by Stephen Deas
I can’t, she said. And she couldn’t. Just couldn’t.
You were worthy to ride me, little one.
She wept. Nothing anyone had ever said meant so much.
‘Hush.’ A shadow moved over her. The Crowntaker stood, eyes burning silver.
‘Why didn’t you …?’ She let out a long breath. What was the point? ‘You could have been my Vishmir.’ She lifted the bladeless knife to him. ‘Finish us. Both of us.’ The glasships above were little more than specks now, glints catching the sun.
The Crowntaker, the Silver King, whatever he was, crouched beside her. ‘I’ll not be your Vishmir,’ he said; ‘I’ll be your Isul Aieha.’ And she might have laughed if they weren’t all about to die. A darkness swelled around the eyrie. The storm-dark was coming.
He reached and touched her brow, and the gold-glass circlet Red Lin Feyn had cast around her to remind her she was a slave dissolved into ash. ‘Be free,’ he said.
The storm-dark swallowed them.
She sank into darkness.
Zafir stepped into the sunlight of the dragon yard, slow and wary and a little bewildered. She looked about. Men milled on the wall in little clusters. They stared and pointed at the curtain of darkness that towered across the sky. Some seemed in raptures, some suicidal with despair, others simply bewildered. The eyrie yard was empty except for the Black Moon, crouched curled in the middle of it, rocking back and forth. Diamond Eye perched on the rim, staring. The storm-dark. There was nothing else it could be.
Zafir frowned. The sight of it should have rocked her, perhaps, a colossal darkness spread out across the sky as far and high as she could see. But it didn’t. She felt numb. She’d been dying. She had died, hadn’t she? The Crowntaker, the Silver King, whatever he was, had crouched beside her. She remembered his words. The alchemist had come too, Bellepheros. The storm-dark had been about to devour them. Then suddenly she was in Baros Tsen’s bath, coughing and spluttering. The bath was bone dry, and whatever hurt she’d suffered, it was gone.
She down looked at herself. Dressed in her armour, the same mangled glass and gold she’d flown in to battle by the Godspike of Takei’Tarr. She had no idea what had happened since.
Where are we? She quickened her stride and marched to the wall where the dragons perched, to Diamond Eye on the rim. She sat beside him and hunched against his talons, her head leaning against his scales, both of them settling to watch the receding storm-dark. His presence was a reassurance. He was warm. What happened?
The Black Moon took us home. Diamond Eye’s thoughts were odd. They had an unfamiliar shade she’d never tasted. Bitterness and a regret embraced his usual distant hostility. Home, he said again. To the Silver Sea where the half-gods went when the war came. We felt it as strongly as a mountain, but the Black Moon would not let us go, and then they cast us out.
They? But all she saw in the dragon’s eye was an endless Silver Sea. It made no sense, and came from Diamond Eye with a searing pain, a tearing wrench of anguish and loss. She withdrew and looked over the rim’s edge instead. Another endless sea, but water this time, not quicksilver. She shivered. The storm-dark towered over them. The size of it made her cold. It went on for ever. Up and to each side. Endless.
What happened to me?
You were on the cusp of life and death. The Silver Sea brought you back.
And then?
The dragon seemed to shrug as if he didn’t much care. The Silver Sea cast the Black Moon out, and us with him. It threw us into the storm-dark. He brought us here.
And where is here? she asked again.
Diamond Eye didn’t know. This world? It is unfamiliar, little one. The taste of the air is different. It is new to me.
Zafir looked at the wall of cloud. Can you go back?
No. Another blaze of regret. Wherever they’d been, the dragons hadn’t wanted to leave.
Can you pass beneath it? Around it?
We have not tried.
Tuuran was heading across the dragon yard. Last she’d seen, a small war had been going on and there were corpses littered absolutely everywhere, a good few of them ripped to pieces. The place had been awash with blood. Now the yard was empty.
How long were we there – wherever we went?
Time has little meaning on the Silver Sea. Months or hours or somewhere in between. Does it matter, little one? He has taken us away. That is all there is.
