The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  Bellepheros paused. ‘You know the story of Prince Kazan and the civil war, Holiness? The revolt against the oppressions of King Tiernel? It’s all rubbish. Kazan was another rider stupid enough to wake his dragon, that was all. Twelve others went missing trying to find him.’ It occurred to him that there must be a pattern to Zafir’s path, to her choice of archways, but she was walking too quickly, and talking and asking him questions and making him think all at once. Deliberately, so that he wouldn’t be able to remember? ‘Fortunately half the dragons didn’t have time to wake, and still it took the intervention of three neighbouring kingdoms and Speaker Ayzalmir to put an end to it. Hundreds were killed. Most of what you think you know is true, the picking over the pieces afterwards, the destruction of the realm as it was. But the beginning … There was no revolt. Waking dragons is madness, Holiness.’ His voice tailed away. The Black Moon had woken dragons. Her Holiness had ridden Diamond Eye for more than a year and yet the monster hadn’t eaten her. It did what she asked. Something to do with what had happened as the eyrie crashed into the storm-dark in Takei’Tarr, although he had the impression that even Zafir didn’t fully understand.

  He missed a step. Cursed. He’d lost the thread of Zafir’s path through the arches. Blasted women. ‘I supposed we’re past that, all things considered,’ he muttered.

  ‘Indeed.’ Zafir snorted, almost laughed. ‘On the other hand, Hyrkallan went to war because I executed his queen, and Jaslyn was willing to marry him to the same end, though she clearly despises him.’ She walked through another arch and this time didn’t reappear behind him. There was a pattern then, and for a moment Bellepheros paused, trying to rebuild it in his head … but she’d walked it too quickly, and if he tarried then perhaps he’d not follow her, and then find himself taken to some other place. Stories were stories. They abounded with lies and exaggerations and misplaced drama, but every one he’d ever heard agreed on how the Enchanted Palace of the Isul Aieha was gleefully merciless in its devouring of the unwary.

  He arrived in a hall of glowing white stone whose walls were covered in yet more archways. Blank this time, leading nowhere. Just décor. Zafir was a dozen or so paces ahead, looking back at him with that irritating little smirk she had.

  ‘You were trying to work out the pattern,’ she said. Bellepheros nodded. No point hiding it – Zafir was too clever for that – but it made him anxious, being with her in this place. Antipathy between the Order of the Scales and the queens of the Silver City went back to the days of the blood-mages, to the men and women who had torn the Silver King down.

  ‘Did you manage it?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  Zafir’s smirk flickered into something with a flash of real warmth. ‘Then I’ll show you, Grand Master,’ she said, ‘one day.’

  ‘That is … generous, Holiness.’ Three hundred years. That’s how long the alchemists had been waiting to see the secrets of the Isul Aieha’s palace.

  ‘Merely practical.’ She started along the hall, brushing her ­fingers across the ornamental arches. ‘The queens of the Silver City guarded their secrets, but in truth we barely understood any of them. You can walk for days and never visit the same place twice and still not see everything the Silver King left behind. And there are three mountain spires that make up the Pinnacles, not merely the one. People forget that this is simply the largest. I would have alchemists back among the works of the Isul Aieha, if opportunity and the Black Moon permit.’ She stopped. Paused. ‘Jehal is dead. Tuuran told me. There are Adamantine Men who left the Purple Spur after the palace fell.’ She sounded bright and yet brittle, as though right now a good solid tap from a hammer might shatter her.

  ‘I remember him, Holiness.’ He chose his words with care. ‘But I did not know him.’

  Zafir smiled with a savage glitter to her eye. ‘Not much to know,’ she said. ‘A selfish piece of shit just like any other prince. I suppose we were made for each other. He was a marvellous lover, though.’ She walked on into another hall, round-walled this time, curving up and down and from side to side, growing wide and tall and then narrow and small with no rhyme or rhythm that Bellepheros could see. There were no more arches here, but every surface, even the floors, was covered in carvings. He paused, reluctant to tread on them.

  Zafir laughed. ‘Don’t concern yourself that you might wear down the stone, Grand Master.’

