Dragon Queen sk-2

by Stephen Deas

  ‘Run, you dogs!’ he roared. ‘Run! Out of the water!’ The sand felt sure beneath his feet. He raced to the beach and stood, naked steel, teeth bared, a roar poised on his tongue. The other sword-slaves were still struggling out of the water. This is what I am. This is what I was made to be. ‘To the trees!’ He ran and Crazy Mad ran beside him, long loping strides. Crazy Mad, still alive. No one had thrown him into the sea or sold him to another ship and now he was a sword, a soldier, and Tuuran was proud of him. Whoever he thought he was, he'd grown into his madness now. He'd made it his.

  ‘The last time I did this there were soldiers waiting in the trees.’ Crazy grinned. Sometimes he was frightening. His hunger for a fight put even some Adamantine Men to shame.

  The second and the third boats were nosing into the shore now. The rest of their little company of sword-slaves and Taiytakei with their bows and their wands and their spiked clubs to keep them all in line. When they'd given Crazy Mad his first sword, Tuuran had seen the wondering in his eyes: how easy might it be to take them down, to cut them apart and seize their ship and be free? But that was what every sword-slave thought when they were given their spear or their blade or whatever weapon they chose.

  ‘And it happened too — once,’ Tuuran told him, as he'd been told in turn. ‘A whole ship threw off its chains. And the Taiytakei hunted down that ship and every slave who sailed her. They sent a sorcerer who could become the wind and the sea and every one of them died a horrible grisly death, and you may scoff as I once scoffed but I've seen those sorcerous killers with my own eyes now and I've seen what they do. So think it, slave, and then think that you'll have to cross your sword with mine and every other here. Better to take what is freely given.’

  And Crazy Mad had thought it, and Tuuran had wondered for the first time in a very long while whether this was a man with whom he might cross swords and lose. But it hadn't come to that, not yet.

  He waited for the other sword-slaves and lined them up, pairing them off.

  ‘Where are we?’ they asked, and Tuuran shrugged. The slave ship sailed where the slave ship sailed. None of them, save perhaps a few of the Taiytakei, knew where they went.

  ‘None of your concern, slave.’ He shoved a man at Crazy Mad. ‘This is Jris. He's yours.’ He took a step back and looked along the two lines of men. ‘You're slaves. Proud slaves. Slaves with names. You look after each other. What happens to one of you, it happens to the other. If one of you runs, we are all punished. If one of you brings back a new slave, we are all rewarded. We are as one.’ He pointed down the beach. ‘A mile that way, some people are stupid enough to be living. Bad for them, good for us. We want more slaves. Men to work so you don't have to. Women for pleasure, because we get little enough. Or boys, if you prefer, or more men, or girls, or donkeys if you're Amrir here. I don't care. The sick and the old have no place in our ranks. If they fight then take them. We like a fighter. If they fight too hard then put them down. Don't break them unless you have to, but if you do, make sure whatever you break stays broken. Burn, loot, plunder, take whatever you like but you won't get to keep it. What's yours is mine and what's mine is theirs.’ He pointed to the Taiytakei. ‘You fall, you get up. You get hurt, you make like it's nothing, because there's no place here for the wounded and there's two ways back to the sea — on your feet or rolling in the surf to feed the fish. Now run! Run with me, you dogs!’

  He loped down the beach with a long pace that drove them hard. The sword-slaves followed in their two lines, the Taiytakei a little way to the rear. No one said a word because no word was needed. They were slavers today, tearing men and women from their homes. They'd strike a village and rip it to pieces, take what they could, and by the time they were done the galley would be close to the shore, the boats beached, and they'd run and be gone before any warning could be given. He'd done it a dozen times and seen it more often than he could remember. Every few days in a different place until they had a hold full of slaves, then away to one of the deep-hulled Taiytakei sailing ships in some hidden cove, and then back somewhere else, somewhere far removed. Sometimes they stayed with their sailing ship and crossed through the storm-dark to a different world. Tuuran understood that much better now although the Taiytakei never spoke of it. They'd move again soon. In the last few days they'd struck three villages along this coast already. The galley hold bulged with screams and tears.

