Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  The slaves from the galley dwindled away over the days and weeks, drifting off to other places, falling into trouble, finding ships and setting sail, but Tuuran and Crazy Mad stuck together. They sold what they could but they hadn’t come with much. The taverns they stayed in became steadily cheaper and seedier, the wine more sour with each day, and before very long all Tuuran had left was Crazy Mad and the clothes on his back and a last few pennies and a handful of Taiytakei treasures that he had no idea what to do with. And that, he mused, was still a lot more than he’d had for a very long time.

  ‘Here’s to us.’ He raised his cup. They were drinking the cheapest wine he could find. Too much most nights, if he was honest, but that had always been the vice among the Adamantine Men. Mostly Crazy Mad just sat and watched.

  ‘Here’s to sleeping on the streets.’ Crazy touched his cup to Tuuran’s. ‘At least the nights are warm here.’

  ‘It could be worse. We have what we hold, nothing more and nothing less. We have our strength and we have our swords, and what more could a man ask than that?’

  ‘Comfortable bed and a clean woman would be nice.’

  ‘We are Adamantine!’ Tuuran was drunk and he knew it. He banged the table. ‘We take what we want! What we need!’

  ‘Not here we don’t!’ Crazy Mad laughed, which earned him a growl. He wagged a finger in Tuuran’s face. He’d taken to doing that a lot since they’d come ashore and Tuuran always wanted to grab it and snap it off. ‘You start up with the I am an Adamantine Man thing again here, you’re going to get us in a fight.’

  ‘Good!’

  ‘Which—’

  ‘Which we’d win!’

  Crazy Mad looked all set to start going on about militias and witch breakers and the hundred and one different kinds of trouble that Tuuran might bring down on them but then he stopped abruptly. His whole face changed from bloody warrior to that of a boy, almost forlorn and a little lost. He blinked a few times. ‘I saw three sword-monks this afternoon,’ he said after a bit. ‘Walking the street in the middle of the day. Yellow robes with those twin curved swords they have crossed over their backs and the sunburst tattoo scrawled over their faces. You’d know them if you saw them. One of them, they’d rip us to pieces, either of us.’

  Tuuran shrugged and looked into his cup. When Crazy Mad went rambling off into one of his stories, some bits might have some truth to them but you could never tell which. He swilled his wine. Enough for one story. Maybe not for two.

  ‘Twenty years and I’ve never seen a sword-monk since, and there they were, right in front of me. Sun and moon, can you believe I’d forgotten her?’

  ‘Forgotten who?’

  ‘The teacher I fell in love with. Tasahre. Back like a punch between the eyes, she was. Gods and soldiers! I haven’t thought of her for years.’

  ‘Two decades?’ Tuuran took a large gulp of wine and raised his eyebrows. ‘And how old were you at that particular time?’ Because if Crazy Mad had been doing much more than crawling twenty-odd years ago then Tuuran was a dragon in disguise; but then they’d been round this particular island so many times that they both knew every spit and cove. ‘Oh, right. That was before those nasty warlocks changed your body for you, eh?’ He rolled his eyes.

  Crazy Mad ignored him. ‘I saw the blood. I held her hand and I felt her heart stop. But I never saw her burn. The last thing I remember was another one of them leaping towards her. And today all I could think of was to chase after those monks and ask them whether there was a monk called Tasahre, whether there’d been some miracle and she somehow hadn’t died after all. I knew what the seal of the sun could do …’

  ‘The what?’ Tuuran’s cup was almost empty. He waved for another.

  ‘There was always a chance, just a tiny, tiny chance …’

  ‘We’re out of money.’ Tuuran drained the dregs from his cup and poked forlornly at the last pennies on the table. Crazy had more stories than Tuuran had seen dragons, and this was sounding very much like one of the dull ones. ‘So here were are, two soldiers with no war to fight and good for nothing else. Where do we start one?’