  Bellepheros tried to crouch, gave up when his knees howled, and dropped to his hands. He ran his fingers over the white stone floor. Like the stone of the eyrie it was as smooth as glass and hard as diamond, the carved edges knife-sharp as though chiselled only yesterday.

  ‘It’s all like this.’ Zafir tossed the words over her shoulder as she might have tossed a pinch of salt for luck. ‘All of it. I couldn’t tell you how many hours I spent here after I mastered the Hall of Mirages. I think the whole story of the Silver King is in these walls, if you’re clever enough to understand it. Perhaps even the whole history of the world.’

  Bellepheros looked down. He paused, trying to make out the picture beneath his feet. Four men walking together, each, if you went by the carving, with a small hole in his head. One was carrying a spear that might have been the Adamantine Spear; one held a knife etched with eyes, the Crowntaker’s Starknife; one wore a coat from which sprang rays of light, and one carried a circlet around his brow. In the next scene they were entering a cave. A little further along the floor they were in another, bowing before a woman on a throne.

  ‘The ones with the marks on their heads are the half-gods,’ said Zafir. ‘Or at least I think that’s the way it works. Come here.’

  She was a good way further down the hall, looking at the ceiling. As Bellepheros wandered towards her, another sequence caught his eye: what must have been the Silver King, conjuring his tunnels under the earth. Beside it a circle of half-gods held down one of their own and plucked out his eyes. When he came alongside Zafir and looked up he saw a half-god standing beside a broken egg. A dragon’s head poked through the shell.

  ‘I was eight years old when I found this place.’ Zafir smiled and shook her head. ‘For a long time this was my favourite. I used to lie on the floor and stare up at it for hours. The first dragon. I think.’

  The dragon, like the half-gods, seemed to have a hole in its head among the lines of its scales. Bellepheros stared.

  ‘You had something to say about the Crowntaker.’ Zafir was giving him a look, eyebrows raised, and he couldn’t tell how much was curiosity and how much might have been simple pity. ‘I ­imagine you mean the Black Moon? Speak, then. We are as alone here as we can ever be.’

  It was hard not to be distracted by the carvings. If Zafir was right then there was so much they could learn, so much he could learn. ‘Yes. He is …’ He knew exactly what he wanted to say. He’s taken his knife to the riders here. He’s cutting the souls out of men and making them into his slaves. But the words wouldn’t come. They were in his head, clear as anything, yet somehow stuck. ‘You said there would be no more slaves.’ It was the closest he could get.

  ‘I did.’ Zafir cocked her head.

  ‘And yet …’ The Black Moon is … ‘Yes. But …’ But that wasn’t what he wanted to say! ‘Holiness, forgive me … It is not something about which I should speak. I have overstepped my bounds.’ No, I haven’t!

  ‘Whom have I enslaved, Grand Master?’

  Everyone the Black Moon has cut with his knife! ‘Your maids.’ His hand flew to his mouth. What? WHAT? ‘Forgive me, Holiness. I did not mean to say that …’

  The Zafir he’d come to know in Takei’Tarr, the dragon-queen who’d burned Dhar Thosis, would have flown into a rage. She would have lashed him with her tongue until he grovelled for forgiveness, and then still might have had him whipped and hanged. Here, in her palace, she only frowned. The look on her face was strange. Alien. Was that … hurt?

  ‘You know, I had the same convers
ation with Chay-Liang. It was a year ago, when we were all lost at sea. I will tell you the same as I told her, that Myst and Onyx may leave my side whenever they wish, and with no fear for consequence. Any one of you may do that. You, Tuuran. Anyone.’

  He wondered if he might even come to believe her one day. ‘But we cannot …’ But we cannot leave the Black Moon. ‘That is …’ He screwed up his face and clenched his fists. He couldn’t say the words. He couldn’t even tell her how he was silenced. The worst was that he felt no sense of another presence the way he did when Diamond Eye intruded on him. He simply found that, whatever he’d meant to say, the words reached his tongue and stopped, and then he didn’t want to say them any more.

