Dragon Queen (66 page)

‘They say the Fire Witch burned the risen dead and put them to rest.’ Several of the oar-slaves made a little sign, a strange gesture of reverence and protection and fear mixed together. They'd been on the galley when she'd freed them. ‘She cleansed the city and let the living come back. It's hers now. She rules it for the Ice Queen.’ Again they made the same gesture. ‘The risen dead are everywhere. They covered the streets to keep the sun at bay. Half the city is theirs.’ The slaves from Aria made another sign, the sign of the sun this time, a ward against evil.

Tuuran scratched his chin, not much liking the sound of any story with so many witches in it. ‘Maybe we shouldn't go that way after all.’ Not that he thought much of stories in which wizards who could really only be the Silver Kings themselves suddenly showed up and raised armies of the dead, seeing as how the Silver Kings had been gone for a thousand years and probably then some. But none of them knew anything better and he couldn't quite shake that memory of Crazy Mad and the way his eyes had flared after the grey dead men had come with their golden knife. And the Ice Witch was real enough, or so the Taiytakei had said before they'd burned. He looked around at the faces lit up by the glowing coals
of the braziers, all equal men for the first time since they'd been ripped from their homes.
Home
. That was what they all wanted, but home was scattered across four worlds and a dozen different kingdoms and Deephaven was the only place where they might find ships to take them across the storm-dark.

They argued some more. No one much cared for a city of the dead ruled over by a witch who could burn men to ash with a blink, that much was obvious. Even Crazy Mad didn't like it. Deephaven might have been where he'd been born on the days he called himself Berren but he'd severed his ties with that past long ago. In his moments alone Tuuran quietly reckoned that Crazy had severed his ties with rather too many things. But in the end, since none of them knew which way it was to Deephaven anyway, they stuck with the wind and kept the coast on their port side and hoped for the best. The other slaves prayed, but not Tuuran and Crazy Mad. Tuuran's only god was the fire that burned everything at the end of the world and Crazy didn't have any gods at all any more.

The coast grew wilder and soon all they found were coves filled with reefs, treacherous shores, few chances to take on water, little food and no sign of habitation. They had supplies for months though and so it was the restless boredom that bothered them the most; and after another week the shores grew tamer again and they started to see huts and farms and here and there a boat and then villages and fishermen, and someone even made a joke about how they should go ashore and do what they'd always done: take some slaves and look for a place to sell them. When Tuuran heard and found out who'd said it, he threw him into the sea.
He
could go ashore, right enough.

His face still hurt.

A few days later they rounded a headland to a bay outside a city that none of them had ever seen but whose name Crazy Mad reckoned he could guess – Helhex, whose whitewashed walls and temples and houses gleamed in the summer sun with such a fearsome light that Tuuran had to screw his eyes up to look at them. The White City, most people called it, home of the witch breakers of Aria. They anchored in the bay and Tuuran tried to keep the galley slaves together as he and Crazy Mad went with a boat to the shore, but none of them knew where to even start when it came
to selling something like a Taiytakei slaving galley. By the time he got back they'd already fallen to fighting and looting, the other boats were all gone and the slaves too and the galley was empty, ransacked. Tuuran looked about him, hands on hips, trying not to laugh and trying not to rage. Crazy Mad stood beside him, blank like he simply didn't care. They ripped out whatever was left that they could carry and Tuuran thought he could sell. Then he split open the casks of oil in the galley that were too heavy to move, lit a torch and set fire to it, because it
was
a slaver and maybe it was better if no one had it at all. It felt good, cleansing himself of the Taiytakei. Crazy didn't lift a finger to stop him, just laughed and laughed as they watched it burn together, rowing for the shore for the last time. It was a strange feeling, an uncertain future in collision with an unkind past. Hope and loss and victory and fear mingled together.

The slaves from the galley dwindled away over the days and weeks, drifting off to other places, falling into trouble, finding ships and setting sail, but Tuuran and Crazy Mad stuck together. They sold what they could but they hadn't come with much. The taverns they stayed in became steadily cheaper and seedier, the wine more sour with each day, and before very long all Tuuran had left was Crazy Mad and the clothes on his back and a last few pennies and a handful of Taiytakei treasures that he had no idea what to do with. And that, he mused, was still a lot more than he'd had for a very long time.

‘Here's to us.’ He raised his cup. They were drinking the cheapest wine he could find. Too much most nights, if he was honest, but that had always been the vice among the Adamantine Men. Mostly Crazy Mad just sat and watched.

