The Empire of Ashes (The Draconis Memoria)

by Anthony Ryan

  * * *

  • • •

  She watched Tinkerer’s face closely as Makario lifted his hands from the pianola and the last note faded. The Follies of Cevokas, according to the musician’s judgement, was as inane and trite a piece of musical doggerel as he had ever heard. However, once he had reproduced the entire score on paper close examination of the text revealed one short melody of interest in the third act. It was hidden in a lyrically dense song known as “Cevokas the Genius,” in which the ever-pompous titular character reeled off a list of his intellectual achievements accompanied by a jaunty high-tempo tune. Once the tempo was slowed something far more elegant and familiar began to emerge.

  “It’s definitely her,” Makario reported. “Empress Azireh’s handiwork concealed within a comic operetta of little distinction. It’s rather like finding a pearl in a pile of turds.”

  “A shared joke, perhaps,” Lizanne mused, her gaze still lingering on Tinkerer, his face as pale and immobile as before. “A secret between lovers.” She imagined Azireh playing the tune for Alestine, first at the original speed then faster, perhaps improvising the lyrics. How they must have giggled together, she thought. Another secret shared between the princess and the Fiddly Girl.

  “When this is over,” she said to Makario, “you might want to examine some other operettas of the period. I suspect Azireh penned quite a few. Doctor,” she went on, glancing at Dr. Weygrand, “if you would, please.”

  Madame Hakugen had given over a large two-storey building for use as the settlement’s clinic, though it had required considerable repair and cleaning before Dr. Weygrand consented to occupy it. Tinkerer had been placed in an upstairs room along with a pianola where Makario laboured to craft the music that might wake him. However, the artificer remained as immobile as ever, forcing Lizanne to conclude that another trance was required.

  The doctor betrayed some hesitation before moving to the bottle suspended from a metal stand at Tinkerer’s bedside. The bottle contained a mix of saline and powdered nutrients needed to keep the comatose patient alive these past weeks. A rubber tube trailed from it, ending in a needle inserted into the vein in Tinkerer’s forearm. Despite the attentions of Dr. Weygrand and his small staff of orderlies, Tinkerer had grown ever more thin and pale as the days went by and Lizanne didn’t need any expert advice to deduce he didn’t have many more left.

  “The last trance didn’t do him much good,” Weygrand pointed out. He had prepared a syringe of Blue, high-quality Ironship product provided by Alzar Lokaras, but seemed reluctant to push the needle into the cork seal at the base of the bottle. “Who’s to say the next one won’t kill him?”

  “He’s already dying,” Lizanne said. “And we need him. Please proceed, Doctor.”

  Weygrand nodded, swallowing a sigh as he depressed the plunger on the syringe, sending a cloud of amber fluid into the bottle. Lizanne waited until the product had faded, indicating it was all now running through Tinkerer’s veins, then gestured for Makario to play the tune once more. She unstoppered her own vial of Blue and kept careful watch on Tinkerer’s face as the melody filled the room. At first there was no reaction, then she saw the faint circular shadow on his closed lids as his eyes began to move—a clear signal of a dream state.

  “This may take some time,” she said, raising the vial to her lips.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Makario promised, which made her smile just as the room disappeared and she found herself in darkness.

  At first she thought she had been cast into a void, some blank vacuum left by Tinkerer’s vanished mind, but then she saw a burst of yellow flame directly ahead. It was bright enough to illuminate the uneven walls of the tunnel in which she stood, at the same time filling it with a roar of pain and rage of sufficient volume to force her to clamp her hands over her ears. The flame faded along with the roar, although this time the darkness wasn’t so absolute. The flames had evidently found a target judging by the flickering glow rising from a dark shape lying at what she recognised as the end of this tunnel.

  Lizanne started forward then stopped as her foot came close to tripping over something. Looking down she saw the disordered and scaled features of a Spoiled, slackened in death. Alestine’s friend from the clearing, she realised, recognising the monochrome war-paint on the Spoiled’s face. Tree Speaker.

