The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  They took off when the eyrie came. First thing they did was have a go at the dragons pulling it through the sky, and there wasn’t any play about that. With Diamond Eye keeping out of the way, wherever he was, the Black Moon had a dozen half-grown dragons doing his bidding now. Six or seven from the mountain went for each. Tuuran saw them in flashes and flickers, in streamers of bright fire and the dull moonlight glow of the eyrie stone, tearing the bound dragons out of the sky and ripping them apart in the starlight. He caught a glimpse, now and then, as pieces of dragon fell in a bloody rain.

  The eyrie drifted on. The victors took its chains and started to pull it away. More flew in from other mountain peaks, up from the Silver City, from across the rolling fields and the distant Raksheh. Starlight lit their wings. They circled the eyrie, swooping in torrents of flame until a violent silver light flared. The eyrie lit up. The dragons pulling the chains vanished. Tuuran didn’t see how or what happened, only that one moment they were there, the next they were gone, swallowed by the night. He reckoned on having a pretty shrewd idea, though. Dissolved into greasy black ash. The Black Moon did it to men, so why not to dragons too?

  The eyrie came on, slow and remorseless, glowing fiercely. Purple lightning criss-crossed its underside, flared and crackled, alive with pent-up possibility, bright in the darkness. It stopped over the Moonlit Mountain and the Black Moon stood on its rim. Brilliant like a nova he was, light bursting from his eyes as bright as the sun. Even his skin glowed. He stood and looked about, and then stepped off the edge and plunged like a falling star, and smashed into the rubble of the mountain top. A shock ring of force spread out around him, a detonation, a shimmer in the air, a cracking of stones. Tuuran felt it shudder through his feet, and then a blast of air knocked him flat.

  Three dragons swooped at once. They doused the Black Moon in fire, not that it made any difference. The half-god stood, oblivious to them, wrapped in a silver aura. Another dragon came, claws stretched to tear the Black Moon to pieces. It dissolved as black dust. The half-god turned to the Queen’s Gate and walked towards it, while dragon after dragon dived to stop him, to burn him, to tear him, to pick him up and hurl him away, to crush him under falling stone, but it made no difference. Their fire bathed him and he barely noticed, and whatever touched him simply turned to ash.

  Didn’t matter. Tuuran dusted himself down and ran ahead to the Queen’s Gate and the High Hall. He stood in the Black Moon’s path, waiting for the half-god to come as the mountain shook under the impacts of stone and dragons, as the night sky flashed with fire. Lazy wafts of scorched air drifted through the gate; and then the Black Moon, sauntering in as though he barely knew what was happening, dissolving the starlight with a brightness all of his own.

  ‘Oi!’ Tuuran might have shoved him. Almost did, but pulled back at the last, thinking of the men and dragons he’d seen turned to ash. ‘Yes. You. Crowntaker. Crazy Mad. Berren still in there? Because if he is then I want a word.’

  The Black Moon didn’t seem to hear. He swatted Tuuran aside as though he was a feather and walked on towards the Grand Stair.

  ‘I want him back. Find someone else. Have me if you must.’ Sod being scared. Tuuran shoved him. Or tried, but it was like pushing at a mountain. He stepped into the half-god’s path again. ‘Oi! I’m talking to you!’

  He didn’t see the knife. The Black Moon must have moved as fast as lightning. Or maybe he simply stopped time. Hard to be sure. All Tuuran knew was that one moment he was standing there, and the next he had the Black Moon’s knife stuck into him.

  Three little cuts. You. Obey. Me.

  ‘Your friend is gone, little one. Make yourself useful. Have a throne set into the summit stone. Bring the spear-carrier and her spear. Have her and my dragons attend me at moonrise. Then when you have done my bidding, little one, be gone. End yourself as you see fit, and give yourself peace.’

  In threes and fours Liang ferried soldiers and alchemists along the Silver King’s Ways, far enough to be out of sight, always making sure she left behind enough men with lightning and axes in case a hatchling came. In the deep night she crept the sled back to the tunnel mouth in case there was a chance to slip back across the Fury gorge. The dragons had gone, but Lystra and her men had disappeared too, and Liang didn’t try to find out where they’d gone.

