The Silver Kings (23 page)

He looked at the corpse and jumped when it turned its head and looked back. He took a knife and cut it to be sure, but it didn’t bleed the way living men bled. Its blood was viscous and dark rust-brown. It oozed like slime.

I should have spoken.
If Chay-Liang had been here she’d be standing at his shoulder and glaring at him now, wagging her finger, well and truly angry with him. It would have been weeks before he heard the last of it. And so he
would
have spoken, if only to save himself from that.

A dragon is still a dragon. Her words nothing but pretty lies. That’s simply what Zafir is
.
Isn’t she?

He didn’t know any more, and he could almost hear Li snort at him for that, derisive and scornful.
Daft old man. Do I need to spell the words out for you?
He shook his head and tried to remember her, flicking through memories of the time they’d shared. Her kindness and her strength, her simple human warmth. He clung to them, bathing in them until he pushed Zafir and Hyrkallan and all the rest away and found his peace again. Then he turned to the dead man who wasn’t quite dead. There
were
ways to bring a man back. He’d seen it done and he’d done it himself. An alchemist pulling a soul into its own dead corpse with abyssal powders in order to make it speak.

He pushed a small stone pestle into the corpse’s mouth, forcing it open.

‘Why are you still moving, eh?’

The corpse, uncooperative, rolled its head away. Bellepheros pinned it still and poked about inside its mouth with a thin stick, trying to scrape out any residues. Abyssal powders were like a thick black treacle. They also stank like nothing else. The corpse stank too, but that was because it was rotting and festering where half its intestines had been ripped out. Bellepheros poked his face up close to its mouth and sniffed. Couldn’t be sure about the smell one way or the other, other than that it was foul.

Thing about abyssal powders was that corpses only came back with their memories. They didn’t know what was happening around them, and so there was no point in simply asking who had done this. Mind you, he’d never known them able to walk either, or even to move their arms and legs much.

Odd.

He took his knife and made a long straight incision just beneath the ribs. Maybe if he got its stomach open then he could work out what sort of potion had been used; or maybe there had been some sort of reflex and the corpse had swallowed the abyssal powders while it was talking. Or maybe it wasn’t a potion at all. Tuuran had his stories about the necropolis of Deephaven, and Big Vish had his own of the dead rising under the Purple Spur, although that could always have been some alchemist meddling with things best left well alone. Merizikat had had its catacombs, where the Black Moon had had Tuuran digging around as if he was looking for something …

Merizikat. A pang of loss crept up from inside and smacked him in the face.
Li.
Li had put an end to whatever had been going on down there. Never said a word. Just did it and was gone, snuffed out of his life, and so didn’t he owe it to her to root out the secrets the Black Moon had been hunting?

He frowned hard, took a deep breath and forced himself to work. Back to his twitching corpse. If he could just get in there and find whatever made it …

‘What are you doing?’ asked the corpse.

Bellepheros yelped. The corpse turned to look at him as he jumped away, crippled knees entirely forgotten. He stabbed the corpse three times in the chest, straight through the ribs into its heart, which made no difference at all.

‘Who are you?’ asked the corpse.

No no no! They never talk back, never never! He ran outside and yelled for help, but no one came because they were all in the Octagon with Zafir, telling each other how many sacks of beans they had, how many barrels of Merizikat biscuits had been unloaded from the eyrie before the Black Moon had vanished with it, and arrows, and all the other necessary things that gave him nosebleeds of sheer boredom. This, though,
this
they needed to hear, and so he set off back there, hurrying as best he could, and had nearly reached the Octagon itself when he turned a corner and collided with Zafir and Tuuran coming the other way.

‘Grand Master. I wanted to show you …’ Zafir stopped. Her hand drifted to her bladeless knife. ‘What
is
the matter?’

Bellepheros grabbed Tuuran and started to drag him back. ‘The walking corpse you found—’

‘The
what
?’ Zafir’s hand landed on his shoulder.

‘The walking
…’ He stopped himself. ‘The catacombs of Merizikat, Holiness? You know what was down there?’ She had to.
Everyone
knew. As best Bellepheros could tell the catacombs were the only reason the Black Moon had taken them there at all.

Zafir took a moment and then let him go. ‘Yes. I … saw them.’ Her mouth twitched at the memory of something deeply un­pleasant.

