Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  ‘A slave who killed a Taiytakei. There are no exceptions.’

  ‘Not for slaves, that is true.’ Tsen nodded as if that was the end of the matter. Then he cocked his head again. ‘Is she a slave?’

  ‘Of course she is …’

  Ah, the quiet satisfaction of a trap seen a moment too late. Tsen smiled. Beamed. He made a show of getting up and inspecting the woman’s arms. They had a strength to them, certainly more than any bed-slave would have, however exquisite. ‘I wasn’t sure.’ He kept on smiling, right in Chrias’s face. ‘She might have been a guest under our lord’s hospitality, in which case her fate would belong to him and not to any of us here at all. But since she is a slave …’ he looked up and held Chrias’s eye ‘… an unbranded slave, that is, then she is nothing. A thing. Property. Not a person at all.’ He let out a heavy sigh and nodded as if finding himself with yet another terrible burden to add to the many he already carried. Not that that was far from the truth. ‘Very well. She is an unbranded slave and so she is a thing and not a person and thus is the responsibility of a t’varr and not a kwen. You have your point, Chrias. She’s mine and I will have the pain of dealing with her.’ He let the woman’s arms go, watching her from the corner of one eye and Chrias from the corner of the other. And now, tongue, say something nice. Something flattering. Send our lord’s kwen away with at least some little bone to play with, eh? ‘Well I thank you, Chrias, for the never-ending petty troubles you send my way. Still, I dare say you have enough on your own plate just now, what with all those sail-slaves and sword-slaves and soldiers of our lord’s guard who all failed so fatally in their duty to keep Zifan’Shu separated from dangerous sharp objects?’ His glance flicked to the two black-cloaks. Oh well done, tongue. Well done. In his head he gave himself a sarcastic round of applause. He might as well have come out and called Chrias an incompetent horse’s arse. Ah well, at least we’re keeping alive the cliché that a kwen and a t’varr can never really stand each other. Much more important than trying not to humiliate a man who doubtless already wants us to go and die somewhere quiet in a ditch. Good good, tongue. Nice work. Now shut up. He feigned another heavy sigh. ‘Leave her to me then, Chrias. I will arrange a fate that will be deeply unpleasant. Hanging is far too good for her.’ And now let’s see if he has these two soldiers run me through. It would be a kwen-ish sort of thing to do. Gets it all over with and out in the open, after all.

  LaLa was here, a part of the air around them. Did Chrias know that? Would it make a difference? He didn’t know. Didn’t know whether LaLa could be quick enough either. He turned away, waiting for Chrias to either leave him or kill him. Quai’Shu was useless now. Tsen had seen that and so had Chrias. Zifan’Shu was dead. There was, as LaLa had suggested, no clear successor, in which case the first to grab the spoils often won, but which spoils, that was the thing. Chrias would take Xican. There’d be no stopping him and Tsen had no intention of trying. And then we’ll see whether these dragons are worth everything Quai’Shu promised, and if they’re not then we raise our hands, drop out of the game and start making wagers on who’s left standing at the end. Eh? He felt relieved beyond words that he’d sent Kalaiya ahead to the eyrie before he’d left. She’d be where Chrias couldn’t get to her, but he felt like such a fool too, because he’d only sent her ahead of him out of a selfish desire to have her with him again as soon as he could. For her own safety? Hadn’t even crossed his mind until he’d reached Khalishtor.

  The kwen was still standing there. Baros Tsen waved him away until he wasn’t and it was just him and the woman and the eyes of his hidden guardian. He felt absurdly excited. Because Chrias and I just declared war? I suppose the chance of being murdered is something that some might find exciting. Hadn’t ever thought I’d be one of them, though. He gave a little nod to the slave woman. ‘I am Baros Tsen. Hands of the Sea Lord of Xican,’ he said.

  The woman looked him over and clearly found him wanting, as most women instinctively did. ‘I am Zafir, dragon-queen of the Silver City and speaker of the nine realms.’

