by Stephen Deas
Fly free if you wish. Go to them. Tell them what has come. I mean no war against either men or dragon, but I will fight if I must to take back what was mine.
Diamond Eye might have laughed. They will not care for your ambition, little one, not one whit either way. It is him they watch for. The Black Moon. Diamond Eye jumped to the rim and fell away into the sky. They know he is here. His return spreads among us like fire.
As Diamond Eye soared away, the Crowntaker climbed the steps from the dragon yard. He stood beside her and watched the dragon vanish into the distance. Berren, Crowntaker, Crazy Mad, the Bloody Judge, all the names he carried around with him like memories of lovers past, clung to despite their betrayals, though they all meant nothing now.
‘Where is he going?’
‘Wherever he wants.’ Zafir peered, trying to see how close the Black Moon lurked behind the Crowntaker’s eyes. ‘Why did you kill that dragon? Bellepheros could have used its blood.’
‘Do you leave a horse with a broken leg to suffer? Bellepheros can have all the blood he wants from the others. The Black Moon will take them with this knife, every dragon that fell and lives. That one I set free because I could.’ He paused. ‘I told you the Black Moon was weak again now. Crossing the storm-dark drains him. Your prisoners are gone, by the way. Fled in the chaos.’
‘Prisoners?’
‘The alchemist and that Adamantine Man and the other one.’
‘They were never prisoners, Crowntaker. We’re not slavers.’
‘I think maybe they didn’t quite see it the same way. Probably on account of Halfteeth and the whole business of locking them up and tying them to chairs. Anyway, they’re gone. Did a bit of damage on their way out, too.’
Zafir looked away. They could have done with another alchemist. Bellepheros hadn’t been the same since the last days of Merizikat; frankly he hadn’t been the same since the Black Moon had come and Tuuran had hailed him as the Silver King returned, the saviour who would deliver them all from fire, and Bellepheros had been the first to see how that was a lie, and also the first to be cut by the Black Moon’s knife. Good or ill Zafir didn’t know, but the Black Moon was something else, not the Isul Aieha, and no saviour of anything except himself; and Bellepheros didn’t have to keep their dragons tame now that the Black Moon had woken them, but Zafir still needed his potions for the dragon-disease she carried and for other things too. Another alchemist would have been a boon.
‘Farakkan,’ she said. ‘We bring Tuuran back to the eyrie. Then the Pinnacles because the Pinnacles were my home and my throne and where I wish to be.’ She watched the Crowntaker carefully, waiting for the Black Moon to come and dismiss her desires. When he didn’t, she went on more softly: ‘Then to the Adamantine Palace to reclaim my spear. And then we deal with the dragons, however it is your half-god means to do that.’ She’d seen it in his head when he’d raged at her once and nearly put an end to her, seen the spear, how badly it mattered, but never the why or what or how, only that it did. The Adamantine Spear. Symbol of the speaker of the nine realms.
The Crowntaker closed his eyes and clutched his head. ‘I don’t know why either. I don’t know what for. I don’t know what he wants …’ He collapsed and squatted on the wall. Zafir watched him with wary pity. She didn’t know much about the Crowntaker’s past except that Tuuran had known him as a friend, but she never knew which to expect, the man or the monster. The Black Moon could stop time itself. He would stay as long as he wanted, and he only even pretended to listen to her because by sheer chance she had cut herself on the Adamantine Spear on the day it had been given to her, and the spear had drunk her blood, and somehow that mattered.
‘Tuuran’s in Farakkan, yes?’ The Crowntaker looked despairingly about the eyrie.
‘You know he is.’
‘We could …’ He drew the venomous Starknife from his belt. Zafir backed hastily away. The thousand eyes of its golden hilt seemed to watch and follow her. Patterns swirled its ghostly blade into shapes and forms of madness, faces flirting on the edge of recognition and then dissolving into chaos.
‘No.’ Zafir shook her head. ‘We tried that once. We both know better now.’
‘But I told you: he’s weak from crossing the storm-dark. Last time … perhaps we waited too long?’
