by Stephen Deas
At dawn he crept to the dragon yard to see the sun rise. They were deep within the mountains and the sky was filled with dragons. The Black Moon seemed oblivious, but Bellepheros didn’t dare stay; he slipped away again and stayed hidden after that. Perhaps, in the end, because he was most comfortable in a quiet cosy place with walls and a roof and solid stone to every side, and with the memories of Chay-Liang all around him. When the eyrie stopped he didn’t even know it until Myst came to tell him, in her own gentle words, that they had reached somewhere, and that the Black Moon was gone.
When he peeked outside to see, he knew at once where he was. The Valley of Alchemy. The old secret redoubt that was the source of every alchemist’s power. So the Black Moon had found it then.
Myst, beside him, pointed at the sky. There were dragons everywhere. Hundreds, perched on the cliffs. Quietly waiting. He’d never seen so many.
‘What do they want, Grand Master?’
‘To eat us,’ Bellepheros said flatly and wondered why they didn’t. Wary, he climbed the eyrie wall. A few Merizikat men Zafir had left behind sat out on the rim, carefree and untroubled, legs dangling over the drop, kicking their heels beside one of the cranes. They were looking down at something, not bothered by the dragons at all, and Bellepheros wondered if he might walk to join them and peer over the edge. Maybe he should. Whatever they were looking at, he ought to see it for himself, oughtn’t he? But the drop already made him dizzy just thinking about it. Standing on the wall was bad enough, out in the open under the gaze of so many dragons. He wondered idly why they paid the eyrie so little thought.
The alchemists’ redoubt. The place the blood-mages had brought the body of the Silver King. If he had a home, one where he truly felt in his heart that he was safe, here it was.
‘Where are we?’ asked Myst.
Bellepheros looked at the dragons. Kataros’s potion hid his thoughts, but it didn’t blind the dragons’ eyes. ‘This is where we make our alchemists,’ he said. ‘The key and the heart to everything we are. The Black Moon went inside, did he?’ Why else come all this way? ‘Then I need to follow.’ He was talking to himself, not to Myst. Telling himself because he knew that it mattered and that he needed to know, and yet the thought left him petrified. To go out there alone … He’d have to go out to the edge. Dragons everywhere, looking on. The vertiginous drop to the valley below. The creaking wood and rope as someone lowered him down. It terrified him, every drop of every thought. Of being surrounded by the sky, of falling, of a dragon tipping off its perch and swooping in some lazy arc across the valley sky to snatch him as he dangled. Of so much naked space; and as paralysing as all those things were, none wrenched his insides as much as what he knew must come after. Walking away from the eyrie into those familiar old caves, alone, leaving every comfort behind and knowing that the Black Moon lay in wait.
‘Zafir would do it,’ he murmured. ‘Tuuran would do it. Li too.’ He had no idea how they found the courage.
‘Do what?’ asked Myst.
He turned to her. She’d always been a strong one. ‘Will you help me?’
‘How?’ He saw how she hesitated.
‘It’s stupid, when you look at everything. Dragons all around us, a half-god … Will you come with me to the ground? Just that far. I’ll have my senses back when I have the earth under my feet again, but I fear I need a little more courage for what comes after. Will you?’
Myst climbed down the wall. She walked across the rim to the men around the crane, smiled and whispered in their ears. She came back and took Bellepheros by his hands.
‘Don’t the dragons terrify you?’ he asked.
‘I think they’re magnificent,’ she whispered. ‘I wish her Holiness would take me into the sky with her just once.’
You know they’re going to eat us, don’t you? But he couldn’t say that. Not to such a shining honest face full of hope and light, that bizarre unshakeable belief both Zafir’s handmaidens had in their mistress and in the Adamantine armour of her protection. He wanted to shout at her that it was all an illusion, that the Black Moon kept them alive by the most slender and tenuous thread … but why? Why do that? It would only hurt her. It certainly wouldn’t save her.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘They’re not scared either.’ She pointed at the men by the crane, how they idled and paid no mind to the dragons above. ‘They’ll lower you down.’