  It took most of another day to walk and fly the length of the tunnel to the Pinnacles. By the time they were done, Liang was ­exhausted. They walked in two groups, one ahead, one behind, and she ferried constantly back and forth between them, from the rear to the front, and then, when they were all together again, started anew until her eyes blurred with fatigue; but she thought, when they arrived, that perhaps it had been worth it, that perhaps they had come before the Black Moon’s eyrie.

  By the time they reached the Undergates beneath the Moonlit Mountain, Kataros’s head was full of mush. She could see Jasaan wilting too.

  ‘You’d have thought,’ he grumbled, ‘it would be you alchemists who fell over from exhaustion first. Look at them! Old men, half of them, but they just keep on going.’

  Kataros laughed at him. ‘They are alchemists, Jasaan. Even old Bellepheros will still be going when the last of you Adamantine Men collapse. I could give you something if you like?’

  ‘Has your blood in it, does it?’ Jasaan shook his head.

  ‘Everything we do relies on our blood.’

  ‘Then no thanks.’

  ‘You took my potions willingly enough back on the Yamuna.’

  ‘Because back then I didn’t know what it meant! Does it ever wear off?’

  Kataros looked away. ‘No.’

  ‘So we’re all your slaves then? Any time you want us?’

  ‘If you want to look at it that way.’ She glared at him.

  ‘Blood-mages are abominations.’

  ‘Fine. Then all of us are abominations!’ She stormed away.

  She thought Bellepheros would lead them right to the Undergates themselves, but he didn’t. He stopped a little way short and handed out potion skins. ‘The Black Moon will be watching,’ he said. ‘The potions that hide us from dragons hide us from the roving eye of the half-god too, but he will see into the thoughts of the men he has around him. If anyone else sees us then he’ll know we’re here. Best he doesn’t.’ He looked around them. ‘So how do we get in? Scale the mountainside?’

  ‘The scorpion caves,’ said Kataros. She pointed to the night-skin witch’s magic sled. ‘And that.’

  Kataros took them all to the tunnels leading to the old Laughing Dog tavern and climbed the steps to the cellars, looking about to see whether there were any feral men hiding there; when there weren’t she clambered from the ruin and crept through the overgrown streets, watching for dragons. Hundreds of specks circled high in the sky, orbiting the Moonlit Mountain. As she watched, a tight pack of six or seven dived across the city, raking the old artisans’ quarter with fire. She tried to see what they were chasing, but as far as she could tell they weren’t chasing anything at all. She didn’t hear Jasaan come up until he stood beside her.

  ‘It works both ways, you know,’ she said.

  ‘What does?’

  ‘The bond I make with my blood. Whether I like it or not. Zafir killed Garros when she took the spear, did you know that? Stopped his heart with lightning and it didn’t trouble her. Jeiros, Queen Lystra, little Prince Jehal, who do you think she would have spared?’ She sniffed. ‘Anyway, if you think very hard of me, you’ll find that the tether runs the other way too.’

  ‘Blood-magic is an abomination.’ Jasaan’s words were mechanical this time, rote and hollow. He had doubts. That was something, then.

  ‘“Make right what I could not.” That’s what the Silver King said to me in the Black Mausoleum. I still don’t know what it means, but I think the Taiytakei woman is right. We have to stop the half-god.’

  Jasaan looked to the
skies, to the circling dragons around the peak of the Moonlit Mountain. ‘I knew what you’d done,’ he said, ‘and so I went back. I gave Tuuran something you once made for me to return the strength you took from him. I gave him my lightning and a knife. Maybe the dragons found them and ate them anyway, or maybe not. Either way, however they ended is not on your conscience, if you actually have one.’ He sniffed hard. ‘How will you stop a half-god, Kat? Did the Silver King tell you? Even if the night-skin witch finds a way to get her sled out of the tunnels, we’ll never get up there. You’ll never get close. They’ll burn us out of the sky.’

