The Silver Kings (10 page)

Red Lin Feyn chuckled and nodded. She let out a long deep breath. ‘A change is coming, t’varr. A catastrophe, perhaps. You see it in the swelling of the storm-dark and in the cracked needle beside the Godspike. You see it in the rise of the sorcerers of Aria and in the necropolis of the Ice Witch and in the dead that do not rest in Merizikat and even here. In other things. In the storm-dark itself. The skin-shifters know.’ She looked across the darkness at the shredded killer on the sand, paused again and smiled. ‘In your history, when the Crimson Sunburst appeared at the foot of Mount Solence with her army of golems, what became of her, Baros Tsen?’

‘The Elemental Men fought her, and she was defeated.’

‘So she was.’ Red Lin Feyn turned away. ‘Disappear, Baros Tsen T’Varr. You, too, will find it is not so hard.’

‘Why do you want the egg?’ Tsen blinked.
Of all the questions you might have asked, you ask her that? What do you care about the Xibaiya-damned dragon egg? Let her have it and good riddance!

But the question had popped into his mind from somewhere else. He looked about, bemused, as Red Lin Feyn shook her head.

‘But the answer is in your thoughts, little one,’ he said. ‘The grey dead have called the Black Moon to rise …’
Tsen flew a hand to his mouth and gasped. The words had come from his own lips but they didn’t belong; they weren’t his at all, as though a stranger had somehow put them there, and they made no sense. ‘I …’

He jumped as a sharp cracking noise broke the quiet. It came from the sled, and it took Tsen far too long to understand what it was. He gawped as the dragon egg cracked and burst apart in a flurry of wings and claws …

Two furious eyes gleamed.
I am Silence.

Tsen squealed.
Red Lin Feyn snapped out an arm and hurled a marble of glass. The hatchling dodged and shot into the air, vanishing into the shadows of the Queverra’s stifling gloom. The Arbiter’s light-globes raced after the dragon, illuminating a wheel of wing, a whip of tail, a slash and arc of neck and claw as Silence wove and flew. Red Lin Feyn’s glass marble hit the sled and flashed into a hollow sphere, swallowing both the sled and the broken remains of the egg. She threw another and then another, streaking up into the chasm, but the dragon darted between them, racing ever further away.

I will not be made into a tomb.

‘I cannot give you a choice, little dragon.’

The hatchling wheeled and dived back at them, spitting fire. Tsen scuttled to the sled, cowering behind the Arbiter’s glass. The Arbiter grew a shield around them. The fire washed over it.

Choices are not yours to give, little one. I am far more than you.
The dragon soared upward. The Arbiter threw down a piece of glass and grew it into a sled of her own; but when she stepped on it she only watched, staring as the dragon flew away into the darkness above.

‘I’d need an Elemental Man to catch him.’ She shook her head and looked at the body beside her on the floor, cut to ribbons. ‘Sadly, we are no longer on speaking terms. This is unfortunate, Baros Tsen. I think it was important that the skin-shifters of Xibaiya had their dragon soul. I wish I could be sure. I do not yet understand what it was for.’

Tsen tried to pretend he hadn’t noticed the dead Elemental Man – better to gouge out his eyes than see something like this – but there was no getting away from it. A killer, murdered by the Arbiter of the Dralamut. He’d heard of Elemental Men being killed exactly three times in the entire history of ever, and it had always been by a dragon.
See, t’varr? She can’t let you go, not really, not with what you’ve seen. She has to kill you now. Both of you. Any chance you might do something about that? Or are you simply going to walk onto the knife when she holds it out?

‘I see nothing,’ he muttered.
Do something? Like what? Wag my finger and tut at her?

The Arbiter smiled. Tsen curled up and withered inside.
Anything, t’varr. Just at least try not to be so miserably useless.

Red Lin Feyn walked to the glass globe that enveloped the sled. She touched it and it shrank back into a marble, crushing everything inside out of existence. Tsen thought he caught a glimpse of something dark and a flash of purple light as the glass collapsed. A flicker of the storm-dark? He shivered.

Coward.

‘Come with me,’ said the Arbiter. She beckoned him on to her floating disc. ‘You can answer my questions about your skin-shifter friends, and we shall see where that leads us. Then you may go.’

