Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  The heart of the lower Visonda was a high-walled space as big as a field with a second pair of great gates on the inner side. The Watcher followed the grey dead from on high, a dull speck among the hundreds of rainbow-draped Taiytakei in their silks and feathers and their slaves in pristine white. At the second gates the grey dead stretched out his arms, palms up, letting his sleeves fall back from his wrists to show the slave brands on his forearms. He had the sign of a two-masted ship burned into each that said to any who cared to know that he was a sword-slave made in distant Shevana-Daro, not here in Vespinarr. By the gate, soldiers decked in bright mustard yellows and tasselled in silver waved him through.

  The Watcher shifted closer. Some called the Visonda the Home of a Thousand T’Varrs. Hundreds upon hundreds of slaves came and went every day but few passed the second gates.

  A series of easy staircases rose behind it, carved into the slope amid a speckle of brightly draped pavilions ranging up the gentle ascent to the summit of the mountain’s root. The bulk of the old palace rose there, looming down over its satellites below, a quadrangular mass capped with gilt canopies. Few slaves came this far, but again the grey dead showed his brands and was permitted to enter. The Watcher shifted through the walls. He followed to the airy Tower of Messages which speared the air at the very peak of the palace. No slave branded and marked should have reached this far, for the upper levels of the Tower of Messages held the precious jade ravens, fabulously rare even in a city as rich as this, each one worth a dozen ships and a thousand sword-slaves. The ravens carried the words of Sea Lord Shonda of Vespinarr to his friends and allies, or his t’varrs and kwens and hsians, and rarely anyone else.

  The grey dead presented himself and was ushered through into the jade-panelled scribing room. He took a gold quill and wrote a brief note on a sheet of paper and handed it to one of the bird scribes.

  ‘Dhar Thosis. At once.’

  The scribe looked the grey dead up and down, decided he was merely a slave and allowed himself to appear offended at such an imperious tone, but the grey dead had already turned and left. The Watcher lingered. He followed the scribe now, wafting in the air, waiting in the inking room as the grey dead’s message was written again, this time with diamond-tipped gold-glass scratching letters so small that an ordinary eye could barely read them onto a tiny silver ring. When it was done, the scribe took the ring and carried it up the steps that led to the cages of the jade ravens themselves, to their keepers and to the open roof where slaves were chained to posts to feed the messenger birds when they came home. Before he left he threw the grey dead’s paper into a jade bowl to be burned at dusk with all the other messages sent that day.

  Alone, the Watcher became flesh. He took the grey dead’s words and sank into the floor. Dhar Thosis. An interesting dilemma. It would take a jade raven five days to cross the desert while he could do it himself in one.

  He shifted through the walls, up to the orange-tiled roof of the Tower of Messages, and squatted there. Away from prying eyes, with the chitter-chatter caws of the jade ravens just beneath his feet, he read the grey dead’s words:

  He is not here. I am unmasked.

  After the words came four symbols. He had no idea what they meant, but he’d seen them before. On the Azahl Pillar.

  Who is not in Vespinarr? And to whom was this message sent? He needed to know both answers. He pondered. A jade raven to Dhar Thosis would go straight to the Palace of Roses, and there fate smiled on him. Xican was in debt to Vespinarr, Dhar Thosis to the mountain city’s great desert rival, Cashax, and so for now the two indefatigable engines of the sea lords played out their endless duel with the Grey Isle and the Kraitu’s Bones as their pawns. Quai’Shu’s spies filled the Palace of Roses as Lord Senxian’s surely festered like maggots in the Palace of Leaves. If one of the grey dead had made his home in the Kraitu’s Bones, he wouldn’t stay hidden for long.

  So, to the who of he is not here.

  The Watcher became the stone of the Visonda’s walls and descended to its gates, waiting for the grey dead to emerge but the slave never did. Over the days that followed the Watcher searched the city with meticulous care but the grey dead had slipped away, had somehow eluded him. When he rested in front of the Azahl Pillar, he saw that the symbols there whose meanings were lost were indeed the same as the ones the grey dead had drawn. Exact copies. A sign of the city from which his message came, was that it? Or did it mean something more?