  Tsen put on his best affable smile and spoke as politely as he could. ‘You were all those things but now you are a slave.’ He tried to look sorry for her but it probably wasn’t working. ‘My slave. Chrias Kwen wants to hang you. Should I let him? I understand you were intent on burning all my ships with your monsters when you were taken.’

  ‘I was.’ She smiled back at him, the smile of a snake. ‘Give me back my monsters and I still will.’ She had a pretty face, Tsen thought. Very, very pretty. The rest of her was a bit of this and that. Good muscles, athletic, well shaped. Her skin let her down, though. It wasn’t as smooth as it could be, rough and blemished in places and, of course, ghostly pale. Maybe an enchanter could do something about that. She could do some with fattening-up too, but the proportions were good and her face was striking and her eyes were lively and bright. Not bad. Nothing special, though.

  He shook his head. ‘Ach, I could probably get a half-decent price for you, but you’re not really a head-turner.’

  She spluttered and inside his head Tsen patted himself on the shoulder. Weakness found.

  ‘Chrias says you’ve driven our sea lord insane.’

  ‘I would have killed him if I’d got to him. Your old one stared into the eyes of a dragon and his mind broke. It broke one of my slaves as well. A quiet little girl, timid and frail, and a great lord who thinks himself a master of worlds.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Gone.’

  ‘Slaves like you do not have slaves of their own,’ he told her. She shrugged.

  ‘You may say that is so, but they know.’

  Tsen took a deep breath. Yes, well you started well, T’Varr. ‘I begin to see why you and my dear friend the kwen fail so marvellously to get along. You killed our sea lord’s son. Do you not see how that poses something of a problem?’ And now shall I take a wager on who will win if we keep on with our sparring?

  The dragon slave – he was already starting to think of her as that – licked her lips. ‘Does it not trouble you that I might kill you too?’

  Tsen laughed and shook his head. ‘No. No, it does not.’

  She held up her bandaged hand, flicked her hair and looked him in the eye, a smile playing at the corner of her mouth. ‘I almost a brought a shard of glass with me. I had one to hand. If I had brought it, I might have used it.’

  ‘To what end?’ Tsen looked her over one more time. ‘Whatever you were before, you are a slave now, mine for my sins and probably lengthy regret. I will parade you about, share you with my friends, speak with you about the realms from which you come and finally tire of you. Amuse me and your life will be a pleasant one. Disappoint me or step out of line and, well, you’ve seen Chrias Kwen. I’ll just give you away to whoever wants you. That’s all. You may go now.’

  She leaned towards him, watching him, looking for something and not finding it. ‘You don’t desire me at all, do you?’ She sounded amused. Surprised. And beneath that the ghost of something else. Relief, was it?

  ‘Not at all.’ He waved her away and she took her dismissal far better than Chrias had done. ‘You can come out now,’ he said when she was gone. Beside the spot where the dragon slave had stood, the air swirled and grew solid and turned into the shape of the Watcher. ‘And what do you think, LaLa?’

  The Watcher bowed. ‘She will not bend to you, Hands of the Sea Lord. The Heart has the right of it.’

  ‘Hang her?’

  ‘Quietly and quickly. Get it over and done.’

  Baros Tsen shook his head. ‘No. Get the slaves who were attending her. I’ll speak to them. And make sure no one hurts her. If she’s no use then Chrias Kwen can have his way but I’ll be sure of t
hat before I let him play.’

  ‘Use?’

  ‘LaLa? Really! Think!’ Tsen beamed at the killer. ‘If she truly is who she says, you cannot deny she must know a thing or two about dragons.’

  ‘Enough to be worth the life of our lord’s heir?’ The Elemental Man sounded doubtful.

  Tsen shrugged. Careful here, tongue. Remember whom he serves. ‘Well we won’t know that until we ask her, now will we? Now hurry along before Chrias Kwen does something stupid, and let us all remember whom we serve. When she’s got nothing left to say, she can still hang but it doesn’t work nearly as well the other way round.’

