The Silver Kings

by Stephen Deas

  She’d hardly taken a drop. Barely let the potion touch her lips. Just a few hours to vanish. I will face you then, little dragon Silence. You and I. Tooth and claw and tail and fire, and I with lightning and spear.

  The dragon didn’t answer.

  They ran down a long sloping passage. Zafir heard shouts echo far ahead. Jaslyn claimed Lystra had born Jehal a son; so Lystra was heading for him, for the rest of her riders and the core of her strength. The dragons were heading there too. It would be a race. Zafir held back, shivered by a sense of doom. She drew Tuuran close to her again.

  ‘Holiness?’

  A hatchling was following them. She’d glimpsed into its thoughts as the alchemical fog had settled through her. As they passed a niche she tugged Tuuran and ducked into the mouth of it, buried and cloaked in gloom.

  ‘We have a dragon shadowing us. He leads the others.’

  Tuuran hissed at her, ‘Then perhaps we should go a different way, Holiness! Perhaps we should let it find them!’

  ‘No.’

  He grabbed her then. Took her arms in his hands and almost shook her. ‘She has what she wants from you, Holiness. She will not let you go. She will turn on you.’

  ‘Go, Tuuran. I release you.’

  ‘No!’ He wouldn’t leave her. And there might have been more from either one of them, so many words not spoken here in the stifling dark, but she heard a scratch of stone then and pressed a hand hard over Tuuran’s mouth and a finger to her own lips, and wished their Taiytakei torches into a blackness absolute.

  ‘Dragon,’ she whispered in the dark, soft lips brushing his ear.

  They moved apart. Zafir crouched into her crevice, still as stone. Silent except for her own racing heart. Could a dragon hear a heartbeat?

  Another scratch of a claw. The scrape of a careless wing. Cold sweat prickled her skin in the darkness. She pressed deeper into her crevice, part of her a girl again, hoping not to be seen. The old fear rose in wave after wave; she pushed it back, eyes screwed shut: Not now, not now, not ever, but especially not now. She pictured Tuuran, close enough to touch though she couldn’t see him. The strength of him, the sureness, the certainty. The strong arms tugging her from the water in that stupid cave before they’d left for Merizikat. Enough to take the edge away, to blunt the fear so she might stand against it.

  Scratch and scrape. Closer still. She didn’t see the dragon but she felt its heat. A heartbeat passed and then another.

  ‘Here, dragon,’ she whispered.

  Her enchanter’s torch lit up the tunnel with a light like day, blinding bright. She sprang as the dragon turned, and drove her two bladeless knives into its flank, ripped and cut. The dragon’s head whipped and snapped. It spat fire at her visored face, and then Tuuran’s axe came down on its neck and split its spine. Zafir wove the bladeless knives in arcs and stabbed them into the dragon’s skull. She watched it sink and die, and stared at what they’d done.

  ‘Holiness, do you see?’ murmured Tuuran. ‘You do not need the Isul Aieha’s spear.’

  ‘With the spear I would have made him into stone.’ She stepped away and idly touched her arm where the Hatchling Disease had taken hold. ‘I would have done to him as they have already done to me. Why is it always stone, Night Watchman?’

  There was a reason, she thought. Something she didn’t see. Something to do with the dead goddess of the earth whose spear the Silver King had carried, and stone her element, but the riddle was beyond her. She climbed past the dragon and …

  Stopped.

  Someone else was here. Someone else had waited.

  Thoughts burst like pricked balloons. The strength drained from her legs as though her strings had been cut. The bladeless knives slipped from her fingers. She stumbled. Her hands turned numb. She couldn’t speak. She fell.

  ‘Holiness!’ Tuuran caught her as she crumpled.

  ‘Step away.’

  A woman’s voice. Zafir took a moment to place it. Not Lystra, not Jaslyn …

  The alchemist. Kataros.

  Poison.

  ‘Step away,’ said Kataros again. ‘She has my blood inside her, Adamantine Man, and if you raise even a finger towards your lightning, I will stop her heart.’

  Zafir couldn’t move.

