Dragon Queen sk-2

by Stephen Deas

  Free!

  Her three broken birds stopped again. One of them whimpered. Zafir slapped them back to work. What good did it do to explain? Why terrify them even more? There will be a time when I will return. There will be a reckoning. Ruin on them all. Ruin!

  Zafir stiffened. Return? Reckoning? Ruin? Those were the dragon's thoughts, not hers. She ought to be afraid. Terrified, as her three little birds were. They'd stopped again, pale and quivering, fingernails half painted, and looked at each other, and then they looked to her, fearful as mice, but they didn't run. Perhaps because she sat still and unmoved among them. Perhaps because she hadn't raised her hand for the third time. They were all hearing the same one voice crashing into them. Did not knowing what it was make it worse, or did it make it better?

  ‘Mistress. .’

  The first word any of them had ever spoken to her. Zafir collected herself. For a moment she closed her eyes. They couldn't have long, after all. Mistress? It made her want to cry for everything she'd lost and at the same time she felt stupidly grateful that, at the very end, someone would be with her. ‘A dragon,’ Zafir said when she'd swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘A dragon has woken nearby.’ That only confused them and so she took their hands and pulled them gently closer, and after all she'd done to them they still came, one by one, to kneel before her as she sat, drawn in because they were terrified and she wasn't. And yes, a part of her wasafraid, the part that knew that death was near, but she'd lived with dragons since she was born and had learned to take that fear and make it into something she could spit right back into any monster's eye, as every dragon-rider did. ‘The silver half-gods will easily see to it,’ she told them, except if it was that easy, how had one woken and why was it still coming? But either way nothing she could do would make a difference, and so for want of anything better she started to tell her broken birds what it meant to be a dragon-queen. All the things that had gone through her mind as she'd killed the Taiytakei on the deck. She told them how she'd been born a princess, heir to the oldest and greatest of the nine realms, to the Silver City, the Pinnacles and the beating heart of the dragon lands. How she'd been made and what it had been like to be a little girl surrounded by monsters. That she had been a queen, a ruler of all and mistress of every dragon in the world even though now she was nothing but a slave. They stared back with wide eyes. She couldn't be sure they were even listening and they certainly couldn't begin to understand. No one could, not unless they'd lived it.

  As she talked and stroked their hair and held their hands; and as she did she heard voices through the walls over the wooden creaks of the ship. Tremors touched her feet, of timbers shaken and rent, closer and closer, the splintering of wood as something crashed its way through the ship. Then shouts and screams and the smash smash smash of something that could only be a hatchling dragon battering its way through a wall. Her birds were whimpering, sobbing, huddling ever closer. Zafir kept her head down, eyes among them, talking, doing all she could to keep the quiver out of her voice. A faint smile played at the corner of her mouth even as she flinched and her heart skipped a beat. She would die by dragon after all, and so would these Taiytakei who thought they could make her a slave, and if that was the way it had to be then she would be content.

  A noise like a thunderbolt shook the room. For an instant fear got the better of her. Her words faltered, the spoken progress of her life stuttering to a halt as she was crowned mistress of the Adamantine Palace. She heard the roar of flames, more screams; sniffed and caught a whiff of burning, of flesh and wood and cloth and hair.

  Know what I am! Her three birds whimpered and cringed and tried to pull away but she held them tight. ‘You can't run,’ she whispered over the din of screams and the crack of tortured wood. ‘Never run. Whatever comes, face it and don't flinch. Can it be any worse than living as a slave in even the prettiest cage?’ She could feel the monster. It was close now.

  The roof of her cabin burst apart, a sharp shower of splintered wood cascading to the floor. Her broken birds cried out and clung to her. Jagged claws tore and ripped at the wood above her. A dragon's head smashed through, all fire and horns and glaring fangs. A hatchling fresh from the egg, not that it made a difference. Zafir met it eye for eye. So this was how she would end? And yes, she was afraid, but she was mistress of her fear, quickly crushed to scorn and anger.

