by Stephen Deas
Beside her the alchemist was looking up at them too. ‘Feyn Charin,’ he whispered. ‘The story of the first navigator.’
The black-cloaks led them on into the vast hollow tower, between walls of pale marble and gleaming glowing glass, across a floor of more black stone speckled with flecks of gold like the night sky. They took her to a glass disc that floated over the floor and pushed her onto it and stood in a circle around her. The alchemist, when he saw it, groaned and clutched his belly, and when he sat, got down by the edge, closed his eyes and gripped it tight with his hands. He looked old now, old and scared and she wondered why, until without any warning the glass rose and floated up through the inner space of the tower. Her heart jumped into her mouth at first but she quickly pushed it back where it belonged. The black-cloaks, if anything, looked bored. To them this was simply how things were, not to be given a second thought.
Dragons. She recalled sitting on Mistral, diving over the edge of the Pinnacles, the wind a storm in her face. They’d played a game, before her mother had forbidden it, with three great poles that jutted out of the cliffs, one at the top, one in the middle, one by the bottom, each with strips of coloured cloth tied to the end. One by one each dragon-rider took their dragon to the edge of the cliff and dived, the aim to snatch a coloured strip from each pole as they arrowed past, a test of skill and courage for rider and dragon alike. She’d been the fastest but it wasn’t for playing the game that her mother had forbidden it. That had come when Zafir had insisted she be the one to climb out on the middle pole to tie on the strips so they could play again. It jutted fifty feet from the cliff, the ground half a mile below, no ropes, nothing to catch her, nothing to save her. She’d crawled along the top of the pole where the other riders hung underneath and the ground had stared up at her every inch of the way, and she’d stared right back while the wind that whipped around the cliffs had tugged at her clothes, and she’d felt so alive! She’d slipped twice, tying on the strips, nearly fallen each time but she’d caught herself, and when she finally came back, her heart was racing so fast and she was shaking so much she could barely stand. Now, as she looked at the black floor of the tower a mere few dozen yards below, she smiled. The Taiytakei thought they were so grand and so elegant, so full of arrogant poise and perhaps they were, but where was their fire?
The light of the setting sun streamed through the wall behind them. To Zafir it seemed as though everything was lit by distant flames. The disc rose high and then slid deftly sideways and stopped at a stone balcony overlooking the hall below. There was a circle of them up here and more above as the inner vault of the tower narrowed. From each balcony an entrance led to a cluster of glass-walled rooms. Zafir saw blurred shadows moving in some of them. People. Others had hangings blocking out the light, hiding whatever was inside. There was no other way up or down except by disc. No stairs.
Two of the black-cloaks led her onto the balcony and the glass disc drifted away, across the void to another. She watched as it stopped again and the other black-cloaks helped the alchemist to his feet and walked him away. When she turned back, Myst and Onyx were standing in front of her. They fell to their knees and pressed their heads to the floor. The black-cloaks didn’t like that. One of them grabbed Myst by the hair and pulled her to her feet again. ‘She’s a slave like you. Get up!’ They gave Zafir a shove as if to emphasise her servitude.
Her two broken birds took her to a room off the balcony. The soldiers didn’t follow but she could see them still out there, slightly blurred through the gold-tinged glass, standing stiffly straight and staring back at her. She looked for a hanging or a curtain or something she could pull across the wall to hide from their gaze but there wasn’t anything. The room was bare except for a silk rug that covered the floor, a chest of clothes, a bath full of warm milky water and a scattering of pots and bottles littered around it. Beneath the rug, she saw, the floor was the same glass as the walls.
Myst and Onyx fussed over her. They cut her hair short like their own and wrapped her in plain white silks. She didn’t try to stop them even when they washed her and covered her in their sickly perfume. Instead she closed her eyes and imagined herself in the Adamantine Palace, imagined that these were her own maids dressing her to appear as the speaker of the nine realms once more. When they were done, they took her out to the balcony and waited until another glass disc rose to take them down to the cavernous heart of the tower once more. At the bottom, Bellepheros was already there. He had a hatchling beside him, fresh from its egg but still a monster. It squatted still and quiet, its eyes following every movement around it with a venomous hunger and a yearning hate. All the Taiytakei who passed by, who’d never seen such a creature, couldn’t help but stop transfixed and tremble and then scurry away. Watching them made her smile. Made her sure in her heart that she was right about them, how they’d crumble when she squeezed. It gave her strength.
