The Silver Kings (52 page)

38

The Alchemists

Zafir planted the spear between her feet in front of Lystra’s men and their scorpions. She cocked her head. Her eyes raked them and settled on Lystra, waiting to see if Lystra would turn on her before the chance to do so slipped away like so much sand.

‘There are dragons under the Spur,’ Zafir said. ‘Dragons in your kingdom, Queen Lystra. They come in from the Silver River. There are dragons at the Adamantine Palace too, seeking entrance there. Dragons everywhere to bring ruin to the last of us.’ Old pride slithered like a snake in her belly. There would be no bending the knee now, no pretence of humility. ‘May we enter or not?’

Lystra spat, ‘Do you still hurt from where my axe nearly took your ankle?’

‘A twinge now and then.’

The Adamantine Men of the Spur looked at her. They’d seen the speaker of the nine realms carry the Silver King’s spear and slay a dragon as Narammed the Magnificent himself had done, and to men like these that was all there was. For a long moment Zafir thought about what it would be like to kill Lystra now. She ran the notion around herself, wrapped her thoughts inside it, dressed herself in the feeling of it. She knew how it
ought
to feel. Delicious. Hot and gleeful. Sweet and salty vengeance, pain returned a hundred­fold for everything Jehal had done to her; and yes, for that twinge in her ankle from when she and Lystra had fought. That was how it
ought
to feel, but with that idea wrapped around her she felt nothing except cobwebs coated with ancient dust. The sensation bewildered her. She didn’t know what to do with it.

I made a promise
, she reminded herself. Jaslyn was right there beside her sister.
Kill one and you have to kill them all.

Kataros sidled to Lystra’s side and whispered in her ear.

‘You should act, Holiness,’ muttered Tuuran. ‘Half these men are Adamantine. They’ve seen you slay a dragon. If you strike at all, you must do it while you have their hearts.’

Her head swam. Her arms ached and her legs burned and her heart pounded. The looming darkness unbalanced her, unseen demons in the shadows, and all the time the spear seemed to sing in a quiet voice too subtle to hear. She looked for Diamond Eye, for the reassurance of his presence, but the great dragon was quiet and distant, somewhere far away and with troubles of his own.

Lystra met her gaze, cold and steady. She stepped to the front of her men. ‘I will grant entrance to your Adamantine Guard. Your band of night-skin sell-swords may shelter here. For returning my sister and her riders, I grant this.’

Tuuran growled and bristled. ‘Sell-swords?’

‘Hush, Night Watchman.’ Zafir threw an arm across his chest to hold him back. Lystra took another step.

‘But
you
are neither wanted nor welcome, Zafir, and nor will you ever be. Return what you stole.’ She held out a hand.

Zafir reversed the spear and drove it into the ground between them. Its Adamantine tip bit deep. It quivered, erect. ‘This is why the dragons are here,’ she said. ‘This and this alone.’ What did it matter who carried it now? In the end the Black Moon would do with it as he wished. Lystra reached to take it, and Zafir almost let her, but as Lystra’s fingers touched its shaft she found she had too much pride after all. She drew her sword and levelled it at Lystra’s face. ‘I did not steal it,’ she said. ‘It was always mine, and if you want it then you will have to earn it.’

Lystra stared at her. No sign of fear. ‘Again, then? Sword and axe?’

Tuuran lurched forward to step between them. ‘Holiness!’

Zafir brushed him aside. She nodded to Lystra. ‘Sword and axe and let’s be done with it.’ She tossed the Silver King’s spear to Tuuran. ‘Be quiet and make yourself useful, Night Watchman. Who­ever remains, they are your speaker. You will serve Lystra as you served me.’

Again he tried to stand between them. ‘Holiness! It doesn’t have to be like this!’ He rounded on the men at the gates, many of them like him, bred and raised for the legion. ‘In the face of dragons we stand together! Adamantine Men! Do we not?’

‘Tuuran!’

‘Tell your speaker as I tell mine! This is not the way!’

‘Tuuran!’ Zafir slapped his face, then laid a hand to his cheek for a second time, gently now. His eyes gave him away. He was afraid for her. ‘Let it go.’

He growled. ‘Then do not lose, Holiness, for if you do I will follow you to Xibaiya and hunt you down and stand by your side against death itself. You’ll never be rid of me, and I’ll complain a very great deal and at quite some volume at the inconvenience of it all.’

