by Stephen Deas
He reached a bridge across a fissure. A rustle of water echoed from below. He put one tentative foot forward and then stopped, trying not to think of the gaping abyss beneath him. Yes, he’d been this way a dozen times before and more, but it never got any better. He stuffed his lamp inside his robe. Better not to see. Better to close his eyes …
A gleam flickered below. Not the pale white glow of an alchemical lamp but a silvery sheen. Bellepheros froze, heart hammering fit to burst from his chest as the Black Moon walked along the sand beside the river at the bottom of the fissure, and he was sure the half-god would somehow know he was there, but the Black Moon passed on and vanished, the last sight of him a lingering flicker of moonlight. Bellepheros waited to catch his breath.
The bridge was a rickety wobbling thing held up by old creaking ropes. He crossed it with his eyes tight shut and let his feet feel their way, clung to the ropes either side and tried to imagine the ground just a short step beneath his toes. He counted the steps as he’d always done until he felt stone under his boots again, welcome as an old lover. When he opened his eyes another alchemist stood less than ten feet in front of him down the tunnel. He was holding up a lamp and peering in disbelief.
‘Bellepheros? Grand Master Bellepheros?’
Bellepheros gawped. He hadn’t expected to find anyone still alive in the redoubt. ‘Who are you?’ he blurted, the first thing that came into his head. He wondered if the other alchemist was some desperate delusion, but the alchemist stubbornly didn’t vanish. Bellepheros peered. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked. Then fear got the better of him, and he scurried forward and wrapped his hands over this strange alchemist’s lamp.
‘Grand Master Bellepheros? How—’
‘Hide the light!’
The alchemist pulled away. ‘It is you!’ he whispered. ‘Where have you been? Grand Master, the dragons can’t reach this far into the caves. There’s no need to fear them here.’
‘Dragons?’ Bellepheros shook his head. ‘It’s not dragons I’m worried about! There’s a half-god loose in here!’ He poked the alchemist to be sure he was real. ‘I thought the redoubt would be dead and abandoned long ago. How many of you are here?’
‘A half-god?’ The alchemist’s mouth fell open. He looked at Bellepheros as though he was mad. As though he was a ghost.
Bellepheros shook him. ‘How many? And what’s your name?’
‘My name?’
‘Your name! You still have those, don’t you?’
‘Vatos, Grand Master.’ They were walking fast now, Bellepheros tugging Vatos along, almost running, which in these caves was often a quick way to end on your arse with sore knees and elbows, but right now Bellepheros didn’t care. He felt on the brink, right on the edge of something he couldn’t grasp. Another alchemist!
‘Vatos! Are there others here?’
‘Y-yes. But you were dead, Grand Master! Everyone said. You went to Furymouth and never returned and—’
‘How – many – others?’ Vatos. The name didn’t mean anything. ‘Don’t you see how important it is?’
Vatos stopped. ‘How did you get past the dragons, Grand Master? Where did you go? Why did you leave us?’ He clutched at Bellepheros. ‘Tell us what to do! There’s nothing left!’
A wild plan already swarmed in Bellepheros’s head. Gather the last alchemists. Trick the Black Moon’s dragons into taking the old poisons again then haul the half-god down. Let loose the blood-magic. Blood-mages once tore the Silver King from his perch, and one half-god was surely much like another …
He forced the madness in his head to be still and looked at it with cold hard reason. The arch-magus Pantatyr had led a thousand blood-mages at the height of their powers, not some ragged half-starved handful. Yet …
He stopped and took careful hold of Vatos. ‘One more time. How many other alchemists are in the redoubt, Vatos?’
A distant flash of silver reflected glistening along the damp tunnel wall. A scream echoed after it. Vatos’s fingertips froze on Bellepheros’s robe.
‘Grand Master?’ He sounded like a fearful child.
‘The Black Moon,’ breathed Bellepheros. ‘We need to find the others, Vatos, before he does. We need …’ He heard another scream. The words died. Too late. He felt numb.
Vatos stumbled away. ‘They’ve found a way in! Oh, Great Flame, they’ve found a way in. How did you get past them, Grand Master? What have you done?’
