The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  But we could at least try to find a less mournful fate, eh? There was a villa waiting for him in the Dominion, if he could find it. On the mountainous coast halfway between Brons and Merizikat, looking down over a lazy sun-soaked fishing town called Dahat that no one had ever heard of because no one ever went there. The orchards on the slopes above grew some of the best apples for wine-making, and the villa had a fine bathhouse. If, somehow, he could get there.

  ‘There is a dragon loose again,’ said the Arbiter, when at last she moved. ‘I have to warn the Elemental Men, and so I must return to the eyrie. I’m afraid you will have to come with me.’

  Tsen considered this. So she’d changed her mind, had she, and now she meant to hand them over? He’d be hanged as he deserved to be, and he’d been expecting it since … well, since the moment she’d told him he was free. Couldn’t last, a thing like that. The world was never kind enough. Here it comes …

  He had a knife in his belt, taken from the abandoned camp. He drew it out and dropped it in the sand. ‘It is no more than is right, lady.’ Capitulation. Truly I have a gift for it. ‘I had arranged to own a quiet place to live out my twilight days in the Dominion, should the need arise. Let Kalaiya be taken there to live out her life in peace.’ He hadn’t the first idea how to get from the Queverra to anywhere useful anyway. Out here in the desert, where starving to death and dying of thirst vie with one another to be the entertainment of the day? We’d just die anyway.

  His inner voices, usually so quick to scorn, offered only contemptuous silence.

  ‘I suppose a little apple wine and a particularly long soak in a particularly hot bath are quite out of the question before we go?’ he asked in the spirit of being at least a little rebellious, but neither the voices nor Red Lin Feyn seemed to hear him.

  ‘When my business is done with the eyrie,’ she said, at last meeting his eye, ‘I will take you to the Bawar Bridge. Beyond that is up to you.’

  The dragon Silence alights atop a stone pillar amid a desert wasteland. Under the glare of the sun she watches. She assembles the last of her memories. As the little ones fly away to the Godspike where the eyrie has fallen, Silence roams ahead, strong, high, unseen in the night sky. She ghosts among their thoughts. The white sorceress Red Lin Feyn already knows that the grey dead have called the Black Moon to rise. She knows that the dead skin-shifters of Xibaiya wander abroad, and that they yearn for a dragon soul, but she does not know why. Silence, who knows very well, will not tell her.

  This new hatchling flesh she wears has become brilliant. Metallic crimson scales darken to near black along her belly. The body is strong, and will grow large. Even so, this world is not safe any more. She will find her way to another; until she does she hides under sand and high in the sky and wanders the thoughts of the little ones. The grey dead have called the Black Moon to rise. It is the end of all worlds.

  They flew in Red Lin Feyn’s gondola over the Desert of Thieves. With every hour they drew closer to the Godspike, Tsen felt his tension rising. Red Lin Feyn had some of his apple wine (stolen from his personal cellar, he reminded himself, and then reminded himself again that everyone had thought he was dead, and that it would be prudent not to complain), and was obliging enough to share. Not his best vintage, which was a shame. They traded stories. Tsen told Lin Feyn how he’d been snatched by the skin-shifter Sivan on the night the Vespinese had seized his eyrie, how Sivan had dragged him across the desert to the Lair of Samim, up the Jokun river and all the way to Vespinarr, only to sneak him back to help him steal dragon eggs and then drop the eyrie into the storm-dark. Red Lin Feyn stood at the window as he talked, watching mesas and broken caterpillar canyons and spires of dry dead rock roll beneath, the patches of wind-rippled sand, of brown baked earth spiked with cacti and thorn grass. She stopped over one mesa and opened the gondola, walked out and bent down beside a dark stain on the stone. Tsen, for want of anything better to do, squatted beside her. He watched her fingertips brushing the rock, pinching the fine powdered earth, tasting the stone. The sun beat on his back and the wind blew across his face, stealing his sweat to cool him. The air smelled of sand.

  ‘Why did the skin-shifters want a dragon’s soul?’ she asked. ‘Do you know? I will keep your secret if you can help me to understand. “I will not become a tomb.” What did the dragon mean?’

