The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  Tuuran felt Jaslyn at his back. And they were still out in the open on a stage in the glaring sun, wedged between cliff faces and with nowhere to go if a dragon came.

  ‘I—’

  A rider he didn’t know – not that that narrowed it down much – pushed past him and shook his fist at Black Ayz and his crossbow. ‘You stand before Queen Jaslyn, daughter of Queen Shezira of Sand, rightful speaker of the nine realms whom you should serve, Adamantine Man! Your disloyalty must—’

  Tuuran winced as Ayz roared. The crossbow shifted. ‘Disloyalty? Rightful? You piece of shit! Where were you when the palace fell? Where were you when the dragons came?’

  ‘Lapdogs for the viper Jehal, all of you!’ The rider took another step, which put the back of his head conveniently beside Tuuran’s left fist.

  ‘Speaker Jehal died when the Adamantine Palace fell.’ Ayz’s face was taut. ‘And if you fuckers from the Pinnacles hadn’t been sulking away there mooning about over your dead dragons, if you’d been here instead then—’

  Tuuran fired a tiny flick of lightning into the back of the dragon-rider’s head. The man screamed and dropped like a sack of apples. Tuuran watched him fall. Dragons didn’t care, that was the thing. You could be heir to both the twin thrones of Xibaiya for all the difference it made; a dragon ate you just the same, and that was that.

  Could see Black Ayz thinking much the same. Could see him having a good long think about Tuuran and his lightning and what he’d just seen too. Good. Two birds with one stone and all that. Tuuran turned back to the stage. ‘Jasaan! Big Vish!’ He beckoned them over. ‘Get this idiot dragon-rider out of the way.’ He gave Black Ayz a look. ‘No rush. You lot have a bit of a talk, eh?’

  Kataros, trussed up, looked to the sky, scanning for dragons, but there was only Diamond Eye with the pretend-speaker Zafir on his back. Zafir who would murder them all. She remembered Jeiros telling her once, when she’d asked him why he hated his old speaker with such a venom, You didn’t know her. You were off in the Worldspine, doing your duty in King Valmeyan’s eyries. You didn’t see what she was like. I was her grand master alchemist for the few months she held the Adamantine Throne. She brought this on us. Under the Spur they all spat at the name Zafir.

  Tuuran was still wrestling with his wooden throne when Jasaan came and touched a hand to her shoulder and then moved away, and then all Tuuran’s men were suddenly running and yelling, clearing the stage and looking for cover as the dragon Diamond Eye came down. They braced themselves against the whipping wind of its wings, but the dragon swooped past the Oratorium and soared away instead, while Zafir seemed to step off its back and glide through the air. When she landed on the stage Kataros saw the gold-glass disc she rode, another enchantment from the bastard night-skins. Zafir carried the Adamantine Spear. Her gold-glass armour was scarred, a hotchpotch of pieces taken from several suits, but it still made her fearsome, with golden dragons on helm and gauntlets, and if anything the dents and cracks made her even more terrible. She snapped her fingers at Tuuran and went and sat in her throne, ready or not. A dozen more soldiers in Taiytakei glass and gold hurried to flank her, Tuuran at their head. A handful of others dragged Kataros to kneel, bound, at Zafir’s feet.

  She could bite her lip. That would be easy. A little blood smeared onto the ropes that bound her, turned to acid to burn them through. Spitting blood into all their faces to blind them … Perhaps Speaker Lystra would bring her other alchemists. Let loose their blood to run amok, wreaking havoc …

  ‘I will let you go, Kataros,’ said Zafir, ‘when Lystra comes. We’re too few for more killing. Give my regards to Jeiros when you see him. You and he might turn your thoughts from how you despise me to how we might usurp the dragons who now rule these realms that once were mine. You might turn them to our half-god too.’ She eased herself forward from her throne then and crouched between them. Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Tell me, alchemist, what would you do in the face of the Silver King’s return?’

  Kataros snarled. ‘This half-god is not the Silver King.’

  ‘No, that he’s not.’ The corner of Zafir’s lip curled in the flicker of a smile. ‘But what would you do if he was?’

  ‘Submit,’ Kataros said, ‘and accept the inevitability of his will.’

