Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  ‘Was that … a regrettable incident?’ he croaked and she let go of him and reeled back in astonishment. What must be almost his last breath and he was trying to make a joke of his own murder?

  His eyes followed her, though, and they weren’t the eyes of a man about to die. He took her hand and showed her his neck where the knife had struck. Beneath blood that was still wet and warm on her fingers there was no wound at all. He pulled her close so they were eye to eye. ‘I can teach these slaves to make a simple potion. I can teach someone like you to make almost anything at all. But true alchemy lives in the blood, Li, and that is a thing that cannot be taught. There is one place in the world where a true alchemist can be made, an alchemist who can dull a dragon. An alchemist who is truly a master of his own blood, and that place is deep within my homeland. Fortunate for both of us that it’s not so easy to be rid of a blood-mage.’ He stood up, an old man who’d just had his throat ripped open and yet showed no sign of it, and she looked at him with new eyes. For a moment he even made her afraid.

  Then he stumbled and put a hand on her shoulder to keep himself from falling, and the moment was gone. ‘Now I think I need to lie down for a while,’ he said. ‘One last thing. Dragon blood. I’ll need dragon blood before the eggs come. If you could manage that sooner rather than later, I’d much appreciate it.’

  She let him lean on her. The relief she felt that he was alive was more than it should have been for any slave, however precious.

  33

  Yena

  Tuuran was wrestling the man who’d just killed the alchemist, setting free all that burning frustration in a frenzy of bone and sinew when the world exploded. The witch’s lightning shattered everything and he was flat and floating, blind and deaf and dumb. Paralysed. Dead maybe, but then his eyes came slowly back. Not much else but he could see the sky. Its brilliant blue burned into his skull until a face blotted half of it out. Yena. She was wringing her hands. From the way her lips moved she might have been calling his name but all he could hear was a ringing. He tried to move, to take her hand, to tell her that he wasn’t hurt, not really, but he couldn’t. Eventually someone picked him up. They left Yena behind and carried him to a dim place lit by the glowing white stone walls and laid him on his back and left him.

  The assassin slave had had marks on him. Tuuran had caught a glimpse as they’d fought. The alchemist needed to know. It seemed important and so he tried his hardest to move. His muscles screamed in pain, all of them, but he made them do it, one by one. Except all he managed to do was roll off his dormitory bed and land like a helpless sack of potatoes on the floor. He floundered there like a landed fish and didn’t hear Yena come in because about the only thing he could hear at all was the screeching whine in his ears. He could hardly even hear his own voice. The first he knew she was there was her touch on his shoulder and he could barely move to turn and look at her.

  ‘Go away!’ He hated that she saw him like this. Helpless. He gritted his teeth and tried to pretend the pain wasn’t there as he hauled himself, one flopping limb at a time, back onto his bed. Then lay there, exhausted. Even breathing hurt. Even every heartbeat. He screwed up his face. His eyes were watering and Yena was still there, hadn’t gone away like he’d told her. He turned away from her but he could still feel the warmth of her hand on his shoulder, gently stroking him. ‘Go away,’ he whimpered. ‘Go away. Leave me be!’ This wasn’t how an Adamantine Man should be, not ever.

  She didn’t go. He felt her kiss his cheek and her hand stroking his hair, and he felt the breath of her voice over his ear but any words she said were lost in the ringing. And despite it all there was a part of him that was glad she’d stayed.

  Eventually he must have fallen asleep. When he woke she was gone and the glow of the walls had changed enough to tell him it was the middle of the night. The pain in his muscles had turned into a dull heavy ache but at least now they moved when he told them to. He sat on the edge of his bed, hands clamped over his ears. All the other slaves were sleeping, packed in around him. The air was stuffy and stale, though nothing like as bad as the stifling holes he was used to from the galleys. Any other night he’d have heard a chorus of snores but now they were barely there, half drowned under the ever-present whine left by the thunderbolt.

