Dragon Queen sk-2

by Stephen Deas

  Growing and getting worse.

  In lands far away. .

  . . with unfamiliar names. .

  . . in the places closest to the cracks. .

  . . even the little ones do not die properly any more.

  The dragon stared back at the formless void, the primal edge of creation that lay before it. It is getting worse. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

  A hand gripped inside it. The dragon called Silence froze in the air, unable to move.

  You cannot keep what you have taken. We must have it back. .

  . . with regret. .

  . . but we know you understand. .

  . . and know that we wish you well upon your return.

  It was a strange death, unlike any other it could remember. The other times it had felt the heat rise inside it, consuming from within, a comforting warmth into which it sank, deeper and deeper, until it woke in Xibaiya, a fleshless spirit. This was more like the snip of a knife as the dragon's spirit howled alone into the realm of the dead.

  One of our kind?

  No. .

  . . it was not us. .

  . . it was a daughter of the sun who did this.

  Tuuran

  26

  The Palace of Leaves

  Many months before the dragon-queen came across the sea, Tuuran arrived with the alchemist Bellepheros in the Taiytakei port of Xican. He nearly died and so became the alchemist's sworn sword. The Taiytakei merely saw it as the giving of a slave and the alchemist wouldn't have understood, but, as they were winched from their ship, Tuuran spoke an oath quietly and softly in his head. The alchemist Bellepheros had saved his life and so now that life would be his shield; and as they stood beside one another at the top of the cliffs and stared for the first time at the City of Stone and the Palace of Leaves, he wondered for a moment what Crazy Mad, his strange friend for the last three years, would have made of what he saw. Because Crazy was complicated and Tuuran was simple, and it was all just far too big to fit inside his head.

  Sometimes, when Tuuran had been younger and was still being forged as an Adamantine Man, he'd lain awake at nights, wondering what it must have been like for the first men to be freed of the tyranny of dragons. Living in their caves and their tunnels, dark and cold and hungry until the man of living silver came with the Earthspear and the world was suddenly changed. How it had felt to walk outside into the warm balmy breeze and the bright sun and feel it on your skin for the first time without the creeping dread and the urge to look up, always to look up. How it was to run in grassy fields and doze beside rivers and sleep for the first time safe and sound under the stars. Most of all he wondered how it must have been to have such a creature as the Silver King appear, a half-god who could snap his fingers and rearrange the world to his liking. What was it like to be around such a presence, to see miracles occur before your eyes? He tried to imagine these things but he always failed. He was a soldier, after all, strong and fast and obedient, not prone to dreaming but wise enough to understand that some things were simply beyond his reasoning. Some ideas were simply too grand.

  Looking up at the Palace of Leaves, Tuuran knew he had his answer. This. This was how it had felt. Beside him the alchemist gaped in slack-jawed awe. A maze of shapes hung in the air dangling from pale golden clouds. They shone and gleamed and dazzled. From the stone peaks beneath, a forest of bright towers rose to meet them. Brilliant strands of sunlight stretched among the shapes, between the towers, to the ground and up to the shimmering clouds like the web of some great spider. When Tuuran squinted he could clearly see a ship suspended among the orbs and towers, masts and sails and all, and he could only think that this must be one of the sky-ships of the Taiytakei of which he'd heard. He stared, open-mouthed, while inside where no one would see he laughed at the wonder of it and wept too at how big a thing this was to see. Perhaps like seeing a dragon for the first time, with no previous understanding that such creatures even existed; but where a dragon was a terrible thing of fear and dread, the palace of Xican was god-touched with beauty.

  The white witch with the glass lenses fiddled at her belt. The movement drew his eye whether he liked it or not. Slaves learned fast about belts and wands. The gold ones with the inner light, they were the ones you watched for. Discipline wands, the galley slave masters called them, although he'd heard them called other things too. The oar masters and the sail masters used them all the time, casually sending little shocks flying across the decks of their ships to remind the slaves who was in charge. For idleness, mostly; sometimes because they felt like it; but now and then it was for something more and then the cracks of lightning they spat out became the slap of a dragon's tail, the crush of a dragon's claw, pain overwhelming. He'd seen white-skinned men turned black and flaking, their extremities crumbling to ash as though burned by dragon fire. A sail-slave grew a sixth sense for when a wand was pulled from a belt and so Tuuran saw what the enchantress did, even though he never quite stopped looking at the sky-palace either, even though a good part of him felt touched by the presence of a divinity whose name he'd never been told.

