The Silver Kings (12 page)

A quiet smugness suffused the days that followed, a happy contentment over an undertow of exhilaration. As far as he could, Tsen kept himself out of sight. He bought himself some decent clothes and some for Kalaiya too. He made discreet enquiries at the sea docks as to what ships would be leaving until he found one, the
Scavenger
, bound for Brons in the Dominion of the Sun King. He found the
Scavenger
’s captain and showed his glass sliver. He took Kalaiya to a bathhouse and bought a bottle of apple wine, and they spent their afternoons together soaking in the water, steaming in Xizic oil, talking about the life they were leaving behind, giving it its own funeral and then casting it away like an old shed skin; and he told her about the waiting Dahat villa and the future he thought they would have, full of lazy days, of peace and calm, of baths and apple wine, of no sea lords or enchanters or killers, and
definitely
no dragons; and the more he talked, the more he wondered at the ambition that had driven him these last years.
A change is coming. We’re best away from it, as far away as possible. Just the two of us.
He looked back at what he’d been, at the life he’d led, at who and what he’d thought to become. It had made perfect sense in its moment, but now it seemed like madness.

He bought them each a small travel chest and let Kalaiya fill them with whatever she thought they might need or took her fancy. He bought a pair of sail-slaves, two old men who had once come from the Dominion, three silver clippers for the pair of them, cheap as dirt because they were far past their prime. Maybe it was sentiment, being far enough past his prime himself, but once his sail-slaves knew they were going home they worked hard enough. He saw when he bought them that they hadn’t really believed it, how they feared some fate far worse – fodder for some sea lord’s jade ravens or to have their flesh murdered and their souls sucked into an enchanted golem perhaps – but as they carried his chests towards the waiting carriage that would take them to the docks and the
Scavenger
, he saw them change. Their faces. That stricken look of anguished joy and hope. Forty years as slaves and they still remembered their home. He’d let them go, he decided, once he’d settled in the villa. A little thing. A touch of goodness to set against what his dragon-queen had done to Dhar Thosis.

The carriage took them to the docks. Tsen paid in jade, a smattering of wafer-thin squares carved with an image of the Hangpoor Palace of Zinzarra where they had been minted. There was another carriage beside the jetty where the
Scavenger
’s boats were waiting. A small gang of men – Taiytakei sword-slaves taken from the desert tribes – sat playing dice and chewing Xizic. Tsen didn’t think anything of them until he started onto the jetty and one got up and stood in front of him, blocking his way.

‘Baros Tsen?’ the sword-slave asked.

Tsen stopped dead, bone-frozen by his own name. The other sword-slaves regarded him.
How did they know?
He bit back a reply, but knew he’d already given himself away. And he supposed he ought to do something like turn and run, but what was the point?

‘Get out of the way.’ He tried to push the sword-slave aside, to brazen it out, the sort of angry righteous gesture of a wealthy Taiytakei confronted by an upstart slave who didn’t know his place. The sword-slave gut-punched him. As Tsen doubled up, the other slaves jumped to their feet. Kalaiya screamed and ran, but they caught her at once. Hands had hold of him, hauling him to the waiting carriage. The door opened and his heart sank. There were two men inside, and he’d seen them before. They’d come to his eyrie months ago with his old friend Vey Rin T’Varr of Vespinarr, who had left as no friend at all.

‘Help!’ he cried. ‘Help! Kidnap!’

His slaves ran away, dropping the chests they were carrying and racing off down the docks. He ought to be angry with them, he supposed, but mostly he applauded.
Well done. Well done for staying alive
. Because really? What could they have done? The sword-slaves bundled him into the carriage and slammed the door. He lunged for the window. ‘Kalaiya!’ They punched him and held him down, but he refused to stop struggling. One got out a knife and waved it in his face as though that might shut him up. He barely noticed. ‘
Kalaiya!
’

The carriage door opened again. The sword-slaves had Kalaiya held between them like a wriggling carpet. They had shackles on her wrists and ankles. They bundled her through the door while the two men inside pulled and dragged and forced her to sit between them.

‘Now shut up,’ snarled the man with the knife, ‘or I will cut
her
, not you.’

