Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  The voices had stayed with him since that day on the shore of the Diamond Isles. He could never quite hear them, never quite understand what they were trying to say. He’d been a gift. Quai’Shu had given him to the sorcerers with their diamond towers. The Watcher had never forgotten that and nor had they. Become as one. He was their servant now. But servant in what? To what end?

  He sat on the mountaintop in the biting cold air which cut like little knives and held his head in his hands until the voices found a calm. Passions clouded the mind and a clouded mind could not become the wind, the earth, the ice, the light, the water, the fire or the dark. Among his own kind a few whispered that the secret of the last element, of metal, was to be bursting with joy or love or hate or fury, but no Elemental Man had ever mastered metal and so whispers was all they ever were.

  The voice of the moon sorcerers never stopped. The Watcher changed it in his head to make it a more soothing thing. His other master was Quai’Shu, whom the dragons had made mad. Men were plotting to kill him and the Watcher would stop them. That, at least, was a simple enough thing to see.

  Become as one. He had no idea what that was supposed to mean. What become as one? Was he supposed to stop it or make it happen? They’d told him just enough to pull at the loose threads of the tapestry of something when they could simply have shown him the tapestry in its whole, the picture it made, and told him what to do. So why hadn’t they done that?

  He drew out his knives one by one, the blades of each so thin that light passed through them, leaving them all but invisible. Bladeless knives. Enchanter-made, sharp as broken glass and hard as diamonds. He cleaned them, cleaned away every speck of dust until he could barely see they were there, and as he did, a stillness settled over him like a weighted net. They’d given him a purpose and a mission, and in that purpose they’d given him a reason for what they’d done. And now he saw why: it was to stop him from looking for another one, purely and simply that. Dragons on Takei’Tarr. Their intervention after the crossing – leading away the hatching dragons and dumping them in Baros Tsen T’Varr’s eyrie – was almost unseemly in its blatant purpose. Tsen and the other Taiytakei were too busy with their own problems to notice but a hsian would see at once. Quai’Shu’s hsian. He could start there. The hsian was due a reminder of whom he served but perhaps he could serve just a little more. It would be … interesting. For both of them. The Watcher would start with why he, alone among the hsians, had decided to bring dragons to Takei’Tarr because of the Midsummer Star and how, exactly, he had made that choice.

  He wrapped his knives in their silks and stood up, breathing in the mountain air. Before that he had one other thing to attend to. The kwen. The kwen was in Xican, and that was as good a place as any to do what Tsen and Quai’Shu had asked. The city of the sea lord’s first grandchild, wilful raven-haired Elesxian. Baros Tsen T’Varr should probably marry her. It would give both of them what they wanted but the simple fact was that Tsen wasn’t ever going to marry anyone. No one would ever marry him. It would be a waste of everyone’s time.

  He blinked, changed to a breath of wind, and the mountaintop became still. A moment later it was a distant shape on the horizon. Another moment and it was gone and he was gusting across mountains and forests and islands and seas to Xican, to the city of stone carved out of the iron-grey and obsidian-black of the Grey Isle where nothing grew. Not a single thing lived there if it didn’t live in the city; in fact most of the island wasn’t even an island but more a collection of boulders, large and small, smashed together, which still rolled and shifted from day to day. The enchanters had done something to the city itself to keep the stones around it still, the ones from which it was carved. Except for the plateau at the centre, the rest of the island changed constantly. Slowly, yes, but never the same. For a long time it hadn’t been much more than a staging post, a first and last place for the great Taiytakei fleets of the sea lords to stop and rest before they crossed the storm-dark to the other realms. That was how it had started.

  The Watcher appeared on a pinnacle overlooking the hollowed stone spires of the city. The weather out here on the far edge of the island was always the same, always bright and sunny and clear and never a drop of rain, even when a deluge of storms hammered at the plateau only a dozen miles to the east. On the horizon, twenty miles away more or less, sat the grey veil edge of the storm-dark. When it was as close as it was today, the Watcher liked to sit and look at it because Xican was the only place in the whole of Takei’Tarr where the storm-dark now and then came close enough to the shore to be seen from land. Through that veil lay other worlds, the dragon realms, the Diamond Isles, Qeled, Aria, all the rest, and it was a veil that even an Elemental Man couldn’t pierce. Not like a wall of silver or glass or gold, which became like a solid thing, hard and impenetrable; no, the veil of the storm-dark was soft like a curtain, always pushing him aside so that no matter how carefully he trod, he always found himself back where he began. It moved too. It drifted back and forth. Some days it was within sight of the Grey Isle, but on others it was far out to sea, hundreds of miles into the ocean perhaps, days of sailing. Most often it was out of sight, but there were some who said that the clouds of the storm-dark had once come closer still, that they’d touched the Grey Isle itself, and that was why it was as it was. To the Watcher the storm-dark was a marvel, a miracle and a wonder left over from the Splintering. For ships and more mundane men it was simply a place of horror and death from which nothing returned. For the Taiytakei that was a much easier thing to understand.

