Dragon Queen sk-2

by Stephen Deas

  ‘By a sump.’ The Bloody Judge looked at him hard. ‘And you're right: I didn't think any of you warlocks would find it again. It seems you did.’

  ‘What?’

  One-Eye was still laughing. ‘We took the castle through that passage days ago, warlock.’ He turned away.

  ‘Wait!’ Berren pulled at his chains again. ‘I'm no warlock! I am Berren! I don't know how they did what they did but don't you remember the sigil, One-Eye? You were right beside me. Six men and a warlock broke out of the trees and came at us. We stuck two of them and I ran the warlock through but he put a strip of paper on me before he died. A sigil. You remember? It was the sigil that did this.’

  One-Eye froze mid-turn. The Bloody Judge cocked his head. ‘Go on, warlock. Play your game. You were there, were you? Watched it, did you?’

  ‘I was you!’

  ‘I remember that sigil. I fell to my knees and blacked out. And it did feel like something sucking at my soul. Yet here I still am, warlock. I guess it didn't work, did it?’

  ‘You were there, One-Eye! You saw me. You tried to help me. I couldn't pull it away.’

  The Bloody Judge's eyes narrowed. ‘What did you do, warlock? What did you do to me with that sigil? Or was it just a trick and this is your great plan.’ He laughed again. ‘You trying to tell Tallis here that Vallas cast a spell on me and now I'm one of you? Go on then. This sounds fun.’

  ‘Tallis, he is one of them! He is a warlock. His name is Skyrie. They. . they switched us somehow. I'm the real Berren. I grew up in Deephaven. I was with Prince Syannis. He was a thief-taker then. I told you about him. Do you remember? The tavern in Brons? The Falling Dagger. I told you about him and the warlock Saffran Kuy. I showed you that knife he's carrying, the golden one with the eyes in the hilt. I told you how Kuy had another one and what he did with it. I told you about Radek of Kalda, how Syannis lured him to Deephaven and how he died and about Tasahre and how I ended up a skag and. .’

  The Bloody Judge took a step closer to Berren. ‘And how I came to Kalda and saw Master Sy again by chance, went after him and found his brother, Prince Talon, joined his company and so joined his war against King Meridian to help Syannis sit on his throne again.’ He glanced over his shoulder at One-Eye. ‘Do you remember that, Tallis? Do you remember me telling you about Fasha, the bondsmaid, and how I didn't kill the Dark Queen when I should have, and what happened after I took my Fasha and my son back again? Do you remember the tears I wept when I told you that. Falling-down drunk we were. What did they call that brew we were drinking? Devil's finger?’

  ‘Devil's foot,’ said Berren hopelessly. He shook his head, lost, then lifted his eyes and met the Bloody Judge's gaze. ‘I am Berren. I am the Bloody Judge, however much you don't want to believe it. Maybe we both are. Do you remember that night in the Maze with Lilissa? After we went with Master Sy into the Captain's Rest and the harbour master set his snuffers on us all? If you really are me, you know where we hid.’

  The Bloody Judge nodded. ‘The Sheaf of Arrows. The old cellar. You could slip into it off the backstreet if you knew how.’ He smiled. ‘I remember Lilissa, yes. And if you're me, you'll remember who was waiting for us when we came out.’

  ‘One-Thumb.’

  ‘Yeh, but it was Hair who saw us first.’ For a moment Berren and the Bloody Judge looked into one another, each trying to fathom the other out. Then the Judge shook his head. ‘I know who I am, warlock.’ He turned away.

  Berren lunged against the chains again. ‘One-Eye! Ask him how he lost his finger, One-Eye. Ask him how he really lost it.’