‘I know you.’ Tsen forced himself to be still. He couldn’t stop his racing heart or his heaving lungs, but he stopped his struggling. The second man tossed Tsen a pair of shackles. They landed in his lap.

‘Put them on,’ said the man when Tsen ignored them. ‘Or she gets cut.’

Tsen put the shackles around his wrists. ‘You came to my eyrie. You saw my dragon.’

The man with the knife nodded. ‘Surprised we weren’t beneath your notice, a great t’varr like you. Not so great now.’ He closed the blinds on the windows.

‘How much do you want to let me go?’ asked Tsen. ‘Right now, right here. I’ll give you everything I have. I’ll get on that ship and no one will ever see me again. No one will ever know.’

The man with the knife banged on the roof. The carriage started to move. ‘But you have nothing to offer, t’varr. Nothing.’

Tsen tried his pleas a while longer as the carriage eased its way from the docks and out through Hanjaadi towards the Vespinarr road. Bargaining, haggling, threatening, cajoling. Begging and pleading when nothing else worked, not that he thought it would make any difference. The two men barely said a word. They didn’t tell him their names when he asked, but it didn’t particularly matter. They’d come with his old friend Vey Rin, t’varr and brother to Sea Lord Shonda of Vespinarr, on the day the great red-gold dragon had broken Vey Rin’s mind. Tsen settled to amusing himself by remembering every detail once it was obvious they wouldn’t be bribed into letting him go.

‘How did you know?’ he asked, but they wouldn’t answer; and though he came at it again and again from all the different ways he could conjure, they never did tell him.

They left the city. As they passed the Bawar Bridge the men opened the blinds, letting in the sunlight. When they stopped and he took a piss, they stood and watched. When he squatted for a shit, they were beside him. Tsen asked them if they might wipe his arse for him; that was when he found they had lightning wands and were happy to use them, now that they were away from the city. He didn’t ask again. The hours dragged to days. They watched him eat and they watched him snore. Always one of them, often both, and their sword-slave mercenaries were never far away. Kalaiya, at least, was with him. They gave him that kindness. Or perhaps kindness wasn’t it, perhaps it was simply less of a burden to watch the two of them at once – but it gave him hope to see her, to talk with her, even if their captors saw every gesture and heard every word. He wondered how he might save her now. What bargain he could possibly strike for her life.

The carriage followed the river road through the Lair of Samim and out the other side. The road began its climb into the Jokun gorge. Tsen stared out of the windows, filled with déjà vu because the skin-shifter Sivan had brought him this exact same way before, captive in a different way but captive nonetheless. The same thoughts came around again; and since the men in the carriage refused to talk, Tsen set about getting on their nerves, chattering away with Kalaiya about how the road here had been carved from the sheer cliffs, wondering how many men it had taken to build it, and how long, and all the other questions that had once come to a bored t’varr with nothing else to fill his mind. He talked on endlessly about that journey, how he’d slipped into Vespinarr itself right under the noses of Shonda’s guards and flown out on a gondola from the Visonda Fields, disguised as a slave. He chuckled every time the carriage slowed, held up by teams of animals towing one barge after another against the river current. He told Kalaiya of all the times, in his mind at least, he’d almost escaped, and of all the new and colourful words he’d learned. From his own mouth the story sounded like some great adventure, an epic journey across a continent to rescue his true love; and sometimes, when he looked at her, that was exactly how it seemed even now, although the truth he remembered was smaller and dirtier, and very much more fearful. But he pushed that aside and wove on with his tales, and in odd times now and then they both forgot what awaited them, and laughed and smiled and held hands and were, in the moment, happy.

They came at last to the head of the gorge where the cliffs fell away around the shore of a familiar lake, where the Jokun paused its plunge from the mountains of the Konsidar to the sea. Hundreds of boats passed back and forth, and the air was cool and damp and fresh, full of life and adventure. When Tsen had come with Sivan a stiff breeze had blown off the mountains to cover the lake with waves; but today the air was still, the waters mirror smooth. The carriage drove past a shanty town of warehouses and sailors and sail-slaves, of mules and the teamsters who drove them through the mountain passes to Vespinarr, of sweat and cheap spirit and even cheaper Xizic. On the far side, where the river started through the upper gorge with its impassable falls and cataracts, a black stone fortress rose from an outcrop of rock. That, his gut said, was where Vey Rin would be waiting.

