The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  Zafir eased her way on, one step at a time, trying to ignore the walls closing around her until she reached the bottom of the stair where it spread into an open space, a place where she could almost breathe without the air catching in her throat. The plinth where the spear once rested was empty. It didn’t surprise her. Neither speaker nor Adamantine Man would leave abandoned any weapon that killed dragons. She stared at it anyway, remembering.

  It was here, its pointed haft driven into the stone. The walls were lit by alchemical lamps. Their light glittered on its silver skin. Aruch told me to touch it. Aruch, the old dragon priest, last servant of the Great Flame. So I did because it offended Jeiros and I was annoyed with him. No other reason than that. She could see the moment, as clear as yesterday. Running the tip of a finger along the spear’s edge, wickedly sharp, watching as a few drops of her blood dribbled over bright silver and then shrank away and vanished as if drawn into the metal itself.

  The spear has tasted you, said Diamond Eye. It knows you. You belong to it.

  Aruch had said the same. The exact same words.

  There were more tunnels here leading into the Spur, but she wouldn’t walk them alone, and so she climbed out of the gloom back to the open sky and took great gulps of air, then returned with Diamond Eye to the eyrie lumbering slowly through the sky beneath the surly resentment of the Black Moon’s hatchlings and their chains. The half-god stood on the walls, staring ahead, eyes blazing silver. Half the Adamantine Men and all of Jaslyn’s riders were with him, watching and waiting. Even so, the eyrie felt empty, the sacks and crates they’d emptied from the warehouses of Merizikat now stored in the Moonlit Mountain, and most of the Merizikat sell-swords left to watch over them. To watch over her sister too.

  ‘The spear has been taken under the Spur,’ she told the half-god. ‘Bring the eyrie to the Adamantine Palace. We can enter through the tunnels there.’

  The Black Moon didn’t turn his head. For all she knew he hadn’t even heard, but she could hardly bear to stay, not on the walls among such a crowd, waiting for them to gasp as they saw what she already knew, the ruin she’d left behind. She abandoned Chay-Liang’s gold dragon with its ruby eyes to keep watch, and returned to the Spur, flying high to the cliffs over the old Zar Oratorium, to where the Diamond Cascade tipped its waters over the cliffs. Set back from the bank a little way down the river was a lodge, not much more than a single room squashed under an overhang and almost impossible to spot unless you already knew it was there. A secret place passed from one speaker to the next, one of several tucked among the silent crags of the Spur. It was untouched, exactly as she remembered it. The dragons hadn’t found it, or else they hadn’t thought it important enough to burn.

  Hyram brought me here before I became speaker. Afterwards I came with Prince Jehal. She watched the water rush by beneath her, then she walked along the little path that led to the great cliffs, to where the waters of the cascade pitched over the edge to vanish in rainbows and mist. She sat on her haunches right at the edge and looked down. I brought Sirion here. I don’t even know why I did that. Trying to make them fight over me, I think. She looked down at the ruin of the Adamantine Palace, of the Silver City, of what had once been nine glorious realms of dragon-kings and -queens.

  Regrets, little one?

  Plenty of those, dragon. But dragons didn’t understand regret. Or sorrow, or forgiveness, or mercy or spite or vengeance or love, or so many other things. And here is something new for you. This feeling. New for both of us. Shame, was it? She wasn’t sure she knew. But probably that. She’d returned to the dragon-realms to claim back her home, her throne, to take what was hers, but all that seemed hollow now. She wanted it undone, unwound, to try again, to somehow make it right.

  I miss him, you know. She walked back to the lodge and settled inside.

  Who?

  Jehal. Obscene after all they’d done to one another, and if he’d been alive then no doubt her fury would have bettered the rest of her and had his blood and his skin. Still, she did miss him, parts of him at least. Moments they’d shared.

  But the tears that stung her eyes weren’t for him; they were for the little girl she’d once been, coming to the Adamantine Palace on the back of a dragon, wrapped in her mother’s arms; and for a time she found herself lost in a sorrow she couldn’t explain or understand, and she was glad beyond reason when the eyrie finally drifted across the last miles of the plain and came to rest over the ruin of the palace below. By the time Diamond Eye spiralled down to join them, Tuuran and Halfteeth and the first dozen of his men were already on the ground.

