Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  Tsen took a deep breath and let out a heavy sigh. The dragon was a dot in the distance now. He watched it until it was gone. ‘Well, you can’t stop the dragon, can you? So you’ll have to stop the rider. She’s a slave and she will do as she is told and if she doesn’t then we’ll just have to find another one.’ He sighed. ‘Come back to me when it’s done. And you’d better send the alchemist to me first. If you have to leave a dragon to wander alone with no rider, let us hope he knows what to do.’

  ‘Rockets!’ Bright streaks arced from inside the city, exploding in brilliant light high overhead. Tuuran watched them. He couldn’t stop laughing, even when a moment later more followed, and then more, raining into the ships and the sea around him. Boulders crashed into the water ahead as the ship turned to face the land. One hit a fireship. The decks exploded, the keel snapped in two and the ship broke apart, scattering flaming debris across the water. Burning splinters rained across the decks of Tuuran’s ship. Someone screamed. Tuuran caught a blur of flames and rushing movement out of the corner of his eye but when he turned to look, whoever it was had already gone over the side and into the water. Patches of the sea around them were burning as though the water itself was aflame. No ordinary fire. The ship had speed again now, racing at a shallow angle to the wind behind them. Over the noise of the fighting and the fire he heard the oar master below, screaming at his slaves.

  ‘Ready rockets!’

  ‘Hoy! Crazy Mad! Berren! Skyrie! Bloody Judge or whatever you are today! Where are you?’

  Lights flashed on the island behind them followed by the distant thunder of lightning cannon; and then the sky lit up as more rockets came, hundreds and hundreds streaking from the shore towards the half of the fleet that had turned towards the island and hundreds more streaking back. As they landed the whole sea seemed to catch fire and Tuuran was glad his own ship had gone a different way. He found Crazy Mad at last, doing the sensible thing and hiding behind the fire shield. Tuuran shook him and pulled him out, pointing at the islands around them. ‘See! Look!’

  ‘What?’ Crazy Mad was hopping up and down in front of him, cringing at the sky as more rockets flew overhead. ‘See what?’ A thunderclap split the air. Tuuran jumped and turned to look but there was nothing. Then it came again, a jagged bolt of lightning from the island. It struck a ship, lighting it up in a blinding moment of white. Its decks shattered, the ship vanished back into the murk.

  ‘That.’ He pointed to the islands and to the black stone monolith rising out of the sea and the golden towers that topped it. ‘I heard the dark-skins talking! That’s the Kraitu’s Bones!’ It towered over them, taller by far than the cliffs of Xican, right up to the sky, reaching for the clouds. Beneath it fire swept over the water, driven by the wind. Glorious.

  ‘What about it?’ Another barrage of boulders and fireballs flew out from the city. They were well within range of the rockets now.

  ‘The Palace of Roses.’ Tuuran cringed and then laughed again as a rocket flew across the deck above his head.

  ‘So?’ Crazy Mad almost dragged him down. ‘Khrozus! And you say I’m the crazy one.’

  Tuuran just laughed and laughed. ‘Do you realise where we are? No, you don’t!’ He could see the shoreline clearly now, lit up by all the fires. They were still too far away to see if there were men out on the dockside to defend it, but there would be. They’d be Taiytakei.

  ‘So how about you tell me!’ Crazy Mad winced as something too fast to see zipped through the air between them.

  ‘Dhar Thosis, Crazy. This is Dhar Thosis. Where you wanted to be. I told you I’d get us here! Didn’t I tell you that?’

  Crazy Mad’s smile was as wide as the sea. His eyes lit up a brilliant gleaming silver.

  After the Watcher was gone, Baros Tsen T’Varr walked slowly over to the little hatch, always locked from the outside, to where the gondola pilot was when the glasship flew. A golem, a mindless automaton that just did what it was told. Usually.

  He opened it. ‘You can come out now, Chay-Liang.’

  67

  Purpose

  The dragon called Silence waited beside That Which Came Before long after the little one was gone. It toyed with seeing whether it could catch another but soon lost its appetite for such games. Once had been amusing; again was dull. Its attention wandered. It had been here in Xibaiya for a long time now, far longer than its usual passage. The thought came that perhaps it was putting off returning to the realms of the living. Perhaps it was waiting for the silver ones who had sent it here to find other matters to occupy their minds. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps …

  Perhaps it was afraid?

