Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  He’d not let that happen. Not to him. Not to the Bloody Judge.

  The boat pulled alongside a galley, a fast shallow-draughted coastal corsair, the sort of ship the Bloody Judge might once have used for fast sharp raids along the Tethis coast. Its decks were busy, filled with bright-coloured Taiytakei and unchained white-shirted slaves. Some of the slaves even carried short cutting knives. The Taiytakei carried them too, but they carried something else: golden glass sticks that glowed with their own light. He was herded with the other newcomers to the back. Several Taiytakei pointed their glowing sticks at him. White light held in glass. He thought he’d seen something like that once before. Trapped fire that Prince Talon, the Prince of Swords, had once used.

  He stopped. He suddenly didn’t know who it was they’d fought that day. The king he’d killed for the Prince of Swords. How he’d earned his other name: Crowntaker. A moment ago he’d known who it was but now the name was gone like the snap of a man’s fingers.

  He stood with the other new slaves, cowed and pressed together, surrounded by armed men while the two ships finished their business. The galley raised a sail and began to move. A slave with a knife on his belt and two Taiytakei soldiers came forward. The slave wore the same white as the others, but around his wrist hung half a dozen strings of brightly coloured stones. He looked at Berren and the others, laughed and spat at their feet.

  ‘If you speak the Sun King’s tongue, nod your head.’ The words were loud and slow as though he was talking to idiots. He looked them over one more time and then walked in among them, cuffing them into answering. ‘We are all slaves. Slaves. Do you know what that means?’ He tore one of the strings off his wrist and threw it into the sea. ‘I didn’t like that one any more. That’s what happens to things I don’t like.’ He waved his fist. ‘I care more about every one of these stones than I care about any of you. This lot.’ He nodded at the guards. ‘As far as they’re concerned, they like the bilge rats better than us.’ He went from one to another, unlocking their chains then held them up. ‘You think these make you slaves? You’re wrong. It’s the colour of your skin. Look at yourselves. Look at the colour of your skin. Look at the colour of my skin. Slaves is what we are, chains or no chains. Or do you wish to be free?’ He gestured over the side of the ship. The coastline was maybe a mile away, maybe less. The air was warm, the sea calm. Berren stared at it. Couldn’t help it. A strong man could …

  The slave with the bracelets stood in front of Berren and snapped his fingers. ‘You. Scrawny one with the scar on your leg.’ Bracelets glared down at him. ‘A strong man could swim. That’s what you’re thinking.’ He turned away, addressed them once again. ‘And he’s right. A strong man could swim to the shore from here, if he could swim at all. But you’re slaves and slaves are weak.’ He laughed. ‘Prove me wrong. Go and jump. Run! I won’t stop you.’

  No one ran. Bracelets glared at them. He raised his left arm to show the lightning brand that ran from his elbow halfway to his fist. ‘I’m a slave like you. One brand makes you worth something to these bastards. You have no brands. That makes you worth nothing.’ He came forward again, nose to nose with the biggest slave from Berren’s ship. ‘I have a name but you’re not worth it yet, so you can call me master, or bastard, or anything you like as long as you do what I say when I say it. What’s your name, slave?’

  The big man murmured something. Bracelets slapped him. ‘Wrong! Your name is slave. Big man like you, why aren’t you swimming?’ Again the big man murmured and again Bracelets slapped him and shouted in his face, ‘Because you’re a slave and because you’re weak.’ One by one he went among them. Whatever they said, he slapped them. If they gave a name, he screamed at them that they were slaves. If they said they were slaves, he screamed at them that they were weak.

  Now he was standing in front of Berren. ‘And you, Scarred Leg, I know you were thinking of taking a jump. Saw your eyes look at the sea. I know what you were thinking. Freedom, eh? Land. So close. So tempting. Yet here you are. Still here. What’s your name, slave? Are you a sheep or a wolf?’

  Berren lowered his head and didn’t reply. Bracelets slapped him. ‘Are you deaf then? Are you mute? Stupid? Are you all three?’ Berren said nothing. Bracelets slapped him again. ‘Slave! You’re a slave. Say it! Say I am a slave!’ Another slap. ‘Say—’

  A tide of fury washed though Berren. He caught Bracelets’ wrist, twisted, had one arm locked around the man’s neck in a flash. The other hand whipped the knife out of Bracelets’ belt.

