The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  ‘Turn back, Zafir,’ said Kataros.

  Zafir laughed at them. ‘Turn back? You think I want to be down here? The sky fills with dragons that mean to kill us all. Shall we fight them together, or shall I kill you first and fight them alone?’ She raised a lightning thrower and levelled the spear. A snort, a sneer, a word of scorn, a hint of derision and she’d have them all. The Adamantine Man was the least of her worries. Zafir shifted the aim of her lightning thrower. Kataros stiffened.

  You were thinking it, then …

  Long deep breaths. She was shaking. Quivering, desperate to explode into a frenzy, anything. A minute ago she’d felt so tired she could have dropped where she stood, but now …

  Tuuran skidded to a stop behind her. ‘Holiness …’

  Zafir lowered her lightning thrower and grabbed him, shoving him in front of her. ‘Tell them, Tuuran. How many? How many dragons?’

  ‘I didn’t stop to count, Holiness.’ He glowered through the gloom at Jasaan. ‘Frankly I don’t think we’ve got enough fingers between us.’

  ‘How – many?’ She already knew the answer. Diamond Eye had shown her. Dragons in a horde she’d never seen except swirling in that carnage of tooth and claw and fire over the Pinnacles with Jehal and Hyrkallan.

  ‘I don’t bloody know. Hundreds of the fuckers.’

  Zafir snapped back to the alchemist and her Adamantine Man. The lightning thrower still pointed straight at Kataros. ‘Doesn’t it make your heart race to hear? Dragons. Hundreds! Go on then, go and fight them. Isn’t that what you’re for?’

  They didn’t move. ‘Dragons come now and then,’ said Jasaan evenly. ‘They don’t fit down here, and even a dragon can’t uproot a mountain. Adamantine Men don’t fight battles they can’t win, where dying serves no purpose.’

  ‘Really?’ Zafir bared her teeth. The rest of her own Adamantine Men were crowding behind her, pressing in close, eager to get as far away as they could from the dragons above. Their tension fed her own. ‘Then do you really want to stand in my way?’ The mountain shook as the first dragon crashed into the stage above. Were they deep enough yet to be beyond the reach of its fire? She snarled, her last few fragile strands of patience snapping one after the next. ‘I’ve seen hatchlings scour tunnels smaller than this, Jasaan.’ Dragons or men, Kataros was giving her no choice but to fight one or the other. And damn her, the alchemist still didn’t move aside to let her pass. Her lightning hand trembled.

  No.

  She lowered the spear. Nodded. There was a better way. ‘Go, then. I have Adamantine Men of my own. I will hold this path alone. Go to your starling speaker.’

  ‘Yes, go wipe her arse for her,’ sneered Tuuran. ‘Or whatever use you are down here in the dark, hiding away. There’s work only for real Adamantine Men here.’ The last was aimed square at Jasaan, the dragon-slayer hero of the Purple Spur. Jasaan bristled. He exchanged a curt few whispers with Kataros and the alchemist hurried away, reluctant and casting glances over her shoulder. Jasaan bared his teeth at Tuuran.

  ‘You show me then. Your men may pass, Tuuran, but either you or your queen tries it and you’ll take my axe.’

  ‘Care to see how that ends?’ Tuuran pulled his own axe from his back and took a step. ‘Shall we just settle that now? I can’t imagine it taking more than a second or two.’

  ‘Night Watchman!’ Zafir slapped his arm. Easy as anything to scythe Jasaan with lightning and run deeper into the Spur with the rest, but no, there was a point to prove and she needed Jasaan alive to see it made. She turned, ready for the onrush of dragons, the dim filtering of daylight at the far end of the tunnel where it turned and then opened under the oratorium stage. The first hatchling would come at any moment.

  ‘Have you faced a dragon before, Night Watchman?’ she asked.

  Tuuran was arranging his men, trying to stand them between her and where the dragons would come. ‘Faced and fought?’ He shook his head. ‘Faced and been lucky? Once. In the desert beside the Queverra, trapped in a slave cage. It would have burned me, but some monster crashed out of the sky before it had the chance and chased it off into the abyss.’

  For a moment the two of them looked at one another. Perhaps Tuuran didn’t know it, but that monster had been Diamond Eye, and Zafir had been on his back, and she’d known Tuuran was near and yet had left him there.

