The Silver Kings (56 page)

‘One of those night-skin sleds would do nicely just now,’ Tuuran grunted.

‘I left one at the Oratorium if you’d like to go back and get it.’ They both laughed and then walked on in silence a while longer, Zafir’s thoughts chasing each other like maddened dogs snapping at their own tails until she couldn’t take it any more. ‘Do you know what I did before the Taiytakei took me? It’s true, much of what they say about me. I helped Jehal to poison Hyram, and then I dangled a cure in front of him that wasn’t real. I took him to my bed. I hated myself for that, but it got me what I wanted, and I’d long ago learned how
that
worked. I took the Speaker’s Throne, which should have gone to Lystra’s mother, and then I had her executed for Hyram’s murder. She probably didn’t kill him. Old fool probably fell all on his own, but I didn’t care about that. I allowed a blood-mage to live under the Glass Cathedral. While I took the realms to war to crush Shezira’s daughters, my lover stole my throne and my blood-mage stole the Adamantine Spear. Jehal was a snake, poison, and you’ll not find many to disagree, and yet they’ll say he was better than me. Perhaps he was, perhaps not, but he wasn’t worse. Are you still proud of me, Tuuran? Because you shouldn’t be. You should leave.’ Leave because everyone always betrayed her in the end. ‘You should go back to Lystra. She’ll make a better speaker than I ever did.’

Tuuran didn’t reply at first, and Zafir wondered if he would answer her at all, or if, when he did, it would be anything more than a stiff and dutiful affirmation. But then she felt a hand on her shoulder, stopping her, turning her, urging her to look at him, and when she did he dropped to one knee and looked her in the eye.

‘I wasn’t here, Holiness. I don’t know the whys and wherefores of who you were or what you did before I met you, or of anyone else. I only know the Zafir I met in Takei’Tarr, in the smashed ruin of the Palace of Roses amid the burned-ash fires of Dhar Thosis. I met the girl for whom I had once given my freedom, and I saw in her everything I had hoped, bringing fire and terror on those who made us slaves, fighting to the death to keep what I had given away, a courage I never found in myself in all my years as a galley slave. The Zafir I know tamed a wild dragon without alchemy. When we were adrift and lost at sea, I saw her lead her people to shelter and help them build a home. So yes, Holiness. I do not know this Zafir who used to be, but the one
I
have seen, I am proud to serve.’ He smiled, and she thought he would let her go but he didn’t. ‘Holiness, if my words may be free, you were at your best on those islands. You were what was needed. Whatever comes, if any of us are to live and prosper, we will need you as you were then.’

‘Without a dragon?’

‘Either way, Holiness.’

‘But without a dragon what use am I?’

He laughed and got up, and for a moment she thought he was about to wrap his arms around her and hold her, and right there and then she wouldn’t have minded that at all. But he only shook his head and laughed. ‘Without your Diamond Eye, Holiness, you took the Silver King’s spear from the heart of your enemies.’ His eyes glittered in the moonlight glow. ‘Without your Diamond Eye, you used that spear to kill dragons. And we
will
get it back, and we will send the Black Moon to his end.’

She nodded. Bit her lip. Couldn’t not. Faith. Loyalty. All that. And in the end, when the Black Moon stood before them and she had the spear in her hand once more, she would let Tuuran down. She would betray him.

They walked on in silence, too much effort simply to keep going for there to be any more words, until ahead the Silver King’s Way faltered and split, riven by a mountain fallen across its back. A narrow crevice led on towards the Mirror Lakes, wrapped in shadows. Zafir saw a glimmer of starlight reflecting from the dark stone. Almost there. Almost out.

Tuuran froze.

‘Holiness … someone else is here.’ He clutched the knife Jasaan had left them, motioned Zafir to stay and then crept into the darkness of the crevice. Zafir fingered the lightning thrower. Its light was bright and ready. She looked back into the dim light of the Silver King’s Ways and saw nothing but the arrow-line length of it, vanishing into the distance under the mountain.

A sharp cry, and then an oath from Tuuran. Another voice. One she knew.

