Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  It moved, but not yet towards the eggs. There was another thing, close to the bleeding wound of the underworld. Something else that lingered. A familiar taste.

  Sister? Brother?

  But it wasn’t a dragon. Something like a dragon, but not. Something more. A silver half-god, nothing less, and the dragon wondered how one of the makers was here. The half-gods didn’t pass through Xibaiya and never had. They’d had their own ways, even before they were banished by the earth.

  Curious then that one of them should be here, and more curious too that it was close to That Which Came Before. Did you come to see, old one? But this is not your domain and you should know better than to be here.

  As it came so close that they might have touched, it tasted a second shade, a little one, and now it understood. The two were locked together, each held fast by the other so that neither could move, a tiny mirror of the Earth Goddess and her slayer wrapped in their prison.

  Old one?

  The shades writhed and screamed together. The dragon turned away, sorrow and disgust all at once. Yes, an old one, one of the silver half-gods, a maker, but diminished to almost nothing, a barely flickering ember of the bright light it had once been long, long ago.

  Old one?

  The little one had trapped it and almost unravelled it so that only the barest essence remained. The dragon wondered how a little one could do such a thing but it had no answer to that. The half-god was all but gone, not enough left for it to know what was happening to it, much less talk. The dragon took the two shades in its claws and picked them patiently apart until they were separate things, each straining to be released. One for the sun, one for the moon.

  Old one? It tried one last time but the half-god was too damaged to understand. Perhaps the night lord would make it whole again, perhaps not. There was a sense of recognition though. This was one of the half-gods who’d turned with old wise Seturakah for whom the dragons had first flown. One of the few who’d stayed and fought, who had turned against the old gods and failed and lost and been broken.

  Were you too close when the end came? Is that what happened to you? It looked at the mangled shrivelled shade. So few, and yet you were so great and so close. It let the old one go. Be with your creator. Make your penance and your peace. Is he merciful in his victory, the night lord? The dragon had little idea what such things meant. Mercy, revenge, forgiveness, spite? Those were not dragon thoughts – for dragons there was only what was food and what was not. It had learned these other words from the little ones. They seemed to think them somehow important. The dragon couldn’t see why they should matter. Mostly what it understood was the rage, the wild impatient fury that always undid them. Why are we this way? Why are we made to be so quick of thought and claw and yet so fleeting? It mused on this for a minute or two, and when it saw that there was no answer to be had to that either, its thoughts moved on. It did not understand resentment either.

  It still held the little one. The little one wasn’t damaged at all.

  Who are you? It began to move back to the broken prison. The little one squirmed and tried to get away but the dragon held it fast. Nor did it answer; but little ones, as the dragon had often observed, could rarely control their thinking. All the dragon had to do was to listen.

  You were a lord among your kind? The little one had a name, but the dragon had no interest. I have never heard of your home. If I find it I will burn it. No, I will not let you go. I mean to feed you to the Nothing to see what will happen.

  The little one struggled but it had no hope of escape. The dragon reached out as close as it dared to the hole and its questing devouring tongues. It dropped the little one inside.

  How? How did this come to pass? How was the old seal broken? Where did the dead goddess and her slayer go? Did they flee or has the Nothing consumed them? Not that, it thought, for the two of them had held the Nothing at bay for an age and more. No, they had gone somewhere.

  A weight of understanding closed over Silence then. If they truly had gone somewhere then they could be found and they could be returned, and That Which Came Before could be locked away once more.

  I do not want the burden of this knowledge.

  The little one flickered as the Nothing closed around it and then it darted through a tiny space the dragon hadn’t seen and flashed away, gone towards its creator, the Lord of Light and Warmth. The dragon lunged, annoyed, but it was slow and the little one had already vanished. As it went, the dragon caught a fractured fragment of a thought.

  I was there. I saw it happen.

  And with that a flicker of something else. Of pride and a place and a face.

  The dragon snarled. If the little one had seen it then so had the old one; and if the little one was gone to the sun, so the old one was gone to the moon and the night lord. And the night lord was known to dragons.

  So, Gods, I have sent these souls with their knowledge and their memories back to you. What will you do?

  What gods always did. Nothing.