  The Watcher returned to Xican and carried out his duties. He ran errands and carried messages, paltry things far beneath an Elemental Man. Amid them the hunt resumed. A sorcerer, no matter his powers, no matter who he was, did not throw off an Elemental Man for long. The brands on the grey dead had come from Shevana-Daro. The Watcher went there and began his search anew. Patience was an Elemental Man’s friend, and months later patience rewarded him with a boat stolen away to the forbidden island of Vul Storna, where the ruins of an ancient tower of white stone rose from the rocky heart of the island, visible from the sea, its top sheared in two. The Taiytakei who looked out across the water from their comfortable lives on the shore joked that the island was cursed, but those who plied their trades on the waves knew better. Not cursed. Forbidden, as the Konsidar was forbidden, on pain of death.

  The Watcher became the air and blew close. This was where the last priests of the old ways had fled when the cleansing purity of the Elemental Men came down from Mount Solence. Vul Storna had been their refuge, a final hiding place, and they’d lived and worked for years amid the deep ruins and in the great labyrinth of tunnels and caves beneath. They’d come to preserve the lore and the teachings of the gods they served, the stories and memories that the Elemental Men sought to destroy, and not everything they’d left behind had been found and made safe. Yet even without them the island would have been shunned. The ruined tower was an older thing than the priests, as old as anything. It had an aura to it. A resistance that reached out and touched him like Baros Tsen T’Varr’s great floating castle. A thing that belonged to the same time, flowed out from the same white enchanted stone.

  He found the grey dead again among those tunnels, searching walls filled with archways that opened onto nothing but more blank white stone. Whispers said that if a man knew the true secrets of what the priests had written, he might open these arches to other worlds, another way to reach across the storm-dark. But whispers were whispers, nothing more.

  He became flesh and bone. ‘And have you found it, sorcerer? What you were looking for in Vespinarr?’

  The grey dead jumped. Black shadows flew from his sleeves, hurled at the Watcher to choke his soul out of his body. The Watcher shifted. The stone walls here were like the castle with its glowing whiteness. They held him out, but the myriad of statues that littered the labyrinth were more ordinary things. Beside the grey dead, the stone features of some ancient lord became the Watcher’s face and the shadows whirled around in impotent frenzy. The Watcher waited patiently for them consume themselves and wilt and die.

  ‘For six years they hid themselves here, sorcerer. When we found them we put an end to them, but in that time they wrote what they wrote. The Rava. More than a hundred copies of their blasphemies and abomination, written in their shaking fearful hands and smuggled away. Doubtless more made since. We track them down as we find them. We destroy them as we destroy all who read them, all who touch them and all who seek them. The Rava is forbidden knowledge, sorcerer. Is that what brought you here? We will not permit the world to end again.’

  The grey dead drew his shadows back into his sleeves. ‘I know your voice. Under the temple of Vespinarr. I thought it strange for a different kind of killer to come, stranger still that my shadows failed to devour him. You I have expected.’

  ‘You cannot escape us, sorcerer. We were made for the likes of you.’

  ‘I know what you are better than you know yourself, earth-touched. I will not fight you. A storm is c
oming that even you cannot stop.’ He stood still and quiet. ‘I will become one with Xibaiya and await the great transformation.’

  ‘You’re making something, warlock. What is it?’

  The grey dead gave away his surprise. ‘Making something?’ He chuckled bitterly, tinged with a weariness he didn’t try to hide. ‘If that’s what you came for, you’re too late. It’s already made, killer.’

  ‘And what have you made?’

  The grey dead shook his head and half a smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. ‘Are we done?’

