by Stephen Deas
‘Did Zafir say that?’ Standing at the Black Moon’s side even though she too knew that the half-god was the devil. Cold, both of them. Ruthless.
‘Actually I thought you might agree. Better the devil than dragons.’
‘I don’t. Chay-Liang wouldn’t stand for devils of any sort, and she was right.’
‘Every single time I see him, I think the same thing. I’d cut his head off in a blink and say get fucked to consequence, but my friend is in there. Still, it’s a good story. These men are ready to believe just about anything. Crazy prowls with her Holiness at his side, and proud riders fall to their knees wherever he goes. They weep and beg the Silver King to save them. Leaves me sick to the core, it does, but what else is there? What other choices? At least it keeps the peace. We’d all be murdering each other otherwise.’
‘That sounds like Zafir, not you. Going to make them all into his slaves, is he, eh? Just like he did in Merizikat? Going to cut out pieces of their spirits so they have no choice but to do his bidding? So even their thoughts aren’t their own any more?’ Zafir’s return home struck Bellepheros as like one of those grisly tragedies played out on the stage of the old Zar Oratorium back in better days. Sat on her throne with the ‘Silver King’ beside her, parading him in grim grinning victory, Tuuran looming and fierce at her back. Sooner or later the executions would start. ‘Three little cuts. That’s how he does it, Night Watchman. You. Obey. Me. And then you do. You become his slave, and the moment he speaks you have no choice but to listen. When he says something is to be done, you have no choice but to do it.’
Tuuran looked away. ‘Her Holiness has forbidden—’
‘No more slaves?’ Bellepheros spat a derisive snort that cut Tuuran short. ‘That tired old mantra? You think any of us believe a word of that any more? The Black Moon didn’t give a hoot what Zafir said in Merizikat. And Zafir knew it, too. Do you think she was so naive? Her Holiness dotes on her two rescued night-maidens. They both have babies now. How old do you suppose he’ll let them grow before he cuts those too? When their squalling annoys him?’ Her Holiness. He could barely bring himself to call her that any more.
Tuuran winced. The two of them stared out at the horizon in silence for a while, Tuuran throwing the odd stone, bouncing it off the rim, seeing how far he could make them go.
‘What will happen when he does that, do you think?’ asked Bellepheros.
‘Her Holiness won’t let him.’
‘And how, exactly, will she stop him? And if she has such miraculous power, why does she let him cut the rest of us? I’ll ask her, shall I?’
He started to get up. Tuuran put a hand on his arm. ‘It’s not your fight, Grand Master.’
‘Not my fight? If not mine then whose?’
Bellepheros hauled himself to his feet, left Tuuran to his sunrise and returned to the lonely quiet of his alchemical study. For the first few hours after the attack he’d toyed with throwing his lot in with Hyrkallan and Queen Jaslyn. Tuuran’s legion – if you could call his ragtag band of knife-cut lackeys a legion – were clearing up the mess, none of them with Zafir except for Tuuran himself. Letting Hyrkallan out of his cage would have been easy then; and helping him get close to Zafir, that would have been easy too, and then letting events take their course … But he hadn’t. In part because alchemists never did that sort of thing, in part because the Black Moon was what he was, and none of them could change that, and Hyrkallan instead of Zafir would make no difference in the end. In part too it was because Hyrkallan had ordered every alchemist murdered in the last days before the fall, and had taken Grand Master Jeiros and smashed his wrists and ankles and hung him on a wheel over the cliff-edge of the Pinnacles to die, and because Jeiros had been a friend.
Or maybe Bellepheros hadn’t done anything simply because he was a coward. He didn’t know. Chay-Liang would have helped him see it through, but Li – the one person who’d had a sense of duty to the world at large, to the ordinary people ever crushed in blood under the heels of dragons and tyrants – wasn’t here any more.
He scratched another mark under his desk. Seven days since they’d crossed the coast near Furymouth. Two and a half months since Chay-Liang had vanished in Merizikat. A little more than two and a half years since the Picker had kidnapped him on the road from Furymouth to the Silver City, and here he was at last. It should have been a journey of a week, that was all, and it made him laugh, wondering if he should just get up and carry on where he’d left off, getting out his truth smoke and quizzing rider after rider to ask what they knew of Queen Aliphera’s death.