‘I think we’ve found another one.’

‘So I hear.’

‘You
know
? But how …’ Tuuran had told her, of course he had. Stupid to think otherwise. But there was something more, the lingering bad taste of some baleful secret shared that they kept to themselves. It riled him how she was always somehow ahead of him. Alchemists informed their speakers, not the other way around. ‘Holiness, how can I serve either you or the realms if—’

Zafir put a finger to his lips and glared. ‘Your dead man can wait, Grand Master. I want to show you something. Both of you. All of you.’

She led him back to the Octagon while Tuuran sent Halfteeth and Big Vish to watch over the walking corpse and see it didn’t escape or … or whatever else a walking corpse might do. Zafir beckoned Kiam and Jaslyn to follow, and led everyone through the Hall of Mirages. This time, as she walked the arches, Bellepheros made a point to remember the pattern.

‘I want all of you to see this place.’ Zafir led them to the arches where the Black Moon had disappeared, and on to the carvings that lay beyond, the history, if she was right, of the Silver King. ‘I want to show you what I think this means,’ she said. ‘The story of the Black Moon and the Silver King.’

Bellepheros twitched. ‘Holiness, the Order of the Scales—’

‘Grand Master?’ Zafir silenced him with a look. ‘If anyone knows the story of the Silver King, it is an alchemist, is that what you were going to say? You and your histories and your libraries of books?’ She leaned in close. ‘Consider, Grand Master, that I had a dragon whisper it in my ear, and that my dragon was there when it happened, that he saw it all, and that I have shared his memories. Besides, you yourself once told Chay-Liang that when it came to the Black Moon I might know more than any of you. So then. Hear me.’

She started as before, at the moment on which everything hinged. The Splintering, when the Black Moon had forged his helm of ice, when the last of the Silver Kings, the Isul Aieha, had struck him down, and the Earthspear had ripped the world to splinters. Diamond Eye rode among them all, slipping ghost-like through their thoughts to show each how he had tasted the Nothing in that moment, a whiff of it, quickly clenched and crushed and buried by the dead goddess and her slayer. Zafir pointed to the Silver King’s carvings of Xibaiya where they’d trapped the Nothing, all three locked together, the Nothing in its prison, the dead goddess and the Black Moon its cage. Diamond Eye whispered through their minds as Zafir spoke. The dragon showed them all, as he had wandered from one life to the next, how he had seen it with his own eyes.

Zafir took them back in time then, along the carvings to the very beginning, where the sun and the moon and the earth and the stars, the four first gods and goddesses, had created their strands of life; and as she showed them each scene, Diamond Eye murmured among their thoughts and told them its meaning, the story of the first age as he knew it. Bellepheros looked down at the picture beneath his feet that Zafir had shown him before: four men walking together, all, if you went by the carvings, with the marks on their heads that showed them as half-gods. One carrying the spear, one with the Black Moon’s knife, one with a coat of light, and one with a circlet around his brow. In the next picture they entered a cave and the dragon told them the story of it, how the earth had summoned the first dark moon into the sky to blot out the sun and cast the world into ice and darkness; how the Isul Aieha and his brother Seturakah had travelled to the fathomless depths of Xibaiya and abased themselves; of the dead goddess of the earth and her demand that one half-god child of the moon should become a sacrifice; how revered Seturakah had tricked the earth, splitting himself in two and hiding a part of his own soul in a faceless helm of ice before he gave himself to the goddess. His return, slow and painful, growing from the seed he’d left behind. How Seturakah had taken the name, from that time, of Black Moon. How the Isul Aieha and the Black Moon had divided the world and ruled it from twin thrones side by side.

The next part seemed out of place, and Diamond Eye seemed not to understand it any better than the rest of them. A half-god raising sorceries, twisting the earth and warping caverns and mountains, gouging twisting tunnels, conjuring labyrinths that wrapped the world in sigils and ritual. The Silver King’s Ways of the Isul Aieha; but those, Bellepheros knew, had been made long after the Splintering, after the Silver King had tamed the dragons, when he made his Enchanted Palace and all these halls around them.

The Black Moon turned against the old ways. The other Silver Kings plucked out his eyes.
Diamond Eye drifted among them, memory to memory like a wraith.

