by Stephen Deas
Footsteps came closer. She saw the silhouette of a man. The tension inside her was like a drawn bow. The man crouched beside Tuuran. He set his lamp on the ground and tipped a cup to Tuuran’s lips. ‘Come on, big man. You’re Adamantine. You want to die here rolling in the dirt?’
She knew the voice.
Jasaan!
The frightened girl inside Zafir dissolved in a flurried stutter of heartbeats. She was the dragon-queen again. She managed another strangled gasp.
‘Come on, come on. You’re still breathing. She didn’t kill—’
Tuuran moved with a sudden violence. A hand, an arm, fingers grabbing Jasaan hard by the throat.
‘Jasaan.’ Tuuran turned and rolled and clawed across the stone as Jasaan stumbled away.‘Come to finish us off? Come back here, you cowardly shit!’
‘What, so you can thank me for saving your life?’ Jasaan danced away.
‘So I can break your fucking traitor’s neck. Why are you here? Your queen is long gone.’
Zafir again tried to move. It came more as the last death-twitch of a broken-necked bird. Be quiet! Listen to him. Beg if you have to, but help me!
Jasaan squatted between them. ‘You serve the wrong speaker, Tuuran, that’s all. I’ve seen many men wear the name and armour of the legion. Some were good, some were bad, many were strong, a few were cowards. You’re loyal to your queen as I am to mine. How can I blame you for that?’
‘I find blaming you and yours as easy as pissing, Jasaan, so perhaps you’re just not trying hard enough.’ Tuuran struggled to get up. He managed to lift himself onto his elbows, tried to roll onto his hands and knees, then crashed back to the ground.
‘I’ve seen men kill dragons before, you know,’ said Jasaan. ‘Some of them were shits even so. But if you’d been Speaker Lystra’s Night Watchman, I would have been proud to take your commands.’ Jasaan eased closer and cautiously stretched his cup again to Tuuran’s lips. ‘I’ve seen plenty of arseholes wear dragonscale, and I’ve heard men sing their praises. I came back because you deserve a better death, that’s all.’ He dropped something to the floor. ‘One of your lightning throwers. A lamp. A knife. A few hours and what Kat did to you will fade on its own, but you’ll find your strength much quicker if you drink this. Only the one cup though. What you do is up to you. I’ll say it again, Tuuran: you serve the wrong speaker.’ He nodded towards Zafir. ‘That one’s bad. Rotten inside. Let the dragons have her. Speaker Lystra carries the spear now, and we’re all the better for it. We could use a man like you. Black Ayz likes you.’
‘You piece of shit!’
‘Your choice, Tuuran.’
Jasaan left the empty cup in Tuuran’s hand. He stepped over Zafir as though she wasn’t there and walked away. Tuuran rolled, fumbled up the lightning wand and pointed it at Jasaan’s back. ‘Jasaan.’ He was quivering with rage.
Don’t! Zafir growled at her own impotence.
‘Jasaan! You stop there!’
‘Follow us if you want, Night Watchman,’ Jasaan called over his shoulder. ‘If not then the quickest way out is back behind you. A tunnel to the Mirror Lakes. Turn back and keep stone to your right, and always take the upper path. In time you’ll see the light of the Silver King’s Ways. You can’t miss it. The lamp should last you long enough to get there.’
Jasaan kept walking. Zafir groaned. Don’t do it! The noise will call dragons on us! Tuuran kept the wand pointed at Jasaan’s back, but Jasaan didn’t stop and didn’t turn his head, and Tuuran didn’t fire. He let it go, and Jasaan disappeared into the darkness. ‘One day, Jasaan. When I have back my axe. Then we’ll see.’
He came to her then, crawled on hands and knees, lifted the lamp and brushed the hair from her face. He looked into her eyes and saw her looking back.
‘You hear me, Holiness?’ he asked.
She couldn’t even nod, not really. But she could blink. A blink for yes, then.
‘You heard that shit-stain? You heard what he said?’
Blink.
