Dragon Queen (73 page)

‘I wonder that myself.’ And from the way he looked at her she knew he wondered something else too. ‘I don't think it was from a Scales. They're all men, and for that very reason. The slaves with the disease are almost all women. If a soldier caught it from the Scales and then spread it, it would be a soldier who was both very busy and had uncommon tastes. Besides, the Scales all deny it.’

‘So did the slaves we just fed to a dragon.’

‘They had the disease, Li. There's no doubt of that.’ He shook his head. ‘No. It definitely came from one of the kwen's soldiers. I suspect more than one.’

‘If it wasn't from a Scales then how did that soldier have it in the first place?’

Belli looked away. ‘An injured Scales, bleeding perhaps. We've had a few of those. A smear on a man's hand just before he eats,
perhaps that could do it.’ He didn't sound or look convinced; in fact he sounded as though he was making up stories to hide something he already knew perfectly well. ‘Perhaps someone has come too close to a new hatchling or one of the tools used to clean it. Although I've taken even more care than usual about such things.’ He sighed. ‘Perhaps it doesn't matter. It
will
happen, now and then. As well to get the first outbreak over with. What matters is that it never gets off this eyrie. No one who has it can leave.’

The dragon rose from the desert and landed on the eyrie walls with a spreading of wings and a thunderclap of wind. It licked its lips. Zafir released herself from her harness, dismounted and walked towards Liang. She carried her helm under her arm and came with a swagger, her short slave-cut hair rising in sweaty spikes as she ran a hand through it. She seemed filled with an energy that dragged men's eyes after her like slaves on a leash. Even Liang could feel it, the tension and the pent-up possibilities that raged, barely contained, around the dragon-queen when she came back down from the sky.

‘Your craftsmanship is superb, Lady Enchantress.’ Zafir gave her a tiny bow with only the slightest edge of mockery and walked away. Liang silently swore. She knew she despised this woman, knew she was right to, but still, here and now, it had felt as though the sun had come out from the clouds to shine on her for a moment before casting her back into shadow.

‘Poison,’ she muttered to herself, quietly enough that Belli wouldn't hear. ‘That would do it.’

A handful of slaves climbed over the battlements that night and lowered themselves to the desert floor in a cage suspended from one of the cranes on the eyrie rim. Slaves with the disease that Bellepheros had missed, preferring to take their chances with the desert than with a dragon. The alchemist shook his head when he heard.

‘Well, you can understand it,’ Liang said to him.

‘There's no shame to being eaten by a dragon.’ He only looked sad. ‘Better than having your joints slowly seize one after the other until you can't move, until your skin is as hard as stone and you can't even breathe any more.’ Not that they'd last that long in the
desert sun but Tsen sent the dragon to find them anyway. Liang and Belli watched it fly and then they walked among the eyrie slaves, Bellepheros poking and prodding yet again at the soft parts of their skin. They talked of deserts as they worked. She told him of the Godspike and the Queverra. He spoke of his own home, of the Desert of Sand and Stone and the Plains of Ancestors. Of a people he called the Syuss who seemed to Liang like their own desert tribes but who had dragons too. ‘The desert around Bloodsalt was the worst. Worse than this.’

The dragon came back. By the end of the day they'd found four more slaves with the first signs of the disease. This time Tsen had them thrown quietly over the side in the middle of the night. Liang wasn't sleeping anyway any more so she came up to watch. She listened to the screams as they went over the edge one after the other. Afterwards she went to Belli to wake him up because she'd realised she knew the answer. When she reached his room though he was already up, pacing back and forth.

‘It was her, wasn't it?
She's
got the disease too, hasn't she? Just like you have it.
She's
how those two soldiers got it. Not some Scales.’

Belli shrugged and nodded and didn't know for sure, but yes, he certainly thought so, and he told her what the kwen's men had done and how Zafir had taken away all his cures and how he'd quietly been making more.