  ‘I will snap your neck, alchemist.’ Tuuran lowered her to the stone. Zafir heard his footsteps, furious and fast, and then a ­strangled gasp and the clatter of crashing glass. When she strained her eyes she could see where Tuuran had fallen, flat and still on the ground.

  ‘You drank my blood too, Adamantine Man.’

  Tuuran? The thought she’d lost him was a knife in her skull.

  Kataros crouched beside her. ‘Her Holiness Queen Lystra sends her regards.’ She took the lightning throwers from Zafir’s vambraces, the bladeless knives lying beside her, the glass wand of light, then heaved Zafir floppy-limbed onto her side and took every other weapon and left her for the dragons. The last gleam of her lantern bobbed and weaved and then faded as she walked away.

  Zafir could barely move her fingers.

  Diamond Eye! But the dragon couldn’t hear her. No dragon could, not any more.

  The darkness closed in, still and silent and empty.

  Halfteeth left Snacksize at the bottom of the stairs. Couldn’t even take her with them; just had to leave her as the next hatchling and then the next came down the spiral shaft. He could hear them, the click of their claws on the stone. They were death, and he didn’t have the stomach for fighting any more. He pushed through his men milling at the bottom of the shaft and led them on, fast, running away deep into the ground, the way he’d gone before with Tuuran, the way Zafir had shown them. He remembered it well enough. That was the thing about being raised in the mountains, in caves and forests and crags: a man got to have a sense of where things were. It had always been a point of pride – follow a path once and he never needed to be shown it again.

  Lightning shivered the air somewhere behind him. The rearguard, fighting off the hatchlings. He ought to be there.

  Snacksize. Stupid name, but somehow she’d liked it. She would have led them better than he ever could. Shown them the way. And then he could have been at the back with the best of Tuuran’s men around him, trading lightning with the dragons that wanted to eat him. Knocking them down and then watching them get back up again.

  Screams. Shrieks. Sometimes he looked back and thought he saw an orange glow of fire reflected from passed-by walls.

  They ran. Mile after mile under the ground, and Halfteeth didn’t stop, putting his lover’s corpse as far behind him as he could until they reached the door that only an alchemist could open, that they’d never closed behind them. He rushed his men into the ­cavern beyond and told them what to do, where to go, pointed them towards the far end and the scaffold there and tuned their ears to the rush of water. He waited and shooed the last on their way, staying, he said, to close these doors which even a dragon couldn’t pass. And when the last of them was gone, he did exactly that, and then stood with his back to them, on the wrong side and not following his men at all, lightning throwers ready, an axe in one hand and a shield in the other, to see how many of the chasing dragons he could kill before he died.

  Snow and a hundred dragons soar. A thousand more gather above. One by one the minds of the little ones flicker and fade. They gutter like dying candles and vanish while the spear still sings, calling. In the skies over the mountains dragons wheel and dive and race, circling, tracing the spear’s path under the earth, away from the peaks and towards the great gorge of the indomitable Fury. Orange stone welcomes them, old as time, split and cracked and flecked with dull-glowing shards of white and a last touch of the songs of the half-gods, hostile and resentful. Shadows and crevices. A way in but too small for dragons. Outside, then, they wait.

  The first hatchling emerged from the shadows. Halfteeth howled and t
hrew lightning in its face. It tumbled back, a flail of twitching wings and claws and whipping tail. He ran at it, saw a second dragon right there and knew at once that he was doomed. And that was fine because he’d known from the moment Snacksize had died in his arms. He cracked his hatchet into the first dragon’s head, raised his second lightning thrower, and then the fire came and rushed him back, screaming, futile arms lifted to cover his face, twisting and turning and dancing for a way out of the pain, an escape that simply wasn’t there.

  His skin burned. The dragons scuttled and leaped and bore him to the stone and pinned him to the ground. They glared him down, and all he could think of was Snacksize and how slight she’d seemed as he’d held her, even in her armour. Light as a feather.

  The dragon seared into his head. He felt the true size of it. Trapped in newborn scales but as old as mountains and as vast as the seas. It tore through his memories, shards of confusion wrapped in a jigsaw of pain. He didn’t try to stop it. Why bother? What did he know that mattered? The door behind him was barred with alchemical sorceries. Nothing but the blood of an alchemist would open it, or so Zafir had said.

