by Stephen Deas
‘They shouldn't have been allowed to go.’ Saying that once too often to Tsen was what had earned him his bruise.
‘A t'varr does not command a kwen,’ Liang said, and they stood in silence a while until the glasships were specks in the distance. She looked at Belli when she thought he wasn't looking back. Watched his face as it gradually changed from strain and fatigue to something else. As that little frown she'd come to love crept over his eyes, the one that said he was thinking. They were slowly breaking him. She'd seen that in the last few weeks. The dragons and then the rider and then everything Tsen wanted, all of that had been more than enough; and now the disease. They were grinding their only alchemist away, piece by piece, and yet he still had a spark in him. She smiled and would have hugged him if hugging a slave hadn't been wholly disgraceful, and then she thought of the moment when the Regrettable Man had ripped open his throat and she'd been sure for a few seconds that he was dead. How that had felt. It seemed so long ago now. ‘Come to me, Belli. When you need help.’ She took his hand and squeezed. No one would see that. ‘There's only so much either of us can do, but we will do it.’
He turned to her, and there was that spark still bright in his eyes and the frown, deep enough to have made its way into a question at last. ‘Your glasships in Khalishtor drew power from black stone towers,’ he said. ‘You said they need to after every journey. How do they draw their power here?’
‘From the eyrie. They draw it from the stone on which we stand.’
‘And from where does the eyrie draw its power? What keeps it up?’
Liang shrugged. ‘We have no idea. Not the least shred of one.’
‘So this might simply fall out of the sky at any moment?’ He laughed. ‘That might be a blessing.’
Liang laughed with him. ‘It hasn't fallen for the last hundred years so why would it fall now? A glasship will fly for a few days before it fails. Baros Tsen's eyrie is something else. Something older and greater than us.’
They stood together. Dragons could fly without rest for. . Bellepheros said he didn't know and Zafir had said the same. Longer than any rider could last, certainly. They might get hungry and they might get angry and they would grow hotter and hotter from the effort until they caught alight and burned from the inside, but they never actually tired.
‘The Silver Kings,’ Belli said quietly, as much to himself as to her. ‘We have their relics too, here and there.’ He straightened himself. ‘Is it coming, then? This war you said would never be allowed to happen? That's where they're going, isn't it? And the dragon will fly to fight beside them.’
Liang didn't answer that. She didn't need to. It was hard keeping secrets in a place like the eyrie where everyone lived on top of everyone else and all of them in the shadow of Zafir and the terrible dragon to whom slave and master alike were nothing but food. ‘Something is coming,’ she said eventually. ‘I don't know what. I still can't believe Tsen would allow it.’
Belli shook his head. ‘Ach! We had our speakers and you see how they become.’
He left her then to make the last preparations for the dragon to fly. To listen to Zafir chide and mock and berate him. To suffer it in silence and bow and call her Holiness, as he always did.
‘You could be rid of her,’ said Liang softly in his ear as the last day came close. ‘She takes your potions every day. I've seen her. So does the dragon. You could be rid of both of them. It would be so easy.’ Bringing the dragon and its rider into their world had been a mistake. She saw it now. It was clear as glass if you stepped back and looked, and Belli had been telling them exactly the same from the very first day. But Quai'Shu was mad, Jima Hsian hadn't come to the eyrie for weeks, the kwen was a kwen and even Tsen, who was a better man, even he wouldn't believe the danger until the damage was irrevocably done.
Belli looked at her and smiled a sad old smile and there just might have been tears in his eyes. ‘I am a preserver of life, Li, not a taker. When a man puts aside what's good in him to serve a cause, often it seems to me that he later forgets where he put it.’
‘Then I will do it. Show me how.’
Belli shook his head. ‘You're an enchantress, Li. You don't need me to show you anything. Kill this war, Li, but with words, not blood. Otherwise that's how we become as they are; and you're so much better than that.’
She could have kissed him.
64
The Diamond Isles
‘Oh, for the love of the Flame!’ Tuuran grabbed hold of Crazy Mad and shook him, almost slapping him, banging his head against the hard sailcloth of his hammock. ‘How's a man supposed to get some sleep? Pity me, slave, Berren, Crowntaker, whoever you are! Mercy! I beg you!’
