Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  ‘I want to go home.’

  For now you do. That was her other challenge for the next two weeks. As well as siphoning away all his knowledge she meant to show him the glories of the world in which she lived. His curiosity and fascination with it were already doors into his mind, ajar, ready to seduce him with ideas and possibilities, and it would be better that way, surely, than making him work by threats and force. One day, she hoped, she could lead him right up to the gangway of a ship home, offer it to him and watch him say no.

  She took his hand and led him to the window, charmed by how he flinched away from the sky, and pointed to the palace and showed him its parts. ‘Do you see the old ship suspended in the air? Her name is the Maelstrom and she is nigh on five hundred years old. Feyn Charin, the first enchanter to cross the storm-dark, reshaped her for that crossing, not far from here. She was the first ship of her kind, the first to cross between worlds. Do you know how many worlds there are? Yours and ours are but two.’

  The alchemist shrugged. He was feigning boredom but he couldn’t quite hide the spark in his eyes. She kept hold of his hand and led him away from the window to the desk that was hers and had been for years. Her gondola, her glasship. I made this. All of it. She’d tell him that when he was ready but that wasn’t now.

  ‘I’m more used to travelling alone,’ she said. ‘I had them put these curtains in. You have a bed and a desk of your own on your side. I’m sorry it’s cramped. I’m sure you’re used to more grand surroundings.’ She knew he wasn’t.

  She unrolled a map of Takei’Tarr and pointed. ‘This is Xican and the Grey Isle. We have to cross the sea to Zinzarra. Two days without a stop, I’m afraid. I brought books for you to read. After that we travel down the western coast through the heartland of my people. I’ll show you what places I can as we pass them. The aqueduct at Shevana-Daro, the Palace of Glass and the Crown of the Sea Lords at Khalishtor, and Mount Solence, home and birthplace of the Elemental Men. Negarrai with its lighthouse. Abaskun, and Sigiriya with its amphitheatre. Here is Hingwal Taktse castle where I learned my art, home of the Vespinese College of Enchanters. I’ll take you there if I can.’ She ran a finger up and down, inland of the western coast where all the cities lay. ‘These are the mountains of the Konsidar. We’ll cross at the far southern end and perhaps stop for a day in Vespinarr itself, here, the greatest city in the world. Then another day into the southernmost reaches of the desert to the salt marsh of the Samim.’ She couldn’t help but smile. ‘Read the books I have for you and you’ll find our oldest stories are rife with monsters. The Red Banatch and the Kraitu of Dhar Thosis. Zaklat the Death Bat.’ The smile turned to a laugh. ‘Stories from before the Splintering. Here.’ She took one of the books and took off her glasses so she didn’t have to squint, then opened it and flipped the pages until she found the Samim. ‘“A giant scorpion a hundred feet long with a hundred legs, seven poisonous tails and three pairs of claws, each of which could cut a horse in two. Around its mouth parts, seventeen venomous snakes so poisonous that their mere breath brings death to lesser creatures.â€�’ She closed the book again. ‘In stories of the desert the Samim never leaves its lair, content to give birth to all the poisonous creatures of the world. The Samim isn’t real, of course, just an idea, an old monster whose time has long gone, but above its lair you and I will give birth to new ones. Tell me about what an eyrie should be. What else will we need?’

  He looked at her as though she was mad. ‘Food. A great deal of food. Great herds of wild beasts. Dragons are forever hungry.’

  ‘The western edge of the Lair then, closer to Hanjaadi and the Bawar Bridge.’ She chuckled. That would not please Quai’Shu, nor his Vespinese allies, nor probably the Hanjaadi. Baros Tsen T’Varr would have to move his flying eyrie even closer to the Jokun river than it already was. Maybe further north too.

  ‘Dragons are death,’ said the alchemist suddenly. ‘We tame them because we have no choice. I’d destroy them if I could. If there was a way. So would you if you really understood them.’