‘Here's to sleeping on the streets.’ Crazy touched his cup to Tuuran's. ‘At least the nights are warm here.’

‘It could be worse. We have what we hold, nothing more and nothing less. We have our strength and we have our swords, and what more could a man ask than that?’

‘Comfortable bed and a clean woman would be nice.’

‘We are Adamantine!’ Tuuran was drunk and he knew it. He banged the table. ‘We take what we want! What we need!’

‘Not here we don't!’ Crazy Mad laughed, which earned him a
growl. He wagged a finger in Tuuran's face. He'd taken to doing that a lot since they'd come ashore and Tuuran always wanted to grab it and snap it off. ‘You start up with the
I am an Adamantine Man
thing again here, you're going to get us in a fight.’

‘Good!’

‘Which—’

‘Which we'd win!’

Crazy Mad looked all set to start going on about militias and witch breakers and the hundred and one different kinds of trouble that Tuuran might bring down on them but then he stopped abruptly. His whole face changed from bloody warrior to that of a boy, almost forlorn and a little lost. He blinked a few times. ‘I saw three sword-monks this afternoon,’ he said after a bit. ‘Walking the street in the middle of the day. Yellow robes with those twin curved swords they have crossed over their backs and the sunburst tattoo scrawled over their faces. You'd know them if you saw them. One of them, they'd rip us to pieces, either of us.’

Tuuran shrugged and looked into his cup. When Crazy Mad went rambling off into one of his stories, some bits might have some truth to them but you could never tell which. He swilled his wine. Enough for one story. Maybe not for two.

‘Twenty years and I've never seen a sword-monk since, and there they were, right in front of me. Sun and moon, can you believe I'd forgotten her?’

‘Forgotten who?’

‘The teacher I fell in love with. Tasahre. Back like a punch between the eyes, she was. Gods and soldiers! I haven't thought of her for years.’

‘Two decades?’ Tuuran took a large gulp of wine and raised his eyebrows. ‘And how old were you at that particular time?’ Because if Crazy Mad had been doing much more than crawling twenty-odd years ago then Tuuran was a dragon in disguise; but then they'd been round this particular island so many times that they both knew every spit and cove. ‘Oh, right. That was before those nasty warlocks changed your body for you, eh?’ He rolled his eyes.

Crazy Mad ignored him. ‘I saw the blood. I held her hand and I felt her heart stop. But I never saw her burn. The last thing I remember was another one of them leaping towards her. And today
all I could think of was to chase after those monks and ask them whether there was a monk called Tasahre, whether there'd been some miracle and she somehow hadn't died after all. I
knew
what the seal of the sun could do . . .’

‘The what?’ Tuuran's cup was almost empty. He waved for another.

‘There was always a chance, just a tiny, tiny chance . . .’

‘We're out of money.’ Tuuran drained the dregs from his cup and poked forlornly at the last pennies on the table. Crazy had more stories than Tuuran had seen dragons, and this was sounding very much like one of the dull ones. ‘So here were are, two soldiers with no war to fight and good for nothing else. Where do we start one?’

Crazy Mad suddenly had a bit of a look like maybe he might be about to punch Tuuran in the face and possibly tear down half the tavern for seconds. But it only lasted a moment and then he let out a bellow of laughter. ‘You want to start a war?’

‘I've been forged for it from the day I could walk, sword-slave.’

‘You can call me by my name now.’

‘Ah, but aren't we both slaves to our swords, even as we think we're free? What name would you like, Crazy Mad?’ He had too much drink in him. The curse of men forged to fight a war that would never come, penned in by their code and their loyalty and their honour. Wine had been his lover once. Where else was there to go?

Crazy Mad was still laughing. ‘For as long as I can remember I wanted to know how to fight. In Deephaven back then you learned to run, always to run. I hated it. Hated how there was always someone bigger, someone stronger, someone who'd simply take whatever they wanted. And so I learned the sword; and then I went to war, more by accident than anything else really, and I found it was no place for flashing blades at all, Tuuran. Scrums of men grunting and heaving at one another, poking at eyes and feet with spikes of metal until one side broke. The slaughter of a sky darkened by arrows. Whole companies of men crushed into the mud by waves of armoured horse, or else it was a sea of fire, or lightning called from the sky, soldiers skewered by spear throwers that could drive a shaft through a stone wall, flesh smeared into
the earth by boulders the size of a man's head, hurled across a river. Nothing flashing, nothing dashing, no heroes, only screams and blood and shattered bone. But by then it was too late. It was my trade. My art. I'd sold my soul to it.’ He stopped and stared at Tuuran as though he'd seen a ghost and then bared his teeth as his eyes went wide. ‘Or someone took it. And I knew nothing else, and for all its horror it became my love. I had enemies, you see. I was the Bloody Judge of Tethis, the king's assassin, the Crowntaker, for ever until the end. Or so I thought until I woke in the skin of a stranger.’ He laughed and spat. ‘Maybe those warlocks did me a favour.’

