by Stephen Deas
The dome’s other brass door lay fifty feet across the yard, half buried in weeds, bent out of shape, a glitter in the sun. The quiet crept inside her. It crawled under her and settled in her heart and belly. She remembered the palace alive and bright with bustle and colour. Servants, soldiers, dragon-riders. Movement everywhere. Commotion. There used to be horses. Sometimes elephants decked with gaudy harnesses, brought in ships from across the sea.
A lump grew in her throat. She could almost see the ghosts moving about, the lives long lost. She walked into the shadowed dust-veils of the Veid Dome, the palatial hall of King Tyan with its three golden thrones arrayed to face her. A sweep of marble stairs arced behind them, curving to the upper balconies. The walls were black with soot, the floor a litter of ash and charred splinters and rubble; the thrones, when she came close enough to see, were half melted. She clambered past them. There had been a door hidden behind them into the rear arches of the dome once, but both door and wall had been smashed down. She stooped and picked up a fragment of cloth, the charred corner of a tapestry. Her jaw tightened. She remembered it. King Tyan the Fourth burning Taiytakei ships at night as they tried to raid his silk farms. Jehal had brought her here late one night. They’d sneaked away, consumed by the rapture of their nascent passion, and he’d shown it to her. Huddled between thrones he’d murmured the story, his hands on her skin and between her legs, his tongue on her lips.
His hands. She remembered the touch of him as though it had been that very morning, as though she could still feel him now, some lingering tingle. She shuddered. Bit her lip and moved on, out through the arches into the little courtyard with its apple tree behind the dome, the secret garden where no one ever came except the royal family; and here was Jehal’s ghost again. Sprawled naked, making love, him inside her, their hands clenched and fingers clawed to the very edge. A savagery to them both, clutching at each other as though trying to climb into one another. The world blurred as a thought hit her: He could be alive. Was it possible?
The loss of him. The betrayal. They were such colossal things. She staggered and held on to the tree and took a long ragged breath. There was no home for her here. There never had been. Perhaps the dragons had done her a favour, burning it all down and putting the truth inescapably before her, a world that was once so familiar now ruin and ash.
What did you expect, little one?
Is it all like this? Is there anyone left? The silence taunted her, a thickening of the air around her, stifling motion and thought.
Yes. But they hide deep, little one.
Zafir looked at the tree. Jehal had given her an apple from it once, and here and now she could almost taste it. She shook herself, put the courtyard behind her and walked on through colonnades and arches into the feasting hall beyond, into the kitchens and down into the cellars and pantries. Everything had been ransacked, everything that could move taken away, everything too large broken into pieces and carried off. The hangings, the wood panels, even patches of tiles from the floors. Just bare stone walls that became bleak shapes of light and dark under the harsh spotlight beam of her enchanted glass torch, colourless and without life.
The darkness, the stark shadows, the suffocating closeness of stone wrapped about her, they tied her insides into knots. The old fear of being trapped in the dark banged at the cage where she kept it, threatening to break loose. She made herself think of Tuuran, his size and bulk a reassurance wrapped around her, waiting for her. Thinking of him like that helped. She walked on.
Close now, little one.
In the deepest cellars she found the ragged handful of men and women left alive, half naked, three-quarters starved, pale-faced, trapped in fright by her light. They looked on her in terror and wonder, and cringed away.
‘Who are you?’ she asked them. ‘Are there any more of you?’
She was a stranger, fierce and terrible in her armour of Taiytakei glass and gold. None of them spoke. She took a step closer. They stared and trembled.
‘Are you all that’s left?’ she asked. She could have wept. A dozen of them. Half dead, thin and hollow. Furymouth: the smelliest, loudest, sprawling hub of life, and this was all that was left, this wretched huddle?
Another step. They shrank away. She took off her helm so they could see her face. So they might see she meant them no harm.
