by Stephen Deas
The soldiers didn't bother to knock, just smashed in the makeshift door. The kwen and a half-dozen of his black-cloaks. They grabbed her arms, pulled her away from Myst and Onyx and almost hurled her to the ground. The kwen just stared. Zafir waited, silent and with the dragon wrapped tight around her. It had always been a dangerous game to play with this one.
‘Bow, slave!’ One of the black-cloaks slapped her. She tasted blood.
‘Kwen.’ She ignored the black-cloak, cocked her head and ran her tongue across her teeth. ‘Do you have something for me?’ Bow? I'll die first, and then who's going to fly your precious dragon?
Shrin Chrias Kwen faced her, his six men around him. ‘I do, slave. I hear Tsen sends you men and you turn them away. So I have some real men for you.’ He spat his words at her and turned to his soldiers. ‘Hurt her if it amuses you but don't break her. Do what you like with her slaves.’
Zafir threw back her head and laughed at him. ‘These? These are your real men? You disappoint me, Kwen. I thought you'd be one to fight your own battles. Sword not sharp enough?’ She stood straight and tall. ‘Well I am here, little man. You can do nothing to me.’
‘She's all yours, boys.’ Chrias turned and walked away. Zafir lunged after him. Oh no. No you don't. You don't get away from me, you limp-dicked shit, not this time. As the first black-cloak snatched for her she danced aside, pulled his dagger out of his belt and rammed it under his chin. She let go as a river of blood ran down his throat and his shirt and flicked the few drops from her fingertips onto the ground. The rest of the soldiers paused, suddenly uncertain. Hands fell to hilts and to wands. Zafir bared her teeth. ‘Yes, cut me down, Shrin Chrias Kwen. Murder me if you can. Touch me if you dare, but if you do not dare then take your flock of sheep away with you and go and baa at some grass. My soldiers were Adamantine, untouchable, unbreakable, their captain a titan to wrestle with dragons, yet he still was my toy to tinker with as I chose and so are you.’ He'd stopped. Hadn't turned, but he'd stopped and that was enough. She bent down and tore the dagger out of the dead soldier's neck, then held it to her own throat as she walked towards him. The black-cloaks moved apart, backing away from her as she came on with the knife still at her throat. Rage and confusion simmered in their faces. ‘I have killed the first man who tried to touch me. Do you not remember the ship, Kwen? You were not there but you've heard every last part, I'm sure.’ The kwen turned at last and she wasn't sure whether it was hate or lust or perhaps even fear that she saw in his face. Perhaps all three. She stood before him.
‘Kill yourself then,’ he spat.
‘Why would I do that?’ She let the knife move a fraction away. Not far, but far enough so that when he lunged at her, quick as a striking snake, he had her hand gripped in his own before she could cut herself. She didn't move, didn't struggle, didn't even try to resist as he twisted her arm and the knife fell to the ground. He was holding her tight. She'd have bruises in the morning but the bruises so far were only the start of what she'd have from this. A small price. She'd known that the moment she'd left Bellepheros.
I am the dragon. She could feel the heat rising through her. They were inches apart. ‘Tsen sends me slaves? You send me soldiers? I am a dragon-queen, Chrias Kwen, and I deserve better.’ She snatched at the knife on the kwen's own belt but he was quicker, jerking it out of its sheath and tossing it to the ground behind him. Not quick enough to stop her sinking her fingers into his throat though.
‘Now what, Kwen?’ She felt the dragon inside her watching them both from up on the eyrie wall. The two of them pressed together. The hunger, the desire, the need for something, the clenching urge to take, take, take! When he didn't move, she hit him square in the face with an open palm, hard enough to make him stagger. ‘Better,’ she hissed, ‘I want better!’
As he blinked from the punch, she slashed him with her nails and finally he broke. He twisted her arm behind her back and hurled her into the room. ‘Out!’ he roared. ‘All of you! Out!’ The black-cloaks scurried away as he pushed through them and grabbed Zafir by the throat. She made no effort to stop him. Maybe, if he'd still had it, she could have taken his knife this time and stabbed him after all, but that wasn't why she'd drawn him here. She had a much nastier death in mind for this one.
