The Silver Kings (24 page)

‘Answer to what?’ muttered Bellepheros to himself, but the carvings had nothing more to say. He wandered the last few walls, which showed the Silver King in the Pinnacles – here, right where he stood perhaps – and peered at carvings of dragons and men, and then walked back to the start. Each Silver King carried a mark on his head while ordinary men did not. The dragons carried that mark too. He ambled back to the sequences on the rites of the dead and prodded at them. ‘Is this supposed to explain why I have a walking corpse in my workshop?’ But that couldn’t be right. The carvings were ancient. Whatever they showed, the world had been that way since before the Silver King came. Hundreds of years. No. He turned to Zafir. ‘In Merizikat the dead had only begun to rise in the last handful of years, no more. They declared holy war because of it …’

‘I have something else.’ Zafir was shaking, Bellepheros saw, and her eyes were wide and her face as pale as a ghost. ‘You remember the hatchling in Takei’Tarr, Grand Master Bellepheros? The one that hatched woken?’ She turned for a moment to Jaslyn. ‘Your Silence. I chased her to a pinnacle in the middle of a desert. She landed and waited for us to finish her, but she showed me something before Diamond Eye bit off her head. It made no sense to me, and Diamond Eye had not woken. But now he has, and he understands.’ She turned away as another dragon memory poured into them all. A memory from the dragon Silence of the rip in Xibaiya, its festering spread wide, its cage and prison gone.

‘It’s been like that for years,’ Zafir said softly. ‘The Black Moon held it back, and now it spreads, whatever it is.
That’s
what the dragon Silence wanted us to know, but I can’t make sense of it. Or rather, I can’t begin to make sense of what it means. Nevertheless, I show it to you while
he
is not here.’ She looked hard at Bellepheros. ‘I think this matters, alchemist. I think this matters a very great deal. I would rather like it if you would fathom this for me.’

It is the abyss of the end for everything that lives
, murmured Diamond Eye.

Bellepheros stared at Zafir. It took a moment to unravel the expression on her face because it was a strange one he hadn’t ever seen there before. Thoughtful, and streaked through with dread.

She walked back to where the Silver King slew the Black Moon. She looked from Tuuran to Bellepheros and back again, and tapped the carved image of the Silver King’s spear. ‘This is what he came for. The spear that killed him. So the Black Moon
will
return to the Pinnacles from wherever he’s gone, I have no doubt of that, and when he does, we will find the spear for him.’

And in those words Bellepheros wondered if he heard the first whiff of conspiracy; and he wanted to tell Zafir no, never to say this, but she couldn’t know, because Bellepheros couldn’t tell her that the Black Moon had cut him with his wicked knife of stars and bound him to obey, nor how the Black Moon, when he returned, would ride these memories and see them all, every one of them.

‘Holiness,’ he rasped, hoarse and choked. ‘When he returns, do not let him see your sister.’ He could do that, at least, and he saw by the shock that passed over her that Zafir understood.

She led them back out to the Hall of Mirages then; and when Bellepheros went back to Vioros’s workshop, the walking dead man was gone. Big Vish and Halfteeth, fed up with standing guard, had bound it and carried it to the top of the mountain and thrown it off the cliff, hoping that would put an end to it.

15

The Bloody Judge

Between fourteen and four months before landfall

Clinging to the hull of Baros Tsen’s ship, unseen beneath the waterline, the dragon Silence crosses the storm-dark. Moons pass, wax and wane. She sweeps the southern coastline, one city to the next along the thin green thread between azure sea and sweeping yellow sands. She circles ragged cloud-clipped spires among the Hothan Mountains and scours the ice-bound plateau in their midst where no men live, where forgotten monsters lurk dormant in caverns as big as worlds. She criss-crosses the night above the Sun King’s seething Western Provinces and bathes in their turmoil of resentful revolt. Weeks stretch to months as she searches. Some nights she lands on the spires and domes of temples to the sun that ridge mighty cities, each with more little ones crammed together than she has ever imagined. So, so many.

