by Stephen Deas
The bird flew out into the open space outside the eyrie. The dragon's tail flicked out, precision perfect. The jade raven plunged at the last moment, but the dragon seemed to anticipate the dive. The very end of the dragon's tail caught the raven like a whip and the bird exploded in a cloud of gleaming green feathers that hung for a moment in the sky before they floated slowly away. What was left of the bird fell towards the desert and out of sight, as broken as the slave it had just eaten.
‘It didn't work.’ Rin's eyes gleamed. ‘It didn't work, but it felt it!’
Tsen gaped. ‘And are you pleased or disappointed? I have a mind to put your name to my Elemental Man for that.’ And he might have said more, or simply pushed Rin off the edge of the eyrie himself, but now the dragon had turned. Its eyes fixed on Tsen and Vey Rin and it stared, exact and calculating, hungry and malevolent. Tsen cringed. The alchemist had said fifty paces but even a thousand would have felt futile now. He couldn't move and the monster was towering over them both and it seemed almost as though it was inside his head, pinning him to the stone beneath his feet. When it came it came fast, crushing the Scales beneath its feet as though it had forgotten he was there, intent focused entirely on Tsen. He felt himself falling apart on the inside and still he couldn't move. Was this what happened to Quai'Shu?
The dragon lowered its head right down, as big as a cart, with eyes like glistening boulders of glacier ice and teeth like swords.
‘Rin,’ whispered Tsen in such a broken voice that he wasn't sure he'd even spoken at all. ‘It was Rin.’
The dragon's eyes shifted very slightly, and then it reached out one massive claw and picked up the t'varr from Vespinarr. For an age everyone was frozen where they were, Tsen still rigid with dread, Rin held in the dragon's claw high up in the air, eyeball to eyeball with the monster. A strange noise echoed over the eyrie, and it took a moment for Tsen to realise what it was. Rin. Screaming.
‘Put him down! Put him down!’ Dimly Tsen registered that the alchemist was shouting too, but the dragon didn't move and the alchemist was left to wave his stick in futile anger until at last the rider came out and told the dragon to leave Vey Rin T'Varr alone. Much to Tsen's surprise, Rin was still alive.
Later they had to help him to get into his gondola. He didn't say much. Tsen didn't think he'd be saying much for a long time, but at least Shonda still had his brother. He might need a new t'varr now, but no one had died and so they weren't going to war, and maybe there would be an Elemental Man coming for him or maybe not, but with a bit of luck not as long as he gave Shonda exactly what he wanted and sent the dragon to burn Dhar Thosis.
The thought made him smile and weep both at once. Shonda had something else now too, something unexpected. He had someone who understood exactly what had happened to Quai'Shu.
For what that was worth.
Goodbye, Rin, old friend.
60
An Orphan Boy from Shipwrights’
He lay in bed at night, wide awake, shaking and sweating and shivering. Trembling at the memory of a dream he could barely hold but to which he clung with every finger of memory hooked into it like talons. All his people were dead. His family. But he knew who he was and he knew his purpose.
In his dream he'd been someone else. More than someone else. The hooded man with the half-ruined face and the one blind eye had been there.
He'd been begging, pleading on his knees. There was someone inside him. Another name. He scratched and scrabbled at the dream, clawing at it to drag the memory back but it wouldn't come. All he remembered was the name.
Skyrie.
Berren Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge of Tethis, sat up, fists clenched and eyes wide. He was surrounded by straw and everywhere was dark, so dark he couldn't see even a glimmer around him. He didn't know where he was. Tethis? The Pit?
The shades from his dreams lingered. There was another pit, one they remembered but that he'd never seen. In another dark place lit by a column of golden light and the broken goddess of the dead earth was there and the Black Moon, and he'd come so close. So close to. .
So close to what? It made no sense.