  Little one.

  The hatchling crushed his arm. Sparks jittered from his lightning thrower as it snapped. They arced over the dragon’s scales. The dragon shivered but didn’t let go. It wrapped one talon around his head and picked him up and held him helpless while with its other claw it scratched at the wound Halfteeth’s hatchet had left in its face. Dragon blood. It touched its blood to the door and pushed. The door swung open.

  We know now what we are, little one, it said, and squeezed Halfteeth’s head until his skull burst.

  Silence follows the song of the Earthspear, creep-crawling through the labyrinth, the click-clacking scrape of claws on stone, lingering here and pausing there to devour the last little ones who remain trapped and helpless, their thoughts naked with delicious fear. Hours pass. Day becomes night, and a distant glow sings of old sorceries of the earth, of the white stone of the Silver Kings and of the passages the Black Moon once made into Xibaiya.

  Among these ancient half-god paths Silence and her hatchling kin run and leap and bound. They gather and pour, fast now, moonlight walls to guide them, space around them, rushing upon the little ones far away who hide their thoughts but blindly cannot hide the spear they carry. They come, Silence and her dragons, in a wave of fire and tooth and claw.

  39

  Myst

  The eyrie drifts over mountains, serene and quiet. Sometimes Myst climbs the walls to watch. Often she brings little Tuuran, and Onyx comes too, and they sit together with their uncertain sons of Tuuran’s legion and watch the world pass below and talk of nothing much. Sometimes she comes with little Tuuran alone. She loses herself in the lives she’s lived and tells them to her child, though he cannot yet understand them.

  Myst …

  ‘I had another name once,’ she tells little Tuuran. Born a child of the desert, the slavers took her in the year she turned a woman.

  Myst …

  ‘There was a boy. He was the last ever to hear it.’ Her eyes are bright, the air over the mountains as thin and clear as a desert night. ‘I remember our hour together. It is twilight and the air is cool. We are travelling towards whispers of black ooze rising from the dunes, because harvesting the ooze for the city lords brings us riches and fat bellies. We are in the ruins of a place called Uban. Much is buried under the sand, and has been that way for very long, but some parts still rise into the sky. I have never seen a city before, even one old and abandoned. I wander through it as we set our tents. Hidden away out of sight, out of sound, I wait behind a stone that climbs from the sand, tall as the stars, for the boy I want. He comes to me and I see him. His eyes are like moonlight. He takes me in his arms and whispers to me. He brings me a blanket. It is camel hair. He says he wishes it was silk. It scratches my skin as I lie beneath him. It itches, but I soon forget. We fumble and kiss and find our way, a first time for both of us. It is a miracle. A mystery of the universe drops its shy veil and hangs naked among the stars as we lie, limbs entwined, looking at the sky.’

  A last memory of joy. She shies away, always, from what comes next.

  Myst.

  Diamond Eye flees the mountain theatre. The theatre is Adrunian Zar’s life’s work. Little ones are always building, littering the landscape with monuments to their short lives lest their memory dissolve to nothingness; but Diamond Eye remembers only an alchemist, a potion-maker, acolyte and priest to his slavery.

  The dragons of the Worldspine have chased him far away but their thoughts sing to him still. Silence, dripping wet and stalking blood, hunting the Isul Aieha’s spear. A dozen dragons have died, but each is a drop in an ocean of fire, and there are always more. They feel Diamond Eye’s thoughts in return, the tickle of them as he whispers for his little one under the stone, self-hidden and vanished. She is dead by now, perhaps, ephemeral and passing as they always are, fragile and so easily broken, but Diamond Eye searches for her nonetheless. He chooses not to believe that his little one has ended; he chooses to care.

  The others do not understand. Even Diamond Eye has no answer. The Black Moon has cut him with the knife of stars he carries and commands that he obey. He hides behind this, it is true, but there is far more. An unsought kinship he has a reluctance to leave behind.

  He reaches to the Black Moon for his aid, but the old half-god cares only for his schemes of deicide.

