Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  They ground to a stop. For a moment she hung helpless, and then with a sudden jerk Diamond Eye righted himself. The blast had flattened half the fortress, blowing the fires out and scattering burning pieces up into the air like blossom in a gale. She watched as three burning globes fell out of the sky and hit the ground and bloomed into balls of fire, but there was nothing left to burn. There was no one moving any more. Zafir felt the dragon’s puzzlement. For a moment he didn’t know what to do.

  Her skin tingled. The air around them fizzed. Her thoughts became muddled. She didn’t quite know where she was any more, or who, or why …

  The lightning from the third tower hit Diamond Eye squarely in the face. Zafir caught a flash of light so bright that it left her momentarily blind and a thunderclap so loud that her ears screamed. She couldn’t see and she couldn’t hear. Diamond Eye fell limp beneath her. The rage and the hunger and the fury all vanished at once. Suddenly she couldn’t feel his presence at all.

  The room. The locked room. Wrapped in darkness. Fear of the light. That was all she was. It took her with it and the world went black.

  74

  The Titans

  There wasn’t much fighting left to be had by the time Tuuran and Berren reached the sea again. Hundreds of sword-slaves, thousands maybe, had come ashore from their little boats. No one had stopped them and now Tuuran and Crazy Mad passed them running the other way, heading deeper into Dhar Thosis and away from the sea and the spreading fires. No quarter – they’d all had that shouted at them until their ears were ringing. They were sword-slaves, bred to the lash at the oars of a galley but strong enough to have survived; and now here they were, let loose on the very people who’d enslaved them. They would not be kind. The roaming gangs had hungry faces and violent eyes. They looked Tuuran and Crazy Mad up and down, saw the colour of their skin and the swords and armour they wore and passed on with a nod and a growl. Closer to the shore, as the gangs thinned, houses burned, sometimes with men and women still inside and knots of sword-slaves at the doors with spears, laughing and poking them back into the flames. They passed bodies in the streets, Taiytakei torn from their beds and hurled out of their houses and ripped to pieces. Crazy Mad didn’t like it but Tuuran couldn’t have cared less. They deserved it for what they did, all of them.

  They passed a half-dozen sword-slaves dragging a pair of screaming women into an alley. The slaves had already left one body behind them, too small to be a grown man.

  ‘This isn’t how an army should behave,’ Crazy Mad muttered.

  Tuuran laughed at him. ‘This isn’t an army, madman! This is a horde. A mob. Besides, war is war. Victory is to crush your enemy so utterly they can never stand against you again. Annihilate them if you can.’

  Crazy Mad scowled back at him. ‘No. Victory is to be better than what you overthrow.’

  ‘Ha! Then slavers or not, I think you’re on the wrong side of this battle.’ For a fraction of a moment, Tuuran hesitated and remembered the girl from the Pinnacles. It had been right, what he’d done, and was this any different? But then he shook his head and walked on. It was different. The Taiytakei were his enemies, all of them.

  Berren stopped. The big man was right. Not that he cared, but he was right, and the Bloody Judge would never have let it be like this, and the screaming from the alley wouldn’t let him go. He stopped and turned back, letting Tuuran walk on without him. The body left on the street was a Taiytakei, a boy no more than about ten. He’d had his throat cut.

  He drew his sword. The Bloody Judge in him wanted to run into the alley, rush the sword-slaves and cut them to pieces. Kill maybe three of them before the rest could gather their wits. But he held the killing fury back. The alley was so narrow they wouldn’t be able to surround him. He had a sword and good armour, and for all their numbers they had neither; so he came up on them and drew his sword across the alley wall hard enough to make sparks and get their attention. It was dark, shielded from the dawn light across the water, and the air was hazy with smoke from the fires around the docks. The sword-slaves had one of the women pinned against a wall, the other forced down on her knees. The women looked small and helpless. ‘Stop!’

