The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

He made himself think about Dahat and whom he might hire. The lad who ran the spice stall in the market knew far too much about spices to be getting himself killed in some stupid war. Then there was the boy who worked in the glassworks. Not that Tsen much liked him, but he liked the father, and the boy was exactly the sort to get sucked in by words like honour and duty and glory, and completely not hear the ones about messy ugly deaths and blood and limbs hacked off, and slowly dying and spending your last few minutes trying to stuff your own guts back inside your belly, and just how loud and long a man screamed between someone setting him on fire and finally burning to death …

  Yes. That sort of thing …

  A shadow blocked the sun. Kalaiya was leaning over him, picking at the letters. ‘If you don’t want to read them, I do.’ She butted against him and settled back to using his belly as something between a backrest and a cushion. ‘See here – a proclamation from the holy sun, unconquered and everlasting … death by drowning now for anyone who avoids their proper responsibilities towards the dead …’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Dead people not staying dead. The catacombs of Merizikat. Blah blah. ‘While the Sun King declares the Empress-Regent of Aria anathema for the necropolis of Deephaven, he neglects to notice how he has one of his own.’ Everyone knew better than to bury the dead under the ground. In the Dominion, in Aria, in Takei’Tarr, in the dragon-lands, in Qeled and Scythia, even the savages of the Slave Coast knew better and always had.

  ‘It’s not so far from here to Merizikat, you know.’ Kalaiya shuddered. The whole idea of dead men who didn’t die unsettled her. It was, Tsen supposed, a reasonable and natural reaction. He wrapped his arm around her.

  ‘There aren’t that many of them. There really aren’t. And we’ve seen dragons, and I think those frightened me a great deal more. A little daylight or moonlight or a little fire and these walking abominations go back to being properly dead. Or push them into a river. Even I could do that.’ He chortled, but his smile quickly disappeared. ‘Half the navigators who ever passed through the Dralamut have come to the Dominion to guide the Sun King’s ships across the storm-dark. The fleet assembled in Brons is the greatest massing of ships the worlds have ever seen. Two hundred thousand men. Five hundred ships to carry them. Any sea lord would weep, and yet still the Sun King comes looking for more?’ He nodded. ‘I will do what I can for the young men of Dahat, I promise you. The worlds are awash with terrible things.’

  A pillar of the Godspike cracked, the storm-dark growing inch by inch, the Righteous Ones restless and roaming, the moon sorcerers out from their seclusion, and never mind dragons on the loose. Before he’d left Takei’Tarr there had been whispers of arcane storms racking the oblique heartlands of Qeled, of monstrous creatures roaming the Scythian coast. He’d scoffed at them all. Not so much now, but thankfully those places were all far away. ‘The plague troubles me more. I hear it’s in Brons now.’ He peered over Kalaiya’s shoulder. ‘Do the letters say anything of it?’

  Kalaiya didn’t answer. Thinking about the plague always soured his mood. Couldn’t pretend that wasn’t at least in part his fault. ‘I should have killed her,’ he muttered. ‘Chrias was right about that. Should have killed her at the start.’

  ‘Tsen—’

  ‘Chrias couldn’t keep it in his breeches.’ Tsen spat, suddenly furious. And yet here I am, passing the blame to another. She meant it, Tsen. The dragon-queen meant to let it loose and do not pretend otherwise.

  ‘Tsen?’

  But she’s gone, annihilated by the storm-dark of the Godspike. No need to think of her any more. No need to wonder. Gone, and her dragons too, and the world is the better for it.

  ‘Tsen!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sea Lord Vey Rin is dead, Tsen. The plague has killed him.’ She could hardly keep the vicious delight out of her voice. She waved the letter until Tsen snatched it out of her hand and read every word with furious hunger while she crouched at his shoulder. ‘It has spread to Shinpai and Xican and Khalishtor, but not yet to Vespinarr; yet Sea Lord Vey Rin is dead. He succumbed months ago. He’s gone, my love. Gone.’

  It seemed crass to get up and dance and whoop in the orchard, but that night Baros Tsen T’Varr and Kalaiya opened a bottle of their most precious wine and shared a smile that was both very quiet and very broad indeed, and on that night Tsen slept more soundly than he had in years.