We might feast and gorge ourselves fat and bloated, and yet barely make a mark.

She plucks drunkards from alleys, lone fishermen from their boats at night. She listens to the thoughts of the little ones. She becomes shadow and darkness and death, and the very few who see her see nothing else before they die.

But the splinters of the Black Moon’s soul are not among them.

She flies north and east among terraced hills and glistening water meadows, over little towns and tiny villages as countless as stars scattered across a crumpled land, the Hills of a Thousand Temples. She crosses the Hothan peaks for a second time, the more gentle and forgiving northern range where the mountains topple and fall into the sea. She steals cattle, goats, wolves, bears, men, whatever is alone and will not be seen or quickly missed. She pauses for a day in the colossal fortress city of Merizikat, filled with sailors and shipyards, and eyes with a murderous hunger the hundred ships at anchor in the waters of its harbour. She sits upon the roof of its armoured basilica and stretches out her thoughts, and wonders at the pleading helpless dead creeping restless in its catacombs, but there is no fragment of the Black Moon here, not yet.

She flies again, long winding days following every river and back again. She passes at night over the quiet town of Dahat, and pauses a moment at the familiar-scented thoughts of Baros Tsen T’Varr. She dark-shadow slides through the sprawling megalopolis of Brons and Caladir, the Sun King’s twin capitals filled with priests and temples. Amid the unquenchable fire of the unconquered sun she creeps into thoughts of generals and princes, of priests and watchmen and sailors, merchants and tailors and dung men and whores. She sees their world inching to war.

The Black Moon is not here.

She courses south into the great plain heartland of the Sun King, its mighty twin rivers and a dozen stink-swollen cities. Over the mile upon mile of white marble of the Unvaski and a hundred other palaces, each enough to swallow a town and still be hungry for more.

The Black Moon is not there.

Now the dragon Silence pauses from her search. The half-god palace, the flying eyrie of Baros Tsen T’Varr, has gone into the storm-dark. Perhaps she has it wrong. Perhaps the Black Moon will not come to this world after all; but many months ago in the desert when her last life peered into the Black Moon’s mind and woke him, there had been a face in his memories, a face and a place and a name. Tethis. The Bloody Judge. The Black Moon split himself in two long ago, a means to survive his sacrifice to the dead goddess. The little one she found in the desert carries one part of him. The face she saw in that little one’s thoughts carries the other. He will seek it to become whole once more, and when he does, nothing short of a god will stop him.

The dragon Silence flies far to the north then, to the cold damp moors of the small kingdoms and their dirty mud-bound towns. If she cannot find the Black Moon then she will find that for which he seeks, and then she will wait for him in lurking ambush. She finds the spoor of the Bloody Judge in the memories of that place, in breaths and traces, remembered glimpses and amber-trapped histories. She follows his trail through the memories of those he has touched, follows it from sailors and soldiers, sea captains and whores, ships and taverns and flophouses and merchant stalls, street by street and life by life until the drip-drip memories of his passing bring her once more to the beating heart of the Dominion, to the palace of its immortal king and his arch-cathedral to the all-conquering god of the sun. Curled nestled among spires and minarets, still and silent in the day, slinking between its domes at night, claws clicking on gold and marble and alabaster, the dragon Silence eats unseen into the minds of those who pass below.

The Bloody Judge. General of the Dominion. Favoured son of the immortal king of flames himself. In crypts and catacombs, dead things walk when they should not. The unconquered sun draws in its wrath and sends visions to its priests, who declare the necropolis of Deephaven an abomination, the Ice Witch of Aria who permits it anathema, and so the engines of war grind their gears and rumble to life, and the Bloody Judge will lead the Sun King’s armies in the greatest crusade the worlds have ever seen; but the dragon Silence sees the visions for what they are.

Lies.