  The Watcher looked down. After Khalishtor and Vespinarr, Xican wasn’t much of a city, not much more than a swathe of rocky spires all jammed together around the water’s edge and hollowed out. A few ships sat in the sheltered bay, pieces of Tsen’s broken-up fleet. The kwen might be there or he might be in among the spires, still searching out the men he’d need to creep back into the waters of the dragon realms and steal another rider.

  Or he might be somewhere else.

  The Watcher turned his eyes to the Palace of Leaves floating in the air above him, a glasship of absurd proportions, a dozen and a half gold-glass discs with scores of silver and golden eggs hanging beneath them, hovering over a cluster of gold-glass towers that reached up like fingers and cold black obsidian columns from where the enchanters drew the energies that kept the palace aloft. Yes, the kwen could be on his ship or in the city minding his business, or he could be up there.

  The Watcher blinked. Vanished and appeared on the surface of the highest part of the palace. Blinked again, working his way down, peering through roofs and windows. He moved from place to place, watching and searching, and although it took days, he kept on until he found what he was looking for and knew that he was right. Which only left the far more straightforward matter of getting inside to put an end to it.

  He blinked again, back down to the surface and to the gates of the first glass tower. Glass and silver and gold. They all thought it was so easy to keep his kind away. The gates were closed of course, or what would be the point? The Watcher appeared out of the air before them and made a show of inspecting them. There were gaps, always gaps, but they were too small and too narrow. Beside the gates a face stared at him through a window of clear fine glass. The Watcher made a gesture to the door as if asking for it to be opened. The face frowned. The Watcher blinked and reappeared a foot to the left so the face could have no doubt what he was. The eyes within the face grew wide and the face turned away. The Watcher’s fingers began to quiver. He raised a hand to touch the glass, placed his palm against it and the window shattered. One decent-sized hole. That was all it ever took. He blinked through, knives out now. The face from the window was running but he hadn’t gone very far. Pale skin. A sword-slave.

  Blink. The Watcher appeared in front of the running man and held out a bladeless knife, then blinked again as the man stopped. Appeared behind him and ran him through. The slave shouted an alarm as he died. Blood sprayed across the
floor over cold white marble. There were other soldiers here in the open space behind the gates, the great open hollow inside the glass spire. He let them see him holding his knife towards them. They could see its blade now, a crimson edge made from the blood of the dead, but they weren’t afraid of him, not yet, not when he was only one and they were fifteen and they hadn’t understood what it was that had come for them. More sword-slaves. Skins of all colours.

  He shifted. He was behind them as they skittered to a stop. He slit a throat. Broke a neck, twisted a head clean round so its eyes stared backwards at him as the light inside died. Ran another through as he turned.

  Blink. Back the other way. Knives in clenched fists now, wading into the middle of them, striding between two with their backs turned, a blade to the heart of each as he passed them. They wore coats of metal plates layered under leather but their armour was worthless against a bladeless knife. A soldier in front of him began to turn. The Watcher opened his throat in a flash of light. Blood sprayed. Another knife rammed hard up under a sword-slave’s chin. These men had done nothing wrong but there was a point to be made and they were only slaves.

  Blink. They were quicker this time. Credit them for that. Blade into the kidneys of another and then the Watcher even had to duck. Shifted away a while now. Up high where they wouldn’t think to look. Listening to their screams, the shouts, the terror and the panic. They needed to feel it. The whole palace needed to feel it from the top of its floating glass to deep within its rocky roots. It needed to feel the dread of an Elemental Man. The kwen, he needed to feel it.

  Nine dead in as many seconds. They didn’t know what to do. One of them ran …

  Blink.

  … onto the point of an outstretched knife he couldn’t even see. The Watcher let him fall to the ground. Let the last few savour it. They stood in a circle now, backs together, swords out, pleading for help and mercy, doing the best they could do not to die, not that it would save them. Around the edges of the tower in their little rooms aghast faces peered out. Slaves and servants. Little kwens and t’varrs and maybe even a hsian or two, but mostly they would be t’varrs. Someone was already riding a disc up the glass side of the tower towards the tip of the spire and the hanging palace of orbs above.

  Blink. Up beside the last of the soldiers close enough to smell their breath, to taste their fear and see the quiver of their skin. Right inside their guard. One knife up under the chin, the other down into the soft hollow of a collarbone.

  Blink. As they fell. Down low at a crouch. Knives deep into feet. One each.