  ‘You're just a newborn,’ she said, and her words oozed with disappointment. ‘I should have better. You should have been a proper dragon. A real monster. Onyx or his like. That’s how a dragon-queen should die. Not you.’ She looked away. Dragon smell filled the cabin, cloying and overpowering. The hatchling glistened. A drop of something dark and sticky fell from it and landed on her skin. She flinched. It was still wet from its egg.

  Dragon-rider. It stared, all loathing and glee, then bared its fangs and bored its eyes into her, battering at her, demanding her submission, her obeisance and her awe. It forced one claw through the hole it had made in the timbers and reached for her. She made herself be still, made herself hold its eye, not flinch away even as it touched her face. It drew one talon sharp as a razor down the skin of her neck from ear to collar with careful delicacy. She felt the pain, the warm blood, but she didn't move.

  I could burn you. I could rip you to bloody strips.

  ‘I bow to no one,’ she whispered. ‘So burn me, dragon. Burn me!’

  Why? Its eye flickered away as if it was talking to someone else. Abruptly it withdrew. She watched it go then stared out through the hole in the roof of her cabin long after, listening to the screams fade and the pop and crackle of flames until she finally found her voice again.

  ‘Because I am a dragon-queen,’ she whispered. She wasn't going to burn after all. She hadn't expected that.

  Her broken birds were cowering in the shadows under the bed now, under the table, in the corner, whimpering and wailing. They made her laugh. That was how men made themselves into slaves. ‘Get up!’ She touched her hand to where the dragon had opened her skin and then to her tongue, tasting her own blood. A habit that came with every wound, started long ago in her mother's palace.

  They wouldn't move. They huddled in their corners, mouths agape, shaking, eyes glazed. Broken. Dragons did that.

  ‘Get up!’ she said again, sharply this time. ‘Tend to me.’ She hauled them one by one out of their hiding places and wrenched them back from their terror. She touched her bloodied neck once more. Whether it had meant to or not, the dragon had set her free. The silver chain was still wrapped around her wrist but at its other end the bolt that had once gone through the roof of her cabin lay among the splinters on the floor. She picked it up and held it loosely in her hand, wondering. A chain like that could strangle a man. The bolt? It was heavy enough that a good throw, well aimed, hard and fast to the temple, might be deadly. But to what end? How many men were on this one ship? Dozens, unless the dragon had killed them. More than even a dragon-queen could fight, and even if she won, what then?

  ‘Get up!’ She grabbed the last of her birds, the one who had hidden under her bed, made her stand up and slapped her. ‘Dragons, woman. That's all they are. Great and terrible monsters, yes, but nothing more. Clean my wound and dress it. Are you afraid of monsters?’

  The slave shook her head. A lie, but now the dragon was gone and Zafir was still here, she was more afraid of her, and it seemed absurd but Zafir understood perfectly, for the worst monsters certainly weren't dragons. She bared her teeth and hissed, tilted her neck and touched the bloody wound again. ‘But monsters can be killed, little bird.’

  They cleaned her throat and wrapped it in silk, hands shaking all the time. When they were done, she pushed them away. She left them behind and climbed up through the ruins of the ship, heedless of the shouts she heard around her and below and to either side, until she had the sky over her head. Blackened bodies littered the decks. The sails were on fire, flaming rags falling now and then, fluttering away in the breeze. The rigging was destroyed, the deck
s scorched. Patches still smouldered, while the bows of the ship were firmly ablaze. A few desperate sailors yelled, running back and forth with buckets — the dragon hadn't killed all of them then. She looked the ship over. It was ruined but it didn't look like they were going to burn to death, not yet, so she turned her back on the panic and sat at the stern near the hole the dragon had smashed as it left and watched the sun glint off the sea. The sailors who were left, if they saw her at all, were too busy trying to save their ship and let her be. She looked out over the ravaged Taiytakei fleet. Some ships were aflame from end to end, others were untouched.

  One hatchling. She started to laugh. In this moment her fate was her own. She could throw herself into the sea if she wanted but these Taiytakei who thought they were her masters, now she saw them for what they were: small frightened men. Children. So no, she wouldn't throw her life away in a fit of foolish defiance. Not when she could do far worse.

