by Stephen Deas
Six days after she'd stood in the Great Sea Council and smiled a coy smile and tried to hide her laughter, the black-cloaks led her onto a disc and down to the black floor of the tower. This time Myst and Onyx came with her. Rain hammered from the sky and the great open emptiness of the tower thrummed with a deep rumble. More soldiers waited, not black-cloaks but men with cloaks whose feathers made a shimmering pattern of burning orange flames with a rampant red dragon in their midst. Tsen's own soldiers. Dragon-cloaks. They led her through the open brass doors and outside over the black marble where the glasships came, slick with water. The rain drenched them all, cold and angry, clinging her silks to her skin. The wind tugged her sleeves. Myst and Onyx shivered and huddled and screwed up their faces, but they were palace slaves, not dragon-riders. In the space outside the Crown, where the glasship pods hovered a hair's breadth above the ground, Zafir lifted her head and stretched up her arms as if she was worshipping the sky and let the glory of the rain and the wind remind her that, despite all she had endured, she was alive. Above her the glasships barely moved despite the wind. The ships-that-flew might be slow but she'd seen they could be precise, for what good it did them. She closed her eyes as the rain battered her face and imagined how it would feel to smash one to splinters with a dragon. A pleasure enough to dull the terror of the Hatchling Disease for a moment.
In the middle of the circle of black marble a golden egg opened for her. Myst and Onyx fell to their knees, faces pressed to the wet stone. Tsen sat inside the gondola with a trio of brightly coloured dragon-cloaks standing to attention around him. As they left, he beckoned Zafir to take their place beside him. The ramp closed behind her and they were alone. A t'varr and a dragon-queen. She could kill him, she thought. It would be so easy. No obvious weapons but he was a fat old man, while beneath her hardening skin was a warrior's heart, fierce and furious when she wanted it to be. The glasship rose, a faint sensation she might never have noticed if she hadn't been tense and waiting for it. Tsen pored over a map, ignoring her. There was one other chair. She sat without waiting for his invitation and lounged and yawned until Tsen rolled the map away and smiled his ever-amiable smile. He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. ‘Dragon-Queen.’
‘T'Varr.’ The half-smile, the slight opening of the mouth, the tilt of the head, the lick of the lips, they were all instinct now and rarely wasted; and though her silks were thick they were soaked through and clung to every curve. But from Tsen? Nothing. She found it hard not to admire him.
‘I'm having trouble with my eyrie,’ he said. ‘My enchanters have yet to discover how to make it move on its own and so we must tow it from place to place with glasships. It's an expensive business.’ He frowned. ‘Also I have been making a list of my enemies. It has become very long. I was wondering whether I should put you on it but I seem to have run out of space.’
He was looking at her hard. Reading her. She met his eyes. ‘Your enemies will desire what you have. They will desire your dragons and they will desire me.’ She tipped her head and turned her shoulder and dipped her eyes at him. ‘Perhaps they will make offers.’
‘Oh, I'm quite sure they will, but if they do, you will not hear of them. You will remain in the eyrie now.’ He frowned. ‘Let us not pretend: you're no ordinary slave but you're not that special. You have something I want but you know that with time and effort I can get it elsewhere. I'm not going to let you go, but if you're trouble to me, I will get rid of you. I want you to consider this for a moment: do you wish to be a little piece on the board of a big game, moved from one square to another, bartered and traded and in the end sacrificed as all little pieces are?’ His brow furrowed. ‘You were a ruler in your own land. It must have crossed your mind that my ships are already on their way back to bring me more dragon-riders. And they won't just be my ships either. When they come back, you will become. .’ He turned up his palms and snapped his fingers and blew a little puff of air across the table at her. ‘Nothing.’ He shrugged. ‘Or I could let you be what you are, within reason. You may be mistress of my dragons for as long as they follow my wishes, however many riders I may one day acquire.’
Zafir found she believed him. Not that it would stop her in the end. ‘Let us say I'm yours for now.’ Another flutter of her eyelashes, completely wasted, and now the wet silks were simply irritating and making her skin itch. She tugged them back into shape.
