Unfettered III

by Shawn Speakman (ed)

“My name is Aesthel,” the dragon said.

  It meant: truth.

  On the next evening, the dragon beat its wings against the sky and screamed, and all the people of Tyrenae stared up in terror, and all the children of Tyrenae wept. The dragon Aestheyl feasted on the last of Undyl’s three children. It flew far out over the Bitter Sea breathing out fire, it danced out its fury, it burned the sky red. It flew up so high that it seemed to burn the stars in the heavens. It dived down and lashed its tail on the surface of the sea.

  It stretched out its neck, its head very close to Undyl. Undyl reached out his hand and touched its face.

  “What would you have me do?” the dragon Aesthel asked him. “My Lord King.”

  Her brother talks to dragons.

  Wonder filled Ysleta’s heart.

  The dragon flew off into the north, burned the trees, tore the rocks apart. Rich veins of copper and tin and quicksilver running beneath the mountains, marbling the stone of the mountains like rich fat. Undyl spoke and the dragon Aesthel opened the mountains to men’s clawed fingers, laid out the wealth buried there beneath. The mine men crawled in its shadow like worms, thousands come flocking to the far mountains, their faces dirty and pinched, swollen with wealth-lust. All the treasures of the earth that lie buried, and the dragon ripped them open, and the men dug them out and took them and shaped them. The sky over Ith was dark, even in the midday sun, with the smoke of a thousand fires to smelt the ore and melt the metal, to forge coins and swords and helmets and spears and shields.

  The dragon flew into the east and into the west, over the waters of the Bitter Sea and the Sea of Grief, burned the fishermen’s ships, burned the merchant ships that sailed from any land but that of Ith. The men of Ith sailed out into the empty waters. The dragon flew into the south and danced in the air over the fields of Immier, poured out its fire to light the sky crimson, came down low over the farmsteads and the villages.

  Fear. The people of Cen Andae cowered in their houses; terror came on the people of Cen Elora; in far-off Tarboran the mountains rang with weeping; in Immish and Theme and the distant countries of the west men hid away and wept. The power of Undyl Silver Eyes the King of Ith was spoken of in hushed voices across all the world. An Ithish merchant might cheat and steal, an Ithish sailor turn pirate—but not a voice was raised in protest, for the King of Ith had at his command a dragon.

  Ysleta sat in her bedchamber, watching the sun rise and the sun set. The ghost of her brother’s wife: What have you done to my children? What have you done to me? The ghost of the children: You held our bodies in your hands, Ysleta. For what? For what? For power? For death? For wealth? The towers of Malth Tyrenae were empty of anything. At night outside her door she heard her brother walking the halls whispering, unable to sleep. In the city beneath the people went with bowed heads, did not look toward the tower. If the shadow of the towers of Malth Tyrenae fell on a man as he was walking, if a woman raised her head and saw the towers rising before her, their hands moved in fear to ward off ill-luck.

  I must destroy it.

  In the blue dawn she realized this. However wondrous. It will destroy her—indeed, she could not see a way in which she could destroy it and live. She would fail. Madness, to think of trying to harm it. But there in the dawn the certainty was stark before her. Like the bare branches of winter trees. The dragon and her brother, she must destroy them, both of them.

  She was afraid then. She sat at her window and the fear ate her, left her weak. Cold and shivering in the sun. But it must be. Destroy it. Beneath its wonder it is formed of children’s broken bones. Her brother’s footsteps in the corridor outside her bedchamber, and then he was climbing the stairs up and up to summon it again, and she must destroy it. Destroy him.

  The bronzeworkers of Malth Tyrenae, who made the glories of the Ithish kings. The mine men crawled like worms, brought down copper and tin; in the forests trees were cut and burned to make black charcoal; the bronzesmiths turned the metal into blazing liquid, formed it into beautiful precious things. A cup. A bell. A mirror.

  A sword.

  “Make me a sword,” Ysleta said to the master bronzesmith. He was old, his back hunched from years spent bending over the forge fire, lifting the crucible of bronze light. His arms red and scarred, a terrible white scar running from his foot to his knee where the bronze had once spilled over him. His arms and shoulders heavy with muscle, and his legs withered, for after being burned he could no longer walk without pain. His fingers were splayed and thick and knotted; there was no skin left on the tips of his fingers. His face, too, was scarred and marked with flecks of metal; he shimmered like a dragon himself in the forge light. His eyes were red with smoke and heat, and with pain.