  Silence wasn’t sure why it should wonder such a thing. Dragons had no notion of fear for themselves, nor any reason for one. A dragon was immortal until the end of creation as far as it knew, although the end of creation was fumbling mindlessly right there in front of it. Perhaps immortality was not as stark a thing as it had once seemed.

  Afraid?

  Dragons understood fear. They understood it perfectly. They devoured it in their prey but dragons were not afraid.

  Perhaps there was some need to show this.

  The dragon called Silence left the Nothing where it was, creeping and unravelling, and went in search of an egg. There were fewer to be had than before, far fewer but still enough. Most of them were in the places that it remembered. A few were somewhere far away from the rest.

  It chose the few.

  I am Silence. I come, world of the living, awake and alert and filled with what I know.

  And hungry. Always hungry.

  The Sea Lord

  68

  Sail, Fight, Freedom

  The air shook with the whoosh of rocket after rocket being fired from the carts on the decks. Berren blinked and watched them fly, hunched down, hands over his ears. A boulder crashed into the water a hundred feet to the side of the ship, shooting a plume of water into the air. A few seconds later a fine smear of spray misted his visor. Absently he wiped it away, still watching the rocket trails arcing towards the city. There were more in the air now, a whole skyful of them coming back the other way. Another hurled boulder hit the ship in front of them, shattering its stern in a shower of wood and splinters. Pieces of the vessel drifted away as its mast toppled and crashed into the waves. He hardly noticed. Just stared, hypnotised by the rockets. They seemed to move so slowly and the brightest of them didn’t seem to be moving at all, just getting bigger and bigger …

  ‘Down.’ Tuuran threw them both to the deck. The rocket slammed into the front of the ship and exploded in a fireball. Slaves and Taiytakei alike rushed forward with buckets of water while flames shot up the ropes and bit into the deck and foresails. The ship turned sharply, grinding past the sinking carcass of one of its companions, and started to lose way. Men thrashing in the water screamed for help as they drifted past. The splintering cracks of snapping oars rose over the shouts and the roar of the fire and the booms and thunderclaps behind them.

  Berren drew his sword and sighed for the moonsteel blade he’d once had, a sword that someone else now carried in his name. It was priceless. Only one place in all of the worlds made moonsteel, and that was in Aria. Black as night, yet now and then the steel would shimmer with silvery moonlight and sometimes he even saw the moon itself shining inside the sword. It cut through mundane mail as easily it cut through flesh and bone and it never lost its edge. The enchanted blades of the Ice Witch, an irreplaceable gift from the Sun King for services he’d once rendered and now he had this: a plain ordinary blade, duller than he would have liked, yet another reminder of the life the warlocks had taken away from him. If they were here in this city, somehow he’d find them. He’d make them tell him what they’d done and why, and how to make it back the way it was, and then he’d cut out their sordid black hearts.

&nbs
p; Another ship powered past in clear water. Others were coming out of the lightening sky. Dozens more were wallowing, adrift and ablaze. Ships from the armada, ships that had been caught at anchor in the harbour. Distant fire glowed ahead through the mist and the clouds of smoke drifting across the sea; the shore itself was lost now, hidden in the haze. The air reeked of black powder, burning his nose. For a moment the noise of the rockets stopped, the sudden quiet punctured now and then by the splash of a boulder striking the water. They were moving again, picking up speed. Sail-slaves with buckets of seawater ran back and forth putting out the last of the fires and hurling the bodies of the dead over the side. Booms and rumbling thunder echoed across the waves from behind. The smoke grew thicker. They were getting close.

