Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  Neither of them heard. The grey dead man drew a knife from inside his robes, one with a blade like a cleaver and a hilt of solid gold with a pattern of stars that looked like an eye. It distracted Tuuran for a moment. It was the knife he’d seen before, that time he’d thrown Crazy Mad into the sea. The knife. Crazy Mad had talked about it enough after all.

  A deep groaning splintering trembled the air. The first of the palace towers crazed with cracks, bent and began to topple. The dragon turned towards them. Tuuran took a step closer. ‘Crazy Mad! Whoever you are! We need to—’

  Vallas clutched the knife. ‘Go, Crowntaker! Be about your work. You have no hold on me, not while I have this. It will crush even your soul.’ He backed away behind the knife, black shadows beginning to swirl around him.

  ‘Best you drop it then.’ Tuuran’s axe flashed and the grey dead man didn’t have a hand any more. The knife clattered to the stones. Tuuran pointed to the palace and glared at Crazy Mad. ‘Not here! Big fucking dragon make big fucking fire!’

  But Crazy Mad was staring at the severed stump; and then Tuuran stared too. No blood came from the wound, only wisps of black shadow. The warlock drew back his lips, bared his teeth and howled then pointed. The shadows flew from around him like daggers towards Tuuran’s throat.

  The stone snapped her head back. Pain shot through her neck, up into her skull and down her spine. She reeled and blinked and then pitched forward as Diamond Eye powered for the sky again. She couldn’t see. Her head spun. No, she could see, but everything was a blur, just formless light. The dragon wheeled and turned. A shape flashed past.

  The visor. The glass in her beautiful visor had crazed. She put a hand to her head to hinge it up and crunching brittle crumbs fell down her face and over her fingers. There was blood on her gauntlet. Hers. Her head throbbed and her neck squealed whenever she moved it, but at least she could see. They were between the great towers at the centre of the palace, Diamond Eye lashing at them with his tail as they passed through, sending more giant shards of shattered glass plunging to the ground, and then they were through and he arrowed for the last cluster of black-powder cannon.

  ‘No fire! No fire!’ But Diamond Eye was too lost in his fury to hear. Zafir pulled the visor down again and pressed herself forward, turning her head away, ignoring the howl of pain from her neck. Broken? No, it can’t be. Diamond Eye shuddered, breathing fire over whatever took his fancy as Zafir cringed on his back. The air shook. Heat washed over her. He turned and tore back into the sky and wheeled for the towers again. She barely had time to think before he crashed into one, gripping at it with all his claws. Glass shrieked and cracked as he tried to cling on, whipping his tail back and forth, striking the tower beneath him again and again. They slid down, pieces of gold-glass flaking away around them, a rain of deadly spears; and then they were falling backwards with half the tower coming down on top of them. Pieces clattered off Diamond Eye’s scales, off Zafir’s already cracked armour, and then the dragon rolled and spread his wings and they were away as the tower fell. A massive piece of debris struck another of the towers near the bottom. Glass exploded up and down the length of it, overwhelmed by the strain, and that too began to fall. Through the pain and the fury and the fatigue and the terror, Diamond Eye’s joy surged into her.

  ‘Down,’ she whispered, exhausted, finished but exultant. ‘Down. Enough.’

  The dragon turned. He cocked his head as if listening for something he could barely hear. And then, for once, he did as she commanded.

  Berren snatched the knife off the road. As the shadows ripped at Tuuran he buried its blade into the warlock’s chest, right where his black heart should have been. He felt no resistance at all, as though Vallas was made of nothing more than smoke, but he wasn’t surprised. He’d done this before. Dismay stretched across the warlock’s face and a pulse of fire swept down Berren’s arm. His vision filled with ghostly faces. He could see Vallas before him, doubled, one figure made of skin and bone and the other a shimmering ghost of something else. He saw two Tuurans, two of everyone, of each slave who ran past them, staring at these mad men who’d chosen here and now of all places to fight while the palace above them burned and was torn to pieces by a monster. The ghost shapes filled his vision and howled in his ears, and inside the second Vallas he could see the web of the warlock’s soul, an endless tangle of threads like a spider’s web wrapped within itself, exactly as he’d seen his own once before.