I am the dragon. I am the dragon.
He pushed her down to the ground and ripped her tunic. Her fingers curled into claws. She tore at his face. He pinned her down, all his weight on top of her.
I am the dragon.
He wrenched her over onto her belly and pulled her legs apart. She bucked underneath him as he took her there with her slaves watching, and for a short time she couldn't have said whether she meant to throw him off and murder him or whether she meant to pull him deeper and deeper until every part of him was inside her skin.
I am the dragon.
A wall of fire burst inside her. It burned her sweat to steam and scorched her skin to ash. She was high, high as the stars and falling into the hurricane, wings tucked back, shattering the sky and the fire filled her, tooth and claw and tail, with a strength to smash the world itself to pieces.
I am the dragon.
The feeling faded as it always did. She remembered where she was again. She felt the kwen stabbing away inside her, listened to his grunts and quietly remembered another time and place and said nothing. When he was done and drawing away from her, she rolled onto her back. Her eyes glittered. Her lips curled for him, a smileful of hate. Still in his armour except for one shrivelling piece. Men. Wherever they are they make their armour the same so that can be the first part of them to come out of it. What does that say about what you are?
‘I remember you,’ she breathed. ‘So full of what you are and so empty of any meaning.’
The kwen shouted at his soldiers and stormed away, and whatever he said was so harsh and sharp that she couldn't understand; and it was only when the soldiers came down on her, one after the other, that she knew. She fought these ones — couldn't not — but they'd left their knives outside and there were six of them and only one of her. She remembered the faces, though, of the ones who took her with gleeful lust, the ones who twisted their lips in disgust, and the one whose eyes showed pity. The one who didn't touch her at all would be the one who would live. The rest had sealed their fates right there. Each one would die, and she wouldn't even have to lift a finger.
They left her on the floor when they were done. Myst and Onyx stared, untouched. The dragon inside looked down as if to ask why and what she meant by this. She met its eye. No regret or sorrow. I sought this out. The pain will go and the vengeance, when it comes, will be a long and lingering joy and I will feel not one iota of remorse. No one can touch either of us. Not while we can fly.
She struggled to her feet. Painfully. All three of them were still alive. That was something. Better than she'd feared. For a time they huddled together, and for a little while Zafir wasn't the dragon-queen any more, she was just Zafir, and the locked dark room was a thing that hadn't happened yet. She whispered softly in the ears of her broken birds, ‘They came because I made them come.’
‘Mistress?’
‘And I was afraid for you. I was afraid of what they'd do to you. And I should have sent you away, but I couldn't bear to be alone.’
Later, when Myst and Onyx had bathed her and clothed her and oiled her bruises, she went back to Bellepheros. She couldn't quite hide the awkwardness of her gait. She waved the gourd around her neck.
‘More.’
‘You don't need more, Holiness. It will not help.’
‘All of it. I want all that you have. Every single last drop.’
He frowned and looked her up and down and then frowned some more. ‘Has there been a change, Holiness? Are you hurt?’
Zafir smiled, sour and tired. ‘I have ridden long and hard today and it has been a while. I am stiff and sore from the saddle, Master Alchemist, nothing more. Why? Do I concern you?’
‘My duty is to keep these dragons dull
, Holiness. You will understand that, I know, for you were speaker once. But beyond that my duty and my love are yours.’ He began to gather the potion. Zafir watched where he went. One bottle from his desk, two from a chest beside his bed. ‘I do need them, Holiness. The Scales will die far more quickly without the potion.’
‘Then they will die but you may give them something to think they are still loved. Is that all you have? Give them to me. All of it.’
He did, and he looked infinitely sad as she tipped them out onto the floor, one by one. When she was done, he held up another bottle. ‘And I, Holiness? May I keep the Hatchling Disease at bay?’
