by Stephen Deas
The violence of the sea and the storm crashed back. Lin Feyn loosed the remains of her captured lightning in one thunderous retort and returned, exhausted, to her cabin, and to struggling with the wilful obscurities of the Rava’s prose. Darkness had been falling as they’d entered the storm, but the other side offered up a bright morning sun, becalmed in a cloudless sky. Such was the way of the storm-dark.
The Servant on Ice sighted land a few days later. She kept over the horizon from the coast of Aria while men on sleds scouted the shore and waters ahead for other ships. When they were far enough north to close on the coast of the Ice Witch’s black fortress in the night, Lin Feyn took a sled and rode for miles until she saw the dark line of land and the fires of the fortress itself. She loosed a few tiny gold-glass birds, golems casting eyes for traps and warnings, but found nothing. In the darkness she struggled to return to the Servant again, and it was almost dawn as she finally set down on its decks. She felt dizzy, and her head swam with fatigue. She stumbled to bed, too exhausted to think, but woke again an hour later to a mayhem of noise, of shouting and thunder and lightning. As she rushed outside a streak of fire shot overhead, punching a hole in the mizzenmast topsail. A flurry of thunderbolts rattled the air, but the fireball was too quick. It flickered sideways and came back again, fizzing past. A second fireball landed on the foredeck and coalesced into the shape of a man ablaze. Burning torrents flew from his fingers, a hose of flame washing the deck. Red Lin Feyn hurled one glass globe and then another, the first a trap that flashed into a glass prison as it hit the flaming man, the second a shield to hold back his torrents. The flaming man burst into dazzling light. Men became pillars of fire and ran screaming around him; more flames shot up the masts and the rigging, biting into rope and sail and wood as though all had been soaked in lamp oil. Lin Feyn clenched her fists. The glass prison tightened around the magician, crushing him smaller until he was a seething knot of sun-bright flame.
‘Stop!’ she howled, ‘or I will end you!’ Her words died in shouts and volleys of lightning as the other fireball shot past. When she looked back her glass prison had vanished and the magician was gone. Sails were burning all across the ship, and most of the rigging too, while sailors ran with buckets, trying to stop the fire from taking the masts. Two galleys were coming at them, closing fast. Rockets whooshed and roared. Bright orange streaks fizzed and hissed across the water leaving trails of smoke in the air as the Servant’s rocketeers got their range. Glass globes shattered in clouds of fire as they hit the water. The Servant fired a salvo and then another, and the sea around the two galleys erupted in a wall of fire; and then Lin Feyn saw the fireball again amid the flames. It sucked them into itself and came back at her, brighter than before and with infernal speed. It shot through the mainmast and shattered it, punched through a sailor who stood in its path, leaving a gaping charred hole in his chest …
The world juddered. The ship twitched. Suddenly Lin Feyn was below decks with no thought or memory as to how, running for her cabin to destroy her copy of the Rava, Feyn Charin’s journals, the notes from the alchemist on the nature of dragons, all before the fire witch came. She crashed through her door and hurled an explosion of glass at the ship’s side to blow open a hole, then gathered up all the papers she could see. The Rava was back in its hidden compartment, and so she threw everything out of the chest and opened it, and then stopped and looked about in time to see the fireball from above hover by her cabin door. It coalesced into the shape of a woman dressed in brilliant orange silk embroidered with cranes in black silhouette. Lin Feyn dived aside and hurled a glass globe. The woman shifted into fire, darted up and hurled a blast of flames. Lin Feyn conjured a glass shield. With her other hand she scattered marbles across the floor. She held her shield firm and drew back her arm to throw again as the fireball coalesced into a woman once more, flames burning from her fingers. She threw a blast at Lin Feyn’s feet, transformed again to flames, shot sideways, materialised … The marbles Lin Feyn had scattered detonated with bangs and flashes … hundreds of whirling glass blades shot into the air in a blur …
Time stopped. Flames paused mid-flicker. Her glass blades hung still. The roar of fire, the thunder and lightning from above, all fell away, silenced and mute. Everything froze as Red Lin Feyn looked on. She had the sense of a woman, achingly beautiful, with a gold circlet on her brow. A place of shimmering rainbows and …
The woman spoke in Red Lin Feyn’s thoughts: You are dreaming, sorceress. Come and sit with me a while.