  Tsen, who didn’t have the first idea, turned his back. He walked to the edge of the mesa. I could always jump, you know. Put us all out of our misery. ‘Is that what Sivan wanted? He never told me. Just that he meant to steal an egg. I thought he was mad. I still do.’ He went back to the gondola and came out with a glass of apple wine in one hand, waving his black rod in the other, the key Chay-Liang had enchanted for him to unlock every glass and gold device she had ever made. ‘This was what Sivan wanted of me.’ He shrugged. ‘Just this.’

  Red Lin Feyn didn’t look up from her inspection of the stone. ‘Yes. To release the glasships that towed the eyrie. To drop it into the storm-dark to hide his theft of the eggs. I know.’

  ‘He held my Kalaiya, but I like to think I might have done it for him anyway. An end to dragons and everything around them. I did not see if it worked, but I fear it did not. Was there another enchanter? Did more glasships come in time? I never knew how quickly it would fall. In the end it was more like a feather than a stone. Sivan did not linger to see the result.’ He looked out over the jumble-maze of cliffs and mesas, hundreds of miles every which way he turned. I should have brought my eyrie here and sunk it low. Shonda might never have found me.

  ‘Your dragon-queen saved them,’ said the Arbiter softly. ‘She dragged the glasships down after the eyrie, the ones you set free, so their chains could be fastened once more.’

  ‘She has a knack for ruining my schemes, I will confess.’ Tsen took a sip of wine and then, on a sudden petulant whim, hurled his black rod as far he could over the mesa cliff. He watched its arc, up dark against the burning blue monochrome sky, and then down, following it with his eyes against the facing crags. He had no idea where it ended up. Somewhere inaccessible, that was all. ‘There. The last of all I used to be. Gone. And good riddance.’ He took another sip of wine, a big one this time. It wasn’t as though he had anything much to lose. At least drunks die happy. Who had said that? Vey Rin probably, back in their days in Cashax.

  Red Lin Feyn laughed. ‘Lord Shonda decided he would leave the eyrie against my order. Your dragon-rider slave returned him. When she came back she found the eyrie falling. I wonder, sometimes, why she didn’t simply let it go, but she didn’t. She brought the glasships down one by one. When she was done she branded Shonda with his own slave mark. Twice.’

  Tsen almost choked on his wine. For that alone he would have given the dragon-queen her freedom. ‘I suppose you sentenced her to die for what she did in Dhar Thosis. As you sentenced me?’

  ‘Everyone stood and watched, and did nothing. I suppose by then no one was in much of a mood to try and stop her.’ Red Lin Feyn shook herself. ‘She was a slave who obeyed her master, t’varr. I could have let her live, but she showed no mercy, no remorse, nothing but a gleeful delight at the murder she had brought. You sent your Elemental Man to stop her, and she killed him. She knew you meant to call her back, and she did it anyway. That is what saves you, and what damned her.’ Red Lin Feyn ran her fingers across the dark-stained earth again. ‘This is where it happened. This is where your Elemental Man confronted her. This is where her dragon killed him.’

  Tsen wondered how the Arbiter could know, how she could pick one mesa from a thousand others that all looked much alike. He went and squatted beside her, fascinated by the stain on the stone. The blood of an Elemental Man. That was twice in two days he’d seen such a rare thing.

  Kalaiya came and sat beside him. Red Lin Feyn watched them, looking from one to the other and back again. She seemed sad. Distant, at least. ‘A dragon hatched and escaped on the night you left,’ she sai
d. ‘Amid the chaos. Weeks later your dragon-slave hunted it. She killed it here in the exact same spot. Curious, don’t you think?’ For a moment Lin Feyn’s face grew dark. ‘A city, Baros Tsen. A whole city, and you sent her to burn it. How could you take such a gamble with one like her?’

  ‘To show the Vespinese for what they were! To save my sea lord’s house and fleet! Because I had an Elemental Man ready to stop her, and I did not consider that he might fail, because Elemental Men never fail!’ He wrung his hands and glared. ‘Or so we are told, lady.’ Easy to be dry and cynical about most things, especially when most things seemed to revolve around some new way to die or somebody else who wanted to kill him; but Dhar Thosis … Dhar Thosis would be with him for ever. No matter that he’d tried to stop it, a sea lord had been hung from the broken shards of his own palace, the heart of his city burned to cinders. That’s why Baros Tsen deserved to die. That’s why, little voices, I don’t listen to you any more. Call me a coward all you like!