She smiled at him. He was an old alchemist and so of course he carried it. ‘Yes. But keep it safe and keep it close.’ She tapped the gourd around her neck. ‘There will be others, you see. Taiytakei. And when they come to you with the Hatchling Disease, the potions you give them will do nothing at all; and when that comes to pass they will take whatever you have, for that is what desperate men do. Be ready for that day, Master Alchemist. I'm sure you'll make more. I won't forbid it, but hide it well.’ She turned to go and then turned back. ‘I almost forgot. I require another gift from you. A small thing, one that's so far beneath you I hesitate to ask but I must. Dawn Torpor.’
Dawn Torpor so I will not grow fat from you or your men, Shrin Chrias Kwen. She watched the alchemist's face, watched his eyes go wide and his mouth hang open, his face blanch.
‘Holiness! What-’
She cut him off with a fierce clenched fist. ‘They took what they wanted, Master Alchemist, as they took us from our homes and made us slaves. They did not ask, they were not kind, they are not dragons and you owe them nothing. When the Hatchling Disease begins to take them, they will come to you. You will do nothing to help them. They will all slowly die in lingering fear and agony and I will watch and spit in their faces. Do you understand, Grand Master Alchemist?’
When she left, she was on Diamond Eye again, tearing the air, clouds of sand billowing in their wake as they burned the desert to glass. She was almost singing.
56
Dhar Thosis
The Watcher appeared on the Divine Bridge a thousand feet above the sea. To his left, rising still higher, stood the Dul Matha, the Kraitu's Bones, which rose half as high again from the sea below in rings of walls and steps with the gatehouses that guarded the Palace of Roses at its peak, the home and dwelling of the ninth sea lord Senxian. It had been a shrine once, in the very distant past before the enchanters had made the first glasships. Pilgrims had come thousands of miles from every city, from every fledging realm, to bring their offerings of hope to the Goddess of Fickle Fortune.
Dhar Thosis. The City of Golems, they called it, although there were hardly any here and the name belonged better to Xican with its Stoneguard.
The Watcher looked past Dul Matha to the larger but much lower island a little way beyond it, Vul Tara, known as the Pilgrims’ Island because visitors to the shrine always came that way if they arrived by ship. It was a fortress now, armed with bolt throwers and black-powder and lightning cannon, but the shelters remained, the refuges and the hostels. Unclean godliness remained scattered across Vul Tara, despite its weapons. He couldn't see the seaward side from the top of the Divine Bridge, but that was where sheer-walled monasteries rested on the tops of low black cliffs, and on the lower parts of the island poor pilgrims still came to pray to the relics from the shrine that Ten Tazei once built on the top of the Kraitu's Bones.
The pilgrims’ ships would have anchored where ships still anchored now, in the sheltered open water between the shore, Dul Matha, Vul Tara, and the third and largest island, the Eye of the Sea Goddess where the sea titans slept and where Senxian's administrators and sea captains now lived, each in their own palace with their own kwens and t'varrs and hsians, servants and soldiers and slaves. A whole island of palaces now, each striving to surpass its neighbours, but it had not been so back in the time of the shrine. They called the island the Eye of the Sea Goddess but they should have made it her nose because that was the shape of it from far away, rising gently from the sea beside the shore, curving up ever sharper to a rounded summit that fell away to a sudden sheer nothing from a thousand feet in the air. Sprawling stone villas loosely jostled one another down by the sea, while at the top rose a forest of gold-glass towers, packed together like slaves in a gondola. The towers were the richer palaces. Few could afford a home built by enchanters.
Two hundred paces across the sea from the peak of the Eye of the Sea Goddess, the Dul Matha rose. The Divine Bridge crossed that space now, floating on enchanted gold-glass, but the Watcher wondered how it might have looked to those ancient pilgrims as they climbed down from their ships squeezed between the towering islands; as they rowed to the Vul Tara and their first night ashore, heads craned back to stare at the sky and the Divine Bridge high above them, searching for a first glimpse of the most famous shrine in the world — or so it had once been. They would have looked again as they rowed back the other way, across to the mainland and to what had once been a swamp, the salt marsh grown over time into the working rump of the city of Dhar Thosis. The swamps and the channels of brackish water were still there, some of them built over, others built around, others still slithering their way between the packed-stone streets of the shore city. There might have been jetties where the shore-side docks now stood, with a few little wooden huts perhaps sheltering sellers of slivers of wood or bone claimed to have come from the shrine. After that the pilgrims would have walked the swamp trails, now city streets with names like Pilgrim's Path and Quicksand Alley. They would have turned their backs on Dul Matha at first, following the curve of the shore until the Kraitu's Bones vanished behind the Eye of the Sea Goddess where they would have crossed the causeway, a treacherous tidal path now supplanted by the gleaming glass and gold spans of the Bridge of Eternity. They'd have climbed the winding paths up the Eye towards its peak, past temples and other shrines long since flattened to make way for palaces. All the way to the top of the Eye and they'd have come here, to where the Watcher stood now, to the start of the Divine Bridge.