Lystra took up a sword and an axe. She stepped into the cave among the stalagmites and the gloom. ‘I would have beaten you last time –’ she smiled ‘– and so I will again.’ So far from the soft queen Zafir had thought she faced in the Pinnacles all those months before with Jehal’s uncle Meteroa dying on her throne. The men around her then had been Valmeyan’s dragon-knights, allies by necessity more than choice. Lystra had fought like a tiger. She
had
been winning. The strength and courage of desperation, perhaps.

Spite, that was all. Petty revenge for Jehal’s betrayal over Evenspire, which had driven a knife through her heart deeper than any of the many knives that had come before.
Why can’t you just let it go?
Was she talking to Lystra or to herself? She wasn’t sure.

She took a long deep breath and found that, despite everything since, despite all her months as a slave, despite what the Taiytakei had done to her and she to them, despite the Black Moon and Diamond Eye and the islands and the cave there, the locked dark room and Merizikat, despite all those things Jehal’s betrayal still cut her to stone, a splinter of rusty iron for ever buried deep under her skin. It had no right.
He
had no right. He was dead and gone and still he hurt her, and it left such a rage inside her. She wanted it finished. Just done.

She whirled and screamed and threw herself at Lystra, sword flying, axe a-swing to make it end. Lystra blocked and dodged. She swept at Zafir’s legs, but she’d tried that trick when they’d fought before and Zafir saw it coming. She jumped as Lystra veered and they crashed together, the two of them pressed up tight, gold-glass against dragonscale. Zafir threw away her sword and axe and wrapped both hands around Lystra’s face, pulling at her helm. They fell, smashing down side by side. Lystra tried to roll away, but Zafir caught her arm and pulled her close again. Lystra’s helm rolled into the shadows. They staggered to their feet. Lystra lunged as a moment of space opened between them. Her sword caught Zafir’s hip and skittered off Taiytakei armoured glass, and then Zafir sprang and bore her down, winding them both. She straddled Lystra and drew back an arm to smash a gold gauntlet into that pretty face, the face Jehal must have wanted more than her own, except with Jehal nothing had ever been about love but always about lust and greed and power and money, and had she ever been any different? No.

The lightning thrower on her arm shone bright. Filled with white fire. She clenched her fist, tighter and tighter. Somewhere among the Adamantine Men a commotion rose. She didn’t look, didn’t hear, but her fist never came down. Lystra twisted. Zafir tumbled off. She rolled and jumped onto Lystra’s back, wrapped an arm around her throat, pulled her up to her feet and held her there, strangling her, a knife whipped from her hip and pressed to the pretty skin of Lystra’s neck. A dragon-rider’s knife for cutting harness ropes.

So easy to slit her throat. Her hand quivered there for a moment, razor-edged steel against smooth, soft skin.

She pushed Lystra away. Tore off her own helmet. Tossed the knife at Lystra’s stumbling feet. ‘If Jehal was here, I would kill him in a thousand ways.’ Not because she’d loved him, if she ever had. Not because she’d wanted him. But for the betrayal. For doing to her what her mother had done, her step-father, her sister. For tricking her into thinking that she mattered, that despite everything she’d learned she was worth something, and then taking that away. Zafir tipped back her head. ‘Go on then. If you must.’

Lystra picked up the knife. She swayed, battered and uncertain. All she had to do was take a step and then another, and then a slash or a lunge. And before she took that second step Zafir would draw the bladeless knife of the Elemental Men from her scabbard and slice little starling Lystra in two, straight through her dragonscale to end her. She’d stared at death before, offering herself, quietly hoping for it to take her, but not this time, not any more.

‘Holiness! Holiness!’ Someone was shouting. ‘Holiness, there are dragons loose under the Spur. Holiness!’

Lystra set the knife back on the ground. ‘One each,’ she said. ‘But we’re not done, you and I, and my condition doesn’t change: the spear, and then you may enter.’ She held out her hand. ‘Else rot here.’

For a long time Zafir looked around her. At the men on either side. At Tuuran. Then she nodded. ‘Give it to her.’

‘Holiness?’

‘The Black Moon will have it when he returns either way. You know that.’

Lystra took the spear from Tuuran. She turned her back and walked away.