  Tell the knife! Make it your promise. And then cut, Berren, cut! Half a lifetime ago Vallas’s brother Saffran had held this knife – this one or its twin, Berren had never known which was which. He’d put it into Berren’s hand and made Berren drive it into himself and see his own soul, displayed just like this. He’d made Berren make three little cuts, snip, snip, snip. Three little slices. You! Obey! Me! Saffran Kuy had made Berren into his slave on that day; and though Tasahre had saved him, the hold had remained, and even after Saffran was gone there was still the hole of what he’d cut away, and Berren knew without knowing how that that hole had something to do with what Vallas and the last of his warlocks had done to him in Tethis.

  And now he’d find the answers. Saffran was dead, killed by the same knife. Berren remembered every moment of that day in Deephaven with perfect clarity and now he made three little cuts of his own, and with each cut the knife sliced a little piece of Vallas away. Three little slices. You! Obey! Me! He pulled the Starknife away from the warlock and held him fast. ‘Let him go!’

  The shadow serpents faded. Tuuran dropped to his knees, gasping and clutching his neck. Berren gripped Vallas by the throat. ‘You tell me now, warlock, you tell me what you did in Tethis. What spell you put on me and then you tell me how it can be undone!’

  The warlock let out a hacking laugh in Berren’s face. ‘The spell should have pulled the Bloody Judge out of his body and put him in yours, and Skyrie the other way with the thing he carries inside him. That was the spell we put on you but it didn’t work.’

  Berren’s fingers tightened around the warlock’s throat. ‘Didn’t work? You liar! How is it undone?’

  Vallas Kuy howled with glee. ‘There is no undone. It failed. The Bloody Judge stayed exactly where he was. He remains still stamping his swords up and down the Dominion, bringing our brothers to their ends one by one, filled with the Sun King’s favour.’

  ‘No! It did not fail. I am Berren Crowntaker! I am the Bloody Judge!’

  ‘I don’t know what you are but you still carry what Skyrie carried. What’s left of him is in you and I am glad to have found you again.’ He held out a hand. ‘Come, brother. I’ve spent years seeking you out. Come, and we’ll see what’s to be done.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me!’ Berren couldn’t stop himself from screaming and something changed in the warlock’s face. The laughing faded. Vallas was looking at Berren eye to eye now, a slow fear filling him, and in the warlock’s eyes Berren could see the reflection of his own. They were silver. Bright burning silver. Vallas tried to pull away.

  ‘See! See! We brought you back! We did!’

  ‘Brought who back? Who am I, warlock? Who am I? What thing is it that I carry?’

  Vallas struggled some more, his face sucking in on itself. ‘You are Skyrie!’

  ‘No, warlock, I am not. No riddles, or I swear I’ll cut you to pieces.’

  ‘You already have, Skyrie.’

  Berren drove the knife into Vallas again. Now when he saw the web of the warlock’s soul, he saw that the strands were unravelling, snapping and falling slowly apart, whole chunks splitting away and fading to nothing. ‘What are you doing, warlock? What’s happening.’

  ‘I’m dying, Skyrie. You have killed me.’

  ‘No! Not this knife. This knife doesn’t cut flesh and I haven’t even started on your s
oul. Stop it!’ And he was sure it was true, nothing more than he’d once done to himself. ‘Stop it! I command you!’

  ‘I don’t even know how,’ Vallas sneered, and then his eyes rolled back. ‘Goodbye, Skyrie.’

  ‘Don’t you dare die! Not before you tell me!’ Berren dived inside the warlock’s memories and found them filled with a small bitter man from the marshes that Kuy had found nursing a grudge – Skyrie, so easily turned with a few sweet lies against the Bloody Judge. Flashes of the Dark Queen Gelisya, of Tethis, of spells and incantations, of potions. Desperation as the Bloody Judge drew closer. Kuy’s last grand scheme. Skyrie for the Bloody Judge in their last stand, and yes, it was all as Kuy said and he truly believed they’d failed.

  ‘You ask me who you are, Skyrie, but that’s not the question. The question is what?’ The last strands slipped through each other.

