by Stephen Deas
I see you.
Closer now, as the Black Moon dances and bounds into the battle’s heart, dashes between the frozen forms of men stood ready, mouths agape with silent cries of war on their lips, spears in hand. He ducks and weaves among arrows an instant from striking home. He touches every man he passes, no matter on which side they fight, turning them to dust, and amid the vengeful fury Berren sees the face for whom the Black Moon hunts. His face. Berren the Bloody Judge. The face he saw every day in glass, in mirror water, until the warlocks threw themselves against him on the battlefield outside Tethis and ripped his soul from his skin and cast it into another. A face behind which all answers lie waiting.
Closer.
A flicker of bright moonlight in the corner of his eye, in a gloomy alley behind a frozen charge of soldiers. The Black Moon whips about, poised to strike.
I see you.
The Black Moon wheels again, throws out his hands, turns soldiers and street and ground, the walls, the very air to ash, all of it. Yet nothing.
Closer still.
A presence above, below, all around, inching under their skin. The Black Moon looks up, seeping desperation. From the horizon the bloody crescent moon looks back, and Berren feels it now. The half-god is afraid.
The Black Moon clicks his fingers. Breathes life into time. Thunderous noise returns, screams and shouts, battle cries, howls of the wounded and the dying. The murdered ships burst into clouds as the wind swallows and scatters their dust across the water. Men dissolve to ash where the half-god has walked. Rockets fizz and hiss and explode. Fire rains. The Black Moon steps through it as though all was mist and illusion, and everything that touches him turns to dust. He seizes a spear from the air and throws it as a gold-glass sled shoots overhead, skewering the rider and throwing him aside. Not a Taiytakei knight or a sword-slave, but a Dominion exalt, a holy warrior of their all-consuming God of the Sun.
The Black Moon leaps impossibly into the air. He lands on the sled and urges it on. A streak of fire blisters the wind, shrieking after them.
I SEE YOU.
The voice of the moon, the blazing bloody crescent that glowers from the horizon while all below is darkness and fire. The Black Moon jumps as the sled comes upon the tower. He touches a silver arch, and as he does an irresistible presence smashes in his head, ripping and tearing and pulling apart, stripping every memory and rending every thought.
Berren stumbles on through. The gate closes behind them. The fury of the moon; the hunter or the huntress, whichever it was that came armed with such old furious loathing, vanishes. He staggers up steps that rise in front of him. He is dazed and dizzy, half blind. The Black Moon screams and shrivels. It the half-god’s turn to suffer.
He trips and falls into waiting water. Flails, bewildered and lost, until he sees where he is. Floundering in Baros Tsen’s bath, he hauls himself out and stands dripping, and for a moment he thinks he is free, is not quite sure who he is, Berren or the Black Moon, or dead forgotten Skyrie, each as bewildered as the other and unable to say quite what they have seen. But it is a moment, nothing more. The Black Moon shakes himself down. He calls the eyrie dragons, summoning them to carry him away. He has learned something.
The doors inside Berren’s head slam shut. He is left alone, blind and deaf in a dark and silent hole.
13
The Fates of Kings and Alchemists
Seventeen days after landfall
‘Sisters,’ grumbled Halfteeth. ‘You’d have thought they might get along.’
‘Then you obviously didn’t have any!’ snorted Snacksize.
Tuuran paused from picking his nose and held up a hand, signalling them to stop. The Silver King’s Ways ran like a labyrinth under the Silver City, around white stone that glowed like moonlight, criss-crossing at different levels with countless side passages, dead-end spurs and the occasional underground hall. Not too hard if you kept to the easy bits from one place to another, but in parts a maze of whirls and twirls and intricate spirals that didn’t even go anywhere. Impossible to search, and Tuuran couldn’t help wondering what the point was. Was a bit like calligraphy, and every bit as pointless. Worthless, like shitting on a dead man.
‘You have brothers or sisters, boss?’ asked Snacksize. A few yards ahead of them a smaller passage merged in from the side.
