The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  He noticed then how the air had a slightly odd taste. Apart from blood – everything tasted of blood at the moment. But there was something else. He tried to sniff and wished he hadn’t. Pain streaked across his face, a blaze of it. He felt a fresh trickle of warm iron at the back of his throat and swallowed hard, quickly, no matter how much it hurt, because Xibaiya help him if he had to cough. Coughing would probably burst his whole face apart.

  The dragon moved closer. You will find a way to cross the storm-dark, Baros Tsen T’Varr. That is where the Black Moon has gone. That is where he will be, looking for his other half. It came closer still, close enough to touch him. Its jaw closed around the rope that pinned his right arm. He felt its teeth brush his skin. It moved to his other arm, and then bit the ropes that bound his ankles. Tsen gasped in relief. He twisted, tried to stand up, fell over, whimpered and curled up into a little ball, naked on the cold stone floor.

  Get up. The dragon nudged him.

  ‘Leave me alone.’ He wanted to drift now, that was all. Drift alone into a peaceful daze. Or maybe quietly to die.

  Get up, little one. The dragon nudged him a second time. Its scales felt warm.

  It hit him, at last, that hallucinations and dream-dragons didn’t bite through ropes.

  He screamed.

  A dragon!

  He screamed again.

  Really a dragon?

  He screamed over and over, but of course no one came, not here where screams were furniture. The dragon simply sat, still as a statue, and looked at him. Eventually Tsen gave up screaming because it hurt too much. He moaned and whimpered instead, and shuffled away and refused to look. Vey Rin had sent a dragon to torture him. Somehow. It was going to kill him and eat him, possibly not in that order, because that’s what dragons did.

  Is that so bad, all things considered?

  Wait! Vey Rin had sent a dragon? How did that possibly make sense?

  At least it’s quick.

  Shut up! Stupid t’varr! Rin doesn’t have any dragons. He practically shat himself at the first thought of one …

  Run, then? Running was about the only thing that did make any sense. He almost laughed. Run, though? Could he possibly think of some suggestion more uselessly stupid? He couldn’t even get up! And even if he could, a dragon could fly, and even if there was a place to hide, it would find him because it could read his thoughts and he was still in …

  You can’t run, little one. You can’t hide.

  But Rin didn’t send it … So Rin didn’t know it was here … So …

  So what? Think!

  He lay still. The fear slowly went away, turned to a touch of wonder. In the end he was in too much despair and pain to be properly scared of anything any more.

  I floated among the thoughts of your tormentor, the dragon said. Do you want to know what he means for you?

  He did. Of course he did. ‘Not … really.’

  A vision washed into Tsen’s mind like a tidal wave across a quiet shore. It swept away everything. He was in the eyrie. He was the great dragon Diamond Eye, freed and woken, sweeping fire across the dragon yard. He was hunting the Elemental Men while the Black Moon burned them with silver light. In the air he flew with the dragon-queen on his back, tearing glasships from the sky, shattering them until he fell under the storm of their lightning. He crashed to the dragon yard, broken and dying and yet falling still, all of them into the storm-dark. He saw the violet lightning and the sky turn black, and the Silver King, the Black Moon, blinding bright, reaching out to the waiting void …

  And then nothing.

  That is how it ended, little one, after you were gone.

  Good riddance.

  You will take me to them.

  ‘How?’

  Ships.

  However he had meant to cross the sea …

  Careful, t’varr. See! The dragon doesn’t know …

  No, little one, indeed the dragon didn’t, but now the dragon does. We will leave, and you will show me.

  Tsen rolled onto his back. He gasped and laughed again at the absurdity of it. ‘We can’t … just leave …’ Look at me, for Charin’s sake! I can barely move! He struggled to his feet. His back and his ribs were a swollen mass of bruises. Standing at all was hard enough, and he was certainly in far too much pain to lift himself properly upright. He hobbled, almost doubled over, and that was when he saw the corpses. The tang in the air he thought he’d tasted, that he couldn’t actually smell because his nose was a bloody mess, that had been the three sword-slaves he’d just found very thoroughly burned to death. The whole dungeon must stink of cooked flesh and sulphur.

  He looked at them, and a horrible murderous glee swelled inside him. It’s a good start, but there are plenty more. ‘If I don’t help you, dragon? What then. You burn me?’

  Slowly, and with infinite patience.

  Ah well. Still better than Rin would offer.

  A crook-toothed grin broke through the pain. ‘Then I will help you, dragon, if you will help me. But I have a price.’

  The dragon glared, but it seemed to understand.

  ‘Kalaiya,’ Tsen said. ‘And Rin. I want you to make the bastard pay.’

  8

  Vey Rin T’Varr

  Vey Rin T’Varr tosses in his nightmare dreams of dragons. He is dangling again, as he dangles every night, from the claws of great Diamond Eye. The air is as dry as an ancient corpse and smells of sand and sulphur. The dragon looks at him with pale vast eyes of glacier ice, as cold and empty as the void between the worlds. It searches him for substance and finds naught but smoke and mist. He is so utterly and insignificantly small.