  He dug deeper. There was another. A man with one eye … Gleefully Berren seized on that one fleeting memory. No, not Kuy’s grand scheme. Someone else! The man with the half-ruined face. And then with the web of the warlock’s soul laid before him and the golden knife to guide him, Berren slowly began to see the cuts and the stitches, the delicate reshaping that had been done, even as it unravelled again before him, and it turned out that Kuy was just a puppet after all, strings pulled without him even knowing it. A masterwork of slavery to make even the most jaded Taiytakei coo with envy. Owned mind and soul by the man with the ruined face and the one blind eye. ‘Him! Who is he?’ Cutting and cutting, ripping Kuy apart as he searched for answers amid the collapsing memories before they were gone. Tearing them from the dying warlock’s thoughts.

  Saffran Kuy’s last apprentice. The one his eyes would never see.

  ‘Where is he? How do I find him? What’s his name?’

  Aria, Skyrie, where the Ice Witch keeps him in a gilded cage but doesn’t know what he is or what he can do, what he brings and what he hides. He gave you a gift, Skyrie, one that not even she knows.

  ‘Gift? What gift?’

  Vallas faded. His eyes closed. When Berren let him go he fell limp to the street. Tuuran was looking from Berren to the warlock and back. He shifted uneasily. ‘You’re doing that eye thing again,’ he grumbled, and then he lifted his axe and cut off the warlock’s head.

  ‘He was already dead,’ murmured Berren. What am I? What gift?

  ‘Well then, now he’s even more dead.’ Tuuran poked at the warlock with his foot. He kept glancing up at the ruined palace.

  Something inside me? Was that Kuy playing with him, taunting him to the end? Berren turned and stared back down the street towards the glass and gold bridge and the island of castles and the city of Dhar Thosis beyond, filled with flames and wrapped in smoke. Vallas hadn’t lied. He’d seen it in his dreams right from the very start. At the water’s edge, eyes filled with tears and the stars winking out one by one. Dying but he wanted to live, wanted it so badly he’d do anything at all; and there he was, the man in the hooded robes the colour of moonlight, with the silver-white face, one half ruined, scarred ragged by disease or fire, and one blind milky-white eye.

  ‘Are you death?’

  ‘I am the Bringer of Endings. Let me in.’

  And he had.

  Berren staggered away from the dead warlock, from Tuuran, from the wrecked and burning towers of the palace. That was someone else. Not me! I’m Berren! The Bloody Judge. That’s who I am!

  ‘Hey.’ Tuuran put a hand on his shoulder, slowly turning him back towards the shattered palace. ‘You found your warlock and there’s a rampaging dragon smashing and burning and doing what dragons do. Can we go now?’

  Berren shook his head and stared at his feet. Go? Go where? He’d come for answers and despite everything he’d actually found Vallas, and after all that the warlock had given him almost nothing. ‘I have to go back to Deephaven. I have to go home.’

  ‘Good for you!’ Tuuran clapped a hand on Berren’s back and started off up the road towards the palace. ‘I might come too. Still reckon there’s a great big fight brewing back there.’

  The flood of fleeing slaves had become a trickle. Berren stared at the warlock lying on the stones. ‘Well, where are you going now then?’

  Tuuran turned and grinned. ‘The dragon’s come down. Shame to come all this way not to see who’s on the back of it, eh?’ He shrugged. ‘Besides, there is that small matter of a palace full of night-skin lords and all their treasure. Might be some fun to be had there, I’d say.’

  Berren followed him because he couldn’t think of anything better to do with himself. Sure. Stand in front of a dragon. Why not?

  82

  Who I Am

  Diamond Eye circled the stumps of the two broken towers. The third still stood, a great chunk smashed out of one corner, a maw of jagged glass teeth tinged with gold. The ground was a litter of glittering pieces like a sea of diamonds, and among them lay the bodies of men and women, slaves and soldiers, Taiytakei and others fleeing as the towers came down on them. Zafir felt the dragon’s satisfaction. She felt her own. No remorse, not a shred of it, not even the idea of it. Slavers. You brought this on yourselves.

  There were Taiytakei soldiers still alive. She saw them hiding in the shadows, cowering behind piles of rubble, watching the dragon to see what it would do. Soldiers from the ships to cheer and wave their swords at what she’d done perhaps, or soldiers from the palace, the last few defenders, too afraid to run. She didn’t care. She was done. Whoever they were, they’d take away what they’d seen and spread it like fire through dry summer grass.

  ‘Down!’

  Diamond Eye fell out of the air, wings tucked in and gathering all the speed he could. The wind wrenched at her, straining to pull her out of the saddle, but the harness was a good one and held fast even after all it had suffered. Bellepheros and his glass-worker woman, the enchantress, they would make her a new one. Tsen would see to it once he understood what she and her dragon could do. The world would change now, and for a while Tsen would be the engine of that change.

