by Stephen Deas
Bellepheros looked over the tangle of poles. ‘You need to put those three big ones together first and make a tripod.’
‘I’ve had this stupid tent with me for a month.’ Liang glared at him. ‘You sit here for five minutes and you think you can tell me how to put it up?’
Five minutes and he had it done. He made a vague effort to look more apologetic than smug, and failed dismally. Liang glowered and seethed, growled a little when he shrugged at her, and then barged inside with her collection of sticks and kindling and set about making a fire. It wasn’t much of one, but once she had it going it would warm the air, and that was enough. When she was done she glared at him again, and then beckoned him to join her inside.
‘Going to tell me that putting up tents is man’s work now, are you?’ she grumbled.
He snorted. ‘Shall I tell you it’s work for slaves, mistress?’
‘Then you slaves have your uses. Tents, eh?’ She sighed and put an arm around his shoulders and pulled him close.
‘I spent three years of my life wandering these lands.’ The alchemist held out his hands to the flames. ‘I was younger then, and less bothered by things like not having a comfortable bed and a proper roof over my head. In the deserts to the north and the east we used to sleep out in the open under the night sky. I remember one night we watched shooting stars and didn’t sleep at all.’
‘We?’
He smiled a sad little smile. ‘It was a long time ago. Her name was Meileros. We were friends, nothing more, or at least we thought so. We had the idea we might travel the country and write a journal to bring back to the Palace of Alchemy. The history and geography and flora of the nine realms.’ He chuckled. ‘Old Tsen even had a copy in his eyrie. It’s still there if you want to read it. Truth was, it wasn’t much more than an excuse to be away and alone together, though I don’t think either of us quite understood that at the start. She was young; I was –’ he laughed again ‘– not so young any more, I suppose, not even then. But not old. I could still run. I thought I needed an assistant. We started in the north and worked our way south. Two years we were together. She was stupid and careless, wandering the fringes of the Raksheh. A snapper got her. I never forgave myself for that. She had a way of looking at things. Like you do. Quite special.’
He faded for a moment, eyes lost somewhere far away, until Liang squeezed him a little closer. ‘I was all for giving up on it then, but in the end I finished without her. It carries my name, but it’s filled with her memory. I hated it for a while after it was done. Loathed it. Wished we’d never started. Now … now I think I’m quite proud of it.’ He shook himself, as if throwing off old dust, and leaned into her. ‘Anyway … my point was meant to be that I spent months in the wilderness, much of the last of it alone with nothing except a tent very much like this one for shelter. So that’s why I know a thing or two about tents.’ He smiled and took her hand.
Later, as they let the fire die, he showed her how the one last piece of sailcloth she’d never understood was a cap to go over the top of the tripod. It covered the vent hole that let out the smoke, and thus trapped the warmth inside. They lay tangled together, warm and cosy in their little shelter, with the world outside far away behind fragile walls.
‘Where are we, Belli?’ she asked.
‘The valley of the Silver River. The hole where the Spur swallows it is called the Silver King’s Tomb. Entirely wrong-headed, but there you go.’ He clucked and tutted. ‘Riders would come to the cliffs out here back when dragons wore our alchemy. They used to race from the top of the cliff to the ground. Idiots, if you ask me, but who ever does? Every year a few would die, broken by the hurricane wind of such a stoop or the force of a dragon’s flared wings.’ He snorted. ‘Speaker Hyram held a tournament once, in his early years. Quite a prize he offered. Riders came from everywhere. Shezira and Hyrkallan from Sand, everyone wanted to see them dive against one another, and they did. Two riders from Bazim Crag raced and both dragons crashed. Broke their wings and killed their riders, along with Prince Vollis of Three Rivers and most of his entourage, who’d camped close to watch. Too close, as it turned out. Thrown a hundred feet in the air by the force of the dragons coming down beside them, so I heard. A young rider from the Silver City won in the end. Riders from the Pinnacles often win the Great Cliff dive. They get more practice than most, with the cliffs of the Moonlit Mountain right there. You might have heard of this one. Her name was Zafir.’
