by Stephen Deas
‘Ha fucking ha.’ Tuuran snorted. He eased himself down ahead of her. ‘The temple entrance on the surface was destroyed during the War of Thorns. Did you know that, at least?’
‘The war of what?’
‘Flame preserve me!’ He squawked as he trod on a loose stone in one of the crevices and momentarily lost his balance. Snacksize caught his arm. ‘Never mind. Long story short … Great Holy Flame, will you look at that!’
They’d come down maybe fifty feet. Felt like it had been half a mile, but that was just the adrenaline. About the same again below them a narrow bridge reached out over the chasm. The bridge was white stone. Tuuran eased his way on down and crouched, took off a gauntlet and touched it. Smooth as glass and edges sharp like it had been cut yesterday. He grunted. Like the white stone of the eyrie, except here it didn’t glow. He got up.
‘Half-god stone,’ he said, which at least meant he’d trust it to take his weight. The bridge was narrow, half a stride at best, and he couldn’t see where it went. Hopefully to the other side, but the other side was out of reach of their torches, and half-god stone meant it had been made by the Silver King, and that could mean …
He shuddered. Could mean anything at all.
He looked down. The cliff below the bridge was sheer. Vertical. He had a good look along the sides of the cavern in case there was some other way down that he hadn’t noticed, but no, there very clearly wasn’t. Of course there wasn’t.
Snacksize jumped to join him on the bridge. Made for a bit of a crowd that did, all pressed up against the face of the stone with only a shoulder of space to share between two clumping pairs of boots. Pushed them close. Next soldier down would end up sitting on Tuuran’s shoulders at this rate.
‘Best you have a quiet word,’ he said. ‘See if there’s any who might have a problem with crossing this. Heights. I’ll start out on my own. I’ll call back when I see anything.’
‘No, boss.’ Her hand caught his elbow. ‘You’re the Night Watchman. The Night Watchman sends other people. He doesn’t do everything himself.’
Tuuran glowered. ‘This one bloody does, and what’s more he does it whenever he bloody well feels like it. I think, if you bothered to find out these things, you’d find most Night Watchmen very much the same in that particular.’ No sense of tradition, this hotchpotch legion of his, but after a moment of thinking it over he let her go first. Maybe she had a point, but mostly he did it because she wanted to, and because she was small. He watched her, step after step, taking her time, tense as a drawn knife, half his men spreading along the first few yards of the bridge, the other half backed up clinging to the stone … He watched the dancing of her enchanted light as Snacksize walked into the dark. It was a long way before she stopped and shouted back.
‘I see the end.’ The words echoed everywhere. The fissure took her voice and made it into the booming call of a god. Tuuran didn’t waste any time following, but he was still out in the middle when he heard her cry out. She shouted something, then came another shout, someone else, then a clash of iron, a howl of pain and last of all a crack of lightning and a boom of thunder that echoed and rolled about the cavern like a storm. He had to stop a moment, too dazzled by the flash to see where he was putting his feet; and then he wanted to run, but he didn’t dare, not on a bridge so narrow. Didn’t like to think too much about what might be waiting at the other end, though. When he reached it, he came with his shield raised high and his axe at the ready.
Snacksize was standing with her light sweeping back and forth over a wide open space and an enormous façade like some great temple entrance carved into the chasm wall. Two bodies sprawled at her feet. Both were dressed in scraps of what had once been dragon-rider armour. One had a bloody hole in his neck from her sword, the other lay twisted up in the unmistakable rag-doll sprawl of death by Taiytakei lightning.
‘Just the two of them?’ he asked. Couldn’t take his eyes off the wall ahead.
‘More inside.’ She waved her torch at the centre of the façade, to a huge metal-bound door. ‘They just came at me.’ She was shaking. ‘They didn’t give me any choice.’
‘Well apparently that was very stupid of them.’ Tuuran scrunched up his nose. After all the things he’d seen, all the places Crazy Mad had taken him in their years together, he’d imagined there wasn’t much that would put the wind up him any more. This place did though. Couldn’t say why. He shivered. ‘The Temple of the Dragon. Men made it even before the Silver King came.’ Hard to credit, but there it was.
