by Stephen Deas
‘We live as best we can in the caves now,’ she said. ‘We’re dying. Slowly and steadily.’
He’d probably heard it all from Big Vish already, and from the other Adamantine Men from the Spur weeks ago, but it did her some good to have someone listen. When she was done he started to tell her about his time with the Taiytakei, bits and pieces, making light of it as though skirting around something huge and terrible. She finished her potion while he talked, and then they shared the last of his cheese, and she went back to her room and fell asleep again and slept through the night, and when she went back the next morning, fresh at last, a dragon-rider woman stood with Bellepheros in his workshop, fierce and hostile in scales and glass and gold, with the monster Tuuran beside her. Kataros blanched as she saw the woman’s face, tense as a drum. If she’d had a knife, she would have pulled it. She hissed, half of her ready to run, the other half to fight.
‘I’ve seen you before,’ she spat. ‘You were asking about the Black Mausoleum. You were going to have me killed. Speaker …’ We don’t need this one … I’ll get rid of her …With the Black Moon, only his eyes hadn’t been silver then and he’d looked like just a man.
‘Zafir.’ The woman nodded. ‘Queen of the Silver City and speaker of the nine realms. Or so I was until –’ she made a wide gesture with her arms ‘– all of this happened.’
Zafir? The last speaker? Under the Spur everyone spat at her name. She was a curse. A demon who was supposed to be dead. Kataros shuddered and hissed again. She could feel Jasaan right on the edge beside her, and the monster Tuuran felt it too. They were eyeing one other, ready if they had to be. Zafir cocked her head.
‘And you say I was going to have you killed? A precious alchemist? I don’t think so. Why on earth would I? But yes, I do remember you. Do you recall the man who was with me then? The one with the knife?’
Kataros nodded. I saw him again at the Black Mausoleum of the Silver King. After I saw the Isul Aieha abandon us. He is another half-god. He is the Black Moon. She almost blurted it out there and then, all of it, but no, not to this harridan, this murderess, this poisoner, the ruiner of everything, the speaker who had let the realms crumble and burn.
‘He is the Black Moon,’ said Zafir, and Kataros jerked, startled by words that seemed plucked out of her own thoughts. Speaker Zafir spoke with a flash of hunger in her eyes. ‘Do you know what that means, alchemist? It means that inside him he carries a half-god, a brother to the Isul Aieha.’ She looked at Kataros hard, unnervingly, as though she really was trying to peer inside Kataros’s thoughts. ‘I wasn’t going to have you killed when we met before. I was going to have you put somewhere safe before he cut you with the knife he carries and made you into a slave.’
Kataros stared. Dragon-kings, dragon-queens, they held no power any more, not for her. But Speaker Zafir … she couldn’t imagine anyone more reviled by the alchemists under the Spur. ‘You did this,’ she said, too tired to hold her tongue. ‘All of this. The end of our world. The dragons set free. You were the speaker. You were supposed to stop it, and what did you do?’
Bellepheros leaned between them. ‘We have a great deal to tell you, alchemist Kataros, and whatever else you might think, her Holiness is right about the Black Moon and his knife. We need to keep you away from him. He’ll cut you if he finds you, and I’m afraid that means you need to keep away from me too. Tuuran, Zafir, your Jasaan – you can trust them. There are a handful of others.’ He sighed. ‘And the rest … I’m afraid you will not find the rest easy to believe.’
Kataros took a deep breath and listened as the monster Tuuran told the story of Berren the Crowntaker and the Black Moon, and when he was finished Kataros told her own of the Silver King and the Black Mausoleum, and watched their disbelief mirror her own. Zafir swept away when they were done, and Tuuran followed, and Kataros and Bellepheros were left alone. They looked at one another in silence and then both looked away, each perhaps as bewildered as the other as to what to say.
‘The eyrie leaves tomorrow,’ said Bellepheros at last. ‘For the Adamantine Palace and the Purple Spur. Her Holiness will claim the Speaker’s Spear.’ He looked at Kataros for a long time without saying another word. Then: ‘Was it all true, what you told them?’
‘All of it, Grand Master.’ Kataros frowned. ‘Should I have not …?’