  A flash of light across the water caught his eyes. He glanced out past the breaking surf. The galley was there waiting for its boats but something else was there too. A bright orange spark in the sky, racing above the sea faster than any bird could fly, skimming the whitecaps, coming from further down the beach. The way he was taking them.

  The spark reached the galley. Behind him the slaves had slowed to look; and then from the deck of the galley a pillar of fire erupted into the sky. Whips of it cracked out across the sea. There were no screams, no shouts, nothing that rode over the gentle hiss of the breaking surf. Tuuran faltered and then stopped to stare. Even the Taiytakei had stopped running.

  A black dot arced up off the galley towards the beach. It came right at them, sailed a dozen feet over Tuuran's head and slammed into the sand so hard it made the ground shake. It broke into pieces, brittle and charred right through but it had been a man once. There were fingers, a hand, an arm. . a stump that had been a head and a face. Tuuran stared at it like they all did, but unlike the others he'd seen this before. This was what happened when a dragon unleashed its fire, although the spark they'd seen streaking across the waves had been too fast and too small. Still, maybe that was why he was the first to look up, that age-old instinct to look to the sky. A dozen more specks were hurtling from the galley as if thrown by trebuchets.

  ‘Run!’

  There was no way to dodge the bodies but that didn't stop some of them from trying. Tuuran bolted up the beach for the trees. A dead man hit the sand in front of him and shattered into blackened pieces. Burned fragments of skin and bone flew up into his face. For a moment the world stank of charred flesh. He glanced back. Most of the sword-slaves were standing there staring up at the sky in horror, or running back and forth, trying to get out of the way of the raining dead. Only Crazy Mad had followed him for the trees. But Tuuran saw something more. The spark had left the galley. It was coming for the beach.

  He reached the trees. On the beach the sword-slaves screamed and scattered as the spark shot across the sand and then stopped and became a woman wreathed in flames. Bolts of fire arced from her hands, three or four at once, cutting men down, so hot and fierce the fire went straight through them, burning them apart and searing their legs from their bodies and leaving holes as big as a man's fist. It was done in seconds. Every single soldier on the beach. Every single sword-slave except for him and Crazy Mad, hiding in the trees.

  The woman became a spark again and flashed after the Taiytakei. He heard booms of lightning and saw flashes through the trees. A moment later and the screams started again. Wands, armour, it made no different. The Taiytakei fared no better than their slaves.

  ‘What in the name of the gods that are no more is that?’ Even Crazy Mad had no answer. They were paralysed. Waiting for it to go away, or to find them and end them. For the first time Tuuran could remember, Crazy even looked scared.

  The screams stopped. For a brief moment there was silence. Tuuran stared at the beach, dumbstruck.

  ‘You.’

  His head snapped round and there she was: the woman wreathed in flames, a dozen yards further in among the trees and pointing a finger straight at him.

  ‘Run,’ he hissed to Crazy Mad but Crazy didn't need telling and had already vanished into the undergrowth so quick and so quiet that Tuuran hadn't even noticed him go. Tuuran raised his hands. ‘I'm just a slave.’

  ‘The beach!’ If she was going to kill him, she'd have done it. There had been no mercy for the rest. No pause and no hesitation. So he stepped back onto the beach, cautious but not fearful. She wanted him for something.<
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  ‘Slavers,’ she hissed and pointed across the sand to where the Taiytakei had been. They were there still, only now they were one great black and gently smoking heap. ‘Slavers,’ she hissed again.

  Tuuran shook his head. ‘I-’

  Fire from her finger seared his cheek. He screamed, clutching his hands to where it had touched him and then tearing them away. She'd burned off his ear, nothing left but rags of crispy skin.

  ‘Your black-skin ships will leave this land. Any who return, this is what will happen to them. Take that message to your masters, slave. Tell them what you have seen.’

  She vanished into flame and was gone, straight up into the sky. Out to sea, the galley was floundering in the waves. Tuuran glowered at the vanishing spark and raised his fist. ‘And how? Just me? How do I find them to tell them when I am all alone in this land? Stupid sorceress!’ The whole side of his face was a blazing mass of pain.

  Crazy Mad crept out from among the trees, dazed-looking but with that mad gleam in his eye again. He kicked at the charred remains of a head. No way to tell who it might have been.

  ‘I've seen dragons do that to a man,’ Tuuran said.