‘Is it true,’ Tsen asked as the carriage turned and drove through the fortress gates, ‘that there are vaults here filled with a fortune in Vespinese silver?’ When Sivan had brought him along this same road they hadn’t stopped, but he remembered wondering how a fortress like this would fare before a dragon. Badly, he supposed, but with his eyrie lost to the storm-dark, no one would ever know.

His guardians didn’t answer. They never did. The carriage stopped in the castle yard, and the sword-slaves opened the doors and pulled Tsen out. They kicked him in the back of his knees to buckle his legs and pressed his head to the weathered stones, ­forcing him to kowtow, and then held him there until he felt the air change around him and someone come close. A waft of exquisitely expensive Xizic lanced through the stones’ vague odour of stale manure. A shadow loomed, stealing the sun and its warmth. Tsen heard Kalaiya cry out. He tried to look, to see what they’d done to her, but he couldn’t turn his head.

‘Hello, Tsen,’ said the shadow. The voice was so familiar, and yet with a high-pitched squeal he’d never heard before. But the voice didn’t matter. The Xizic had been enough.

‘Hello, Rin, old friend.’

Vey Rin kicked him in the face. The sword-slaves let go and Tsen rolled onto his side, clutching his head. Blood poured out of his nose. Rin kicked him again and then again, and then he was swearing and cursing like a sailor, laying in with blow after blow as though he meant to kick Tsen to death right there in the yard, and Tsen could see Kalaiya now, held fast between two soldiers and forced to watch, and all he could think of was that at least it wasn’t her.

‘You kick,’ he gasped, ‘like an old woman.’

Vey Rin T’Varr, sea lord of Vespinarr, stamped Tsen down. He howled with hateful venom, stumbled and would have fallen if his own guards hadn’t caught him. ‘Take him!’ Rin sounded more like a monster than a man, warped and wrenched. ‘Take him to the pen! You know what to do with him. Gut him! Flay him!’ The sword-slaves dragged Tsen away while Tsen tried to see what they did with Kalaiya, but he didn’t dare call her name, not now. Didn’t dare even let Vey Rin see him look at her for fear that Rin would murder her on the spot out of spite. Even through the pain and the anguish, he wondered what had happened to his old friend. If friend had ever been what he was.

The sword-slaves dragged him into the fortress, down into stinking bowels of stone never touched by the sun, slick with damp. They ripped his clothes from his skin, beat him with short sticks and then shackled him to a wall, wrists and ankles, spreadeagled, as helpless and as undignified as a man could be. Tsen was fairly sure he knew what happened next – Rin came and gloated and tormented him for a while, and then they tortured him for a bit to make him confess to whatever it was that Rin wanted to hear. Then, probably, they dragged his half-dead carcass back to Vespinarr and hanged him. Or maybe they’d do it in Khalishtor.
Look! Look what we found! Baros Tsen, murderer of Dhar Thosis, alive after all to receive his sentence.
And Red Lin Feyn, once the Arbiter of the Dralamut, who’d been all ready to let him slip into some anonymous new life, would say nothing. They’d hang what was left of him by the ankles, to be mocked and jeered.

That was if he was lucky. If he was
un
lucky then they did everything the same, but first they murdered Kalaiya in front of him.

He wept when they left him alone. Couldn’t help himself, even if it was just pathetic worthless self-pity. He had nothing to offer and no bargain left to make. For some reason which made no sense at all, he suddenly found himself immensely angry with Red Lin Feyn for letting him go.
A quick death. You could have given that to me. Pushed me off your sled or strangled me with your glass collar or even handed me to the Elemental Men to be hanged. At least Kalaiya would live. But no. You had to give me hope.

He didn’t know how long it was before Rin finally came. Hours, and it must have been dark outside. Rin stank of wine and smelled of Xizic and grease. The first thing he did was walk up to Tsen and belch in his face.

‘Hungry?’

‘We were friends once,’ croaked Tsen. There really wasn’t anything else he could try. ‘Do you remember? Do you remember Cashax? Riding our sleds out into the sands, running scout for those slavers? The House of the Burning Womb? You and me and Shonda and the rest? You
do
remember?’