  Three full-grown dragons circled overhead. Her dragons, she reminded herself. Other hatchlings flitted aimlessly back and forth in the sky. She turned as the air shook and popped and one of the silver men appeared on the deck. He raised his hands and the fires leaped to them as though he was sucking the flames away from everything burning and drawing them into himself. When he was done, he blinked away. Now there was a thing to drive a spike of awe through her heart. A sorcerer clad in silver like the Silver King himself, the half-god. Was that who they were? The alchemists said the Silver King was gone for ever, destroyed by the blood-mages, that he'd been only one, unique, an aberration, but there were stories inside the Pinnacles that said otherwise. Stories etched into the walls in places that no alchemist was allowed to see. Her home. Her secrets, amid the rows and rows of arches carved into white stone walls which glowed with a soft inner moonlight. Doors sealed shut, doors that led nowhere except on rare nights when perhaps they opened into other worlds but she'd never seen it happen. Her grandmother had sealed much away, her mother had been the same, afraid of her own palace, but not her. Her fears had come from something else, and so she'd crept among those forbidden places, finding in them a sanctuary from the monster she saw every day. And though she'd never seen anything beyond the arches but blank stone walls, she'd seen plenty more to hold her eye: carvings, mosaics, murals, all of them witheringly old. Things the Silver King had made. She'd come to know the old half-god, in her way. She saw his sadness. A pining for something long lost. Memories of others of his kind, perhaps, for whatever the alchemists said he clearly hadn't been alone, not always. A catastrophe that he had somehow brought about. It was all there in the forgotten pictures on her walls.

  And now they were here?

  Across the waves the fires winked out one after another. Some ships were already lost, listing as they took in water. They sank as she watched then, their last fires put out as the sea swallowed them. She counted. Ten ships lost. Forty-six left by the end. Not as many as she'd thought. Little boats struggled through the waves between them, carrying men. Flags ran up masts and fluttered, messages sent. She didn't know what any of it meant but she understood what they were saying. The air was thick with it. What do we do? What now? What happened to us?

  Then, to her surprise and delight, the old white-haired Taiytakei came stumbling from his cabin — Quai'Shu who thought that all of this was his, every ship and every man, the dragons and perhaps even the half-gods, but most of all her. He was like a dragon-king and so she knew him, knew how his mind would work, even if instead of dragons he had ships. She weighed the bolt in her hand. Another man who thought he could own her. She'd done for the first and she'd do for this one too. No one would stop her, not this time.

  She hesitated though as she watched him. The Taiytakei sailors all fretted and bowed around him but something inside him was broken. His presence was gone, his veneer of command, and all he was was a weak old man who didn't understand what was happening any more. As she understood, Zafir smiled. He'd stared a dragon in the eye just as she had and the dragon had snapped him. The smile lingered a little longer. She let go of the bolt. The dragon had shown her the way. These were just men like any others. Patience, and they would fall.

  The Taiytakei led Quai'Shu away with his vacant eyes staring blindly at his scattered fleet. She didn't struggle when they came to take her too, across the sea to a ship that still had sails. She watched the fleet split. Perhaps because she hadn't tried to run they let her wander free now. She sat on the decks out of the way, watching, and she knew they saw her compliance as acquiescence, as defeat, but they were wrong. Her broken birds knew better. Something had changed between them. They were flags to her mast now, all three of them, afraid and unsure of their fates but they'd tied themselves to her. She saw it in their eyes. Still afraid, yes, but the fear had turned to something else too.

  Awe.

  The dragon had done that. Given her that gift.

  The remaining dragons circled overhead and then flew away, all of them, the silver half-gods on the backs of the adults and the hatchlings trailing in their wake. A sigh of relief rose from the ships as they left, for they were the greatest terror that any of these men had ever seen.

  Now and then a Taiytakei — she could barely tell their dark faces apart and disdained the effort of trying — would tell her to move, or to do this, that or the other. They spoke to her slowly as if she was a fool. She smiled and bowed and did as she was told because she had seen now that they could be broken.

  Patience, and they will fall.

