by Stephen Deas
Alone, Kataros stared at the archways. The Silver King. She’d come here to find his secret, and all she’d done was take him home.
The Black Moon comes again, whispered the last echoes of his memory inside her. Make right what I could not.
‘But we need you,’ she whispered, over and over. She’d lost so much blood. Everything was a haze of missed possibilities. She drifted off, taken by her own weakness, and when she opened her eyes again Jasaan was standing over her. He offered her water. She gulped it greedily.
‘I came to find you,’ he told her. ‘I’m supposed to bring you back to the Pinnacles. All the riders who came with me are dead now. So it’s just you and me, and I never meant to take you back there anyway.’ He shrugged. ‘Tell me what you want me to do.’
He’d come to save her then, had he? Hadn’t ever crossed his mind that she didn’t want to be saved, but too late for that now. She shivered. Her fingers and her arms were stained red. ‘We go back to the Spur,’ she said. ‘Back to Grand Master Jeiros and the other alchemists who survive. We tell them what we’ve found and we come here again, and Jeiros will make these gateways open and beg the Silver King to save us. That’s all we have left.’ The Black Moon comes again. Another half-god. Another who had lingered, and so the Silver King wasn’t the last after all, and so perhaps there was still hope. Make right what I could not. Something to do with the Adamantine Spear that Jeiros guarded under the Spur. That was all she knew. All the echo had shown her.
Jasaan looked sceptical. ‘Back through the Raksheh? There are snappers.’
‘We’ll use the river.’
‘There’s the worm.’
‘I will soothe it.’
‘We’ll get hungry.’
‘I’ll show you what you can eat. There was a dragon outside. Has it gone?’
‘Yes. Half buried under a landslide. Are you hurt?’
‘I’m weak, that’s all.’
Jasaan nodded and waited to be told what to do. While he was waiting, Kataros curled up and went back to sleep. Watch over her for a bit, that’s what he could do, and by the time she woke again night had fallen. She crept past Jasaan’s snores and sat in the mouth of the tunnel behind the dragon-thrown boulders that had once sealed the Black Mausoleum shut. She loitered there a while, listening. There weren’t any sounds of people out here in the forest, only the night noises of the Raksheh, the rustle of monkeys high up in the trees, the flap of bats, the now-and-then calls of owls and other nightbirds. The air here, far under a canopy of leaves that turned even brilliant sunshine into twilight, was still. The night sky cast an odd light across the overgrown landing field, a flicker now and then of a deep reddish blue …
A tinge of violet …
A chill rippled through her bones. She crept from behind the boulders out into the open and there it was, floating in the sky overhead, dropping into the gap between the monstrous trees that was the old eyrie landing field: a great black mountain of stone hanging between the stars, purple light crashing out of its jagged underbelly, flickering with now-and-then flashes of inner lightning. The flying castle of Farakkan. A dragon circled it. Only a small one, not the great gold monster that had come after her yesterday, but a dragon was a dragon all the same. A crude cage was coming slowly down from the flying eyrie’s rim. The same cages they’d used to lift her and Skjorl and Siff from the plains of the Fury valley.
‘Jasaan! Jasaan!’ She ran back into the Black Mausoleum and shook him awake, then dragged him out to see what had come in the night. The dragon swooped and soared up the scree of tumbled stone and clinging earth. It flared its wings and settled on the ruin of the Moonlight Garden over the cliffs of the Yamuna falls. The cage from the eyrie touched the ground, and Kataros gasped, for the eyes of the man who stepped from it glowed with a brilliant silver light, the light she’d seen in the eyes of the Silver King as he’d left her only hours before.
She knew at once who he was. What he was. The Isul Aieha had shown her before he left. This was the Black Moon, and as he passed where she hid, Kataros recognised him as the pale-skinned man from the eyrie who’d asked her questions when she’d been his prisoner. What was she supposed to do – follow him? She didn’t know. Make right what I could not. Chase him down and beg his help? But that didn’t feel right. She was supposed to stop him, but stop him from what? And how?
