The Silver Kings (26 page)

She landed on the rim, close to where Tuuran and some of the others were rebuilding one of the cranes, then crossed the dragon yard and went into the tunnels to the little room where her handmaidens lived. Myst and Onyx stripped her and scrubbed her skin with sand and pumice. They massaged her with Xizic oils looted from Baros Tsen’s little room beside his bathhouse. They didn’t say much, just looked at her in wonder and awe and perhaps a touch of fear, and when she asked them what had happened, all she heard was the same: the Black Moon had taken them to a Silver Sea, and it had been the most beautiful thing imaginable, and then he’d taken them away again.

For the first time in more days than she could remember, Zafir slept in a bed instead of out on the eyrie walls. Myst and Onyx curled up beside her. She kept touching her head where the Arbiter’s circlet had bound her, but it was gone. Gone for ever. The Black Moon had done that.

In the morning she summoned everyone to the dragon yard. The sun shone bright and steady. The blue unchanging sky was cloudless, the air warm, a soft and gentle breeze brushing at her hair. She ran a hand through it and realised it had grown. Last she remembered, fighting for her life against the Taiytakei and their lightning, it had been close-cropped, sheared in the manner of a slave. It was longer now. Close to a finger’s length. Quite some time had passed then while she had lain in Baros Tsen’s bath. Months?

Did I really die
? she wondered, but that was just stupid.

The Black Moon was where he’d crouched the day before, curled up on his side now and fast asleep. She told Tuuran to take him away somewhere quiet. The other survivors, when she had them arrayed in front of her, were a motley collection, a handful of Taiytakei soldiers who might once have served any of half a dozen different sea lords, and a couple of dozen slaves, kitchen slaves and house slaves, old men for the most part, although there were a few younger ones who hadn’t died taking up arms. But she had what she had, and would make the best of it, and so she split them into bands. The largest she put with Tuuran to build winches and pulleys to lower men to the sea, to fish and draw buckets of water. The witch Chay-Liang claimed to have a notion how she and Bellepheros might separate out the salt and make water they could all drink; and there were still plenty of pieces of gold-glass out on the rim, enough to make sleds for everyone, enough to shape buckets that wouldn’t leak and perhaps parts that Tuuran would need for his winches. Zafir charged Myst and Onyx with searching the eyrie from top to bottom and drawing up an inventory, and then some other men to make lines and hooks and lures for fishing. She tried to persuade the hatchlings to hunt, but they simply refused. She couldn’t bring herself to ask Diamond Eye to do anything so menial.

‘What of the eggs, Holiness?’ asked Bellepheros when she’d divided up the work. ‘Shall we have no Scales for when they hatch?’

‘There are still eggs?’

Bellepheros led her to the tunnel beside what had once been the hatchery. Inside a room deep within the spiral tunnels were six dragon eggs.

‘I don’t know how they came to be here,’ Bellepheros said. ‘I don’t recall moving them. But we have no Scales if they hatch.’

‘Do you have potion with which to dull them if they do?’ Zafir asked. The questions were pointless. Diamond Eye and the two hatchlings were already awake. They barely tolerated her as it was, and even then only because the Black Moon had told them that they must. They would not stand for another dragon muted by alchemy.

‘I do.’

‘Then throw it over the side. These dragons will hatch free. Those already here will not permit otherwise.’

Bellepheros nodded. ‘May I have Tuuran, then, to see to these eggs?’

He meant for Tuuran to take his axe to them and murder the hatchlings in their shells while they waited to be born. Zafir shook her head. ‘You may not. Nor may you tip them over the side. If they hatch, Grand Master Alchemist, then they hatch. Diamond Eye will see to them if our Silver King does not.’

Bellepheros’s face, screwed up already, pinched a little tighter. ‘He is not
our
Silver King, Holiness. Not
our
Isul Aieha. Far from it.’ He stamped away, back to seethe a little in his laboratory before turning his mind to separating salt from sea. Zafir watched him go.
Not our Isul Aieha.
He was right about that.
But he is a Silver King. And he set me free
.

She meant to take to the sky again to resume her search for land, but in the end she stayed with Myst and Onyx and rummaged through the eyrie. In the afternoon she went to Chay-Liang’s workshop with Myst tagging behind like an eager duckling, Zafir’s old armour piled in her arms. The enchantress was making buckets and gold-glass fish hooks. She glared as Zafir waited at her door. The loathing was still there. Hard to tell if it was the same as it used to be.

