The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  ‘Where is she?’ Zafir almost barged him off the wall.

  ‘The bathhouse, Holiness, but—’

  She ran down the steps into the dragon yard and on into the nearest tunnel, down the spiralling passages. The eyrie was a mess, half unpacked, Merizikat crates and sacks piled up in the tunnels and left there, waiting to be unloaded. She hurdled them where she had to, scrambling and jumping until she reached the bottom where the eyrie tunnels all came together at the hard iron doors to Baros Tsen’s bathhouse. She paused then, suddenly wondering what she was doing and whether she had the courage for this. But she had to.

  She took two deep breaths and creaked open the door.

  ‘Zara?’ Little sister. Zara-Kiam. ‘Zara?’

  Princess Kiam sat in the bath, head and shoulders out of the water, her golden hair plastered to her skin. She turned and settled a languid gaze on Zafir. For a long time neither of them spoke, until Zafir took another step.

  ‘You’re alive,’ Zafir said.

  ‘Yes.’ Zara-Kiam nodded slowly. ‘And so are you, I see. More’s the pity.’

  Zafir took another step. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘Don’t pretend you care.’

  ‘Are. You. Hurt?’ Zafir’s foot twitched.

  ‘So you’re the Speaker again. Does that mean I can have my old rooms back?’

  ‘Zara—’

  Zara-Kiam turned to face her fully. ‘Because I really would like them back. Because it hasn’t been the most pleasant time while you were gone, what with the end of the world and dragons and so forth. I’ve been living with the bare few riders who survived your war and a gaggle of lecherous old men. Mind you, I suppose that was better than living with you.’

  However she armoured herself, Zara always pierced her. Zafir strode to the bath and almost grabbed her sister by the hair to haul her out of the water. ‘Did they touch you?’ Words through gritted teeth.

  Zara grabbed Zafir by the jaw. ‘If you mean did they rape me, then no, no one did that, although I did have a good few rough fucks for the sheer pleasure of it, that and the not having much else to do after you decided it wasn’t enough to wreck our home and went and did it everywhere. If anyone had “touched” me, as you put it, I’d have cut their dicks off and stuffed them down their own throats.’ Zara-Kiam let go. ‘No, big sister. I can look after myself, in case that’s a concern you still pretend to have. Would you like to go away now, or shall we cut each other raw some more?’

  ‘Can we ever find peace, you and I?’ Zafir backed towards the door. Two years and nothing had changed, not the slightest thing. She could have been away for a day. An hour.

  ‘Come back and ask me again when you can raise the dead.’

  Zafir left. She closed the door and put her back to it, sank to her knees and touched a hand to her eye, wiping it dry. She saw Tuuran then, lurking uncomfortably up the corridor, half watching and half pretending not to pay any attention. Zafir straightened herself.

  ‘Holiness, there are still men inside the—’

  She pushed past him, then stopped for a moment. ‘When you go back to the eyrie, you will take the riders sworn to Queen Jaslyn and return them their weapons and armour. You will bring them to the Octagon with their queen, and they will swear their fealty to their speaker.’

  ‘Holiness—’

  Zafir held up a finger, silencing him. ‘Don’t speak, Tuuran. Just don’t. And listen. Whatever else you do, never tell my sister it was your knife I took on that night when Speaker Hyram came to the Pinnacles. Never. If you do then she’ll kill you. Mostly because she knows it would hurt me to lose you.’

  ‘Holi—’

  ‘Stay here and finish your work. Come back when you’re ready.’

  She walked away, climbed onto Diamond Eye, and they leapt together into the sky. She barely noticed the rain now, already soaked through. They flew long, high, languid circles, up through the clouds into glorious sun and down again into drear and gloom. When she landed she hid away in her rooms, stripped off her wet clothes and curled up naked on the bed, wrapped under silk sheets, then stretched and tossed and turned and tried to think of useful things; but all she saw was that night, more than a decade ago, panicked, pressed against a wall by too much strength to resist, a hand up her dress, and then Tuuran’s voice beside them both. Leave her be, you fat prick.

