Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  Bellepheros snorted. Idiot. ‘Who are they, assassin, these Moon Sorcerers?’ Men of silver, when every man, woman and child who lived in the nine realms knew the name of the silver half-god who’d tamed the dragons. Isul Aieha. The Silver King.

  The Watcher walked away and Bellepheros was left to stare at the three Taiytakei guards who’d opened the egg. He was about to follow but something made him pause. Some thought that for a moment he couldn’t pin to the floor of his mind to dissect. But only for a moment.

  Walked. The Watcher had walked.

  45

  The Hsian

  A HSIAN IS NOT BORN AND A HSIAN IS NOT MADE. A HSIAN IS BOTH. The words written across the entrance to the Palace of Forever where every hsian who ever served a sea lord was trained. It was called the Palace of Forever because, while a t’varr concerned himself with matter and the moving of it to be at the right place at the right time and a kwen concerned himself with the minds of men, with spirit and courage, a hsian concerned himself with time itself. All you have to do is think further ahead than any other and you will be the greatest among us. It was a simple and yet impossible creed.

  The thinking that had brought him to this day had started twenty three-years ago when a new star lit up the sky above the Godspike. It first bloomed like a new moon on the night of midsummer, the last night of the year. It had lasted for a week, and every hsian across Takei’Tarr had seen it.

  What does it mean?

  There were old gods. Forbidden gods now, and not to be spoken of, but a hsian knew of these things because a hsian was nothing without knowledge. Probably every single one of the great savants of the thirteen cities had their own secret copy of the Rava, carefully hidden and always denied lest the Elemental Men kill them for simply knowing the old gods’ names. They’d met in secret in their Palace of Forever to wonder what this new star, born so bright and yet already dead, could mean. An omen, they agreed. Something was coming. Something to do with the ancient mistress of the night sky, most forgotten and least understood of the old gods. And then they’d looked at one another askance and each had gone their own separate way.

  Jima Hsian had thought long and hard and deep, and all that thinking had brought dragons to Takei’Tarr, and now it was taking him to the far corner of the sea lords’ empire, to Dhar Thosis and the Sea Lord Senxian, Quai’Shu’s greatest rival. Not an easy journey, even for a hsian with a glasship. He’d be missed, no doubt about it. A week away from Khalishtor could never pass without comment even at the quietest of times, and Quai’Shu’s monsters were anything but quiet. For most of the journey there weren’t even any places to stop. From Khalishtor he flew beneath the perpetual clouds around Mount Solence, mountain of the Elemental Masters, then over the rolling plains and hills to the high peaks of the Konsidar where the Righteous Ones still dwelt in their endless tunnels and caves, guarded from intrusion by the wrath and fear of the Elemental Men. He made a stop there, high among the Konsidar, too high for the Righteous Ones to mind or even notice he was there. The enchanters had built a mountaintop retreat, a quiet and comfortable place for sea lords and hsians and kwens and t’varrs who desired a few days of peaceful rest and tranquil meditation. It was spartan in its luxuries but kinder than the cramped living aboard an egg beneath a glasship. They shouldn’t have built it, not really, not in the Konsidar, but the Elemental Men had turned a blind eye for once. Perhaps Senxian and his predecessors had found a way to twist their arms, for it was a long hard flight across the deserts to the Kraitu’s Bones.

  The place was rife with spies, of course, and everyone would know he was there. He put it about that he was doing exactly what he really was doing – crossing the deserts to the far coast and Dhar Thosis. No one would believe that he’d simply told the truth for long enough for it not to matter any more.

  Past the enchanters’ retreat he flew alone again, trapped in a golden cage for eight days and a thousand miles. The Konsidar became bleak and dry. A little ice capped some of the mountains but the sky was blue and there were no clouds in sight and the sun was remorseless. The Righteous Ones lived far below, in tunnels so deep that they didn’t care about rain or sun, night and day. Throwbacks. An Elemental Man had called them that once, but throwbacks to what Jima had never been sure. What he did know was that something had happened to make them restless. It had happened about six years ago but he had no idea what it was; nor, to the best of his knowledge, did anyone else.

