by Stephen Deas
A mournful sadness settled like a thick blanket, full of memories of better times never to be reclaimed. Zafir asked a little more – about the Adamantine Palace, about Jehal and whether he was alive, whether anyone at all had survived. They didn’t know, and the more they talked the more she caught the glances that Vish and his men tried to hide. She felt the air change, pricked by needling accusation, by resentment and blame; or perhaps they simply wanted the companionship of their own, free of a dragon-rider outsider. Either way, she knew she wasn’t welcome any more, and so she took another wineskin and left them, stumbled away in the darkness and drank where no one would see until she could barely stand, until she wept for the folly of pride and the hurt of so many long knives driven into her back, and that was how Tuuran found her later, when darkness had long fallen and the fire had died low. She didn’t even see him coming until he loomed over her in the gloom.
‘Holiness?’
She struggled to her feet and leaned and staggered into him, and he was drunk too, but big and strong and sure.
‘Come with me,’ she said, and led him through the towers and up the stairs to the solar where she’d stood before. She tossed her helm aside and stripped away her gold-glass armour and the dragonscale wrapped beneath, and pulled him to her and kissed him. They were drunk and full of need, both of them cut to the quick by their own different hurts, and he wanted her and always had, and it was stupid and dangerous and they’d both regret it desperately, but in the here and now she needed to be touched, to be held, to feel skin on sweating skin. He fumbled with her, uncertain and confused as she took his hand and pressed it to his cheek and kissed his fingers. She pressed his other hand to her heart, to her breast. She heard his breath catch in his throat.
‘Holiness?’
‘Not here. Not now. Tomorrow again, yes, but not now. Now I am just Zafir.’
She ran his hand over her. He reached behind and cupped her and pulled her hard into him and she gasped, and so did he. She tore at his armour, at the buckles and clasps, clumsy and urgent, head fogged by wine and desire. She stripped him naked and kissed him until he growled and tugged at her filthy sweat-stained silks and lifted them over her head and fell on her, fingers and lips, rough and crude. She turned her back to him and pressed against him, running his hands wild over her skin, along her thighs, inside her, across her belly, her breasts, her neck, her face. She arched and groaned and heard him moan: ‘Please, Holiness. Please.’
She ran her fingers over his brittle places of dead white skin. ‘You have it too, don’t you?’ She needed him to say it. ‘The dragon-disease.’
‘Yes.’
And that was the last of her reasons gone. ‘How long?’
‘Since before Merizikat.’ Dust flew in clouds as they fell onto the mouldy bed together, where she and Jehal had once made love. He drove inside her, harsh and hungry, so different and so much more honest. She came almost at once and so did he, howling like animals, half mad, clinging on, each looking at the other as though at a stranger they’d never seen before, eyes as wide as the world. It wasn’t enough. She coaxed him back and straddled him, demanding him, pulling his hands over her. She felt the dim pain of bruises and half-healed wounds, dulled by lust and wine. She rode him, half blind, half forgetting he was even there, until she stuttered and gasped and arched and cried out again, and even then it wasn’t enough. She lost herself inside him. Exorcising the pain and the old betrayals, though they’d surely be back with the sunrise, burning sharp as ever. Twice more, and then the wine finally took her and she passed into dreamless sleep, a black oblivion as deep and silent as the void of the storm-dark’s heart.
It was still dark when she woke. Her head thundered. Beside her, Tuuran was snoring, sleeping the sleep of the damned and the just. She looked at him lying there and knew she’d done a terrible and stupid thing. One more to add to the list. She dressed and slipped outside, found a quiet corner to squat and take a piss, and called to Diamond Eye; he came and cocked his head at her, as if to ask what that was all about, and she had no answer but to fly together, soaring to the freedom of the sky, through rain and cloud to the endless blue beyond for hours and hours. She leaned into him and hugged his scales and dozed until her head was clear.
