The Silver Kings (28 page)

She didn’t know this place. Her feet had walked all the cities of Takei’Tarr and many of other realms, but not this. She would have remembered it at once for its towers, their white stone, their shape and texture not unlike the Godspike of Takei’Tarr.

A woman sat with her feet over the edge. She wore tight breeches in a deep lush red, black riding boots and a short tunic of white and gold. Her skin was dark, her long black hair tied in a plait that reached to the small of her back. Her eyes were emerald green, and the golden circlet she wore across her brow blazed with power. The Circlet of the Moon.

‘Ice Witch!’ Red Lin Feyn hurled her summoned snips of storm-dark, two brutal things to annihilate whatever they touched. The woman barely seemed to notice.

‘I learned that trick a while back,’ she said. ‘Have you learned this one?’

The whistle of the wind fell silent. The noises of the city too. When Lin Feyn looked at the river, the ships had fallen still and the gleaming ripples on the water had frozen. Birds hung motionless in the air between wingbeats. The Ice Witch had stopped time.

‘The Sun King plans a war against my world, Red Lin Feyn. Only a Taiytakei witch may cross the storm-dark, and so your people must mean to aid him. Why?’ The Ice Witch turned. Her eyes fixed Lin Feyn to the spot, a brilliant depthless green that sparkled with sadness and anger. Lin Feyn composed herself. She had no gold-glass, and the Ice Witch was impervious to the storm-dark, and that left her with nothing but words; but then wasn’t this a dream? So words might be as deadly as she liked.

‘You are a sorceress,’ she said.

The Ice Witch nodded. ‘That I am. As are you.’

‘You are the most powerful this world has seen for many genera­tions.’

‘In your world I might say the same of you. And?’

‘You breed more.’

‘I do. So do you. And?’ In their moment of frozen time the Ice Witch stared into Lin Feyn, and Lin Feyn thought, amid the ire, she saw true bewilderment. The Ice Witch really didn’t understand why she was the enemy.

‘Sorcerers broke the world into pieces …’ Lin Feyn tried to pick her words carefully. She was an ambassador for her people …

‘Ah. So it’s your Elemental Men who wish me dead? But I hear there are hardly any of them left. Besides, you stopped trusting them months ago when they lied to you about dragons, did you not?
They
are the ones for whom all sorcery is anathema.
You
are a witch to them, as wicked as I. But you let them tell you what to do, and so you become useful to them, I suppose.’ The Ice Witch stood. ‘Why so afraid, Red Lin Feyn?’ Her eyes shone; for a moment they burned ferocious bright, then faded and grew sad again.

‘Years ago I made a bridge,’ said the Ice Witch quietly. ‘I made it because the river was too wide and too deep and no builder could span it. It stands beautiful and abandoned. I charge no toll, but no one uses it. The ordinary folk prefer to give a penny to one of the many boatmen who cross the river beside it. Now and then a drunken oarsman will capsize. Now and then people fall overboard and drown. Almost every day someone dies crossing my river, yet no one uses my bridge. Why? Because they do not understand, and so they are afraid.’ She cocked her head. ‘You are afraid I will become a monster. Ruled by your fear, you force it to truth, and thus a monster I must be, to tear down the pillars of your world, and crush your empire to ash and sand. Your nightmare prophecies take substance and grow real from such nourishment. Is that wise, Red Lin Feyn of the Taiytakei?’

They were suddenly in the room of arches. It happened in a seamless moment, something so natural that Red Lin Feyn thought they must have been there all along, as though the time-frozen city had been an illusion. It was a dream, she reminded herself. No ordinary one, but played by the rules of dreamers.

‘The past,’ whispered the Ice Witch. She touched an arch. It shimmered silver and rippled like water and dissolved to show a fleet of white ships with huge curved prows like giant swans. Silver-armoured red-eyed white-skinned half-god moon sorcerers sailed upon them, who summoned knives of ice to rain from the air and send slaughter upon some city and raised the murdered dead into an army of deathless slaves. She saw them come upon this city of spires and the dead pile themselves against the walls. She saw them burn, saw the moon sorcerers dissolve the city’s walls into black ash, saw the dead swarm the streets and then the fist of the moon strike the earth and the sun climb into the night sky. She heard the moon-god’s sister whisper something like the intimate murmur of a lover in her ear. And then light. Endless, timeless light and a limitless sea of silver, and the living dead and their moon sorcerer masters were gone.