  On other nights this is when he wakes, sobbing wails and gibbering, slick with trembling sweat, but tonight he falls into the dragon’s eye, a speck like dust. The dragon blinks, and Rin is on the inside, surveying the world from a glass lens in a great palace. He is become single-minded murder, a pure totality of purpose.

  … races, claws skittering on stone, exquisite silks shredded. Another pair of little ones. Smashes them. Limbs torn from torsos …

  A numb shocking cold soaks deep into sleeping Vey Rin. A ball of smouldering ice punched into his belly. The dragon is here. It has come for him at last, and he is helpless.

  … another. Incinerates him. Burns his face to charcoal. Lightning flash and thunder. Spring and tear a flail of limbs, rip away a helm and bite a scream in two …

  Vey Rin snaps awake. He sits bolt upright, rigid alert. As he screams he tells himself that no, it was the dream. Every night the same. A dream, just a dream.

  But it is not.

  Across the dim light rises the silhouette of the dragon. The scream lodges in Vey Rin’s head. Sticks and will not stop, even as he gulps to fill his lungs. His bowels and bladder empty. Everything burns white, wherever he looks, blinding and blistering, scouring his skull. Thoughts dissolve, piece by little piece collapsing into tiny helpless fear. He can’t look away. His screams are silent now, though they never stop. The dragon comes closer, and he cannot move as it creeps to the end of his bed and crawls on, as its claws wrap around his neck and push him down, as its face comes close, as its hot breath of sand and sulphur brushes his skin. A talon ­caresses his cheek and leaves a sharp line of blood. The dragon looks down on him, into him, through him. A drip of saliva grows on the tip of a fang. He watches it, helpless in fascination amid the terror, until it falls and lands on his face and mingles with his blood. The dragon’s eye blazes into him.

  Everything he’s done, everything he has yet to do, it all counts for nothing. He understands that his entire existence is worth no more than a mote of dust.

  ‘What do you want?’ Vey Rin T’Varr chokes out the words, tiny as a baby.

  Stone and damp dark. Tsen watched the hatchling dragon slide off into the shadows, slither and skitter and vanish into the gloom. He c
ouldn’t stand, not really. He certainly couldn’t walk, which left him with crawling. When he reached the steps from the dungeons he took a few deep breaths and forced himself upright. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the strength, but the pain was like a burning stake driven into his face, and his back and ribs were one great bruise. If he bent over and put both arms against the wall, he found he could hobble along crabwise with only a few whimpers, one slow step at a time.

  He wasn’t sure what to do when he got to the top. Which way to go.

  ‘Kalaiya?’

  Guttering torches gave reluctant light to a cramped passage. There was another body here, a Vespinese soldier with his head ripped off. A crazy thought came to Tsen that he might take this soldier’s clothes and armour and waltz his way right out of the fortress as though just another guard. It made him laugh, despite how much that hurt. My, my! What about that Baros Tsen and his amazing escape, eh? Yes indeed! Quite miraculous! And, by the way, what happened to your nose, and why can’t you stand straight?

  Better than nothing though, better than being naked. He dropped to his hands and knees and started to strip the fallen soldier, and that was how they found him, one man crawling on the floor beside the headless corpse of another, both naked by a pile of clothes and armour. He wasn’t stupid though. He took the soldier’s lightning wand, first thing he did, and Tsen was still a t’varr to a sea lord as far as the wand’s enchantments knew, and so they bowed to him. He sent the first guardsmen who came his way flying with lightning. He supposed the others would kill him then, which would at least be a quick end, but they didn’t. They ran for cover and shouted at him instead.

  ‘Baros Tsen T’Varr!’

  He thought about turning the lightning on himself. Better than what Rin had had in mind, that was for sure. But something in their voices stayed his hand, and besides Rin would only take out the disappointment of losing his toy on Kalaiya.

  ‘I’m here,’ he croaked. He sat there exhausted, legs splayed, awash with pain and with a lightning wand in his hand, waiting to see what would happen. It seemed he waited for quite a while, and then Vey Rin himself was shambling out along the stinking stones, a pair of soldiers shuffling ahead, shielding him with great gold-glass shields. There was something very wrong with Rin. He was in a nightshirt – a brilliant priceless silk, emeralds and yellows embroidered in the entwined dragons and lion of Vespinarr, but still a nightshirt – and he walked with the shambling gait of a man heading to the scaffold, hunched into himself, small and moulded by fear and dread. Of the two of them, Tsen thought Rin looked the more broken. Quite a feat that.

  ‘Stop!’ Tsen, on hands and knees, levelled the wand at them. The soldiers stopped, but Vey Rin didn’t. He pushed past and then sank to his knees and dropped to his hands and crawled the last dozen paces between them. He pounded his head into the floor, over and over until his face was bloody, and then pressed it there.

  ‘Make it go away,’ he wailed. ‘I’ll give you whatever you want. A ship across the sea. Your slave too. Both of you. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Or money. Do you want money? Anything! But make it go away!’

