The Silver Kings (51 page)

Tuuran looked at his arms. His lightning throwers were nowhere near ready again. Looked at his men for the sun-bright of charged wands and didn’t see it. They were spent. That was that, then. Lightning gone. So the next one was going to be a right ­bugger.

‘I’ll wall you out with a mound of your own corpses!’ he spat. He looked at White Vish, and Vish looked back.

‘As good as it gets, boss.’

Fire thundered from the tunnel, long and hard and fierce, enough that he had to back away. He could feel it through the stones, the trembling earth. Big like the first. A monster, hauling itself through. He took deep breaths and braced to take a swing.

‘Holiness!’

The fire came on and on, washing around the entrance to the cavern, sweltering hot, cooking him in his own sweat. With a sudden lunge the dragon’s head snapped out, curling to the side, snapping at him, fire burning on and on. He had his shield ready, gold-glass held up to cover his face. The dragon twisted and squirmed, pulling itself onward. It bit at Vish and then whipped back, fangs splintering glass, knocking Tuuran down like the kick of a mule. Flat on his back. It opened its mouth to burn him, and he had nowhere to run. No time.

‘Bollocks to you!’ Tuuran threw the knife off his belt, the only thing he had. It struck in the dragon’s eye. Its fury blazed, a thunder­clap. Then flame and blinding light. For a moment he couldn’t think. He blinked. A scorpion bolt struck the dragon’s neck. It reared away from him. More thunder smashed it back, dazed them both with noise and pain, and then Zafir was there with her spear, driving it into the dragon’s scales. Tuuran didn’t move. Just lay and watched the dragon turn to stone, sealing the tunnel tight with its bulk.

He blinked and looked at himself in amazement that he wasn’t dead. Visor down, but through the clear glass of her dragon-rider’s helm he could see Zafir’s eyes, wide and wild. She offered him her hand.

‘We have earned entrance to the Spur, Tuuran.
You
have earned us entrance.’

Tuuran stared a moment longer at the stone dragon.

‘Up, Night Watchman. More will come.’

Halfteeth, left in charge of the ruin of the Adamantine Palace, had Snacksize standing up on watch on the walls since he reckoned she had the best eyes. So it was Snacksize who first saw the dragons coming. They flew low, hugging the cliff wall of the Spur a few miles to the north, and she didn’t spot them until they were close, dark specks against dark stone. She took a moment to be sure of what she was seeing, and then she ran, hard and fast like she’d never run before, yelling and screaming to anyone and everyone to drop whatever they were doing and flee like the wind. Halfteeth, never much one for doing what he was told, bolted out of the Glass Cathedral into the rubble-strewn yard as the commotion broke.

‘What?’

Snacksize pointed northward. ‘Hundreds of them.’

There was a terror in the way she looked, and that wasn’t the Snacksize Halfteeth had come to know. He let her go, though, yelled at everyone who hadn’t already started running to get on with it, and clambered up the stone remains of some monster dragon. He crawled onto its back and still couldn’t see over the walls, and so he went on clambering up its scaled neck.

The first dragon he spotted was a hundred yards short of the palace, skimming the ground, keeping low, racing in fast like a
night-skin rocket and looking straight at him. Halfteeth froze for a heartbeat. And then, since there wasn’t much else to do except gawp and die, he slid down the neck of the stone dragon, skittering across its scales and praying to every god from every world he could remember on the off chance that one of them was real; and maybe one of them was, because instead of falling off the dragon’s neck to dash himself to pieces in the rubble below, he managed to cling on until he reached its back, and then twisted and tumbled and fell and rolled and grabbed hold of one half-open petrified wing. He ducked underneath it as fire poured from the sky, as a very alive flesh-and-blood dragon shot across the ruined palace and doused everything in flame.

