by Stephen Deas
‘Did you …’ she started, and then her eyes snapped to something behind him. She whipped up the bright gleam of her lightning thrower, and Halfteeth had exactly enough time to slap his hands over his ears and cringe away before she let loose a thunderbolt. A chaos of claws and wings tumbled down the steps and crashed into them both, momentarily dazing them, all sliding together. The hatchling’s eyes snapped back into focus. A claw raked at Halfteeth, grabbing him, scratching over his gold-glass, hooking into its layered scales, cracking plates.
‘Shit!’ Halfteeth swung his axe at it. A hatchet, really, nothing more. No leverage. The blade slid across the dragon’s scales. Snacksize stabbed at its eye. The hatchling snapped at her face. She lifted her arm, that instinct to protect herself, and the dragon’s teeth bit shut through glass and gold and flesh and bone. Blood sprayed. Snacksize screamed. She drove her sword hard into the hatchling’s eye, slitting it open and then fetching up against the bone of the socket beneath. The hatchling shrieked. Pain-mad, it bit at her again and caught her by the shoulder. It tossed her into the air and spat fire.
‘No!’ Halfteeth jumped onto its head and wrapped his legs around its neck. He closed a fist around the sword still stuck through the dragon’s eye, pulled it free and drove it in again, deep, twice more until he drove it to the hilt into the dragon’s brain. The hatchling shuddered and died. Ahead down the stairs he could hear men yelling, seeing the fire behind them, trying to get away. There would be more hatchlings, no doubt, but right now he didn’t care. He grabbed at Snacksize and looked at the horror that was her arm, severed above the elbow and gouting blood. He didn’t know how to stop it. He tore at her armour, trying to pull it free so he could tie something tight above the wound, and saw her face. Eyes burned blind, skin scorched red and charred.
She started to spasm.
‘No! No, no!’ He shook her. ‘Fight it, damn you. Fight it. Live! I don’t care about the scars! One-armed you’re still better than half the men down there! Don’t! Don’t you …’
The cry trailed out of him like a last failed breath as Snacksize died.
Kataros raced into the depths, lamp held high to light her way, tripping and stumbling on the uneven floor. Jasaan followed at her heel. There were dragons in the Spur, coming through the river.
‘Jasaan!’ Kataros pulled him into a crevice and unstoppered a drinking horn. ‘Jeiros has potions to hide us from them. Enough for everyone.’
The same potion as they’d drunk together drifting down the Yamuna. Jasaan took a swig. Kataros watched the other Adamantine Men run on, watched their lamps disappear into the darkness, then slipped deeper into her crevice, a crack in the mountain so narrow she almost had to walk sideways. Her lamp lit their way, dim and shadow-shrouded, scraping and squeezing to an old rusty door. Hinges ground open, reluctant grating rusted metal. Light crept from the other side; not sunlight, but still bright enough to make her screw up her eyes. Moonlight silver in a hollow shaft of glowing white stone. A breath of air wafted over her, cool and fresh, not the stale reek of the tunnels.
‘You have a head for heights, Jasaan?’ A rope bridge stretched across the void to a latticework of nets. More ropes dangled down into the middle of the shaft like some old attic cobweb. Kataros scrambled across the bridge. The web of ropes shook and swayed with each step as she clambered down a crazy mess of knots and pieces of netting and tethers and hawsers and knotted sheets of all different shapes and sizes, cobbled together haphazard and higgledy-piggledy over decades. The white stone walls were cracked and broken as if the shaft had once been part of something greater and had been snapped off.
‘The Silver King made this?’ asked Jasaan.
The bottom of the shaft was filled with rubble. Kataros clambered across fallen stone to a crack where the white wall was split. She squeezed through. ‘The Silver Kings left their relics scattered like salt at a wedding.’ She stopped at another iron door. ‘It hardly matters now. You were there. In the Black Mausoleum. You saw the Silver King leave us. Help me with this, will you?’
Jasaan added the weight of his shoulder to the door. A cracking sound made him jump as something snapped and the door creaked open. Kataros wrapped her lamp in cloth over and over until no glimmer of it remained. Together they crept into the darkness.