  Another gout of flame snapped her gaze to the end of the tunnel, although the roar that accompanied it was far weaker now. As the flames faded she heard a ragged rasp of indrawn breath followed by a high-pitched rattle that told of a drake in immense pain. Remembering Alestine’s warning about the real risk of injury in this trance, she waited until the rattle had died away before starting forward again. Sinking to her haunches at the end of the tunnel, she crouched close to the wall and peered out at a huge cavern, the floor of which featured a tower of some kind.

  Bone tower, she surmised, recalling Clay’s shared memories of the White’s lair and Arberus’s tale of his expeditions to the Interior. The tower rose from the centre of a scorched circle on the cavern floor. Slumped against its base was a White Drake, blood seeping in a thick stream from the large iron spike protruding from its rib-cage. It let out a plaintive moan as Lizanne stepped out from the tunnel, but seemed to show no sign of noticing her presence, tail coiling in twitches of diminishing intensity. Lizanne judged its size as perhaps half that of the beast Clay had found beneath the Coppersoles, which still made it larger than an adult Red and comparable to a youthful Black. The only light came from the flaming corpse lying a few yards within the scorched circle. The flames had consumed it so completely it was impossible to tell if it had been human or Spoiled.

  Lizanne gave a start as a cascade of dust descended from above, along with a shower of displaced stones. Her gaze jerked upwards to the roof of the cavern, her ears detecting the sound of claws frantically skittering on stone.

  “We thought there would only be one.”

  Lizanne spun in alarm as Alestine stepped into the light, offering a grin of welcome that seemed impossibly broad, too many teeth gleaming in the glow of the fire. Burned, Lizanne realised as Alestine turned her gaze upward. Much of the flesh around her lower jaw and upper neck had been seared, along with her left ear. The impossible grin was in fact the result of half her lips having been burned away.

  “Actually, there were two,” Alestine went on, speaking in a wet rasp. “A male and a female, and she was pregnant. I had hoped her wounds were fatal.” She pointed at a stream of blood visible in the continuing cascade of dust and stone. “That she would crawl away and die somewhere along with the egg growing in her womb. But in my heart I knew it could never be that simple.” Her gaze settled on the dying male White. “I had to know. Excuse me a moment.”

  Alestine abruptly collapsed onto her hands and knees and began a slow painful crawl towards the dying White. It lay almost immobile now, chest rising and falling in ever-slower and more laboured breaths. But its eyes were still bright, Lizanne recognising the hate in its gaze as Alestine crawled near.

  “One of my last inventions,” she said upon reaching the beast’s side, her voice free of the pain that made her arm tremble as she raised it to grip the iron spike protruding from the rib-cage. “Or rediscoveries to be fully accurate. The ancients had an alloy that could pierce anything if fashioned into a point and projected with sufficient force. I had enough Black for a killing thrust, but we only had one spear.”

  She gripped the spike tighter and jerked it, provoking a convulsive thrash from the White. Blood steamed in the heat blossoming from its maw as it raised its head, neck coiling in a final attempt to roast its tormentor. Alestine raised herself up, grunting with the effort of twisting the spike then driving it deeper. The White’s last flames subsided into smoke, its head thudding onto the stone floor. The tail and the wings continued to twitch but the dull, empty gleam of its eyes told the tale clearly.

  “Tree Speaker’s pe
ople carried the old stories,” Alestine said, slumping against the dead drake’s flank. “Treasured them throughout the ages. At first, I could scarcely believe what they told me. The White was real, and once it came close to burning this continent to ash, perhaps the rest of the world into the bargain. So great was its malice that it twisted the people here, made them into deformed two-legged versions of itself, a whole continent of willing slaves. But there were those who resisted, kept the kernel of humanity burning within themselves, and in time they fought back, with the help of the Blacks.”

  “How?” Lizanne said, moving closer to crouch at the Artisan’s side. “How did they beat it?”

  “The White could control all drakes but the Blacks. It could control humans it Spoiled, but not the Blood-blessed. It needed something to match them, match their abilities, but it never found it. Through battle and guile and courage the Blood-blessed freed enough Spoiled to ally with the Blacks and bring it down, though by the time the war was won their civilisation that once flourished here had fallen to rubble. The enslaved Spoiled, maddened by the loss of their god, hunted their free enemies mercilessly. After decades and centuries of persecution, only Tree Speaker and his tribe were left.”