Its shadow blotted out the sky as it passed over him. It flicked its tail, shattering the wing beneath which he’d paused, but by then he was moving again. The stone shuddered, almost shook him off his feet. He ran and slid and fell off the dragon-statue’s tail and smashed into the ground. The breath burst out of his lungs. For a second he couldn’t move, too winded to get up, but Snacksize, every bit as stupid as he’d always thought, was already hauling at him with the desperate strength of a man twice her size and yelling so many curses that his head spun. She kicked him and pulled him and ran and threw them both flat through the entrance of the Glass Cathedral as a second torrent of flames washed the yard outside. Halfteeth staggered to his feet and turned back to see what was happening. The skull of some great old dragon rested in front of the cathedral. Halfteeth stared at it, and then a live dragon crashed to ground beside it, swatted it away and rammed its snout through the doorway to scour the place with fire. Snacksize loosed ­lightning straight in its face. The dragon lurched back, stung, and that was long enough for Halfteeth to scramble to his feet. Snacksize thumped him.

‘You really as stupid as you look?’ she screamed. ‘Keep moving!’ She pulled him and bolted for the far end of the cathedral behind the altar, where the men he’d told to run were fighting each other for the steps that spiralled to the tunnels below. For somewhere safe. Halfteeth swore at them.

‘Shields, you idiots! Get your shields up. And your lightning, damn you!’ The ones who actually had shields. The ones who even had lightning throwers.

Something slammed the Glass Cathedral hard. It shook. Snacksize worked her way through the crush of men around the stairs, dragging a few of them out, the ones with lightning and armour. Another dragon head burst through the entrance. Bolts of lightning smacked it back. The noise left Halfteeth half deaf, but there wasn’t much else to do except hold his ground. Another dragon came, or maybe the same dragon for all Halfteeth could tell, and then another, and then suddenly they were out of lightning and the last of his men were still on the stairs, screaming at the ones below to get out of the way.

A new dragon came. A white one this time. Riding inside their heads, plucking out Halfteeth’s thoughts.

Your fear is delicious, little ones.

Halfteeth threw a rock at it and then cowered behind the altar as the fire came, scorching and furious.

Under the Spur the dragon Silence prowls onward, sniffing ever closer to the thoughts of the little ones. Through crack and crevice and fissure, always with the water leading the way, until at last a glimmer of light shines on distant stone. A lamp. Silence feels the hunger of her brothers and sisters who follow, hatchlings all, not long from the egg yet each with the ravenous memories of a thousand years and centuries of servitude.

I am Silence
, the dragon whispers to the little ones in their terror,
and we are hungry
.

Along the caves around the fissure of the Silver River the dragons dance amok. Little ones run and scream. Silence tears them from their holes, men and children, women, infants, animals, all scythed the same. The iron reek of blood scents the air. Red-muzzled fangs snap on flesh and bone. The little ones howl while dragons move in murderous silence. They creep among the scatter of terrified thoughts scrabbling to escape. They lurk in shadowed corners. They leap and pounce. Tails lash air and crack iron and bone. A handful of little ones escape along tunnels too narrow for even a hatchling to follow. The dragons pour fire in their wake, scorching
the last to flee, burning their skin, charring them, listening to their fading screams.

The first nest is found and put to death. The dragon Silence dives once more into the water. On and again until all are gone, and the Earthspear is held in dragon claws to keep the Black Moon at bay.

37

The Enchantress

Bellepheros led Li to the potion store, and Li set about making another sled. In Takei’Tarr and Merizikat Bellepheros had seen her shape glass and make it flow like water, moulding it to her desires in seconds. Here it moved like reluctant molasses.

‘The dragons,’ she said when she saw him frowning. ‘They feed on the weave of the world and take it for themselves. They’ve drained these realms almost dry. That’s why the Elemental Men were so afraid of them, once they knew. Nothing here works the way it should. Everything is dying.’

