by Stephen Deas
‘Do you remember,’ Tsen asked him, ‘how we used to ride our sleds among the dunes when we were young?’ He could see past Rin through the open door, and started, sat bolt upright, dazzled by a moment of understanding, of knowing again who he was. Baros Tsen. ‘Where are we?’
Rin said something, but Tsen didn’t hear, and the moment danced gaily out through the door, skipping and laughing with all his clarity in its arms to dissolve in the breeze. ‘I should like to ride our sleds into the dunes again one day,’ Tsen murmured as he closed his eyes and sank. ‘Tomorrow, perhaps? Would that be good?’
He flew once more. A last stand. All the dragons that had ever lived; together they rained fire across the Isul Aieha and the armies that came with him. His brothers and sisters fell, one by one, as the terrible Earthspear struck them down. Armies rose, and the Black Moon cracked the earth to swallow them. Petty priests and sorcerers called fire from the sun and scorched the earth. From his airy watch Tsen saw the Black Moon’s last great work, a helm made of ice imbued with a fragment of the half-god’s own soul. He saw the moment the battle hung in the balance, dragon after dragon storming at the Isul Aieha, drowning him in fire and lashing him with claw and tail, battering him down though they died in their hundreds. He saw the Earthspear tumble away, saw it seized and taken in dragon claws, felt the surge of victory; but the spear returned to its master, and the dragon turned to dust.
He saw the cataclysm of the Splintering, the world broken into pieces. Saw everything hang for a moment in the balance as the Nothing tore its hole, as time and space unravelled. He saw how the Black Moon in his dying wrought a final spell with the dead goddess wrenched from her spear and made a prison of his own soul, a cage. In Xibaiya, the underworld now bloated with fallen souls passing on, and some that were not so dead, he saw the hole the Nothing had made, the dead goddess and the Black Moon entwined together about it, embraced in their mutual murder, self-forged into a cage that held the unravelling at bay.
That Which Came Before.
And then it was gone.
When Tsen woke again, his head was clear. He sat up. He was at sea, at night. In a cabin, rocking back and forth, with a little glass window looking out at the waves. Someone must have carried him here but he had no memory of it. The dragon was still with him, and he felt himself drift outside, over the whitecaps and among the hunting gulls with their cries and their waiting ambush for scraps thrown over the side; yet at the same time he knew who he was again. Baros Tsen, sitting in his bed, weak and fragile and not quite dead.
The dragon flew with the gulls a while, and then drifted further to watch the ship that carried him. Tsen understood. The dragon was showing him things that mattered, but he didn’t know what any of it meant.
Why? Why me? Kalaiya deserves this but not I, not after what I have done. Rin was justice. A punishment to fit my pride.
The dragon wheeled and plunged, taking them both diving into the sea, deeper and deeper until the darkness was complete, and on deeper still until they drove through the seabed and into Xibaiya. In its stillness they moved, together and with purpose, and he knew the dragon had come this way many times, eager for the mewling call of new skin, dulled dreamlike by the alchemical potions of Bellepheros and his ilk; but this time the dragon was awake, rank with stalking menace, creeping among ephemerals to the hole, to show him him how the dead goddess and her slayer, sentinel and prison, were gone, and how the Nothing now seeped through, ending everything, annihilating all it touched. Its taste had a tang dredged from ancient memories of the dragon’s first lifetime, hazy and dull from centuries of alchemy. The dragons had scented this Nothing once before.
Together they perched, Tsen and the dragon Silence on the edge of the unravelling of everything, and the dragon wondered what might be done but found no answers, and so wondered a more dragon-like question instead, filled with an acceptance that all must inevitably end.
The Black Moon is gone, Baros Tsen. An echo of a memory of him roams free. It must show the way, how the rip might be sealed once more, for everyone and everything will otherwise be devoured.
Why, dragon? Why me?
The dragon showed him a face.
‘Kalaiya?’
Because you will remember.
And, in a blink, the dragon was gone.
Tsen jerked. The shredded depths of Xibaiya vanished and he was back at sea, warm and cosy in a bed, although the cover that wrapped him had a sour scent. The air smelled of tar and burned wax. The rhythmic creak of wood and the rocking back and forth told him that the ship was under heavy sail and making good speed. He blinked, wondering for a moment if this was real. It felt real, but then so had the dragon’s sendings.