  The temptation to ram his lightning wand into Rin’s face, to set it off and char him from the inside out, was almost overwhelming. If it hadn’t been for Kalaiya he probably would have done it.

  ‘A ship,’ he whispered. ‘To the Dominion. All mine.’

  ‘Yes,’ whimpered Rin. ‘Anything.’

  ‘Silver and jade. A chest small enough to be carried by two slaves.’

  ‘And the slaves to carry it?’

  Tsen thought about this a moment. ‘We’ll start with some clothes, shall we? How about some of yours.’

  They brought him a chair to carry him through the fortress, since sitting hurt less than standing. He had them bring him clothes, the best they could find. He had them send slaves to clean him, to bind the wounds they’d given him as best as could be done. When he was dressed, he sent for Kalaiya. He never saw the dragon again, but he knew it was there. He could feel it, lurking on the fringes of his thoughts, whispering in and out of his memories. Red flanks, black belly. The hatchling from the Queverra. He wondered vaguely why, why him, but for the most part he was past caring.

  In the morning Rin’s sword-slaves carried him from the black stone fortress to Rin’s royal barge on the lake. Kalaiya walked beside him. She held his hand, and he couldn’t stop looking at her, nor she at him. Eyes full of wonder, both of them. At least Rin hadn’t hurt her. Which was good. He could forgive a lot, he thought, but not that.

  By the middle of the afternoon they were sailing down the river, making a merry pace with the Jokun’s current sure and strong. In the far distance now and then Tsen spied a dark speck in the sky. The hatchling, and he knew that Rin saw it too.

  His dreams on that first night on the river were strange. He found himself in a huge crystal cave etched into white stone and filled with moonlight. He felt a familiar moment of confusion before he broke from his egg and stretched his first wings. He didn’t remember what he was or how he’d come to be here, but he wasn’t alone. Dragons surrounded him. They were small, all of them, but they would grow. They were the first. They told him so.

  My first awakening.

  Not a dream then. A sending. The hatchling dragon from the Queverra.

  Asleep, he settled again, calm, knowing now that he was a passenger in the hatchling’s memories. The other dragons took him outside among white spires that snagged clouds from the sky. Men walked among them, but not men from any world Tsen knew. Their skin was pale, their hair long and lush and white as snow, their eyes fresh-blood red. He’d never seen their like, yet they were familiar. He knew them in some way he no longer remembered.

  He stretched his wings. Dragons in their hundreds swarmed the spires, circling in currents of air. The sun shone bright, and at night the moon burned and the stars glowered, and still they flew, higher, until the air was too thin to breathe.

  But we don’t breathe, the other dragons said, and flew higher still.

  The dream faded into stars and darkness. Tsen woke late the next morning, soaked in sweat. He crawled from his bed and stumbled into the sun. The river. The Jokun. It took him a while to work out who he was again. When he did, he shivered and hugged himself and crawled back to his bed. He didn’t know where they were. Somewhere in the swamps of the Samim.

  You have a fever, said the dragon. Do not die, little one, not yet. You have a debt.

  They might kill me.

  Either way you all burn.

  He tossed and turned and fell inside himself, drifted afar, deep across time and space. He had grown. His wings were large and strong. His fire melted stone now, and the world had changed. The half-gods had gone, most of them. Those that remained wore silver armour. Blood and the tang of iron tainted the air, war and sulphur and sorcery. Little ones marched in armies, bright and shining. Toys and playthings thrown against one another for sport and amusement, but beneath the click of dice and the roll of fate and the laugh of half-god wagers made and lost lay a discord too profound to simply put aside. More and more they intervened. More and more the last half-gods turned on one another.

  He flew. Invincible, unstoppable, burning rivers of fire, slaughterer and devourer. Sorceries of fire and lightning faded like mist at his passing. He fell upon monsters, devil jade ravens, burning their flocks out of the sky. Other birds whose names were forgotten now, black winged and with beaks like spears who drove into flesh and then spewed ravenous beetles. Fire wraiths. The collosepedes that carried entire cities on their backs, stone titans and sea serpents, a hundred other demon creatures shaped for war, and the dragons slaughtered them all. They hunted half-gods and brought back their souls until only one would not yield. The Isul Aieha.

  In his bed Baros Tsen moaned and rolled his eyes.

  The worlds turned again. The dead goddess of the earth sent a
dark planet into the sky to hunt down the sun and blot it into darkness. The living moon burned with a baleful hate so strong that even dragons sought shelter. The stars whispered their ire in changing patterns etched across the night sky. Yet the dragons flew on, and Tsen lost himself in the power of his wings, in the strength of his fire …

  For a moment it fell away. Kalaiya was looking down at him, fearful and sad.

  ‘Tsen,’ she whispered, ‘don’t die.’

  He tried to reach out to her, but the moment was fleeting. He was a drowning man in deep tumultuous seas, snatching one quick breath of air, flailing his arms for more but helpless against an undertow that sucked him into the deep. He was the dragon again. He fought on.

  Later it was Rin. Quivering and shaking, clinging to his hand and begging for something. Tsen didn’t know what or why.