  Her hand grabbing the knife from his belt. Stabbing and stabbing and stabbing. Murdering the man who called himself her father, though he wasn’t, not really. And, by the Great Flame, she’d had her reasons for it.

  ‘I did it for her as much as I did it for me.’

  ‘Did what, mistress?’ asked Myst. Zafir shook her head. Off in another room, one of the babies started to cry. Myst hurried away. Zafir stretched out and tried to swallow the memories and wrap them in darkness. As she reached a hand under her pillow, her fingers found a piece of cloth almost lost down the top of the bed. She pulled it out and looked at it. A strip of black silk, a blindfold. Once upon a time it had let her see through the eyes of an enchanted golden dragon, one of a pair that the Taiytakei had given to Jehal for his wedding to Lystra. Jehal hadn’t given the second dragon to his bride, he’d given it to his lover. To her. To Zafir, the dragon-queen.

  She put it on and stretched out her mind, searching in case it was still there.

  12

  The Black Moon

  Nine days after landfall

  From world to world the Black Moon pauses and wanders. Beside each gateway he finds, he reaches out, looking for that something lost, something missing; on and on until at last he steps across a silver haze into a room ringed by archways. There he pauses. A breeze blows, tinged with a tang of sharp smoke and with something else, a scent the Black Moon seeks, a thing familiar and yet unknown, like a well trodden story but a thousand years out of time. Trapped inside him, watching from a shrinking corner of his own mind, Berren the Crowntaker screams in silence. He is fighting for possession of himself against an irresistible enemy, mercy neither offered nor given, squashed into a tiny spark. The Black Moon owns him, flesh and blood, thought and bone.

  They are atop a tower. Four archways open to the world outside, a waiting balcony; and Berren knows, without knowing how, that they point to the north, the south, the east and west. The sky beyond is clear and dark, though it was brilliant daylight in the world they left only a moment before. The air is clear and the stars shine bright. A slender crescent moon hangs low on the horizon, tinged with a drop of red. It will be dawn soon.

  The Crowntaker feels a shiver, an anxiety deep and old. An ancient hostility that simmers between them, the half-god and the moon. The half-god turns his back, steps through the western arch, and there they stand, the half-god and the last light of Berren Crowntaker, at the peak of a slender white tower. There are other towers here, five in all, arranged in a circle. A city spreads beneath them, and a great river runs beside it, as wide as the magnificent waters of Deephaven, his home, or of Merizikat in the Dominion where the dead walked in dark catacombs until the enchantress Chay-Liang burned them to their end.

  The Black Moon sniffs the air. He smells the death-grip of war. Fire and steel, the reckless rage of the flaming sun, the merciless stiletto prick of the murderous fickle moon. He smells death; walking, shambling, marching forests of life extinguished and yet gripped tight. Ships swarm on the black-night water of the river. He can see their lights. Fires in the city scatter along two facing lines. Streets divided. Families. Brother against brother, daughter against mother. The sun and the moon, their pretty clothes stripped away, animosity naked and open, both sides weary to the bone, each aware of the futility of their cause and yet trapped, neither able to give an inch of ground. The Black Moon smells it all. He licks his lips and tastes the air and bares his teeth in vicious joy. The rest of the city is in darkness. Abandoned to whatever war has come.

  Divided they fal
l, Crowntaker, he says, and with that thought comes so much more. A sleeping parasite growing somewhere in the midst of this, rising from strength to strength. A path dark and secret, black-scaled cobras twisting in a sea of poison beneath unsuspecting skin.

  Sun or moon, it does not matter. Each as false as the other.

  The Black Moon chooses no side in this. He has no love for gods any more. He will bring an end to them all if he has his way.

  Flurries of bright orange sparks streak from the river. Taiytakei rockets, launched from one of the ships. They arch through the air and down, and bloom into plumes of flame. A distant roar, a thousand waiting voices calling to arms. Smoke rises. Shapes fast through the air. Men on sleds. The sun-flash of lightning as some new pointless battle begins. The Black Moon looks on, his eyes flaying into the city’s heart to the flash-sparks of iron and steel to taste the first scatter of life’s extinction, while behind those same eyes Berren Crowntaker turns away. He has seen all this before. At least this time there isn’t a dragon.

