by Stephen Deas
‘Good. Now. Most people don't get this choice, but you do. You can hold out your arm on your own and keep it there, and keep it still while I do this. Or I can get some men to hold you down. Most people, it's best if they're held down.’
Berren took the leather out of his mouth for a moment. ‘Did you need to be held down?’
Tuuran grinned. ‘You think there are any slaves here who could do that? Hold out your arm. Left one. Nice and straight.’
Berren stared at the brand. He clenched his fists. Then he pushed the strip of leather back between his teeth and held out his arm. He was breathing hard now.
‘Turn it over. Open your fist and bend back your hand.’ Tuuran ran rough fingers over the inside of Berren's arm, back and forth, then held Berren's hand, bending it back until it hurt, holding his arm locked straight. He had the brand in his other hand, poised. ‘Now close your eyes. Go on, close them. And no matter what, keep that arm still or I'll have to do this again. Ready now?’
Berren nodded. He was panting as though he was running for his life, every muscle clenched tight, tense and ready to explode into life.
‘Good. Now there's. . Great Flame, what's that?’
Berren opened his eyes and started to turn his head and as he did, Tuuran whipped the brand over and pressed it into Berren's arm. Blazing agony punched him in the back of his eyes and then grabbed them and squeezed. Berren screamed. His face screwed up tight. His teeth clamped on the leather. The brand hissed as Tuuran placed it into a bucket of waiting water but the big man still held his hand, gripped it tight as he poured cold seawater over the wound. He smeared it with something and then wrapped it in a bandage. He might have spoken, but if he did then Berren didn't hear. The pain consumed everything. He snarled like an animal, deaf to the world.
When he was done, Tuuran left him there, clenching and unclenching his fist, rocking back and forth, tight as a drum, breathing hard and deep until a numbness took over and the pain slowly ebbed. Then Tuuran came back. He crouched beside Berren and gave him a cup of clear fresh water and a bowl of rice with a lime cut in two perched on top.
‘You're no longer an oar-slave,’ he said solemnly. ‘You're no longer an animal. You're no longer property. You're a sail-slave and your voice has worth again.’ He slapped Berren on the back. ‘In Takei'Tarr they'd give you half a loaf of bread fresh from the baker's oven and a bowl of olives. At sea we have to make do with what we can get. You have half a glass and then I expect you to work.’ He got up and left.
The slaves who worked the ropes and the sails moved freely around the ship and over the days and weeks that followed, Berren found his way into every nook and cranny. Down among the oars he'd come to know the men who sat around him but he'd never bothered to learn the names of the rest. Now he paid attention. To be up here they were survivors like him and they came from all over the known worlds. In his waking memories he'd grown up in the city-port of Deephaven, the second greatest city of the empire of Aria, and he found other slaves from there, most from the coast a hundred miles further south but they'd all heard of Deephaven. They told him of a war that had come since he'd left, of sorcerers dressed in silver, of ice raining in knives from the sky, the city put to the sword and then rising from the dead. Afterwards, the coast to the south had become a hunting ground for the Taiytakei slavers. Deephaven had survived but now there was a necropolis at its heart, populated by the risen dead and guarded by sorcerers who were masters of fire. And from those ashes the empire had a mistress now, beautiful and terrible to behold. They spoke of her in hushed whispers, as though even here she might hear them. The Ice Queen. Berren listened to their stories but he didn't much believe them. Most of these slaves, whatever they claimed, had never strayed more than a day's walk from where they'd been born until they were taken and stories had a way of changing, of growing wilder the further they travelled.
Other slaves came from places around the Dominion. The Bloody Judge had been to a few and heard of a few more. He'd even sacked one once, which made him smile in secret to himself. Others, like Tuuran, came from places with names he'd never heard. On nights when the ship was still and drifting and there was little work to do, they sat around a stove of hot coals and told each other their stories. As each new slave arrived from the oar deck, the older slaves always saw that he had his turn.