They rolled potion barrels onto the sled when it was done, and floated it to the cave mouth. The sled Liang had used to fly across the ocean waited there. It was a strange contraption. Concentric rotating rings hung from the back end at all angles to one another, a crazy jumble of spinning geometry rimmed in bright-lit gold. A Taiytakei sled was usually little more than an elongated ellipse, and riders simply stood braced against the wind, but Li had moulded something much larger for herself, something more like a sedan chair with a seat and a roof set into a glass hemisphere. It didn’t strike Bellepheros as particularly comfortable, but at least he could sit down.

‘You put a top on it.’

‘Because of the rain,’ said Li drily. ‘You never thought to mention that in your world it rains all the time!’

‘You never thought to ask.’

The front of the sled bristled with lightning throwers and gold-glass shields. The rest was a mishmash of harnesses welded into glass, of leather straps and ropes and buckles tying down crates and barrels. Two ranks of golden spheres lined its underbelly. More lightning throwers protruded there, and there were glass tubes loaded with Taiytakei black-powder rockets tipped with globes of trapped fire. Mounted behind the rider’s seat was a battery of them on a steel pivot mount a bit like a small scorpion. Bellepheros laughed.

‘You’ve made your own dragon, Li.’ He walked around the sled, looking at it, over it, under it. ‘Rockets, eh? Some dragon lords from the northern realms would strap scorpions on the backs of their war-dragons.’

Li touched a piece of gold-glass shaped like a bucket. It rose into the air. She guided it to the river and grinned as it sank and filled and then floated back. ‘Sleds have more uses than you think! I was imagining the desert again, you see. Where water is hard to find and doesn’t constantly fall out of the sky without ever stopping. Do you have deserts here?’

‘In the north. I don’t know what’s there any more. The Black Moon never went so far. I suppose I have no idea where Zafir has roamed on her dragon.’

They loaded as much from the redoubt as the sled could carry. Potions to kill, to hide, to strangle a dragon’s memories and make them dull. Not enough for the thousand who haunted the Worldspine, not yet, but enough to start. Enough for the Black Moon, if they could find a way to make him drink them. The night was half done when they stopped, the sky as black as tar under rolling clouds that covered moon and the stars, the air filled with the familiar hiss of rain, but Bellepheros and Liang worked on, roaming the old redoubt. They took as much food as they could find, more water from the river, lamps and potions and pouches of herbs and minerals, leaves and roots and powdered stone, anything Bellepheros thought might have a use. They returned to Li’s sled when they were done to find the long shadows of dawn already creep-crawling along the cliffs of the valley outside. The dragons that had once stood sentinel over the crags were gone. Bellepheros couldn’t see a single one.

‘Even so, we shouldn’t fly in the day,’ he said. ‘The dragons will see—’

‘Dragons?’ Li snorted. ‘I’ve seen dragons every day for the last week.’

She was full of fire now, and so was he, nothing like the wasted, exhausted creature he’d been before he found her. Seeing her again was like a new life coursing through him, although he still balked as she climbed onto the sled and beckoned him to follow, knowing how utterly petrified he was going to be the moment he saw the ground fall away.

‘Just close your eyes, Belli.’ She took his hand as he climbed onto the sled. ‘Close your eyes and hold my hand. I’ll keep us safe.’

He huddled under the battery of Taiytakei rockets and curled into as tight a ball as he could manage, wedged in and pressed against her, wrapped in an old dusty fur. He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see and tried to think of happy days long ago, and the next thing he knew the sun was a long way past its zenith, and Li was shaking him awake, and the sled was blissfully on the ground under a canopy of trees, and the caves of the redoubt were far away. He felt it in the air – thicker, warmer, dry. They were still in the mountains but out of their deep heart.

‘Welcome back,’ Li said, a little drily. ‘We passed the eyrie a while ago but now I don’t know which way to fly.’

Bellepheros tried to unfold himself and whimpered at the pain of it. His knees, as usual. Locked fast from being cramped up for so long. None of his joints wanted to move, and his legs had gone to sleep. Took a few minutes before he could stand on his own.