Over the next few days the alchemist tirelessly inspected slave after slave while Liang looked for the first inevitable victims among the Taiytakei. Slave or Taiytakei, the alchemist gave them potions and promised them long and happy lives if only they would drink it daily. Tsen was more ruthless. He waited a few days until the epidemic seemed to have stopped, and then the Taiytakei who had it all vanished one night. Liang never knew what he'd done to them. Thrown them off the edge, she supposed. At least they weren't fed to the dragon. She asked about the two soldiers but found they'd gone over the side too, a few days back with their throats cut open. Liang had wondered, until she heard that, whether the story Bellepheros had told her was the truth or whether the rider-slave had made it up, but when she cornered Chrias Kwen himself and he spat at her and demanded to know how she dared to ask such
questions, she saw shame under the mask of outrage, or was it even fear? And so the slave Zafir hadn't been lying; and though it was another reason to be rid of her, it was hard to despise her quite so much after that. After that, Liang wasn't sure what she was supposed to feel about anything any more.

At last a cluster of glasships drifted in across the endless blue sky. The desert was starting to change now, growing a little more life to it. In the distance Liang could see a ragged line of hills. She had no idea where she was. Somewhere to the north and to the west, she supposed. Not far from the Godspike, though too distant to see it even from the height of the eyrie. She wondered idly whether the dragon and its rider had ventured that far, whether they'd found it and stopped and stared in wonder at something that would make even them seem small.

Chrias Kwen and most of the other Taiytakei with colourful robes and ornate feathered cloaks and long braided hair left the next day, carried away with the glasships. The eyrie stopped, hovering above the naked stone of the earth. Belli stood beside her as the glasships floated away. He rubbed his chin where one of the Taiytakei soldiers had hit him.

‘They shouldn't have been allowed to go.’ Saying that once too often to Tsen was what had earned him his bruise.

‘A t'varr does not command a kwen,’ Liang said, and they stood in silence a while until the glasships were specks in the distance. She looked at Belli when she thought he wasn't looking back. Watched his face as it gradually changed from strain and fatigue to something else. As that little frown she'd come to love crept over his eyes, the one that said he was thinking. They were slowly breaking him. She'd seen that in the last few weeks. The dragons and then the rider and then everything Tsen wanted, all of that had been more than enough; and now the disease. They were grinding their only alchemist away, piece by piece, and yet he still had a spark in him. She smiled and would have hugged him if hugging a slave hadn't been wholly disgraceful, and then she thought of the moment when the Regrettable Man had ripped open his throat and she'd been sure for a few seconds that he was dead. How that had felt. It seemed so long ago now. ‘Come to me, Belli. When you need help.’ She took his hand and squeezed. No one would see
that. ‘There's only so much either of us can do, but we
will
do it.’

He turned to her, and there was that spark still bright in his eyes and the frown, deep enough to have made its way into a question at last. ‘Your glasships in Khalishtor drew power from black stone towers,’ he said. ‘You said they need to after every journey. How do they draw their power here?’

‘From the eyrie. They draw it from the stone on which we stand.’

‘And from where does the eyrie draw
its
power? What keeps it up?’

Liang shrugged. ‘We have no idea. Not the least shred of one.’

‘So this might simply fall out of the sky at any moment?’ He laughed. ‘That might be a blessing.’

Liang laughed with him. ‘It hasn't fallen for the last hundred years so why would it fall now? A glasship will fly for a few days before it fails. Baros Tsen's eyrie is something else. Something older and greater than us.’

They stood together. Dragons could fly without rest for . . . Bellepheros said he didn't know and Zafir had said the same. Longer than any rider could last, certainly. They might get hungry and they might get angry and they would grow hotter and hotter from the effort until they caught alight and burned from the inside, but they never actually tired.

‘The Silver Kings,’ Belli said quietly, as much to himself as to her. ‘We have their relics too, here and there.’ He straightened himself. ‘Is it coming, then? This war you said would never be allowed to happen? That's where they're going, isn't it? And the dragon will fly to fight beside them.’

Liang didn't answer that. She didn't need to. It was hard keeping secrets in a place like the eyrie where everyone lived on top of everyone else and all of them in the shadow of Zafir and the terrible dragon to whom slave and master alike were nothing but food. ‘
Something
is coming,’ she said eventually. ‘I don't know what. I still can't believe Tsen would allow it.’

Belli shook his head. ‘Ach! We had our speakers and you see how they become.’

He left her then to make the last preparations for the dragon to fly. To listen to Zafir chide and mock and berate him. To suffer it in silence and bow and call her
Holiness
, as he always did.

