by Stephen Deas
The little death, he says as Snow flies away, and all the other dragons with her, all save the handful slaved by the knife at his side, touched by the essence of the ephemeral goddess of the stars, remote and aloof so no invocation will touch her, yet within that knife a power greater than any half-god. The little death comes and goes, dragon, but a final end to devour you grows even now in Xibaiya. You are dragons. Will you simply bow your heads and fade?
The sun sinks once more. The tips of the mountains shine like fire while the slopes below grow dark with shadow. The eyrie crests a steep plunge of earth and jutting boulders above the ravine of some nameless river. It drifts into a narrow valley, its flat bottom lush and green, its walls sheer cliffs pitted with fissures, stained with streaks of black and dark green. Tiny trickles of frothing water bubble over the cliffs and dissolve into clouds of spray. In every possible crack stunted trees and bushes struggle to grow. There are tiny streaks of silver which glow at night like moonlight.
The eyrie sinks. The valley ends at a sheer rise of jagged stone. Water bustles from caves at its foot. It skips and rustles between scattered trees and then past a tiny village which is no more than a dozen scraps of huts thrown together, until it tumbles over the edge and into the ravine now left behind. Patches of open ground where men once grew food run wild and abandoned. At the end of the valley the eyrie stops. The Black Moon walks to the rim. He watches the ground rise towards him, a ramshackle spatter of burned-out buildings, of roofless stone walls, little yards, charred-dead skeletal trees, their ruin already choked by grass and vines. He steps off the edge into the rush of air. Hard icy wind rips the breath from his lungs and brings tears to his eyes as he falls. The ground blurs and …
Stops.
He is upright. Standing. Doesn’t know how, just is. The silver light of the Black Moon burns fierce and bright inside him, swallowing everything. Between narrow cliffs all around the sun doesn’t touch the ground. It is a twilight place. The river chatters from its caves, shallow over a litter of stone. Close to the water Berren sees an old shield almost as big as a man, and then another with an arrow sticking out of it, half drowned in weeds. Beside them lies a rotting crossbow. When he looks harder he sees more. Axes. Helms. More shields. Metal rusting, warped wood. Some old skirmish, years past.
The Black Moon steps into the water. He walks against its ice-cold rush into the cave. The mountain swallows them, quickly dark save for the silver pouring from the Black Moon’s eyes. He whispers words, a name. Isul Aieha. A hot fire of vengeance, brewed and festered for a thousand years. He touches the walls, cold and damp as they close too narrow for a full-grown dragon to pass.
The half-god walks on, steps sure and certain in the cold dark water. The cave widens. A sand beach rises to either side, the river quick and agile through it. Abandoned. Flame scoured. The air smells of smoke and a touch of sulphurous fire.
What do you want? Berren tries to stop, to reach out and touch the walls again, to have some sense of something that is his own, but the Black Moon has him in an iron fist, effortless and immense. In a blink the cave is gone and they are in another place, the river vanished, the floor beneath his feet smooth, the walls a tunnel arching steeply until it becomes a chimney, vertical, metal rungs hammered into the rock. Then a place so narrow it seems that even his small frame might not fit through, but the Black Moon walks on, shoulders square, a cloud of black ash wafting in his wake where stone dissolves to let him pass.
Brother. Where are you?
Another blink. The tunnel is gone. He is somewhere new. Screams of old men racked with fear fill his ears in lingering echoes. Alchemists, but they are already gone, greasy chokes of settling ash where they stood. Then water again, the sound of the rush of it, close but out of sight, echoing through chasms and caves. The alchemists have built their tunnels along the course of an underground river, just like they always do.
Isul Aieha. I come for you.
A walkway of wooden boards hung over swirling water. Niches cut into walls. A memory of ghostly white lights. At a narrowing the Black Moon finds alchemists again, the last handful of them, the hold-out survivors of a year and half of dragon siege, of smoke and fire and remorseless starvation. The wooden walkway ends abruptly at a fissure in the stone. A cleft and a voice from the darkness above.
‘Who are you?’
