Dragon Queen sk-2

by Stephen Deas

  More rockets hissed and shrieked back and forth from city to sea. The sword-slaves turned and fled from his axe but the golems were another matter, hulking brutes of black rubbery skin, terrible enough almost to quell the battle madness but Tuuran was having none of it. ‘Are you dragons?’ he screamed at them. Behind the screams and the clash of swords and the dull thumps of bursting fireballs and the roar of flames and the distant booms and thunderclaps, a deep rhythmic pulsing was building, louder and louder. ‘Are you? Because that's what I was made to kill.’ He ducked under a clumsy swipe and split a golem in half with his axe, ripping open its belly. It fell apart and lost its shape like an overripe fruit and now Crazy Mad and the sword-slaves who'd followed him surged forward again. He felled another. .

  A rocket howled out of the air and struck one of the golems, spitting it. It stood there for a moment, reeling, and then exploded. Tuuran stumbled back, blinded by the flash, only the gold-glass helm saving his eyes from the flames. All around him men staggered and screamed and clutched their faces. There was a terrible smell of burning tar. When he blinked the brightness away, another of the golems was standing right in front of him. It had a wooden beam in its hands. It swung. He ducked easily underneath and inside its reach. They were large, too large to be men, but they were slow and had no notion of how to fight. He hacked at the golem, slashing it open. Black goo oozed from the wound. A substitute for slaves and cranes, that's what they were. Enchanted creatures for loading and unloading ships in the harbour and little use for anything else. Beside him Crazy Mad stabbed and cut.

  ‘Get away from the shore! Get away! Into the streets! Quick!’ They'd broken through at the end of the jetty. More attackers were dashing past them. Out in the dawn smoke over the jetties other ships loomed. Wood snapped and splintered. Lightning flashed and thundered back and forth. The Taiytakei with the golden armour was urging them on and now he had others around him, more of the night-skins in their shimmering colours and their cloaks of bright feathers. They had short stabbing swords at their sides, their black rods too, but in their hands were the lightning wands, cracking and fizzing thunderbolts all around them. They carried shields, huge things of glass and gold, and spiked ashgars over their backs. Up and down the shore among the handful of ships that had rammed the jetties, smoke lay over a sea full of bobbing boats, oars straining furiously for the land. The throbbing noise was louder. Across the waves flashes and booms surrounded the island that the fleet had passed in the pre-dawn twilight as they'd lit their first fire-ships. Within the smoke the water was ablaze with misty glowing shapes, burning hulks and wreckage and pools of fire that floated and seemed to burn the very water itself. The sun had cracked the horizon far out to sea, shining straight though the carnage and the haze, throwing everything into silhouette. Tuuran could see all three of the islands now. The one they'd passed was low and shrouded in smoke while bolts of lightning flared like the sun, one and then another and another. The middle of the three islands, the tallest, must have been a mile away across the sea and he still had to tip his head back to look at the top of it. A great column of rock, sheer sides rising out of the water. With the rising sun behind it, its top glowed with golden fire. The third sloped up from the sea to the meet the cliffs of the second. A bridge crossed the chasm between, gleaming in the dawn with a dazzling fiery gold.

  The golems were falling one by one. They fought without thought, swinging their clubs at any who came within range. The stabbing swords and spears of the sword-slaves wounded their rubbery skin, but Tuuran, with his axe and quick feet, he was the one to finish them, fast enough to get in close and split them apart before their clubs could shatter him. They were slow, too slow to be much danger to a man with his eyes open and his wits sharp. ‘Next!’ He sliced the legs from one and buried the head of his axe into the side of another. ‘And again! More! Harder! Give me something that can fight!’

  ‘Move! Clear the shore!’ The ships out in the water were turning, those that weren't broken or shattered burning wrecks. ‘Get away! Get away!’ He had no idea who was shouting. He hacked at another golem's leg and it staggered. One heaved its club at him. He ducked and it struck the first golem in the face, splitting it open. The crippled golem sagged to the ground, black liquid pooling around it. Another rocket exploded on the dockside and then a whole string of them rained down, falling on the end of the jetty and on the ship he and Crazy Mad had stormed; and on their own ship too, engulfing everything in a storm of fire. Tuuran staggered away, overwhelmed by noise and light and the heat. So much for our passage back. The golems pressed forward. He saw a sword-slave picked up and ripped in two, another hit by a club so hard that it took his head off his shoulders, a third batted out to sea like a ball in a game of circle-running.

