by Stephen Deas
She lowered him back to the ground. He was shaking, still rooted to the spot, his feet refusing to move as Snow very slowly wrapped her fore-claw around him. ‘What about cruel? What about heartless? What about mercy?’ The words stuttered out of his mouth, kicked out between reluctant lips by the part of him that refused to crumble. Ever.
What of them? She picked him up and lifted him into the air, peering at him as she rose onto her back legs and towered fifty feet above the ground. We play when we are playful. We rage when we are angry. We eat when we are hungry. We pay as little attention to what our food is called as your kind do, Kemir. If that is cruel and without heart or mercy then that is what we are. I might wonder if we even understand the meanings you give to these words. With a languid, almost careless motion she dropped him and then caught him again, this time between her teeth. He could feel her breath blowing past him in heavy slow gusts. He’d once, before he’d learned better, imagined that dragons’ breath always reeked of rotten meat, but in fact there was usually almost no scent to it at all. Snow smelt warm and slightly acrid, with a whiff of fresh blood.
Tell me what you want, Kemir. Shall I let you go? If I do, one of us, one day, will find you.
For a moment he twitched and wriggled, unable to stop the animal instinct that screamed at him to tear himself free, even if he had to rip himself half to pieces to escape. Snow held him fast.
It is hard to be so gentle, Kemir. If I am distracted I might forget you are there for a moment. That is how little you mean to me.
Most of her teeth were like sword-edges, long and hard and sharp as razors, built for shearing flesh and bone and nothing else. Her larger fangs were the size of his thigh. He couldn’t imagine what prey they were meant to pin.
Oh the world was once full of many creatures that are now lost. A few were made like us. Others came when the world was first made. They are all gone now. We ate them. We are what is left.
With a soft gasp, Kemir pissed himself. He started to sob. Fear. That’s all it took. Enough of it would break anything, and he’d finally found what was enough to break him. The last little part, the part that had always held out no matter what the world did to him, cracked and fell to pieces.
There. Finally you understand what I am. With that, she took him back in her claws and casually tossed him away over the edge of the mountain.
11
A Nest of Snakes
Jehal slid languidly out of bed and hobbled to his dresser. Discarded silks littered the floor. Bright yellows and greens and blues. The best colours, the best dyes, the finest silk. It all came from the silk farms on Tyan’s Peninsula, close to his home in Furymouth.
‘Does it hurt?’ The voice came from somewhere under the tangle of soft furs piled up on the bed.
‘No,’ he lied. ‘Not at all.’ Three months had passed since Shezira had tried to neuter him. He threw on a robe and went to stand in one of the windows. Vale was out there somewhere, the Night Watchman who’d placed the crossbow in Shezira’s hands the day before he’d cut off her head. He’d be down below, stomping up and down and shouting at his men most likely. At any other time, Jehal would simply have had Vale hanged, drawn and left to die in a cage outside the gates, that old ritual that Zafir had so gleefully revived. But I need him, and he needs me, and however much we’d love to slit each other’s throats, neither of us can stand alone. Put him away for later. When the war peters out, they’ll either make me speaker or they won’t. If they do, I can do what I like with him. If they don’t, well then does it really matter? I should savour the view while I’ve got it.
He was back in his favourite room in the palace, in the bedroom at the very top of the slender Tower of Air, looking out over the Speaker’s Yard, the Glass Cathedral, the City of Dragons, the Mirror Lakes, the Purple Spur and the Diamond Cascade beyond, except today it was raining buckets and there wasn’t much to see of any of those. He’d tried Hyram’s rooms for a while, but they made him restless. Too gloomy for his taste. The air was too heavy. Too many ghosts and too much taint of failure and sickness and decrepitude. So he’d come back to the place that had been Zafir’s favourite as well as his own, the place that held all his best memories. It was hard. Strange. Ever since Evenspire, he’d missed her almost constantly. Far more than he’d ever missed her when she was alive.
What I mean, if I’m honest with myself, is that this is the place where I had all the best sex. Speaking of which . . .