He stared around him. The dream was fading but in the darkness he could still see it. He saw a woman bent over a man, and the man had an arrow in him and he was going to die; and the woman was trying to save him, but that didn't matter because the woman needed to die too because she was the last lock on the gate he'd so very nearly opened, and there was something about her, something inside her that made her like him, more than one person at once, but there was another voice far away calling him and his hands wouldn't move, wouldn't make that last tiny little gesture to make him free, and the rage and the frustration and the despair were like tidal waves crashing through him one after the other.
He roared and jumped up off the floor and lunged for the door he couldn't see. ‘Leave me alone!’ Not my memories. Not my memories. It was there somewhere. He knew it. He still couldn't remember where he was but he knew this place. He fumbled for the wall.
A hand landed on his shoulder. ‘Great Flame. Again?’
He jerked. Tuuran. And with his name the memories that didn't belong shattered to glittering shards and faded like smoke in the wind and yes, he knew where he was: he was in Deephaven. The place he'd once called home. Deephaven, looking for Taiytakei and their ships to take him to Vallas Kuy.
‘Come on. Out, out!’ Tuuran was pushing him through the door into a passage every bit as dark as the room where they'd been sleeping. He thrust Berren ahead of him up a steep flight of stairs. There was light here now. Gleams and slivers of something bright at the top. A trapdoor onto a rooftop.
Deephaven. His head was clearing. He remembered now. They'd found a ship and worked their passage up the coast and he'd let himself sink away again and for a time he'd become. . the other one. Skyrie. Still in there. Lurking. Hiding. But now he was where he'd been born and Skyrie was the weak one, and he wanted this, this place with its memories.
Tuuran pushed the trapdoor up and Berren almost fell back down the steps as he reeled from the brightness outside. It was the middle of the day. He climbed up and looked, and all his strength was suddenly gone because he was here again and seeing it was like a punch to the gut. Twenty years since he'd trained with the sword-monks of Torpreah when they'd come to Deephaven for a summer. The start of a civil war, his master had said, but it had come to nothing. Twenty years and yet he could see Tasahre as though it was yesterday, dying at his feet as he knelt beside her. He blinked and shook his head, trying to tear himself away from the past and the deck of that ship, from the Emperor's Docks and the Deephaven he'd known half a lifetime ago, but he couldn't. It had gripped him from the moment they'd sailed round the Blue Cliffs and the needle-like spikes of Deephaven Point. When the ship had brought them into the bay, it had all come crashing back. He'd seen the city from the sea before, but only the once, from the ship that had taken him away all those years ago. The docks were still there, the castle-like House of Records at one end where the harbour masters lived, the great warehouses, the Old Harbour Watchtower at the other leaning like a drunkard over the Kingsway but still not fallen down. He stared at it all, fifteen years old again, the Bloody Judge and the Crowntaker both names that hadn't yet found him. Just Berren, the thief-taker's boy, the day after his life was shattered. He felt as though he'd stepped back in time, as though he'd gone back to those days to walk through them again, only this time he was walking backwards ever further into the past. He'd watched the city come closer and he'd wept, because if he was walking backwards through his life he knew exactly what happened next; and also because he knew that he wasn't, that the sensations weren't real, and that however hard he wished, he wouldn't be seeing his Tasahre again.
From a distance the city had seemed much the same. The changes were small and subtle and it took being up close to see how deep they ran. And not so much see as feel. As he stepped off the boat and onto the docks, a tension had embraced him like a poisoned shrou
d. He'd walked up the Avenue of Emperors, drinking it in, the rich taverns on one side and the hostels for sailors who could afford decent lodgings. The Assayers’ quarter, as he remembered it. On the other side should have been the first fringes of the Maze, and that was where the city had changed. But not just changed. Every single street and alley had vanished, simply not there any more as though all the taverns and bawdy houses and the jewellers and the goldsmiths and the Moongrass dens and the sailors’ flophouses had all shuffled up while he was gone and quietly closed them off. Further on it was suddenly familiar again. The two great curved swords still reared over the top of the Avenue, the Swords of the Sun proclaiming the virtue of truth and a terrible fate for thieves and liars. The old statues he remembered were still there: the first emperor and the last, except the statue of Ashahn the Wise had now gone and there was another in its place, a young woman. She might have been beautiful and regal once but her face had been scratched and scarred and daubed with paint.
