by Stephen Deas
‘Forgive me, your Holiness.’
‘Forgive?’ Zafir heard her own voice, hard and cold as ice. Forgive? For what? For not remembering? Wasn’t that perhaps for the best?
The Crowntaker turned his head. He looked hard at Zafir, straight through her and beyond. There was a glimmer of silver in his eye. Not yet burning bright, but she knew the signs. The Black Moon inside him was on the verge of waking. ‘Do you know these places?’ he asked her. ‘Tell me!’
‘The Aardish Caves? I’ve been there. Follow the Yamuna river deep into the Raksheh forest towards the foothills of the Worldspine and there’s a waterfall, a cataract. The Moonlight Garden sits atop the bluffs on the south side overlooking the top of the falls. It’s a ruin. Across the river at the foot of the falls are the entrances to the caves.’ The words trotted out of her. She wasn’t really listening to herself but was watching the Crowntaker’s eyes for glimmers of the half-god. Sometimes little hints of desire leaked from his face at times like this. The Adamantine Spear. That, above all else, was why he’d brought them here. But the name of the Silver King stirred him too, the Isul Aieha. When chances came, she looked hard for the tiny tells of his secret avarice. ‘There’s a story about the Isul Aieha,’ she said, ‘that he created a mausoleum for himself before he died. “Made of black marble across the great river from the endless caves,” or so the legend says. Speaker Voranin’s riders thought they’d found it. Vishmir, who followed him, searched the Aardish Caves for nigh on twenty years. It’s not there, Crowntaker, but Vishmir had a mausoleum of his own built in the same place. There’s an eyrie, a small one.’ Or there had been when she was last there. Most likely it was gone now. Abandoned and burned.
The veil across the Black Moon was paper thin now, and Zafir desperately didn’t want him to wake, not here and now, not with a second alchemist right here in front of him and the Starknife already in his hand. She poked Kataros. ‘We don’t need this one,’ she said sharply. ‘Get the third one in here, the one who really knows.’ Bellepheros could have her. He’d like nothing better. It might even cheer him up, but either way Zafir decided she’d be damned if she’d sit by and watch as the Black Moon cut this woman and made her his slave. An alchemist was worth too much …
She turned to Halfteeth’s guardsmen. ‘And get Bellepheros!’ Where was he? Why wasn’t he here already? ‘Is Tuuran back yet?’ Although how could he be?
‘Bellepheros? He’s here?’ The alchemist looked startled at the name. So she remembered him, at least, did she?
The Crowntaker’s eyes flared.
‘Bring the other one,’ Zafir snapped. ‘Now!’ The one who’d seen the Black Mausoleum with his own eyes. Get this alchemist out of here!
‘What about her?’ asked the Crowntaker. The Black Moon was a hair’s breadth behind the Crowntaker’s eyes, twirling the knife, and even if the Black Moon was looking elsewhere, the Crowntaker himself knew perfectly well how to use it too.
‘I’ll get rid of her. And the first one. As you wish.’ She could feel the edge of her own panic.
‘I suppose we should wait for Bellepheros …’
‘No. I said get rid of her. Both of them.’ Tuuran could have the first and Bellepheros the second. They’d probably all be very happy together, but not here, not now; now she needed this alchemist away. Safe. She nodded to the soldiers of Tuuran’s guard. They took the alchemist’s arms and held her down while they untied her ropes. Zafir kept her eyes on the Crowntaker. ‘I’ll get her out of here and keep her watched,’ she said. ‘I’ll come for her when I’m ready. It’s the third one who matters, isn’t it? The one who knows where it is?’ Bellepheros! Where are you? As soon as he arrived she could be done with this façade …
The fortress shuddered. A tremor rippled the walls. The Crowntaker jerked. His eyes burned, and there, for a moment, was the Black Moon, the half-god inside, awake and potent, flaring before simmering back beneath the surface; but before she could say a word more, Halfteeth skidded around the corner and almost fell into her.
‘You!’ She grabbed at him. ‘I’ll—’
‘Dragons!’ he yelled, oblivious. ‘Dragons are coming. Dragons!’