  The Bloody Judge

  58

  Never Forgotten

  By the time the boats from the galley came ashore, the pain ran right from the top of Tuuran’s head down his neck. His face felt like it was still on fire and it wasn’t going to get any better in a hurry either. Adamantine Men knew all about fire. When old Hyram had taken the Speaker’s Ring, he’d put on a tournament and games for the dragon-riders who came from across the nine realms to kiss it. They’d fought mock battles, strafing legions of the Adamantine Men with dragon fire while the soldiers hid behind their dragon-scale armour and walls of dragon-scale shields. It was supposed to show how fearless the speaker’s army was, how they could stand up to anything. And it had, but they’d still lost fifty men over the space of the five days and a hundred more carried their burns proudly, scars to prove who they were. Tuuran reckoned the good soldiers were the ones who’d managed to get themselves and their brothers beside them properly behind their shields, but anyone who got burned got treated well enough. Burns hurt.

  He growled and waved his sword at the slaves from the galley and turned them right around. ‘That’s a ship, that is,’ he bellowed at the oar-slaves and the sail-slaves as they struggled in through the surf. ‘That’s a ship, and we know how to sail it and that makes it our life. What are you going to do? Run into the woods barefoot? Do you even know where you are?’ The men from the cages in the hold came from up and down the coast here but the galley slaves came from everywhere, mostly the little kingdoms like the one Crazy Mad said he was from, all around the fringes of the Dominion. They’d be lost here, as lost as he would, so he rounded them up, sail-slaves, oar-slaves, the men from the cages, and made them have a good long look at what had happened on the beach. All those dead Taiytakei, that was the sort of sight a slave ought to see now and then. The sort to remember. No one questioned that he should be the one giving the orders now.

  ‘Any of our slave masters left on the galley?’ he asked. The pain across his face turned everything he said into an angry snarl. But no, the Fire Witch – or whatever she was – had burned every Taiytakei to ash. So he looked at all the slaves, standing there on the beach, shitting and pissing themselves and gawping at the mangled remains of their masters, and left them to wonder for a bit while he picked up one of the lightning wands and waved it about in case he could make it work. Everyone knew the wands only worked for the dark-skins but it seemed worth a go. Turned out everyone was right, but it didn’t stop them from flinching when he pointed it at them. He’d keep it, he thought, and turned and waved it at the slaves and asked them, ‘You really want to stay here? Stay. The rest of you, we go back to the galley because it just became ours.’

  About half stayed, mostly the ones from homes up and down the coast. Back on the galley, once the rest of them had scrambled aboard, it turned out that not all the dark-skins were dead after all. The galley slave masters might all be burned to crispy ash and yes, the
deck smelt like an eyrie from back home, but down among the oars they found a pair of Taiytakei oar-slaves cowering under the rowing benches. Tuuran had no idea what they were doing there – putting Taiytakei slaves in among the oars was just another way of killing them, everyone knew that – but there they were anyway, terrified. Tuuran dragged them out and gave the others a choice: kill the dark-skins or keep them and they voted almost to a man for keeping. It didn’t surprise him. Slave or not-slave always counted more than the colour of a man’s skin.

  Flame but his face hurt! Cursed Fire Witch or whatever she was. And he still kept wanting to touch it and still kept having to stop himself. Burns. You had to keep them clean – every Adamantine Man knew that – and so you didn’t touch them, didn’t wrap them, just let the air do its work and maybe a little cold clear water for relief now and then. Damn but he’d have killed to get his hands on a decent alchemist now, or at least a bit of Dreamleaf.

  It slowly dawned on them all that they were free. They broke into the hold and hauled out the Taiytakei food and the little barrels of wine and spirits and drank themselves stupid. Tuuran drank until he couldn’t stand up any more. It took the edge off the pain. He passed out as the sun set, same as half the rest of them. He thought maybe he saw Crazy Mad’s eyes burn silver again right as the sun turned the sea into a lake of orange fire, but afterwards he couldn’t be sure and he’d been drunk enough to see faeries and dragons dancing on the moon too. In the morning, face still burning, head pounding, guts churning, he tried cleaning up the messes that the Fire Witch had left behind. Not that he particularly minded them, but it was something to do. Didn’t get far though. The Taiytakei slavers – what was left of them – were little more than ash and charcoal burned into the galley’s wooden hull. He tried to scrape them off but they were welded in as though wood and flesh had melted and then set again, merged together.