  After a day the peaks sank away beneath the glasship, although Jima Hsian kept it high, so far above the ground now that any prying eyes down in the desert would never see him, not that anyone could live in the waterless inferno below. A lot of it was bare rock, so hot it burned the skin. Gravel flats rose gently away from the mountains and then fell sharply in their turn into the broken cliffs and cracked valleys of the Tzwayg. Another day took him deep into the boundless expanse of the Empty Sands, dunes ruddy and immense, a thousand feet tall, on and on until they too sank into a shapeless flatness, stained by dark scars that might once have been lakes before the Splintering had cracked the world a millennium ago. The deserts were one huge space filled with heat and dead stone and nothing else.

  No, not nothing else. There were things in the desert. Relics. The bones of ancient monsters as large as cities. The hsian had seen a few and knew there must be more yet to be found if anyone could be bothered with the effort of looking. A thousand miles by a thousand miles of nothing, though … Too much trouble. Easier to trade with Aria, with the Dominion, with … other places. But Quai’Shu’s eyrie had come from here, sitting abandoned for however many hundreds of years before someone found it, and even then for another fifty, doing nothing except floating impossibly above the ground on its cushion of violet light and its cracks of lightning that meant you couldn’t help but think of the storm-dark. Enchanters had been and gone and none had been able to fathom its secrets, and no one had much use for a large floating rock when they had sleds and discs and gondolas and palaces of gold and glass, all so much brighter and prettier and less … less frighteningly old; and so in the desert it had stayed until Quai’Shu had sent every glasship he possessed to drag it hundreds of miles and turn it into a nest for his dragons.

  Yes. There were things in the desert that had been found and taken, and others that had been left and never understood, and doubtless many more that had never been found at all. Mysteries and mysteries, but they all lived in the shadow of the greatest. Another day into the desert and he began to see it. The Godspike.

  No, what he saw first was the strange darkened air around it. A thick roiling darkness. Not clouds like a storm but something else, stricken with lightning that lit up the night-time desert for a hundred miles – a snip of the storm-dark itself. It began at the Ring of Fifty Needles, fifty white stone monoliths perfectly smooth and never mind their age, each a mile high and sharp as a sword point. They were like the black monoliths the enchanters made to draw power up from the earth for their glasships, but ten, twenty, fifty times their size and white. They made a circle around the Godspike a dozen miles across. Outside the circle the air was the same air as in every other realm and the desert was the same desert that stretched for a hundred miles in every direction. Inside … inside was different. Electric. The storm-dark churned above, reaching down to touch the needle points but never straying below, cooling the air while perpetual violet lightning flashed through it. Every hsian went there – in glasships careful never to fly too close – just as every hsian went to sea to stare at the storm-dark with its own black roiling clouds and their lightning. To any who saw both they were clearly the same, yet the curtains of the storm-dark at sea went on for ever, up and down and from side to side, impenetrable and infinite and no one but a navigator could cross them. The Godspike was different. Feyn Charin, the first navigator, had entered the storm-dark here and crossed to another place and returned again, a feat no other navigator had since managed to repeat. They a
ll simply vanished. Nothing that went in came out.

  From the air it was the storm-dark and the lightning that caught the eye, as it always did for any who came this way, but on the ground the storm-dark was high above. Its shade became a relief from the desert sun and heat, flickering a little but otherwise a welcome shadow and not much more. On the ground what pinned a man to the spot and never let him go, not ever, not even when he’d put years and thousands of miles between them, was the Godspike itself. Pure white like the other monoliths but vastly greater – and they were large enough. It was perfectly round and perfectly smooth and a thousand paces across, give or take. It glowed a little and it was so high that no one had ever seen the top of it. It rose into the storm-dark, pierced it and came out the other side, and since no one could see through the storm-dark from below, and since no one dared fly through it and few had the courage to go over it, what lay at the top of the Godspike remained a mystery. As far as the hsian knew, the Godspike simply rose from the top of the storm-dark and went on, fading into the sun-haze of the sky. Maybe an Elemental Man had once merged with the air, or even with the stone itself, and sought the summit, but if he had then he had never spoken of it to any but his own. Jima Hsian liked to think it was a mystery even to them.

