by Stephen Deas
Madness. Had to be.
*
Tuuran passed through huddled groups of Taiytakei dead, their armour battered and their bright cloaks ragged and scorched. They smelled of burned feathers. They’d been fierce and proud and terrible once, glorious and regal, but now he looked at their faces and saw the wide eyes, the terror and the blank incomprehension. They hadn’t known what to do, any of them, and all the armour, all that gleaming glass and gold and all those bright colours, their shields and their batons that hurled lightning and their wicked spiked ashgars, all of those fell away to nothing and they were just men as scared as a virgin oar-slave. It made him want to laugh. Laugh at them for their mad pride, laugh at Crazy Mad for thinking he was any better, at himself for refusing to be scared of even a hundred-foot monster made of fangs and fire that tore cities apart for fun. Or of a man whose eyes turned silver, for that matter.
The dragon lowered its head to the ground as if to look at them, and that only made it seem even bigger. Its eyes were the size of a man’s head and slitted like a snake’s. Its teeth protruded from its jaws, bone swords. There were great tears in its wings and gashes through its scales. Blood ran down its flanks and dripped onto its claws and onto the rubble beneath, but it had won, and victory poured out of it in waves, for that was all that mattered. It stared at them, unblinking, as if to ask what in the name of the Great Flame they thought they were doing. Then it cocked its head and rubbed it against the ground. Laughing at them, if monsters could laugh. Tuuran bared his teeth and laughed right back. He lifted his axe over his head and held it in both hands.
‘I am Tuuran, dragon-rider, ’ he roared. ‘And I am Adamantine.’
The two men came right up to Diamond Eye’s head. Zafir was about to ask them who they were when Diamond Eye did the strangest thing. He cocked his head to one side and rubbed it against the ground. Zafir blinked. It was a rare gesture. She’d seen it among her dragons when they fought one another for mates but she’d never once seen it used to a human. It was submission.
‘Stop it!’ she hissed. ‘Get up!’
The big one grinned at the dragon and lifted his axe over his head. ‘I am Tuuran,’ he roared. ‘And I am Adamantine.’
She frowned and stared at him because something about his voice was familiar. It was the first voice she’d heard from her own land for months that wasn’t Bellepheros. Maybe that was it. An Adamantine Man sworn to serve the speaker of the nine realms.
Slowly she climbed down from Diamond Eye’s back. Slowly because half the harness was missing and because she was starting to feel how everything hurt, how much a toll this battle had taken on both of them. The dragon’s wounds looked terrible but they wouldn’t slow him. They’d heal, and so would she.
When she was on the ground, Diamond Eye lazily lifted his head. The Adamantine Man stood still and impassive, towering over her, patient and not afraid at all, the way an Adamantine Man should be. The other had something about him, something that had caught Diamond Eye’s interest. Not another guardsman – his skin was too dark, he was too short and he didn’t carry an axe, and yet … It was the sensation she’d had before, a scent of something. What is it, my deathbringer? What is it about him?
The Adamantine Man wasn’t moving. He waited patiently. Are there any more of you? Her heart beat a little faster. She took off her gauntlet and held out her hand, the one that still wore the Speaker’s Ring.
‘I am Zafir,’ she said. ‘Queen of the Silver City. Speaker of the nine realms. Come closer.’
The dragon was watching him. Not Tuuran, not anything else, but him. He could feel it and he could barely move. Its rider whispered something. The dragon lifted its head but its eyes never left him. And, sun and moon, it struck him to the heart, the most fearful thing he’d ever seen or would ever see again, vast and made of death, and most of him wanted to quiver and empty his bladder and his bowels and fall sobbing to his shaking knees and beg and sob for a mercy that simply didn’t exist. And yet he didn’t. And he ought to be terrified but he wasn’t. He felt almost … proud, and it was a pride that didn’t belong to him, but came from the thing he carried inside. Fearless and fiery. Like seeing a long-lost son grown strong and powerful and master of the world around him.