  Alestine cast a stricken, wet-eyed glance at the burning corpse lying close by. “Meeting me sealed their fate. When I told them I had deciphered writings telling of an ancient White sleeping in the caverns beneath this temple they had no choice but to follow me. Every warrior they sent died here, meaning their young will be defenceless. The other Spoiled will destroy them now. But what else could I do?” She turned to Lizanne, tears streaming from her eyes into her ruined flesh. “It couldn’t be allowed to rise again. They knew that.”

  She held Lizanne’s gaze, beseeching some kind of absolution. But Lizanne was not a priest.

  “What did it need?” she said, seeing the distress on Alestine’s face dissipate at the hardness of her tone. “You said it needed something to match the Blood-blessed. What was it?”

  “What else could it be?” the Artisan said with a shrug. “A Blood-blessed of its own of course. One with the right kind of mind.”

  “What kind of mind?”

  Alestine blinked and turned away, grunting in pain as she shifted closer to the rivulet of blood still flowing from the wound the iron spike had torn in the White’s hide. “Madness is a common trait amongst humans,” she said. “But the non-Blessed are many and we are few. And it needed to be the right pitch of madness, coloured with enough cruelty, envy and resentment to see what it intended for the world as right and just. All those centuries ago it never found the right mind. In your time, it would be more fortunate.”

  She leaned closer to the stream of blood, face tense in expectation and fear.

  “You drank,” Lizanne said. “You drank and saw that it would rise again.”

  “I saw . . .” Alestine lifted a trembling hand and touched her fingers to the blood, wincing as the tips turned white in the flow. “Many things, Lizanne. Terrible and beautiful, cruel and kind. For that is life, and I saw it all. But there was a greater gift to be had here.”

  She reached into her pocket and drew out a flask, drinking down the contents in a few gulps before tossing it aside. Lizanne saw the strength flood Alestine’s body as the Green took hold, the woman rising to her feet and taking a firmer grip on the iron spike with both hands. A few hard tugs and she had drawn it out, raising it to let the diminishing flames play on the dark, near-black substance on the spear-point tip.

  “The heart-blood of a White,” she said. “For someone who had spent much of her life seeking knowledge, how could I resist it?”

  Alestine pressed her ruined mouth to the spear-point, jerking in agony as the blood made its way past her exposed teeth and down her throat. The cavern disappeared, leaving them floating in what Lizanne at first took for some kind of giant fish-bowl. Forms swirled around them, some indistinct, others vibrant and shimmering with colour. They were constantly shifting, a formless misty swirl one second then a human face or a fully realised body, sometimes naked, sometimes clothed. There were men and women, infants and elderly. Lizanne realised she could hear them, a thousand voices babbling at once. Not voices, she realised. Thoughts. These are minds.

  “Indeed they are,” Alestine said. She floated close by, whole and beautiful once again, a mix of wonder and dismay on her face as she surveyed the swirling minds. “Every Blood-blessed drawing breath at the moment I drank the White’s blood. And they were all mine. All I had to do was reach out and take one.”

  One of the shimmering minds veered towards them, Lizanne recognising the face of a woman in the misty shape. “Curious thing about heart-blood,” Alestine mused. “The abilities it conveys never fade. They are seared into your being, an eternal gift . . . or a curse. And one that can be shared.” She flicked her hand and the woman’s mind flew away, soon lost amongst the multitude.

  “This is how you called the first one to you in Scorazin,” Lizanne said. “And how he called the next.”

  “Yes. A great and unforgivable sin. But one I had to commit if this world was to survive. There wasn’t just heart-blood on the spear. I saw what was coming, and I saw you and I saw the clever boy and knew it was my role to bring you together.”

  The huge fish-bowl turned into a grey mist, which soon coalesced into something familiar. Lizanne found herself regarding walls of uneven stone lit by the light of an oil-lamp. She turned at the sound of scraping chalk and saw Tinkerer at the smooth patch of wall he used as a blackboard. The flat surface was covered in an incomprehensible mélange of numbers and formulae, some of it so dense the stone was completely covered in chalk. He gave no sign of having noticed Lizanne’s presence, his hand moving in a blur as it added yet more wisdom to the wall.