Pathetic useless coward. I hope she takes Kalaiya first so you see the light go out of her eyes and know you did nothing, tried nothing, to save her.
‘Am I offered a choice?’ His voice trembled. Shame at himself, that was.

‘Stay at the bottom of the abyss if you prefer, Baros Tsen!’ Red Lin Feyn laughed. ‘Or confess yourself to the Elemental Men, or to the Crown of the Sea Lords!’ If she was laughing at him, he deserved it.

I am not a murderer. I’m not a killer.

His voices laughed.
Stupid t’varr. Tell that to the thousands who burned in Dhar Thosis!

But he did nothing in the end, and so Red Lin Feyn carried him and Kalaiya out of the chasm on her sled, and Tsen spent every moment of their flight expecting her to push him off, and every moment in between thinking that he should do the same to her, and yet neither ever moved.

When they reached the top, Red Lin Feyn let him and Kalaiya off by the rim of the abyss. The desert air was quiet and still and rasping hot, dry, scraping at his throat and tight across his skin. He sat quietly and held his head in his hands, waiting for his eyes, accustomed to days of starlight darkness, to embrace the desert sun. When they finally acquiesced enough to see more than bright, bright and more bright, he looked about him. They had stopped amid the chaos and debris of what had once been a dozen slaver camps. Across the abyss of the Queverra the chasm cliffs rose higher, bright in the sun, a pale ruddy pink in the shade. Closer in, juts and spars and mangled walls of mustard stone erupted from the sand, etched and carved and sliced into curls and arcs and windswept bubbles. Swirls of pale-coloured lines stained them in twists and turns, while littered across the sand lay a tale of slaughter and ruin, bones picked clean but not yet bleached white by the sun, rags of clothes, broken tents, abandoned sleds for dragging things across the dunes, slave cages torn down, their doors smashed open. The sky burned a dazzling blue that scoured his eyes. The disc of Red Lin Feyn’s glasship turned lazily, catching the sun and casting bright will-o’-the-wisp sparks dancing across the sand. There was a skeleton nearby with its skull split in two. An axe, perhaps?

Still and quiet and death everywhere. In the distance Tsen heard the mournful cry of an eagle.

It struck him then: he was alive. He sat there, mute and acquiescent, and took it all in, half of him wondering when the Arbiter would get bored with her charade and kill him, the other half dreaming ridiculously impossible ways he might make an escape, both halves berating him for being such a pathetic and useless coward.

‘It won’t be easy.’ Kalaiya sat beside him and stroked his hair. ‘But you’re a resourceful man. No one is looking for us.’ Yet she had him wrong for once – it wasn’t fear of a new life that had him clenched up so tight.

Dress your cowardice as you will, t’varr; that doesn’t change its colour.

Red Lin Feyn was at her glasship, sitting on the steps of her golden gondola agleam in the sun. She was staring at the maw of the Queverra. An Arbiter killing a killer. Something never done, and so perhaps she had her reasons for contemplation; but she had a glasship to take her home, too, and a home to go to, and Tsen had neither.

This wouldn’t do. He picked himself up, took a deep breath, dusted himself down and took Kalaiya’s hand. Here was the death and ruin of a camp overrun right enough, but sooner or later Red Lin Feyn would ask her questions, whatever they were, hear his useless answers, and then, at best, do as she’d promised and leave; and among the discard and scatter were surely all manner of useful things for a fat old t’varr left alone in this wilderness. Probably no food, but perhaps a sled? Whoever had been here, they’d left in a hurry, and once he started rummaging it didn’t take long to find everything he’d need to live for a few days and a few more things he might sell or trade. He supposed it wasn’t a bad place to wait around for a while, not with the river running into the end of the abyss. Sooner or later they’d have to walk, of course, and when they did they’d end up in Dhar Thosis because there simply wasn’t anywhere else to go for the best part of a thousand miles. If whoever was left in the ruin of that place made him into a slave or recognised his face and hanged him, well then he probably deserved it.

But we could at least try to find a less mournful fate, eh?
There was a villa waiting for him in the Dominion, if he could find it. On the mountainous coast halfway between Brons and Merizikat, looking down over a lazy sun-soaked fishing town called Dahat that no one had ever heard of because no one ever went there. The orchards on the slopes above grew some of the best apples for wine-making, and the villa had a fine bathhouse. If, somehow, he could get there.

