The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  ‘You must obey the will of the Black Moon,’ Tuuran said at last, ‘and he commands that you serve, and so you cannot escape, no matter how you wish you could, and you build him his army, though it is against your will to do so. But there are other ways of escape, Chay-Liang.’ Tuuran opened the door for Liang and stepped out behind her. The back of the basilica was closer to the river than she’d thought, not far from the banks of the estuary and butting against the run-down upriver end of the old docks where everything was crumbling and the streets smelled of harsh raw spirit, of stale smoke and rotting human waste. Litter-strewn ­alleys wriggled towards the water, tunnels almost black with shadow even in the middle of the day.

  The soul-cut exalts got out beside her.

  ‘I hope you are worth the lives you cost,’ said Tuuran.

  For a moment the air was electric and still, the instant before the first crack of thunder breaks from a storm. Then soldiers burst into the light from the slum alleys, Dominion men in the Sun King’s colours, six of them, crossbows loaded. Liang gasped in shock. Tuuran grabbed her from behind and wrapped one huge arm around her neck, squeezing her throat between his bicep and his forearm, strangling her.

  She shook her sleeve, dropping a glass ball into her hand.

  ‘Remember this, enchantress,’ hissed Tuuran in her ear as her vision blurred. ‘Whatever life comes next, remember that I set you free.’

  The exalt beside Liang died instantly, two bolts through his face. The second took three in the chest, punching through the gold-glass armour she’d made. He fired a bolt of lightning before he died, taking two of his killers with him. The thunderclap shook the air. Somehow it shook her fingers too, and the glass ball they held fell harmless at her feet. The two dead exalts collapsed and clattered to the ground. She heard more shouts behind her. Cries of warning. She struggled as best she could, trying to wriggle herself free, anything that would break Tuuran’s grip, but he only squeezed tighter.

  ‘I know you must resist, enchantress,’ he whispered. ‘I know you have no choice. So I have made your choice for you.’

  The four Dominion soldiers still on their feet rushed at her, hands reaching out. The colour drained from her world. She heard muted thunder, deep and rumbling as though she was underwater. She felt herself falling, drowning, and then everything went black.

  31

  The Arbiter

  Four months before landfall

  Red Lin Feyn stared into the mirror. She touched her fingers to the three pale marks on her cheek that looked like fingertips.

  ‘The catacombs of Merizikat are hardly the Ice Witch’s necro­polis,’ whispered the Elemental Man standing behind her.

  ‘It wasn’t real,’ said Lin Feyn at last. Every day she looked at herself and repeated the same mantra, and every day the scars on her face said otherwise. The marks weren’t terrible; they were barely visible at all, and easily hidden with a little powder, but they were there. ‘I summoned the storm-dark to devour her, and one does not simply conjure the void on a whim. Yet the Servant on Ice and I both bore the scars.’

  ‘You are changed, lady Arbiter,’ said the Elemental Man when she was done. ‘There is a manner about you that I would liken to a priest now.’ There. A carefully crafted taunt to heat the blood of any true stalwart of the Dralamut and the ways of the Elemental Men, but those days were gone. She lived by their sufferance now, the few of the killers that had survived the catastrophe of Baros Tsen’s eyrie and the Godspike. Or perhaps to call it an uneasy truce would be more accurate. She’d told them what she knew because she felt she had no choice, and now she wasn’t sure whether they thought she was mad or brilliant or desperate, or simply a fool. Perhaps a little of all of those things, but what mattered was that they believed her enough to let her carry on, if under their very watchful eye.

  ‘Must it be Merizikat, lady?’ the Elemental Man asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Red Lin Feyn tilted her head as if to ask what troubled him so about the city of the dead. ‘A ship directly to the city itself would be preferable. I would ask you to help me make the necessary arrangements.’

  ‘Merizikat,’ said the Elemental Man again. ‘You really don’t know, do you?’

  32

  Each Her Own Way

  Two months before landfall

  Liang gasped and sat bolt upright only to find she was trussed like a fly in a spider’s larder. Not dead. That was the first shock. Tuuran had despised her from the start. Thick as thieves, him and the dragon-queen. An impulsive violent ape – no surprise that he’d be the one to do away with her. I have made your choice for you. Never cared about getting his hands dirty. Brute. Yet here she was.