General of the Dominion, yet the Bloody Judge is a ghost, slipping like water among the thoughts of the little ones below. She has his face, the face seen in the desert of the night-skins, in the little one possessed by the Black Moon. In memories slit from blind minds she meets him, speaks with him, sleeps with him, tries to kill him, but never finds him. The priests of the unconquered sun think to command him, but Silence knows better. The Black Moon has woken in the Bloody Judge, as he woke in the man in the desert, and twists everything to his own grand design.

The hunt changes. She will find the Bloody Judge and kill him. She will send this other piece of splintered half-god screaming back to Xibaiya. She rides her little ones long and deep. Sees at last the face she seeks, the Bloody Judge, and what and who he truly is. She regards him through borrowed eyes, and tries to slip inside his thoughts, but glances away as though grasping for mist. Now he sees her too, and the man from which she watches turns to oily black ash; and from walls and halls rise the grey dead who exist only as shadow; and they throw up their arms and the darkness around them twists and roils; it grows into knives and spears that lacerate every servant whose eyes she has stolen. It rips their souls to shards. She saw these things too in the memories of that little one in the desert. She has found warlocks.

The shadow-knives fly into the sky to hunt. They find her, and each blade that cuts tears not flesh and scale but flays pieces of her eternal dragon soul. She flees, but the shadow-knives fly faster. Their swarm swells and grows, dozens to hundreds to thousands. One by one they catch and cut, until Silence feels herself bleeding away, the core of what she is crippled and dying. It is a true death that comes after her, not the little death, and not to be escaped, and through the hail of blades and knives she hears the warlocks laugh, for even a dragon cannot stop the end of everything that they have foreseen. They have her in a death grip.

But a dragon does not succumb so easily. With ragged failing strength she falls like an arrow from the clouds to the ground. She strikes with the force of a thunderbolt. The shadow-knives rain around her, seeking her soul to finish their murder, but she is gone, flesh and bone smashed and broken, the little death casting her wounded soul to Xibaiya where the warlocks’ knives cannot follow. Cheated, they mill and circle and dissipate under the glaring gaze of the vicious sun.

The warlocks return to their sculptures of fate. The Bloody Judge arms for war. In Xibaiya the dragon Silence licks her wounds and waits to heal.

The Black Moon. The half-god split in two. One part must be destroyed. It does not matter which.

The Seven Worlds

The Hsians of Takei’Tarr hide in their towers, mystic logicians calculating their way to victory. In the Crown of Khalishtor the sea lords puff their chests and bellow for war while the Statue Plague decimates their land and the rotting flesh and bone of a corpse they imagine to be Baros Tsen T’Varr is carried across the desert to hang by an ankle. In Caladir the Sun King girds his armies for holy war, a jihad against the risen dead and all who would allow them to walk beyond the catacombs of his eternal prisons; in Aria the Ice Witch waits with armies of her own. In hostile Qeled old spirits stir among the dead who no longer die. In Xibaiya the earth-touched gather around the tear that rips their realm. Among the dragons of the Worldspine a whisper spreads:
The Black Moon is risen.

In the desert of Takei’Tarr, beside the unfathomable Godspike, the eyrie of Baros Tsen T’Varr is about to fall.

16

Chay-Liang

Sixteen months before landfall

Glasships and lightning fought the dragons overhead. The last of the Elemental Men took his bladeless knife to the chains holding the eyrie aloft. He severed them, and the eyrie started to fall, slipping like a discarded feather through the air. The maelstrom of the storm-dark waited below to devour it. In minutes, everyone was going to die.

Liang dashed across the eyrie wall, risking the dogfight of hatchling dragons and lightning and Taiytakei soldiers screaming through the air on their sleds. The Black Moon sat in the middle of it all, a hundred tempests swirling about him, eyes closed, legs crossed, head tipped to the sky, light streaming out of him.

Well, sod him
. She half ran, half slid down the steps, made it to another tunnel and scrambled inside. The white stone walls glowed full-moon bright, blazing stronger with every moment.