I’ll get rid of her. That’s what the woman on the eyrie had said, that woman who called herself speaker. She’d said it twice.
Here was a half-god. Another who could tame dragons!
The Black Moon walked to the tunnel into the Mausoleum, blind to her, striding quickly. Kataros hesitated, torn by indecision …
The Black Moon crosses the open field, heading for a cleft between two stones. From behind the half-god’s eyes Berren Crowntaker sees two figures dart away to hide in the moonlight, but the Black Moon has no thoughts to spare for such trivial things. He has come here to finish what began a thousand years into the past, and will not be swerved. He walks through a cleft and into a tunnel of white stone that runs deeper into the earth, the silver fire from his eyes lighting his way until he reaches a circle of archways that seem to Berren much like a larger imitation of Baros Tsen’s bathhouse in the eyrie. The Black Moon stops in the midst of them, riven with anticipation, all-consuming hope and hunger, all-devouring fear and scorn. Beyond these gates lies something so yearned for, and yet so utterly despised.
The Black Moon stoops to look at the blood on the floor. He touches it and tastes it and finds an echo of his prey. Isul Aieha. Brother. He has been here. And he is weak, so very weak. The Black Moon reaches for the gates, and Berren finds himself whispering: Don’t.
Fingers touch stone. Everywhere blooms to shimmering liquid silver. A harsh violent light flays his flesh and pierces his heart, eating, burning, blinding. It is the same cold and hateful fire that cast him from the Silver Sea. The Black Moon screams, the taste of scorching knives driven into his head. He staggers and reels and flees into the night.
Behind him the light dies, surly and reluctant to let go.
The tunnel mouth flared in dazzling light. Kataros heard the Black Moon’s horror-scream of anguish and agony, of bottomless pain. Sharp panic cut her to the quick. Make right what I could not. What was that supposed to mean? Was she supposed to stop him? But from doing what? What if she was already too late? She started after him, but as she did the Black Moon bolted from the tunnels, straight at her, past her, full pelt, almost crashing into her, oblivious. She jumped out of his way. He was clutching his face. Blood ran from his eyes and the silver light was gone.
‘Stop!’
He didn’t hear. She started after him again, out onto the landing field, out under the stars and into the darkness, arms waving, shouting, screaming at the top of her lungs for him to wait. He didn’t turn, didn’t even seem to know that she was there.
‘Kataros!’
The dragon perched atop the Moonlight Garden had spread its wings. It swooped. Kataros screamed, turned, fled back to the trees and crashed into Jasaan, both of them scrabbling for the entrance to the tunnels, but the dragon didn’t come after them. It disappeared instead over the top of the flying mountain, and when she looked back, the Black Moon had vanished. The eyrie started to rise and drift away. It crossed the falls and sank out of sight into the valley beyond, its flickering purple fading into the night sky.
‘Who was that?’ asked Jasaan, all wide eyes and bewildered twitches of wonder. Asking as if she might somehow know.
‘Another half-god.’ Kataros shivered. She started to walk back the way she’d come, back to the Mausoleum of the Silver King. ‘The Black Moon, and we’re supposed to stop him. But I don’t know from doing what.’
Inside the mausoleum the archways were empty and dull, the white stone now tinged grey. When Kataros touched them they crumbled to an ash as fine as powder.
&nb
sp; ‘They found us over the floodplains near Farakkan. Skjorl and I.’ Her heart pounded. She didn’t know where to start. Silver eyes like the eyes of the Isul Aieha. Make right what I could not. Make what right? ‘They had dragons. Men with dragons, Jasaan. We didn’t know who they were or what they wanted or how they survived or how their castle flew, but they were men, that was what mattered most of all, and they weren’t afraid. That one asked me questions.’ She shivered. ‘He seemed so ordinary. We have to find him again!’