That was what scared him far more than this monster.
The rider climbed down, stiff and awkward, and Berren could see how much pain she was in. But she was proud too, and she had a strength in her face. Her short hair was plastered to her pale skin. There were cuts on her face and streaks of blood but she wore them well. Her armour was battered and cracked and broken. A proper soldier. The Bloody Judge in him approved. And when she stood in front of Tuuran, no matter how the big man dwarfed her, she looked him in the eye without hesitation and held out her hand.
‘Come closer!’ The rider spoke with the same accent as Tuuran.
Tuuran stared at her hand and then he fell to his knees, bowed and pressed both his head and the shaft of his axe to the ground. He was shaking. All his poise was suddenly gone.
‘Speaker of the nine what?’ Berren muttered. ‘I know we don’t see many women, but—’
The big man was on him in a snarling blur of speed: ‘You come from Aria? Well, slave, this is my empress, and you will still your tongue or I will cut it out, despite all that has passed between us!’ The rider watched them both, unmoved. Amused perhaps. She certainly wasn’t afraid, but then why would anyone be afraid who had a monster like that at their back? Berren held up his hands. Old words came back to haunt him, knocking him off balance. Dragons for one of you. Queens for both! An empress!
The rider ignored Berren and kept her eyes on Tuuran. ‘I’ve heard your name, Tuuran of the Adamantine Guard. You served the alchemist Bellepheros. You served him well, with your blood and your heart, and perhaps better than he in his turn served you.’ Her voice was strong and proud. ‘Will you serve me, your speaker, in this land?’
Tuuran dropped to his knees again and pressed his head against the broken flagstones. ‘From birth to death, Holiness. Nothing more, nothing less.’
She was a slave. The understanding hit Berren like a rock between the eyes. A slave from the same land as Tuuran, with the same accent and the same pale skin. But a slave on the back of a dragon. A slave who’d thrown down the palace of a sea lord!
Her eyes shifted. She was looking at him now. ‘And you? What is your name, sword-slave?’
‘Berren,’ he said without a moment of doubt. ‘I’m Berren Crowntaker. Berren the Bloody Judge of Tethis.’
83
Blood
The holy queen of the Silver City asked him questions about places and people and realms and armies which felt like they belonged to another life, and Tuuran answered them. Beside him, Crazy Mad stared at the rider and the dragon stared back. At Crazy Mad and only him and nowhere else, and its eyes were intense and intelligent and filled with questions. The queen never said, but Tuuran understood. Despite what she was, despite the dragon she rode, she was a slave. A prisoner of the Taiytakei like all the rest of them, and he was but one man, and there was no great army come for her.
It took most of the time they talked before Tuuran realised that they’d met once before. She was the girl from the Pinnacles, the one who’d stabbed a man to death, the one for whom he’d kept silent and had been sold as a slave. He wondered if she remembered him. Probably not, he supposed. After all, we soldiers all look the same, don’t we? He found it didn’t much bother him. Here she was, proud and a queen and on the back of a dragon and furiously alive. It made him smile. He’d done something good then, once long ago.
When they were done she did the strangest thing. The speaker of the nine realms took his hand, the one that held his axe, and touched it to her lips.
‘Go,’ she said. ‘Find your way back to me.’
<
br /> She turned away and climbed into the dragon’s harness and Tuuran retreated into the rubble, pulling Crazy with him. The dragon spread its wings. It stared at Crazy Mad one last time and then began to run, and the wind of its ascent showered them with stones and broken shards as big as a man’s fist. Tuuran watched them fly, staring long after the dragon was gone, a distant speck vanished into the horizon over the burning city and the desert beyond.
‘I understand,’ he said when he finally tore his eyes away. He nodded to himself. ‘I understand why I’m here. Why my fate sold me into slavery. It’s for her. I have served my speaker. I will serve her again.’
