Authors: Stephen Deas
‘Remember to keep away from the little ones,’ he said absently.
The Taiytakei made a sticky sweet spongy bread which they dipped in their qaffeh and he'd acquired so much of a taste for it that even the thought was making his mouth water. ‘They're easily young enough to still carry the Hatchling Disease.’
‘They're dry. No residues of their birthing products remain.’
‘So they may seem but they need to be washed, Li. By the Scales. Did they all feed?’ No, wait, they did all of this yesterday didn't they? When the dragons suddenly popped out of the sky and filled the eyrie to its rim. Flame! There was nothing he could do for so many! Twenty-six Scales he'd prepared, far more than he'd thought would be necessary, and suddenly he needed five times that number. No. They'd started a feed and he'd run from one to the other, shouting and yelling at the Taiytakei and at all the slaves to keep away and stay underground and . . . and what? He pressed a hand to his forehead. He didn't remember coming back to his bed.
‘They were all washed and they were all fed, Belli.’
‘The adult? You're sure the adult fed? And drank?’
‘Yes.’ Liang bowed. ‘I saw to every one.’
He could have held her hand and cried. She was better at this than him, she truly was, and if he'd had it in his power he would have turned her into a true alchemist so there could be two of them and the burden of the dragons wouldn't be his alone and never mind everything else. But of course he couldn't, because there was no essence of the Silver King for her to drink and weld into her own blood.
‘Waiting for this?’ With a flourish she presented a loaf of Bolo bread and tore it in half. ‘Shall we break our night fast?’
He was shaking so much he didn't trust himself to answer but he took the bread and dipped it and let its sweetness melt over his tongue while he tried to push some order into his thoughts. If the dragons had eaten then they had his potions inside them. They'd be dulled for a while. It was the adult that mattered the most. If a hatchling woke they might still use the adult to hunt it down. If the adult woke and broke free then no force in the world would stop it.
‘The moon sorcerers.’ Li paused to wipe her lenses. ‘I think I never quite believed that The Watcher and our sea lord had actually met them. I certainly didn't think they ever left their island.’
Lists in his head. Checking them off one by one. He'd made a lot of potion over the weeks and months since they'd brought him the dragon blood he needed. As much as his own blood would allow. Enough for today but enough for how long after? He didn't know. Not for ever, not as the dragons grew. There would have to be a cull. Better to do it sooner rather than later then. But how to explain? He could lay it out to Li step by logical step. Yes, and she'd see he was right. But Tsen? And the sorcerer-assassin who watched over them?
He
wouldn't.
‘And you told me what a dragon would be and I had an idea in my mind, but . . . by Xibaiya, Belli, it's as big as a glasship!’
Did he have poison? Yes of course. Enough? No. What else did he need then? He screwed up his face. Lists. He'd have to write it all down. What needed to be done. Each step, one after the other.
O Flame, don't make me have to do this in secret! I can't, I simply can't!
‘Belli?’
And soon. Sort out what needed to be done. All of it while Tsen was away. Before his sorcerer spy came back from wherever he was. However long he had. Let it all be done without their say, one way or the other, that was best. Argue about it after the fact. But so much, so much, and it all had to be done today! As soon as he could!
‘Belli!’
Liang. If there was sense to it, she'd see it, she
would
. One thing they had in common, the way they thought. It bound them closer than their differences pushed them apart.
Help me, Li! You have to help me with this. Please!
‘Bellepheros!’
He jumped, his thoughts knocked sideways. She still called him that sometimes when he wasn't paying attention or when she was angry with him. ‘What? What is it, Li?’
She pushed another chunk of bread his way and nodded earnestly. ‘Qaffeh makes everything better.’ He smiled as she put her hand on his. ‘Chaos has come, Belli, but
we
shall make order. There's much to be done and some of it will be hard, but we shall prevail. You will show me what and why and I will stand beside those of your decisions that are right to my eye. You know this, Grand Master Alchemist Bellepheros, keeper of our sea lord's dragons. Tsen is in
Xican and will take days to get back here, if he comes here directly at all. The Watcher has gone to tell him that his dragons have come and even
he
can't travel such a way and back again in a day, and even when he does return, he'll not interfere. You'll do what you must, and I'll be beside you. So it's not so bad.’
