by Stephen Deas
The Crowntaker drew out the Starknife. Zafir’s hand whipped at once to the edge of the bath and came back pointing her vambrace with its lightning thrower straight at his face. The rest of her didn’t move.
‘I will not be a slave even to a half-god,’ she hissed. ‘What do you want?’ Her hand was as steady as stone.
‘The dragon eggs you hid. He found them. He made them hatch, and then he cut them.’ The Crowntaker reversed the knife and offered her the haft. He was shaking. ‘Take it!’ he said. ‘Tuuran won’t do it. But you will. Take it and cut the bastard out of me. Or kill us both. I don’t care.’
Zafir put the lightning thrower aside. She took the knife he offered her. ‘I wouldn’t have the first idea what to do with this,’ she said. ‘And what you suggest strikes me as madness.’
‘You don’t need to know how. It can show you. I can show you. Three little cuts. You. Obey. Me. You rode inside him when he did it to your dragon. You saw it. I know you did, because I was there too, remember? Do the same to him! Do what he did to your Diamond Eye. Make him your slave, if you like!’ The Crowntaker grabbed her hand that held the knife and squeezed it tight. He pulled it towards him.
‘No.’
‘Do it!’ The Crowntaker threw back his head and howled. ‘For the love of the sun and the moon and everything else there is, cut him out of me!’
‘Myst! Onyx! Go outside!’ Zafir waved them away with her free hand. It surprised her how calm she sounded. The Crowntaker’s eyes snapped back to hers, mad and wild.
‘It can cut out anything. Change anything. Make me your slave if you must. Make him. Make him your slave and then make him go away! Make him leave! I don’t care! But you know how to do it!’
She did. ‘This knife can cut out anything at all?’ she asked. ‘Could it cut out a fear of the dark?’
He stared at her, a flood of desperation. ‘He’s waking up! He’s right here! You’ve got to do it now, right now!’ The Crowntaker’s voice shook. ‘Right beneath the surface!’ He looked about as if searching the bathhouse. ‘These islands. Do you know what they are?’
‘I think I do,’ murmured Zafir. ‘They were creatures once.’
The Crowntaker nodded. ‘Drifting ancient bone corpses so vast and long dead they’ve become like this. He made them, dragon-queen. A thousand years ago he just snapped his fingers and made them. Look at them! When he wakes, he’ll make more. And that’s just the start. When he wakes, everybody dies!’
Zafir didn’t resist as the Crowntaker pulled with vicious strength at her hand. He fell into the bath on top of her. The knife buried itself inside him, and Zafir saw a second ghostly shape at his side, and within that shape a web of silver strands woven together in impossible detail, and within that something infinitely more vast, a weaving as intricate and complex as the whole of history, exactly as she’d seen when the Black Moon had stabbed the Starknife into Diamond Eye.
Exactly like seeing a dragon.
He was right. She remembered. She knew what to do. Three little cuts that even the sun-child within me knows. You. Obey …
Time stopped. A force like the falling of the moon crashed into her.
No.
She saw the Black Moon, and the Black Moon saw her back, the half-god as he truly was, a relentless hostility that set every nerve and cell to flames. Zafir screamed and arched. A blaze of silver light scoured her eyes. The Black Moon bared his teeth and pressed her down into the water. Hard fingers gripped her face. His thoughts burst into her head, vast and overwhelming like a woken dragon, brutal and careless. He crushed all thought and memory and everything she was into a tiny crumpled ball.