  A dart of dazzling flame flares and flashes across the sky. It crashes into the river. A ship bursts alight, stem to stern. The ball of fire bursts and leaps away. Flurries of lightning give chase. Berren touches a hand to the side of his face. The fire witch of Aria once burned off Tuuran’s ear, and she had looked the same as this, if there was a difference to be told between one ball of fire and another.

  Aria. With a jolt he realises that he knows this place. Further downriver lies the sprawl that birthed him. Deephaven. Upriver the throne from which the Ice Witch rules the world. Witches, kings, speakers, sea lords, arbiters, elemental men, the Crowntaker has seen them all, and what are they? No more or less than he: fleeting flesh and bone, come and gone in the blink of a half-god’s eye.

  The Black Moon walks back among the arches. One by one he touches them. They shimmer open, silver and inviting. Another touch and the silver ripples and spreads apart, opening like the iris of an eye.

  I see you.

  A voice in his head. The Black Moon starts, startled and aquiver like a night-time mouse who feels the owl’s all-seeking eye. He moves faster, searching, then freezes as one gate opens to another tower-top ring of arches and balconies, and standing in the ­centre like a spider in his web, staring back at the shimmer of silver through the light of the Black Moon’s eye and straight into Berren’s naked heart, is the warlock with the ruined face and the one blind milky eye.

  At last.

  ‘You!’ He takes a step and then freezes. The warlock with the ruined face and the one blind milky eye wags a warning finger and shakes his head.

  ‘You can’t come here, little broken half-god. She will have you if you do.’ The warlock titters to himself. His eyes dart about the floor. ‘Very bad for both of us, that. Our time is short, but I have a moment for you. I made it especially.’

  Berren howls at the top of his lungs, bursting through the Black Moon, a spear of incandescent fury. For a heartbeat his body is his own. ‘Tell me what you did to me!’

  The warlock’s head shifts from side to side like a bird’s, peering as though trying to look inside him. ‘Who have you got in there, broken little half-god? I know your face, but who is it inside? Skyrie? Is there still a bit of you left? You gave yourself to this, don’t you remember? You gave yourself to him.’ He giggles to himself. ‘Do you remember the lessons that little pet Vallas gave? How to hide yourself? Or is it you, Crowntaker? A little piece here, a little piece there. None that makes any sense. None that knows who or what they are. But now and then each piece feels an inexplicable compulsion they cannot help but follow. And then all the little pieces come together, and for a time they remember their task. And they act, oh yes they do, and then back to little pieces again before she can catch them.’ The warlock cocks his head. ‘Over and over and over. So many little pieces, and sometimes acci­dents happen and one of them doesn’t come back, and then it’s gone for ever and the rest must make do as best they can. Like an old old picture with the paint all cracked, and here and there little flakes have come away, and the flakes mean nothing but a drab flash of dirt and colour, but the picture … oh, the picture survives and keeps its meaning.’ For a moment the one-eyed warlock looks as forlorn as a scolded child. ‘I have to do it. It’s the only way to keep her out. The ice witch comes inside me whenever she wants, you see. She sees the holes. She thinks it’s you, half-god, who does this to me. She doesn’t know she’s got it all wrong, that I am the master and you are the pawns. She’s looking for you now. Poor crippled half-god. She understands her mistake and she will do anything to put it right. So hide, little cripple, before she finds you.’

  Berren steps closer, determined to snap the warlock’s throat, but now the Black Moon stirs and forces him down, drives him away, whips and lashes him into the tiny dark corner that is his own.

  Hide?

  ‘We made a hole in you, Crowntaker. Do you remember?’

  He remembers. How long ago now? Twenty-five years?

  ‘Little seeds, Crowntaker. You and I were but boys upon the shoulders of others.’

  He sees it as it was. The jerk of the knife, the blade pushing into his skin, his own hands pressing it deeper towards his heart. He screams, but there is no pain, only a pressure inside his head. Seeing himself as though looking in a mirror, but he isn’t seeing his skin; he is looking at what lies underneath, at his soul, an endless tangle of threads like a spider’s web wrapped within itself.

