress carved out of stone long before the Silver King. Catacombs all the way down. Secret doors scattered among the cellars of the Silver City. If you believed the stories, there were things buried here, old monsters, sorceries that would rip a man’s soul from his flesh. He felt its hostility at his intrusion. A resentment as old as the moon …
He shook himself. At least it put him in the right mood for hitting something.
Felt like bloody miles before he found the entrance to the Enchanted Palace. Couldn’t have been, nor anything like, but felt it. Easing his way in the blackness, ears straining, waiting for the counter-charge, the trap, the lurking knife. Then the glow of light ahead at last, and him as tight as cordage in a storm. Don’t think. Just run, axe in one hand, shield in the other. Let it all out – the rage, the frustration, the years of being a slave that lay behind him.
Soldiers waited with iron and steel and bleeding smiles. A wall of spears and shields, and he wouldn’t have given a pebble of shit, would have scattered them as easily as old gnawed bones, but these men were Adamantine, and he knew it at once from the way they held themselves. Was enough to pause him, and so he stopped an inch from their spear tips. His kin, these men, and he was theirs, and they saw it too. He lifted his visor.
‘I am Tuuran,’ he said, ‘and I am Adamantine.’
Eight of them blocking his way. Dozens of his own men coming up behind with Taiytakei lightning, half in gold-glass armour over dragonscale, but these eight wouldn’t flinch or budge. They’d hold their ground until they were dead. He’d expect nothing less. He tried again.
‘Her Holiness Zafir, queen of the Pinnacles and speaker of the nine realms, demands entrance.’ Not that he imagined for a moment they’d believe him. Was quite something that they even listened.
A soldier levelled his spear at Tuuran’s face. ‘Speaker Zafir died over Evenspire. Speaker Jehal at the Adamantine Palace. There are no speakers any more. Surrender yourself. King Hyrkallan will hear your voice, brother.’
Tuuran lowered his shield. Eight years a slave at sea, where the galley masters tossed lightning about the decks on a whim with a casual wave of their hand. When anger took them, then their bolts threw men into the air and left them black twitching corpses, but mostly it was pain they were after, and obedience. Tuuran nodded sharply and pressed his hands to his ears. Thunder flashed and flew about him. Men screamed and crashed to the stone. Not dead, because Tuuran knew his lightning, knew how much it took to kill a man and how to wrap one in fleeting agony. The soldiers behind him swarmed forward, beating the Adamantine Men down before they could rise again, taking their spears and their shields. It almost made him weep seeing that, seeing how easy it was.
‘Watch them.’ He gave Halfteeth a long hard look. ‘My brothers these, so Flame help any man who kills one, for I will flay him. And yes, Halfteeth, I am looking at you. You can stay with me.’
He pushed through. Adamantine Men were his brothers right enough, but somewhere here, hiding at the back, would be some prancy-arsed dragon-riders. Dragon-riders were different, and Halfteeth could do as he damn well liked. Dragon-riders could bleed and burn and die for all Tuuran cared, and he’d be happy to piss on them as they did.
The flare of silver light faded. In the deep heart of the Isul Aeiha’s labyrinth Zafir stood inside a vast hollow sphere of white stone, wide enough to swallow a palace. Its distant walls glowed with soft moonlight. White archways ringed her, while a single span of white stone reached from the centre of the void to its edge. Standing here was like standing in the centre of a bubble.
‘What is this?’ asked Vish. Hard as iron, most of these men, but here they clustered like frightened children about their mother.
‘A relic of the Silver King.’ Zafir ran a hand over the stone. ‘And nothing we should fear.’ As smooth as glass and cold. There were arches like these in the eyrie too.
‘But what is it?’ Vish peered anxiously over the edge at whatever lurked below, screwed up his face and shuddered. At the bottom of the curve beneath them was a pitch-dark hole.
‘No one knows.’ Zafir put the arches behind her. She crossed the white stone span. That hole wasn’t just any hole. If the stories were true then it was a hole in the world, but Vish probably didn’t want to hear that. ‘I used to come here when I was a child,’ she said. ‘I used to drop things over the edge into that hole. Stones and sticks and little things. I never did find where they came out.’ She clapped a hand on Vish’s shoulder. ‘So don’t fall, eh?’
He looked at her as though she was mad.