  ‘To get to the spear this way we will need an alchemist,’ she said to Tuuran. ‘Bring Kataros but don’t let her be seen. Armour her up as one of your own. Do it yourself.’ She didn’t give him any chance to object, but brushed on past to look for the Black Moon. When she found him she looked him in the eye and stared into his moonlight pupils. No one else could look at him like that and hold his burning gaze, but she was a dragon-queen, raised from the moment she could walk to stare down monsters. She hunted for any sign of the Crowntaker inside him, for Tuuran’s friend Crazy Mad, and found nothing. Only the half-god Black Moon, end to end, inside and out.

  ‘You will bring out my brother’s spear, dragon-queen,’ he said. He didn’t mean it as a question, but Zafir chose to imagine that he had.

  ‘I will. And then?’

  The Black Moon smiled. ‘We make everything as it was meant to be.’

  ‘Which looks like what?’ She kept hold of his eye. The moon inside him flickered and flared.

  ‘The world healed,’ he said. ‘The Splintering undone. The gods cast down. Dragons at our side. Dominion, dragon-queen.’

  ‘Your dominion?’

  ‘Mine.’

  Zafir shrugged. ‘I suppose at least you’re honest.’

  ‘And you at my side with the Spear of the Earth and a thousand dragons at your beck and call. You will be beautiful and terrible, dragon-queen, desired and feared above all. Men will poison and murder and fall on their swords for a glance from you. Be gracious and merciful or terrible and dance on their bones. Be constant or capricious. All the worlds save one will be your playground, for I will not care.’

  ‘You know me well.’ Zafir smiled, though she didn’t believe a word of it, but the Black Moon didn’t smile back. He leaned into her. ‘Above the storm-dark, beside the Godspike, I saw into your soul. I know you, and I know what you are.’ He touched two fingers to her cheek, not a gesture of any kindness or affection but a threat, a reminder, a claim of ownership, a demand for sub­mission; instead of brushing them away, Zafir pinched his nose and squeezed and pushed him back.

  ‘You don’t own me. You earn me. Half-god or not.’

  The Black Moon snapped away. Furious light blazed from his face. His hand flew to the Starknife on his belt, but Zafir refused to look away. No fear. Not for a dragon-rider.

  ‘Can you bring back the dead for me?’ she asked. ‘There’s a lover I once had I’d see die slow and screaming over and over. Can you do that, half-god? Bring back the dead?’ Let him see the darkness. It was a part of her, after all.

  The Black Moon froze. His fury sparked about him and then ebbed as he laughed. ‘No, little one. None of us ever could do that. Now fetch my brother’s spear, dragon-queen.’

  She watched him stride to the cages dangling from the eyrie rim, moonlight pouring out of him, soldiers scattering from his path while the bones of the dead turned to black ash around him. There would come a time, she supposed, when he’d tire of her. But for now he needed her – not that she understood quite why – and she needed him, and that was all there was.

  ‘The alchemist you asked for,’ said Tuuran, and Zafir realised she’d been staring at the Black Moon all the way up to the rim, and Tuuran had come up beside her, and she hadn’t even noticed, and he had a fire in his eye too. ‘So we get the spear
now, yes? That’s why we’re here?’ He was restless as though he couldn’t wait.

  ‘Why doesn’t he cut me?’ Zafir asked, though she was asking it of herself and never mind the flash in Tuuran’s eye, the wild desperation he kept clenched inside, perhaps asking himself much the same. She put a hand on his arm, stilling him before he said something they’d both regret.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We get my spear.’

  ‘And then?’

  She laughed, although it was an empty sound. ‘And then, Tuuran? And then I really don’t know.’

  The Black Moon might have looked into her soul in Takei’Tarr, but there were things there now that hadn’t existed to be seen back then.