Bellepheros could only imagine the Black Moon had put some sort of spell on them to make them so fearless, or more likely he’d cut them with his wicked knife and they had no choices any more, or perhaps he’d simply cut all the fear right out of them. Three little cuts. Don’t be afraid of dragons. And so they weren’t. Was it that easy?
Three little cuts. Don’t be afraid to fall …
Myst put a hand on his arm.
‘Come.’ She led him with care down the outer slope of the wall and onto the rim. He was shaking and he hadn’t even looked over the edge yet. Pathetic. He wished Tuuran was there. Or even her Holiness. Didn’t see eye to eye much with one and could barely stand the other, but their fearlessness was infectious. They would have stood with him for this without a moment of hesitation if they thought it was right. They would have come inside the caves. They would have faced the Black Moon …
And they would have died, like he was going to die. Or worse.
Myst walked him to the edge, to the crane and into the wooden cage that dangled from its arm. She came in with him, and he felt so stupid as the cage lifted into the air and swung out over the void below, but he was shaking like a leaf. He closed his eyes. Myst wrapped her arms around him. She cooed and whispered into his ear as though she was comforting a child or an animal – him, Bellepheros, grand master of the Order of the Scales, a blood-mage alchemist whose potions mastered dragons, whimpering like a whipped dog.
He kept his eyes closed until the cage bumped onto the ground. Took a few long deep breaths and then made himself let her go. He lifted the loop of rope that held the cage door closed, pushed it open and stepped out. The air smelled wrong. The sweetness he remembered scorched by a tang of ash …
The dark purple-veined underside of the eyrie glowered down. So huge. Overpowering. If he hadn’t been here a hundred times before and known this valley as well as he knew his own fingers, he might never have guessed that the smashed scattered stone around him had once been something else. Stores. Workshops. Homes for alchemists. And he should have been ready for this, he told himself, he should have known, after everything he’d seen, that of course the dragons would find this place. Of course they’d tear it down and smash it to pieces and stamp it to dust, yet the sight rocked him. Around the ruins and cave mouths the ground had been scorched black. Burned to the bedrock.
He turned to Myst in the cage, and it hit him right between the eyes then that he wasn’t coming back, a certainty as sure as the rising sun. He supposed he ought to say something, but he couldn’t think what. In truth he hardly even knew Myst. Hadn’t ever seen her as anything more than a conduit to her mistress, just like everyone else. He felt ashamed of that now.
‘Look after the little ones,’ he said in the end.
‘Is there anything I should tell my mistress?’
‘Nothing she doesn’t already know.’ Bellepheros shook his head. ‘Nothing that will make a difference. I know you love her. I wish I could love her too.’ He forced himself to turn away and start for the caves before he simply wilted into nothing. ‘Tell her the same as I told you,’ he called back. ‘Tell her to look after the little ones.’
Unsteady legs hurried him into the mouth of the nearest cave. With the comfort of walls around him and a roof over his head, he dared to look back. The cage had already risen halfway to the rim. If Myst was looking back at him, he couldn’t tell; and when it reached the top she was too far away for his old rheumy eyes to make out anything much at all. He stood and looked for a few secon
ds more anyway. A longing filled him. Li would have come with him. Stood beside him. The two of them together, maybe they might have stopped Zafir and the Black Moon from bringing down whatever end of the world the half-god had in mind. But Li wasn’t here, and it was just him, and he really didn’t think he could do it on his own.
‘I’m sorry, Li. I’m sorry I couldn’t wait.’ At the very least she’d have known how to make him stop feeling sorry for himself.
He turned his back on the eyrie, on the sun and the sky, on the lurking dragons who barely seemed to know he was there, on stone and air, on everything. He faced the darkness of the cave where the Black Moon had gone and walked slowly into the gloom. Every man had his fate, but he really would have quite liked a different one.