  ‘Those who know of these things say that the writings of the Rava are incomplete. Is that why you came here, warlock? Did you think the priests of the Vul Storna had another volume finished in secret when we fell upon them? One that we never found?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ The grey dead smiled. He drew back his hood and closed his eyes. ‘I don’t think it, I know it, earth brother. The Book of Endings. Filled with more secrets, mundane and deadly, than you or I will ever know. It would have made their Rava complete. It’s hidden behind one of these archways. Behind one of these gates to another world.’

  ‘Where it remains.’

  The grey dead tapped the blank archway beside the Watcher’s stony face. ‘Perhaps it’s this one. But how to open them, eh? And where do they lead? And what will you do if the Ice Witch of Aria has found it first? For that is the world in which it was finally hidden, after all.’ He laughed. ‘Oh, there are far worse things than you and I, brother of the earth.’

  The Watcher shifted. He became air and flesh again in the blink of an eye. With a slice of his bladeless knife the grey dead’s head fell from his shoulders. It rolled on the floor, still grinning.

  ‘I will wait for you in Xibaiya, earth-touched,’ it mouthed.

  14

  The Dragon Slave

  The man chained next to Berren was dead. He’d been dead for days; he stank of rank decay and the rats had gnawed his feet to the bone. Whenever Berren dozed for a few minutes one of the rats would take a nip to see if he was ready to be eaten too. They were hungry, these bilge rats, and they were big and there were a lot of them. So far he’d found the strength to kick them into the stinking inches of stale water that slopped back and forth underfoot. Sometimes he even managed to stamp on one and break its back. It would squeal, and the squealing told him where it lay, legs thrashing. There were better things to eat than raw rat, but there were worse things too.

  Lazily he rattled his chains. Except when he had visitors come to taunt him, there was no light down here, nothing to see by. The Taiytakei who ran the ship were still taking bets on how much longer he was going to last. One or two who’d gambled long at the start had even smuggled down bread and water at first but that had stopped after the man next to him had died. The Taiytakei bet on everything. They couldn’t help themselves. They could have bet on who he really was, if he’d told any of them his story, but it might have come to an unsatisfying end because he didn’t know any more. Simply didn’t know. Whenever the rats left him alone, whenever he drifted into a fitful sleep, his mind wandered into a past that belonged to someone else. In his waking memories he knew he’d grown up a street urchin in the city of Deephaven. When he closed his eyes he found he lived in a village beside a lake, surrounded by reeds taller than the tallest men. Instead of streets he ran among the tiny channels between them, up to his knees in muddy water. Or sometimes it was the other way round. He’d lost track of everything. Lost track of who he was, lost track of time. Tethis had been months ago. The battle, the pit, Vallas, the Bloody Judge, they’d faded to one half-remembered dream.

  The hatch overhead opened. The sound roused him to lift his head. No one had come for more than a day but now men were lowering the ladder, clambering down the steep narrow steps, boots clumping on hard damp wood, splashing when they reached the bilges.

  Taiytakei. Two held candles and lurked in the shadows. Two others came and peered and poked. He’d never seen any of them before but they wore their hair in long braids that fell almost to their waists. The longer the braids, the more important the man. He’d learned that much before they’d thrown him down here. The same went for their clothes and especially their cloaks. They liked their feathers and their bright colours. The bigger and the gaudier they were, the better; but here in the dim flicker of the candles their cloaks looked black. So did everything.

  The Taiytakei gibbered to each other in their dialect, too fast for Berren to follow. Now and then he heard words he understood, but for the most part their speech was impossible. Written down though, their letters and language was the same as he’d learned in Aria. In Deephaven with the priests and the monks and Tasahre, years before the Bloody Judge had been born.

  He closed his eyes. The Taiytakei chattered away right in front of him as though he was a carcass hung up in a slaughterhouse. Tasahre. His first love. Sometimes when he closed his eyes he watched her die, over and over and over, always the same, the sword opening her throat and the blood, so much blood. But other times, when he screwed up his eyes and tried, he remembered her from before. His hand pressed to her cheek. Her tears on his skin, and gods how he wanted her. How he wanted her now, to hold him and tell him what to do. But she was gone, and every time he remembered that anew, despair tried to drown him. She’d told him once that words were all the same – in Aria, with the Taiytakei, in the Dominion, Tethis, everywhere the same – and it was just the way of saying them that was bent and changed.

