Authors: Stephen Deas
Shit. And now here he was, looming over the alchemist Bellepheros like an angry bear roaring at an old man.
Nice one, big man. Well done.
Bellepheros pushed Tuuran’s arm aside. ‘Don’t you threaten me in my own rooms, Night Watchman. Don’t you
dare
! There’s only one of me, more’s the pity. I’m sure there are plenty more like you.’
‘I’m sure there are.’ Tuuran forced the anger back. Wasn’t angry with Bellepheros anyway, not really. Had Crazy under his skin, that was all. And her Holiness, and now her sister, and it was all a bit much. He raised his hands and backed away, sat down and tried to look contrite. ‘I didn’t come here for a fight. So. Other alchemists?’
Bellepheros struggled with himself for a moment. The last year hadn’t been easy on any of them, but they ought to be friends, they really ought, both missing people they’d come to love in their different ways and neither with much hope of getting them back; but history noted how a Night Watchman and a grand master alchemist rarely did more than get on each other’s nerves, and then there was the whole thing about how Chay-Liang had disappeared in Merizikat, and how Tuuran had been there when it happened, and how Bellepheros had built the Taiytakei their eyrie in the first place and so been complicit in what they’d done.
The alchemist sighed and slumped at his desk. The fight seemed to go out of him. He sipped from his cup and propped his head in his hand, and Tuuran saw how tired he looked, how old he was. Two years they’d known each other, give or take, and in that time Bellepheros had aged a decade. ‘That man of yours was from the Purple Spur. Interesting to hear how things are in other parts of the realms.’
Tuuran nodded. ‘I know his story.’ Although apparently not all of it. ‘I hear several of them made it from the Spur.’
‘They brought four alchemists all this way under dragon-infested skies. Kept apart to try and make sure that at least one survived.
That
the story you know?’
‘Go on.’ The alchemist bit was new.
‘So. You
don’t
know?’
‘I don’t know about any alchemists, no. Are you saying there are more of you here?’
‘I’m saying that three arrived from the Spur, and your man Big Vishmir was with them. Hyrkallan took them to the summit. They never came back. The story was that he claimed they were caught in the open by a dragon, but that actually he threw them off the cliffs.’ Bellepheros threw his hands to the heavens. ‘Did it never cross your mind that I might want to know something like that?’
Tuuran reckoned the words he’d be having with Big Vish later might be loud and colourful and go on a while. Still, would he have said anything if he’d known? ‘I suppose if they were dead then it was done.’ He shrugged. ‘And Hyrkallan is already caged. Maybe it seemed not to make much difference.’
‘Seemed not to make much difference?’ Bellepheros jumped to his feet. ‘Seemed not to make much difference! Dear Flame! Three men killed. I
knew
them, Tuuran. I knew their names. I
taught
them! They were friends, once. You think I wouldn’t want to know?’
Tuuran sighed. ‘You carry enough burdens, Grand Master. If I’d known then I might have kept it from you, but I didn’t. Does it better your life to hear that?’
‘It betters my life to know there was a fourth who got away!’ Bellepheros leaned closer. ‘While you were in Farakkan your men found two men and a woman wandering between the Ghostwater and the Fury.’ His eyes blazed. ‘You knew about
that
, at least? One was an Adamantine Man! One was an alchemist! An
alchemist
, Night Watchman, and your men took her captive and trussed her and threw her into a cell. Apparently she took a dim view of that and made good her escape.’ He was on his feet, red-faced and quivering with fury.
‘Ah. That.’ Tuuran grimaced.
Bloody Halfteeth.
‘Her Holiness was not pleased. Very fucking far from pleased, actually. Caused me a shit-heap of trouble.’
Bellepheros looked ready to explode. ‘That would be her Holiness who deigned to mention this to me this morning. Fourteen days later! Fourteen? What was she thinking?’
Tuuran shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Grand Master, but perhaps you might save your shouting for her then?’ An alchemist. No one had bothered telling
him
that either. ‘Killed a good few men when they left, they did. Got to wonder why they ran. What would make them take their chances with the dragons.’