  ‘My name is slave,’ Berren hissed. ‘But my other name is Berren. Berren Crowntaker, Berren the Bloody Judge of Tethis.’ The Taiytakei soldiers were pointing their wands at him. The light inside them blazed bright. And he didn’t care. Not one bit.

  Bracelets snarled and waved them back. ‘You stay here, you’re just slave to me,’ he said. ‘You want a name? You earn it.’

  Berren forced Bracelets’ head up. ‘I see the archers there. You might not kill me but they will.’ He felt a dizziness coming over him. Weakness. Weeks of being starved.

  ‘You earn it!’ Bracelets grabbed Berren’s wrist and pulled the knife away from his throat. He twisted Berren’s arm until the knife fell to the deck and then kicked him down and roared at the other cowering slaves, ‘By fighting! This is a fighting ship. You man the oars. If you live a year, you man the ropes and the sails. If you live another year, you fight. You’ll be slaves, you’ll always be slaves, but you can be proud slaves.’ He held up his hand and waved his strings of stones. ‘Every year you live, you get one of these. If you live long enough to fight, you can leave if you want but you won’t. You’ll have a taste for it by then. Either that or you’ll be dead.’

  Bracelets reached down and glared, eyes a-glitter. ‘You. Scarred Leg. You’re not as weak as these others so now they’re yours. Down among the oars they’ll take their punishments from you. Whatever wrong they do, you’ll be the one to pay. Any of you survive to be a sail-slave, it’ll be the same but worse, because then I’ll be the one taking it out of your skin. Now give me back my knife, slave. Pick it up and give it to me.’

  I … am … He’d had another name once. He reached for it but it slipped between his fingers, wriggled from his grasp. He reached across the deck and picked up the knife and handed it back. Bracelets hauled him up and then his face jumped forward and they were eye to eye. ‘Do not think that I fear anything, slave, for I have taken back my name. I am Tuuran. I am Adamantine, and I kill dragons.’

  Berren Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge of Tethis, bared his teeth and smiled.

  15

  Crazy Mad

  A year at the oars killed a good few. Some died from exhaustion. A few annoyed their Taiytakei masters once too often and were thrown overboard. A couple were sold. But mostly they died in the bouts of sickness that swept the rowing deck every few months. Not Berren, though. He never got sick. He never argued with the oar masters, the Taiytakei soldiers who walked the oar decks with their whips and their ashgars, their spiked clubs. He grew stronger. The endless hours filled out his muscles, broadened his shoulders and his chest. His flesh became his own again. He no longer looked at his hands and wondered whose they were. It was only when he glanced down and saw the scar on his leg that he remembered the warlock Skyrie.

  When his year was done they let him loose from his place among the oars. He stood up on the open decks with the wind in his hair and the sun on his face and grinned.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten you, Berren the Crowntaker, Berren the Bloody Judge of Tethis,’ whispered Tuuran behind him. ‘I told the Taiytakei not to throw you over the side then. I told them you’d be worth it. They said not but they let me have my way. Now prove that I was right and they were wrong.â€�
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  Berren had seen Tuuran perhaps twice since that first day. He didn’t turn around. He could smell the brand in Tuuran’s hand, the hot metal scorching the air. ‘Another year and they give me a knife, is it?’

  ‘A year, two, maybe three. Who knows? Stay alive and one day you’ll be a fighting slave. I think you’ll like that. Face me.’ Now Berren turned. Tuuran tipped his head up to the wind, to the spray of salt. ‘You kept it in. Well done. Mostly the oars break a man one way or the other. Some shout and fight and get themselves killed. Others? A little light inside them snuffs out. Not you, though. You have a touch of the dragon-killer in you. You have patience.’ For a moment Berren caught a gleam in Tuuran’s eye. A fierce madness, a knowing of a shared longing.

  ‘No. Not me.’ A touch of the dragon-killer? A touch of something. The other was still inside whenever Berren thought to look. The husk and dust of the warlock, still screaming in the dark.

