The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  Fly far, little one.

  Liang huddled in the corner of her cage, waiting for her heart to explode. The eyrie drifted out to sea across the estuary, towed by half a dozen ships. The Black Moon was leaving.

  Diamond Eye took the wagon between his talons. He wrenched the cage apart and then walked away along the riverbank.

  ‘Wait!’ Liang struggled between the mangled bars and flopped to the ground, sinking into sticky silty mud. ‘Wait!’ She wanted to know: ‘Why did you come for me? Did you choose this yourself or are you sent? Did Zafir command you? Why?’ She wanted to know where the Black Moon planned to go now and what he meant to do, and so many things … ‘Wait! Would you take me back if I asked?’

  The Black Moon? The dragon was in her head. He is a half-god and will do as he wishes. Two faces I see in his thoughts. One he seeks, one he fears. One he calls the Bloody Judge. The Black Moon seeks him for the other half of his own splintered soul. The second face is the sorceress who wears the circlets of the moon, the mortal foe who set him free from Xibaiya and whose birth you once saw as a comet in the sky. He will take the Isul Aeiha’s spear now, and he will find each face and skewer them through. This Black Moon? He is but a splinter, terrible beyond imagining to your kind, but had you seen him at his height and whole it would have shattered your mind. Scorn, was that? Fly far, Chay-Liang. Go and be free. I have no care one way or another for the fates and ends of little ones. You are small and mundane, sometimes amusing, often beneath notice.

  The dragon stretched its wings and flew. The wind of its leaving hurled Liang flat. She rolled onto her back, filthy, and lay gasping for air as she watched the dragon rise over the river and turn out to sea, following the eyrie’s wake. When it was gone she propped herself exhausted against the broken wagon. She sat in the rising sun, sheltering from the cold sea breeze, and wrapped the black silk around her eyes. The little glass dragon was in the eyrie where she’d left it, waiting patiently and obedient, tucked in shadows out of sight in what had once been her workshop. She knew the eyrie as though it was a part of her, and Belli had his laboratory almost across the passageway, and so now she scurried to it, but the door was open and he wasn’t there. She tried his study and found him sitting at his desk, head in his hands, quill and paper untouched in front of him. He might have been asleep by the way he jumped when she tapped his leg. He sprang halfway to his feet, leaned into the desk, wheezed and winced at his knee and stared.

  ‘Li?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Wait. No. Who are you?’ He got to his feet and backed away. ‘Who are you and what do you want?’

  Tuuran had told him she was dead, and she’d never given the little glass dragon a voice. Eyes and ears, yes, and wings and claws and little teeth and a tail, a silent and beautiful spy to peer through the windows of dragon-princes and queens and kings in their lofty towers. But never a voice to speak.

  She thought for a moment and then jumped onto Belli’s desk and dipped a claw into his ink and started to write. The words were messy, barely legible, the first thing she could think of to tell him it was truly her:

  Qaffeh? Bolo?

  ‘Li!’

  She watched him crumple and felt tears behind the silk across her eyes. Knee forgotten, Belli jumped and snatched the little glass dragon from the desk and hugged it. He put it down again, gently, and stroked a fond hand across its snout. ‘Li.’ For a while he just said her name over and over. ‘Tuuran told me you died! That you took black powder and burned the walking corpses in the catacombs and were crushed in the explosion! How are … Where are you, Li? Are you hurt? Do you need help? Tell me where you are!’

  The little glass dragon cocked its head and wrote:

  Alive. Not hurt. Left behind. Scared.

  Belli leaned closer, eyes bright and wide. ‘Where are you? I’ll come to you. I’ll even ride one of those blasted sleds if I must. I will, Li! Just tell me where to go.’

  Behind her silk Li smiled at the thought of Bellepheros and his terror of heights trying to ride a glass sled you could see right through all the way to the ground, lying flat and with his eyes screwed shut in terror. He’d faint from fright if ever he managed to guide himself over the eyrie edge and saw how far up he was, but he probably wouldn’t even get past the walls; then her smile faded as a sadness lanced her through, remembering the first day she’d ever seen him, and the sled she’d made to take them up to Quai’Shu’s Palace of Leaves, so long ago.