Who are you, little one? What insignificant speck do you aspire to be? She felt him rummage through every part of her, every memory, and as he did she remembered the hatchling dragon Silence who had once done the same on its way to murder her, and how she had crept around the edges of it and looked back the other way, and she remembered the trick of how she had done that; and so as his relentless glare unravelled her, Zafir slipped inside the thoughts of the Black Moon himself, a thief in a half-god’s memories. She saw the murderous threat of the Adamantine Spear, which held him back, which had once drunk her blood when Aruch and Grand Master Jeiros had made her speaker of the nine realms and taken her to see it. Wrapped around it she saw a battlefield strewn with corpses, men, horses, broken spears, monstrous things, dragons dead and burning from the inside, dark-winged birds with beaks like swords fallen from the sky, impaled in the earth where their dead wings fluttered limp like dwarfish banners. Mountains floated in the sky, eyries, a score of them, shattered towers of black stone, half grown, half formed, slumped limp and smashed down. She saw the second moon, dark shadow teeth chasing the sun and drawing ever closer, and most of all she saw the Isul Aieha, the Black Moon’s brother, the Earthspear in his outstretched hand, racing towards her with killing intent, the desolation of murder all about, and then the great betrayal as the Isul Aieha struck her down, as the land shuddered and shifted and was rent apart, as impossible curtains of black cloud and violent lightning spread up to the sky with no end. She saw the Nothing open to devour everything, her final vengeful strike against wilful brutal gods. Tumbling towers of white stone and rivers of ash, lakes of fire, the earth torn open, the sky split apart.
And mingled among these memories was the future he demanded, her as his vassal, her lethal spear kept safely aside. Dragons sweeping realm after realm, bending all to his will, tearing the moon out of the sky and the ghost of the dead goddess from Xibaiya, burning them into the hole in the underworld, banishing the Nothing, the That-Which-Came-Before, bending the unconquered sun to his will and casting moonshadow over everything, all realms brought back as one, storm-dark vanquished, a god-emperor to every end of creation.
Amid the hurricane she glimpsed the Crowntaker, fighting, clawing at the Black Moon, exhausted but never quite gone, even now holding the fractured half-god back. She reached for him. I am here. I see you. She saw another face too, one the Crowntaker claimed as his own but one she had never seen in the flesh. She saw the half-god as he truly was, split in half, one splinter cast into ice and freed and now the storm inside her head, the other splinter still missing, sought yet feared, vessel for a power a magnitude greater yet than he already possessed.
The Black Moon. She felt herself shrivel into nothing before him, and then a new rage poured into her like the flood through a breaking dam. Fury and hunger, an incandescence as Diamond Eye threw himself down before the Black Moon and shrieked the challenge of a dragon; and it seemed to Zafir in that moment that the two of them were somehow equal and the same.
You dare, dragon?
I dare.
The half-god gazed into her deepest heart. Take me to it, spear-carrier. Wield it at my side and we shall cross worlds. We shall be titans, you and I, and all will be ours. You will be a goddess, adored, feared and worshipped.
She was back in Baros Tsen’s bath. The Black Moon washed out of her like an ebbing tide. The Crowntaker lay on top of her in the water, his weight forcing her under. His eyes burned silver bright like twin suns. He pulled himself away and left her there, too weak to move, too weak to even watch him go. A half-god.
‘Make yourself ready, spear-carrier,’ he said as he went.
Zafir sank back under the water. She didn’t have the strength to stop herself, save to arch her neck to keep her mouth and nose in the air until Myst and Onyx slunk to her side. They dragged her out and carried her to lie staring at the ceiling above her, waiting to be able to move again, looking for elusive sleep and finding only nightmares in silver light. And the next day, when she had strength back enough to move, she went to Tuuran and told him that his friend was gone and would not be coming back, and had the men and women of the village stop their work and make a wooden cage for Diamond Eye to carry, sturdy and strong; and when it was done she took the cage across the
sea and found the little boats from the ship she’d destroyed, the Taiytakei parched and dying of thirst and sun; and she gave them water and carried them back with her to the island, those that would go, so they might live and be a handful fewer deaths on a barely born conscience that she knew would soon bear too many ever to count.
She didn’t see the Black Moon stab them, one by one, to make them his slaves. She didn’t see him take her stolen charts from the water where she’d left them in Tsen’s bath, nor did she see him barter with time to conjure back the words and lines she’d washed away, nor read them and circle a name in thick black ink; but she did see him summon the hatchlings, and that they were eight and not three, and that he had found the eggs Diamond Eye had hidden just as he had said; and she saw how he bound them to the eyrie to drag it through the air, and she was beside him when he walked into the island village and told everyone to ready themselves to leave, whether they wished it or not, and saw how every last man and woman wept and wailed and cried out and raged and gazed at the Black Moon with unbridled hate but nonetheless obeyed.