  Zafir let out a little sigh. ‘I suppose that’s alchemists for you. When I leave here, tell Queen Lystra what you’ve seen with your own eyes, not the stories you’ve heard.’ She shifted and settled back into her wobbling throne. ‘Hyram did what he did, and Shezira pushed him off a balcony, and yes, I took her head for that, but Jehal was the poisoner, not I, while Jeiros hated me from the very moment Aruch put the Speaker’s Ring on my finger.’

  And why? Zafir sat back in her improvised throne, wishing for a moment that it was Jeiros bound before her so she might kick him down and needle her feet into his old skinny ribs. Why? Because I was young and pretty? Because I wasn’t old like you? Because I was a queen of the Silver City and you hated us all for keeping the Silver King’s secrets to ourselves? Restless pacing would have suited her better than sitting on this throne, waiting for Lystra. A dull uneasy fury at the Black Moon for taking her eyrie swatted at any calm and flushed it away. And where were the dragons? Hiding? But that wasn’t how dragons were. Why hadn’t she seen them? Why hadn’t they fallen on the eyrie, the Pinnacles? Where was the storm of fire and fang?

  They come. Diamond Eye peered into the thoughts and souls of everyone around her, but she still wished she was on her throne in the Pinnacles with its white stone dragon that sought out deceit and glowered it naked into submission or revolt. So easy to fall into old habits, tried and tested and found wanting, but habits nonetheless. Kill them all. A clean sweep. Alchemists, dragon-riders, everyone who would not submit; but whatever she did, mercy or murder, it made no difference to what was coming. The Black Moon would have his way with the world. None of the rest mattered.

  None of us are anything but insects to him. Even you, dragon. Ants. Diamond Eye bristled at the truth she threw at him. Will Lystra bend her knee to me?

  No.

  Good. Wouldn’t have believed it anyway. Better Lystra’s animosity come open and raw.

  A trumpet sounded, garish in the still air of the Oratorium, blazing her Adamantine Men into silence. Zafir stayed still, stiff as a rod, the Speaker’s Spear firm in her right hand and the ring worn on the left. She heard the tramp of boots through the secret entrances under the stage to the tunnels and caves of the Spur. She pictured Lystra, murderous defiance, the two of them face to face, spittle-flecked. Diamond Eye whisking Lystra into the air and ripping her apart. But no, that wouldn’t do. The spear then. Rammed through her black treacherous heart.

  Or another way. Lystra mute and humble. Bowing and scraping and begging forgiveness. But no, that way too ended in the spear and blood.

  I made a promise …

  She was sweating under her gold and glass. She wished there was a breeze to cool her; no, not a breeze, a gale to blow out the detritus of past lives clawing inside. Staying so still, waiting like this, next to impossible not to twitch …

  Lystra emerged from the tunnels. She came alone. Jaslyn’s ­little sister, smallest of them all, and yet she walked like a speaker, like a queen; and she didn’t come to the stage to tower or grovel before Zafir’s pretend throne, but instead climbed the first tier of the Oratorium seats and sat on the stone benches with the three Adamantine Men she’d sent ahead of her. Meeting Zafir eye to eye across the still air and open space where musicians once played between the speeches of each performance, where jugglers tumbled and frolicked between the acts of Narammed the Great. They watched one another. She deserved respect for that, Zafir thought. Sitting on her throne with her guardsmen arrayed about her with their lightning throwers and their Taiytakei armour, with her dragon circling his obvious and irresistible menace above, Zafir had imagined herself appearing strong and terribl
e. But to come alone and sit apart, Lystra took that away.

  She’s more like me than I thought. And in that perhaps she found a chance they might part with no blood spilled, and so she rose and walked to the edge of the stage and waved Tuuran to stay where he was, and jumped down into the space between them. She stood in the middle of it, straight and tall with the spear in her hand, with everyone looking down on her, and made it her own.

  ‘I am Zafir of the Silver City,’ she said, strong in this place made for strident voices. ‘These realms were once mine. All of them.’ She looked Lystra in the eye and saw strength there, and frailty too. ‘Lystra, daughter of Shezira of Sand. Queen of Furymouth. Our realms are ashes. Everything between us is burned in fire. We begin anew. The slate clean. That is what I offer.’