‘You could be rid of her,’ said Liang softly in his ear as the last day came close. ‘She takes your potions every day. I've seen her. So does the dragon. You could be rid of both of them. It would be so easy.’ Bringing the dragon and its rider into their world had been a mistake. She saw it now. It was clear as glass if you stepped back and looked, and Belli had been telling them exactly the same from the very first day. But Quai'Shu was mad, Jima Hsian hadn't come to the eyrie for weeks, the kwen was a kwen and even Tsen, who was a better man, even
he
wouldn't believe the danger until the damage was irrevocably done.

Belli looked at her and smiled a sad old smile and there just might have been tears in his eyes. ‘I am a preserver of life, Li, not a taker. When a man puts aside what's good in him to serve a cause, often it seems to me that he later forgets where he put it.’

‘Then I will do it. Show me how.’

Belli shook his head. ‘You're an enchantress, Li. You don't need me to show you anything. Kill this war, Li, but with words, not blood. Otherwise that's how we become as they are; and you're so much better than that.’

She could have kissed him.

64

The Diamond Isles

‘Oh, for the love of the Flame!’ Tuuran grabbed hold of Crazy Mad and shook him, almost slapping him, banging his head against the hard sailcloth of his hammock. ‘How's a man supposed to get some sleep? Pity me, slave, Berren, Crowntaker, whoever you are! Mercy! I beg you!’

Crazy Mad was breathing hard, heart racing. He snarled something obscene. Tuuran backed away. Crazy Mad and his demons, and they were getting worse.

‘You're doing it again!’
Watch him. You will be rewarded
. And he'd wondered why an Elemental Man was interested in some faroff slave, but not any more.

‘Doing what?’

‘Your eyes. Silver and glowing.
That.’
Tuuran took another step away and shook his head. ‘Every bloody night since we got here.’ One hand reached for his sword, thinking on its own without checking with the rest of him, but his blade was where it belonged, wrapped up inside their travel chest and wasn't to be had. Just as well. ‘Which one was it tonight?’ Half the time Crazy didn't remember, just looked blank and then laid into Tuuran for waking him up; but ever since they'd crossed the storm-dark and come to these islands, Crazy had tossed and turned at night. Dreams or memories, Tuuran wasn't sure which, but they were relentless things that never left him.

‘The silver man with the spear. That one.’

Ah.
That
one. Men of silver. Dragons and fire. White towers of stone that touched the sky. An endless sea of silver. And always always the same at the end, arms raised high amid a sea of destruction, calling up the powers of gods-knew-what while a man made of silver rushed at him with a spear made of the same held aloft, and then falling and falling with some great
thing
wrapped around
him that Crazy Mad couldn't begin to describe. The dream that made his eyes light up like lamps while the rest of him writhed in his hammock like a skewered snake. The sort of dreams Tuuran didn't want anywhere near him, and it wasn't made any better by the fact that the silver man and his spear sounded exactly like the Silver King and the Adamantine Spear of the speakers even though Crazy had never once seen a dragon or been to the dragon realms. He'd probably only even heard of the Silver King and the spear in bits and pieces from Tuuran's own mouth.

The light in Crazy Mad's eyes faded. Tuuran watched until it was gone. Then, only then, he slowly relaxed. ‘You have a problem,’ he muttered.

‘I told you what happened to me.’ Crazy Mad still looked like he might punch someone. Tuuran could take a punch or two if he had to, but these days, with Crazy Mad, you never quite knew what it would turn into. Or what Tuuran feared it
might
turn into.

‘No, you have a problem in that you have to share a cabin with me and I get surly round the edges when I don't get my sleep. Go do your shouting somewhere else before I throw you in the sea for a second time.’ Tuuran yawned and rubbed his eyes and shambled back to his hammock. ‘Go on! Go up on deck. It's warm. Dawn soon anyway.’ When Crazy Mad flipped him a dirty finger and climbed back into his hammock, Tuuran tipped him back onto the floor. ‘I'm not bloody joking. All bloody night, the worst you've ever been and I've had enough. So you can piss off and bother someone else for a bit and let me sleep, and I tell you, if that's the way you're going to be now, you and I are going our separate ways. There's not a lot I won't do for a man but I draw the line when it comes to not getting my shut-eye.’