‘So.’ Tsen rubbed his hands. ‘Tell me: what does a dragon-queen do when she's surrounded by enemies on all sides?’
Burn them. Burn them like she'd burned them at Evenspire. At the Pinnacles. At Furymouth. Yet as she opened her mouth she thought of Jehal, stopped and met Tsen's eye. ‘I would look very hard, Baros Tsen T'Varr, for the enemy I had not yet seen hiding among such a crowd. The one who stands beside me and calls himself a friend.’
Tsen laughed. ‘You have the makings of a kwen!’
‘And then I would burn them. All of them.’ Her jaw clenched. She hadn't meant it to show but the anger inside was too much. Jehal. Tsen. Chrias. All of them. Every Taiytakei in every realm and every dragon-lord who'd ever flown against her.
A half-smile wrinkled the t'varr’s face again. He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘But does not war destroy us all? Perhaps subtlety and dragons do not mix. They don't seem very subtle creatures. I've heard a great deal from the alchemist about what must be done to raise and train one of your monsters and also what they can do, but not what they are for.’ He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table, head on his hands, his eyes on hers. ‘Let us begin. You are the rider, so answer me — how far do they fly before they tire?’
Zafir shrugged.
‘You don't know?’
‘No one does.’ She gifted him a slight smile. Deluded fool. ‘They fly on and on.’
‘Then how far do they fly before you tire?’
‘Far enough.’ She took his map and unfurled it, noting the slight flicker of irritation that caused, but there was no indication of the distances between the islands and the cities it showed her. ‘From one realm to the next in a day. If the need was strong enough, one might fly days and nights one after another without end. One must make certain arrangements for such journeys. One must be properly equipped. But it can be done.’
‘And the dragon itself doesn't tire?’
‘I'm told not. But you must know this from Bellepheros already. Why ask me?’
He brushed the question aside. ‘The fire. How much fire may it breathe?’
Zafir laughed at him. ‘Dragons don't breathe. Have you not seen?’
No, he hadn't, he'd barely even seen his own monsters! And no one had told him either. But then why would they? ‘All creatures breathe,’ muttered the t'varr.
‘Not dragons.’ Zafir took a deep breath. ‘Baros Tsen T'Varr, they do not tire. Ever. They will gout fire without end if you demand it of them. It will simply make them hungry. Starve them of sustenance for long enough and they will wither and burn from the inside and die, but they don't tire. How long that takes depends on their size. A week for the newly hatched, perhaps longer. A month or more for an adult but Bellepheros will know far better than I. Drive them hard for long enough and again they will grow hot and burn from the inside if they're not allowed to cool. They last better amid glaciers and mountains than deserts but I doubt you'll much appreciate the difference.’
‘Are they damaged by their own fire?’ Tsen looked incredulous.
‘It washes over them like water.’
‘Then by what?’
Another shrug. Zafir chuckled. ‘Poison.’
‘Poison?’
‘There's no other way to stop a dragon, Baros Tsen T'Varr. Not that's known to me, save to take its will for the fight. The rider. The rider is always a dragon's weakness.’
‘You.’
‘You're right to look for others. You'll need them. I'll do that for you. I'll train them.’ If you have a blood-mage who can make a potion to force me against every grain
of my will!
‘And how long will that take?’
As if he hadn't asked the alchemist already! ‘For ever.’ She stretched, letting him see her curves. Still wasted. ‘The longer a rider is with his dragon, the better they're paired. A few months, perhaps, before they can do something useful. You should begin now. Choose the men who will ride your hatchlings once they're grown in years to come.’ A little light emphasis on the years. Time was her friend, not his, and they both knew it. ‘Take all the riders you like from my realm. It will be quicker but they must still bond with the dragon they'll fly.’ There was even a grain of truth to that. She'd leave it to him to imagine how long that bonding would take, that it might be months or years and not merely a few scant hours or sometimes even minutes.
Tsen frowned. ‘Look outside.’
