Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  He turned his course westward to the fringes of the Konsidar itself. On top of the peaks he stopped a while to stare. Becoming one with the world was no effort once you knew the trick of it. Air or stone or water, or any element at all save for unruly metal, it was simply another nature, as easy and natural as breathing. He took it to be a gift too, a window to wonders that other men wouldn’t ever see, and so he stopped now and then to stare at the landscapes of the world the way men from other lands might stop for a moment to pray and to give thanks to their blasphemous gods.

  He chose his course with care across the mountains, skirting the domain of the Righteous Ones who dwelt in the majestic Konsidar. Though they dwelt below rather than among the mountains and would not have noticed an Elemental Man crossing high overhead, they had been more unruly of late, emerging from their holes and rattling their sabres like angry ants whose nest someone had disturbed. Best not to give any reason to add to their ire, whatever had caused it.

  He turned south as the peaks and crags fell away into the desert of the Empty Sands, the wasteland that filled half the continent from the Konsidar to the Godspike and beyond. Dunes as tall as an enchanter’s tower rippled beneath him, then the flats, a hundred miles of gravel, of milky-white powdered glass and hard dark lakes of clay. In the stories of the desert tribes there had been water here once, vanished now after the old cataclysm of the Splintering, pouring into the lost depths of the Konsidar and stolen away by the Righteous Ones. Or so their stories said.

  Dunes rose again, reddish-orange now instead of yellow and pale. He crossed a fresh slick of black ooze streaking the sands, with a scatter of white specks at its edge that were the tents of the desert men there to collect it, scraping it into barrels to sell to the enchanters in Cashax or Vespinarr. That they’d been there long enough to build a village of tents reminded the Watcher of how long it was since he’d last come this way. Further still he passed over a faint line across the desert, invisible from the ground. Just as there had been lakes out here once, so too had there been paths that criss-crossed the wasteland. Roads. There had been cities even, but now they were ruins and the only things that lived in them were spiders and scorpions, rats and snakes and desert hawks. The desert men came here on occasion too but never lingered, not without good reason.

  Amid this emptiness Baros Tsen’s castle beckoned him, a huge lump of stone floating above the sand on a dazzle of purple lightning. The Watcher felt it before he saw it, the slightest thickening of the air so that being one with the wind was no longer effortless. No one knew the castle’s origin. It had been in the desert for as long as anyone could remember, hanging in the sky, empty and forgotten. It was stone rather than glass, and though it floated like an enchanter’s glasship, it was vastly greater than anything any enchanter had ever made, a wide bowl-shaped slab larger even than the Palace of Leaves in its entirety. Its underside was torn and jagged, as though it had been ripped out of the earth by giant hands. Purple lightning flickered and flashed through the shadows of its belly to the dunes below like a tiny fragment of the storm-dark snipped away and captured in glass. The upper side was dull and flat, a shallow-sloped white stone wall around a huge and perfectly circular space. It had no black monolith to feed it, to draw power from the earth, and yet it sustained itself. How? No one knew.

  Six glasships hovered over the castle today. They were dwarfed by it yet they captured the Watcher’s eye, brilliant things, concentric spinning discs of glass twisted at different angles, tinged and rimmed with lightning-thrower gold which shone and caught the sun. They were like brightly coloured cleaner fish flitting to and fro over a kraken’s back, tethered to it by chains of Scythian steel.

  The Watcher slowed. The thickening of the air grew worse. He felt the castle’s resistance to him, a tiny force trying to knock him back to the form and shape of his birth. The Picker had said it was like this in the dragon lands only a thousand times worse, remorseless and relentless and everywhere.

  He swept over its surface. A hundred men and women lived here now, slaves and Taiytakei alike, but most worked underground and he saw only two slaves aloft. They were slowly clearing sand and litter and desert plants from the edges of the castle outside the white stone walls, sweat gleaming off their backs as they scraped away to the ancient rock beneath. One was tall, a black-skinned desert man from a tribe like the one he’d seen camped by the ooze slick in the sands. His native people were probably less than a few hundred miles from here, out in the desert. The other was short and olive-skinned, from Aria or from the Dominion, either of which meant thousands of miles and a crossing of the storm-dark, but both men had been bought and sold at the skin markets of Cashax or Xican. They were slaves now, nothing else. The Watcher drifted past them, a hint of a breeze in the still and baking air.