Zafir led them back to where they’d started. The Isul Aieha and the Black Moon now opposed. The other Silver Kings vanishing one by one, most of them withdrawing to some great silver sea.

‘I have wondered about this war,’ she said, ‘and of the Black Moon’s obsession with the Silver King’s spear, and of the dead that rise and walk again. That spear is the Earthspear. I think perhaps the Black Moon became the avatar of the dead goddess. She took him and made him her own. Perhaps this is why, in the end, she let him go. I cannot be sure, and even Diamond Eye doesn’t know. Such things are perhaps beyond even dragons. But in the stories here the goddess of the earth raises the Black Moon and threatens the Silver Kings with extinction. From that our half-god takes his name. Perhaps he serves the same purpose.’

Another carving Bellepheros remembered from before was on the ceiling over his head. A man with a hole in his skull – a half-god if Zafir was right – standing beside a hatching egg. A dragon’s head poked through the shell. The same man and hatching dragon were in the next scene along, the half-god with one hand wielding a knife and stabbing it into another man’s skull, the other hand reaching inside as if to pluck something out, while the little dragon lay sprawled, eyes closed beside the broken egg. In the next the half-god was alone, fingers outstretched to touch the little dragon’s head, the dragon alive and aflame this time, straining its neck to greet the half-god’s touch.

The first dragon, summoned into being by the Black Moon.

And then the end again. The sun devoured in the sky. The dark moon of the dead goddess climbing for a second time. Through it all, Diamond Eye filled them with the story the dragons remembered, with the memories he still carried deep. The Splintering.

They moved on, bewildered and amazed. Now the Isul Aieha wandered alone. His carvings showed him finding the storm-dark and crossing it to some fortress, half real and half an imagined thing substanced from dreams and nightmares. Diamond Eye knew it as Darkstone, filled with relics of death. The pictures showed the Silver King travelling from place to place, standing before archways like the arches in the hall behind them, sometimes passing through, sometimes not, sometimes standing before the gateway to the sea where the other silver half-gods had gone and then turning his back.

‘I always had a sense that he was looking for something,’ murmured Zafir, ‘but I never knew what.’ She stopped at a short sequence that seemed to show all manner of rites for the dead, of souls being lifted away to the gods of the sun and the moon, or else the goddesses of the earth and the stars, the old creator deities forgotten by dragon-riders and long forsaken by the Taiytakei; but Bellepheros, and even Zafir and Tuuran, had spent long enough in Merizikat to recognise them for what they were. Different rites of the dead for different divinities. Fire or sunlight for the sun. Water or moonlight for the moon. Wind and air and starlight for the stars. Darkness and interment for the earth …

Bellepheros began to see.

Pictures. Countless souls reaching their proper rest, broken by another savage depiction of the rip in Xibaiya; here were the souls of the dead sent to the goddess of the earth. The picture’s meaning was clear. Those given to the dead goddess were dragged to Xibaiya, where they were devoured and annihilated by the Nothing. Feeding it.

More. The Isul Aieha travelling from world to world as a wind and storm of warning. To one realm, where he became a darkness spread upon the entire world, demanding worship and sacrifice, declaring in whispers and catastrophe the moon and the earth to be anathema, the god and goddess whose hubris had allowed the shattering of the world. Then to another. Opening ways to Xibaiya and calling the lost children hidden there, changing them so their shifting forms were no longer flesh and bone but stone and air and fire. Instilling in them a fervour that the old gods be forgotten and obliterated so that such a cataclysm should never happen again …

Bellepheros felt Zafir start beside him. ‘The Elemental Men,’ she gasped. ‘Those are the Elemental Men! He made them. The Isul Aieha made the Elemental Men! Unholy Flame! I didn’t see it!’

Another realm. Dragons. Diamond Eye’s knife-blade tension, hostile as fire, as Zafir stopped before a grand carving of the Isul Aieha astride a mountain, his silver spear held aloft, the spear that had killed the Black Moon and cast him to Xibaiya, while around him in the sky a thousand circling dragons swooped to devour hapless fleeing men, in turn to be caught in the Silver King’s snare. The day he dulled them and gave the power of alchemy to his blood-mages. Taming them. And in the images that followed there was the sense, at last, of some possibility, of an answer; and then the carvings abruptly stopped, for this was when the blood-mages tore their mentor down, and his answer, whatever it might have been, was never found.