  The morning after the letters came, he rode the steep coil of mule track down from his villa to Dahat, hot dust burning the back of his throat until he reached the bathhouse heat by the sea. He took Demarko with him. They wandered the town together, ambled the markets and the quiet shady squares and the seafront, strolled the pinched-narrow streets of pocket kiosk shops where every shopkeeper sat out in the open air on a little stool and wore more wrinkles than the last, where everything was sold with a tiny cup of something strong – black qaffeh like tar in the morning, a plethora of venomous spirits in the evening. Tsen looked in them all and waved and smiled at the faces he knew, and beamed at the ones he didn’t. He found the lad who worked the spice stall and convinced him to pick apples in the evenings, away from the exalt’s sergeants when they came. He rounded up the other young men he’d taken a shine to over the months – the honest hard workers who deserved better than hunger, disease and butchery, although didn’t everyone? Kalaiya would have preferred some women to join the harvest, but in the end he chose only men because they were the ones who needed saving. The solar exalts and the priests of the unconquered sun took a simple view of the world: men for fighting, women for raising children.

  He went back to the villa tired and aching, still not used to ­riding any animal at all, and certainly not some barrel-chested mule set on tipping him sideways with every plodding step. Come next morning he and Kalaiya were up bright and early with their baskets, scouting the orchard, picking the first windfalls and spying out the ripest fruit. Demarko slouched sleepy-eyed at the front of the villa, snoozing in his rocking chair in the sun, eyes slitting open now and then to direct the straggle of visitors to the orchard for work and a penny for every apple basket returned full. Tsen toiled until the sun rose high, then walked to the little meadow at the edge of the orchard where he and Kalaiya liked to picnic. He lay and dozed and fell asleep; and when Kalaiya woke him she took him to the house and they spent the lazy midday hours swinging in hammocks in the shade, chewing grass and drinking air as thick as syrup. When the heat loosed its grip, Tsen went back to work, and as he walked to the orchard he saw a ship gliding into Dahat, her sails the bright yellow of the Sun King. He put his arm around Kalaiya and hugged her.

  ‘You were right about starting a day early.’

  ‘I’m always right.’ She hugged him back.

  The days of harvesting were a warm glow of hard work and effort well spent. A clear autumn sun kept the air thick and still, heady with the fresh smell of apples. The ship remained in Dahat harbour. When it looked like the orchard might be picked clean before the exalt left, Tsen found other things for his hired hands to do. He grew used to seeing the same faces up in his orchards day after day, and took the time to talk to them and learn their names. They laughed behind his back at the colour of his skin and the disfiguring of his face, but it didn’t trouble him. They weren’t unkind, these Dahat lads, or cruel; they laughed at Demarko for being old too, but thought no less of him.

  The harvest was all but done. They sat outside, him and Kalaiya and Demarko, the evening air warm and pleasant, crickets buzzing in twilight scents of jasmine and heliotrope laced with the inevit­able warm-breath wafts of Xizic, the table lit by a dozen ­candles. Demarko, unasked, had made a feast for them, and now he fussed and tutted from the kitchen, and flitted about them carrying dishes of pickled urchins drenched in lemon, baked fish, roasted flaked nuts and some strange concoction of sweetened milk curd flavoured with mint. When they were done, while Tsen stretched back, bloated and rubbing his belly, Dema
rko brought out another letter that must have arrived earlier in the day. Tsen read it, bored and not really interested.

  Then he read it again.

  ‘Well that can’t be right,’ he said. Couldn’t be, could it? Because if it was then all he wanted was to scream his lungs out and then dig a very great big hole in the earth and dive into it and pull the soil back on top of him. The letter was short and to the point. A flying mountain had come out of the storm-dark. It had come across the ocean to Merizikat and sacked the city. And he’d wanted to know any word of dragons, hadn’t he? Well now he had one almost next door.

  His eyrie. It couldn’t be anything else.

  ‘What is it?’ Kalaiya asked.

  Tsen held Kalaiya’s arm, fingers tight and digging into her, then forced himself to let go. ‘It’s nothing, my love. Nothing for us to worry about.’

  ‘Then may we go to bed now?’ she asked. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Yes, my love. We have apples to press in the morning.’ He pulled Kalaiya close. They wrapped each other in their arms and turned away. As he took her hand he touched the letter to one of the candles, watched the flame take hold of the paper and burn it to ash.

