Crown of Dragonfire (2 page)

Finally, dizzy, Tash stumbled
into her home—the glittering cavern beneath the ziggurat. The pleasure pit.

Here was a place of
smoke, shadows, flickering lights. Her little kingdom to rule. Curtains of
beads and silk hung from the ceiling. The walls were roughly carved, no finer
than the walls of a cave, peppered with alcoves full of candles, incense
sticks, and gleaming crystals. The other pleasure slaves—Tash's girls—lounged
upon tasseled pillows and rugs, smoking from hookahs. The
hintan
—a
pleasurer's favorite spice—bubbled in the glass containers, gleaming green,
while purple smoke rose from the slaves' lips. Two male seraphim were here
today, lying on a rug, moaning as perfumed slaves pleasured them with spice,
wine, and flesh.

Tash was a young woman,
among the youngest in the pit, yet she ruled over the others, for she refused
to surrender to the spice. Her mind was clear, her instincts sharp. With her
wits, she had risen to rule her domain of shadows.

Let there be some
safety here,
she thought, gazing upon her girls.
Let this be a haven
even as the world shatters above.

She walked through the
chamber, navigating between the curtains of beads, the bubbling hookahs, and
the pleasure slaves who lay everywhere. The candlelight shone, the beads
jangled, and the giggles of the slaves rose like music. But still those screams
echoed in Tash's ears, and she could not forget the raining blood.

She thought of Elory,
the young girl who had come here from the bitumen craters, who had vanished
from the pleasure pit days ago. Tash had thought the girl insufferable at
first, naive and dulled by the sun of Tofet, yet as she had taught Elory the
ways of lovemaking, Tash had come to like the girl.

Are you still alive,
Elory? Did you find safety up in the cruel world, or did—

The door to the
pleasure pit banged open.

Tash spun around and
felt the blood drain from her face.

Her heart seemed to
stop.

There he stood—the new
King of Saraph, the blood of his mother and sister still on his hands.

Ishtafel.

Tash hid the long white
feather behind her back. Her heart, which only an instant ago had seemed
frozen, burst into a gallop. Cold sweat washed her. She had just watched this
seraph, the man who had destroyed Requiem, cut the wings off Meliora, and now
he was here, bloodlust in his eyes.

Tash raised her chin.
I
cannot let him hurt any others. I cannot let him hurt my girls.

"My lord!" She rushed
toward him, placing herself between him and her fellow pleasure slaves. "Welcome
to the pleasure pit! I am Tash, and I would be glad to—"

He grabbed her, snarling,
lust in his eyes—no longer bloodlust but lust for her. Not the playful,
sometimes even wild lust of the other seraphim who called upon her services.
His was a violent, cruel thing, the lust of a predator, of a conqueror.

"My lord, I would be
happy to please you—" she began, heart thumping.

"Silence."

He ripped her clothes,
and he did not let her do her work. She would not be pleasuring him today,
would not pour him wine, giggle at his jokes, kiss every part of his body until
he went mad with desire. No. He wanted her to give him nothing; he wanted only
to take. And he took from her. He took all of her, clutching her with bloody
fingers, laughing, drooling onto her, a rabid beast, a demon above her. She
shut her eyes, shuddering beneath him as his fingers bruised her, smearing
others' blood across her pale skin. Tash had made love to countless men, yet
she had never had a man take her like this; he was not a man, she thought, not
a sentient being but a charging bull of fire.

Finally he pulled out
from her, and he shoved her aside.

He left her there on
the rug. He left her as he had left Meliora—wingless, a broken thing. He left
her as he had left Requiem—shattered.

She lay there in
another person's blood, clutching her feather.

Remember Requiem,
Tash
thought.
Remember Requiem.

Slowly, as a flame in
old embers, a rage kindled in Tash. She had seen a nation march. She had seen a
leader rise among them—Meliora the Merciful—only for Ishtafel to cut off her
wings.

When Elory had spoken
to her of her dreams—dreams of old Requiem, of Requiem rising again—Tash had
scoffed. But something had happened this day. Something Tash knew she would
never forget. She held her feather so tightly she crushed it.

Remember Requiem.

"Tash, are you all
right?" whispered one of her girls, a slave with long red hair.

