Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  ‘I have considered my sea lord’s position carefully,’ said Jima Hsian at last. ‘It is no secret that the acquisition of dragons from the western realm has placed a huge burden upon him. There are some who question whether he can survive. My sea lord will require considerable additional loans before his debts can be stabilised and brought under control. I have made my assessment of those who will be sympathetic and those who will not, of what assets will be traded fairly away and what cannot be lost. I have assessed those among the sea lords who see an ally in need, those that see an opportunity for partnership and advantage, and those who see a giant about to fall. Sadly, the state of Quai’Shu’s health and the fragility of his mind will have a significant and substantial adverse affect on the confidence of our friends and allies. In short, he does not have the trust and faith that he once commanded. Had that been otherwise I believe the fleet of Xican would weather this storm. As it is, I have concluded that it will be you, Sea Lord Senxian, who will hold the balance. The fate of Quai’Shu’s fleet will rest in your hands. You will decide whether Xican remains proud and free or whether it becomes a second vassal to the bottomless wealth of the Vespinese.’ Quai’Shu. Not My sea lord. There was a hint in that if Senxian cared to see it.

  ‘My hsian concludes the same,’ Senxian said.

  ‘Feyn’Channa. A great and dear friend and colleague.’ If you could say that about a man who was a venomous snake. ‘We studied together for a time.’

  ‘Yes. Be clear to me now, Quai’Shu’s hsian. Have you come to beg? If so, what does your master offer?’

  ‘My master hasn’t sent me,’ said Jima Hsian. ‘My conclusion is that you would see him fall and we will become vassals to Vespinarr.’

  ‘Do you seek new employment then, Hsian? How curious. What would you offer?’

  ‘You know there’s only one thing worth either of our considerations.’

  ‘The dragons, Hsian? Why would I want them?’

  ‘Not the dragons. The alchemist, Sea Lord. Whoever controls the alchemist controls the dragons. Feyn’Channa, I’m entirely sure, has already told you this.’

  ‘Yes. So I have … heard.’ Senxian didn’t believe him! Which meant Jima had missed something and all his calculations were wrong or …

  He started to get up, then stopped as Senxian stood up too, shook his head and rang a little bell. ‘Why not meet the man who believes otherwise, Hsian, since you’ve come such a way.’

  A cleverly concealed door opened behind Senxian, one that Jima Hsian hadn’t seen. Beyond it stood a slave, a very tall man with skin so pale it looked like moonlight, dressed in grey robes and with tattoos that ran from his cheeks down his neck and vanished into their folds. A slave. Worse – one from a distant realm. The hsian wrinkled his nose.

  ‘This was once the home of your dragons, Hsian.’ Senxian smiled. ‘They belong to this stone. Perhaps this slave can explain more clearly than I can.’

  The slave pulled a weapon from his robe, a cleaver with a gold handle covered in stars. He held it up and bowed. Jima Hsian started to rise from his chair again, quickly this time, pricked with fear. A trick! Betrayed! But the slave was already on his feet and quicker, and the knife came down fast and sharp.

  Three little cuts. You. Obey. Me.

  But that wasn’t what happened, at least not how Jima Hsian remembered it later, and when the slave had explained and made everything perfectly clear, the hsian scoffed at his own childish fright. For Sea Lord Senxian had shown him something he hadn’t known before, something that changed a great deal, and he knew now that he’d made the right choice to come here, that he would stay and serve Senxian as he’d once served Quai’Shu. That he’d give him every possible help and, for him at least, everything would end exactly as he desired. At night, as he lay in his new bed with his new life around him, the strangest thought came to him: the white stone walls that glowed, the ones inside the eyrie he now meant to help Senxian to steal, they’d felt under his hands exactly like the stone surface of the Godspike.

  46

  Slaves and Executioners

  Tuuran jumped over the side into the churning surf. The water was cold. A wave lifted the boat beside him, bumping him, almost knocking him off his feet. Crazy Mad was beside him. There were a lot of things wrong with Crazy, but how he handled himself in a fight wasn’t one of them. Life felt good. It was one of those days for revelling in being alive.

  ‘I’ve been here before.’ Crazy Mad’s eyes gleamed. They fought through the surf. ‘Not here here. Probably not even this world. But somewhere, leaping out of a boat like this, crashing through the water up onto a sandy beach towards waiting lines of trees. Oh yes. You were there too. You were called Tarn.’

