by Stephen Deas
He gazed at her face, so full of compassion and determination. ‘Did you sleep at all, Li?’
‘Don’t be silly!’ She laughed. ‘How could I?’
‘There are too many. They don’t even fit in the eyrie!’
‘Very true.’
‘And I don’t have enough Scales.’
‘I can see that.’
‘I don’t even have enough potion! Not for so many. Not for long.’
‘Well, admittedly I can’t see that. But I believe you, Belli.’ Her hand was still on his, still squeezing tight.
‘We don’t have enough food.’
‘That I can help with.’
‘No, no. There’s not … there’s not enough. Of anything!’
‘I agree.’
He blinked. ‘What?’
She let his hand go and took a sip of qaffeh. ‘I agree. There are too many dragons. The eyrie isn’t big enough. I’m sorry, Belli, but you’ll have to get rid of some.’
‘What did you say?’ Was that a twinkle in her eye?
‘I said you’ll have to get rid of some. Quite a few, I’d imagine. I’m sorry if that upsets you but sometimes hard decisions must be made.’ She watched him steadily and smiled. He probably imagined it but he could have sworn she winked too. She raised her cup. ‘To us.’
He raised his own but his hand was shaking so much that he dropped it and spilt qaffeh all over his desk. ‘Bloody bugger!’
‘Belli! Language!’
He got up and found a cloth to wipe up the mess. His legs felt wobbly. ‘Nigh on sixty dragons waiting outside means I can say bloody bugger if I want to! Bloody bugger, bugger bloody, bloody bugger!’ For a moment the world spun and he had to hold on to the table so as not to fall, forcing himself to take long deep breaths, slow and steady. Li was on her feet in a flash, holding him, holding him tight, murmuring in his ear.
‘You’re a cranky old man but you’re also brilliant and strangely likeable, and you can do this. You can.’ She held on to him tightly until the shaking stopped.
‘And you’re a mad woman and a slave driver,’ he said softly. She let him go and filled his cup again.
‘You are my slave.’ She gave him his cup. ‘So tell me, truthfully, how many of them of them have to go? No, wait, let’s have a wager. I’ll wager I can guess. If I’m close, you make the qaffeh every day for a week.’
‘And if you lose?’
‘Well, it’s not down to me to set you free and send you home, otherwise obviously I would, but since I can’t let’s just say that I make the qaffeh. I guess half.’
He told her how much more than half it would have to be. She simply nodded and didn’t flinch at all and later, when she was bringing fresh qaffeh to his study each morning while the dragon yard was littered with hatchling corpses burning from the inside, he wondered whether that was when he’d fallen in love with her, or whether it had been much, much earlier.
36
In the Realm of the Dying Sun
In the stillness of the underworld the spirit of the dragon called Silence moved with wonder and deliberate purpose. It had come this way many times but on the previous occasions it had moved swiftly, eager for the call of a new skin, dulled dreamlike by the alchemical potions of the little ones. This time it was awake. This time it remembered. How? How did you make a poison that lingered even with the dead?
The dragon mused on that and then threw the thought away. It didn’t move swiftly this time, but slowly. Carefully. Creeping among the ephemerals around it to the hole where the dead Earth Goddess and her slayer had held That Which Came Before at bay for so long. They were gone now and the hole was getting bigger and the Nothing was seeping through. The Nothing would kill more than dragons. The Nothing killed everything, annihilating all it touched. That was the nature of the Nothing. What it was called was what it was.
The dragon Silence lingered at the edge that crept ever further, staring, reaching in with its senses.
The Nothing. But its taste had a tang of the familiar nevertheless. The dragon dredged through ancient memories of its very first lifetime, hazy and dull from the centuries of alchemy it had suffered, until it found what it was looking for. When the Silver Kings had owned the world and the half-gods and the sorcerers had gone to war, it had scented this Nothing then. Just the once, right at the end.