‘We make our potions beside the river because we need the water,’ she said.
The river. Where the dragons were.
Adamantine Men surrounded Zafir, all mixed up together in the madness to survive. The darkness and the press of men suffocated her and left her twitching like a nervous bird. She took a lightning thrower and pressed it into Lystra’s hands. Something to do. To take her thoughts away from her demons, battering at their cages.
‘Point it. Think bad thoughts. It’ll kill a man. With a dragon it will buy you a moment. In that moment you must use the spear.’ Perhaps Lystra would shoot her in the back, but then she’d find out how Taiytakei gold-glass turned lightning into harmless sparks, and in the moment after, which would be her last, she’d discover how dragonscale didn’t, and why Zafir wore both, one layered over the other. A coldly calculated purchase of uncertainty.
Am I turning into me again? The Zafir I left behind? The old habits, the double-thinking, the scheming, the perpetual watching for who would be next to slink behind and stab her in the back, the deep dark fears she buried in bottomless pits but which never quite let her go. For a while all that had gone; she’d been someone else. But now it was coming back. She’d forgotten how tiring it was.
‘Dragon!’ A crack of lightning, and then Tuuran pelted from the corner ahead where she’d sent him, one hand raised, two fingers in the air. Two fingers, two hatchlings, hurtling hard on his heels, maws gaping, fire ready. Thunderclaps blew the first dragon tumbling a dozen yards back. Crossbow quarrels peppered its scales, punching through with poison tips. More lightning flew. Zafir’s ears rang so loud she could barely hear her own thoughts, but she kept them there, shining bright for the dragons to see, letting them linger long enough that they couldn’t be missed. Let it pass among you, from one to the next as you flicker through one another. The poison that dulls is what waits you. More arrows flew. When the hatchlings tried to rise, lightning pressed them down. Zafir sent her men forward with their axes.
The little death, little dragons. Do not come back.
She went to the bodies when the soldiers had finished their butchery. Hacked to pieces. Paralysed with lightning, and yet they’d still killed three men lashing back and forth as they died.
Tuuran looked sourly at the corpses. ‘Three good men, Holiness,’ he said. ‘It had better work.’
Lystra pushed past, spear in hand. She carried it well. For a moment Zafir envied her. Another dragon-queen, hard as iron.
Kataros froze. The darkness was absolute but she could hear the scrabbling of claws on stone. There was a dragon somewhere in the tunnels ahead. She counted heartbeats as the sound came and went. When she didn’t hear anything more she crept on. One hand held a knife, ready to cut herself. With the other she felt her way along the wall.
Light spilled into their crevice a little further on. A low dim glow. It flickered as a shadow passed across it. Kataros waited again, then eased forward to where the crevice joined with a wider tunnel. She crouched, invisible, a shadow in a deeper dark. The light ahead came from an alchemical lamp, its luminous innards smashed and spattered across the tunnel floor. She listened, and then darted out towards the distant hiss of the Silver River as it wove and split and fell through the caves to the Mirror Lakes and its final end. To the workshop Jeiros kept here.
The door hung ajar. She slipped inside, pulled Jasaan after her and closed it. Listened again in case dragons lurked. Or, more likely, someone trying to hide from them.
No sound. She felt her way to the potions she wanted, then unwrapped her lamp and gave it to Jasaan.
‘Here.’ She cut hers
elf across the heel of her palm. One by one she opened every bottle and dripped a little blood into each, then stoppered them shut.
‘What are you doing?’
Kataros gathered the bottles and packed them into a sack. She gave it to him. ‘We have what we need now.’
They eased back as they’d come, across the glowing patch of tunnel floor, and there was the dragon she’d heard, waiting for them, a hatchling soft and fresh from the egg and as old as time, sniffing at the crevice to the white shaft as though it had caught a whiff of something. Kataros saw it at the same moment as some instinct made it look up, hardly more than a good spit between them. The dragon bared its teeth. Hesitated. Hunting for her thoughts and curious, perhaps, because it couldn’t find them. Kataros slashed her wrist and flicked handfuls of blood onto the stone and across the dragon’s scales, and then stopped and quivered as she quietly forced the wound to close. Her blood dripped from the dragon’s face. The dragon opened its mouth to burn them, trembled once and fell dead, holes burned clean through its skull by the fire of an alchemist. Kataros stepped past. She slipped into the crack in the wall, back towards the white stone shaft.