  Tuuran showed him the brand, six inches of lightning bolt still glowing a deep dull red. ‘Easy now. They’re watching you. It’s going to happen one way or another and you know that. That’s how this works. And it’s good – it makes you more than you were. So no struggling now. Bite on this.’ Tuuran offered a strip of thick leather. Berren hesitated, then took it and pushed it deep inside his mouth and bit down hard.

  ‘Good. Now. Most people don’t get this choice, but you do. You can hold out your arm on your own and keep it there, and keep it still while I do this. Or I can get some men to hold you down. Most people, it’s best if they’re held down.’

  Berren took the leather out of his mouth for a moment. ‘Did you need to be held down?’

  Tuuran grinned. ‘You think there are any slaves here who could do that? Hold out your arm. Left one. Nice and straight.’

  Berren stared at the brand. He clenched his fists. Then he pushed the strip of leather back between his teeth and held out his arm. He was breathing hard now.

  ‘Turn it over. Open your fist and bend back your hand.’ Tuuran ran rough fingers over the inside of Berren’s arm, back and forth, then held Berren’s hand, bending it back until it hurt, holding his arm locked straight. He had the brand in his other hand, poised. ‘Now close your eyes. Go on, close them. And no matter what, keep that arm still or I’ll have to do this again. Ready now?’

  Berren nodded. He was panting as though he was running for his life, every muscle clenched tight, tense and ready to explode into life.

  ‘Good. Now there’s … Great Flame, what’s that?’

  Berren opened his eyes and started to turn his head and as he did, Tuuran whipped the brand over and pressed it into Berren’s arm. Blazing agony punched him in the back of his eyes and then grabbed them and squeezed. Berren screamed. His face screwed up tight. His teeth clamped on the leather. The brand hissed as Tuuran placed it into a bucket of waiting water but the big man still held his hand, gripped it tight as he poured cold seawater over the wound. He smeared it with something and then wrapped it in a bandage. He might have spoken, but if he did then Berren didn’t hear. The pain consumed everything. He snarled like an animal, deaf to the world.

  When he was done, Tuuran left him there, clenching and unclenching his fist, rocking back and forth, tight as a drum, breathing hard and deep until a numbness took over and the pain slowly ebbed. Then Tuuran came back. He crouched beside Berren and gave him a cup of clear fresh water and a bowl of rice with a lime cut in two perched on top.

  ‘You’re no longer an oar-slave,’ he said solemnly. ‘You’re no longer an animal. You’re no longer property. You’re a sail-slave and your voice has worth again.’ He slapped Berren on the back. ‘In Takei’Tarr they’d give you half a loaf of bread fresh from the baker’s oven and a bowl of olives. At sea we have to make do with what we can get. You have half a glass and then I expect you to work.’ He got up and left.

  The slaves who worked the ropes and the sails moved freely around the ship and over the days and weeks that followed, Berren found his way into every nook and cranny. Down among the oars he’d come to know the men who sat around him but he’d never bothered to learn the names of the rest. Now he paid attention. To be up here they were survivors like him and they came from all over the known worlds. In his waking memories he’d grown up in the city-port of Deephaven, the second greatest city of the empire of Aria, and he found other slaves from there, most from the coast a hundred miles further south but they’d all heard of Deephaven. They told him of a war that had come since he’d left, of sorcerers dressed in silver, of ice raining in knives from the sky, the city put to the sword and then rising from the dead. Afterwards, the coast to the south had become a hunting ground for the Taiytakei slavers. Deephaven had survived but now there was a necropolis at its heart, populated by the risen dead and guarded by sorcerers who were masters of fire. And from those ashes the empire had a mistress now, beautiful and terrible to behold. They spoke of her in hushed whispers, as though even here she might hear them. The Ice Queen. Berren listened to their stories but he didn’t much believe them. Most of these slaves, whatever they claimed, had never strayed more than a day’s walk from where they’d been born until they were taken and stories had a way of changing, of growing wilder the further they travelled.