Hang the witch.
They'd found a place to stay. He hadn't been paying much attention. Memories came at him from everywhere. He must have fallen asleep, and then the dreams, and now he sat beside Tuuran on a rooftop in the sun.
‘You never believe me when I tell you who I am.’ He said it without any bitterness but with a sadness that came of simply being here. From the rooftop they were looking over what had been the Maze, back when he'd been an orphan boy from Shipwrights’. He should have been able to see other places he'd known once: the Sheaf of Arrows where he'd hidden with Lilissa, the Barrow of Beer where old Kasmin had lived. He should have been able to point them out to Tuuran but he couldn't. The Maze he remembered was all gone and a new Maze had risen in its place. The House of Embalmers and Morticians stood on one corner, a place that hadn't existed in Berren's day because burying the dead had been a terrible sin and still was. The streets of the Maze were covered over now, everything was covered over, windows boarded and curtained or bricked up and it didn't take much to understand the why of it. The Maze had become the Necropolis, a city within the city, a city of the dead just as the oar-slaves in the galley had said. Every street he knew had been barricaded from within and then blocked by the living except for one — Taphouse Way once, but now they called it Dead Man's Walk.
‘I know you think I'm mad.’ He didn't look at Tuuran's face but pointed out over the city. ‘There. Those towers up there. The Peak. The tower capped in gold is the Temple of the Sun. The one that seems to have wings is the Overlord's tower. They're the same height so neither overlooks the other.’ He peered at them. They were still exactly as he remembered them. His arm moved round. ‘That tower poking up over the rooftops is the Temple of the Moon.’ Old Garrent who had always put a smile on his face. ‘Beyond lies the Godsway, which runs from Arr estuary and the River Gate to the Square of the Four Winds.’ Right past the House of Cats and Gulls where Saffran Kuy once lived. His arm moved again. ‘Down there runs the Avenue of Emperors. All the way to the sea. The one we walked up yesterday from the docks. Next road along is the Kingsway.’ His arm swept further round. ‘Pelean's Gate and the Sea Gate are over there. Then somewhere are the old city walls. On the other side there used to be a canal. It was supposed to go from the river to the sea and make Deephaven into an island but they never finished it. It's mostly covered over now, but the canal's still there underneath the slums. You go and see, Tuuran, and then come and tell me how I know all this.’
‘Never said you hadn't ever met someone who'd been here.’ Tuuran snorted. ‘Just said you were too young to be the Bloody Judge, that's all. Thought you were a bit pale to be from here too but I see they have all sorts.’
Berren rocked on his haunches. ‘Bit of everything in Deephaven. Anything you want, you can find it.’ Almost anything. The boat from Helhex had brought them round the mouth of the river. He'd seen the Emperor's Docks where his thief-taker master had killed his first love. The memory felt as fresh as dripping blood. He knew he'd never find someone like her again.
‘We could stay here. In Aria. In Deephaven,’ said Tuuran.
‘No.’
‘There's work for a good sword here.’
Snuffers. He meant they could be snuffers. He was right too. The snuffers the young Berren inside him remembered, the old soldiers from the civil war, they were all gone now, dead or hung up their swords. The city hungered for more.
‘There's a war coming.’ Tuuran said it almost like he was saying a prayer. A war, except there were no dragons here for him to slay.
On the rooftop, sitting in the sun, staring out over the Necropolis, Berren Crowntaker turned. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We're not staying.’
Tuuran sniffed. ‘I've been listening out,’ he said. ‘Keeping my ears alive while you've been sleeping the day away. That Ice Witch rules here now, and these risen dead, their presence, the tolerance she gives them, the fact that she doesn't have them all burned, that's proof enough of what she is.’ Tuuran made a gesture of the sun, a warding away of evil. ‘You should look for your warlocks and your blood-mages here, not somewhere across the sea.’ He drew his knife and tested its edge with a finger. ‘They say she rules as regent for her younger brother but that when he comes of age he's going to move against her. There's going to be a war. They say she's built a vast fortress up the coast from here, a huge thing as big as the Palace of Paths. All black stone risen out of the earth and welded into shape by her magic.’ He shivered.
