The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  ‘This is just a little bit shitty,’ he grumbled. He looked at White Vish and then at Jasaan. Jasaan at least had the decency to look away, shamefaced. ‘Well? Dragon-slayer? Do you stand with us or not? If it’s not then could you at least go and ask your queen if she might just possibly consider helping us not all burn to a crisp?’

  Jasaan shook his head. ‘I’ll stand with you, Tuuran. But you’ve been gone a long time. You don’t understand what Zafir did here. You don’t understand what she means to them, how many died because of her, how—’

  ‘Dragon!’

  The cry echoed from the tunnel, which was handy for Jasaan because it saved him from a punch in the face. Zafir didn’t move. She didn’t even look round. Which was all very Zafir, but not very helpful.

  ‘You going to get that spear, then?’ asked Jasaan. But that wasn’t how this worked, and he really ought to know it. Bloody queens. Both of them as bad as each other. Just happened to love one of them, that was all.

  Shit. Did I just think that? Bollocks no!

  The love of duty. That was probably what he’d been thinking. Yes. That.

  The soldier he’d set at the rear watching for dragons came bolting past out of the tunnel, and Tuuran had never been so grateful for something else to think about. ‘How many?’ he yelled.

  ‘Six? Ten? I don’t bloody know. Lots! It’s big, this one. Hardly fits.’

  Big made it slow. So there was that.

  A last glance back to the gates with their scorpions. Would they do better to hold there? Lystra seemed to think so, but Tuuran wasn’t so sure. Better here at the entrance with the dragons trapped in a tunnel and coming at him one at a time. Once they spread into the cavern the men at the gate might kill two or three, if they were astoundingly lucky, and then everyone died in fire …

  ‘It’s never the bloody easy way, is it,’ he said, as much to any of the old spirits of the legion that might happen to be watching. They ought to be, he thought, because there wasn’t going to be another fight quite like this for a while. True Adamantine Men – even if there were only a dozen of them – armed with a pair of lightning throwers apiece, with Taiytakei gold-glass shields and armour. Men who just might keep their shit together when a dragon came at them. ‘Sit yourselves down and enjoy it,’ he muttered, ‘if only because there might not be any Adamantine Men left come the end of it. If you could find some way to pitch in and help, that would be nice.’ On the other hand, they might just think it was as good a blaze of glory as any to die in.

  Ghosts. He was talking to ghosts.

  Zafir was still on one knee before the gate. Still not moving, still no bloody use. Down to him then. He shouted at his men to back away a distance from the tunnel mouth and get their shields and those lightning throwers ready, because they were bloody well going to need them, because any moment now the first dragon was going to come and hose everything with fire until it squeezed itself out, and Tuuran needed them far enough back not to burn, but close enough that they had some chance of hitting what they were aiming for once they started throwing lightning back the other way. And even this handful might have held a tunnel where dragons could only pass one at a time if their lightning throwers had worked as well as they did in Takei’Tarr or in Merizikat, but they didn’t. Took bloody ages to find the strength to fire again. Ever since they crossed the storm-dark, and Tuuran didn’t have a bastard clue why. Bellepheros reckoned something to do with the dragons, but it hadn’t made much sense.

  ‘Never the bloody easy way,’ he grumbled again, and looked about for anyone else who had a nice big axe and might be up for using it. ‘You!’ White Vish. ‘With me.’ He looked at Jasaan. ‘You too, dragon-slayer, for when one of us gets his head burned off. The rest of you lot, shield wall and blast anything that shows its snout through that hole until it stops moving, but not until it’s ­poking its nose out, mind!’

  ‘We’re going to die here, are we?’ asked Jasaan.

  Tuuran bared his teeth. ‘If we do, won’t it just be glorious?’ Which, in the end, was all that was supposed to matter. He tucked himself out of sight where the tunnel opened into the cave, where the dragons had to pass, lightning thrower at the ready, axe propped against the stone beside him. Waved Vish to the other side. He sneaked a glance into the tunnel and swore loudly. The hatchling was only yards away, slithering on its belly, scales scraping along the walls, almost too big to fit.