  She held his eye across the desk, looking for the lie in what he’d said, but no, he meant it. ‘Then make me understand, Bellepheros of the dragon lands. I’m not your enemy.’ She frowned. ‘Would you really destroy them?’

  ‘Yes.’ He shook his head. ‘You just don’t understand what you’re doing.’

  ‘Then why don’t you?’

  ‘Because I don’t know how!’ He closed his eyes and sighed and his shoulders slumped. ‘Besides, you have sea lords and their like to tell you what you may not do. We have our dragon-kings and -queens.’

  ‘And what do they say?’

  The alchemist leaned towards her across the map. ‘You know what they say. They say the same as your lord says here! They say that every dragon is precious and to be saved if it possibly can. They would likely murder us all rather than lose their precious monsters. And I would destroy every dragon in existence if such a thing could be done, and for no better reason than that very greed!’ The force in his voice was enough make her step back. ‘Although there are better reasons than that. Many.’ He turned away, the passion in his words slipping to defeat. ‘But what does it matter? Kill a dragon if you can. It just comes back again, born in another egg somewhere.’

  Chay-Liang rolled away her map, slowly and deliberately. This. Exactly this. ‘Really?’

  The alchemist rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, what harm is it for you to know? It hardly makes a difference and if it helps you understand why what you’re doing should not be done … As far as we understand, the number of dragons never changes. For an egg to hatch – and there are many, many eggs across the dragon realms – elsewhere a dragon must die. And the dragon that is reborn will be the same dragon as the one that died. Not the same shape, not the same colour, perhaps not even the same breed, but the same essence. The same soul, if you will. The same thoughts and memories, when they’re not dulled away by my potions.’

  ‘Are you saying they’re immortal?’ Now there was a thing. A puzzle more for the Elemental Men, perhaps. Something that just came back when you killed it? They wouldn’t like that one little bit. Chay-Liang wasn’t at all sure that she did either but then maybe she hadn’t properly understood what he meant.

  ‘You might say so.’ Bellepheros closed his eyes and tipped back his head with a great sigh. ‘Within my order such things are held secret from the kings and queens who think they rule us, and for good reason.’ He looked at her hard. ‘You’re not like a dragon-king, I can see that. Your masters embark on madness, Chay-Liang. Madness, and you as well if you believe that what they’re asking me to do is good and wise and for the better of all. The dragons remember, Chay-Liang. When they’re reborn, they remember the lives they used to have and they do not think fondly of our kind at all. Little ones they call us when they’re awake and we’re nothing to them but food. My alchemy may keep them dull for you for a while but even if you keep me here until I die, I am already old and I won’t live for ever, while they will. Bring dragons to this land and sooner or later they’ll wake. It may not be for years and perhaps neither you nor I will live to see it – and I will do everything in my power to stop it – but it will happen; and when they do then all your pretty palaces will mean nothing.’ He stopped for a moment and looked her in the eye. ‘And your palaces are wonders, Chay-Liang, and I wouldn’t see them shattered and burned even though your people have taken me from my home and my family and everything I know and love, and all out of greed.’ He took her hand from where it held the map and squeezed it between his own. ‘What I offer you is the truth, Chay-Liang. If dragons come then I will do all I can to keep them at bay, but I cannot be here for ever and then what?’ He smiled, almost in
tears at the certainty of his own words. ‘I know what you think. You think you can make more alchemists. I could teach another. One of your own kind. You, perhaps. You might even promise that I could go home once I’m no longer necessary. You think this alchemy is something that I can pass on. But it’s not. Whether I want to or not, I cannot make another alchemist who can tame dragons.’

  She looked into him. He believed every word. He was almost weeping and the pain and sadness shook her somewhere deep. Damn him, but she almost believed it too. Didn’t want to but there it was. A man they’d taken from his home to be their slave. He should be angry – he had every right to be – waving his fist and snarling at her and telling her that he’d never help them, not for anything. She’d been ready for that but not for this. Not for sorrow and … pity! He pitied them. ‘Sit,’ she said quietly, trying to rein in her disquiet. ‘We will not end so easily.’