The fear in him spread like plague to the men around her. The room fell into pandemonium. Zafir closed her eyes. Every day since they’d crossed the storm-dark she’d been waiting for this.
‘Get her out of here and get the other one!’ She rounded on the Crowntaker as Halfteeth’s soldiers bundled the alchemist away. ‘You’re the Bloody Judge,’ she hissed. ‘You deal with them. Wake up your half-god if you must.’ But the half-god wouldn’t help them. He never did. She might watch him burn with silver light and disintegrate anything that came close enough to bother him, but he wouldn’t actually do anything more until the very end, when out would come the knife to cut more slaves to his will. Harvesting the survivors. That was the way of him.
Halfteeth and his soldiers scattered. Zafir raced to the dragon yard and the shanty town of huts and sailcloth shelters. Grey clouds muted the daylight. It was still raining. There was still half an inch of water underfoot.
Where are they? She launched the thought to Diamond Eye, high in the sky above, claws wrapped around one of the great chains by which the dragons pulled the eyrie through the air. And why didn’t you warn me before?
They deceived me, little one. They hid their purpose from me. The rest of the answer came as a storm of wind and flames. A dragon swept over the eyrie, fire pouring out of its mouth, tearing through rain, scorching wood and cloth dry and setting them alight. Plumes of steam rose where the dragon’s breath struck the yard. Zafir ducked back into the tunnel as the wind that followed the dragon’s wings ripped through the remains, sucking the debris into the air, tearing rope and cloth, lifting and scattering them like autumn leaves in a gale.
Drive them away. When I’m ready, come to me. She wasn’t armoured.
Diamond Eye answered with a familiar scorn, but she knew he would come. Screams followed the fire, men and women caught in the open even though they were told, always, to be close to shelter. Lightning cracked from a Taiytakei cannon mounted on the eyrie walls. A dragon shrieked in pain, and then the first of the Black Moon’s soldiers came running through the steam and fog and hurtled into the tunnel, barging into her and almost knocking her down. Zafir bolted the other way, out into the open, taking her chance, racing across the dragon yard, hugging the wall as fire rained again, as lightning and thunderbolts shook the sky. Clouds of steam scalded her face. She couldn’t see how many dragons had come.
Are they few or countless? She reached the next tunnel entrance and dived inside with the last handful of soldiers. When it came to dragons, Tuuran had drilled them well: run fast and hide deep.
Twenty, thereabouts. Diamond Eye was flying free, chasing down the attack. Small and young most of them. Little more than a year. There are many here of that age.
The first door in the tunnel was hers – a small room because the smaller rooms were the ones close to the dragon yard, and she needed to be close. Myst and Onyx were already laying out her armour, their faith in her bewildering and absolute.
They are awake. They remember. The reminder chilled her. Proof, as if she needed more, of what had happened after the Taiytakei had taken her to be their slave.
Drive them away! Zafir stripped off her dress and threw on a thin silk shift. Myst offered her the bandages she used when she flew, more strips of silk to be wrapped around the places that chafed, but Zafir waved her away. ‘No time.’ A dragonscale coat next. She wrapped it around her, and felt a spike of glee from Diamond Eye as he crashed into a dragon somewhere above and brought it down. Curls of smoke and vapour wafted into the tunnels and crept into the room, licking at her feet. She could hear the lightning cannon fire over and over, and then the boom of the black-powder gun, not that it stood much chance of hitting something as fast as a dragon. That had been for Taiytakei
glasships, and it had been a long time since any of those had menaced her.
Onyx pushed Zafir’s gold-glass boots in front of her, offering to buckle her in. Again, Zafir shook her head. ‘Diamond Eye has his war harness on.’ She slipped into the cascade of gold-glass plates that was the bulk of her armour, and held out her arms. Dragon-riders dressed themselves, that was always the way, but there were plenty of old customs she’d discarded these last two years, and more hands made for more speed. Myst took her left arm, buckling gold-glass vambraces and pouldrons. Onyx took the right. They were good at this. Practised. They fitted her lightning throwers, two to each arm; as soon as they were done Zafir snatched up her helm, the beautiful gold-glass helm with its perfect, clear visor that the enchantress Chay-Liang had made so that she might ride again.
