Authors: Stephen Deas
‘I don’t under—’
The Black Moon crashed into his head, as strong and violent as any dragon.
The Silver King. The Isul Aieha. A sliver of him lives in your blood, infinitely dilute but there. How?
Bellepheros didn’t even try to resist.
The answer came up from inside him, summoned because the Black Moon had called it. The Black Moon ransacked the memories there, took what he wanted and then withdrew.
Be gone, alchemist. The taint of your blood offends me. Do not speak to Zafir of what has passed here
.
Three little cuts for dragons and men alike.
You. Obey. Me.
Sometimes Bellepheros wondered if he should feel privileged that he’d been the very first.
‘When I was little,’ Zafir said, ‘I used to come here to hide.’ She walked through the Hall of Mirages, a galleried octagon with archways off every face as tall as ten men. Myst and Onyx trailed behind, quiet and attentive, distracted by the spectacle of the Enchanted Palace but doubtless also thinking of the little ones they’d left behind in the eyrie. Across the threshold of the hall Zafir stopped and looked up. High overhead the roof was a dome decorated with a sun motif. The eight great arches defined the space and, as with the Octagon, each lower arch was crowned by a second. There were balconies above, if you knew how to get to them, each with a false window, an intricate screen cut from marble that radiated a fierce silver light when the moon was above the horizon. With the moon set, as now, the dome’s sun glowed a soft lemon colour that would tinge to orange at dusk.
In the middle of the Hall of Mirages rested a sarcophagus. It was supposed to contain the remains of the Silver King. They all knew better, but still it was odd to find it here. Zafir’s mother had kept it in the Octagon beside her throne. Hyrkallan had moved it. She would move it back, Zafir decided. Back the way it was. She stretched out her arms and tilted her head. Home. The cold glories of the long-dead Silver King.
‘Walk with me,’ she said. ‘Whatever exit you choose, you will find yourself outside the arch where we first began.’ She crossed the hall and walked through the archway on the other side, Myst and Onyx beside her. They found themselves back where they’d started, staring at the entrance again, the passage to the Octagon behind them. Zafir ran her fingers over the stones set into the arch. Every surface was decorated with an exquisite lapidary of precious and semi-precious stones formed into twining vines, fruits and flowers, all in a detail so delicate it was hard to understand what means short of sorcery could have made them. But then sorcery
had
made them.
‘I used to come here to think.’ She crossed the hall a second time and took a different exit. ‘I need to think now, about what to do.’ Once again they appeared where they’d started. Zafir walked on as though she hadn’t noticed. She took another exit and then another, emerging at the same place over and over. ‘About Princess Jaslyn and Rider Hyrkallan.’ King and queen now, but that wasn’t how she remembered them.
Another exit and then another, each time always back to the start …
Jaslyn would have taken her mother’s throne, no matter whether Almiri, the eldest of the three sisters, had died at Evenspire.
… but there was a pattern to it. Take the archways in the right sequence and you could find yourself almost …
Hyrkallan? A good choice, Zafir supposed. Political. Practical. Not like the Jaslyn she remembered.
… anywhere.
The Hall of Mirages spat her into a cave deep in the depths of the palace, an underground cathedral filled with stalagmites and stalactites in cascades like corrugated walls and organ pipes. Silver lights shone from the roof far above, stars and a slender crescent moon. The night sky as she would see it from the summit of the Moonlit Mountain, the sorcerous simulacrum moon mimicking the phases of the real moon outside, the stars shifting with the season. She heard gasps of wonder. It was always night in this cave.
‘What do I do with them?’
Myst and Onyx bowed their heads. They spoke more than they used to, but they knew better today. They knew her moods.
‘When old Quai’Shu and his moon sorcerers took me, I thought they would kill me. Perhaps it was what I deserved. But they didn’t. Greed led them otherwise. They made me their slave instead, and you know how I punished them for that. You know all of
that
story, but you don’t know what happened before it began.’ She wandered among the stalagmites and sat on a rough stone bench. For a while she was still, listening to the drips of water that echoed through the gloom. ‘The Silver King used to come here,’ she said. ‘He would come to reflect. Sometimes for days on end. Sometimes for months. But I don’t have months.’
Myst knelt in front of her. ‘Mistress, you are home. Are you not content?’