Yes it is!
Bellepheros took a deep breath. He let it out slowly and forced away the lists and the whirl of all the things that needed to be done.
Maybe
she was right. Maybe there was time if he was organised enough. And efficient. And didn't forget anything, and had everything he needed to hand . . . A lot to do, though. A lot to do . . .
‘In fact, I don't think we'll be troubled much at all until the remnants of Sea Lord Quai'Shu’s fleet make it back to Khalishtor harbour, charred and ragged by the sounds of things. And surely the worst of whatever they carried is here already. It
is
already here, Belli? There's not some other secret about dragons that I should know?’
Bellepheros laughed, slightly hysterical. ‘Why? Isn't this enough for you?’
Li raised her cup and clinked it against his. She smiled. ‘I know. You're terrified!’
Bellepheros giggled again. Couldn't help himself. ‘Terrified? Yes! Of course I'm terrified. And if you're not then you don't understand them! One egg! I was ready to start from one egg and work my way up, not this. One slip, one thing forgotten . . . and boom!’ He threw up his hands. ‘Woken dragons. Your world ends!’
She rolled her eyes. ‘We're not helpless, Belli!’
‘Really?’
‘Really. The little ones don't bother me much.’ Then she frowned. ‘The big one? Yes, all right. Yes, that one . . . troubles me. Is that what you wanted to hear?’
Bellepheros sipped at his qaffeh. Swilling its bitter taste around his mouth calmed him a little. ‘Not really. But perhaps it helps to hear you say it.’
‘You'd have to be mad not to feel it. It's so . . .’ She threw up her hands. ‘Big. That's all there is to say, really. I could cage the little ones in glass and gold if I had to, or batter them with lightning. But the big one? No, I'm not sure I could make something to hold it.’
She reached across the desk and took his hand again and squeezed. ‘But you, you scrawny old man, are the master alchemist. They shouldn't frighten
you
.’
He gazed at her face, so full of compassion and determination. ‘Did you sleep at all, Li?’
‘Don't be silly!’ She laughed. ‘How could I?’
‘There are too many. They don't even fit in the eyrie!’
‘Very true.’
‘And I don't have enough Scales.’
‘I can see that.’
‘I don't even have enough potion! Not for so many. Not for long.’
‘Well, admittedly I can't see
that
. But I believe you, Belli.’ Her hand was still on his, still squeezing tight.
‘We don't have enough food.’
‘
That
I can help with.’
‘No, no. There's not . . . there's not enough. Of anything!’
‘I agree.’
He blinked. ‘What?’
She let his hand go and took a sip of qaffeh. ‘I agree. There are too many dragons. The eyrie isn't big enough. I'm sorry, Belli, but you'll have to get rid of some.’
‘What did you say?’ Was that a twinkle in her eye?
‘I said you'll have to get rid of some. Quite a few, I'd imagine. I'm sorry if that upsets you but sometimes hard decisions must be made.’ She watched him steadily and smiled. He probably imagined it but he could have sworn she winked too. She raised her cup. ‘To us.’
He raised his own but his hand was shaking so much that he dropped it and spilt qaffeh all over his desk. ‘Bloody bugger!’
‘Belli! Language!’
He got up and found a cloth to wipe up the mess. His legs felt wobbly. ‘Nigh on sixty dragons waiting outside means I can say bloody bugger if I want to! Bloody bugger, bugger bloody,
bloody bugger
!’ For a moment the world spun and he had to hold on to the table so as not to fall, forcing himself to take long deep breaths, slow and steady. Li was on her feet in a flash, holding him, holding him tight, murmuring in his ear.
‘You're a cranky old man but you're also brilliant and strangely likeable, and you can do this. You can.’ She held on to him tightly until the shaking stopped.
‘And you're a mad woman and a slave driver,’ he said softly. She let him go and filled his cup again.
‘You
are
my slave.’ She gave him his cup. ‘So tell me, truthfully, how many of them of them have to go? No, wait, let's have a wager. I'll wager I can guess. If I'm close, you make the qaffeh every day for a week.’
‘And if you lose?’
‘Well, it's not down to me to set you free and send you home, otherwise obviously I would, but since I can't let's just say that
I
make the qaffeh. I guess half.’
