by Stephen Deas
‘There’s people up on the ridge,’ he said when he came back down. ‘Slavers, maybe.’
Crazy seemed to give that some thought. ‘I want a ship to take me home,’ he said. ‘You want to find the woman who flies dragons. There’s nothing for either of us here so it’s either the sea or the desert.’ He shrugged. ‘And like you said, I don’t see any ships. They’ll want paying though.’ He set off again. Tuuran let Crazy pull the sled a while and rummaged through the bag of stuff he’d looted from the sea lord’s palace. Silver coins, golden feathers, jade carvings, polished stones, anything that had caught his eye. Like a magpie.
‘Plenty here,’ he said.
The outskirts of Dhar Thosis seemed as deserted as the rest, but Tuuran knew better because he saw signs now and then: a flicker of movement that was too big to be a dog or a lizard; a body too recent to have died in the battle; one time he heard the sound of running feet. He felt eyes on him again, only here the eyes were human, peering out through cracked walls and from behind closed curtains. Here, on the fringe of the desert, the streets, where there were any at all, were trampled sand and dirt. The houses were a mishmash of wood, of pieces of stone and mud brick, mostly simple huts. Doors were strips of sailcloth and roofs too. They passed burrows dug into the sand framed with old wood with hanging canvas or pieces of sacking for doors. When Tuuran peered inside, he found they were only a few yards deep, little more than places to sleep out of the sun. They were cool but they were empty, and after the third he stopped looking. Sometimes, when he was sure he was being watched, he stopped and held up his arms, palms outward, showing off the brands of a sword-slave, the lightning-bolt scars of the lord of Xican. He wore them with pride now, those brands, for the sea lord of Xican had faced a dragon and it had broken his mind, and Tuuran had faced many and never wavered once. Each time he showed off his brands he felt the air fall still and dead as if the streets themselves held their breath. Those brands had been here before.
Tuuran and Crazy walked on. The sea was a mile to their backs now and the land was barren earth where nothing grew but tufts of spiny grass. As they climbed the ridge, Tuuran could see men moving about or sitting under sun shelters around their morning fires. They ignored him at first, then, with the drilled precision of a legion of the Adamantine Guard, a dozen of them stopped what they were doing, picked up spears with bulbous hafts and blunt hooks near their points for tripping and clubbing and beating, and started down the slope. Tuuran stopped and held up his hands, showing off his brands and making a gesture of peace.
‘We’re here to trade.’ He glanced along the ridge at the shelters but he didn’t see anything that looked like a slave cage. He opened his bag and took out a golden owl. Everyone liked gold, didn’t they? He cast a sideways glance at Crazy Mad. ‘If they come for us, you got my my back, right?’
The desert men came on, calm and without fuss, but they kept their spears high. A sinking sensation wormed through Tuuran’s guts. He dropped the golden owl back into his bag of treasures and took the axe off his back instead, shook his head and set his eyes on the leader of the desert men, a narrow wiry man, tall but thin.
‘Oi! Skinny! You don’t want to do this. You might have the numbers but you’ll be first. You will be first.’
A charge, a feint with the point of the spear and then a hook at the legs, that’s what he’d do, and Tuuran would jump over the hook, move in and split the skinny shit with his axe right down the middle. But they didn’t charge and they didn’t stop coming either. They circled him instead, keeping their distance, cautious but penning him and Crazy together. Crazy hadn’t bothered to draw his sword.
‘You come one way or the other, slave,’ said the skinny desert man.
Tuuran roared at them, ‘Well then? I say I kill three of you before you touch me.’
Skinny shrugged. ‘At least with us you get food and water.’
‘Got food and water here, thanks all the same.’ Tuuran gritted his teeth. ‘Crazy, at least draw your sword. You’re good for a handful of these camel shaggers. The two of us, we might just take them.’
They wouldn’t though. Twelve was too many unless Crazy did the thing he did when his eyes went all silver and turned men into greasy black ash, which was sort of what Tuuran had been counting on. Admittedly, Crazy claimed that that hadn’t ever actually happened and Tuuran hadn’t actually seen it either, just an empty space where three men had been only a few seconds before and two screaming women and a cloud of sticky black dust in the air. But then there was the whole business about the holes in Crazy’s armour, like something had gone straight though him and yet never cut his skin.
