by Stephen Deas
She was free.
From above this time, she told the dragon. The way it should have been.
She started to laugh.
*
‘Kalaiya!’ Tsen gazed at her face, and Kalaiya stared back as though he was mad and a complete stranger.
‘Tsen? You’re not dead? But I saw—’
‘The rod. Quickly.’ Sivan pushed her away, none too gently, and if Tsen had had a knife on him he might have used it, but as it was he clenched his fists and did as Sivan asked. The glasship moved over the dragon yard. He felt Kalaiya’s stare on his back as he lowered the gondola and watched in a daze as Scales brought four dragon eggs and rolled them up the ramp, doing exactly as alchemist-Sivan ordered. When they were done, Tsen brandished his black rod at the shifter. Sivan pointed to a small sled. The Scales loaded that too.
‘Now do as you promised,’ Tsen hissed. Kalaiya was still staring at him. She wasn’t stupid. She’d seen him use the rod and knew he was no illusion, and yet her eyes wouldn’t have it.
‘I saw you dead,’ she said. She touched him and his vision blurred with tears because she brought everything he loved back into the world simply by being there. Baros Tsen T’Varr, short and fat and happy, only without much of the happy just now.
‘Touching.’ Sivan pulled Kalaiya aside for a second time and stood at Tsen’s shoulder, a hand on his back. ‘Down to the desert! Now! And quickly! We don’t have long, T’Varr. The Elemental Men will not be kind to you if they catch us.’
Tsen touched the black rod to the pilot golem and they drifted away from the eyrie. ‘What happens if they catch you, skin-shifter? Do the rest of your brother Righteous Ones under the Konsidar pretend you don’t exist? Is it war between us?’
He didn’t get an answer. Sivan stood at his shoulder, tense as a drum. He flinched as Tsen almost skimmed the edge of the storm-dark in his haste to be away and only relaxed when they were underneath it where they wouldn’t be seen. ‘Now tell the golem to take us to the ground.’ Sivan clambered past the eggs and opened the gondola’s ramp. A great wind rushed in and swirled around them. He grabbed Tsen and pushed him at the sled the Scales had loaded with the eggs.
‘I’ve done my part, T’Varr,’ he shouted over the howl of the air. ‘I’ve got your woman for you. Now you do yours. Ride with me! Release the other glasships. Drop your eyrie to be devoured by the storm-dark and no one will ever know!’
Far away, out in same the desert night, Diamond Eye tucked in his wings and dropped from the sky like a falling star, straight and hard and fast, and this time the Vespinese never saw him coming. He hit Shonda’s gondola like a ball from a cannon, ripped it off its chains and fell on, and all the Vespinese saw was a blur and a mighty shape and a gondola that was hanging in the air one moment and gone the next, while the heart of the glasship above cracked and then shattered into fragments. The great glass disc shuddered in its spinning and began to slide out of the air. Diamond Eye barely even slowed. He levelled out across the dunes and not a single lightning cannon glowed in his wake.
How it should have been.
Zafir flew him skimming across the sand, miles and miles, and then brought him down. She unbuckled the corpse of the Elemental Man and threw it off and then slid down beside it. It was hard to resist the temptation to have her dragon pick up the gondola and shake it, but she simply knocked on the ramp instead. When nothing happened, Diamond Eye bit the ramp open and ripped it off. A crack of lightning shot out at once and hit him on the nose. She felt its sting but the dragon understood her mind and, dulled or wild, dragons always enjoyed playing a little with their food before they ate. He backed away and waited, watching her.
Zafir peered warily inside. One battered Taiytakei in emerald robes crouched behind an upturned table. She ducked instinctively as he fired his wand, but he was shaking so badly that the lightning hit the inside of the gondola. Behind him Shonda quivered under a table cut from a single diamond. The gondola walls were silver and jade, carved into dragons and lions. Six chests of gold sat against the walls, and three glass cabinets. The cabinet doors had fallen open and golden bottles and white clay pots rolled around the floor. Behind the diamond table a silver staircase curled up to a second level. Zafir narrowed her eyes. Diamond Eye felt three souls, all of them deliciously terrified, but she saw only two.