  She snapped her fingers. Tuuran cut Kataros free. Zafir turned and looked at Jaslyn, nodded and tipped her head, beckoning her. Other words of building the realms back to glory wandered through her thoughts, but they tasted of ash and crumbled on her tongue. The realms would be built into whatever vision the Black Moon saw, and nothing anyone here said or did would change a whit of it.

  Kataros edged around the side of the stage to sit quietly beside Lystra’s Adamantine Men. She whispered to them. Queen Jaslyn, hesitant as a butterfly, climbed down to stand at Zafir’s side. She wore a helm that hid her face and she didn’t take it off. Zafir lowered her spear and cocked her head. She looked up at Lystra, meeting her eye.

  ‘Well?’

  Lystra regarded her in silence a moment, then rose and stepped nimbly down the tiers of the Oratorium. Like Zafir she came alone, and as she came closer, Zafir saw her clearly at last, how thin and gaunt and tired she was, and how young, though a year and then some under the Spur had aged her. Lystra stopped a few feet short. She met Zafir blaze for blaze. A void of animosity settled between them. She held out a hand for the Adamantine Spear. ‘Return what you stole,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  She looked Zafir up and down. ‘Why did you come back?’

  ‘Because this is my home.’ As close to one as she’d ever had.

  ‘Now it is mine.’ Lystra turned her back to walk away.

  ‘Wait!’ At last Jaslyn took off her helm. Lystra froze. When she looked back, just for a moment, it was with a look of wonder. Joy, even.

  ‘Jaslyn?’

  ‘My gift to you,’ said Zafir softly. ‘Did Jeiros not pass on my words?’

  ‘I took them to be lies,’ Lystra said.

  Jaslyn stepped forward to greet her. For a moment the two sister queens faced one another. Lystra pulled off a gauntlet and touched her fingers to Queen Jaslyn’s cheek.

  ‘You’re alive. You’re real.’

  Jaslyn pulled back a pace, tight, full of anguished tension. Her face seemed to crumple. ‘Speaker Zafir, queen of the Pinnacles, greets you,’ she said. ‘She offers you a gift.’

  Jaslyn’s hand went to her side. Zafir caught a glint of steel.

  Far away, dragons fly. Hundreds pouring from the Worldspine in a wind of wings and scales, racing turbulent over the rapids and cataracts of the Silver River, leaping and diving under the shadows of the Great Cliff. Hatchlings, young adults, great old war-dragons, sleek agile hunters, they come. Silence drives them on, and the white dragon Snow above. A hundred hatchlings peel away as they reach the tumultuous sink hole where the Silver River plunges into abyssal depths under the cliffs of the Spur. Dragon after dragon dives into the chasm and soars into darkness, spewing bursts of flame to light their way, a hundred flaring mouths in a cathedral of space that makes even monsters small. Behemoths birthed these mountains, and here is their abandoned shell, hollow and vast, the mouth of a fissure that cracks the Spur in two. A mile overhead scatter-specks of sunlight filter through, brilliant-bright like morning stars. The dragons fly on, searching, diving, wheeling until they find the caves and tunnels that lead away, that wiggle from the great fissure of the Silver River. The dragons call to one another. Far it runs, this abyss, old as time and deep as the ocean, through the mountains to the other side, carrying the water that feeds the bottomless wells of the Mirror Lakes.

  Through secret paths to where the little ones hide, newborn dragons race and leap and bound. Through the deep unlit caverns of the Spur, the unknown places, unexplored, untouched for more than a thousand years but not forgotten. They shriek and light their way with fire, while far above and high, those dragons already grown too large for such places slice onward across the open dust of the Hungry Mountain Plains, ripping the wind.

  The spear.

  Across desert plains and high valleys between skyborn peaks they scour stone and forest with their thoughts. They sing old songs, words in strange dead tongues long rotted to dust, rhythms born in the first shaping of the world. The spear of the earth hears them, and answers their call.

  Zafir caught a glint of steel. Jaslyn already had the knife in her hand. Zafir lunged to stop her, already too late, but the knife never struck. Jaslyn reversed it and held the blade pointed back towards herself.

  ‘Life.’ Jaslyn’s voice broke. ‘Speaker Zafir offers us the gift of life, sister.’ The knife slipped from her fingers and clattered to the stone. Queen Jaslyn, weeping, fell towards her sister’s arms. Lystra backed away.