Jasaan hissed behind her. ‘Kat? How did you do that?’
She paused. He deserved it, didn’t he? A confession of sorts. ‘I saw things,’ she said. ‘When the Silver King gave me his memories. I saw his fall and what came after.’ She faced Jasaan. In the garish shadow-light of her alchemical lamp she couldn’t read his face. ‘Jasaan, the Order of the Scales is nothing but the Order of the Dragon by another name. The blood-mages of the Silver City were not driven into exile by alchemists but by their own kind. We call ourselves by a different name, but we are the same as we ever were. Alchemist. Blood-mage. There is no difference.’ It felt better, somehow, to say it. He’d find out soon enough anyway.
Jasaan snorted. ‘You may as well say that the sun is the moon!’
She didn’t answer. Didn’t look back. She’d told him what she was. No reason he had to believe her.
Among the little ones running and screaming in the darkness the dragon Silence tears through the river warren. They try to hide but Silence ferrets out their thoughts and burns them from their holes. Skipping and bounding from one slaughter to the next. No mercy, no remorse, no pity under fang or claw or fire as they hear the luring song of the Silver King’s spear.
Armed men gather, a feeble imagination of resistance, lines of spider-web substance. Dragonscale against flame. Spear against fang and talon, a shredding whirlwind of tooth and claw. Mayhem and slaughter, murder and chaos. No life, no breath, no movement. Behind them the dragons leave dark caves stained red.
Alchemist!
A hatchling dies, dissolution in alchemical blood.
The dragon Silence pauses from her savagery. Among the thoughts of the little ones she has found one whose scents are familiar.
The poison that dulls … Do not come back …
The dragon Silence listens to the distant dragon-queen, small and yet sparking with prideful fire. That one. That one is mine. She crushes the little one trapped beneath her claws, who once called himself a rider of dragons and becomes now a feast for worms and maggots. Spear shafts are broken, swords bent, dragonscale shields split in two. Around her the once proud riders of Furymouth die, the cream of King Tyan’s court, the victors of Evenspire and the Pinnacles; now they burn and bleed.
Against whom did you pit yourselves in your meaningless wars? whispers Silence to the corpses and the blood-rank caves. Again the dragon-queen pits her enemies against one another.
It does not matter. High above the mountains great war-dragons and hunters circle and watch. They listen and wait for the Black Moon to answer their challenge, one way or another.
Zafir kept Tuuran close after the hatchlings. Her demons were out of their cages now, riotous inside her. He said something: Lystra and her sister Jaslyn. She hardly heard. Too wrapped in her own whirlwind, too deafened by so much lightning. A year flying on Diamond Eye’s back, listening to the great dragon’s thoughts. She was tuned to them, and now others were leaking through. The hatchlings running amok below. Snippets and flashes, flares of gleeful joy, a hiss of momentary frustration. She shook her head. Too full. Too many things. ‘Lystra leads us from fire to inferno, Tuuran. There is nothing …’ He probably thought she was mad.
‘Holiness, we should slip away.’
Zafir stopped. Among the dragon thoughts one looked back, steady and knowing, and when she closed her eyes and hooded her mind there was a taste to it, as Diamond Eye would say. A scent, a crisping crinkle at the edges, a unique sibilant hiss and crackle.
I see you, little one.
Silence. And I see you, little dragon. Zafir stumbled. She batted Tuuran away as he caught her. Diamond Eye bit off your head. Yet here you are.
The spear, little one.
Touch me for it and I will make a pretty statue of you. The Black Moon would make a new world. And she would carry the Isul Aieha’s spear beside him. Or so he said.
We will stop him.
Are you not afraid, little dragon, that you might lose?
No.
