by Stephen Deas
He went looking. Wasn’t supposed to take long. Five minutes on a sled to the basilica to find the Black Moon, but no such luck. He saw her Holiness on the back of her dragon snatch up a little skiff from the river and use it to scoop water and dump it on the burning city somewhere. Flame knew who that left in charge in the palace. Halfteeth, probably, which wasn’t likely to end well. He supposed he ought to care, but then her Holiness headed off up that way, and that was good enough.
He found Berren wandering the city. Wasn’t hard to spot the flashes of silver light now and then. Clouds of dirty smoke drifted through the docks, and parts of the riverside slums were on fire. Berren was meandering about the little squares and squashed alleys behind the basilica. He had a sword in one hand and a shield in the other, yelling and shouting challenges at anyone who would listen. Judging by the trail of dead he’d already got himself into a fight or two. Tuuran watched him walk up to a gang of looters, out making the most of the chaos, and pick a fight with far too many to have a chance of walking away. He watched Berren take one of them down before someone caught his legs with a spear. Over he went, and the rest were on him, knives and fists raised, a bloody and brutal murder, except that as the first blade fell there was a flash of silver light and half of them exploded into greasy black ash. The rest had the sense to run. Berren staggered back to his feet, howling at them how they were cowards. He might have gone after them too, until Tuuran came and stood in his way. There was a madness in Berren’s face. The old madness that had once got him the name Crazy Mad, but Tuuran couldn’t call him that any more. Crazy had been the name of his friend.
‘He won’t let you,’ said Tuuran curtly. He felt the Crowntaker’s hurt, felt it deep. Poor bastard was trying to get himself killed, but they both knew it wasn’t going to work, and surely he’d tried enough times now to give up. ‘He won’t. He just won’t. You know that.’ He put a hand on Berren’s shoulder and then glanced at the basilica. The great doors hung open and the insides were a black-scorched ruin. Wafts of a fine dark ash breezed out in gasps, as if the basilica itself was wheezing a last few dying breaths. ‘What—’ But no. He didn’t want to know what had happened in there. Really, really didn’t.
Berren closed his eyes and collapsed into Tuuran as though he was some grief-stricken lover. ‘Why, Tuuran? Why don’t I just die?’
Tuuran shook him. Made Berren meet his eye. Peered closely. ‘Is he in there, Crazy?’
‘Always.’
‘Is he listening?’
‘Always that too, big man.’ The Crowntaker pulled away. Turned his back. ‘He’s missing a piece, just like me. Just like Skyrie was before me. It burns him up, doing the things he does. He’s weak from the fight now.’ Berren shrugged. ‘Thought that might be enough to make it end, but no. Nothing ever is. But yes, he’s here. He hears you.’
Tuuran gripped Berren and spun him round so they were face to face. ‘I don’t know what any of this is any more,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why we came here. I don’t know what he wants. I killed a round dozen men today and I haven’t the faintest idea why.’ He snarled and spat. ‘I don’t know shit about anything – never did – and death comes when death comes, but a man should surely know the why of it when he takes another’s life. I meant what I said. If there’s a way to take this half-god out of you, Silver King or not, I’ll find it. My life. You hear me? And when I find that way, I’ll stop at nothing to see it through.’
Berren nodded, though not like he really believed it. He was staring at something on Tuuran’s neck. ‘What’s that?’
‘What’s what?’ Tuuran ran a finger over his skin. Yes, a roughness. A patch of it. Had those starting up all over the place these last few weeks. Bloody nuisance. ‘Chafing.’ Or that’s what he told himself. Or maybe some sort of stupid rash. Had to be. Too much other shit to worry about for it to be anything else.
Berren gave him a hard look, long and steady. ‘Chafing, big man? Really?’
‘You think you know better?’
‘I think you need to go see your alchemist, that’s what I think.’ Eventually Berren turned away, the light of the Black Moon gone from his eyes. ‘Never mind. Ah shit, big man, do what you want. Let’s get drunk.’