  “It wasn’t like this when I lived here,” Alestine said in a croak, appearing at Lizanne’s side. “The others must’ve enlarged it over the years.” Her form had recovered its wounds, though the burns appeared much older now, the scars pink and mottled rather than puckered and blackish red. Lizanne could see wrinkles on her undamaged skin and she stood with a pronounced stoop, grey hair hanging over her ruined face in slack, unwashed tendrils.

  “How did you come to be here?” Lizanne asked.

  “I wrote a letter to an old friend when I returned to the Empire.” Alestine moved to peer at Tinkerer’s wall, frowning in bafflement. “And I thought I was clever,” she muttered.

  “Azireh,” Lizanne said. “She put you here.”

  “It was what I asked for, somewhere to hide and remain hidden for all time. A reward for all the marvellous trinkets I brought back from Arradsia. She was effusive in her thanks and prompt in granting my request, but never came for a visit, not that I blame her. No doubt the Imperial agents who escorted me here gave her a fulsome report on my appearance. Hey, boy!” She snapped her fingers beside Tinkerer’s ear. “Not polite to ignore your guests, you know.”

  Tinkerer’s chalk kept moving and he betrayed no indication of having heard her. “Always knew he’d be a rude bugger,” Alestine said, aiming a cuff at the back of Tinkerer’s head but her fingers passed through. “Not my mind, y’see,” she told Lizanne. “This is all his. Doesn’t want to see me so he doesn’t.” She leaned closer to Tinkerer, shouting into his ear. “Can’t stay in here forever though, can you?”

  Lizanne went to stand at Tinkerer’s shoulder, looking closely at his face, which displayed the habitual blankness that overtook him when he lost himself in a task. Perhaps he doesn’t want to come back, she thought, turning her gaze on the mass of calculus. Perhaps this is all he wants. She fought down an upswell of guilt as she raised her hand and placed it over his, stopping the chalk in its tracks. What he wants doesn’t matter. Alestine had a task and so do I.

  “Looks like he’s happy to see you,” Alestine said, moving away. “Time for me to go, I think.”

  “Wait,” Liza
nne said. “You said the ancient Blood-blessed freed some of the Spoiled. How?”

  “I don’t know. Tree Speaker’s people had no tale to tell on that score. The White’s blood showed me a battle, great and terrible, Spoiled and human and drake locked in a struggle to the death. You were there, Lizanne, fighting and bleeding.”

  “Do we win?”

  Alestine’s aged and stooped form slipped away and she was once again the same woman Lizanne had met in the clearing, beautiful and brave but now with a vast weight of guilt behind her eyes.

  “I saw nothing beyond this,” she told Lizanne. “This song is played out and now will end, as all songs must.” She cast a final, unreadable glance at Tinkerer and stepped away, disappearing into the wall and leaving them alone.

  Lizanne turned back to Tinkerer, finding herself shocked by his wide and fearful eyes. “I . . .” he began, faltering over the words in a halting rasp. “I have been here a very long time. Months, I think. Perhaps years. Perhaps longer. I couldn’t count the minutes, or the hours or the days. It was . . . disturbing.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lizanne said. “But we can leave now.”

  He frowned at her, utterly baffled. “How?”

  “She’s gone. This is your mind and your trance. Just decide to wake up.”

  Tinkerer’s brow smoothed, eyes sliding from her face as he lost himself in momentary calculation. “Oh,” he said. “Very well.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Lizanne blinked and found herself in darkness once again, though the moonlight streaming through the window revealed her to be back in Tinkerer’s infirmary room. The lack of light was puzzling, however, as was the chill in the air which she assumed resulted from the fact that the window was open. She saw Makario slumped at the pianola and began to speak his name, then stopped when she saw something dark dripping over the keys. Tearing her gaze away she scanned the room, coming to a halt at the sight of Dr. Weygrand’s body lying close to the door.