34
The Zar Oratorium
Forty-one days after landfall
Tuuran, if anyone had bothered asking, would have said that he didn’t much like traipsing up to the Zar Oratorium, not one bit, not with a dozen Adamantine Men herding a gaggle of riders he couldn’t even name and a queen everyone knew had a madness inside her. Didn’t know what to make of what they were doing, didn’t know what to make of any of it, but mostly what he didn’t like was the three miles of walking out in the open in bright daylight. First through the crippled ruined gates of the Adamantine Palace – maybe a little cover there if a dragon suddenly fell out of the sky and set about killing them, but not much. Then around the flattened scorched ash and rubble that had once been the City of Dragons, where the only place to cower was between broken-down walls and in ripped-open cellars. Dragons had spent a good long time here, that much was clear, tearing up everywhere a few guardsmen might hide. Then to the cliffs of the Purple Spur. Filing up the exposed winding steps to the Zar Oratorium, a narrow stair carved into the rock with nowhere else to go. Three hundred steps. If a dragon came by, he might as well jump up and down and wave his arms and shout, daring the dragon to eat him.
Almost no one here had seen the Adamantine Palace burn. Kataros had. Big Vish and a couple of others, Adamantine Men who’d actually fought and survived. That was all. Queen Jaslyn and her riders had been in the Pinnacles. White Vish had been on his way to Furymouth. Jasaan had been in Sand, far in the sun-stricken desert of the north. Queen Jaslyn’s home. Way Jasaan told it, Sand had been one of the first places to fall when the dragon-rage was at its height. Ash and smoke hadn’t been enough; they’d burned it until the stones cracked in the heat, until even the deepest cellars turned to ovens. Later, after they’d gone, Jasaan said he’d found women and children cooked through. Tuuran reckoned he’d got a sense of how bad a dragon could be when her Holiness had sacked Dhar Thosis, but Sand sounded infinitely worse – the darkness, the screams, fire and flames, tooth and claw and talon and tail moving like whirlwinds through a city as it fell.
Not a thing he much wanted to see coming at him from the skies, all things considered, and so he kept watch like a hawk. Zafir circled overhead on Diamond Eye, watchful and obvious, but there were other dragons here, somewhere. He couldn’t see them, but he could feel them lurking. Watching, waiting, and that wasn’t what dragons did. Set him on edge, thinking that, tense and ready at any moment for a shadow to plunge from the mountain cliffs, for the burning to start.
‘Adrunian Zar,’ muttered Big Vish beside him as they started up the steps. ‘Did you know he was an alchemist?’
The Diamond Cascade came over the lip of the Spur a hundred yards to the right of the Oratorium. Down this low it wasn’t anything more than spray and mist except on days when the air was as still as a mouse. ‘Doesn’t sound like an alchemist name.’ Tuuran looked up. Checked the sky again as they climbed the steps. ‘Dragon comes now, we’re dead,’ he said.
Big Vish sniffed. ‘All his own work. Him and the hundred or so men he hired.’ He grunted. ‘There used to be a lift. Pulleys and a platform to get people up. And the props for the stage. Dragons burned all that. But most of the rest is still there.’
For a moment Tuuran forgot about expecting dragons to fall on them at any moment. ‘You’re an Adamantine Man, Vish. You telling me you used to go to the theatre?’
‘Whenever I could.’ Vish frowned. ‘They used to put things on at different times throughout the year. Except in winter because of the sun being too close to the horizon behind the stage. Best time was an early-summer morning.’ He sighed. ‘Sun would come sideways across the stage from the east straight through the cascade. Made for the most vivid rainbows you can imagine.’
Tuuran tried to picture it. Big Vish, the scarred and battered Adamantine Man who’d killed a dozen men with his axe, who’d stood and faced and fought with dragons, standing on the edge of a cliff, mooning at rainbows. Tried but couldn’t make it work. ‘Really?’
‘Really did, boss. Dyton’s Narammed in The First Speaker. That was something special, that was. If he’d stood up here with that pretend spear and given his great soliloquy on the day the dragons came, he’d have turned them away, he would. Just with his voice.’
They reached the top of the steps. Tuuran looked back at the plodding trail of figures following him up. Checked the sky once again for the dragons that would surely come, but saw only Diamond Eye, circling over the ruined Adamantine Palace. When he was sure they weren’t all about to burn he spared a glance for the Oratorium itself. Granite terraces cut from the natural amphitheatre of the cliff, infilled with earth, small stones and pebbles shovelled down from the higher ledges and lined with marble slabs brought from Bazim Crag. Curved tiers of bench seats, steep concentric semicircles of scarred stained stone with numbers and letters carved into each. The cliffs of the Purple Spur rose behind them, an undulating curtain of striated stone.