  The nearest sword-slave faced him down. ‘Piss off.’ He peered. ‘You could almost be one of them.’

  ‘But I’m not, and I’m telling you to leave these women be.’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or I’ll kill you, that’s what.’ Berren opened his arms to them. Daring them.

  The sword-slave spat and drew himself up. ‘There’s plenty more. Go find your own.’

  The fury came so quickly it took him by surprise. He let out a roar of rage and lifted his sword, but the fury brought something with it this time, something from deep down. Something that wasn’t his, that had been left behind when the warlocks had ripped him from the battlefield and consigned him to the pit under Tethis. He wasn’t quite sure what happened after that but the sword-slaves were gone and the alley was empty except for the two women, screaming as though they’d been set on fire. A fine cloud swirled around them all, black ash that must have blown in from the docks. Berren took a step towards the nearer woman. She cried out and shrank down the wall, blubbering, Please please please.

  ‘I’ll not hurt you. You should run. Run hard and run far. If anyone chases you, look for narrow places where big men in armour will be slow. Or high places where heavy men will fall or dark places where you can’t be seen.’ The first rules a Shipwrights’ boy learned. He was surprised he remembered, but he was wasting his breath. The girl was lost to her fear. For some reason she seemed more afraid of him than she’d been of the sword-slaves.

  ‘There you are,’ grunted Tuuran from the mouth of the alley. ‘Now what?’ Berren turned. Tuuran was frowning at the two women. ‘I thought you didn’t approve of this sort …’ He stopped and stared. Then he looked at the women again. His voice became strangely calm and quiet. ‘You two, you should probably go now.’ Tuuran took a step back himself. ‘Run. Go! Shoo! Quick!’

  Berren stared at the big man. He heard the two women run out of the alley and away. ‘What?’

  ‘You’re doing that thing again.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘That silver eyes thing. Weren’t there some of our comrades here just now?’

  ‘They ran away.’

  Tuuran sniffed the air and took another step back. ‘Right …’

  ‘Well, they didn’t just vanish into thin air.’

  The big man shook his head as he turned away. ‘Really? And exactly how sure are you about that?’

  Berren glanced back down the alley. The two Taiytakei women were gone. The black ash was settling on the ground and on his armour. It was greasy and it smelled bad.

  ‘You stink of burned man.’ Tuuran strode out of the alley and whatever had happened there back towards the sea. Fast. To be away from Crazy Mad too, but Crazy ran after him.

  ‘Burned man? What does that mean?’

  ‘Means exactly what I said: you stink of burned man. Everything here stinks of burned man. You think I don’t know the smell?’ He tapped his nose. ‘Land of dragons, remember?’ They turned a corner and he could see the sea again, right there in front of him. ‘So. Those men …’ He stopped.

  Shapes were rising from the waves past the breaking surf. Stone giants with craggy features were breaching the water and heading for the shore. There were still boats coming in, the last stragglers. He watched as one of the creatures from the sea picked a boat up, tossed it into the air and smashed it to pieces.

  ‘Now there’s a thing.’ Flame! Now what? Tall as a house they were. Even Crazy Mad had stopped, frozen by the sight. The last gangs of sword-slaves were racing away from the sea, screaming and
waving their arms and pointing back to the giants as if Tuuran might somehow not have seen them. And they had the right of it, he decided: running seemed like a fine idea. He turned and shot down another street, shouting over his shoulder at Crazy, ‘They had people made of stone in Xican. Where I was for a bit when they took me away. They called them golems so I suppose those things are golems too, only … bigger. Big golems. Really, really fucking big.’ He was talking to himself and he knew it, but sometimes talking a thing out was the only way to deal with it.

  He kept running, heading for where he thought the first bridge was. Debris littered the roads again here. The windows over the streets were all smashed and broken glass crunched under his boots. Doors had been kicked in and houses were burning from the inside. Broken pieces of Taiytakei rockets lay scattered about. There was no movement except the odd soldier from the ships picking through the ruins. The tide of sword-slaves had already swept through this quarter of the city and everyone had either fled or was dead or hiding.