But something needed to be done, and someone had to do it, that’s what Chay-Liang would have said, and if she’d been the one left abandoned and alone then she wouldn’t have balked at being the one to do it, which was how he came to be inside the Hall of Princes, heading for the Octagon all a-brim with righteous outrage when Halfteeth and a squad of Adamantine Men pushed past him hauling Hyrkallan in their wake. Bellepheros followed, determined to speak his piece to Zafir, twist her, coerce her, whatever he had to do, but as it turned out she wasn’t even there. Inside the Octagon the Black Moon lounged on Zafir’s throne, his half-god eyes burning silver.
Bellepheros stopped. Halfteeth’s men pushed Hyrkallan inside. Riders seized him, his own men now manhandling him to his knees at the Black Moon’s feet. The half-god touched a finger to his lips. Hyrkallan fell silent, then he started to struggle and scream, but his cries were muffled as though he had something across his mouth, and it was only when he managed to shake loose one of the men holding him that Bellepheros saw the truth of it: Hyrkallan didn’t have anything across his mouth. He simply didn’t have a mouth at all any more. Nose to chin, sealed with skin.
Bellepheros gasped and almost threw up. He stumbled and turned hastily away, but as he did the Black Moon saw him. Just a glance, a flick of the eye, but enough.
‘Wait, alchemist!’
Bellepheros froze. Hyrkallan was on his knees, writhing and arching, nostrils flared, snorting great heaving breaths of air as though each one might be his last. The Black Moon took out his knife and drove it into Hyrkallan’s collar. Three little cuts. You. Obey. Me. That was how he did it, how he made men into his slaves. Every single one of them.
With a snap Hyrkallan had a mouth again.
‘What have you—’
‘Quiet.’
Hyrkallan fell silent.
‘Bring me your queen, little one.’
Hyrkallan’s riders let him go. Hyrkallan rose. He lurched from side to side across the Octagon, marched Jaslyn to the throne and forced her down. He moved with the awkward jerkiness of Chay-Liang’s golems, devoid of feeling. There was no affection, no kindness, no sadness or pity or regret, nothing soft or gentle at all. From Queen Jaslyn’s face, she’d expected nothing better. She spat at the Black Moon’s feet. ‘I despise you for what you did, Silver King.’
The Black Moon stabbed her with his knife. ‘I’m not your Silver King,’ he said when he was done with her, and Bellepheros watched as she walked away, an empty shell; and he stared at the knife in the Black Moon’s hand, wondering who would make such an evil thing.
When the last of Hyrkallan’s riders were done, the half-god fixed Bellepheros with a languid eye. He beckoned as he waved the riders away, dismissing them to whatever they had been doing before. They filed out of the Octagon, a melange of dull bewilderment, of resignation and frightened fury.
‘Her Holiness—’ Bellepheros began.
‘Quiet, alchemist.’ Bellepheros fell silent, felled by the irresistible compulsion to obey. ‘You carry a tiny part of my brother in your blood, alchemist. Your Silver King. The Isul Aieha. He’s here, in this realm. I feel him. Where? Tell me where.’
‘I don’t under—’
The Black Moon crashed into his head, as strong and violent as any dragon. The Silver King. The Isul Aieha. A sliver of him li
ves in your blood, infinitely dilute but there. How? Bellepheros didn’t even try to resist. The answer came up from inside him, summoned because the Black Moon had called it. The Black Moon ransacked the memories there, took what he wanted and then withdrew. Be gone, alchemist. The taint of your blood offends me. Do not speak to Zafir of what has passed here.
Three little cuts for dragons and men alike. You. Obey. Me. Sometimes Bellepheros wondered if he should feel privileged that he’d been the very first.
‘When I was little,’ Zafir said, ‘I used to come here to hide.’ She walked through the Hall of Mirages, a galleried octagon with archways off every face as tall as ten men. Myst and Onyx trailed behind, quiet and attentive, distracted by the spectacle of the Enchanted Palace but doubtless also thinking of the little ones they’d left behind in the eyrie. Across the threshold of the hall Zafir stopped and looked up. High overhead the roof was a dome decorated with a sun motif. The eight great arches defined the space and, as with the Octagon, each lower arch was crowned by a second. There were balconies above, if you knew how to get to them, each with a false window, an intricate screen cut from marble that radiated a fierce silver light when the moon was above the horizon. With the moon set, as now, the dome’s sun glowed a soft lemon colour that would tinge to orange at dusk.