‘Not dragons. The half-god.’ Bellepheros leaned against the tunnel wall. He sank to his haunches and held his head in his hands. ‘The half-god struck down by the Isul Aieha’s spear. Alive again, and now he’s killing us. There’s nothing we can do, Vatos. You have to go now. You have to hide.’
Another flash of moonlight flared through the caves, carrying another scream. Silver light glinted off the walls, growing ever closer, ever brighter. Vatos looked with eyes wide in terror, looked over his shoulder and then back at Bellepheros once more, forlorn like a beaten dog, and Bellepheros couldn’t blame him for his fear. The very walls gleamed silver, and the Black Moon was coming, and Vatos simply stood there because they were in a tunnel and there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run. No nooks, no cracks or crevices for a man to crawl inside, only bare stone walls and shadows and the silver-bright of the Black Moon like the light of the sun, the midday moon, closing them steadily down. He stood quaking while Bellepheros huddled against the wall and waited to see if he would die.
The half-god came. In the fire of silver fury that surrounded him, the glaring bright that filled the air, Vatos froze and arched and screamed. He rose helpless into the air, arms and legs windmilling, and hung adrift until the Black Moon stood before him. A ruddy haze filled the space between them. Bellepheros stayed where he was, careful and silent. The Black Moon didn’t seem to see him, but that couldn’t possibly be right.
‘I know your thoughts.’ Glee and triumph came in gaudy streamers from the Black Moon’s tongue. He tapped a finger on Vatos. ‘An alchemist should know there’s no such thing as a place to hide from a dragon as he peers into your soul.’
The crimson haze thickened, a red iron vapour torn from Vatos and oozing from his skin, slick and bloody now, silvery too, flowing into the Black Moon. The essence of the Silver King that every alchemist carried inside themselves. The Black Moon took it, and Vatos died, and the Black Moon let him fall and walked on; and Bellepheros pressed himself against the stone, as plain to see as a man on a rock under the midday sun, and yet the Black Moon passed him by, and he didn’t understand why, why the half-god would leave him be, but he did. It was as though Bellepheros wasn’t even there.
Vatos was a husk, what was left of him, dead and white-skinned and flaking as though a corpse left to dry in a cave for years. All the moisture had been sucked out of him. Every drop, every prick of blood. He was shrivelled. At a touch Vatos would crumble to dust.
Bellepheros moved away, on through the redoubt, already sure he was too late. He found more alchemists – his family, for want of anything better, their corpses sucked desert-dry in caves precipitately abandoned, lamps still lit, food half eaten. In some the air carried the taint of a greasy black ash, settling like silent corrosive death. The Silver King had vanished. Dead or raised to vengeful life, Bellepheros didn’t know, but it hardly mattered. He was too late; and it struck him hard then: there would be no more alchemists. None. Ever. He and Kataros might well be the last. He sat down and held his head in his hands and shook and heaved, racked by the irrevocable end of everything he knew.
He was there for a while, lost in grief and misery. By the time he forced himself back to the mouth of the caves the sun was sinking, the eyrie gone and the Black Moon with it. The distant clouds at the end of the valley hung edged in purple. He tried to remember why he’d come here and what he’d thought he could achieve. The stupid notion of a hundred alchemists united to his cause, their power and blood t
urned as one against the Black Moon after the dragons had been tamed. The stupid notion that there could be anyone left alive.
Ash. All of it. Ash and sand.
‘Belli?’
The voice came from deeper in the cave, hesitant and hurt. A voice that couldn’t possibly be real, but after a moment he looked up anyway, ready to see the Black Moon again, to see that the half-god had known he was here all along, and that everything had been one cruel trick.
Chay-Liang sat cross-legged on a bizarre and ornate gold-glass sled, looking at him.
‘You’re not real,’ he said flatly when he found his voice.
‘Belli,’ she said, ‘if that is so, then this mirage would nevertheless like some Bolo and qaffeh, if you have any. I am rather hungry.’ She gave a wan smile, and then she jumped from her sled and ran across the sand beside the little bubbling river, and Bellepheros started to get to his feet and his knees almost gave way, and then she had his hands, pulling him up and into her arms and holding him tight, quivering and shuddering as though she meant never to let go, and he knew exactly how she felt, a relief as though his blood had been made of lead and was suddenly turned to air.