He shifted and then stopped sharply, stabbing pains running from his buttocks to his shoulders. His face felt numb. When he gingerly touched himself there, he felt a lot of soft padded cloth. His head was wrapped in bandages, and he whimpered, suddenly frightened at what Rin had done. The fevered dragon-fed visions fell away like mist-made dreams, while the memories of Rin’s black fortress firmed. The more he remembered, the more he wished they might leave him too.
He levered himself out of bed. Everything ached. He was as weak as wet paper. He wrapped the blanket around himself and crawled to the cabin door and opened it, and looked across the deck of the ship. The sky was dark, a quiet cloudless night full of stars. When he hauled himself to his feet he saw, far on the horizon, a glimmer of purple lightning. The storm-dark.
‘Hey!’
Tsen turned. A watchman at the wheel on the deck above had seen him.
‘Hey! Do you …? What’s the—’
Tsen cut him off. ‘To what port do we sail?’
The watchman hesitated a moment, apparently baffled to be asked such an obvious question. ‘To Brons, t’varr. To Brons.’
Tsen turned away and crept back inside. Brons would do. The Dominion. The Sun King’s great port. He crawled back to his bed. He was wretchedly tired, and so he closed his eyes and drifted to sleep. Proper sleep this time, without all those fever dreams that sucked him dry. The dragon, it seemed, was gone.
He missed the crossing of the storm-dark. Slept right through it, and by some happy quirk of chance the curtain of the storm was only a couple of hundred miles from Dominion shores when the ship came through. By the evening he could see the city and the coast through his window. By next morning they were anchored in Brons harbour, the largest and busiest port in the seven worlds, larger even than Khalishtor; and by the middle of the afternoon he was on land, and they had him lying on a slab with three men poking at his face, one from the ship and a pair of city chirurgeons.
‘The bleeding doesn’t stop. There was an abscess here. In places it went bad. I drained the fluid …’ After that Tsen put his hands over his ears and went back to remembering the dreams and visions from his fever. Anything. Some things he just didn’t want to hear.
Are you there, dragon? he wondered, but the dragon never answered him again, and so he never knew whether or how it had crossed the storm-dark beside them. It must have, he supposed, because that was what it had wanted, but it would have been nice to be sure. More than a decade ago the Sun King had started all this when he’d told Sea Lord Quai’Shu that the one thing he wanted and didn’t have was a dragon. Well then, now the Sun King had one, even if he didn’t know it. Tsen wondered how pleased the immortal king might be when he found out.
The chirurgeons agreed there wasn’t anything more to be done about his face. There was a mass of scarring where he’d once had a nose, and the fever had come because the wound had turned bad, and he was lucky to have lived through it – but he had, and so that danger was gone, and the worst he had to worry about now was that he’d be as ugly as a toad and never have much sense of smell any more. There wasn’t much to be done except to wait and hope the bleeding would eventually stop. Oh, and pray. Lots and lots of praying. Mos
tly to the sun, but some to the moon and the stars wouldn’t hurt either. The more he prayed, the better his chances – for best effect, the two chirurgeons recommended several hours a day. Tsen quietly rolled his eyes. He’d forgotten about that, how the people here revered their gods, the enthusiasm with which they brought praying to the sun into every aspect of their life. One of the forbidden gods the Elemental Men of Takei’Tarr had sought to wipe out, and with much the same fervour too.
Rin, he discovered, had gifted him the ship, crew and everything, and would have gifted him the navigator too if she’d been his to give. Tsen promptly leased it out for a flat monthly payment to be made in gold to one of the city’s banks, and between one thing and another they spent more than a month in Brons. By then his face had scarred over and healed. Of everything Rin had done to him, it was the crippling of his sense of smell that he resented most. Xizic baths and apple wine weren’t quite the same and never would be. Two of his three great delights.