They were up in the clouds. The sky was a dense white, just beginning to break up as the glasship rose through to the clear sky above. She caught glimpses of what looked like line after line of great white waves, frozen still. As they rose higher she stood by the window as the waves became a rolling white sea. To be high in the sky like this, yes, she missed that, but with the howling wind in her face too. More than anything, that was what she missed.
‘How high can a dragon fly?’
There was a mountain, the same mountain that rose behind the city and vanished into the cloud except now it rose from the white sea and she could see its peak, still verdant green. ‘Higher than this.’ She had no idea, really. At Evenspire they'd come from above the cloud so as not to be seen from below, and Hyrkallan had done the same but from higher still. There'd been times she'd flown so high that she couldn't breathe, high enough for the sky to turn a deep deep blue, for the world below to become a formless haze, for the far horizon to be a blur and, if you looked hard, to seem not quite straight any more.
‘But how high?’ asked Tsen politely. ‘Would they cross the mountain of the Elemental Masters?’ He flicked his eyes at the peak outside the window.
‘With ease.’ High enough to feel sick and for her head to ache and spin, for the air to be as cold as ice so it hurt her lungs to breathe it, but the dragon hadn't been troubled at all. ‘As high as the stars perhaps. I don't know how high a dragon might fly alone.’ She stared at the mountain peak. The glasship was flying away from it now. They were leaving the city at last.
‘I've been told what dragons did to my fleet. What would a dragon do to my glasships?’
Zafir smiled over her shoulder and tugged at her damp silks again. ‘Do they burn?’
‘They are glass and gold.’
‘If I were to ride a dragon against one of these, I would seize the egg where people are carried and rip it away. I would snap the tethers that hold it and hurl it through the air. Or, if I was playing, maybe fire would amuse me. Gold will melt in dragon fire, and silver too, but only long after all those inside would be dead, black and charred and brittle. Or perhaps seize the ship itself and smash it into the ground. Are they fragile? If they are I might shatter one with the lash of a tail.’ She tore herself from the window. ‘We're leaving your city and you ask me questions of dragons that are filled with war, Baros Tsen T'Varr.’ She glanced at the map, once more rolled up in front of him. ‘Is there something else you wish to share?’
He shook his head and put the map away, and for a time they talked of other things, of her life in the realms, of the eyries she knew, of dragons and how they were raised, of the wars the realms had seen, old and new, and how dragons fought. They talked for hours and grew slowly tipsy together on wine that Tsen had brought that tasted like apples and honey and fire on Zafir's tongue. She flirted with him constantly. Couldn't help herself. Instinct, but she never reached him and never got anything back from him, not once.
‘Do you prefer men?’ she asked him when the wine made her careless. She thought he might blanch or frown but he only shook his head. ‘Are you a eunuch then?’ He just laughed. ‘Then what are you?’
‘A t'varr,’ was all he said, but she could see she'd touched something. He hid it well but not well enough. A sadness, perhaps, and a flicker of resentment. And then they went back to dragons and ships and how large a sea lord's fleet might be as they slowly finished getting drunk. Whatever she asked, Tsen smiled as he answered her. Did he always smile? He seemed to, and nothing she asked bothered him. Even glow-cheeked on his apple wine he gave nothing away. She'd never met anyone quite like him, one who could keep his passions so contained.
Night came and went. They slept in beds divided only by a thin curtain of silk, yet Zafir slept with an ease she couldn't remember, not since Jehal. The second day passed as the first, filled with talk and more apple wine. She took his hand on the second night when they were drunk again and looked at the lines there and told him his fortune in some preposterous way that made him laugh, and then he took hers and did the same. He didn't flinch from her touch, merely chose not to seek it. He was ever kind and gentle and yet somehow oblivious. She came at him from every way — coy, sly, eager, angry, bitter — and none of it made the slightest difference. If there were gaps in his armour, ways to reach through to the soft heart inside and fix her talons around it, she didn't find them. It was a failure that vexed and intrigued her. Maybe he simply didn't have one?