  ‘Tuuran, slave. Always Tuuran. One name’s good enough.’

  Crazy Mad ignored him. ‘That was the day the Bloody Judge was born.’

  Six months back at sea. Six months away from the choking desert and the mad devices of the Taiytakei and their slaves and the alchemist and his shameful submission. Three months since the grey-robes had come and no one had known why or what they wanted; and no one else had been on the deck after they’d gone and Tuuran had hauled Crazy Mad back up out of the sea, and so no one else had seen him sit bolt upright and stare at Tuuran with eyes that blazed with silver-white fire like the full moon on a cloudless night.

  ‘I am the Bringer of Endings.’

  Three months. The grey dead hadn’t been happy not to find what they were looking for but they hadn’t come back. Three months and Crazy Mad’s eyes had stayed crazy and mad but they hadn’t burst into moonlight flames again. Tuuran had quietly decided he must have imagined it. Easier to bury that way.

  ‘Run, you dogs!’ he roared. ‘Run! Out of the water!’ The sand felt sure beneath his feet. He raced to the beach and stood, naked steel, teeth bared, a roar poised on his tongue. The other sword-slaves were still struggling out of the water. This is what I am. This is what I was made to be. ‘To the trees!’ He ran and Crazy Mad ran beside him, long loping strides. Crazy Mad, still alive. No one had thrown him into the sea or sold him to another ship and now he was a sword, a soldier, and Tuuran was proud of him. Whoever he thought he was, he’d grown into his madness now. He’d made it his.

  ‘The last time I did this there were soldiers waiting in the trees.’ Crazy grinned. Sometimes he was frightening. His hunger for a fight put even some Adamantine Men to shame.

  The second and the third boats were nosing into the shore now. The rest of their little company of sword-slaves and Taiytakei with their bows and their wands and their spiked clubs to keep them all in line. When they’d given Crazy Mad his first sword, Tuuran had seen the wondering in his eyes: how easy might it be to take them down, to cut them apart and seize their ship and be free? But that was what every sword-slave thought when they were given their spear or their blade or whatever weapon they chose.

  ‘And it happened too – once,’ Tuuran told him, as he’d been told in turn. ‘A whole ship threw off its chains. And the Taiytakei hunted down that ship and every slave who sailed her. They sent a sorcerer who could become the wind and the sea and every one of them died a horrible grisly death, and you may scoff as I once scoffed but I’ve seen those sorcerous killers with my own eyes now and I’ve seen what they do. So think it, slave, and then think that you’ll have to cross your sword with mine and every other here. Better to take what is freely given.’

  And Crazy Mad had thought it, and Tuuran had wondered for the first time in a very long while whether this was a man with whom he might cross swords and lose. But it hadn’t come to that, not yet.

  He waited for the other sword-slaves and lined them up, pairing them off.

  ‘Where are we?’ they asked, and Tuuran s
hrugged. The slave ship sailed where the slave ship sailed. None of them, save perhaps a few of the Taiytakei, knew where they went.

  ‘None of your concern, slave.’ He shoved a man at Crazy Mad. ‘This is Jris. He’s yours.’ He took a step back and looked along the two lines of men. ‘You’re slaves. Proud slaves. Slaves with names. You look after each other. What happens to one of you, it happens to the other. If one of you runs, we are all punished. If one of you brings back a new slave, we are all rewarded. We are as one.’ He pointed down the beach. ‘A mile that way, some people are stupid enough to be living. Bad for them, good for us. We want more slaves. Men to work so you don’t have to. Women for pleasure, because we get little enough. Or boys, if you prefer, or more men, or girls, or donkeys if you’re Amrir here. I don’t care. The sick and the old have no place in our ranks. If they fight then take them. We like a fighter. If they fight too hard then put them down. Don’t break them unless you have to, but if you do, make sure whatever you break stays broken. Burn, loot, plunder, take whatever you like but you won’t get to keep it. What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is theirs.’ He pointed to the Taiytakei. ‘You fall, you get up. You get hurt, you make like it’s nothing, because there’s no place here for the wounded and there’s two ways back to the sea – on your feet or rolling in the surf to feed the fish. Now run! Run with me, you dogs!’