  Crazy Mad giggled. ‘Is that Fire Witch a dragon then?’

  ‘Dragons look like dragons, not like that.’ Tuuran frowned. ‘Who would have thought it, eh? Been hearing a lot of whispers about this place.’ Damn but his face hurt. The whole side of his head.

  Crazy Mad wandered across the sand and stood beside him. He peered at Tuuran's ear. ‘Nasty. What place is that then?’

  ‘Aria,’ whispered Tuuran after a time, long after the woman was gone. Boats were on their way from the galley now, closing in on the shore. Oar-slaves. The witch hadn't burned them; she'd set them free. ‘We're in Aria.’

  ‘Aria.’ There was a smile in Crazy Mad's voice and Tuuran understood it, as he understood now what the witch wanted him to do.

  Home.

  47

  The Walking Man

  You will get no answers, old slave. Not from them. No one ever does. The voices of the moon sorcerers were always there, soft like a spider's web across the Watcher's thoughts. Around the eyrie, becoming the wind or the stone was getting harder every day, not easier. It had to be the dragons. Something about them. In Khalishtor, in Dhar Thosis, in Vespinarr, in any other place he went he felt the world bend to his will as it should. Just not here where he needed it most.

  When he was done with the alchemist, the Watcher took himself to the edge of the eyrie where no one would see the lines of pain on his face and his clenched fists as he turned himself into air and vanished away. The world rushed by. As the wind he had no eyes but there was a sense of the shape of things, the rise and fall of the land, the taste of running water, the tiny bright pinpricks that were hard barriers of silver and gold and gold-glass.

  He turned away from his course. .

  . . and appeared from the air atop a mountain deep inside the Konsidar, far from any city, in a place that no one but an Elemental Man would ever go, a hundred miles from the nearest Taiytakei or slave. From the peak he could see right down the mountain on every side, but on one particular side the descent never stopped. The mountain slopes reached down, but where they should have joined the lower slopes of another and made a pretty tree-filled valley with a stream rushing and bubbling through it, instead there was a colossal rift. It always looked to the Watcher as though some god had reached down and pulled the mountains apart, splitting the skin of the earth between them. It reminded him of the Queverra. The rift ran for miles though the Konsidar, a sheer-walled and depthless chasm between the mountains. Somewhere down there lived the Righteous Ones. Instinct had brought him here. It wasn't even on his way to where he was going but he'd come nevertheless, and as he looked down on the rift he knew why. Something was happening. The Righteous Ones had been caught creeping out of their caves of late. Something had changed down there, some years back, and at the same time out in the desert by the Godspike one of the ring of needles had cracked and the storm-dark had started to shift. Further back still and the Elemental Masters had allowed Quai'Shu to buy him and to buy the Picker too, as though they needed Quai'Shu’s hunger for dragons to be fulfilled. As much as anyone, his makers had brought the dragons here. They hadn't merely allowed it to happen; they'd been its architects every bit as much as Quai'Shu. And the moon sorcerers too, who never came out of their towers, who were myth and legend until that day on the beach, they had made this happen. Whatever it was they'd seemed to want in return — his hunt for the grey dead ones or the Adamantine Spear of the dragon lands — what they really wanted was for dragons to cross the storm-dark. He could see that now. Perhaps that was the one thing they couldn't do, cross it themselves, and so they'd needed Quai'Shu and some navigator to make it so. Dragons in Takei'Tarr. That's what they wanted all along. In hindsight it seemed so obvious. They knew something, and the Righteous Ones, in their gloom, they knew something too.

  The voices had stayed with him since that day on the shore of the Diamond Isles. He could never quite hear them, never quite understand what they were trying to say. He'd been a gift. Quai'Shu had given him to the sorcerers with their diamond towers. The Watcher had never forgotten that and nor had they. Become as one. He was their servant now. But servant in what? To what end?

  He sat on the mountaintop in the biting cold air which cut like little knives and held his head in his hands until the voices found a calm. Passions clouded the mind and a clouded mind could not become the wind, the earth, the ice, the light, the water, the fire or the dark. Among his own kind a few whispered that the secret of the last element, of metal, was to be bursting with joy or love or hate or fury, but no Elemental Man had ever mastered metal and so whispers was all they ever were.