  ‘We are slaves of circumstance.’ It was the best he could do, the closest he could come. And he knew that she’d seen the Black Moon cutting men into slaves back before they’d crossed the storm-dark, back in Merizikat. She had to, didn’t she? How could she not? ‘You must know,’ he whispered. ‘You must at least suspect.’

  A strange look crossed her face, as if perhaps she understood him after all. ‘Slaves of circumstance.’ She nodded. ‘Yes, Grand Master. We are all of us that.’

  A tremor shook the hall, and then another. Zafir ran back the way they’d come, and Bellepheros scurried after her as best his old knees could manage. He turned the corner into the hall of archways and skidded into the back of her when she abruptly stopped. The Black Moon was coming towards them, eyes blazing bright, while every arch etched into the white stone walls now shimmered with liquid silver. The half-god moved from one to the next, pressing his hand against their fresh mirror skin until each rippled and dissolved into something else; and Bellepheros couldn’t see what lay on the other side as the half-god reached through, but sure as he was that dragons were monsters, there was another side.

  ‘Holiness …?’ he croaked.

  Zafir ignored him. ‘Crowntaker! What are you doing?’

  The Black Moon didn’t answer. He didn’t look at them, didn’t even seem to see that he wasn’t alone. He stopped in front of one more gateway, opened it, paused a moment longer than before the others, and then stepped through and was gone. The walls quaked, and the silver gates trembled back to blank white stone. Zafir ran to where the Black Moon had vanished. She touched the wall, and tapped it with a fingernail.

  ‘As a child I heard stories,’ she murmured, ‘that now and then an archway would open to somewhere else. To some other world. But they were stories, and I later came to suppose that that’s all they were. No one had ever seen it.’ She couldn’t hide the touch of wonder in her voice.

  Maybe now, maybe now he’s gone … Bellepheros tried again. ‘The Black Moon …’ has been cutting souls! Every man he meets! Making them into slaves! But nothing had changed. He turned away so that Zafir wouldn’t see and howled a silent scream. ‘Where did he go?’ he asked. A stupid question. How could she possibly know?

  ‘Who can say?’ murmured Zafir. ‘But the world goes on. We managed without him once before, after all.’ She gave Bellepheros a hard look. ‘Whatever the Black Moon was doing to rile you so, he won’t be doing any more now, will he?’

  Said, Bellepheros thought, with a little of the old petulance, for which – and this surprised him – he found himself profoundly grateful.

  Dear Flame, is she our only hope? Is that what I’ve come to?

  He’d never missed Chay-Liang so much.

  10

  The Dragon-Queen’s Sister

  Eight days after landfall

  Tuuran pushed his way past an old curtain hanging across a crude tunnel. A stair ran down into darkness. He peered and tossed an alchemical lamp into the gloom; it hit the stone and shattered, a dull glowing splatter across the walls some forty steps down. Halfteeth thought he was daft for carrying around these old lamps when he had a Taiytakei light-maker strapped to his arm.

  ‘Can’t do that with gold-glass,’ Tuuran muttered under his breath. Sadly Halfteeth wasn’t here to eat his words. Then much louder: ‘Anyone down there?’

  Behind him Snacksize hawked up a gobbet of phlegm and spat it between his feet. ‘I saw something come this way. I saw the curtain move and it wasn’t a rat.’ Snacksize, sold to the Taiytakei years ago. The whole idea made him laugh, but whoever had bought her hadn’t done much laughing by the sound of things. Way Snacksize told it she’d been taken to Zinzarra, where no one would touch her. Ended up a night-soil slave, escaped, ran away, got caught, then worked in someone’s gardens for a couple of years until the old sail-slave who’d watched over her died and a new one came in, which apparently led to some minor disagreements about the proper care of mint plants. Tuuran thought he probably wasn’t getting the whole of the story around about there, given that it ended up with the new overseer having a trowel driven though his eye, but he didn’t ask out of the respect that one slave gave another. You talked or you didn’t, and that was always your choice to make.

  Didn’t matter. She was Adamantine now. Didn’t look like much, and Tuuran didn’t think there had ever even been any Adamantine Women – nor any Adamantine Dwarves for that matter – but, like Halfteeth, she’d been with the eyrie since the Godspike. They’d survived, and in the end that was what an Adamantine Man did.