‘No.’ Bellepheros took a deep breath, turned away and paced his tiny workshop and then sat down again. ‘No, it’s for the best. But her Holiness will likely take you with her to the Spur, and the Black Moon will come too, and you must stay hidden from him if you can. He mustn’t know you’re there. Do you have dragon’s blood?’
She shook her head.
‘Blast! Then you cannot hide your thoughts from his dragons. They will know you, and they will tell him what you are.’ He closed his eyes and slumped.
‘I have potion already made for that. A little still left.’
Bellepheros brightened. ‘How much?’
‘A few days, but there is more under the Spur. Plenty of it. As much as you could want.’
He came to crouch beside her and clutched her hand. ‘The dragons read my thoughts. I am not to be trusted. But the Black Moon is not the Silver King, he is not the Isul Aieha, he is not our saviour, and he must be stopped, and if our speaker stands beside him then she must somehow be dissuaded or subdued. I will need your help and the help of every other alchemist still alive. I need you to take that message to Jeiros in the Spur. Above and beyond all else, no matter what happens, he must hear those words from someone he will trust.’ He patted her shoulder. ‘But for now I need your help on the eyrie. There’s a dead dragon burned to ash and cooled enough that we can harvest its bones and scales. Her Holiness requires new armour, and while we do it we can find you a place to hide.’
He reached into a drawer and pulled out a little pouch. As he did, Kataros caught his arm.
‘Grand Master! The Silver King left with a warning. I didn’t tell the others what he said. “Make right what I could not.” So I will help you stop him, no matter what. I think that must be what our Isul Aieha meant.’
They looked at one another in silence for a moment. Then Bellepheros nodded and handed her the pouch. Inside were some dried berries as hard as seeds.
‘From a part of a world that even the Taiytakei have never seen,’ he said, and grinned. ‘Tuuran calls them shitberries, but I find them quite tasty. These are the last I have. Tell me what you think of them.’
25
The Adamantine Palace
Thirty-eight days after landfall
The eyrie drifted north over the plains around the Silver City, towed by the seven hatchling dragons the Black Moon had cut with his knife. Zafir rode Diamond Eye in long lazy circles overhead, keeping watch. The dragon’s eyes were sharper than hers, but his mind was sharper still.
She flew to Hammerford to see for herself whether the alchemist Kataros’s claim was true. The town was a burned husk, overrun with grass and weeds and thorns. The fires were long out and the smoke was gone, but the air, when she landed among the ruins, smelled of charred wood and ash. The petrified dragons were exactly as Kataros had described them. One rearing on its back legs, tail coiled over its head and around its neck, the tip in a circle as though it was holding something and had brought it closer to have a look at what it was. The other lay at the edge of the river, wings outstretched. Its tail slanted up, while its head and neck disappeared into the water, toppled forward. A few remnants of shattered boats bobbed against it. All that was left of the waterfront was wreckage, long scavenged.
Dragons turned to stone. Preposterous. Absurd. But there it was. The work of the Adamantine Spear. Her spear.
Eyes do not lie, little one.
She dismounted and stood beside the stone dragons while Diamond Eye looked on. Beyond belief, except here they were, right in front of her, close enough to touch. Fifty feet high
and a hundred feet long, the detail exquisite and perfect. She’d never seen anything like it. The one reared on its back legs even had a surprised look. No craftsman had made these. Not even the best artist of the Taiytakei could have come close. Easier to believe they were conjured by magic, but Kataros claimed to have seen it with her own eyes.
Diamond Eye believed. In the end that was what mattered, and so Zafir would believe it too. She turned away, mounted again and flew, racing north until the last of the rainclouds broke into white cotton tufts. She overtook the eyrie and reached Gliding Dragon Gorge; high on Diamond Eye’s back she stared down at the Fury river as they flew over it, a tiny winding ribbon of silver. On the ground it seemed enormous as it carved its mile-deep scar out of the Worldspine and halfway across the realms. From so high it seemed diminished. Dragons had a way of making everything small.
