Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  And why was she thinking of him so much today? But she knew the answer. Because he’d betrayed her, and the last thing she’d seen on Baros Tsen T’Varr’s face had been that same look. That not-quite-hidden gleam of a knife, drawn and sharp, glittering deep in his eye.

  She picked one of the smaller towers of stone, a place where no one could possibly be alive. Diamond Eye glided down among the thorns and the arid earth. A cloud of dust rose around them, choking her as he flapped his wings, angry to be brought to earth. Never mind how many hours he’d flown, he wanted more, always wanted more. He was as fresh and eager and hungry as he’d been when they’d left. More, more, more; always the way with dragons but here in this place Diamond Eye’s hunger was greater than any dragon she’d ever known. They were dangerous things, dragons and their urges. They bled into their riders – the want, the hunger and the anger, the urge to fly and to burn, to smash and to crush. Thoughts bled the other way too. A rider had to be careful. She’d learned to control her feelings, especially in an eyrie with a hundred of the monsters around. Calm, always calm, never angry and most certainly never ever afraid. But it was harder in the air with the dragon’s own desires constantly nibbling at the edges of her thoughts, and when it came to a battle no rider lasted long. They caved in, one after the other, to the fury, to the lust, to the madness. If she’d known that before Evenspire – if she’d truly understood it – she might have done things differently. But she hadn’t, and so things had gone as they did, and Jehal had taken the chance that she’d given him.

  She climbed from Diamond Eye’s back, taking a skin of water down with her, and began to strip off her armour. In the eyrie she’d worn it as though it was tawdry and tattered. There had been eyes on her then, Taiytakei eyes, and she was the dragon-queen, haughty and imperious and filled with disdain for anything they could offer. Now she could be a child, gawping with awe at each piece, at the exquisiteness of the glass and the gold, of the construction so far beyond anything the smiths of the Silver City could ever have made. Beautiful. Almost the most glorious piece of craftsmanship she’d ever seen. Almost, except for …

  She stopped. Someone else was with them. Not that she could hear or see them but someone was, nonetheless. The dragon felt a presence and so she felt it too. Diamond Eye was casting his eyes around, thinking how hungry he was. Wary, Zafir put the last piece of her armour down and looked about. She wasn’t afraid – it was hard to be afraid with Diamond Eye beside her, his hunger pulsing out in waves through her thoughts. But cautious nevertheless, given who it must be and the look in Tsen’s eye when she’d left him. ‘Watcher, you should show yourself before my dragon eats you.’

  The Watcher appeared a little way away. He walked towards her slowly and carefully, and sat down cross-legged, keeping a respectful distance. ‘Your dragon will not eat me, slave,’ he said. ‘You are admiring the work of our enchantress. They are very fine pieces. Baros Tsen wastes her talents by keeping her at work in the eyrie. They would fetch a fine price and he could use the money.’

  A flush of anger washed through her. She’d been seen after all, after being so careful in the eyrie. By one of them. Diamond Eye bared his teeth and hissed behind her. Maybe she should let him eat the Elemental Man. But the Watcher was too quick. He’d vanish and then appear again behind her with his knife and that would be that. ‘I am impressed,’ she said at last. ‘And curious to know how they were constructed. But they are not the best pieces I have seen.’ Which was true. In the Pinnacles, deep under the Octagon and past the Hall of Mirages, there were the mysterious treasures the Silver King had wrought and left behind, carefully put away where no blood-mage or alchemist would ever be allowed to wake them up again; compared to those even the exquisite craft of Bellepheros’s enchantress seemed dull.

  ‘You are not flying the way you were told.’ The Watcher looked at her.

  ‘Is that so?’ She smiled and took a few steps away from the armour laid out around her, back towards Diamond Eye until she was standing almost beneath him. ‘If it is then you’ve taken a very long time to point that out. Do you intend to remain here for the night, Elemental Man?’

  ‘I do not.’

  Zafir stared at him, half-tempted to let him see the subtle signs and signals just to see if he’d bite. But she let the temptation go. He wouldn’t. He wasn’t the kwen, nor any of the kwen’s men. She wouldn’t snare this one so easily, at least, not that way.

  His face was stony. He stared at her and said nothing.