In the middle of the Hall of Mirages rested a sarcophagus. It was supposed to contain the remains of the Silver King. They all knew better, but still it was odd to find it here. Zafir’s mother had kept it in the Octagon beside her throne. Hyrkallan had moved it. She would move it back, Zafir decided. Back the way it was. She stretched out her arms and tilted her head. Home. The cold glories of the long-dead Silver King.
‘Walk with me,’ she said. ‘Whatever exit you choose, you will find yourself outside the arch where we first began.’ She crossed the hall and walked through the archway on the other side, Myst and Onyx beside her. They found themselves back where they’d started, staring at the entrance again, the passage to the Octagon behind them. Zafir ran her fingers over the stones set into the arch. Every surface was decorated with an exquisite lapidary of precious and semi-precious stones formed into twining vines, fruits and flowers, all in a detail so delicate it was hard to understand what means short of sorcery could have made them. But then sorcery had made them.
‘I used to come here to think.’ She crossed the hall a second time and took a different exit. ‘I need to think now, about what to do.’ Once again they appeared where they’d started. Zafir walked on as though she hadn’t noticed. She took another exit and then another, emerging at the same place over and over. ‘About Princess Jaslyn and Rider Hyrkallan.’ King and queen now, but that wasn’t how she remembered them.
Another exit and then another, each time always back to the start …
Jaslyn would have taken her mother’s throne, no matter whether Almiri, the eldest of the three sisters, had died at Evenspire.
… but there was a pattern to it. Take the archways in the right sequence and you could find yourself almost …
Hyrkallan? A good choice, Zafir supposed. Political. Practical. Not like the Jaslyn she remembered.
… anywhere.
The Hall of Mirages spat her into a cave deep in the depths of the palace, an underground cathedral filled with stalagmites and stalactites in cascades like corrugated walls and organ pipes. Silver lights shone from the roof far above, stars and a slender crescent moon. The night sky as she would see it from the summit of the Moonlit Mountain, the sorcerous simulacrum moon mimicking the phases of the real moon outside, the stars shifting with the season. She heard gasps of wonder. It was always night in this cave.
‘What do I do with them?’
Myst and Onyx bowed their heads. They spoke more than they used to, but they knew better today. They knew her moods.
‘When old Quai’Shu and his moon sorcerers took me, I thought they would kill me. Perhaps it was what I deserved. But they didn’t. Greed led them otherwise. They made me their slave instead, and you know how I punished them for that. You know all of that story, but you don’t know what happened before it began.’ She wandered among the stalagmites and sat on a rough stone bench. For a while she was still, listening to the drips of water that echoed through the gloom. ‘The Silver King used to come here,’ she said. ‘He would come to reflect. Sometimes for days on end. Sometimes for months. But I don’t have months.’
Myst knelt in front of her. ‘Mistress, you are home. Are you not content?’
Zafir cupped Myst’s cheek. ‘My home wasn’t a kind place, not like yours before you were taken. It wasn’t a place of happiness, and what there was of it is gone now. I can’t say I miss it, not much of it.’ She let out a long breath. ‘I was raised in a tomb filled with the memories of a half-god we could never understand. We carved ourselves in what we thought was his image and climbed into shoes we could not begin to fill. He ate us all, our Isul Aieha.’
She got up and paced languid circuits around the paths between the misshapen columns, pausing now and then to gaze at the false night sky.
‘I gave Hyrkallan every reason to despise me. Jaslyn even more so. Do I have to hang them now? I’ve had my fill of that, and anyway it made no difference in the end.’ She tried to push away the jagged memories of the Octagon, of fighting with Hyrkallan for her old throne. Crazed animals, both of them. ‘I want them to …’ Forgive her, after all she’d done? But how could she ask for that? How was it even possible? Mad Princess Jaslyn, who loved her dragons more than she loved anyone except her little sister Lystra, whom Zafir had tried to murder. Hyrkallan, a man of stone and iron who loved only duty and honour and the mighty Queen Shezira, Jaslyn’s mother, whom Zafir had beheaded.