Liang snuggled closer as they stroked each other in lazy circles. She closed her eyes and listened to Belli talk his wandering stories of younger days, of the beauty of his homeland and of its horrors, of dragons and men, and fell asleep.
In the morning, while Belli still snored, she slipped outside to shape her sled to carry two instead of one. When she was done she stopped, and looked at it a while. She and Red Lin Feyn had poured hour after hour into building it. Black-powder rockets strapped to glass javelins tipped with storm-dark snips of annihilation. Lightning throwers stronger than any wand, closer to the cannon carried by the armoured golem-guardians of the Dralamut, though neither she nor Lin Feyn were more than journeymen when it came to wrapping lightning into glass. Talking quietly, burying themselves in work, keeping busy, both armouring themselves as best they could. The sorceress and her apprentice. Lin Feyn to stand between the Ice Witch of Aria and the Sun King of the Dominion. And her, Chay-Liang of Hingwal Taktse, to stand between dragons and a half-god; and Liang couldn’t help thinking how she’d come out with rather the worse end of that particular bargain.
Belli finally floundered from the tent, all aches and groans and bleary eyes. Liang poured him a cup of river water, and they chewed seeds and dried fruit from the alchemists’ caves. She let him put the tent away on his own and didn’t help, and in return he smiled at her every time he saw her sour face carefully held in place, until in the end she gave up and stuck out her tongue at him. They took to the air over the swirl and white crash of spray where the Silver River plunged under the Spur. The Great Cliff loomed above into tattered shreds of cloud, drifting from the mountains to die over dry dusty plains and desert. They passed the glitter of the Emerald Cascade, spray sparkling green and rainbows glinting in the air. She skimmed the Sapphire River, rushing rapids under an old rope bridge and the charred ruins of an abandoned eyrie overgrown and choked with thorns. Through the day Liang revelled in the grandeur around her, the curtain cliffs of the Spur, the crags above, the tenuous clinging thorn trees, the dazzling sprays of bright sunlit water. For a time she almost forgot why she was here.
But only for a time. As twilight came she caught a glint of sunset fire on a distant lake, and when she climbed the sled high she saw a ruined city beside the shore, gutted and smashed down, flattened and trampled, already half lost under shreds of creeping green. A shattered palace stood on a low hill beside it; the dark shape of a dragon took to the sky as she watched, rising from the ruins and heading south. She slowed then, letting the night darken as they reached the tumbled ghost stones and moon shadows of the fallen Adamantine Palace.
‘Wake up, you.’ She poked Belli.
‘I wasn’t asleep.’ He yawned and stretched. ‘Just keeping my eyes closed so I don’t have to see how far away the ground is.’
‘There was a dragon. The first I’ve seen since I found you,’ she said.
‘Perhaps the rest are mobbing the Black Moon. So much the better if they are.’ Belli looked about him at the ruin of the Adamantine Palace. ‘Good place to rest. Plenty of hiding under the ground here. Tomorrow we throw ourselves at the abyss, eh?’
‘If not us then who will do it?’
‘Fifty years, Li, give or take.’ Belli let out a heavy sigh. ‘It would be nice if it was someone else for a change. It really would.’ There surely couldn’t be anyone left here alive, but Belli led the way into the fire-scoured hulk of hollowed stone that was the Glass Cathedral anyway. Down the sp
iral of stairs hidden behind the altar was the sprawled corpse of a hatchling dragon, but that was all. They slept in the tunnels and left on the next morning, Liang skimming the overgrown plains from the smashed-down City of Dragons to the Fury gorge, searching for an entrance to the Silver King’s Ways, and that was how they found Kataros and Jasaan and the last survivors from under the Spur.
‘Belli!’ She had to wake him up. ‘Bellepheros!’
‘Grand Master Bellepheros?’
Bellepheros blinked a few times, trying to clear his head, trying to work out where he was. They were in the mouth of some cave, and two Adamantine Men with lightning throwers were staring at him, while a dim glowing light filtered through broken stone from deeper under the earth.
