by Stephen Deas
‘Let them come.’ What was the point in running. Run to where? To the Pinnacles to throw herself on the mercy of Zafir’s sister, if anyone there was still alive? She’d seen inside the Silver King’s Enchanted Palace for a while. Had a good look around. If anywhere could hold, it would be the Pinnacles. But hold for what? For how long?
The dragons she’d seen were coming straight for her. Fifty or sixty of them. She pulled herself to her feet, struggling to find the will to move. She looked at little Jehal in her arms, wrapped up tight and warm and asleep, without the first idea of the world he’d been born to. She had to force herself not to give him up, hand him over to one of her Adamantine Men and send him running for shelter, or back to her riders who were still cowering in the Silver King’s Ways, getting hungrier by the day.
‘I hope you’re ready to die well,’ she said. She didn’t bother putting on her helm, looking out across the Fury gorge as the dragons flew in towards her. Instead she unwrapped little Jehal from his dragonscale basket and held him in his blanket. ‘When the fire comes,’ she murmured. ‘It will be quick.’
The dragons rose overhead and circled. One by one they landed. They formed a semicircle, pinning her against the cliff. Fifty dragons, give or take.
‘Does it have to be this way?’ she railed. ‘Can’t you just win?’ She’d told herself she wouldn’t be afraid. She had really thought she wouldn’t, but now, as the end came, she found she was. It wasn’t so much for herself, but dragons liked to play with their food. They toyed with the people they cornered, eking out their terror. She thought for a moment of tossing little Jehal over the cliff and being done with it, just so they wouldn’t have him.
The last dragon to land was colossal, a real monster, as big as a dragon got. Its scales were red and gold; its wounds were deep and terrible, and it wore them with a fierce and ghastly pride. A rider sat on his back. Dressed in fractured glass and battered gold and shreds of dragonscale. She carried a spear.
Zafir slid to the ground. She took off her helm and laid it down, and then the spear beside it and her gauntlets too. She regarded Lystra steadily as she did, then walked slowly closer until they stood face to face, an outstretched arm apart.
‘I won’t bow to you,’ Lystra said. She half expected Zafir to simply reach out and push her, to topple her off the edge of the cliff.
‘I’m sorry about your sister,’ Zafir said. ‘She was a little bit mad, but I liked her best of all of you. Perhaps the madness was why. You will do better with this than I ever did.’
She pulled the Speaker’s Ring from her finger and dropped it to the dirt at Lystra’s feet. Then turned and walked back to her dragon and flew away.
Xibaiya
The Black Moon crashes spitting into Xibaiya, pinned helpless by the spectre of the Adamantine Spear. Silence takes him in her jaws. She has been waiting. And though the Black Moon howls and screams and threatens and begs, though the dead goddess is loose unfettered upon the world once more with all the horror she will bring, though the Black Moon alone cannot cage the Nothing, the dragon Silence carries the Black Moon there nonetheless, and hurls him to be devoured, all without a word.
Epilogue
Three years after landfall
‘The speaker Zafir flew to her Enchanted Palace that very day with a single dragon egg. Atop her mountain fortress she slew her dragon Diamond Eye with the Silver King’s spear and released him from his promise to serve her one of his many lifetimes. Later that day he hatched again from the egg they’d carried together. He found Zafir waiting for him dressed in simple silks, fearless. When he was ready she led him through the Hall of Mirages to the Silver King’s gateways and touched the Adamantine Spear to the archways there. One after another they opened to the Silver Sea. The two of them stood together before the gates and waited, the dragon-queen and her dragon, and Diamond Eye let every one of his brothers and sisters ride his thoughts and eyes to share what he saw: the Silver Kings walking across the Silver Sea to greet him and welcome him, finally, to be with them, to become again the half-god that every dragon had been before the Black Moon came. And when the dragon Diamond Eye had shown the end that waited for any who wished it, he turned away and chose to stay with the dragon-queen for one lifetime more. And in the days and months that followed, dragon after dragon came, hatchlings freshly woken, and the dragon-queen led each one of them home and thanked them for their choice.