A preposterously dumb idea with the Black Moon about, a city in flames and barely fallen before a tiny conquering army that he was supposed to be leading, but Tuuran had been past caring for weeks now. And yes, if he was honest for a moment, he knew damn well what that patch of rough skin was, and all its little friends he kept hidden out of sight. Fucking dragons. Fucking Hatchling Disease from the fucking hatchling back from that night on the islands; and so yes, all things considered he reckoned that maybe everyone else could manage without him for a while, whether they liked it or not.
‘You think it would work on me?’ asked Crazy.
‘What would?’
‘The dragon-disease.’
‘No.’ Tuuran made a face. ‘And don’t you even think about looking at me to give it to you just so you can see what happens.’
They looked at one another for a long time, and then Berren burst out laughing, and so did Tuuran, and for a moment he could imagine that Berren was Crazy again, and nothing else. ‘Fine. I’ll go see Bellepheros.’ And a good part of him was thinking how it might just be a lot easier to do nothing at all, but he’d gone and made another stupid oath, hadn’t he? And dying was always just a cheap way out. He slapped Berren on the back. ‘You were here once before, right? Recommend a good place to get shitfaced?’
‘Disappear for a day, eh?’
‘At least. Let her Holiness sort this shit out. Fuck knows she’ll do a better job of it than you or I.’
30
The Catacombs
The Black Moon came to Chay-Liang after the storming of Merizikat. He wanted an army, he said. A thousand men, not a meagre hundred, and she would arm it. She was to move her workshop and equipment into the palace. He already had rooms put aside for her, a whole tower if she wanted it; and Liang did as she was asked because the Black Moon had cut her with his knife and left her no choice. Week after week he kept her at work until she was dripping with the fatigue of it. She barely saw Bellepheros for a time, up to his neck in his own problems, starting with trying to make sure that the arch-solar didn’t die from Tuuran cutting off his hand.
Lines of men came to the palace, summoned by the arch-solar to his court. The Black Moon sat on the throne of Merizikat with his knife, waiting for them. Three little cuts. You. Obey. Me; and with that he made the city into his slaves, one by one. The Dominion soldiers, the exalts and the temple armsmen, he sent to Tuuran; the rest he returned to be about their work, not caring what it was save that they give their all to their new cause and proclaim the virtue of their new god. For his soldiers Liang made sleds, armour, lightning-throwers and anything else the half-god could be bothered to imagine. Each day Tuuran brought her another dribble of men. ‘Soldiers recruited into the legion,’ he would say, and Liang knew that meant they’d been stabbed by the Black Moon’s knife, and surely even Tuuran wasn’t so stupid that he didn’t see what was happening. He had his own problems now, though, so perhaps they blinded him. The Hatchling Disease. Bellepheros, in one of their fleeting moments together, claimed Tuuran had caught it when the first dragon hatched in the islands. While Belli worried about how much further the disease might already have spread, Liang couldn’t help wondering whether it hadn’t come from a dragon at all, but from the dragon-queen instead.
After the first weeks Tuuran stopped bringing new soldiers to dress in her armour and carry her lightning, though he still huddled away with Bellepheros, claiming his potions to keep the dragon-disease at bay; each time he stalked away white-knuckle tense. Now and then she and Belli talked between themselves in the scant time they had of how to be rid of a half-god. She found herself thinking that perhaps Tuuran having the dragon-disease was no bad thing, that it g
ave her and Belli a hold over him; and yes, maybe it was unworthy of her, but violent use brought violent thoughts, and Liang would have murdered the Black Moon in any way to hand if only there was something that might have worked.
Not that there weren’t plenty of others willing to try. She lost track of the number of times Merizikat assassins tried to kill him. A dozen by the end of the first month. He made no effort to stop them. He made it easy, even, and then turned them to black ash as soon as their knives touched him. Liang half wished that those knives would come after the rest of them too, until she realised that that largely meant her. Zafir stayed on the eyrie after the first day of anarchy, aloof, circling the city now and then with her dragon to remind everyone of the threat she posed. Sulking, perhaps – Liang had no way to know; but even from her eyrie Zafir surely knew what the Black Moon was doing. She couldn’t be oblivious to it, could she, not really? So much for no more slaves. Leopards never changed their spots.
