Dragon Queen (83 page)

Crazy Mad shrugged as if it was obvious. ‘Well, clearly not ours.’

‘Thing is, I don't think we've got one any more.’

A snort of derision came back at him. ‘Thing is, big man, I never thought we did.’ Crazy had his fierce face again, all resolute and faraway like he was when his eyes went funny. Tuuran backed away. The street was empty again.

‘Right. Night-skins are gone.’ He ran quickly for the bridge. Couldn't be thinking about Crazy Mad and what he was or wasn't. Thoughts like that were too difficult. Had no place on a battlefield. No, no, no . . . because Flame be damned but for a moment back there in that alley he'd been afraid. An Adamantine Man and he'd been afraid and that simply wasn't good enough.

He cast a wary eye over his shoulder. The sea titans were still wading through the water towards the bridge.

The Silver King?
A half-god who'd been dead for half a thousand years? And anyway the Silver King hadn't had silver eyes. Everything else but not his eyes, if Tuuran had got the stories right. Blood-red, they said.

So, what then? What have you got inside you? Do I really want to know?

Another gang of sword-slaves came running from the end of the street. Something else to think about – that was good. Then a series of whistling screams overhead. Tuuran grabbed Crazy Mad and smashed in a door. The building shook as they vanished inside, walls quivering, clouds of dust rattling out of them. The flat crump of an explosion rolled through.

‘Rockets again.’ Crazy squatted in a corner. ‘Getting sick of them, I am.’

‘And there I was, starting to miss them.’ Tuuran pressed himself against a wall. As his ears stopped ringing he heard other sounds, sword-slaves calling to each other and then running and screaming and cracks of lightning. He waited until they were all gone and then peered back through the shattered door. The bridge was quiet now, silent and still. Distant shouts of burning and looting echoed across the water. A haze of smoke drifted over the sea, making the Eye of the Sea Goddess blur at the edges. He poked his foot at the dust on the floor. Hadn't quite been true what he'd said about everything smelling of burned flesh. Just in the alley, amid the haze of greasy black ash.

He wrinkled his nose.
Don't think about it
. ‘Come on! Best we get to the bridge before those stone monsters do.’ He didn't wait. Didn't want to. Didn't want to even look at Crazy Mad in case he started glowing again. The Silver King was gone and he had to keep telling himself that. Just a story. Certainly wouldn't come
back as some short-arse dark-skin slave, would he?
Idiot! Stop even thinking such drivel!
He ran between fires fresh from the last salvo of rockets and didn't look back. The streets and even the beach were covered in rubble. Burned-out ships floated lopsided in the water close by or beached in the shallows. The last of the fireships. A shriek tore the air across the sea – the dragon again. Tuuran scrambled into the shattered remains of another building and found himself a good solid piece of cover.

‘I thought you said it was on
our
side.’ Crazy Mad skittered down beside him, sliding on pieces of fractured masonry.

‘I did. But it's a dragon and you should never trust them, nor their riders.’

The dragon landed on the back of the furthest of the giant stone golems and tried to lift it out of the water, claws screeching on stone, tail lashing the sea and sending columns of spray into the air. The other two giants were almost at the bridge. Tuuran shook his head.
Why do this when I could walk away? Because some slave master said so? Because that's where Crazy Mad wants to go? Just to smash stuff and scar a few pretty night-skin faces? Because I can't think of anything better to do? Come on, Tuuran, what the Flame are you doing here?

Crazy Mad sidled closer, watching as the giant and the dragon toppled backwards together under the waves. ‘How
do
you kill dragons, Tuuran? If that really is what you were made for?’

Tuuran laughed. ‘We drink a poison that kills them. Then we make them so angry that they eat us.’

‘Funny man. And really?’

‘Really exactly like I said,
slave
. You've seen one now. You think you're going to wander up to something like that with a piece of steel and do anything useful?’ He cringed as yet another volley of rockets screamed overhead, arcing out towards the stone giants in the sea, exploding around them.
And what was that about? Who are they even firing at? Do they even know any more, any of them?
Didn't matter though. Chaos was chaos, and while everyone was looking at the dragon and the golems they wouldn't be looking at
him
, so Tuuran lunged to his feet and ran out of the house across the beach, through shallow water and over fine muddy sand which sucked at his boots and tried to tear them off.
Talking to myself. I don't even know which one of us is the crazy one any more. I'll be as bad as he is by the end of this
.