Crazy Mad was breathing hard, heart racing. He snarled something obscene. Tuuran backed away. Crazy Mad and his demons, and they were getting worse.
‘You're doing it again!’ Watch him. You will be rewarded. And he'd wondered why an Elemental Man was interested in some faroff slave, but not any more.
‘Doing what?’
‘Your eyes. Silver and glowing. That.’ Tuuran took another step away and shook his head. ‘Every bloody night since we got here.’ One hand reached for his sword, thinking on its own without checking with the rest of him, but his blade was where it belonged, wrapped up inside their travel chest and wasn't to be had. Just as well. ‘Which one was it tonight?’ Half the time Crazy didn't remember, just looked blank and then laid into Tuuran for waking him up; but ever since they'd crossed the storm-dark and come to these islands, Crazy had tossed and turned at night. Dreams or memories, Tuuran wasn't sure which, but they were relentless things that never left him.
‘The silver man with the spear. That one.’
Ah. That one. Men of silver. Dragons and fire. White towers of stone that touched the sky. An endless sea of silver. And always always the same at the end, arms raised high amid a sea of destruction, calling up the powers of gods-knew-what while a man made of silver rushed at him with a spear made of the same held aloft, and then falling and falling with some great thing wrapped around him that Crazy Mad couldn't begin to describe. The dream that made his eyes light up like lamps while the rest of him writhed in his hammock like a skewered snake. The sort of dreams Tuuran didn't want anywhere near him, and it wasn't made any better by the fact that the silver man and his spear sounded exactly like the Silver King and the Adamantine Spear of the speakers even though Crazy had never once seen a dragon or been to the dragon realms. He'd probably only even heard of the Silver King and the spear in bits and pieces from Tuuran's own mouth.
The light in Crazy Mad's eyes faded. Tuuran watched until it was gone. Then, only then, he slowly relaxed. ‘You have a problem,’ he muttered.
‘I told you what happened to me.’ Crazy Mad still looked like he might punch someone. Tuuran could take a punch or two if he had to, but these days, with Crazy Mad, you never quite knew what it would turn into. Or what Tuuran feared it might turn into.
‘No, you have a problem in that you have to share a cabin with me and I get surly round the edges when I don't get my sleep. Go do your shouting somewhere else before I throw you in the sea for a second time.’ Tuuran yawned and rubbed his eyes and shambled back to his hammock. ‘Go on! Go up on deck. It's warm. Dawn soon anyway.’ When Crazy Mad flipped him a dirty finger and climbed back into his hammock, Tuuran tipped him back onto the floor. ‘I'm not bloody joking. All bloody night, the worst you've ever been and I've had enough. So you can piss off and bother someone else for a bit and let me sleep, and I tell you, if that's the way you're going to be now, you and I are going our separate ways. There's not a lot I won't do for a man but I draw the line when it comes to not getting my shut-eye.’
‘Eat my shit!’ Crazy Mad got up and staggered through the door. Tuuran clambered into his hammock and lay there, staring wide-eyed and awake at the planking overhead. After a bit he sighed and followed. No telling what a madman might do. Best to keep an eye on him.
He found Crazy in the mid
dle of the ship's deck under the mast, lying flat on his back and staring up at the cloudless sky and the stars. He looked as though he was trying to count them. They had different stars here, not the ones Tuuran knew from his home. Different stars wherever they went, whenever they crossed the storm-dark. Or. . mostly different. Here and there he saw a few familiar constellations. The Dragon. Hadn't seen that one since he'd been taken from his own land. He'd pointed it out to Crazy Mad on their first night by the Diamond Isles, and the Swan and the Harp and the Ship. He'd pointed to the Adamantine Spear too but Crazy had called it something else, the Earthspear, though they both liked Tuuran's name for it better. And then Crazy Mad had pointed to others, constellations Tuuran had never seen. The Mooncrown rising off to port. The Knife and the Twins and the Sea Serpent. The Torch and the Archer.