Zafir shook her head. Blind hope was all the Crowntaker had left.
‘Then tell your dragon to eat me!’
She kept her distance, watching him, eyes for nothing else, waiting for the first warning of silver light, of the Black Moon inside. ‘My dragon isn’t here, and none of them would dare to touch you. You know that.’
The Crowntaker came closer. Zafir backed steadily away at first, but he kept on coming. Eventually she stopped and let him close. Too close.
‘What do you want from me?’ she asked.
‘I want to be me.’ His hand shot out, snatching for one of the bladeless knives on Zafir’s belt. He was too quick for her to stop him, but she caught his hand as he drew out the blade and clamped his wrist, keeping him from turning its edge on himself. ‘It won’t work,’ she snapped. ‘I already tried that too, don’t you remember? And I don’t want to lose that knife.’
‘I want to be free.’ He was stronger than her. Not by much, but he was, and more desperate too. He turned the blade slowly towards his own throat.
Zafir snarled at him. ‘It won’t work!’
They stared at one another. He wouldn’t back down, so in the end she let go.
‘You know it won’t work,’ she said again. ‘But if you absolutely must make him angry, be far away from here when you do. I want no part of it.’
‘You’re the only one he listens to!’ The Crowntaker bared his teeth, and Zafir laughed in his face. The Black Moon pretended to listen but he didn’t, not really, just followed whatever whim of the moment most piqued his fancy. She was so much dust to him, like everyone else.
The Crowntaker gave back her knife. As she took it, he offered the Starknife too. She took that as well, and watched him pick his way down the gentle outer slope of the dragon-yard wall and out to the eyrie’s rim. He kept on walking, right to the eyrie’s edge and off, vanishing with the falling rain. She watched him go and thought of throwing the Starknife over the edge after him, but she didn’t. There wasn’t much point. They’d danced this dance before, and petulance only made it worse.
She called to the dragons that remained instead, and told them to take the eyrie’s chains and head for Farakkan. They obeyed her because the Black Moon had told them that they must. She didn’t know what would happen if the Crowntaker did actually die, but she imagined that the dragons would probably eat her the first chance they got. And it didn’t bother her, because the Crowntaker wouldn’t die, not today. The Black Moon wouldn’t let him.
Over Farakkan Halfteeth lowered cages and hauled Tuuran and his men to the rim. They had a few new faces, a handful of feral survivors of the dragon terror. Farakkan, built on mud and flooded every spring. It was a wonder that Tuuran had found anyone at all; but he had, and he came out of the cages and knelt in front of her, the old rituals kept alive even though they both had more pressing things to do. She patted his shoulder and moved on, and in her face he must have seen the torment the Crowntaker carried to anyone he touched. He winced and asked her with his eyes: What happened, what was it this time?
‘He’s gone again,’ she said. ‘Over the edge.’ Tuuran simply nodded.
With the cages empty, Zafir turned for the Pinnacles, for home, while Tuuran set about clearing the dragon yard. There wasn’t much they could do about the headless dragon corpse that now filled a good part of it, but they could clean away the rest. For a while she went to sit with Myst and Onyx, to watch them nurse their newborns, hoping to make all the leaden feelings go away. She played with them a little. Sometimes it helped, seeing the blind hope of new life and the fierce love that surrounded th
em, but not today.
Much later, when it was dark, one of the hatchlings landed in the eyrie. Dark meant the dragons would keep to themselves, and so Zafir had changed out of her armour, although queenly dresses hardly suited the wind and steady rain and so she was wrapped in a soldier’s leather coat, up in one of the five watchtowers that ringed the yard. She knew the hatchling as it came down, as she knew each and every one of the eyrie’s dragons – Stars Cascade Over a Dying Mirror Sea in her first life – and Zafir wondered why the half-gods had been so melancholy with their names, but Diamond Eye had no answer to that. Stars Cascade had something in her claws. Zafir watched the something get up, then climbed from the watchtower and walked across the yard through the rain. The shanty-town debris of huts and sails and ropes had been cleared. Everyone would sleep in the tunnels now, and if that meant they were crowded, it was still better than being burned.