  The dragon grinned and belched fire. Tuuran barely jerked out of the way in time, and then everything kicked off.

  ‘Hold!’ he screamed. ‘Hold!’ Last thing he needed was people wasting precious lightning, and he needed the dragon out in the open, or at least a part of it, enough of it to hit. He flicked another glance at Zafir. Still hadn’t moved. Nor had the men at the gates, but he had their attention now right enough. So that was something. He grimaced at Vish. ‘Die well. That’s the best we ever get, right?’

  The dragon lunged out, claws scrabbling for purchase, trying to pull itself through as fast as it could. Its jaws snapped round and bit at him. Tuuran jumped back as flames swept over him, screaming burning pain. Then lightning, a cacophonous scatter of thunderclaps that set his whole skull ringing, loud enough to blur his eyes. The dragon shrieked. It coughed on its own fire.

  ‘Now! Take it down!’ He snatched up his axe.

  Lightning flashed, dazzling. Thunderclaps boomed. The cavern air shook in deafening echoes. Light and noise and he could barely think, but that didn’t matter. Didn’t need to think. Just needed to bring his axe down on the hatchling’s head.

  He swung. Missed as it snapped away. Bastard thing was half out of the tunnel now, almost loose. Another bolt hit the dragon and then another. It screamed and shook, talons flailing. Vish brought his axe down on its head. Glanced sideways, cut deep but not deep enough to kill. Jasaan jumped wildly past him, smashing his blade into the dragon’s snout, and still it came. Tuuran roared and leaped, howling with every ounce of muscle, springing into the air, axe square into the dragon’s skull with all his weight and strength behind it. Down deep, the whole axehead driven through scale and bone. Wrenched it free and jumped again, screaming his head off for it to just die, over and over and …

  He stood for a moment, gasping. The dragon fell. Half his face was burning agony where its fire had caught him, worse than when that fire witch had burned his ear off in Aria.

  ‘It’s dead, boss,’ yelled Vish. ‘You killed it.’

  Tuuran nodded. ‘We killed it.’ His ears were ringing. After-flashes of lightning seared his eyes. He staggered, trying to orient himself, and then the dragon lurched forward, and for a moment he thought it was still alive and howled and lifted his axe, and damn, what did it take to kill these bastards? But then he understood: the dragons in the tunnel behind were barging it out of the way, ready to come at him again, and just for a moment he wondered if he could really do this any more.

  Not an Adamantine thought that. He shook himself and scanned his eyes over his waiting men, crouched behind their Taiytakei shields. The glow of their lightning throwers in the gloom. He picked them out, the bright white dazzle-light of the ones primed and ready, the dull glimmer of those already loosed. A dozen left still strong. Good enough. One of the pair fixed to his left arm still gleamed bright too. Never mind the roar in his ears, never mind the flashes of light and shadow that meant he could barely see, or the pain of his scorched face. He let it eat him and turned it to savage anger.

  ‘Come on then!’ he bellowed. ‘Who’s next? I don’t care how many of you there are. One by one my axe will have you!’ Maybe they’d get three or four before their lightning was spent. But like he’d said: fucking glorious.

  Zafir still didn’t move. What was the bloody woman thinking?

  The dead dragon flopped to one side. Two small hatchlings shot through the gap, one after another. Tuuran caught the first with his lightning and sent it tipping h
ead over tail in among the stone columns. ‘Someone kill it! Kill it quick!’ He swung his axe at the second. Missed. Vish shield-slammed it. Lightning hit it in the face, three bolts at once, and Tuuran ended it with a second swing, straight through the neck. A small one this, if you could say that anything was small when it was the size of a carthorse. Jasaan ran at the hatchling loose in the cave. Another soldier broke from the wall of shields. In the gloom Tuuran didn’t see who it was, but he saw the hatchling dart and lash with its tail, saw his soldier fly twenty feet through the air, chest caved in, saw him smash against a stone pillar like a petrified tentacle and slump still. Lightning sprawled the dragon back down. Jasaan slammed in with his axe. Two more men dived out of the wall and finished it.