  26

  Avalanche

  The dragons gather among the deep peaks of the Worldspine. They circle and wheel, an impatient sky of talons and scales and waiting fire. They are young adults hatched after the Adamantine Palace fell in flames. They are hunters and great war-dragons. But all are here made small by the ice-crowned peaks of the Worldspine itself. Bleak and jagged, iron-hard sheer faces of black stone. Nothing lives so high, so cold, so far and remote. Under a deep clear sky of searing violent blue the dragons watch, hungry, snapping taut on a leash of anticipation. On the tallest peak the world offers her, a dragon of pure white perches motionless. The half-gods once called her Alimar Ishtan vei Atheriel, Beloved Memory of a Lover Distant and Lost. More elegant, they would say, than a thousand stars. The little ones had named her Snow. Because she was white.

  She watches now, eyes almost closed, quiet and serene as dragons roar and scream.

  The Black Moon has come.

  Maker.

  Creator.

  The Isul Aieha is fled.

  The Black Moon seeks the spear.

  The Black Moon is risen from the dead. The maker-creator who abandoned them to their fates now comes once more. So says the great dragon Diamond Eye, who in those thoughts he lets them see stands aloof from what must come. The Black Moon. Shatterer of worlds.

  Even a half-god can burn.

  We served him. We are his children.

  Over and again, in mantras and refrains like a familiar chorus. They are divided, while eyes and thoughts pry into the distant veiled mind of great Diamond Eye, watching and waiting; but the biding of time is not for dragons, and Snow has long made her choice.

  She stretches. She flares her wings and flies.

  Dragons do not serve.

  27

  The Silver King’s Spear

  Thirty-eight days after landfall

  No fear. Not for a dragon-rider. Not of anything. Of no man, no monster, not even a half-god, not of the sun crashing from the sky or the moon shattering to silver-glass splinters and raining into the sea. But of a dark place with walls pressed close and the air suffocating with old still dust?

  Tuuran and Halfteeth and six other Adamantine Men ­circled ahead of Zafir down the stair behind the altar of the Glass Cathedral. Kataros walked beside her, dressed in dragonscale and the old armour of some dead rider, hostility oozing from her every pore. A mistake, bringing this alchemist instead of Bellepheros, and Zafir already felt it. They reached the room with its empty plinth where the Earthspear had once been. Halfteeth at the front opened the iron-bound door deeper into the tunnels. They filed through.

  It knows you. You belong to it. Aruch’s words on the day he’d crowned her.

  The door closed, a dull metallic boom. Zafir shivered as Diamond Eye drifted in and out of her thoughts. He was gliding the updraughts that wrapped the cliffs of the Purple Spur. She envied him. She wanted the wind in her hair too, and the huge spaces of the sky around her; not to be wrapped in stone like this, guiding Tuuran’s men from memory through dim forking passages, smooth-worn and narrow.

  They reached a long hall, dark now but in her memory lit with dozens of alchemist lamps. The enchanted glass torches of the Adamantine Men danced harsh and sharp, light hard-edged enough to cut the eye. The jerking shadows unsettled her, their motion too erratic. The darkness and the walls picked at her corners and frayed her edges. She closed her eyes and thought of racing among the clouds, of howling winds on her face. A dragon-queen had no place for fear. A dragon-queen had no place for doubt.

  ‘I never much liked your grand master,’ she said to Kataros beside her. ‘He didn’t know as much as he thought he did.’ Talking made it easier.

  ‘You despised him,’ said Kataros. ‘Everyone knows it. And he despised you. Thoroughly and completely. Why did you bring me here?’

  Zafir faltered as her thoughts burst apart. She laughed, a shrillness creeping at her edges. ‘No wonder Hyrkallan locked you up.’ She pointed Tuuran to some steps, worn and sandy into a low-roofed maw of darkness, and let him lead the way down. ‘Jeiros told me these tunnels lead all the way to the Fury at the bottom of Gliding Dragon Gorge. Is that true?’

  ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘Bellepheros hides his disdain more ably than old Jeiros ever did. I might mistakenly trust him. I know I will not make that mistake with you. That’s why you’re here. Also because if I must lose an alchemist in these caves then you are the less precious, and because Bellepheros is fearfully old and his knees aren’t up to all these steps and Tuuran has better things to do than to carry him. For all these reasons, but most of all because I know, although he cannot say it, that the Black Moon has cut Bellepheros with his knife, and I wish to keep you hidden from our half-god.’ The walls pressed at her. The shadows ahead and behind simmered with unkind mystery. She bared her teeth and tried to force the tension out of her voice. ‘So. Is it true these tunnels reach all the way to the Fury?’

