Dragon Queen (40 page)

But he'd lost that black stone with the little piece of him inside. It hung around another neck and so now the hole was there
.

He looked inside and saw he was not alone
.

The dragon perched on the edge of the unravelling of everything and wondered to itself what might be done but it had no answers to that and so it wondered something else instead. A more dragon-like question, filled with an acceptance that all must inevitably end.
How long?

Water came and water went. Air too, now and then. Gasped mouthfuls. Holding fast to a weighted rope with a hard wooden cliff over his head, always battering, pushing him under. So little left. Dragons and ice. Falling and falling, locked in an embrace of death with a goddess, and
he
was the one who'd stopped their fall and
he
was the one who'd gripped her tight and
he
was the one who'd kept her from the final death, and it was
he
who had kept That Which Came Before from spilling into the world and unravelling the very weave of creation
. He
had done all of that!

I.

The Bringer of Endings. The Black Moon who once killed a goddess
.

The Nothing was come again, seeping through the hole, slow but relentless
.

The hole
that he'd made
.

*

Hours after the warlocks and the ship that had brought them were gone, Tuuran went and stood where he'd thrown Crazy Mad into the sea. There was a sounding rope there, marked and weighted at the end. The sail-slaves used it for unfamiliar shallow waters to measure the depth beneath them. Out here in open water they didn't need it but it was still there. Tuuran pulled. It was heavier than it had any right to be so he gave it all his strength, and when he reached the end of it he pulled Crazy Mad back into the galley, soaked and freezing, half drowned and three quarters dead.

‘Was the only way,’ he said. The grey-robes had gone through every slave. They'd come looking for the mark on Crazy Mad's leg.

Crazy Mad sat in his own puddle of water. Shaking. Barely even there.

‘They knew who you were.’ And Crazy Mad laughed, in between coughing and vomiting up the sea, because most of the time that was more than
he
could have said.

The Watcher

37

Feeding Time

The Watcher approached. As he drew close he felt the air thicken as it always did around the eyrie, the tiny press of resistance, a drag trying to claw him down; but this time, instead of a tiny tug at the back of his thoughts, the thickening grew steadily worse. Instead of cutting though the wind like a sword through the air, the last mile felt like wading through an ever heavier sea.
Like walking in treacle –
that was what the Picker had said of the dragon lands, but that was there, not here.
Here
being the wind was no effort at all.
Here
he darted between Xican and the eyrie and half a dozen other cities like a bee between roses in his hunt for the elusive grey dead and it had hardly troubled him at all until the dragons had come. So it had to be them. Something to do with dragons.

For a few seconds after he materialised on the eyrie rim he couldn't do any more than catch his breath and look around the eyrie's outer edge, dotted with its cranes and shacks and crates and boxes. The gold-glass discs and spheres of two dozen fully built lightning cannon peppered the rocks among long tubes of Scythian steel pointing skywards – black-powder cannon to shatter any hostile glasship that strayed too close. Between them the litter of their building lay scattered higgledy-piggledy. The hands of the sea lord had moved quickly. Baros Tsen T'Varr had turned his eyrie into a fortress.

Once he'd recovered, the Watcher walked across the rim and up the steps shaped into the outer slope of the wall around Chay-Liang's dragon yard. His steps slowed as he reached the top. The monster, the big one, was wide awake and snarling, and even
he
couldn't help a shiver of awe. Its tail, thirty paces long, swished carelessly back and forth with enough restless energy to smash down towers. Its wings, when it stretched them out, were wider still. Its head was as large as a cart, big enough to swallow a horse
whole, its teeth two neat rows of swords and knives. It towered over the dragon yard, dwarfed everything and made even the sun seem small. Its skin was a shining ruddy gold and every part was armoured with scales that shone and caught the light like plates of gold-glass. Its claws clenched and unclenched, its talons as big as a man and sharp enough to gouge stone. It was a thing to crush men simply by looking at them. Its eyes roamed, always hunting, never staying still.

Eyes. Those would be its weakness. He shook away the sense of awe. Every monster could be killed. He would just need a long enough spear. Yet even as he thought that, the dragon turned its head and looked straight at him as though it had read his mind and was already calculating how to kill him first. They sized each other up, monster and slayer. The smaller dragons stopped their restless pacings and snappings to stare at him as well, eyeing him as though he might be tasty. A dozen were awake, chained and tethered to the wall. The rest lay still, the forty or so more that the moon sorcerers had brought. Asleep, perhaps. The Watcher took them in, wondering how long it would take for them to grow. A year? Ten? A hundred? He didn't know.

The alchemist was there too, among the small ones and surrounded by his Scales, arguing with the enchantress Chay-Liang. Usually the Watcher would have merged with the wind and slipped through the air and appeared beside them, a constant reminder to them both of what he was and what he stood for, but not today. This close to the dragons he wasn't even sure that he
could
shift any more. Practice. The Picker said he'd grown used to it with practice. He'd have to try.

The alchemist turned and headed away across the dragon yard. The enchantress walked beside him. The Watcher followed them with his eyes and then looked back to the dragon. It was still staring at him, cold glacier-blue eyes never blinking. Then, as the alchemist entered the tunnels, the Watcher turned his back and walked down to the eyrie rim. With an effort he became the air again and forced his wind-self across the eyrie's heart and down into its tunnels. Passing the dragon was like walking into the teeth of a hurricane. He made himself do it though, then spiralled down to where the alchemist lived, passing the alchemist and the
enchantress on his way. They were arguing, but as he blew between them the enchantress stopped and frowned and looked around her as though she sensed his presence. He kept on, and when he turned to flesh in the alchemist's room he was panting so hard that he could barely stand straight, and so perhaps it was for the best that he had another minute before they arrived. Thick as honey, those two, and better that neither of them saw his weakness before he left again and went back to his hunting.