  The paler of the two clutched his leg and cried out and then stared at his hand. ‘Kelm’s Teeth!’ Kelm’s Teeth. From Aria then, that one. The Watcher had heard a great deal of Aria in the last years. The Ice Witch. The sea lords were talking of another Abraxi or a Crimson Sunburst, or something even worse, if such a thing was possible. There were whispers that the Ice Witch had found a way of her own to cross the storm-dark. Whispers that the cherished secrets of the Scythians and their steel and of the enchanters and their glass were finding their way to her empire. Whispers though. As yet nothing more.

  ‘It jumped! Ow! Bugger, but that hurts!’ The short one had a small ball of spikes stuck in the back of his leg. The desert man was peering over at him. The Watcher paused for a moment and did what he did best. Watched.

  ‘They don’t jump.’ The desert man knelt beside the other slave, plucking with delicate care at the spikes. Patience. Always the key and always the greatest weapon of the Elemental Men. They struck when they were ready, and struck true. They’d done so many times before and would do so again. Aria and this Ice Witch would be no different.

  ‘Bugger you, dark-skin. I saw it.’

  The desert man shook his head. ‘Be still.’

  ‘I tell you …’

  Patience and careful observation. The Watcher appeared beside them. ‘They do not jump,’ he said. ‘Yet this one did. Had you the eyes to see, you would have deduced my presence.’ The two slaves froze. They stared at him, dumbstruck. ‘Where is Baros Tsen T’Varr?’

  The desert man fell to his knees and bowed his head. He pointed across the wall and beyond. ‘Inside, Demon Lord of Earth and Sky.’ The Watcher bowed and with a flicker of effort became the wind again, sweeping into the labyrinthine bowels of the castle, swirling ghost-like through the rune-carved tunnels of glowing white stone that ran within. The air here was at its thickest so close to the old enchanted stone. The Picker said he’d grown used to the fierce animosity of the dragon lands. It was hard, but with practice you built a tolerance to it. But then the Picker had always been a little strange, a little different. He was the only Elemental Man ever taken from another world. The Watcher knew now that he wouldn’t see the Picker again. The moon sorcerers’ visions had told him so.

  It would have been easier to search through the stone than through the air but the white walls of the castle were yet another mystery. Stone, yes, but as impervious to his gift as metal. Still, he found Baros Tsen T’Varr in the first place he looked, supervising some change to the bathhouse at the castle’s heart. The Watcher shimmered out of the air far enough away to show his respect, and bowed. ‘T’Varr. Hands of the Sea Lord.’

  ‘LaLa!’ The t’varr liked his little names for those around him. Tsen was like that, had a childish streak to him and a way of making men see him as less than he was. He slouched. He was fat and he always looked either bored or half-asleep – often both – but he had sharp eyes behind the façade and his vices were surprising and few. The Watcher wondered sometimes how many people he really fooled. ‘Quai’Shu has returned then, has he? Planning a visit? H
e must be. We’ve had the emerald cages installed for weeks now and jade ravens carry news well enough for the rest of us. Just not quite as quickly, eh?’

  The Watcher shook his head. ‘Our sea lord plans to return at once to the Western Realm, T’Varr, to oversee the further stages of his design. Enchantress Chay-Liang will join you here shortly.’

  Tsen pouted. ‘Well, you certainly didn’t come all the way here just to tell me that! What news do you really bring?’

  ‘Our sea lord has acquired the alchemist. He is in Xican. Enchantress Chay-Liang will bring him to you when she comes.’

  A broad smile spread across the t’varr’s face, so wide it ran halfway up his cheeks. ‘And dragon eggs, LaLa? Any sign of those?’

  ‘Our sea lord advises less than a year, T’Varr.’

  ‘Delicious.’ The t’varr clapped his hands. ‘Then we shall be busy soon. I’m sure this alchemist will be most demanding. But good. Good.’

  ‘Sea Lord Quai’Shu also commands that his castle be taken to the northern edge of the Lair of Samim. The alchemist will offer further advice when he arrives.’