  The three of them left, drifting away across the sky in Lin Feyn’s golden gondola. They talked a little more as the night wore on and through the day that followed. The fractured stone of the mesas and canyons gave way to sand and spires and wadis, and then a gentle rise to a plateau and a jagged cliff, and beyond that a sea of dunes, the fringe of the Empty Sands. Tsen and Kalaiya took turns to stand at the window and watch it pass as Red Lin Feyn asked question after question about the skin-shifter Sivan, about where they had stopped and when, how they travelled, until Tsen had told her everything he could possibly remember about the Lair of Samim and the Xizic harvesters, about the strange shaft in the desert and the white stone tunnel deep under the dunes, about the Jokun gorge and Sivan’s little cave-home tucked behind a waterfall, until it was clear that he didn’t have the answers that Lin Feyn sought. As they crossed the last cliff and started over the sands, Tsen saw the stain of the storm-dark around the Godspike in the distance. And yes, he was afraid to die, no matter Lin Feyn’s promises, but the shame was worse. The thought of ever looking another soul in the eye and having them know what he’d done. Why, they would all ask, as he asked himself, why would you do such a thing? And he had no answer. Hubris. Stupid arrogant pride. What else could it be?

  The glasship began its ascent, rising past the cloud of the storm-dark. Tsen saw scattered specks on the ground that caught the sun and seemed to glow. Red Lin Feyn peered through her farscope, trying to find the eyrie, and found the sky around the Godspike filled with bright glasships glittering in the sun, dozens of them. Dozens upon dozens, but the eyrie wasn’t there.

  They returned to the ground to search for someone who might know where it had gone, and there Tsen again saw the shapes that had shone in the sun, only now he saw them for what they were: bodies. The traders from the desert tribes who made their camps out here, butchered, sprawled in brilliant-white ankle-length robes stained with blood, scattered like confetti across the sand. Among them were other men, naked but with their skin painted white. The ghost-men of the Queverra had swarmed the camps, slaughter­ing everyone, and been slaughtered in their turn by lightning from above. There was no one left alive. Yet more glasships hung around the fringes of the storm-dark, some high, some low, some alone, others in twos and threes. Meandering aimlessly or simply floating adrift like bewildered cubs beside a murdered mother. Eventually Red Lin Feyn spotted a camp on the edge of the storm-dark’s shadow. The Vespinese. She went alone. Tsen, knowing what was good for him, kept well out of sight.

  ‘The Vespinese sent the eyrie into the storm-dark after all,’ Lin Feyn told him when she came back. She smiled and then laughed, as if relieved and also bitterly sad. ‘You got your way. Shonda is gone. The Vespinese are left with nothing.’

  ‘The dragons are gone,’ said Tsen. ‘That’s all that matters.’ And everyone who lived on the eyrie presumably gone with them. All dead now. He closed his eyes. The dragon-queen, yes, she was wicked and heartless, but the rest … the alchemist Bellepheros, in another life, could have been a friend. The enchantress Chay-Liang was as close as he’d had to one for a long time. There were others. Many good men and women, and none had deserved to die. ‘Did any escape?’ he asked, but he already knew the answer from Lin Feyn’s eyes, and so he shuddered and tried to shake away the memories of all those faces.

  Best not to think about it.

  Nothing you could have done to stop it anyway.

  And maybe, perhaps, with a bit of luck, mostly it was those bastard Vespinese who’d gone crashing into the storm-dark, or else got themselves eaten by the monster dragon before it fell, and as for the rest, surely some must have slipped away? Scuttled to hide in the desert? There had been no shortage of sleds after the Vespinese came …

  Yes. You keep telling yourself that, t’varr. Keep hiding from what you’ve done.