‘Sort of.’ Tuuran crept to the intersection and peered round the corner, gold-glass shield raised, lightning thrower at the ready. He hadn’t exactly heard something, but all the hairs on the back of his neck were tingling. ‘People sell their children to the legion when they’re a few years old. That was me. We all grow up together, soldiers from the start. So I had a thousand brothers. Not brothers of the same flesh and blood, mind, but I don’t see as how it makes a difference.’ Bloody place was a right tangle. You had to wonder what the Silver King had been thinking when he made this. Whether it was all part of some great plan, whether every passage and chamber had a purpose, or whether it had all been on a whim or he’d just plain been bored, and that was why some parts glowed bright with their own white-stone moonlight while others were dark as midnight. Doodling, so to speak.
Everywhere was damp. The tunnels ought to stink. They didn’t. The walls were stained with old tidemarks, the floors left littered with tiny stones and dirt and fallen leaves trampled almost to extinction, left behind by some old flood. Whatever had once been in the side rooms was long gone, rotted away, eaten, stolen, maybe got up and walked off of its own free will for all Tuuran knew. All he ever found was dust and dirt, old sacks as fragile as paper and flakes and fragments of wood not much use except as kindling. Oh, and bones. Now and then they found bones. But the air was always fresh.
‘No sisters?’ asked Snacksize.
‘Never had a woman in the legion before you.’
‘Everyone knows women can’t fight,’ said Halfteeth, po-faced, and then sniggered. Snacksize clipped him around the back of the head.
‘You want to tell that to her Holiness, Halfteeth?’ Tuuran laughed. He started down the passage and then stopped. There was something here. He could feel it.
‘Come on.’ Halfteeth stopped beside him. ‘You know her better than anyone. What gives between her and her sister?’
Snacksize smirked. ‘Careful, Halfteeth. Boss has got the moon in his eyes there.’
Tuuran told her to piss off.
Halfteeth leered. ‘No. It’s her Holiness he wants. That right, eh boss?’
Tuuran told Halfteeth to piss off too. Glared, thinking how there might suddenly be a good deal more latrine duty in Halfteeth’s future. Snacksize muttered something crude. Tuuran glared some more. ‘Shut it, you two.’
They fell quiet. Tuuran counted fifty heartbeats and then started on again. The tunnel floor was covered in the same litter of gravel and dirt as everywhere else. Old and trodden down, but when he crouched to take a look he couldn’t tell whether it had been days or hours or weeks since anyone had come this way. Been raining almost constantly since they’d made landfall. Wouldn’t be much fun to be trapped here when the next flood came …
There!
The room right beside him. Midnight dark. A rustle of something. Tuuran pointed his torch inside and saw a man huddled on his haunches, curled up in the corner and cringing from the light.
‘Hey! We’re not going to hurt you. You hungry?’ Tuuran lifted his helm. Slow and careful. The feral cowered further. Tuuran let out a long sigh and stepped back. He slapped Snacksize on the shoulder. ‘Go on then.’ He pushed her at the opening. Five days they’d been stomping about the place, looking for survivors. Most ran away, which made Tuuran want to grab the odd dragon-rider now and then and smack them in the teeth for what they’d done here. If anyone got the ferals to stay, it was Snacksize.
Snacksize took off her helm and eased in. ‘Hey.’ Arms held out in front of her, palms open, hands empty. ‘You’re safe
. The old king is gone. You can come inside now if you want. There’s food and shelter and safety from snappers and dragons.’ Same thing she always said. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Tuuran only half paid attention. He shouldn’t be down here, not really. A Night Watchman stayed beside his Speaker. Queen Jaslyn and her riders with their blades returned. Hyrkallan still locked in a cell. Zara-Kiam telling anyone who’d listen how Zafir had murdered their father. Sooner or later someone was going to stab someone, and shit was going to kick off, and when it did it would be bloody.
‘Hey!’ Snacksize eased closer, doing her best to look like she didn’t mean any harm. No mean feat dressed in gold-glass plate armour with a sword at her side and an axe over her back. Halfteeth hovered, tense beside him. Had a thing they did, him and Snacksize. Made him all protective. Well, good for them. Moon in my eyes, my arse. That night in Furymouth, just one of those madness moments, a flash of incandescence as a dancing phosphor-moth gets it wrong and dives into the lantern flame—
Snacksize let out a yelp. She jumped away. Tuuran’s thoughts snapped to where they were supposed to be, sword in hand in a blink. Snacksize backed out as the feral got to his feet. Halfteeth gasped in disbelief. Tuuran gagged. Hadn’t been able to see when the feral had been all curled up, but his belly had been ripped open and half his guts were hanging out, and it wasn’t a fresh wound either. He looked like he’d been half eaten, and he very definitely ought to be dead.