‘Li,’ he said, over and over. ‘Li. How?’ His head spun with why and what she was doing here, and when had she crossed the storm-dark, and how many others were with her, and so many questions spinning in his head like an unruly carousel, all tangled and tripping over one another before they could be made into words, but more than anything else she was here, and the relief and the joy and the sheer dazzling happiness to see her again almost knocked him flat.
‘I told you I’d find you again,’ she said. She felt different. Hardened and sharpened. Thinner than she’d been the last time he saw her in Merizikat.
They let one another go at last, but they held hands and never stopped touching, even if it was only fingers. Bellepheros led Li back among the caves and stopped in a hand-hewn cellar beside the underground river, the darkness of the fissure above them. Sturdy wooden stools sat around a stone-block table and three half-eaten bowls of pasty mush. Three desiccated corpses lay on the sand beside the water. Bellepheros set his lamp beside the bodies and held Li close, feeling her as she shivered into him – both dazed, both amazed to be alive – and he knew that the corpses at his feet could so easily have been either one of them. He imagined the Black Moon drawing out their lives, and didn’t dare peer at their ghastly upturned faces in case there was enough left that he would recognise them. He knew every alchemist alive well enough to at least flounder for a name. Many were old friends. Some he’d studied beside for twenty years. A handful he’d known since they were children. So no, he didn’t want to see their faces.
Li pulled away and righted a stool and sat on it, ravenously shovelling food into her mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I haven’t eaten for days.’
It seemed wrong to eat a dead man’s supper right beside his corpse, but Li ate like she hadn’t eaten for a month, and Bellepheros was sure the dead alchemists would have understood. Between mouthfuls she told him the truth of how Tuuran had helped her to escape Merizikat, how she’d found Red Lin Feyn and crossed the storm-dark. She laughed as she scraped the last bowl clean and her eyes ranged the floor for more. ‘My ship headed back into the storm-dark before I was even out of sight.’ She started to shake. Sobs, and Bellepheros wrapped his arms around her and they clung to one another again.
‘I wish you hadn’t come, Li,’ he whispered. ‘And I’m so glad you have. So very happy.’ He closed his eyes and basked in her, and for a while there was nothing else, and even the Black Moon was forgotten. Then he took her hand and led her further into the fissure, skirting as far around the scattered corpses as he could. One thing he could do: there would be food here, somewhere.
‘I had a map,’ Li said behind him. ‘I thought Zafir’s home must be easy to find. I never imagined all the cloud and rain you have in this land.’
They reached a shaft so narrow that even Bellepheros had to twist his shoulders. He went ahead, peering with his failing lamp until Li lit up a brilliant wand behind them, a glass torch like the hundreds she’d made in Merizikat and a hundred times brighter. A film of greasy ash covered the walls. Another desiccated body lay across the tunnel at the top. Bellepheros tried to step around it, lost his balance, stumbled and landed heavily on the corpse’s shoulder. It crumbled and cracked underfoot like a mound of dead wood, dry-rotten almost to dust. He shuddered.
‘What happened here?’ Li asked.
‘The Black Moon.’ Bellepheros told his own tale as they went from cave to cave through the redoubt’s stores, gathering what food they could carry. He stopped as he reached the tale of Zafir’s expedition to retrieve her spear, and shivered. Li leaned into him.
‘I’m sorry, Belli.’ She’d found a bucket of nuts and was gnawing on them.
‘These were my last few friends, and the Black Moon brushed them away as though they never existed. When was the last time you ate, Li?’
She wrapped an arm around him and rested her head on his shoulder. ‘You know I was born and raised in a city, Belli. We had two sail-slaves who cleaned and cooked. When I was eight, I was sent to Hingwal Taktse, where half of us forgot to eat when we were supposed to and wandered about suddenly ravenous at all odd times. The slaves there were used to it. Food was a distraction made by other people that came and went, to be dealt with as quickly as possible. An irritating necessity. I never truly appreciated it until now.’ She shook her head and stretched and got up and rubbed her belly. ‘I got lost. I was in the middle of nowhere and starving, and I didn’t have the first idea what to do, and there wasn’t some nearby market, and I couldn’t just have a slave prepare a salad …’
‘No qaffeh?’