  The dragon Diamond Eye reaches, then, for another.

  The horizon seems so distant. The sheer size of it burns her eyes. Myst can’t look, and yet she can’t look away. There are tears. There were a lot of tears on that night when the slavers came and found her wrapped in the arms of the boy she would never see again.

  Myst.

  Dragged away wrapped in nets. Her family scream, run, scattered across the sand as the slavers sweep through on their sleds. They cast their snares, swing their staves, throw their flicks of weakened lightning, enough to fell a man but not to kill. She will never know how many are taken, how many die, how many flee. She tries not to remember her boy, screaming for mercy, forgetting her as though she doesn’t exist.

  Why today? she wonders. Why do these memories all come back to me today?

  Myst.

  Powerless. Tied and stripped under desert stars. Tied hand and foot to long wooden poles, the men are marched into the night. The children are next, on a great glass sled pulled by a dozen Linxia. The women are last. The slavers take longer, dividing them by the skills they claim, their age, the look of them. They poke and prod and pry at her. They take her in manacles and fly away. They send her to learn how to be with men. She weeps every night at first, but in time it passes. They teach her how to please. They beat her when she fails, in ways that leave no mark.

  She never sees her people again.

  Myst!

  ‘I excelled,’ she breathes to the mountains, though why they want to hear her story she can’t imagine. Only Kalaiya and Onyx have heard it before, because for Kalaiya and Onyx it is their story too. ‘Within a year I am among the best. Within another all of Cashax whispers my name. The Desert Orchid. By the end of a third, men from other cities come for no other reason than to lie with me. My last is Zifan’Shu. The money he pays to own me would have bought a ship.’ She chuckles. ‘A small one, he says. But he is small too, in the places only his women see. I excel at what I do. I wear a mask and make it perfect.’

  A life with no feeling is a thin veil for death.

  ‘I am a performer. I am exquisite and without compare.’

  And then Zafir, who killed Zifan’Shu on the deck of his own ship. Who’d stabbed him eighteen times before they pulled her off and wore, it seemed, no masks at all. Terrible and terrifying. How I envied her. For who she was. For what. For what she had done.

  And now you would die for her.

  ‘Yes
.’ Myst, too, has no need for masks any more. No need to be anyone other than who she is, a quiet woman who yearns for the desert stars and a boy long lost. Zafir has taught her that. Zafir has set her free. Her and Onyx, and others too.

  Myst watches Zafir’s dragon rise from the valleys. He circles the eyrie and slams to the wall beside her. She doesn’t flinch. As he lowers his head she sees that Zafir isn’t on his back. He looks at her. Gazes inside her.

  Your mistress has gone to a place I cannot see. I desire your aid. Be my eyes, little Myst. Be my sight and hunt for her.

  The dragon draws pictures in her head. Everything. The Black Moon’s indifference. Faces and names she doesn’t understand. Zafir vanishing from his thoughts. A sense of need. Of a debt. He shows her what he wants, and Myst swells with pride and delight, for to ride a dragon is a dream she has. She hurries into the tunnels and takes a bladeless knife, one of many the dragon-queen keeps hidden there. Zafir once named her Myst after a dragon she flew, her and Onyx. And Brightstar too, long dead but whom none of them forget.

  ‘Don’t you mean our mistress?’ she asks because no one has told her that dragons bow to nothing, but Diamond Eye doesn’t answer. When she is on his back, he jumps into the sky.

  40

  Diamond Eye

  Zafir lay in darkness, heart pounding, gasping shallow breaths, squirming inside with the old dread. She could still move, but only a little, a twitching of her fingers and toes. She could turn her head now to look for Tuuran, but in the darkness she couldn’t see whether he was alive or dead. When she tried to call out, all she managed was a strangled gurgle.

  She had no idea what the alchemist Kataros had done to her. She twitched and wriggled towards where she’d heard Tuuran fall. In the black she couldn’t tell whether she got any closer. She was still trying when she realised that she could see a little, and thought at first that her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, but the light kept growing. A lamp, bobbing from a passage towards her, and with it a sharp spike of fear. The darkness and what came after.