by Stephen Deas
What makes you think I want to get him out? But that would crush him.
Shouts came from the scaffold. A wooden platform rattled slow and creaking down through the middle of it. Zafir tugged Tuuran away and climbed on as it reached the ground. She had the wind in her hair and the noise of the water, and stray damp specks of spray on her skin and Tuuran beside her.
‘We’re at the back of the caves behind the Diamond Cascade,’ she said. ‘The Zar Oratorium isn’t far from here.’ She said it as much to herself as to Tuuran. ‘I made a promise, Night Watchman. Lystra, if we find her, is to live. Make sure your men know.’ She touched his hand. ‘Tell me about the spear once we have it. Tell me then.’
Halfteeth was at the top, and he wasted no time laying into Tuuran about how much he’d enjoyed climbing a slime-covered rickety old scaffold in the pitch dark. Zafir pushed on past, leading the way down a rough-hewn passage, driven by urgent expectation while Diamond Eye rode inside her, watching and listening, looking for thoughts around her, for anyone close. Little Lystra. You could swing an axe, I’ll give you that. Her ankle twinged at the memory. She’d been in such a towering fury …
They passed a bronze door. Behind it was a dragon trapped in chains, or there had been when she’d come this way before. She walked on. First things first.
A jab of warning from Diamond Eye. Zafir closed her eyes and looked at what he saw. ‘Two men ahead of us,’ she said and stroked her lightning throwers dim, in part for stealth, in part for mercy. She hid her torch and walked with Tuuran at her side, guided by the spill of light ahead, creeping until she turned the corner and there they were: two guardsmen. Adamantine Men. They saw her and gawped in surprise and alarm. Hands flew to axe hafts as they began to bark a challenge.
‘Sta—’
Pocket thunder rippled the walls. Twin claps of lightning rattled her ears and left them ringing. Zafir pushed on fast as the two guardsmen arched and fell and clawed out silent screams. ‘Make sure they don’t get up again!’
Tuuran ripped a glance at Halfteeth. ‘But no throat cutting!’
Diamond Eye was already flitting through the minds around her, a greedy ghost stealing flashes of thought and sense. He saw a shaft, a platform starting to rise, a man pulling ropes to lift himself up. Fire to be poured down … Zafir sprinted around the next corner, crashed into a stone wall, torchlight flashing madly back and forth, yelling at Tuuran to move, fast. The shaft. There ahead. She reached it, jumped, caught the edge of the platform with the fingers of one hand and drove the bladeless knife of the Elemental Men straight through the wood and into some poor bastard’s foot. Through Diamond Eye she felt the sear of pain. A scream. The platform lurched, stopped, started to fall, and then Tuuran and Halfteeth were there as she dropped, grabbing hold and pulling it down, hauling the solitary watchman off as blood gouted from his boot. They dumped him, and Halfteeth punched him out. Tuuran bounded straight onto the platform, trying to haul himself up without her.
‘Don’t you dare!’ She jumped and pulled herself up beside him. Halfteeth clambered over the edge. The rest would just have to wait. Tuuran and Halfteeth heaved at the winch. Rope creaked and wood groaned as the platform rose. Zafir checked them both at the top, making them wait quietly and out of the way as the others ascended in twos and threes.
When Kataros came, Zafir pinned her to a wall and hissed in her face, ‘Queen Jaslyn has my word that I won’t hurt her sister Lystra. She keeps her crown, for what it’s worth, and Lystra may do the same as long as Jaslyn holds to her peace. You want Jeiros spared? Take me to where they keep the spear and I won’t cut out his heart.’ The dark, the tension, the walls all around, they were spilling out from her.
Someone comes.
Zafir clamped a hand over Kataros’s mouth. Who?
A little one.
Zafir drifted with the dragon among stray thoughts. She nudged Tuuran and put a finger to her lips. Gestured a warning.
‘Just one,’ she whispered.
Tuuran nodded. Halfteeth slipped off into the shadows. The lights from Chay-Liang’s enchanted torches dimmed and died. Zafir’s hand tightened over Kataros’s face, the two of them pressed together against the stone.
