by Stephen Deas
‘The eyrie’s falling! It’s all going to the storm-dark now!’ She forced him down beside her, kicked off and raced the sled ever faster, weaving around the curves and loops of the tunnels. They were glowing a brilliant silver now, almost like daylight. She held Belli tight. ‘Dragons, hatchlings, eggs – everything, all of it.’ Up the spiral to the surface. ‘Everything it touches, it destroys.’ Past the rooms where Tsen’s t’varrs and kwens once lived. Still did, for all she knew. ‘We have to get off before it’s too late.’ Past the rooms where his favoured slaves once slept. ‘We have to fly …’
She reached the last twist and shot into the dragon yard. Heedless of her will, the sled stopped. The madman with silver eyes stood there, arms stretched wide, head pitched up, moonlight blazing out of him. The red-gold dragon Diamond Eye lay curled up on its side behind him, still and almost dead. Two hatchlings flanked him, watching like sentinels. A handful of men and women lingered nearby: a few Taiytakei soldiers, a dozen slaves from across the worlds, maybe a few more, the last survivors. They stood entranced. Enraptured. Liang tried to make the sled move again, but it wouldn’t.
Belli climbed off. He walked to join the others. Liang barely noticed. The sky above and beyond the eyrie was a black churning cloud. Purple lightning flashed. They were too late. She was too late. They were inside the storm, and she knew what happened next.
The wind stopped.
The darkness turned absolute.
Silence.
She counted, as Red Lin Feyn had told her to. Five hundred heartbeats, give or take. The madman with the silver eyes reached up. He reached out at the same time, as though there were two of him – no, three, no, six – all in the same place, all reaching in different ways, an infinite mirror upon mirror of reflections, of possibility grasping into the Nothing that had become their sky, their sea, their land.
I am the Black Moon, he said in her head, in all their heads, and I am your creator. Take me home.
Five hundred heartbeats and then a handful more, and then the darkness changed. A flood of pinprick stars lit across the sky. Familiar constellations: the dragon, the spear, the water carrier. And unfamiliar ones too, stars she’d never seen. She grabbed Belli and pulled him back to her sled and shot into the air, and never mind where the mad half-god had brought them. The Black Moon, whatever he called himself, had pulled them through the storm-dark of the Godspike to another world, an impossible thing, she’d thought, but no matter. Whatever world it was, she would know it, for the Taiytakei had travelled to them all; and wherever they were, she and Belli were getting away, as far and fast as they possibly—
They crossed the rim of the eyrie. Far below rolled a featureless endless dim-glowing sea of silver, on as far as she could see. Liang’s breath caught in her throat. She staggered. Belli let out a quiet wail, shuddered and then fainted, curled up in a ball around her feet, clinging to her as though to let go was death. They were so high that Liang could see the curve of the horizon every way she looked. Dozens of miles up? Hundreds? From here the Silver Sea looked polished smooth, featureless. Gaugeless.
A roar built inside her head. A space so vast she couldn’t breathe. She opened her mouth and forced her lungs to stretch. One, two, three and in. One, two, three and out. She’d never been high enough to see the world curve this way, never even close. The scale of everything dizzied her: the emptiness, the size of the Silver Sea stretched out for ever, the sky as clear as glass and black as ink, the horizon infinite and sharp enough to cut, everything else a bewildering conclave of stars set in stark, stark night.
One, two, three and in. One, two, three and out. The air was buttery rich, thick as though they were on the ground in the desert of Takei’Tarr. The eyrie dropped beneath them. It was gently falling, feather-like. There was no wind. Liang found herself losing all sense of motion and scale.
Belli let out another wail. Liang looked about for anywhere they could go, but there was nothing. No hills, no rivers, no mountains. The Silver Sea stretched endless, and she didn’t know what else to do but to go back to the eyrie. She landed the sled again on the rocky rim outside the walls, hoping not to be seen, thinking to creep into the tunnels and find a place to hide until she understood where the Black Moon had brought them, but the madman with the burning silver eyes saw at once, and came to her. Belli rolled off the sled and spread himself across the stone. The Black Moon pulled him gently to his feet, and then stabbed Liang with his gold-handled knife carved with a thousand eyes. A short moment of shock, that was all, and the knife was to its hilt in her chest.