  ‘A perk of being what I am,’ said the witch and stepped onto the glass disc she'd made. Tuuran still couldn't take his eyes from the palace. Only one power had ever created such things as these. The Silver King, but the Silver King was gone. Witchcraft and alchemy and blood-magic? He couldn't believe any of those could even begin to craft such marvels.

  The Taiytakei shoved him onto the glass disc. As it began to move, the alchemist stumbled. Tuuran caught him. The ground fell away and the palace soared closer. Beneath him the hatchling mountains of the City of Stone seemed even steeper and sharper than they had from the summit of the cliff. Tuuran drank it all in. This! This must be how it felt to fly on the back of a dragon, and suddenly he was filled joy and envy. Joy because an Adamantine Man rarely sat on the back of one of their monsters; and envy because now he understood why the dragon-riders strutted like gods.

  He sat down and kept his eyes firmly on the palace. The alchemist looked as though he was going to be sick. Don't look down. You learned when they made you climb the cliffs of the Purple Spur, and yes there was a thing that passed for a path that wound its way up past the Zar Oratorium, but when you were a half a mile up on a ledge that was a handspan wide, then you learned.

  The white witch said something. Tuuran didn't hear — his eyes were locked on the palace. He eased the alchemist down to sit beside him, gripping him tight.

  ‘I have you,’ he murmured, never looking aside. ‘Witchcraft and blood-magic, but we are stronger, Lord Alchemist. We are stronger! Cling to that!’

  For a moment he did take his eyes off the palace and its orbs and risked a glance, because even when they knew they shouldn't look, every Adamantine Man still did. The sight made him dizzy. They were high over the stones of the city, floating between them, the sea hundreds of feet beneath, an invisible nothing all that was holding him. He gasped and stared and started to laugh with amazement, and then the dizziness took him so hard that he could barely even sit without falling sideways. He squeezed his eyes shut and turned back to the golden towers where the white witch and her flying disc were headed and watched them come closer. The dizziness ebbed.

  A wind picked up and grew stronger as they climbed. The alchemist's fingers dug into his arm, deeper and tighter. As they drew close to the towers he saw they weren't truly gold but gold-tinged glass, huge flat slabs of it as though the tower had been moulded from a single colossal piece. Like the white stone tower of Outwatch they were flawlessly smooth, except Outwatch was all curves and arcs without a single sharp corner, while the gold-glass towers were edges and angles all over. They were heading for the upper reaches of one, one of many, already in the golden half-shadow of the great glass discs overhead. Most of what he'd taken for a giant web he could see were chains running from the sky to the ground, or to the pendulous gold and silver eggs and orbs that hung beneath the discs, or else they were half-seen bridges that ran high between the towers
. The sky-ship was below now, its masts and furled-up sails nestled between the towers away to one side, festooned with chains as though it would break free given even a glimpse of freedom. Among all this, kaleidoscope patterns of light and shadow moved slowly through one another as the sunlight met the serene revolutions of the gold-glass structures above.

  The witch's disc glided at last to a stop beside the skin of the tower. Tuuran reached to touch it and found it silky. The witch took the black rod from her belt again. She tapped the tower wall and the glass flowed like liquid, rippling back to leave a hole the shape of an egg. The witch put away her rod, looked at the alchemist and then at Tuuran. Bellepheros was swaying where he sat, eyes still tightly shut.

  ‘You might want to help him,’ she said and walked calmly through. Tuuran gawped at the hole in the wall and at the cavernous hall beyond, a white marble floor the full width of the tower between the gold-glass walls. He picked himself up slowly and carefully and gently lifted the alchemist to his feet.

