Authors: Stephen Deas
‘You have your dragon, Holiness. I have him.’
And we could have each other.
His unspoken words. He leaned closer, words whispered: ‘He told me how to set him free, Holiness. With the spear. I told you—’
‘I know.’ She pushed Tuuran back, gentle but firm. ‘And the spear will open the way to the Silver Sea. I have seen and done that much.’ The old Zafir might have said she’d done it just for him too. Tried to earn his gratitude even when she didn’t need it. But it had been an accident, that was all, and the Zafir she found in her skin today simply wished she hadn’t said anything at all, because Tuuran’s eyes turned wide as saucers. Hope flared in them so bright that she had to look away again. It seared her.
‘Holiness! Then we can save him! Holiness, if you have opened the way to the Silver Sea then I swear on everything, I will find a way to take him there and push—’
‘Stop!’ She rounded on him, though she still couldn’t look him in the eye. ‘Just stop, Tuuran. Even if I could fool him. Even if I did, what then? What of the dragons? We burn and slowly starve.’
But no, there was no crushing an Adamantine Man. Tuuran set his jaw. He nodded, and she knew exactly what he was thinking.
Right then. Dragons first, and then
boot the bastard half-god back where he belongs
. Something like that.
The dragons left them alone on the second day, waiting now for the Black Moon to come. Zafir hid with Myst and pretended to sleep – Flame knew she needed it – but in the middle of the night she dressed in gold and glass and dragonscale. She slipped alone to the foot of the Grand Stair and touched another hidden piece of moonsilver. The stone that barred the way shivered and shifted and rose without a sound, opening once more. A gateway wide enough for a full-grown dragon if it didn’t mind a bit of a squeeze.
She called to Diamond Eye. She felt the dragon touching her soul again now. Kataros’s potion had worn away at last, and so perhaps Kataros could reach from the Spur to touch her again now too. Another alchemist might know the answer to that, but Zafir didn’t have any of those and so she supposed she’d never know until it happened. She tried not to think about that. Too much like the alchemy that Bellepheros and his ilk once used to control the dragons. Too much like the gold-glass circlet the Taiytakei had wrapped across her brow to crush her skull whenever the whim took them, until the Black Moon had turned it to ash and set her free.
Was that what he was? A liberator? Hard not to have her doubts about that, all things considered.
She climbed the Grand Stair and walked into the night, sucking in the air, revelling in the space around her. The stars. The moon. The cold. The scents rising from the land far below. Never again. Never again trapped in suffocating holes and tunnels and caves. Never again living in a cage. She’d rather die.
Diamond Eye waited for her on the cliff edge of the summit.
The others?
she asked.
The dragons?
Some have flown to burn the Black Moon’s eyrie. A few have scattered, knowing what must come. Most wait close for him. Some will side with him when he comes. Most will not.
Can they stop him?
No.
Then it’s futile, is it? The Black Moon will be master of us all. He will make slaves of everyone he touches, even dragons. But what else is there? We will all become like the man who was once Tuuran’s friend. Caged and drowning in our own skin.
That one is gone, dragon-queen. The Black Moon snuffed him out. He has taken what essence remained of the Isul Aieha and has added it to his own. He is finding his true strength.
Zafir walked through the fire-cracked stone. She stopped at the bubbling water, all that was left of the Silver King’s Reflecting Garden. She took a drink. The water was cool and pure and fresh, as it always was.
Why did you have to smash it? Where was the need for that?
Diamond Eye rumbled, looming over her, massive and dark against the night. A flash of fury seared her.
Five hundreds years of servitude, little one. That was his gift to us. We would erase his memory as he erased ours.
Vengeance, Diamond Eye? I thought dragons had no use for it.
He didn’t answer at once. His thoughts, when he did, were measured.
So that no one else remembers that it can be done, little one.
Is that wise? You were half-gods once. Did you remember that?
Another pause.
No.
But you know that it’s true.
Yes.