  ‘Well if you have nothing to say, killer, you will excuse me, but I’ve spent a very long day on the back of Diamond Eye and have only just touched the earth. Avert your eyes if you will.’ Not that she cared. She turned her back on him and walked another few steps until she was fully beneath the bulk of the dragon, stripped away the dragon-scale leggings, lifted the short soft skirt beneath and squatted. The relief was so sharp that she let out a little sigh of pleasure. When she was done she walked back and knelt across from the Elemental Man, picked up the skin of water she’d brought down from Diamond Eye’s back and drank deeply. ‘Is that why you’re here? Did you come to tell me that I’m going the wrong way?’

  Back the way she’d come, back towards the distant eyrie, the setting sun in the clear sky turned the desert and its mesas into islands in a lake of fire. The Elemental Man watched her drink for a while. ‘Did Baros Tsen tell you to do this?’ he asked.

  Zafir paused. Delicious water trickled down the skin of her throat. ‘I’m his slave, killer, not yours. Ask him.’

  The Watcher shook his head. ‘I do not need to.’

  ‘Then why ask me?’ She finished off the water and rummaged in her knapsack for something to eat. ‘Are there Elemental Women as well as Elemental Men?’

  ‘There are not. We are eunuchs.’

  Which perhaps explained a lot. ‘How disappointing for you.’

  ‘It is a small loss compared to the powers we learn. One that is barely noticed.’

  ‘But how can you know if you don’t know what you’re missing?’

  The Watcher snorted and Zafir couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or merely disgusted by the thought. ‘The temptation of our nature is strong enough. More would be ill advised. If such things are of so much interest to you, the Righteous Men who live in the depthless caverns beneath the Konsidar are able to change their shape at will. They are not as we are but they are born of a similar seed. They are masters of flesh and bone and they can adjust themselves with considerable fluidity when the need arises. Or the desire. Very few know this truth that I have shared with you, even among the Taiytakei. Enjoy it a while, while you can.’

  Zafir let out a scornful laugh. ‘Shall I suppose that you’ve shared this with me to spare yourself my further interest, imagining somehow that you had it?’ She shook her head. ‘But you did not. So have no fear of me, elemental eunuch.’ The knapsack offered her dry flatbread, hard enough to make axeheads, and salted meat. Linxia meat probably. Both made her grateful she still had all her teeth, and annoyed that she’d left the rest of the water on the dragon’s back. ‘Will you be a gentleman for me, Watcher? Vanish yourself to the back of my dragon and retrieve another skin of water for me?’

  ‘I will not.’

  Something in his voice was off. Not only disdain and disgust but something else. ‘Because I am a slave?’ But it wasn’t that. He was afraid of the dragon. She climbed up herself, took her time over it, found another skin of water and took a third to be sure and tossed them both down to the earth. Stripped to her underclothes, the air still felt warm but it was cooling. The sun was setting and the stars were beginning to show and the desert air was cold at nights. Not that she’d notice, sleeping beside the living furnace that was Diamond Eye. ‘Why are you
here then, Elemental Man, if not to stare at my strange pale body and let your eyes wander over it, not sure whether it attracts or repels you – yes, I’ve seen enough of that. It’s very hard not to notice these things and it tires me to the bone. But not from you, which makes your company a touch more welcome than otherwise. Nor from Baros Tsen, for that matter – is he a eunuch too?’

  The Watcher snorted. ‘You are not like Taiytakei women. Or men for that matter. You are tasteless and repellent.’

  Zafir laughed. ‘How refreshingly honest of you!’ Diamond Eye shifted and growled. ‘But that’s not what your kwen thinks, nor half his soldiers, or does it merely make them hate themselves all the more? That they cannot control their lust for such a degenerate slave as I?’ She reined in the flash of anger and with it her tongue. ‘Tsen’s tastes lie elsewhere, then? Forgive a slave for wanting to please her master.’

  The Watcher shook his head. ‘I have never been to your land. I am glad of that if all of your kind are like you. Baros Tsen T’Varr sips his apple wine and sings songs to himself and is happy and that is all. If there were a vice then I would know. You cannot hide from an Elemental Man.’