  He loped down the beach with a long pace that drove them hard. The sword-slaves followed in their two lines, the Taiytakei a little way to the rear. No one said a word because no word was needed. They were slavers today, tearing men and women from their homes. They’d strike a village and rip it to pieces, take what they could, and by the time they were done the galley would be close to the shore, the boats beached, and they’d run and be gone before any warning could be given. He’d done it a dozen times and seen it more often than he could remember. Every few days in a different place until they had a hold full of slaves, then away to one of the deep-hulled Taiytakei sailing ships in some hidden cove, and then back somewhere else, somewhere far removed. Sometimes they stayed with their sailing ship and crossed through the storm-dark to a different world. Tuuran understood that much better now although the Taiytakei never spoke of it. They’d move again soon. In the last few days they’d struck three villages along this coast already. The galley hold bulged with screams and tears.

  A flash of light across the water caught his eyes. He glanced out past the breaking surf. The galley was there waiting for its boats but something else was there too. A bright orange spark in the sky, racing above the sea faster than any bird could fly, skimming the whitecaps, coming from further down the beach. The way he was taking them.

  The spark reached the galley. Behind him the slaves had slowed to look; and then from the deck of the galley a pillar of fire erupted into the sky. Whips of it cracked out across the sea. There were no screams, no shouts, nothing that rode over the gentle hiss of the breaking surf. Tuuran faltered and then stopped to stare. Even the Taiytakei had stopped running.

  A black dot arced up off the galley towards the beach. It came right at them, sailed a dozen feet over Tuuran’s head and slammed into the sand so hard it made the ground shake. It broke into pieces, brittle and charred right through but it had been a man once. There were fingers, a hand, an arm … a stump that had been a head and a face. Tuuran stared at it like they all did, but unlike the others he’d seen this before. This was what happened when a dragon unleashed its fire, although the spark they’d seen streaking across the waves had been too fast and too small. Still, maybe that was why he was the first to look up, that age-old instinct to look to the sky. A dozen more specks were hurtling from the galley as if thrown by trebuchets.

  ‘Run!’

  There was no way to dodge the bodies but that didn’t stop some of them from trying. Tuuran bolted up the beach for the trees. A dead man hit the sand in front of him and shattered into blackened pieces. Burned fragments of skin and bone flew up into his face. For a moment the world stank of charred flesh. He glanced back. Most of the sword-slaves were standing there staring up at the sky in horror, or running back and forth, trying to get out of the way of the raining dead. Only Crazy Mad had followed him for the trees. But Tuuran saw something more. The spark had left the galley. It was coming for the beach.

  He reached the trees. On the beach the sword-slaves screamed and scattered as the spark shot across the sand and then stopped and became a woman wreathed in flames. Bolts of fire arced from her hands, three or four at once, cutting men down, so hot and fierce the fire went straight through them, burning them apart and searing their legs from their bodies and leaving holes as big as a man’s fist. It was done in seconds. Every single soldier on the beach. Every single sword-slave except for him and Crazy Mad, hiding in the trees.

  The woman became a spark again and flashed after the Taiytakei. He heard booms of lightning and saw flashes through the trees. A moment later and the screams started again. Wands, armour, it made no different. The Taiytakei fared no better than their slaves.

  ‘What in the name of the gods that are no more is that?’ Even Crazy Mad had no answer. They were paralysed. Waiting for it to go away, or to find them and end them. For the first time Tuuran could remember, Crazy even looked scared.

  The screams stopped. For a brief moment there was silence. Tuuran stared at the beach, dumbstruck.

  ‘You.’

  His head snapped round and there she was: the woman wreathed in flames, a dozen yards further in among the trees and pointing a finger straight at him.

  ‘Run,’ he hissed to Crazy Mad but Crazy didn’t need telling and had already vanished into the undergrowth so quick and so quiet that Tuuran hadn’t even noticed him go. Tuuran raised his hands. ‘I’m just a slave.’

  ‘The beach!’ If she was going to kill him, she’d have done it. There had been no mercy for the rest. No pause and no hesitation. So he stepped back onto the beach, cautious but not fearful. She wanted him for something.

  ‘Slavers,’ she hissed and pointed across the sand to where the Taiytakei had been. They were there still, only now they were one great black and gently smoking heap. ‘Slavers,’ she hissed again.

  Tuuran shook his head. ‘I—’

  Fire from her finger seared his cheek. He screamed, clutching his hands to where it had touched him and then tearing them away. She’d burned off his ear, nothing left but rags of crispy skin.