  Crazy Mad slowed and then stopped, a weird look on his face as though he’d been taken by a sudden urge to go inside a house and find out, in the middle of the city’s death, what these people who’d taken him for a slave were like. To see how they lived. Tuuran shook him and pulled him on, pointing back the way they’d come. ‘You want to wait for those stone things while they climb out of the sea or shall we keep moving?’

  Crazy Mad shrugged. ‘Depends whose side they’re on, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Did you want to go and tap them on the foot and ask?’

  They passed more bodies as they closed on the bridge. Taiytakei at first, men and women pulled from their houses and beaten and butchered. They caught up with the last of the looters, a group of sword-slaves carrying bulging sacks. Tuuran shouted at them to draw their swords and head for the bridge. They shook their heads and laughed at him. Disappointments, all of them, but he couldn’t really hold it against them.

  In a small square they passed a pile of corpses, a hundred or more thrown together and set on fire. Here and there Tuuran saw furtive faces staring at him from the shadows. City folk trapped by the roaming looters. The attacking Taiytakei had set their slaves loose on the city. No quarter! Do your worst. Take what you will. And after years of pent-up fury the slaves had become savage animals. These men would never forget and they’d never be slaves again, any of them. And the Taiytakei would know that …

  It hit him then: there wouldn’t be any ships coming to take them away. That was why all he’d seen so far were sword-slaves. The Taiytakei were holding back. They would sweep the city when it was all done and put down every slave they found, no matter for whom they’d fought. Or maybe they’d use their dragon. The dragon would be perfect.

  Bastards!

  The bodies changed. They passed more dead sword-slaves now, some riddled with arrows, others with scorch marks on their skin, and then even a few Taiytakei soldiers with their swords and armour stripped away. They were close to the bridge, three wide spans of gold-glass sitting on squat black piers and lined with a hodgepodge of huts and tiny houses. Towers on each pier rose above the main spans. At the far end another lone tower frowned over the sea. The din of fighting wafted across and flashes of lightning burst from the bridge and arced over the water. Three giant stone golems lumbering through the waves were heading for the bridge.

  ‘So. These golems, then,’ grumbled Crazy Mad. ‘Worked out whose side they’re on yet or do I need to go and ask after all?’

  Tuuran scowled at him. ‘Let’s just get to the bridge before they do.’

  75

  Vul Tara

  Zafir opened her eyes. She hung sideways out of Diamond Eye’s harness. The air smelled strange. Sharp and bitter. For a moment she couldn’t remember who or where she was. For that moment she was in a dark room and something was coming, something terrible that turned the pit of her stomach cold and made her want to be sick with fear. She gasped for each breath.

  The air filled with distant sounds. Booms. Thunder. She could smell smoke. Evenspire. I’m at Evenspire! The memory was like a knife. She jerked up and looked behind her, searching for the dragons that would come like rockets through the cloud, diving down at her Onyx to tear her to shreds, only it wasn’t her on Onyx’s back but one of her riders; and then Jehal would come and he’d be coming to save her, only he wasn’t and it was the great betrayal …

  No dragons. And the sky was a dull and cloudless blue, tinged with wafts of grey and brown smoke.

  Not Evenspire.

  Diamond Eye wasn’t moving. For some reason no one was running across the burning stone yard to finish her. She fumbled for the harness straps and undid them one by one, still on the edge of panic. She’d been here before. Sinking in the water. About to drown. A man made of silver. Haven’t you forgotten something?

  Her mind was playing tricks on her. Her head felt full of wool. Everything was unfamiliar. Where in the realms … ? She pulled the last buckle loose and fell off Diamond Eye’s back hard onto the scorched stone. Not the realms. And she was the Taiytakei’s dragon-riding slave and they’d sent her to war and someone had hit her with lightning. Her armour was splintered. When she sat up to look at it, much of the glass was crazed with cracks. The gold was smeared here and there as though it had started to melt. Which wasn’t possible. Was it?