  The Taiytakei started poking him, still jabbering at one another. As the Bloody Judge, he’d planned to meet a slaver crew some years ago but it had never come to anything. Now one of them was prodding his arms and his ribs, turning his face this way and that, peering at his teeth and eyes. He wondered if these Taiytakei were slavers too. How would he have seen them, standing as Gaunt had stood on the edge of the sea when he’d been taking their silver and selling his captives? He’d always said he’d sell the queensguard to slavers. Wars cost money and the men of the queensguard had picked the wrong side. Exactly his own words but now he saw how hollow and cold they were.

  ‘Do you want to live, slave?’ The accent was still thick but the Taiytakei could be understood when they tried. He nodded. He forced himself. Did he want to live? He wasn’t entirely sure any more. Here was life, come full circle, back to being a skag, only worse. Did he want that again?

  Better than death though. Wasn’t it?

  The slaver frowned. ‘Why? Why do you want to live?’

  ‘I … want …’ What sort of question was that? So I can wring your necks, all of you, one by one. What did he want? He wanted his life back, his own skin. My sword, my army, my missing piece that I once wore around my neck that makes me whole. But swords came and went and the Fighting Hawks only existed to break the warlocks and their queen. The other him had already done that.

  Then so I can wrap my hands around my own throat and strangle the life out of whatever bastard has stolen my body and my name. That’s why. That was more like it. Revenge? He understood revenge. From the day he’d left Deephaven his life had been made of it. The Bloody Judge had had his way now, and all that was left was a sordid hunt through the back alleys of the world, cutting up the last few warlocks that still survived, but that’s what he’d do. Revenge was what he had left to him. Revenge on the friends who’d sold him as a slave. Revenge for a son taken by disease before he could hold a sword. Revenge for a lover whose fire for him had died. Revenge against the gods themselves, though he knew well that revenge was a whore and not a lover.

  Deep inside him something stirred. Revenge against the gods themselves. A strength surged through him, a will to exist and yes, a will to wreak that revenge, all of it. He lifted his head and bared his teeth and glared at the Taiytakei in front of him.

  ‘Because I’m not ready to die.’


  The Taiytakei exchanged more words. One called a candle bearer closer and pointed at Berren’s thigh, at the scarring on his leg. The other looked him up and down. ‘You know ships?’

  He nodded. Two years as a skag; but they must have known, because knowing his way around a ship was what had landed him down here in the first place. Normal disobedience was met with floggings or simply being thrown overboard to drown. It took a special crime for a Taiytakei slave captain to put one of his precious cargo to death so slowly; but then it took a special understanding of sails and ropes and how they worked together to fray the right few so they’d snap when they should hold and sails that should be reefed would stay aloft untouched until the wind in them snapped the masts that held them high. If he’d thought of a way to send the ship to the bottom of the sea, he’d have done it.

  ‘Sail, fight, gold,’ said the Taiytakei. To him it seemed to mean something.

  They left him chained in the dark for another two days but at least he got food and water now. The dead man beside him was taken out and thrown into the sea. When they let him out, up onto the decks, Berren screwed up his eyes and stretched and cast his arms to the sky, feeling the sunlight and the fresh air and the wind on his skin for the first time in … days? Weeks? He didn’t know. When they prodded him into a boat along with a dozen more slaves, he did as he was asked, meek and docile while the fire inside smouldered on. A time and a place. One day …

  Revenge on the gods themselves. The thought haunted him yet gave him its strength. Inside him, now and then, he still felt the remnant of the warlock whose body he’d taken, crushed and squashed, forced away into some deep dark corner, jumbled and slowly fading to nothing, a husk to be devoured by alien thoughts and foreign memories, drenched with despair, although these days even the despair was a dull thing, muted and driven away.