  He’d touched it, the one time he’d been made to see it from the ground, when he and the other hsians of his class had been brought here to be awed by it. He’d been the only one who’d dared and it had changed him. It was so immeasurably old, so massively big, so beyond everything he knew, that it had changed how he thought about time. Everything that seemed large became small. And that, he supposed, was why he had become the hsian that he was.

  He steered his glasship around the Godspike, staying well clear because if there was one place in the western desert where eyes might be, it was here. He tried not to look but it was impossible. The Godspike drew him in as it drew everyone. He stared and stared for hours on end as the glasship made its slow circumnavigation of the outer needle ring. It dwarfed him in every way. Him and everything about him, every deed and every hope, every aspiration and every scheme, it made them into nothing. Sea lords should be made to come here, he thought. All of them, to see what trivia they really are.

  On the far side, away from the Konsidar, he should have turned to cross the second great desert, the Desert of Thieves, to finish his journey, but now that he was here he couldn’t resist. In the years since he’d last come the storm-dark over the Godspike had changed, the first record of such a thing since there had been records at all. He pulled out a farscope and studied it as best he could and still wasn’t sure, so he turned his glasship toward it and spying eyes be hanged. When he got close, he could see that one end of the storm-dark was hanging a little low, covering the tip of one of the outer needles.

  He moved closer still, as close as he dared. He was lost to this now. There were men a mile below him on the ground, clustered around the base of this needle. Tribesmen probably, although he couldn’t be sure there weren’t others among them. All could be spies, and they’d have seen his ship because they were looking up at the needle.

  The needle was cracked. It wasn’t a big crack and it didn’t go far, but it was there, a jagged dark line running from the top where the storm-dark had come down. The flaw in the white stone ran for a hundred yards until it faded to nothing. The hsian thought about this for a while. Then he thought about whether he should bring his ship down low to silence the tribesmen and blind their eyes with his lightning cannon. But perhaps that carried more risk than it removed and so he simply flew on, out across the Desert of Thieves.

  Six years. Six years since the storm-dark had begun to change, slowly creeping lower and lower at that one point in the circle of needles. Six years. The thought horrified him. I haven’t been this way for that long? Gods! I’m old! Six years. At the same time as the Righteous Ones had begun to stir. A hsian noticed such things, but Jima had no idea at all what they meant.

  Away from the Godspike the desert changed again, morphing to a maze of mesas and broken cliffs and canyons, some of them so deep and dark he couldn’t see to the bottom of them even when the glasship was directly overhead. He veered off course to the biggest and deepest canyon of all, the Queverra. There were some who liked to suggest that the Queverra was somehow the antithesis of the Godspike but Jima was sure this wasn’t true. Very deep and very sharp and very dark, rather like some unfeasibly large god had slit the desert open with a knife. It had a bottom, though, and people had been there. The upper terraces were home to desert tribesmen, kept cool and shaded by the canyon walls for much of the day and there was even a little water to be had and places where plants would grow and animals could be fed. Further down in the darkness where the sun almost never reached, things were said to live. Jima had never quite grasped what these things were, exactly, and suspected they were ghosts, shadows and other products of the imagination rather than anything real; but since he’d never been down there himself and never would, he was cautious about where he poured his scorn. Glasships that flew over the centre of the Queverra sometimes mysteriously lost their buoyancy and plunged into the darkness, never to be seen again, and there were plenty of myths and legends of monsters. The caverns that opened into the walls of the Queverra were supposed to run right across the Desert of Thieves, for hundreds of miles under the Empty Sands to the ruins of Uban and into the Konsidar. They were supposed to reach down into Xibaiya itself.

  Stories. Everywhere had its stories.