Zafir cupped Myst’s cheek. ‘My home wasn’t a kind place, not like yours before you were taken. It wasn’t a place of happiness, and what there was of it is gone now. I can’t say I miss it, not much of it.’ She let out a long breath. ‘I was raised in a tomb filled with the memories of a half-god we could never understand. We carved ourselves in what we thought was his image and climbed into shoes we could not begin to fill. He ate us all, our Isul Aieha.’
She got up and paced languid circuits around the paths between the misshapen columns, pausing now and then to gaze at the false night sky.
‘I gave Hyrkallan every reason to despise me. Jaslyn even more so. Do I have to hang them now? I’ve had my fill of that, and anyway it made no difference in the end.’ She tried to push away the jagged memories of the Octagon, of fighting with Hyrkallan for her old throne. Crazed animals, both of them. ‘I want them to …’ Forgive her, after all she’d done? But how could she ask for that? How was it even possible? Mad Princess Jaslyn, who loved her dragons more than she loved anyone except her little sister Lystra, whom Zafir had tried to murder. Hyrkallan, a man of stone and iron who loved only duty and honour and the mighty Queen Shezira, Jaslyn’s mother, whom Zafir had beheaded.
‘They cast me out,’ she whispered. ‘And they were right to do it, because any one of them would have been better. Even Jehal, in the end, was better.’
‘Talk to them, mistress,’ murmured Onyx. ‘Talk to them and see if there is hope? There is always hope, mistress.’ But there wouldn’t be, because Onyx was wrong about that, there was never any hope.
‘This
is
my home,’ Zafir said to the stones.
Bellepheros found himself in the Hall of Mirages, wandering in aimless frustration through the archways looking for Zafir, always coming back to the same place. He was about to give up when she walked in behind him, her two handmaidens beside her with a cool damp smell of caves on them, as welcome and familiar as woodsmoke.
‘Holiness!’ If Zafir was surprised to see him, she hid it well. She’d know something was wrong too, that he wanted something, because he almost never called her that these days. Well good, because something
was
wrong, and he
did
want something. She’d hear about the Black Moon and his knife one way or another, and she’d damn well stop pretending she didn’t already know.
‘Grand Master?’ She watched him coolly. ‘Myst was just asking what it was like to ride on a dragon for the very first time. I’m not sure I have the words. Exhilarating and magnificent, I would answer, but I rode dragons with my mother from a very young age. My first time was so long ago that I have little memory of it. Perhaps you can describe it better?’
Bellepheros shook his head. ‘I am not the best choice to ask. For me they are an unrelenting terror quite beyond my capacity for reason. I’m afraid even a Taiytakei sled thoroughly unnerves me.’ He looked hard at Myst. ‘I’ve seen you stare at Diamond Eye, young woman, and I know that look. That yearning. Yes, I know you want to fly, but you’re wrong to think that a dragon can transform you. They will not form some bond of friendship like a horse or a dog. They are devourers, nothing more.’ He frowned hard, then turned away and looked around the Hall of Mirages instead. It was hardly fair taking out his bitterness on someone as innocent as Myst, even if what he’d said was entirely true. ‘I … I had heard of this place,’ he said to Zafir at last, ‘but I never understood its nature.’
‘None of us understands its nature!’ Zafir shrugged and laughed. ‘The Silver King made it because he wanted to. I know some of its secrets but it may have more. For all I know, if you walk it in the right way it will take us straight to the Adamantine Palace.’ Except it wouldn’t, because the Adamantine Palace hadn’t existed when the Silver King had conjured these halls. ‘You want something, Grand Master. What is it?’
‘The Crowntaker.’ Bellepheros wrung his hands. He almost clutched at her, and then remembered how she hated to be touched. ‘Holiness, I have to speak with you.’ He glanced back towards the Octagon. For all he knew the Black Moon was still sitting there, lounging in Zafir’s throne. He whispered. ‘With discretion.’
Zafir nodded to Myst and Onyx and shooed them away, off back to the eyrie and their babies. It amazed Bellepheros how she put up with servants who carried infants, but she did. The blunt-edged vicious creature the Taiytakei had brought in chains to Baros Tsen’s eyrie had changed. She was subtler now. He just wasn’t quite sure which way she’d gone. Softer or sharper. Either way she was dangerous and selfish and unpredictable.