‘Well, you do that,’ snapped Crazy Mad. ‘I have to go back and find the man who made Vallas do what he did. I have to find out who he is and what I am.’ He seemed out of sorts now the dragon was gone, but at least his eyes were his own. Normal and human. ‘How? How am I supposed to do that?’
‘Every man has his own destiny.’ Tuuran could almost read Crazy’s thoughts. Whatever he said, a part of Crazy wanted to follow the dragon and the woman who rode it as well. To find out who she was and why dragons filled his dreams. Wasn’t hard to see. After all, didn’t everyone?
Crazy Mad stared out into the sky where the dragon had gone. ‘Thanks for that, big man. Something a bit more helpful next time, eh?’
Out around the towers Taiytakei soldiers were stirring again. The dragon was gone but the invaders still had business, finishing this city and its lord. Some were already picking their way into the stumps of the ruined towers. There was no fighting any more, just a smashed-up palace full of … stuff.
Tuuran offered Crazy Mad his hand. ‘Come on, slave! You can ponder your existence later when your pockets are stuffed with some rich bastard’s silver.’ When Crazy Mad waved him away, Tuuran shrugged. ‘Well, I’ll be sure to loot something nice for you, eh? Don’t get left with nothing, Crazy.’ He picked up his shield and trotted away to disappear among the ruins.
When he was gone, Berren Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge of Tethis, sat alone together with the last little voice of someone who had once been called Skyrie, listening to the far-off crash of the waves and the crying of the gulls. Listening but not watching, because his eyes were staring into their own reflection in the blade of a gold-hilted knife. The knife that severed souls. The knife that could cut pieces of people away. And he was wondering what it was that he carried inside him.
What did they do to you, Skyrie?
*
When the dragon came back, the hatchlings shrieked and screamed and flapped their wings, straining at their chains, clamouring its victory. Baros Tsen watched it land. He made a show of being slow and not very interested as he ambled across the eyrie to look. It was damaged, bloody scars streaked across its belly and its flanks, but there was a savage joy in the way it held itself. The rider was much the same. He watched her slide off the monster’s back and stagger as if half dead, pulling off her armour piece by piece and letting it fall as she walked. She moved awkwardly, held her head gingerly, and he could see bloody scars on her face and the bruises around them. He smelled her before she reached him. She stank. Yet she had the same look about her as the dragon: gleeful and filled with a fierce pride. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. She was only a slave, after all. A slave he’d thought to be dead by now. He could correct that mistake and have her killed right here and now. Should, really, but he had to know what had happened first, how it really was. ‘The slaves of Bom Tark are no more?’ he asked, aware of any ears that might be near.
She looked him in the eye, unblinking. Smiling. ‘I flew as I was asked, Baros Tsen T’Varr. I found a city and I tore it to pieces. There were ships too. I’m afraid most of them are gone. There was no resistance of any great consequence.’ Arrogance dripped from every word and gesture.
Tsen forced himself to look at her. ‘Destroyed? All of it?’
The smile didn’t change but the gleam in her eyes brightened. ‘Oh yes, Master Tsen. All of it. Every part a shattered smoking ruin. I doubt many survived at all.’
‘Then you have done well, slave.’ He waved her away, and waved at the air as well, hoping the smell of her would quickly follow. Turned his back. So the Watcher had betrayed him? The Elemental Man had allowed Dhar Thosis to die? It was against everything for which the Watcher and his kind stood and yet they’d let it happen, and so Sea Lord Shonda had been their advocate all along, not their adversary as Tsen had thought. A terrible thing had been done and the world would think that he had ordered it. A savagery not seen across the Takei’Tarr for hundreds of years.