Myst?
He was coming back now, and yes, he had Myst with him, clambering through the uneven passage, her silhouette unmistakable. Zafir stared, incredulous. It wasn’t possible. The eyrie? The Black Moon? They’d returned? But Myst? Here …? She tried to make sense of it and found that she couldn’t.

‘Myst. How …?’

‘Holiness.’ Myst shivered and fell, but Zafir was on her before her knees touched the stone, pulling her back up, hugging her.

‘How …’

I have it! The spear! The Silver King’s spear.
The Earthspear. The power of the dead goddess, reborn when the Black Moon was set free. From a thousand silent voices come dragon-songs of victory and death, of triumph and defeat, of flames and a world’s end. They course from thought to thought. The Black Moon comes. An end, one way or another. Spear and half-god and a sky filled with fire.

Among them a voice pierces the chorus.

Silence!

The dragon Silence pauses from her glee.
Diamond Eye?

I have a gift for you, little Silence, if you are not afraid to take it.

In the great dragon’s mind Silence sees a shape and figure and a place, and a joy lights inside her.

‘How are you here?’ Zafir looked at Myst in disbelief. ‘What are you doing? Are you hurt?’ No sign of blood, though in the gloom it was hard to be sure. Myst didn’t
look
hurt. ‘Is the eyrie …? Has the Black Moon returned? How …?’ She didn’t know what to think.

‘Your dragon brought me. I rode him.’

‘Diamond Eye?’ Zafir blinked in amazement.

‘He asked me to find you, Holiness. I hear him in my thoughts.’

Which meant other dragons would hear hers in turn. A cold shock that, a lurching back to the here and now and the vicious truth that they were all in danger. ‘Myst, if you can, tell him to come! You can’t be here! Tell him I lost the spear. It’s over. The Black Moon will—’

Something in Myst’s face shifted. The look in her eye changed to a glitter of glaciers, hard and ancient and frozen. She cocked her head, exactly as Diamond Eye would have done.

‘I already know, little one. I ride the thoughts of my kind.’

‘Myst?’ The voice wasn’t Myst at all. All warmth gone. Cold as ice.

‘No.’

‘Diamond Eye?’

‘A dragon is coming, little one. Fast behind you. You do not have long.’

All she could see down the Silver King’s Way was gentle light. Zafir cupped Myst’s face. ‘Why did you bring her? Why? She’ll die here!’

Myst’s face changed. She became herself again. ‘Then I will die free, Holiness, and I thank you for that.’

Zafir turned away. A daughter who should have been a son, a princess to earn her father a crown. A lover to moan and cry whenever it suited. A queen to be cruel and terrible, to be feared and hated and loved. A dragon-rider to stand guard, to fly in battle against any who opposed her mother’s will. A speaker to guide and lead. Never herself. She didn’t know who that was any more. And yet what arrogance to imagine that made her any different to any other. Tuuran, beside her, an Adamantine Man from birth, raised for obedience and then sold as a slave. Myst, taken from her people and taught to be nothing more than a vessel of pleasure for men to whom slaves were objects, who cared nothing for anyone else. Dragons, wrapped dull in alchemy, lifetime after lifetime …

‘We are all slaves. Every one of us.’ She was shaking. Furious.

In the far distance a shadow in the moonlit tunnel skittered towards them.

‘Tuuran!’ Zafir pointed. One hurl of lightning, and then Tuuran with nothing but a knife. They would die.

‘Holiness, run!’ Tuuran tried to push her on, away and out, but Myst stood firmly in their path.

‘Little one.’ She was Diamond Eye again.

‘I don’t have the spear,’ howled Zafir.

‘I told you that I once held it between my claws, snatched away from the Isul Aieha. He called it to him, little one, and it came because it was his. Call the spear. It has tasted you and claimed you. It is yours.’

‘I don’t know how!’ Zafir whirled back. The dragon in the tunnel was coming fast. She shouted at Tuuran. ‘Go!’ She held out her hand, willing the spear to appear and feeling stupid. Nothing happened.

‘The dragon has it,’ cried Tuuran.

Zafir levelled her lightning thrower at the onrush of claws and fangs. ‘Run. Both of you.’

‘Mistress!’ Myst had her own voice again. ‘Take this!’ She handed Zafir one of the bladeless knives of the Elemental Men. Zafir took it. There was a surety to holding it.