  The Bloody Judge roared with laugher. He looked back to glare at Berren and his eyes blazed. ‘Which story should I tell him, warlock. Should I tell him the one I told him when we first met, how it was cut off in my first battle as a Fighting Hawk, or shall I tell tell him the one he's never heard where it was cut off by the warlock Saffran Kuy on the day he cut a piece out of my soul with this cursed knife.’ He turned back, shaking his head, baring his teeth and chuckling to himself, and as he came closer he drew out the golden-hafted knife again. ‘Three little cuts, warlock. You. Obey. Me. I see it now. That's how you know so much about me, is it?’ He touched the stone that Berren had worn around his neck every day for the last dozen years, the stone that Gelisya had given back to him when they'd been friends. The stone that made him whole again, or so it had always seemed. ‘Saffran's little piece of me. That's how you know. I always thought it was too good to be true that he'd give it back.’ He held the Starknife in front of Berren's face. ‘I should cut you and make you my slave, warlock.’

  ‘Cut me with that and you'll see everything I say is true! Cut me, then! Do it! I'm begging you!’ But The Bloody Judge was already backing away and shaking his head.

  ‘I don't make men into slaves, warlock. I'm not like you.’

  Tallis One-Eye spat at Berren's feet. ‘So do we hang him, Judge? He's a warlock after all.’

  The Judge stared a long time, off into the distance, then shook his head. ‘Maybe so, One-Eye, but he can go with the rest. You never know.’ He turned and walked away.

  Berren closed his eyes and gasped. For a moment he'd almost believed that there were two of them, that they were both him. But no. The stone with Saffran Kuy's piece of him inside it. That was how this this usurper knew everything about him. It had been a trick then, had it? A trap right from the very start? He bit his lip. And who was it who'd given the stone and that piece of his soul inside back to him? Gelisya. The Dark Queen herself, back when she'd been nothing more than a girl. Twelve years old.

  He wept then, knowing he was doomed. The soldiers unchained their prisoners one by one and manacled them back together in a single line. The first of the queensguard to struggle was beaten swiftly and brutally to death. After that the others were mute and meek. By the time they were done and filing out into the glare of the sunlight, the two warlocks the Judge had singled out were already dead and hanging from their gibbets. All along the seafront other men hung by their necks, swinging slowly back and forth in the morning breeze whipping off the sea. The warlocks of Tethis. Berren stared at them with disbelief because it was exactly as he'd planned. Hang them by the sea and then burn them in a pyre, all of them together, then scatter their ashes over the waves. Give them to any god who'd take them, any but their own. And now it was done, finally done. A dozen years of war and they were broken once and for all, and someone else had done it. Someone who wore his skin. One of them. So they weren't really broken at all.

  ‘Who are you?’ he whispered, and turned and tried to catch the eye of the impostor, to ask him, to tell him that this wasn't done, not finished, not over, not ever for as long as he breathed. I will hunt you and I will kill you, stealer of my skin. But the Bloody Judge never looked back, and when Berren snarled and rattled his chains, soldiers turned and raised their sticks. They'd kill him. They weren't afraid to do that. In fact, it wouldn't trouble them at all.

  The air tasted of salt. The stones on the beach crunched under his feet. The soldiers separated them into groups of six. There were boats waiting, rowing boats, and Taiytakei sword-slaves, and standing on the shore with them was a single black man in a cloak of tattered feathers. He handed a purse to Gaunt — of course it had to be Gaunt who was dealing with slavers — who smiled at them all in turn. ‘Tethis thanks you kindly for your contribution to its coffers.’ He jingled his bag of coins, happy and jaunty as he walked away.

  The wind tugged at the rags of Berren's stolen robe, stinging him with salt, stealing the warmth of the sun until he shivered. Among the beached fishing boats, ropes rattled and banged against their masts and sails flapped where they'd been hung to dry. Waves crashed and sucked, the relentless rhythm of the sea that Berren had once known so well. The Taiytakei's feathered cloak kept whipping back in his face. He looked them up and down, barked an order and walked away. Out in the harbour his slaving ship rocked, sleek and lean like all their ships. Far out to sea the skies were leaden. It wo
uld be raining again before long. Did feathered cloaks hold off the rain?

  Berren the Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge of Tethis, looked back at the town that had given him its name, still searching for the man who'd stolen his life. He stared until someone threw a sack over his face and pushed him forward and hissed in his ear, ‘Forget it, slave. You'll never see it again.’

  And he never would.