‘You’re getting worse,’ Li said.

‘I know. It’s the dragon-disease. These last months …’ He might have said more, but she cupped a hand around the back of his head and pulled him close and kissed him, and Bellepheros, once grand master alchemist of the Order of the Scales who had held the fate of kings and realms in his hands, entirely forgot how much his old knees hurt. Chay-Liang kissed him for a long time and then gently eased him to the ground and held him tight.

‘Alchemists don’t take lovers,’ said Bellepheros hoarsely. ‘Well, we’re not supposed to. The disease …’

She shut him up by kissing him again.

‘I’m an old man, Li.’

‘And I’m an old woman.’ She shifted abruptly and sat cross-legged beside him, but when Bellepheros tried to get up as well she pushed him down. ‘Tell me about your Silver King, old man,’ she said. ‘How did your blood-mages bring him down? What do we have to do?’

‘There are more stories about that than I have fingers.’ Bellepheros wrinkled his nose. ‘When the dragons forgot who they were, the Silver King showed the blood-mages how to bend them to their will, how to ride them and fly them, but as to how they brought him down?’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know. No one remembers. It was never written. If dragons and half-gods are the same under their skins then the best I can think of is to use the same potions we once used against dragons, the ones the Silver King taught us. What does the Black Moon mean to do, Li? Do you know? What does he want? Vengeance against the Silver King who once slew him and cast him into the abyss of Xibaiya? But he’s taken that. What was left of the Isul Aieha is turned to dust.’

‘The Black Moon turned against the first gods, Belli, the forbidden ones the Elemental Men would have us forget. He is the half-god who shattered the earth itself, who slew one goddess and aimed to slay three more. He will try again. Him and his dragon-queen beside him. He will gather the monsters he once made, and he will ride them through every world and burn them. I know you want to remake this world as you remember it, Belli, but you cannot. It has already burned. I’m sorry.’

‘What do we do if the potions don’t work?’

Li laughed. ‘Then we take the spear that killed him once before and we run it through him for a second time, that’s what!’

‘Zafir went looking for it. She probably has it by now.’

Li straddled him and leaned in close. ‘You see, I was thinking about that, and what you said when Mai’Choro Kwen’s assassin poisoned me. You saved me with your blood, and then afterwards you told me there would be consequences. That I would feel things. That you would know things about me. That it made a link between us. A bond of sorts. I have felt that, and it is sometimes quite wonderful. But you said that you could … do other things. Yes?’

‘Li! I never did and I never would!’

‘I know, Belli. I know. But you could, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could you make me act against my own will.’

Bellepheros swallowed hard. Li was leading him to blood-magic and the darkness every alchemist carried and fought, even as her lips brushed his face, as she nuzzled his ear. ‘Could I? Li, if I wanted to, I could probably make you cut your own throat. But I
don’t
want to, and I never will!’

‘How many potions have you made for her, Belli?’ Li whispered.

‘You mean Zafir?’

‘Yes. Does she not have that bond with you too?’

‘She does.’

‘Then let her carry the spear. Let
her
be the one to do it.
Make
her do it.’ He could feel the glee in her. ‘They will neither of them even see it coming!’

‘Li … I can’t …’ Except of course he could. It wasn’t a matter of if or how. It was a matter of who he was and of choices and consequences, of elemental right and wrong.

‘Then we’ll probably die, Belli,’ Li breathed, ‘as the Black Moon is not likely to conveniently drink your poison and die. But we’ll still try because if not us then who? Do you see, you daft old man, why I don’t care much for your stupid Statue Plague just now? If it comes to it, if we live long enough for it to matter, you can make potions for us both and be glad that we’re alive at all.’

She wrapped him in her arms then, and for a while Bellepheros forgot all about dragons and dead friends, about the Black Moon and the end of the world.