  ‘And you? Have you faced a dragon, Holiness?’

  ‘Only riding on the back of another. I ran from a hatchling once.’ She set herself. ‘Baros Tsen’s white witch faced down a dragon on her own though, more than once, armed with lightning and enchanted glass. The lightning will stop them.’

  Tuuran grunted. ‘It knocks them down good enough, but someone still has to go to them with an axe and finish the job before they get up again. We have Taiytakei gold and glass armour. Fine against lightning, but I’m not so sure about dragon-fire.’

  ‘I have dragonscale under my glass and gold, Night Watchman.’

  Tuuran gripped his axe. At the far end of the tunnel a shadow crossed pale ghosts of second-hand sunlight. ‘Good. Then I’ll worry a little less for your safety while you stand behind the ranks of my soldiers.’

  Zafir didn’t move from his side. She looked back to Jasaan, watching from further down the passageway, and called to him: ‘Soldier! Your alchemist lover Kataros claims that the Silver King’s spear turns dragons into stone. Do you believe her?’

  ‘Why don’t you show me?’

  Tuuran laughed, but Zafir gently nodded. ‘I think I will.’

  A darkness fell at the far end of the tunnel. A shape, blocking the light. The Adamantine Men raised their arms. A dozen enchanter torches raked the tunnel stone, dazzling sharp beams born of gold-glass. There it was, a snout. Fangs, claws. A dragon eased around the corner and paused a moment to glare at them all, dazzled by the light. Tuuran gritted his teeth. ‘If your spear turns dragons to stone, Holiness, perhaps you would be kind enough to allow me to wield it on your behalf?’

  High above the mountain Diamond Eye danced and wove the air, beset by a hundred dragons who demanded to know why, why do you choose this little one, why do you let her ride when you are free, why? And yet as he wheeled and arced and swooped among them, he rode with Zafir and she with him, and through him she saw into the hatchling’s thoughts, the dragon in the tunnel who meant to kill her.

  ‘Sooner rather than later, Holiness,’ urged Tuuran. She barely heard him. Deep now, inside dragon minds.

  The hatchling took a step closer and then another. It bared its fangs. Cautious. It would be inside them too, peering through their thoughts, reading their minds, scanning their memories. It saw the lightning they carried, but it had never tasted that lightning for itself. It wouldn’t know quite how it hurt, not yet.

  Her. Its head turned a tiny notch, and Zafir knew it was looking at her.

  The spear.

  An exhilaration. Awe and a flash of understanding, wrought from the skies above her. That, little one. The Earthspear. That is why they come.

  Jasaan, still behind them, still watching. Zafir regarded the dragon, eyeing her in return.

  ‘But Tuuran, I also have the dragonscale.’ She took a glass shield from the soldier beside her and sent him scurrying back. Then cocked her head as Diamond Eye might have done. Are you afraid of me, little hatchling? Because you should be.

  The hatchling bared its fangs and opened its mouth to unleash fire. Zafir gripped her spear a little tighter. She hunched behind her pilfered shield, ready for the flames to come.

  Deep in the caves under the Spur, wending their way along the cascade and rush of the Silver River, come a hundred hatchling dragons. Claws spark on stone. Tails scrape, wings flare, looking for a way in, a way to reach the little ones in their secret hiding places, the deep earth that will be their tomb. Through crack and crevice, cave and fissure and ancient tunnel they come. Stone bars the
way. Tiny narrowings where men might squeeze but too small for any dragon to pass. Rockfalls too deep to dig aside. Walls and barriers built long ago to keep monsters at bay in the years when fire last ruled the skies. The dragons swirl in furious confusion, rage and hunger surging them on, filled with desire for blood and the hunt.

  The spear. They feel it. All of them. Awake and alive. Keening for the touch of a half-god, but the caves and tunnels offer no passage.

  Amid chaos and storm the dragon Silence pauses.

  The water, she calls. The water will take us through.

  In she dives and others follow, for water is one thing the ­little ones cannot live without, and though the Silver River dances through deep lake and cistern and mile after mile of drowned inky black wend and wind, there is a truth that even the little ones of long ago had not fully understood. That dragons do not need to breathe.