The ships reached the city later that day, and the eyrie came not long behind. Zafir kept to the skies, high and watching out for other dragons, but swooped beneath the cloud now and then, gliding above the steady stream of boats from the ships to the shore, all carrying men and supplies from Merizikat. She watched the cranes on the side of the eyrie with their up and down, over and over all through the day, lifting everything inside, filling it ready to burst. The dragon yard swarmed with men and sacks and crates, and it took the next day and most of the one after before they were done. By then the dragon yard had become a village of tents and shelters strung with ropes and poles as men looked for places to lay their heads. She brought Diamond Eye to land on the rim and surveyed their work. The eyrie was full, every nook and cranny, every room stuffed wall to wall with food and water and ropes and Flame-knew-what, or else strung with hammocks. She sought out Tuuran and told him he’d done well, and if there was any thought in either of them of that night in dead King Tyan’s palace, they both kept it carefully hidden.
Eventually, because there was no getting away from it, she sought out the Black Moon, sat on the eyrie rim, eyes dim glowing silver, oblivious to the hive of bustle around him.
‘You know where to go,’ he told her.
The eyrie left Furymouth that night. It drifted sloth-like north along the course of the Fury towards the Pinnacles, guided by the Black Moon’s dragons. In the morning Zafir found Tuuran with White Vish and his two favoured lieutenants. Halfteeth and Snacksize, born in the Worldspine and sold in the slave markets of Furymouth, both of them, so she wasn’t the only one coming home to find old wounds bleeding again. The Furymouth slave markets were overgrown with weeds now, but Halfteeth was still looking for someone to hurt. He wasn’t much liking White Vish and his Adamantine Men, and there would surely be blood if he ever found himself facing a dragon-rider with no one nearby to keep him in check.
‘Farakkan.’ Zafir led Tuuran to the eyrie rim and pointed into the distance. The cloud above and the fields below hazed into a grey fade of rain, but somewhere out there, if they followed the river’s meanders, was a heap of shacks and a mound of mud called Farakkan. A bustling stinking hole of a place that became an island every spring when the Fury burst its banks. Zafir had seen it often enough from above, but she’d never been there. She couldn’t think of a single reason why a dragon-rider would ever want to.
‘Holiness?’
‘Survivors, Night Watchman.’
‘In Farakkan?’ He snorted.
‘Someone needs to go and look.’ She kept her face a mask.
‘Right. In Farakkan.’ They both knew she was sending him away to keep them apart, though she might have sent him to do this either way. There probably wasn’t anyone left alive in Farakkan because there wasn’t anywhere deep underground to hide, but what if she was wrong? They should at least look, shouldn’t they?
‘Yes.’
To her surprise Tuuran laughed. ‘I suppose anyone who survived living there all their life might survive living anywhere.’
There wasn’t any more to say, but she couldn’t bring herself simply to turn and walk away. He deserved better than that. On impulse, struggling to find anything else, she saluted him, fist pressed to her breast. ‘Have a care, Night Watchman. Return. I will watch for dragons for you.’
He grew an inch taller right there in front of her. Pride. Flame, he almost grinned as he glanced at Halfteeth. ‘I’ll take White Vish and the new men, since they know the land. Halfteeth, you’re in charge while I’m gone.’ He bared his teeth, letting that grin out this time, and slapped Halfteeth on the shoulder. ‘Try not to be an idiot.’
Half
teeth snorted. Snacksize nudged him and gave Tuuran a nod. ‘I’ll keep an eye on him, boss. Bring us back a present, will you? Something nice.’ The three of them laughed while Zafir, suddenly an outsider, stood in awkward silence. If Halfteeth and Snacksize had real names, she’d never heard them, and she never would.
They passed over Farakkan later that morning, not that there was much left of it. The town had been built of wood, and the only thing that had saved any of it at all from the dragons was the constant wetness there. There were outlines that might once have been houses, but most of it was a black char-smear across the hilltop and sodden fields. The eyrie paused while cranes lowered a pair of cages with Tuuran and White Vish and a dozen other men, and then moved on, stopping again for the night a few miles further north, close to where the Ghostwater emerged from the hidden tunnels of the Silver King’s Ways, which ran all the way under the ground to the Pinnacles. Zafir looked over the eyrie as the sun set, over the dragon yard sloshing with half an inch of water. The rain hadn’t stopped for the best part of three days, and the yard had no drains. They’d have to do something about that before they had rivers running through the eyrie tunnels and people drowning down there. There were too many Merizikat men setting up their tents and shelters too. If the dragons came – and come they would, and soon – everything that wasn’t underground would burn. The dragons loitering about her old home, Diamond Eye told her, were paying attention now.