Most of it, anyway. Presumably the Silver King had added the bridge.
He waited until his men were all across and formed up into a wall of shields, then made sure they all had their lightning throwers out and the damned things were working. Wasn’t going to be much fun pushing through that door. Good chance he was going to lose someone, which never put him in a good frame of mind. Still, needs must … and he about had them all ready to go, gritting his teeth for a fight, when the door opened of its own accord, loud and grinding, stone on stone, old heavy hinges thick with rust or verdigris crying out for a touch of oil. A woman walked out, and Tuuran had to look twice and hold back a little gasp. First glance she looked like her Holiness. Bit shorter and dressed in rags, and her hair was a tangled mess, but the face … Most of all, though, it was in the way she walked. How she held herself.
‘Adamantine Men, is it?’ she asked, apparently not much bothered at standing in front of a dozen heavily armed and armoured soldiers, nor particularly fussed by the two corpses behind them either. She cocked her head and tilted her chin at him. ‘And what Speaker do you serve today?’ Flame, she even sounded like her Holiness.
‘Her Holiness Zafir,’ growled Tuuran. ‘Queen of the Silver City.’ He couldn’t stop looking. She was like a scraggeldy mirror image. Younger. Ragged and filthy and a mess, softer on the outside and maybe not so lined, but you could see the same steel underneath, hard as diamond. Zafir as she might have been five years younger.
‘Zafir is dead,’ said the woman. ‘Fallen in the dragon war brought by Hyrkallan and that cunt-licker Jehal. But you were dressed by the Taiytakei. So where are your masters? What did they do with Hyrkallan and his mad queen?’
Tuuran tried to imagine the woman in front of him in different clothes and twelve years younger. It was possible she was … ‘Princess Zara-Kiam?’ Zafir’s younger sister.
Zara-Kiam narrowed her eyes and looked at him hard and didn’t speak.
‘I came here with Speaker Hyram a decade ago and then some. You were younger. But I remember you. There’s a lot of her Holiness in you too.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve heard bits and pieces of this dragon war of yours, but I was busy at the time being a slave to the night-skins. Her Holiness Zafir didn’t die. She was taken. The night-skins took us both, each in our own time.’ A crooked smile settled on his face. ‘And they came to rue us both too …’ We brought the Silver King back with us. But who would ever believe that? It was a thing you had to see for yourself, and rumour already had it that the Black Moon had pissed off somewhere, and who was to say he’d ever bother with coming back? He sighed. ‘Her Holiness returns to reclaim her throne and restore the realms to their glory.’ He was fairly sure that not one of them had the first idea how to go about doing that last bit, but never mind. ‘You’re welcome to—’
Zara-Kiam laughed shrilly. ‘Come back to rule the wreckage, did she? I flew to war that day too. It would have been better if we’d both died and been done with it. I’ve seen your flying castle, though. So that’s her palace now, is it?’
Tuuran took off his helm and scratched his head. The furrows in his brow deepened. None of this was going in a way that made any sense. Everywhere he went, people refused to believe the simple truths he told them. And you might think, after everything this realm had seen these last couple of years, there would be some sort of pleasure in learning of a sister unexpect
edly alive. Didn’t look like it, not from the face glaring in front of him. Come to that he couldn’t remember if Zafir had ever said anything to him about a sister. He’d already known, but she’d never spoken of it.
‘How many of you are here?’
Princess Kiam shook her head. ‘I’ll not give my people away so easily. You still smack of Taiytakei. You may take me to whoever claims my sister’s name so I can explain to them why they should choose another.’
Tuuran tried again. ‘Her Holiness will be pleased to see you.’ He couldn’t quite make himself believe it though. Nothing here was the way it was supposed to be. Be nice, he thought ruefully, if he showed up somewhere and someone was actually pleased to see him.
‘Beginning to wish we’d stayed in Takei’Tarr,’ he muttered, but no one heard.
He crossed back over the bridge with the ragged princess in front, climbed the wall of the fissure and the stairs to the outside, where the eyrie floated over the top of the mountain. He pointed, and then looked for Princess Kiam to be amazed and awed, but she simply shrugged. ‘Bigger than it looked yesterday.’ She tilted her chin and scanned the skies. ‘Where are all the dragons? I haven’t seen any dragons except the ones you brought.’