‘May I come in?’ asked Zafir.

There was a moment of hesitation before Chay-Liang nodded.

‘The armour you made for me is battered. I’d ask you to repair it, but you have more pressing things to do, and I don’t imagine we shall find ourselves under attack while we remain adrift at sea. Use its parts as you see fit.’ She looked around Chay-Liang’s workshop, trying not to stare, not to seem nosy or aghast at the sheer chaos of it, benches covered with half-formed pieces of glass, metal, bundles of gold and copper wires, pincers, tongs, scalpel-sharp knives, and at least a dozen tools whose purpose Zafir couldn’t imagine never mind name.

Chay-Liang pointed to a box on the floor. It already contained pieces of half-made armour. ‘There.’ Myst dropped her bundle into the box.

Zafir spread her arms. ‘You have a lightning wand somewhere here, Chay-Liang? I’m sure you must. If you want to use it then get on and do it.’ She tilted her head.

‘This again?’ Chay-Liang hooted and banged her worktop. ‘We cannot return through the storm-dark without that devil creature, and he, it seems, is useless now. We have no navigator. We are stuck here, wherever
here
is. We need your dragon or we will all drift and die! So we need him to fly and search for land, and we need him not to eat us, and thus we need you. You well know these things. If you turn on us – if you hurt Bellepheros in any way – I will rack you with lightning enough to make your bones burst, slave. Until then you may strut all you like without fear of me. Go away and make yourself useful.’

‘There are no slaves any more, Chay-Liang. None. I will not tolerate it.’

The enchantress almost spat at her. She glared and then looked hard at Myst. ‘Have you told that to
her
?’

‘I freed Myst and Onyx long before the Elemental Men came to end us. She chooses to stay.’ Zafir met Chay-Liang’s eye as if facing down a dragon. ‘I am not your enemy, Chay-Liang.’

‘Ha!’ The witch barked with laughter, then stared, hard and cold. ‘Here and now you are not. Here and now every soul on this eyrie needs you, as they need me, and neither can survive without the other, and so, as we are both practical women, we put aside our differences. But I have no doubt that as soon as we find land you quickly
will
become my enemy again. That is what you are, and then my lightning will come for you.’

Zafir’s eye glittered, a flash of fury. ‘I could simply fly away, you know. Take Diamond Eye and head off and not come back. Take my chances. They would be far better than yours.’

‘Oh, I’m quite sure you could!’ The witch snorted her scorn. ‘But you’ll not leave us without your alchemist, whose potions keep at bay the plague in your blood.’

Zafir tugged at the arm of her shift. The patch of skin on the inside of her elbow. No bigger than a fingernail for now, but the witch was right: it
would
kill her in time without Bellepheros and his potions. She pulled up her sleeve and offered her arm. ‘You can check on it every day if you like to make sure I’m still in thrall.’ Then spun on her heel and strode away, calling over her shoulder, ‘Until landfall then, enchantress. Do let me know if I can in any way help you in your endeavours.’

As an overture of peace Zafir supposed she’d achieved her purpose. It stuck with her though, Chay-Liang’s scorn, and chased her through the eyrie like a petulant ghost. A dragon-queen wasn’t supposed to care what her servants thought. A dragon-queen ruled and her subjects obeyed, and that was the simple way of the world. But not here.

The next morning she rose early. She went to Diamond Eye and checked his saddle and harness. She replaced and repaired what she could, and reminded herself that, battered and frayed and ­broken as the harness was, it had survived intact enough to keep her safe through the battle with the Taiytakei glasships. When she’d done what she could she sent Myst and Onyx for water. A lot of it. Too much, the others might say, but they weren’t about to spend day after day with their skin flayed by the wind and the sun on their back. She was about to mount and take wing when the witch came out into the dragon yard, tugging a sled. On the back of it was a huge glass bucket, and in the bucket was Zafir’s armour. Chay-Liang stopped at the bottom of the wall.

‘Dragon-slave! You asked if you could help. You can.’

‘How?’

‘Take this tub and fill it with seawater. Bellepheros and I mean to begin our work, he to test his alchemy and I my enchantments.’

Zafir smiled, and for once she even meant it.