  A Taiytakei pushed past him and ran right in among the golems. He was clutching one of their black rods. Every golem he touched immediately froze. The work of a few moments and they were like statues. When he was done, the Taiytakei grabbed Tuuran, pushing him away from the sea and into the lee of a low stone wall. ‘Move, slave! Get away from the shore!’ He was looking up. When Tuuran followed his gaze, he saw glasships floating down from the upper parts of the city. They didn't carry golden eggs beneath them this time; instead it seemed they had great balls of fire.

  ‘Up there!’ The Taiytakei pointed across the sea to the abyss between the two islands and the bridge that crossed it. ‘Take your men and lead them up there. Across the Bridge of Eternity to the Eye of the Sea Goddess and keep going up. To the Kraitu's Bones! Keep away from open spaces. The glasships are coming. Sail! Fight! Freedom! No quarter!’ He slapped Tuuran's shoulder.

  ‘I don't have any. .’ I don't have any men he wanted to say, but the Taiytakei had already run off. For another moment Tuuran looked at the islands and the bridge between them. There? We have to get there? They'll bring it down and we'll never get across. But then again that was where the palace was, and palaces meant the best looting. He grinned to himself and looked about for Crazy Mad and then remembered another thing the Taiytakei had said.

  Glasships.

  They were closer and lower now, and the golden rim of the nearest was glowing. Further out to sea more were coming from the top of the Kraitu's Bones. They were too far away to see clearly but with the sun behind them they were like little stars, six of them, then seven, then eight.

  The rims of the ones floating in from the upper city glowed brighter and brighter, a searing light almost beyond white with the slightest taint of blue. The unbearable brilliance of lightning. His skin prickled. His hair tinged. Lightning cannon. .

  Shit!

  The air exploded. Tuuran fell to his knees, clutching his ears. He couldn't hear any more. He could barely see. Half the docks were simply gone. Smoke rose from the golems, the ones that hadn't been blown apart. The sword-slaves who'd been in the open were all gone too, vanished utterly. Maybe some had followed him to shelter before the glasship fired. Maybe. The next glasship was starting to glow. He crouched down, huddled against a wall, curled up tight in a ball, hands over his ears and covering his face. The thunderclap ripped right through him. It came at him through the ground; it came at him through the wall, tipping him sideways and sending him sprawling; it came at him through his ears, leaving them screaming, and through his bones to pick him up from the inside and shake him as though he was made of rags.

  This. . is not. . how it will end. I am Adamantine!

  Another thunderclap. A burning ship exploded into splinters. Pieces of wood and crumbs of stone showered around him. The wall thumped him. There was a noise that wasn't quite the roaring aftermath of thunder. He staggered to his feet.

  A voice. He turned and there was Crazy Mad, blinking rapidly, mouth agape, staring up at the sky, pointing and mumbling.

  ‘What?’ Tuuran could barely hear his own shout. Pointing at the glasships? Seen those already, you daft bastard!

  ‘Loud!’ bellowed Crazy Mad. He grinned the grin of a madman lost to the mani
a that drove him. ‘Look!’ And did his eyes gleam with a touch of silver or was that just the fire and the lightning and Tuuran's own frayed edges? Crazy was pointing up towards the glasships.

  Tuuran shrugged him off. ‘We've got to run. No time for your shit!’

  ‘Run where?’

  ‘Where? Away, you dumb slave. Anywhere.’ A thunderclap almost threw him off his feet as another ship exploded. He pulled at Crazy Mad, hauling him away from the docks, but Crazy was dragging him a different way. He was still pointing up at the glasships. ‘Look! Holy sun! What in Xibaiya is that?’