  “Why should you want a sword?” he asked Ysleta. His voice was bold, almost scornful. If she was a Princess of Ith, he was a master bronzesmith. A greater thing than she might ever be.

  I cannot speak it. My tongue cannot form the words. It is a curse-spell: if I speak it my heart will burst with fear and grief.

  Ysleta did not answer, but looked up at the sky.

  The bronzesmith’s face paled. The scars and the flecks of metal clear against white frightened skin. His eyes wide. Afraid.

  “You cannot mean to do this,” he said. “I cannot make you a sword to kill a dragon. No man can.”

  “Coward,” said Ysleta. “You, who boasts of his skill with the bronze, who claims to be like to a dragon himself with his skill over the fire and the molten metal.”

  The master bronzesmith said, “Yes.”

  That night the dragon danced in the sky over the city of Tyrenae. No one within the city slept. The sky rolled with white and golden flames, it flowed like water, it washed over the sky, blazed to scald the stars clean. The moon was full, its light reflected off the dragon’s scales as off ten times a thousand drawn swords. White scales, the white moon, the white moonlight: Ysleta saw the white of children’s bones. The sky was filled with music, low and mournful; it sings for joy, some said in whispers; it is weeping, others said; it is filled with shame. A shooting star rushed across the sky beneath the moon: look, some said, it is weeping, there are its tears there in the sky. The dragon flew out over the Bitter Sea, its wings almost touching the white crests of the waves. It breathed out its fire and the water rose up in perfumed steam.

  There was a knocking on the door of Ysleta’s bedchamber. Her brother? Ah, gods, have mercy. Please, no. She feared, even, that her brother might have come to kill her, offer her up to the dragon. But when she opened the door the bronzesmith’s bellows boy stood there. In his hands he held a crudely made sword blade.

  “It will kill you,” he said. “But I thought . . . you should try.”

  “Thank you.” She saw then that his hands were red with blood. That the sword blade was already marked with blood. “What have you done?”

  “I . . .” He shifted on his feet, did not look at her. There was blood smeared on his face. Like a child who has been playing in wet mud. “My master . . . he would not let me do this thing.” And then he said, “In some tales, my Lady, a sword that kills dragons must . . . must be tempered in a man’s blood.”

  She should close the door in his face. She should flee from him. From all in this place. How, she thought, how have we come to this? The dragon speaks and we . . . we are driven mad by it. Madness has come over us.

  The sword was brittle. Badly weighted, rough, not well made. Too small, and yet too heavy for Ysleta’s hands. But the blade was sharp. Had killed a man.

  “You will be punished,” she said to the bellows boy, “for what you have done. I will see you hanged from the city walls.”

  The bellows boy lowered his head to her. “I know it, my Lady.”

  “Wait here in my rooms,” Ysleta said.

  His eyes went huge with fear, as his master’s had. Wild horse’s eyes, the whites all around. “You will go now?”

  “I would rather not sit with a bloody sword in my hands and wait.”

/>   Ysleta swung the sword back and forth between them. The smell of metal. The faint rancid smell of drying blood. Metal, of course, smells like blood. In the candlelight the blade seemed to be glowing. She thought of dragon fire, and the liquid light of the molten bronze. Pure white light being poured into the mould.

  She said, “I will call the sword Goldlight.”

  At the top of the tower her brother stood staring out into the darkness. His hands gripped tight to each other, his nailless fingers clawing at himself.

  “Beautiful. Beautiful. Ah!” He turned his head to Ysleta, his pale grey eyes like moth’s wings. Silver, in the moonlight. His lips and his skin, too, silvery and gleaming. The Lords of Ith drink quicksilver in the morning and in the evening, it silver-tints their hair and their skin. “Ysleta! See! See!”