  Crazy Mad suddenly had a bit of a look like maybe he might be about to punch Tuuran in the face and possibly tear down half the tavern for seconds. But it only lasted a moment and then he let out a bellow of laughter. ‘You want to start a war?’

  ‘I’ve been forged for it from the day I could walk, sword-slave.’

  ‘You can call me by my name now.’

  ‘Ah, but aren’t we both slaves to our swords, even as we think we’re free? What name would you like, Crazy Mad?’ He had too much drink in him. The curse of men forged to fight a war that would never come, penned in by their code and their loyalty and their honour. Wine had been his lover once. Where else was there to go?

  Crazy Mad was still laughing. ‘For as long as I can remember I wanted to know how to fight. In Deephaven back then you learned to run, always to run. I hated it. Hated how there was always someone bigger, someone stronger, someone who’d simply take whatever they wanted. And so I learned the sword; and then I went to war, more by accident than anything else really, and I found it was no place for flashing blades at all, Tuuran. Scrums of men grunting and heaving at one another, poking at eyes and feet with spikes of metal until one side broke. The slaughter of a sky darkened by arrows. Whole companies of men crushed into the mud by waves of armoured horse, or else it was a sea of fire, or lightning called from the sky, soldiers skewered by spear throwers that could drive a shaft through a stone wall, flesh smeared into the earth by boulders the size of a man’s head, hurled across a river. Nothing flashing, nothing dashing, no heroes, only screams and blood and shattered bone. But by then it was too late. It was my trade. My art. I’d sold my soul to it.’ He stopped and stared at Tuuran as though he’d seen a ghost and then bared his teeth as his eyes went wide. ‘Or someone took it. And I knew nothing else, and for all its horror it became my love. I had enemies, you see. I was the Bloody Judge of Tethis, the king’s assassin, the Crowntaker, for ever until the end. Or so I thought until I woke in the skin of a stranger.’ He laughed and spat. ‘Maybe those warlocks did me a favour.’

  Tuuran let out a ferocious fart. Here we go again. Crazy Mad with his stories. All these things he can’t possibly have done. ‘They raised me to fight dragons. Fight and die. Simpler really. Dragon comes, dragon burns. None of the rest of all that stuff you were on about. Get eaten, that’s all an Adamantine Man needs to do. And what about this Skyrie of yours? What’s his story? How did he get to be a slave to the sword?’

  Crazy Mad hardly seemed to hear. ‘Skyrie? He’s mostly gone now.’ He was lost. Off again. ‘I had a son once. By a bondswoman, which was just another fancy way of saying a slave. She belonged to the queen of Tethis. I stole her and I stole my son. It took three years of my life to do it and I gave no thought to anything else. I went to war. I killed men and I stripped the dead. It was the only thing that mattered and not one second of one day went by when I didn’t think of her and of the son I had waiting for me. The other soldiers drank and bought women while I counted my silver until I had enough to buy her. And then in the end when I finally took her and she saw what I’d become … well, she didn’t see it right away and there were some good times. The best times …’ Crazy Mad looked away. Tuuran stared, wine forgotten. The mad bugger looked all but ready to burst into tears. But then Crazy took a deep breath and pulled himself together and emptied his own cup and now he just looked lost again. ‘It didn’t last. She saw who I was, saw the blood on my hands and wanted nothing to do with me any more. So I let her go and I never saw her again, nor my son, because I knew she was right, and nothing good could come to anyone who liv
ed their life around me. I gave her everything I had and I sent her away and I went back to war but I kept my eyes and ears open. Was going to look after them the best I could. See they didn’t want for much. Send them money, that sort of thing. And I did too, for bit. And then the pox came and that was that. Gone. My boy. The one I swore wouldn’t grow up like me. I want my life back,’ hissed Crazy Mad. ‘The one they took from me in Tethis. The first one they took from me when I did what they wanted and they threw me in the pit for it. Never mind the rest.’