  Fire burst from the hatchling’s maw. Trapped and held fast by the tunnel walls the flames rushed at Zafir and Tuuran and their bristling steel and lightning.

  ‘Shields!’ Tuuran pulled Zafir beside him, pressing against her. He wrapped himself around her as best he could. Zafir slammed shut the gold-glass visor of her helm and planted her shield beside his. The Adamantine Men pressed together, a single solid wall of gold-glass. The flames washed around them, over and past while they cowered tight together like some armoured beast, waiting for the fire to end but it didn’t. It burned on and on and crept like water between crack and chink, searching for skin to burn. Baros Tsen had asked Zafir once how much fire a dragon could vomit from its gullet before it was spent and she’d laughed at him and told him that no one knew. No one had ever seen a dragon drained. There was no end to them. Nor would there be today.

  She stole a glance behind her. Lit by the garish light she could see the length of the tunnel, reaching far on into the mountain before opening wide. Jasaan was crouched behind a dragonscale shield of his own. On and on the fire came.

  ‘Back,’ she cried. ‘Send your men back, Night Watchman.’ Their shouts were tinged with pain now, and fear. They would break, and Tuuran knew it, and if they broke even once before a dragon’s fire then she would never have them stand again as they stood now; but in glass and gold and with dragonscale wrapped around her, the flames wouldn’t touch her, not yet.

  Tuuran’s hand pulled her, drawing her with him in retreat. She shook him away and lifted a clenched-fist from behind the shield and let the flames wash her. Dragonscale. She barely felt the heat. She straightened, one arm holding the spear, the other holding her borrowed shield across her face and throat, the only weakness in the armour she wore. The fire scourged her. She let it.

  ‘Holiness!’

  Tuuran’s scream rang over the roar of the fire and the shouts and cries of his men as they scurried away. He lunged for her, but too late as she ran straight at the dragon’s throat, into flames too burning bright to see the monster at the other end. With every stride the roar and rush grew. The heat wrapped her in a gasping embrace. She half-drew a breath and choked on it at once, blistering and fierce. Blind and breathless she raised her lightning thrower and let fly. The thunder of it shook the walls and shuddered the air and deafened and dazed her. The hatchling jarred back, twitching and twisting. The fire, for a moment, paused. Dazzled by flames and lightning and now drenched in sudden gloom, Zafir saw only shapes of shadows, a blur, a whirl of claws and wings and tail as the dragon tried to right itself, to shake clean its lightning-raddled thoughts and understand what she’d done. She took a lungful of air, clean and warm, and burst forward, and howled and lifted the spear. The hatchling shook itself and faced her, grinning fangs to snap her in two, but too slow. As it opened its mouth she hurled the spear with every drop of her strength. The dragon arched and twisted as though it already knew what was coming, but the stone around it was a cage, a wall against escape. The spear struck and flashed with silver moonlight as bright as a thunderbolt. The dragon froze. Before her eyes it turned to stone.

  Zafir stood, chest heaving, gasping for air, looking at what she’d done. A warning from Diamond Eye whistled through, arching and weaving in the air somewhere far away now. And yes, she felt them, the other dragons in the tunnel behind, crazy-eyed with murderous madness. She tugged at the Isul Aieha’s spear, jutting from the frozen dragon’s petrified scales. It came free with a willing ease. Then she turned and ran.

  Tuuran already had Jasaan pinned to the floor, his men around him. Zafir strode among them, a wildness coursing through her. They were huge, these Adamantine Men, muscle and strength, and yet she felt taller than any of them. She kicked Tuuran off Jasaan.

  ‘You just had to make a point, is that it? Let him up,’ she said. Her glare snapped to Jasaan. ‘Did you see? Did you see, Night Watchman?’

  Tuuran nodded.

  ‘They can be killed.’ She waited as Tuuran’s men drew away. There was an uncertainty to the way Jasaan looked at her now. An amazement. Not a fear, exactly. Was it awe? He half-expected her to murder him. It was in his eyes, yet he wasn’t afraid. She crouched beside him.

  ‘Do you see? They die. They can die.’ She offered him her hand to help him to his feet. She thought perhaps he might take it, but in the end he shied away.

