by Stephen Deas
She’d seen that before, from the Black Moon.
Diamond Eye shrieked and turned. The sled was pelting away, dragons diving after it. He wheeled to give chase, then veered full of warning. Three hunters stooped as one, shrieking fireballs streaking the air. Zafir drew a deep breath and held it as flames engulfed her, pressed her arm over the storm-dark rent in her dragonscale as they washed over, drowning her. Through the perfect glass of her visor the air burned. The ornate gold on her helm and her gauntlets, battered and scratched and bent, softened at the edges; but underneath the glass and gold of the Taiytakei she wore dragonscale, all but impervious. She twisted and hurled the spear into the flames. Diamond Eye bucked and flared his crippled wing. The spear came back to her hand. She threw again. Two dragons arrowed past. Diamond Eye rolled, shivered and shuddered as something hit him, then another came with fire and she was engulfed once more. She gasped for air as the flames stopped, threw, howled in pain and exhaustion, and threw again. Her shoulder screamed at her, muscles beyond ragged. Close to the end of her strength.
A war-dragon slammed into Diamond Eye’s belly. They plunged, tearing at one another. Again fire bathed her. She lunged as it stopped, throwing herself sideways, reaching and stabbing at the claws ripping at Diamond Eye’s scarred flank. Both dragons screamed. The spear struck home. A moment before they all smashed together into the Moonlit Mountain Diamond Eye bucked and twisted free, tossing Zafir this way and that.
Something in the harness snapped, fire-scorched leather burned through. She felt herself slide. She grabbed at Diamond Eye’s scales, fingers of one hand turned to claws, the other still clutching the spear.
Let it go.
A suffocating wet fist burst inside her head. The feeling she’d had when the alchemist Kataros had let loose her blood-magic. Her arms slumped limp.
She let go.
Tuuran saw Zafir fall. He ran, jumping and bounding down among the stones, heedless of the storm of fire as if he might somehow reach her before she hit the ground. As if he might somehow catch her.
Kataros slid inside Zafir to pull her apart. She felt the dragon-queen slip. Deeper, tighter, further, but then a coldness bloomed inside her. An icy blackness that came with a soft old hand on her shoulder.
‘What are you doing, alchemist?’ Bellepheros.
‘By your own account, Grand Master, what you should have done long ago.’
His hand tightened on her. In the sky the great red and gold Diamond Eye had seen his rider fall. The dragon dived and snatched Zafir out of the air. He flared his crippled wings. Too mauled to break his plunge he twisted, curling around Zafir as he hit the mountaintop and tumbled, scattering boulder rubble all around him. Another dragon fell out of the sky in their wake, landing hard on Diamond Eye’s neck. Zafir rolled away, curled up and clenched with pain.
‘What are you?’ asked Bellepheros. ‘Alchemist or blood-mage?’
‘What’s the difference, old man? What is the difference?’
Zafir clawed at the ground, writhing. The spear lay beside her. She was screaming in pain. She knew. Knew what was happening to her and who was doing it, and that she was helpless. Powerless.
‘The difference is murder, alchemist,’ said Bellepheros quietly.
Another dragon slammed into Diamond Eye’s flank, and then another, holding down his tail. They were pinning him, as they’d already pinned a dozen others.
‘Without the Black Moon, the dragons will kill us all. Zafir knows this. Li would see the dragons free, the Black Moon ended, but this is not her world, and it is mine. So we disagree, but that is all. We argue with words, and we do not kill each other. I ask you again, Kataros. What are you? Alchemist or blood-mage?’
The ice spread inside her. Bellepheros, grand master alchemist and the greatest blood-mage of them all, and one way or another his blood was inside every last one of them. His potions.
‘Alchemist.’ Kataros let Zafir go.
Bellepheros nodded. ‘Then help me, alchemist.’
Zafir screamed. She’d never known an agony so taut, clawing its way though her insides as though some tiny dragon was tearing free. She felt herself fall and was glad. A relief to dash her head against the rocks below and end it.