Tash rose to her feet,
a deep ache between her legs, searing up her belly. She clutched the feather as
if drowning at sea, clinging to a rope.

"No," she whispered. "I'm
not all right. None of this is all right."

And then she heard it.

The chanting—not just
in her memory but true voices, calling out, again and again.

"Free Meliora! Free
Meliora!"

The voices of her
people. The cry of Requiem.

We rise up.

Tash balled her fists.

And I will rise with
my people. With Requiem.

Tash tightened her lips
and left the pleasure pit. She made her way along the dark corridors, up the
stairs, and back to the surface of the world. She walked along a portico, a
wall of frescos to one side, columns to the other, affording a view of the city
beyond.

"Free Meliora!" the
slaves cried. "Free Meliora!"

Requiem cried out . . .
and Saraph answered.

Fire streamed above,
and there he flew—Ishtafel, rising in a chariot of fire, laughing, slick with
blood, and the pain in Tash flared. A hundred thousand seraphim or more flew
with him, their chariots covering the sky.

Tash stared from
between the columns, feeling the world collapse around her.

Blood flowed across the
city of Shayeen that day.

Fire rained.

Shrieking, laughing,
praying to their gods, the seraphim descended upon the children of Requiem with
spear and arrow, decimating the slaves, and a forest of the dead rose, corpses
upon pikes.

Requiem shattered.

The screams rose, then
tore, then fell silent.

Tash knew that all her
life, she would remember the slaughter she saw here. She knew that if Requiem
survived, her people would forever remember this day, the decimation of the
slaves, the massacre of sixty thousand souls, their voices forever silenced,
their light forever darkened. And she knew that she herself could never return
to that glittering pit, to the smoke of hintan and incense, to the kingdom she
had carved beneath the mountain.

Once Tash had thought
herself merely a pleasurer, a queen of the glittering goddesses of the
underworld. That life had ended. This day she was a daughter of Requiem.

The fire seared her
tears dry, and Tash forced herself to stare at the slaughter. At the blood on
the streets of Shayeen. At the piles of dead. At the seraphim who still dipped
from the sky, thrusting spears, slaughtering the fleeing children of Requiem.
She forced herself to see this, as King Benedictus in days of old had seen the
slaughter at Lanburg Fields in Requiem's ancient war against the griffins, as
Queen Lyana had seen the phoenixes descending upon the marble halls of Nova
Vita, Requiem's lost capital.

I'm not a warrior
like they were.
Tash touched the collar around her neck.
I have no
legendary sword to wield, nor can I become a dragon and blow my fire.
She
reached down between her legs, feeling the pain Ishtafel had left.
But I
still have this weapon, this weapon I've always fought with. And I will fight
for Requiem. For our savior.

She looked at the white
feather in her hand. It was nearly as long as Tash's forearm. Meliora's
feather. The feather of the great Princess of Saraph . . . and the great leader
of Requiem.

Tash turned away from
the city.

She faced the towering
wall across from the portico. A fresco appeared there, several times her
height, showing the fall of Requiem. Painted dragons fell while seraphim fired
their arrows, and above them all flew the tyrant.

"You cut off her wings,"
Tash whispered. "You hurt me. You slaughtered thousands. You did not think
slaves could fight you, Ishtafel, but I will fight. I remember Requiem."

 
 
MELIORA

She lay in darkness, alone,
her phantom wings aflame.

How long had she
languished here in this prison cell? Meliora didn't know. There was no night or
day here, no way to tell the passage of time. A guard arrived sometimes, slid
open a small metal square on the doorway, and shoved in a bowl of gruel and a cup
of water. Whether she had three meals a day or one, Meliora could not tell. She
could have been in here for days, perhaps weeks.

And still her wings
burned.

Their fire lit the cell
with a hot, red light, crackling, illuminating brick walls, a craggy floor, and
a ceiling coated with spiderwebs. A chamber so small Meliora had no room to lie
down, only curl up in the corner. She kept reaching over her back, trying to
extinguish those flames on her wings, but felt nothing. Her hands passed
through them.

Missing. Gone.
She
shuddered.
Ishtafel cut them off.

