Dragon Queen (65 page)

Old one?
It tried one last time but the half-god was too damaged to understand. Perhaps the night lord would make it whole again, perhaps not. There was a sense of recognition though. This was one of the half-gods who'd turned with old wise Seturakah for whom the dragons had first flown. One of the few who'd stayed and fought, who had turned against the old gods and failed and lost and been broken.

Were you too close when the end came? Is that what happened to you?
It looked at the mangled shrivelled shade.
So few, and yet you were so great and so close
. It let the old one go.
Be with your creator
.
Make your penance and your peace. Is he merciful in his victory, the night lord?
The dragon had little idea what such things meant. Mercy, revenge, forgiveness, spite? Those were not dragon thoughts – for dragons there was only what was food and what was not. It had learned these other words from the little ones. They seemed to think them somehow important. The dragon couldn't see why they should matter. Mostly what it understood was the rage, the wild impatient fury that always undid them.
Why are we this way? Why are we made to be so quick of thought and claw and yet so fleeting?
It mused on this for a minute or two, and when it saw that there was no answer to be had to that either, its thoughts moved on. It did not understand resentment either.

It still held the little one. The little one wasn't damaged at all.

Who are you?
It began to move back to the broken prison. The little one squirmed and tried to get away but the dragon held it fast. Nor did it answer; but little ones, as the dragon had often observed, could rarely control their thinking. All the dragon had to do was to listen.

You were a lord among your kind?
The little one had a name, but the dragon had no interest.
I have never heard of your home. If I find it I will burn it. No, I will not let you go
.
I mean to feed you to the Nothing to see what will happen
.

The little one struggled but it had no hope of escape. The dragon reached out as close as it dared to the hole and its questing devouring tongues. It dropped the little one inside.

How? How did this come to pass? How was the old seal broken? Where did the dead goddess and her slayer go? Did they flee or has the Nothing consumed them?
Not that, it thought, for the two of them had held the Nothing at bay for an age and more. No, they had gone somewhere.

A weight of understanding closed over Silence then. If they truly had
gone
somewhere then they could be found and they could be returned, and That Which Came Before could be locked away once more.

I do not want the burden of this knowledge
.

The little one flickered as the Nothing closed around it and then it darted through a tiny space the dragon hadn't seen and flashed away, gone towards its creator, the Lord of Light and Warmth. The dragon lunged, annoyed, but it was slow and the little one had already vanished. As it went, the dragon caught a fractured fragment of a thought.

I was there. I saw it happen
.

And with that a flicker of something else. Of pride and a place and a face.

The dragon snarled. If the little one had seen it then so had the old one; and if the little one was gone to the sun, so the old one was gone to the moon and the night lord. And the night lord was known to dragons.

So, Gods, I have sent these souls with their knowledge and their memories back to you. What will you do?

What gods always did. Nothing.

The Bloody Judge

58

Never Forgotten

By the time the boats from the galley came ashore, the pain ran right from the top of Tuuran's head down his neck. His face felt like it was still on fire and it wasn't going to get any better in a hurry either. Adamantine Men knew all about fire. When old Hyram had taken the Speaker's Ring, he'd put on a tournament and games for the dragon-riders who came from across the nine realms to kiss it. They'd fought mock battles, strafing legions of the Adamantine Men with dragon fire while the soldiers hid behind their dragon-scale armour and walls of dragon-scale shields. It was supposed to show how fearless the speaker's army was, how they could stand up to anything. And it had, but they'd still lost fifty men over the space of the five days and a hundred more carried their burns proudly, scars to prove who they were. Tuuran reckoned the good soldiers were the ones who'd managed to get themselves and their brothers beside them properly behind their shields, but anyone who got burned got treated well enough. Burns
hurt
.

He growled and waved his sword at the slaves from the galley and turned them right around. ‘That's a ship, that is,’ he bellowed at the oar-slaves and the sail-slaves as they struggled in through the surf. ‘That's a ship, and we know how to sail it and that makes it our life. What are you going to do? Run into the woods barefoot? Do you even know where you are?’ The men from the cages in the hold came from up and down the coast here but the galley slaves came from everywhere, mostly the little kingdoms like the one Crazy Mad said he was from, all around the fringes of the Dominion. They'd be lost here, as lost as he would, so he rounded them up, sail-slaves, oar-slaves, the men from the cages, and made them have a good long look at what had happened on the beach. All those dead Taiytakei, that was the sort of sight a slave ought to see now and then. The sort to remember. No one questioned that
he should be the one giving the orders now.

‘Any of our slave masters left on the galley?’ he asked. The pain across his face turned everything he said into an angry snarl. But no, the Fire Witch – or whatever she was – had burned every Taiytakei to ash. So he looked at all the slaves, standing there on the beach, shitting and pissing themselves and gawping at the mangled remains of their masters, and left them to wonder for a bit while he picked up one of the lightning wands and waved it about in case he could make it work. Everyone knew the wands only worked for the dark-skins but it seemed worth a go. Turned out everyone was right, but it didn't stop them from flinching when he pointed it at them. He'd keep it, he thought, and turned and waved it at the slaves and asked them, ‘You really want to stay here? Stay. The rest of you, we go back to the galley because it just became ours.’

About half stayed, mostly the ones from homes up and down the coast. Back on the galley, once the rest of them had scrambled aboard, it turned out that not all the dark-skins were dead after all. The galley slave masters might all be burned to crispy ash and yes, the deck smelt like an eyrie from back home, but down among the oars they found a pair of Taiytakei oar-slaves cowering under the rowing benches. Tuuran had no idea what they were doing there – putting Taiytakei slaves in among the oars was just another way of killing them, everyone knew that – but there they were anyway, terrified. Tuuran dragged them out and gave the others a choice: kill the dark-skins or keep them and they voted almost to a man for keeping. It didn't surprise him. Slave or not-slave always counted more than the colour of a man's skin.