Shelter. She felt the shift of the eyrie through her feet, the lurch as it started to fall. She glanced at the glasships overhead, dozens of them raining lightning in a storm around the dragon Diamond Eye as it finally fell. She picked out the ones that had once belonged to Baros Tsen T’Varr, receding upward, dangling chains slack beneath.

Severed. Every one of them. It was done. Over. Still she forced herself to stay at the tunnel mouth until she’d counted them, and knew for certain that the Elemental Man had finished what she’d started. The eyrie was falling irrevocably into the storm-dark, and that would be that. The end. No one to save them this time.

The shock as Diamond Eye smashed into the stone of the dragon yard almost knocked her off her feet. She’d seen all she needed to see, and so now she ran as fast as she could, and never mind how her legs burned and her feet hurt. The tunnels here had been the barracks once, an unfamiliar place, but that didn’t matter because they all spiralled in the same downward fractal pattern to the eyrie’s core, to where Baros Tsen had built his bathhouse amid a ring of white stone arches. She lurched, sprinted, ran pell-mell to reach it before the storm-dark ate them. There was no one else here. Everyone was dead now, or else had fled to the darkest corner they could find. She stumbled and slipped, legs pumping too fast for the rest of her as she sprawled across the white stone floor. She got up and raced on, deeper and deeper, dodging and hurdling the ripped bodies that lay scattered about until she reached the open doorway to the bathhouse. Cold air billowed out, chilled by the enchantments she’d made for the room to become a morgue.

She stopped there, pinned for a moment by what she saw. The arches. Tsen had brought her here on the day she’d first come to the eyrie.
What do you make of these, enchantress?
And she’d made nothing of them at all, because they were simply a ring of white stone arches around a white stone slab. An altar to the old forbidden gods perhaps, that was all she could say, and Tsen had laughed and declared it as fine a place as any to build his bath and drink his apple wine, since those were as close as
he
could imagine to any gods, and after that she’d barely spared the room a second thought.

She spared it now, though. The space within each arch shimmered silver, something she’d never seen. Shining liquid moonlight. She went to one and almost touched it to see if it would ripple, then shook herself and shivered in the cold and ran on. She was here for Belli, that was all, all that mattered before the eyrie plunged into the storm-dark and everything was gone as though it had never existed. She ran past Tsen’s old rooms, past her workshop to Belli’s study, praying to the forbidden gods that he was still there, that he hadn’t moved, that she would find him …

A hatchling blocked her way. Small and crippled, but still a dragon. It shrieked as it saw her. Its talons scrabbled at the stone, clawing for purchase. Liang darted back the way she’d come. The hatchling bounded after her. She dived into her workshop, snatched up the first globe of glass that came to hand, stumbled, turned, and threw it as she fell, aiming at the dragon’s head, willing the glass to bloom into a cage to hold the dragon tight as it pushed inside her room.

The glass hit the dragon’s flank and burst in a thunderclap of imploding air; the dragon lurched and fell dead at once, a gaping hole in its side where a festering dark black mass floated, lit from within by purple flickers. Liang stared in horror. In her haste she’d thrown Red Lin Feyn’s captured snip of the storm-dark, and now a tiny cloud of it hovered free in the doorway, filling what wasn’t already filled by dead dragon. She couldn’t get out. She’d trapped herself, and the eyrie was falling into annihilation, and she was going to die, and so Belli would die too.

She wasn’t ready for that, not after everything they’d been through. She reached her mind into the storm-dark as she would into a piece of enchanted glass. There was a twist, Lin Feyn had told her. A reaching in and then doing something different. Not just a bit different, but completely. Something alien.

Glass was a matter of control. Delicate, intricate, precise thoughts. Her fingers touched the storm-dark. It burned like acid fire. She screamed, desperate and anguished, knowing she’d never make it move, that it had her held fast.