‘There is a dragon loose again,’ said the Arbiter, when at last she moved. ‘I have to warn the Elemental Men, and so I must return to the eyrie. I’m afraid you will have to come with me.’

Tsen considered this. So she’d changed her mind, had she, and now she meant to hand them over? He’d be hanged as he deserved to be, and he’d been expecting it since … well, since the moment she’d told him he was free. Couldn’t last, a thing like that. The world was never kind enough.
Here it comes …

He had a knife in his belt, taken from the abandoned camp. He drew it out and dropped it in the sand. ‘It is no more than is right, lady.’
Capitulation. Truly I have a gift for it.
‘I had arranged to own a quiet place to live out my twilight days in the Dominion, should the need arise. Let Kalaiya be taken there to live out her life in peace.’ He hadn’t the first idea how to get from the Queverra to anywhere useful anyway.
Out here in the desert, where starving to death and dying of thirst vie with one another to be the entertainment of the day? We’d just die anyway.

His inner voices, usually so quick to scorn, offered only contemptuous silence.

‘I suppose a little apple wine and a particularly long soak in a particularly hot bath are quite out of the question before we go?’ he asked in the spirit of being at least a
little
rebellious, but neither the voices nor Red Lin Feyn seemed to hear him.

‘When my business is done with the eyrie,’ she said, at last meeting his eye, ‘I will take you to the Bawar Bridge. Beyond that is up to you.’

The dragon Silence alights atop a stone pillar amid a desert wasteland. Under the glare of the sun she watches. She assembles the last of her memories. As the little ones fly away to the Godspike where the eyrie has fallen, Silence roams ahead, strong, high, unseen in the night sky. She ghosts among their thoughts. The white sorceress Red Lin Feyn already knows that the grey dead have called the Black Moon to rise. She knows that the dead skin-shifters of Xibaiya wander abroad, and that they yearn for a dragon soul, but she does not know why. Silence, who knows very well, will not tell her.

This new hatchling flesh she wears has become brilliant. Metallic crimson scales darken to near black along her belly. The body is strong, and will grow large. Even so, this world is not safe any more. She will find her way to another; until she does she hides under sand and high in the sky and wanders the thoughts of the little ones. The grey dead have called the Black Moon to rise. It is the end of all worlds.

They flew in Red Lin Feyn’s gondola over the Desert of Thieves. With every hour they drew closer to the Godspike, Tsen felt his tension rising. Red Lin Feyn had some of his apple wine (stolen from his personal cellar, he reminded himself, and then reminded himself again that everyone had thought he was dead, and that it would be prudent not to complain), and was obliging enough to share. Not his best vintage, which was a shame. They traded stories. Tsen told Lin Feyn how he’d been snatched by the skin-shifter Sivan on the night the Vespinese had seized his eyrie, how Sivan had dragged him across the desert to the Lair of Samim, up the Jokun river and all the way to Vespinarr, only to sneak him back to help him steal dragon eggs and then drop the eyrie into the storm-dark. Red Lin Feyn stood at the window as he talked, watching mesas and broken caterpillar canyons and spires of dry dead rock roll beneath, the patches of wind-rippled sand, of brown baked earth spiked with cacti and thorn grass. She stopped over one mesa and opened the gondola, walked out and bent down beside a dark stain on the stone. Tsen, for want of anything better to do, squatted beside her. He watched her fingertips brushing the rock, pinching the fine powdered earth, tasting the stone. The sun beat on his back and the wind blew across his face, stealing his sweat to cool him. The air smelled of sand.

‘Why did the skin-shifters want a dragon’s soul?’ she asked. ‘Do you know? I will keep your secret if you can help me to understand. “I will not become a tomb.” What did the dragon mean?’

Tsen, who didn’t have the first idea, turned his back. He walked to the edge of the mesa.
I could always jump, you know. Put us all out of our misery.
‘Is that what Sivan wanted? He never told me. Just that he meant to steal an egg. I thought he was mad. I still do.’ He went back to the gondola and came out with a glass of apple wine in one hand, waving his black rod in the other, the key Chay-Liang had enchanted for him to unlock every glass and gold device she had ever made. ‘This was what Sivan wanted of
me.
’ He shrugged. ‘Just this.’