  The little glass dragon shook its head.

  ‘You left,’ said Bellepheros. ‘Didn’t you? You found a way to get away from from him.’ And it was so much more complicated, but she couldn’t possibly explain, not with scratchy writing and a dragon’s claw for a nib.

  I will come back for you.

  No matter the world.

  ‘Li!’ There were tears in his eyes as he smiled. ‘Then I’ll be here. Waiting. Doing what an alchemist must. I miss you already.’ He shook his head. ‘But don’t do it, Li. Don’t follow. You know what waits here. Nothing. Go back home. Tell your people. Tell everyone. Find a way to stop him.’

  Yes. Together.

  Liang stared hard and frowned at him. Belli threw up his hands in exasperation. ‘Li! Don’t—’

  The glass dragon lunged and nipped his hand. Belli jumped away.

  ‘Don’t! Don’t come back here. You know better. You do.’

  Daft old man.

  She tried to make the little glass dragon wear a defiant nothing-you-can-do-will-change-my-mind-about-this-so-you-might-as-well-get-used-to-it look. She had no idea how it came out, but Belli’s shoulders slumped and then he smiled and stroked her snout, and so it must have come out close enough.

  ‘If you come, Li, don’t come alone. Find your Elemental Men and your Arbiter and all her friends and … Wait a moment!’ He hurried out of his study, and when he came back he was clutching a handful of wax-stoppered vials. He stuffed them into a sack. ‘Can you carry this?’

  Liang took the sack between her claws. She hopped about the desk and then jumped off the edge and flew to Belli’s bed. The vials clattered and clacked against one another.

  ‘Be careful!’ Belli flustered and chased her to the bed and sat down beside her. ‘Remember when the Black Moon came and the eyrie fell. Do you remember the potions I gave to the killers? This is all I have of them, but they will hide your thoughts from the dragons so they don’t see you, so they don’t know you’re there. Bring an army, Li. Bring whatever you can.’

  A hurried padding of footsteps came from the doorway. Liang looked up, eyes darting for a place to hide, but too late. Myst was at the door, a baby in her arms. Bellepheros jumped to his feet and stood between her and the glass dragon, trying to keep Liang out of sight.

  ‘Grand Master?’ Myst hopped from foot to foot.

  ‘Her Holiness takes a turn for the worse?’

  ‘No, Grand Master, it’s little Tuuran. He has such a fever. He screams and screams, and I fear her Holiness cannot rest.’

  ‘Colic, probably.’ Liang couldn’t see Belli’s face but she could feel him roll his eyes. It made her smile and sob both at once to not be with him any more. ‘Go back to him. I’ll be with you in a moment.’

  Bellepheros closed the door and turned back to Liang, half his usual testy self, half full of smiles. ‘A dozen women on this eyrie and not one of them a midwife.’ He shook his head. ‘Wait for me, Liang. It’s probably wind. It’s always wind. In that regard he apes his namesake. I won’t be long.’

  He left. While he was gone Liang wrote a last few words.

  Keep the Bolo fresh or I will be cross.

  I will find you. I WILL.

  She flew away then, knowing that if she didn’t then she might stay with him for day after day until the little glass dragon could never come back to her. She cried a little, pausing to wait on the eyrie rim, not sure how or whether she could honour the promise she’
d left behind, knowing she’d do everything her power would allow and fearful it wouldn’t be enough. Then she flew her ­precious burden back to the shore, to Merizikat, to the riverbank and her upturned cart. With Tuuran’s glass sliver in her pocket and Belli’s potions in a sack slung over her shoulder, she set to walking.