He’d picked her carefully. She had lips and a tongue that worked miracles, they said, and so they had. The pain had been something like having a white hot and very long needle stabbed between his legs and pushed very slowly but surely deeper and deeper, but there had been more to it than that. Something had happened, at least. When she’d stopped and he was gasping, blind with something between ecstasy and agony, her tongue had brushed his lips. There’d been salt. He’d tasted himself on her. She was letting him know.
He still throbbed with the aftermath, pulses of pain enough to make him wince and that wouldn’t go away. Through it, he could hardly stop himself from grinning. I’m still a man. At last I know the answer. Shezira didn’t neuter me after all.
It was a good thing. Not least because it meant he didn’t have to throw the woman in his bed out of a window in order to keep his secret. On the contrary. Now they both knew, he could let her go to spread the word that the speaker was whole. He chuckled to himself and set about dressing. The sun had come up hours ago. There were probably things he ought to be doing.
Yes. All the trivial little palace things that Jeiros and Tassan haven’t dealt with because they’re too busy saving the realms. I’m hardly in a hurry, am I?
By the time he was thinking of putting his boots on, the waves of pain had faded into something that was more a reminder of something sharp than anything truly unpleasant. Gentle snores came from under the furs. Jehal pulled them back and let his eyes wander over the curves underneath. We could try again. Maybe the second time won’t hurt so much?
He was still pondering when someone started hammering at his door and a dragon shot through the air right past his windows, the wind of its wings ripping through the open balconies, staggering him. One silk curtain tore free and dived away into the void, sucked into the dragon’s wake. The woman in his bed was suddenly forgotten. Jehal was out and down the stairs before he could even begin to think. Are we under attack?
Vale was waiting for him at the bottom. Of course he was. He bowed, just a fraction late, just a tad too high and an instant too abrupt. ‘Your Holiness.’ He smiled thinly, reading Jehal’s face. ‘No, we are not being attacked. If we were, I would be on the walls, supervising our defence.’ He glanced at Jehal’s bare feet. ‘Shall I find you some shoes?’
‘Only if you have nothing better to do,’ Jehal snapped. ‘Why is a dragon flying so close to my bed? Whoever was guiding it should be hanged.’
Vale gave the faintest of shrugs. ‘As you wish. They are your riders, Your Holiness. I have asked them before to avoid the palace. There is always the risk that my scorpioneers will not recognise them. I’d be disappointed if we had some sort of an accident. My men have been practising, Your Holiness, and they are really quite good.’ Which was certainly true. Day in, day out, Vale had men on horseback charging around the palace flying target kites from their saddles. The parts of the Hungry Mountain Plain that were in range had become so littered with scorpion bolts that when they’d stopped for a day and offered a penny for each bolt returned to the palace, they’d come in by the cartload.
‘The dragon was a messenger, Your Holiness. There are dragons massing north of the Purple Spur,’ said Vale, when Jehal didn’t speak. ‘I will be glad to make an example of the rider, nonetheless, if that is your command.’
A spike of dread momentarily nailed Jehal’s feet to the earth. ‘Hyrkallan or Sirion. Or both?’
‘Both.’ Vale’s face didn’t betray him at all, but Jehal was sure he heard the faintest twitch of glee in the Nigh
t Watchman’s voice.
Yes, we both know you’d be rid of me in a flash if you could have either of them as speaker. But you can’t. Sirion is Hyram’s cousin and Hyrkallan is just some jumped-up dragon-knight. He might be the jumped-up dragon-knight who kicked me out of the sky over Evenspire, but that doesn’t mean you can make him speaker.
Jehal allowed himself a slight smirking smile, the sort calculated to get under Vale’s skin. If anything can. ‘Well, so? What do they want? Come to pay their respects? Come to pay homage to the dead. If that’s the case, I hope your men have been keeping themselves busy in the eyries, raking through dragon-shit for any sign of Zafir. If there’s anything left, it should have come out by now, after all.’ What did come out of the wrong end of a dragon? Something, Jehal knew that much. Did anything survive of the bones and armour of a dragon-rider unfortunate enough to become a dragon-snack? He had no idea. Maybe it all burned to ash on the way through. Meteroa. Meteroa would know about that. When it came to dragons, Meteroa knew most things.