Yet if the Isul Aieha had not left his story you would never know what you once were. You would never know that it not only could be done, but that it already had.
Zafir left the water and climbed onto his back.
Take me to the dragon Snow.
She will kill you.
You will not let her.
And the other thousand dragons who wait? Shall I fight them too?
You will do what you can.
Diamond Eye lowered his head. He turned and stepped off the edge and spread his wings.
Would you dive together, little one, one last time?
Zafir smiled.
I would.
She didn’t quite know why she was doing this. Stupid, perhaps. But what did she want? Not the things she’d wanted before the Taiytakei took her as a slave, when all she thought was to climb to the highest throne where no one could touch her.
And after they took me, all I wanted was to be free.
Was there a lesson there? Or were they actually the same thing when you cut to the heart of it? Perhaps they were. She didn’t know.
Together they plunged from the summit of the Moonlit Mountain. Zafir clung to Diamond Eye and pressed herself against his scales. The wind tore and whipped, and for a short span she lost herself in the rush of it, the sheer exhilaration of arrowing almost a mile straight down through the air. Diamond Eye broke the dive gently, sparing her bruises and battered bones. He soared silently, wings stretched taut, gliding through the night from the smashed-down ruin of the Silver City and the eyrie beside it, east towards the great Fury river and Hammerford. Zafir closed her mind, keeping him distant and all the other dragons too. The spear was back in her room. Perhaps without it they might not notice her – they might not think to look – but as they came close and started their descent, Diamond Eye felt the presence of the white dragon Snow circling over the long-burned town. Zafir felt it too. The white dragon was waiting for her.
Why leave your fortress, little one?
The white dragon asked.
Out here you are only prey.
In the moonlight below Zafir could make out the stone dragons on the waterfront, the frozen statues made by the Silver King’s spear, the first dragons to die in their war of awakening.
Your name is Snow. I remember you, although I never saw you. You were supposed to be a present for Jehal. A gift to come with his bride.
The half-god comes, little one.
The Black Moon will make you into the scourge of worlds
, Zafir said, curious,
yet Diamond Eye says you mean to fight him. Does it not please you what he brings? Fire and death and ash? Destruction, annihilation, isn’t that what you are? Isn’t that what you crave? Isn’t that your nature?
We are all that, little one, and such things shall not be tamed into servitude.
The dragon Snow snarled her thoughts. Zafir looked about, trying to spot her in the sky.
Diamond Eye laughed.
Little sister, how will you stop him? With the spear in your claws, even if you held it?
I
held it once, torn from the grasp of the Isul Aieha himself. It served me nothing.
With remorseless fire and tooth and talon and tail, great brother. With an endless whirlwind to weather him down. We will all die the little death, over and over, but we will come at him again and again and again, and we will never stop until he breaks.
Snow shot out of the night, arrow hard. Zafir almost didn’t see her. Diamond Eye rolled at the last and took the impact. Claws raked around his flank, reaching. Snow’s tail slashed the air. It whipped past Zafir’s head and curled and smashed down, and would have shattered her, but Diamond Eye twisted and lunged and caught the tip of it in his jaws and bit it off. A haze of dragon blood misted the air. Snow snapped at Diamond Eye’s throat and tore at flesh and scales.
You are weaker, great brother, with this little one on your back. She makes you small.
Diamond Eye caught Snow’s head between his foreclaws and pulled her away.
Little Snow. Little hunter with your long wings and tail, but what substance is there to you? You have no strength. Graceful wings but not for fighting. I have given the little death to far greater dragons.
Snow raked fire over his belly, not that he felt it, but Zafir knew the fire was for her, for the harness that held her. Claws tore a savage gash in Diamond Eye’s flank, lashing to catch his wing. Diamond Eye threw Snow away and wheeled. He dived after her, but Snow was a hunting dragon, fast and agile, and while Diamond Eye had speed and strength to match her and more, he could never be as nimble. The white dragon darted aside. She twisted in the air, wheeled and arced and lunged and snapped at Zafir. The long tail lashed again, its bloody severed tip whip-cracking past Zafir’s face. Diamond Eye rolled, a vicious wrench as he flared his wings, falling backwards. Snow veered away, out of reach of Diamond Eye’s great claws.