  He went off to puke into the sea in case that would make him feel any better. It didn’t, but then Crazy Mad showed up with a pot of something he’d looted from the galley captain’s trunk, and when he smeared it on the side of Tuuran’s face where his ear used to be his skin went numb and the pain just wafted away. Crazy had found some Xizic too, and after a while chewing on that, the world was suddenly a whole lot better and Tuuran took to doing what he did best: strutting the deck and yelling at people, and it never once struck him as strange how easy it was to send the oar-slaves back to their oars and the sail-slaves back to their sails. How easily he became their captain and Crazy Mad his mate.

  ‘Aria,’ he muttered to Crazy once the galley was moving again. ‘You reckon that was that Ice Witch the night-skins keep whispering about?’

  Crazy Mad looked all deep for a moment and smiled one of those smiles of his, the one where it looked like he knew all the dirty little secrets of the gods and was wondering what to do with them. ‘No. Not her.’ Then the smile hit his eyes and the chill was gone as he laughed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, not exactly ice, was it?’

  Tuuran scuffed at some charred remains on the deck beside him. ‘Seen dragons do that to a man once. Just burned and burned him until there was nothing left but a handful of charcoal.’ He stood up and looked out at the sea and the sky and the land. ‘I don’t know where we are, Crazy. Not the first idea. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have a clue how that would help me work out which way to go.’

  ‘I want to go to Tethis. I want the man who took my life.’

  Tuuran shook his head and wrinkled his nose. ‘It’s the Judge in there today, is it? Well, Judge, I never heard of Tethis save what you’ve told me and most of that I don’t believe. But even if I did, there’s no going back home for either of us, not yet. A galley can’t cross the ocean and none of us can navigate the storm-dark and your Tethis lies on the edges of the Dominion, does it not? We’re in the wrong world for either of us. Shall we say Deephaven? To be blunt, in this world I don’t even know the name of anywhere else.’

  Crazy Mad spat. ‘Deephaven then.’

  ‘At least I know it exists beyond your say-so, eh?’ He grinned. ‘And it sounds a good enough place for a shipload of sailors to make their home. I’ve heard there are Taiytakei anchored there often enough too. Traders, not slavers. Maybe you could persuade them with that sharp-edged charm of yours to take you home. Maybe I could too!’ He laughed.

  Crazy Mad shrugged and turned away. ‘Bad memories. Bad things happened in Deephaven. Someone died. But that was a long time ago. There’s others who might know it better by now.’ Crazy didn’t like Deephaven today by the look of things. And on his bad days Crazy Mad could be, well, crazy. And mad.

  Tuuran gestured vaguely at the sea. ‘Look, I don’t care where we go. You know another place? Choose it.’

  ‘No, you’re right – there always used to be Taiytakei ships in Deephaven. I remember them. Sharp-edged charm or not, they can take us both home. If we can think of something they want bad enough to do it.’

  Tuuran snorted. ‘Or they can make us slaves again.’ But Crazy Mad didn’t say anything more and Tuuran still had the glass shard given to him by the Watcher, the one that would make the Taiytakei give him aid, and so maybe they could get home, one way or another. He jabbed a finger at the coast. ‘Pick a direction. Left or right?’

  Turned out neither of them had any idea where Deephaven was, and so they sailed with the wind because at least they’d cover more ground that way, and it was only later that day that Tuuran heard the oar-slaves talking among themselves about the Fire Witch who’d freed them and stopped to listen, and of course as soon as he did, the oar-slaves all stopped talking and made a point of some vigorous rowing and he had to remind them that they weren’t wearing chains any more, that they weren’t slaves and that he wasn’t some Taiytakei with a whip; and when he’d done yelling that at them, he set them to rowing again. Much later, as the galley drifted through the night and they sat around their braziers on the deck, doing what they’d always done and telling each other stories, he found those oarsmen again and told them to tell everyone else what they’d heard.