‘My name is Zafir,’ she said, her voice broken. ‘I was speaker of the nine realms once.’ How stupid it was, telling them that. The speaker was the guardian of the kingdoms, the keeper of the peace, and she’d done the exact opposite. Great Flame, she’d burned this palace herself! Her arm tensed, half raised. She had two Taiytakei lightning throwers strapped to each forearm on the outside of her gold-glass vambraces. On her hip she carried a pair of bladeless knives, the short glass swords of the Elemental Men of the Taiytakei, blades so thin they were almost invisible, which would slice through stone and iron as easily as they would cut butter.
No one moved. No flicker of recognition. Perhaps they didn’t remember her.
‘I’ve come back to …’ To what? To sit on a throne that no longer carried any meaning? To put her old realms back together again? How? To undo the damage she’d done? Prostrate herself? Beg forgiveness from the dead?
Yes to all of that, and all such impossible things.
‘To find my home,’ she said at last. ‘To find a place to be.’
A man stepped closer, watching her with uncertain awe. ‘I remember you, Holiness,’ he said, and bowed and dropped to one knee. ‘I am Vishmir. I am Adamantine.’
She crouched in front of him and took off her gauntlet and touched a hand to his face. The sight of this soldier, of finding him alive amid the ashes, filled her.
‘Then get up, Vishmir,’ she said, ‘for we have work to do.’
2
The Fury
Three days before landfall
So this was Vishmir’s story: in the last days of the Adamantine Throne Night Watchman Vale Tassan had sent companies of Adamantine Men to every eyrie, armed with hammers and axes to smash all the dragon eggs they could find, and with letters of authority written by Grand Master Jeiros commanding his alchemists to assist them. A last desperate throw of the dice against looming catastrophe. Vishmir and his company had been sent to King Jehal’s eyrie along the coast, Clifftop, but everything had gone to shit before they could reach it, and by this point he didn’t give two hoots for who was speaker and who wasn’t anyway. Anywhere with food and shelter was good enough.
Zafir led him back under the open sky. Climbing outside, to space and light, was like bursting from under the sea and being able to breathe again.
‘What do your company call you?’ she asked. Half the soldiers of the Adamantine Guard had called themselves after the legendary Speaker Vishmir when the time came for them to choose a name. She wondered sometimes if they did it on purpose to make them harder to tell apart.
‘White Vish.’
‘Then I have work for you, White Vish.’ She glanced to the skies. Are there any other dragons close by?
They are all far away, little one, answered Diamond Eye. They know what comes.
Because you’ve told them?
He didn’t deny it. Many gather in the Worldspine. They wait there to see what the Black Moon will do.
Zafir took White Vish through the courtyard with the apple tree and the Veid Dome beyond. They stood in the doorway, its one brass door hanging askew. Vish tensed as he saw Diamond Eye.
‘The dragon is mine,’ Zafir soothed. ‘Are there others here, hiding in the city?’
White Vish nodded. ‘We see them now and then when we come out to forage. They run from us in case we steal their food.’
‘Then I charge you with this: you have two nights to find them.’ She pointed out to the sea. ‘I have ships coming. On the morning that follows I will bring food and men to help you. I’ll bring you w
hatever you need.’
‘Holiness, will you bring an alchemist?’
‘Not on the back of my dragon, soldier.’ She shook her head. ‘But one comes on my ships. Grandmaster Bellepheros himself, stolen into slavery by the night-skins and now free again.’
White Vish stared at her in surprise. ‘We heard the alchemists were all dead, Holiness. Murdered by the King of Sand and his mad queen, who hold the Pinnacles.’
The Pinnacles. Home. Her heart missed a beat. ‘There are people there?’
Vish nodded, though when Zafir pressed him for more he didn’t know who else might be alive. She asked after Zara-Kiam, but he only looked blank, and so she left Furymouth not knowing whether her sister was alive or dead. A part of her hated herself for not having thought of Kiam before. A blind spot, blanked from her mind and pushed away because of all the bitterness between them; now she didn’t fly straight back to the eyrie as she’d planned, but instead rode Diamond Eye deep across the country, as far as Three Rivers in the east and Farakkan in the north, far enough to see the distant outline of three peaks on the horizon.