‘Then you know what this is.’ He lifted her head and pressed the cup to her lips, the last mouthful of whatever Jasaan had brought him spat back out and saved for her instead. Giving her his strength, as ever. When she was done he cradled her. She could hear him breathing, and knowing that he was alive was a warmth and an almost unbearable relief. She started to shake. In the dark she was naked before her demons, but Tuuran was her armour, her shield, her lightning; and as she listened to the rise and fall of his chest, the demons slunk back to their cages, slow and reluctant while he rocked back and forth with her held in his arms, cursing himself for how he’d failed her. ‘Forgive me, Holiness.’
‘Tuuran?’ She had her voice again, croaky and rasping. They lay together, still, sensation slowly returning. ‘Tuuran.’ Where no one else would see or know she closed her eyes and imagined her hands pressed to his face. A private moment they could never have again.
As soon as he could stand Tuuran tried to pick her up and almost crashed them both to the ground. Five minutes later he had her over his shoulder, grunting and groaning at the weight of her armour. In the quiet lonely dark he staggered step after step, snapping and snarling about how he might just beat Jasaan’s head against a rock until it split like a melon. An age seemed to pass in lurch and growl and stagger, but Tuuran kept stone to his right and always took the upper path, and in time Zafir saw a familiar distant light reflecting off the stone ahead. A tunnel like the ones under the Pinnacles. The Silver King’s Ways.
‘Go ahead, Night Watchman.’ She smiled, a weak little gesture he didn’t see. ‘I think I can stand now. Go ahead and check for dragons for me.’
He set her propped against the tunnel wall. She waved him away, further and further until he was almost out of sight. When he was gone she collapsed. Gulped lungfuls of air. Forced herself up again and staggered out of sight down some tiny tunnel, pulled herself along the wall and then squatted. Trying to piss out the demons running riot inside her head. The dark, the quiet, the stillness, the unbearable crushing weight of the earth above her. She’d come to the Spur with a dragon, with the spear in her hand and soldiers beside her. One by one she’d lost them, and now the old fear came at her from all sides to slip back under her skin. In the dark, alone, she faced it down.
‘I am better than you now,’ she whispered, ‘and you cannot have me.’
The dragon Diamond Eye leaves the Worldspine. Night falls. Myst sleeps across his back. He rides her dreams and whispers to her as she walks through other worlds. Your mistress will find her way to you. Your mistress? Our mistress? A dragon has no mistress or master, or so they tell themselves, but what then of the Black Moon? What of him?
In the false light before dawn the dragon Diamond Eye settles beside the Mirror Lakes, by caves the last alchemists will use to make their escape. He wakes Myst and leaves her there.
Be my eyes, little one. I will be with you. I will ride inside you.
He flies to perch beside Adrunian Zar’s gasp for immortality, and there wonders again how the dragon-queen has come to matter to him so. He trawls through the roaming fire of dragon memories leaping through the tunnels and cathedrals under the mountains, but none, it seems, are of killing her. All dragon eyes are elsewhere now – the hunt for the Silver King’s spear has become a chase. The turn of the moon and the stars falters to a pause. A world frozen in the place between heartbeats, all except the dragon Silence, closing with murderous impatience to barter lightning for flames. Dragons fall and tumble and rise again. Fang and talon tear flesh and iron. Arrows fly, poison-barbed to bite through scales. An axe strikes off a claw. Everything is fire and the stone-maker spear. Half-blind amid flames and screams, Silence sees the armoured shape that carries it. The spear strikes and pierces the air. Dragons pirouette and jump and crash among the little ones. They burn and snap with tooth and claw amid their scouring fire. They die together,
dragons and men.
The spear falls, knocked ajar and skittering through the air as it once fell from the Isul Aieha’s hand, and as it arcs the dragon Silence springs and snatches it for her own. The little one who holds it does not call it back, as the Silver King once did from Diamond Eye’s claws. This little one cannot. The spear does not claim her.
Lightning and axes and poison barbs. Dragonscale and gold-glass. The little ones have learned, at last, how to fight. The dragon Silence takes the spear and leaves as the little ones murder the last of her hatchling kin. The little death does not matter. The spear is everything, and who carries it will shape the world. All worlds.
Zafir dragged herself to the mouth of the Silver King’s Ways. She forced the mask of the dragon-queen back into place and leaned into Tuuran, letting him take her weight.