Where they were, how they were here, how long they were gone, the dragons didn’t care. Zafir looked for the cages she remembered by the walls, and the broken scaffold, but they were all gone. She was thirsty. Hungry. Ravenous, now she stopped to think about it.
‘Holiness.’
Tuuran. The hatchlings eyed him as though he was food. Tuuran glared back. Food that bites, said his eyes. The dragons quietly laughed.
‘Holiness, you’re alive. Are you …’ He looked confused. ‘You were hurt. It was bad. Crazy had you taken to Tsen’s bath and—’
‘I am well enough now, Tuuran.’ She cut him off. He could tell her the story of how she’d ended up in Baros Tsen’s bath some other time, how she was alive and not dead. ‘Where has the Black Moon brought us?’
‘No one knows, Holiness. I don’t think he knows either.’ Tuuran frowned hard. He looked out at the storm-dark, at the sea and the sky. ‘Holiness, what do we do?’
She couldn’t stop looking at the dragon yard. How empty it was. ‘Last I saw there were corpses everywhere. There were cages. There was a man in one of them.’
‘No one survived, Holiness.’ Tuuran laughed bitterly. ‘I didn’t see what happened, but the night-skins killed everyone they could, and the dragons had much the same thought. We fell through the storm-dark. Crazy took us … somewhere.’
‘The Silver Sea.’
‘Yes.’ He frowned at her as if wondering how she could possibly know. ‘He … he got rid of it all. It all just vanished one day.’
‘The cages?’
Tuuran shook his head. ‘There was no one left, Holiness.’
So he was gone then. Shrin Chrias Kwen. The man who’d killed Brightstar. The man who’d told his soldiers to rape her, to remind her that she was a slave. Pity. She’d been looking forward to watching him die slowly of the plague she’d given him.
‘Holiness,’ asked Tuuran again, ‘what do we do now?’
‘You could start by bringing me something to drink. I’m parched.’
‘Yes.’ He shuffled his feet. ‘Thing about that, Holiness, as there really isn’t all that much left. I think we—’
‘Tuuran, if you glower any harder at my dragons, your face is going to rupture.’ He was her Night Watchman now. She remembered that.
‘Holiness, I’m just a soldier. Or sometimes a sailor, but it makes no odds. I don’t know much about anything. I don’t understand where we are or where we were, or how we got to wherever we went or how we left again. Truth is, I don’t remember much about it. It was a strange place. Real, but at the same time like it was only a dream; but if that’s what it was then we were all very hungry in our dreams, for the stores are almost empty.’
‘It was real, Tuuran.’ The dragons had no doubts, even if Tuuran couldn’t be sure. ‘Do you mean to say we have no water?’
‘We have little of anything, Holiness. We don’t know where we are. We don’t know what to do, or what any of it means. Holiness, we need you. We need someone to lead us.’
‘I died, Tuuran. For an instant, I actually died.’
‘I pushed your face into the silver water and watched you drown.’
Too much. Zafir took a deep breath and stood up. ‘Is Bellepheros still with us?’
Tuuran nodded.
‘And his witch mistress?’
‘Chay-Liang?’ Tuuran nodded again. Zafir looked into the dragon yard, at the Black Moon huddled in the middle of it. She re
membered moonlight blazing from his eyes, but that was gone now.
‘Who is he, Tuuran?’
‘He was my friend once. Berren Crowntaker he called himself. Other names too. Now …’ Tuuran’s face soured. He shook his head. ‘Now he’s something else. The Isul Aieha, perhaps.’
He didn’t sound convinced. Zafir shook her head. ‘No, he’s not that. But he set me free, and he saved my life, and he took us to wherever it was we were, and then he brought us here.’
They stared together a while longer, each as mystified as the other, and then, since the Black Moon wasn’t moving or doing anything much except rocking back and forth, she sent Tuuran to get the witch and her alchemist, and made sure to have them wait a moment before she joined them in the yard.