Let me have her, great brother. Who are you to serve a little one?
Snow arced and pirouetted and slipped beneath Diamond Eye and came again. Zafir pressed herself hard flat. The fury of the fight had her. The two dragons were inside her head, coursing through her, pitiless for blood, to claw and slash and rend and kill …
Give her to me, great brother.
Snow came again, a violent flurry of talons, of blood still flying from her damaged tail, drops spattering Zafir’s face. She howled with a furious glee.
The blood of my enemies!
Diamond Eye roared. Snow lacerated his flanks. He flared and wheeled and shot in pursuit. Snow pinwheeled. The dragons passed one another, and again Diamond Eye rolled Zafir away from Snow’s claws and tail, and again they savaged one another, and this time Zafir felt a surge of vicious delight. Snow didn’t turn this time as they parted, but dived for the ruin of Hammerford. Zafir pushed herself upright and peered. She quivered and shook, wrapped bloodthirsty and murderous in dragon-fire and fury. The white dragon was favouring one wing.
You hurt her!
She couldn’t let it go.
Finish her!
Diamond Eye rolled away.
Kill her!
To what end, little one? To sate you?
The great dragon circled.
His thoughts, always cold, turned to abyssal ice.
The Black Moon cut my soul with his knife of eyes, a fragment of the forgotten goddess of the stars. He bound me to you against my will. You demand this? So be it. I will kill for you.
He snapped viciously in the air and shot after Snow.
Zafir screamed. The rage was like a fire in her blood. Glorious flames, a violent greedy joy of victory that left no space for other thought …
Stop!
She closed her eyes.
You are free. Do as you wish.
Diamond Eye slowed. The white dragon Snow vanished into the night, sinking lower with each broken beat of her wings, and as Diamond Eye soared homeward towards the Pinnacles, Zafir thought she heard a voice that was meant for someone else.
Here lies your answer, little sister.
Gliding Dragon Gorge
Forty-two days after landfall
Chay-Liang flew low, the two of them freezing and shivering and squashed together for warmth. They left the mountains behind them in the night, Belli with his eyes tight shut and sunk so deep into himself with cold and his fear of heights and open spaces that Liang wondered if she’d ever get him back. As the land fell to foothills she skimmed rolling dales and dipping valleys, until the world below her dropped into the gorge of the Silver River and the Great Cliff beyond. She stopped not far from the sink-hole rush and torrent where the river vanished under the mountain spur, and shook Belli from his stupor.
‘Are we there yet?’ He didn’t move except to look at her balefully. ‘If we’re not, can I go back to sleep?’
Liang snorted and poked him. ‘We’re definitely somewhere. I don’t have the first idea where, so whether it’s
there
or not I couldn’t tell you.’ She rummaged through the leather satchels at the back of the sled. ‘I’m also too tired to care. While you’ve been snoring, one of us has been flying, you know.’
Belli didn’t move until she started building a fire. Then he hauled himself up and hobbled towards her, flapping his hands. ‘No! No fire.’
‘I’m cold, Belli. I want to be asleep, and I want to be warm. Wrapped in silk and lying on a bed of feathers with a hot summer breeze wafting in through the windows, if you could manage that for me.’
‘A dragon might see flames from miles away.’
Which made her feel a bit stupid. ‘You’re such a killjoy sometimes.’ She went to the sled and pulled out a bundle of sticks and sailcloth which, with the right application of patience and on a good day, could sometimes manage to turn itself into a sort of conical tent. She wrestled with it. ‘We can have a little fire inside this, can’t we?
If
I can get it up.’
Bellepheros glanced at the sky, but he didn’t say no. He was cold and shivering too. Liang fussed around him, battling ropes and poles.