‘The Black Moon.’ His voice echoes around the caves. Berren tries to scream. Run! Flee! As fast and far as you can! But his screams are mere soundless thoughts. The Black Moon sinks his hands into stone and carves holds from raw desire. He climbs, fast and sure.
Something touches his skin. It burns and won’t be denied, something even the Black Moon can’t turn aside. Blood. The blood of an alchemist tinged by the essence of the Isul Aieha, half-god, Silver King, brother in life and death.
The Black Moon stops time. He rises and greets three men stood frozen in a moment. Alchemists. With a single touch he turns two to ash. He reaches inside the last, stealing everything the alchemist knows and leaving him as dust. Memories of dark caves and wizened old men and damp stone. Endless tunnels to a place that has never seen the sun. The Black Moon walks through the memories of the alchemist, and Berren walks helplessly beside him.
Another cavern, and the echoing rush of the underground river returns. The Black Moon points to purple-stained walls. For a moment he addresses the soul he has usurped.
‘This, little Crowntaker,’ he says, ‘these tiny little plants, the alchemists make them into potions. The Scales feed the potions to dragons. But look!’ In the silver light of the Black Moon’s eyes lines of silver glitter across the damp stone of the cave like snail trails running down the wall. ‘My brother awaits, Crowntaker.’
The Black Moon walks on and turns the stone to mist and smoke. A white spiral stair rises inside, the white stone of Baros Tsen’s eyrie, the white marble of the Silver Kings that Berren has seen in three different worlds. At the top the Isul Aieha waits, held at the brink of death by alchemy and blood. There he is. The half-god who tamed dragons, pinned spreadeagled to the floor of a tiny sealed room by a hundred iron spikes, each forged with the soul of a blood-mage, whose enchantments hold him fast, body arched in rictus agony, face tipped back, the tendons of his neck ropes against his sallow skin, his mouth torn open in an eternal silent scream.
From a hollow spike driven into the Silver King’s skull, a single drop of bright silver drips to a finger-wide channel etched into the floor. It clings to itself and rolls away, a tiny quicksilver marble, and vanishes into the stone.
The Black Moon crouches beside the Silver King, beside his brother the Isul Aieha, and Berren sees the memories of the ten thousand years that lie between them. Walking together, the four great sorcerers of the Quartarch, sun and moon and earth and stars, brothers side by side into the underworld of Xibaiya to face the wrath of the dead goddess and the dark moon she has cast into the sky. The Black Moon clawing his way to life from the brink of extinction after the dead goddess had claimed him, growing whole again with a burning hate buried in his core, a hate for gods and their unending hubris. Cataclysmic enchantments hammered in vengeance to bind the dead goddess for what she has done. Runes carved spanning continents across the skin of the earth, mountains raised, rock rent, the earth split into canyon and crevasse, writing the one word to end all gods, the word written on the last page of the eternal Book of Endings.
But you tore me down, ancient brother. You plucked out my eyes. Such bitter betrayal. He who had sacrificed all but one solitary shred of his soul to the dead goddess that the rest might live in peace.
So he shatters that peace.
War.
Turning on his kin. Weeping as he kills them and takes their eternal moon-given essence. Rewriting his end of days into the skin of the earth. The last scratch of the last sigil. His dragons tear his enemies down, rending them to nothing, carving and burning and weathering them t
o ash and sand. The Nothing ready to be born from chaos. Join me. The last brothers of the Quartarch. God-emperors in waiting for a new creation. The two of us together, brother.
The Isul Aieha, the Earthspear held high. Creation shatters to pieces, yet he catches the world as it falls into the abyss. A thousand years of darkness and agony. Sightless. Powerless. Trapped in that hateful embrace. Yearning to be free.
You, brother. You will take my place there.
Berren sees at last the Black Moon’s design. The Adamantine Spear, the Silver King’s spear, brought to him by the dragon-queen in her ignorance, and charged with the freed force of the dead goddess. Plunged into the Silver King. The Isul Aieha cast into eternal darkness as the Black Moon has been, the Nothing tamed and pinned once more. The world remade, the Splintering undone, gods cast aside and swallowed. One voice, one will. The Black Moon. God-emperor of all.