They could have gone by boat along the coast to the little town of Dahat, but Tsen, his moods ever more capricious, decided to go by land; and so instead of three or four days it took them weeks. When they finally reached his precious villa, almost three months had passed since Red Lin Feyn had left them beside the Bawar Bridge, more than four since the dragon-queen had destroyed Dhar Thosis, and pressing on towards a year since the first dragons had come to his eyrie. Tsen very much hoped never to have a year even remotely as interesting ever again. He took Kalaiya into the hills to a sun-soaked bluff and showed her their orchard, spreading around the villa’s warm whitestone walls. A donkey trail wound down the slopes to sleepy Dahat, with its fishermen and its vineyards and its olive groves. The sea was calm and azure. It looked pleasingly warm and inviting.
He held her hand. ‘We will never go back,’ he said. ‘And they will never find us.’
Far away across the sea and the storm-dark, Red Lin Feyn sat in the Dralamut, listening to words of the world outside. Of the growing juggernaut of war between the Dominion of the Sun King and the Ice Witch of Aria. Of the outbreak of plague in Khalishtor, where men seemed to turn slowly to stone, the Statue Plague the dragon-slave had brought to Baros Tsen’s eyrie.
When she was alone – certain she was alone and with no Elemental Men flitting as wind and shadow nearby – she went to the Dralamut library, the greatest in all the worlds. She walked from one end to the other until she reached an iron door hidden behind a bookcase. She tapped the gold-glass lock with her black rod so it would know who she was and that she was permitted to enter. Inside, among the forbidden books of the Taiytakei, she gathered the journals of the first navigator, Feyn Charin. She lit a lamp and laid them on a table, and then she went to the secret place where the navigators kept the most forbidden book of all. The Rava. An original, penned by the priests of the Vul Storna before the killers found them and wiped away the stain of their heresies. She opened it and started to read, looking for anything that might throw light on the nature of dragons and half-gods, and this thing called the Black Moon.
Somewhere in the middle of Charin’s journals, a late one, she found the beginnings of what she was looking for.
‘It is said that in the war of the immortals one thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven of the half-gods vanished utterly.’
The Pinnacles
Seven days after landfall
Two years have passed since Zafir took the Adamantine Throne. With it she took Queen Shezira’s head and began the war that tore the nine realms apart. Zafir’s lover and betrayer Jehal is dead and gone. The realms have burned in dragon-fire, but the bitterness lingers. In the Pinnacles deposed King Hyrkallan would yet have Zafir’s head on a spike. The mad Queen Jaslyn, most neglected of Shezira’s daughters, weeps. Not for lives lost, but for the dragons she once flew.
Elsewhere, deep in the Worldspine, the last guttering embers of the Silver King, the Isul Aieha, flicker into life. An old seed left hundreds of years ago has been found and has started to grow. A thousand years a wanderer, now the Isul Aieha dreams he might at last go home. The alchemist Kataros and the Adamantine Man Skjorl are taking him where he must go, to the unfound Black Mausoleum, though they do not yet know it.
9
Bellepheros
Took about a day, Tuuran reckoned, to go from the euphoria of victory to feeling utterly wretched. He felt strange, coming back here after so long. Had felt strange in Furymouth and Farakkan too, but not like this. The Pinnacles was a place he knew, the last place he’d been a free man.
He stood on top of the Moonlit Mountain and took a long breath and surveyed the horizon. Ten years? Eleven now? Might even have been twelve, not that it made a fly shit of difference. This was going back to the start of things. Probably felt strange to her Holiness too, coming home and seeing it all torn down, but Tuuran reckoned it was a different sort of strange. Didn’t feel like coming home to him, not really, but it felt like something. A tug on his guts.
He walked across the summit rubble and quietly watched Zafir. Seeing her here like this, after all they’d been through, after all they’d done, the moments shared, the triumphs and the anguish, he felt a surge of pride. A pocketful maybe, fierce and hard; but it only lasted a moment, and then back came the emptiness. Always happened after a fight. The rush, the elation, the savage lightning-tingle energy of the last blow, blood alive with death or glory. Then the slump. First came the aches, the pains, the twinges, all the little wounds. Then the fatigue, and then the regrets. Normal, all of that, but this time it was worse. At first he thought maybe it was the dragon-disease messing with him. First day in Merizikat had been the same too, victory and despair, one after the other, both the same; but when he took that thought to Bellepheros on the eyrie the alchemist just laughed at him.