‘You want to stop the rise of a terrible sorceress who will crack the world in two? I fear you are too late, Red Lin Feyn of the Taiytakei. What you see? I did that to them, to the old ones who still linger here.’ A wan smile flickered across the Ice Witch’s face, and she tapped the circlet on her brow. ‘You should have sent your assassins when I took the Sapphire Throne as regent for my little brother.’ She nodded then to the swimming silver arch. ‘Others tried. I see now that their reasons were the same. They too might have done better to speak with words than with weapons, but they were right that that was the time to change fate. You are years too late. I have already done the thing you fear, much to my chagrin.’ She turned to another arch. ‘Now behold the future.’

Red Lin Feyn saw the room where she stood, but now a man was in her place, his back to a slender crescent moon. He stepped onto the balcony. The wind picked up, a strong steady breeze that blew into his face, and Red Lin Feyn was with him as he looked about. The same five towers, the same city spread beneath them, but now night. A flurry of bright orange streaks launched from the river. Rockets. Plumes of bright flame bloomed. A roar rose from below, the voices of a thousand men racing to their deaths. Smoke rose from close to the waterfront, the start of some pointless battle. Shapes moved fast through the air. Men on sleds. The first sun-flash of lightning …

The Ice Witch touched an arch. ‘I see you,’ she whispered.

The vision returned to its start. To the man who stood in her place in this room of arches with his cropped hair and pale skin and eyes that poured forth moonlight.

‘I will not be the monster,’ whispered the Ice Witch, ‘no matter what you do. But the monster is indeed loose, and now you have seen its face, and if you fall upon me as his half-kin once did, if you bring this future to pass, I have another to show you. One I cannot stop.’

Through a third arch a dark moon rose from the southern sky to chase the sun. Lin Feyn saw the earth burn and dragons fly. She saw fire and death and ash. She saw glass ground to sand. She saw the dark moon catch the sun and hold it tight, darkness fall to throttle life and fire until all became ice and still. She saw a half-god blaze across the sky with a thousand dragons at his back, and turn the world to dust.

The Ice Witch’s voice turned hard. She faced Lin Feyn eye to eye. ‘Your people are arrogant and cruel. I will take away from you that which you have no right to have. Ships of all worlds shall cross the storm-dark. I will share that gift far and wide.’ She bared her teeth. ‘But if you come here, Red Lin Feyn of the Taiytakei, I will destroy you. I will find your ships and your sorcerers.
You
, Red Lin Feyn. You and yours. I will hunt you and end you all.’

Lin Feyn was shaking. ‘There is something of the Crimson Sunburst in you,’ she blurted.

‘I don’t know what that is, Red Lin Feyn.’

‘How do you know my name?’

‘Because this is your dream, and I am inside it.’ The Ice Witch reached out a hand. Where her fingers touched Lin Feyn on the cheek they burned with a deep and lingering hurt. ‘I would prefer you as an ally, but you have made yourself my enemy.’

The colossal armoured fist of an angry god crashed into Red Lin Feyn’s head and ripped her memories out of her, everything she knew and everything she was and everything she hoped for. Took it all out and looked carefully at every piece and then put it back again, all in its proper place. Around the edges Lin Feyn gasped at the flashes that came unsought and unwanted the other way. As the Ice Witch lingered on Lin Feyn’s memories of dragons, on the last words the hatchling had breathed in the depths of the Queverra, on knowledge of the Rava and the name of the Black Moon, trickles of colour and emotion bled the other way. The Black Moon most of all. The Black Moon. The enemy, and a dread that she had years ago made a most terrible and ghastly mistake.

How many years? Seven. The crack in the Godspike, the change in the storm-dark, the beginnings of the walking dead. All tied together. All begun at the same time. All caused by a single event. And there, Red Lin Feyn saw, was the answer she sought.

The Ice Witch had been to Xibaiya. She’d seen the rip. She’d freed the Black Moon.

The world of Red Lin Feyn’s dreams dissolved.

She woke in her cabin aboard the
Servant on Ice
. Disorientated and confused and a little lost. She roused herself and splashed a little water on her face. A dream then, all of it; and yet when she stumbled on deck she saw that the
Servant
was heading home. When she looked harder, many sailors were simply gone, and no one knew quite what had happened to them or why or how. Her copies of the Rava and Feyn Charin’s journals had gone too, and here and there, beneath careful repair, the
Servant
bore the scars of the battle she remembered, charred and burned in places exactly as she’d seen; yet no one else now knew how any of these things had happened, or what had become of their missing comrades and crew. Their memories were entirely gone. They knew nothing at all of galleys or of the fire witch, or of months spent captive in Deephaven harbour held under guard while they repaired their ship, nor of Red Lin Feyn imprisoned in the Ice Witch’s black fortress, or of the empress with her golden circlet who came to visit before they were sent on their way. Yet so it had been; and when Red Lin Feyn looked at herself in a glass she saw the pale marks on her face where the Ice Witch had touched her in a dream that had been no dream at all.