  The Watcher left him to it. The glasships with their chains would move the castle, inch it to the edge of the great salt marsh where the Samim, the mother of snakes and scorpions and all things poisonous, was said to live.

  He went that way himself too, but for entirely other reasons.

  10

  Someone Else’s Skin

  Beside the river of Tethis he forgot his thirst. He was Skyrie, but the Crowntaker was inside him. Panting, sweating, he stripped off his clothes and stood in the water and looked at himself naked in the moonlight. He didn’t know how long he had before his skin wouldn’t be his own again. He touched himself, looking for the marks that came with ten years of soldiering. Not his marks, but those of the Bloody Judge. But all he found was the huge scar on his left thigh, old and puckered and familiar and comforting, the size of his splayed hand. At least his skin was still his own.

  He waded to the bank and fell to his knees at the edge of the water and started to sob. The thing was still there, writhing and screaming in impotent agony and rage, and he wanted it gone, but he didn’t know how. Oh gods, he’d killed four of his brothers! Friends! He howled at the sky, ‘It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! It was him! Oh Xibaiya! Someone help me!’

  He was young, a boy coming into the first flushes of manhood. He was hiding. Cowering in the crude hut that was his home. Outside, open and in the daylight, something terrible was happening. Women were screaming. Men roared and howled and he heard horses. They came every year, the riders, had done ever since he was small. Came and took what they wanted and left; and whenever they came, he and his brothers and sisters hid away. He was shaking. Trembling. The Bloody Judge’s men. Hadn’t known then, but Vallas had told him later who had done it.

  The sobs turned to howls. He buried his face in his hands.

  A giant burst in and pulled him from his hiding place. Immense and as tall and as broad as the doorway. Long dreadlocked hair hung to his waist and a short spiked axe hung on a loop of leather from one wrist. The giant picked him up and flung him against a wall. The axe swung and Skyrie lost all will to move and simply slumped. He looked down. He was sitting in a lake of his own blood. His leg had been cut open, so deep that it was more off than on.

  And then later the water.

  He got back to his feet, the river dripping off his legs. He was cold, the water icy, the night air chill and he was naked. He looked at the scar again in the moonlight, long and hard. The skin looked as though it had melted and then frozen again, twisted out of shape. In the moonlight it was speckled with pale and silvery streaks, thousands of little marks left in the skin as it had healed.

  That’s no axe scar, warlock. In his head the Crowntaker was right behind him. He squealed and turned and ran a few steps and then stopped, helpless, and wailed, because how did you run from something that was inside you? The Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge. There. Watching and looking and waiting.

  It looks like a burn, warlock. But it came from an axe. The one the giant had swung at him. He tried to scream: I was there! It was me! I felt it! But though his mouth opened, no sound came out. He was losing control. The Judge was taking him back.

  The Crowntaker had seen those silver streaks before. There were patterns in them, staggering and intricate and they looked like writing of a sort. The sigils that warlocks used, perhaps. Or maybe the sunburst marks of the sun priests. The thought came with a trail of wistful regret strung out like gossamer behind it, lingering.

  He looked at his hands. The fingers were long and slender. The callouses that came from years of gauntlets and swords weren’t there. They were soft.

  He put the grey robes back over his head.

  The warlock was screaming. Endless screaming, battering against the prison of his own mind, howling to be let out, but that would never happen, not again. Flickering memories flashed by, not his own, dancing past, revealing a little of their skin and dashing away. Then a great slew of them came like rocks tumbling from the face of a cliff to reveal new strata beneath, pristine and clean. Memories of the death-mage sticking that paper to his breastplate, fierce and hot, striking the last stroke of the last sigil in his own blood and casting his incantation as he died. Everything that came after.

  I am the Bloody Judge. For a moment he faltered, bewildered by the enormity of what they’d done to him, frozen by it. He looked at the hands that weren’t his. Stared at them as they shook. How could they be real? Then forced the horror away because what use was it? The sigils were gone, the spell cast. What was done was done. There would be time later for fear and anguish and dread – now was for bloody vengeance. Vallas Kuy, the master warlock. He needed to find Vallas and his golden knife that cut pieces out of the souls of men.