‘They cast me out,’ she whispered. ‘And they were right to do it, because any one of them would have been better. Even Jehal, in the end, was better.’
‘Talk to them, mistress,’ murmured Onyx. ‘Talk to them and see if there is hope? There is always hope, mistress.’ But there wouldn’t be, because Onyx was wrong about that, there was never any hope.
‘This is my home,’ Zafir said to the stones.
Bellepheros found himself in the Hall of Mirages, wandering in aimless frustration through the archways looking for Zafir, always coming back to the same place. He was about to give up when she walked in behind him, her two handmaidens beside her with a cool damp smell of caves on them, as welcome and familiar as woodsmoke.
‘Holiness!’ If Zafir was surprised to see him, she hid it well. She’d know something was wrong too, that he wanted something, because he almost never called her that these days. Well good, because something was wrong, and he did want something. She’d hear about the Black Moon and his knife one way or another, and she’d damn well stop pretending she didn’t already know.
‘Grand Master?’ She watched him coolly. ‘Myst was just asking what it was like to ride on a dragon for the very first time. I’m not sure I have the words. Exhilarating and magnificent, I would answer, but I rode dragons with my mother from a very young age. My first time was so long ago that I have little memory of it. Perhaps you can describe it better?’
Bellepheros shook his head. ‘I am not the best choice to ask. For me they are an unrelenting terror quite beyond my capacity for reason. I’m afraid even a Taiytakei sled thoroughly unnerves me.’ He looked hard at Myst. ‘I’ve seen you stare at Diamond Eye, young woman, and I know that look. That yearning. Yes, I know you want to fly, but you’re wrong to think that a dragon can transform you. They will not form some bond of friendship like a horse or a dog. They are devourers, nothing more.’ He frowned hard, then turned away and looked around the Hall of Mirages instead. It was hardly fair taking out his bitterness on someone as innocent as Myst, even if what he’d said was entirely true. ‘I … I had heard of this place,’ he said to Zafir at last, ‘but I never understood its nature.’
‘None of us understands its natur
e!’ Zafir shrugged and laughed. ‘The Silver King made it because he wanted to. I know some of its secrets but it may have more. For all I know, if you walk it in the right way it will take us straight to the Adamantine Palace.’ Except it wouldn’t, because the Adamantine Palace hadn’t existed when the Silver King had conjured these halls. ‘You want something, Grand Master. What is it?’
‘The Crowntaker.’ Bellepheros wrung his hands. He almost clutched at her, and then remembered how she hated to be touched. ‘Holiness, I have to speak with you.’ He glanced back towards the Octagon. For all he knew the Black Moon was still sitting there, lounging in Zafir’s throne. He whispered. ‘With discretion.’
Zafir nodded to Myst and Onyx and shooed them away, off back to the eyrie and their babies. It amazed Bellepheros how she put up with servants who carried infants, but she did. The blunt-edged vicious creature the Taiytakei had brought in chains to Baros Tsen’s eyrie had changed. She was subtler now. He just wasn’t quite sure which way she’d gone. Softer or sharper. Either way she was dangerous and selfish and unpredictable.
‘You can advise me as we walk.’ She beckoned him to follow. ‘How should I deal with Jaslyn and Hyrkallan, Grand Master?’ She stepped through an arch and Bellepheros followed. It didn’t seem to bother her that she ended up right back where she started; she simply kept on going as if she hadn’t even noticed.
‘With mercy, your Holiness.’
Zafir flicked him a glance. ‘There is an argument for reconciliation. The Adamantine Palace awaits, and I must leave the Pinnacles in hands I can trust. If I hang those two then I might as well hang every rider that came with them from the north.’ She walked through the hall over and over, taking a different exit each time and always coming back to the same place. ‘Mercy, though? The Adamantine Men Tuuran found in Furymouth, and here too, quietly whisper that Queen Jaslyn is mad. They say she woke a dragon and wouldn’t let her alchemists feed it their potions. But I should let her go?’