  Peace, t’varr.

  Far across the waiting sea the dragon Silence bursts in blood and broken bone upon the ground and returns once more to Xibaiya, realm of the dead and their murdered goddess. In sanctuary there she lurks and heals from the wounds the warlocks have given her. Slowly and painfully. She has found the Bloody Judge but not the Black Moon, and though the one is clearly a part of the other she cannot fathom the how of it.

  The Nothing, unbound, creeps from its prison. The tear grows ever worse.

  She is a dragon. She hunts for her next hatching with care. The ancient half-god, split in two; she has hunted one splinter and failed. The other, then, will have to do. It will end, one way or another, in flames.

  It always does.

  The Adamantine Palace

  The Silver King muted dragons and made dull servants of them. In fear and envy the blood-mages drove a spike into his head. Now they drink the silver ichor of the moon that drips from his wound and call themselves alchemists, but half-gods are not so easily bound. The Isul Aieha foresaw his fate and, as the Black Moon had once done, cut a piece of himself apart and made it into a seed. Along the Yamuna River, beside the Moonlight Garden, a man called Sif carries that seed to the Black Mausoleum of legend, bringing with him the one thing the Isul Aieha needs to open the way home: a memory of himself, carried in the blood of the alchemist Kataros.

  Beneath the ruins of the Glass Cathedral the last alchemists brew their potions and their poisons and plot their way to freedom. They too have secrets. Closely guarded, in deep caves far out of sight, they keep the last enslaved dragon.

  While in the Raksheh forest the Adamantine Man Jasaan searches for Kataros. He has failed her once, and swears he will not fail her again.

  22

  Kataros

  Twenty-two days after landfall

  It hadn’t been the easiest journey after Kataros and Skjorl escaped from the flying eyrie, but Kataros hadn’t given up. She’d followed the Yamuna upriver into the deep Raksheh, where the trees were a thousand feet tall, to where the banks rose in pale cliffs from the water, to the falls under the Moonlit Garden with crags of rock to either side, a little beach below now littered with dead, to the entrances to the Aardish Caves. In the dragon-smashed ruins of the little eyrie that had once stood there she’d found a boulder torn asunder, a hole smashed into the ground, tunnels of white stone which glowed like moonlight. She’d found the Black Mausoleum, the lost tomb of the Silver King, a simple hemisphere room of soft moonlight, and at its heart a ring of archways. She’d brought him here, led him here, the last echoes of the Silver King himself, the Isul Aieha, hidden inside the Outsider she’d found trapped in the Pinnacles and waiting to die.

  She lay between them now, those arches, pale and half bled out on a white stone plinth. Spatters of her ran red and fresh over the arches around. Touched by the essence of a half-god, they shimmered silver. She felt the power coursing through the vault. His power. The Isul Aieha. They would open now, if he asked them. The distant sound of the Yamuna falls rumbled through the tunnels. Outside there was a dragon, but it had come too late to stop them.

  The Silver King looked at her, almost sad. The stone around him was covered in her blood. It was everywhere. ‘Such a shame you couldn’t see this,’ he said. ‘Such a shame.’ Moonlight serpents wriggled from his fingers. The gateways beside him opened. Through the arch of white stone a sea of liquid silver appeared before him, and when he reached to touch it with his hand there was no resistance, no shimmer. This time the door was open. A giant moon hung low in a night sky bedecked with stars. ‘Such a shame,’ he said again.

  Kataros watched through half-closed eyes. She couldn’t blame him for what he’d done to her. She’d seen him tethered and roped under a mile of mountain stone, frozen in a silent rictus scream with a hollowed-out spike driven into his head from which dripped, slow as tar, the silver essence of the half-gods, one drop enough to give an apprentice alchemist power over dragons for life. As far as she knew he was still there, yet he was here too. The Silver King. Half alive and full of wonder, and she knew that the Silver Sea beyond the gate beside him was his home. There were others there, others of his kind, the half-gods who had once fled their own catastrophe. They were waiting for him, beckoning him to join them, to leave her world behind, and here he was. The last of his kind to linger, or so she supposed. The last relic of a tragic age lost in cataclysm, of a time when even dragons had been young and the silver half-gods had strode the world in their multi­tudes.