‘In my land there are dragons. Flying monsters as big as this ship whose wings would cast the whole world into shadow when they flew.’ Tuuran chewed on a stick of Xizic stolen from their Taiytakei masters. His eyes shone in the glow of the coals, wandering among the sail-slaves, daring any of them to speak. ‘I was born to fight them. Raised to slay them. I am Adamantine. I have stood in walls of dragon-scale shields and turned back their fire. We were masters of the beasts, not their slaves. We were the undrawn sword.’ He said the same thing every time, that and nothing more. He never once told them how he'd been taken.
‘I come from a farm,’ said Berren when it was his turn. In his waking memories he never saw any farm but if he said who he thought he really was, that he was a man well into his third decade who'd led armies, fought wars, killed kings and conquered kingdoms, no one would believe him. The stories the slaves shared were meant to have at least a little truth in their hearts. ‘I grew up far away from the sea. We lived beside a lake and everywhere around us was swamp and reeds.’ He dreamed of that village every night, knew it now as though it had been his home. ‘Men with swords and horses came each year. They took our food and our animals and left us to starve. One year they branded me.’ He tapped his thigh, the great scar that lay half-hidden under his tunic. The other slaves murmured. They'd all seen it.
He changed the truth a little from the way his dreams had it then: ‘One year they came a second time. After they'd taken all we had they came back to destroy us. Man or woman, old or young, it didn't matter; they put us to the sword. I was away among the reeds. It was night. When I came back, the dead were left where they'd fallen, scattered across the ground.’ He could see it, feel it. The loss and the horror and the fear of being suddenly alone were so vivid, and so was the rage that followed. That was how it went in his dreams. Gone out into the swamp to die. Given back his life by the miracle of the one-eyed spectre. Returned to find his home slaughtered in savagery.
He pinched himself. Those were dreams and they didn't belong to him, for he was Berren, child of Deephaven, son of the city through and through. The Bloody Judge, warlord of the Small Kingdoms. The Crowntaker, maker and breaker of kings and queens. He was a lot of things but he'd never lain dying by a lake, and yet he felt it. He ground his teeth and watched the slaves around him carefully as he spoke. ‘I went after them,’ he said. Some of them gently nodded, others shook their heads, and then and there Berren divided the slaves into two in his mind. The Nodders and the Shakers. The ones who'd fight and the ones who wouldn't. The wolves and the sheep.
Tuuran belched. ‘Is that it, Berren Crowntaker, Berren the Bloody Judge? Or is this story going to be a very long one?’
The other slaves laughed and nodded and raised their cups. ‘Berren the Crowntaker?’ said one. ‘I knew him.’ A chorus of jeers and boos and laughing drowned out whatever came next. ‘Well I saw him, then. The Bloody Judge he was calling himself. Had a part in sacking Mor-Dyan. Six years ago that was.’ The sail-slave snorted and looked at Berren. ‘You ain't anything like him.’
Mor-Dyan. He remembered that. Berren chuckled and shook his head. ‘I just have his name.’ Stupid thing, that first day in front of Tuuran, saying who he really was. It had gone around the ship like a disease and none of them ever quite forgot because Tuuran wouldn't let them. Berren spat onto the deck. ‘No, my story's about done. You can dream the rest easy enough. Was the Crowntaker's men who'd done it, and no hope I had of doing anything about it. Got as far as the sea. Soldiers came by, clearing out a tavern, and there I was too far in my cups to even notice. Next thing I knew I was here.’ He shrugged. ‘Let that be the end of the story.’
‘So who's this Skyrie, then?’ asked Tuuran. ‘The one you keep mumbling about in your sleep, keeping the rest of us awake all night. He one of those soldiers you set off to hunt, Berren the Bloody Judge, or was he just a lover?’
The name hit him like a fist. He hadn't heard it outside his dreams for almost a year. He froze, unable to speak.
‘He can call himself what he wants, can't he?’ muttered someone. ‘As long as what he answers to is slave like the rest of us, eh?’ There was a chorus of laughter. Berren screwed his eyes shut. Skyrie was gone, wasn't he? But there was something more than the memories of another man's life. Something else trying to break through in his dreams of the one-eyed man.