  He remembered his thirst again, knelt and touched his lips to the water, taking care not to look at his own reflection. The river was clean here, the smells of the docks mere whispers on the breeze. Afterwards he danced from stone to boulder across the hiss of the water and slipped in and out of the alleys that nestled among the houses of the rich on the other side. He found a wall that was low enough to climb. Jumped onto the edge of a storehouse roof, crept to the top and then along the ridge of it, skills the warlock Skyrie had never had, old skills the Bloody Judge had learned long ago as a thief in far-off Deephaven. He slipped through the town unseen, running down the Galsmouth Road towards the battlefield where he belonged.

  11

  Over Her Heart

  Long ago the Elemental Men had come down from Mount Solence. They’d fallen on the squabbling coast of Takei’Tarr and cut away the old sorceries and religions in a swathe of blood and fire. It had been a necessary thing, an act of mercy to save this piece of the now-broken world from another cataclysm. Some places had taken to the new order well. The old Mar-Li Republics had acquiesced almost at once and so became the model for the society that now grew under elemental eyes. Others had not. Yet it struck the Watcher that two cities in particular had resisted most furiously. They were the cities furthest from the first Elemental Men, with the most time to prepare and who should have seen the inevitability of history sweeping inexorably towards them but whose pride was matchless. Cashax in the far north of the desert with her inexhaustible supply of slaves; and worse, Vespinarr, deep in the southern mountains on the edge of the Konsidar with her silver and her bottomless wealth. They had fought the hardest and so had been cut the deepest. Vespinarr had given birth to the sorceress Abraxi, Cashax to the indescribable abomination of the Crimson Sunburst. Both had been crushed in the end, conquered and ruled and their histories rewritten by the Elemental Masters, and yet now they quietly ruled the world despite their pasts. Every conflict among the Taiytakei, if you looked hard enough, was underpinned by their rivalry.

  The Watcher blew high above mountain peaks shining white
with snow and swirled down between them. Vespinarr lay spread across the plateau beneath, ringed by snow-capped stone, the bright gleam of the Yalun Zarang river running through it, the roiling waters of the Jokun not far away. The city glittered silver and gold under the clear blue sky, while the land between the two rivers was threaded with silver strands through green fields dappled with bright yellows and brilliant blue. The Elemental Men had come late to Vespinarr when perhaps they should have turned to it first. They’d done what they’d done everywhere, destroyed and desecrated the city’s sacred sites, culled its priests and sorcerers. But here more than anywhere else the old ways still survived in secret.

  He circled the Kabulingnor Palace, whose shining towers of gold and glass were the highest in the world and could be seen from a hundred miles away, whose vast yellow walls sprawled like cliffs across the might of Mazanda’s Peak, Sea Lord Shonda’s colossal declaration of the city’s power. He soared lower in arcs around the crags and bluffs, past two massive floating cargo sleds made of gold-glass, laden with crates and sacks and pens full of animals, slowly riding the air from the city below to the mountaintop palace; and smaller sleds too, moving through the sky, carrying just one man or two, messengers or guests not worthy of a glasship but in too much haste for the long winding mountain road. Then lower still to the tiers and scattered pavilions of the Visonda Palace at the mountain’s feet, where a legion of t’varrs and kwens saw to it that the heart of the city kept up its merciless beat.

  There, in a quiet place, he became a man once more, hidden deep in shadows where no one would see. There were reasons today for stealth.

  Below the Visonda stood the Azahl Pillar. It had come from somewhere much deeper in the Konsidar, moved here long before there were such things as Elemental Men. He stopped in front of it as he always did. It had grace. The white stone was flawless, inscribed to an unnamed general, an account of his services to the forgotten king of a nameless realm, and ringed with symbols no one had ever deciphered. It belonged to the time before the Splintering, yet the stone hadn’t aged. The Watcher ran a hand over it. Its edges were as sharp as they ever were, as though they’d been carved that very morning. The moon sorcerers belonged to that age. They’d seen the Splintering with their own eyes. On the beach they’d shown it to him because, beneath every other purpose, what an Elemental Man was for, what had brought them into life so long ago, was the fear that it might happen again and the resolve that it should not. It was why they did what they did, why they cast away every trace of the old gods, killing them down to the deepest roots, why they learned to hunt and kill sorcerers from any and every world.