‘Make a sound and I run you through.’ She could feel the alchemist’s jaw working under her fingers. Biting down hard enough to draw …
Blood.
Zafir lurched away, spun Kataros around and smashed her face into the stone, dazing her for a moment, then pulled her away and clamped a hand across her face, holding her jaw firmly shut. The other hand whipped out a bladeless knife.
‘I will drive this through your head. You’ll die before you know it’s in you. Don’t! I am not your enemy!’ Diamond Eye! Read her!
She is hidden from me.
Potions to hide from dragons. Like the ones Bellepheros used to make, like the one she’d used in Takei’Tarr when the hatchling Silence had stalked her through the eyrie tunnels. An unease shivered her, but a stray thought too – would they hide thoughts from the Black Moon too, as they did from a dragon?
Halfteeth came back, pulling a dead man by his feet. Zafir let Kataros go.
‘Did you have to kill him?’
Halfteeth cocked his head. He thought about this for a moment and then nodded.
Zafir snapped back to Kataros. ‘I do not want a bloodbath, alchemist, but I will not leave without the spear!’
Kataros glared. ‘I’ll show you the way if I must.’
Zafir smiled and shook her head. Tuuran shifted silently behind Kataros and wrapped one huge swift arm around the alchemist’s neck and squeezed, while Halfteeth grabbed her from the front and held her arms. Zafir shone her torch into Kataros’s eyes and watched the panic in them.
‘I do not need a dragon to see the betrayal in your thoughts, alchemist. We will find our own way.’ Do you know where it is?
Yes. I will guide you.
Tuuran let Kataros go. ‘She’ll wake in a few moments,’ he said. ‘You want, I’ll snap her neck.’
‘No, but keep her here until we come back. Don’t let her bleed or she’ll have you.’
Halfteeth trussed Kataros and shoved a wad of balled-up cloth into her mouth. Zafir lingered a moment when Halfteeth was done and pretended not to see the face he made when he thought she wasn’t looking. She touched a finger to the alchemist’s skin. Kataros was starting to move again. ‘Better than have you turn on me,’ Zafir whispered. ‘There would be no coming back from that.’
Diamond Eye roved thoughts and memories trapped in the caves of the Spur. Zafir surfed them with the dragon as she led the way. She felt an old twisting glee, the delight of enemies oblivious, triumph amid the murder of others, a vicious hateful delight grown long ago, seeds planted in a child groomed to be a dragon-queen, fed and nourished for as long as she could remember. Yet entwined around them was something much less familiar. A sadness like a strangle-vine. A longing and a wishing for something different.
Her torch raked the tunnels, thin narrow winding things crudely cut from black stone. Tuuran and his Adamantine Men followed, moving brisk and sharp. The air, rank and stale, filled with the ammonia reek of waste, of men squeezed together, worse than the old slave markets of Furymouth and the filthy rooms on Baros Tsen’s eyrie where the Scales had lived. She saw glimmers of light ahead, and then the tunnel widened into a fissure rising endlessly into the mountains above, lit by a scatter of alchemical lamps, too few to do more than shake a hopeless fist at the enveloping darkness. Furtive feral eyes watched from behind pillars of stone.
Diamond Eye wandered their thoughts. Men, women and children, wandering here and there, half-starved with nothing to do, with no purpose and no hope.
Sometimes I wish we’d never left the islands, she thought, but the dragon didn’t reply.
They crossed the fissure. Tuuran and his men marched around her, a sharp cluster o
f incipient violence moving quick and taut, lightning and axes at the ready, shields raised, menace barely leashed. The path narrowed again into a winding tunnel branching left and right, twisting and turning ever closer to the spear. They crossed another cave of cowering eyes, of filthy hopeless fugitives. Beyond were passages carved square with niches for alchemical lamps, dusty and empty, the last clinging scatter of some ancient tiling visible now and then on the floor, welded to the stone by age. They were close now, and Zafir could smell the alchemy. She should have asked Kataros how many alchemists were down here …
The caves opened into a crude mockery of the Silver King’s hall of arches. Pools of light spilled out of them. More eyes staring. Her Adamantine Men clustered tight, moving quick, daring anyone to stand in their way. A boy barrelled out of the gloom, turned and froze right in their path. A woman came after him. She skittered to a halt, terrified, twitching, too afraid to flee. Old men and young stared and did nothing. Through Diamond Eye Zafir felt a melange of fear and hostility over a crushing undertow of apathy and despair. Tuuran lunged, scooped the boy in his huge arms and set him down out of the way. The twitching woman darted back into the shadows and both were gone. Zafir stared after them. Her stride faltered. She stopped and then realised she didn’t know what she meant to do. Give them food? She didn’t have any. Tell them she was their speaker and would set everything right, was that it? And how, exactly, would she do that?
