Authors: Stephen Deas
Jeiros’s lip curled. ‘It was Zafir. She did this to us. All of it.’
Everything came out. The last days under the Spur. The long months of dragon tyranny. The years before. Zafir and the spear. Everything she’d done.
‘She’s like a cockroach,’ Jeiros spat. ‘Squash her down and she’s crawling again the moment you lift your boot.’
‘What happened to her?’ Bellepheros asked. He looked round and caught Jasaan’s eye. ‘She left you all to die, did she? Took the spear and abandoned you?’
Jasaan shook his head. ‘She stayed, alchemist. She fought the dragons, but she is not with us now.’
Dead? Hard to be sure from the look on Jasaan’s face. ‘And the spear?’
‘The dragons have it.’
Bellepheros laughed. Probably made him look deranged, but he couldn’t help himself. Zafir gone, the spear lost? He wasn’t sure how he ought to feel about that, but what he actually felt was almost nothing.
‘The Pinnacles,’ he said to Jeiros. ‘That’s where the Silver King kept his secrets. Kataros tell you about the Black Moon, did she?’
Jeiros nodded. ‘It’s good to see you again, old friend. Even if these are our last days.’
Jaslyn needed rest and water and to be looked after in peace and quiet, and in a day or so she might wake or she might not. Li flew her sled out into the gorge, scouting for dragons and not finding any, and there didn’t seem much point in waiting for that to change. She took Bellepheros across the Fury to the sheared mouth of a white tunnel halfway down the cliffs, the Silver King’s Ways that would take them to the Pinnacles.
‘Bring the other alchemists before you carry the rest,’ Bellepheros told her. ‘We need to talk about what’s to be done. You and I and them. Alone.’
‘Even the cripple?’
‘Especially Jeiros.’
Li pointed across the sky, far away down the gorge, and passed him a farscope. Far away to the west, drifting across a horizon of distant grey mountains, a speck moved. The eyrie, on its way to the Pinnacles. ‘We need to get there first,’ she said.
Bellepheros nodded.
‘It will be poison, then?’
‘Without the spear there’s no other way. But I doubt it will work, Li, and then he will kill us all with a snap of his fingers.’
Chay-Liang flew her sled back across the gorge. She returned with Kataros and Jeiros and Jasaan – apparently because two old alchemists and a scrawny woman needed some beefy Adamantine Man to make sure they didn’t hurt themselves. When he had them all together Bellepheros told the last alchemists of the dragon-realms the truth as he knew it: that the Black Moon was a half-god who must be stopped, and that it fell to them because there was no one else. It didn’t surprise him much when they didn’t like it.
‘What about the dragons?’ Jeiros asked. ‘Without the Isul Aieha, who will stop them?’
‘It will be down to us,’ Bellepheros began. ‘Whatever we can—’ A cacophony of dissent drowned him out, a melange of fear and dread and bewilderment and mistrust, until Li set off a thunderclap that shocked them to silence.
‘There is another choice,’ she said. ‘Kill the Black Moon and simply leave. I can cross the storm-dark. I can take you away.’ She looked at them, these ragged old men and women. ‘All of you. My people would fete you. Yes, you would be their slaves, but you would live like little kings for the powers you bring. End the half-god, and then leave this world behind.’
‘Li! No!’ Bellepheros rounded on her. ‘What are you—’
Her face tautened. ‘Haven’t you seen enough, Belli? There’s nothing left here! It’s all gone! All your kingdoms, all your palaces. This world is lost, but the Black Moon will carry this destruction to every other!’ Her gazed raked the other alchemists. ‘If you want more to think on then consider this: you could build eyries for my people as Bellepheros did, but you could do it willingly. Castles that fly, armed with lightning-cannon and black-powder guns. Belli here knows what I mean. He’s seen them. You could build an armada. Not to face the dragons in the skies in open battle, but to steal their eggs. With the potions you make and the arsenal I could build, we might slip from world to world and take the dragons’ unborn young. Hatch them in eyries of your design, if you must, where you would be waiting for them. They cannot cross the storm-dark, but
we
can. In a generation you would make them tame.’
She let that hang between them as Bellepheros looked away. There were so many things wrong with that that he didn’t know where to start, but in the end he didn’t say a word. They were all desperate, and Li was no different, and nor was he.