The Pinnacles. Home. The one place in all the realms where men could hide and no dragon would ever touch them, with water to last for ever and food for decades.
There are dragons there, warned Diamond Eye. Waiting for us.
Can you see my sister? Zafir pictured Zara-Kiam as she remembered her. Can you see anyone?
I see a haze of thoughts, little one. The numb dull chattering of your kind. They are unfamiliar. I do not know them and so I cannot name them.
They circled once more, Zafir’s gaze fixed on the distant peaks, but she’d made a promise to White Vish, and so she turned back and flew the hours across the sea to the eyrie, told Tuuran what she’d found and had a pallet made up with crates and sacks of food taken a month ago from the warehouses of Merizikat. Diamond Eye guided the Black Moon’s dragons towing the eyrie, while Zafir lingered with her handmaidens, Myst and Onyx, and their two babes. She left again without seeing the half-god himself, glad of that and keen to be gone as quickly as she could. She took Tuuran with her. He hated flying on Diamond Eye’s back, but she made him.
It was almost twilight when they reached the shore and Furymouth again, certainly not the morning as she’d promised, the sun sinking behind a drizzling mist of rain rolling east from the Worldspine and the Raksheh. Zafir flew high, riding over the top of the cloud in brilliant-blue sunshine sky, watching for other dragons, and only dived into damp miserable grey as they reached land. She set the pallet down, dismounted with Tuuran in front of the Veid Dome, and together they built a fire. After Diamond Eye lit it, Zafir sent him away into the cloud, out of sight but ever watchful, and went to look for White Vish. He had more than a hundred men and women gathered in his cellars this time, gaunt and hollow shells but alive.
‘I was beginning to wonder if you wouldn’t come, rider. If you were an illusion.’
‘Is this everyone?’
‘Everyone who would come. There are more, but I couldn’t reach them all. Many would not believe what I told them.’
Zafir shrugged. Others would come quickly enough when they heard there was food. ‘The ships will reach the shore tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We’ll stay a day or two and then move inland. Come with us or remain. You can all choose.’ She wondered if she should try to explain the flying eyrie, the Black Moon, the hatchling dragons that towed them through the air, but Adamantine Man to Adamantine Man was probably better, and so she left Tuuran with them to tell his tale and walked away through the palace, among towers she’d once known so well, wandering aimlessly until she found herself in the solar where she and Jehal had lain together on the last night before his wedding.
So what’s she like, this girl you have to marry?
She could hear his voice as though it was yesterday. She could see him as they were, naked together, side by side under a sun so beautiful and warm instead of this drab grey rain. She smiled, sad and wan, remembering how Jehal had made his nests around the palace. Private places where he could come and go through hidden passages. Solars with tall windows, abundant in light and air.
The bed was still there. Mouldy and moth-eaten and ragged at the edges. She couldn’t look at it. The last and worst betrayal.
A girl, as you say. Him stroking her thigh. The air in the solar thick with incense. Stifling midsummer hot. Naive. Full of wonder at the world, and almost completely lacking in any experience of it, I would say. He’d told her a few pretty lies, things he thought she wanted to hear.
Tell me she’s ugly and deformed.
I’m afraid I could only say that about her sister.
Jaslyn. The mad queen who’d come with Hyrkallan and all his vengeance to tear her from the skies over the Pinnacles. Zafir walked to the windows. She looked down, out over the fire ablaze in the palace yard. A murmur of voices reached through the rain. Now and then an outburst of laughter. She’d done some good here then. A little. The start of something.
You like her, don’t you?
Jehal’s face hadn’t flickered for a second. I hardly know her, my love. She is a doll. All dressed up to look as pleasing as she can, but still a doll.