‘Jasaan?’ Bellepheros staggered from the sled. ‘Jasaan! Where—’ He stared past Jasaan at the figures beyond – Kataros and a feral old man in a wheeled chair, wrists and feet crippled and useless. ‘Jeiros?’ His mouth hung open. He stumbled closer. ‘Jeiros?’ They’d grown up together, learned, trained and taught together. They’d sat by firesides and spun tales and brewed potions that no one else had ever made and never would again. Half a century of friendship whose presence should have been the comfort of a cosy fire and a favourite robe and a cup of warm spiced brandy; and yes, he knew the story of what Hyrkallan had done, but it hadn’t made him ready, not for this …
‘Jeiros,’ Bellepheros said at last. ‘I heard about the hammers. I’m so sorry.’ He shook his head.
The other survivors from the Spur were camped further down the tunnel. Bellepheros bowed to a queen he barely recognised as Princess Lystra, and to the son she carried wrapped in a dragonscale bundle, little Jehal, heir to Furymouth. Three thousand men had fled under the Spur when the Adamantine Palace fell, so Jasaan said. A score of alchemists, hundreds of Adamantine Guard and dragon-riders, a thousand servants from the speaker’s palace and the Palace of Alchemy, and as many again rescued from the City of Dragons in the days that followed. Bellepheros looked at the bedraggled company around him now. Less than a hundred. A dozen alchemists and a few motley handfuls of simmering Adamantine Men and dispirited dragon-riders. He listened as they murmured to one another. They were walking dead men, half of them, shambling from hour to hour with no thought of what to do, half of them bloody or burned from battle, waiting for the end to come and take them in talons and fire.
Kataros took him to Queen Jaslyn. She was all but dead, ripped half apart in the dragon attack that had seized the spear, and for a while Bellepheros forgot about anything else while he and Jeiros worked to save her. Most of one arm had gone below the shoulder, leaving nothing but rags of flesh and a splintered stump of bone. A claw had ripped her open down one side from armpit to hip. Bone glistened through a wound harsh enough to kill most men. Bellepheros cut himself and dripped a little of his blood into the wounds, and Jeiros did the same, the two of them working together to knit muscle and skin, to close veins and arteries. There wasn’t much to be done about the arm, but it felt good to do something that made a difference, even if it was only a small one, only one life. While they worked Bellepheros tried to explain what had happened to him, the last two years of his life, but there was so much to say and so little time, and he soon tied himself in knots. The other alchemists looked at him askance, their old master, vanished while their world was sucked into cataclysm and now miraculously returned.
Jeiros’s lip curled. ‘It was Zafir. She did this to us. All of it.’
Everything came out. The last days under the Spur. The long months of dragon tyranny. The years before. Zafir and the spear. Everything she’d done.
‘She’s like a cockroach,’ Jeiros spat. ‘Squash her down and she’s crawling again the moment you lift your boot.’
‘What happened to her?’ Bellepheros asked. He looked round and caught Jasaan’s eye. ‘She left you all to die, did she? Took the spear and abandoned you?’
Jasaan shook his head. ‘She stayed, alchemist. She fought the dragons, but she is not with us now.’
Dead? Hard to be sure from the look on Jasaan’s face. ‘And the spear?’
‘The dragons have it.’
Bellepheros laughed. Probably made him look deranged, but he couldn’t help himself. Zafir gone, the spear lost? He wasn’t sure how he ought to feel about that, but what he actually felt was almost nothing.
‘The Pinnacles,’ he said to Jeiros. ‘That’s where the Silver King kept his secrets. Kataros tell you about the Black Moon, did she?’
Jeiros nodded. ‘It’s good to see you again, old friend. Even if these are our last days.’
Jaslyn needed rest and water and to be looked after in peace and quiet, and in a day or so she might wake or she might not. Li flew her sled out into the gorge, scouting for dragons and not finding any, and there didn’t seem much point in waiting for that to change. She took Bellepheros across the Fury to the sheared mouth of a white tunnel halfway down the cliffs, the Silver King’s Ways that would take them to the Pinnacles.
‘Bring the other alchemists before you carry the rest,’ Bellepheros told her. ‘We need to talk about what’s to be done. You and I and them. Alone.’
‘Even the cripple?’