  It took another full day from the Queverra to reach Dhar Thosis. He came to it early in the morning, and the first things he saw were the two great pieces of stone that rose out of the sea around its harbour, the larger Eye of the Sea Goddess, which from this angle, coming straight from the desert, looked more like a nose, and the pinnacle of the Dul Matha, the Kraitu’s Bones. He could even see the arrow-straight line of the Bridge of Eternity, the span made of enchanters’ glass and gold that crossed the sea between the two, hanging a thousand feet above the waves. The stories of the desert men had it that the Kraitu had come from the Queverra, sent by the desert gods to battle the sea. The great serpent of the ocean, the Red Banatch, had fought it in the shallows here and the Kraitu had been crushed in the serpent’s coils; the Kraitu’s body had become the monolith of the Dul Matha, and the marks of the battle were still there to be seen if you believed in such things, the long dark gouges down the side of the sheer stone stack. The Red Banatch had returned to her depths, but not before she stole the Kraitu’s essence and laid a thousand eggs along the shore, the offspring of earth and sea. Half had hatched into the sea titans, little images of the mighty Kraitu itself, and the other half into dragons.

  Odd, the hsian mused, to be coming to one of the few places in Takei’Tarr that had a story about dragons in its past when he was driven by the ones that Quai’Shu had brought to the present. The dragons of Dhar Thosis were myths, and even if they’d once been real were long gone, but not so the titans. The old story went that the titans had savaged both land and sea with storms and floods after they hatched from the serpent’s eggs. The dragons had plucked them from the water one by one and dropped them from the top of the Dul Matha – the shards and lumps of broken stone around the base of the cliffs were said to be their bones – until the last few swore an eternal oath to become guardians of the coast here for ever. In the cataclysm of the Splintering the dragons had vanished as the world fell to chaos and darkness but the titans were still there, lurking under the water, ready to come if the sea lord master of the Kraitu’s Bones called to them. No one, as far as Jima knew, was quite sure any more whether the titans were real or merely an elaborate and exquisitely crafted story to instil caution into the city’s enemies.

  Time. Such scales of time and space and change beggared lesser minds. But not a hsian. Why would there be dragons here? He could see, as the glasship flew over the city and across a narrow stretch of sheltered sea full of ships at anchor, how it would be
a fine place for dragons. The only ways to the top of the Dul Matha were to fly or else to cross the water to the Eye of the Sea Goddess and climb her winding roads to the Bridge of Eternity, both of which would be next to impossible for any unwelcome invader. Perhaps not quite as safe as Baros Tsen’s flying fortress, but Jima Hsian was about to bet his life that the Palace of Roses on top of Dul Matha was a great deal more impenetrable to what was by far the most dangerous threat to any lord – an Elemental Man.

  The glasship nudged up against a black enchanters’ monolith. They would need to stop here for a full day to recover enough energy to cross back over the deserts. Seneschals cloaked in feathers of emerald and blue, the colours of the city, greeted him with kindness and courtesy, exactly as the protocols of a good host demanded, and never mind the enmity that existed between their lords. They led him across the open yards between the three great glass and gold towers at the heart of the Palace of Roses. They opened the tower walls for him with their black rods and took him to a beautiful hall filled with scents and pleasures where they entertained him while their lord decided what was to be done. An hour passed and then another, and then the inevitable black-cloaks came. Polite to a fault, they blindfolded him and led him through a maze. Down, he thought. We went down, not up. Down into the Kraitu’s Bones.

  When they took the blindfold away, he was at the end of a passage filled with fine silver chains hanging from the ceiling, so thick with them that every step was like walking through thick mud.

  ‘They say the Elemental Men cannot pass such a passage in any form other than flesh and blood,’ said Sea Lord Senxian on the other side.

  ‘And are they right?’ Jima finished pushing his way through.

  ‘We will probably never know.’ As he emerged from among the chains, Senxian led him on into a small room lined with gold and lit with candles in such a way that no shadows could exist. They exchanged the necessary words, spoke of their families, their business interests, all the things that needed to be said before the reason for the hsian’s coming could be reached.