  She laughed. And I’m still alive. A dragon-queen ! And then the laughter wanted to become tears because Diamond Eye still didn’t move, and without a dragon what was she? Nothing; and so now they’d kill her, or else they’d dress her in a whore’s silks and perfumes and pass her around among themselves, a novelty for their amusement.

  Her legs were shaking. However hard she tried they wouldn’t quite be still, but she managed to stand. She still had the bladeless knife she’d taken from the Watcher. No, they’d not have her again. Never.

  Across the open yard, among the burning pieces of whatever this fortress had been, men were moving. They ran quickly from one piece of cover to another. She wondered why, and then streaks of bright orange fizzed overhead and landed in a crazy pattern around the far end of the fortress and exploded in balls of fire. A few fell closer. Zafir stood and watched. Flames washed over her but her dragon-scale kept them at bay.

  The visor on her beautiful perfect helm was cracked. What do I do now? Without a dragon she was pointless. She stumbled to Diamond Eye’s side. He was hot, the exertion of the battle making his scales burn. She could smell the scorching of the leather in his harness. ‘Wake up! Be alive!’ She beat on his scales with her fists. You can’t be dead. You can’t! I won’t allow it! WAKE UP! But dragons didn’t sleep, not really. They didn’t do a lot of things that other creatures did. They didn’t breathe.

  Diamond Eye twitched. ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ Furious hammering against the dragon’s hide. Pointless. He wouldn’t even feel her. And yet perhaps he did, for as she screamed at him he lurched and raised his head and rolled to his feet, and she felt such a wave of relief and joy and …

  Fury!

  The force of it knocked her back. She stumbled and fell. Diamond Eye bared his teeth. His eyes burned and such a rage filled her head that she screamed, the only way to let even a part of it escape. The towers! The towers! She tried to turn her head towards the place from where the lightning had come but she could barely even move as the dragon’s fury crushed all other thought like a tidal wave. Diamond Eye threw himself into the air without her. The tower where the lightning cannon stood was glowing again, white hot. He crossed half the distance before it fired and a second bolt of lightning struck him, this time in the chest. Zafir closed her eyes and screamed at the noise and at the dragon’s rage and pain as his wings faltered and he smashed to the ground again, twitching and writhing. Wings and claws and tail lashed and struggled, pulverising everything around him, wood and stone and metal alike. Then violent joy burst in her as he staggered to his feet and launched
himself forward a second time. The tower was already glowing again, but not yet as brightly as before.

  Another thunderbolt, another blinding light, this from the other surviving tower. Diamond Eye shrieked and went down yet again. Zafir clutched her hands to her head. He was colossal inside her, crushing everything else, pain and rage and rage and pain drenching every corner of every thought.

  In the locked room, in the dark, with the fear and the dread and the pain to come …

  The dragon lurched to his feet once more. Three giant strides. He had his head down this time, mantling his wings to cover himself. The first tower fired again. More screaming pain and furious rage. Zafir fell to her knees. A desire burst inside her. A hunger. An understanding. Diamond Eye moved suddenly this time. Not straight for the tower of the lightning cannon but behind it, with a surge of speed that made Zafir gasp. Yes! The second cannon fired and missed and then Diamond Eye fell upon the first, ripping it apart, savaging the metal tubes that pointed to the sky. He tore one loose, held it in his foreclaws, reared up and hurled it at the last tower, smashing it into dazzling crackling sparking shards. The burning white of the growing lightning flickered and died. Sparks ran across the stones. Now Diamond Eye launched himself into the air and fire flooded from his mouth to douse the first tower. Bright flashes popped and crackled inside it. Zafir sat and watched, stricken with awe. Burn them! Burn them!’