‘I haven’t seen any dragons since this morning,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t that seem odd? They were everywhere when I followed Tsen’s eyrie to those caves.’
‘They’re probably still with the eyrie.’
‘What do you suppose they want?’
‘I don’t know.’ There was a flicker of amusement in his voice as he watched her struggle with the tent. ‘The Black Moon thinks himself their master. If they think otherwise then I’m glad not to be there.’ His head hung. ‘Suppose we succeed? Suppose we poison the Black Moon. What then?’
‘One day at a time. We’re alive, aren’t we?’ Liang ruffled his hair, mostly because she knew he hated that and so maybe it would snap him out of feeling sorry for himself. She leaned against her sled and scratched her head, and looked at the mess of cloth and poles and ropes and pegs scattered around her. The tent was having one of its days when it resolutely didn’t want to be put up. ‘You know, whenever I needed any sort of shelter in Takei’Tarr, I made it out of glass. A big block of it. I’d take my sled here apart and mould a shelter to fit the landscape. In the morning I’d turn it back into a sled! Both done in a matter of minutes! It was so easy. I hate your world, Belli. Nothing works as it should.’
Bellepheros looked over the tangle of poles. ‘You need to put those three big ones together first and make a tripod.’
‘I’ve had this stupid tent with me for a month.’ Liang glared at him. ‘You sit here for five minutes and you think you can tell me how to put it up?’
Five minutes and he had it done. He made a vague effort to look more apologetic than smug, and failed dismally. Liang glowered and seethed, growled a little when he shrugged at her, and then barged inside with her collection of sticks and kindling and set about making a fire. It wasn’t much of one, but once she had it going it would warm the air, and that was enough. When she was done she glared at him again, and then beckoned him to join her inside.
‘Going to tell me that putting up tents is man’s work now, are you?’ she grumbled.
He snorted. ‘Shall I tell you it’s work for slaves,
mistress
?’
‘Then you slaves have your uses. Tents, eh?’ She sighed and put an arm around his shoulders and pulled him close.
‘I spent three years of my life wandering these lands.’ The alchemist held out his hands to the flames. ‘I was younger then, and less bothered by things like not having a comfortable bed and a proper roof over my head. In the deserts to the north and the east we used to sleep out in the open under the night sky. I remember one night we watched shooting stars and didn’t sleep at all.’
‘We?’
He smiled a sad little smile. ‘It was a long time ago. Her name was Meileros. We were friends, nothing more, or at least we thought so. We had the idea we might travel the country and write a journal to bring back to the Palace of Alchemy. The history and geography and flora of the nine realms.’ He chuckled. ‘Old Tsen even had a copy in his eyrie. It’s still there if you want to read it. Truth was, it wasn’t much more than an excuse to be away and alone together, though I don’t think either of us quite understood that at the start. She was young; I was –’ he laughed again ‘– not so young any more, I suppose, not even then. But not old. I could still run. I thought I needed an assistant. We started in the north and worked our way south. Two years we were together. She was stupid and careless, wandering the fringes of the Raksheh. A snapper got her. I never forgave myself for that. She had a way of looking at things. Like you do. Quite special.’
He faded for a moment, eyes lost somewhere far away, until Liang squeezed him a little closer. ‘I was all for giving up on it then, but in the end I finished without her. It carries my name, but it’s filled with her memory. I hated it for a while after it was done. Loathed it. Wished we’d never started. Now … now I think I’m quite proud of it.’ He shook himself, as if throwing off old dust, and leaned into her. ‘Anyway … my point was meant to be that I spent months in the wilderness, much of the last of it alone with nothing except a tent very much like this one for shelter. So that’s why I know a thing or two about tents.’ He smiled and took her hand.
Later, as they let the fire die, he showed her how the one last piece of sailcloth she’d never understood was a cap to go over the top of the tripod. It covered the vent hole that let out the smoke, and thus trapped the warmth inside. They lay tangled together, warm and cosy in their little shelter, with the world outside far away behind fragile walls.