‘Never came up here before,’ he muttered. ‘It’s smaller than I thought.’
‘Seats used to be covered with cypress wood before everything burned.’ Vish sounded almost like he was giving a eulogy.
Tuuran nudged him. ‘Wood,’ he growled, ‘is just wood.’
‘I know.’ Vish shook his head. ‘It’s just I never came up here after—’
‘Most people here had a good few friends who used to be covered with skin before everything burned,’ snapped Tuuran. Tension was making him waspish. ‘They walked and talked too, and sometimes I dare say they were even funny.’
Big Vish gave him a sour look and stomped off to the tunnels under the stage that led into the depths of the Spur. There would be more Adamantine Men in there somewhere, keeping watch. Friends. What few Vish had left.
Queen Jaslyn came up the last steps. She reached the stage and stood there, unmoving, her back to the open sky, as exposed as you could possibly imagine. She kept staring out at Diamond Eye, and Tuuran didn’t much like the look on her. Too much longing. And all her dragon-riders kept stopping too, as they came up, and stood with her, looking out over the distant landscape peeling away towards Gliding Dragon Gorge. The ruin of the City of Dragons, tumbled stone and ash, part overgrown now. On the low hill beside it stood the palace with its sheared towers, only the walls looking much as they ever had, too massive and mighty for even dragons to destroy. Was a good view if you’d never seen it before. Question was: did you want to see it at all, all that loss?
Some of his men had set about lashing up a makeshift throne of wood and rope. It occurred to Tuuran then, far too late to do anything about it, that the riders under the Purple Spur were mostly men from Furymouth, while the riders in the Pinnacles were largely men from Sand and Bloodsalt, opposite ends of the realms who rarely managed to play nicely together even at the best of times. Which it certainly hadn’t been when the palace fell. And then there was Zafir and him, caught in the middle.
Vish came trotting back from the tunnels. ‘Boss?’
Tuuran sighed. Nodded. ‘They waiting for us, are they?’
‘Black Ayz has the gate. He’ll be the one leading Speaker Lystra’s vanguard.’
&nb
sp; ‘And what did you tell him?’
Vish laughed. ‘I told him he’d better let us in, didn’t I!’
‘Take that well, did he?’ Tuuran chuckled. ‘Come on, get that blasted throne built. Sooner we’re out of here the better.’ He paced the edge of the old stage and watched his men set up their stupid throne. When they thought they were done he went and stood on it and sat on it and jumped on it to make sure it was sturdy. They were still making the second when Queen Lystra’s vanguard emerged from the passages under the stage that led into the caves of the Spur. The one at the front, he supposed, must be Black Ayz. He was carrying an absurd crossbow, a murderous thing that would probably go right through a man, armour and all. Had had one of those himself, once. Made for killing dragons. Took the best part of a day to cock, but one well-placed shot could kill a hatchling dead, and that made it quite something. He watched it, calculating, as Black Ayz walked up to him.
‘I want to see my sister!’ Tuuran almost jumped out of his skin. Queen Jaslyn was right behind him. Her voice had a shrill edge of hysteria.
‘Well?’ Black Ayz stopped a few feet short. ‘You in charge?’
Tuuran shivered. ‘Queen Zafir comes with—’
‘Yes.’ Black Ayz sounded on the edge of exasperation. ‘Messages. The Pinnacles. Wonderful. Vish told me. But I don’t know who you are.’
‘I am Tuuran. Night Watchman to Speaker Za—’ He stopped. Black Ayz had levelled the crossbow at him. Just sort of done it without Tuuran seeing it happen. ‘What?’
‘I am Black Ayz, and I am Night Watchman here.’ He peered hard at Tuuran. ‘An Adamantine Man.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll grant you that much. But I still don’t know you.’ Black Ayz looked around the stage. ‘Big Vish I know. And is that Jasaan the Dragonslayer? And Bishak. Those too are men I know. I’ll raise a cup to you for bringing them back to me. But let fifty armed and armoured dragon-riders I’ve never seen before down into the Spur?’ Ayz shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. You stay here until my speaker says otherwise.’