‘We taught them to keep away.’ Tuuran grinned smugly, but even then Princess Kiam wasn’t impressed. When he thought she wasn’t looking, he glowered at her. He led her to one of the cages that would lift them to the eyrie rim. Glared and frowned at them too. The cages and their winches were getting old and had only been lashed together in the first place. Best do something about fixing them up properly before there was an accident …
Princess Kiam wasn’t looking at the cages. She was peering at his neck. ‘Are you a Scales?’
The marks on his skin. He shook his head. ‘Adamantine born and bred, but I had an unfortunate encounter with a hatchling.’
‘Oh.’ She shrugged it off as though it didn’t matter. ‘Why do you keep staring at me?’
‘Because you look like your sister. It’s … striking. It keeps taking me by surprise.’
‘We don’t look anything like each other.’ Kiam turned away from him. Tuuran sneaked another glance and begged to differ. Her nose was pointed while Zafir’s was rounder. Other than that they were two puppies from the same litter …
He shuddered and glared at the sky. The drizzle was turning back to steady rain. Two puppies from the same litter? That wasn’t any way to be thinking about her Holiness and her sister.
When they reached the rim he picked his way through the piled detritus of abandoned crates and ropes and sacks where his men had been offloading the supplies from Merizikat down into the Moonlit Mountain. He led Zara-Kiam up the wall and then tried to take her down to the dragon yard and into the tunnels where it was dry, but she wouldn’t have it. She walked along the top of the wall instead, staring at everything. The lightning cannon fascinated her, and Tuuran almost fired it so she could see what they did, then stopped himself. Showing off, was he? He stomped away to get a proper grip on himself, and sent Snacksize off on a glass sled through the air between the mountain tops to take word back to her Holiness, to ask her kindly to recall the eyrie, since otherwise they were all stuck out here on entirely the wrong mountain.
Zara-Kiam was still up on the wall, standing out in the rain. Drenched. He brought her a cloak, but by then there wasn’t much point.
‘I remember him.’ Kiam pointed to Diamond Eye, circling the ruins of the Silver City far below. ‘He was one of Zafir’s favourites. She took another to ride when Hyrkallan came, but I remember that one. Diamond Eye. So she really didn’t die?’
Tuuran told the story as best he knew it – how the Taiytakei had taken Zafir and Diamond Eye and a clutch of dragon eggs and had tried to start their own eyrie, and how it had all ended badly. ‘I wasn’t there for most of it. You’d best ask Grand Master Bellepheros if you want to know more.’
‘You have a grand master alchemist too?’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘Anyone else?’
‘Not from here.’ Didn’t know where even to start with Crazy Mad and the Black Moon. Too hard to get into all that without sounding stupid. So he didn’t bother, and ended up standing beside her in the rain, looking out at the haze and the dim outline of the Silver City, at the other two mountains of the Pinnacles poking up through the earth like the skeletal fingers of some buried god, wondering what to say and not finding any answers, feeling more and more like a fish flopped up on a muddy shore and not knowing how to get back into the water. ‘You ought to get inside,’ he said after a bit. ‘Too much cold and wet doesn’t do any man any good.’
She didn’t move. Didn’t seem right, but then what was he going to do about it? Pick her up and carry her?
‘You have no idea what it’s like,’ she said after a while, ‘to be able to stand out here in the open and just breathe the air without looking up all the time.’
He laughed at that. ‘I do have some idea.’
Took about an hour for Diamond Eye to give up on doing whatever he was doing and come crashing down with Zafir on his back to tow the eyrie from one mountain to the other. Tuuran had Kiam down into the tunnels by then. Pointed her to Baros Tsen’s old bathhouse down in the bowels where the Black Moon used to spend his time, found her some threadbare old towels and a reasonably clean old slave tunic. Couldn’t think of anyone to send to look after her, not with Myst and Onyx in the Moonlit Mountain and him with nothing but a handful of foul-mouthed scurvy men and one bad-tempered alchemist. If she needed any looking after at all, which didn’t look likely.
Zafir’s unexpected sister. Hadn’t been ready for that.