  His voice cracked. ‘Yes, you will. You’re making your own doom.’

  She took another map and unravelled it in front of him. Perhaps to show him who her people were, to convince him that he was wrong and that even Quai’Shu’s dragons were nothing for the Taiytakei to fear. Perhaps for herself, to fight the conviction he carried in his words. But in part too as something that would interest him, this strange old man from far away, and take his mind from all the terrible things that couldn’t be helped, not even if both of them set their minds against them. She showed him her map of the many worlds with Takei’Tarr at its heart and the five lines of the storm-dark that every Taiytakei knew. She told him of the realms that lay beyond. His own with its dragons. The vast Dominion with its Sun King and its stagnant theocracy and its terrible battle-priests who called down the fire of the sun itself and the Small Kingdoms on its fringes. Aria, with its sorcerers and its gold. The great wilderness of the Southern Realm which had no name of its own because all the people who lived there were savages, yet whose ruins spoke of a civilisation as old and vast as any other. She told him tales of the lost land of Qeled, of the mysteries and horrors that surrounded that ancient kingdom and spoke of far greater things to be found within, of the Scythian masters of steel who still lived on their island and remembered a time when half-gods clad in silver had walked the earth …

  A sharp breath stopped her. The alchemist’s eyes glazed for a moment. Half-gods clad in silver. Does that mean something to you? ‘Is there something the matter?’ Yes. Yes, it does!

  The alchemist shook his head and tried to pretend otherwise. ‘No. Please do go on. This is fascinating. Well …’ He shrugged. ‘It passes the time, at least.’

  She poured him a little wine. We’ll come back to your silver men after a glass or two, eh? ‘Feyn Charin and those who followed him say there should be eight lines of the storm-dark to be found. Five are known well. A sixth, it is said, was once found by the men of Vespinarr but led nowhere that mattered, and they never wrote down where they found it and never sought it again.’ She laughed. ‘Which, if you ever meet a lord of Vespinarr, you will know at once is one lie upon another, and if it’s true that they found it then they certainly didn’t lose it again. I’ve heard theories of a seventh line that comes and goes as it pleases. Feyn Charin himself claimed to have crossed it and found a realm unlike any other, a sea of liquid silver and nothing else. We call it the moon line and no one has found it since, or if they have then they haven’t returned. Perhaps Feyn Charin’s story is just that. He was a strange one, and if he did find the seventh line then he found it late in his life from his bed in the Dralamut.’ She put a hand to her heart. ‘Now there is a place we shall go, you and I. One of these days, when our work is done and our eyrie built. The Dralamut and Feyn Charin’s library. The greatest ever assembled.’ She watched him. He was sipping at his wine like an old woman and she wanted him tipsy so they could get back to the Scythians and the silver half-gods that had made him start so.

  ‘Some say there should be an eighth line,’ she said. ‘Eight elements, eight lines, but that we’ll never find the eighth because it’s the line belonging to the element of metal and the Elemental Men have lost the art of that.’ She snorted. ‘Maybe it’ll be a Scythian, then. But others say that seven is the right number. Eight elements, eight realms, seven lines between them.’ She raised her glass to the alchemist. ‘A toast! To arguments about numbers. To the system of the world.’

  The alchemist raised his glass but didn’t drink. ‘And where would your eighth line go, Chay-Liang?’

  ‘To the land of the dead, Master Alchemist. To Xibaiya.’

  He looked at her hard. ‘Then you should ask a dragon,’ he said, and drained his glass.

