The Silver Kings (39 page)

‘The spear has been taken under the Spur,’ she told the half-god. ‘Bring the eyrie to the Adamantine Palace. We can enter through the tunnels there.’

The Black Moon didn’t turn his head. For all she knew he hadn’t even heard, but she could hardly bear to stay, not on the walls among such a crowd, waiting for them to gasp as they saw what she already knew, the ruin she’d left behind. She abandoned Chay-Liang’s gold dragon with its ruby eyes to keep watch, and returned to the Spur, flying high to the cliffs over the old Zar Oratorium, to where the Diamond Cascade tipped its waters over the cliffs. Set back from the bank a little way down the river was a lodge, not much more than a single room squashed under an overhang and almost impossible to spot unless you already knew it was there. A secret place passed from one speaker to the next, one of several tucked among the silent crags of the Spur. It was untouched, exactly as she remembered it. The dragons hadn’t found it, or else they hadn’t thought it important enough to burn.

Hyram brought me here before I became speaker. Afterwards I came with Prince Jehal.
She watched the water rush by beneath her, then she walked along the little path that led to the great cliffs, to where the waters of the cascade pitched over the edge to vanish in rainbows and mist. She sat on her haunches right at the edge and looked down.
I brought Sirion here. I don’t even know why I did that. Trying to make them fight over me, I think.
She looked down at the ruin of the Adamantine Palace, of the Silver City, of what had once been nine glorious realms of dragon-kings and -queens.

Regrets, little one?

Plenty of those, dragon.
But dragons didn’t understand regret. Or sorrow, or forgiveness, or mercy or spite or vengeance or love, or
so many other things.
And here is something new for you. This feeling. New for both of us.
Shame, was it? She wasn’t sure she knew. But probably that. She’d returned to the dragon-realms to claim back her home, her throne, to take what was hers, but all that seemed hollow now. She wanted it undone, unwound, to try again, to somehow make it right.

I miss him, you know.
She walked back to the lodge and settled inside.

Who?

Jehal.
Obscene after all they’d done to one another, and if he’d been alive then no doubt her fury would have bettered the rest of her and had his blood and his skin. Still, she
did
miss him, parts of him at least. Moments they’d shared.

But the tears that stung her eyes weren’t for him; they were for the little girl she’d once been, coming to the Adamantine Palace on the back of a dragon, wrapped in her mother’s arms; and for a time she found herself lost in a sorrow she couldn’t explain or understand, and she was glad beyond reason when the eyrie finally drifted across the last miles of the plain and came to rest over the ruin of the palace below. By the time Diamond Eye spiralled down to join them, Tuuran and Halfteeth and the first dozen of his men were already on the ground.

‘To get to the spear this way we will need an alchemist,’ she said to Tuuran. ‘Bring Kataros but don’t let her be seen. Armour her up as one of your own. Do it yourself.’ She didn’t give him any chance to object, but brushed on past to look for the Black Moon. When she found him she looked him in the eye and stared into his moonlight pupils. No one else could look at him like that and hold his burning gaze, but she was a dragon-queen, raised from the moment she could walk to stare down monsters. She hunted for any sign of the Crowntaker inside him, for Tuuran’s friend Crazy Mad, and found nothing. Only the half-god Black Moon, end to end, inside and out.

‘You will bring out my brother’s spear, dragon-queen,’ he said. He didn’t mean it as a question, but Zafir chose to imagine that he had.

‘I will. And then?’

The Black Moon smiled. ‘We make everything as it was meant to be.’

‘Which looks like what?’ She kept hold of his eye. The moon inside him flickered and flared.

‘The world healed,’ he said. ‘The Splintering undone. The gods cast down. Dragons at our side. Dominion, dragon-queen.’

‘
Your
dominion?’

‘Mine.’

Zafir shrugged. ‘I suppose at least you’re honest.’

‘And you at my side with the Spear of the Earth and a thousand dragons at your beck and call. You will be beautiful and terrible, dragon-queen, desired and feared above all. Men will poison and murder and fall on their swords for a glance from you. Be gracious and merciful or terrible and dance on their bones. Be constant or capricious. All the worlds save one will be your playground, for I will not care.’