  ‘Swords! Archers!’ More and more Taiytakei appeared on the deck now, armed and armoured for battle. Slaves too. Suddenly, weapons were everywhere. The ship heeled. ‘Lines and grapples!’ Berren thought he saw a flickering light in the smoke. Then another and maybe an outline. Something tall and dark. A mast. They turned hard again and yes, he was right: out of the smoke came the shape of a second ship. There were shouts across the water as the two glided towards each other. For a moment no one seemed sure whether the other ship was one of their own or an enemy, then a storm of fire arrows rained down on them. Even as the archers were still shooting, the ships came together. He felt it through his feet. Not a crashing blow but a glancing, grinding, oar-snapping impact. An arrow hit his helmet and glanced off, staggering him sideways. Another hit his brigandine coat, winding him. It hung limply from the leather, stopped by the metal underneath. He looked at the sword in his hand again. A short stabbing weapon, the sort he’d learned to use long ago in Deephaven. The sort his thief-taker master had once had. What would you make of me now, Master Sy? All those years you spent hunting after the man who took your kingdom, and now here I am embarked upon the same, far away from home just like you were, chasing after warlocks as you once did. But it’s not a kingdom I’m after.

  ‘Grapples! Lines!’ The enemy were so close he could almost reach out and touch them. Men on both sides screamed as arrows found their marks, as archers fell from the rigging. Berren slid his sword back into its scabbard and crouched behind the fire shield and checked his weapons one last time. Sword on one side, a ravensbeak on the other – a small hammer-and-pick thing for finding the joints in men with too much armour for a blade. There were spears on offer and javelins and crossbows, but crossbows were slow and heavy and spears were no weapon for fighting in city streets. He’d seen other things too, fire globes like the ones the Prince of War had used half a lifetime ago to reclaim his kingdom. Staves made of glass and gold that Tuuran said would shoot lightning like the wands the galley slavers had carried. Black rods that neither of them understood, but such devices worked only for the Taiytakei, not for sword-slaves who might steal them and run away. Or worse, turn them on their masters.

  ‘Sword-slaves!’ Tuuran raised his axe. Berren had no idea where he had found it, but it was enormous and having it seemed to make the big man happy. The ships were bound together now by a dozen grapples. Fists punched the air. ‘Sail! Fight! Freedom! No quarter!’

  Sword-slaves and Taiytakei alike swarmed over the side. As they did, another group of Taiytakei dumped a heavy chest in the middle of the deck and kicked it open. More weapons. ‘All slaves are sword-slaves today,’ shouted a Taiytakei solder. He picked up a couple of spiked cudgels and pressed them into the hands of the two nearest sail-slaves as Berren ran past. ‘You fight!’ he bellowed. ‘Sail! Fight! Freedom! Fight or die!’

  ‘Sword-slaves!’

  Men rushed to the chest. On the deck of the other ship Tuuran was already laying about him with his axe. Berren grabbed a rope and swung across, dropped, rolled sideways and fetched up against the body of a fallen Taiytakei in glass and gold plates. Around him, slaves too slow or too stupid to do anything but gawk were cut down. A battle madness was growing inside him as it always did, a hunger he had no choice but to embrace.

  A man fell out of the rigging above him, stuck by a dozen arrows. The enemy were scattering, some bolting below decks to hide or beg for mercy, others leaping over the side towards the shore. Sword-slaves and sail-slaves and even oar-slaves were swarming across, filled with greed and killing lust, hands clenched around their knives. Most of them had no armour at all, like most of the sailors that lay dead around the deck. Berren scurried across the ship and peered over the other side. Arrows came from the shore, thudding among them, fired blind perhaps but no less dangerous for it. Bolts of lightning came with them, shattering the air with their thunderclap roar, striking the hull, the mast. He saw one catch a hapless sail-slave, hurling him away in a stink of ozone and crisping skin. The smoke had thinned enough for Berren to see the docks. The ship they’d taken was moored to one end of a long floating wooden jetty that reached to the shore. At the far end soldiers were waiting for them, crouched behind huge metal shields. A dozen bulky black creatures stood around them, motionless. They were the shape of a man but half again as tall and as broad as two. Now and then an arrow struck one of them and stuck, quivering, but they seemed not to notice.

  Golems. Tuuran had told him all about the Taiytakei and their golems but he’d never seen one before; even Tuuran had only seen them from a distance.

  The Taiytakei with the golden armour strode out into the middle of the deck and raised his lightning staff. He screamed at them all again, ‘Sail! Fight! Freedom! No quarter.’ The words were ringing from his mouth when an arrow struck him in the side of the head, hard enough to stagger him as it ricocheted off his helm and away across the water. A crack of lightning followed, the thunderclap making them all cower and cringe, but the Taiytakei stood unmoved while his glass and gold armour crackled and sparked. Berren was breathing hard now, full of the fight. The air was rotten with the stench of rocket smoke. He crouched beside Tuuran, trying to damp down the battle madness.