  He stood up, paced the room and then went outside – there were still no doors almost anywhere except where the Taiytakei had their rooms. He walked up to the huge circular dragon yard. In the moonlight the white stone shone a ghostly silver. No one stopped him. He climbed to the top of the wall – couldn’t really call it battlements – and walked around it, looking out across the night at the desert and the stars. The soldiers in the watchtowers challenged him as he passed but they all knew him and didn’t shout and send him back under the ground, not tonight. Sometimes he felt as though he was floating, not walking. The ringing in his ears was disorientating. Distracting. It unbalanced him.

  Maybe the alchemist could do something; and that was when he realised he had no idea whether the alchemist was even still alive and how badly he was hurt. He’d seen blood fly, that was for sure, so it hadn’t just been a scratch.

  The tunnel to the alchemist and the witch and all the Taiytakei that mattered had the usual pair of soldiers standing in front of it. When he got close they drew out their wands. ‘No further, slave.’ They were edgy. He frowned and cocked his head – they knew who he was, after all – and then could have slapped himself. Of course they were bloody edgy after what had happened! He held up his hands and kept his distance. One lightning bolt was enough for one day.

  ‘I’m Tuuran. You know me.’

  They called back, something that sounded unfriendly. He cocked his head.

  ‘You’ll have to shout! Lightning made me deaf!’

  One of them took a step closer and waved his wand. He looked angry. ‘Keep away! Go back! You cannot enter.’

  ‘And why the bloody Flame not? I’m supposed to be his bodyguard.’ Although a fat lot of use he’d been this time. ‘How bad was he hurt?’

  The question unsettled them. The one waving his wand stepped back again and shook his head. The soldiers exchanged a glance and they both seemed to shiver. ‘Alive, slave. And that’s all you need to know. Go back now! You shouldn’t be out here.’

  He left them and walked back. He should have been relieved, surely, but he found he wasn’t. Yes, a part of him was but there was another part too, a nasty angry little piece that wished the alchemist had died.

  He stopped at the entrance to the slave tunnels. Why? Why would he wish such a thing? But the answer was right there waiting for him: because then it would be finished. The Taiytakei wouldn’t get their eyrie. For once they wouldn’t get everything they wanted simply by reaching out and taking it. He wouldn’t have to watch the alchemist lie to himself every day. Wouldn’t have to watch him making himself into a perfect slave for them with his foolish dreams. Wouldn’t have to watch his own dreams of going home have the life bled out of them with every glance from that cursed witch.

  He took a deep breath and crept away down the tunnels and found a place to sit in the soft moonlight glow of the walls for a while to think, then slipped further to where the witch’s slave women slept. He crept among them, quiet as a panther until he found Yena and silently woke her.

  Her eyes went wide when she saw him. ‘Tuuran! What are you doing here?’ At least that was probably what she said. It looked like it. He leaned in close.

  ‘My hearing’s still not right. Come with me!’

  She pulled his ear to her lips and hissed, ‘You can’t be here, Tuuran! If they catch you, you know what they’ll do!’

  Yes, he knew. They’d flog him and there were enough slaves who didn’t like him to see that word got out if any of them saw him here. But still. He took her wrist and pulled. ‘Come.â€
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  She held back a moment, looking around at the sleeping women in their cots, then giggled and slipped back her sheets and followed him out. They ran down the passage deeper into the tunnels. There were still lots of empty rooms, bare, lit by their moonlight walls. More slaves would be coming to fill the eyrie when the dragon eggs arrived he’d heard, but not yet.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  He led her into one of the rooms and pulled her to him and kissed her. Sod being a slave. Sod being an Adamantine Man. Sod duty and screw honour. A finger to all of it. The alchemist had all but forgotten him, the witch had barely even noticed him in the first place. He had no place here, none. He ran his fingers through Yena’s hair, pressed his tongue into her mouth and felt her teeth nip him. Ran his hands down her shoulders, down her back. He could feel every shape of her through her silk.

  She broke the kiss, gasping for breath. Her face was flushed with excitement and right there and then he wanted her more than anything else. Run away with me. The words were on the tip of his tongue.