  Until she was done with him.

  She closed her eyes. The wind tugged at the skin of her cheeks, at her lips. As Diamond Eye shifted beneath her to open his wings, she leaned forward to press herself against him. He stopped almost dead in the air a few feet above the ground. The force crushed her, and the wind of his wings lifted and hurled the litter of broken glass into a storm of razor edges that cut through the air. He landed, head held high and twitching from side to side in silent challenge. If there were enemies waiting then Diamond Eye would know. Dragons did that. They felt your thoughts. There was nowhere to hide. They’d know you were there and they’d read your mind, and if you meant harm to their riders then they’d feel it before you even knew it yourself, and you’d burn.

  Dragons. Glorious. Terrible.

  She fumbled for the buckles on her helm that held it to her shoulders and tugged them apart. One fell to pieces in her fingers. A shame. Such beautiful armour all ruined now except the dragon-scale that lay beneath. The helm’s visor was a maze of cracks only held together by whatever force went into a Taiytakei enchanter’s art. The golden dragon curled across the crest was scarred, marked by flying stones and glass. For a moment she thought about throwing it away. Riding without a helm was like riding naked, free and open to the wind and with a frisson of danger, but she still had to cross the desert again, back to Tsen’s eyrie, and that was a long way to go with the howling wind in your face.

  If that’s where I choose to go. Zafir thought about that for a bit, then put the helm carefully down beside her and reached for a skin of water. She was filthy, drenched in sweat, sticky-skinned, bloody-faced and thirsty. You didn’t notice when you flew. Hunger and thirst fell away, lost in the ecstasy of the dragon. When you landed, it all came back. She tipp
ed almost all the first skin over her head, running her other hand through her hair and over her face, washing off the salt and the blood, then drank a mouthful.

  She wasn’t alone. Two men were creeping towards her, cautious and afraid but coming closer nevertheless, flitting from one pile of rubble to another, hoping not to be seen. Futile. Diamond Eye felt them so she knew they were there. And Diamond Eye was hungry.

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No more fire. Let them see us. Let them drink us in, us and what we have done.’

  Diamond Eye rumbled. Zafir undid enough straps to get out of the saddle and stand up high on his back. She looked around her one more time. Smoke and flames poured from broken holes in the outer palace. Five of the six lesser towers still stood but the sixth was a jagged stump. She didn’t even remember doing that. Bodies lay blasted against the walls by the wind of Diamond Eye’s landing, jumbled among the chunks of stone and iron and broken glass.

  ‘Sea Lords of the Taiytakei?’ She threw back her head and laughed. ‘Do you see me, lords of the sea? You think you are the masters of the world, but you are not. You will learn to fear. You will learn to beg. You will plead and none of it will save you. Not from me. For I am Zafir! I am the dragon-queen ! Do you hear me?’

  She waited. If there were Elemental Men here then they would come. If they had a way to touch her, she would only know as they appeared at her back and slit open her naked throat.

  Die slowly and badly, slave. I do not wish you well. The words of the Watcher as he’d prepared to kill her.

  ‘But it was you who died,’ she whispered. ‘I killed you and I have your knife. And as you say, I am what I am.’

  There were no Elemental Men. The two soldiers who now came towards her openly were sword-slaves, bared arms held high to show their brands.

  Mad. Mad mad mad, but Berren followed anyway. He tucked the warlock’s knife into his belt and gripped his sword and then wondered what, exactly, was the point. The dragon was enormous. Obviously it had been big, it had to be big. He’d seen it flying through the air, seen it smash the glasships over the docks. He’d seen it over the sea against the ships and he’d seen it over the island and over the palace. He’d seen the rider on its back, a mere speck against its bulk. He’d seen it lift up a giant made of stone and as tall as a barn and carry it high into the air and smash it on the rocks below. All these things. But on the ground with its neck and its tail stretched out, it was simply enormous. As long as a ship, maybe longer. And what was a sword going to do against something like that? Like the big man said: nothing. Not even annoy it. It scared him witless. A true monster that would eat him and barely notice. And yet … What was the eagerness he felt as he followed Tuuran, picking their way through the daggers of broken glass and the flayed bodies?