‘Especially Jeiros.’
Li pointed across the sky, far away down the gorge, and passed him a farscope. Far away to the west, drifting across a horizon of distant grey mountains, a speck moved. The eyrie, on its way to the Pinnacles. ‘We need to get there first,’ she said.
Bellepheros nodded.
‘It will be poison, then?’
‘Without the spear there’s no other way. But I doubt it will work, Li, and then he will kill us all with a snap of his fingers.’
Chay-Liang flew her sled back across the gorge. She returned with Kataros and Jeiros and Jasaan – apparently because two old alchemists and a scrawny woman needed some beefy Adamantine Man to make sure they didn’t hurt themselves. When he had them all together Bellepheros told the last alchemists of the dragon-realms the truth as he knew it: that the Black Moon was a half-god who must be stopped, and that it fell to them because there was no one else. It didn’t surprise him much when they didn’t like it.
‘What about the dragons?’ Jeiros asked. ‘Without the Isul Aieha, who will stop them?’
‘It will be down to us,’ Bellepheros began. ‘Whatever we can—’ A cacophony of dissent drowned him out, a melange of fear and dread and bewilderment and mistrust, until Li set off a thunderclap that shocked them to silence.
‘There is another choice,’ she said. ‘Kill the Black Moon and simply leave. I can cross the storm-dark. I can take you away.’ She looked at them, these ragged old men and women. ‘All of you. My people would fete you. Yes, you would be their slaves, but you would live like little kings for the powers you bring. End the half-god, and then leave this world behind.’
‘Li! No!’ Bellepheros rounded on her. ‘What are you—’
Her face tautened. ‘Haven’t you seen enough, Belli? There’s nothing left here! It’s all gone! All your kingdoms, all your palaces. This world is lost, but the Black Moon will carry this destruction to every other!’ Her gazed raked the other alchemists. ‘If you want more to think on then consider this: you could build eyries for my people as Bellepheros did, but you could do it willingly. Castles that fly, armed with lightning-cannon and black-powder guns. Belli here knows what I mean. He’s seen them. You could build an armada. Not to face the dragons in the skies in open battle, but to steal their eggs. With the potions you make and the arsenal I could build, we might slip from world to world and take the dragons’ unborn young. Hatch them in eyries of your design, if you must, where you would be waiting for them. They cannot cross the storm-dark, but we can. In a generation you would make them tame.’
She let that hang between them as Bellepheros looked away. There were so many things wrong with that that he didn’t know where to start,
but in the end he didn’t say a word. They were all desperate, and Li was no different, and nor was he.
Li went back to ferrying the survivors from the Spur. They were half on one side of the gorge and half on the other when the first dragon appeared, arcing away from the speckle of dots in the sky swarming the Black Moon’s eyrie. It chased Li across the gorge, and when she threw lightning in its face and it didn’t fall or die, Bellepheros and the alchemists and Jasaan and the handful of his Adamantine Men already across fled into the Silver King’s tunnels, and Li shot after them, leaving Lystra and her riders stranded on the other side, not waiting to see how it would end for them because there simply wasn’t anything else to be done.
43
The Black Moon
Forty-four days after landfall
The eyrie reached the Pinnacles in the small hours before dawn. Tuuran was on the summit of the Moonlit Mountain. On watch, he told himself, but mostly it was because he couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the easiest place to be, what with the hundreds of dragons that had taken to perching on the cliffs, circling overhead, doing whatever dragons did when they were bored and waiting. Kept him busy, though. Sometimes they burned stuff for the fun of it, not that there was anything left that would burn any more. They’d seen to that long ago, but they still strafed the place with fire for no apparent reason now and then. Strafed each other too, lighting up the night; and then one would get annoyed with another and they’d fight. Maybe it was play. Tuuran couldn’t tell. Whenever it kicked off between a pair of dragons, that was him scurrying pell-mell to shelter. He didn’t stay to see whether they ever really hurt each other, but they certainly hurt anything that happened to be anywhere near. Like rocks. Lot of broken rocks. Taking a right pounding they were. Try hard enough and keep at it, the dragons looked like they might smash the whole mountain down.