Halfteeth raised his arm, about to finish the poor bastard with lightning, then thought better of it. Down in the tunnels, throwing lightning was a good way to make yourself deaf and warn everyone for about a thousand miles that you were coming. And the feral wasn’t doing anything much. Was just standing.
‘What in Xibaiya?’
‘Can you walk?’ asked Tuuran. The feral didn’t answer. His eyes were dead.
‘It’s a dead man,’ hissed Snacksize.
‘Don’t look dead to me,’ growled Halfteeth.
‘Merizikat,’ whispered Tuuran. They’d all seen the same in the catacombs under the Basilica of the solar exalts. Dead men who weren’t dead. Gave everyone the creeps, that had. Broken a few too, but Tuuran had seen it before. Years ago with Crazy Mad before the half-god inside him woke up, in Aria, in a city called Deephaven. A whole necropolis full of dead men who were still walking and talking. Getting on with living as though that’s what they still were, manicured up to hide the rot and with their eyes sewn shut, their own little markets and craftsmen. Would sell you fish in a bun if you wanted. Not that the dead had much use for food, but the living did. Pickled fish in a bun from a dead man with his eyelids threaded shut. Tuuran shuddered.
‘I think we go back now.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose we’d better find her Holiness and our grand master alchemist. Tell them it’s happening here too.’ Didn’t want to. Didn’t want to go back to the Octagon. All that time he’d spent looking forward, yearning to come back, and now here they were and all he felt was restless and empty. Odd.
They hurried away.
‘What you need,’ said Snacksize, suddenly beside him, ‘is to find some woman to fuck you to within an inch of your life. You need that, boss.’
‘I do, do I?’ Tuuran snorted. ‘You offering?’
‘Fuck off!’
‘Well shut up then.’
‘Them two with the babies, boss. They’re starting to miss it.’
‘Doesn’t feel right. Wouldn’t be the same now. Not like it was in the islands. Anyway …’ He tapped the rough white skin on his neck beneath his ear. ‘Don’t think they’d be as keen as they used to be. There’s no cure for the dragon-disease.’
Snacksize shrugged. ‘There’s still ways, boss. I mean you don’t have to stick your … There’s other …’ She threw up her hands in exasperation. ‘Worst comes to the worst you can always take a piece of pig gut and tie a knot in the end – you know, boss.’ She looked up at him as he glared, a look that ought to have been ferocious enough to scare a mountain into a heap of pebbles.
‘Will you shut up?’
‘Would have to be a big piece, I’m sure. Right, boss? And a real tight knot. But I mean it could …’
There were ways of standing and looking at someone when you were holding a big axe. Tuuran reckoned he was pretty good at most of them, but that if he excelled at one in particular, it was when he was sizing up someone’s throat and imagining exactly the fastest way to cut it. ‘What I need,’ he growled, ‘is to remember that I had a friend once, and that wherever he’s pissed off to now, he needs me. So sod you, sod her Holiness, and sod everyone else.’
Snacksize shut up. They walked the rest of the way in silence to the cavern of the Undergates and the waterfall that crashed through it. Tuuran nodded to the soldiers he’d left on watch there and stomped up the steps, muttering under his breath. Bloody alchemist. And of course he couldn’t talk to anyone else about it, about how he and Bellepheros didn’t get on and how that bothered him. Couldn’t talk to Halfteeth or Snacksize or any of the rest of his men because he was their Night Watchman, hard as nails and never wrong. Couldn’t talk to her Holiness for much the same reason. Couldn’t talk to Crazy Mad because …
‘You all right, boss?’ asked Halfteeth.
‘No, I’m bloody well not. I’ve seen a dead man looking back at me, and I’m bloody angry.’ Maybe Snacksize was right after all: maybe some tension-blowing tumble, done and gone again, maybe that would help.