  ‘I don’t think—’

  The Taiytakei with the golden armour levelled his staff at the shore. He let off a bolt of lightning that left Berren’s ears ringing. He could hardly hear a thing now but he didn’t need to. ‘No quarter!’ Tuuran’s eyes were mad. With sail-slaves and Taiytakei solders at his heels he launched himself towards the enemy; and as he did, Berren fell to his own madness and followed.

  69

  Desert Twilight

  ‘Kwens like you will no longer be needed when I’m done.’

  Zafir smiled at the kwen who was showing her the direction to fly, then pulled down the glass visor on her perfect helm. She climbed the ladder to Diamond Eye’s back and buckled and strapped herself into the dragon’s harness. They leaped together from the eyrie walls, dragon and rider, and rose towards the desert sky. She took one look along the line of the rising sun and then flew the way the kwen had pointed, urging Diamond Eye up high, on and on until the sky was a deep burning blue and the horizon sun was fierce and relentless and the eyrie nothing but a violet-shrouded speck lost in the haze of the ruddy ochre ground below. When she was sure no one would see her she turned east, the way Tsen’s other kwen had wanted her to go. She had no idea why Tsen had given her a different place to fly to and could hardly have cared less. She was on the back of Diamond Eye. She was alive. For a time nothing else mattered.

  The miles passed. Up so high she had no sense of the distance, no feel for the change of the ground far below. She felt only the wind, the push of it against her, and revelled in the perfect sight of the enchanter’s visor. A dragon-queen, first and last and always. In the hours that passed up in that thin bright sky she lived the months before the Taiytakei had taken her all over again, slowly stepping through them, looking for the mistakes she must have made, the little signs and signals of all the betrayals and failures that had later come. When she didn’t find them she made them up. A little word her
e that she’d never questioned but had meant more than it seemed. A look. A glance. A twitch of the lips. Wasted effort and she knew it, but she couldn’t help herself. It was better than going back any further, to the Pinnacles and to the princess locked away in the tiny lightless room, more afraid of what would happen when that door finally opened than of anything else in the world.

  The sun shifted. It rose to its zenith and began to sink. The pressure in her bladder grew. She ignored it as long as she could. Dragon-riders learned these things. No water before a flight. Starve yourself. Drink little and often when thirsty. She had skins of water beside her, a saddlebag full of them for the blistering desert heat, yet she touched them as rarely as she could. When she lifted the visor to drink, the wind in her face made her weep. Some riders arranged their harnesses to allow them to stand up and piss in the wind and go on but Diamond Eye had been saddled for war, for battling King Jehal over the Pinnacles or over the Adamantine Palace, and no such thoughts had been in his rider’s mind back then.

  She flew as long as she could and came down only because she had to. By then the light was failing, the sun dipping close to the horizon behind her, a ball of angry orange fire. How long had they flown? Most of a day. She’d pay for it tomorrow, legs and hips and back stiff and full of aches.

  The ground was still a hazy tan blur, passing leisurely beneath them. Diamond Eye had flown for hundreds of miles in a single straight line and yet they were still in the desert. How far did it go? It had changed, though. She saw that as they came lower. Not quite the arid lifeless place where the eyrie had been; there was more to the earth now than rock and sand. A great plain of dirty brown stone, scarred with dried-up riverbeds and littered with thorn trees clinging to whatever life they could find. Huge slabs of rock lay scattered about, flat-topped and a hundred feet high with crumbling craggy cliffs. Mesas like the ones at the edge of the Maze, the lifeless carved canyons of stone with their rivers which rushed from the lush peaks of the Purple Spur not a hundred miles from the Adamantine Palace that had once been hers. The land there had been like this, broken, not quite lifeless, not quite dead and dry but so close it barely seemed to matter. No one lived in these places. Except in the world she’d come from that hadn’t been true. The Red Riders had lived in the Maze. They’d made it their home, there and the Spur, a constant thorn in her side, and Jehal had told her and told her and told her to deal with them until finally he’d done it himself and taken their dragons to add to his own. Was that the moment he’d turned against her?