  The voice of the moon sorcerers never stopped. The Watcher changed it in his head to make it a more soothing thing. His other master was Quai'Shu, whom the dragons had made mad. Men were plotting to kill him and the Watcher would stop them. That, at least, was a simple enough thing to see.

  Become as one. He had no idea what that was supposed to mean. What become as one? Was he supposed to stop it or make it happen? They'd told him just enough to pull at the loose threads of the tapestry of something when they could simply have shown him the tapestry in its whole, the picture it made, and told him what to do. So why hadn't they done that?

  He drew out his knives one by one, the blades of each so thin that light passed through them, leaving them all but invisible. Bladeless knives. Enchanter-made, sharp as broken glass and hard as diamonds. He cleaned them, cleaned away every speck of dust until he could barely see they were there, and as he did, a stillness settled over him like a weighted net. They'd given him a purpose and a mission, and in that purpose they'd given him a reason for what they'd done. And now he saw why: it was to stop him from looking for another one, purely and simply that. Dragons on Takei'Tarr. Their intervention after the crossing — leading away the hatching dragons and dumping them in Baros Tsen T'Varr’s eyrie — was almost unseemly in its blatant purpose. Tsen and the other Taiytakei were too busy with their own problems to notice but a hsian would see at once. Quai'Shu’s hsian. He could start there. The hsian was due a reminder of whom he served but perhaps he could serve just a little more. It would be. . interesting. For both of them. The Watcher would start with why he, alone among the hsians, had decided to bring dragons to Takei'Tarr because of the Midsummer Star and how, exactly, he had made that choice.

  He wrapped his knives in their silks and stood up, breathing in the mountain air. Before that he had one other thing to attend to. The kwen. The kwen was in Xican, and that was as good a place as any to do what Tsen and Quai'Shu had asked. The city of the sea lord's first grandchild, wilful raven-haired Elesxian. Baros Tsen T'Varr should probably marry her. It would give both of them what they wanted but the simple fact was that Tsen wasn't ever going to marry anyone. No one would ever marry him. It would be a waste of everyone's time.

&nbs
p; He blinked, changed to a breath of wind, and the mountaintop became still. A moment later it was a distant shape on the horizon. Another moment and it was gone and he was gusting across mountains and forests and islands and seas to Xican, to the city of stone carved out of the iron-grey and obsidian-black of the Grey Isle where nothing grew. Not a single thing lived there if it didn't live in the city; in fact most of the island wasn't even an island but more a collection of boulders, large and small, smashed together, which still rolled and shifted from day to day. The enchanters had done something to the city itself to keep the stones around it still, the ones from which it was carved. Except for the plateau at the centre, the rest of the island changed constantly. Slowly, yes, but never the same. For a long time it hadn't been much more than a staging post, a first and last place for the great Taiytakei fleets of the sea lords to stop and rest before they crossed the storm-dark to the other realms. That was how it had started.

  The Watcher appeared on a pinnacle overlooking the hollowed stone spires of the city. The weather out here on the far edge of the island was always the same, always bright and sunny and clear and never a drop of rain, even when a deluge of storms hammered at the plateau only a dozen miles to the east. On the horizon, twenty miles away more or less, sat the grey veil edge of the storm-dark. When it was as close as it was today, the Watcher liked to sit and look at it because Xican was the only place in the whole of Takei'Tarr where the storm-dark now and then came close enough to the shore to be seen from land. Through that veil lay other worlds, the dragon realms, the Diamond Isles, Qeled, Aria, all the rest, and it was a veil that even an Elemental Man couldn't pierce. Not like a wall of silver or glass or gold, which became like a solid thing, hard and impenetrable; no, the veil of the storm-dark was soft like a curtain, always pushing him aside so that no matter how carefully he trod, he always found himself back where he began. It moved too. It drifted back and forth. Some days it was within sight of the Grey Isle, but on others it was far out to sea, hundreds of miles into the ocean perhaps, days of sailing. Most often it was out of sight, but there were some who said that the clouds of the storm-dark had once come closer still, that they'd touched the Grey Isle itself, and that was why it was as it was. To the Watcher the storm-dark was a marvel, a miracle and a wonder left over from the Splintering. For ships and more mundane men it was simply a place of horror and death from which nothing returned. For the Taiytakei that was a much easier thing to understand.