He told her how much more than half it would have to be. She simply nodded and didn't flinch at all and later, when she was bringing fresh qaffeh to his study each morning while the dragon yard was littered with hatchling corpses burning from the inside, he wondered whether that was when he'd fallen in love with her, or whether it had been much, much earlier.
In the stillness of the underworld the spirit of the dragon called Silence moved with wonder and deliberate purpose. It had come this way many times but on the previous occasions it had moved swiftly, eager for the call of a new skin, dulled dreamlike by the alchemical potions of the little ones. This time it was awake. This time it remembered. How? How did you make a poison that lingered even with the dead?
The dragon mused on that and then threw the thought away. It didn't move swiftly this time, but slowly. Carefully. Creeping among the ephemerals around it to the hole where the dead Earth Goddess and her slayer had held That Which Came Before at bay for so long. They were gone now and the hole was getting bigger and the Nothing was seeping through. The Nothing would kill more than dragons. The Nothing killed everything, annihilating all it touched. That was the nature of the Nothing. What it was called was what it was.
The dragon Silence lingered at the edge that crept ever further, staring, reaching in with its senses.
The Nothing. But its taste had a tang of the familiar nevertheless. The dragon dredged through ancient memories of its very first lifetime, hazy and dull from the centuries of alchemy it had suffered, until it found what it was looking for. When the Silver Kings had owned the world and the half-gods and the sorcerers had gone to war, it had scented this Nothing then. Just the once, right at the end.
Crazy Mad. Sinking into the sea, down and down, deep and dark and icy cold but at last he knew who he was. He was Berren, the orphan boy from Shipwrights’ in the city of Deephaven, and the warlock Saffran Kuy was upon him. ‘Dragons for one of you. Queens for both! An empress! The future, boy! See the Black Moon!’ And the gold-handled knife jerked and the blade pushed into his skin and his own hands pressed it deeper and deeper towards his heart and he screamed but there wasn't any pain. Instead he saw himself as though looking in a mirror, but he wasn't seeing his skin, he was seeing what lay underneath, his soul, an endless tangle of threads like a spider's web wrapped within itself
.
In the mirror there was something staring beside him
.
Gelisya the Dark Queen, a child back then, standing in front of him and holding something out. A black stone pressed into Berren's hand. She closed his fingers around it. ‘I suppose I have to give him to you now. I don't really want to because he's my friend. But I suppose you want him back.’
Facing him, no more than a few dozen yards away, he saw himself. He raised his javelin ready. His own face stared back at him, wild-eyed, spattered in blood
.
‘Well? Are you going to throw it or not?’
Silence remembered. It remembered fighting the gods themselves, burning the armies of their minions, crushing them, slaughtering their sorcerers. The splitting of the Quartarch. The scent of this Nothing belonged to the very end when the Black Moon had forged his greatest work of ice and the last of the silver ones had struck him down and the Earthspear ripped the world to splinters. The dragon had tasted the Nothing in that moment, a whiff of it, quickly clenched and crushed and buried away by the dead goddess and her slayer. Here. They'd trapped it here, all three of them locked together, the Nothing in its prison, the goddess the bars and the walls, her slayer the lock to its cage. In that moment the dragon called Silence had not understood. None of them had. No one except perhaps the silver ones and by then so very many of them were gone. Vanished away to wherever their abstention had taken them.
Crazy Mad. Holding fast to a weighted rope. Embraced by cold dark water but he knew who he was. Skyrie, bloodied and broken and crawling to his death in the swamps while the stars above winked out one by one. With a man standing over him in robes the colour of moonlight, his pale half-ruined face scarred ragged by disease or fire, one blind eye, milky white. Fingers that traced symbols over him. Air that split open like swollen flesh. Black shadow that oozed out of the gashes left behind
.
‘It fills the hole, you see.’ Gelisya again. The Dark Queen as she would be, but back then she'd been only twelve. ‘Like the Black Moon and the dead Earth Goddess fill the hole in the world. He showed me. You have to keep it closed. Otherwise something will come through. Not yet but one day. Before you both come back for the very last time. You have to keep it closed.’ Even with her lips almost touching his ear, her whisper was so quiet he could barely hear. ‘He's making us ready. To let it in when the Ice Witch sets it free.’