‘Tuuran! Go! I am your speaker and I command you. Myst! Run!’ Zafir flipped her visor shut against the dragon’s fire and braced herself. The dragon slowed, eyeing her. Something about it seemed familiar. Not its shape or its colour but the way it moved, the way it looked at her as though it knew her too. It grinned and hissed. She saw what it held in its talons. The Silver King’s spear.

Tuuran jumped in front of her, knife ready, for all the good it might do him. The dragon bunched on its haunches. Strange to face one and not to feel its thoughts, its glee, its hunger, its furious desire.

‘Holiness! You must live!’

The dragon sprang. Tuuran jumped sideways. Zafir let the lightning fly, and the thunderbolt slammed the dragon back, knocking it down. Her ears rang with the boom of it. Tuuran leaped and landed on its head, scrabbling to lock his arms around its neck and stabbing his knife at its eye. The dragon reared and shook. The Silver King’s spear hung awkward and useless in its talons. It let go with one foreclaw and raked at Tuuran, slashing at him through his armour and throwing him loose. He fell and slid across the smooth white stone. The dragon opened its mouth, fire in its throat to burn him to ash. Zafir dived between them. She took the dragon’s flames on gold-glass and dragonscale and sliced at the other claw. The bladeless knife cut through scale and bone. The spear fell. The dragon shrieked, and Tuuran scrambled away. Zafir ducked a lashing tail. She lunged for the spear but it clattered out of reach. She slashed, cutting into the dragon’s scales again while the fire came on, scorching fingers reaching through her armour until she reeled away and knew then that the dragon had her, tooth, claw or tail. No blade would be enough, not even the enchanted glass of the Elemental Men. She threw herself flat under the whip of its tail, rolled to her feet, turned and faced it, blade ready for the end.

‘I know you,’ she whispered. ‘Silence.’

The dragon Silence stared, grinning like death, still for a moment, eyes sparking as if trying to tell Zafir something yet unable to reach through the fog of alchemy that wrapped her. Then the light in the dragon’s eyes dimmed, and it turn to stone.

Tuuran pulled the Adamantine Spear loose. He walked, slow and shaking, around the hardening corpse. They stood together, side by side. Tuuran handed Zafir the spear.

‘Yours, Holiness,’ he said. He looked pale.

‘I gave you a command, Night Watchman.’

Tuuran bowed his head. ‘One I could not obey.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t.’ She half reached out to touch a hand to his face, then thought better of it. She couldn’t see well enough in the moonlight gloom to be sure, but he’d been burned by dragon-fire more than once today, and it probably hurt.

‘I come,’ said Myst from deep inside the crevice. ‘Fast and with fire. A thousand of my brothers follow on furious wings. Do not delay, little ones.’

Zafir ran into the crevice. They climbed and ran some more, the three of them, until at last the underground darkness changed into overcast night. The still cold water of the depthless Mirror Lakes spread out before them, and for a moment Zafir looked at the ripples and at the spear in her hand, and wondered if she should simply be rid of it, throw it into the depthless cold where no one would ever find it again …

Diamond Eye thundered from the sky and crashed to the ground, a flare of wings and a clash of air and water. He lowered his head and they flew away, the three of them, the spear still clutched in Zafir’s fingers, while distant comet flares and shooting-star lines of flame wrote words across the sky, until they climbed through the cloud and burst into the cold clear night above, the stars and the baleful moon glaring upon them all, the three mountain tops of the Pinnacles bathed in gleaming silver light, far ahead.

41

The White Dragon and Her Killer

Diamond Eye smashed hard into the rubble of the Silver Onion Dome, scattering stone. A glimmer of dawn tinged the eastern sky pink. The dragons swarming from the Spur smeared a dark stain across the horizon. They were close, rushing onward.

‘Do what you must.’ Zafir slid to the ground from Diamond Eye’s neck. The dragon wheeled and jumped over the mountain edge, heading for the canals of the Silver City to cool himself, scorching hot from the exertion of their flight. Zafir dragged Myst behind her. They ran down the Grand Stair and under the massive stone the Silver King had left to bar the way; inside she paused beside a hanging, reached behind and twisted a silver bar set into an alcove. The stone came smashing to the floor. Enough to keep even dragons out.