Meliora could still
feel
them there as they said soldiers sometimes felt missing limbs. Yet the wings had
fallen from the balcony, and the firelight did not come from burning feathers.
It came from the halo on her head.

Wincing, Meliora
reached over her head again, then pulled her seared fingers back. The fire
crackled with new vigor. She ached for a mirror, ached to see what burned above
her head. Her old halo, a thin ring of soft light, was gone. Instead flames now
seemed to wreath her brow, a crown of dragonfire.

"Who am I now?" she
whispered in the shadows. "What am I?"

Her mother was Queen
Kalafi, a seraph fallen from Edinnu, but did the holy ichor still flow through
Meliora's veins? She had thought herself a noble seraph princess, pure and
fair, yet her long golden hair was gone; only stubble now covered her head. Her
wings, once curtains of white, were gone too. Her halo was a thing of flame
that burned her own fingers. Who was she now?

"A child of Requiem,"
she whispered.

She closed her eyes,
and she thought of Requiem. She had grown up seeing that ancient kingdom of
dragons. All her life, she had gazed upon Requiem in frescos, mosaics,
paintings, engravings on great palace walls and temple columns. All her life,
she had heard of a kingdom of reptiles, of ruthless enemies that Ishtafel had
conquered.

And all her life,
Meliora had dreamed of that distant, fallen land—and in her dreams, Requiem
still stood, and she flew among the dragons, one of their number, not beastly but
noble and proud, and the stars of the dragon shone above her.

Perhaps I've always
known that I'm a child of starlight.

That land of marble
halls and birch woods had fallen, but Requiem still lived. It lived here in
Saraph—in the land of Tofet beyond the City of Kings. It lived in the
thousands of huts. It lived in the small home of her father, the priest Jaren,
and her siblings, Vale and Elory. It lived in the hearts of the slaves who had
marched behind Meliora into the city, stood before the palace, and cried out
for freedom. And it still lived within Meliora—a memory of starlight, a torch
of dragonfire she vowed to keep carrying.

She could feel the
magic deep inside her, warm, tingly. She tried to summon it again, to become
the dragon. As a dragon, she could shatter the prison door, storm through the
halls, burn all in her path. Breathing deeply, Meliora let the magic flow
through her, rising, filling her like healing energy. Scales began to rise
across her body, pearly white, and her fingernails lengthened, and—

The collar tightened
around her neck.

Meliora gasped in pain,
and her magic petered away.

Her scales vanished,
and she fell to the floor, trembling, bile in her throat. She clawed at her
collar, but it was forged of solid iron, engraved with runes of power. No saw
or blade in the empire could cut through this collar, no fire could melt
it—certainly not her fingernails.

But there is a key
that can open it.

Coughing, weak from her
wounds and hunger, Meliora reached into the pocket of her burlap shift. She
pulled out the ancient relic she had snatched in the battle—the Keeper's Key.

Or at least what was left
of it. For hundreds of years, the Keeper's Key had hung around Queen Kalafi's
neck, allowing the royal family of Saraph to remove the collars from choice
slaves. Only a few Vir Requis were ever allowed to become dragons—to dig in
the tar pits, to haul heavy stones, and sometimes to entertain the people in
the arena in mock battles from the old war.

But Ishtafel had
crushed that key in his palm, forever sealing the Vir Requis—and her among
them—in their human forms. Meliora examined the remains of the key. It lay in
her palm, crumpled into a ball of crimson metal. The old runes upon it, written
in gold, were barely visible, only a few squiggly lines.

Once again, Meliora
tried to unbend the key, to tug the metal back into its long slender form. But
she could not; she didn't have Ishtafel's strength, and even if she did, would
she simply snap the key when trying to straighten it? As she had countless
times, she brought the twisted ball of metal to her collar, hoping against hope
that this time—finally!—it would work. The few crumpled runes on the
key—whatever was still visible—gave but a soft glow, then fizzled away. The
collar remained locked.

Meliora sighed and
returned the crushed key to her pocket. If only she had grabbed the key from
Ishtafel in time! She had flown so close. She could have burned him, stolen the
key, freed the slaves, led a nation of dragons home to Requiem. Yet now she
lingered here in a prison cell. Now the slaves cried out in agony, suffering
under an even crueler tyrant.