‘No dragons, Night Watchman?’ Her voice sounded brittle.
Tuuran shook his head. ‘They’ll pay, Holiness. They will bend their knees to you, all of them, or they will die on blades of Adamantine. I swear this.’
‘You stand beside me, Tuuran. You alone. You always have. But what will you do? Will you fight them all for me? Every last one of them?’ Zafir closed her eyes.
‘If I must.’ Tuuran quickened his pace. ‘Do not despair, Holiness. Your sister remains in the Pinnacles with three hundred men from Merizikat and—’
‘Most of whom will sell their swords to her if she dangles something pretty in front of them, and she also has three hundred riders from Sand who will jump to stand at Lystra’s side. Kiam herself calls me a murderess, and rightly so.’ She shrugged. ‘You know what I did. I doubt she would believe me after all this time, if now I told her why.’
‘Then I will tell her.’
Zafir laughed. ‘She won’t believe you either, Night Watchman.’
‘I was there. I saw it with my own eyes.’
‘She will hear only what she wishes. She will have you hanged for slurring our noble dead stepfather, and I will hang beside you. There’s nothing left, Tuuran. Nothing.’ Nothing except Diamond Eye, the rock of her life, the other half of her soul now driven far away by a thousand angry dragons. Nothing except the Black Moon, who would discard her like a used whore without the spear.
Nothing except her Night Watchman.
She walked faster, anger feeding the return of her strength. Beneath it she was as tired as death. She wanted to stop, to lie down, to wail and scream and tear her hair, but Tuuran kept her going simply because he was there and she wouldn’t let him see her that way. On and on, step after step, hour after hour through the moonlight glow of smooth white stone, the same stone she’d seen over and over throughout the many worlds, relics of the half-gods. Her legs burned and her hips ached, her armour weighed her down, her helm pressed too tight around her skull. She’d twisted something in her shoulder and couldn’t properly turn her neck.
‘I didn’t know what it would be like to come home,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t think it would be this.’
Tuuran ploughed on. He seemed never to weaken. If she faltered she thought he might simply pick her up and keep on going without breaking stride, all the way to the Pinnacles if he had to as though she was nothing more than a feather. ‘Mostly I didn’t think I would ever come back at all,’ he said at last. ‘I suppose I thought everything would keep on much the same.’
‘Did you ever think about me while you were a slave?’
‘Some. I used to think about that night on and off. Still do. I wondered who you were, at first. I had my notions, but I didn’t know for sure. Too well dressed to be just some servant. I wondered what happened to you.’
‘Do you blame me?’
‘For killing him?’ Tuuran snorted. ‘Flame, no!’
‘Not for that. For what happened to you afterwards. For being sold as a slave.’
Tuuran shrugged. ‘Shit heel deserved what you did to him, that’s all I knew.’ Which meant he had blamed her, at least for a while, Zafir thought.
‘I only wish I’d thought to stab him more in the gut and less in the chest so he might have lingered a little longer. Did you hate me?’
‘Hate you, Holiness? No.’ To her surprise Tuuran laughed, a deep chuckle that echoed from the hard white stone around them. ‘When I thought of you at all, I imagined you grown powerful and beautiful, a dragon-rider with a heart full of righteous fury, the scourge of every man like him. I thought of you doing as I had done, a hundredfold. You had to be to make it not matter, to make it worthwhile that I was a slave because of that night. And I was right, Holiness. I was right. When I saw you again in Dhar Thosis, you were all of those things.’
She could feel the pride in him.
‘I was many of those things, Tuuran,’ she said after a moment. Deep breath. Breathe in, breathe out. So tired. ‘That much is true, although my fury was selfish more than righteous, and I certainly had a heart brimming full of it. Still do.’ Step after step after step. She sighed and took off her helm and tried to tuck it under one arm. It felt awkward. Clumsy. She let it hang from her fingers. It seemed heavier than it was.
‘One of those night-skin sleds would do nicely just now,’ Tuuran grunted.