‘Where are we, Belli?’ she asked.
‘The valley of the Silver River. The hole where the Spur swallows it is called the Silver King’s Tomb. Entirely wrong-headed, but there you go.’ He clucked and tutted. ‘Riders would come to the cliffs out here back when dragons wore our alchemy. They used to race from the top of the cliff to the ground. Idiots, if you ask me, but who ever does? Every year a few would die, broken by the hurricane wind of such a stoop or the force of a dragon’s flared wings.’ He snorted. ‘Speaker Hyram held a tournament once, in his early years. Quite a prize he offered. Riders came from everywhere. Shezira and Hyrkallan from Sand, everyone wanted to see
them
dive against one another, and they did. Two riders from Bazim Crag raced and both dragons crashed. Broke their wings and killed their riders, along with Prince Vollis of Three Rivers and most of his entourage, who’d camped close to watch. Too close, as it turned out. Thrown a hundred feet in the air by the force of the dragons coming down beside them, so I heard. A young rider from the Silver City won in the end. Riders from the Pinnacles often win the Great Cliff dive. They get more practice than most, with the cliffs of the Moonlit Mountain right there. You might have heard of this one. Her name was Zafir.’
Liang snuggled closer as they stroked each other in lazy circles. She closed her eyes and listened to Belli talk his wandering stories of younger days, of the beauty of his homeland and of its horrors, of dragons and men, and fell asleep.
In the morning, while Belli still snored, she slipped outside to shape her sled to carry two instead of one. When she was done she stopped, and looked at it a while. She and Red Lin Feyn had poured hour after hour into building it. Black-powder rockets strapped to glass javelins tipped with storm-dark snips of annihilation. Lightning throwers stronger than any wand, closer to the cannon carried by the armoured golem-guardians of the Dralamut, though neither she nor Lin Feyn were more than journeymen when it came to wrapping lightning into glass. Talking quietly, burying themselves in work, keeping busy, both armouring themselves as best they could. The sorceress and her apprentice. Lin Feyn to stand between the Ice Witch of Aria and the Sun King of the Dominion. And her, Chay-Liang of Hingwal Taktse, to stand between dragons and a half-god; and Liang couldn’t help thinking how she’d come out with rather the worse end of that particular bargain.
Belli finally floundered from the tent, all aches and groans and bleary eyes. Liang poured him a cup of river water, and they chewed seeds and dried fruit from the alchemists’ caves. She let him put the tent away on his own and didn’t help, and in return he smiled at her every time he saw her sour face carefully held in place, until in the end she gave up and stuck out her tongue at him. They took to the air over the swirl and white crash of spray where the Silver River plunged under the Spur. The Great Cliff loomed above into tattered shreds of cloud, drifting from the mountains to die over dry dusty plains and desert. They passed the glitter of the Emerald Cascade, spray sparkling green and rainbows glinting in the air. She skimmed the Sapphire River, rushing rapids under an old rope bridge and the charred ruins of an abandoned eyrie overgrown and choked with thorns. Through the day Liang revelled in the grandeur around her, the curtain cliffs of the Spur, the crags above, the tenuous clinging thorn trees, the dazzling sprays of bright sunlit water. For a time she almost forgot why she was here.
But only for a time. As twilight came she caught a glint of sunset fire on a distant lake, and when she climbed the sled high she saw a ruined city beside the shore, gutted and smashed down, flattened and trampled, already half lost under shreds of creeping green. A shattered palace stood on a low hill beside it; the dark shape of a dragon took to the sky as she watched, rising from the ruins and heading south. She slowed then, letting the night darken as they reached the tumbled ghost stones and moon shadows of the fallen Adamantine Palace.
‘Wake up, you.’ She poked Belli.
‘I wasn’t asleep.’ He yawned and stretched. ‘Just keeping my eyes closed so I don’t have to see how far away the ground is.’