There were slaves beside the dragon, three of them. Scales with their hollow empty eyes. A part of her yearned to go to the dragon and touch it, to meet its eyes and stare into them and let it know that she was there, that one day, when it grew, she would be its mistress and its rider, but she kept away. The hatchling was too young and small to be properly clean and the slaves surely had the Hatchling Disease. It didn’t show – the first patches of rough white skin on their knuckles wouldn’t be visible for weeks – but they were Scales and so they had it, whether it showed or not. She sidled up to the alchemist instead, although he probably had it too. Most alchemists did.
‘Remember who we are,’ he whispered when they were close enough not to be overheard. ‘Remember, Holiness. They need us both.’
She didn’t reply. Bellepheros knew the secrets that would keep these stolen dragons in check but what use did they have for her? For a moment a quiver of doubt crept out. She took it in her hand and clenched her fist around it and put it back into the box where she kept all her others. I am a dragon-queen. They cannot touch me.
Shrin Chrias Kwen came strutting up, wrapped in his most brilliant feathers and surrounded by more black-cloaks, and she wondered briefly how easy it would be to get close enough to stab him in the neck and watch him bleed. But today she didn’t have a knife and so she pretended not to see him, flicking lidded glances through her lashes now and then.
Another floating glass sled drifted across the floor, much bigger than the first. The black-cloaks poked and prodded her and Bellepheros and the Scales and the hatchling onto it. She sat at the edge beside Bellepheros, as far away from the hatchling and its disease as she could be, smiling at the black-cloaks who refused to stand anywhere close until Shrin Chrias Kwen planted himself in front of the hatchling’s face with his lightning wand ready in his hand. That made her smile even more – the thought of the kwen’s skin slowly turning hard as stone until he suffocated because he couldn’t breathe. Delicious …
The sled rose, wafting through the space inside the tower to its centre and then rising towards its peak and another large open glass-walled space where the lords of this palace doubtless held their courts amid their gold-drenched glory. Zafir stared down past her dangling feet. Sitting over a void was strange, a very different thing from sitting on the back of a dragon. She dredged out another memory: standing on a cliff overlooking the top of the Diamond Cascade, watching as it washed over the edge of the Purple Spur and fell into mist above the City of Dragons. A few days before they’d made her speaker, with Sirion, old Hyram’s cousin, beside her.
‘Am I beautiful?’
‘Of course.’ He tried to step away, but as he did she caught his hand and pressed it against her breast.
‘Am I desirable?’
‘I am not to be had, harlot.’ He’d pulled away but for an instant he’d hesitated. He’d felt her heart beating strong and fast. He’d been her enemy then, the most dangerous of them all, or so she’d thought, but for a moment she’d still see
n the hunger in his eyes. A knife of last resort but always a weapon when she needed it, and she saw that hunger now in Shrin Chrias Kwen, even with her hair cut short and wrapped in these white silks, drab amid the colours of the Taiytakei. Not desire but a cruel lust to break her, fierce and brutal, to hurt her and crush her spirit utterly. A smile twitched at the corner of her lip. It made him weak.
Yet in T’Varr Baros Tsen, where she needed it most, there wasn’t even a flicker.
High up, the sled stopped its ascent and drifted to the glass wall that faced the silver sphere at the heart of the Crown. Shrin Chrias Kwen touched a black rod to the gold-glass wall and it flowed away before him, opening into a portal leading onto a bridge of near-invisible glass. The black-cloaks pushed her onto it, wind howling in from the sea and the setting sun. The height made her head spin and her heart race. She strode out, head back, arms stretched wide to embrace the wind. This was more like it.