Liar. She’d known even then. The beginning of the end, though everything still lay before them, the climb to the Adamantine Throne. But it was there, in that moment. The betrayal of Evenspire had begun right here. And she’d known it and had looked the other way, because the truth would hurt more than she could bear.
Where no one would see, Zafir wrapped her arms tight around her shoulders and hugged herself. She should have pushed him out the window that day and been done with it. Instead she’d pulled him closer.
Rain drummed on the roof above, grey and dour. More laughter rose loud from outside. The first time these people had filled their bellies in a year. The first time in longer still since they’d gathered together under the open sky. Zafir stood, listening to them, staring out at the haze, drifting between thoughts that never lingered, and it was dark by the time she snapped herself away; by then some of the men were singing, Tuuran and White Vish leading the songs. They were tipsy. She had no idea where they’d found wine. Tuuran, slipping a barrel of it onto the pallet when he was supposed to bring water, most likely.
The Adamantine Men looked suddenly awkward as she returned at last. The singing died. Tuuran got to his feet, and then the others did the same. ‘Holiness. We …’ He bowed.
‘My dragon had to carry that,’ Zafir scolded him. She snatched the wineskin out of his hand and sat down quickly, before they could all start their kowtowing and all manner of other pointless formalities. She didn’t want that now. There would be a time, yes, but not today. Instead she took a long swallow and ordered them to all sit down and get back to their singing, and gradually they forgot who she was. They got quietly drunk together, her and Tuuran and White Vish, sitting in the warmth of their fire while the sun set, while the stars rose and Diamond Eye circled watch in the clouds overhead. The rain dampened nothing except the stones, while White Vish told his story.
‘We travelled down the Fury by boat,’ he said. ‘It was already too late, but we didn’t know that. Town after town gutted by dragon-fire. We thought it was the war.’ He gave Zafir a mournful look, half sorrow, half accusation. ‘We thought you’d done it, Holiness, scorching the earth in your retreat. Then we came to Hammerford. We found the two stone dragons on the waterfront, colossal statues that had never been there before. We came ashore looking for food, and that was where we heard tell of dragons without riders rampaging across the land.’ Another pause, another look. ‘There had been a great battle at the Pinnacles, we heard, and a massacre of dragons had followed.’ He laughed. ‘The alchemists, Holiness. After your defeat, the alchemists poisoned every dragon they could. Yours, King Jehal’s, King Hyrkallan’s – all of them. When he saw what they’d done, Hyrkallan had every alchemist he could f
ind put to the sword. They were trying to stave off the end, I suppose, but it didn’t do any good.’
‘That was after they drove me from my home,’ Zafir said. ‘I fled here from the battle. There were Taiytakei ships in the harbour. I knew by then that they were the ones who had made our war. That they had set us against one another to steal our dragons.’ She looked away. ‘I knew what they’d done, but it was too late to make any difference. I tried to burn their ships so they wouldn’t escape with the eggs they’d stolen from Clifftop, but they had sorcerers like the Silver Kings themselves. They took me and my Diamond Eye and made us their slaves.’ She was shaking again. Couldn’t go on. Just looked about at the ragged survivors laughing and joking into the fire. Their numbers were dwindling, men and women slipping away with the dark, taking whatever they could carry back to their hiding places, not trusting the world. And why would they?
‘The eyrie at Clifftop had already fallen when we reached Furymouth,’ said White Vish. ‘Dragon-riders went and never came back. For a time there was a quiet. The wise and the cowards fled the city, looking for shelter.’ He took another long swallow. ‘I’m sorry, Holiness. We fought as best we could, but Furymouth offers almost nothing, a city on a solitary hill. There’s nowhere much to hide. Hatchling dragons slithered and flew from the eyrie at Clifftop. War-dragons came across the sky. They hunted and killed, and we couldn’t stop them. More than a year ago, that was, and that’s how it’s been ever since. Mostly they leave us alone now, but sometimes another comes.’