Crazy Mad. Sinking into the sea, down and down, deep and dark and icy cold but at last he knew who he was. He was Berren, the orphan boy from Shipwrights’ in the city of Deephaven, and the warlock Saffran Kuy was upon him. ‘Dragons for one of you. Queens for both! An empress! The future, boy! See the Black Moon!’ And the gold-handled knife jerked and the blade pushed into his skin and his own hands pressed it deeper and deeper towards his heart and he screamed but there wasn’t any pain. Instead he saw himself as though looking in a mirror, but he wasn’t seeing his skin, he was seeing what lay underneath, his soul, an endless tangle of threads like a spider’s web wrapped within itself.
In the mirror there was something staring beside him.
Gelisya the Dark Queen, a child back then, standing in front of him and holding something out. A black stone pressed into Berren’s hand. She closed his fingers around it. ‘I suppose I have to give him to you now. I don’t really want to because he’s my friend. But I suppose you want him back.’
Facing him, no more than a few dozen yards away, he saw himself. He raised his javelin ready. His own face stared back at him, wild-eyed, spattered in blood.
‘Well? Are you going to throw it or not?’
Silence remembered. It remembered fighting the gods themselves, burning the armies of their minions, crushing them, slaughtering their sorcerers. The splitting of the Quartarch. The scent of this Nothing belonged to the very end when the Black Moon had forged his greatest work of ice and the last of the silver ones had struck him down and the Earthspear ripped the world to splinters. The dragon had tasted the Nothing in that moment, a whiff of it, quickly clenched and crushed and buried away by the dead goddess and her slayer. Here. They’d trapped it here, all three of them locked together, the Nothing in its prison, the goddess the bars and the walls, her slayer the lock to its cage. In that moment the dragon called Silence had not understood. None of them had. No one except perhaps the silver ones and by then so very many of them were gone. Vanished away to wherever their abstention had taken them.
Crazy Mad. Holding fast to a weighted rope. Embraced by cold dark water but he knew who he was. Skyrie, bloodied and broken and crawling to his death in the swamps while the stars above winked out one by one. With a man standing over him in robes the colour of moonlight, his pale half-ruined face scarred ragged by disease or fire, one blind eye, milky white. Fingers that traced symbols over him. Air that split open like swollen flesh. Black shadow that oozed out of the gashes left behind.
‘It fills the hole, you see.’ Gelisya again. The Dark Queen as she would be, but back then she’d been only twelve. ‘Like the Black Moon and the dead Earth Goddess fill the hole in the world. He showed me. You have to keep it closed. Otherwise something will come through. Not yet but one day. Before you both come back for the very last time. You have to keep it closed.’ Even with her lips almost touching his ear, her whisper was so quiet he could barely hear. ‘He’s making us ready. To let it in when the Ice Witch sets it free.’
But he’d lost that black stone with the little piece of him inside. It hung around another neck and so now the hole was there.
He looked inside and saw he was not alone.
The dragon perched on the edge of the unravelling of everything and wondered to itself what might be done but it had no answers to that and so it wondered something else instead. A more dragon-like question,
filled with an acceptance that all must inevitably end. How long?
Water came and water went. Air too, now and then. Gasped mouthfuls. Holding fast to a weighted rope with a hard wooden cliff over his head, always battering, pushing him under. So little left. Dragons and ice. Falling and falling, locked in an embrace of death with a goddess, and he was the one who’d stopped their fall and he was the one who’d gripped her tight and he was the one who’d kept her from the final death, and it was he who had kept That Which Came Before from spilling into the world and unravelling the very weave of creation. He had done all of that!
I.
The Bringer of Endings. The Black Moon who once killed a goddess.
The Nothing was come again, seeping through the hole, slow but relentless.
The hole that he’d made.