  ‘Everyone knows the Fire Witch. She came to Deephaven after the day the knives fell from the sky. That was the day the silver sorcerers came and raised the dead to walk and lifted an army from the earth. The Ice Queen drove them all away. And then the Fire Witch came.’ Which was about the most ridiculous story Tuuran had ever heard until he thought about the tales he might tell of dragons and a stolen alchemist and an ancient flying castle drifting over a desert.

  ‘They say the Fire Witch burned the risen dead and put them to rest.’ Several of the oar-slaves made a little sign, a strange gesture of reverence and protection and fear mixed together. They’d been on the galley when she’d freed them. ‘She cleansed the city and let the living come back. It’s hers now. She rules it for the Ice Queen.’ Again they made the same gesture. ‘The risen dead are everywhere. They covered the streets to keep the sun at bay. Half the city is theirs.’ The slaves from Aria made another sign, the sign of the sun this time, a ward against evil.

  Tuuran scratched his chin, not much liking the sound of any story with so many witches in it. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t go that way after all.’ Not that he thought much of stories in which wizards who could really only be the Silver Kings themselves suddenly showed up and raised armies of the dead, seeing as how the Silver Kings had been gone for a thousand years and probably then some. But none of them knew anything better and he couldn’t quite shake that memory of Crazy Mad and the way his eyes had flared after the grey dead men had come with their golden knife. And the Ice Witch was real enough, or so the Taiytakei had said before they’d burned. He looked around at the faces lit up by the glowing coals of the braziers, all equal men for the first time since they’d been ripped from their homes. Home. That was what t
hey all wanted, but home was scattered across four worlds and a dozen different kingdoms and Deephaven was the only place where they might find ships to take them across the storm-dark.

  They argued some more. No one much cared for a city of the dead ruled over by a witch who could burn men to ash with a blink, that much was obvious. Even Crazy Mad didn’t like it. Deephaven might have been where he’d been born on the days he called himself Berren but he’d severed his ties with that past long ago. In his moments alone Tuuran quietly reckoned that Crazy had severed his ties with rather too many things. But in the end, since none of them knew which way it was to Deephaven anyway, they stuck with the wind and kept the coast on their port side and hoped for the best. The other slaves prayed, but not Tuuran and Crazy Mad. Tuuran’s only god was the fire that burned everything at the end of the world and Crazy didn’t have any gods at all any more.

  The coast grew wilder and soon all they found were coves filled with reefs, treacherous shores, few chances to take on water, little food and no sign of habitation. They had supplies for months though and so it was the restless boredom that bothered them the most; and after another week the shores grew tamer again and they started to see huts and farms and here and there a boat and then villages and fishermen, and someone even made a joke about how they should go ashore and do what they’d always done: take some slaves and look for a place to sell them. When Tuuran heard and found out who’d said it, he threw him into the sea. He could go ashore, right enough.

  His face still hurt.

  A few days later they rounded a headland to a bay outside a city that none of them had ever seen but whose name Crazy Mad reckoned he could guess – Helhex, whose whitewashed walls and temples and houses gleamed in the summer sun with such a fearsome light that Tuuran had to screw his eyes up to look at them. The White City, most people called it, home of the witch breakers of Aria. They anchored in the bay and Tuuran tried to keep the galley slaves together as he and Crazy Mad went with a boat to the shore, but none of them knew where to even start when it came to selling something like a Taiytakei slaving galley. By the time he got back they’d already fallen to fighting and looting, the other boats were all gone and the slaves too and the galley was empty, ransacked. Tuuran looked about him, hands on hips, trying not to laugh and trying not to rage. Crazy Mad stood beside him, blank like he simply didn’t care. They ripped out whatever was left that they could carry and Tuuran thought he could sell. Then he split open the casks of oil in the galley that were too heavy to move, lit a torch and set fire to it, because it was a slaver and maybe it was better if no one had it at all. It felt good, cleansing himself of the Taiytakei. Crazy didn’t lift a finger to stop him, just laughed and laughed as they watched it burn together, rowing for the shore for the last time. It was a strange feeling, an uncertain future in collision with an unkind past. Hope and loss and victory and fear mingled together.