‘You know me well.’ Zafir smiled, though she didn’t believe a word of it, but the Black Moon didn’t smile back. He leaned into her. ‘Above the storm-dark, beside the Godspike, I saw into your soul. I know you, and I know what you are.’ He touched two fingers to her cheek, not a gesture of any kindness or affection but a threat, a reminder, a claim of ownership, a demand for sub­mission; instead of brushing them away, Zafir pinched his nose and squeezed and pushed him back.

‘You don’t own me. You earn me. Half-god or not.’

The Black Moon snapped away. Furious light blazed from his face. His hand flew to the Starknife on his belt, but Zafir refused to look away. No fear. Not for a dragon-rider.

‘Can you bring back the dead for me?’ she asked. ‘There’s a lover I once had I’d see die slow and screaming over and over.
Can
you do that, half-god? Bring back the dead?’ Let him see the darkness. It was a part of her, after all.

The Black Moon froze. His fury sparked about him and then ebbed as he laughed. ‘No, little one. None of us ever could do that. Now fetch my brother’s spear, dragon-queen.’

She watched him stride to the cages dangling from the eyrie rim, moonlight pouring out of him, soldiers scattering from his path while the bones of the dead turned to black ash around him. There would come a time, she supposed, when he’d tire of her. But for now he needed her – not that she understood quite why – and she needed him, and that was all there was.

‘The alchemist you asked for,’ said Tuuran, and Zafir realised she’d been staring at the Black Moon all the way up to the rim, and Tuuran had come up beside her, and she hadn’t even noticed, and he had a fire in his eye too. ‘So we get the spear now, yes? That’s why we’re here?’ He was restless as though he couldn’t wait.

‘Why doesn’t he cut me?’ Zafir asked, though she was asking it of herself and never mind the flash in Tuuran’s eye, the wild desperation he kept clenched inside, perhaps asking himself much the same. She put a hand on his arm, stilling him before he said something they’d both regret.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We get my spear.’

‘And then?’

She laughed, although it was an empty sound. ‘And then, Tuuran? And then I really don’t know.’

The Black Moon might have looked into her soul in Takei’Tarr, but there were things there now that hadn’t existed to be seen back then.

26

Avalanche

The dragons gather among the deep peaks of the Worldspine. They circle and wheel, an impatient sky of talons and scales and waiting fire. They are young adults hatched after the Adamantine Palace fell in flames. They are hunters and great war-dragons. But all are here made small by the ice-crowned peaks of the Worldspine itself. Bleak and jagged, iron-hard sheer faces of black stone. Nothing lives so high, so cold, so far and remote. Under a deep clear sky of searing violent blue the dragons watch, hungry, snapping taut on a leash of anticipation. On the tallest peak the world offers her, a dragon of pure white perches motionless. The half-gods once called her Alimar Ishtan vei Atheriel, Beloved Memory of a Lover Distant and Lost. More elegant, they would say, than a thousand stars. The little ones had named her Snow. Because she was white.

She watches now, eyes almost closed, quiet and serene as dragons roar and scream.

The Black Moon has come.

Maker.

Creator.

The Isul Aieha is fled.

The Black Moon seeks the spear.

The Black Moon is risen from the dead. The maker-creator who abandoned them to their fates now comes once more. So says the great dragon Diamond Eye, who in those thoughts he lets them see stands aloof from what must come. The Black Moon. Shatterer of worlds.

Even a half-god can burn.

We served him. We are his children.

Over and again, in mantras and refrains like a familiar chorus. They are divided, while eyes and thoughts pry into the distant veiled mind of great Diamond Eye, watching and waiting; but the biding of time is not for dragons, and Snow has long made her choice.

She stretches. She flares her wings and flies.

Dragons do not serve.

27

The Silver King’s Spear

Thirty-eight days after landfall

No fear. Not for a dragon-rider. Not of anything. Of no man, no monster, not even a half-god, not of the sun crashing from the sky or the moon shattering to silver-glass splinters and raining into the sea. But of a dark place with walls pressed close and the air suffocating with old still dust?