The figure in the dragon yard came towards her, eyes blazing with silver light in the twilight. The face was still the Crowntaker, but behind it seethed the Black Moon.
‘You have something of mine.’
Zafir had the Starknife already in her hand. Without a word she offered it. Without a word, the Black Moon took it and walked away.
4
The Moonlit Mountain
Four days after landfall
The mountains of the Pinnacles poked from the plains of the Silver City like three thousand-yard fingers, sheer-sided, snub-topped, draped in clinging green veils of vines and stubby thorn trees, whatever could find a crack in which to root. Within them lay the arcane labyrinths of the Silver King’s Enchanted Palace where Zafir had been born. Between their feet sat what remained of the Silver City, once the greatest metropolis of the nine realms.
Zafir and Diamond Eye plunged out of the cloud towards the sprawl of stone fortress that covered most of the Moonlit Mountain’s flat-topped peak, the tallest of the three giant fingers. There had been scorpions here once, giant crossbows that fired iron-tipped spears with enough force to tear a man in half and sting even a dragon the size of Diamond Eye. The scorpions were gone now, smashed and ripped from their mounts. Where they’d stood, spikes protruded from the ground, ten-foot iron barbs meant to stop a dragon from simply slamming into the walls. Several were bent, and a few were torn away. Ceramic tiles painted with pictograms were scattered and strewn across the ground. Most were broken. Some had been stamped to powder by crushing dragon strides.
There were men here. Watching. Diamond Eye felt them and plucked at their thoughts. As she punched through the cloud Zafir watched them run. They ran because they’d seen a dragon, and running was what men with any sense would do. And though she told herself over and over that she meant no murder to whoever had taken her home, watching them run she felt her veneer flake, a seething core of vengeful animosity burning it away.
But I will try, she told herself.
They wouldn’t let her though, whoever held her palace. Deep down, simple and primitive, she knew it. They would fight her, and she was content with that knowledge. Glad even, because it let her pretend it wasn’t what she wanted …
She swept Diamond Eye low across the top of the mountain through the ever-present drizzle, scanning the ground. Perhaps there wasn’t any point, but she’d already found one alchemist here, and alchemists were more dangerous than she’d ever imagined. How dangerous, exactly? She didn’t know.
I feel their thoughts, little one. Hundreds of them teeming through the mountain, but there are no alchemists here. They have a taste to them. It makes them easy to pick out.
Unless they choose to hide themselves, she reminded him.
She circled one last time. There had been beauty to the mountain-top once. The Reflecting Garden was here, a toy of the Silver King, an eternal fountain feeding pools of water that didn’t lie flat but ran along in arcs, tiny flowing rivulets twisting cold through the air, suspended in the last echoes of the Silver King’s sorcery, all of them leading to the glimmer of the Silver Onion Dome, so old that no one could remember its proper name, where the air was bright and fresh and dry and always smelled of spring in defiance of the seasons. Zafir looked at the remains, at the shattered stones and gravel. The Onion had been smashed flat. There was almost nothing left of the Silver King’s water garden except a stream bubbling out of the rubble into a few haphazard pools, with raindrops bounding patterns across them before they drained into the mountain below. That was all.
What was it for? As a girl she’d played in the water, oblivious to its mystery. She’d taken it for what it was, no sense of wonder at how it had been made, just a simple joy that it had.
She shuddered. There had been a happiness to the Moonlit Mountain once, but it was so long ago that she doubted she could ever find her way back to it.
To amuse himself. They were all that way. Diamond Eye landed on the stones around the shattered dome. There were no spikes to keep dragons away here, only in the fortress of broken scorpions. Stars Cascade landed beside them, impatient and hostile. The dark shape of the eyrie was coming down from on high now, a sinister blackness laced with purple veins pushing through parting cloud, dropping slowly as the dragons let go their chains. Zafir had made them lift it up above the clouds in the night, sick of rain and wanting to see the stars. She supposed she ought to wait now for Tuuran and his Adamantine Men to march beside her, but she was here, so close, and the urgency to finally see with her own eyes, to know whether her sister or any others lived, to understand how much her world had changed, was impossible to resist.