  For a long while the Arbiter didn’t speak. She guided her glasship around the storm-dark through the night among the camps, and through the next day too, looking. She didn’t say, but she was searching for someone quite specific, Tsen thought, and he could see from the slump of her shoulders how it saddened her she didn’t find what she wanted. She looked older. Older and beaten and defeated by some loss of which she would never speak.

  ‘Where now?’ Tsen asked, as the next day’s light began to fade. Lin Feyn would surely return to the Dralamut, or to Khalishtor, and he was quite certain he didn’t want to be going anywhere near either, and equally quite sure he wasn’t about to be given a choice; but there didn’t seem to be an obvious way to ask if Kalaiya might get dropped off somewhere along the way. Tayuna for preference, but anywhere would do if it had a harbour and plenty of ships and there was a chance she could get a passage across the storm-dark to the Dominion and the little Dahat estate he’d quietly bought for their later years.

  With apple orchards and a winery and one of the best bathhouses in the province …

  He let out a little sigh.

  ‘I told you, Baros Tsen. I will take you to the Bawar Bridge.’ It took him a moment to realise that she didn’t mean only Kalaiya. She meant both of them. And yes, she’d said it, but he hadn’t ever truly believed her.

  ‘Lady …’

  ‘I said you were free, Baros Tsen.’ She turned away. ‘There are dead enough for the ghosts of Dhar Thosis, and too many honest souls already sent to Xibaiya. I’ve had enough of it. You can go.’

  Free?

  While the Arbiter retired to her little upstairs cabin, and Kalaiya dozed propped against his shoulder, he mulled the word over. Rolled it around in his head. He even believed it this time. The Bawar Bridge. Close to Hanjaadi, which was an entire city of Vespinese lapdogs, which in turn brought problems of its own, and Tayuna would be much more preferable indeed; but it seemed churlish, under the circumstances, to object …

  Free. He couldn’t stop rolling it around in his head.

  A tapping on the window disturbed his musing. He tried to ignore it at first, but they were a thousand feet in the air out in the Empty Sands and it didn’t go away, and that was quite distracting since he really couldn’t imagine what it could be. A bird? Out here? He opened his eyes and peered.

  A claw was tapping on the glass. At the window a hatchling dragon looked in at him. Baros Tsen T’Varr screamed as he’d never screamed before and fell off his chair, and stared and rubbed his eyes and looked again, but the dragon was gone.

  ‘A dream.’ Kalaiya held his head and stroked his hair. ‘You fell asleep, Tsen. It was just a dream.’

  He wasn’t at all sure he’d been asleep, but he decided to believe her anyway.

  7

  The Jokun River

  There were ports and there were ports. There was Tayuna, where the Vespinese were universally despised, and then there was Hanjaadi, vassal state to the mountain lords whose distant masters were merely roundly disliked, but it felt graceless to complain to the Arbiter about her choice of destination. Not hand
ing him over to the Elemental Men to be hanged in Khalishtor or flying him out of the desert in her glasship – those seemed quite magnanimous enough and, if Tsen was honest and chose to look at it with any kind of critical eye, bewildering to the point of suspicion. He couldn’t quite shake the notion that something bad waited for him by the Bawar Bridge, but pushing his luck, a trait indulged too often of late, struck him as an invitation to Red Lin Feyn to change her mind and drag him back to the Dralamut, and such alternatives didn’t bear much scrutiny. Besides, there was Kalaiya to think of. Thus Tsen opted to be small and discreet, to be as innocuous as possible in the hope that the former Arbiter might begin to forget that he was even there. Which, in a gondola where three people shared a space no larger than one decent-sized room, was a challenge, but one he took with relish.

  It must have been an odd sight, he thought, when Red Lin Feyn brought her glasship down across the Jokun river in the small hours of the morning darkness, a little before sunrise with the sky already lightening across the desert at their backs, ochres on the horizon to violet and to a deep purple straight above, and still dark enough for the last dawn stars to shine in the west. The gondola came to ground a mile from the bridge where the old desert road ran out into the Lair of Samim and then to the Empty Sands beyond. The road was quiet and, well, deserted, rarely travelled in these days of sleds and glasships, but he still wished the Arbiter might have chosen a more subtle landing place. He kept thinking this while he bowed and scraped and smiled and gave her his thanks.