‘Holiness?’
They were broken, the men who lived here, and she had nothing to offer them. Nothing.
She marched on. The hall ended in wide steps, ancient stone worn smooth by the passage of feet over a thousand years. The old Palace of Alchemy, part of whatever the Glass Cathedral had been, built so long ago that the stones under these mountains had no memory of dragons.
From before the Splintering, little one. From before the Black Moon.
There were pictograms on the walls in places. Crude carvings. She wanted to stop and look at them, to study them, but there was no time. The spear was close. People should not live like this, dragon. Your kind have done this to us.
Five hundred years of alchemy and slavery, little one.
The steps led to a second hall. Straight across was a double door, the only door she’d seen since the alchemy-bound entrance. Zafir stopped. So what hope does that leave us?
None, little one. We will soar and hunt. Your kind will burn and die.
There is nothing else?
Nothing.
Zafir offered the darkness a nod and a taut little smile. Queen Jaslyn carried some foolish notion of a day when dragons and dragon-queens might live side by side, but Zafir knew better, had known and understood for as long as she could remember. Dominate or die. That was all there was.
Diamond Eye laughed at her. He did that now and then, when he thought she was a little too much like a tiny flaring dragon.
‘The spear.’ She nudged Tuuran and pointed at the door across the hall. ‘Through there. With Grand Master Jeiros and a pair of alchemists and four Adamantine Men. Are you ready?’
They burst through side by side, her and Tuuran. Musty shadows filled the chamber beyond. Zafir felt the size and the space, stale air that smelled of old dust and wasn’t as rank as the feral caves outside. A lamp rested on a table. Four Adamantine Men sat around it, playing dice. Their faces snapped up. Zafir ignored them and went straight for the back room and the alchemists. Alchemists were far more dangerous. Lightning from behind her knocked one of the Adamantine Men sprawling. A second bolt took another one down and then they were on their feet.
‘Jeiros! Grand Master!’
Zafir tried to run past them. An Adamantine Man swung an axe at her. She sliced it with her bladeless knife, lopping the haft in two. The soldier jerked and stared, bewildered at what she’d done. She battered him with her shield, trying to keep him off balance. A moment later two of Tuuran’s men barged him down. She pushed past, not waiting to see how it ended.
They come.
Half with the dragon’s eyes, half with her own, Zafir saw the three alchemists together in the next room starting to move. Crippled Jeiros in impotent fury, two others snatching up knives, ready to cut skin and bleed their lethal blood to burn whatever it touched, or else go crawling into a man’s soul. She walked smartly to the doorway, dropped her gold-glass shield and dived through the curtain with a lightning thrower in each hand. She let fly with thunder on the other alchemists before their knives could even move, then levelled both wands at Jeiros, sitting in his wheeled chair beside his bed. The wands were spent, but he had no way to know that.
‘Look at me, Jeiros.’ She lifted her helm and let him see her face. Her hair still hadn’t fully grown back. Maybe in the gloom he wouldn’t …
‘You!’
‘Who am I, Jeiros?’
‘You’re dead!’
‘Who am I, Jeiros?’
‘Zafir!’ He bared his teeth. ‘Zafir the ruiner!’
The Adamantine Spear stood propped in a corner of the room, dumped there like an old broom. Zafir took a moment to savour the look on Jeiros’s face – the shock, the horror, the terror, the loathing, all naked in front of her – then she walked past him and took the spear and held it tight. She paused a moment to see if anything would happen, but no, it was like picking up any other spear – no blaze of mystic power, no transformation, no soaring insight, no more than the dozens of other times she’d held it. Just a weapon, lethal, brutal and sharp, perfection in its form. She twirled the spear between her hands and then snapped the point at Jeiros, the tip poised at his throat.