  Tuuran didn't want to look. Looking at the glasships made him feel small and helpless, but something in Crazy Mad's voice made him do it anyway. Behind and above the glasships he caught a glimpse of something much faster, something with wings and fangs and claws and fire coming down on them from above, but that couldn't be right because the Taiytakei didn't have dragons; and then he couldn't be sure of anything any more because the nearest of the glasships had almost reached the docks, and the burning globe of fire that hung beneath it began to fall, and he couldn't do anything but watch it come down towards them.

  ‘Oh. . crap!’ He dropped. He pressed himself against a wall and curled up into a ball again, hauling Crazy Mad down while the world exploded around them.

  71

  Snake Dance

  She always rested well sleeping beside a dragon. Sleeping alone was the worst. She never quite relaxed. Alone you never quite knew who would come, silent and creeping into your room, and slide into your bed and clamp their hands all over you. Alone she slept with one eye open. To not be alone was one of the reasons she used to take as many lovers as she did. It was why Myst and Onyx stayed beside her in the eyrie, so she could sleep without her ears picking constantly at the silence. Lovers wanted things too though, and even when she gave herself willingly, in the end they all betrayed her. Dragons were different. Dragons had a purity to them. A singleness of intent and no pretence of being anything other than what they were. Kept dull, they were a part of her own will. Diamond Eye's unsleeping eyes watched over her, and so she slept well.

  She woke before dawn. The desert air was cold now, the stars bright pinpricks in their thousands in the clear sky. She watched them for a while, searching for anything familiar. Some of the constellations she'd learned as a child were there but all in odd places, clustered around the horizon if they shone at all. Many had simply vanished in this strange alien world.

  ‘Where are we, old friend?’ Diamond Eye was calmer in the nights than he was in the day. Stupid really, to talk to a dragon. She had no illusions about what he was: a monster who'd eat her without a thought if ever the alchemists and their potions lost their grip on him. But then that was how a dragon-queen should meet her end, eaten by her own mount. That was her way, far better that than being a slave. ‘I could let you go,’ she said. ‘I could send you to fly away, on and on until you find the sea and then sink down beneath the waves where they'll never find you, and stay there still and quiet until you wake up and rise again and wreak vengeance for us both. Shall I?’

  She put the Taiytakei armour on one piece at a time as she whispered to him, enjoying again each little miracle. If the Taiytakei had offered her marvels such as this back when she'd been speaker, this and not their tawdry farscopes which merely gave her headaches, perhaps she might have bargained with them from her Adamantine throne and freely given them the dragons they desired. But they hadn't. They'd taken what they wanted and now they'd suffer for it.

  ‘I am what I am.’ She climbed onto Diamond Eye's back, buckled herself into the harness and looked down one last time at the stain that had been the Elemental Man. The Watcher was right about that. Right about her in so many ways. ‘I am what I am, for aren't we all?’ And as she leaned forward, Diamond Eye turned and cocked his head and bared his teeth, and if she hadn't known better, she'd have sworn he was smiling. Her eyes sparkled. ‘Now they burn, my deathbringer. As many as we can before they bring us down so they will never ever do this again.’ And then when that didn't seem to be enough, she threw back her head and screamed at the dark and empty sky, ‘I am Zafir! Do you hear? I am a dragon-queen!’ And Diamond Eye took to the sky and roared up high into the air and surged on towards the sea and whatever awaited them.

  They reached it as the sun began to rise. She felt the changes in the air, the moisture and the warmth; then lower she tasted the salt, and there was the sea and then, in the distance, flashes of light far off to one side, miles away but she knew what they were. Lightning. So she turned toward them and surged on, and as the dawn light split the desert from the sky, there it was, the city of Dhar Thosis as the kwen from the mountains had described it, three islands and its curving shore and two of the three islands rising like mountains from the waves. Sun-bright lightning lit up the morning twilight in flashes, flickering around the furthest of the three. The pitch-dark sea burned with a thousand fires and the sky above it filled with fizzing orange streaks. Rockets.

  She urged Diamond Eye on. They would take this city from the desert and from the sky. No one would see them. Not until it was too late.

  Thunder rumbled, a distant shake of the air. Another flash came, from over the city this time. Closer. Diamond Eye banked and rolled, and she saw the glasships floating over the city, a cluster of little brightnesses drifting across the sky beneath her towards the sea and the broken and burning ships that littered the shore. The glasship rims lit up one by one, light pulsing around them, brighter and brighter until each one let loose with a brilliant flash and a clap of thunder and ship after ship exploded into pieces.