Three little cuts, he said in her head. You. Obey. Me.
She fell to the white stone and noticed now that it was dull. The Black Moon plundered her memories and took them to be his own. He commanded, and his will would be done. His dragon-queen and her dragon: enchantress and alchemist would revive them. By word he made it so, and so Liang held Belli’s arm and led him to Diamond Eye; and though she screamed and howled the Black Moon had cut her with his knife, and no choice was offered.
Bellepheros crouched beside Zafir. Her eyes were open.
‘Grand Master …’ Frothy blood dribbled from her mouth. Bellepheros ignored her. He took a tiny razor from his sleeve, made a neat incision in the fleshy part of his hand and dripped a few drops of blood onto Zafir’s tongue. He closed his eyes.
‘Broken bones,’ he said after a moment. ‘Several. Punctured lung. Bleeding inside and out.’ He shook his head. ‘The bleeding I can stop, but she’s past my help. There’s too much damage. Nothing much in there works any more. She had a strong heart, and so she’ll last a while yet before she goes. She’s in a lot of pain.’ He glanced up as if looking for the Black Moon. ‘It would be kinder to make a quick end of it.’
He seemed truly sad. Liang stared into nothing, too shocked for any thoughts except the compulsion to obey and the desperation to shake it off, all-consuming like an animal paw-caught in a trap. It strangled her.
Bellepheros stroked a finger across Zafir’s cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Holiness, but I cannot mend this.’ He went to the dragon. ‘At least she died fighting. That’s what they all want, dragon-riders. Let her lie here with Diamond Eye.’
No.
The eyrie fell on towards the Silver Sea. The Black Moon showed them his will. Slaved, helpless as trapped flies in amber, Bellepheros and Liang lifted Zafir onto the gold-glass sled that Liang had made for their escape. Together they carried her to the heart of the eyrie, to Baros Tsen’s frozen bath. The air was cold, and the ring of arches still blazed silver. They laid Zafir out and took the near-frozen corpses of the morgue and dumped them in the nearest room, and then Liang lifted the enchantment that kept the bathhouse freezing cold and trapped it in a piece of glass, while Bellepheros drained the bath onto the floor to leave them slopping in a few inches of water.
‘What … are …’ They lifted Zafir into the bath. She tried to fight them, but there was no strength to her any more. Almost gone, death sombre at her shoulder.
The eyrie plunged onward.
Back on the rim Liang made a new sled. It was easy here – wherever here was – to weave her enchantments, easier than anywhere she’d ever been, as easy as breathing. She flew down, streaking towards the sea, while Bellepheros returned to the dragon. Unlike his rider, Diamond Eye would live. The dragon was strong.
My dragons always were.
Liang flew until the eyrie was a speck against the night sky above, quickly lost as it wafted downward. The sea was as smooth as glass, silver as a mirror. As the Black Moon had commanded, she took enough silver water to fill Tsen’s bath to the brim. Then she paused. The Black Moon had told her what she must do, but had said nothing about what she must not, and so she lay down on her sled and touched the sea. The mirror-flat surface stretched out for ever in every direction. The stars above were more and brighter than she’d ever seen, the eyrie so far away that she’d long lost sight of
it. The silence was absolute. She was as alone as it was possible to be.
She pushed her fingers into the silver. There were no ripples – it simply seemed to swallow her. She pressed her hand in deeper until the silver was up to her wrist. When she drew back, her hand jumped out as though fired from a spring. A single circular ripple bloomed, sluggish and fat and quickly dying away. Not water, this sea, but quicksilver. That most precious thing and twice as heavy as lead, but the sled didn’t seem troubled by its weight.
She rode back to the eyrie, through the fractal spirals of the tunnels to the bathhouse, and emptied the precious quicksilver into Baros Tsen’s bath as the Black Moon commanded. The Adamantine Man Tuuran now waited there too, cradling Zafir’s body with the delicate care of a lover. The rider-slave’s eyes were closed, and Liang couldn’t tell if Zafir was still alive. When the bath was full, Tuuran laid her on its surface. She barely sank at all.