They will all turn on you, she thought. Every single one of them. Beneath your yoke they will live their lives to tear you down.
And I?
She didn’t know. The Black Moon had set her free, and his promise was limitless.
21
The Apple Orchard
Four months before landfall
Baros Tsen – first t’varr to Sea Lord Quai’Shu no longer – lay back in the grass with his hands behind his head, chewing on a piece of straw. He savoured the afternoon sun on his face and the warm late-summer breeze on his skin. He took a deep breath and rolled the scents of the orchard around his mouth. He might have lost his nose, but he could still taste and smell the air if he took the trouble to try. Dry grass and meadow flowers and a slight tang of salty surf wafting in off the sea. And apples. The first ones were ripe on the trees. They’d start to fall soon, and so in a couple of days he’d be down in Dahat hiring men to come and harvest them, and then the interesting work started, the alchemy of brewing and distillation; but until the harvest started he didn’t have much to do except lie in the sun and stare at the bright blue sky between the leaves and snooze, and think how glad he was to be home. Kalaiya lay beside him, holding his hand, her breathing so rhythmic that he knew she was asleep. He could have chosen this life for himself twenty years ago; more and more he wondered why he hadn’t.
Because twenty years ago you were an idiot who thought he was something special, too good for this sort of idleness. Remember?
He did. After he and Vey Rin had left Cashax. The last of their crazy gang of self-obsessed narcissists to finally go their separate ways, all set on changing the world, on grabbing it in both hands and making it their own and shaping it into whatever they desired. And without, he realised now, much idea of what that actually was. He’d gone to Xican. Not the greatest of the fourteen cities by any stretch, but he’d sensed the opportunity waiting there and he’d been right.
T’Varr to a sea lord. Shaping the world with shipping manifests and a firm grasp of logistics. He snorted quietly to himself and closed his eyes, listening to the birds. He wasn’t quite sure what had changed and how, but he wasn’t that man any more.
You found Kalaiya.
There was that.
You also don’t have a nose.
There was that too, although it didn’t bother him much these days. He’d never imagined himself anything special to look at.
And, in the end, Shonda and Vey Rin were the ones who got there. Who rose to the very top. Sea lords of Vespinarr, one after the next, the richest city in the seven worlds. Look at you all. Shonda dead and branded as a slave by a dragon-rider. Rin, who can never sleep thanks to his nightmares of dragons. And me. A corpse hung from the ankle in Khalishtor for the murder of thousands. How triumphant we must seem.
Yes, he liked his orchard.
Something in the rustling of the wind changed. An animal moving through the grass, he thought at first. Then it came again. He sat up, but it was only the house-servant Demarko, a sly old fox with a sneaky past and fingers in every pie in Dahat, who mostly liked his simple quiet pleasures, and that, Tsen thought, made them at least a little alike. Demarko didn’t talk much. He didn’t seem to do very much either except sit about and doze, but he knew every single person in Dahat on first-name terms. When Tsen wanted something, Demarko knew someone, and so, effortlessly, it was done, and Demarko would be back to sitting in his chair on the porch and sunning himself. Tsen rather liked him for that.
‘Master Baros.’ Demarko thrust a rolled-up sheaf of papers at him as though raising his guard in some slightly off school of fencing – the Dahat whispers were that he had been a fighter once, quite a famous one too, but if that was so then he’d hung up his sword two decades back and had settled for doing nothing very much. Tsen rather liked him for that too.
‘Papers to sign?’ There always seemed to be papers to sign. The Dominion was embracing the Taiytakei attitude to bureaucracy with the same religious fervour as it embraced everything else.
Demarko shook his head. ‘Courier from Brons. The usual.’