What do we do? A fine question. She glanced at the three dragons, not that she expected any sort of answer. Not that they cared much one way or another. Where are we and where do we go, and what happens next? Isn’t it a queen’s duty to have an answer? Hard questions, too, but easier than the ones that vied to take their place. What happened to me? Did I really die? What does he want?
The dragons didn’t know and they didn’t care. All she saw was the desire in them, singular, deep and bright. Wherever they’d been while she lay in Baros Tsen’s bath, they wanted to go back.
And I? What am I to want?
She didn’t know the answer to that any more than the dragons did; and now Tuuran had the witch and Bellepheros with him in the dragon yard, waiting. Zafir climbed down the steps to join them. Something practical to take her thoughts away from fog-laced far horizons. The here and now. She dealt better with that.
‘If you think you—’ Chay-Liang began, but Zafir cut her off.
‘Where are we?’ She looked at them, from one to another: Tuuran, Bellepheros, Chay-Liang. None of them had the first idea. All three looked like sleepers woken too abruptly from deep dreams, still fumbling for their senses. Underneath her façade she felt the same. She shook her head, trying to shake some sense into the world. ‘Bellepheros, you have a library of sorts. Find out. Tuuran tells me we have almost no food or water. We are adrift, and the sorcerer who brought us here –’ she glanced again at the Black Moon ‘– now appears unable to help us. So whatever happened to us, put it aside unless you plan to die of thirst and starvation. I suggest you find out where we are, and then tell me which way I should have Diamond Eye tow us to find land.’ She raised an eyebrow. Delicious, seeing her grand master alchemist and his enchantress mistress lost for words. ‘Tuuran, I don’t care if it’s the last cup of water we have, it’s mine and I want it.’ She smiled a broad tooth-bared beam calculated to climb as far up the witch’s nose as it could possibly go, and went back to her dragons. Space and time alone to think. She didn’t know how she was supposed to feel about any of this. Confused, mostly. She was supposed to be dead. The Black Moon had saved her.
She looked at her arm, at the little patch of rough skin on the inside of her elbow where the Hatchling Disease had started to take hold. It was still there, still dormant, still held in abeyance by Bellepheros and his potions. But not gone. He hadn’t saved her from everything then.
Tuuran came back to her a few minutes later and tossed a skin full of water into her lap. ‘There’s a couple of barrels and not many of us left.’ He glanced at the sky. ‘We’ll last a day or two yet. Perhaps our ancestors will favour us with some rain?’
‘Rain?’ Zafir snorted. The deserts of Takei’Tarr hadn’t seen much of that. She looked up anyway, but the clouds were wrong. No rain to save them, not here.
The eyrie drifted on, easing further from the dark curtain of the maelstrom, carried blind and helpless by a soft and gentle wind. Are there thoughts out there? she asked Diamond Eye. Do you sense any others, far away? Land? A town? A city? A ship?
Nothing.
Anything we can eat?
The sea teems with life.
There were cages and cranes around the eyrie rim. No one had used them since Baros Tsen had dragged them out into the depths of the desert and over the top of the storm-dark. Maybe they’d all been smashed while the Taiytakei lords wrestled for the eyrie, but maybe not. She sent Tuuran to have a look. ‘Perhaps someone here knows how to fish?’ She drank half the water in the skin and took the rest with her up onto Diamond Eye’s back and launched into the sky, soared with him for hours, veering one way and then another, sweeping the sea ahead of the eyrie, looking for land but to no avail. By the time she returned the curtain of the storm-dark had become a distant darkness, riven with its muted violet flashes. She swept Diamond Eye in a single circuit of the eyrie and then flew him underneath, hugging the black stone underbelly and its veins of dull purple light. The storm-dark and the eyrie. The same light, the same lightning. It meant something, but she had no idea what.
She landed on the rim, close to where Tuuran and some of the others were rebuilding one of the cranes, then crossed the dragon yard and went into the tunnels to the little room where her handmaidens lived. Myst and Onyx stripped her and scrubbed her skin with sand and pumice. They massaged her with Xizic oils looted from Baros Tsen’s little room beside his bathhouse. They didn’t say much, just looked at her in wonder and awe and perhaps a touch of fear, and when she asked them what had happened, all she heard was the same: the Black Moon had taken them to a Silver Sea, and it had been the most beautiful thing imaginable, and then he’d taken them away again.