Crazy drew his sword, slowly and carefully, held it sideways in front of him and dropped it onto the sand. ‘Let it be, big man. They’re taking us where we want to go after all.’
‘What?’
Crazy walked to the ring of desert men, arms held up. He dropped to his knees in front of them and bowed his head. Tuuran watched in disbelief as two of them tied his hands. The silver eyes never came. No one turned into dust. Nothing happened at all. Crazy just let himself be taken; and after that making a fight of it all on his own didn’t seem to make much sense. Tuuran let his axe fall too, let his shield hang and stared as three of them led Crazy away. The others gathered close, keeping their spear points an inch from his skin while Skinny tied his hands. They led him to the top of the ridge, following Crazy’s footsteps in the sand, and now he felt stupid because on the other side of the ridge, carefully out of sight, dozens of crude slave pens stood. Most were full. Slaves. Hundreds of them.
They pushed him and Crazy into a cage together. Skinny bared his teeth and smiled. ‘See, it’s not bad.’ Tuuran just gave him a look. Short and sharp and straight in the eye to let him know that he wouldn’t be forgotten.
13
The Elemental Men
Chay-Liang didn’t see the Vespinese who knocked her down. She felt something hit the back of her head, felt herself dragged and dropped and kicked and then a great wind, and then mercifully she was left alone. When she finally managed to get up again, groggy as a sailor after his first night back in port, they’d taken away her wand and all of her globes of gold-glass. Soldiers led her back to her room and shut her behind the iron door she’d made to keep out the Elemental Men. She sat on the bed, nursing her head and wondering what to do, musing on the small arsenal of devices that littered her shelves and floor, but she must have fallen asleep almost at once, because suddenly the white stone walls were bright with the orange light of dawn and the Vespinese were hammering on her door.
In the bright morning sun they led her to the dragon yard. A glasship hovered over the hatchery, its chains wrapped around the remains of the ship that had crashed in the fight, lifting the pieces too large to be carried by hand. The soldiers watching the slaves at work weren’t wearing their armour but lightning wands still dangled from their belts and their hands hovered close. Away on the eyrie wall Diamond Eye sat watching the Godspike. Four hatchlings that had broken free in the night sat around him. On the opposite side of the eyrie the sunrise over the desert lit the sky with orange fire.
A Taiytakei in long robes of shimmering emerald and blue feathers stood in front of Liang and snapped his fingers in her face. A t’varr. An important one by the braided hair that ran past his waist and his voluminous robes, but not from the same stratum as Tsen or Mai’Choiro Kwen. His sleeves flapped in the wind. ‘Is it always like this up here? This wind?’ He swept his hand across the dragon yard and then frowned and glared at the sky as a particularly vicious gust knocked him a step sideways. Liang looked about. Scales were standing huddled among the eggs. They looked wretched this morning.
‘Sometimes gets worse,’ she said, not bothering to raise her voice. The Vespinese cupped a hand to his ear.
‘Pardon?’ he shouted.
Liang dragged him into the shelter of the tunnel mouth, stepping around the mangled iron door. In the light of day it looked as though a dra
gon had stamped on it.
‘I said it sometimes gets worse,’ she said icily.
He nodded thoughtfully. ‘I am Perth Oran T’Varr. For your slaves everything will be much as it was. They’ll hardly notice the change. For you it’s a bit different. Mai’Choiro Kwen favours throwing you off the side of the eyrie. The alchemist says he has to have you. You will make it all work as it did before, that’s all I ask.’
Liang took a moment to look the emerald and blue t’varr up and down. He was old and with some grey in his hair, the two of them probably much of an age. Maybe that made things easier. Tsen’s words came back to haunt her. Whatever he does, however terrible it is, you mustn’t stand in his way. You must survive, Chay-Liang. Hold the truth close to your heart and never let him see that you have it. Keep it until you can destroy him . . . And now the moment had come. She would do as Tsen had asked and meekly lie down for the bastard Vespinese, would she?