  13

  The Grey Dead

  The Watcher waited. When the grey dead finally walked away from his tomb-like shrine deep under the Sun and Moon Temple, the Watcher became the floor on which he walked, the shadows he wore for his cloak, the air he breathed. Outside, through the colours and bustle of the Harub, he was the sunlight of the day. At the foot of the Visonda he became one with the Silver Mountain's feet, with the outcrop of rock on which the fortress-palace was built.

  The grey dead climbed the wide sweeping steps and walked in through cavernous open gates of black wood studded with rust-brown iron. The Watcher became the vast slope of the walls, the air amid the neat straight rows of windows that broke its upper tiers, the myriad coloured tiles of the near-flat roofs of its many different levels.

  The heart of the lower Visonda was a high-walled space as big as a field with a second pair of great gates on the inner side. The Watcher followed the grey dead from on high, a dull speck among the hundreds of rainbow-draped Taiytakei in their silks and feathers and their slaves in pristine white. At the second gates the grey dead stretched out his arms, palms up, letting his sleeves fall back from his wrists to show the slave brands on his forearms. He had the sign of a two-masted ship burned into each that said to any who cared to know that he was a sword-slave made in distant Shevana-Daro, not here in Vespinarr. By the gate, soldiers decked in bright mustard yellows and tasselled in silver waved him through.

  The Watcher shifted closer. Some called the Visonda the Home of a Thousand T'Varrs. Hundreds upon hundreds of slaves came and went every day but few passed the second gates.

  A series of easy staircases rose behind it, carved into the slope amid a speckle of brightly draped pavilions ranging up the gentle ascent to the summit of the mountain's root. The bulk of the old palace rose there, looming down over its satellites below, a quadrangular mass capped with gilt canopies. Few slaves came this far, but again the grey dead showed his brands and was permitted to enter. The Watcher shifted through the walls. He followed to the airy Tower of Messages which speared the air at the very peak of the palace. No slave branded and marked should have reached this far, for the upper levels of the Tower of Messages held the precious jade ravens, fabulously rare even in a city as rich as this, each one worth a dozen ships and a thousand sword-slaves. The ravens carried the words of Sea Lord Shonda of Vespinarr to his friends and allies, or his t'varrs and kwens and hsians, and rarely anyone else.

  The grey dead presented himself and was ushered through into the jade-panelled scribing room. He took a gold quill and wrote a brief note on a sheet of paper and handed it to one of the bird scribes.

  ‘Dhar Thosis. At once.’

  The scribe looked the grey dead up and down, decided he was merely a slave and allowed himself to appear offended at such an imperious tone, but the grey dead had already turned and left. The Watcher lingered. He followed the scribe now, wafting in the air, waiting in the inking room as the grey dead's message was written again, this time with diamond-tipped gold-glass scratching letters so small that an ordinary eye could barely read them onto a tiny silver ring. When it was done, the scribe took the ring and carried it up the steps that led to the cages of the jade ravens themselves, to their keepers and to the open roof where slaves were chained to posts to feed the messenger birds when they came home. Before he left he threw the grey dead's paper into a jade bowl to be burned at dusk with all the other messages sent that day.

  Alone, the Watcher became flesh. He took the grey dead's words and sank into the floor. Dhar Thosis. An interesting dilemma. It would take a jade raven five days to cross the desert while he could do it himself in one.

  He shifted through the walls, up to the orange-tiled roof of the Tower of Messages, and squatted there. Away from prying eyes, with the chitter-chatter caws of the jade ravens just beneath his feet, he read the grey dead's words:

  He is not here. I am unmasked.

  After the words came four symbols. He had no idea what they meant, but he'd seen them before. On the Azahl Pillar.

  Who is not in Vespinarr? And to whom was this message sent? He needed to know both answers. He pondered. A jade raven to Dhar Thosis would go straight to the Palace of Roses, and there fate smiled on him. Xican was in debt to Vespinarr, Dhar Thosis to the mountain city's great desert rival, Cashax, and so for now the two indefatigable engines of the sea lords played out their endless duel with the Grey Isle and the Kraitu's Bones as their pawns. Quai'Shu’s spies filled the Palace of Roses as Lord Senxian's surely festered like maggots in the Palace of Leaves. If one of the grey dead had made his home in the Kraitu's Bones, he wouldn't stay hidden for long.