Behind her the Scales were coaxing the dragon out onto the bridge. It kept opening its wings, wanting to fly instead of walk. Its claws skittered on the hardness of the glass. Chrias Kwen walked with the Scales and the dragon as though it was nothing. Proving his fearlessness, perhaps? ‘How young is it?’ she whispered to Bellepheros. ‘Does he not care about the Statue Plague?’
Bellepheros had turned the sickly yellow-white of old bone. He was gasping for breath, a black-cloak either side of him guiding him and holding him up. He barely managed to even look at her. ‘He doesn’t know, Holiness,’ he gasped. ‘I’ve held nothing back but not all men listen as they should. In some matters I feel little urge for repetition. Sometimes one must learn by seeing and doing and suffering a little from one’s mistakes.’
He doesn’t know? She smiled, a vicious little smile of imagining the kwen riddled by the dragon-disease, joints creaking, weeping sores forming over his hardening skin until he froze rigid and set like stone. ‘Thank you for that thought, Master Alchemist. We must talk more.’
‘Holiness, forgive me!’ Bellepheros was too lost in his own misery to really listen. Maybe that was as well. ‘I’m no dragon-rider and I do not take well to such heights. Caves and libraries are my home, not this.’ He was shaking like a leaf in the wind and his face was now as white as her silks.
The black-cloaks urged them on, impatient. At the far end the kwen touched his black wand to the silver orb and its bright mirror skin flowed open to embrace them. Zafir’s fingers brushed it as she passed through, trailing across its gleaming skin, ice-cold and glass-smooth and hard as diamond. ‘There are places in the Fortress of Watchfulness where none of us go,’ she murmured to Bellepheros as he stepped through behind her. ‘Deep places. There are things left behind by the Silver King that are a little like this, though much smaller.’ The alchemist didn’t seem to hear her. He looked ready to collapse and the Taiytakei soldiers were as good as carrying him. Perhaps that too was for the best. The old blood-mages had never understood what the Silver King had made and the alchemists who followed had never been allowed close. Creations. They were mysteries that had never been unravelled.
Beyond the silver liquid skin warm wood walls welcomed them, exquisite but mundane. Across the floor some fifty strides away more silver faced her. A gently lit space arced overhead, following the curve of the egg’s outer shell. Thick woollen rugs were scattered across the floor, full of colour, and after the glass bridge they felt lush and warm under her bare feet. She wriggled her toes in them and it felt oddly pleasant. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone for so long without boots.
The kwen and his black-cloaks swirled around her towards a cluster of ornate bone-carved tables, chairs and crystal bottles of many-coloured liquids. Other Taiytakei circled warily in their rainbow clothes, with their cloaks and capes of bright feathers and their long braids. They watched but their eyes weren’t on her; they were on the kwen and his hatchling. Zafir smiled to see them – yes, let them stare and gawk in wonder! The dragon was on edge. She could see from the way it twitched its tail. It sensed the fear and anxiety, the uncertainty all around it. Beneath the potions that dulled its mind lay old and powerful urges that even Bellepheros couldn’t quell. These Taiytakei, what were they but prey? It made her smile. She caught the hatchling’s eye and for a moment they regarded one another. I understand.
Bellepheros, gasping, moved beside her and sat down with relief. ‘They need a rider, Holiness,’ he said under his breath. ‘The dragons and the Taiytakei both. They need someone who is trained. Someone the dragons will understand. Someone who will not be afraid. They have one that is full grown and they have no one else to fly it.’
Zafir let that sink in. That was why they needed her? They hadn’t thought to take someone else? Flame! There must have been a hundred riders across the realms who’d lost their dragons in the war! And that was the thread on which she hung?
The hatchling eyed her, almost as though it knew her. Soon. When you’re bigger and have the back for me to sit on and the sickness you carry is gone. It would be months before the dragon could be ridden and even then it would really still be a hatchling. Yet it looked back at her hard as if to say, Yes, but I will grow, and we will ride, and when the time comes my fire will be fierce …
One that is full grown. That meant they had one of the dragons she’d flown from Furymouth. The sort of monster she would need to bring this world crashing to its knees in flames and ash! Cloud Claw? Diamond Eye? ‘But there were three, Bellepheros, not one. I saw them take three. If the Taiytakei have one, where are the other two?’