The Servant on Ice was gone. She was in a dark room in some other ship on a sea so still she could barely feel its rocking swell. Her head throbbed. She was thirsty and had terrible cramps in her stomach. The clothes she wore were unfamiliar, a slave’s silk tunic, belted at the waist, and nothing else. Her glass had gone, all her sleeves and pockets. Her wrists and ankles were bound.
A shadow slid across the room, a shadow without light nor any flesh-and-blood body to birth it. It slipped under the crack of the door and was gone …
Come closer.
Again the world lurched and flickered. Now she was in a room of polished white stone, round, somewhere high in a breeze where the air was fresh and cold. Archways opened to the sky, north, south, east and west. Sunlight streamed through. Between the openings were more arches, blank plain things. They made her think of Baros Tsen’s eyrie. Dreams were like that, weren’t they?
Her legs were unsteady. She was in the same slave’s tunic as before, but now her hands and feet were free. She couldn’t see anyone, but she knew she wasn’t alone.
‘Come outside.’ A woman’s voice, soft and melodious. Red Lin Feyn took a deep breath and summoned a snip of the storm-dark into each hand. She looked at them and wondered how such a thing was possible, and then remembered that she was in a dream. Fearless then, she walked out to a balcony atop a slender white tower. Four other towers stood about her, all arranged in a circle. A city spread beneath them, and a great river ran beside it, as wide as the city itself and a-swarm with ships and barges. The streets were full of life and motion. Sounds wafted on the air, merchants selling their wares, the singing of street-corner bards, criers shouting news and imperial edicts, the clatter of horses, the distant blare of cavalry horns. The stink came too.
She didn’t know this place. Her feet had walked all the cities of Takei’Tarr and many of other realms, but not this. She would have remembered it at once for its towers, their white stone, their shape and texture not unlike the Godspike of Takei’Tarr.
A woman sat with her feet over the edge. She wore tight breeches in a deep lush red, black riding boots and a short tunic of white and gold. Her skin was dark, her long black hair tied in a plait that reached to the small of her back. Her eyes were emerald green, and the golden circlet she wore across her brow blazed with power. The Circlet of the Moon.
‘Ice Witch!’ Red Lin Feyn hurled her summoned snips of storm-dark, two brutal things to annihilate whatever they touched. The woman barely seemed to notice.
‘I learned that trick a while back,’ she said. ‘Have you learned this one?’
The whistle of the wind fell silent. The noises of the city too. When Lin Feyn looked at the river, the ships had fallen still and the gleaming ripples on the water had frozen. Birds hung motionless in the air between wingbeats. The Ice Witch had stopped time.
‘The Sun King plans a war against my world, Red Lin Feyn. Only a Taiytakei witch may cross the storm-dark, and so your people must mean to aid him. Why?’ The Ice Witch turned. Her eyes fixed Lin Feyn to the spot, a brilliant depthless green that sparkled with sadness and anger. Lin Feyn composed herself. She had no gold-glass, and the Ice Witch was impervious to the storm-dark, and that left her with nothing but words; but then wasn’t this a dream? So words might be as deadly as she liked.
‘You are a sorceress,’ she said.
The Ice Witch nodded. ‘That I am. As are you.’
‘You are the most powerful this world has seen for many generations.’
‘In your world I might say the same of you. And?’
‘You breed more.’
‘I do. So do you. And?’ In their moment of frozen time the Ice Witch stared into Lin Feyn, and Lin Feyn thought, amid the ire, she saw true bewilderment. The Ice Witch really didn’t understand why she was the enemy.
‘Sorcerers broke the world into pieces …’ Lin Feyn tried to pick her words carefully. She was an ambassador for her people …
‘Ah. So it’s your Elemental Men who wish me dead? But I hear there are hardly any of them left. Besides, you stopped trusting them months ago when they lied to you about dragons, did you not? They are the ones for whom all sorcery is anathema. You are a witch to them, as wicked as I. But you let them tell you what to do, and so you become useful to them, I suppose.’ The Ice Witch stood. ‘Why so afraid, Red Lin Feyn?’ Her eyes shone; for a moment they burned ferocious bright, then faded and grew sad again.