Tuuran and Halfteeth and six other Adamantine Men ­circled ahead of Zafir down the stair behind the altar of the Glass Cathedral. Kataros walked beside her, dressed in dragonscale and the old armour of some dead rider, hostility oozing from her every pore. A mistake, bringing this alchemist instead of Bellepheros, and Zafir already felt it. They reached the room with its empty plinth where the Earthspear had once been. Halfteeth at the front opened the iron-bound door deeper into the tunnels. They filed through.

It knows you. You belong to it.
Aruch’s words on the day he’d crowned her.

The door closed, a dull metallic boom. Zafir shivered as Diamond Eye drifted in and out of her thoughts. He was gliding the updraughts that wrapped the cliffs of the Purple Spur. She envied him. She wanted the wind in her hair too, and the huge spaces of the sky around her; not to be wrapped in stone like this, guiding Tuuran’s men from memory through dim forking passages, smooth-worn and narrow.

They reached a long hall, dark now but in her memory lit with dozens of alchemist lamps. The enchanted glass torches of the Adamantine Men danced harsh and sharp, light hard-edged enough to cut the eye. The jerking shadows unsettled her, their motion too erratic. The darkness and the walls picked at her corners and frayed her edges. She closed her eyes and thought of racing among the clouds, of howling winds on her face. A dragon-queen had no place for fear. A dragon-queen had no place for doubt.

‘I never much liked your grand master,’ she said to Kataros beside her. ‘He didn’t know as much as he thought he did.’ Talking made it easier.

‘You despised him,’ said Kataros. ‘Everyone knows it. And he despised you. Thoroughly and completely. Why did you bring me here?’

Zafir faltered as her thoughts burst apart. She laughed, a shrillness creeping at her edges. ‘No wonder Hyrkallan locked you up.’ She pointed Tuuran to some steps, worn and sandy into a low-roofed maw of darkness, and let him lead the way down. ‘Jeiros told me these tunnels lead all the way to the Fury at the bottom of Gliding Dragon Gorge. Is that true?’

‘Why am I here?’

‘Bellepheros hides his disdain more ably than old Jeiros ever did. I might mistakenly trust him. I know I will not make that mistake with you. That’s why you’re here. Also because if I must lose an alchemist in these caves then you are the less precious, and because Bellepheros is fearfully old and his knees aren’t up to all these steps and Tuuran has better things to do than to carry him. For all these reasons, but most of all because I know, although he cannot say it, that the Black Moon has cut Bellepheros with his knife, and I wish to keep you hidden from our half-god.’ The walls pressed at her. The shadows ahead and behind simmered with unkind mystery. She bared her teeth and tried to force the tension out of her voice. ‘So. Is it true these tunnels reach all the way to the Fury?’

‘Why an alchemist at all?’ Hostility like a naked blade. Zafir welcomed it. It kept her mind sharp.

‘I asked you
a question, Kataros.’

‘The Silver King’s Ways reach to the gorge, yes, but closer to the top than the bottom. Why an alchemist?’

Zafir laughed. ‘You’ll have your answer when we get there.’

Into the bowels of the earth with the darkness always creeping behind her. Hours of the same rough-walled passage, on and for ever. Zafir closed her eyes and summoned wind and space around her, below and above. Caves were for alchemists, not for dragon-riders. Not for her. But she’d lived for years with this foolish fear and learned the tricks to hold it at bay.

‘There was a river here once,’ she said, searching for a distraction. ‘Its course was changed to create parts of this passage. Jeiros told me that.’

No reply.
Fine. Be that way.

The tunnel stopped at another iron-bound door. Tuuran pulled at it, but Zafir stopped him. ‘You won’t get in like that,’ she said and snapped her fingers. ‘Only an alchemist may open this door. Jeiros told me that too, and that, Kataros, is why you’re here. So open it.’

‘What if I refuse?’ asked Kataros.

Blood-magic? Sealed doors?
Jeiros had shown her more than he’d ever intended. ‘I only need your blood to open this door, Kataros. How much of it gets spilled is entirely up to you.’ Easy here in the dark with the earth wrapped so close around to find her old spite jumping out of its pit to grab her while she looked the other way. Zafir slammed the lid on it and stamped it back.

‘I will need a knife,’ said Kataros at last. Tuuran gave her a blade.

‘Is it bad in there?’ he asked.