‘You despised me from the very start.’ She kept the tip perfectly still, touching his skin but not cutting. ‘Tell Lystra I have returned on the back of a dragon with the Silver King at my side, with Grand Master Bellepheros and with the sorcery of the Taiytakei.’ Her voice trembled, choked by being home, by seeing Jeiros in front of her again. The spear never wavered. ‘Two days, Grand Master. I will wait for her in the Zar Oratorium. Fearless under the open sky. She may parley with me then. You may tell her I am not here for either blood or throne, not that I expect either of you to believe it. You may tell her that I have her sister, and I will give her Jaslyn for this spear.’
She wheeled away and left, quickly before he could recover his wits, before the two alchemists she’d stunned found their senses again. She picked up her shield and marched through the chaos outside with the spear held high, visor open, making sure they all saw her face.
‘I am Zafir. Dragon-queen. Speaker.’
She left the way they had come. On the way out she stopped at the bronze door close to the scaffold and went inside, in part to see if the story of the spear was true, in part as a mercy to the dragon that the alchemists kept in chains. No one tried to stop her.
28
The Black Moon
Forty days after landfall
Through flickers and glimpses the last shades of Berren Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge of Tethis, once apprenticed to the thief-taker of Deephaven, soars on the wings of the Black Moon. He speaks to the dragons of the eyrie. He commands them to fly and they answer. He feels no snarling resentment from them as he does when the dragon-queen demands their service, only vicious delight and an eagerness to be unleashed. They know him. They remember him. In the deep ferment of the Black Moon’s thoughts, they see the future the half-god means to bring, and Berren sees it too.
The eyrie flies west to the setting sun, abandoning Diamond Eye and dragon-queen alike to their fates. A handful of one-time slaves and cripples remains. The Black Moon barely deigns to notice them. They are, to him, as insubstantial as the wind.
Berren sees this new unknown land in snips and snatches between the wax and wane of the Black Moon’s veil. Voices and whispers pulled out of the air. Alchemists. The source of their power. The dragons know. A dragon called Snow. A place called the Worldsp
ine. He stands on the rim and sees through the Black Moon’s eyes as the eyrie drifts high over a maze of canyons and chasms, lifeless and pale between tangles of churning white water that tumble and slice headlong through pillars of dry dead stone in their rush for the great canyon valley of the Fury.
On and up. The sun sets. The beat of dragon wings goes on. The Black Moon paces the walls over stars and mountain peaks. The moon rises, its silver light a cloak of animosity draped upon the world below. The Black Moon turns his back. He will look at the sky, at the ground, at the stars, at the night, at the sun when it rises, but not at the moon. The moon is dead to him. The moon has cast him out.
The night passes. The sun rises again among mountains that are now towering things, glowering and guarding their territories across deep wide valleys. The eyrie floats on, deeper and deeper. The mountains rise sharper, closer, piled on top of each other, squashed together now. The valleys become ravines while summit snow spreads ever further. Life diminishes and slips away, hiding from the cold in the sheltered depths of the valleys, driven from this freezing airless place. In the distance wait a thousand dragons, tight with a hunger for answers.
He feels the Black Moon’s thrill. The half-god has found what he is looking for. The sun comes down, fiery red, and with it a fury of dragons, swirling from the depths of the Worldspine. While the others circle high, so many they darken the sky, a single white hunter lands in the heart of the eyrie yard. The Black Moon walks to greet her. He touches a hand to the dragon’s scales.
Beloved Memory of a Lover Distant and Lost. I remember your soul. Your scales shine bright again.
This world is ours now, Black Moon.
I claim your service, Beloved Memory, to overthrow the tyranny of gods who demand we abase ourselves before them. To make the world as it was meant to be. As it ever was.
A thousand years you were gone, Black Moon. That vision is yours, not ours.
The Black Moon touches the white dragon again. With a surge of silver light he reaches to grasp the soul of Alimar Ishtan vei Atheriel and turn her to ash. Then thinks better of it.