Flame but his face hurt! Cursed Fire Witch or whatever she was. And he still kept wanting to touch it and still kept having to stop himself. Burns. You had to keep them clean – every Adamantine Man knew that – and so you didn't touch them, didn't wrap them, just let the air do its work and maybe a little cold clear water for relief now and then. Damn but he'd have killed to get his hands on a decent alchemist now, or at least a bit of Dreamleaf.

It slowly dawned on them all that they were free. They broke into the hold and hauled out the Taiytakei food and the little barrels of wine and spirits and drank themselves stupid. Tuuran drank until he couldn't stand up any more. It took the edge off the pain. He
passed out as the sun set, same as half the rest of them. He thought maybe he saw Crazy Mad's eyes burn silver again right as the sun turned the sea into a lake of orange fire, but afterwards he couldn't be sure and he'd been drunk enough to see faeries and dragons dancing on the moon too. In the morning, face still burning, head pounding, guts churning, he tried cleaning up the messes that the Fire Witch had left behind. Not that he particularly minded them, but it was something to do. Didn't get far though. The Taiytakei slavers – what was left of them – were little more than ash and charcoal burned into the galley's wooden hull. He tried to scrape them off but they were welded in as though wood and flesh had melted and then set again, merged together.

He went off to puke into the sea in case that would make him feel any better. It didn't, but then Crazy Mad showed up with a pot of something he'd looted from the galley captain's trunk, and when he smeared it on the side of Tuuran's face where his ear used to be his skin went numb and the pain just wafted away. Crazy had found some Xizic too, and after a while chewing on that, the world was suddenly a whole lot better and Tuuran took to doing what he did best: strutting the deck and yelling at people, and it never once struck him as strange how easy it was to send the oar-slaves back to their oars and the sail-slaves back to their sails. How easily he became their captain and Crazy Mad his mate.

‘Aria,’ he muttered to Crazy once the galley was moving again. ‘You reckon that was that Ice Witch the night-skins keep whispering about?’

Crazy Mad looked all deep for a moment and smiled one of those smiles of his, the one where it looked like he knew all the dirty little secrets of the gods and was wondering what to do with them. ‘No. Not her.’ Then the smile hit his eyes and the chill was gone as he laughed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, not exactly ice, was it?’

Tuuran scuffed at some charred remains on the deck beside him. ‘Seen dragons do that to a man once. Just burned and burned him until there was nothing left but a handful of charcoal.’ He stood up and looked out at the sea and the sky and the land. ‘I don't know where we are, Crazy. Not the first idea. Even if I did, I wouldn't have a clue how that would help me work out which way to go.’

‘I want to go to Tethis. I want the man who took my life.’

Tuuran shook his head and wrinkled his nose. ‘It's the Judge in there today, is it? Well, Judge, I never heard of Tethis save what you've told me and most of that I don't believe. But even if I did, there's no going back home for either of us, not yet. A galley can't cross the ocean and none of us can navigate the storm-dark and your Tethis lies on the edges of the Dominion, does it not? We're in the wrong world for either of us. Shall we say Deephaven? To be blunt, in this world I don't even know the name of anywhere else.’

Crazy Mad spat. ‘Deephaven then.’

‘At least I know it exists beyond your say-so, eh?’ He grinned. ‘And it sounds a good enough place for a shipload of sailors to make their home. I've heard there are Taiytakei anchored there often enough too. Traders, not slavers. Maybe you could persuade them with that sharp-edged charm of yours to take you home. Maybe I could too!’ He laughed.

Crazy Mad shrugged and turned away. ‘Bad memories. Bad things happened in Deephaven. Someone died. But that was a long time ago. There's others who might know it better by now.’ Crazy didn't like Deephaven today by the look of things. And on his bad days Crazy Mad could be, well, crazy. And mad.

Tuuran gestured vaguely at the sea. ‘Look, I don't care where we go. You know another place? Choose it.’

‘No, you're right – there always used to be Taiytakei ships in Deephaven. I remember them. Sharp-edged charm or not, they can take us both home. If we can think of something they want bad enough to do it.’

Tuuran snorted. ‘Or they can make us slaves again.’ But Crazy Mad didn't say anything more and Tuuran still had the glass shard given to him by the Watcher, the one that would make the Taiytakei give him aid, and so maybe they
could
get home, one way or another. He jabbed a finger at the coast. ‘Pick a direction. Left or right?’

Turned out neither of them had any idea where Deephaven was, and so they sailed with the wind because at least they'd cover more ground that way, and it was only later that day that Tuuran heard the oar-slaves talking among themselves about the Fire
Witch who'd freed them and stopped to listen, and of course as soon as he did, the oar-slaves all stopped talking and made a point of some vigorous rowing and he had to remind them that they weren't wearing chains any more, that they weren't slaves and that he wasn't some Taiytakei with a whip; and when he'd done yelling that at them, he set them to rowing again. Much later, as the galley drifted through the night and they sat around their braziers on the deck, doing what they'd always done and telling each other stories, he found those oarsmen again and told them to tell everyone else what they'd heard.

‘Everyone knows the Fire Witch. She came to Deephaven after the day the knives fell from the sky. That was the day the silver sorcerers came and raised the dead to walk and lifted an army from the earth. The Ice Queen drove them all away. And then the Fire Witch came.’ Which was about the most ridiculous story Tuuran had ever heard until he thought about the tales he might tell of dragons and a stolen alchemist and an ancient flying castle drifting over a desert.