The spear slipped from her fingers. Diamond Eye caught her. They crashed. She rolled free, half-blind with pain, holding herself doubled over, rolling like a death-stricken animal; and then as suddenly as the pain in her chest had come it left her. She staggered to her feet. Standing on the mountain top. Dragons pinning Diamond Eye to the stone. The Black Moon, arms spread wide, laughing at them all because of what a wonderful show they had put on for him, even if none of it mattered.
The spear stood where she’d fallen. Point first, driven into the ground, erect, waiting to be grasped. A dragon swooped towards her, lame and erratic and white. Snow. Zafir lunged for the spear and snatched it up, tripped and fell over her own exhaustion. Stumbled to her feet. Snow landed a little way short. The white dragon looked at the Black Moon. At the dragons left circling above. At Zafir.
You are beaten. The dragon said it with her eyes, with the contemptuous curl of lip over fang. Spear-carrier. Half-god. We defy you all. We choose to be free.
Zafir met the dragon’s gaze. So do I.
Tuuran was thundering towards her, waving his arms, shouting something her dazed ears and jangled head couldn’t make into any sense. She didn’t see Chay-Liang in her sled skimming the air. The first she heard was the thunderclap as lightning slammed into her back.
‘The Silver King’s spear,’ Bellepheros said. To Kataros, because she was the only one of them young enough and strong enough and with the legs to run and duck and weave. He watched her arrow for it. Kataros the spear-carrier. The alchemist who had saved it from the dragons once before. He hoped she understood what she had to do with it, that she would have to drive it through the Black Moon’s heart while he held the Black Moon’s sorcery at bay.
The difference between blood-mage and alchemist is murder, is it? Does it count if I murder a half-god?
Because the Black Moon had Bellepheros’s blood inside him. He’d seen to that months ago. And his blood carried the power of the Silver King, and the Silver King was a half-god too. It wasn’t a battle he could win, he knew that; but he didn’t have to win. He just had to not lose for a second or two. That would do.
And after that, to make all the dragons go away? He hadn’t the first idea. Just as well it was going to be a problem for someone else then.
The enchantress’s lightning sparked through her battered gold-glass, reaching through like a hundred prickling fingers. Zafir collapsed to her knees and dropped the spear again. She shuddered. Her eyes blurred. Time slowed. Chay-Liang on her sled, lightning thrower in hand, pointing it at her. The alchemist Kataros running from the ruins for the fallen spear. Dragons, hundreds, landing in a hostile ring around the Black Moon in silent challenge, while the last dregs of battle ebbed above in shrieks and blood and claw. Tuuran pounding towards her. The Black Moon himself, twisting in unexpected pain as though knifed in the back, staring up at the Queen’s Gate, where Bellepheros stood.
‘Holiness.’ Tuuran threw himself at her.
Too slow. On hands and knees Zafir grabbed the spear. Chay-Liang was rushing closer. Another thunderbolt rang her head as though she’d been hit with a hammer. Flattened her. Kataros leaping towards her. Tuuran …
Everything fell still.
Everything stopped.
Silence.
Chay-Liang on her sled, left to hang in the air. Dragons above, paused in a wingbeat. Kataros leaping from stone to stone, poised like a frozen dancer. Tuuran sprawling across the rubble, hand stretched out to her. The stilled rush of the wind. The only sound her beating heart as the Black Moon stopped time. She lay still, waiting. He’d told her to summon the dragons, but the dragons hadn’t needed summoning. They’d alre
ady known what was coming.
With a wave of his hand the Silver King stopped time, but the spear in my claw kept his sorceries from me.
Carefree, the Black Moon walked slowly closer. His eyes lingered on the far horizon and the crescent moon that hung there with the sun. The knife of a thousand eyes gleamed naked in his hand.
‘Unruly children,’ he said, and though his voice was quiet there was no other sound. Only the words of a half-god. ‘I gave you a choice.’
Two hunting dragons pinned another to the stone. The Black Moon dissolved them to smoke, all three at once. They stayed as they were, dragon-shaped clouds of black dust, waiting for time to start again, for the wind to scatter them.