Li went back to ferrying the survivors from the Spur. They were half on one side of the gorge and half on the other when the first dragon appeared, arcing away from the speckle of dots in the sky swarming the Black Moon’s eyrie. It chased Li across the gorge, and when she threw lightning in its face and it didn’t fall or die, Bellepheros and the alchemists and Jasaan and the handful of his Adamantine Men already across fled into the Silver King’s tunnels, and Li shot after them, leaving Lystra and her riders stranded on the other side, not waiting to see how it would end for them because there simply wasn’t anything else to be done.
The Black Moon
Forty-four days after landfall
The eyrie reached the Pinnacles in the small hours before dawn. Tuuran was on the summit of the Moonlit Mountain. On watch, he told himself, but mostly it was because he couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the easiest place to be, what with the hundreds of dragons that had taken to perching on the cliffs, circling overhead, doing whatever dragons did when they were bored and waiting. Kept him busy, though. Sometimes they burned stuff for the fun of it, not that there was anything left that would burn any more. They’d seen to that long ago, but they still strafed the place with fire for no apparent reason now and then. Strafed each other too, lighting up the night; and then one would get annoyed with another and they’d fight. Maybe it was play. Tuuran couldn’t tell. Whenever it kicked off between a pair of dragons, that was him scurrying pell-mell to shelter. He didn’t stay to see whether they ever really hurt each other, but they certainly hurt anything that happened to be anywhere near. Like rocks. Lot of broken rocks. Taking a right pounding they were. Try hard enough and keep at it, the dragons looked like they might smash the whole mountain down.
They took off when the eyrie came. First thing they did was have a go at the dragons pulling it through the sky, and there wasn’t any play about
that
. With Diamond Eye keeping out of the way, wherever he was, the Black Moon had a dozen half-grown dragons doing his bidding now. Six or seven from the mountain went for each. Tuuran saw them in flashes and flickers, in streamers of bright fire and the dull moonlight glow of the eyrie stone, tearing the bound dragons out of the sky and ripping them apart in the starlight. He caught a glimpse, now and then, as pieces of dragon fell in a bloody rain.
The eyrie drifted on. The victors took its chains and started to pull it away. More flew in from other mountain peaks, up from the Silver City, from across the rolling fields and the distant Raksheh. Starlight lit their wings. They circled the eyrie, swooping in torrents of flame until a violent silver light flared. The eyrie lit up. The dragons pulling the chains vanished. Tuuran didn’t see how or what happened, only that one moment they were there, the next they were gone, swallowed by the night. He reckoned on having a pretty shrewd idea, though. Dissolved into greasy black ash. The Black Moon did it to men, so why not to dragons too?
The eyrie came on, slow and remorseless, glowing fiercely. Purple lightning criss-crossed its underside, flared and crackled, alive with pent-up possibility, bright in the darkness. It stopped over the Moonlit Mountain and the Black Moon stood on its rim. Brilliant like a nova he was, light bursting from his eyes as bright as the sun. Even his skin glowed. He stood and looked about, and then stepped off the edge and plunged like a falling star, and smashed into the rubble of the mountain top. A shock ring of force spread out around him, a detonation, a shimmer in the air, a cracking of stones. Tuuran felt it shudder through his feet, and then a blast of air knocked him flat.
Three dragons swooped at once. They doused the Black Moon in fire, not that it made any difference. The half-god stood, oblivious to them, wrapped in a silver aura. Another dragon came, claws stretched to tear the Black Moon to pieces. It dissolved as black dust. The half-god turned to the Queen’s Gate and walked towards it, while dragon after dragon dived to stop him, to burn him, to tear him, to pick him up and hurl him away, to crush him under falling stone, but it made no difference. Their fire bathed him and he barely noticed, and whatever touched him simply turned to ash.
Didn’t matter. Tuuran dusted himself down and ran ahead to the Queen’s Gate and the High Hall. He stood in the Black Moon’s path, waiting for the half-god to come as the mountain shook under the impacts of stone and dragons, as the night sky flashed with fire. Lazy wafts of scorched air drifted through the gate; and then the Black Moon, sauntering in as though he barely knew what was happening, dissolving the starlight with a brightness all of his own.
‘Oi!’ Tuuran might have shoved him. Almost did, but pulled back at the last, thinking of the men and dragons he’d seen turned to ash. ‘Yes. You. Crowntaker. Crazy Mad. Berren still in there? Because if he is then I want a word.’
The Black Moon didn’t seem to hear. He swatted Tuuran aside as though he was a feather and walked on towards the Grand Stair.
‘I want him back. Find someone else. Have me if you must.’ Sod being scared. Tuuran shoved him. Or tried, but it was like pushing at a mountain. He stepped into the half-god’s path again. ‘Oi! I’m talking to you!’