‘In twos and threes the men who lived in the Enchanted Palace left her there and walked away. They had lived without the sun while she was gone and now they wanted it back. There weren’t enough people left anywhere alive to rebuild the Adamantine Palace, but a little life returned to the Silver City, and a small town grew beside the Mirror Lakes on the fringes of the old City of Dragons, though only the brave and desperate went in among the ruins, foraging for tools or clothes, or perhaps simply stone for building homes, and always finding bones.
‘The dragons honoured their pact. We saw them often in those early days, but they left us alone and slowly we came to trust their peace. As the months turned to years they diminished. There are a handful of them left now, but they are hardly ever seen.
‘Jasaan and the other Adamantine Men, the true ones who had always been a part of the legion, were among the first to leave her. The Taiytakei witch flew them back to the Adamantine Palace on her sled to serve their new speaker. We sent a few off across the realms, to Furymouth and Sand and Evenspire and Bazim Crag to see if there were survivors, to hunt out the caves and the old eyries and castles and palaces, the tunnels and the alchemists. The alchemist Kataros went with them, though Jasaan had asked her to stay. But she said she would know where to look, and so off they went to spread the word that the terror was over. We didn’t think we would see them again, but they came back in time, most of them. They told stories, sometimes, of how now and then a dragon had helped them.
‘Jasaan? Black Ayz died under the Spur fighting dragons, so Jasaan became our Night Watchman, though there seems little need for a legion of Adamantine Men any more. The alchemists Bellepheros and Jeiros and a few of the others threw in their lot with the witch. They came to the palace before they left and told us where and why and promised they would return now and then to do what they could, but that there was no place here for alchemy without dragons. Bellepheros said it was because of the Statue Plague, spreading across the other worlds, that he and the others wanted to be useful. But the truth was simply that he was in love with the Taiytakei witch, and she with him, and she wanted to be back among her people, and he was content to follow her. Two old sorcerers in their twilight years.’
Lystra sighed and stroked little Jehal’s hair. ‘That was a year after the pact, and the last time we saw the dragon-queen Zafir. She came with them, riding on the back of a yearling. She didn’t say much. But she looked at you for a very long time. She said you looked like him. That you have his eyes. And so you do.’
She laughed. ‘He was a glorious lover, your father, and an arrogant selfish prick too, and we both loved him, and because of that …’ She shook her head. ‘Zafir went back to her empty mountain. No one sees her any more, the crazy dragon-queen in her ghost palace with her dragon, where hatchlings sometimes arrive but never leave. They say she has explored all of the Silver King’s enchanted palace and knows every one of its secrets, but that there is still one dark room she keeps sealed and never enters. They say she flies out now and then to hunt down dragons that forget the pact they made. She turns them to stone, but she always takes an egg and carries it home so they might hatch in front of the gate to the Silver Sea. When you’re older, Jehal, and wandering the world and you see a dragon made of stone, you’re seeing the story of her passing.’
Lystra went to the door and opened it. She shivered in the icy wind which blew even in the shelter of the old palace walls. ‘And Tuuran? I would have made him Night Watchman. Jasaan said I should. But he wouldn’t leave the
dragon-queen until she forced him to go, and when he did, he left with the Taiytakei witch and the alchemists and the dragon-queen’s handmaidens. She sent them all away. They say there was another child who went with them, the dragon-queen’s child, and that Tuuran was its father, but that’s just a story. They say too that the man who became the Black Moon, who had once been Tuuran’s friend, had had a twin or some such left behind. A brother perhaps, and that Tuuran meant to look for him, that he meant to find his old friend again. But one should not pay much attention to stories, little Jehal.’
Lystra stepped outside into the snow. She climbed the ice-covered walls of the old Adamantine Palace and looked up at the sky. It was clear today, and the air was bitter. She pulled her dragonscale coat tighter. Riders once wore it to keep fire at bay; it had never crossed their thoughts that it might keep out the cold. The dragon-realms had never been cold when she was young. Raised in the desert, she’d never seen the snow.
She stared at the sky, at the halo of fire that was the midday sun wrapped around the black disc of the new dark moon. She looked at the stars, the bright ones that were visible even in the day now, in the dim perpetual twilight.
‘No one knows what became of the half-god,’ she whispered to the wind. ‘But now that the dark moon has risen to devour the sun, now that the dead goddess is loose, now that the world slowly dies in ice, they whisper at night that the dragon-queen will emerge from her fortress one day and carry the Silver King’s spear, and return to save us all.’