‘Years ago I made a bridge,’ said the Ice Witch quietly. ‘I made it because the river was too wide and too deep and no builder could span it. It stands beautiful and abandoned. I charge no toll, but no one uses it. The ordinary folk prefer to give a penny to one of the many boatmen who cross the river beside it. Now and then a drunken oarsman will capsize. Now and then people fall overboard and drown. Almost every day someone dies crossing my river, yet no one uses my bridge. Why? Because they do not understand, and so they are afraid.’ She cocked her head. ‘You are afraid I will become a monster. Ruled by your fear, you force it to truth, and thus a monster I must be, to tear down the pillars of your world, and crush your empire to ash and sand. Your nightmare prophecies take substance and grow real from such nourishment. Is that wise, Red Lin Feyn of the Taiytakei?’
They were suddenly in the room of arches. It happened in a seamless moment, something so natural that Red Lin Feyn thought they must have been there all along, as though the time-frozen city had been an illusion. It was a dream, she reminded herself. No ordinary one, but played by the rules of dreamers.
‘The past,’ whispered the Ice Witch. She touched an arch. It shimmered silver and rippled like water and dissolved to show a fleet of white ships with huge curved prows like giant swans. Silver-armoured red-eyed white-skinned half-god moon sorcerers sailed upon them, who summoned knives of ice to rain from the air and send slaughter upon some city and raised the murdered dead into an army of deathless slaves. She saw them come upon this city of spires and the dead pile themselves against the walls. She saw them burn, saw the moon sorcerers dissolve the city’s walls into black ash, saw the dead swarm the streets and then the fist of the moon strike the earth and the sun climb into the night sky. She heard the moon-god’s sister whisper something like the intimate murmur of a lover in her ear. And then light. Endless, timeless light and a limitless sea of silver, and the living dead and their moon sorcerer masters were gone.
‘You want to stop the rise of a terrible sorceress who will crack the world in two? I fear you are too late, Red Lin Feyn of the Taiytakei. What you see? I did that to them, to the old ones who still linger here.’ A wan smile flickered across the Ice Witch’s face, and she tapped the circlet on her brow. ‘You should have sent your assassins when I took the Sapphire Throne as regent for my little brother.’ She nodded then to the swimming silver arch. ‘Others tried. I see now that their reasons were the same. They too might have done better to speak with words than with weapons, but they were right that that was the time to change fate. You are years too late. I have already done the thing you fear, much to my chagrin.’ She turned to another arch. ‘Now behold the future.’
Red Lin Feyn saw the room where she stood, but now a man was in her place, his back to a slender crescent moon. He stepped onto the balcony. The wind picked up, a strong steady breeze that blew into his face, and Red Lin Feyn was with him as he looked about. The same five towers, the same city spread beneath them, but now night. A flurry of bright orange streaks launched from the river. Rockets. Plumes of bright flame bloomed. A roar rose from below, the voices of a thousand men racing to their deaths. Smoke rose from close to the waterfront, the start of some pointless battle. Shapes moved fast through the air. Men on sleds. The first sun-flash of lightning …
The Ice Witch touched an arch. ‘I see you,’ she whispered.
The vision returned to its start. To the man who stood in her place in this room of arches with his cropped hair and pale skin and eyes that poured forth moonlight.
‘I will not be the monster,’ whispered the Ice Witch, ‘no matter what you do. But the monster is indeed loose, and now you have seen its face, and if you fall upon me as his half-kin once did, if you bring this future to pass, I have another to show you. One I cannot stop.’
Through a third arch a dark moon rose from the southern sky to chase the sun. Lin Feyn saw the earth burn and dragons fly. She saw fire and death and ash. She saw glass ground to sand. She saw the dark moon catch the sun and hold it tight, darkness fall to throttle life and fire until all became ice and still. She saw a half-god blaze across the sky with a thousand dragons at his back, and turn the world to dust.