She laughed then, remembering how Silence had hunted her with murder in mind on Baros Tsen’s eyrie. Through cave and tunnel, in darkness and shadow, the dragon Silence would come.
‘Holiness!’ Tuuran was shaking her. ‘Holiness!’
Around her the other Adamantine Men lingered, White Vish and her last few. She touched a hand to Tuuran’s arm. ‘They come, Night Watchman. They come for me and for the Silver King’s spear. The Isul Aieha commanded them once before, and I am no half-god, but he commanded them with that spear and nothing else, and if that is what I must do, then so I shall.’
The look he gave her was half madness, half adoration.
Kataros swung onto another twisted thread of uncertain rope dangling across the shaft. She eased her way along it, sure-footed as a goat, to a crevice they’d not traversed before. She opened another rusted door and unswaddled her lamp and held it in the open and ran through cave and tunnel until she heard a volley of shouts, cracks of lightning and a dragon shriek. The shouts became louder, and then another slew of lightning and a cheer. She rounded a corner where the tunnel spilled into a cavern wide enough to swallow a palace. Dull white alchemical lanterns bobbed, their light pale like a cloud-streaked moon, and between them the raking beams of gold-glass torches carried by the false speaker Zafir and her Adamantine Men. Kataros saw Zafir almost at once, picked out in the light, walking alone with her back to a strange-formed lump of stone, and it was only as Kataros came closer that she saw it was another dragon, jarred helpless by lightning and hacked dead by a dozen Adamantine axes.
Speaker Lystra’s soldiers moved together, pressed tight in a circle of shields. Zafir paced like a restless tiger around them, her handful of men following like they were her cubs.
‘Holiness! Holiness!’ Kataros took the sack from Jasaan and ran ahead, calling out. Zafir and Lystra both turned. ‘Holiness!’ As she drew closer, Kataros tossed her stoppered bottles to Lystra’s Adamantine Men. ‘Drink,’ she shouted. ‘All of you! You know when you leave the Spur how the dragons can find you, and you know we alchemists can make potions to hide you. Here they are. The dragons are hunting us, looking for us. With these they will walk straight past you. So drink. Let the hunted become the hunters!’ She pressed her head to the stone before Speaker Lystra, one hand stretched in offering.
‘What did you do?’ Jasaan hissed as he caught up with her. ‘I saw you tamper with them.’
Kataros ignored him. Lystra took a potion bottle and drank deep.
‘They’re coming for that, not for us.’ Apart from the others, Zafir pointed to the Adamantine Spear. ‘Give it to me and I will lead them away.’
‘And how would you know?’ asked Lystra.
‘Because I talk to them.’ Zafir sw
ooped in close and snatched a bottle from Kataros’s hand, then tossed it to Tuuran. Her eyes fixed on Lystra. ‘To drink this? For a rider? Do you know what it means? I did it once and I couldn’t ride until it was gone, and I would rather have torn out my eyes. A battle swung one way that day when I might have swayed it another.’ She raised the bottle in salute. ‘To the ruins we leave behind us, queen under the Spur.’ She laughed. ‘Queen of Stone, just like your mother.’
A tension drew tight across Kataros’s shoulders. The waiting, the held breath of anticipation. Zafir snatched another flask. ‘The alchemist is right,’ she said. ‘They seek us out. Deny them what they desire.’
She put the bottle to her lips and drank.
Watch me vanish, little dragon Silence. Find me if you can. Zafir ran with Tuuran deeper into the Spur. The dragons were a tightening net, Zafir the rudder, steering between them.
It will not save you.
Their thoughts were hazed and distant. She’d long lost any sense of Diamond Eye, already far away, an absence worse than losing a hand, a leg, the ability to speak. No rider had ever known a bond like theirs, a woken dragon revelling in all its strength, the sorcerous rich air of Takei’Tarr, untainted by a millennium of wings and fire. A thousand years ago half-gods had ridden on Diamond Eye’s back; in moments, now and then, she felt pity that Lystra would never know how it felt. Perhaps Jaslyn, who had glimpsed it, might understand. Perhaps she would find the words to describe it.