The massif of the Purple Spur loomed ahead. She began to see distant specks in the sky: other dragons, the first time she’d seen any since she reached the Pinnacles. They were miles away, flying high, distant but watchful. She felt their murmurings in Diamond Eye’s thoughts. Half-heard conversations as he spoke with them, too garbled to make into any sense. They were wary. Watching to see what would happen.
What do they want?
The Black Moon comes for the Silver King’s spear, Diamond Eye told her. They know this. They wait to see his purpose. They remember.
What do they remember?
That a half-god came once before and betrayed us. That the Black Moon is not the Isul Aieha. That he once made us as we are, but that he is no longer whole. She felt then a hesitation. That the Earthspear is the Isul Aieha’s ancient weapon charged with the power of the dead goddess. Again a hesitation. A change will come, spear-carrier, for better or for worse. They watch to see what that change will be. They wonder what he will do. What you will do.
What I will do? Zafir laughed. If only I knew.
What you will do, little one, when the spear is in your hands again. It carries a power greater than any other, if you have the wit to use it. Greater than the Black Moon at the zenith of his might, and what walks among us now is but an echo of a memory of that. The Black Moon believes it bound to you. We wonder how this can be so.
We? That was telling, wasn’t it? It drank my blood. The Speaker’s Spear. It seemed impossible to believe. It was a strange old spear, that was true, sharp as the sun on glacier ice, metal through and through, with four long blades that ran almost half its length, and it had always struck her more as a lance than a spear. In all the years the speakers had carried it, it had never been more than unusually sharp. Legend said that the first speaker, Narammed, had slain a dragon with it, but that had been hundreds of years ago, and no one believed in those myths any more, not even the alchemists.
She’d sat on the Adamantine Throne and held it.
She flew on, trusting Diamond Eye to warn her if the watching dragons broke their vigil and skewered in to attack. She could see the Adamantine Palace and the City of Dragons, what was left of it, spread out beside the sun-bright glitter of the Mirror Lakes. The bulk of the Purple Spur rose behind them, sheer mountains almost vertical. Here and there cascades of water tumbled over the edge, flashing sparks and glitter as they caught the sun before their waters dissolved into mist and were carried off by the breeze.
Home. Here was home. More than anywhere. Zafir lifted her visor, then took off her helm and tucked it down beside her, let the wind pull at her hair and blow tears into her eyes, savouring what it was to be alive. The sky was a deep devouring blue, the sun bright and warm, the wind cold and fresh. From this height the rolling fields below, overgrown now with thorns and weeds, shone in vivid greens and yellows. Blotches of darker woodland lay scattered among them. The Hungry Mountain Plains stretched beyond to the north, too far away and lost in the haze. When she looked back over her shoulder, the ribboned scar of Gliding Dragon Gorge ran as far as she could see to east and west. Flying could be so peaceful. It was always so different to see the world from the sky.
I’ll never forget the first time my mother brought me here. The sky a brilliant blue, the sun burning and bright, the far-below ground dark and lush. Distant mountains, and then blossoming beside them as she approached something a-glitter like a jewel, the greatest jewel she would ever see, the Adamantine Palace gleaming in the sun, the lakes sparkling around it, the mountains of the Purple Spur at its back. A sight burned into her mind like dragon’s breath.
Jehal had said much the same once. They might even have been his words.
The memory of him shook her back to where she was. She brought Diamond Eye down in a shallow glide towards the palace. Its towers were toppled and broken, the mighty walls standing but scabbed and scarred and battered, bites smashed out of them. They were littered with the twisted remnants of scorpions. In the Gateyard and the Speaker’s Yard were the dragon statues, great monsters rearing up in frozen poses of war, snarl-faced hatchlings, some of them broken, their wings spread wide, their tail tips snapped off. The square bulk of the Speaker’s Tower was still there, one corner sheared away in ruin below. The elegant spire of the Tower of Air was gone. The other towers, the Azure Tower, the Towers of Dawn and Dusk, the Humble Tower, all were shattered stumps. The Glass Cathedral alone had survived, a misshapen lump of stone in the centre of the Speaker’s Yard.