  The dragon had grown larger. Long years it had slept in the mountains, drowsing, unreal, a dream thing, a pale shadow thing of no depth. Snow or white blossom. As unreal as a star. As the liquid bronze is an unreal thing. A dream thing. A ghost thing. Her brother speaks to dragons: it grows real, it beats white wings, it fills the world, there is blood on its claws, on its teeth. It spins in the sky around the tower, its wing beats are a storm wind. It is lit by its own fire, it is every colour the eye can behold, it flashes colours like frost. Its fire unrolls in the sky like great banners of crimson silk.

  Ysleta raised the sword Goldlight. Rough, crudely made thing. Awkward in her hand: a Princess of Ith, a woman of power, one such as her would have no need of a sword. Its blade was smaller than the dragon’s claws.

  “What are you doing? Ysleta? Sister?”

  She struck her brother with the sword that had already killed one man for trying to stop her doing this. The rough blade went into his throat. His breath sounded like the dragon’s wing beats. The bronze was washed with his life’s blood. The people of distant Chathe, they say, believe that the base of the throat is the seat of a man’s soul.

  He fell at her feet, dead, his hands still clasped together. Undyl Silver Eyes, King of Ith.

  The dragon shrieked. The sky burned.

  “Ekilankanderakesis. Ekilanaltreset. Geonanare ke nane kel genher?”

  My master. My beloved one. What have you done to him?

  The night sky was red as bleeding. The fire came down around Ysleta. She raised the sword Goldlight. The blade was filthy with her brother’s blood. In the heat of the dragon’s fire, the bronze began to glow, to sweat and melt.

  The dragon came at her to devour her. It was so vast before her that she could see nothing beside the scarlet of its open mouth. Like turning closed eyes to the summer sun, and all the world is only red nothingness.

  Her hair was burning.

  Such pain.

  Swallowing her up. Drowning her in its flames.

  She swung the sword out. Striking the fire, cutting the sky apart, her hands running with her brother’s blood. The blood rose up as red steam. The sword burned her hands. Burned itself into her hands, becoming part of her skin. The dragon’s teeth came down upon her, they were longer than the sword blade, they were like the bars of a cage.

  Ysleta drove the sword down into its jaws. Cried out at the pain of striking it. Flame and heat burning her throat.

  It screamed with her. Its head whipped away from her, its body coming at her, it was like a ship striking the rocks of a cliff. It poured toward her. It thrashed with light.

  She drove the sword down. Into the base of its shoulder, where its wing met its twisting back. Its muscles moved there like a nest of insects. The sword caught something there. Dark blood came welling up.

  The blood, like the fire, burned her skin raw. The sword fell from her hand.

  “Geonanare kel genher?”

  What have you done?

  Blood. Blood.

  Her hands. Running with blood.

  What have you done?

  The dragon screamed in grief. It soared up into the night sky, tearing itself, the world opening up around it. It was wounded. It was itself a wound. Impossible, that such a thing could be harmed. Blood poured from it in a rainfall, and the stones upon which Ysleta stood began to hiss. Its wing beats frantic, grasping at the sky; its body spinning; it was like snow blown on a wind. Its fire burst from it. Choked and guttering with blood.

  Far below, the city was filled with torchlights. Voices calling out in terror. People on the streets pointing, cowering, running. The dragon fire and the dragon blood poured down, set houses ablaze.

  Footsteps, running up the stairs of the tower. Soldiers. Servants. The bellows boy, thinking she must now be dead.

  The dragon was a maggot thing, writhing. Mindless. Opening itself. It fled upwards into the sky. It screamed. It flew out over the Bitter Sea, spiralling down, drifting down, spinning like snowflakes, it gleamed white in the moonlight, it struck the water with a crash.

  The sea boiled. Seethed in a maelstrom. Salt mist. White foam stained with blood.

  The waves folded over the dragon Aesthel’s body. Took it into themselves. Waves broke on the shore. Whispered. Sang.

  The water grew calm.

  The sea and the sky were empty. A slick of blood floated on the water’s surface, black in the moonlight.

  The night was very dark, without the light of the dragon’s fire. Ysleta’s eyes were half-blinded with the fire of its dying. She bent and groped for the sword at her feet, took it up with arms that trembled. She looked out over the city. A red glow rising from the buildings burning far below.