‘It’s up to you whether we make this bloody.’ Zafir stepped into the hole where the ramp had been, trusting to the armour the enchantress had made. ‘Where’s the third of you? I know he’s here.’
Shonda fired straight at her chest. Her skin tingled, a few muscles twitched, a corona of sparks fluttered around her but nothing more. The man in the emerald feathers drew a long knife from his belt and threw himself forward. Zafir stepped back, letting him stumble past her and out of the gondola. He slashed. The blade skittered off her armour. She looked at him as he wheeled to face her, cocked her head and then laughed at him, wondering whether to have Diamond Eye squash him or burn him. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Him in his emerald feathers and her in gold-glass armour. It seemed hardly fair.
Another thunderclap sounded behind her. She shivered and twitched. Shonda had shot her in the back. The enchantress’s armour shrugged most of it aside, but the man with the knife took his chance and jumped, thrusting at her neck, and he might have killed her too if it hadn’t been for the dragon-scale she wore underneath with its high collar. As it was, she staggered back, choking from the blow to her throat, while the emerald-feathered man feinted a thrust at her face, quick as a snake, kicked at her legs, almost knocking her down, then slashed at her chest and cut at her hand so quickly she only just whipped it away. He was limping. It slowed him, and that was probably the only reason she was still standing. Careless.
‘You’re good.’ Zafir raised an eyebrow. ‘Bodyguard? If I wasn’t wearing this armour, you’d win. I don’t even have a weapon.’
He was circling, trying to manoeuvre her back round to the hole so Shonda could shoot her again. She folded her arms.
‘You realise I have a dragon?’
He still didn’t answer, though she could see it in his face. He understood.
‘I don’t know you. I have no quarrel with you. Don’t die for that pig in there.’
Nothing. Zafir sighed. Pin him.
It was a hard thing for a dragon to take a man in his talons and not crush him to death, and maybe Diamond Eye was still smarting from the battering he’d taken from Shonda’s lightning cannon. His tail whipped in a silent arc and took the emerald-feathered man in the side and caved in half his chest. Zafir shrugged, crouched beside him, took his knife and finished him. A quick kill. A mercy stroke.
Back to the gondola. Shonda was on his feet. Backing away, he trod on a bottle, lost his footing and fell over as he fired at her again. Missed. He didn’t get another chance. Zafir bent down and pulled the wand out of his hand.
A sharp warning from Diamond Eye. She ducked fast and low as a movement flickered from the top of the stairs and something came flying out and shot over her head and out through the ripped-open ramp. A glass sphere landed in the desert sand. In the blink of an eye it blew up into a huge sphere bigger than the gondola and as thin as paper. Diamond Eye smashed it and then flung the tip of his armoured tail like a spear straight through the gondola’s silver skin, rattling everything. Two of the cabinets fell over and smashed. Zafir felt the spark of life from whoever had thrown the orb flicker and die.
She looked at Lord Shonda, wondering what to do. He was trembling but at least he wasn’t begging. ‘So you’re the most powerful man in the world, are you?’
‘What do you want? What is your price to serve me? I have anything. Everything. You know that because you know who I am. Fly for me and I will give you worlds!’
She would think afterwards that there were so many other things she could have done. Pacts that could have been made. Bargains struck. Words spoken. Maybe he had an enchanter to take the doll-woman’s circlet off her hea
d. But in the end he was just another fat old man who thought he could own her, and what she remembered most of all was watching him turn away from her, tapping his arms to remind her that she was a slave and he was not. What then struck her eye was the brand lying on the floor, of three dragons and a lion entwined together, and the realisation that she had a fire-breathing monster outside who could heat it to a nice cherry-red in no time at all. And when she thought afterwards of all those other things and remembered how the most powerful man in the world had screamed and screamed and screamed as she’d marked him, there was never even the slightest sliver of regret.
Except perhaps that she could have held the brand to his skin a little longer.