She went back outside and sat hard on the ground and held her head in her hands and cried. All the gateways turned to ash. What was it worth now, everything she’d done to get here? All she’d hoped for, to find the relics of the Silver King and call him back. Ash. Whoever this Black Moon was, he’d destroyed it, all of it. What was the point of anything now? ‘They said something about Bellepheros,’ she rasped. She was tired, so tired. Dizzy. Light-headed. Overwhelmed. She’d lost too much blood.
But pitying herself wouldn’t do anyone any good. She wiped her eyes and got up and walked across the open ground of the landing field, and scrambled through the starlit litter of fallen stone. Wrapped in visions of half-gods and an apocalypse of dragons she wouldn’t even have noticed Skjorl’s body, bloody and mangled, if she hadn’t turned back to see Jasaan crouched beside it.
‘Is he dead?’ She hoped he was. She wasn’t sure she could bring herself to help him if he wasn’t.
Jasaan nodded, grim. Kataros scaled the slope, climbed quickly and nimbly up the scree of boulders and loose gravel until she reached the firmer granite top of the outcrop. She stood there and stared, looking out over the forest and the night sky after the flying mountain as it drifted away. The water of the Yamuna rushed below her, pitching over the falls on the other side of the Moonlight Garden in a roar of noise, dampening the air. She climbed onward, hand over hand until she reached the flat top and the ruined walls of black marble.
Built in black marble across the great river from the endless caves. The only clue the Silver King had left behind to his Mausoleum, and here it was. Deep within the wilderness of the Raksheh forest on the edge of the mountain foothills of the Worldspine, and she’d found it. The great river of the Yamuna, the endless Aardish Caves somewhere below which guarded Vishmir’s tomb, Vishmir who’d searched here for twenty years and failed, and she’d found it, and now it was gone. Dead.
The tumbled remains of the Moonlight Garden’s dark walls closed around her. She climbed through thickets and ruin in the gloom, up as high as she could without any care for what these walls had once meant. In daylight the marble was a deep dark bloody red, veined with mustard yellow, not black at all, and there was no other stone like it in any of the dragon kingdoms. Between the walls were columned arcades and small round buildings, their domed roofs long since staved in by wind and rain and dragon-fire. Away from the river, the highest points were two grand red sandstone buildings open on two sides, each a precise mirror image of the other. No one knew what any of it meant, or what it had been for, or why the Silver King had built it.
Her hands came away black as she forged her way up, old ash still clinging to the half-buried stone from when Speaker Voranin’s riders had cleared the ruins using dragon-fire. The red sandstone heights repelled her, too sheer and high to climb in the dark, so she scrambled to the top of the walls instead, overlooking the plunge pool of the falls. She gazed out across the forest and the Yamuna, high enough to see over the canopy of trees as the river rushed towards the flat open plains of Bonjanland and the Fury floodplain beyond the forest. She could see the flying castle in the distance again, a violet speck among stars, drifting away. She watched it dwindle, a flicker-flash gleam of purple, and tried to guess its course.
The Pinnacles.
Jasaan clambered up beside her. They sat and watched together in silence as the flying mountain vanished against the horizon.
‘So now what?’ he asked when it was gone. Kataros didn’t answer at first. The flying mountain and the Black Moon it carried changed everything, didn’t it? Or maybe they changed nothing at all. She didn’t know, and struggled to care, so immensely alone in a world that was both huge and hostile. The gateways of the Black Mausoleum were gone. The Silver King wasn’t coming back, and he’d left her with a burden that seemed impossibly huge.
‘We follow.’ She jumped from the black marble wall and started the tortuous climb down the other side of the Moonlight Garden, picking her way through the silver-shadowed night down steep steps that wound from the top of the bluff to the rushing water, and then on between the crags beside the falls until they reached the shore below and the carnage of corpses from the day before. She was shaking by the time she reached the bottom, and pale and exhausted. She had no strength left. The Silver King had bled her almost dry.
Two canoes sat pulled up onto the grassy bank, abandoned by the men who had brought her here. The few survivors were long gone. The dead had been looted, and flocks of silvery night-time carrion birds had already started on skin and flesh. They rose into the trees with angry cries as Kataros shooed them away. No one deserved this. None of them.