Vale bowed another one of his insolent little bows. ‘Grand Master Jeiros is having a new ring forged. I am not hopeful that we will find the one Zafir wore.’
‘Perhaps finding the spear will be a little easier?’ But the spear had gone somewhere else. And Jeiros must do something about that.
‘Lord Hyrkallan and King Sirion, it seems, wish to parley. With you.’
‘And why am I hearing this from you, Vale Tassan? Where is Hyrkallan’s messenger?’
‘Hyrkallan’s messenger, as you call him, is a rider from your own guard, seized over the Purple Spur. He is in the Gateyard, Your Holiness. The message he bore was sealed and for me. I can’t imagine why or whether he has others. Hyrkallan also says you may keep the dragon, as a token of his good faith.’
‘I can keep my own dragon. How very kind.’ Jehal stared at Vale. Why? Why don’t they simply swarm across the mountains and fall on us? ‘Tell me, Night Watchman, if the full force of the north came at us, would we hold?’
Vale smiled and shook his head. ‘No, Your Holiness. Not even if the Adamantine Men fought to the very last. There would be very little to fight over by the time they were done, however. Perhaps that is what concerns them.’ He half let out a derisive snigger, and for a moment Jehal wasn’t sure at whom it was aimed.
Me. It’s aimed at me. Who else, after all? He sighed, waved a bored hand and turned away. ‘Very well, very well, let them come. Twenty dragons each and a hundred men between them, including servants. The usual promises of hospitality if anyone feels they’re necessary, but really it’s not as if we’re at war with each other.’ Ha! Try making Hyrkallan see it that way!
Vale blinked. ‘Your Holiness, they have requested that you and the Lesser Council come to meet them at Narammed’s Bridge.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘I have informed you ahead of the council, but I imagine they will be eager to agree.’
Jehal turned back and beamed at Vale. ‘Marvellous.’ Yes. So absolutely marvellous I’d better be careful I don’t faint with delight. So I can either sit here and do nothing while the Lesser Council and Shezira’s bloody avatars quietly settle on a new Speaker of the Realms that will clearly not be me, or else I can go with some vague hope of putting a stop to whatever they’re planning and conveniently put myself within easy reach. He gave short sigh. Right then. As long as I keep out of reach of Hyrkallan’s arm plus the length of one sword, I suppose we’ll get on just fine. He forced the smile a little wider. ‘Whenever they propose, Night Watchman. The sooner the better. Won’t it be nice to put all this behind us.’
Vale bowed deeply. ‘I would like almost nothing more, Your Holiness.’
Jehal shooed him away and then watched him go. As long as you get to watch me dangle in one of Zafir’s cages, eh? Pity I had them all cut down after Evenspire. Jeiros was no use either. The alchemist had the power to pull Vale’s strings if he really tried, but the poor man was too busy watching potion supplies across the realms slowly run dry. In the Palace of Alchemy they were talking about a cull, about sending orders to every eyrie-master to poison their dragons. No one had bothered to mention this to Jehal – he was only the speaker, after all – but it was hard to get particularly worked up about something so inane. At a time like this not one single eyrie-master would heed such an order. The fact that Jeiros was thinking of it merely served to show how distracted he was. At some point, he supposed, he would have to have the master alchemist explain why they couldn’t just make more of the stuff.
We can agree on one thing: we need this phony war to end. The way I want it to.
He took his time while Vale prepared the palace for battle, just in case – picking his best clothes, then picking his nails, idling away his time while his servants and soldiers rushed around. When they were finally done, he hobbled out of the Tower of Air, the wound in his leg still aching from the morning. Riding a horse was a pleasure Vale and Shezira’s crossbow had taken from him probably for ever; instead he allowed himself to be carried in a covered chair down the hill from the Adamantine Palace. He was surprised by how peaceful it was. They didn’t hurry – no need for that – and he was left with little to do but stare at the glory of the City of Dragons, with all its little square towers, the ornate palaces around the edge of the nearest Mirror Lake. The cliffs of the Purple Spur behind the city seemed larger and darker than usual, while the water of the Diamond Cascade glittered and shimmered in the morning sun. Now and then, as the wind changed, little rainbows came and went, chasing each other up and down the cliff amid the falling spray. All very pretty.