High among all those stars the silver light of the half moon bathed the ocean waves. It seemed to call out, soothing and peaceful and seductive, but it made him wary too, and he found his eyes would look elsewhere almost of their own will. Too bright, perhaps. He closed them. And then he must have fallen asleep because the next thing he knew the sun was up and the sky was bright and the ship was full of life and they were getting ready to leave at last. He jumped to his feet, slammed by a moment of panic, but Crazy Mad was sitting right there beside him where he'd been in the night. He looked calm now.
‘Didn't want to, you know, trouble your sleep.’ He grinned.
‘Dreams left you alone up here, did they?’
Crazy Mad shrugged. ‘Must have. Don't remember. What I remember is the moon singing to me.’
Tuuran shook his head. He looked over the water at the three peaks of the Diamond Isles. ‘I've heard of the sorcerers who live here. Silver like the moon.’ It gave him an odd feeling to think of it. Awe and yearning all at once. Men like the Silver King, only that couldn't possibly be who they were because the Silver King was dead and he'd only ever been one man, not three. Maybe that was why Crazy Mad got his dreams so bad here, them being so close.
Crazy wrinkled his nose. ‘You about to go all religious on me again?’ Crazy Mad could do with a good punch sometimes.
‘Mock away, short man. I'll dip your head into the sea until you see whatever god it is that you worship if you like. You haven't seen a dragon. Imagine them as big as these ships, wings that fill the sky, fire belching from their mouths, sweeping the land and cleansing it of men. My ancestors lived in caves, in holes, always in the dark or deep in the Raksheh forest. They were burned and eaten. We were food until the Silver King came to us. Some say he was a man, some say he was a god, but I tell you he was not fully either; he was both, half one and half the other. There's stories that he was made of liquid silver, or if you prefer it then the silver was armour that sprang from his skin at his beck and call and beneath was a man so pale he was a ghost, with hair as white as snow and eyes like fresh blood. Whatever he was, he was the Silver King. He came to us with the Adamantine Spear and called the dragons to him and bound them to his spell. He taught the first alchemists how to make the dragons serve men. And then he left us. Some say killed by blood-mages, some that he left for who-knows-where. The place the Taiytakei call Xibaiya perhaps, or even the moon and the silver colour it wears now is his. I don't know about that, but that the Silver King came and tamed the dragons? Of that I'm certain. You'll not find a man, woman or child of my land who doesn't know this story.’
‘Yeh, but story, Tuuran,’ muttered Crazy Mad. ‘You said it yourself. Story.’
‘And yet here you are, dreaming of him while up in those towers dwell the moon sorcerers who might just be his children. So mock away, puny one, so I have a reason to feed you to the sharks I've seen circling the ship these nights while I've been not sleeping. Perhaps they'd prefer a juicier and less bony morsel with a little meat on him but I doubt they'll be picky.’ Crazy Mad laughed, but he did it carefully and said nothing more while Tuuran's eyes bored into him. Eventually Tuuran went back to staring at the islands. ‘I wish I could climb up there to see them. What a marvel that would be. To tell my children I walked among gods.’
‘You don't have any children.’
‘And how would you know that?’ Tuuran chuckled and a big fat smile full of memories grew over his face. ‘I was an Adamantine Man before I was taken and I can promise you that Adamantine Men father many sons. And I'll father plenty more and I'll still be fathering them when my hair turns white and my teeth fall out and you — ’ he poked Crazy Mad sharply in the ribs ‘- skinny man, are too withered and weak to raise your talking head, never mind the other one!’
Crazy Mad snorted. Tuuran stared up at the mountains. He hadn't seen it before, but one of the three diamond spires was splintered and broken.
‘Some of the soldiers I fought with used to call me dark-skin,’ Crazy Mad muttered. ‘Then I'm surrounded by Taiytakei and suddenly I'm pale-skin. Be nice to be back in a place where it doesn't matter.’