  She blinked and took in the world. Cold fresh spray. An ­orchestra of sea sounds, a sail purring like a lion as the wind shifted, ropes rattling taut against wood, the slow breathing creaks of a ship, the bend and flex with each sigh.

  Not dead.

  The boat was a little river skiff with a triangular wedge sail, beating upriver against the wind. One man sat behind her at the tiller. Another was by the mast pulling on ropes, two more in front of her, watchful and waiting with crooked squinting eyes all big and dark as the Sun King’s people often were. They looked like fishermen but they had soldiers’ knives and axes tucked among the sail and rope at their feet.

  ‘Water?’ offered one. He had a skin he was drinking from. When Liang shook her head, he hawked and spat. His teeth were crooked and yellow and his nose was bent. Another gnawed noisily on a strip of dried meat. The hair was missing from one side of his head and the skin there was red. He’d been burned once.

  ‘Your dragon,’ he said when he caught Liang staring.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  The boat trembled. A rumble like distant thunder echoed across the water. Liang lifted her head to look at the city. At first she didn’t see anything amiss, but then one of the corner towers of the basilica leaned very slowly sideways and tipped and broke into pieces and fell, and a cloud of dust and smoke rose to take its place.

  Tuuran. It hit her like one of her own bolts of lightning. Tuuran and his furtive midnight demands for black powder and torches that didn’t work. He’d taken the powder from the arsenal rockets and set it off through the catacombs. Her faulty torches had been an excuse for oil lamps. He’d burned the walking dead of Merizikat because the dragon-queen had told him to; and since he was who he was, there wouldn’t have been any of his men down there when the explosions went off. He would have set the powder himself …

  And she understood then that he hadn’t been trying to kill her at all, that he’d given her a way to escape. He’d choked her out and passed her to men who would take her out of the city, tied like a midwinter pig so she couldn’t run back as the compulsion of the Black Moon demanded; and while he was at it, he’d given her a means to cross the storm-dark and go home and a reason for her to be dead so the Black Moon wouldn’t look for her; and whether he’d done it to set her free, or whether he’d simply meant for her to take the blame to protect his precious dragon-queen from what he’d done, it didn’t matter. And it occurred to her too that Tuuran was the one who had brought soldier after soldier to her to fit with new armour, that he was the one recruiting sell-swords to replace the soul-cut men the Black Moon had made; that while the dragon-queen wallowed in her endless no-more-slaves hypocrisy, while the Black Moon’s knife cut men’s will left and right, perhaps Tuuran defied him more than Liang had ever thought, more than Zafir herself, more than any of them.

  She’d got him wrong. Quiet and resolute he stood against the half-god.

  I wish you’d told me. I wish I’d known.

  A pang of guilt shuddered her. Not for the things she’d done, but for the things she hadn’t. She watched the spindle of smoke twist and coil, unfurling over the basilica of Merizikat to drift and fade in the breeze. The boat heeled a little as the wind changed.
/>   Did he stand in secret against Zafir too? Now there was a thought …

  A mile past the city wall the skiff tacked across the river to the shore and delivered her into the maw of the Sun King’s waiting army, a seething litter of white tents that spread like a pox on the hillside. The boatmen picked her up and carried her ashore and then fell into an argument with some soldiers about what they were supposed to do next. Liang, who wasn’t quite sure whether she’d been rescued or captured, said nothing until the argument looked about to turn bloody.

  ‘I made their lightning,’ she said, which somehow seemed to settle things. The soldiers and the boatmen together carried her to a wagon made into a cage of iron bars and locked her inside. They threw a sail over the top to hide her away, and she was glad to be their prisoner for now, helpless and stripped of choices. Left to herself she might have gone back, siren-lured by the compulsion of obedience cut into her by the Black Moon’s knife, by affection and loyalty and friendship, by shared hopes and pain and joys, the alchemist’s gift, a more subtle poison by far. But the bars around her meant that she couldn’t, and she had to be content with that, and if she had the artifice, as an enchantress, to escape such a crude prison, she chose not to use it.