‘Wake everyone up,’ she snapped at Tuuran. ‘Dragons come. Make sure there are scorpions and lightning at the Undergates and men not afraid to stand and use them. That’s where we’re weakest. I will be there shortly.’ She left Tuuran shouting at bewildered bleary-eyed men to quit lollygagging and dozing through the night watch and to get everyone out of their beds, and beckoned Myst to follow her through the Hall of Mirages to the carvings of the Silver King’s story. She stopped before them and banged the haft of the old half-god’s spear into the glowing white stone.

‘Well?’ she challenged. ‘I have it. I’ve brought it back. The Black Moon wants it. Should I give it to him? Do
you
want it? Where are you?’ She banged it again. ‘What do I do with it?’

‘The Isul Aieha is gone,’ hissed Myst, Diamond Eye still riding inside her.

‘The Black Moon then? Shall I give it to him?’ Diamond Eye had become inscrutable when it came to the Black Moon, a silence which thundered.

Myst said nothing. Zafir wandered the scenes. The Silver King hadn’t carved them with any great care to their order, it seemed, and she wasn’t entirely sure she had the history right. The Isul Aieha and the Black Moon and two other nameless half-gods travelling to Xibaiya, where the the dead goddess demanded her sacrifice. The Black Moon’s trick, splitting himself in two, hiding a part of his own soul. His return as the avatar of the goddess, slow and painful, growing from the seed he’d left behind, all that made a sense to her, but the next scenes belonged much later: the Isul Aieha building his paths between the worlds after the Splintering of creation, conjuring the Silver King’s Way, twisting the earth, warping caverns and mountains. The stories of the alchemists claimed that the Silver King had made his passageways after the dragons were tamed. The scenes were out of sequence with the others …

Zafir blinked. What if the alchemists were wrong? What if the carvings
weren’t
out of sequence? What if this wasn’t the Isul Aieha at all? What if these scenes were here for a reason, the order of the carvings not haphazard as she’d thought, but arranged with meticulous care? Then these were still the Silver King’s Ways, but the Silver King hadn’t made them. The Black Moon had done it.

Sigils. There were sigils everywhere in the corners of the carvings. Sigils like those of the warlocks and the Crowntaker; like the Azahl Pillar of Vespinarr and the gates to Xibaiya in the Queverra. She’d never seen any of those things except the marks on the Crowntaker’s scar, but Tuuran had.

She touched the carvings and whispered: ‘The Silver King’s Ways. The Black Moon made them, not the Isul Aieha.’

Myst tensed beside her. Diamond Eye hadn’t known.

An arcane revenge against the dead goddess, conjuring ­labyrinths that wrapped the world in sigils and ritual, a mesh of vast rune sorceries that sucked at her strength, that pulled the life out of her. Black monoliths. White stone.
That
was from where they drew their power!

Another sequence. A circle of half-gods breaking the mesh of wards and sigils strung around the earth. They plucked out the Black Moon’s eyes and banished him. She’d got it all wrong. The Black Moon was never the dead goddess’s avatar or servant; he was her nemesis, and
there
was the reason he couldn’t touch her spear, the reason for the vitriolic animosity she felt inside it. It wasn’t his weapon, to be retrieved and handed over. It was his doom, to be kept carefully and for ever close … ‘Why did they take his eyes?’

‘They did more than that,’ said Myst. ‘They ended his sight. They made it something that for him cannot ever be recovered.’

‘The Black Moon is blind?’

‘When he is the little one, he has eyes. When he is the Black Moon he sees as a dragon sees. He sees the elemental nature of the world – earth and air and fire and water, ice and metal and light and dark. He sees your thoughts, little one. Your life.’

‘Then he doesn’t see me now?’

Myst paused. ‘No.’

Zafir looked over the carvings, mulling the memories Diamond Eye had once shown her of the Isul Aieha and the Black Moon going to war, of the other half-gods vanishing to the Silver Sea. The dead goddess raising her dark moon from which the half-god had taken his name. The Black Moon slaying his kin, taking some part from inside their heads and making them into dragons.