*
Sivan raced the sled back towards the eyrie. Tsen clung on as best he could. They were really going to do it. Sivan was really going to bring the whole eyrie down. One glasship, Chay-Liang had told him, one glasship was all they needed to hold it up, but with none it would fall. And he shouldn’t do it, he knew that, but Kalaiya . . .
Or maybe he should do it . . .
They reached the rim. Sivan crept the sled to where the first glasship chains merged into gold-glass were welded into the stone. Tsen didn’t even have to step off to release them.
‘Do it!’ hissed Sivan.
Chay-Liang is probably here. Others. Good men, good women. The storm-dark will swallow them all. But hadn’t he had the same thought himself, back before the Vespinese had come? Yes. But I was going to send them away first. Mai’Choiro and I would have gone together. And alone.
Sivan gripped his arm. ‘Do it! Put an end to dragons!’
Chay-Liang could make a sled out of glass. There were other sleds too . . . Maybe people would get away . . . An end to dragons . . .
‘Do it or never see your slave woman again!’
Tsen touched his rod to the chains and watched them let go. They hung loose. The glasship stayed where it was and so did the eyrie. He did it not because it was right or wrong or because it would end the dragons or even because of Kalaiya; he did it because he knew that if he didn’t then Sivan would kill him right there and then.
Stupid, weak, pathetic, cowardly t’varr.
Sivan dropped the sled beneath the eyrie and followed the underside of the rim to the next glasship. And the next and the next and the next; and as the last chains unravelled and the eyrie began to fall, Sivan turned the sled and hurtled off into the night as though the wind itself was chasing him.
Such a coward, Tsen. Such a pathetic coward.
Chay-Liang
44
Not the Quietest Night
Bellepheros almost missed Baros Tsen T’Varr. Underneath the bland smile, the amiable facade of blissful ignorance and the cheerful slightly stupid t’varr manner, he’d had the sense and the certainty in his own people to leave Bellepheros and his Scales and Li alone. He’d given them whatever they needed, trusted they had a good reason for everything they did and largely believed in Li to do what was right. Mai’Choiro Kwen, on the other hand, hadn’t even trusted his own t’varr, Perth Oran.
The Elemental Men had cleared out his study. They were watching him as though they knew he’d done something terrible; and Liang had as good as told him to keep his mouth shut and his head down. He trusted her, so he was following her advice. He missed her. He missed having someone to talk to.
Lord Shonda had made his exit with all the subtlety of a monkey kicking over a hornet’s nest. The killers were buzzing after him, her Holiness was off on some night flight, and between the two of them that left him with a little peace and quiet for once, a rarity these days.
On his desk was what would be a book if he was ever allowed to finish it. In earlier years he’d travelled the length and breadth of the nine kingdoms of the dragon-realms and written about what he’d seen so other alchemists could learn about their lands without the indignity and discomfort that came from having to go and look with their own eyes. It was better that way for most. Dragon-riders called him mad, but he really did prefer to read about faraway places in the comfort of a warm fireside than see them for himself in the freezing rain through a haze of hypothermia. Writing a book about the Taiytakei was a little different but he’d been reading whatever he could and boiling it down into one account. For that he appreciated quiet nights like these.
‘The Konsidar’. He kept coming back to the same page, the one he read every night before he started work again. It was where Li had gone.
The Konsidar mountain range runs north–south along the western side of Takei’Tarr and divides the continent into the narrow but wet and fertile Western Coast and the arid interior. Largely unexplored. A few passes exist in the far north, which provide once-vital but now little-used land routes between the cities of Cashax and Zinzarra. Other routes existed before the Splintering, an event which considerably changed the landscape of the Konsidar. The city of Vespinarr lies on a plateau at the southern tip of the range, along with the silver mines that give it its famous wealth . . .
And the thoughtless self-serving bastards who lord themselves over it.
The thought made him blink. He wasn’t used to thinking things like that. It was only a short step away from saying the same about dragon-kings and dragon-queens, and he’d long ago decided he knew better than to have any thoughts at all when it came to them. He served. That was his purpose. He served whoever needed to be served in order to keep the dragons from flying free.