The eyrie was far behind now. Diamond Eye circled and then landed. His wings threw up a flurry of dust and ash. The smell almost made her retch. A few weeds had found purchase in the cracks between the flagstones, and the ground was littered with skeletons stripped to the bone, still in their armour. Burned. Bits of them – hundreds, perhaps a thousand. Scattered everywhere. The last stand of her legions of Adamantine Men. Zafir dismounted and walked among the dead, looking at them, trying to imagine how it had been. Kataros claimed to have been here and seen a little of it. A handful of men – hard as it was to believe – had survived this cataclysm of fire. They’d actually driven the dragons off the first time they came, but not the second.
She climbed the palace walls and picked her way through twisted metal, through the remains of skeletons still clinging to scorpions, burned so hard by dragon-fire that metal and bone had fused together. She looked out over the ruin of the City of Dragons. Jehal’s crushed bones lay out there, and somewhere here in the Speaker’s Yard beneath her feet was the corpse of Vale Tassan, the Night Watchman she’d left behind. He’d despised them both, and he’d been right, and yet he’d done his duty nonetheless. He’d walked into the abyss, eyes wide open, knowing he must surely die.
This is what we swore to stop. It hit her hard, and she had to force herself not to look away. This is why the speakers exist. These were my people, whom I swore to protect. She’d seen Hammerford now. And her own Silver City and Furymouth and Farakkan. All gone. She shivered. The speaker she’d once been would never have thought such things. There would be blame, yes, and plenty of it, and vengeance for all those who had wronged her. But guilt? A sense, somehow, of being accountable? Never.
But I didn’t do this. Dragons did this. The Taiytakei did this. Valmeyan. Was Shezira any better? Was Jehal? Could any of us have stopped it?
She turned away, climbed down from the wall and walked to the remains of the Tower of Air. She sat on one of its tumbled stones and wrapped the piece of black silk across her eyes, the silk from her old bed in the Pinnacles, trying to find the enchanted golden dragon with the ruby eyes that Jehal had given her so they might watch each other while they were apart. It had been fun for a time, although she knew now that the Taiytakei had been watching them too, that the golden dragons had been ensorcelled by Quai’Shu’s enchantress Chay-Liang, and had served a greater and darker purpose that neither she nor Jehal had understood until it was far too late.
Quai’Shu was long gone, and Chay-Liang too, but the golden dragon the enchantress had made was still here. Zafir found it eventually, and Diamond
Eye prised it free for her, pulling fallen stones aside with ease as though they were made of foam. One of the golden dragon’s wings was bent and it couldn’t fly, but its eyes still worked and it could hop and hobble along. She played with it a while, pushing everything else aside until she grew bored, and then picked her way through the bones and the thousand corpses to the entrance of the Glass Cathedral. What she’d come for, if it was still here. The spear.
The doors had been smashed down, splintered and rent by dragon claws. The innards were old-scoured by fire. The benches were ash, the metal sconces empty, the alchemical lamps gone. The stone altar was misshapen and glassy as though burned until molten. An old compulsion had her walk up and touch it. It felt cold.
I stood here, she told Diamond Eye. Or told herself, perhaps – she had no idea whether the great dragon listened to her now-and-then wistful memories. Aruch slipped the Speaker’s Ring onto my finger. He placed the Earthspear in my hand and named me Queen Zafir, speaker of the nine realms. I drifted through it as though it was a dream.
Dragons do not dream, little one.
So he was listening. I made myself look at them. I made them see me. For a moment they all truly saw who I was. Just for an instant. She walked around the altar of the Great Flame to the spiral stairs that burrowed into the ground beneath and descended, shuddering as darkness wrapped around her, as the confined space of the stair pressed in, a heavy gloom that even an enchanted glass lamp couldn’t shiver away. The tunnels go deep here, dragon. They riddle the earth beneath us. They were old, far older than the rest of the palace. No one knew who had built the Glass Cathedral or why, its stone burned glassy smooth long before the Silver King had come. Do you remember it, dragon? Does it live in your times before the Silver King?
It was a refuge for a few half-gods who lingered, crippled ghosts like the moon sorcerers you once saw. They did not belong. The world was no longer theirs after what they had done, and they are gone now.