Bellepheros sat heavily. He reached across the desk and grabbed Tuuran’s hand and gripped it tight. There was steel in his eyes. ‘Her name was Kataros. She claimed to have found the Black Mausoleum. The Silver King’s tomb. Her Holiness doesn’t believe a word of it and nor do I, but this Kataros,
she
believed it. She
believed
it, Tuuran, and alchemists aren’t idiots, so she must have found
some
thing. Do you know what that could mean?’
‘Not really.’ Tuuran went to the curtain and hauled Big Vish back inside, pulled him in by his ear, sat him down on his chair and leaned back against the wall. Took a while, the three of them together, but Tuuran reckoned he’d got the gist of the story by the end: Hyrkallan tips three alchemists off the Moonlit Mountain; a fourth shows up and gets wind of it, gets stuck in a cell, and then suddenly she’s gone and an Adamantine Man too, and some shit-eater who apparently killed a whole bunch of riders with his teeth or something; three days later Halfteeth’s gang finds the same three wandering about and carts them back to the eyrie; Halfteeth sees an Adamantine Man, loses his rag and beats him to a bloody mess. Then comes the dragon attack, and in the middle of the chaos the alchemist and the Adamantine Man vanish, leaving half a dozen corpses behind them.
‘Hyrkallan sent out riders,’ said Vish. ‘Went off to try and find her. Crazy bastards jumped off the summit with a pair of Prince Lai’s wings each strapped across their backs, gliding off through the air.’
‘
And?
’ asked Tuuran.
‘And nothing, boss.’ Vish shrugged. ‘Never saw any of them again.’ He screwed up his face. ‘One of them was Jasaan the Dragonslayer. Killed a dragon in Bloodsalt, he did, a full-grown adult and him with just an axe, or so they say. But Prince Lai’s wings? From the top of a mountain?’ Vish shook his head.
‘I’ll ask about,’ Tuuran said to Bellepheros at last. He looked hard at Vish, wondering whether to send him away or not. He settled on not. ‘Interesting as this all is, I came for something else. Grand Master, there are dead men walking in the Silver King’s tunnels.’
Bellepheros gave him a thoughtful look. There was shiftiness to the alchemist more than any sense of surprise. A guilt. ‘I know,’ he said at last. He looked at Vish, whose face had frozen ashen. ‘Elsewhere too. Under the Spur. That another thing your man hasn’t told you, is it?’
Vish seemed to draw into himself. He gave Tuuran the apologetic look of someone who knew he was going to get his bollocks served to him on a plate. ‘We used to carry the dead out of the caves at night, boss.’ He shuffled his feet. ‘We got a few dragons with poison early on, but they quickly got wise to that. But we still take them out because … sometimes … sometimes when we don’t, they get up again.’
Different customs in different worlds. Tuuran had been to a good few and seen them all, or so he thought. Rites for the dead. Burned. Left out in the sun. Given to the water. Left under the stars for three nights. Things like that. But never left under the earth, not in any world. Never, never. He looked at Bellepheros, wondering if the alchemist was thinking the same, but the Bellepheros simply shook his head.
‘Merizikat,’ he whispered.
‘Go on then.’ Tuuran kicked Vish and jerked his head towards the curtain. ‘Get lost. I’ll come and kick your bollocks to grapefruits later, and then you can sod off into the tunnels for a day and hunt for walking dead men for me.’ He shoved Vish out and was about to follow, then stopped. He’d spent so long in the catacombs of Merizikat that he’d started to give the walking corpses there their own names.
The shuffler. Wobbly eyes. Legless
… Trapped between life and death with deliberate malice. It had scared the shit out of all of them at first, but men would accustom themselves to almost anything given time, and so they had, and besides, of all the things he’d seen, walking dead men certainly weren’t the worst.
‘Something else you want, Night Watchman?’ asked the alchemist.
Tuuran bowed his head. Couldn’t find the words. Merizikat hung between them. Merizikat and Chay-Liang and all the secrets he couldn’t share. ‘I’ll let you know if I find out anything about this alchemist Kataros.’
He pushed the curtain back to leave. Bellepheros looked up sharply as he did. ‘Bring your corpse to my workshop, Night Watchman. I’ll see to it.’
Tuuran nodded. Wasn’t any harm. Not with the Black Moon gone. First sign of the eyrie back in the sky and he’d have every man who could walk crawling through those tunnels, finding the not-quite-dead and putting them down.