  ‘Why an alchemist at all?’ Hostility like a naked blade. Zafir welcomed it. It kept her mind sharp.

  ‘I asked you a question, Kataros.’

  ‘The Silver King’s Ways reach to the gorge, yes, but closer to the top than the bottom. Why an alchemist?’

  Zafir laughed. ‘You’ll have your answer when we get there.’

  Into the bowels of the earth with the darkness always creeping behind her. Hours of the same rough-walled passage, on and for ever. Zafir closed her eyes and summoned wind and space around her, below and above. Caves were for alchemists, not for dragon-riders. Not for her. But she’d lived for years with this foolish fear and learned the tricks to hold it at bay.

  ‘There was a river here once,’ she said, searching for a distraction. ‘Its course was changed to create parts of this passage. Jeiros told me that.’

  No reply. Fine. Be that way.

  The tunnel stopped at another iron-bound door. Tuuran pulled at it, but Zafir stopped him. ‘You won’t get in like that,’ she said and snapped her fingers. ‘Only an alchemist may open this door. Jeiros told me that too, and that, Kataros, is why you’re here. So open it.’

  ‘What if I refuse?’ asked Kataros.

  Blood-magic? Sealed doors? Jeiros had shown her more than he’d ever intended. ‘I only need your blood to open this door, Kataros. How much of it gets spilled is entirely up to you.’ Easy here in the dark with the earth wrapped so close around to find her old spite jumping out of its pit to grab her while she looked the other way. Zafir slammed the lid on it and stamped it back.

  ‘I will need a knife,’ said Kataros at last. Tuuran gave her a blade.

  ‘Is it bad in there?’ he asked.

  ‘I fought a duel with Lystra once,’ said Zafir. ‘I hated her so very much.’ She put a hand on Kataros’s shoulder; the alchemist flinched and lurched away as though she’d been stung. ‘I’m not here seeking bloodshed.’

  ‘Do you think any of them will believe you?’ asked Kataros.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Then why should I?’ Kataros sliced her palm and placed her hand on the door. It shuddered and groaned ajar. She returned Tuuran’s knife, turned her back and stepped away. Zafir pushe
d the door open and strode into the cave beyond. Darkness swallowed their lights, a yawning void as black as pitch. She had Tuuran leave one of their lamps behind, and together they crossed the cave, a black cathedral of nothingness over smooth pale sand. A whisper of rushing water touched the stillness, and the sound was her guide, rising to a roar as it led her towards a lonely scaffold of old wood and ancient knotted ropes that climbed out of the sand into the shadows and deep black stone of the cavern roof above. Tuuran sent Halfteeth to climb ahead, and then Zafir took his arm and led him to where water swirled a plunging storm from above, a thunder that spattered and sprayed off dark stone outcrops before diving on to some other chasm far below.

  ‘The Silver River flows right through the Spur,’ she shouted over the roar. ‘From the Great Cliff to the Mirror Lakes.’ Last time she’d come this way all they’d had were dim alchemical lamps, and she found herself absurdly grateful to Chay-Liang for their gold-glass torches, so much brighter.

  ‘Holiness!’ Tuuran had a strange look to him, intense and ­urgent. ‘Holiness, there is a way to cast the Black Moon out!’

  Zafir looked around. Kataros and the other Adamantine Men had stayed close to the scaffold. They were alone. She cocked her head.

  ‘A way to kill him!’ Tuuran was nodding, eager for her ear. ‘With the spear. He told me.’

  ‘Would sticking him with it do? It seems to have worked for the Silver King.’ The torrent of water was strong enough to shake the ground. The air tasted moist. Zafir pulled away and looked at Tuuran. Something was wrong with him. He was ripped up inside like he’d been for months, but there was a hope there again. He wasn’t talking about killing, he was talking about setting his friend free. What do you know?

  ‘No. Not that. A way to get him out. With the spear.’