‘You can advise me as we walk.’ She beckoned him to follow. ‘How should I deal with Jaslyn and Hyrkallan, Grand Master?’ She stepped through an arch and Bellepheros followed. It didn’t seem to bother her that she ended up right back where she started; she simply kept on going as if she hadn’t even noticed.
‘With mercy, your Holiness.’
Zafir flicked him a glance. ‘There
is
an argument for reconciliation. The Adamantine Palace awaits, and I must leave the Pinnacles in hands I can trust. If I hang those two then I might as well hang every rider that came with them from the north.’ She walked through the hall over and over, taking a different exit each time and always coming back to the same place. ‘Mercy, though? The Adamantine Men Tuuran found in Furymouth, and here too, quietly whisper that Queen Jaslyn is mad. They say she woke a dragon and wouldn’t let her alchemists feed it their potions. But I should let her go?’
Bellepheros paused. ‘You know the story of Prince Kazan and the civil war, Holiness? The revolt against the oppressions of King Tiernel? It’s all rubbish. Kazan was another rider stupid enough to wake his dragon, that was all. Twelve others went missing trying to find him.’ It occurred to him that there must be a pattern to Zafir’s path, to her choice of archways, but she was walking too quickly, and talking and asking him questions and making him think all at once. Deliberately, so that he wouldn’t be able to remember? ‘Fortunately half the dragons didn’t have time to wake, and still it took the intervention of three neighbouring kingdoms and Speaker Ayzalmir to put an end to it. Hundreds were killed.
Most
of what you think you know is true, the picking over the pieces afterwards, the destruction of the realm as it was. But the beginning … There was no revolt. Waking dragons is madness, Holiness.’ His voice tailed away. The Black Moon had woken dragons. Her Holiness had ridden Diamond Eye for more than a year and yet the monster hadn’t eaten her. It did what she asked. Something to do with what had happened as the eyrie crashed into the storm-dark in Takei’Tarr, although he had the impression that even Zafir didn’t fully understand.
He missed a step. Cursed. He’d lost the thread of Zafir’s path through the arches. Blasted women. ‘I supposed we’re past that, all things considered,’ he muttered.
‘Indeed.’ Zafir snorted, almost laughed. ‘On the other hand, Hyrkallan went to war because I executed his queen, and Jaslyn was willing to marry him to the same end, though she clearly despises him.’ She walked through another arch and this time didn’t reappear behind him. There
was
a pattern then, and for a moment Bellepheros paused, trying to rebuild it in his head … but she’d walked it too quickly, and if he tarried then perhaps he’d not follow her, and then find himself taken to some other place. Stories were stories. They abounded with lies and exaggerations and misplaced drama, but every one he’d ever heard agreed on how the Enchanted Palace of the Isul Aieha was gleefully merciless in its devouring of the unwary.
He arrived in a hall of glowing white stone whose walls were covered in yet more archways. Blank this time, leading nowhere. Just décor. Zafir was a dozen or so paces ahead, looking back at him with that irritating little smirk she had.
‘You were trying to work out the pattern,’ she said. Bellepheros nodded. No point hiding it – Zafir was too clever for that – but it made him anxious, being with her in this place. Antipathy between the Order of the Scales and the queens of the Silver City went back to the days of the blood-mages, to the men and women who had torn the Silver King down.
‘Did you manage it?’ she asked.
‘No.’
Zafir’s smirk flickered into something with a flash of real warmth. ‘Then I’ll show you, Grand Master,’ she said, ‘one day.’
‘That is … generous, Holiness.’ Three hundred years. That’s how long the alchemists had been waiting to see the secrets of the Isul Aieha’s palace.
‘Merely practical.’ She started along the hall, brushing her fingers across the ornamental arches. ‘The queens of the Silver City guarded their secrets, but in truth we barely understood any of them. You can walk for days and never visit the same place twice and still not see everything the Silver King left behind. And there are three mountain spires that make up the Pinnacles, not merely the one. People forget that this is simply the largest. I would have alchemists back among
the works of the Isul Aieha, if opportunity and the Black Moon permit.’ She stopped. Paused. ‘Jehal is dead. Tuuran told me. There are Adamantine Men who left the Purple Spur after the palace fell.’ She sounded bright and yet brittle, as th
ough right now a good solid tap from a hammer might shatter her.