She laughed, and they sat together a while longer, drinking each other in while Li told him how useless she’d been, how lightning throwers weren’t the best weapons for a hungry hunter, and how she’d eventually found the Pinnacles and followed the eyrie all the way to the redoubt.
‘I saw the Black Moon come into these caves,’ she said, ‘and then he came out and the eyrie flew away, and all the dragons with him, and you were still inside, and I thought …’
Her last words trailed into gossamer silence. Bellepheros struggled to his feet, wincing at the creaking of his knees and how they always hurt when he sat still for too long.
‘I thought I might stop him,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how. I don’t know why he didn’t see me. Or why he didn’t see you, for that matter.’
‘I took your potion,’ Li said. ‘To keep myself hidden.’
‘But that was for dragons, Li. Not half-gods.’
Li grabbed him by the arm. ‘But that’s what I found out! After Tuuran sent me away! The dragons are half-gods. The Black Moon changed them, but they were like him before. They were your Silver Kings, the ones he defeated. I saw it in the unholy Rava. It’s right there, spelled out in black and white, if you know how to look.’
Bellepheros froze as though he’d been turned to stone. ‘The carvings in the Pinnacles!’
‘What?’
The Black Moon with his blindfold. The Black Moon with his eyes plucked out. And suddenly he knew: the Black Moon’s eyes were blind. The Crowntaker saw as any man did, but the half-god hunted as dragons hunted hidden prey, by thought and memory, and Bellepheros, who had hidden his thoughts from the dragons and made himself as invisible to them as he could, had without knowing it made himself invisible to the Black Moon too.
Li told him what Red Lin Feyn had shown her, the same pictures he’d seen in the Enchanted Palace beyond the Hall of Mirages, of the Silver Kings and of dragons, and how every one of them had been drawn with a hole inside their head, and of the Black Moon cracking open the skull of a half-god and seeming to take something out and offer it to a sleeping dragon. And he’d never quite understood what that had meant or what it could b
e, but what if it was a soul?
‘His eyes are blind, but he sees our thoughts and reads our minds, and what hides us from the dragons also hides us from—’
‘From him!’
‘Yes! And if he can’t see us and read our thoughts, he can’t command us, and the pieces that he cut out of us with that wretched knife no longer matter. We are free!’ Ice crawled up and down his skin. ‘Li?’
‘Belli?’
‘If dragons and half-gods are the same, then there is poison enough here in these caves to wipe out every half-god ever born.’
36
The Savage Claw
Forty-one days after landfall
‘The tunnels! Now!’ Zafir spared a glance for the sled she’d used to fly from Diamond Eye’s back, but it wouldn’t do her any good underground and it couldn’t outrun a dragon. Tuuran stared, bewildered at first, but when he saw the onrush of dragons swooping across the plains he understood right enough. He swore a lot and yelled; Zafir was already moving, bolting for the tunnels where Lystra had gone, bracing for the fight she knew she must now have with Lystra’s soldiers. Better to face men than dragons, though.
Already on edge, taut as a twisted rope from having Lystra stand in front of her again after so long, adrenaline-spiked from the storm of dragons rushing to fall upon her, Zafir ran under the stage and into the sense of the mountain closing around her, walls pressing in, the roof low over her head, the suffocating wrap of stone and gloom and looming darkness.
‘Lystra!’ Her heart was pounding. Too fast. She had to run because walking was too stifling. Her hands gripped her spear, anything to release the pent-up tension. ‘Lystra!’ She didn’t even know which way to go through the nest of little rooms and passages under the stage where the actors used to keep their costumes and make their changes; but she didn’t have to look far before she saw the flash of a lamp and then Lystra’s Adamantine Men ahead of her. They heard her coming, of course. The alchemist Kataros stopped and turned to face her, and the Adamantine Man she’d brought with her, whatever his name was – Jasaan, was it? – drew out his axe. She saw him hand a knife to Kataros. The others hurried Lystra and Jaslyn away.