  So, to the who of he is not here.

  The Watcher became the stone of the Visonda's walls and descended to its gates, waiting for the grey dead to emerge but the slave never did. Over the days that followed the Watcher searched the city with meticulous care but the grey dead had slipped away, had somehow eluded him. When he rested in front of the Azahl Pillar, he saw that the symbols there whose meanings were lost were indeed the same as the ones the grey dead had drawn. Exact copies. A sign of the city from which his message came, was that it? Or did it mean something more?

  The Watcher returned to Xican and carried out his duties. He ran errands and carried messages, paltry things far beneath an Elemental Man. Amid them the hunt resumed. A sorcerer, no matter his powers, no matter who he was, did not throw off an Elemental Man for long. The brands on the grey dead had come from Shevana-Daro. The Watcher went there and began his search anew. Patience was an Elemental Man's friend, and months later patience rewarded him with a boat stolen away to the forbidden island of Vul Storna, where the ruins of an ancient tower of white stone rose from the rocky heart of the island, visible from the sea, its top sheared in two. The Taiytakei who looked out across the water from their comfortable lives on the shore joked that the island was cursed, but those who plied their trades on the waves knew better. Not cursed. Forbidden, as the Konsidar was forbidden, on pain of death.

  The Watcher became the air and blew close. This was where the last priests of the old ways had fled when the cleansing purity of the Elemental Men came down from Mount Solence. Vul Storna had been their refuge, a final hiding place, and they'd lived and worked for years amid the deep ruins and in the great labyrinth of tunnels and caves beneath. They'd come to preserve the lore and the teachings of the gods they served, the stories and memories that the Elemental Men sought to destroy, and not everything they'd left behind had been found and made safe. Yet even without them the island would have been shunned. The ruined tower was an older thing than the priests, as old as anything. It had an aura to it. A resistance that reached out and touched him like Baros Tsen T'Varr’s great floating castle. A thing that belonged to the same time, flowed out from the same white enchanted stone.

  He found the grey dead again among those tunnels, searching walls filled with archways that opened onto nothing but more blank white stone. Whispers said that if a man knew the true secrets of what the priests had written, he might open these arches to other worlds, another way to reach across the storm-dark. But whispers were whispers, nothing more.

  He became flesh and bone. ‘And have you found it, sorcerer? What you were looking for in Vespinarr?’

  The grey dead jumped. Black shadows flew from his sleeves, hurled at the Watcher to choke his soul out of his body. The Watcher shifted. The stone walls here were like the castle with its glowing whiteness. They held him out, but the myriad of statues that littered the labyrinth were more ordinary things. Beside the grey dead, the stone features of so
me ancient lord became the Watcher's face and the shadows whirled around in impotent frenzy. The Watcher waited patiently for them consume themselves and wilt and die.

  ‘For six years they hid themselves here, sorcerer. When we found them we put an end to them, but in that time they wrote what they wrote. The Rava. More than a hundred copies of their blasphemies and abomination, written in their shaking fearful hands and smuggled away. Doubtless more made since. We track them down as we find them. We destroy them as we destroy all who read them, all who touch them and all who seek them. The Rava is forbidden knowledge, sorcerer. Is that what brought you here? We will not permit the world to end again.’

  The grey dead drew his shadows back into his sleeves. ‘I know your voice. Under the temple of Vespinarr. I thought it strange for a different kind of killer to come, stranger still that my shadows failed to devour him. You I have expected.’

  ‘You cannot escape us, sorcerer. We were made for the likes of you.’

  ‘I know what you are better than you know yourself, earth-touched. I will not fight you. A storm is coming that even you cannot stop.’ He stood still and quiet. ‘I will become one with Xibaiya and await the great transformation.’

  ‘You're making something, warlock. What is it?’

  The grey dead gave away his surprise. ‘Making something?’ He chuckled bitterly, tinged with a weariness he didn't try to hide. ‘If that's what you came for, you're too late. It's already made, killer.’

  ‘And what have you made?’

  The grey dead shook his head and half a smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. ‘Are we done?’