  Other slaves came from places around the Dominion. The Bloody Judge had been to a few and heard of a few more. He’d even sacked one once, which made him smile in secret to himself. Others, like Tuuran, came from places with names he’d never heard. On nights when the ship was still and drifting and there was little work to do, they sat around a stove of hot coals and told each other their stories. As each new slave arrived from the oar deck, the older slaves always saw that he had his turn.

  ‘In my land there are dragons. Flying monsters as big as this ship whose wings would cast the whole world into shadow when they flew.’ Tuuran chewed on a stick of Xizic stolen from their Taiytakei masters. His eyes shone in the glow of the coals, wandering among the sail-slaves, daring any of them to speak. ‘I was born to fight them. Raised to slay them. I am Adamantine. I have stood in walls of dragon-scale shields and turned back their fire. We were masters of the beasts, not their slaves. We were the undrawn sword.’ He said the same thing every time, that and nothing more. He never once told them how he’d been taken.

  ‘I come from a farm,’ said Berren when it was his turn. In his waking memories he never saw any farm but if he said who he thought he really was, that he was a man well into his third decade who’d led armies, fought wars, killed kings and conquered kingdoms, no one would believe him. The stories the slaves shared were meant to have at least a little truth in their hearts. ‘I grew up far away from the sea. We lived beside a lake and everywhere around us was swamp and reeds.’ He dreamed of that village every night, knew it now as though it had been his home. ‘Men with swords and horses came each year. They took our food and our animals and left us to starve. One year they branded me.’ He tapped his thigh, the great scar that lay half-hidden under his tunic. The other slaves murmured. They’d all seen it.

  He changed the truth a little from the way his dreams had it then: ‘One year they came a second time. After they’d taken all we had they came back to destroy us. Man or woman, old or young, it didn’t matter; they put us to the sword. I was away among the reeds. It was night. When I came back, the dead were left where they’d fallen, scattered across the ground.’ He could see it, feel it. The loss and the horror and the fear of being suddenly alone were so vivid, and so was the rage that followed. That was how it went in his dreams. Gone out into the swamp to die. Given back his life by the miracle of the one-eyed spectre. Returned to find his home slaughtered in savagery.

  He pinched himself. Those were dreams and they didn’t belong to him, for he was Berren, child of Deephaven, son of the city through and through. The Bloody Jud
ge, warlord of the Small Kingdoms. The Crowntaker, maker and breaker of kings and queens. He was a lot of things but he’d never lain dying by a lake, and yet he felt it. He ground his teeth and watched the slaves around him carefully as he spoke. ‘I went after them,’ he said. Some of them gently nodded, others shook their heads, and then and there Berren divided the slaves into two in his mind. The Nodders and the Shakers. The ones who’d fight and the ones who wouldn’t. The wolves and the sheep.

  Tuuran belched. ‘Is that it, Berren Crowntaker, Berren the Bloody Judge? Or is this story going to be a very long one?’

  The other slaves laughed and nodded and raised their cups. ‘Berren the Crowntaker?’ said one. ‘I knew him.’ A chorus of jeers and boos and laughing drowned out whatever came next. ‘Well I saw him, then. The Bloody Judge he was calling himself. Had a part in sacking Mor-Dyan. Six years ago that was.’ The sail-slave snorted and looked at Berren. ‘You ain’t anything like him.’

  Mor-Dyan. He remembered that. Berren chuckled and shook his head. ‘I just have his name.’ Stupid thing, that first day in front of Tuuran, saying who he really was. It had gone around the ship like a disease and none of them ever quite forgot because Tuuran wouldn’t let them. Berren spat onto the deck. ‘No, my story’s about done. You can dream the rest easy enough. Was the Crowntaker’s men who’d done it, and no hope I had of doing anything about it. Got as far as the sea. Soldiers came by, clearing out a tavern, and there I was too far in my cups to even notice. Next thing I knew I was here.’ He shrugged. ‘Let that be the end of the story.’

  ‘So who’s this Skyrie, then?’ asked Tuuran. ‘The one you keep mumbling about in your sleep, keeping the rest of us awake all night. He one of those soldiers you set off to hunt, Berren the Bloody Judge, or was he just a lover?’

  The name hit him like a fist. He hadn’t heard it outside his dreams for almost a year. He froze, unable to speak.