Tuuran let out a ferocious fart.
Here we go again. Crazy Mad with his stories. All these things he can't possibly have done
. ‘They raised me to fight dragons. Fight and die. Simpler really. Dragon comes, dragon burns. None of the rest of all that stuff you were on about. Get eaten, that's all an Adamantine Man needs to do. And what about this Skyrie of yours? What's his story? How did
he
get to be a slave to the sword?’

Crazy Mad hardly seemed to hear. ‘Skyrie? He's mostly gone now.’ He was lost. Off again. ‘I had a son once. By a bondswoman, which was just another fancy way of saying a slave. She belonged to the queen of Tethis. I stole her and I stole my son. It took three years of my life to do it and I gave no thought to anything else. I went to war. I killed men and I stripped the dead. It was the only thing that mattered and not one second of one day went by when I didn't think of her and of the son I had waiting for me. The other soldiers drank and bought women while I counted my silver until I had enough to buy her. And then in the end when I finally took her and she saw what I'd become . . . well, she didn't see it right away and there were some good times. The best times . . .’ Crazy Mad looked away. Tuuran stared, wine forgotten. The mad bugger looked all but ready to burst into tears. But then Crazy took a deep breath and pulled himself together and emptied his own cup and now he just looked lost again. ‘It didn't last. She saw who I was, saw the blood on my hands and wanted nothing to do with me any more. So I let her go and I never saw her again, nor my son, because I knew she was right, and nothing good could come to anyone who lived their life around me. I gave her everything I had
and I sent her away and I went back to war but I kept my eyes and ears open. Was going to look after them the best I could. See they didn't want for much. Send them money, that sort of thing. And I did too, for bit. And then the pox came and that was that. Gone. My boy. The one I swore wouldn't grow up like me. I want my life back,’ hissed Crazy Mad. ‘The one they took from me in Tethis. The first one they took from me when I did what they wanted and they threw me in the pit for it. Never mind the rest.’

‘You can never go back, Crazy.’ Tuuran belched. ‘Besides, doesn't sound like it'd be much use to you now.’

‘The warlocks who came to our galley. You remember them?’

The last pennies were gone now, the last cup of wine in front of Tuuran and they were flat broke with nothing to their names except what they carried on their backs and at their hips. And Crazy Mad was so full of shit. Too young to have done all the things he claimed – as long as Tuuran didn't look at that memory he had, carefully locked away, of Crazy Mad with his eyes like burning liquid silver. Maybe not too young to have fathered a child. He'd looked forlorn enough about that. Maybe
that
bit was true. Maybe. And
maybe
he just didn't care, because what did it matter? Tethis? He had no idea where that even was except that it was near the Dominion and across the storm-dark and so might as well have been on the moon. He started eyeing the loose pennies on the tables around them. He wanted more wine. ‘Yes, yes. How could I forget throwing you into the sea? One of my fondest memories. Is this going to take long?’

‘Where are they?’

‘Bugger me if I have the first—’

In a flash Crazy Mad was across the table, a fist clenched around Tuuran's collar. ‘Tell me! Tell me what you know about them!’

Tuuran looked at the hand at his neck. With delicate care he wrapped his fingers around Crazy's wrist and squeezed, harder and harder, until he let go. ‘I could crush your bones, sword-slave.’ Then he laughed. The men on the next table were looking carefully away, very pointedly not seeing anything. While they weren't looking, Tuuran reached out and helped himself to some of the money on their table. Not all of it, just a couple of pennies for another cup. He waved for a refill. ‘They weren't Taiytakei, even you
could see that much. And that really is about as much as I know. They didn't stay for long. They were looking for you; they were sure you were there and they were mighty upset when they didn't find you. When they left I don't know what they were thinking but they were certainly wondering who it was I threw into the sea. They peered into the water a lot until everyone decided you'd drowned; or maybe they thought you couldn't have been who they were looking for.’ Tuuran rubbed his nose. ‘Mind, something was off with them. I'd keep my guard about me if I were you, if you see them again.’