  Kataros didn’t answer. She eased out from the alley behind the Laughing Dog into the old Raksheh Way that led from the Forest Gate into the city’s heart. In years past it would have been crowded even at this time, a bustling jumble of noise and life. She beckoned Jasaan and pointed deeper into the city to the broken emerald dome of the Golden Temple. ‘That’s where I came down.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When Skjorl and I stole a pair of Prince Lai’s wings and jumped out of a cave. That’s where I came down.’

  ‘There?’ Jasaan stared in disbelief. ‘When I jumped they carried me for miles.’

  ‘Because you jumped from the summit.’ She looked back at the green and grey dappled cliffs of the Moonlit Mountain, tracing its sheer face, weaving her eyes through the hanging trails of vines and moss. She pointed at a patch of shadow under a sheet of grey rock, one side swathed in tangled ropes of vivid green creeper. ‘There.’

  ‘The overhang?’

  ‘It’s a cave. The palace labyrinth behind is largely abandoned. Only a few hundred feet above ground. A bold man might even have a go at climbing to it.’

  Jasaan snorted. ‘A bold man on a good clear day and with a kind wind and no rain, and with no dragons circling above, you mean.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She sighed and faced him. ‘I did what I did, Jasaan. I thought it was best. I didn’t kill them. I could have, and maybe I should have, but I didn’t, and I didn’t need you to spare my conscience. I was content enough. Do you see the eyrie?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I’m going to stay here and keep watch then. Someone has to.’

  ‘You want some company?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  The night-skin witch came up as twilight fell, with a sack of glass balls as big as grapefruits. She sat with them in the cellar of the Laughing Dog for hours more, and every time Kataros looked, her pieces of glass were different shapes, until, long past midnight, they were shields almost as tall as a man and a single wedge-like sled that hovered off the ground. The alchemists and the Adamantine Men gathered around her. The witch picked up a handful of glass rods and passed them out.

  ‘These are your lightning throwers. They make a lot of noise. Give them to whoever you think best.’ She dumped the rest of the wands in Jasaan’s arms and went to where half a dozen odd-looking fat-bodied bulbous javelins were propped against the cellar wall, each inside a glass tube like an oversized map case with a curved piece visor near one end. ‘These are your black-powder rockets. Close the back end and it will fire the powder. Hold the glass tube over your shoulder and make sure the visor covers your face. And do make sure you do that unless you don’t mind having your eyes burned out. Point it at whatever you don’t like and wait for the rocket to go off. On the nasty end is a glass bulb with a snip of storm-dark inside. The storm-dark annihilates whatever it touches, and so that should be the end of whatever you hit. If I were you I’d point them at the Black Moon and set them off all at once.’ She shrugged. ‘It might work, it might not. Hard to hit something that’s moving fast like a dragon though. Our rockets were never very accurate.’

  As the night ended and the sun rose they crept across the shattered city, keeping together and keeping to the shadows, slipping from ruin to ruin until they reached the foot of the mountain.

  ‘Who’s first?’ asked the witch. ‘I can take two.’

  Kataros went because she’d been this way before. Jasaan came too. A few minutes later they were hovering outside the entrance to the caves.

  ‘This one,’ Kataros said.

  Moonrise. A slender crescent chasing the sun. Zafir stood on the highest point of the Pinnacles above the Queen’s Gate, the Silver King’s spear in her hand. Myst stood beside her. A terrible thing to ask, but alchemy once again hid her thoughts from dragons, and she would need Diamond Eye, and so Myst would be her dragon’s voice, and it would probably get her killed. Zafir didn’t think she could ever forgive herself for that, but here she was anyway because someone had to be.

  She watched Tuuran below her as he wandered the ruin of the Reflecting Garden, restless and aimless both at once. The Black Moon had demanded a throne, and so Tuuran had brought him one, a flimsy wooden chair that wobbled and barely held together and would have fallen apart if anyone sat on it. A spiteful act of rebellion, and the Black Moon turned it to ash and conjured one of his own, grown from the stone of the mountain itself, flowing like liquid butter and adorned with a tormented dragon writhing along each armrest. Crystals of ice spread across its surface, little white lines like twigs and branches of tiny trees.

