Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  Right now, however, those were Tsen’s troubles because she had quite enough of her own. The dragon disease again, which was why she was standing out in the yard along with every other Taiytakei, every slave, every single person who lived in Baros Tsen’s eyrie. They were crowded together in a great big arc, all of them together, pressing themselves back as far away from the ever-looming presence of the dragon as they could. They were staring at the dozen slaves caged at the dragon’s feet. Those found to be infected would be fed to the dragon. Liang supposed it was as good a way as any to dispose of the problem, and Tsen was doing it openly, a grand display for all the slaves and for his own men too. If you get the disease, this is what will happen to you. If you get this disease you will not be able to hide it. There is no cure. There are no exceptions. Do not get it. No one will leave until the eyrie has been cleared. He said his piece and then the dragon leaned down with the rider-slave Zafir on its back and picked up the cage between its claws. The slaves inside screamed, tumbling over one another, tangling together as the dragon lifted the cage and eyed it, turning it. She’s enjoying this, Liang thought, and for a moment she wondered how easy it would be to make a little device on the dragon bitch’s helm to make her head explode when no one was looking. Very easy, that was the answer. Very easy indeed.

  She watched the alchemist’s eyes. He didn’t like this either. He was watching the cage now, but as Tsen had said his piece his eyes hadn’t been on the t’varr at all. He’d been watching Chrias Kwen. She wondered why. I am missing something? And maybe she was. There were clues to be had in the slaves screaming in their cage. All bar one of them were women. It didn’t seem likely that the one male slave in there with them had spread it to all the rest. So someone else, and almost certainly a man. She didn’t know the ins and outs of the slave hierarchy terribly well, but Tsen would. He’d have worked it out already, who the carrier was. One of the kwen’s soldiers? And that made sense, since soldiers were generally stupid and didn’t understand anything they couldn’t hit, and the ones with the kwen came and went and didn’t understand how the eyrie worked at all.

  The dragon turned. Its tail swept across the dragon yard and there were more screams. Then it climbed onto the eyrie wall and launched itself into the air. Liang raised an eyebrow. She took Belli’s hands in her own and forced him to look at her. His skin was pallid and there were dark lines under his eyes. ‘How long, Belli? I need to know how long before I can tell Tsen we’ve found everyone who has the disease.’

  Bellepheros closed his eyes. ‘A month, perhaps, before it begins to show. Among the Scales it was quicker but they’re exposed every day so that was to be expected.’

  ‘This isn’t over, is it? These are just the first.’

  The alchemist shook his head. ‘It always spreads, despite my efforts to hold it back. There are others here who carry it. A few of your people. I know who they are.’

  ‘Soldiers?’

  He looked a bit surprised, then nodded. ‘Two so far. Tsen knows. They’ll never be allowed to leave now. But I’m certain there are more in whom the disease has yet to show itself. How did you know?’

  ‘When did you last sleep, Belli?’

  ‘I slept last night.’

  ‘You dozed on your couch. When did you last sleep a full night in your bed?’

  He turned away from her. Around the eyrie all eyes in the assembled crowd were following the dragon. ‘Tell Baros Tsen T’Varr that no one may leave the eyrie for another month at least. After that, for the month that follows, I will inspect any who must depart for sign of the disease. I should be able to see it by then. Really, everyone here or everyone who ever has been should keep to themselves for half a year to be sure.’

  ‘Half a year?’ Chay-Liang laughed. ‘I’ll tell our t’varr but I can’t be sure to make him listen.’ The dragon was circling high over the eyrie now, still clutching the cage in its claws. Higher and higher, and then it simply crushed the cage in the air above them. Little specks began to fall. They were too high for Liang to see their flailing arms and legs or to hear their screams but she found she could imagine them clearly enough. The dragon tucked in its wings and dived after them, snapping them up one after the other.

  ‘Couldn’t you simply have made them into more Scales, Belli? Did they have to die?’

  ‘I could. I have no need of any more, but I could. Don’t underestimate the Hatchling Disease, Li. It’s a slow and insidious killer that will grip half an eyrie before it even reveals itself. Entire cities have died of it because it’s never seen until it’s already spread far and wide. All who live here need to understand that. Tsen’s right to set an example. He’s right to make everyone afraid to their very bones. A dozen men or women lost is a sadness, a tragedy, but a small one. If the disease spreads though the eyrie, I’ll do what I can to contain it. But if it ever gets out, Li, you have no alchemists, no resistance, no defences, nothing. It will savage your cities. Your sailors will carry it, unknowing, across to other lands. You can see that dragon, Li, but you cannot see the Statue Plague. No, Tsen’s right to do this, although he shouldn’t have let the dragon eat them. He’s reminded it that we’re food.’

  ‘Did it have to be so cruel?’ The dragon was coming closer. Falling like an arrow, guiding itself with twitches of its tail. As the last few slaves fell past the eyrie towards the desert below and the dragon rocketed after them, Liang glimpsed Zafir. She was pressed down hard on the dragon’s back, dressed in the dragon armour Liang had made for her.