  In the days that followed men brought her simple food and water. Exalts and priests sat around her cage in quiet crescents, a devoutly attentive audience who drained her of the Black Moon and the dragon-queen and the eyrie. She shared what she knew, willing and eager to be rid of it, and begged them not to let her go; but one secret she kept to herself, the strip of black silk wrapped high around her arm under her tunic. Each time the exalts and their armsmen threw the sail over her cage to hide her from the light she wrapped the silk like a blindfold across her face and watched through the eyes of the little glass dragon in Merizikat, scouting the aftermath of her disappearance.

  Tuuran was limping but alive. She found him quickly and felt an odd flood of relief. She’d never know how he escaped the explosion and the collapse of the catacombs, but she listened to the story he spun in lieu of the truth: of how Liang’s enchanted torches had failed and left his men with no choice but to use oil lamps, how the choking smoke had driven them out, how he’d brought Liang to the catacombs to see for herself the faults in her work, how she’d smuggled kegs of black powder beneath the basilica and set the walking dead aflame there, and how the flames and her powder kegs had blown both tunnel and enchantress to pieces. The catacomb vaults had collapsed and no way in could be found, and the risen dead were all gone, every one of them burned and blown to pieces or buried beneath a mountain of crushing stone. She watched Bellepheros as he heard the news, the stony hostile face he presented and how he sagged and broke and wept once he was alone, and felt the heartbreak of not being able to tell him otherwise. She watched Tuuran tell his lie to the Black Moon with Zafir at his side and then later tell her the truth: that he’d been the one, that Liang was safely free; and she saw Zafir shake her head and tell him no, he couldn’t share that truth with Bellepheros however much the alchemist hurt, because Bellepheros had been cut by the Black Moon’s knife, and no one was to be trusted; and she saw how Bellepheros, never a fool, began to see that Tuuran’s story wasn’t the whole and honest truth, and drew conclusions of his own that were entirely and horribly wrong.

  Days passed. The Black Moon and Tuuran and Zafir left the city to parley with the Sun King’s exalts, and Liang and her little glass dragon followed and looked on. The exalts’ demands were no surprise: the return of their city, reparation and the withdrawal of the eyrie and the Black Moon’s army. The Black Moon didn’t answer, and so Zafir and the exalts negotiated back and forth, the dragon-queen’s exasperation more evident with every passing moment until the Black Moon grew bored.

  ‘The Bloody Judge,’ he said. ‘Bring me the Bloody Judge. He stole my face.’ Without warning he stabbed the nearest exalt and pressed a hand into his face, forcing him to his knees. The other ­exalts flashed blades. One swung at the Black Moon and immedi­ately dissolved into ash. Three charged at Zafir, two at Tuuran. Zafir took the first exalt to come at her and sliced him open with a bladeless knife. She ducked the second. Tuuran backed away, weaving his axe in arcs. He couldn’t hide how he was favouring one leg over the other. Zafir severed another exalt’s hand at the wrist and then took a hammer blow to the back that knocked her flat. The wounded exalt fell on top of her, huge and armoured, pinning her, howling curses and trying to drive a knife at her face while she held him off with one hand and rammed a second bladeless knife into his ribs, stabbing as he screamed until blood ran out of his mouth and he collapsed. The one who’d taken her down raised his axe to split her in two, then vanished into the air as Diamond Eye swooped and plucked him away and tore him to pieces in the sky. The rest fled then, except for the Moon’s snared exalt, who burst into a pillar of silver flame and shrieked and died. The half-god stayed where he was. Liang didn’t think he’d moved as much as a muscle.

  Zafir struggled free from under her corpse. She hobbled, stooped, drenched in the blood of her murdered exalt, growling and gasping in pain. She shoved the Black Moon, almost kicking him over. The half-god whirled and raised the Starknife; Zafir hissed and lashed the air, a blade in each hand, ready to make a fight of it; Diamond Eye smashed into the ground and bared his fangs, and for a moment Liang thought the most wonderful thing was about to happen.

  ‘No!’ Tuuran half-jumped, half-limped between them. He threw down his axe. ‘Damn you both, no!’

