Dragon Queen (77 page)

‘Grapples! Lines!’ The enemy were so close he could almost reach out and touch them. Men on both sides screamed as arrows found their marks, as archers fell from the rigging. Berren slid his sword back into its scabbard and crouched behind the fire shield and checked his weapons one last time. Sword on one side, a ravensbeak on the other – a small hammer-and-pick thing for finding the joints in men with too much armour for a blade. There were spears on offer and javelins and crossbows, but crossbows were slow and heavy and spears were no weapon for fighting in city streets. He'd seen other things too, fire globes like the ones the Prince of War had used half a lifetime ago to reclaim his kingdom. Staves made of glass and gold that Tuuran said would shoot lightning like the wands the galley slavers had carried. Black rods that neither of them understood, but such devices worked only for the Taiytakei, not for sword-slaves who might steal them and run away. Or worse, turn them on their masters.

‘Sword-slaves!’ Tuuran raised his axe. Berren had no idea where he had found it, but it was enormous and having it seemed to make the big man happy. The ships were bound together now by a dozen grapples. Fists punched the air. ‘Sail! Fight! Freedom! No quarter!’

Sword-slaves and Taiytakei alike swarmed over the side. As they did, another group of Taiytakei dumped a heavy chest in the middle of the deck and kicked it open. More weapons. ‘All slaves are sword-slaves today,’ shouted a Taiytakei solder. He picked up a couple of spiked cudgels and pressed them into the hands of the two nearest sail-slaves as Berren ran past. ‘You fight!’ he bellowed. ‘Sail! Fight! Freedom! Fight or die!’

‘Sword-slaves!’

Men rushed to the chest. On the deck of the other ship Tuuran was already laying about him with his axe. Berren grabbed a rope and swung across, dropped, rolled sideways and fetched up against the body of a fallen Taiytakei in glass and gold plates. Around him, slaves too slow or too stupid to do anything but gawk were cut
down. A battle madness was growing inside him as it always did, a hunger he had no choice but to embrace.

A man fell out of the rigging above him, stuck by a dozen arrows. The enemy were scattering, some bolting below decks to hide or beg for mercy, others leaping over the side towards the shore. Sword-slaves and sail-slaves and even oar-slaves were swarming across, filled with greed and killing lust, hands clenched around their knives. Most of them had no armour at all, like most of the sailors that lay dead around the deck. Berren scurried across the ship and peered over the other side. Arrows came from the shore, thudding among them, fired blind perhaps but no less dangerous for it. Bolts of lightning came with them, shattering the air with their thunderclap roar, striking the hull, the mast. He saw one catch a hapless sail-slave, hurling him away in a stink of ozone and crisping skin. The smoke had thinned enough for Berren to see the docks. The ship they'd taken was moored to one end of a long floating wooden jetty that reached to the shore. At the far end soldiers were waiting for them, crouched behind huge metal shields. A dozen bulky black creatures stood around them, motionless. They were the shape of a man but half again as tall and as broad as two. Now and then an arrow struck one of them and stuck, quivering, but they seemed not to notice.

Golems. Tuuran had told him all about the Taiytakei and their golems but he'd never seen one before; even Tuuran had only seen them from a distance.

The Taiytakei with the golden armour strode out into the middle of the deck and raised his lightning staff. He screamed at them all again, ‘Sail! Fight! Freedom! No quarter.’ The words were ringing from his mouth when an arrow struck him in the side of the head, hard enough to stagger him as it ricocheted off his helm and away across the water. A crack of lightning followed, the thunderclap making them all cower and cringe, but the Taiytakei stood unmoved while his glass and gold armour crackled and sparked. Berren was breathing hard now, full of the fight. The air was rotten with the stench of rocket smoke. He crouched beside Tuuran, trying to damp down the battle madness.

‘I don't think—’

The Taiytakei with the golden armour levelled his staff at the
shore. He let off a bolt of lightning that left Berren's ears ringing. He could hardly hear a thing now but he didn't need to. ‘No quarter!’ Tuuran's eyes were mad. With sail-slaves and Taiytakei solders at his heels he launched himself towards the enemy; and as he did, Berren fell to his own madness and followed.