For the first time in more days than she could remember, Zafir slept in a bed instead of out on the eyrie walls. Myst and Onyx curled up beside her. She kept touching her head where the Arbiter’s circlet had bound her, but it was gone. Gone for ever. The Black Moon had done that.
In the morning she summoned everyone to the dragon yard. The sun shone bright and steady. The blue unchanging sky was cloudless, the air warm, a soft and gentle breeze brushing at her hair. She ran a hand through it and realised it had grown. Last she remembered, fighting for her life against the Taiytakei and their lightning, it had been close-cropped, sheared in the manner of a slave. It was longer now. Close to a finger’s length. Quite some time had passed then while she had lain in Baros Tsen’s bath. Months?
Did I really die? she wondered, but that was just stupid.
The Black Moon was where he’d crouched the day before, curled up on his side now and fast asleep. She told Tuuran to take him away somewhere quiet. The other survivors, when she had them arrayed in front of her, were a motley collection, a handful of Taiytakei soldiers who might once have served any of half a dozen different sea lords, and a couple of dozen slaves, kitchen slaves and house slaves, old men for the most part, although there were a few younger ones who hadn’t died taking up arms. But she had what she had, and would make the best of it, and so she split them into bands. The largest she put with Tuuran to build winches and pulleys to lower men to the sea, to fish and draw buckets of water. The witch Chay-Liang claimed to have a notion how she and Bellepheros might separate out the salt and make water they could all drink; and there were still plenty of pieces of gold-glass out on the rim, enough to make sleds for everyone, enough to shape buckets that wouldn’t leak and perhaps parts that Tuuran would need for his winches. Zafir charged Myst and Onyx with searching the eyrie from top to bottom and drawing up an inventory, and then some other men to make lines and hooks and lures for fishing. She tried to persuade the hatchlings to hunt, but they simply refused. She couldn’t bring herself to ask Diamond Eye to do anything so menial.
‘What of the eggs, Holiness?’ asked Bellepheros when she’d divided up the work. ‘Shall we have no Scales for when they hatch?’
‘There are still eggs?’
Bellepheros led her to the tunnel beside what had once been the hatchery. Inside a room deep within the spiral tunnels were six dragon eggs.
‘I don’t know how they came to be here,’ Bellepheros said. ‘I don’t recall moving them. But we have no
Scales if they hatch.’
‘Do you have potion with which to dull them if they do?’ Zafir asked. The questions were pointless. Diamond Eye and the two hatchlings were already awake. They barely tolerated her as it was, and even then only because the Black Moon had told them that they must. They would not stand for another dragon muted by alchemy.
‘I do.’
‘Then throw it over the side. These dragons will hatch free. Those already here will not permit otherwise.’
Bellepheros nodded. ‘May I have Tuuran, then, to see to these eggs?’
He meant for Tuuran to take his axe to them and murder the hatchlings in their shells while they waited to be born. Zafir shook her head. ‘You may not. Nor may you tip them over the side. If they hatch, Grand Master Alchemist, then they hatch. Diamond Eye will see to them if our Silver King does not.’
Bellepheros’s face, screwed up already, pinched a little tighter. ‘He is not our Silver King, Holiness. Not our Isul Aieha. Far from it.’ He stamped away, back to seethe a little in his laboratory before turning his mind to separating salt from sea. Zafir watched him go. Not our Isul Aieha. He was right about that. But he is a Silver King. And he set me free.
She meant to take to the sky again to resume her search for land, but in the end she stayed with Myst and Onyx and rummaged through the eyrie. In the afternoon she went to Chay-Liang’s workshop with Myst tagging behind like an eager duckling, Zafir’s old armour piled in her arms. The enchantress was making buckets and gold-glass fish hooks. She glared as Zafir waited at her door. The loathing was still there. Hard to tell if it was the same as it used to be.