He didn’t see the knife. The Black Moon must have moved as fast as lightning. Or maybe he simply stopped time. Hard to be sure. All Tuuran knew was that one moment he was standing there, and the next he had the Black Moon’s knife stuck into him.
Three little cuts. You. Obey. Me.
‘Your friend is gone, little one. Make yourself useful. Have a throne set into the summit stone. Bring the spear-carrier and her spear. Have her and my dragons attend me at moonrise. Then when you have done my bidding, little one, be gone. End yourself as you see fit, and give yourself peace.’
In threes and fours Liang ferried soldiers and alchemists along the Silver King’s Ways, far enough to be out of sight, always making sure she left behind enough men with lightning and axes in case a hatchling came. In the deep night she crept the sled back to the tunnel mouth in case there was a chance to slip back across the Fury gorge. The dragons had gone, but Lystra and her men had disappeared too, and Liang didn’t try to find out where they’d gone.
It took most of another day to walk and fly the length of the tunnel to the Pinnacles. By the time they were done, Liang was exhausted. They walked in two groups, one ahead, one behind, and she ferried constantly back and forth between them, from the rear to the front, and then, when they were all together again, started anew until her eyes blurred with fatigue; but she thought, when they arrived, that perhaps it had been worth it, that perhaps they had come before the Black Moon’s eyrie.
By the time they reached the Undergates beneath the Moonlit Mountain, Kataros’s head was full of mush. She could see Jasaan wilting too.
‘You’d have thought,’ he grumbled, ‘it would be you alchemists who fell over from exhaustion first. Look at them! Old men, half of them, but they just keep on going.’
Kataros laughed at him. ‘They are alchemists, Jasaan. Even old Bellepheros will still be going when the last of you Adamantine Men collapse. I could give you something if you like?’
‘Has your blood in it, does it?’ Jasaan shook his head.
‘Everything we do relies on our blood.’
‘Then no thanks.’
‘You took my potions willingly enough back on the Yamuna.’
‘Because back then I didn’t know what it meant! Does it ever wear off?’
Kataros looked away. ‘No.’
‘So we’re all your slaves then? Any time you want us?’
‘If you want to look at it that way.’ She glared at him.
‘Blood-mages are abominations.’
‘Fine. Then all of us are abominations!’ She stormed away.
She thought Bellepheros would lead them right to the Undergates themselves, but he didn’t. He stopped a little way short and handed out potion skins. ‘The Black Moon will be watching,’ he said. ‘The potions that hide us from dragons hide us from the roving eye of the half-god too, but he will see into the thoughts of the men he has around him. If anyone else sees us then he’ll know we’re here. Best he doesn’t.’ He looked around them. ‘So how do we get in? Scale the mountainside?’
‘The scorpion caves,’ said Kataros. She pointed to the night-skin witch’s magic sled. ‘And that.’
Kataros took them all to the tunnels leading to the old Laughing Dog
tavern and climbed the steps to the cellars, looking about to see whether there were any feral men hiding there; when there weren’t she clambered from the ruin and crept through the overgrown streets, watching for dragons. Hundreds of specks circled high in the sky, orbiting the Moonlit Mountain. As she watched, a tight pack of six or seven dived across the city, raking the old artisans’ quarter with fire. She tried to see what they were chasing,
but as far as she could tell they weren’t chasing anything at all. She didn’t hear Jasaan come up until he stood beside her.
‘It works both ways, you know,’ she said.
‘What does?’
‘The bond I make with my blood. Whether I like it or not. Zafir killed Garros when she took the spear, did you know that? Stopped his heart with lightning and it didn’t trouble her. Jeiros, Queen Lystra, little Prince Jehal, who do you think she would have spared?’ She sniffed. ‘Anyway, if you think very hard of me, you’ll find that the tether runs the other way too.’
‘Blood-magic is an abomination.’ Jasaan’s words were mechanical this time, rote and hollow. He had doubts. That was something, then.
‘“Make right what I could not.” That’s what the Silver King said to me in the Black Mausoleum. I still don’t know what it means, but I think the Taiytakei woman is right. We have to stop the half-god.’
Jasaan looked to the skies, to the circling dragons around the peak of the Moonlit Mountain. ‘I knew what you’d done,’ he said, ‘and so I went back. I gave Tuuran something you once made for me to return the strength you took from him. I gave him my lightning and a knife. Maybe the dragons found them and ate them anyway, or maybe not. Either way, however they ended is not on your conscience, if you actually have one.’ He sniffed hard. ‘How will you stop a half-god, Kat? Did the Silver King tell you? Even if the night-skin witch finds a way to get her sled out of the tunnels, we’ll never get up there. You’ll never get close. They’ll burn us out of the sky.’