*
Hours after the warlocks and the ship that had brought them were gone, Tuuran went and stood where he’d thrown Crazy Mad into the sea. There was a sounding rope there, marked and weighted at the end. The sail-slaves used it for unfamiliar shallow waters to measure the depth beneath them. Out here in open water they didn’t need it but it was still there. Tuuran pulled. It was heavier than it had any right to be so he gave it all his strength, and when he reached the end of it he pulled Crazy Mad back into the galley, soaked and freezing, half drowned and three quarters dead.
‘Was the only way,’ he said. The grey-robes had gone through every slave. They’d come looking for the mark on Crazy Mad’s leg.
Crazy Mad sat in his own puddle of water. Shaking. Barely even there.
‘They knew who you were.’ And Crazy Mad laughed, in between coughing and vomiting up the sea, because most of the time that was more than he could have said.
The Watcher
37
Feeding Time
The Watcher approached. As he drew close he felt the air thicken as it always did around the eyrie, the tiny press of resistance, a drag trying to claw him down; but this time, instead of a tiny tug at the back of his thoughts, the thickening grew steadily worse. Instead of cutting though the wind like a sword through the air, the last mile felt like wading through an ever heavier sea. Like walking in treacle – that was what the Picker had said of the dragon lands, but that was there, not here. Here being the wind was no effort at all. Here he darted between Xican and the eyrie and half a dozen other cities like a bee between roses in his hunt for the elusive grey dead and it had hardly troubled him at all until the dragons had come. So it had to be them. Something to do with dragons.
For a few seconds after he materialised on the eyrie rim he couldn’t do any more than catch his breath and look around the eyrie’s outer edge, dotted with its cranes and shacks and crates and boxes. The gold-glass discs and spheres of two dozen fully built lightning cannon peppered the rocks among long tubes of Scythian steel pointing skywards – black-powder cannon to shatter any hostile glasship that strayed too close. Between them the litter of their building lay scattered higgledy-piggledy. The hands of the sea lord had moved quickly. Baros Tsen T’Varr had turned his eyrie into a fortress.
Once he’d recovered, the Watcher walked across the rim and up the steps shaped into the outer slope of the wall around Chay-Liang’s dragon yard. His steps slowed as he reached the top. The monster, the big one, was wide awake and snarling, and even he couldn’t help a shiver of awe. Its tail, thirty paces long, swished carelessly back and forth with enough restless energy to smash down towers. Its wings, when it stretched them out, were wider still. Its head was as large as a cart, big enough to swallow a horse whole, its teeth two neat rows of swords and knives. It towered over the dragon yard, dwarfed everything and made even the sun seem small. Its skin was a shining ruddy gold and every part was armoured with scales that shone and caught the light like plates of gold-glass. Its claws clenched and unclenched, its talons as big as a man and sharp enough to gouge stone. It was a thing to crush men simply by looking at them. Its eyes roamed, always hunting, never staying still.
Eyes. Those would be its weakness. He shook away the sense of awe. Every monster could be killed. He would just need a long enough spear. Yet even as he thought that, the dragon turned its head and looked straight at him as though it had read his mind and was already calculating how to kill him first. They sized each other up, monster and slayer. The smaller dragons stopped their restless pacings and snappings to stare at him as well, eyeing him as though he might be tasty. A dozen were awake, chained and tethered to the wall. The rest lay still, the forty or so more that the moon sorcerers had brought. Asleep, perhaps. The Watcher took them in, wondering how long it would take for them to grow. A year? Ten? A hundred? He didn’t know.
The alchemist was there too, among the small ones and surrounded by his Scales, arguing with the enchantress Chay-Liang. Usually the Watcher would have merged with the wind and slipped through the air and appeared beside them, a constant reminder to them both of what he was and what he stood for, but not today. This close to the dragons he wasn’t even sure that he could shift any more. Practice. The Picker said he’d grown used to it with practice. He’d have to try.