Now. She called Diamond Eye down and ran barefoot outside, splashing through the warm surface water in the yard, half blind in the mist and steam, but she knew her way well enough without needing to see. Up the steps in the eyrie wall as Diamond Eye slammed into the rim and bounded beside her. He gave a familiar cock of his head as he lowered it, and Zafir gripped the mounting ladder. She slipped her foot into the loop at the end of the legbreaker rope and held grimly tight as Diamond Eye tossed his neck and threw her on to his back. As best she knew, no other dragon-rider had ever mounted this way. She and Diamond Eye had learned it together. He launched himself into the air, swooping under the bulk of the eyrie for shelter while Zafir buckled herself into the saddle.
Dragon facing dragon has not happened for a long time. Diamond Eye rose from under the eyrie and soared high. Dreary sunless sky above, steady rain, dull hazed horizons and a murky patchwork ground, broken by the black winding water of the Fury river. Amid the grey Zafir could see a score of circling dragons.
They’re small, she thought.
They are young. Diamond Eye dived. Zafir pressed forward into his scales. Rain lashed her face, smearing across the visor of her helm, blurring everything. She couldn’t see. The Taiytakei dragon armour had been made for riding over a desert, and the best she’d devised for rain was a silk pad tied to the back of her gauntlet. She wiped the visor clear and then watched the world blur again. Thunder pummelled the air and lightning flashed from the cannon below. It caught the dragon ahead of them in the wing; the monster tumbled and tried to catch itself and spiralled down, quickly out of sight as Diamond Eye wheeled and powered after another and then another, chasing them off. The smaller dragons were edging away.
That one. Zafir watched a great golden war-dragon stoop. She wiped her visor again and … Flame, was that a man standing on the eyrie wall, waiting for the golden dragon with a hefted axe? Idiot. Yet a moment before fire should have come to burn him, whoever he was, one of the Black Moon’s yearlings hit the gold monster from the side. The two twisted through the air and tumbled over the edge of the eyrie, the gold lashing its tail and cracking the wall above the yard. For a moment the two dragons tangled and plunged towards the ground, until the gold war-dragon threw its smaller brother aside. Zafir tensed. Every dragon was precious. Every single one.
That one brings this to us, said Diamond Eye. Black Scar of Sorrow Upon the Earth was his name in our first lifetime; and Zafir would have dived to bring the golden dragon down, but Diamond Eye shot forward and rolled, curled in the air, upside down, wings flared. Zafir caught a glimpse of shimmering green before another massive adult slammed into them, an emerald war-dragon. Lightning flashed past. The emerald reached to bite at Zafir; Diamond Eye’s teeth closed on the green dragon’s neck, but the emerald still strained for her. Its tail whipped and lashed with enough force to snap her in half. Diamond Eye let go the dragon’s throat and caught its tail instead, but now the emerald’s jaws were free. They were falling together, plunging towards the eyrie, a drop enough to smash all three of them to pieces. Perhaps the emerald didn’t care. The dragons would die and find new eggs and be born again. It didn’t seem to trouble them.
Zafir raised her arm to the green dragon’s face as it lunged. Lightning flew from the Taiytakei slaver wands set there by the enchantress Chay-Liang, and stung the dragon in the eye; it shrieked and jumped away. Diamond Eye let go its tail and flared his wings, catching their fall, pitching Zafir hard forward and smashing her into the scales between his shoulders. The emerald spread its wings and came again, rising in a tight circle, fire building in its open mouth. The other dragons were scattering now, driven away by the lightning of the Taiytakei cannon. Zafir searched, looking for them through the blur of water across her visor and drawing out their thoughts as Diamond Eye danced through their minds. Confusion. Incomprehension. They didn’t understand this lightning. Dragon servants. A rage that could melt mountains, fill seas and burn skies. Some withdrew. Some did not, could not. They came at the eyrie again. One by one they fell or fled.
The emerald dragon hurled itself at them, consumed by fury. Her. It wanted her.
Do I know you? Were you one of mine? Zafir couldn’t see well enough to be sure.