The storm-dark curled obediently into a ball. It floated in her palm. Liang stared at it, paralysed for a moment, awed and amazed. She looked at the storm-dark and at the dead dragon, and then remembered where she was and why and where she’d been going, and wrapped the snip of the storm-dark in glass and tossed it aside and clambered out. Belli was where she’d left him, sitting in his study, rocking in despair. She formed a sled from a piece of glass and dragged him to it.

‘The eyrie’s falling! It’s all going to the storm-dark now!’ She forced him down beside her, kicked off and raced the sled ever faster, weaving around the curves and loops of the tunnels. They were glowing a brilliant silver now, almost like daylight. She held Belli tight. ‘Dragons, hatchlings, eggs – everything, all of it.’ Up the spiral to the surface. ‘Everything it touches, it destroys.’ Past the rooms where Tsen’s t’varrs and kwens once lived. Still did, for all she knew. ‘We have to get off before it’s too late.’ Past the rooms where his favoured slaves once slept. ‘We have to fly …’

She reached the last twist and shot into the dragon yard. Heedless of her will, the sled stopped. The madman with silver eyes stood there, arms stretched wide, head pitched up, moonlight blazing out of him. The red-gold dragon Diamond Eye lay curled up on its side behind him, still and almost dead. Two hatchlings flanked him, watching like sentinels. A handful of men and women lingered nearby: a few Taiytakei soldiers, a dozen slaves from across the worlds, maybe a few more, the last survivors. They stood entranced. Enraptured. Liang tried to make the sled move again, but it wouldn’t.

Belli climbed off. He walked to join the others. Liang barely noticed. The sky above and beyond the eyrie was a black churning cloud. Purple lightning flashed. They were too late.
She
was too late. They were inside the storm, and she knew what happened next.

The wind stopped.

The darkness turned absolute.

Silence.

She counted, as Red Lin Feyn had told her to. Five hundred heartbeats, give or take. The madman with the silver eyes reached up. He reached out at the same time, as though there were two of him – no, three, no, six – all in the same place, all reaching in different ways, an infinite mirror upon mirror of reflections, of possibility grasping into the Nothing that had become their sky, their sea, their land.

I am the Black Moon
, he said in her head, in all their heads,
and I am your creator. Take me home.

Five hundred heartbeats and then a handful more, and then the darkness changed. A flood of pinprick stars lit across the sky. Familiar constellations: the dragon, the spear, the water carrier. And unfamiliar ones too, stars she’d never seen. She grabbed Belli and pulled him back to her sled and shot into the air, and never mind where the mad half-god had brought them. The Black Moon, whatever he called himself, had pulled them through the storm-dark of the Godspike to another world, an impossible thing, she’d thought, but no matter. Whatever world it was, she would know it, for the Taiytakei had travelled to them all; and wherever they were, she and Belli were getting away, as far and fast as they possibly—

They crossed the rim of the eyrie. Far below rolled a featureless endless dim-glowing sea of silver, on as far as she could see. Liang’s breath caught in her throat. She staggered. Belli let out a quiet wail, shuddered and then fainted, curled up in a ball around her feet, clinging to her as though to let go was death. They were so high that Liang could see the curve of the horizon every way she looked. Dozens of miles up? Hundreds? From here the Silver Sea looked polished smooth, featureless. Gaugeless.

A roar built inside her head. A space so vast she couldn’t breathe. She opened her mouth and forced her lungs to stretch. One, two, three and in. One, two, three and out. She’d never been high enough to see the world curve this way, never even close. The scale of everything dizzied her: the emptiness, the size of the Silver Sea stretched out for ever, the sky as clear as glass and black as ink, the horizon infinite and sharp enough to cut, everything else a bewildering conclave of stars set in stark, stark night.

One, two, three and in. One, two, three and out. The air was buttery rich, thick as though they were on the ground in the desert of Takei’Tarr. The eyrie dropped beneath them. It was gently falling, feather-like. There was no wind. Liang found herself losing all sense of motion and scale.

