The Silver Kings (2 page)

We are close now, little one.

Safer to be down in the tunnels, no doubt. But she didn’t move; and as she sat on the edge of the abyss, she felt another presence closing behind her. Tuuran. She knew him by the tremors of his feet, by the pattern of his stride.

‘Holiness! You should—’

‘Don’t even think it, Night Watchman. I will stay and see this darkness for myself, however little you like the notion.’

Tuuran sat down beside her. ‘When I was a slave I crossed the storm-dark many times. Our galley masters would send us to the hold and seal the hatches so we wouldn’t see. They trapped us in darkness. We could feel our ships toss and heave with the violence of the storm. It broke some. An oar-slave penned like that for the first time, you were certain your ship would break its keel and founder and sink, that everyone would drown, though they never did. When the fear was at its height, then came the silence. Somehow that was even worse.’ He idly picked his nose and flicked a snot at the storm. Zafir tried not to laugh.

‘You saw it when we left the Silver Sea. I didn’t.’

Tuuran sniffed. ‘I saw it when they brought old Bellepheros back from Furymouth. I told them he was so frail that the fright might kill him, and so they bolted shut his cabin window and let me sit with him to make sure his heart didn’t stop. Not that there was any chance. Tough as old leather that one.’ He hesitated, and Zafir knew it was because Tuuran had once thought of the al­chemist as a friend when friendship had been thin on the ground. The coming of the Black Moon had changed the first, but not the latter.

‘I kicked the window open for him,’ Tuuran went on. ‘Let him see what it was. I thought that him being a grand master alchemist with all his lore he might know a thing or two. When we reached land the night-skins set to kill me for showing him that. He stood up for me though, and it was Chay-Liang who spared me. Fat lot of use in the end. Turned out he was as ignorant as the rest of us.’

The eyrie shivered and shuddered in the storm. Lightning struck one of the low watchtowers on the wall and sparked across the white stone of the dragon yard.

‘Holiness, maybe we should—’

‘Stay exactly where we are, Night Watchman?’

Tuuran growled and mumbled something, but he knew better than to press her. Lightning flashed below, thundering from the underside of the eyrie into the clouds. She’d seen that before, riding Diamond Eye around the Godspike of the Taiytakei, how the eyrie and the storm-dark were somehow alike. Now that same violet lightning rattled back and forth beneath them.

The clouds ahead became a wall of black that rushed towards them. The lightning stilled, and then the wall hit them, and with it came a silence and a nothingness. They were adrift in a void between worlds.

‘Count, Holiness,’ murmured Tuuran. ‘Five hundred heartbeats and then a score. It helps. Maybe it’s six hundred now. It’s been getting longer these last few years.’

I have shown you how it ended
, whispered Diamond Eye in her thoughts.
But there is more.

A flicker again. A different memory. The memory given to them both by the hatchling dragon Silence in the moment before Diamond Eye bit off its head.
Among the wandering dead, the rip is opened again. Diamond Eye will understand.
A mercurial sliver of memory, of moving among the ruins of the place the dragons called Xibaiya, the dead realm through which they slunk from one life to the next. To the edge of a hole and oozing out from that hole a spread of void and chaos. It crept hither and yon, devouring whatever it touched.
The Black Moon was once a cage to keep the Nothing at bay, but now he is free and the Nothing grows.

Neither she nor her dragon had understood, not then. But Diamond Eye had woken now.

I have seen that cage. A hundred times, between every life. When the Isul Aieha and the Black Moon ripped creation to tatters and cast us into Xibaiya, I roamed the shade-lands. I saw the rip in the world with the Black Moon and the dead goddess entwined about it. A prison, the goddess the lock and bars and walls, the Black Moon its gate and key. Now the Black Moon returns among us, and the shade of the dead goddess is vanished, and where once they stood sentinel, the Nothing unravels creation, slow and remorseless, piece by piece.

And we are inside that nothingness now?

Yes.

Sound and light crashed into life. The wind struck Zafir so hard it almost knocked her down. Tuuran snatched at her, grabbing her with the terror of watching her pitch over the edge, then let go at once as he realised the wind wouldn’t take her over. Zafir caught his hand. She held it and brushed his skin with her fingers. There were rough patches on his knuckles and on the joints, split red and raw beneath in places. Maybe to other eyes they were simply the hands of a soldier, but a dragon-rider knew the signs. The dragon-disease had him. The Statue Plague. Sooner or later, one way or another, dragons would be the death of them all.