  ‘You can never go back, Crazy.’ Tuuran belched. ‘Besides, doesn’t sound like it’d be much use to you now.’

  ‘The warlocks who came to our galley. You remember them?’

  The last pennies were gone now, the last cup of wine in front of Tuuran and they were flat broke with nothing to their names except what they carried on their backs and at their hips. And Crazy Mad was so full of shit. Too young to have done all the things he claimed – as long as Tuuran didn’t look at that memory he had, carefully locked away, of Crazy Mad with his eyes like burning liquid silver. Maybe not too young to have fathered a child. He’d looked forlorn enough about that. Maybe that bit was true. Maybe. And maybe he just didn’t care, because what did it matter? Tethis? He had no idea where that even was except that it was near the Dominion and across the storm-dark and so might as well have been on the moon. He started eyeing the loose pennies on the tables around them. He wanted more wine. ‘Yes, yes. How could I forget throwing you into the sea? One of my fondest memories. Is this going to take long?’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Bugger me if I have the first—’

  In a flash Crazy Mad was across the table, a fist clenched around Tuuran’s collar. ‘Tell me! Tell me what you know about them!’

  Tuuran looked at the hand at his neck. With delicate care he wrapped his fingers around Crazy’s wrist and squeezed, harder and harder, until he let go. ‘I could crush your bones, sword-slave.’ Then he laughed. The men on the next table were looking carefully away, very pointedly not seeing anything. While they weren’t looking, Tuuran reached out and helped himself to some of the money on their table. Not all of it, just a couple of pennies for another cup. He waved for a refill. ‘They weren’t Taiytakei, even you could see that much. And that really is about as much as I know. They didn’t stay for long. They were looking for you; they were sure you were there and they were mighty upset when they didn’t find you. When they left I don’t know what they were thinking but they were certainly wondering who it was I threw into the sea. They peered into the water a lot until everyone decided you’d drowned; or maybe they thought you couldn’t have been who they were looking for.’ Tuuran rubbed his nose. ‘Mind, something was off with them. I’d keep my guard about me if I were you, if you see them again.’

  Crazy Mad bared his teeth and hissed, ‘If I see them again, I’ll rip them to bloody shreds! You told me, after you came back from your flying castle over the desert, that you’d found out who all the Taiytakei lords were and what their cities were called and the flags and insignia and all that.’

  ‘That’s true. Although fat lot of use it is to a slave.’

  ‘You saw the ship that brought the warlocks and took them away again, Tuuran. Where did it come from?’

  Tuuran picked up his pennies and stood up, swaying slightly. ‘I like you, Berren Skyrie Bloody Judge Crowntaker Crazy Mad, whoever you are. But I was a slave and no one tells slaves where things are to be found. You want your grey dead men, you’ll have to ask one of them.’ He waved and bellowed something across the tavern floor and sat down again. ‘The night-skins. Our masters. Black on the outside but they bleed like the rest of us. Go ask one of them. You know where to find some? Deephaven, I’d say.’ He smiled and sighed as a tavern boy filled up his cup. ‘The flags said the ship came from one of their cities. Dhar Thosis. For what it’s worth, I happen to know that. But don’t ask me where it is because I haven’t the first idea.’

  59

  All Debts Paid

  An emerald glasship hung beside Baros Tsen’s eyrie, carefully out of the way of the long snouts of the black-powder cannons. There wasn’t much it could do about the dragon though. Tsen supposed Vey Rin simply trusted him, which was comforting in a way: at the very least it proved that Rin couldn’t read his thoughts.

  They stood side by side on the battlements watching the dragon fly. The rider took it into the air every day now. It was a little miracle, he thought, that she hadn’t turned on the eyrie and destroyed them all. She was a terrible slave, utterly the worst sort, wild and with a dark vein of self-destruction inside that fed her and made her impossible to control or even to contain. Slaves like that were almost always put down, yet so far Tsen hadn’t done that and she hadn’t burned them all either. Perhaps he had that same vein hidden in him somewhere. Maybe that was why he didn’t just go back to his orchards and make wine and build bathhouses for people like Rin. It seemed that he and this unruly slave somehow got along, in their strange way.