A glass globe, a present from Chay-Liang, shifted on his desk. It started to roll sideways. He caught it and put it back but for some reason it just started to roll again. He frowned at it hard. For the last several days it had been perfectly happy sitting still and now it wasn’t?
There was a tapping at the door. He ignored it. The Elemental Men and Perth Oran would both just barge right in; Li wasn’t here and so this had to be a slave. He didn’t want a slave. He tried to settle the globe but the sphere wasn’t having it.
The tapping on his door came again.
‘Go away!’ he shouted. He tossed the globe onto his bed and went back to his notes.
The central massif of the mountains is inhospitable and largely unknown even among the Taiytakei. A prohibition on entering is ruthlessly enforced by the Elemental Men. Within live the so-called Righteous Ones, a mysterious group whose existence is not widely known. Some texts allude to deep complexes of caves and tunnels running through the Konsidar in much the same way as they are said to exist under the Desert of Thieves. If true, it is conjectured that these tunnels and caves interconnect under the expanse of the Empty Sands.
Every night he read it and finished with the same thought: that what he’d written was a dry and long-winded and slightly dull way of saying, ‘Range of mountains. Do not enter. No one knows why.’
The tapping on his door came again. ‘Master Alchemist sir!’ He recognised the voice now. A Scales. Which was odd because the Scales never came here to bother him. Never.
He got up, lurched sideways and almost fell over as if he was drunk. He steadied himself on the desk. Frowned. There was something odd. The room was . . . tilted? Except that surely couldn’t be right, could it? He rubbed his eyes.
‘Master Alchemist, sir!’
‘What?’ He walked to the door slowly, an old man a little unsure of his footing. When he opened it, the Scales looked terrified.
‘Master Alchemist, the eyrie’s falling!’
‘What?’
‘The eyrie’s falling!’
Scales weren’t the cleverest slaves. The potions he gave them did that. He hurried up to the dragon yard, and on the way found that he kept drifting towards the passageway walls as he did. By the time he got outside, there was no doubt. He could see the Godspike and feel the change in the wind. The eyrie was dropping steadily through the air. Falling more like a feather than a stone, but falling nevertheless. It was also tipping slowly sideways. He looked up. The glasships that once held the eyrie aloft were high above, five tiny specks of lig
ht.
A momentary chill ran through him.
‘There used to be six . . .’ He shook himself. Falling. And what in the name of the Great Flame was he supposed to do about that?
Someone had let loose the glasships. He’d warned her Holiness, but whoever it was had done it without telling anyone. How long do we have? They weren’t falling all that fast . . . Long enough to get everyone up and away . . . A surge of panic shot through him. He forced himself to be calm and looked around for Diamond Eye but the great dragon hadn’t come back. ‘Well go and wake everyone up!’ He shook himself again. No. No need. There were already men up on the walls and other men coming running out of the tunnels and passages dressed in their nightclothes. ‘We need an enchanter.’ Did they even have one any more? Now that Chay-Liang had gone and all the Vespinese? ‘Sleds! We need sleds! Get them! Load the eggs!’
Really? Load the eggs? When he could simply let them go?
A kwen came running. ‘You have a sled! Where?’
They kept one in the hatchery. Bellepheros looked about wildly. ‘Yes.’ He poked the Scales. ‘Show him. Take him to it!’ Let the eggs fall into the storm-dark, but he’d need his potions, and a single sled wouldn’t be enough for all his Scales anyway .
Other sleds were rising from the rim, heading fast towards the floating glasships. Bellepheros watched them go, helpless, then ran to his secret larder of corpses and started to pack a bag.
Zafir flew with Shonda’s gondola in Diamond Eye’s claws. She had Shonda trapped inside and the corpse of the Elemental Man to keep him company. At the edge of the storm-dark she dropped the gondola towards the maelstrom. She watched it fall and then thought better of it, swooping to snatch it out of the sky. She turned Diamond Eye towards the Godspike but the eyrie wasn’t where she expected to find it. There was a moment of disorientation then, but only a moment before she spotted it. Not so much falling, she thought. More adrift. Slipping slowly downward, half a mile lower than when she’d left it and half a mile and steadily less from the violet churning clouds below.