Tsen took the sheaf and nodded, and Demarko ambled off without a word. News from Takei’Tarr, and for a moment Tsen thought about unrolling the messages and reading them out here in the sun, but really what was the point? What did it matter? Whatever it was could certainly wait until the evening and another bottle of apple wine.
Kalaiya stirred beside him. ‘What was that?’
‘Demarko. The monthly from Brons. Nothing that can’t wait.’ He put the papers beside him and lay back, squeezed her hand and closed his eyes. Time went by and the news never changed much except to make him ever more pleased to have left the rest of the world behind.
‘All your spies?’ Kalaiya shook her head.
‘I can’t pretend that Vey Rin doesn’t know I’m still alive.’ Mostly he tried not to think about it.
‘You know there’s a ship coming in a few days? Bringing an exalted solar of the holy sun. Recruiting soldiers to the Sun King’s armies for this war that comes.’ Kalaiya yawned and stretched, and then shifted to rest her head against his belly. He had a good belly, they both agreed. Soft and plump as a pillow.
‘The young men of Dahat strike me as far too sensible to pay any attention to such claptrap.’ Demarko must have told her. Kalaiya talked to him more than Tsen did.
She wriggled her head, trying to make herself more comfortable. She braided her hair these days, like a proper Taiytakei lady. With the braids came long sleeves to hide the slave brands. ‘You know how men are.’
‘I’m not sure that I do.’ Of course he did. Fired by promises of glory and riches and an eternal basking place in the warmth and fire of the holy sun if they died. They’d probably line up in droves. Youth always did, didn’t it? Too naive and stupid to realise they were being sold shit on a stick as though it was gold. Pity really. ‘I was a t’varr, my love, not a kwen. I don’t know very much about tricking men into dying for no good reason. As best I could tell, whenever one of my kwens wanted an army, they simply armed a huge mob of slaves and set them loose. And then murdered them all when they were done.’ Being a kwen had never struck him as terribly difficult.
Kalaiya delicately elbowed him in the ribs. ‘A t’varr who spent a little more time thinking and a little less snoozing might wonder a little at what a sudden diminishing in the supply of local young men might do to his apple harvest.’
Tsen let out a little sigh. She had a point. ‘I’ll take Demarko into Dahat tomorrow then. Before the ship comes. Bring it forward a day.’ He turned his head and squinted at the apples hanging from the trees around him. They were ready.
‘Someone who wished to enhance his standing among the local craftsmen might think about whether there are any particular sons or favoured nephews, or apprentices perhap
s, that he might wish to hire and then keep gainfully busy until such time as the exalt of the holy sun moves on.’
Tsen snorted. ‘We’re hiding, remember?’ Lying in the sun like this, chewing grass and with nothing to do, his eyelids were getting heavy. He chuckled. He knew her too well. ‘You already have a list, do you?’
‘A list?’
‘Of the men you’d like me to save.’ He lowered his voice and waggled his fingers in exaggerated mockery. ‘From the villainous exalt who would carry them away to war!’
Kalaiya rolled off him. She settled on her front, propped herself up on her elbows and poked him. ‘If I had a list, Baros Tsen, it would be of old men I didn’t wish to see lose their last son and of young women I don’t wish to see become widows. A list you might easily imagine for yourself.’
Tsen made a show of thinking hard, then stretched and nodded. Moving the harvest forward a day would be good for not thinking about other things. Might stop him wondering what was going on back in Takei’Tarr and what they were doing to press the Sun King into a war that the Dominion could very much do without. And yes, kicking off some great war or other every couple of generations was the sea lords’ way of keeping the Sun King and his absurdly vast population in check; and yes, the Ice Witch was scaring the shit out of everyone, and so was her necropolis, but sooner or later the immortal Sun King was going to notice what his ‘friends’ were really up to. He’d ally with the sorcerers of Aria – who, as far as Tsen could see just wanted to be left alone – and that, as Vey Rin used to say back in Cashax, would become the overfilled chamber pot that just didn’t stop giving.