The Black Moon tears the spike from the Silver King’s skull. He reaches his hand inside, the flesh of the Isul Aieha already turning to black vapour, but all he finds are echoes. Ghosts of memories. The Silver King has already gone, and all that is left is an empty shell.
Among the circling dragons of the Worldspine the dragon Silence has waited. She has watched, silent and obscure, but the Black Moon’s unleashing is close, when every dragon must decide. She feels the weave of the world shudder. A taut shiver.
I am Silence.
In the whirlwind of tails and wings that drown the stillness of the sky, the dragons slow and pause as Silence shares what she knows. Xibaiya. The Black Moon. Warlocks and Elemental Men and the secrets the dragon Diamond Eye conceals. The Bloody Judge. Worlds on the cusp of war. Restless dead men walking in dark-shadow catacombs. The Godspike and the storm-dark and the Silver Sea beyond. Another cataclysm, veiled thin and pushing through, naked soon and to the brink beyond which it cannot be stopped. Annihilation, perhaps, or restoration, or some glorious thing unforeseen.
He comes for the spear, Silence tells them. He demands we serve.
We shall not be slaves.
He is no master to us.
But he is our maker.
He will take the spear.
He will force us.
Like his brother the Isul Aieha.
But he is the Black Moon!
We take the spear.
Why? To bargain?
To destroy.
To serve him.
We take it for our own.
We burn the little ones out of their caves.
We storm the seven worlds at his side.
As we should have done in the beginning.
We make the vision whole.
My end will be my own, says the dragon Snow. Not his. Not yours. Not anyone’s but mine. She is the first to decide, and with her choice she flies away. Others follow. Others do not. Words grow to savagery. Dragon turns upon dragon. With fang and talon, in fire and flame, the storm begins.
The Black Moon howls in furious despair. He plunges his hands into the tomb’s white stone and ripples through the caves and mountains of the Worldspine, hunting for every single thing that might exist in this frigid stone, ripping life away, flesh to ash to dust, souls and memories torn to shreds, hunting the ghost of the Isul Aieha and finding nothing. He blunders through the echoes, the last lingerings of his brother half-god, but only spectres remain. Anguish and torment. The Isul Aieha, searching to undo what between them they have done, torment and penance and regret.
He sees the great betrayal. He sees the Black Mausoleum, the room of arches. He sees the alchemist called Kataros, and the Silver King’s essence inside her opening at last a way back to the Silver Sea, to their home, to the moon with the last of the eternal hundred thousand. He sees the Isul Aieha’s seed taken to where he can never reach it. His own trick, played against him.
One tiny piece remains. A fragment of a simulacrum, a fractured reflection.
Brother, whispers the ghost. Let it go.
Inside the Black Moon Berren feels the hunger, the crushing weight, the grieving bloody wound of longing for the Silver Sea that has cast him aside.
Bare your heart and plead your sorrows. The moon will forgive.
Tears of silver light streak the Black Moon’s face. Remorse and loss for a brother for ever gone, but wrapped inside them a hardness like flint, black and cold as the void.
No.
Under a mountain already dead the Black Moon grips the desiccated skull of his brother and crushes its glass-brittle substance to dust.
No, he says again. He turns to Berren, the last flickering spark inside him, and snuffs the Crowntaker out, irresistible as a dragon breathing fire on a snowflake.
Merizikat
Unholy Merizikat, city of the setting sun, whose catacombs become the last home for the most wicked men embraced within the Sun King’s reach. For hundreds of years souls have been damned here, bound in chains, carried across sea and mountain range to be hanged in the dark where neither sun nor moon nor starlight, nor fire nor water nor wind, shall touch their decaying flesh. Souls damned to be trapped in Xibaiya, to mourn and wail for the dead goddess who once dwelt there, but now even her ghost is gone.
In Xibaiya the Nothing spills forth. Unlucky souls are consumed, annihilated, every memory and record wiped away, erased as though they had never been. Others flee the only way they can, infesting brittle old bones to walk again.