He walked around the alchemist's study as he slowed his racing heart, one delicate pace after another, eyes flitting over the mayhem of open books and crumpled papers and bottles and vials and pots and jars which lay scattered across every surface without any hint of order. Elemental Men were, above and beyond all else, hunters of sorcerers and magicians and he knew in his belly that this alchemist was more than he seemed. There were books written by the enchanters. There were herbs and powders, and potions the alchemist had made. A dozen open glass beakers sat in a row on the alchemist's desk, all of them different shades of vivid green and each with a note beside it. The Watcher thought the notes were code at first – wondered even if they might be the same sigils and symbols he knew from the Azahl Pillar and elsewhere – but when he looked closely he eventually recognised a few of the words. Just bad handwriting. He shook his head. The alchemist made him uneasy. He'd brought almost nothing with him from the dragon lands but that didn't seem to have stopped him, had barely even slowed him down.

He caught himself.
Almost
nothing. On the desk, pushed aside in one corner but out in the open nevertheless, sat a small round bottle of silver liquid metal. The alchemist had brought
that
, of all things.

Outside he heard them coming, still bickering with each other, but they walked on past the alchemist's room and their voices faded. The Watcher followed on foot, keeping back, listening to their conversation.

‘You need to stop, Belli. It won't take long. I've seen how you struggle. I've been meaning to do this for months. Yes, well, now you have no choice, because I'm
telling
you.’

In between, the alchemist was arguing and objecting that now
wasn't the time although he never said for what. The Watcher dropped back a little further then stopped. He'd give them a moment to begin whatever it was the enchantress had in mind and then catch them in the middle of it.

He stood alone, his dark robes stark in the hostile white passages with their quiet inner light, and it felt strange to be loitering like this, flesh and bone, not turned into light or shadow. The eyrie had been floating out in the desert for as long as anyone could remember. Simply there, and no one had thought of what to do with it until Baros Tsen T'Varr had tethered glasships to its rim and moved it. It was a strange place, made before the world broke into pieces and then forgotten, and it resented the Elemental Men. Thoughtless and mute but it resisted their presence and it always had, even before the alchemist and his dragons. He gave them a few minutes, contemplating the eyrie's builders and who they might have been, then marched into Chay-Liang's workshop. The alchemist was sitting on a chair with a nest of metal wires over his head and a book in his hands, still complaining bitterly that he had other things to be doing. Chay-Liang was stooped in front of him, fiddling with the wires.

‘Enchantress!’

The alchemist looked up sharply as he spoke which earned him a curse. Chay-Liang didn't even look round. ‘Watcher!’ She poked the alchemist. ‘Be still, you! Where have you been, Watcher?’

‘To the Grey Isle, lady.’ He addressed himself to the alchemist: ‘Slave! You will travel to Khalishtor at once to bow before our sea lord. You are to bring one of the monsters.’ A hatchling could fit inside a gondola, if the gondola was a big one. The adult dragon, well, tails and wings outstretched it was probably the size of a whole glasship. He couldn't begin to see how they might move it. On a particularly large sled?

The alchemist blinked as though the Watcher was utterly mad. ‘At once? Entirely out of the question.’

‘Still!’ Chay-Liang took two beads of glass and put them very carefully in among the wires right in front of the alchemist's eyes. She touched them and the glass began to flow. ‘Close your left eye and look at the book and tell me when you can see the letters without squinting.’

The Watcher took a step closer. ‘It is not a request.’

‘No?’ Chay-Liang still didn't look round. ‘Then I shall call it what Belli is too polite to say: the absurd demand of the deeply ignorant! Completely unfeasible.’

The alchemist snorted then tensed. ‘There! There! That! Great Flame, how did you do that? No! Back!’

‘I'll do it more slowly this time.’ Chay-Liang hunched closer.

The Watcher took another step. ‘Enchantress, the dragons are your duty to manage. I am not interested in difficulties. I am only interested in your obedience to our sea lord's wishes.’

She waved a hand vaguely in his direction. ‘Just wait a moment.’

‘There!’ The alchemist was beaming. ‘There! That's perfect. Clear as anything!’

Chay-Liang sighed and straightened. ‘I'm
so
glad I won't have to watch you squinting any more.’ She shook her head and turned to face the Watcher at last. ‘How long has he been here? And
how
long has he pretended that his eyes are perfectly fine, thank you very much?’

The Watcher hardened his voice. ‘Lady! Our sea lord sends his commands! Your slave shall come with me to Khalishtor. At once.’

The smile fell off the alchemist's face like a stone off a cliff. ‘Controlling the dragons is not something Li can do, Elemental Man. And
I
cannot
manage
them, as you so glibly put it, if I am not
here
!’

Li?
Not
my mistress?
Not even
Lady Chay? Li?
The Watcher bared his teeth and drew out the bladeless knife. ‘Slave! You will obey our sea lord! One way or the other.’

The alchemist met his glare, one eye strangely large through the glass lens Chay-Liang had made, the other hidden by unshaped glass and the nest of wire. He shook his head. ‘This is the arrogance and ignorance of power without wisdom. It's stupid, dangerous and ridiculous. I refuse.’ He looked pointedly at the bladeless knife. ‘And how, exactly, do you think
that
will help?’

‘Have you been waiting all this time, slave?’ The Watcher smiled. ‘Waiting for these monsters and now that they're here you disobey? Do not even think these thoughts, slave, for I will crush them right now before they grow roots. I do not wish to hurt you but I will if I must. Or others, if needs be.’ He kept looking straight at the alchemist. Let him wonder who those others might be.