  The Watcher left. Tsen’s gaze followed him across the decks. Chrias will get Xican. He’ll get the Stoneguard. He’ll get the fleet. And I get her? These dragons had better be good, old man.

  25

  That Which a Dragon May Not Have

  The dragon once called Silence remembered its first hatching. It remembered the world breaking. It remembered many lives lived but it had never crossed the sea, not in a single one of its hundred lifetimes. Long ago before the one silver half-god had returned and betrayed them all, it had tried. It had flown far across the water, flown for days and found nothing but waves and sea and a storm and then emptiness. A nothingness, as though its consciousness had passed through a cloud. And then a moment of waking again, already burning from the inside, and the sight of a black and empty void and violet lightning rattling around and then gone. Over to the realm of the dead, to Xibaiya to seek another shell.

  It left the little ones and their ships and the weak pretend half-gods behind it and flew back the way it had come, reaching out with every sense for the home it remembered, the world it knew and the dragons that were its kind. The air grew thick and dark. Storms broke around it. The dragon flew on. Violet lightning split the sky and black clouds roiled thicker and thicker. The place it had found before, but this time it was more careful. This time it would look to see what the half-gods had done to the world at their end.

  It wasn’t alone in its awakening. Other dragons remembered, if they still lived. The white one that had come to break it out of its prison. Alimar Ishtan vei Atheriel, in the syllables of the half-gods. The little ones had called her Snow. An unbecoming name. And others too, and the ruin they’d burned among the cities and palaces and lives of the little ones had been glorious until the Earthspear had torn its soul and skin apart and hurled it back to Xibaiya once more. All had hung in the balance and Silence wanted to know: Did we win? Or am I alone?

  So it flew back towards that land but the storms and the lightning were a wall and a chasm and an end of the world with no way to pass, not even for a dragon. Beyond, where the sea and the distant dragon realms should have been, there was nothing. The dragon followed the line of the storm for a hundred miles and found it had no end. It flew high, so high that even in the bright sunlight of the day the sky fell black and stars winked. It found no passage.

  You called me Silence. You said that was my name but it is not. Here the world was broken. And amid the chaos, on the edge of the unravelling of creation, it sensed a familiar presence once more.

  Dragon …

  … you have something that is not yours.

  It must be returned.

  It is not for you.

  The feeble shadows of its creators again. Yes, and it had devoured one of them and taken its essence. It looked at the elemental anarchy all around it, at the formless nothing just out of reach. You did this, it said. You broke the world. You tore it to pieces.

  Yes …

  … our kind and yours.

  And then you pieced it back together again and plastered over the cracks, imperfect and doomed to fail. The dragon turned away. Any closer and it would start to unravel, the very essence of what it was dissolving into foam and smoke. The little ones had found a way through. How did they do that? It peered at the churning darkness at the broken edge of creation. There was an inside to it. There were … there were things in there. It strained its senses. Things that were familiar.

  Dragons? Spirits? The dead?

  You too found a way through …

  … many of you …

  … through the realm of the dead …

  … through shattered Xibaiya that should not be.

  Between its lives it met the souls of other dragons now and then. Most were dull and dim and passed quickly away. But there were some who had woken long ago, and other things too. Sometimes they spoke as their spirits passed in the ruins of Xibaiya. It had seen, many times, the hole where the dead Earth Goddess and her slayer had held the Nothing at bay for so long, but they were gone now. The Nothing was seeping through and the hole was growing. Now there was something that could kill a dragon. One of your kind has ripped the old wound open.

  Growing and getting worse.

  In lands far away …

  … with unfamiliar names …

  … in the places closest to the cracks …

  … even the little ones do not die properly any more.

  The dragon stared back at the formless void, the primal edge of creation that lay before it. It is getting worse. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

  A hand gripped inside it. The dragon called Silence froze in the air, unable to move.

  You cannot keep what you have taken. We must have it back …

  … with regret …

  … but we know you understand …

  … and know that we wish you well upon your return.