  Tuuran looked at his arms. His lightning throwers were nowhere near ready again. Looked at his men for the sun-bright of charged wands and didn’t see it. They were spent. That was that, then. Lightning gone. So the next one was going to be a right ­bugger.

  ‘I’ll wall you out with a mound of your own corpses!’ he spat. He looked at White Vish, and Vish looked back.

  ‘As good as it gets, boss.’

  Fire thundered from the tunnel, long and hard and fierce, enough that he had to back away. He could feel it through the stones, the trembling earth. Big like the first. A monster, hauling itself through. He took deep breaths and braced to take a swing.

  ‘Holiness!’

  The fire came on and on, washing around the entrance to the cavern, sweltering hot, cooking him in his own sweat. With a sudden lunge the dragon’s head snapped out, curling to the side, snapping at him, fire burning on and on. He had his shield ready, gold-glass held up to cover his face. The dragon twisted and squirmed, pulling itself onward. It bit at Vish and then whipped back, fangs splintering glass, knocking Tuuran down like the kick of a mule. Flat on his back. It opened its mouth to burn him, and he had nowhere to run. No time.

  ‘Bollocks to you!’ Tuuran threw the knife off his belt, the only thing he had. It struck in the dragon’s eye. Its fury blazed, a thunder­clap. Then flame and blinding light. For a moment he couldn’t think. He blinked. A scorpion bolt struck the dragon’s neck. It reared away from him. More thunder smashed it back, dazed them both with noise and pain, and then Zafir was there with her spear, driving it into the dragon’s scales. Tuuran didn’t move. Just lay and watched the dragon turn to stone, sealing the tunnel tight with its bulk.

  He blinked and looked at himself in amazement that he wasn’t dead. Visor down, but through the clear glass of her dragon-rider’s helm he could see Zafir’s eyes, wide and wild. She offered him her hand.

  ‘We have earned entrance to the Spur, Tuuran. You have earned us entrance.’

  Tuuran stared a moment longer at the stone dragon.

  ‘Up, Night Watchman. More will come.’

  Halfteeth, left in charge of the ruin of the Adamantine Palace, had Snacksize standing up on watch on the walls since he reckoned she had the best eyes. So it was Snacksize who first saw the dragons coming. They flew low, hugging the cliff wall of the Spur a few miles to the north, and she didn’t spot them until they were close, dark specks against dark stone. She took a moment to be sure of what she was seeing, and then she ran, hard and fast like she’d never run before, yelling and screaming to anyone and everyone to drop whatever they were doing and flee like the wind. Halfteeth, never much one for doing what he was told, bolted out of the Glass Cathedral into the rubble-strewn yard as the commotion broke.

  ‘What?’

  Snacksize pointed northward. ‘Hundreds of them.’

  There was a terror in the way she looked, and that wasn’t the Snacksize Halfteeth had come to know. He let her go, though, yelled at everyone who hadn’t already started running to get on with it, and clambered up the stone remains of some monster dragon. He crawled onto its back and still couldn’t see over the walls, and so he went on clambering up its scaled neck.

  The first dragon he spotted was a hundred yards short of the palace, skimming the ground, keeping low, racing in fast like a night-skin rocket and looking straight at him. Halfteeth froze for a heartbeat. And then, since there wasn’t much else to do except gawp and die, he slid down the neck of the stone dragon, skittering across its scales and praying to every god from every world he could remember on the off chance that one of them was real; and maybe one of them was, because instead of falling off the dragon’s neck to dash himself to pieces in the rubble below, he managed to cling on until he reached its back, and then twisted and tumbled and fell and rolled and grabbed hold of one half-open petrified wing. He ducked underneath it as fire poured from the sky, as a very alive flesh-and-blood dragon shot across the ruined palace and doused everything in flame.