69

Desert Twilight

‘Kwens like you will no longer be needed when I'm done.’

Zafir smiled at the kwen who was showing her the direction to fly, then pulled down the glass visor on her perfect helm. She climbed the ladder to Diamond Eye's back and buckled and strapped herself into the dragon's harness. They leaped together from the eyrie walls, dragon and rider, and rose towards the desert sky. She took one look along the line of the rising sun and then flew the way the kwen had pointed, urging Diamond Eye up high, on and on until the sky was a deep burning blue and the horizon sun was fierce and relentless and the eyrie nothing but a violet-shrouded speck lost in the haze of the ruddy ochre ground below. When she was sure no one would see her she turned east, the way Tsen's other kwen had wanted her to go. She had no idea why Tsen had given her a different place to fly to and could hardly have cared less. She was on the back of Diamond Eye. She was alive. For a time nothing else mattered.

The miles passed. Up so high she had no sense of the distance, no feel for the change of the ground far below. She felt only the wind, the push of it against her, and revelled in the perfect sight of the enchanter's visor. A dragon-queen, first and last and always. In the hours that passed up in that thin bright sky she lived the months before the Taiytakei had taken her all over again, slowly stepping through them, looking for the mistakes she must have made, the little signs and signals of all the betrayals and failures that had later come. When she didn't find them she made them up. A little word here that she'd never questioned but had meant more than it seemed. A look. A glance. A twitch of the lips. Wasted effort and she knew it, but she couldn't help herself. It was better than going back any further, to the Pinnacles and to the princess locked away in the tiny lightless room, more afraid of what would happen when
that door finally opened than of anything else in the world.

The sun shifted. It rose to its zenith and began to sink. The pressure in her bladder grew. She ignored it as long as she could. Dragon-riders learned these things. No water before a flight. Starve yourself. Drink little and often when thirsty. She had skins of water beside her, a saddlebag full of them for the blistering desert heat, yet she touched them as rarely as she could. When she lifted the visor to drink, the wind in her face made her weep. Some riders arranged their harnesses to allow them to stand up and piss in the wind and go on but Diamond Eye had been saddled for war, for battling King Jehal over the Pinnacles or over the Adamantine Palace, and no such thoughts had been in his rider's mind back then.

She flew as long as she could and came down only because she had to. By then the light was failing, the sun dipping close to the horizon behind her, a ball of angry orange fire. How long had they flown? Most of a day. She'd pay for it tomorrow, legs and hips and back stiff and full of aches.

The ground was still a hazy tan blur, passing leisurely beneath them. Diamond Eye had flown for hundreds of miles in a single straight line and yet they were still in the desert. How far did it go? It had changed, though. She saw that as they came lower. Not quite the arid lifeless place where the eyrie had been; there was more to the earth now than rock and sand. A great plain of dirty brown stone, scarred with dried-up riverbeds and littered with thorn trees clinging to whatever life they could find. Huge slabs of rock lay scattered about, flat-topped and a hundred feet high with crumbling craggy cliffs. Mesas like the ones at the edge of the Maze, the lifeless carved canyons of stone with their rivers which rushed from the lush peaks of the Purple Spur not a hundred miles from the Adamantine Palace that had once been hers. The land there had been like this, broken, not quite lifeless, not quite dead and dry but so close it barely seemed to matter. No one lived in these places. Except in the world she'd come from that hadn't been true. The Red Riders had lived in the Maze. They'd made it their home, there and the Spur, a constant thorn in her side, and Jehal had told her and told her and told her to deal with them until finally he'd done it himself and taken their dragons to add to his own. Was that the moment he'd turned against her?

And why was she thinking of him so much today? But she knew the answer. Because he'd betrayed her, and the last thing she'd seen on Baros Tsen T'Varr’s face had been that same look. That not-quite-hidden gleam of a knife, drawn and sharp, glittering deep in his eye.