‘I fought a duel with Lystra once,’ said Zafir. ‘I hated her so very much.’ She put a hand on Kataros’s shoulder; the alchemist flinched and lurched away as though she’d been stung. ‘I’m not here seeking bloodshed.’

‘Do you think any of them will believe you?’ asked Kataros.

‘Not really.’

‘Then why should I?’ Kataros sliced her palm and placed her hand on the door. It shuddered and groaned ajar. She returned Tuuran’s knife, turned her back and stepped away. Zafir pushed the door open and strode into the cave beyond. Darkness swallowed their lights, a yawning void as black as pitch. She had Tuuran leave one of their lamps behind, and together they crossed the cave, a black cathedral of nothingness over smooth pale sand. A whisper of rushing water touched the stillness, and the sound was her guide, rising to a roar as it led her towards a lonely scaffold of old wood and ancient knotted ropes that climbed out of the sand into the shadows and deep black stone of the cavern roof above. Tuuran sent Halfteeth to climb ahead, and then Zafir took his arm and led him to where water swirled a plunging storm from above, a thunder that spattered and sprayed off dark stone outcrops before diving on to some other chasm far below.

‘The Silver River flows right through the Spur,’ she shouted over the roar. ‘From the Great Cliff to the Mirror Lakes.’ Last time she’d come this way all they’d had were dim alchemical lamps, and she found herself absurdly grateful to Chay-Liang for their gold-glass torches, so much brighter.

‘Holiness!’ Tuuran had a strange look to him, intense and ­urgent. ‘Holiness, there is a way to cast the Black Moon out!’

Zafir looked around. Kataros and the other Adamantine Men had stayed close to the scaffold. They were alone. She cocked her head.

‘A way to kill him!’ Tuuran was nodding, eager for her ear. ‘With the spear. He told me.’

‘Would sticking him with it do? It seems to have worked for the Silver King.’ The torrent of water was strong enough to shake the ground. The air tasted moist. Zafir pulled away and looked at Tuuran. Something was wrong with him. He was ripped up inside like he’d been for months, but there was a hope there again. He wasn’t talking about killing, he was talking about setting his friend free.
What do you know?

‘No. Not that. A way to get him out. With the spear.’

What makes you think I
want
to get him out?
But that would crush him.

Shouts came from the scaffold. A wooden platform rattled slow and creaking down through the middle of it. Zafir tugged Tuuran away and climbed on as it reached the ground. She had the wind in her hair and the noise of the water, and stray damp specks of spray on her skin and Tuuran beside her.

‘We’re at the back of the caves behind the Diamond Cascade,’ she said. ‘The Zar Oratorium isn’t far from here.’ She said it as much to herself as to Tuuran. ‘I made a promise, Night Watchman. Lystra, if we find her, is to live. Make sure your men know.’ She touched his hand. ‘Tell me about the spear once we have it. Tell me then.’

Halfteeth was at the top, and he wasted no time laying into Tuuran about how much he’d enjoyed climbing a slime-covered rickety old scaffold in the pitch dark. Zafir pushed on past, leading the way down a rough-hewn passage, driven by urgent expectation while Diamond Eye rode inside her, watching and listening, looking for thoughts around her, for anyone close.
Little Lystra. You could swing an axe, I’ll give you that.
Her ankle twinged at the memory. She’d been in such a towering fury …

They passed a bronze door. Behind it was a dragon trapped in chains, or there had been when she’d come this way before. She walked on.
First things first.

A jab of warning from Diamond Eye. Zafir closed her eyes and looked at what he saw. ‘Two men ahead of us,’ she said and stroked her lightning throwers dim, in part for stealth, in part for mercy. She hid her torch and walked with Tuuran at her side, guided by the spill of light ahead, creeping until she turned the corner and there they were: two guardsmen. Adamantine Men. They saw her and gawped in surprise and alarm. Hands flew to axe hafts as they began to bark a challenge.

‘Sta—’

Pocket thunder rippled the walls. Twin claps of lightning ­rattled her ears and left them ringing. Zafir pushed on fast as the two guardsmen arched and fell and clawed out silent screams. ‘Make sure they don’t get up again!’

Tuuran ripped a glance at Halfteeth. ‘But no throat cutting!’