A bolt of lightning lit the sky. The air shuddered with thunder. The emerald arched and screamed and twisted and fell, one wing stretched out, the other fluttering useless. It spiralled down, spitting fire. Lightning hit it again and then again; Zafir watched as the emerald dragon crashed into the eyrie yard. The mists and steam were clear now, wafted away in what little breeze blew off the Oordish Moors and across the floodplains of the Fury valley. The fight was done, the attacking dragons in retreat, in dismayed disarray.
Up. She took Diamond Eye over the eyrie. Then higher still, through the rain and the clouds and beyond into dazzling blue sunlight and the huge wild open sky.
They will come back, she thought.
Yes.
She scanned the skies, the cloud below, the old instincts of a dragon-rider driven into her before she was ten years old. Scattered specks moving in the far distance. To the south where the clouds broke she could see the distant sea and the line across the land that was Tyan’s Dyke. To the east the Fury river wound away towards Purkan and all the valley towns that once dotted its shores, Hammerford and Valleyford and Arys Crossing, all burned and gone. To the west the Yamuna wound into the endless dark wrinkles of the Raksheh, wrapped in perpetual mist and cloud. Perhaps in the very distance, groping through a white sea that faded to the far horizon, was a slight dark stain. The mountains of the Worldspine.
To the north …
She could see them. The three solitary mountain tops, distant protrusions punching dark through the raincloud. The Pinnacles. So far away they were almost lost in the haze, but they were there. Unmistakable.
Home.
Yes.
Her thoughts were a shoal of fragments. Diamond Eye’s were deep and ancient. He was remembering from a thousand years ago.
Yes?
A surge of something ancient burst from the eyrie below. It echoed across the plains and faded and died. Diamond Eye felt it. Saw it. Saw the emerald dragon shattered from its fall, one of his own kind he had known for fifty lifetimes lying crippled and broken in the folds of the eyrie’s womb. Saw the dragon cut by the Black Moon’s knife and die at the touch of an old goddess who always took something away.
Yes, they will come back, Diamond Eye answered, distracted by the death below them. Yes, home. Yes to both of those things and more. His thoughts were far away. He was thinking of the Black Moon. Remembering, and Zafir knew how it troubled him.
They circled downward. The gold dragon Blackscar was keeping his distance but hadn’t withdrawn like the rest. He was watching. Zafir nudged Diamond Eye closer, but as soon as she did, the gold turned and flew away, hard and fast.
That one carries a rage that has strength even among dragons.
She swooped low again. The emerald lay smashed across the dragon yard, wings broken, its spirit dead and gone. The handful of Adamantine Men they’d rescued from Furymouth swarmed over it now. There w
ere no special rituals for killing a dragon. You took your chances as they came. Mostly you died trying, and even if you managed to kill one you died at the claws of another moments later, or else you burned; and that was the way of being an Adamantine Man.
They cut off its head. There was no need, but they did it anyway. The corpse would burn from the inside now, getting hotter and hotter for days if not weeks, until flesh and bone crumbled to ash and all that was left were scales and a few scorched bones from its wings. Scales for armour, bones for bows. No one had been able to harvest a dead dragon since the Adamantine Palace had burned, but these men would, and Bellepheros would show them how.
She roamed Diamond Eye’s memories, rode among his distant thoughts, looking for bitterness or anger or resentment, but as he watched this dead dragon, he felt nothing.
Sorrow is not for us, he told her. There is no loss. We come again. Always and for ever.
It troubled him though, that knife, as it troubled her and Tuuran and Bellepheros too. Their journey would be wreathed in bloody fire – that was always going to be true – but Diamond Eye had met the Black Moon’s knife and with furious hostility submitted to its cut. Dragons and men alike, shaped to the Black Moon’s will. He used it over and over without thought, on anyone and everyone who crossed his path. It would have to stop.
Yes.
They landed on the rim. Zafir’s armour was starting to chafe where she hadn’t taken the time to bandage herself under the dragonscale. She dismounted from the war harness, the top half of her cased in gold and glass, dragonscale underneath, bare feet and ankles at the bottom where the coat ended.