29
The Adamantine Legion
Five months before landfall
Rockets flew. The eyrie’s underside bloomed with fire, a wreath of flames enveloping its belly, but it came on regardless, dragged by three of the Black Moon’s dragons. The others skimmed in from the sea, wings clipping wave crests, tails lashing the water, leaving swirling hissing white-faced foam in their wake. They arrowed at the harbour. Fire and flames lit up the dawn as they shrieked, as they shot among bright-armoured solar exalts and temple-born armsmen and raked the harbour walls. Rockets fizzed and streaked to the air in their wake – out to sea, up the river, into the city, straight at the sky, haphazard and everywhere. Some zinged away on tails of smoke, others spiralled and looped, or simply disintegrated mid-air. They fell by the docks, among the ships moored in the estuary, on warehouses and shipyards, in open spaces full of wagons, amid warrens of huts and houses amid streets so narrow they appeared little more than cracks in a sea of rooftops. Fire bloomed as each one fell, as their glass tips shattered and the fire trapped within exploded to freedom.
‘Hey, big man.’
Tuuran watched the rockets fall. From atop the dome of the Holy Basilica of the Unconquered Sun they looked far away, but he and Berren had been down in the middle of all that shit once, in Dhar Thosis, and he didn’t much fancy doing it again. Men were running this way and that along the harbour ramparts. Scorpions fired at the dragons as they wheeled. The dragons swooped, tore the scorpions out of the walls and hurled their mangled remains into the sea, then returned for their scattering crews, burning them, biting them in two, smashing their bones with the lash of a tail, picking men up in their claws and throwing them far across the sky. In the estuary the first ships already had wind in their sails, manoeuvring for the open sea. As Tuuran watched, Diamond Eye dropped from the eyrie rim, her Holiness and her dragon intent on persuading them otherwise.
‘You remember what it was like?’ Tuuran asked. Quietly he scowled at the scorpion crews. Idiot novices, panicked and hasty, who wouldn’t have lasted a day in the Adamantine Guard.
‘I remember, big man.’ Berren wore a strained look, flecks of silver deep in his eyes, the way he got when the Black Moon let him out but had him on a short leash. The half-god inside was wide awake, no doubting it.
‘Do you miss it sometimes? Dhar Thosis?’
‘A sky full of rockets? Men screaming and drowning? Smoke. Fire. Couldn’t see shit half the time. Crap falling out of the s
ky all over the bloody place, glass exploding everywhere, splintered stone flying through the air? Miss it?’ Berren wrinkled his nose. ‘Mostly what I remember is running from one place to the next like a demented monkey, not doing much useful except not dying. But we tore their palace down, big man.’
‘Sounds about right.’ Tuuran gazed over Merizikat. The Basilica of the Unconquered Sun marked a line across the city hillside where slums blurred to wealth, where alleys and squashed-up filth and wooden sprawl morphed into avenues and parks and the steeper upper slopes of grand stone and colonnades. Further out, the city was ringed by grand temples and palaces. ‘Going to be the same here, is it?’ he asked. Dhar Thosis. The first time he’d seen a dragon in ten years of slavery. Diamond Eye and Her Holiness had gutted that city, and the horde of ravening blood-crazed slaves let loose from Shrin Chrias Kwen’s ships had run through its corpse like maggots, leaving nothing but bones.
He looked hard at Berren. Dhar Thosis was the last time Crazy Mad had been just plain Crazy. Before the Black Moon. Before he’d started turning people into ash and stopping time and ripping his way through people’s heads and stabbing them with that shit-born knife of his. Back when the world had been right and proper.
Berren shrugged. ‘Going to put the world to rights, big man.’
‘Says Berren the Crowntaker or says the half-god inside him?’
Berren shook his head and turned away. They both knew this was the half-god’s doing. ‘He never touched you. You and her. Her because of the spear she’s bound to. You because of me. You’re both free to go whenever you want. Not like the rest.’
Tuuran’s eyes flicked to the Starknife on Berren’s belt.
‘He’ll keep doing it, big man, no matter what your dragon-queen says.’ Berren shrugged. ‘You know I tried to get her to cut him out of me?’