The Black Moon watched. ‘Push her under,’ he said. Tuuran shook his head. ‘Push her under,’ said the Black Moon again and put a gentle hand on Tuuran’s shoulder. ‘It’s going to save her, big man. You have to trust this.’
The pain on Tuuran’s face was as clear as the sky. He nodded and pushed Zafir’s head down, trying to force her into the quicksilver, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t strong enough. So they turned her over, him and the Black Moon together, face down, and drowned her, killing, it seemed, what little spark was left. Zafir kept breathing right to the end. Thin shallow breaths. She shook a little and then was still.
‘We’ve killed her.’ Tuuran looked at his hands in horror, then at the Black Moon. ‘Crazy Mad? If that’s you? Tell me we haven’t killed her!’
‘You haven’t killed her, big man,’ said the madman. He let Tuuran turn Zafir back to lie with her face up, and then the Black Moon ushered them all away. And Liang, more than anything, was left to wonder why, why not let her die?
Time drifted around Chay-Liang in the months and moments that followed, seeming to pass her by, seconds and hours and even entire days falling wilfully between the interstices of the moments she remembered. She wandered in a daze or else sat in her room, staring at nothing. When she went to the walls the Silver Sea lapped at the eyrie rim. She didn’t remember landing – it happened so softly that no one seemed to notice. The great dragon Diamond Eye perched silent and unmoving, one surviving hatchling to either side. A sadness poured out of the three dragons, a longing so deep and profound that Liang had to turn away; and even then it followed her. She caught herself weeping now and then for no reason she could find. She wasn’t alone. It seemed that a doom weighed on them all, the few survivors, a crushing weight of mourning for something lost that they’d never even known they had.
Later it struck her as strange that the eyrie didn’t float in the air the way it had in Takei’Tarr, but rested in the quicksilver sea. Later still it struck her as even stranger that she never once remembered eating or drinking, or feeling hungry or thirsty. And all the while the sea called to her. Her dreams filled with it, and with the moon, giant and full, silver in the sky, beckoning. Awake she stood on the eyrie walls for hours, staring at nothing. Sometimes the Black Moon stood too, unblinking, with silver light pouring from his eyes, the same light as the sea. He felt it as the dragons did, an unbearable hurt at his very core; he tried to hide it but he might as well have tried to hide the sea itself. She had a sense of him building his strength, readying to leave, but also that this was somehow a place where he belonged, against which he had turned his back long ago.
She took a sled. No one had said that she couldn’t. She flew away without knowing why, except that something called her, on and on, barely aware of the passage of time until she came upon a city built of the white stone of the eyrie and the Godspike and the Azahl Pillar of Vespinarr, and other places too. Gleaming spires rose above the sea, thin and tall and impossible, with webs of silver strands between them. She stopped and snipped a piece of glass from her sled and made a farscope, shaped it with implausible ease, moulding it sharper and more perfectly bright than any she’d ever made, and with it, among the towers, she saw the silver-clad men who walked upon the surface of the sea itself. They looked back, wafting a warm and gentle curiosity at her intrusion. Their questions roamed about her in an instant, playful enough to make her smile. They toyed with who she was and where she had been and how she had come here, harmless and kind. She felt them spread around and through her, winged sprites of imagination full of joy and seeking answers, skimming the mirror sea, flitting ever-wider patterns, looking for her source.
She had no idea who they were. It barely occurred to her to wonder.
Her thoughts rode back among them, drawn out of herself with no desire to resist. She led them gambolling back to the eyrie, happy to have found them, sure they would ease the sadness that infused the Black Moon’s palace. They darted and danced to the eyrie rim and climbed its walls, and sang with joy as they found the great dragon and tried to welcome him home, but in that moment the Black Moon turned his baleful eye and set his gaze upon them, and burned them into shrivelled screams and sent them howling away. They scattered and were gone. They took their joy and delight and left Liang alone and hollow on her sled. She called after them, and tried to give chase, but they didn’t come back.