They’d been in Merizikat for a month and a twelvenight when Bellepheros rushed to the eyrie at the news that Onyx was about to give birth, and Liang went with him to help because she saw so little of him these days and liked to have him near when she could. As an excuse she took a company of Tuuran’s soul-cut soldier-slaves to collect crates of broken glasship debris from the rim for use moulding sleds and armour. When she brought her sled over the rim she saw Zafir was on the wall, sitting beside her dragon, looking out over the city, Myst beside her stroking the dragon’s scales, fat with another of Tuuran’s little bastards waiting to pop. Stupid bed-slave was infatuated with Zafir’s monster. It made Liang want to shake her and shout in her face: Don’t you see what they are? Don’t you see what she is? Either one would toss you aside without thought or care, without remorse or regret, without remembering you even have a name.
The dragon turned an eye. He looked at Liang and cocked his head.
‘You know what he’s doing, don’t you?’ Liang shouted. ‘You do know what he’s doing with that knife, dragon-slave?’ Zafir didn’t even look round.
Onyx gave birth to a son. She called him Tuuran. A few days later Myst followed her and gave birth to a son of her own. Another little Tuuran. At night, afterwards, Liang curled in bed with Belli. She could have punched him sometimes for his fatalism. The Black Moon had made her a slave, and every night she paced the cell of the half-god’s will like a restless lion. Bellepheros, ensnared exactly the same, simply fell asleep.
‘Why don’t you scream?’ she asked him ‘Doesn’t it make you want to murder something?’
Bellepheros shrugged. ‘Should a slave care who is his master?’ A nasty little barb, because she’d said much the same once about Baros Tsen, but he put an arm around her to tell her he didn’t mean it. ‘I grew up a slave to dragons, Li. Speakers come and speakers go, but the dragons are always there. I suppose I’m used to it.’
‘I’m not. I can’t stand it.’
‘Then perhaps you have more in common with her Holiness than you thought.’
The day after that a Merizikat assassin stuck a knife in him. It wasn’t the cleverest way to try and kill a man whose blood was at the heart of his sorcery, but it was enough of a warning that the Black Moon sent Belli back to the eyrie and told him to stay there, and after that Liang hardly saw him any more. She took to leaving her balcony door ajar and a sled outside so she could fly to him without the half-god seeing her go. She went to her old workshop there and dusted off the enchanted glass dragon she’d made years before. It was the size of a cat, a crude prototype for the two golden automata she’d made for her new master of the time, Sea Lord Quai’Shu, who in turn had given them as a wedding gift to some faraway dragon-prince years ago. In Takei’Tarr she’d once used it to spy on the Vespinese and then the Elemental Men, until the Elemental Men had noticed and, with very polite menace, requested that she stop. She took to flying it again, wrapped an enchanted silk tight over her eyes until the glass dragon shifted and woke and its crystal eyelids opened and Liang saw through its amethyst pupils. She sent it scurrying through the galleries of the Merizikat palace, stalking the deepest shadows, settled it lurking in gloomy corners, a silent sentinel statue spy, watching the Black Moon, listening to his plans; and though Zafir and her dragon roamed far and wide and rarely came down, it wasn’t long before she caught the two of them together. Twin evils dancing swords about each other. She saw the Black Moon’s gaze blaze silver, and if she had to give anything at all to Zafir it was that the dragon-queen was the only one who could look the half-god in the eye when he was that way. She met him head on every time. Face to face he stood a finger shorter than her, and she never let him forget it.
Today Zafir was in a temper. ‘Why are we still here? It’s been nearly two months. I have fifty ships penned into the mouth of the river and not one of their captains suggests that more than eight could work together to pull our eyrie across the—’
‘A half-god I called brother made it, that eyrie.’ The Black Moon raised a disdainful hand. He touched splayed fingers to Zafir’s face. Zafir swatted him away. ‘When the river of history swelled to a flood he chose to stand upon the wrong bank, and for that I took his soul. On which bank do you stand, dragon-queen?’