  ‘Eyes still closed, Lord Grand Master,’ he whispered, ‘but we're here.’ Wherever here was. A little like a great lord's grand hall in the realms. Like the Speaker's Hall except vastly brighter and made of gold and hundreds of feet above the ground. His eyes were watering. Tears of awe, was it? Yet he couldn't stop himself.

  ‘We are arrived, Lord Alchemist. The ground is stone again.’ He let the alchemist go. Through the walls he could see the sky, the muted distant shapes of clouds and of the sea, of the City of Stone below like thousands upon thousands of giant dragon-tooth towers pressed together, rising out of the dark waters. The walls of this hall rose up fifty feet more. Beyond them, past more gold-tinged glass, the shapes of the upper palace hung large and close.

  Bellepheros fell to his knees and puked. Slaves came running at once to clean up the mess but Tuuran barely noticed. As the white witch began to walk, his feet followed but his eyes stayed where they were, looking up. Entranced. A hundred spans above his head hung a golden sphere, a small black hole pointing directly down. At the far end of the gold-glass hall the witch tapped her black wand against the wall and another piece of floating glass grew at her feet, forming out of the wall itself. Tuuran flinched back and looked at it askance but the witch stood on it and the other Taiytakei guided the alchemist to sit beside her, and so he had little choice but to join him, legs dangling over the edge, torn between the glorious vista around them, the hypnotism of the distant hole above and the gnawing sense that the glass beneath him was somehow alive and would notice him and either buck him off or eat him at any moment.

  When the glass kept on rising and didn't eat him, he looked back down to the hall from which they'd come. The handful of slaves who stood there waiting patiently to serve looked small and lost in its enormity.

  ‘Does height not trouble you?’ gasped the alchemist. His eyes were screwed tightly shut. The spell of the place faltered for a moment, broken by ordinary words.

  ‘Height? I'm a sail-slave!’ Tuuran chuckled. ‘A sail-slave who's afraid of heights doesn't last very long. If the floor was pitching and heaving beneath us, the wind howling and the rain flaying the skin off my face, I'd feel quite at home. Height? No.’ No, it wasn't the height that made the squirming knot in his belly, even through the rapturous wonder. ‘But glorious as these sights may be, Lord Alchemist, I don't like not seeing what holds me from falling. It reeks of witchery.’ Even so, witchery or not, its magic still held him — perhaps that more than anything was what made him afraid — that he was bewitched and made so infinitely insignificant. The moment he fell silent he felt himself shrinking again, the colossal tower wrapping itself around him, making him smaller and smaller and smaller.

  They passed into empty space and a wind that whipped at sleeves and cuffs and robes. The alchemist yelped and clung with fingers like claws. He had his eyes closed again while Tuuran couldn't even bring himself to blink. ‘Is this how it is to ride a dragon?’ He held the alchemist tight but what he wanted was to let go. To leap and fly with the wind howling in his face. The world beneath him was shrinking. Suddenly he didn't feel small any more but huge, gripped by a strange need to stand and hold out his arms and somehow embrace the sheer size of everything around him.

  He put his hands in front of his eyes, since he couldn't make them close, until the sensation went away and a gloom wrapped him in its shadows and they were out of the sky and up into the lowest belly of the sky-palace itself, surrounded by dark carved wooden walls and bronze plaques and more shining bronze on the floor and other mundane and familiar things. A dragon-king's palace might look like this, perhaps. He'd never seen the inside of one to know, but he'd seen the houses of the rich in the City of Dragons and he'd lived inside the walls of the Adamantine Palace. His eyes flicked everywhere, taking it all in.

  There were slaves already waiting for them, branded on both arms with the lightning bolt sigil of the City of Stone. Trusted sword-slaves but these were passive docile things, spiritless palace creatures, invisible servants with scarcely a flicker of life in them. The slaves followed the white witch and the Taiytakei soldiers like broken ghosts in their white tunics, heads bowed, up a single flight of stairs made of bronze and wood and lit by oil lamps, all reeking of the smell Tuuran knew well from the ships he'd sailed: Xizic, the ubiquitous drug of the Taiytakei. Sailors chewed lumps of it when they could get it. Men and women alike bathed in its oil, those who could afford it. Now it seemed they scented their lamp oil with it too.