Past the Undergates lay the Gold Hall, as tall as any tower in the realms, full of elegant pillars and colossal arches. The light carried a yellow tinge which gave the place a sun-drenched look, except that whenever he looked up, looking for the open sky or the great windows, there weren’t any. The whole Enchanted Palace gave him the shivers. Didn’t help when a wrought-bronze gate at the far end took him into the upper levels half a mile above without any sense of movement.
‘I hate this place,’ he muttered as he stepped through the gate.
On the far side the Octagon lay straight ahead of him. He marched through, sent Snacksize and Halfteeth off about other errands, then headed for the grand master alchemist’s door, not that Bellepheros actually had a door as such. The Silver King hadn’t bothered much with things like that when he’d conjured his palace. Tuuran supposed maybe he had a point, that any sorcerer who could turn people inside out at a thought, could disintegrate them into greasy black ash with such ridiculous ease that most of the time he had to consciously stop himself from doing it, well, a man like that probably hadn’t been worrying too much about assassins in the night and knives in the back and suchlike. Made guarding her Holiness a right nightmare, though. Hadn’t much helped the Silver King in the end either.
Either way, Bellepheros didn’t have a door, more of a curtain, and even before Tuuran got there he could hear voices from the other side. The alchemist and the guard Tuuran had given him, Big Vish, Vish standing awkwardly to attention while Bellepheros paced around him, a cup of something clenched in white-knuckled fingers. Tuuran barged in.
‘Grand Ma—’
‘You!’ Bellepheros pointed an accusing finger at Tuuran before he could get out two words. ‘Did you know about this?’
Well that was a good start. ‘What have we done now?’
‘The alchemists!’
‘What about them?’
‘The ones who were here! You know what happened to them?’
Tuuran paused. Took a moment to take the sting out of the air, the accusation, the old surly resentment. The inside of the grand master’s room was full of fine things. Portraits of kings and queens and princesses of the Silver City hung on the walls. There was a desk which had belonged to Queen Sakabia before she was elected speaker; a sumptuous bed with silk sheets from Furymouth, as good as anything the Taiytakei had ever had; a stone bath set into the floor, constantly fed with water fresh from the fountain up in the ru
in of the Reflecting Garden and always warm. It never felt right seeing Grand Master Bellepheros standing in the middle of this tidy and elegant chamber in his scruffy robe and apron, uncomfortable as a cheap whore at a royal wedding.
Tuuran took a good long look at it all, settling his mind. Unclenching his fists. In the end he shrugged. ‘If you mean did I know that King Hyrkallan strung up every alchemist he could get his hands on and then murdered them, then yes, I did know that.’ They all knew that. ‘Her Holiness keeps him imprisoned and we all wait her judgment. If you have something to say on that, I suggest you take it up with her. You’ll see no tears from me if he hangs.’
‘Not that!’ Bellepheros slammed his cup on the desk. ‘The other alchemists! The ones who came here just a few weeks before us.’
‘Other alchemists?’ Well, here was something. Tuuran glared at Big Vish. ‘No, can’t say as I do. Should I?’ He let Vish suffer a moment. ‘Vish, you know about this?’
Big Vish hung his head. ‘Yes, boss.’
‘Well then you can wait outside and stay there until I say otherwise, and while you wait you can think about the long days of shit about to come your way for not telling me stuff I apparently needed to know.’ Vish bowed his head. Bellepheros started to say something else, but Tuuran stopped him and poked him in the chest. ‘And, you, Grand Master Alchemist, my men answer to me and to her Holiness, not to you. Ever. Do you understand that? You want a strip torn off one of them, you leave that to me.’ He heard Vish slip out behind him, the sheepish swish of the curtain. Damn right too. They’d be having more words about this later, and they wouldn’t be pretty ones.
Shit. And now here he was, looming over the alchemist Bellepheros like an angry bear roaring at an old man. Nice one, big man. Well done.
Bellepheros pushed Tuuran’s arm aside. ‘Don’t you threaten me in my own rooms, Night Watchman. Don’t you dare! There’s only one of me, more’s the pity. I’m sure there are plenty more like you.’