  “My Lady?”

  Servants, soldiers, their eyes fixed on her brother’s body. Ysleta held out the sword at them with trembling hands.

  “I killed him. I killed it.” She should weep. Her heart was weeping. “I killed it,” she said.

  The bellows boy, his eyes white with terror. Still traces of his master’s blood on his face, smudged there, like a child who had been playing in the dirt. “My Lady,” the bellows boy said.

  Her brother talks to dragons. She has killed a dragon.

  The moonlight fell very bright on the bronze blade.

  The bellows boy knelt at her feet. Bent his head low, his forehead pressed to the ground. “My Lady Queen,” the bellows boy said. All of the people assembled, the soldiers, the servants, terrified, half-asleep, unbelieving, filled with revulsion, filled with joy- at the top of the tower they knelt in the dark and said in one voice, “My Lady Queen of Ith.” And she had not even thought of this.

  “Bury my brother’s body.” Ysleta laid the sword carefully on the bloodied ruin of her brother’s chest. “Place the sword on his grave as a marker. As a warning.” She pointed to the bellows boy. “And this man . . .”

  She looked at the line of the sky, where the sea and the sky met in darkness, where the first light of dawn would rise. The endless expanse of the sea. The endless eternity of the night sky. A single yellow star hung there. And the moon, round and white. Clouds were coming in, below them, cutting the tower off from the world beneath, clouds thick and solid as stone. Hiding the city and the sea and the dragon’s grave place.

  “Turn this man out of the city of Tyrenae,” Ysleta said. “Banish him from all the kingdom of Ith. If he is not gone from my city by the time the sun is risen, kill him. But give him first . . . give him three bags of gold. One for each of my brother’s children.” She took the bellows boy up, kissed his bloody face. “Thank you,” she said.

  In the bright morning, Ysleta sat sitting in her bedchamber, watching the sun rise over the Bitter Sea. Her room was high in the tallest of the towers of the fortress of Malth Tyrenae, that rises over the city of Tyrenae clear as a sword blade, old as dying, so tall that clouds come around it to shield it from mere human sight. She sat in her bedchamber, watching. Ysleta White Hands, Queen of Ith. Her hair was silver pale, from drinking a cup of quicksilver every morning. Her eyes were grey. She wore a crown of red gold on her head.

  The sunlight flashed on the spire of the tower. The sea shone gold and silver and blac
k as metal. White crests danced on the waves. In the harbour of Tyrenae, the great ships and the fishing boats were coming in.

  She gripped dry white hands on the sill of her window. Raised her face to the morning light. The air smelled of salt and wind and flowers. A scent to it, also, of dark blood.

  In the east, out over the water, out over the rising sun, a thing like bird came flying. Calling to her.

  “Athela! Athela!”

  Come! Come!

  Ysleta turned away from the window. Walked down very slowly into the world beneath.

  The clouds came down, grey and heavy with cold northern rain.

  The sky above the city of Tyrenae was hidden and gone.

  JASON DENZEL

  THE STORY YOU’RE ABOUT TO ENJOY HOLDS A SPECIAL PLACE IN MY HEART. According to the timestamps on my earliest revisions, I began writing it in early 2011, more than four years before my first novel, Mystic, would be published. In those years, I commuted from Sacramento to San Jose once a week for work, and during that four-hour-round-trip journey, I’d get lost in music and let my mind wander, searching for ideas or characters who might whisper to me in the stillness and routine of the drive.

  Qual’Jom’s lonely golem was one such character.

  I first imagined him lurking in his stony domain, massive and hunched but lost in deep thought. Loreena McKennitt’s music has always had a significant impact on my writing, and this story was the first that it directly affected. Her Nights from the Alhambra live album was my constant companion in the writing of this story. Listen carefully and you’ll hear its influence throughout, especially (but not limited to) the songs “Dante’s Prayer,” “The Old Ways,” and “Never-Ending Road.”

  Now, after all these years, I’m delighted that the golem and his story have found a home in this anthology. It may’ve taken a while to emerge fully into the world, but, as you’ll soon see, time means little to a golem made of stone.

  Jason Denzel

  The Stone Golem of Qual'Jom