  Half-god and dragon-queen faced each other down for a moment more, and then Zafir sheathed her bladeless knives. She turned and lurched away, snarling in pain. ‘I don’t care what you are.’ She hobbled in small circles. ‘We go back now. We go back to my world. We take back my spear you’re so precious for, and call the nine kings and queens with their dragons, and then you do whatever you like with them. A thousand dragons. More. Does anything else matter?’

  ‘One thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven,’ said the Black Moon, the light in his eye dying to a silver shimmer. ‘That’s how many I made.’

  ‘Then you made more than enough to burn any world you please.’ Zafir gasped and doubled up and lurched to Diamond Eye’s side, clinging to his scales. She buckled and fell to one knee and then hauled herself up again. Glistening white face contorted in agony, she climbed one-handed onto the dragon’s back and flew away. As soon as she was gone the last light went from the Crowntaker’s eyes. He sagged and sank to his knees.

  ‘All this way.’ He was almost sobbing. ‘All this time. For what? For what, big man? He’s not even here.’

  ‘Who’s not here?’ Tuuran crouched beside the ruin of his friend.

  ‘The Bloody Judge. The man who stole my face.’

  Liang watched as Tuuran sat with the Black Moon, talking softly to the tattered remains of what had once been Berren Crowntaker, solemn whispers and earnest nods of the head, then a little smile and a touch of laughter between them, of older, better times, of easier days fondly remembered. She saw at last how all of this was for him, this simple soldier for whom she’d once had such scorn. Friendship and duty. However deep you went in him, nothing else mattered. Worlds might burn and empires crumble and he’d barely even see it. Stupid, perhaps. Blind and foolish and unwise, but whatever the dragon-queen and the Crowntaker did, he’d be there for them as best he ever could, and she found that she envied his simplicity, and that she envied Zafir and the half-god too for such loyalty; but most of all she wished she could spare Tuuran the day when he’d have to choose between them.

  She watched them walk away and then, later, when Tuuran was gone, after the exalts and priests had come to her and lifted the sail from her cage and questioned her through the long hours of the afternoon as they laid their plans for battle, she retied the silk across her eyes and watched the Black Moon slip out once more to wear the Crowntaker like a cheap coat, watched him meander through the Merizikat slums, spitting hi
s rage, bright moonlight eyes, rending houses and streets and anyone who crossed his path to ash on random whim until the fury slowly died. In the dead of night she flew the little glass dragon to the eyrie and found the dragon-queen lying flat naked on a bed, head propped up, staring furious eyes at her own door, spittle-flecked, glassy-faced in pain, gnashing her teeth and hissing like a viper at her two maidservants and Bellepheros as they huddled over her, Bellepheros poking and prodding. The whole of one side of her back was livid red, the skin split and caked in a wash of dried blood. The others had their backs turned, but as the little glass dragon crept inside, exposed for a moment. Zafir looked up and locked her eyes on it, and Liang knew that the dragon-queen understood.

  ‘Stop!’ Zafir gasped. ‘Stop!’

  Bellepheros froze, stung still. ‘Holiness! There are bones cracked at the very least and I hazard there are some broken. There is ­damage inside that might yet be fatal. I must …’ But Liang knew Zafir had meant the command for her, not for him.

  Zafir ignored Bellepheros, screwed up her face against the pain and looked the glass dragon in the eye to mouth words without sound: Hide your toy, witch. Go! Be gone!

  Liang scuttled the little dragon outside the door and waited a while in case there was more, but all she heard were Zafir’s howls and curses of pain. She hurried away and hid, waiting for Bellepheros to come out so she might see him again, but he never did that night, and back in her cage Liang must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew it was light outside and the air was full of screaming and the earth quaked, and as she pulled the silk from across her eyes the sail over her cage was ripped away and the great red-gold dragon stood over her, those piercing glacier eyes staring right through her. Liang screamed as Diamond Eye picked up the wagon and tore into the air, soaring up as arrows and tardy lightning flashed their pursuit, but the dragon didn’t take her back to the eyrie as she imagined he would, nor did he rip her to pieces; instead he set her down in her prison on the far shore of the river. Alone and abandoned. Free to go as she chose or to die unseen and unremembered.