Souls.

‘You were once like him,’ she said. It numbed her.

‘Yes.’

‘How long have you known?’

‘On the day you took the Earthspear.’

Zafir crossed to the Silver King’s last battle, the Splintering. ‘When
you
took the Isul Aieha’s spear, you said his sorcery wouldn’t touch you.’ She closed her eyes and bowed her head. ‘Dragon, if I gave you the spear now, what would you do with it?’

‘I would give it back.’

‘What if it was yours?’

‘But it is not. You touched it, and it cut you, and you did not turn to stone.’

‘So I must choose, must I? Dragons or a half-god. And what do your brothers and sisters offer? Will they leave this realm? They cannot. Will they let us be and allow us to grow our cities once more? To farm our fields and herd our cattle and fish our rivers? Will they allow us to return to the lives we once had? Shall we ride on their backs as I ride on yours? Shall we live in peace, side by side? No. Any one of us might become an alchemist, and so it is war to the bitter end between men and dragons, with no quarter to be given. The Black Moon, then? Shall I carry the spear at his side? Do his bidding? And what then? Dragons enslaved, and men too. Worlds conquered, all of them. War against old gods and goddesses whose names I’ve never heard. Better than extermination in fire perhaps, but not by very much.’ Zafir spat. A surge of bitterness shivered her. ‘Death for most or slavery for all, dragon? Is that the choice I have? If it is then I reject it. I will not have either one.’

She threw the spear hard away, out of the hall of carvings and into the Silver King’s gallery of arches. It struck the heart of the nearest and drove its point in deep to the white stone. It froze there a moment, quivering with force; then the arch shimmered silver and the spear crashed to the floor. Where once had been plain white stone was now a gateway, climbing through the wall into the endless Silver Sea.

Tuuran marched across the Octagon, shouting at everyone to wake up and get moving. He felt like a bobbing boat in a giant ocean of rolling waves which picked him up and carried him with them whether he liked it or not, with no thought to which way land might lie, not that he had the first idea himself either. He tried to find Zafir, but she’d disappeared deep inside her palace, and the Black Moon was coming, he knew it, and with him some sort of end, and he still didn’t know what to do or how to drive the half-god out.

He went outside and lurked in the rubble by the Humble Gate. The clouds had rolled in low from the Raksheh, or else a fog had risen, and he couldn’t see the ground. Dragons clustered on the Moonlit Mountain’s summit, on the other peaks of the Pinnacles, while yet more circled overhead. Hundreds flew in and out of the cloud, down to the Silver City and back again, looking for a way in; and as the sun rose higher and lit the sky, as the cloud below took a pink glow like lightly blooded snow, the perching dragons pitched over the edge, and swooped and shrieked and doused the summit with criss-cross lines of flame, greeting the rising sun with a spray of fire that chased Tuuran back inside.

They came then, with the rising light. They scoured the scorpion caves, ravaging them with flame until Tuuran gave up on their defence; they landed clinging to the sides of the mountain, claws gouged deep into nook and crevice, tearing out the scorpions they could reach, hosing fire into the tunnels inside, clearing the way. Hatchlings followed, racing rampant through the outer caves, but the tunnels to the Enchanted Palace were too narrow for them. They came through the Queen’s Entrance and down the Grand Stair to find stone barring their way. They clawed at the Humble Gate and the Servants’ Passage, but the tight staircase was too small for even the tiniest of them; they scurried through the maze of the Silver King’s Ways, the half-written sigils that spanned the world and were forged by the Black Moon to bind a goddess. They came to the Undergates and found Zafir waiting to throw them back with scorpions and arrows and lightning, with men with axes, and her spear to turn dragons into stone. They rode their thoughts through the Enchanted Palace. They ate the fear they found there and laughed, and whispered deep into the souls of every mind they found, murmurings of anguish and pain and fire.
We are fire. We are death
.