The Adamantine Council
Eighteen days after landfall
Whenever he could, Bellepheros escaped the room Zafir had given him. The master alchemist of the Pinnacles back when the late Queen Aliphera had ruled from the Octagon had been Vioros. Bellepheros and Vioros had practically grown up together, and Vioros had had the decency to leave behind a well stocked laboratory and a workshop deep inside the Enchanted Palace pleasantly far away from anywhere. Hyrkallan’s riders had found it and smashed it up a bit, and then left it alone with an almost reverent superstition, and there was a lot he could still use. The workshop even had a tiny sleeping cot and a wardrobe with a fine collection of robes, all a bit wide around the waist for Bellepheros these days, but they were a comfort, old and familiar.
By contrast he loathed the royal room Zafir had given him. Everything about it. How tidy it was, how pristine, how priceless, how everything was to be seen but not be touched; but most of all he hated how close it was to the Octagon, and how people kept bothering him.
The curtain swished open. Big Vish poked an apologetic head inside. ‘You should really come now, Grand Master. The speaker is on her way.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Maybe giving him Big Vish as a guardian had been Tuuran’s idea of a kindness, but he didn’t
want
to be guarded. Alchemists could look after themselves, and he couldn’t shake the sense of eyes peering over his shoulder.
He looked down at himself. Li would have been all over him on a day like this, his first formal duty as the restored grand master alchemist of the nine realms. She’d have been fussing, straightening his robe, picking away imagined specks of fluff; and he’d tell
her off for being an old hen, and she’d tell him off back for being an old scruff, and they’d both quietly be laughing because most of the time they worked in whatever stained smock or tunic first came to hand, him with his potions, her with her enchanted glass and gold. And while they bickered they would have talked about the things that mattered, and she would have helped him to know what to do. They would have talked about Tuuran. About Zafir. Most of all they would have talked about the Black Moon.
He missed her smile.
He hurried out and let Big Vish walk behind him, stiff and straight like a reluctant statue, until they reached the Octagon. Zara-Kiam sat in a throne beside Zafir’s own, dressed in flame-red silks and gold over hatchling dragonscale. Queen Jaslyn sat in another on the other side, dressed in dragonscale too, and Bellepheros wondered again how Zafir had turned the queen of Sand to her cause. Riders stood impatiently, waiting along three sides of the Octagon, men who once flew with Hyrkallan to burn Zafir out of the skies, yet here they were, bending their knees to her. The rest were a motley collection: the other Vish, White Vish, and the Adamantine Men rescued from Furymouth or found inside the Pinnacles, the handful of former slaves who had survived with them all the way from Takei’Tarr, scores and scores of sell-sword soldiers taken from Merizikat and a few of the Black Moon’s soul-cut solar exalts. A mongrel court for a mongrel queen, while the sheer size of the Octagon dwarfed them all.
Bellepheros took his place beside Princess Kiam’s throne. She cocked him an eye. ‘Look at what we have become, Grand Master. The courts of my mother held three or four times as many, every man and woman dressed in rich silks and gold and dragonscale. Parades of men and armoured knights full of pageantry, trumpets and banners. My blood-mothers once ruled the world from this room.’
Zafir entered last of all. She walked in without ceremony, with Tuuran beside her, and sat down without fanfare, all so quickly that she was in her throne before some of the men from Merizikat even realised she was there. Dressed in dragonscale and Taiytakei glass and gold. The damage to her armour from the fight in the Octagon was still obvious. Without Chay-Liang they had no one who could repair it.
There was Li again, creeping into his thoughts. Bellepheros shivered and then stared at Zafir, trying to see inside her. Li had despised the dragon-queen. Loathed her from the start and never wavered, seen her for what she really was: ambitious, ruthless, self-obsessed. She’d been that way for as long as he could remember. Maybe she’d softened a little of late, but she was what she was. Dragons never changed their scales; and even if they could, they were still dragons.
Or was it leopards and spots? Li had had a thing about leopards …
‘We have indeed all fallen a long way,’ he answered at last, fishing for words bland enough not to be seen to carry some hidden meaning.