Or at least it would have been if the rain wasn’t still tipping out of the skies. You didn’t notice these things, he thought. Not when you were forever riding around here and there, this way and that, getting to some place as fast as you could on the back of a horse or better yet a dragon. He’d never been one for stopping to admire the scenery back when he’d been a prince. Then he’d become a king, and now he was Speaker of the Realms. He was where he’d always wanted to be, and there was nowhere else to go. There was nowhere to race to any more. Nothing to do but stop and take a look at what was around him.
The impatience came back quickly enough, though. Once he was on Wraithwing’s back in a cloud of warm steam, getting slowly wetter and wetter while he waited for Jeiros and Aruch and the Night Watchman to follow him. Cursed dragons kept you warm in the cold, but ancestors help you if it rained after you’d flown them hard. He’d seen whole eyries vanish in a cloud of tepid fog so thick that a man couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. You didn’t go out in an eyrie fog, not unless you wanted to get stepped on.
Suddenly there was Jeiros, and the Grand Master Alchemist of the Nine Realms was climbing up onto Wraithwing’s back as well. The alchemist slid in behind Jehal and began strapping himself into his harness.
‘Well this is unexpected,’ said Jehal as Jeiros settled himself. ‘Comfortable there? I thought we were all obliged to fly on different dragons.’
‘Is it always like this when it rains? I don’t remember. I did most of my eyrie time in Bloodsalt. If it rained there we thought the end of the world was coming.’ Jeiros flapped at the mist. ‘The Lesser Council must not fly together. Any of us can fly with you. I got here first.’ He sounded uncomfortable.
‘Ah.’ Yes, remind me again that I’m merely some near-worthless figurehead.
‘I imagine that Wraithwing’s back will be the safest place to be, will it not?’
‘That depends very much on whom you fear, master alchemist.’ How easy it would be for one of our passengers to suffer some terrible misfortune. Let’s not pretend that I wasn’t tempted to have the Night Watchman fall out of his harness once he was a few thousand feet up in the air. Jehal gave a bitter laugh. ‘No, since you’re the one who makes sure I don’t wake up in the middle of the night being dragged out of my bed by a gang of Adamantine Men. I suppose I should be happy to have you close.’
Jeiros smiled and gently shook his head. ‘Va
le understands your worth.’
‘Yes.’ But is that enough? ‘If this is a trap, Wraithwing will be a prize target for Hyrkallan’s riders.’
‘Yes, and that’s why I’m here, to deter such treachery, although I think it unlikely. I thought you might pick another.’
He’d had the same thought, but what was a speaker to do? Hide all the time? Show how weak and fearful he was? No. Enough of hiding and skulking. Enough of poisons and knives in the dark. ‘I’ve never been to Narammed’s Bridge.’
‘There’s wasn’t much to see even before the Red Riders burned it down. Only a few fields and some farms, some huts and a stone house. Hyram used to keep a good stable there with some very fine horses, but Sirion took them after Hyram fell.’
‘Is there actually a bridge?’ What did you say? After Hyram fell?
‘There was, once. I don’t know if it survived the fire.’
‘You don’t know?’ After Hyram fell? Not after Hyram was pushed?
‘For a time it was the only bridge across the Sapphire River. Before Narammed became the first speaker. Afterwards it used to mark the end of the speaker’s realm and the start of the Evenspire Road.’ The alchemist shrugged. ‘Vishmir built a bigger bridge at Samir’s Crossing. There are probably dozens of other places with Narammed’s name on them and I don’t doubt that a few more of them happen to be bridges. This one just happens to have an eyrie built beside it.’ He frowned. ‘Had, at least, before the Red Riders burned it. It was where Narammed hammered out his peace with the northern eyries. It has a symbolism for them, I suppose.’
‘Do you think Shezira killed Hyram?’ Jehal didn’t change his tone at all. Just dropped casually into the conversation as if it hardly mattered at all.