‘It’s what we’ve done, Night Watchman,’ Bellepheros said. ‘Nothing more and nothing less than that.’
Maybe the alchemist had a point. The Pinnacles quietly seethed. Dragon-riders without dragons, strutting and prancing like they were little kings, knights who once flew a thousand miles from Sand and Bloodsalt and Evenspire to bring Zafir down, and here they were with Zafir sitting on her throne again, all their dragons lost, everyone they left behind dead and ash, and what had it all been for, eh? Hyrkallan in a cage frothing and screaming for Zafir’s head on a pike. His queen, Jaslyn, mooning about on the top of the Moonlit Mountain, staring at Diamond Eye like she wanted to be eaten. Death by fire soaring the skies and incipient murder all around him, crawling over his skin wherever he turned, and in the middle of all that he was supposed to keep the peace?
No. Not what he’d thought it would be like to come home.
You’re losing it, old man. Pull yourself together and stop being so silly. On a whim Bellepheros went out to the eyrie yard just after dawn. He stood carefully away from the dead dragon that was still lying there, steaming quietly in the damp air, and soaked himself in the morning chill. The clouds had finally gone. He could almost hear Chay-Liang talking in his head. You need to act. If not you, then who will do it?
He climbed the steps to the eyrie wall and then slithered down to the rim on his backside, dignity be damned, then walked towards the edge, small tentative steps until he felt himself start to sway, vertigo dizzy, and stopped. He’d come out here thinking to peer down at the Silver City, to look at the ruin of it and remember what it had been, but the closer he got to the edge the more his legs quivered, and in the end he sat back amid the rubble and debris and stared out at the horizon instead, and even then he couldn’t stop trembling. Stupid dumb mindless fear of heights. He pulled a piece of canvas over himself. Not so much for shelter from the sun as for shelter from the size of the sky. Caves. He liked caves. Or at least a roof over his head.
‘Alchemist?’
He hadn’t seen that Tuuran was out here. The Adamantine Man must have been hiding or at least keeping very still, and now he was coming over to talk, and
Bellepheros didn’t want it. He wanted to be alone with his memories and nothing else. He certainly didn’t want Zafir’s lackey; but wanted or not, Tuuran settled down beside him. ‘Surprised to see you out here, Grand Master.’ He raised an eyebrow. Despite himself, Bellepheros snorted. They both knew exactly how badly he coped with heights.
‘I came to look at the Silver City,’ he said. ‘I was on my way here when the Taiytakei took me.’ He shook his head. ‘Stupid. I should have known I wouldn’t get within ten feet of the edge without shaking myself to pieces.’
‘I used to come out here to watch the sun rise.’ Tuuran laughed. ‘Hasn’t been much point these last few days. A lighter shade of grey and much the same rain. But today … When was the last time we were up this high, Lord Grand Master?’
‘That’s not something I care to think about.’ Probably when they’d been hanging underneath Chay-Liang’s glasships a mile over the storm-dark out in the middle of the Taiytakei desert, and Flame was he glad that that was over. He pointed to the north. ‘You see that smudge on the horizon, Tuuran? That’s the Purple Spur.’ The land below faded to a pale haze before it fell away into the Fury gorge, but the mountains beyond were a deeper grey than the sky. Or maybe he was wrong and it was simply a distant bank of cloud. ‘I hear there are more survivors there.’
Tuuran sniffed and scratched his nose. ‘Crazy’s been summoning Hyrkallan’s riders.’ Crazy Mad. There was a story in a name like that; Bellepheros didn’t know it and didn’t imagine he ever would, but the name certainly fit. Whoever this Crazy Mad used to be, he was the Black Moon now.
‘Shouldn’t you be there? To watch over as he cuts them?’ He couldn’t keep the bitterness at bay, not any more.
Tuuran ignored him. ‘I suppose he makes it easier. Keeps them all in line. The Silver King, returned to tame the dragons again. Not that either you or I believe that, but who’s going to argue when Crazy has moonlight pouring from his eyes, when you’ve seen an unbeliever or two turned into ash? Better the devil you know, eh?’