She picked one of the smaller towers of stone, a place where no one could possibly be alive. Diamond Eye glided down among the thorns and the arid earth. A cloud of dust rose around them, choking her as he flapped his wings, angry to be brought to earth. Never mind how many hours he'd flown, he wanted more, always wanted more. He was as fresh and eager and hungry as he'd been when they'd left. More, more, more; always the way with dragons but here in this place Diamond Eye's hunger was greater than any dragon she'd ever known. They were dangerous things, dragons and their urges. They bled into their riders – the want, the hunger and the anger, the urge to fly and to burn, to smash and to crush. Thoughts bled the other way too. A rider had to be careful. She'd learned to control her feelings, especially in an eyrie with a hundred of the monsters around. Calm, always calm, never angry and most certainly never
ever
afraid. But it was harder in the air with the dragon's own desires constantly nibbling at the edges of her thoughts, and when it came to a battle no rider lasted long. They caved in, one after the other, to the fury, to the lust, to the madness. If she'd known that before Evenspire – if she'd truly
understood
it – she might have done things differently. But she hadn't, and so things had gone as they did, and Jehal had taken the chance that she'd given him.

She climbed from Diamond Eye's back, taking a skin of water down with her, and began to strip off her armour. In the eyrie she'd worn it as though it was tawdry and tattered. There had been eyes on her then, Taiytakei eyes, and she was the dragon-queen, haughty and imperious and filled with disdain for anything they could offer. Now she could be a child, gawping with awe at each piece, at the exquisiteness of the glass and the gold, of the construction so far beyond anything the smiths of the Silver City could ever have made. Beautiful. Almost the most glorious piece of craftsmanship she'd ever seen. Almost, except for . . .

She stopped. Someone else was with them. Not that she could
hear or see them but someone was, nonetheless. The dragon felt a presence and so she felt it too. Diamond Eye was casting his eyes around, thinking how hungry he was. Wary, Zafir put the last piece of her armour down and looked about. She wasn't afraid – it was hard to be afraid with Diamond Eye beside her, his hunger pulsing out in waves through her thoughts. But cautious nevertheless, given who it must be and the look in Tsen's eye when she'd left him. ‘Watcher, you should show yourself before my dragon eats you.’

The Watcher appeared a little way away. He walked towards her slowly and carefully, and sat down cross-legged, keeping a respectful distance. ‘Your dragon will not eat me, slave,’ he said. ‘You are admiring the work of our enchantress. They are very fine pieces. Baros Tsen wastes her talents by keeping her at work in the eyrie. They would fetch a fine price and he could use the money.’

A flush of anger washed through her. She'd been seen after all, after being so careful in the eyrie. By one of
them
. Diamond Eye bared his teeth and hissed behind her. Maybe she
should
let him eat the Elemental Man. But the Watcher was too quick. He'd vanish and then appear again behind her with his knife and that would be that. ‘I
am
impressed,’ she said at last. ‘And curious to know how they were constructed. But they are not the best pieces I have seen.’ Which was true. In the Pinnacles, deep under the Octagon and past the Hall of Mirages, there were the mysterious treasures the Silver King had wrought and left behind, carefully put away where no blood-mage or alchemist would ever be allowed to wake them up again; compared to those even the exquisite craft of Bellepheros's enchantress seemed dull.

‘You are not flying the way you were told.’ The Watcher looked at her.

‘Is that so?’ She smiled and took a few steps away from the armour laid out around her, back towards Diamond Eye until she was standing almost beneath him. ‘If it is then you've taken a very long time to point that out. Do you intend to remain here for the night, Elemental Man?’

‘I do not.’

Zafir stared at him, half-tempted to let him see the subtle signs and signals just to see if he'd bite. But she let the temptation go.
He wouldn't. He wasn't the kwen, nor any of the kwen's men. She wouldn't snare this one so easily, at least, not
that
way.

His face was stony. He stared at her and said nothing.

‘Well if you have nothing to say, killer, you will excuse me, but I've spent a very long day on the back of Diamond Eye and have only just touched the earth. Avert your eyes if you will.’ Not that she cared. She turned her back on him and walked another few steps until she was fully beneath the bulk of the dragon, stripped away the dragon-scale leggings, lifted the short soft skirt beneath and squatted. The relief was so sharp that she let out a little sigh of pleasure. When she was done she walked back and knelt across from the Elemental Man, picked up the skin of water she'd brought down from Diamond Eye's back and drank deeply. ‘Is that why you're here? Did you come to tell me that I'm going the wrong way?’