by Stephen Deas
The dragon picked him up and looked at him, the dragon that was supposed to have been his wedding present. It cocked its head curiously as if wondering at what a sorry excuse for a king he was.
He tried to beg but all he managed was a whimper and a whine. His bladder emptied. See. You can’t even die well.
Little one, enough.
‘Zafir!’
The dragon squeezed. Jehal’s ribs snapped like twigs. All the air in his lungs burst out of his mouth and then everything from his stomach too. He had a moment or two to feel his hips shatter and then his bowels ruptured, his guts spilled out down his useless legs and his heart was crushed to a stop.
The dragon tossed him aside and moved on.
Epilogue
Silence and the Endless Sea
In the stillness of the underworld the spirit of the dragon moved with wonder and deliberate purpose. So many dead dragons. Dulled things, moving without direction, looking for a new home. Even here the alchemical potions wove their magic. How? How did you poison the dead?
The spirit mused on that for a moment, then threw the thought away. It skirted around the hole where the dead earth goddess and her slayer had held the Nothing at bay for so long. They were gone now. The hole was getting bigger and the Nothing was seeping slowly through. Now there, there was something that could kill a dragon.
Yes, the spirit of the dragon kept well clear of that. It had found something else. Hatchling flesh, waiting for the spirit to wake it. Eggs. A few here, a handful there. And one great clutch of them. So many eggs. So many dragon souls searching for new skin.
Quai’Shu sat in his cabin, quietly staring out at the sea, at the waves rolling away from the back of his ship. He felt a warmth inside him, the quiet contentment of someone who had worked very hard for a very long time and who had finally got what they wanted.
‘Sea-Lord? Sea-Lord?’
The dragon-spirit raced towards the clutch, dragging others in its wake. More had gone ahead, many more. The spirit felt them shimmer out of the underworld as they merged into the waiting bodies. It followed. It felt the moment, the pull of new life, dragging it away, and then it was born. Alive. With a single violent jerk, the dragon shattered the shell that held its new form.
Two hatchlings were already loose in the hatchery. One had a human in its mouth and was shaking him from side to side like a dog worrying a rabbit. The man was already dead. The hatchery was smaller than the ones the dragon remembered, much smaller. Cramped and smelly. Smelled of wood and tar and water.
In the doorway stood a silhouette. A silhouette of silver.
Be STILL!
The dragon hissed. No.
One hatchling sprang; the other dropped the dead man. The sorcerer who blocked their escape shifted, the silver he wrapped around him flowing like water into a long spike in front of him. It touched – a scratch – the first hatchling, and the dragon fell dead. The second hatchling ripped the sorcerer’s head off. Even as it did, the silver flowed again. The hatchling shuddered and collapsed beside the sorcerer’s corpse. They both lay still while the sorcerer’s liquid silver turned hard and dull on the floor.
The dragon called Silence jumped on the corpse. Everyone else had fled. It seized the dead sorcerer’s head between its jaws and bit down. Hard.
Free . . .
‘Sea-Lord?’
With a sigh Quai’Shu eased his aching joints out of his comfortable chair and stood up. As he did, he happened to glance out of the stern windows at the end of his cabin.
Half his ships were burning.
Quai’Shu’s jaw fell open. Before he could think, a voice thundered straight into his head, just like the moon-sorcerers had done.
I am Silence, it said, and I am hungry.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Simon Spanton, devourer of unnecessary prologues, who asked for dragons and got more than he bargained for. To John Jarrold, agent overlord. To the copy-editors and proofreaders, whose names I’ve rarely known. To Dominic Harman and Stephen Youll for their gorgeous dragons and the artists who turned them into covers. To Jon Weir, who demanded the duel.
To lovers of dragons. And to all alchemists everywhere, unseen, unrewarded, tirelessly working to keep our monsters at bay.
To you, for reading this.
For any who want to explore the world of the dragons for its own sake, you can do so at the online gazetteer at
www.stephendeas.com/gazetteer.
And lastly, if you liked this book, please tell someone!
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Stephen Deas 2011
All rights reserved.
The right of Stephen Deas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2011 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 09823 7
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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