‘Fickle whore father, I am more than you made me to be.’ He clenched a fist and raised it to the moon. ‘Older than you. Here before you. The void that was before. Endless and without substance.’ His voice fell. ‘Without time.’ He walked past Zafir as though she wasn’t there, ignored Chay-Liang on her sled and everything else. He stopped beside Diamond Eye and touched each of the four dragons holding him down. They turned to dust.
‘You set us here on the skin of the earth. You and brother sun with his numberless little ones. You left us to the mercy of the dead goddess, and she raised the dark moon and left us with your cold light alone. We pleaded. We prayed. We begged. But you gave us nothing.’
His eyes flared silver. He looked from Diamond Eye to Snow. To Chay-Liang. To Kataros and to the Queen’s Gate, where Bellepheros stood frozen. Helpless, all of them. He lifted his knife of eyes.
‘A new beginning, fickle father. A new creation. No fiery sun. No hostile moon. No cold distant stars. No dead goddess with her violent wrath. It will be as it should have been, and we will all be free of you, and all the better for it.’ He cocked his head to Chay-Liang on her sled. ‘You. Tiny and small. You think to touch me with the storm-dark?’
Zafir rose behind him. Her feet were unsteady. He didn’t see. His own eyes were blind, and in this crack between moments there were no other eyes through which to see. The dragon-potion hid her from more than dragons, and that was why she’d taken it. So he wouldn’t see her, or know her, or read her thoughts, or understand what she meant to do. Even if she hadn’t quite known herself.
‘You know nothing,’ he said. ‘Your ignorance is your doom.’
Zafir stood behind him. As The Black Moon reached out to turn Chay-Liang into dust Zafir drove the Earthspear into his back. He spun, ripping the spear out of her hands. The point stuck out from his chest. The weight of its haft almost toppled him. His lips drew back. Moonlight silver poured from his eyes. He reached – not for her, but for something she couldn’t see, for something that wasn’t quite there. Then he toppled to his knees and pitched down face first into the broken stone of the mountain.
The wind blew.
Diamond Eye shivered.
Dust-turned dragons shattered into formless smoke, dissolving in the breeze. Chay-Liang’s sled shot past Zafir’s face. Dragons wheeled and shrieked. Kataros skittered to a stop, bewildered at Zafir and the spear and the Black Moon, who had all moved from one place to another in the blink of an eye. Zafir opened her palm and raised her arm and flexed her fingers. The spear appeared in her hand. Calm and smooth and sure she drove it through the Black Moon again, through his heart this time, spearing him to the mountain stone. The last light from his eyes flickered, and for a moment Zafir thought she saw another man inside. She heard a howl of anguish. And, perhaps, of relief.
Tuuran stared aghast. The silver light dimmed in the Black Moon’s eyes. For a moment Crazy Mad seemed to look out at him. Crazy Mad. Berren Crowntaker. The Bloody Judge.
And then he died.
‘No!’ Tuuran screamed. ‘No!’ He whipped the axe off his back. Lifted it to split Zafir’s head. Saw the shock on her face and smashed the blade into a stone beside her instead. He ran to Crazy Mad’s side, dropped to pick him up, filled with some foolish hope that somehow Zafir had driven the Black Moon away and that was all, but Crazy was dead, as dead as a spear through the heart would make you.
Never mind the circling dragons. Never mind the alchemists and their schemes. Never mind the Taiytakei witch and her lightning.
‘Hush.’ He felt Zafir’s arms around him, clinging to him. ‘Hush.’ Felt her head pressed into the back of his singed hair. She held him tight. ‘He’s not the friend you once had any more, big man. He stopped being that a long time ago.’
A part of Tuuran knew she was right and that it was true, and another part knew that Crazy Mad had never been quite dead until now, and that Zafir had killed him.
44
The Silver Sea
The dragons eyed one another. Diamond Eye, mauled and battered. Crippled Snow with a hundred dragons arrayed behind her. Paused between them the Black Moon lay dead and pinned to the earth by the Silver King’s spear, just as he had a thousand years before. And Tuuran, crouched over him, and Zafir beside them both.