  They weren’t getting any answers from the stairs. Tuuran started down, slow and cautious. Hard to see how far it went. Even her Holiness was no help here. He called out again: ‘My name is Tuuran. Night Watchman of the Adamantine Guard. I serve the Speaker Zafir, queen of the Silver City. If there’s anyone there who can hear me, we have food and water and shelter to share.’ He almost said they came in peace, but coming in peace hadn’t done much good in the Octagon. At least someone had cleaned the blood off the floor now.

  Snacksize at his back and then a dozen men behind. Really didn’t want another fight though. He called out again: ‘Did you hear? Fresh water and food. You can take as much as you want.’ There were three mountains around the Silver City, but only the Enchanted Palace had water streaming through the middle. Tuuran had quietly assumed the other peaks would be empty and dead, but Zafir had sent him to come and have a look anyway. Turned out this one wasn’t as dead as he’d supposed.

  ‘They get their water from the rain,’ said Snacksize as though that was some miraculous insight. The clouds had come back in the night and it was drizzling again.

  ‘Being from the Worldspine,’ grunted Tuuran, ‘I imagine you’re feeling right at home, crawling around mountains and being rained on.’ He stopped and flicked his Taiytakei light back and forth down the steps, hoping to see something useful, but the stair just carried on down. He called out again: ‘If there’s anyone down there, you could make both our lives easier by talking back, you know. I’ll stay right here if that helps.’ He turned back to Snacksize. ‘All right then, clever bastard, where do they get their food? Because they’re not living up here near the top if there’s nothing up here to eat, but if there is then where is it?’

  ‘They grow things.’

  ‘What? On sheer cliffs?’ Tuuran snorted and started on down. ‘You disappoint me, woman. I was all ready to ask our one and only alchemist if he’d like to take on an apprentice. But he’d need someone bright—’

  ‘Birds,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you see? The cliffs are full of old birds’ nests, and full of caves too. They put out traps and they raid nests for eggs. We used to do that all the time.’

  ‘Can’t be many of them up here if they’re living off eggs …’ Tuuran stopped. In front of him the stair opened into a fissure, a void that stretched down as far as he could see and disappeared into darkness. The size of it stole the breath from his lungs. The steps carried on, gouged steep and precipitous into its side. One great abyss. He remembered something Bellepheros had told him when they’d been stuck on a ship together with nothing else to do but read books and tell stories. ‘Oh, bugger. Not this again.’ Two years ago that had
been, and he’d travelled to four different worlds in between. Could hardly blame a man for forgetting, but still …

  ‘What’s up, boss?’ Snacksize looked across the fissure, scanning her enchanted torch back and forth, looking for the other side, or for a top or a bottom. The space devoured light. There was no telling how big it was.

  ‘I walked into an abyss once before,’ grumbled Tuuran. ‘That’s what. And I’ll tell you for free that climbing out again afterwards was shit. My legs are holding a grudge even now.’ The steps in the side of the fissure were little more than an erratic and reluctant series of footholds. A decent person might at least have bolted a chain to the stone to give a man something to hang on to. He started on down, slowly and carefully. Years of scampering around the rigging of a Taiytakei slave galley had given him sure feet and hands and a head for heights, but this was taking the piss. ‘I hope you’re not scared of falling.’ At least he could be fairly sure that no one was about to ambush him. ‘King Hiastamir gave this place to the Order of the Dragon on his ascension to the Adamantine Palace. Any of you know that?’

  ‘Can’t say as I did,’ Snacksize grunted behind him, shifting down the holds.

  ‘Now that you do, do you even remotely care?’ Snacksize seemed sure of herself as she climbed. An Outsider from the Worldspine might know a thing or two about getting around a place like this, he supposed.

  ‘No, boss. Not even a tiny little bit. But do regale me with some more pointless shit if there’s any to be had. Might make me feel a bit better if I fall off and plunge to some horrid death to know that at least it’s sparing me yet another dull piece of history that no one, not even you, really cares about.’