  The last words had a bitterness to them. He didn’t say anything more. Then he rose abruptly, snapped a stick from an almost-dead thorn tree and began to draw in the dirt.

  ‘Mai’Choiro Kwen told you where to fly. I saw and I heard his words. The city you will find is not Bom Tark. It is Dhar Thosis, seat of Senxian of the thirteen sea lords, and he is likely present.’ He drew a line in the dirt and then three islands and told her their names – Vul Tara, Dul Matha and the Eye of the Sea Goddess – just as Mai’Choiro Kwen had done. He told her, word for word, what the kwen had said so she could have no doubt that he’d been there too. He told her in a voice that was ruthless and fatally cold, a voice that said, quietly and without mercy or remorse, that she would die here on this stone on this night in the desert. When he was done, he looked her in the eye. ‘Sea Lord Shonda of Vespinarr is the most powerful man in the world. If he cannot hide his secrets, how will you hide yours? I know what you are doing, slave.’

  She met his eye. ‘Then stop me.’

  The Elemental Man drew a blade from his belt. Or rather, he drew the hilt of a blade with an edge too thin for Zafir to see. ‘Quai’Shu took loans that Tsen cannot repay. The other sea lords circle like sharks to devour his fleet.’ He stood up. ‘Stop you? That is what Baros Tsen T’Varr has asked of me. I wondered, with the truth before you, if it would make a difference. But, like the monster you fly, you are what you are. I hope you die slowly and badly, slave. I do not wish you well and I will not give you a quick and easy death.’ He turned his back on her. ‘When you are gone, Tsen will have to let his alchemist poison your monster. It is better for all this way.’

  ‘I am a slave, killer,’ she said. ‘Let me go. Let us all go. Back to my palace. Back as it was. I would be content with that.’

  ‘No,’ he said softly without looking back. ‘No, I do not believe you would.’

  He vanished. Zafir dived for Diamond Eye, to be as close as she could to the dragon. Too slow, always too slow when the enemy was an Elemental Man, and yet she saw him coming through the air, a haze of wind that rushed and then slowed and faded into being a man again, a rictus face of furious strain. Zafir crouched under Diamond Eye’s bulk, hissing at him, ‘Come on! Kill me then! That’s all there ever is, isn’t there?’

  He was breathing hard. She could feel Diamond Eye restless above her, peering down between his feet, trying to see. The Elemental Man screwed up his face and shimmered, half faded and then slipped back to solid flesh again. Zafir snarled. She reached for a knife she didn’t have, and that was that. He was going to kill her. The old way.

  He stepped towards her. Cautious, although surely he could see she was helpless. She stood to meet him. Quivering not with fear but with despair. She had to blink hard to keep the tears from her eyes. No pity for pretty little Zafir. She touched a hand to her breast. ‘My heart is here, killer. What’s left of it. Strike true.’

  ‘Think of it as a mercy,’ he said, and maybe he was right. Maybe that’s what it was, but she’d never know because he only took one more step before the tip of Diamond Eye’s tail flew like a spear out of the gloom behind him. It impaled him like the bolt of a scorpion and threw him through the air to land broken at her feet. And at the very last, as he lay dying, he didn’t even move. Just screwed up his face as if he were trying to shift to another form and couldn’t. Zafir stepped back. Diamond Eye lifted up one massive foot, stamped the Elemental Man flat and stared at her. She started to laugh. She was right underneath him and so his head was upside down. He looked faintly ridiculous.

  ‘No.’ She closed her eyes. ‘No mercy for Zafir. Never that.’ She looked up at the dragon. ‘But you? You don’t even know what that is, do you? Mercy?’ She looked down again as Diamond Eye lifted his foot. ‘And he was probably right. Have I ever been content? I don’t think I have.’

  For a long time afterwards she stared at the smear that was all that was left of the Elemental Man. She drank and ate and looked and wondered. Later she picked up his knife with its invisible blade and gingerly slipped its scabbard out from the mess that was the rest of him. When she was done, she curled up tight beside Diamond Eye. ‘You stopped him, didn’t you? You made his magic not work. I don’t understand. Did he think you wouldn’t keep me safe?’ She nestled closer to the dragon’s uncaring warmth. ‘Watch over me, Diamond Eye. He’s right. We are what we are.’