  The roads were unfamiliar. They led her through villages long abandoned in fear of the dragon of Merizikat. She took food where she found it and sent her little glass wings searching far and wide for anyone or anything that might help her find her way, and that was how she found Red Lin Feyn in her carriage with two Elemental Men at her side, and neither could quite believe the other was real, but Red Lin Feyn had qaffeh and Bolo bread too, and it was the best food Liang had ever tasted. They shared it together around a little fire in the hearth of an abandoned hall while the Elemental Men stood watch and Liang told her story. It was a long one and ran late into the night; but when she was done neither of them seemed tired, and so Lin Feyn launched into her own. How she’d returned to Takei’Tarr on the Servant on Ice to find that months had passed for which she had no memory.

  ‘I returned to the Dralamut. I read the Rava. Every page.’ She smiled at the glaze of dull shock that passed across Liang’s face and at the glance Liang threw at the watching Elemental Men. ‘They already know. They have come to accept it …’ She closed her eyes then and screwed up her face, frustration showing through at last. ‘Something is coming, Liang. Something from Xibaiya. The storm-dark grows inch by inch. Some great change is happening that will sweep across every world. The first pillar of the Godspike cracked eight years ago. And here in the Dominion, on that same day in the catacombs of Merizikat, those condemned to die without the light of the sun began to walk again after they were hanged. Something happened, Liang. Worlds apart, and yet on the very same day. That’s what brings me here. I thought perhaps a navigator who walks the storm-dark might find some reason for the restless dead of Merizikat.’

  Liang shook her head. ‘They are gone, lady, and the catacombs with them.’

  So on the morning that followed Red Lin Feyn turned back for Brons and the armada of the Sun King’s ships. She took Liang with her. Her journey to Merizikat had lost its purpose with the burning of the catacombs, and that left her with the necropolis of Aria and the Ice Witch, with the city of Deephaven that sat on the brink of cataclysmic war.

  Merizikat to Brons was four hundred miles as crow or dragon flew, but the coast road was longer, winding around the northern edge of the Hothan peaks where they crashed into the sea, threading its way through passes and narrow valleys, past lakeside villages, then back to the coast snaking in coils along the side of the sea, cliffs above, azure waters below; and as they began their slow toil along the winding road, both Red Lin Feyn and Chay-Liang agreed that neither could wait any longer, for the Black Moon had gone to one realm and the Sun King to another, and both girded themselves for war. Red Lin Feyn made sleds, one for each of them, and the two Elemental Men – bodyguards or captors Liang never knew – became wind and air and flew beside them. They came to Brons exhausted, hungry and filthy. They had almost nothing with them but Liang’s glass sliver, given to her by Tuuran, and Red Lin Feyn’s name, once the Arbiter of the Dralamut and the most powerful voice in all the seven worlds, but either one would have been enough, and so each set their course; and thus it was some days later that two ships sliced through crashing waves, tossed from side to side while storm winds howled across spray-lashed decks and loosed banshee wails through rigging taut as steel, yet both ships carried every shred of sail they dared, racing the ocean towards the storm-dark.

  On the last night before each would go their separate ways Red Lin Feyn burst into Liang’s cabin far past the middle of the night, dressed in a nightgown.

  ‘I have it!’ She slammed a book onto the table beside Liang’s cot. ‘Look!’

  Liang, racked by her old curse of seasickness, dry-heaved into a chamber pot as the ship bucked and rolled. ‘Go away.’ Her words slurred like a drunkard, but Lin Feyn didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Liang! Look! One thousand, seven hundred and seventy-seven.’ Lin Feyn’s eyes burned like candles. She lit an enchanter’s torch and shone it at the book, and never mind that Liang could barely focus on Lin Feyn’s face. ‘I knew I’d seen it before. You said the Black Moon numbered the dragons and claimed to have made them? But here! Look!’

  There was a page of something. Words and a picture all swimming across her eyes. Liang closed her eyes and shook her head and groaned. ‘Just tell me, for the love of Charin, what it means.’

  ‘The Rava speaks of the half-gods as immortal, and in the same breath claims some vanished in their war before the Splintering. It numbers them. It is the same number, Liang. And here. Look. Look!’