  ‘Holiness,’ he said. He shook his head, bewildered and confused. ‘From birth to death we obey. Nothing more, nothing less. Lystra is our queen and our speaker. But I will vouch for what I have seen. I will speak of your victory.’

  ‘We’ll kill a hundred dragons more and it still won’t be victory, but so be it.’ Zafir nodded. ‘Lead the way, soldier of Narammed, and takes us to where we might all stand together and turn back this tide.’

  They ran, all of them together, while the dragons skittering through the tunnels lashed the stone hatchling to rubble and came on.

  Water. Deep and dark and cold, black as death and old as unholy Xibaiya. The dragons swim silent through its icy calm, drawn by the current. Bottomless and timeless, these holes and burrows from when half-gods strode the sky and labyrinth wyrms crawled beneath the skin of the earth to caress their doomed goddess. Long gone all of these, all but their relics, earth places whose desiccated souls stir restless now, goaded from their eternal sleep by the murmurings of the goddess’s spear. Hostile and sullen they watch the dragons pass; but though the dragons feel their presence they know the ancient earth for what it is, toothless and without power. The dragons care nothing for its animosity, and besides, water bows always to the moon, fickle and changing and ever shifting.

  Mile after mile the river draws them on into the air once more, to a grand void of darkness rising among the mountains, the great fissure spread wide like an opening wound. In blackness the hatchling Silence skitters across wet slime-drifted stone and pauses to listen.

  Little ones. Silence feels their thoughts. They are close now.

  Jasaan led them fast through lamplit passageways carved long ago to a grand cavern riddled with pillars of water-grown stone, fangs rising from the ground and hanging from above like the teeth of some ossified devil as tall as a mountain. The walls and low-pressing ceilings of stone lifted away, and Zafir felt the tightness in her chest lift with them. Space. A chance to breathe. Not like open skies, but not the oppressive cage of dark narrow places either. Their Taiytakei torches shone bright, dancing leaping shadows across the twisting spires. The Adamantine Men talked quietly among themselves of the Great Flame, the first mother of all dragons who climbed from the earth beneath the Spur and gave birth to a ­thousand eggs, a dragon as big as a city. Zafir knew better. She had an idea, now, of the father of dragons. The carvings in the Pinnacles laid it out for anyone to see if they had eyes to understand. The Black Moon had made them.

  ‘How far does all this go?’ she asked Jasaan. The caves under the Spur belonged to the alchemists and always had.

  ‘A realm all of itself,’ he said.

  Across the cavern, close en
ough to see with their torches, gates of iron and wood hung open into another maw-like darkness. Men thronged around them, lit by bobbing alchemical lamps. Lystra’s Adamantine Men and Lystra herself, a hundred strong arms in dragonscale. They even had a pair of scorpions, battered and bent in places, salvaged from the walls of the Adamantine Palace after it fell. On either side the cavern fell into a darkness black and all-swallowing. A sense of lurking demons clawing at Zafir. She pushed it aside as best she could and approached the gates alone. It helped to have something there, right in front of her, something immediate to fill her head. A scorpion pointed at you was good for that, and the hostile glare of soldiers who had once sworn to serve her. For the second time she faced Queen Lystra, old rival and enemy, face to face and eye to eye, wary and pleased at the distance between them. Once-impossible things came more easily now, but it still took a breath or two before she could bring herself to drop to one knee. She couldn’t bow her head. Too much pride for that.

  ‘Dragons come,’ she said. Her voice echoed through the emptiness, the darkness. She spoke the words loud. ‘This is your realm, Lystra of Sand. If you will have it, I will stand at your side, my men with yours, until these dragons are gone or else we die in their fire.’

  Lystra, armoured for battle as she’d been before, turned her back. Zafir stayed as she was, down on one knee but head held proud. Waiting.

  Tuuran watched, half of him wondering why Zafir didn’t just blast the wretched queen under the mountains with a nice dose of lightning like she had with her sister Jaslyn. Teach her some manners, that would. The other half of him busied itself with how long they had before the next hatchling came scrabbling after them and how, exactly, he was supposed to do anything about it while Zafir held the spear that conveniently turned them into stone, and how, exactly, he was supposed to do what a Night Watchman was supposed to do and keep his speaker from harm when there were dragons one way and a horde of hostile soldiers and alchemists and scorpions the other.