  Its shadow blotted out the sky as it passed over him. It flicked its tail, shattering the wing beneath which he’d paused, but by then he was moving again. The stone shuddered, almost shook him off his feet. He ran and slid and fell off the dragon-statue’s tail and smashed into the ground. The breath burst out of his lungs. For a second he couldn’t move, too winded to get up, but Snacksize, every bit as stupid as he’d always thought, was already hauling at him with the desperate strength of a man twice her size and yelling so many curses that his head spun. She kicked him and pulled him and ran and threw them both flat through the entrance of the Glass Cathedral as a second torrent of flames washed the yard outside. Halfteeth staggered to his feet and turned back to see what was happening. The skull of some great old dragon rested in front of the cathedral. Halfteeth stared at it, and then a live dragon crashed to ground beside it, swatted it away and rammed its snout through the doorway to scour the place with fire. Snacksize loosed ­lightning straight in its face. The dragon lurched back, stung, and that was long enough for Halfteeth to scramble to his feet. Snacksize thumped him.

  ‘You really as stupid as you look?’ she screamed. ‘Keep moving!’ She pulled him and bolted for the far end of the cathedral behind the altar, where the men he’d told to run were fighting each other for the steps that spiralled to the tunnels below. For somewhere safe. Halfteeth swore at them.

  ‘Shields, you idiots! Get your shields up. And your lightning, damn you!’ The ones who actually had shields. The ones who even had lightning throwers.

  Something slammed the Glass Cathedral hard. It shook. Snacksize worked her way through the crush of men around the stairs, dragging a few of them out, the ones with lightning and armour. Another dragon head burst through the entrance. Bolts of lightning smacked it back. The noise left Halfteeth half deaf, but there wasn’t much else to do except hold his ground. Another dragon came, or maybe the same dragon for all Halfteeth could tell, and then another, and then suddenly they were out of lightning and the last of his men were still on the stairs, screaming at the ones below to get out of the way.

  A new dragon came. A white one this time. Riding inside their heads, plucking out Halfteeth’s thoughts.

  Your fear is delicious, little ones.

  Halfteeth threw a rock at it and then cowered behind the altar as the fire came, scorching and furious.

  Under the Spur the dragon Silence prowls onward, sniffing ever closer to the thoughts of the little ones. Through crack and crevice and fissure, always with the water leading the way, until at last a glimmer of light shines on distant stone. A lamp. Silence feels the hunger of her brothers and sisters who follow, hatchlings all, not long from the egg yet each with the ravenous memories of a thousand years and centuries of servitude.

  I am Silence, the dragon whispers to the little ones in their terror, and we are hungry.

  Along the caves around the fissure of the Silver River the dragons dance amok. Little ones run and scream. Silence tears them from their holes, men and children, women, infants, animals, all scythed the same. The iron reek of blood scents the air. Red-muzzled fangs snap on flesh and bone. The little ones howl while dragons move in murderous silence. They creep
among the scatter of terrified thoughts scrabbling to escape. They lurk in shadowed corners. They leap and pounce. Tails lash air and crack iron and bone. A handful of little ones escape along tunnels too narrow for even a hatchling to follow. The dragons pour fire in their wake, scorching the last to flee, burning their skin, charring them, listening to their fading screams.

  The first nest is found and put to death. The dragon Silence dives once more into the water. On and again until all are gone, and the Earthspear is held in dragon claws to keep the Black Moon at bay.

  37

  The Enchantress

  Bellepheros led Li to the potion store, and Li set about making another sled. In Takei’Tarr and Merizikat Bellepheros had seen her shape glass and make it flow like water, moulding it to her desires in seconds. Here it moved like reluctant molasses.

  ‘The dragons,’ she said when she saw him frowning. ‘They feed on the weave of the world and take it for themselves. They’ve drained these realms almost dry. That’s why the Elemental Men were so afraid of them, once they knew. Nothing here works the way it should. Everything is dying.’

  They rolled potion barrels onto the sled when it was done, and floated it to the cave mouth. The sled Liang had used to fly across the ocean waited there. It was a strange contraption. Concentric rotating rings hung from the back end at all angles to one another, a crazy jumble of spinning geometry rimmed in bright-lit gold. A Taiytakei sled was usually little more than an elongated ellipse, and riders simply stood braced against the wind, but Li had moulded something much larger for herself, something more like a sedan chair with a seat and a roof set into a glass hemisphere. It didn’t strike Bellepheros as particularly comfortable, but at least he could sit down.