Yes, if it meant she could burn them later. So she told Perth Oran T’Varr, who might have been a perfectly decent person, that she would help as best she could. She asked where she could find Bellepheros.
‘He says that he needs you, his Scales, food and water for the dragons, the rider-slave to fly the big one and otherwise to be left alone. I need you to document all of this and tell me precisely what is required and in what quantities and why and what it is for. I also need you to explain this “Statue Plague”.’
Liang nodded. ‘I need to start at once with what was destroyed in the fighting. The hatchery is ruined and there are hatchlings loose.’ She could see Bellepheros for herself now, out in the wind leading a handful of Scales coaxing the hatchlings at Diamond Eye’s side back into their chains. Docile all of them, far too docile, and it put her on edge. Maybe they were simply mesmerised by the maelstrom of the storm-dark and the Godspike. She tried to tell herself that but didn’t really believe it. She couldn’t shake the notion that they were waiting for something.
Perth Oran T’Varr was looking at her expectantly. Liang nodded.
‘Yes, yes. I’ll start at once.’ She hurried after the alchemist; and when Belli turned and saw her coming, the relief on his face was obvious. He couldn’t help grinning.
‘Li!’ He came towards her. She brushed past him, haughty, letting out the undertow of angry resentment and . . . was that a flash of shame? Yes, it was.
‘You told them you needed the rider-slave, did you?’ she snapped. ‘Well you’ll not have her. She’ll not fly that monster. If that means it has to eat the bodies of the dead, so be it.’
The horror on his face crushed her. ‘Li!’
So much else they needed to say and she was so desperately glad to see him alive, but the Vespinese were all watching and she couldn’t let them see . . . They’ll use us. Play us off against each other.
‘What else?’ she hissed. ‘He hasn’t eaten for two weeks and I’ll not let her out again. Your beloved slave brings nothing but ruin. Let her go, Belli. Let her die as she deserves.’
‘Will you let me poison it then?’ he snapped, the old argument they’d always had.
Liang snorted. ‘Do that and they’ll hang us both!’
‘Then she must fly him!’
No. She couldn’t keep this up. She pulled him close and hissed in his ear, ‘We just quietly get on with what needs to be done and we do what they say. We are mistress and slave to them, nothing else. We keep our heads down. The time will come. I’ll say more when they’re not watching.’ At least the wind meant you didn’t have to worry about anyone short of an Elemental Man eavesdropping on your conversations.
She tried to set her mind to the hatchery and what they’d need to repair it, but it was hard while Belli and the Scales were still getting the hatchlings back into their chains. Every time a dragon moved her heart jumped, expecting to see Belli ripped to pieces in a flurry of claws and fire, but the hatchlings submitted with a meekness that, if anything, was worse. Just like her, they were hiding something.
When Belli was done, they picked their way together through the mess of the hatchery. The Vespinese had lifted the biggest pieces of the shattered glasship out of the way and dumped them on the other side of the eyrie wall, another heap of junk out on the rocky rim. The ship had fallen on some of the eggs and smashed them to pieces. Shreds of crushed unborn dragon lay scattered about. Each one carried the threat of the Statue Plague, and Bellepheros was as keen as the Vespinese to clear those away. A job for the Scales. And for him and for her; and so she waited until he was ready and then they wrapped each other up in their leather aprons with their gauntlets and masks and goggles. ‘We’ll burn them afterwards,’ he told her. ‘Just to be sure.’ He meant the leathers. The pieces of dead dragon could go over the rim, down into the maelstrom below.
They set to work, she and Belli with the Scales, counting the eggs and the hatchlings and telling the other slaves what to do and generally trying to restore the hatchery to some sort of order before anything actually hatched. She felt a fraud. What she ought to be doing was everything she possibly could to bring these Vespinese bastards to their knees.