  Those, my dragon. Start with those. Diamond Eye heard her and tucked in his wings and dived towards them, and as he did she heard him sing, as dragons sometimes did, murmuring to themselves at the joy of being unleashed for war. The song curled around and writhed inside her and she embraced it and took it to be her own, and they were gone, both of them, lost to the hunger and the rage. With her dragon she fell upon the glasships, belching fire, though both of them knew that fire would be no use against these monsters made by men, these creatures of glass and gold — and so it came to tooth and claw and the lash of the tail. And if the enemy saw them coming then there was nothing they could do but hang helplessly in the sky and hurl their lightning.

  Diamond Eye hammered into the first and slashed and bit at the glass and the gold discs at the heart of the ship, shattering and bending and ripping until the glasship began to fall; but the dragon spread his wings and held it in his talons, strained to lift it higher and then hurled the ship towards another. The two smashed together and exploded into shards while Diamond Eye stormed at the rest, slashing at them with his tail, swooping and soaring as their gold rims glowed with white-hot light and the air prickled and scratched; and as the hail of lightning began, Zafir saw something bright and burning fall. It vanished into the gloom of the streets below and the city beneath bloomed into a sweeping lake of fire. Her heart sang. Joy. Not hers, but Diamond Eye's.

  72

  Fire

  Tuuran didn't see where the fire bomb landed. Couldn't have been far away. Two streets, maybe. The very air shook. He felt the wall beside him quiver and begin to tip.

  ‘Run!’ He pulled at Crazy Mad but Crazy had felt it too and was already up and moving. Ahead the street suddenly filled with flames, a burning cloud blooming fast towards them. The buildings were all coming down. Stone smashed into the road. Tuuran cringed and turned his back as the fire washed over them, wishing for the dragon-scale he'd had long ago. Crazy Mad did the same, tucking his head between his arms and his hands under his armpits. The fireball flashed by, a short sudden scorch and then gone.

  ‘Weak!’ Tuuran yanked Crazy Mad away. ‘At the end of its reach. Lucky for us.’ The air shook from another thunderbolt and then another, each one rattling the litter of rubble and stone around them. He didn't see where they struck. ‘We need cover! We need shields!’ More booms of lightning overhead, a
whole string of them, and with each one the savaged streets shook. Yet more stone juddered loose from already broken walls and fell around them. As he and Crazy Mad ran, Tuuran turned to look up. ‘Holy Flame!’

  He threw himself flat as a tumbling glasship spun out of the sky and smashed into the city ahead. It exploded into slivers of glass that flew like scorpion bolts. A splinter shattered off his armoured shoulder and a piece as long as a horse fizzed over his head, then glittering daggers showered around him, pinging off his helmet and rattling over his back. He winced. He was feeling the burns from the fire now. Skin burns, nothing deep, but they stung like he'd been whipped. The backs of his hands, the backs of his legs. The back of his neck, that was the worst.

  He hauled himself up again and then stopped, transfixed. Everything around him was smashed. The wide stone-paved street was covered in debris, littered with destruction. The buildings either side, whatever they'd once been, their thick stone walls had been ripped apart and tumbled and their roofs were simply gone, disintegrated by fire and lightning. Above him, the glasships were falling one by one and there was a dragon among them. They were throwing lightning at it but the dragon was too fast and too agile. It was a big one too, huge, bigger even than the glasships when it stretched out its wings, with claws like lances and a head filled with teeth like scimitars. As the dragon leaped away from one stricken glasship and passed another, it lashed with its massive tail, smashing the ship to pieces. Tuuran watched as it shattered another and then jumped onto the last of them. It opened its mouth and fire poured out, on and on and on until even Tuuran on the ground could feel the air turning hot. The glasship shuddered and then started to fall. Its glass heart was glowing a dull throbbing red and there were drops of bright golden rain in the air. It came down behind the buildings shattered by the fire bomb and the tortured ground shook again. The monster shrieked. For a moment, as it turned, Tuuran caught a glimpse of a rider on its back.