  ‘Tuuran!’

  ‘What?’ He came to her slow and reluctant, like a dog to his master’s side after a beating, full of prowling discontent.

  ‘It’s beautiful here today,’ Zafir said. There were no clouds, no rain. A hot sun beat down, mingling with the cold air, a steady wind blowing from the north, dry from the deserts. She pointed her spear at the moon on the horizon. ‘Why does this matter to him? Moonrise? Who does anything at moonrise?’

  Tuuran didn’t answer.

  ‘He cut you, didn’t he?’

  Tuuran didn’t answer that either, but he didn’t need to; his face said it all. Fury and crushing despair all at once. When she put a hand on his shoulder he flinched.

  ‘He’s gone, Tuuran.’

  ‘No.’ He wouldn’t look at her. ‘He’s still in there. Somewhere.’

  ‘The Crowntaker wouldn’t have let him cut you. He never did before.’

  ‘He is in there, Holiness. He. Is. Still. There.’ Tuuran was trembling. ‘Yes. He cut me, and he told me to end myself after I brought you here. As I see fit, he said. So you’ll open the door to the Silver Sea, Holiness, and I’ll push him inside, and it will kill me, but the Black Moon will be gone for ever, and Crazy will come back, and that is how I see fit.’

  She didn’t press for more, for how he might manage such a feat. She thought he might strangle her if she did.

  The Black Moon turned to look at her then. The wind abruptly dropped. Tuuran froze and so did Myst beside her. Everything fell silent. Everything stopped except for the Black Moon, walking slowly up the stone path towards her. Zafir stayed exactly as she was, watching him come, too shocked by the sudden stillness of the world to move. Tuuran had seen this once, so he said, out in the deserts of Takei’Tarr when the Black Moon had first woken. And in Diamond Eye’s memories Zafir had seen the Isul Aieha do the same when Diamond Eye had snatched his spear. The stillness she’d felt in the dragon’s memory of that moment. There was nothing quite like it. The Black Moon had stopped time.

  The half-god stood in front of her. The world snapped into ­motion. The wind blew again. She felt Tuuran’s quivering.

  ‘Give me the spear,’ the Black Moon said.

  The spear was all she had. She hesitated a moment, and then handed it to him. The Black Moon gripped it tight. His face screwed up in agony. Silver fire burst from his eyes, and ice-white cracks spread along his arm as he lifted the spear and aimed it at the rising moon. ‘Do you see me?’ he cried, a roll of thunder enough to make mountains shiver. ‘Do you see me?’ He handed the spear back to her. ‘Call them,’ he said. ‘Call the dragons, spear-carrier.’

  ‘How?’

  He whirled at her and slam
med a hand into her face and drove his fingers into her skull, and for a moment she felt him inside her, rushing through her, a whirlwind maelstrom of unbearable power.

  ‘Like this,’ he said.

  The knowledge was there before her, the keys to the Silver King’s spear unlocked. She summoned the dragons as he asked, all of them, while the Black Moon raised his hands to the sky and locked his eyes on the distant moon.

  Bellepheros led them through the Enchanted Palace. The Silver King’s maze eluded him. The Hall of Mirages remained a mystery, as did the routes to the arches and the carvings and all the palace’s other innermost secrets. But from the cave where Kataros had flown she took a shaft to the old reflection cells that had been her prison while Hyrkallan decided how to be rid of her, where Zafir had held Hyrkallan himself, and from there Bellepheros guided them to the Gold Hall beyond the Undergates where a pair of dragon-riders sat in mute boredom, keeping watch against errant dragons. They looked at Bellepheros, curious, and then at the men who came after him. At Jasaan holding a lightning thrower, not quite pointing it at them but not quite not. At the other alchemists, and then Adamantine Men they’d never seen before, and Jeiros in his wheeled chair, and Jasaan and Kataros circling behind, perhaps simply to walk on through and make way for those who were following, or perhaps not.

  ‘Alchemist?’ The watchmen rose slowly, wary now. Riders who had once flown with Hyrkallan, who had been taught that al­chemists were devils.