‘Holiness, I beg your forgiveness.’ Because he was her Night Watchman, and she was a queen of queens, and men had died for less; but out here they were neither of those things and there was no one to see, and they could both do with a little comfort. Flame knew they needed it, each fighting their own silent demons and with no end in sight. She held Tuuran’s hand a moment more, and then squeezed and let him go. She touched a finger to her own arm, an unconscious gesture, stroking her own roughness of skin the size of a thumbnail, always kept carefully hidden away; then settled and set her head to the wind until the dark clouds broke into a brilliant sky and they emerged from the storm. She left Tuuran to his thoughts, and crossed the rough mangled stone of the eyrie rim, between the piles and mounds of random debris, the crates and accumulated pieces of this and that piled outside the dragon yard walls. The rim had been a place for dumping anything that might one day be useful even back in Baros Tsen’s day. Chay-Liang had been the worst. There were piles of broken gold-glass from when the Vespinese had come and one of their glasships had crashed.

Zafir moved among them. She climbed the slope of the dragon yard wall, smooth white half-god stone, and walked down the steep steps set into the other side. Everyone else had had the sense to stay in the tunnels, but the Black Moon sat in the middle of the yard, guiding them through the storm. Zafir carefully didn’t catch his eye. Diamond Eye and the hatchlings perched alert around him; Diamond Eye looked at her and cocked his head as she approached. She could read his gestures now. It was a cock of the head that said
Yes, please.
She climbed onto his back, and he jumped onto the wall and pulled away into the air and stretched out his wings.

No more dragging at chains
, she said
. Let the wind carry them. Let the Black Moon’s hatchlings do his work.

He soared for her, high and fast, wheeling and diving and spiral­ling for the sheer joy of it, perhaps because he knew this was her homeland where she longed to be, or perhaps because this was
his
home too, where he had hatched and grown. Zafir looked back once at the eyrie. She watched it draw away from the curtain cloud of the storm-dark stretched like an iron wall across the sea. She watched the five ships that slowly emerged, one after another behind it, watched for long enough to see that the sixth never came. Lost in the silence in the storm-dark’s heart, she supposed. Removed from existence, its slate wiped clean, its memories gone. After that she turned away and didn’t look back.

You hatched a few miles from where my mother birthed me
, she said to Diamond Eye as they skimmed the sea. The dragon slapped his tail into the wavetops, explosions of spray left in his wake.
The eyries of the Silver City. Do you remember?

I see them through the fog of your alchemists and their poisons.
He paused.
I have had many hatchings. None were more special than the rest. There were mountains in this world. They were cold, and I like the cold better than desert heat. But I soar for the other dragons I will find here. My brothers and sisters, awake again. I soar with the memories of them as we were long ago.

The hard truth jolted her again, that everything she remembered was likely gone. Dragons and furious fire. Cities razed, palaces smashed.
Do you feel them already?
she asked, careful to keep her thoughts in check.

Distant and muted. It is harder to reach them in this realm. I had forgotten how different the air is here. In that I prefer the other lands, where everything was easier. We have devoured so much of this one. Its weave is weak and dry.
His thoughts seemed to wander, kept within himself.
I had forgotten
, he said again.

The eyrie was far away now. Zafir rode Diamond Eye far and wide, roaming across the waves for days, searching. There were books and charts in the Taiytakei libraries that might have told her which ways to go, but they were left behind, and the first land they found was an unfamiliar coast hundreds of miles from any place she knew.

Once she saw a speck in the distance. Too large to be a bird.

The others know we are here,
she thought
.
Dragons so far out to sea would have told her that something was terribly wrong, if she hadn’t already known it. No one from the other worlds sailed here any more.
Have they told you what happened while we were gone?

Yes.

Then show me.