She sent for Halfteeth. ‘Set some people to bailing out that water,’ she told him. ‘I don’t want it getting any deeper. And is there really no space below for all these men?’
Halfteeth looked at her hard. No bowing or kowtowing from this one. He took a breath and nodded. ‘Some of us like it better up here.’ He smiled, half-mocking her. ‘Out under the sky, no roof, no walls. At a guess I might say you do too, your Holiness.’
So he knew of her fear of small cramped places in the dark? But the eyrie innards weren’t dark at all. The Silver King’s white stone glowed soft as the moon in the night, gentle as an early-morning sun in the day, warm and comforting, and she’d grown up and lived half her life in a place exactly the same; but before she could answer him, his face changed. The smug self-satisfied lurking murderer shifting in an instant to a taut-faced killer cornered by something much bigger.
She knew that look. The Black Moon was behind her, eyes glowing silver, moonlight bright.
‘There’s someone on the ground,’ he said to Halfteeth as though Zafir wasn’t even there. ‘Someone curious.’ He pointed to the west. ‘Bring them here.’
Halfteeth scurried off. He didn’t have a choice, because, like almost all of them, Halfteeth had met the Black Moon’s deadly knife, and the half-god had cut away a piece of his soul and made him into a slave.
Zafir rounded on him. ‘If you …’ But the Black Moon was already walking away.
One day, half-god or not, I will make you look at me.
Have a care, little one, warned Diamond Eye.
Zafir found Snacksize and told her to deal with bailing out the dragon yard instead, then took herself into the tunnels and to the cell she shared with Myst and Onyx. She curled up with them to sleep, and it was only after the next dawn that anyone bothered to tell her that Halfteeth had come back in the night with an alchemist, and with a couple of others, and that one of them was an Adamantine Man, and that Halfteeth was busy kicking the shit out of him.
3
The Crowntaker
Three days after landfall
Crazy Mad, Berren the Crowntaker, the Black Moon, whatever he was today. Not the Black Moon, because his eyes burned with silver moonlight when he was that. The Crowntaker, then. He was already there when Zafir reached the round stone cell. He twirled the Starknife in his hand. It was a strange thing: the blade shone like polished silver and patterns swirled inside it. The shape was odd, more like a cleaver than a knife, while the golden hilt was carved into a pattern of stars that made a thousand eyes. It cut souls, not flesh, cut pieces out of people and made them into what they were not. The Black Moon used it to cut away the will of men and make them into his slaves. His instruments, he said. Extensions of his desire. And Zafir had told him there were to be no more slaves, neither men nor dragons, but he did it anyway when he thought she wouldn’t see. He was as he wished to be, and would not be changed or swayed, and the only thing that struck her as strange was that he bothered to try and hide it from her at all.
It was a terrible thing, that knife, and so was the Black Moon who held it. But behind his eyes Zafir saw it was the Crowntaker with her today.
There was a man tied to a chair. The Adamantine Man Halfteeth had found, at a guess. He’d already been beaten half to death.
‘Where is he?’ Zafir hissed. ‘Where’s Halfteeth? I’ll have him skinned for this!’ She could talk to the Crowntaker easily enough when the half-god inside was asleep or resting or … elsewhere, or whatever it was he did in there. Then the Crowntaker was simply Tuuran’s friend. Which was a shame, because he was doomed, and he knew it, and so did she, and the only one who refused to see the inevitable was Tuuran himself.
‘His name is Skjorl,’ the Crowntaker drawled. ‘And I sent Halfteeth away before you got here in order to save him from being strung up by his balls. Let the big man deal with it when he’s back from Farakkan.’
‘And your half-god?’ she asked. The Crowntaker winced as though she’d stabbed him. The look he gave her was half pleading, half sharpened edges.