‘People assume a great deal,’ he said as they slipped under their separate sheets on their second night in the sky. ‘Do not let it concern you.’ And she realised that yes, people did assume so very much, and that she'd come to count on it.
‘What are you trying to show me with this?’ she asked. ‘Do you have some guard here I cannot see who keeps you safe from me? Alone, so very much could come to pass. It still might.’
‘And little of it good — ’ he yawned ‘- and yet here we are and you haven't murdered me even once.’
‘It's always there, that thought.’
‘I suppose it is, and I'm quite sure you could have done so if you wished. I am just a fat old man, after all. And no, there is no guard.’ He laughed. ‘Although of course I might be lying.’ He smiled again. ‘I knew another slave once. Like you in some ways, very different in others. You wouldn't kill me even if you were certain there was no hidden guard to stop you. If you wanted to die, you'd be dead. And we will never quite trust one another, and one day, if I'm foolish enough or you're clever enough, you'll find a way to be free. But I don't think I can have what I want from you any other way.’ Another chuckle. ‘Yes, Dragon-Queen, you're being tested just as you have been testing me. We both know this. I think we've both done quite well too. Perhaps even surprised one another.’
Tested? But in more ways than the obvious, surely. She felt the answers there as she fell asleep, flitting and fluttering at the edges of her reason yet always dancing between her fingertips as she reached for them. It dawned on her as she dreamed that this t'varr might be a lot more dangerously clever than he seemed.
On the morning of the fourth day the clouds thinned and faded away. They flew over dry brown land wrinkled and scarred by rivers, crossed a line of hills and drifted towards a scorched and yellow desert. The glasship sank. Tsen went to stand by one of the windows at the front above the little door leading to the place where the pilot golem was. In the warmth Zafir shivered when he showed her. The closest a Taiytakei could come to being a dragon-rider and they replaced their pilots with automata. Then he beckoned her to stand beside him and pointed. To share his window they had to stand close, so close that now and then they touched.
Sitting on the desert ahead was a huge rock. ‘My eyrie,’ he said.
No. Not sitting on the desert but floating over it, and on its back was a round fortress of thick sloping walls and low squat towers and. . other things whose nature she couldn't make out from so far away. It reminded her a little of Evenspire with its sloping walls meant to stand up to dragons. She saw it and laughed. It floats in the air so has no tunnels deep under the ground and so there's nowhere to hide when the dragons come. ‘Whoever is master of that eyr
ie had better make victory a habit,’ she murmured.
Maybe Tsen misunderstood her. He pulled away, faced her, reached out a hand and touched her brow with two warm fingers. ‘Yes,’ he said. He went back to his chair but Zafir stayed, watching until the floating eyrie was beneath them and she couldn't see it any more. She'd seen the one thing that mattered by now. The golden war-dragon perched on one wall. A monster. Her monster. Her heart skipped a beat. She knew him at once. Diamond Eye, for the deathly pale blue of his eyes like glacier ice.
The glasship slid slower and lower through the air and finally came to a halt on the sloping wall. Through the windows Zafir took in Tsen's eyrie. The space was huge, bigger than any walled circus she'd ever seen, bigger than the Speaker's Yard in the Adamantine Palace. Bigger even than the spaces inside the vast walls of Evenspire and yet almost empty. A few huts in the middle, a lot of crude tents around them, lines of sails strung up on ropes, partitioning the yard like low walls, flapping in the wind. In one area she saw hatchlings chained to the stone. She tried to count them. A dozen perhaps, give or take.
The back of the gondola split apart and the ramp of gold and glass lowered. Tsen made a little gesture and Zafir stepped outside, but the t'varr made no move to follow her. On top of the walls were squat towers, little more than a few stone pillars with a roof on top; along and below the walls were dozens of long blunt-ended tubes made of thick iron. Each was mounted on a mesh of metal wheels built to turn quickly. They were nothing like the scorpions defending the Adamantine Palace: the tubes pointed up rather than out and there was no dragon-scale shield to protect the firer. Strange.