‘I left one at the Oratorium if you’d like to go back and get it.’ They both laughed and then walked on in silence a while longer, Zafir’s thoughts chasing each other like maddened dogs snapping at their own tails until she couldn’t take it any more. ‘Do you know what I did before the Taiytakei took me? It’s true, much of what they say about me. I helped Jehal to poison Hyram, and then I dangled a cure in front of him that wasn’t real. I took him to my bed. I hated myself for that, but it got me what I wanted, and I’d long ago learned how that worked. I took the Speaker’s Throne, which should have gone to Lystra’s mother, and then I had her executed for Hyram’s murder. She probably didn’t kill him. Old fool probably fell all on his own, but I didn’t care about that. I allowed a blood-mage to live under the Glass Cathedral. While I took the realms to war to crush Shezira’s daughters, my lover stole my throne and my blood-mage stole the Adamantine Spear. Jehal was a snake, poison, and you’ll not find many to disagree, and yet they’ll say he was better than me. Perhaps he was, perhaps not, but he wasn’t worse. Are you still proud of me, Tuuran? Because you shouldn’t be. You should leave.’ Leave because everyone always betrayed her in the end. ‘You should go back to Lystra. She’ll make a better speaker than I ever did.’
Tuuran didn’t reply at first, and Zafir wondered if he would answer her at all, or if, when he did, it would be anything more than a stiff and dutiful affirmation. But then she felt a hand on her shoulder, stopping her, turning her, urging her to look at him, and when she did he dropped to one knee and looked her in the eye.
‘I wasn’t here, Holiness. I don’t know the whys and wherefores of who you were or what you did before I met you, or of anyone else. I only know the Zafir I met in Takei’Tarr, in the smashed ruin of the Palace of Roses amid the burned-ash fires of Dhar Thosis. I met the girl for whom I had once given my freedom, and I saw in her everything I had hoped, bringing fire and terror on those who made us slaves, fighting to the death to keep what I had given away, a courage I never found in myself in all my years as a galley slave. The Zafir I know tamed a wild dragon without alchemy. When we were adrift and lost at sea, I saw her lead her people to shelter and help them build a home. So yes, Holiness. I do not know this Zafir who used to be, but the one I have seen, I am proud to serve.’ He smiled, and she thought he would let her go but he didn’t. ‘Holiness, if my words may be free, you were at your best on those islands. You were what was needed. Whatever comes, if any of us are to live and prosper, we will need you as you were then.’
‘Without a dragon?’
‘Either way, Holiness.’
‘But without a dragon what use am I?’
He laughed and got up, and for a moment she thought he was about to w
rap his arms around her and hold her, and right there and then she wouldn’t have minded that at all. But he only shook his head and laughed. ‘Without your Diamond Eye, Holiness, you took the Silver King’s spear from the heart of your enemies.’ His eyes glittered in the moonlight glow. ‘Without your Diamond Eye, you used that spear to kill dragons. And we will get it back, and we will send the Black Moon to his end.’
She nodded. Bit her lip. Couldn’t not. Faith. Loyalty. All that. And in the end, when the Black Moon stood before them and she had the spear in her hand once more, she would let Tuuran down. She would betray him.
They walked on in silence, too much effort simply to keep going for there to be any more words, until ahead the Silver King’s Way faltered and split, riven by a mountain fallen across its back. A narrow crevice led on towards the Mirror Lakes, wrapped in shadows. Zafir saw a glimmer of starlight reflecting from the dark stone. Almost there. Almost out.
Tuuran froze.
‘Holiness … someone else is here.’ He clutched the knife Jasaan had left them, motioned Zafir to stay and then crept into the darkness of the crevice. Zafir fingered the lightning thrower. Its light was bright and ready. She looked back into the dim light of the Silver King’s Ways and saw nothing but the arrow-line length of it, vanishing into the distance under the mountain.
A sharp cry, and then an oath from Tuuran. Another voice. One she knew.
Myst? He was coming back now, and yes, he had Myst with him, clambering through the uneven passage, her silhouette unmistakable. Zafir stared, incredulous. It wasn’t possible. The eyrie? The Black Moon? They’d returned? But Myst? Here …? She tried to make sense of it and found that she couldn’t.
‘Myst. How …?’
‘Holiness.’ Myst shivered and fell, but Zafir was on her before her knees touched the stone, pulling her back up, hugging her.