Kataros, out in the open. She stared at the spear sticking out of the Silver King. A spear that killed dragons. Zafir had used it to summon them. What else could it do? She took a step forward, then stopped. The white dragon Snow crept a pace closer. Diamond Eye languidly stretched his battered wings.
Do you see now? he seemed to say. Do you see why?
Snow eyed the Silver King’s spear, but before she could move Zafir snatched it from the Black Moon’s corpse and slammed it into the stone. The mountain quivered. ‘There is another way,’ she said.
Diamond Eye bared his fangs. Zafir faced him.
‘Old friend. Do you remember the Silver Sea?’
The dragon cocked his head. Yes.
‘Do you remember how it felt to leave it behind? What was that place – the Silver Sea? Was it home? That’s what I felt from you when we left it. A longing for home.’
Home.
‘You tried to hide it, but I saw what it meant. I saw the loss in you. The yearning you felt. That’s where they went, isn’t it? The other half-gods? Your sisters and brothers. And you were the ones who stayed behind, the courageous ones. The Isul Aieha’s brothers. You stayed to stop the Black Moon from turning the world inside out, but he tore you down. He broke you. He took your souls and made you forget what you were. He turned you into dragons and claimed you for his own. You’ve seen the carvings the Isul Aieha left behind, Diamond Eye.’ She walked to the old dragon and touched a hand to his snout. ‘Tell them. Tell them all. Tell them everything you’ve seen and everything you know. He didn’t take away all that you once were. Perhaps he couldn’t, and that’s why you felt the yearning.’
She turned to Snow and levelled the spear at the white dragon’s eye. ‘The Silver King did to you what the Black Moon had already done once before. And I know your mind, dragon. You would kill every one of us now while you can so there can never again be such alchemy, but there is another way.’
There would never be another alchemist again. These few here would be the last. Kataros already knew that because Bellepheros had quietly told them all as they walked the Silver King’s Ways. The Silver King, nailed to a cave beneath a mountain, was gone. The last of him. Without the filtered essence of his divinity, there could never be another. Kataros and Bellepheros, Jeiros and the handful of others, they would be the last.
Zafir lifted the spear. ‘This is the Isul Aieha’s palace, dragon, and this is his spear. He left behind a way for you to go home. With this I have opened the gates to the Silver Sea. So you do have a choice, white dragon. You can stay, and we can fight, you and I, and we can kill one another over and over, or you can go home and become the half-gods you once were. But you cannot have this end by force. Smash at this mountain for a thousand years and you will not get in. I will allow hatchlings to enter. One at a time, and I will take you where you want to be. Make your choice, dragons.’ She turned and started the climb to the Queen’
s Gate. ‘We cannot live together. But we can both live, and there will be no more dragon-riders, for there will be no more dragons to ride.’ She walked to the old gate where every queen of the Silver City had walked in their turn to claim their throne, and not one dragon moved to stop her.
45
The Speaker
Forty-six days after landfall
Lost and forlorn on the edge of the Fury gorge, Queen Lystra sat, the last speaker of the nine realms, last survivor of her house and family, queen of a city burned to ash, speaker of realms that no longer existed. Thirty-seven men and fifteen women, that was all she had. Queen of nothing much. For all she knew they were the last humans left alive for a thousand miles.
She dangled her legs over the cliff, holding her son Jehal tight in her arms. The four Adamantine Men she had left to her stood nearby. They didn’t like it that she was out here in the open. Her riders didn’t like it either, but most of them had stopped caring when they’d lost the Spur. At least the Adamantine Men did what she said and didn’t talk back.
Zafir had executed her mother. Almiri had died in the battle over Evenspire. She’d seen Jehal picked up and crushed by the white dragon Snow. Now Jaslyn hovered at the brink of death, shredded by a hatchling. That was what had become of her family.
As she swung her legs and looked to the south she saw specks in the sky. Dragons. She didn’t have any alchemists left, so there were no potions to help them hide, and so the dragons would feel her thoughts even if they didn’t see.
‘Holiness.’ The Adamantine Men moved in closer, pointing.