There were Taiytakei soldiers running from the city towards them, but before they drew close a rocket flashed out of nowhere and exploded in their midst, wrapping them in a ball of fire, and then another and another. A building burst in front of him, flinging shards of stone through the air. Tuuran swore and staggered and turned his back as they peppered him, thumping and pinging off his armour. Crazy Mad pointed towards the sea. The nearest giant was almost at the bridge. In the shallows the water only reached its knees. It towered over the narrow stone streets.

‘Look at the bodies.’ Tuuran wrinkled his nose. They were at the edge of the bridge now, looking for a way up, and the dead were everywhere. Mostly Taiytakei, not the gangs of sword-slaves they had met looting the city. They had gold-glass armour and scorch marks on them. He ran on, hugging the wall. Not that that would save him if he was in the wrong place when the next rocket came in. They ran up a set of steps onto the golden bridge itself and he stopped there for a moment, gathering his courage. That was when he saw the back of Crazy Mad's armour. There was a hole in it. He poked his finger through, touching the skin of Crazy's back.

‘You've got a hole,’ he said, and he turned Crazy Mad around and poked another finger through a second hole at the front. ‘And another one.’ He wiggled both his fingertips. ‘In one side and out the other, but on you? Not a mark. Why aren't you dead?’ Crazy Mad only shrugged, not what Tuuran wanted at all. He shivered. ‘Isul Aieha,’ he whispered.
Silver King
. But that couldn't be. Couldn't possibly be. And maybe those holes were . . . something else. Maybe they'd been there all along and he'd just never noticed. Maybe.

Crazy Mad rolled his eyes and pulled away. He vaulted up to the bridge and started to run, fast like there was a wind driving him. Tuuran took another breath and looked around him. The dead lay scattered about like litter after a summer festival, scorched and burned by fire and lightning. Sword-slaves and Taiytakei alike. Crazy Mad just kept going, across the open killing ground of the bridge, hurdling the bodies strewn over the road. Tuuran watched him. ‘Have to hand it to you, Crazy. Whoever you are and whatever you are, you can certainly run.’

Gawping. Never useful. When Crazy Mad reached the other side and no one had tried to kill him – yet – Tuuran tore after him as fast as his legs would go.

77

Men of Stone

The kwen from the mountains had told her that nothing could be done about them. They would surely destroy her if she strayed too close.
They will cleanse the bridges. Leave them alone
. He hadn't told the dragon though, or else Diamond Eye hadn't been listening.

She wasn't sure which of them saw the creatures in the water first. They seemed like more boats perhaps, but with bigger wakes than their size deserved. Diamond Eye veered towards them at once but she turned him away, up towards the tallest of the three islands, the sheer-walled peak of Dul Matha if she remembered the name aright. More glasships waited there. They were high, drifting across the water towards the city, floating apart as if they didn't know quite what to do.

Lightning. She'd felt it from the ones over the city and seen the way the rims of their outer discs would glow and burn with a light brighter and whiter than the sun before they fired. Now she knew what it would do to her dragon. To plunge helpless to the sea from such a height would be death for her, even if Diamond Eye survived. So she reigned him in and forced him to hold his hunger in check. They would not fly fast and straight at these, not like they did before. This time she stayed away and circled higher until she was far up above them, and
then
she let Diamond Eye have his way. He fell from the sky like a stone, striking the first like a meteor, disintegrating it into a shower of glass and gold and then arrowed on straight at the sea to spread his wings and skim the waves and turn and rise and strike again.

And that was when he saw the creatures in the water for what they truly were, and this time when she told him to rise, he refused. They weren't boats. She saw that as they came closer. They were men, or giants with the shape of men, with craggy features of the same dark stone as the Dul Matha and long ropes of seaweed
draped from their head and their shoulders. They were walking with all but their heads and shoulders lost beneath the waves so she couldn't be sure how large they were, but they were as tall as a barn at the very least.