‘There is an army assembling to drive us into the sea,’ said Zafir.
‘I know.’
‘Then why are we still here? For what? What does Merizikat have for you?’
‘The catacombs, dragon-queen.’ The blaze in the Black Moon’s eyes faded to an ember. He waved his dismissal at Zafir, disdainful and bored, and turned his back, and for a moment Liang thought Zafir might hit him, but she didn’t. She whirled on her heel and stalked away, barely checked fury swirling about her like a cloak in a storm. Liang unwrapped the silk from her eyes and went back to her glass. The same rider-slave she’d known in Takei’Tarr, petulant and swaddled in her own wants with never a whit of care for anyone but herself. If she’d seemed different in the islands, it had been an aberration. Leopards and spots.
She stared at the glass she’d been working. All inspiration had fled today, and so she went out to her balcony and looked over this alien city, at its unfamiliar domes and blocky stone mansions, its flat-topped houses. She tried to remember the cities of her home. Xican, all buried in stone, cliffs full of doors and windows and ladders, gantries and the glorious glass of the Palace of Leaves. Khalishtor, with its red-tile roofs and wide open spaces full of green, its towers of glass and gold. She missed them, and then wondered: was this what it had been like for Belli when Quai’Shu’s Elemental Man had stolen him from the dragon-lands and brought him to Takei’Tarr, this sickness, this longing for home? He’d told her so, but she realised now that she’d never understood. How could she?
As she turned away she caught a flash of light from the eyrie. A sled. She watched it arc over the city and wondered who it could be. It was heading for the basilica where Tuuran spent most of his time, something to do with the catacombs and the dead who walked down there.
She sent the glass dragon in pursuit to spy. There were sides now. Battle lines to be drawn and they all knew it. There was the Black Moon and Zafir, and Tuuran reluctant beside them, and then there was her and Bellepheros and everyone else in the seven worlds.
The figure on the sled was Zafir.
Zafir on a sled, not on the back of her dragon.
Truly curious now, Liang settled into the tiny golem thoughts of her automaton. She kept her distance as Zafir descended towards the basilica and landed on its glass dome and hurried inside. A spiral of stairs made a sweeping arc around the basilica’s inner walls, bright and gold, warm and sun-dappled. Amid the pale yellow stone and the wooden benches and the hundred golden effigies of the unconquered sun, people looked up and stared, priests and other Merizikat folk. They all knew of the dragon-queen by now, and Zafir wore her glass armour and dragonscale and made no effort to disguise who she was. Zafir ignored them and marched
into the cloisters behind the basilica, between the twin statues of the moon and the stars that stood guardian to the catacomb shafts. A handful of Tuuran’s soul-cut Merizikat men waited there, bored and idle, and Liang had to wait for a chance for her little dragon to scurry between them unseen. She caught up as Zafir descended into the gloomy vaults that antechambered the dark depths of the catacombs. Grated shafts driven from the basilica square above lit patches of stone in bright sunlight, while elsewhere lamps and lanterns fought against the shadows and lost. Carvings covered the walls down here, signs and sigils of warding and protection, unfamiliar save the two or three that Liang recognised from her brief foray into the forbidden texts of the Rava.
Zafir walked briskly on, stiff and uneasy in the dark. An Adamantine Man greeted her. One of Tuuran’s favourites. Halfteeth, was it? Liang had no idea, nor of what the Black Moon wanted from under the basilica, but he was surely after something, and she dearly wanted to know. Halfteeth led Zafir down a grand stairway shrouded in gloom, broad steps that went on and on. Liang scurried after, glass flitting from shadow to shadow. The dragon-queen, her movements so languid and fluid when she strutted her eyrie and the Black Moon’s palace, looked sharp and taut here, head twitching as she looked about, side to side and up overhead, always on edge and on guard. There was something that got to her then …