  ‘His back was burned black.’ She shivered. ‘But he had writing on him. Tattoos all across his belly.’ She put a hand on Tuuran’s chest.

  ‘What?’ Tuuran blinked. ‘What did? I mean who? What?’

  ‘The man you were fighting! The one who tried to kill your master.’

  She’d smashed his thoughts with a hammer. He half turned away, trying to put them back together again. And he hadn’t really thought this through, had he? How, exactly, was he going to run away from an eyrie floating in the air half a mile over the desert? ‘What did it say?’ Not that he cared but it gave him some time to gather himself.

  ‘Mistress doesn’t know.’ Yena’s fingers moved over his shirt, soft and delicious. ‘Nor your master. It must be a language from one of the other worlds. She’s been asking all the other slaves to look, but no one else knows it either.’

  That stopped him cold. ‘What? How? Have they hung him up in the sun for everyone to come and have a look?’

  ‘No.’ The fingers stopped for a moment. ‘Your master … he took the skin off the dead man.’

  ‘Ah.’ Yes, an alchemist would do that.

  The thought caught in his throat. Bellepheros had done that? After he’d had his neck ripped open? Since when did alchemists get their throats cut and then act like nothing had happened? That wasn’t alchemy, that was blood-magic, the second time Bellepheros had shown he possessed it. Adamantine Men knew all about blood-magic. Do not suffer a blood-mage to live. Yet another reason to go, as if he needed one. He took Yena’s hands in his own and pressed them together and then put them to his lips. A blood-mage uses the blood of others, not his own. So Bellepheros had said but that didn’t change how wrong it felt. He cupped Yena’s face in his hands and made himself look at her. Adamantine Men didn’t take wives and never raised sons. They weren’t even supposed to have lovers, though all of them did. We are swords. We sate ourselves in flesh and move on. Stupid saying but there were plenty enough who were like that.

  Ah Flame! He let her go. Taking her with him had seemed right, exactly the thing to do. Instinct said so. And he liked her and it wasn’t just for her willing skin either, but she was a palace slave, delicate and fragile and smooth while he was a sailor and a soldier, all hard leather and rough edges. He stepped back. ‘If I ran, would you come with me?’

  ‘What? Why would you run?’

  ‘Never mind the why – would you come? That’s all. Never mind the how or the where either, never mind any of that. Would you come with me or not?’

  Her face wrinkled up. ‘But I do mind, Tuuran.’ She turned away and then turned back. ‘Why would you want to leave? You’re almost a sword-slave. They treat you like one already! Where would we go? What would we do?’ She shook her head. ‘No, Tuuran. No. Don’t ask me that.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘With you or without you I’m going to ask my master to let me go.’ And he watched her carefully and caught her, right there, that look in her eye calculating what his leaving would mean. Not feeling his loss but assessing the change in her status. It burned his heart.

  ‘Why?’ Her fingers brushed his cheek. He let her, forcing back the urge to grab her and snap her wrist.

  ‘Because he’s making this eyrie. Because he thinks he’s the master here and he’s happy but he isn’t; he’s a slave and a fool and your mistress is a witch who’s put a spell on him. He’s forgotten he’s not free, but I haven’t. He makes me sick. So do you, all of you. Slaves content to serve. You’re pathetic.’

  That was the bitterness talking but it was out before he could stop it. And though it might have been true, there were other truths too. Kinder ones not spoken. It was just that, right there and then, he couldn’t seem to find them.

  Yena turned and left without a word. When she didn’t come back he roamed the eyrie aimlessly until dawn.

  His hearing slowly came back over the days that followed, though the ringing never quite left. He spent day after day with nothing to do, kicking his heels, sitting on the walls or right at the very edge of the eyrie with the sky under his feet, staring out across the desert. The alchemist had other guards now, Taiytakei soldiers in their glass and gold armour with wands that spat lightning, better protectors than any slave could ever be. On the rare days when Bellepheros emerged from his quarters, he always had two of them at his side and usually the witch too. Tuuran watched them together. They were like old lovers and it made him want to scream, not just because of what the witch had done to the alchemist but because it stabbed him every moment with a reminder of how alone he was. He missed his home. But he missed his ship more, the slaves who sailed it. Men who were like he was.