‘Here’s your armour. I can’t do anything for the dragonscale, but the gold-glass is repaired and shaped as it was. My own work so it was easy enough.’ She handed Zafir her helm. ‘I made some changes. You wear dragonscale. It must get very hot under there.’

‘Yes.’

‘Baros Tsen’s bathhouse, after the Arbiter came, was used to keep the dead. I placed an enchantment to keep it cold so they wouldn’t rot. The Black Moon had me take it away, so I’ve put it on your helm instead. Touch a finger to your left brow and it will cool you. Touch a finger to your right and it will stop.’

‘And is there another to crush my skull when the whim takes you?’ Zafir’s smile didn’t falter. It was what Red Lin Feyn had done.

Chay-Liang laughed. ‘If there was, I wouldn’t tell you, would I? Here.’ She passed Zafir one of the greaves that would cover her arm. It had a glass rod mounted along the top that hadn’t been there before. Liang tapped it. ‘A lightning thrower. In case your dragons misbehave.’

‘Aren’t you afraid I’ll turn it against you?’

‘Aren’t you afraid I’ll crush your skull?’ The enchantress twisted her face in a crude imitation of Zafir’s smirk. ‘The seawater, if you please.’

Zafir climbed the wall and stood beside Diamond Eye. She stripped to her riding shift, and if the former slaves on the rim working on the crane all stopped to stare, they knew better than to meet her eye. She armoured herself. Dragonscale, then gold and glass. The witch had done a better job this time. The armour fitted well.

Does she mean us harm?
Zafir asked.
Did you see that in her thoughts?

She knows you will turn on her when she least expects it, and that she lacks the courage to do the same.
Diamond Eye felt distant.

I think it is not courage you describe, dragon. I think that is fear.

It is survival, little one. Nothing less and nothing more.

They flew together, carried Chay-Liang’s tub to the sea and returned it full to the brim, then took a bearing from the sun and flew again, fast and far. Hour after endless hour Zafir dozed while Diamond Eye flew. When they had travelled perhaps a thousand miles and could still see nothing but sea, she took him down to the water to rest. Not that he needed it, but she’d flown him hard and he was hot, and they both needed to cool. She stripped naked and dived into the water and swam. Later she wished she hadn’t. The salt from the sea, trapped against her skin, burned and chafed. She had no idea how far she went after that. They rested twice more, and everywhere looked the same. The sea and even the clouds. What if there was no land at all? Was that possible? She turned back when her water was half gone, as the second sunset of her flight began to fall, and without Diamond Eye to guide her to the distant whispers of chattering thoughts that were the eyrie, she might have flown out here for ever, adrift and lost over endless water.

She returned after three days on Diamond Eye’s back, de­hydrated, fiercely hungry, so far into exhaustion that her vision kept blurring, and yet she’d found nothing. No land, no ships. She staggered across the dragon yard, shedding her armour as she went. When Tuuran ran to her side, she snapped him away. A dragon-rider stood on her own two feet. Always. Myst and Onyx had Baros Tsen’s bath waiting for her. She fell asleep in it and barely noticed when they pulled her out and dried her and put her to bed. When she woke, she realised that a bath meant Chay-Liang and Bellepheros were making fresh water from the sea as they’d promised. Fresh and pure and cool. She could have kissed them both.

Tuuran had finished his cranes and was winching people in shifts down to the sea to fish. Zafir allowed herself a day to watch them, to rest and recover, and then flew again, a different direction this time, longer and further, and with more water to sustain her. Chay-Liang’s enchanted helm cooled her, but she found it gave her headaches too and so after the first day she stopped using it. This time, when she came back, she collapsed in the middle of the dragon yard and almost couldn’t get up again.

‘You’re not taking enough food,’ chided Bellepheros, but it wasn’t that. It was the sheer numbing exhaustion of flying a dragon so far. Further than any rider had ever flown before. Not that Diamond Eye cared. He would have flown for ever if she let him.

They’d had a storm while she was gone, but it had passed. Afterwards Chay-Liang had moulded a hundred sleds. She wanted to use them to pull the eyrie so they didn’t simply drift in the wind, but she didn’t have any chains to tether them. Zafir had Diamond Eye move about the rim of the eyrie, burning it until it was molten, while Liang then set the sleds into the stone as it cooled. Half the sleds melted or fell out again, but it was better than nothing. They’d do some more after her next flight.