  Tsen glanced at Rin and for a moment struggled to remember what exactly it was that had brought them together all those years ago in Cashax. Half his memories of those days were lost in a haze of wine and Xizic and Devilsmoke dens. Tsen had been the leader of the pack back then. Maybe a dozen of them at times – rich, young, soulless and cynical, Taiytakei destined for power and greatness, all of them. He struggled to even remember most of the names now. They’d done whatever they could to make each day wilder than the last. Things that were best forgotten sometimes but Tsen remembered them clearly. For a while he’d been the worst of them all. And then things had happened and people had died, badly, and the others had drifted away and suddenly he and Rin were the only ones left, and Rin had dragged him out into the desert to go hunting desert men with a slaving gang who’d been only too happy to have a couple of rich boys with their sleds slumming it out in the sands. His heart hadn’t been in it any more by then. In fact most of the time out among the dunes he wasn’t sure whether he even had a heart at all.

  Thirty years later he knew that he did. It had taken quite a while but he’d found a certain peace again. And so would it be so bad to give in to wisdom and let it all go and live a long quiet life somewhere doing the things I love? But the more he looked at Rin, the more all those old memories kept coming back and the more he knew that yes, it would. Ah, the follies of pride.

  ‘I’ve explained matters as succinctly as I can to Sea Lord Quai’Shu,’ said Vey Rin. ‘He doesn’t seem to be terribly … coherent.’ Overhead the dragon twisted in somersaults, jinking and rolling into a series of tight turns far too fast for a lightning cannon to follow. Rin wasn’t really looking – didn’t seem to care at all – but Tsen often came out to watch the dragon when it flew now. Not that he wanted to actually get onto the back of the thing – the thought made him shudder every time – but he did find himself wondering what it felt like up there. He’d sailed sleds over the desert after all, him and Rin and the rest of them. From what he remembered, it had been a lot of fun.

  ‘Quai’Shu has lost his mind, Rin. He and coherence parted long ago and you knew that before you came.’ Charades and masquerades. Is that all we are?

  ‘At least he’s still alive. How much longer before your wager with your friend Meido is done?’

  ‘A little under two months.’ Your friend Meido? What have you promised him? He wondered at his own irritation. Would Meido be so bad? Of all the rest, would he really be so bad? No, he wouldn’t. So why not just let him have it? But he couldn’t. Why? Because I can do better, damn you all, that’s why. And because Meido would give Shonda what he wants, and for some reason I simply can’t bear to let you have these monsters, Rin. Because you and Shonda never really changed.

  Rin shoo
k his head. ‘My brother is growing impatient. He doesn’t wish to wait for two months. He wonders with whom he should speak regarding matters that affect the future of our business together.’

  Tsen watched the dragon, a distant speck in the sky now. With her. With that. He wondered, as always, if today would be the day she simply didn’t come back. ‘I suggest the Great Sea Council, my friend. Or for matters less public, perhaps my Lord Quai’Shu.’ Tsen smiled, though Rin knew him far too well for that to work.

  ‘I didn’t come here to be mocked, Tsen.’

  ‘And I won’t be the one to set that monster on Dhar Thosis. I see no profit in it.’

  Rin shrugged. ‘All debts paid and you see no profit?’

  ‘Oh, if my dragon is destroyed by Senxian and his stone titans and his lightning cannon then you’ll find some other way to keep me in your pocket; and if by some miracle my dragon destroys his city, the Elemental Men will rip both of our houses to pieces and I shall be too dead to even wag my finger at you and say told you so. Perhaps I might ask them to take my corpse to yours and re-enact the scene. How many thousands dwell in Dhar Thosis?’