Leave them!
But Diamond Eye would not. He landed on the back of the first of them and snarled. Claws screeched on stone as he tried to lift it out of the water, wings tearing at the air, tail lashing the sea and sending great showers of spray over them all. Where the water touched his scales it steamed. The two monsters shook and Diamond Eye flapped his wings, striving for balance. He twisted his neck towards the giant's face, hurling Zafir forward against the buckles of her harness, knocking the wind out of her.

Let it go! You can't!

What were they? Books hidden in the secret places of the Pinnacles where she'd grown up had had pictures of things like this, and of something the same but much, much greater, something that made even a dragon look tiny. Books the alchemists always coveted but were never allowed to see. But if these creations had a name, she'd never known it.

Leave them! Up! Fly up!

The stone monster toppled backwards into the sea taking Diamond Eye with it. The waves slammed into her side and then she was under the water, beneath the dragon with the giant on top of both of them.

No!
Diamond Eye writhed beneath her. Dragons didn't breathe. Dragons could live under water for days if they wanted to. Dragons didn't care . . .
But I can't
. There was no struggling this time, no cutting herself free. She didn't even try. Her lungs began to spasm, demanding that she take a breath. The rippling daylight far above flashed orange and bright. Fireballs hot and fierce in the air but the water was black and cold and dark. She closed her eyes. She wasn't afraid, not any more. Focused her mind.
Just. Let. Go!

And then Diamond Eye was free and he surged upwards. She burst out of the water and gasped and gulped at the air. The dragon spread his wings and towered out of the sea, half of him still under, but his head and claws and wings were out of the waves, and so was she. Steam rose all around them. Diamond Eye's wings pulled at the air, harder and harder, but they weren't moving as the stone
monster anchored them to the seabed. Then at last Diamond Eye burst up out of the water in a cloud of mist and spray.

He had the stone monster of the sea in his claws.
How
many tons of stone? And he knew what to do, and this time there was no stopping him, no desire to even try. She understood, without quite knowing how, that he'd done this before in another time and in another life. Long ago, before the Silver King had come, he'd fought this battle once before and won. She felt it in him.

He rose slowly and painfully, sinking down again before each upward beat of his wings, but he still climbed and the giant made of stone still hung from his claws. High above the top of Dul Matha he let it go, soared up, turned and arrowed down again, following the stone titan as it fell until it struck the jagged rocks at the bottom of Dul Matha and exploded into pieces and a gleeful satisfaction poured though dragon and rider both. He crashed into the waves and dragged her beneath the water again, but now she simply closed her eyes and waited. He was too hot. The cold of the water would stop him from burning on the inside, and she knew, as certainly as she could, that he wouldn't hurt her, that he would remember her enough to see she didn't drown. And so it was; and they rose together and swam for a while until the heat inside him eased and he pulled himself back into the sky.

He plucked the second giant out of the water like a sea eagle taking a fish. And because he could, when he soared once again high up above the pinnacle of the Kraitu's Bones, this time he dived and hurled it into one of the glasships and smashed them both.

78

Shields of Glass and Gold

Berren, Crazy Mad, the Bloody Judge, Skyrie. More names than he needed, a different man born each day, but this was war, and war was what had birthed the Bloody Judge, and so in the here and now that was who he was. He raced across the three arches of the bridge and on, through smudges of thick smoke, leaping over dead sword-slaves and Taiytakei soldiers alike. Tiny elegant huts lined both sides of the bridge, miniature shops and workshops blocking the view to the sea. All of them were wrecked and ruined by lightning now, and in the gaps between them he saw the rising sun of the morning on one side and the stone monsters on the other.
Spawn of the Kraitu and the Red Banatch
. He didn't know how, but he knew that's what they were.

The first of them was getting close, yet what spurred him on more was the look he'd seen in Tuuran's eye. It frightened him, that look. He'd seen it before on the faces of men across the world. Belief. Fanatical belief. And that wasn't Tuuran. Tuuran believed in Tuuran and that was that. That look in his eyes didn't belong.