The Ice Witch’s voice turned hard. She faced Lin Feyn eye to eye. ‘Your people are arrogant and cruel. I will take away from you that which you have no right to have. Ships of all worlds shall cross the storm-dark. I will share that gift far and wide.’ She bared her teeth. ‘But if you come here, Red Lin Feyn of the Taiytakei, I will destroy you. I will find your ships and your sorcerers. You, Red Lin Feyn. You and yours. I will hunt you and end you all.’
Lin Feyn was shaking. ‘There is something of the Crimson Sunburst in you,’ she blurted.
‘I don’t know what that is, Red Lin Feyn.’
‘How do you know my name?’
‘Because this is your dream, and I am inside it.’ The Ice Witch reached out a hand. Where her fingers touched Lin Feyn on the cheek they burned with a deep and lingering hurt. ‘I would prefer you as an ally, but you have made yourself my enemy.’
The colossal armoured fist of an angry god crashed into Red Lin Feyn’s head and ripped her memories out of her, everything she knew and everything she was and everything she hoped for. Took it all out and looked carefully at every piece and then put it back again, all in its proper place. Around the edges Lin Feyn gasped at the flashes that came unsought and unwanted the other way. As the Ice Witch lingered on Lin Feyn’s memories of dragons, on the last words the hatchling had breathed in the depths of the Queverra, on knowledge of the Rava and the name of the Black Moon, trickles of colour and emotion bled the other way. The Black Moon most of all. The Black Moon. The enemy, and a dread that she had years ago made a most terrible and ghastly mistake.
How many years? Seven. The crack in the Godspike, the change in the storm-dark, the beginnings of the walking dead. All tied together. All begun at the same time. All caused by a single event. And there, Red Lin Feyn saw, was the answer she sought.
The Ice Witch had been to Xibaiya. She’d seen the rip. She’d freed the Black Moon.
The world of Red Lin Feyn’s dreams dissolved.
She woke in her cabin aboard the Servant on Ice. Disorientated and confused and a little lost. She roused herself and splashed a little water on her face. A dream then, all of it; and yet when she stumbled on deck she saw that the Servant was heading home. When she looked harder, many sailors were simply gone, and no one knew quite what had happened to them or why or how. Her copies of the Rava and Feyn Charin’s journals had gone too, and here and there, beneath careful repair, the Servant bore the scars of the battle she remembered, charred and burned in places exactly as she’d seen; yet no one else now knew how any of these things had happened, or what had become of their missing comrades and crew. Their memories were entirely gone. They knew nothing at all of galleys or of the fire witch, or of months spent captive in Deephaven harbour hel
d under guard while they repaired their ship, nor of Red Lin Feyn imprisoned in the Ice Witch’s black fortress, or of the empress with her golden circlet who came to visit before they were sent on their way. Yet so it had been; and when Red Lin Feyn looked at herself in a glass she saw the pale marks on her face where the Ice Witch had touched her in a dream that had been no dream at all.
19
Awakening
Thirteen months before landfall
Pride. Now there was a thing. Tuuran stood out on the eyrie rim, eyes fixed across the rippling sea, and tried to remember the last time he’d felt properly proud. He’d felt it sometimes back when he’d been a sail-slave on his Taiytakei slaving galley. He’d definitely felt proud on the night he’d cracked the skull of the galley oar-master and hurled him overboard where no one would see. Men he’d taken up from the oars had made him proud – slaves full of broken hate, righteous anger or sullen resentment, and he’d turned them back into men, fierce and strong. Yes, he’d had his moments back on that galley, but not like this. All those times he had never quite forgotten he was making more slaves for the bastards who thought they owned him. This, though … This was different. Pride, clean and honest.
He looked over the eyrie moving steadily towards the limitless horizon. He’d lost track of how long they’d been adrift. A month, maybe. Another day, her Holiness said, and they’d reach land. Her dragon pulled on a chain that the dragon and the enchantress had forged, a harness yoking the monster as though he was an ox dragging a plough. A hundred enchanted sleds pulled too, each one tiny but the sum of them worth something. His men had built cranes and winches and platforms and lowered them, and they all lived on fish and the tepid water hauled up from the sea and made drinkable by the witch and the alchemist and their magics.