Jasaan pushed a canoe off from the shore, little more than a hollowed-out tree. Kataros splashed after him and climbed in. She started to paddle, and then stopped. The Yamuna’s current was strong here and there wasn’t any need, and Jasaan was dozing before she could count to ten. She hated him for that. Tired as death, but she couldn’t sleep, head too full of thoughts that wouldn’t be silent, and so she lay there for a while, and paddled now and then, trying to keep the canoe away from the banks, but mostly she was still, bone-tired, sleepless eyes open wide, staring unseeing into the darkness, rolling over and over through what she’d seen. The Silver King in the gateways. The Silver Sea beyond. The hope, the regret, the anguish, the pain, the blood, the ice-cold lake of memories.
Make right what I could not. What do you mean? She looked to the sky, to the moon hanging bloated there, looking for an answer but finding nothing.
They let the river carry them, day and night, taking turns to rest. Its water was clean and fresh. They didn’t have much food, but neither of them fancied an expedition into the forest, and so Jasaan gave her what little he had and Kataros ate it without shame, clawing her way back to some semblance of strength. After it was gone they just got hungry, but they’d both lived for a year under the Purple Spur and so they were used to that. Days passed, blurring together, until the giant trees that made the heart of the deep Raksheh thinned and fell away. The land turned rougher and more broken. The river picked up speed. They passed the confluence of the Yamuna with some other nameless river, and then a second a few hours later, and Kataros knew from that that they were close to the edge of the forest, and to the tree village of Outsiders who had carried her to the Moonlight Garden. She kept them going, drawing deep on her last reserves through one more night until they emerged into grassy broken hills. She nudged Jasaan awake then, and had him paddle for the shore, too weak to do it herself any more.
‘There’s a cataract somewhere ahead,’ she told him, and they kept the canoe close to the shore after that. Out here in the open they ought to hide to keep away from dragons, but Jasaan still had a little of the potion to cloak their thoughts and make dragons blind to them, and Kataros still had a pinch or two of powdered dragon blood to make more if she had to, and so from far enough above their canoe was simply another fallen tree adrift in the water. When they came to the upper reaches of the cataract gorge Jasaan paddled to the riverbank and rolled the canoe upside down. They crept underneath it to rest. Later, as the sun set, sleep still broken and elusive, Kataros slipped out again to look back at the forest, distant hills above the plains shrouded by mist and cloud and backlit by the red sinking sun. A ruined village stood not far away, a place she’d stopped at with Skjorl on their way up the river, a few stone houses on the edge of the hills, nothing more. She roused Jasaan and led him there to peer at
the scorched walls, roofs gone, black and empty shells half tumbled down. While he did that, Kataros went to the old alchemists’ house with its cellar. She climbed inside and rummaged through the shelves of alchemical pots and jars left behind for anything she could eat. She found some nuts and seeds, a few mouthfuls, and greedily chewed them down, and only after they were gone thought perhaps she might have shared what little she had with Jasaan, the Adamantine Man who’d stayed with her all the way from the Purple Spur to the Pinnacles, him and three others to keep her safe from dragons and feral men and snappers, and whatever else roamed the wastelands that had once been the nine realms of the dragon-kings. She looked around for anything else she might give him, but all she found was wine, and wine made her think of Skjorl. Drunkard rapist bastard.
There was the knife too, the one she’d almost used to cut Skjorl’s throat. She cut herself instead, let out a few drops of precious blood into a vial, mixed it with water from the river and the last of the dried dragon blood she had, and worked on it until she had a potion to keep her and Jasaan hidden from the prying minds of monsters. Enough for both of them for another week or two, maybe three. After that … after that she didn’t know. She was too tired to think.
‘Where are we going?’ Jasaan asked again when she went back outside.
‘The Pinnacles,’ she said. She wasn’t quite sure why. Mostly because she couldn’t think of anything better, and to do nothing at all was to give in to paralysing despair.