Halfteeth practically threw Snacksize at the stairs. He held his post a moment longer, pressed against the altar. When the fire stopped, that was when he bolted, because he knew that was when a hatchling small enough to fit through the Cathedral’s smashed-down doors had come looking for him. He caught a glimpse of it over his shoulder, leaping and bounding, a great flare and flap of wings. He jumped into the shaft and spun as he did and fired his last lightning throwers. One missed; the other caught the hatchling and knocked it out of the air. The dragon crashed into a jumble of charred smoulder that had once been wooden benches, all pushed aside now, but it wouldn’t stay down for long. In the moment he’d bought himself Halfteeth slid and bounced down the first half-spiral of the stair until he fetched up against Snacksize.

‘Did you …’ she started, and then her eyes snapped to something behind him. She whipped up the bright gleam of her lightning thrower, and Halfteeth had exactly enough time to slap his hands over his ears and cringe away before she let loose a thunderbolt. A chaos of claws and wings tumbled down the steps and crashed into them both, momentarily dazing them, all sliding together. The hatchling’s eyes snapped back into focus. A claw raked at Halfteeth, grabbing him, scratching over his gold-glass, hooking into its layered scales, cracking plates.

‘Shit!’ Halfteeth swung his axe at it. A hatchet, really, nothing more. No leverage. The blade slid across the dragon’s scales. Snacksize stabbed at its eye. The hatchling snapped at her face. She lifted her arm, that instinct to protect herself, and the dragon’s teeth bit shut through glass and gold and flesh and bone. Blood sprayed. Snacksize screamed. She drove her sword hard into the hatchling’s eye, slitting it open and then fetching up against the bone of the socket beneath. The hatchling shrieked. Pain-mad, it bit at her again and caught her by the shoulder. It tossed her into the air and spat fire.

‘No!’ Halfteeth jumped onto its head and wrapped his legs around its neck. He closed a fist around the sword still stuck through the dragon’s eye, pulled it free and drove it in again, deep, twice more until he drove it to the hilt into the dragon’s brain. The hatchling shuddered and died. Ahead down the stairs he could hear men yelling, seeing the fire behind them, trying to get away. There would be more hatchlings, no doubt, but right now he didn’t care. He grabbed at Snacksize and looked at the horror that was her arm, severed above the elbow and gouting blood. He didn’t know how to stop it. He tore at her armour, trying to pull it free so he could tie something tight above the wound, and saw her face. Eyes burned blind, skin scorched red and charred.

She started to spasm.

‘No! No, no!’ He shook her. ‘Fight it, damn you. Fight it. Live! I don’t care about the scars! One-armed you’re still better than half the men down there! Don’t! Don’t you …’

The cry trailed out of him like a last failed breath as Snacksize died.

Kataros raced into the depths, lamp held high to light her way, tripping and stumbling on the uneven floor. Jasaan followed at her heel. There were dragons in the Spur, coming through the river.

‘Jasaan!’ Kataros pulled him into a crevice and unstoppered a drinking horn. ‘Jeiros has potions to hide us from them. Enough for everyone.’

The same potion as they’d drunk together drifting down the Yamuna. Jasaan took a swig. Kataros watched the other Adamantine Men run on, watched their lamps disappear into the darkness, then slipped deeper into her crevice, a crack in the mountain so narrow she almost had to walk sideways. Her lamp lit their way, dim and shadow-shrouded, scraping and squeezing to an old rusty door. Hinges ground open, reluctant grating rusted metal. Light crept from the other side; not sunlight, but still bright enough to make her screw up her eyes. Moonlight silver in a hollow shaft of glowing white stone. A breath of air wafted over her, cool and fresh, not the stale reek of the tunnels.

‘You have a head for heights, Jasaan?’ A rope bridge stretched across the void to a latticework of nets. More ropes dangled down into the middle of the shaft like some old attic cobweb. Kataros scrambled across the bridge. The web of ropes shook and swayed with each step as she clambered down a crazy mess of knots and pieces of netting and tethers and hawsers and knotted sheets of all different shapes and sizes, cobbled together haphazard and higgledy-­piggledy over decades. The white stone walls were cracked and broken as if the shaft had once been part of something greater and had been snapped off.

‘The Silver King made this?’ asked Jasaan.

The bottom of the shaft was filled with rubble. Kataros clambered across fallen stone to a crack where the white wall was split. She squeezed through. ‘The Silver Kings left their relics scattered like salt at a wedding.’ She stopped at another iron door. ‘It hardly matters now. You were there. In the Black Mausoleum. You saw the Silver King leave us. Help me with this, will you?’