‘Stay if you want; I won't.’ Berren got up, leaving Tuuran out in the sun, and clambered across the rooftops looking for a way down. On the whole he'd seen enough of war, and now he'd seen enough of Deephaven too, but he had to have a look at what had once been the Maze, just the once before he left. Had to, because what was now the Necropolis had almost been his home.
‘They don't like the light.’
Berren was following a man and a woman down Dead Man's Walk, loitering behind them because the woman seemed to know what she was talking about. The man was obviously new to the city — it was all over him in the nervous way he walked and how his eyes darted from side to side, in the unease that clouded his face; and who could blame him, heading into the gloom to where dead men walked and spoke and haggled over pieces of bone. The windows overlooking Dead Man's Walk were boarded up, the side alleys and streets blocked with rubble or walled shut. A patchwork of boards and blankets and sails hung between the rooftops overhead. The street became a tunnel. In places the stone was blackened and charred. There had been fires here.
The man looked around him and gawped and Berren stared too. Fire destroys the walking dead. He wished he knew how he knew that.
As they walked deeper in, only a few dim rays of sunlight filtered down to the ground. His eyes began to adjust to the strange twilight. He could see where daylight burst in again at the far end of the street, where the Necropolis ended once more. Between there and where he stood lay a small square, the Speaking Square in his day although it doubtless had another name now. A dozen or so figures stood within it, clustered in twos and threes.
‘This is where they do their business with the outside world.’ The woman was talking again. Berren stopped close enough to listen. She pointed down another street, a black hole leading away from the square. ‘There lies the heart of the Necropolis.’
One of the figures in the square turned to look at him. It was the face of a doll, beautiful and perfect and cold and lifeless; and as Berren looked around he saw they were all like this, and they were all turning and looking at him. They started towards him, all of them at once. Though they moved as though they could see as well as anyone, each had their eyes sewn firmly shut. The woman fell silent. Sudden fire flickered from the tips of her fingers.
Berren turned and fled. Bolted like a frightened little boy until he was back in the summer sunlight once more, holding his side and gasping for breath. People passed him on the street with wry smiles. Someone running out of Dead Man's Walk like his arse was on fire? They probably saw the
same thing every day. He waited until he caught his breath but no dead men came shambling after him. Out here the rest of Deephaven, the rest of the empire and beyond, everything was exactly as it was when he'd entered. Perhaps ten minutes had passed, and yet as he emerged into the light he came into a different world. Nothing would be quite the same. His home was gone for ever. He'd leave on the first ship he could find now and Tuuran could do whatever he liked. He didn't think he'd ever be back.
He walked to the Temple of the Moon. The priest Garrent had been a friend once. Perhaps a priest might understand what the warlocks of Tethis had done to him, but when he went in and asked he found Garrent was dead five years, and when the priests of the moon looked at him closely a horror spread across their faces and moonlight began to shimmer around them and their fingers pointed at Berren's heart and he backed away while they flung words like stones at him: Monster! Abomination! Anathema! The words Tasahre had hurled long ago at the warlock Saffran Kuy. He ran, scared again, and it was only when he was halfway down the Godsway to the river docks that he realised the moon priests had been scared too. They'd been terrified. Of him, and he had no idea why.
Even as he thought that, he saw the one-eyed man in grey in the night with the stars winking out around him. Skyrie's memories, haunting him.
At the bottom of the Godsway he went looking for the old house of Cats and Gulls to see if it was still there, for the relics of his old enemy Saffran Kuy, but the rickety wooden riverfront warehouse was gone. It had been torn down and a stone one built in its place, and the cats and the gulls and the stink of fish were gone too. He stopped there for a long time, looking, but Saffran Kuy was dead. Berren Crowntaker had killed him on a ship in Tethis long ago. The warlock of Deephaven was gone. And yes, there had been others, but they were somewhere else now.