Blood ran down Tuuran’s axe. A rider threw himself forward, fury and a swinging blade. Tuuran caught the sword on his shield, feinted at the rider’s head, let him dodge, then kicked the bastard hard in the ankle, bashed in his face and floored him with a backswing. Twisted it at the last so the axe hit on the flat. Stupid buggers, these dragon-riders. Not one with a jot of sense of how to fight when they didn’t have their fat arses spread over the back of a dragon. Pompous bluster, toothless and pathetic. No stomach, no spine, spiritless rags now they’d lost their mounts. He picked the dazed rider up off the floor.
‘Who rules here?’
The rider spat blood in Tuuran’s face. Tuuran smashed him into the wall.
‘Let’s try that again. I’ll ask nicely, and if you really want to see how it feels while I rip your balls off with my bare hands, you won’t tell me. So. Who rules here?’
‘Hyrkallan!’
The second time he’d heard the name. Hadn’t meant anything when the Adamantine Men had crumbled before his lightning, but he’d had time to think about it now, between murdering stupid stuck-up fools with too little sense to run. Hyrkallan. From Sand in the north. He’d won the Speaker’s Tournament when Hyram took the Adamantine Throne. Strong and hard. Good. About time he found someone worth waking up for. He threw the rider away.
‘Chance we could do this the nice way, do you think? Settle matters with some pretty words?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. Dragon-riders didn’t bend. They couldn’t, because of what they were; and Adamantine Men, when it came to it, were more of the same. Dragons, that’s what it was. Left no space for anything but black and white.
More fighting ahead. Halfteeth clenched tight and impatient as a virgin in a brothel. Tuuran ran on and caught up in time to see him pick up a crippled rider and rip out his throat, then jump out into a hallway and thumb his nose at whoever was at the end of it. A flurry of crossbow quarrels chased him back into shelter. At least Tuuran had a few men still with him, and others catching up. They were getting strung out though. Dragon-riders coming from all sides. Could turn bad any time now. Tuuran hurried up close, took a quick peek around the corner and grinned. Coming at him from all sides, yes, but they weren’t actually stopping him, and now the arched entrance to the Octagon was right ahead. Queen Aliphera’s throne room. Where he wanted to be.
‘Gather everyone you can. Right here, right now.’ He crouched behind his shield, quarrels pinging off the walls around him. Sneaked a look, then dived across the open space. The Hall of Princes, was that what they called it? Crossbow bolts rattled around him. He rolled and jumped into a niche behind the statue of some old queen or other who’d just had a chunk chipped out of her face. Checked the lightning thrower on his arm. Bastard things were playing up. Not working right. Half-god enchantments all around. Made his skin crawl. Best not to think about it.
A volley of thunderclaps echoed ahead. Flashes of lightning through the archway to the Octagon itself. Tuuran braced himself. Glorious victory or a quick death, one way or the other. The riders in the Pinnacles hadn’t seen anything like his lightning, nor his Taiytakei gold-glass armour. So far he’d cut through them like a hot knife through soft old rotting cheese, but damn, there were more men here than he’d been ready for. Surrounded and outnumbered, flanked and nipping at his rear …
Right then. Time to end it. He roared, hurling war cries and curses at his ancestors as he led the charge, loud enough to shake mountains and wake the dead. A quarrel slammed into his shield, cracking it. Another zinged over his head. A swarm of fight-crazed men pelting into the teeth of the storm, hiding behind their shields, screaming at the barricade across the entrance to the Octagon, laying into whoever was there until they shut up and stopped with the fucking crossbows. No idea how many he lost because he wasn’t looking back and wasn’t going to. Couldn’t see much inside as he ran either, except a swirling melee of men. Stupid idle thoughts came at him sideways. Crazy Mad, he would have loved this.
Almost at the barricade, and some bastard with a crossbow nearly took his head off; Tuuran returned the favour with a blast of lightning. That was that done, then. Someone screamed beside him. Another quarrel hit his shield and cracked it again – that cock-crawler could die too. It wasn’t as if they had an armoury stuffed full of shields and lightning throwers back on the eyrie, and they didn’t have an enchantress to fix things any more. He smashed through a gap between an upturned table and some sort of dresser and laid about with his axe, splitting the first evil bastard he saw almost in half, and bursting on into the throne room. One way or another it ended here.
The white stone bridge passed through an arch inscribed with sigils and out into a maze of halls and corridors. Etched archways lined the walls, plain and leading nowhere. The servants said the maze shifted, that it was never the same, that sometimes men became lost here for days, but Zafir had never found it so. There were darker stories that on full-moon nights the arches shimmered silver and sucked men inside them. The stories made sure no one ever came to the Silver King’s inner sanctum, that and the Hall of Mirages, where anyone who tried to cross found themselves back where they started until they unpicked the secret to its design.