  Liang finally forced herself upright. The cabin blurred before her. Lin Feyn swayed back and forth and Liang couldn’t tell whether that was the ship or simply her own eyes playing tricks on her. She took a deep breath and summoned her last strength and looked. Lin Feyn’s picture was of a crudely drawn man. One hand wielded a knife and was stabbing it into another man’s head. The other hand seemed to reach inside as if to pluck something out, while lying on the floor beside them both, flat on its back, was a small dead dragon.

  ‘This is him,’ hissed Lin Feyn. ‘The Black Moon. And the ­dragon’s not dead. He’s bringing it to life. He’s killing other half-gods and making them into dragons. Half-gods and dragons. They’re the same, Liang. The same!’

  Liang nodded and fell back onto her blankets, whimpering. Lin Feyn paused a moment, then touched a hand to Liang’s brow.

  ‘Your alchemist would have made something for the sickness, wouldn’t he?’

  Liang closed her eyes. Yes. He would. And he would have sat with her for as long as it took and never left her side.

  The clouds and the wind and the lashing rain didn’t relent, and so Liang didn’t see Lin Feyn go, flying on her sled through tumult and gale to her own ship. But she forced herself up to the deck and watched as the two ships sailed one after the other into the storm-dark, and whispered her farewells until the silence came, the blessed stillness of the Nothing at the storm-dark’s heart, where they would part, each to their own other world, Lin Feyn to stand before an army and the might of her own people to stop a holy war before it could start, and Liang to go alone into the dragon-lands while her borrowed ship turned back for whence it had come. She wasn’t sure which one of them was the bigger fool.

  Alone, but Belli would be there, and she would find him; and together they would bring the Black Moon down and his dragon-queen too. Whatever it took.

  Half-gods and dragons. They’re the same, Liang. The same! Now there was a thing. Through the knotting snakes writhing in her belly, Chay-Liang smiled, picturing Belli’s face as she told him.

  The Black Moon

  There are tunnels under the Purple Spur. There are palaces bored into stone, made by the first men before the fall of the Silver Kings. When dragons flew wild and unchecked they were a shelter, a sanctuary in which to eke out a life. Abandoned when the dragons were tamed by the Isul Aieha, they became home to alchemists and the most dread of their secrets, but now they once more offer shelter from fire and claw that come from the sky. The last alchemists fade here, and dragon-riders too under the rule of their queen and their grand master alchemist. Lystra, last of Shezira’s daughters, King Jehal’s bride. And Jeiros, crippled by King Hyrkallan for his last desperate poisoning of a thousand dragons. For both, one name conjures all their spite, one name mothering all they have lost.

  Zafir, the dragon-queen.

  33

  Hide-and-Seek and Alchemy

  Forty days after landfall

  Bellepheros had no idea whether the Black Moon knew he was still on the eyrie, or whether the half-god even cared. Zafir had left the Merizikat sell-swords and most of the exalts back in the Pinnacles. She’d take
n her Adamantine Men down to the Spur and the ruin of her old palace, and Queen Jaslyn’s riders too. A dozen abandoned souls wandered the eyrie, that was all, bemused and wondering what to do with themselves – solar exalts cut by the Black Moon’s knife, mostly – and Bellepheros hid from them in Li’s old workshop while Myst and Onyx brought him food. No one paid much attention to Zafir’s handmaidens except to court them for the dragon-queen’s favour, but they’d come to see him as a friend because he’d midwifed them both through the births of their sons. Kept him busy, at least.

  He drank the last of Kataros’s potion to hide his thoughts from the Black Moon’s dragons, and then kept out of sight as best he could, flitting, lurking and forgotten, between his laboratory and his study and Li’s workshop, surrounded by all the things Li had made, all the scatter of half-built ideas and discarded shapes of metal and glass whose purpose he couldn’t decipher. He looked at them all, wishing she was here so she could tell him what to do. Stop the Black Moon? Take his power and use it to tame the dragons, not that he knew how? Or let the Black Moon tame the dragons himself as the Isul Aieha had done, if that was what the Black Moon planned, and then somehow bring him down? History repeating itself, except a few hundred years ago it had taken a thousand blood-mages to silence a half-god. This time there was only him.