  ‘Tell the knife! Make it your promise: You will be unswervingly loyal to my desires. And then cut, Berren, cut! Three little slices. You! Obey! Me!’

  Saffran Kuy. The warlock of Deephaven. Berren the Crowntaker closes his eyes to the dim flood of old anguish.

  ‘I took something away from you, but I put something into Skyrie too. Do you remember Skyrie?’

  Berren sees again. The dusty memories he carries with him of a soul now extinguished. A man standing over him in robes the ­colour of moonlight. He blinks, bewildered. The man’s face, where it isn’t lost among the shadows of his cowl, is pale. One half is ­ruined, scarred ragged by disease or fire, with one blind eye, milky white. The warlock who stands before him through a gateway across the world. In Skyrie’s memories the warlock’s fingers trace symbols that split the air open like swollen flesh. Black shadow oozes from the gashes left behind.

  ‘Are you death?’ Skyrie asks, but the words never come out.

  ‘I carry the Black Moon.’ The stranger’s one good eye bores into him.

  And then himself again, more a man than a boy but not yet the Crowntaker.‘It fills the hole, you see.’ Words Gelisya once spoke. The dark queen, before that’s what she became. ‘Like the Black Moon and the Dead Goddess fill the hole in the world. He showed me. You have to keep it closed. Otherwise something will come through.’ Even with her lips almost touching his ear, her whisper is so quiet that he can barely hear her. ‘He’s making us ready. To let it in when the Ice Witch brings down the Black Moon.’

  She’d told him, warned him of what his fate might be. Now he chokes out words: ‘Was she your puppet too? Everything she did to me? You made her do that?’

  ‘We made a hole in you, Crowntaker. All ready to fill. And so we did, and now the Bloody Judge comes to wreak his havoc as ever we foresaw. But you …’ The warlock giggles, then winks his one good eye. ‘The Ice Witch doesn’t know how my little pieces all scurry about. Oh, she despises me, but not like she hates you, ­broken little half-god.’ His eye rolls. He bares his teeth and grins, then cocks his head and raises an exaggerated hand to his ear. ‘Hark, now! She comes for you. Run, my poor little mistake! Hide! We all have to hide before she catches us! You know what you have to get to face her down. Or perhaps the Bloody Judge will touch her first.’

  Mistake?

  Violent silver flares from the Black Moon’s eyes. A power as vast as the core of the earth billows up inside, and yet as
the Black Moon lunges the gate snaps closed, and when the Black Moon opens it once more it shows nothing but the empty black abyss of Xibaiya. The half-god roars and plunges his hands into white stone, tearing pieces away. The gates shimmer and open into an endless sea of bright liquid silver, then slam closed as the half-god reaches for them. A voice rings in his head once more, born of a different throat this time: I see you.

  Some brilliant luminance is searching ever closer. The Black Moon looks out over the city once more, at the ships ablaze on the river, the rockets arching in torrents through the air, the cracks of lightning sundering the darkness, the volleys of arrows, the shouts and screams of war, the writhing, walking, seething carpet of dead men crawling, racing, climbing, tearing, until they are burned still by darting balls of fire that punch through flesh like an arrow through paper. He climbs to the edge of the balcony and spreads out his hands and steps into the air.

  Time stops.

  Rockets hang. Flames pause their flickering. Whorls of smoke freeze still. The sounds of battle snipped dead, snuffed like an unwanted candle. The Black Moon moves as if stepping from one breath of wind to the next. He reaches the rooftops and walks across them, vaults to the street, runs, clambers over barricades, scales walls as the boy-thief Berren did long ago in his home of Deephaven. At the river he walks across the unmoving waves until he touches the first of the ships that wait there; and as he touches it, every part turns black to ash, wood and rope and nail and sail, glass and iron and flesh and bone. Only its shape remains, waiting for time to begin again and for the wind to burst its greasy sooty cloud. One ship to another, touching them, destroying them.