‘Should have stayed in Deephaven then.’ Tuuran bared his teeth and grinned at the sea. ‘Used to have other slaves call me out for my skin, or for my nose, or for the way I talked, or just for where I was from. Didn't bother me much. Adamantine Men learn better. You live a few years in the Guard and then even being an oar-slave is like taking a bit of a rest. But then it came to me that it should bother me.’ He clenched his fists and smiled at them one after the other. ‘So then it stopped. That was easy. There was an oar-master who had it in for me until he vanished one night. I think he fell into the sea while no one was looking. Maybe because someone hit him round the head with a boathook. No one was ever sure though, because the slave who got blamed for it said it wasn't him right up to when they hanged him. Odd, that sail-slave being another one who gave me trouble too.’ He bared his teeth at Crazy Mad. ‘Funny how things work out sometimes, eh?’
‘Hilarious.’
They left the Diamond Isles behind that day, and — thank the Great Flame — Crazy Mad's dreams too; and after a week at sea more ships joined them, three at first and then the next day another six and then another three. When they sighted land there were more, day after day until they were an armada of more than a hundred. There were no slave galleys here either, only sharp-prowed ships that crossed the oceans.
‘Only one thing a fleet like this can mean.’ Tuuran cracked his knuckles. ‘Listen to it. Listen to the sailors at their talk. Listen to the tension. Listen to the whispering of the wind and the hungry knives it brings. We're going to war, my friend. About time too.’
‘They can do whatever they like as long as they take me to Dhar Thosis.’
Tuuran shook his head. ‘You and your pus-filled wound. You are who you are, Crazy Mad. Even if you find your warlock, all he can do is tell you the same.’
65
Beneath the Skin
Zafir rode Diamond Eye high and far. Alone and alive and free to be the woman of her deepest heart, the one beneath the masks and the disguises and the armour and the pretence. Savage and small. In this world Diamond Eye was the most alive creature she'd ever found, even among his own kind. He flew for her as no other dragon ever had, as if they fed off each other's desires.
The glasships dragged Baros Tsen's floating eyrie ever further until there was nothing to see even from the heights at which she flew, nothing to the horizon but endless sand and burning rock; and still they dragged the eyrie further and each day her dragon flew. There was nothing in the desert for either of them. The camels and cattle that had been hoisted into the eyrie and filled the dragon yard were enough for the hatchlings and the men and women of the Taiytakei but for a full-grown dragon? No. So she went as the whim took her, looking for food, hundreds of miles sometimes, and when they found a herd of something that moved and ran they burned it to embers and feasted together, alone save for the Elemental Man lest they forget they were still slaves tethered by chains to T'Varr Tsen. Bellepheros said that the dragons interfered with the Elemental Man's power. Zafir watched carefully and saw he was right, and wh
at a delicious truth it was to watch the assassin suffer and strain.
Each day after she landed the alchemist was waiting for her with his Scales. The air around the eyrie sang with tension. She saw it as clearly as she saw the violet lightning that sprang from the underside of the eyrie whenever she flew low and close beside it.
‘Don't fly Diamond Eye to war for them, Holiness. Tell them no. Defy them, I beg you.’
He'd cornered her today, among the hatchlings where none of the Taiytakei would come close. Perhaps the Elemental Man was secretly listening but he was desperate enough not to care. She smiled at him and let him see in her face that she didn't care either. ‘They are my enemies, Bellepheros, all of them, and I'll have not one drop of pity for any of them. They should be yours too.’ She looked him in the eye until he turned away. ‘I don't care one whit how many Taiytakei burn. The more the better.’ The only pity was that Chrias Kwen had gone. Would he understand what she'd done to him? He'd seen it in two of the men he'd had with him. It must have crossed his mind. It must have started by now, after all this time, the first little signs, but the Statue Plague was a slow and unpredictable killer. She'd hoped, when he'd come back, to see it on him, but no, and now he'd gone again but she could still imagine him somewhere far away, staring at the strange patches of hard rough skin that he couldn't understand, rubbing himself with creams and ointments and wondering why they wouldn't go away. For your arrogance. For killing one of my own slaves simply to show me that you could. A shame not to watch you die, slowly and in pain as your skin turns to stone. To show you that I could.
The alchemist shrugged his shoulders. ‘I try not to think of it, Holiness. Those who fall with a spear in their belly and a sword in their hand might be said to deserve their end. But many will die who do not. I know what you do when you fly him.’