  ‘The sea lord will see you in the morning.’ The white witch with her glass lenses stopped beside a wood and bronze door and opened it. A simple handle, no black rod this time and no lock either. ‘These slaves will tend to you. You must be at your best for the sea lord, if you wish to get the most from him.’ She winked as though she and the alchemist were part of some conspiracy together but the alchemist didn't seem to notice; Tuuran wasn't sure he'd even heard.

  The palace slaves went inside and Tuuran would have followed but the white witch laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment and whispered in his ear, ‘Watch him, sail-slave. Guard him. We'll not keep him here for long but when others know of his arrival he will be in danger. I cannot arm you but I will send no slave that you could not easily overpower. You will taste his food. If he dies then it will fall hard on us all. And for those who are slaves, you know what that must mean.’

  Tuuran nodded and bowed as she backed away. Slaves knew better than to question what they were told but it struck him as a very strange thing to say, and strange in an uncomfortable sort of way, as if she didn't trust her own men walking right beside her as much as she did a slave she'd barely met. He followed Bellepheros into his room where the palace slaves were already undressing him. Their demeanour changed the moment the witch had gone. Eyes that said they were better than Tuuran, with their two brands to his one. Tutting and muttering, talking about him as if he wasn't there, appalled by the state and the stink of him. He'd seen slaves like this before. The worst of the worst. Sniffing and servile and fawning to their masters, haughty and arrogant among their own. They were looking at him like that now.

  He waited while they poured bucket after bucket of water into a bronze bath, then, while the alchemist was bathing and wouldn't see, he picked up the palace slave who was doing the worst of the talking and punched him on the nose. Not much of a punch but the look on the man's face was priceless.

  ‘You. . you! I will have you destroyed for this, sail-slave.’ The man kept his voice low, glancing nervously towards Bellepheros in his bath. Then he spat at Tuuran's feet. Still afraid though, and that was what mattered. Tuuran punched him again, harder this time, enough to daze him.

  ‘Do your worst,’ he sneered. ‘You'll find I barely notice.’ He looked from one slave to the next to the next, seeing their faces crumble from disdain to fear. His eyes lingered on the women. Flickers of interest here and there maybe? Or maybe not, maybe that was his imagination and being surrounded by sail-slaves and sailors for too long. Sail
-slaves had little enough chance for any pleasure. Now there was a thought. Better than the slack-jawed awe that still threatened to sweep him away.

  Other slaves came while the alchemist was bathing. They brought food, a great feast when set against the endless rice and beans that Tuuran was used to. The new slaves whispered to the ones already there and the ones already there whispered back and they all stole glances at Tuuran. He smiled and bared his teeth back at them, putting them at their unease, and tasted all the food. He wasn't sure how he'd know if anything was poisoned until he keeled over and died but it was the sort of food that most sail-slaves couldn't dream of even seeing from a distance. The old luxuries of lemons and fire-brandy and wormy biscuits would never be the same after this! It made him laugh, imagining his old friends, Crazy Mad and the rest, bickering over a handful of fresh lemons. And he'd been no better either. Food of the gods, lemons. And now he looked at what was in front of him and shook his head. Ah, Crazy, if only you could see!

  The thought came to him that he was much larger and stronger than the alchemist and so perhaps a small dose of poison wouldn't trouble him? He tasted the food some more to be sure. It seemed like it was his duty. After he was done, the furious slaves carefully rearranged everything to make it seem untouched. He watched them at it and laughed some more and shook his head.

  The alchemist took his time with his ablutions. The palace slaves dressed him when he emerged and then he picked at the food with little interest. If he noticed that half had already gone, he didn't show it. When he was finished, the slaves would have done more if he'd asked but he sent them away. Tuuran watched them go. ‘Is this how life is in the Palace of Alchemy?’ he asked. Food made for them? Servants and women at their beck and call? Sounded fine enough. Certainly looked it.