The alchemist turned and headed away across the dragon yard. The enchantress walked beside him. The Watcher followed them with his eyes and then looked back to the dragon. It was still staring at him, cold glacier-blue eyes never blinking. Then, as the alchemist entered the tunnels, the Watcher turned his back and walked down to the eyrie rim. With an effort he became the air again and forced his wind-self across the eyrie’s heart and down into its tunnels. Passing the dragon was like walking into the teeth of a hurricane. He made himself do it though, then spiralled down to where the alchemist lived, passing the alchemist and the enchantress on his way. They were arguing, but as he blew between them the enchantress stopped and frowned and looked around her as though she sensed his presence. He kept on, and when he turned to flesh in the alchemist’s room he was panting so hard that he could barely stand straight, and so perhaps it was for the best that he had another minute before they arrived. Thick as honey, those two, and better that neither of them saw his weakness before he left again and went back to his hunting.
He walked around the alchemist’s study as he slowed his racing heart, one delicate pace after another, eyes flitting over the mayhem of open books and crumpled papers and bottles and vials and pots and jars which lay scattered across every surface without any hint of order. Elemental Men were, above and beyond all else, hunters of sorcerers and magicians and he knew in his belly that this alchemist was more than he seemed. There were books written by the enchanters. There were herbs and powders, and potions the alchemist had made. A dozen open glass beakers sat in a row on the alchemist’s desk, all of them different shades of vivid green and each with a note beside it. The Watcher thought the notes were code at first – wondered even if they might be the same sigils and symbols he knew from the Azahl Pillar and elsewhere – but when he looked closely he eventually recognised a few of the words. Just bad handwriting. He shook his head. The alchemist made him uneasy. He’d brought almost nothing with him from the dragon lands but that didn’t seem to have stopped him, had barely even slowed him down.
He caught himself. Almost nothing. On the desk, pushed aside in one corner but out in the open nevertheless, sat a small round bottle of silver liquid metal. The alchemist had brought that, of all things.
Outside he heard them coming, still bickering with each other, but they walked on past the alchemist’s room and their voices faded. The Watcher followed on foot, keeping back, listening to their conversation.
‘You need to stop, Belli. It won’t take long. I’ve seen how you struggle. I’ve been meaning to do this for months. Yes, well, now you have no choice, because I’m telling you.’
In between, the alchemist was arguing and objecting that now wasn’t the time although he never said for what. The Watcher dropped back a little further then stopped. He’d give them a moment to begin what
ever it was the enchantress had in mind and then catch them in the middle of it.
He stood alone, his dark robes stark in the hostile white passages with their quiet inner light, and it felt strange to be loitering like this, flesh and bone, not turned into light or shadow. The eyrie had been floating out in the desert for as long as anyone could remember. Simply there, and no one had thought of what to do with it until Baros Tsen T’Varr had tethered glasships to its rim and moved it. It was a strange place, made before the world broke into pieces and then forgotten, and it resented the Elemental Men. Thoughtless and mute but it resisted their presence and it always had, even before the alchemist and his dragons. He gave them a few minutes, contemplating the eyrie’s builders and who they might have been, then marched into Chay-Liang’s workshop. The alchemist was sitting on a chair with a nest of metal wires over his head and a book in his hands, still complaining bitterly that he had other things to be doing. Chay-Liang was stooped in front of him, fiddling with the wires.
‘Enchantress!’
The alchemist looked up sharply as he spoke which earned him a curse. Chay-Liang didn’t even look round. ‘Watcher!’ She poked the alchemist. ‘Be still, you! Where have you been, Watcher?’
‘To the Grey Isle, lady.’ He addressed himself to the alchemist: ‘Slave! You will travel to Khalishtor at once to bow before our sea lord. You are to bring one of the monsters.’ A hatchling could fit inside a gondola, if the gondola was a big one. The adult dragon, well, tails and wings outstretched it was probably the size of a whole glasship. He couldn’t begin to see how they might move it. On a particularly large sled?