  It was a strange death, unlike any other it could remember. The other times it had felt the heat rise inside it, consuming from within, a comforting warmth into which it sank, deeper and deeper, until it woke in Xibaiya, a fleshless spirit. This was more like the snip of a knife as the dragon’s spirit howled alone into the realm of the dead.

  One of our kind?

  No …

  … it was not us …

  … it was a daughter of the sun who did this.

  Tuuran

  26

  The Palace of Leaves

  Many months before the dragon-queen came across the sea, Tuuran arrived with the alchemist Bellepheros in the Taiytakei port of Xican. He nearly died and so became the alchemist’s sworn sword. The Taiytakei merely saw it as the giving of a slave and the alchemist wouldn’t have understood, but, as they were winched from their ship, Tuuran spoke an oath quietly and softly in his head. The alchemist Bellepheros had saved his life and so now that life would be his shield; and as they stood beside one another at the top of the cliffs and stared for the first time at the City of Stone and the Palace of Leaves, he wondered for a moment what Crazy Mad, his strange friend for the last three years, would have made of what he saw. Because Crazy was complicated and Tuuran was simple, and it was all just far too big to fit inside his head.

  Sometimes, when Tuuran had been younger and was still being forged as an Adamantine Man, he’d lain awake at nights, wondering what it must have been like for the first men to be freed of the tyranny of dragons. Living in their caves and their tunnels, dark and cold and hungry until the man of living silver came with the Earthspear and the world was suddenly changed. How it had felt to walk outside into the warm balmy breeze and the bright sun and feel it on your skin for the first time without the creeping dread and the urge to look up, always to look up. How it was to run in grassy fields and doze beside rivers and sleep for the first time safe and sound under the stars. Most of all he wondered how it must have been to have such a creature as the Silver King appear, a half-god who could snap his fingers and rearrange the world to his liking. What was it like to be around such a presence, to see miracles occur before your eyes? He tried to imagine these things but he always failed. He was a soldier, after all, strong and fast and obedient, not prone to dreaming but wise enough to understand that some things were simply beyond his reasoning. Some ideas were simply too grand.

  Looking up at the Palace of Leaves, Tuuran knew he had his answer.
This. This was how it had felt. Beside him the alchemist gaped in slack-jawed awe. A maze of shapes hung in the air dangling from pale golden clouds. They shone and gleamed and dazzled. From the stone peaks beneath, a forest of bright towers rose to meet them. Brilliant strands of sunlight stretched among the shapes, between the towers, to the ground and up to the shimmering clouds like the web of some great spider. When Tuuran squinted he could clearly see a ship suspended among the orbs and towers, masts and sails and all, and he could only think that this must be one of the sky-ships of the Taiytakei of which he’d heard. He stared, open-mouthed, while inside where no one would see he laughed at the wonder of it and wept too at how big a thing this was to see. Perhaps like seeing a dragon for the first time, with no previous understanding that such creatures even existed; but where a dragon was a terrible thing of fear and dread, the palace of Xican was god-touched with beauty.

  The white witch with the glass lenses fiddled at her belt. The movement drew his eye whether he liked it or not. Slaves learned fast about belts and wands. The gold ones with the inner light, they were the ones you watched for. Discipline wands, the galley slave masters called them, although he’d heard them called other things too. The oar masters and the sail masters used them all the time, casually sending little shocks flying across the decks of their ships to remind the slaves who was in charge. For idleness, mostly; sometimes because they felt like it; but now and then it was for something more and then the cracks of lightning they spat out became the slap of a dragon’s tail, the crush of a dragon’s claw, pain overwhelming. He’d seen white-skinned men turned black and flaking, their extremities crumbling to ash as though burned by dragon fire. A sail-slave grew a sixth sense for when a wand was pulled from a belt and so Tuuran saw what the enchantress did, even though he never quite stopped looking at the sky-palace either, even though a good part of him felt touched by the presence of a divinity whose name he’d never been told.