  Blink. So fast the first bodies were still falling. Behind the man with the bleeding feet as he dropped his sword and opened his mouth to scream. Opened his throat instead. Snapped into air and back again, falling this time, straight down, head first, face upside down before the last two. They had a moment, a flashing instant to see what would come before the bladeless knives found their open mouths and they saw him vanish before their eyes. He appeared between them as they were still falling. Made sure that the faces peering from above had plenty of time to see him, to see who he was and what, standing in the middle of a circle of bloody death. His eyes settled on the disc rising up the wall. A face stared back at him. Screams echoed through the huge space inside the tower. Shouts, the terror spreading among the slaves and the servants who worked down here, the ordinary palace folk faced by a horror beyond their understanding save that they knew him as death. An Elemental Man. A bringer of endings.

  He let them see and then vanished and appeared on the disc. The man there was a Taiytakei, not a slave – a t’varr by the feathers he wore – but the fear in his face was the same, a tangible thing. The Watcher took a step and the t’varr backed away. Another step forward and another step away, and then there was no glass beneath the t’varr’s feet, only air, and he fell and smashed on the white marble floor far below.

  Fear. The all-consuming power of the Elemental Men.

  48

  The Lord of Silver

  Chay-Liang stood next to Baros Tsen, watching the Vespinese glasships drift in towards the eyrie. As the ships drew closer she could see that some were different colours, not the plain gold-glass of Xican and most of the other sea lords. Emerald-green, ruby-red, sapphire-blue and one that was almost midnight-black, surrounded by a dozen of the plain glass and gold she was more used to seeing. Huge streamers hung beneath, trailing from their gleaming silver gondolas. The wastefulness of it irritated her, but then she was already irritated with having to fit iron-clad doors into the white stone passages of the eyrie – stone, she noted sourly, that would not be scratched or pierced by any tool she could find – and she’d barely even finished when Tsen had told her to take them all out again.

  For a moment the annoyance of it all got the better of her. ‘Why do I have to take all the doors off for them? Do they not have doors in Vespinarr? Does it offend them?’

  Baros Tsen smiled beside her, the same affable smile he always had. ‘You don’t need me to answer that, Chay-Liang. Think about what they’re for. And of course you’ll be putting them back again as soon as our guests are gone.’

  ‘What a delight.’ She gave him an acid glare. ‘I can barely contain myself.’ But yes, she understood. The doors were for stopping an Elemental Man, and the first thing anyone who saw them would wonder would be what use they were when an Elemental Man could simply merge with the stone instead and simply pass round them. And the second thing that a man like Shonda would then realise would be that the doors must mean that they couldn’t pass through the stone. And Tsen didn’t want them to know that.

  The t’varr shook his head. ‘They always have to show off, don’t they?’

  ‘The Lord of Silver flaunts his wealth? When will that ever change?’ Chay-Liang sniffed. There was more to life than silver. Other kinds of wealth worth more than money.

  ‘Oh, I hope never.’ Tsen turned and flashed her his perfect white teeth and she had to crush the urge to slap his smile off him. ‘And the question you really wanted to ask is Why are they here? Well think about that one too, mistress of our lord’s eyrie.’

  Chay-Liang jumped as if she’d been stung. ‘What? Me?’

  ‘Not really, of course, but that’s what they think. They’re here to see our dragons … your dragons. Their, ah … investment. And to see our sea lord since he’s so close by. And of course they’re really here to see whether Quai’Shu is as ill as they think he is and how much of a stake in our little enterprise they can wheedle out of us in exchange for the debt our lord has amassed.’

  ‘You mean you have amassed.’

  Tsen’s smile didn’t waver. ‘I suppose I do. I suppose what I really mean is we have amassed.’ He patted Liang on the shoulder. From almost anyone else she might have taken offence, but Tsen was wearing his harmless amiable fat-man persona and he slipped into it so well that it worked even on her, even now, even when she’d known him for so long that she knew it for exactly the façade it was. ‘Go on, go and get your alchemist and your dragon ready. I’m sure that’s what they really want to see. Your dragon-rider too if you can be sure she won’t suddenly set about them.’ He laughed. ‘Not that I’d particularly mind in some cases. Oh, and LaLa is about some other business and not here to keep an eye on things. There’s no way they should know that of course, but you can never be too cautious with our dear friends from the mountains. Keep your alchemist safe.’

  ‘Not here?’ Chay-Liang raised an eyebrow. ‘Exactly when we need him! Their arrival shows interesting timing.’

  For a moment Tsen’s mask slipped and his eyes glinted like a pair of daggers. ‘Doesn’t it just?’ He shook himself and turned away. ‘There’s going to be a big formal meal and all the usual hooha. Meido and Bronzehand are both with the Vespinese but don’t you worry about that. My problems. Just make su
re your dragon doesn’t eat anyone. Or your rider either.’

  ‘They are not mine, T’Varr!’

  ‘Today they are, Liang, today they are.’

  Tsen strolled away down the battlements towards the steps that led to the dragon yard. Chay-Liang watched him go. He passed a cluster of air cannon, the black-powder guns that pointed into the sky to shatter any glasships that strayed overhead. They were inferior in almost every way to lightning cannon except for the one crucial flaw: a lightning cannon wouldn’t trouble anything made of gold-glass.