‘There was a dragon. The first I’ve seen since I found you,’ she said.
‘Perhaps the rest are mobbing the Black Moon. So much the better if they are.’ Belli looked about him at the ruin of the Adamantine Palace. ‘Good place to rest. Plenty of hiding under the ground here. Tomorrow we throw ourselves at the abyss, eh?’
‘If not us then who will do it?’
‘Fifty years, Li, give or take.’ Belli let out a heavy sigh. ‘It would be nice if it was someone else for a change. It really would.’ There surely couldn’t be anyone left here alive, but Belli led the way into the fire-scoured hulk of hollowed stone that was the Glass Cathedral anyway. Down the spiral of stairs hidden behind the altar was the sprawled corpse of a hatchling dragon, but that was all. They slept in the tunnels and left on the next morning, Liang skimming the overgrown plains from the smashed-down City of Dragons to the Fury gorge, searching for an entrance to the Silver King’s Ways, and that was how they found Kataros and Jasaan and the last survivors from under the Spur.
‘Belli!’ She had to wake him up. ‘Bellepheros!’
‘Grand Master Bellepheros?’
Bellepheros blinked a few times, trying to clear his head, trying to work out where he was. They were in the mouth of some cave, and two Adamantine Men with lightning throwers were staring at him, while a dim glowing light filtered through broken stone from deeper under the earth.
‘Jasaan?’ Bellepheros staggered from the sled. ‘Jasaan! Where—’ He stared past Jasaan at the figures beyond – Kataros and a feral old man in a wheeled chair, wrists and feet crippled and useless. ‘Jeiros?’ His mouth hung open. He stumbled closer. ‘
Jeiros
?’ They’d grown up together, learned, trained and taught together. They’d sat by firesides and spun tales and brewed potions that no one else had ever made and never would again. Half a century of friendship whose presence should have been the comfort of a cosy fire and a favourite robe and a cup of warm spiced brandy; and yes, he knew the story of what Hyrkallan had done, but it hadn’t made him ready, not for this …
‘Jeiros,’ Bellepheros said at last. ‘I heard about the hammers. I’m so sorry.’ He shook his head.
The other survivors from the Spur were camped further down the tunnel. Bellepheros bowed to a queen he barely recognised as Princess Lystra, and to the son she carried wrapped in a dragonscale bundle, little Jehal, heir to Furymouth. Three thousand men had fled under the Spur when the Adamantine Palace fell, so Jasaan said. A score of alchemists, hundreds of Adamantine Guard and dragon-riders, a thousand servants from the speaker’s palace and the Palace of Alchemy, and as many again rescued from the City of Dragons in the days that followed. Bellepheros looked at the bedraggled company around him now. Less than a hundred. A dozen alchemists and a few motley handfuls of simmering Adamantine Men and dispirited dragon-riders. He listened as they murmured to one another. They were walking dead men, half of them, shambling from hour to hour with no thought of what to do, half of them bloody or burned from battle, waiting for the end to come and take them in talons and fire.
Kataros took him to Queen Jaslyn. She was all but dead, ripped half apart in the dragon attack that had seized the spear, and for a while Bellepheros forgot about anything else while he and Jeiros worked to save her. Most of one arm had gone below the shoulder, leaving nothing but rags of flesh and a splintered stump of bone. A claw had ripped her open down one side from armpit to hip. Bone glistened through a wound harsh enough to kill most men. Bellepheros cut himself and dripped a little of his blood into the wounds, and Jeiros did the same, the two of them working together to knit muscle and skin, to close veins and arteries. There wasn’t much to be done about the arm, but it felt good to do something that made a difference, even if it was only a small one, only one life. While they worked Bellepheros tried to explain what had happened to him, the last two years of his life, but there was so much to say and so little time, and he soon tied himself in knots. The other alchemists looked at him askance, their old master, vanished while their world was sucked into cataclysm and now miraculously returned.