  28

  Knives

  Tuuran walked with the alchemist and the white witch as far as a bronze door and there the witch stopped him. The soldiers who’d come too barred his way and so he watched the alchemist disappear. It gave him a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach watching the two of them go ahead together. He felt the floor tremble and then the soldiers lost their quiet calm and barked and poked and pushed him back another way, through another bronze door where he found himself cramped into a room not much bigger than the alchemist’s, only with a dozen more slaves and piles of crates already filling it and making it feel small. It was round, with bright metal walls, bronze or gold or something in between. It might have been tall once but now it had been split by a dividing floor of crude planks and it didn’t take Tuuran long to realise there were more slaves crammed into the upper part, and probably more crates too. The women on the top, the men underneath, and the planks between them were so low that around the edges Tuuran couldn’t stand straight. There were hammocks strung up in stacks of three, so close that they were all practically sleeping on top of one another. They had no lights and no candles. The palace slaves already there were looking at one another aghast, sharing their horror and their outrage at being treated this way, but for Tuuran this was the world he knew, where sailors were packed like fish in a barrel if they weren’t at work as a slave to oar and sail.

  Around the walls were tiny round windows, right up by the improvised ceiling like the portholes of the ship that had brought him to Xican. He elbowed the other slaves aside. Some of them grumbled and some of them shouted their outrage. One or two bowed their heads and kept out of his way. He heard them talking, whispering about who he was and what he’d done in the alchemist’s room the night before, punching a palace slave in the face and making his nose bleed. Either way, through glares and shoves and by sheer size, by the time the glasship was loaded Tuuran had quietly established among the other slaves that, however many lightning bolts you had branded on your arms, you bloody well gave up your window to an Adamantine Man.

  The view as they left the Palace of Leaves was breath-stealing. They rose, Tuuran and the others all craning their necks and bending their heads to peer outside, while right over their heads the women were lying on the floor, squinting through windows that for them were by their feet. They were so close through the thin wood that he could smell them, jasmine and lavender and cheap Xizic wafting through the planking. He watched the Palace of Leaves fall away beneath them, its huge gold-glass wheels spinning slowly just below the clouds, and then the rest of the City of Stone and the Grey Isle itself, smaller and smaller, looking like some behemoth porcupine dropped in a sea just a little too shallow to cover it.

  ‘Great Flame!’ He shook his head in awe. ‘And you live here? Do you even see it?’

  The palace slaves turned their backs. They scorned him when they weren’t being afraid of him, but a soft whisper came through the boards from above: ‘Magnificent, isn’t it?’

  ‘The world I knew, it had nothing like this.’ Through the haze the bulk of the island rose to a great plateau. The same spikes of rock that jutted out of the sea to make the City of S
tone grew here too, but snapped and broken and tumbled down among each other. Maybe he was wrong, maybe if he’d crossed the realms on the back of a dragon he’d have seen a dozen wonders like this. Maybe.

  ‘Nor mine,’ whispered the boards above. ‘Come to the other side. Come and look ahead.’ He followed the whisper and crossed the gondola, elbowing and barging his way through a sea of growls and mutters and surly resentment. ‘Do you see it?’ asked the whisper when they were together again, and he did: the other flying ship of glass, the one with the alchemist, rising ahead of them, a golden gondola hung by chains from another sun-bright wheel like those that lifted the palace. He stared at it, amazed. It made him feel small again, uncomfortable. He understood dragons well enough but not this, and he knew he never would. He shivered, half in awe, half fearful, except it couldn’t really be fear because Adamantine Men had long since left fear behind.

  He turned and looked around the room. At the roundness of it, at its curved floor and metal walls. ‘We’re in one of those too, aren’t we?’ He bit his lip. Witchery and blood-magic again! But there was nothing to be done.

  ‘Of course we are.’ The voice above giggled at him.

  He turned back to the window. He didn’t dare let the other slaves see him looking afraid, even if he knew he wasn’t. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘A slave, of course,’ said the whisper. ‘You’re the new one, aren’t you? The one who comes from the place they call the land of the dragons? Do they really have dragons there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And are they terrible monsters?’

  She felt so close. He turned and stared at the boards and wondered if he was strong enough to rip a hole. ‘Terrible enough,’ he growled. ‘But not as terrible as I am. What’s your name?’

  ‘I already told you.’ She was laughing at him.