He didn’t answer but she thought perhaps she knew. The silver men. Three of them. Three dragons. But then why did they let one go?
The kwen and his men helped themselves to the wine or whatever else the Taiytakei kept in their bottles. They hardly spared her and Bellepheros another glance. ‘This is their heart,’ she murmured. She could feel the power here. She saw it in the flash of all these colours, in the brilliance of the feather cloaks all around her, in the length of the braided hair. But she saw it in their eyes too, in the unflinching stares, the pinched mouths. Used to obedience, all of them.
‘As I have said, Holiness, this is their City of Dragons,’ said Bellepheros. ‘Their Adamantine Palace.’
‘Is it true they have no speaker?’
‘Kings and queens they call sea lords. Their enchanters and the navigators who dwell above us are perhaps their alchemists but they have none to speak for them as one.’
‘Then they may be turned against one another.’
‘Perhaps.’
Perhaps? Kings and queens always turned against one another. She flinched away as the hatchling moved restlessly closer then realised that Chrias Kwen was watching her. He laughed at her. ‘Afraid of your own monster, slave?’
So much disgust. So much hate. Anger? Yes, anger. Envy? Is that what she saw there amid all that hungry desire to hurt her? She threw back her head and laughed right back in his face. ‘Fear?’ Angry men were easily made into fools, and lustful men too, and this kwen was both. She shivered. ‘Fear?’ she said again. ‘Of that? What you misread, Shrin Chrias Kwen, is disdain. That is a toy. A pretty thing for your master to show to his friends but that is not a dragon, not yet.’
They glared at one another until the inner wall flowed open and there was Baros Tsen T’Varr himself. ‘Chrias Kwen.’ The t’varr smiled, showing his usual jovial mask. Zafir watched the looks that passed between them. No love, not a bit of it. In a dark street with knives at their sides and no eyes to bear witness, only one of them would ever walk away. ‘Bring the dragon and the slaves. Our lords wish to see them.’
She followed the kwen and the t’varr as she was bidden into a wide circle of a room whose walls were silver, whose floor was solid gold, where a soft light fell from ab
ove and marvellous thrones surrounded her. They stood her in the middle with the alchemist to one side of her and the hatchling kept carefully away from all the Taiytakei in their magnificent clothes. The black-cloaked soldiers pressed close as if fearful that Zafir would launch herself in another murderous fury. And one day I will. But when I come again it will be with dragons, and nothing in the skies will save you.
Tsen started talking, preaching about how he and his dragons would pour fire over a place whose name she’d never heard and turn it into ash. She watched the other Taiytakei as they listened. They were curious at first. Fascinated, but they weren’t afraid. If anything she felt scorn from them. What could such a tiny monster achieve against a nation mighty with sorcerers?
Tsen talked of an army of dragons but he spoke in terms that were absurd and Zafir could only shake her head. A year? A hundred dragons? But it would take ten before they were grown to their full size. Did he mean to go to war with a hundred yearlings? Even her Adamantine Men would have destroyed them, no need for any blood-mages.
A Taiytakei in a cloak so cleverly made that he seemed to be garbed in flames rose and asked Tsen how much all of this would cost. The answer came in words that Zafir didn’t understand but the meaning was clear enough. Something preposterous. Around their circle the Taiytakei fell to laughter and derision and discord as the soldiers bustled her and the alchemist and his hatchling away again. And that was that, and Zafir laughed as she left because for all their gleam and colour and glamour they were so much like her own Council of Kings and Queens. So deliciously, delightfully familiar and so utterly pointless. With no speaker, how did they ever do more than bicker?
It was as she walked away that she touched a finger to the soft skin inside her elbow and noticed a roughness there. She stopped and stared in horror at the first little whiteness on her own skin. She knew it for what it was at once – she’d seen it enough times after all – but it was too soon by far to have come from the hatchling Tsen and Bellepheros had brought today so maybe she was wrong … And then she understood. The hatchling dragon on the ship. The woken one that had so very carefully cut her with its claw and then let her live. It had done this to her. It had given her the dragon-disease.