Then, from the quicksilver sea, came a dark moan of wakening, and a shiver as a different mind fixed itself upon her, as colossal as the light of the moon itself, hostile and terrible and bleak as winter stone. Liang fled, racing to the eyrie as a thousand eyes of burning silver set after her, each a gleaming gaze of murderous animosity. The sea shuddered and swirled; a whirlpool sank beneath her and grew until it was a hole as vast as the sun, as depthless as night. Liang wept and howled her fear and clung to her sled until she crashed into the dragon yard and fell, but she felt no pain from it. She ran to the tunnels and ran for Bellepheros to hide inside him as deep as she could; and as she did, she felt the eyrie lurch and twist and sink, and the Black Moon howl with depthless rage and furious despair.
She clung to Belli and he seemed to speak: ‘What is it, Li, what’s happening?’ His words carried every edge of her terror as the Silver Sea swallowed the eyrie whole and spat them out and cast them all into darkness. The eyrie shook and shivered and shuddered, and then as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped, and Liang found her mind clear and sharp again. She stumbled and shook away the cobwebs and climbed the fractal spirals of the eyrie into bright sunlight. The sky over the dragon yard was blue, a mackerel of cloud far overhead, thin and pale, not stars and darkness. The Black Moon hunched curled up into a ball in the middle of the yard, rocking back and forth. The dragon Diamond Eye perched on the rim with the hatchlings beside it, both as she remembered, unmoved, their eyes tuned to a dark curtain of cloud that reached into the sky as far as Liang could see, cutting this new world in two. Dim dull flickers of muted violet lightning flashed and pulsed within it.
A storm-dark line. Liang blinked. The memories of the Silver Sea were clear and sharp and yet somehow unreal. She couldn’t quite be sure that it hadn’t been a dream. The eyrie was aloft again, drifting through the air a hundred feet above some ocean, and what little wind there was nudged them slowly away from the curtain cloud of the storm. The dragons stared, eyes fixed, blind to all else, and Liang felt their yearning, a sweeping sense of loss and want.
It was real, then, the Silver Sea?
The dragons didn’t answer. The handfuls of slaves and soldiers who stood on the walls gazed into the storm-dark too. They stood apart from the dragons, carefully distant, suffused with fear and dread and loss. Liang found Belli among them. She slipped beside him and took his hand and squeezed it tight. The ocean below was an ordinary sea this time, of water with its familiar colour of hammered steel and its stippled skin of waves, patient and restless.
‘I had the strangest dream, Belli,’ she said, and then shivered because it had felt so real, and yet how could tha
t be?
‘No dream, Li,’ he said.
The glittering sea stretched to the horizon like the taut skin of the world. No one seemed to know what to do except to look at the storm-dark as it left them behind. No one spoke. It had them mesmerised.
‘I saw the Silver Sea,’ Liang said.
‘So did I.’ Bellepheros squeezed her hand.
‘What was it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There were people.’
‘They were not people, Li, not like us.’
‘I felt a yearning to stay. The dragons too.’ Liang shuddered. ‘Did not you feel their sadness?’
‘I felt my own.’ Belli turned to face her. ‘I have the Silver King in my blood, Li. Just a touch, but the longing was … unbearable. It felt like it had … as though I had come home.’ He blinked a few times. ‘I don’t know where we were, Li, but I know what we saw. We saw the Silver Kings. As they once were.’
‘They would have let us stay with them,’ she said. ‘All of us. I felt their joy. Delight. But the Black Moon spurned them, and so they sent us away.’
‘Is that what happened?’
‘In my memories, yes.’
Bellepheros looked away. ‘What I saw was different. When they came there was no joy. When they came, they scorned me and cast me aside.’ He shifted and let go her hand.
17
Truce
The glasships were high overhead, far higher than they’d been before, receding into specks. The eyrie was falling. The lightning had stopped. Maybe they were out of range. Zafir reached Diamond Eye’s head. She’d have to climb on top of him to finish him, to drive the knife through his skull and send him to the little death before the oblivion of the storm-dark annihilated them all. She wasn’t sure she could. She threw off her helmet and wiped her eyes, brushing away the pain, then reached for the ruins of his harness to pull herself onto his shoulder, took hold of a rope and howled in agony and frustration when her arms didn’t have the strength. She fell back. Another dull wave of pain washed over her. She could feel herself failing.