  ‘Your black-skin ships will leave this land. Any who return, this is what will happen to them. Take that message to your masters, slave. Tell them what you have seen.’

  She vanished into flame and was gone, straight up into the sky. Out to sea, the galley was floundering in the waves. Tuuran glowered at the vanishing spark and raised his fist. ‘And how? Just me? How do I find them to tell them when I am all alone in this land? Stupid sorceress!’ The whole side of his face was a blazing mass of pain.

  Crazy Mad crept out from among the trees, dazed-looking but with that mad gleam in his eye again. He kicked at the charred remains of a head. No way to tell who it might have been.

  ‘I’ve seen dragons do that to a man,’ Tuuran said.

  Crazy Mad giggled. ‘Is that Fire Witch a dragon then?’

  ‘Dragons look like dragons, not like that.’ Tuuran frowned. ‘Who would have thought it, eh? Been hearing a lot of whispers about this place.’ Damn but his face hurt. The whole side of his head.

  Crazy Mad wandered across the sand and stood beside him. He peered at Tuuran’s ear. ‘Nasty. What place is that then?’

  ‘Aria,’ whispered Tuuran after a time, long after the woman was gone. Boats were on their way from the galley now, closing in on the shore. Oar-slaves. The witch hadn’t burned them; she’d set them free. ‘We’re in Aria.’

  ‘Aria.â
€™ There was a smile in Crazy Mad’s voice and Tuuran understood it, as he understood now what the witch wanted him to do.

  Home.

  47

  The Walking Man

  You will get no answers, old slave. Not from them. No one ever does. The voices of the moon sorcerers were always there, soft like a spider’s web across the Watcher’s thoughts. Around the eyrie, becoming the wind or the stone was getting harder every day, not easier. It had to be the dragons. Something about them. In Khalishtor, in Dhar Thosis, in Vespinarr, in any other place he went he felt the world bend to his will as it should. Just not here where he needed it most.

  When he was done with the alchemist, the Watcher took himself to the edge of the eyrie where no one would see the lines of pain on his face and his clenched fists as he turned himself into air and vanished away. The world rushed by. As the wind he had no eyes but there was a sense of the shape of things, the rise and fall of the land, the taste of running water, the tiny bright pinpricks that were hard barriers of silver and gold and gold-glass.

  He turned away from his course …

  … and appeared from the air atop a mountain deep inside the Konsidar, far from any city, in a place that no one but an Elemental Man would ever go, a hundred miles from the nearest Taiytakei or slave. From the peak he could see right down the mountain on every side, but on one particular side the descent never stopped. The mountain slopes reached down, but where they should have joined the lower slopes of another and made a pretty tree-filled valley with a stream rushing and bubbling through it, instead there was a colossal rift. It always looked to the Watcher as though some god had reached down and pulled the mountains apart, splitting the skin of the earth between them. It reminded him of the Queverra. The rift ran for miles though the Konsidar, a sheer-walled and depthless chasm between the mountains. Somewhere down there lived the Righteous Ones. Instinct had brought him here. It wasn’t even on his way to where he was going but he’d come nevertheless, and as he looked down on the rift he knew why. Something was happening. The Righteous Ones had been caught creeping out of their caves of late. Something had changed down there, some years back, and at the same time out in the desert by the Godspike one of the ring of needles had cracked and the storm-dark had started to shift. Further back still and the Elemental Masters had allowed Quai’Shu to buy him and to buy the Picker too, as though they needed Quai’Shu’s hunger for dragons to be fulfilled. As much as anyone, his makers had brought the dragons here. They hadn’t merely allowed it to happen; they’d been its architects every bit as much as Quai’Shu. And the moon sorcerers too, who never came out of their towers, who were myth and legend until that day on the beach, they had made this happen. Whatever it was they’d seemed to want in return – his hunt for the grey dead ones or the Adamantine Spear of the dragon lands – what they really wanted was for dragons to cross the storm-dark. He could see that now. Perhaps that was the one thing they couldn’t do, cross it themselves, and so they’d needed Quai’Shu and some navigator to make it so. Dragons in Takei’Tarr. That’s what they wanted all along. In hindsight it seemed so obvious. They knew something, and the Righteous Ones, in their gloom, they knew something too.