Another slave got up, pale-skinned Adasi who'd come from the Small Kingdoms. ‘No, Jorri. He wants to call himself the Bloody Judge, he can answer for him too.’ He walked around the coals and stood over Berren, looking down at him. ‘I had a cousin in the Tethis queensguard. The Bloody Judge killed him. That means that you and I, we got a-’
Berren shot to his feet and wrapped an arm around Adasi's neck. The words ended in a strangled gasp as Berren squeezed. ‘If he served the Dark Queen then he deserved what he got!’ he hissed. He was breathing hard. Rage swarmed through him, rage and revenge, demanding release. ‘So what was his name? Was it Skyrie?’ His arms clenched tighter. Why would he say that? Skyrie? How could it be?
‘Adasi, last month your cousin was a pirate,’ laughed someone else.
‘You going to let him go now?’ asked Tuuran.
‘And a bad one at that.’
Then Tuuran's arms were around Berren like iron bands. Adasi scrabbled away, off into the shadows, staring at him as though he was a monster, a madman, a freak. And at the same time he saw himself walking down into the pit under Tethis castle, four brother warlocks around him as an honour guard. He felt the hatred burning inside him as his village had burned. Revenge. That was what had taken him there. He stumbled away, out of the shelter of the sailors’ awning and into the wind. Cold fresh air crashed though him. He reached the rails at the edge of the deck and heaved the contents of his stomach into the sea. ‘Gods!’ He spat out the taste of bile and gritted his teeth. With the wind in his face and the stars up above, the memories slowly faded until all that was left was the name.
Skyrie. He almost didn't know who that was any more.
‘I don't care who you were or who you think you are,’ murmured Tuuran in his ear. The big man had crept up on him and now he slipped in beside Berren and leaned on the rail too, looking out at the night-black sea. ‘You can be the Sun King himself for all I care but to the rest of us you're still called slave. Do you know the penalty for damaging another slave, slave?’
‘A slow and painful death, I don't doubt.’ Berren spat again.
‘I send you back down for another year at the oars.’
‘Is that all?’
‘In your case I'll make sure it's five.’
‘Then I'd best start with you.’
Tuuran laughed. ‘No one cares, slave. No one gives a drip of piss about who you were or how you got here. You're here. That's the only truth that matters. Everything else is slaves’ tales. You heard Vhalin speak?’
‘Used to be sergeant of the guard in some place I've never heard of?’
‘Sold into slavery when his town was overrun. Fought with such ferocity that when they finally took him they were too afraid to kill him, right? Whoever they were.’
‘So he says.’
‘He comes from a town you've never heard of because it doesn't exist. He was a dock worker. He was sold to the Taiytakei because he couldn't pay his debts. Found that out from another slave who knew him. Sahan the pirate? Feared throughout the Gulf of Feyr, renowned from Helhex in the south to the mountains in the north, scourge and terror of the seas?’ Tuuran shook his head. ‘Fisherman. He was a pirate but only for one night. Thought he'd row into Deephaven harbour and climb up an anchor chain and rob one of the ships. Caught first time. Sold.’ Tuuran chuckled. ‘But you wouldn't believe it now, either of them. They made up the stories of who they wanted to be. Vhalin the Panther and Bloody Sahan.’ He turned to Berren. ‘So you can be the Bloody Judge of Tethis if you want, or you can be the emperor of Aria or the speaker of the nine realms. No one cares. Just don't act like it makes you any better than the rest of us.’
Berren spat into the sea. ‘Why make up stories if no one cares? They don't change who you are. Pretty pointless, I'd say.’
‘Are they?’ Tuuran slapped Berren on the shoulder and spat a laugh of anger at the night. ‘We have nothing, slave. So when I dream, I am the Tuuran who faced dragons and I fight them and I win. When the time for blood-letting comes, that's who I become and so I live and others die. But when it's not time for blood-letting, these other slaves are what pass for your friends. So if anything happens to Adasi now, you'd better have about a hundred witnesses to say it wasn't you and I'd better be one of them. Otherwise. .’ He mimed a rowing motion.
‘I could throw you over the side right here and now,’ muttered Berren.
‘You really think so?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Then why don't you?’