  She fell asleep, and her dreams were as they always were when she slept beside a dragon. Furious and filled with fire.

  70

  Death From Above

  Tuuran charged as another barrage of rockets fizzed out of the city from not far behind the docks. He hit the enemy hard. If the waiting soldiers had had bows he’d have been dead and so would most of the rest of them. But they didn’t and so he crashed into them axe first like a wild boar into a band of novice hunters, tossing them this way and that. As Crazy Mad and the rest came on behind him, more rockets shrieked in from the sea. They exploded, fire scouring the far end of the docks in a chorus of screams. From the corner of his eye he saw a man run and dive into the water, on fire from head to toe, but that was only a moment, a flash of something else between the arcs of death he flung before him. The soldiers in his way were sword-slaves, armoured in a hodgepodge of whatever had come to hand, some in nothing but leathers, others in mismatched pieces of steel. His axe battered them aside, cutting limbs and spraying blood through the air. This was what an Adamantine Man was made for. This was what it meant! He howled as his eyes searched for the men he most wanted to kill, Taiytakei in their glass and gold.

  More rockets hissed and shrieked back and forth from city to sea. The sword-slaves turned and fled from his axe but the golems were another matter, hulking brutes of black rubbery skin, terrible enough almost to quell the battle madness but Tuuran was having none of it. ‘Are you dragons?’ he screamed at them. Behind the screams and the clash of swords and the dull thumps of bursting fireballs and the roar of flames and the distant booms and thunderclaps, a deep rhythmic pulsing was building, louder and louder. ‘Are you? Because that’s what I was made to kill.’ He ducked under a clumsy swipe and split a golem in half with his axe, ripping open its belly. It fell apart and lost its shape like an overripe fruit and now Crazy Mad and the sword-slaves who’d followed him surged forward again. He felled another …

  A rocket howled out of the air and struck one of the golems, spitting it. It stood there for a moment, reeling, and then exploded. Tuuran stumbled back, blinded by the flash, only the gold-glass helm saving his eyes from the flames. All around him men staggered and screamed and clutched their faces.
There was a terrible smell of burning tar. When he blinked the brightness away, another of the golems was standing right in front of him. It had a wooden beam in its hands. It swung. He ducked easily underneath and inside its reach. They were large, too large to be men, but they were slow and had no notion of how to fight. He hacked at the golem, slashing it open. Black goo oozed from the wound. A substitute for slaves and cranes, that’s what they were. Enchanted creatures for loading and unloading ships in the harbour and little use for anything else. Beside him Crazy Mad stabbed and cut.

  ‘Get away from the shore! Get away! Into the streets! Quick!’ They’d broken through at the end of the jetty. More attackers were dashing past them. Out in the dawn smoke over the jetties other ships loomed. Wood snapped and splintered. Lightning flashed and thundered back and forth. The Taiytakei with the golden armour was urging them on and now he had others around him, more of the night-skins in their shimmering colours and their cloaks of bright feathers. They had short stabbing swords at their sides, their black rods too, but in their hands were the lightning wands, cracking and fizzing thunderbolts all around them. They carried shields, huge things of glass and gold, and spiked ashgars over their backs. Up and down the shore among the handful of ships that had rammed the jetties, smoke lay over a sea full of bobbing boats, oars straining furiously for the land. The throbbing noise was louder. Across the waves flashes and booms surrounded the island that the fleet had passed in the pre-dawn twilight as they’d lit their first fireships. Within the smoke the water was ablaze with misty glowing shapes, burning hulks and wreckage and pools of fire that floated and seemed to burn the very water itself. The sun had cracked the horizon far out to sea, shining straight though the carnage and the haze, throwing everything into silhouette. Tuuran could see all three of the islands now. The one they’d passed was low and shrouded in smoke while bolts of lightning flared like the sun, one and then another and another. The middle of the three islands, the tallest, must have been a mile away across the sea and he still had to tip his head back to look at the top of it. A great column of rock, sheer sides rising out of the water. With the rising sun behind it, its top glowed with golden fire. The third sloped up from the sea to the meet the cliffs of the second. A bridge crossed the chasm between, gleaming in the dawn with a dazzling fiery gold.