Diamond Eye was already flitting through the minds around her, a greedy ghost stealing flashes of thought and sense. He saw a shaft, a platform starting to rise, a man pulling ropes to lift himself up. Fire to be poured down … Zafir sprinted around the next corner, crashed into a stone wall, torchlight flashing madly back and forth, yelling at Tuuran to move, fast. The shaft. There ahead. She reached it, jumped, caught the edge of the platform with the fingers of one hand and drove the bladeless knife of the Elemental Men straight through the wood and into some poor bastard’s foot. Through Diamond Eye she felt the sear of pain. A scream. The platform lurched, stopped, started to fall, and then Tuuran and Halfteeth were there as she dropped, grabbing hold and pulling it down, hauling the solitary watchman off as blood gouted from his boot. They dumped him, and Halfteeth punched him out. Tuuran bounded straight onto the platform, trying to haul himself up without her.

‘Don’t you dare!’ She jumped and pulled herself up beside him. Halfteeth clambered over the edge. The rest would just have to wait. Tuuran and Halfteeth heaved at the winch. Rope creaked and wood groaned as the platform rose. Zafir checked them both at the top, making them wait quietly and out of the way as the others ascended in twos and threes.

When Kataros came, Zafir pinned her to a wall and hissed in her face, ‘Queen Jaslyn has my word that I won’t hurt her sister Lystra. She keeps her crown, for what it’s worth, and Lystra may do the same as long as Jaslyn holds to her peace. You want Jeiros spared? Take me to where they keep the spear and I won’t cut out his heart.’ The dark, the tension, the walls all around, they were spilling out from her.

Someone comes.

Zafir clamped a hand over Kataros’s mouth.
Who?

A little one.

Zafir drifted with the dragon among stray thoughts. She nudged Tuuran and put a finger to her lips. Gestured a warning.

‘Just one,’ she whispered.

Tuuran nodded. Halfteeth slipped off into the shadows. The lights from Chay-Liang’s enchanted torches dimmed and died. Zafir’s hand tightened over Kataros’s face, the two of them pressed together against the stone.

‘Make a sound and I run you through.’ She could feel the alchemist’s jaw working under her fingers. Biting down hard enough to draw …

Blood.

Zafir lurched away, spun Kataros around and smashed her face into the stone, dazing her for a moment, then pulled her away and clamped a hand across her face, holding her jaw firmly shut. The other hand whipped out a bladeless knife.

‘I will drive this through your head. You’ll die before you know it’s in you. Don’t! I am
not
your enemy!’
Diamond Eye! Read her!

She is hidden from me.

Potions to hide from dragons. Like the ones Bellepheros used to make, like the one she’d used in Takei’Tarr when the hatchling Silence had stalked her through the eyrie tunnels. An unease shivered her, but a stray thought too – would they hide thoughts from the Black Moon too, as they did from a dragon?

Halfteeth came back, pulling a dead man by his feet. Zafir let Kataros go.

‘Did you
have
to kill him?’

Halfteeth cocked his head. He thought about this for a moment and then nodded.

Zafir snapped back to Kataros. ‘I do not want a bloodbath, alchemist, but I will not leave without the spear!’

Kataros glared. ‘I’ll show you the way if I must.’

Zafir smiled and shook her head. Tuuran shifted silently behind Kataros and wrapped one huge swift arm around the alchemist’s neck and squeezed, while Halfteeth grabbed her from the front and held her arms. Zafir shone her torch into Kataros’s eyes and watched the panic in them.

‘I do not need a dragon to see the betrayal in your thoughts, alchemist. We will find our own way.’
Do you know where it is?

Yes. I will guide you.

Tuuran let Kataros go. ‘She’ll wake in a few moments,’ he said. ‘You want, I’ll snap her neck.’

‘No, but keep her here until we come back. Don’t let her bleed or she’ll have you.’

Halfteeth trussed Kataros and shoved a wad of balled-up cloth into her mouth. Zafir lingered a moment when Halfteeth was done and pretended not to see the face he made when he thought she wasn’t looking. She touched a finger to the alchemist’s skin. Kataros was starting to move again. ‘Better than have you turn on me,’ Zafir whispered. ‘There would be no coming back from that.’