Yet everywhere they whispered, Zafir followed, spear slung across her shoulder, the dragon-killer, defiant and fearless. The sell-sword soldiers of Merizikat eyed her with wonder and awe, but the looks she took from the old dragon-riders touched Tuuran more. The dragonscale warriors who had once ridden with Hyrkallan or Jehal, with Queen Jaslyn, men of Sand and Furymouth, sworn enemies who had gathered to tear Zafir from the sky, now they looked on her and saw, at last, what Tuuran had seen from the very beginning. A true dragon-queen, a Vishmir, a worthy heir to Narammed, the first speaker of all, who had killed the dragon of Dragondale and founded the nine realms of the dragon-kings.

In the quiet moments of the night Zafir dozed. Her dreams were of fire, of the smell of scorched air and burning skin and singed hair. When she woke the smell was still with her. She called to Myst and Onyx to dress her for war.

‘A dragon-rider learns about fire,’ she said as Myst held up her dragonscale, ‘and a dragon-rider learns that they are alone, but most of all a dragon-rider learns, quick and early, how to check their armour. I was ten years old when I was given my first dragonscale. My mother fastened and buckled every piece with painstaking words that commanded my attention. I felt so proud. She took me to the summit. There was a dragon perched on the edge of the cliff with my father on its back, my real father back then. My mother stood me in front of him. She gave me a helm and told me to put it on. She told me that if I moved, that if I even flinched, then the dragon would eat me, and then she walked away. I tried so hard not to be afraid. Fear before a dragon is doom and a short bloody end, every dragon-rider learns that. So I stood and waited, daring it to hurt me, as it opened its mouth and breathed its fire over me.’

She shivered as she fastened her dragonscale, as she checked each buckle, remembering how the force of the flames had staggered her. ‘I screamed,’ she said, ‘but I held my ground because I was told I must. The fire went on and on and on, and slowly I understood that I wasn’t burning. I stopped being afraid. I leaned into the flames as though basking in them and asking for more. I stretched out my arms to embrace the fire. I reached into it, forgetting the palms of a rider’s gauntlets are soft plain leather to bend and flex and not dragonscale at all. My hands burned, but the fire went on.’ She held out her arms for Myst and Onyx to strap on her Taiytakei gold-glass plates. ‘The burns weren’t deep, hardly anything. They hurt for a few days and didn’t even scar. My mother told me I was stupid, and that I must dress myself the next time. So I did.’ From the corner of her eye she saw Tuuran sidle in, keeping quiet, waiting patiently. ‘It hurt doing the buckles with burned hands, but I did them anyway. I climbed the Grand Stair alone and bathed again in dragon-fire. By the time my mother found me, all there was to see was her little girl wrapped in flames.’ She turned to Tuuran. ‘The Black Moon will come soon.’ In the calm now she saw his face clearly, one side red and swollen where he’d been caught by a touch of dragon-fire under the Spur.

‘I know.’ Tuuran rolled his shoulders, easing out the stiffness there. Adamantine Men learned about fire too, in the same ruthless ways. His Merizikat men were a mess.

‘You need a new legion. A proper one.’

‘Holiness, what will you do when the Black Moon comes?’

He craved closeness from her, the closeness they’d had under the Spur. She understood that well enough, both of them driven by demons they couldn’t fight, although Tuuran’s demon at least had a name and a face and some teeth he could punch out if the mood took him.

‘Berren Crowntaker is still inside him,’ he said.

‘I know, Tuuran.’ It would be easy to tell him what he longed to hear. Easy, too, to give him what he wanted from her.

‘He was my friend. The only friend I had for years.’

‘I know that too, Tuuran.’ If she was honest with herself, she wanted it too.

‘I don’t know what to do, Holiness.’

‘Nor do I.’ She turned and fleetingly touched him. He could have that much, even if he could never again have more.

‘Help him, Holiness,’ Tuuran whispered. ‘Please.’

‘And the Black Moon half-god who rules his soul?’

Tuuran flinched from her. ‘The Black Moon can have my axe in his skull!’

Zafir sighed. She turned away. Too hard to look him in the eye for what had to be said. ‘When the half-god comes, Tuuran, I will stand at his side. I will do as he asks, and you will do the same, and so will the alchemists if there are any of them left, even though they despise us both. We will all do as he asks because what else is there? Who will save us from fiery annihilation if not our Black Moon?’ It was hard to give him any hope when she didn’t see any herself.