  Belli shrugged. ‘All I said to Tsen was not to let the dragon eat them.’ He shook his head. ‘Her Holiness may have suggested otherwise. Still …’ He looked out over the crowd in the dragon yard. They were still silent. Stunned. ‘You can’t deny it’s put his message in their heads. Her line always did have a flair for the dramatic when it came to spilling blood.’

  Liang stared out over the desert. The dragon was somewhere underneath them now. She shook her head. ‘And all this because some idiot soldier took a Scales to their bed? Wouldn’t that person be the first to show the disease? And why? Why would anyone do that? They were told, all of them. You could hardly have been more clear!’

  ‘I wonder that myself.’ And from the way he looked at her she knew he wondered something else too. ‘I don’t think it was from a Scales. They’re all men, and for that very reason. The slaves with the disease are almost all women. If a soldier caught it from the Scales and then spread it, it would be a soldier who was both very busy and had uncommon tastes. Besides, the Scales all deny it.’

  ‘So did the slaves we just fed to a dragon.’

  ‘They had the disease, Li. There’s no doubt of that.’ He shook his head. ‘No. It definitely came from one of the kwen’s soldiers. I suspect more than one.’

  ‘If it wasn’t from a Scales then how did that soldier have it in the first place?’

  Belli looked away. ‘An injured Scales, bleeding perhaps. We’ve had a few of those. A smear on a man’s hand just before he eats, perhaps that could do it.’ He didn’t sound or look convinced; in fact he sounded as though he was making up stories to hide something he already knew perfectly well. ‘Perhaps someone has come too close to a new hatchling or one of the tools used to clean it. Although I’ve taken even more care than usual about such things.’ He sighed. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t matter. It will happen, now and then. As well to get the first outbreak over with. What matters is that it never gets off this eyrie. No one who has it can leave.’

  The dragon rose from the desert and landed on the eyrie walls with a spreading of wings and a thunderclap of wind. It licked its lips. Zafir released herself from her harness, dismounted and walked towards Liang. She carried her helm under her arm and came with a swagger, her short slave-cut hair rising
in sweaty spikes as she ran a hand through it. She seemed filled with an energy that dragged men’s eyes after her like slaves on a leash. Even Liang could feel it, the tension and the pent-up possibilities that raged, barely contained, around the dragon-queen when she came back down from the sky.

  ‘Your craftsmanship is superb, Lady Enchantress.’ Zafir gave her a tiny bow with only the slightest edge of mockery and walked away. Liang silently swore. She knew she despised this woman, knew she was right to, but still, here and now, it had felt as though the sun had come out from the clouds to shine on her for a moment before casting her back into shadow.

  ‘Poison,’ she muttered to herself, quietly enough that Belli wouldn’t hear. ‘That would do it.’

  A handful of slaves climbed over the battlements that night and lowered themselves to the desert floor in a cage suspended from one of the cranes on the eyrie rim. Slaves with the disease that Bellepheros had missed, preferring to take their chances with the desert than with a dragon. The alchemist shook his head when he heard.

  ‘Well, you can understand it,’ Liang said to him.

  ‘There’s no shame to being eaten by a dragon.’ He only looked sad. ‘Better than having your joints slowly seize one after the other until you can’t move, until your skin is as hard as stone and you can’t even breathe any more.’ Not that they’d last that long in the desert sun but Tsen sent the dragon to find them anyway. Liang and Belli watched it fly and then they walked among the eyrie slaves, Bellepheros poking and prodding yet again at the soft parts of their skin. They talked of deserts as they worked. She told him of the Godspike and the Queverra. He spoke of his own home, of the Desert of Sand and Stone and the Plains of Ancestors. Of a people he called the Syuss who seemed to Liang like their own desert tribes but who had dragons too. ‘The desert around Bloodsalt was the worst. Worse than this.’

  The dragon came back. By the end of the day they’d found four more slaves with the first signs of the disease. This time Tsen had them thrown quietly over the side in the middle of the night. Liang wasn’t sleeping anyway any more so she came up to watch. She listened to the screams as they went over the edge one after the other. Afterwards she went to Belli to wake him up because she’d realised she knew the answer. When she reached his room though he was already up, pacing back and forth.

  ‘It was her, wasn’t it? She’s got the disease too, hasn’t she? Just like you have it. She’s how those two soldiers got it. Not some Scales.’

  Belli shrugged and nodded and didn’t know for sure, but yes, he certainly thought so, and he told her what the kwen’s men had done and how Zafir had taken away all his cures and how he’d quietly been making more.