Zafir banged the floor with the haft of some old relic of a spear, a wooden thing from the years of the Silver King. She whispered to Tuuran, who hurried away while the Octagon settled to silence, and then Zafir held out her hand with the Speaker’s Ring. No one spoke. The little white stone dragon above the throne cast its gaze hither and yon, twisting back and forth like a snake until it settled on Princess Kiam. Zafir kept her hand held outward.
‘Sister?’
Perhaps she had Diamond Eye raking through their thoughts. There were potions, of course, to block the dragon out, but Bellepheros needed dragon blood for that, and Vioros hadn’t left a stock of it. Diamond Eye had plenty, of course, but Bellepheros didn’t suppose the dragon would be keen to oblige him.
Zara-Kiam paused long enough to show her disdain, then slid off her throne and knelt before Zafir. She kissed the ring. ‘Sister.’ Her tone was mocking. The little dragon’s eyes followed her.
Jaslyn came next. She knelt without hesitation and kissed the ring. Her riders watched, some bewildered, some surly, few with any great conviction, but the little dragon on Zafir’s throne never reared and hissed at them. Bellepheros couldn’t for the life of him understand how Zafir had done that. Then his own turn. He was dreading having to bend down.
That
part was easy enough, but
he wasn’t sure he could actually get up again these days; but as he came to the throne Zafir stood.
‘From you a bow will do, Grand Master.’
Bellepheros bowed and kissed the Speaker’s Ring. He returned to his place next to Princess Kiam. Zafir looked hungry. Restless.
‘I have seen the realms around us,’ she said, addressing them all, steely and strong. ‘I have seen Furymouth and Clifftop in ashes. Farakkan, Purkan, Three Rivers, Valleyford, Arys Crossing. All are gone. The City of Dragons too. Perhaps kings and queens still hold their courts in Bazim Crag, in Bloodsalt, in Sand, in Evenspire, beneath the Purple Spur. If they do they are welcome at this council, but until they come, we are but who we are.’ She turned to Princess Kiam. ‘A speaker must relinquish the throne of their realm. I will do so when we leave for the Adamantine Palace. I name Zara-Kiam as my heir, here and now before you all. All this shall be yours, little sister. You are Queen Kiam now, and I name you to my council.’ She turned to her right. ‘Queen Jaslyn, heir to Queen Shezira, queen of Sand. I name you too to my council.’ Now at him. ‘Bellepheros, grand master alchemist of the Order of the Scales, I name you to my council. Last of all I name to my council Tuuran, Night Watchman of the Adamantine Guard. There will no longer be a voice for the Order of the Dragon, for that order is dead. For the other realms, any may stand forward if their claim is strong.’
No one moved.
‘Then I have named you, my Adamantine Council. To you falls the burden and duty of finding those who survive and sheltering them. Of taming the dragons or killing them, or of finding some manner of peace with them …’ She stopped as Tuuran returned, dragging Hyrkallan before her throne.
‘Isn’t your council a bit pointless without your precious Silver King?’ asked Princess Kiam, loudly.
Tuuran and Halfteeth forced Hyrkallan to his knees. A restless murmur moved through the dragon-riders from Sand and Evenspire. Zafir glared them to silence.
‘Hyrkallan, you are not and were never Queen Shezira’s heir. You brought war to my realm. You killed my riders and my men and drove me into exile. Nevertheless I offer you amnesty. Will you honour the ring I wear and bow to me as your speaker?’
Hyrkallan snarled. ‘I will not!’
Zara-Kiam snorted her contempt. ‘So execute the murderous bastard. Let him die slowly in lingering agony.’
Bellepheros shook his head. Zafir’s eyes moved and settled on him. ‘Then that is one vote from my council for execution,’ she said. ‘Grand Master Bellepheros, this man hanged every alchemist here. He took Grand Master Jeiros and smashed his wrists and ankles, and hung him from a wheel over the edge of this mountain to die. Do
you
have an opinion as to his fate?’
Bellepheros closed his eyes. The Hyrkallan he remembered had been a better man than any of these queens. A better rider, a stronger king, a perfect speaker who could have rallied the nine realms against anything.
He
was the one who should be wearing Zafir’s ring and sitting on that throne. He was the one to lead them through this. There couldn’t be any question of it, surely? And yet the words stuck stubbornly in his throat. Jeiros had been a friend. And maybe he’d never learn the whole truth of what had happened in the last few days before the dragons rose, but Hyrkallan had murdered countless alchemists, and that was certain. Friends. Pupils. The closest he had to family and kin. He found he couldn’t forgive that.