‘I faced him once. The man who stole my life. Let's say, for the sake of things, he was the man who burned my village.’ He stared at the sea, spilling words to the air. ‘I remember the feel of the javelin in my hand. The exultation as I threw it. I looked into his eyes and a chill wrapped itself around me like a long-dead lover. He met me, stare for stare, steady and unflinching as a stone. They weren't the eyes of some doppelganger. They were my own.’ He didn't say anything more after that. Just gazed out across the water.
‘Never mind those other names. I think I'm going to call you Crazy. Crazy Mad,’ said Tuuran.
And that was how things stayed. The days grew to months and the months to years and Tuuran was his friend as much as anyone until the time came when he left, summoned to some voyage to his homeland that filled him with tears and fire and a hunger to be free, and Berren was alone. Crazy Mad. Wondering what to do and waiting for the world to remember him. And remember him it did, after many months more had passed, with a Taiytakei sailing ship and three men in grey robes and one that he knew. The one he wanted most of all.
Vallas. Vallas Kuy. Brother to the dead warlock Saffran who'd cut out a piece of his soul.
16
Priests of the Vul Storna
Not that anyone in the eyrie knew or cared, but in the dragon realms the Adamantine Palace had already burned to ash and glass when the Watcher saw the moon sorcerers for the second and last time. With no warning given they appeared in the desert out of the sky above the eyrie the stolen alchemist had made. Two of them now, not three; and they came with dragons and said nothing, left the monsters behind and vanished into the sky whence they came. The Watcher watched them go and then looked once more at the paper, carefully written in a scribe's hand, that he'd taken from the grey dead under the Vul Storna not many days before.
For the brother who waits in grey.
We have found him
.
Vallas
Vallas. Now he had a name.
The Dragon-queen
17
The Speaker and Her Spear
Six months before it would burn under an onslaught of dragons, the dragon-queen Zafir stood before the altar of the Great Flame in the Glass Cathedral of the Adamantine Palace. Aruch, the cathedral's high priest, was mumbling old words handed down from the first speaker, Narammed. Zafir hardly heard them. Her head was spinning, full of doubts and fears and possibilities and amazement. Out in the Gateyard the Adamantine Men were still clearing up the corpses. The Night of the Knives, they'd soon be calling it. The night that the riders of the north had fought with the Speaker's Guard and left more than a hundred dead strewn across the palace. The night Shezira had pushed Hyram off his balcony to fall to his death and the night Zafir had imprisoned a king and a queen, the first time a speaker
had done such a thing in nearly a hundred years. The night she'd started a war.
The Glass Cathedral was half empty. It should have been full, but many of those who had come to see the new speaker chosen were dead or underground. Aruch's mumbling turned into a buzz in her ears. She couldn't concentrate. Her heart was fluttering. War. She'd started a war. Maybe Jehal thought there was a way to turn back but there wasn't.
It took a moment to realise Aruch had stopped. The cathedral had fallen silent. The air was taut with expectation. Aruch was holding something in the palm of his shaking hand.
‘The ring, Holiness,’ he said again.
Zafir stretched out her hand. Her fingers were long and delicate. Musician's fingers, her mother had said a long time ago when they'd still been speaking to each other, before Zafir had bled her first woman's blood and discovered the truth of what was waiting for her.
Today her hands were shaking as much as the daft old priest's.
Aruch slipped the Speaker's Ring onto her finger. He placed the Earthspear in her hand and named her Queen Zafir, speaker of the nine realms. She returned the spear and it was done. As she turned and walked away down the aisle of the gloomy windowless cathedral, she looked for Jehal, but he wasn't there. He'd stayed carefully out of sight. He'd said he would and she understood that he had to, but she wished he hadn't.
Doubts. Doubts had no place in a dragon-rider but it was hard to stand alone with so much uncertainty, not knowing with each hour what would come of Hyram's fall and the battle in the Gateyard, of dragon-kings and dragon-queens imprisoned in her towers, a blood-mage under her feet and a Night Watchman who wasn't as obedient as he seemed. Hard, and Jehal would have made it easier simply by being there to share the burden — but he wasn't, and she'd shambled through this ceremony like a sleepwalker, doing her part but barely aware of what was around her.