She picked up a piece of gold-glass the size of her head and dumped it in the crate on the sled beside her – at least they had no shortage of those now – then winced in disgust as she moved part of the collapsed net of chains and found a dragon’s severed talon underneath. She shouted and waved to one of the Scales to do something about it. The net had to go back up and Belli was as anxious about that as he was about everything else. Back up and the hatchery restored as quickly as could be. She hoped that obeying Perth Oran T’Varr would be easy for Belli after that because it certainly wouldn’t be easy for her. There would be a reckoning, probably sooner rather than later, one she fully expected to end with her falling off the rim one dark night, but Belli . . . ? All he had to do was carry on with what he’d done before. Bellepheros and Baros Tsen had never seen eye to eye, and a change of master probably didn’t mean that much to him. Perth Oran was right – it shouldn’t matter to a slave. Shouldn’t matter to an enchantress either but she found that it mattered very much. Mai’Choiro had sent Zafir and her dragon to kill thousands upon thousands. That Zafir had actually done it made her every bit as despicable, but if you absolutely had to give her credit for anything at all, she didn’t hide and pretend to be anything but what she was. ‘Monsters, both of them.’
Liang started. She hadn’t meant to say that aloud but Bellepheros hadn’t noticed; in fact he probably hadn’t heard anything at all over the wind. He was standing in the middle of the surviving eggs, looking at the pieces of the broken ones, counting for the third time, beckoning her over. When she looked, he lifted his mask and yelled at her, but she didn’t catch what he said. She was about to go to him when a thought struck her and she crouched down and peered at the stone of the dragon yard. A glasship had fallen here last night. Crashed down and smashed to pieces with enough force to crumple a half-inch iron door and pulverise everything beneath it. Yet the white stone was undamaged. Not even scratched. Not the faintest hint of a mark. Smooth as glass. She pondered that and then looked across the yard to the place where the eyrie wall was chipped and cracked. A dragon had done that. She shuddered.
‘One went into the tunnels last night,’ Bellepheros shouted when she got up and went to see what he’d found. ‘It went for her Holiness.’ There was an odd look on his face. He seemed to struggle for words. ‘It burned my laboratory. Is it dead? I don’t see the body. Where is it?’
Liang shook her head. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten or thought it didn’t matter; it was just . . . it was just that there were so many other things to worry about, and what could they do? Nothing. It was gone, and that was that. She frowned, shook her head and gestured to the ruined hatchery, but when the day ended and they dragged their weary bones out of the wind and to the tunnels, she made qaffeh for them both in her workshop and broke out some Bolo bread and told him what had happened, all of it. When she was done, Bellepheros gazed a
t her in horror.
‘It came out of the egg awake? It knew? Great Flame, we have to find it!’
Liang snorted and shook her head. ‘No. We have to keep our heads down and do as we’re told and hope they don’t kill us. Then we have to find it.’ He might, she thought, have shown some sort of concern for her, what with having faced down a dragon all on her own. But he was lost in this, entirely lost. He was terrified. She sighed. ‘Belli, it’s gone. It’s already out in the desert somewhere, and it’ll be no more dangerous tomorrow than it is today, nor the day after or the next. We have time. We’ll rebuild the hatchery. We’ll make sure no others escape. Let this matter with Shonda and Tsen resolve itself. When the Elemental Men come we’ll tell them, and they’ll hunt it down and kill it and we’ll help them as best we can. My promise to you.’
‘And how long, Li, before they come?’
‘A few days, perhaps. It could be any time.’
‘A few days?’ He grabbed her and stared into her face. ‘It’s a woken dragon, Li! Do you know what that means? It’s aware! It thinks! It remembers! A hundred lifetimes! And they’re clever, Li, as clever as we are. If it goes to ground in the desert then they’ll never find it! Perhaps not for years, until it comes from nowhere fully grown and another city goes up in flames.’ He was trembling, still shaking his head. ‘Or worse – what if it comes back here, Li? What if it comes back to the eyrie? It could do that today or tomorrow. It could be here right now, lurking under the rim. How would we know? What if it freed the others? How could you possibly stop it? Li, we have to tell them!’
Liang frowned. I stopped it all on my own last night, you know. She glared at him and then sighed again. ‘Oh, I’ll talk to Perth Oran T’Varr then.’ And she would, but he wouldn’t listen. He wasn’t the sort. Not like Tsen. ‘Shonda has a hundred glasships with lightning cannon.’ She made a face. ‘I expect that should be enough.’