11
Mad Queen Jaslyn
Eight days after landfall
Zafir sat on her throne, dressed in a queen’s dress she hadn’t worn for more than two years. Servants who had seen half a dozen lords and queens come and go wafted silently around her. They had survived her mother, Meteroa, Valmeyan, Jehal, and never changed. They knew where things were, even after Hyrkallan and his riders had ransacked the place.
She’d loved this dress once. Fresh-blood-red, threaded with gold and silver and made from silk by the seamstresses of Furymouth, but it seemed tawdry now after the dazzling clothes of the Taiytakei. It didn’t quite fit any more either. She wasn’t the same Zafir. The last year had sharpened her, changed her shape, leaned her, but her discomfort went beyond that. They no longer belonged to the same world, her and this silk. She was more at home in her armour these days.
Home. The word was supposed to mean something, wasn’t it? And perhaps it had when she’d first sat on her throne again, commanding the Octagon, when she’d wandered the old halls of the Silver King dredging through two decades of memories. She’d decided almost at once that she would welcome Hyrkallan’s riders into her home, if they would have her, forgive everything that had happened in the dragon war if they would do the same; but they hated her, every last one of them, and it seemed such an implacable thing that couldn’t ever be moved, and so the world would go back to the way it had been before, and she’d hang them because they gave her no choice, and then everyone she didn’t hang would hate her even more, and they’d all fall to fighting again to see who would be the last to stand upright atop the pile of bones and ash that the realms had become. She would fight for that too, if she had to. She’d fight for everything because she didn’t know anything else, but it left her so overwhelmingly weary. Weary to the marrow.
Home. Nothing but a great emptiness.
There has to be another way.
It is the dragons’ way, little one. Diamond Eye’s thoughts were as gentle as a dragon could be as he roamed the once magnificent Silver City. She’d send soldiers into the tunnels, she decided, for the men and women who eked out a living there. And they’d hate her too, because she was a dragon-rider and Hyrkallan had been a dragon-rider, and Hyrkallan had had a fondness for send
ing his riders to hunt and kill them; but she’d do it anyway. Tuuran and his company could deal with it when they were done rooting around the other two mountain summits.
She’d rebuild her city one day. She told herself that every now and then, though she didn’t see how. But right now she needed to decide what to do about Hyrkallan’s riders. The Crowntaker had kept them in line for a while, but the Crowntaker was gone, and who knew when he might come back?
Talk to them. Myst and Bellepheros had counselled mercy.
Tuuran, off exploring, had left her with Halfteeth running things. Crooked-faced, broken-jawed Halfteeth didn’t bother pretending that he liked her, but after what he’d done over Farakkan, Zafir didn’t much like Halfteeth either, so that was fair at least. She told him to bring Queen Jaslyn to her, up on the summit, warned him to be nice if he wanted to keep his hamstrings, then left her throne and wrapped herself in the old comfort of dragonscale and a cloak against the worst of the weather. She climbed the Great Stair to the summit, to the whip of wind and the slash of rain, and stood in the ruin of the Reflecting Garden.
Talk to them. But how could that ever work? What could she offer?
Halfteeth brought Jaslyn to her. Jaslyn was dressed in a simple tunic. Halfteeth hadn’t bothered to give her anything against the rain, and by the time they reached Zafir, she was soaked and shivering. Zafir rolled her eyes at Halfteeth. The rain lashed them.
‘Go away.’ She took off her cloak.
Halfteeth sniffed. ‘Tuuran will have my balls if I let you get hurt.’
‘You won’t have any to give him if you don’t do as you’re told.’
He looked at her, looked at Queen Jaslyn, shrugged and withdrew, settling back under the Queen’s Gate out of the downpour. Zafir put her cloak across Jaslyn’s shoulders and stood beside her. For a while she looked at the remains of the Reflecting Garden, then at Jaslyn, then back again. She almost had to shout over the wind. ‘I get angry about the most stupid things,’ she said at last. ‘It makes me angry that the dragons did this. Of all the havoc they wrought, it makes me angry that they destroyed this. A pointless, stupid vanity of a thing, but it was beautiful, and nothing we make will ever replace it.’