Belli let out another wail. Liang looked about for anywhere they could go, but there was nothing. No hills, no rivers, no mountains. The Silver Sea stretched endless, and she didn’t know what else to do but to go back to the eyrie. She landed the sled again on the rocky rim outside the walls, hoping not to be seen, thinking to creep into the tunnels and find a place to hide until she understood where the Black Moon had brought them, but the madman with the burning silver eyes saw at once, and came to her. Belli rolled off the sled and spread himself across the stone. The Black Moon pulled him gently to his feet, and then stabbed Liang with his gold-handled knife carved with a thousand eyes. A short moment of shock, that was all, and the knife was to its hilt in her chest.

Three little cuts
, he said in her head.
You. Obey. Me.

She fell to the white stone and noticed now that it was dull. The Black Moon plundered her memories and took them to be his own. He commanded, and his will would be done. His dragon-queen and her dragon: enchantress and alchemist would revive them. By word he made it so, and so Liang held Belli’s arm and led him to Diamond Eye; and though she screamed and howled the Black Moon had cut her with his knife, and no choice was offered.

Bellepheros crouched beside Zafir. Her eyes were open.

‘Grand Master …’ Frothy blood dribbled from her mouth. Bellepheros ignored her. He took a tiny razor from his sleeve, made a neat incision in the fleshy part of his hand and dripped a few drops of blood onto Zafir’s tongue. He closed his eyes.

‘Broken bones,’ he said after a moment. ‘Several. Punctured lung. Bleeding inside and out.’ He shook his head. ‘The bleeding I can stop, but she’s past my help. There’s too much damage. Nothing much in there works any more. She had a strong heart, and so she’ll last a while yet before she goes. She’s in a lot of pain.’ He glanced up as if looking for the Black Moon. ‘It would be kinder to make a quick end of it.’

He seemed truly sad. Liang stared into nothing, too shocked for any thoughts except the compulsion to obey and the desperation to shake it off, all-consuming like an animal paw-caught in a trap. It strangled her.

Bellepheros stroked a finger across Zafir’s cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Holiness, but I cannot mend this.’ He went to the dragon. ‘At least she died fighting. That’s what they all want, dragon-riders. Let her lie here with Diamond Eye.’

No.

The eyrie fell on towards the Silver Sea. The Black Moon showed them his will. Slaved, helpless as trapped flies in amber, Bellepheros and Liang lifted Zafir onto the gold-glass sled that Liang had made for their escape. Together they carried her to the heart of the eyrie, to Baros Tsen’s frozen bath. The air was cold, and the ring of arches still blazed silver. They laid Zafir out and took the near-frozen corpses of the morgue and dumped them in the nearest room, and then Liang lifted the enchantment that kept the bathhouse freezing cold and trapped it in a piece of glass, while Bellepheros drained the bath onto the floor to leave them slopping in a few inches of water.

‘What … are …’ They lifted Zafir into the bath. She tried to fight them, but there was no strength to her any more. Almost gone, death sombre at her shoulder.

The eyrie plunged onward.

Back on the rim Liang made a new sled. It was easy here – wherever
here
was – to weave her enchantments, easier than anywhere she’d ever been, as easy as breathing. She flew down, streaking towards the sea, while Bellepheros returned to the dragon. Unlike his rider, Diamond Eye would live. The dragon was strong.

My dragons always were.

Liang flew until the eyrie was a speck against the night sky above, quickly lost as it wafted downward. The sea was as smooth as glass, silver as a mirror. As the Black Moon had commanded, she took enough silver water to fill Tsen’s bath to the brim. Then she paused. The Black Moon had told her what she
must
do, but had said nothing about what she must not, and so she lay down on her sled and touched the sea. The mirror-flat surface stretched out for ever in every direction. The stars above were more and brighter than she’d ever seen, the eyrie so far away that she’d long lost sight of it. The silence was absolute. She was as alone as it was possible to be.