  She looked at the Silver Sea. The stones drew their power from her. They needed her blood for the tiny echo of his essence she carried within her. She could take that away, but past that they were a mystery to her. Artefacts of another time and beyond her comprehension.

  ‘Everything is wrong,’ whispered the Silver King to the emptiness. ‘The Great Flame? No. This. This.’ He sobbed, overwhelmed, and maybe he was right. With exquisite caution he reached one foot through the gateway. His foot touched the silver beyond and he gasped.

  His boot had her blood on it. She reached through the link it made to touch the Silver Sea with her mind. To see, but the quicksilver consumed her as though she was nothing, washed her down, a tidal wave against a sand castle, immense and vast and ever beyond her understanding. In a blink it looked at her, took her in, absorbed her. She felt its size and its age and its utter indifference, and realised that yes, she did know what it was. She knew exactly. This was the Silver King, not the man standing in front of her. It had to be. Whatever old crippled Jeiros had said, there was nothing else that could be so colossal.

  ‘Alchemist! Kataros!’ A voice so distant it seemed to come from another world, one far behind her.

  Help us! she thought, simply hoping to be noticed. We need you!

  The Silver King turned slowly to look at her. Trying to shake away the presence. Trying to bring himself back to the simple world of stone and flesh.

  ‘Siff,’ she breathed. ‘Look at it.’

  Blood and snarls whirled. An armoured man skittered between them, all edges and motion and wide urgent eyes; and Kataros thought at first that it was Skjorl, but he was too short for that, too small. He came, blade raised, and it seemed that he hardly saw her. Silver rose from the sea beyond the gate. It flowed across the Silver King’s skin and shattered the soldier’s sword as it came down. Steel slivers flew like arrows among the arches.

  Jasaan? Her thoughts were muddied, distant and lost, dispersed through her scattered blood and deep in quicksilver. Jasaan stood before her, before the Silver King and his gateway, panting, holding the stump of his sword.

  ‘Jasaan!’ she gasped. ‘Don’t …’

  The Silver King stood through the gate n
ow, the Silver Sea wrapped around him, clothing him. The other arches flickered and failed, their mirrors falling black and dead and then fading to nothing, until each was simply an arch of old white stone and nothing more. All except the one where quicksilver grew into an armour around him, hard plates in layers and layers, exquisite and complex. Two silver swords grew too, short and curved, one in each hand. There were pictures in the Palace of Alchemy of this man. Drawn five hundred years ago, and exactly the same.

  ‘Isul Aieha,’ she said softly.

  The Silver King pointed a sword at her. History crashed in as their memories merged. She saw herself call the dragons and tame them with a single word. She ruled over men, but they were nothing to her. A distraction. She was looking for something, always. Something about the spear she carried and a great and terrible thing she had once done. An age of looking but never finding, and all the while a building despair inside her, a loneliness until she could bear it no more. She saw herself come to this place and conjure these arches, saw a glimpse of her future and the end that awaited her. She saw men, blood-mages, alchemists in another guise, tear her apart and take her body to their mountains to some distant cave, saw them hold her there caught at the edge of life and death. They drank her in tiny drops, not the blood of her veins but the silver god-blood, and as they did each took a morsel of her power. Through a thin veil far away, the alchemist Kataros knew the truth. She’d been there. She’d swallowed him too. He was inside them all.

  The Silver King lowered his sword and turned away.

  ‘No!’ Kataros struggled to her feet. She had almost to claw her way up Jasaan to rise. ‘Don’t! Don’t leave us! We need …’

  The Silver Sea became a silver mirror that faded to black and died.

  ‘ … you.’ She began to sob. Her blood was all over the arch. She reached through it, trying to open the way again, but there was nothing. Dead stone, that was all it was now. It wanted more than a mere alchemist, and the Silver King was gone, and the world would not be saved. Tears blurred her sight. Jasaan hovered about her, mumbling words she didn’t hear. She didn’t want him, didn’t want to leave this spot, alone and desolate though it was. Eventually he left and went and did whatever it was that Adamantine Men did. Wandered around the other tunnels probably, looking for things to hit. Not here, that was all that mattered, all she cared about.