‘Not here just now. He’s weak from crossing the storm-dark. But I’m sure he’s watching.’ He spat and turned away and then turned back. ‘This lot think they know something about the Silver King’s tomb. Does that mean anything to you? Because it certainly does to the Black Moon, and if we don’t get it out of them nicely then he’ll wake up again and do it the only way he knows.’ He paused, desolation in his face. ‘This one, Skjorl, he was an Adamantine Man back when that meant something.’ He paused in case she knew the name, but of course she didn’t. A speaker never knew her legions. ‘Anyway, he doesn’t know much. The alchemist’s the one. Skjorl here says her name is Kataros. You heard of her?’
Zafir shrugged.
‘He says the third one with them claims to have found this tomb, but he’s not in a good way, and so I was saving him for last. I’m guessing an alchemist might know best anyway.’
‘Says he’s found the Silver King’s tomb?’ Zafir scoffed. ‘Then he’s a liar. But an alchemist would be useful. Be gentle if you can.’
She watched the Adamantine Man Skjorl hauled away. Tuuran would have a use for him, if he could be willingly turned – if he could manage to live in the same legion as Halfteeth after what Halfteeth had just done to him. Maybe he could. She was the speaker of the realms, and the Adamantine Men served without question. It was their creed, drilled into them as children. Was that slavery? They could always choose otherwise, couldn’t they?
She watched as the alchemist Kataros was dragged in and tied to the same chair. She winced at that. Wouldn’t it be better to ask them in a quiet calm? As friends? Feed and water them, shelter them and then get to what mattered? But she could feel the Crowntaker’s impatience, the lurking sense of the Black Moon beneath the surface, and none of them wanted that. She snapped her fingers at one of Halfteeth’s men. ‘Go and get Bellepheros. Quick, now!’ Another precious alchemist. He would thank her for that, and Bellepheros, of any of them, would seem like a friend.
‘Where is it?’ asked the Crowntaker. He spoke slowly and carefully. Zafir watched, trying to decide whether she remembered this alchemist’s face. Months had passed. Years. It was still a shock to suddenly remember, again and again, that this ash-scarred ruin of a land was her home, that everything she once knew had changed.
No more slaves. But tell that to the Black Moon.
‘Where is what?’ The alchemist clenched her fists. ‘Who are you?’
‘The Silver King’s tomb,’ whispered Zafir, because that certainly did mean something, and possibly everything. ‘That’s what you’re looking for. Where is it?’ Was that where she might find an answer? In the relics of the Silver King, the Black Moon’s half-god brother who had once taught blood-mages how to steal the memories of a dragon and dull them into pliant beasts? The woken dragons remembered him with a simmering fury. The Silver King. The Isul Aieha. Diamond Eye spat fire at his name for what he’d done, a sure way to arouse his ire if ever she needed it.
She stretched, easing the stiffness out of her aching back and surly bones, the last twinges of that wound from Merizikat that had close to killed her. Perhaps another alchemist would draw Bellepheros from the gloom that had settled over him since the loss of Chay-Liang.
‘I believe it to be in the Aardish Caves,’ said the alchemist at last. ‘Underneath the Moonlight Garden, where Vishmir always thought it was.’
Zafir tried not to laugh. Vishmir the Magnificent had spent twenty years looking for the Silver King’s Black Mausoleum and had never found it. Hundreds of dragons. Ten thousand men. And now, amid the end of the world, some scrawny alchemist claimed that Vishmir had been looking in the right place all along, and yet had somehow missed it?
‘Forgive me, Highness, Holiness, lord, lady, but, with the most humble respect, please, who are you?’
‘Who am I? Who am I?’ Zafir didn’t know whether to laugh or weep or fall into a rage. A little of all three, perhaps. Two years gone and the world turned on its head. ‘I am your speaker. Do you not know me?’ She searched for a glimmer of recognition as the alchemist looked her over, and found nothing. If anyone should remember, surely an alchemist …
‘Lady Lystra?’
A torrent of fury tore at her. The frustration of their months in Merizikat bursting its dam, the wounded pain since she’d left, forced to her bed as she healed, unable to fly. The searing sense of loss as she’d circled Furymouth and wandered the abandoned passages of Jehal’s old palace. All this way, all this time, and she was finally home and to what? To nothing. To an alien land where dragons had burned her cities and her people had forgotten her. And Lystra …? She gritted her teeth. Little Lystra. Jehal’s starling bride. Oh, but she was past that now, wasn’t she? Surely she was.