Like the Bridge of Eternity, the Divine Bridge was now a thing of gold and glass, one great magnificent span crossing the sea far below, but back when pilgrims had come to the shrine atop the Kraitu's Bones the Crimson Sunburst had yet to be born and Hingwal Taktse and the Dralamut were just two warlord castles among many. There were no golems, no gold-glass, no enchanters, no navigators, no sea lords with their palaces and the Divine Bridge had been nothing more than two great ropes strung across the void. A place to be at one with the air, with the sea below and the unforgiving cliffs to either side. Bones still littered the rocks where the Goddess of Fickle Fortune had chosen not to cast her favour on her pilgrims. They said the ropes of the very first bridge were made from the hair of Ten Tazei, the first man to stand on Dul Matha's peak; but then they also said that he'd been carried there by an eagle, that he'd lived for three years on top of the rock eating birds and eggs and fish brought to him by the gulls — who for some reason didn't much like the eagles — until he'd grown his hair long enough to make the rope that would become the first bridge.
They said a lot of things in Dhar Thosis, but the rope bridge was long gone and nothing of it now remained. The enchanters had come with their glass and gold and a sea lord had followed. Parts of the shrine were still there, walled within Senxian's palace where only the greatest of men were allowed to see them. The Elemental Men had seen to the rest. The shrine was a curiosity from another time, a relic of ideas now forbidden.
The Watcher, by his nature, had no time for gods. The Elemental Men had wiped out their religions long ago, casting out all but their most distant echoes. It seemed a shame, though, that the enchanters had built this bridge. The Watcher tried to picture it as it had been in the stories, two great strands of rope, a coming together of air and stone and sea when Dul Matha was untouched.
The stories belonged to another time. T
he Palace of Roses had stood here for hundreds of years now and the sea lords had thrived as all sea lords did. Evidence perhaps that the Goddess of Fickle Fortune was nothing but a superstition, for surely to wall away her shrine was nothing if not insulting and yet she had rained no great misfortunes upon the lords of Dhar Thosis to punish them for their hubris — at least not until now.
Or perhaps that was simply why she was called fickle? The Watcher smiled to himself. He became the air and vanished and appeared again atop the highest of the gold-glass towers of the palace, looking down on the city so far below that even the ships were little more than specks in the grey rippled sea. There were no doors here of course, none that could be opened from the outside, no point of entry for an Elemental Man. The palace wore a shield of gold, armour against such killers. The Elemental Masters would never permit one sea lord to strike against another and so such armour should never be needed, but the sea lords dressed their palaces in it nonetheless, never quite trusting the Elemental Men as they never quite trusted their peers, their kin, their kwens and hsians and t'varrs. They built their world of opposing forces kept in carefully weighted balance to prevent any one from overwhelming the rest. An illusion, all of it, a fallacy. The Watcher knew this and the sea lords perhaps knew it too at their core, but for as long as the Elemental Men obeyed their masters and as long as the masters kept themselves to themselves, this tension of oppositions worked.
And that, he knew, was why the sea lords of Vespinarr and Cashax and Dhar Thosis and all the other great cities feared Quai'Shu and his dragons. Quai'Shu had ruined his house to get them. None of the others knew quite what for, but the not knowing made them afraid, and through the visor of their fear all they saw was a crippled house ripe to be brought down and a corpse to be picked over. None of them even knew what these dragons would do to them, not even Baros Tsen T'Varr, to whom the beasts answered, but they were right to be afraid.