Kataros didn’t answer. She eased out from the alley behind the Laughing Dog into the old Raksheh Way that led from the Forest Gate into the city’s heart. In years past it would have been crowded even at this time, a bustling jumble of noise and life. She beckoned Jasaan and pointed deeper into the city to the broken emerald dome of the Golden Temple. ‘That’s where I came down.’
‘What?’
‘When Skjorl and I stole a pair of Prince Lai’s wings and jumped out of a cave. That’s where I came down.’
‘There?’ Jasaan stared in disbelief. ‘When
I
jumped they carried me for miles.’
‘Because you jumped from the summit.’ She looked back at the green and grey dappled cliffs of the Moonlit Mountain, tracing its sheer face, weaving her eyes through the hanging trails of vines and moss. She pointed at a patch of shadow under a sheet of grey rock, one side swathed in tangled ropes of vivid green creeper. ‘There.’
‘The overhang?’
‘It’s a cave. The palace labyrinth behind is largely abandoned. Only a few hundred feet above ground. A bold man might even have a go at climbing to it.’
Jasaan snorted. ‘A bold man on a good clear day and with a kind wind and no rain, and with no dragons circling above, you mean.’
‘I suppose so.’ She sighed and faced him. ‘I did what I did, Jasaan. I thought it was best. I didn’t kill them. I could have, and maybe I should have, but I didn’t, and I didn’t need you to spare my conscience. I was content enough. Do you see the eyrie?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I’m going to stay here and keep watch then. Someone has to.’
‘You want some company?’ he asked.
‘Not really.’
The night-skin witch came up as twilight fell, with a sack of glass balls as big as grapefruits. She sat with them in the cellar of the Laughing Dog for hours more, and every time Kataros looked, her pieces of glass were different shapes, until, long past midnight, they were shields almost as tall as a man and a single wedge-like sled that hovered off the ground. The alchemists and the Adamantine Men gathered around her. The witch picked up a handful of glass rods and passed them out.
‘These are your lightning throwers. They make a lot of noise. Give them to whoever you think best.’ She dumped the rest of the wands in Jasaan’s arms and went to where half a dozen odd-looking fat-bodied bulbous javelins were propped against the cellar wall, each inside a glass tube like an oversized map case with a curved piece visor near one end. ‘These are your black-powder rockets. Close the back end and it will fire the powder. Hold the glass tube over your shoulder and make sure the visor covers your face. And do make
sure
you do that unless you don’t mind having your eyes burned out. Point it at whatever you don’t like and wait for the rocket to go off. On the nasty end is a glass bulb with a snip of storm-dark inside. The storm-dark annihilates whatever it touches, and so that should be the end of whatever you hit. If I were you I’d point them at the Black Moon and set them off all at once.’ She shrugged. ‘It might work, it might not. Hard to hit something that’s moving fast like a dragon though. Our rockets were never very accurate.’
As the night ended and the sun rose they crept across the shattered city, keeping together and keeping to the shadows, slipping from ruin to ruin until they reached the foot of the mountain.
‘Who’s first?’ asked the witch. ‘I can take two.’
Kataros went because she’d been this way before. Jasaan came too. A few minutes later they were hovering outside the entrance to the caves.
‘This one,’ Kataros said.
Moonrise. A slender crescent chasing the sun. Zafir stood on the highest point of the Pinnacles above the Queen’s Gate, the Silver King’s spear in her hand. Myst stood beside her. A terrible thing to ask, but alchemy once again hid her thoughts from dragons, and she would need Diamond Eye, and so Myst would be her dragon’s voice, and it would probably get her killed. Zafir didn’t think she could ever forgive herself for that, but here she was anyway because someone had to be.
She watched Tuuran below her as he wandered the ruin of the Reflecting Garden, restless and aimless both at once. The Black Moon had demanded a throne, and so Tuuran had brought him one, a flimsy wooden chair that wobbled and barely held together and would have fallen apart if anyone sat on it. A spiteful act of rebellion, and the Black Moon turned it to ash and conjured one of his own, grown from the stone of the mountain itself, flowing like liquid butter and adorned with a tormented dragon writhing along each armrest. Crystals of ice spread across its surface, little white lines like twigs and branches of tiny trees.