  And so they sailed on until the first dark line of land smudged the horizon and the Taiytakei fleet came home with a dragon-queen in its midst.

  22

  The T'Varr

  As well as its spires, its floating orbs and great glass discs, the Palace of Leaves in Xican extended down into the stones themselves. Deep in its bowels Baros Tsen, t'varr to Sea Lord Quai'Shu of Xican, had built his bathhouse. It was, false modesty aside, magnificent. Not too ostentatious but perfectly formed. Large enough so that when steam filled the cave, the walls vanished into the mist. Tall enough and dark enough to give the illusion of being outside. Tiny little spark-lights dotted the ceiling, arranged to mimic the stars. You could pick out the constellations if you wanted. The floor was simple black marble — none of the glass and gold that filled the rest of the palace — and in the centre the marble fell away in a series of steps into a square heated bath where the water was always kept exactly as he liked it. Hot but not too hot, more often than not scented with the particular flavour of Xizic from near Hanjaadi that he happened to like, with a potpourri of other scents flirting at the edges. There were perhaps a hundred different oils in pots in a simple wooden chest, and beside the bath, in a bowl scooped out of the marble, there was always ice and a crystal chalice of cold apple wine. It was the best bathhouse in the palace, possibly the best across the whole of Takei'Tarr, and that was because Baros Tsen T'Varr, it was whispered, loved his baths more than anything in all the eight worlds. And Tsen had heard the whispers too and knew who the whisperers were, because that was the nature of who he was, and he didn't mind what they said because if it wasn't exactly true, nor was it far wrong.

  Wet footprints speckled the marble where slaves had padded to and fro only moments before, lighting the hundred candles that ringed the floor. They were gone now, the doors closed and sealed for his privacy. Baros Tsen T'Varr lowered himself gingerly into the pleasantly stinging water and sniffed, taking a deep lungful of steam and the scent of Xizic. He smiled. Across the water, his lady Kalaiya smiled back, a slave but a very special one. And actually I like my slave and my apple orchards better than my baths, though it would pain me to lose either. Our little secret, eh? For there wasn't anyone in the many worlds more special than Kalaiya. To Tsen, at least.

  He took a deep breath and then another. The Xizic scent rose around him. He'd let Kalaiya choose today and she'd gone for something a little different. Deeper and more subtle than his own favourites. His eyes narrowed as he tried to place
it. ‘The finest oil of the desert from Shinpai,’ he guessed, and watched her face. From all the way across the desert on the far coast of Takei'Tarr. And her own scent hid behind it like her face hid behind the steam.

  She kept him guessing a moment and then her smile brightened and she nodded. ‘You always have to be right. One day I'll trick you, you know.’

  ‘I hope so.’ He sighed deeper into the water and tipped back his head until only his nose and his eyes were above the surface. Sometimes when he looked at her and saw that little prickle of resentment that every slave carried with them, somewhere deep down he wondered at himself for keeping her, for not letting her go. I love her. I should let her fly if flight is what she wants. He thought exactly the same thing every time he saw her. But he never did and never would.

  ‘You look happy today,’ she said when he sat up and looked at her again. Her face was soft and warm, glistening in the damp heat, slightly mocking perhaps but always kind.

  ‘Life is good, my dear.’ More ritual words to go with the ritual of thought. He said them every time they bathed and usually he meant it. The life of a t'varr to a sea lord was a fine thing. On other days he might have laughed at that — unless your sea lord is Quai'Shu with his impossible schemes of dragons. But not today. Today he brought with him something wonderful.

  ‘Are you back here for long?’ She'd been his favourite for years, taken from the desert by Cashax slavers long ago, and he'd found her, and she'd understood him at once, better than any of the Xicanese. She knew his secrets and she kept them and so he was good to her. And he liked her. A lot. That little thing so rare.

  ‘Not for long, my dear. But when I return I'll take you with me. Some things will be so much less awkward that way.’ And how wonderful it would be to have her with him again all the time, just like it had been in Xican before. He half-sat, half-lay in the water, letting its almost painful heat wash through him. He was sweating already. A bathhouse was a place for sweat. And for reflection and drifting and the numbing of thought.