  Over the next few days the alchemist tirelessly inspected slave after slave while Liang looked for the first inevitable victims among the Taiytakei. Slave or Taiytakei, the alchemist gave them potions and promised them long and happy lives if only they would drink it daily. Tsen was more ruthless. He waited a few days until the epidemic seemed to have stopped, and then the Taiytakei who had it all vanished one night. Liang never knew what he’d done to them. Thrown them off the edge, she supposed. At least they weren’t fed to the dragon. She asked about the two soldiers but found they’d gone over the side too, a few days back with their throats cut open. Liang had wondered, until she heard that, whether the story Bellepheros had told her was the truth or whether the rider-slave had made it up, but when she cornered Chrias Kwen himself and he spat at her and demanded to know how she dared to ask such questions, she saw shame under the mask of outrage, or was it even fear? And so the slave Zafir hadn’t been lying; and though it was another reason to be rid of her, it was hard to despise her quite so much after that. After that, Liang wasn’t sure what she was supposed to feel about anything any more.

  At last a cluster of glasships drifted in across the endless blue sky. The desert was starting to change now, growing a little more life to it. In the distance Liang could see a ragged line of hills. She had no idea where she was. Somewhere to the north and to the west, she supposed. Not far from the Godspike, though too distant to see it even from the height of the eyrie. She wondered idly whether the dragon and its rider had ventured that far, whether they’d found it and stopped and stared in wonder at something that would make even them seem small.

  Chrias Kwen and most of the other Taiytakei with colourful robes and ornate feathered cloaks and long braided hair left the next day, carried away with the glasships. The eyrie stopped, hovering above the naked stone of the earth. Belli stood beside her as the glasships floated away. He rubbed his chin where one of the Taiytakei soldiers had hit him.

  ‘They shouldn’t have been allowed to go.’ Saying that once too often to Tsen was what had earned him his bruise.

  ‘A t’varr does not command a kwen,’ Liang said, and they stood in silence a while until the glasships were specks in the distance. She looked at Belli when she thought he wasn’t looking back. Watched his face as it gradually changed from strain and fatigue to something else. As that little frown she’d come to love crept over his eyes, the one that said he was thinking. They were slowly breaking him. She’d seen that in the last few weeks. The dragons and then the rider and then everything Tsen wanted, all of that had been more than enough; and now the disease. They were grinding their only alchemist away, piece by piece, and yet he still had a spark in him. She smiled and would have hugged him if hugging a slave hadn’t been wholly disgraceful, and then she thought of the moment when the Regrettable Man had ripped open his throat and she’d been sure for a few seconds that he was dead. How that had felt. It seemed so long ago now. ‘Come to me, Belli. When you need help.’ She took his hand and squeezed. No one would see that. ‘There’s only so much either of us can do, but we will do it.’

  He turned to her, and there was that spark still bright in his eyes and the frown, deep enough to have made its way into a question at last. ‘Your glasships in Khalishtor drew power from black stone towers,’ he said. ‘You said they need to after every journey. How do they draw their power here?’

  ‘From the eyrie. They draw it from the stone on which we stand.’

  ‘And from where does the eyrie draw its power? What keeps it up?’

  Liang shrugged. ‘We have no idea. Not the least shred of one.’

  ‘So this might simply fall out of the sky at any moment?’ He laughed. ‘That might be a blessing.’

  Liang laughed with him. ‘It hasn’t fallen for the last hundred years so why would it fall now? A glasship will fly for a few days before it fails. Baros Tsen’s eyrie is something else. Something older and greater than us.’

  They stood together. Dragons could fly without rest for … Bellepheros said he didn’t know and Zafir had said the same. Longer than any rider could last, certainly. They might get hungry and they might get angry and they would grow hotter and hotter from the effort until they caught alight and burned from the inside, but they never actually tired.

  ‘The Silver Kings,’ Belli said quietly, as much to himself as to her. ‘We have their relics too, here and there.’ He straightened himself. ‘Is it coming, then? This war you said would never be allowed to happen? That’s where they’re going, isn’t it? And the dragon will fly to fight beside them.’

  Liang didn’t answer that. She didn’t need to. It was hard keeping secrets in a place like the eyrie where everyone lived on top of everyone else and all of them in the shadow of Zafir and the terrible dragon to whom slave and master alike were nothing but food. ‘Something is coming,’ she said eventually. ‘I don’t know what. I still can’t believe Tsen would allow it.’

  Belli shook his head. ‘Ach! We had our speakers and you see how they become.’

  He left her then to make the last preparations for the dragon to fly. To liste
n to Zafir chide and mock and berate him. To suffer it in silence and bow and call her Holiness, as he always did.

  ‘You could be rid of her,’ said Liang softly in his ear as the last day came close. ‘She takes your potions every day. I’ve seen her. So does the dragon. You could be rid of both of them. It would be so easy.’ Bringing the dragon and its rider into their world had been a mistake. She saw it now. It was clear as glass if you stepped back and looked, and Belli had been telling them exactly the same from the very first day. But Quai’Shu was mad, Jima Hsian hadn’t come to the eyrie for weeks, the kwen was a kwen and even Tsen, who was a better man, even he wouldn’t believe the danger until the damage was irrevocably done.

  Belli looked at her and smiled a sad old smile and there just might have been tears in his eyes. ‘I am a preserver of life, Li, not a taker. When a man puts aside what’s good in him to serve a cause, often it seems to me that he later forgets where he put it.’

  ‘Then I will do it. Show me how.’