He turned his back to Zafir and Hyrkallan both.
‘Grand Master Bellepheros abstains.’ Zafir sounded surprised. ‘Queen Jaslyn of Sand?’ Bellepheros closed his eyes. Hyrkallan’s own wife, at least, would call for mercy, wouldn’t she?
‘Do with him as you will.’ Jaslyn too turned her back. Bellepheros blinked and stared at the white stone, numb.
Abstains?
He reached out a hand to the wall and touched it to steady himself.
Oh ancestors, I’ve killed him.
The thought struck him hard. Because Zafir wasn’t ever going to show any mercy, and so all of this was a sham, and he’d played into her hand, because now it didn’t matter what any of the others had to say.
‘Tuuran, Night Watchman of the Adamantine Guard?’ There. That little curl of triumph lingering at the edges of Zafir’s words. Whatever Tuuran said now, it didn’t matter. Zafir would have the last vote. Hyrkallan was already dead.
‘Holiness?’ Tuuran sounded confused.
‘What should we do with this dragon-rider, Tuuran? Should we spare him and banish him?’
Princess Kiam leaned forward. ‘I’d like you to say we should kill him. I think my sister would like that too. For once we agree on something.’
‘Holiness?’ Tuuran’s bewilderment fitted the charade this had become. Zafir must have known,
must
have, what Jaslyn and Kiam would say.
‘Choose his fate, Night Watchman,’ Zafir said. ‘Or turn your back as our grand master and the queen of Sand have done if you have nothing to say, and then it will fall to me to decide, and I will banish him. Choose as your conscience demands. Say he should die and so he shall. Say he should be banished and he will be taken to the edge of the Raksheh with a week of food and water to survive as best he might. Wits and strength against the world as befits a great rider in his twilight. He would have a chance to reach the Purple Spur, I think. But you must choose, Night Watchman, or turn away.’
‘But there
is
no choice, Holiness. I don’t understand why you even ask. He took arms against his speaker. It must be death; it cannot be anything else.’
A silence settled, stifling and heavy and inevitable like a last exhalation. Bellepheros felt dizzy. His face was tingling numb. He couldn’t feel his fingers. Princess Kiam stretched into her throne like a purring cat. She smiled and bared her teeth.
‘A year and a half living like those feral men under the city, false king,’ she hissed.
Bellepheros found Zafir staring at him. No smirk, no gleeful triumph. Just looking at him as though asking why, why didn’t he speak? Even now, why didn’t he speak?
He couldn’t.
‘I would have preferred banishment,’ she said, quietly so that even Bellepheros had to strain his ears to hear. Then she straightened in her throne and found her voice. ‘Execution, then. Ten days from today.’ The haft of her spear struck the stone. A dull powerless thump, and yet it rang around the Octagon and sounded in Bellepheros’s head like the roar of a dragon. The Adamantine Council was made again, and its first act was to kill. He tried to tell himself that he couldn’t have stopped it, that Zafir would have had her way, that Hyrkallan’s sentence was inevitable, that his death was what she’d wanted, no matter her words. And yet that searching look on her face as she’d turned to him at the end … She’d meant it. She really had. Had she?
I should have said something.
No. He couldn’t believe it. Dragons didn’t change their scales.
The court moved on to Tuuran’s forays into the Silver King’s Ways. Bellepheros excused himself and left. He hurried past his rooms and down into the depths of the tunnels and passages, away from the grand halls and sorceries of the Silver King until he reached Vioros’s workshop, where it was quiet and empty, where he was alone and people let him be. Tuuran’s men had brought the walking corpse up from the tunnels. They’d strapped it down with a great deal more rope than it needed, and when Bellepheros let them go, they couldn’t get out fast enough. Apparently it hadn’t struggled much, but it was very definitely not quite dead, and very definitely ought to have been. He took a deep breath and made himself look at it.
Banishment was as good as execution when there were dragons roaming the skies.
I should have spoken.
But Zafir surely couldn’t have meant what she’d said.
A dragon is always a dragon. She wanted him dead. In her heart, she wanted him dead …