He showed her how the dragon Snow had woken, and the dragon Silence, chained in the eyrie of Outwatch and then set free; Silence who had given Zafir the slow death of Hatchling Disease, and who had tried twice more to kill her until Diamond Eye had bitten off the little dragon’s head, but
dragons always came back. He would be here again somewhere; then further into the memories Diamond Eye had seen. The razing of the eyrie at Outwatch, the burning of Sand and Bloodsalt, the siege and destruction of the Adamantine Palace, the murder by poison of a thousand dragons in the eyries outside the Silver City, and the great hatching that followed of a thousand new eggs across the realms. The death and fire and end of everything she knew; and as he roamed the past they flew, following the snaking line of unknown shores until slowly they became places she recognised, until she saw the outline of Tyan’s Peninsula with its dyke a line across its neck, and the miles-wide mouth of the Fury river beyond, and on the far bank, the ruin of what had once been a city.

Furymouth.

Memories collided inside her. Of the first day she’d come here, and of the last. The city bright with lights, the air thick with its stink of smoke and rot and the sea. The Sea Kings kept their ­dragons away from their city and their ships, so Zafir had always come by land until her defeat over the Pinnacles. Fleeing here. Flying over the city, looking down at it and burning the traitor Jehal’s Veid Palace in petty vicious vengeance.

Do you remember?
Diamond Eye had been there with her on that day.

Yes.
Fire blossomed in the dragon’s memories. She saw the palace burn, through her own eyes and through his. Such a strange rush of emotion, unexpected and strong. The anger and the pain and the loss and the betrayal, and carrying with them an overwhelming sadness. Nostalgia. The Zafir who’d burned the Veid Palace hadn’t known who she was or what she’d wanted, only that whatever she had was never enough. She wasn’t sure that she knew any better now, but looking back at who she was was like looking at a ­stranger. The Veid Palace at least was much as she remembered it, save that it wasn’t ablaze this time.

She brought Diamond Eye lower. Most of the palace was built of stone; dousing it in fire hadn’t hurt it much, but time had had its turn too. Weeds grew in the cracks. The black scars she’d left across its gardens were gone, turning into a fairy dust chaos of spring flower colours. Creepers had found purchase in the tower walls. Seagulls cried, squawking danger to each other as they circled. She shivered, spooked. From the air the city looked the same now as it ever had, only quiet and overgrown and empty. The air smelled of the sea. It didn’t smell of people any more, not of shit and rot and smoke.

I never belonged here.
The unbearable stillness shook her. The aloneness.
Take me to the palace. I want to see it.

Diamond Eye swooped. The Veid Palace was a mosaic of narrow towers linked by bridges and walkways, a design that had never made any sense until she’d seen the gold-glass tower-palaces of the Taiytakei. That was where the palace of the Sea Kings had its heart, in the edgy ebb and flow of love and hate between the kings of Furymouth and the night-skinned sea lords. She landed beside the great Veid Dome, the palace’s centrepiece. One of its great brass doors, twenty feet tall, hung open, askew. The other was missing. She slid from Diamond Eye’s back and walked closer, and then stopped and listened. The seagulls had fallen quiet, and the breeze rustling from the sea was the only sound. The sun beat down, warm and caressing. A comfort, unlike the relentless heat she remembered from the Taiytakei deserts.

The dome’s other brass door lay fifty feet across the yard, half buried in weeds, bent out of shape, a glitter in the sun. The quiet crept inside her. It crawled under her and settled in her heart and belly. She remembered the palace alive and bright with bustle and colour. Servants, soldiers, dragon-riders. Movement everywhere. Commotion. There used to be horses. Sometimes elephants decked with gaudy harnesses, brought in ships from across the sea.

A lump grew in her throat. She could almost see the ghosts moving about, the lives long lost. She walked into the shadowed dust-veils of the Veid Dome, the palatial hall of King Tyan with its three golden thrones arrayed to face her. A sweep of marble stairs arced behind them, curving to the upper balconies. The walls were black with soot, the floor a litter of ash and charred splinters and rubble; the thrones, when she came close enough to see, were half melted. She clambered past them. There had been a door hidden behind them into the rear arches of the dome once, but both door and wall had been smashed down. She stooped and picked up a fragment of cloth, the charred corner of a tapestry. Her jaw tightened. She remembered it. King Tyan the Fourth burning Taiytakei ships at night as they tried to raid his silk farms. Jehal had brought her here late one night. They’d sneaked away, consumed by the rapture of their nascent passion, and he’d shown it to her. Huddled between thrones he’d murmured the story, his hands on her skin and between her legs, his tongue on her lips.