She turned away. ‘But I knew her well, little Jehal, and I wouldn’t count on it.’
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Simon Spanton, devourer of unnecessary prologues, who asked for dragons and got more than he bargained for. To Marcus Gipps and Robert Dinsdale for their editorial work. To Hugh Davis for copy-editing all my dragons, and to the proofreaders whose names I’ve rarely known. To Stephen Youll for his gorgeous covers. With thanks to all the people who read A Memory of Flames and talked about it. Thank you to lovers of dragons everywhere. Thank you to all the alchemists and enchantresses. Thank you for reading this.
This will be the last dragon book for a while, perhaps for ever. It’s been long and glorious and sometimes exhausting, and yes, there are other stories that could be told, but this one was for Zafir, not for anyone else. To this day I don’t quite know where she came from. I had something quite different planned when I started, but when it didn’t work out the way I thought it would, Zafir rose from the ashes. I’ll tell you a story, she said, but you might not like me very much.
If it happens that you did, then please say so. Loudly and to lots of people, and maybe, now and then, to me.
The Bloody Judge
Six years before landfall
Men pressed him from all sides, crushed together. His own soldiers pushed against his back and to either side. The enemy were forced before him by their own numbers. He met them with remorseless savagery, slashing and stabbing, reaching for any inch of unguarded flesh. The black moonsteel edge of his sword glittered in the sunlight. Dark as night and sharp as broken glass, it shattered steel and splintered bone with a hunger all of its own. Spears and swords broke. Armour ripped open like skin beneath a tiger’s claw. Entrails spilled across the ground to join the bloody mess of severed heads and arms. His feet slipped and slid beneath him. Sweat stung his eyes. The air stank of iron and death, while blood ran down his blade and over his gauntlets. A part of him forgot his name, forgot why he was there, forgot everything and gave itself over to the savage he kept inside, letting it fill up every pore, every hair, every thought.
There was a peace to killing. He’d always found it so.
The enemy broke and ran. He watched them go, scattering into the long grass, racing for the line of trees ahead. The savage inside wanted their blood, but the savage was on a leash, always.
My name is Berren. Berren the Bloody Judge. Berren the Crowntaker.
A last knot of soldiers ran at him, one mad suicidal charge. He drove his moonsteel blade through the first man’s mail and into his heart. Blood sprayed as he snapped the sword away, and then the grey sorcerer in their midst was in front of him. Berren drove his sword through heavy robes, through flesh and blood and bone until the point emerged from the man’s spine. It was the easiest thing in the world.
The rest turned and ran. Madness.
The grey sorcerer pressed a strip of sigiled paper to Berren’s chest. He clawed a handful of his own blood and threw it at Berren’s face. Then crumpled and fell, lips drawn back across his teeth, grinning blankly at the clear blue sky.
‘For Saffran,’ he breathed.
The world blurred and Berren fell. Something oozed inside his head. Something from a dark place. It pushed through him, clambering over him, squeezing him back. Huge and vast and ablaze like the full moon, it bloomed in an explosion of silver light as Berren tumbled screaming into darkness.
In the light of the battlefield, surrounded by the faces of strangers, the Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge of Tethis, opened his eyes. He looked about him at a world fresh and full of gawping faces. He tore the half-ripped sigil from his breast and got to his feet. Alive as he had never been.
‘Let’s be at it then, lads,’ he said.
A flare of silver moonlight flashed across his eyes.
Also by Stephen Deas from Gollancz
The Adamantine Palace
The King of the Crags
The Order of the Scales
The Black Mausoleum
The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice
The Warlock’s Shadow
The King’s Assassin
Dragon Queen
The Splintered Gods
Writing as Nathan Hawke
Gallow: The Crimson Shield
Gallow: Cold Redemption
Gallow: The Last Bastion
Gallow: The Anvil (eBook only)
Gallow: Solace (eBook only)
Gallow: Dragon’s Reach (eBook only)
Co-Writing as Gavin Deas:
Elite: Wanted
Empires: Extraction
Empires: Infiltration
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Stephen Deas 2015
All rights reserved.
The right of Stephen Deas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London ec4y 0dz
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2015 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10064 0
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.stephendeas.com
www.orionbooks.co.uk
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