  He tried to tell Yena that he was sorry, that he hadn’t meant it, that he missed her too, but she wouldn’t speak to him now. One time he slipped out late at night to look for her again, unable to sleep, and found her with another man pressing her against a wall, and it made him think of a different time and a different place where he’d seen much the same, only with a girl who’d been much less willing, and the red mist came down and the next thing he knew there were soldiers hauling him away and all he felt was relief, though he knew perfectly well what the Taiytakei did to slaves who couldn’t behave. Shoot him with lightning a few times and then throw him off the edge of the eyrie he supposed; but instead they hauled him to a makeshift cell with a door and a frame that had been forced into the opening and didn’t work properly, and in the morning the alchemist and the witch were waiting for him.

  ‘He should be hung,’ said the witch.

  Tuuran shrugged. She was looking at the alchemist anyway, not at him. ‘So hang me,’ he said.

  ‘He’s cost me a slave.’ There wasn’t much he could say to that. He didn’t remember exactly what he’d done, only that it surely hadn’t been pretty. ‘Belli, why shouldn’t I? Give me a reason.’

  The alchemist looked at Tuuran. He cocked his head but he only seemed sad, and Tuuran didn’t have any sort of answer that would make any sense. He shrugged again. He’d saved the alchemist’s life once. Either that was enough or it wasn’t. ‘If I was you that’s probably what I’d do,’ he said.

  ‘Bloody Adamantine Men.’ The alchemist sniffed and offered Tuuran his hand. ‘Come on.’

  ‘I did save your life, Lord Grand Master.’ Shouldn’t have needed to be said, though.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten. A glasship will leave soon for Vespinarr. You’ll be on it. Come with me.’

  ‘To where, Lord Alchemist? Off to the slave markets again?’

  ‘Where would you like to go, Tuuran? What is it you want?’

  Tuuran flared. ‘What is it that I want? You have to ask me that, Grand Master? Ho
me, of course, I want to go home. To be with my own people again. To be free. What you should want too. To serve your speaker.’

  The alchemist shook his head. ‘But I do not serve the speaker, Tuuran. Alchemists never have. We serve the realms. The truth is, we answer only to ourselves, and I’ve concluded that I may best do this from where I am. There are possibilities that—’

  ‘Spare me, blood-mage!’

  ‘Oh, just bring him.’ The witch turned away.

  ‘Let him stay with me a while,’ said the alchemist. ‘Until the glasship comes.’

  The witch threw up her hands. ‘If you absolutely must.’

  Four Taiytakei soldiers led Tuuran up into the dragon yard and down the spiralling passage to where the alchemist and the witch kept their rooms. Bellepheros waved them away, and they weren’t happy about that one little bit and only went when he almost pushed them out and shut the door. When they were gone, he looked at Tuuran in silence. Tuuran’s eyes wandered around the alchemist’s room, remembering how he’d laid out the clothes and the books before Bellepheros had arrived, trying to make it the way he thought an alchemist would like it. Trying to make it like home and now that’s exactly how it looked. Home. Tuuran clenched his fists.

  ‘How did you come to be a slave, Tuuran? An Adamantine Man? I know the Taiytakei bought slaves taken by the King of the Crags. Outsiders, mostly. Something of which I greatly disapproved even before I was taken myself, for what little that’s worth. But an Adamantine Man? How?’

  ‘Stupidity, like I told you.’ The same stupidity he’d had last night. Tuuran laughed bitterly. No one had ever asked him how he’d ended up as a slave before, not asked and really meant it. Every man had his own story and every man thought his was the most important, but the essence of them all was the same. Wrong place, wrong time, bad luck. ‘What does the how of it matter?’