  ‘No!’ She shook her head. ‘This woman beheaded our mother, Jaslyn. Our mother!’

  Zafir bared her teeth. ‘Because she threw Hyram off a balcony when he chose me instead of her, Lystra. You can’t simply kill a speaker and expect it not to matter!’

  ‘I will never bow to you. Never!’ Lystra backed further away.

  ‘Then I will not ask you to.’

  Lystra didn’t stop shaking her head. ‘No. Not to you. Keep my sister, whatever you’ve done to her.’

  ‘Lystra!’ Jaslyn fell to her knees sobbing. Zafir hammered the haft of the Adamantine Spear into the ground.

  ‘Shall we murder one another then,’ she shouted, ‘while dragons own our skies? The last few of us left railing bitter about who shall be queen of the ash pile? Which of us shall be the last sour relic?’ The spear in her hand felt firm and cold. If she listened hard she thought she heard it murmuring, but more likely that was her own growing madness. I could throw it. Pin her to the stone and take it all away. Let more blood run.

  Lystra paused, fierce and furious. ‘You took the Adamantine Throne by treachery, murder and poison. You made it into a pile of skulls and bones, and look what you brought! These caves and tunnels are all that’s left of our brightness, and you claim it as yours? No. There will never be peace between you and me. Never!’

  Zafir gripped the spear. Teeth bared on the edge of fury. She took a step and levelled it ready to throw. ‘Whom did I murder? Your dear Jehal was the master of poisons, not I.’

  ‘You murdered my mother!’

  Zafir shrugged. ‘I have brought a half-god, starling Lystra. One way or another he will tame the dragons again. He will make them his, for better or worse. He will have his spear whether you like it or not, and he will do what he will do, and none of us will matter a jot.’ Her anger seeped away, scurrying shamefaced into the dark corners of her thoughts, withered and sucked dry by a bottomless fatigue.

  ‘I see no half-god; I only see a murderess.’ Lystra walked away for the tunnels under the stage. Kataros and the three Adamantine Men followed. Zafir watched them leave.

  What did I expect? Old anger still bubbled and simmered in its corners, refusing to die, growling under its breath that she should strike them all down. Zafir took a deep breath and turned to the men assembled on the stage. She hauled weeping Jaslyn from her knees. ‘You are all free to choose,’ she cried. ‘Follow her if you wish.’

  For a moment no one moved. Then the Adamantine Man Jasaan headed for the tunnels, following in Lystra’s wake. A murmur and a shuffling of unrest rippled through Queen Jaslyn’s riders, until at last one
of them moved. They came together then, fearful as though they expected Zafir to change her mind at any moment and cut them down, that it had all been a trick. They gathered Queen Jaslyn among them and left, and Zafir watched them vanish into the tunnels under the stage. She stood, long after they were gone, fixed to the spot. Her fingers gripped the spear, still pointing it where Lystra had stood. They were tight as stone. She had to put her other hand to them to make herself lower it.

  ‘Night Watchman,’ she said, raddled by exhaustion, ‘we have what we came for. We have what he wants, and we are not welcome. Leave them to their troglodyte ways. We’ll ask no more.’ For a moment the world shimmered and blurred. She closed her eyes against a wave of fatigue and nausea. ‘We await the pleasure of the Black Moon.’ And to do whatever must be done, and as always she would do it alone.

  Little one! Diamond Eye pierced her, sharp and urgent. She saw in his mind a swarm of hostile wings skimming cliff walls, coming fast, minds closed to his questions but brimming with fire and murder. The dragons of the Worldspine had chosen their course.

  Little one, run!

  35

  One In, One Out

  The old redoubt was a labyrinth, impossible to navigate if you didn’t already know your way or have a guide, and even Bellepheros didn’t know where half its passages led or what was really at the end of them; but he’d been here enough times to get to anywhere that really mattered, and he knew where the half-god was going: to the Silver King, trapped on the brink of death. He walked through the passages and tunnels that would take him there, climbed shafts and ladders and winced at the pains in his old knees, and wondered in the name of Xibaiya what he thought he was doing. How, exactly, was this going to work? Did he simply pull the spike out of the Silver King’s head and wake him up? And then what? Even if that worked, he probably wasn’t going to exactly be pleased …