He closed his eyes. Someone would die for this, but he had something even the Watcher hadn’t known. A second witness to the truth. Chay-Liang. And now what? Turn the eyrie back towards Khalishtor? Abase myself in front of the lords and navigators and give them the truth and Chay-Liang’s word and demand that the Elemental Men explain themselves? Or … Or perhaps not. He smiled. Now there was a thought. He would enter the Crown of the Sea Lords, yes, but not to abase himself. There would be uproar. They would demand his head and the destruction of his house, the dismantling of his fleet. He would be passive, sorrowful, head bowed. Yes, he would say. It is a terrible thing that Shrin Chrias Kwen has done. And yes, when I am sea lord then he will be caught and he will be punished and every memory and trace of him erased. Of course. And yes, when I am sea lord then reparations will be made and Xican will make every effort to restore Sea Lord Senxian’s heirs to their glory. And the outrage would continue, for he might as well have turned to them all to tell them where to stick it and thumbed his nose in their faces, but then he would hold up his hand. Aria, he would say. Something must be done. Here is that something. And the Crown of the Sea Lords would shake at his words and he would lead them out onto their balconies, each one to their own Path of Words, and they would all stare at the dragon perched atop the Crown and their outrage would fall silent and they would choke on it. He’d send the dragon away, and whatever it was they wanted done to Aria and its Ice Witch, he would do it for them. And they would pay; and his t’varrs would talk to other t’varrs about extended lines of credit and cancellations of loans and the remains of his fleet would be saved and Quai’Shu’s dream with it, and all would be well, and he would get away with it because he hadn’t done this. He would get away with it because the Elemental Men had permitted Dhar Thosis to die. Because this was their design in the end, not his …
The smell hadn’t gone away. The dragon-rider slave was still there. He almost struck her, the first time he would ever have raised a hand to anyone. She deserved it after what she’d done, but then he saw what she had in her hands. The hilt of a knife, and he saw which hilt of which knife. And it wasn’t that the knife didn’t have a blade, only that it was so thin that he couldn’t see it. And he realised then that the Elemental Men hadn’t permitted anything at all and that he was utterly and completely ruined. He closed his eyes. And what were you thinking, stupid T’Varr? That was the dream of a kwen. It would never have worked. Someone would simply have killed you.
‘You tried to murder me,’ she said and tucked away the bladeless knife once more. He couldn’t answer. ‘As you see, I require a bath.’ The same smile, exactly as it had been since she’d landed. ‘And your ear, or I will burn your whole world black. Do you understand me?’
She didn’t wait for him. She strode off, limping, and he followed, for what else could he do? All the way through the spiralling white-lit tunnels of his eyrie to his most private sacred space, the baths he’d built at the eyrie’s heart. She shrugged off her dragon-scale and slipped off her shift at the edge of the waters and never looked round, only raised a hand to beckon him to join her. He closed the door behind them and watched her step in, wincing at the water’s heat. Other men might have looked past her ugly pale skin and her muscular arms and leg
s and her hard curves with no softness in them at all, past her bruises and her scars and the streaks of dried blood. When Tsen looked at her he felt … nothing. He ought to be feeling outrage and fear and disgust, that was what he ought to be feeling. And maybe some dread, and he ought to be calling his black-cloaks to have her killed and thrown off the edge of the eyrie for what she’d done, but what did it matter when they were already both as good as dead? At least this time she didn’t try to flaunt herself. Today her eyes were hard. The pretence of anything tender was gone. She was, at last, her true self.
He followed her into the water and poured a glass of apple wine for each of them. She took hers from him in silence.
‘We are alone,’ he told her. ‘Truly alone. No one else will hear. You have my ear as you asked, slave. Speak then, for when you are done I will very likely have you killed.’
She looked at him long and hard through the steam from the hot water that caressed his skin. He sipped slowly, savouring the exquisite taste of his wine. No sense in not enjoying it. He wondered how long it would be before the news of what he’d done to Dhar Thosis reached anywhere that mattered? Days? A few weeks? And then the killers would come. How long depended on whether any glasships had escaped. Perhaps she could tell him that.