She slipped from Diamond Eye’s back. Keep watch, if you will. Give warning of what you can. However hard she kept her expectation in check, however much she quashed the unruly sprouts of hope, both grew virulent like weeds the moment she looked away. Tuuran would be furious with her. Diamond Eye didn’t much like her impatience either, though he tried to hide behind aloof indifference. She didn’t understand him. Stars Cascade simply wanted to eat her. That she understood.
The entrances into the mountain from the dome were rubble-choked. Zafir climbed to the great Queen’s Gate at the top of the fortress. The gate itself had been smashed to splinters, the Grand Aisle beyond collapsed, the stair to the High Hall below packed tight with shattered marble. Clumps of grass grew in niches of earth. She went to the lower Humble Gate instead. The rubble there was looser – wood, not stone – and when she pulled a fallen door aside she could see the old Servants’ Passage leading down. She smiled to herself. So this was where the watchers had gone, was it? And rightly too, for the Queen’s Gate was for queens alone.
‘Hello?’
She lit her torch, as bright as a thousand lanterns. Whoever was here would come up to parley, wouldn’t they? Hidden away in their magical tunnels and caverns, kept alive by the relics of a long-dead sorcerer, trapped in an enchanted cage by rampaging dragons. Perhaps they were all mad by now. Everyone said that about the queens of the Pinnacles. Not right in the head. Her own mother. Her …
No. Not a time to go to that place. She looked down the steps. They had to talk to her, didn’t they? A rider come down on a dragon for the first time in … she didn’t know exactly, but her old world hadn’t lasted long after the Taiytakei had taken her from it.
They don’t hear you, murmured Diamond-Eye.
Zafir called again, louder. The Grand Aisle past the Queen’s Gate was the gate for kings and queens, wide and bright and airy, full of open arches to the world outside. Not so the Servants’ Passage. My mother kept a menagerie of birds up here, and a butterfly garden. Sometimes she let them loose to flutter about the crowns of visiting kings, and the walls were buttered with gold and white marble behind drapes from the silk farms of Tyan’s Peninsula. She shivered, lost in memories, though Diamond Eye likely didn’t care a whit to hear them. She used to let me play with the butterflies when I was small. I squashed one once. I wasn’t looking and I trod on it. She was angry. I learne
d after that to be so very careful …
But those days were long gone even when she’d ridden her first dragon. They seemed so distant now that they must surely have belonged to someone else.
She took a deep breath. The Grand Aisle and the High Hall and the Great Stair were all wide enough for a hatchling, but the Humble Gate had been made with other thoughts. It was the entrance for those who merely served, barely wide enough for an armoured man to squeeze along sideways, carefully and deliberately too small for any dragon to enter. The darkness looked back at her, deep and hostile. The cramped space of it clawed its way inside her until it became almost physical, a barrier against her. And she couldn’t be having that. She closed her eyes for a moment and stood amid the leering demons that haunted her, the fanged glinting creatures of small dark places, and thought of Tuuran, not far behind her now, and shooed the demons away and picked her way down the steps. These fortress parts had been carved by men long after the Silver King had come and gone. They were crude and tight and narrow, their walls plain rough stone. She ran her hand over the stone, remembering the times she’d come this way before.
‘Is anyone there? Do you hear me?’
The stair took her into a long straight hall, wider but oppressive in its gloom. Shadows jumped to swallow her light the moment she swung it around. There were sconces in the walls where torches had once burned, but not any more. This was where a visiting queen’s servants mustered with their bags and boxes, but it was also a killing place where defenders could hold off an assault after their dragons had lost the air above. There were murder holes over her head and slits for crossbowmen in the walls. When Jehal’s uncle Meteroa had seized this place, he’d shown how deadly it was. Sadly for him, he hadn’t known about the other entrances, the ones below. Likely as not it would come to those again, but she’d promised herself to give whoever held her old throne a chance, first, to talk.