19

Awakening

Thirteen months before landfall

Pride. Now there was a thing. Tuuran stood out on the eyrie rim, eyes fixed across the rippling sea, and tried to remember the last time he’d felt properly proud. He’d felt it sometimes back when he’d been a sail-slave on his Taiytakei slaving galley. He’d ­definitely felt proud on the night he’d cracked the skull of the galley oar-master and hurled him overboard where no one would see. Men he’d taken up from the oars had made him proud – slaves full of broken hate, righteous anger or sullen resentment, and he’d turned them back into men, fierce and strong. Yes, he’d had his moments back on that galley, but not like this. All those times he had never quite forgotten he was making more slaves for the bastards who thought they owned him.
This
, though … This was different. Pride, clean and honest.

He looked over the eyrie moving steadily towards the limitless horizon. He’d lost track of how long they’d been adrift. A month, maybe. Another day, her Holiness said, and they’d reach land. Her dragon pulled on a chain that the dragon and the enchantress had forged, a harness yoking the monster as though he was an ox dragging a plough. A hundred enchanted sleds pulled too, each one tiny but the sum of them worth something. His men had built cranes and winches and platforms and lowered them, and they all lived on fish and the tepid water hauled up from the sea and made drinkable by the witch and the alchemist and their magics.

And then there were the men.
His
men now, slave or night-skin, soldier or tailor. He’d earned that. Half were more skilled with needle and thread than knife and sword, but he had uses for that now. The tailors and the two seamstresses were down by the sea every day, fishing, keeping their bellies full, weaving lines from their stores of thread, sewing nets and even a few little sails. Everyone was hungry, yes, and bloody sick of fish all the time, but they weren’t starving and they weren’t dead. Hadn’t lost a single man; even when one idiot fell into the sea the enchantress had flown down and dragged him out.

Made him chuckle how many slaves the night-skins had kept to keep their fancy clothes in order. One slave had even been a gardener, though Tuuran had no idea what Baros Tsen T’Varr had wanted with a gardener on a piece of floating stone out in the middle of the desert. Fellow reckoned he was some sort of expert on fruit trees.

Pride. They’d had storms so bad hardly anyone dared come out of the tunnels, but her Holiness had still stooped to the sea on the back of her dragon and drawn up tubs of water. When anyone was injured, Bellepheros made them well. The dragon heated stones with its fire for warmth and cooking. They’d even managed to build a pair of masts from the remains of the shattered black powder guns and rigged sails made from from silk sheets. They were crap, but they weren’t nothing. They’d built something, all of them together, and he felt it deep in his chest, hot and pure, a future full of possibility.

Wasn’t perfect though. Crazy Mad stood on the eyrie wall, looking out at the sea like he didn’t have anything better to do, lost and waiting for the Black Moon to rise again. Her Holiness sat out on the rim, legs dangling over the edge, back arched, head tipped back almost as though she was taunting him, taking the wind and letting it have her, revelling in it with her two servants at her side. She’d changed. She had a wildfire in her. Maybe she always had, but all the stabbity anger had turned into something else. She smiled instead of snarled, and the energy that poured out of her no longer sang songs of murder but of some other determination. To Tuuran she seemed to make everything possible.

He was staring. He made himself look away.

Best not to think about that
. Except he couldn’t stop. Couldn’t not think about that moment before she’d told him she’d found land.

Pride then, yes, but damn did he need someone he could talk to.

They came to the island in the night. It was there in the morning when Tuuran went up before dawn, the coast a few miles away. Most days he was first out, sitting alone on the eyrie wall to watch the sun rise long before its fire lit up the sea, but today her Holiness was ahead of him, and Crazy the Crowntaker too, side by side on the rim, sitting there and kicking their feet like a pair of children planning mischief. Her Holiness waved him over. She didn’t turn to look, but she always knew who was near, and so Tuuran went and hovered behind them, awkward, not sure where to sit. Didn’t seem right sitting next to the speaker of the nine realms like they were on a bridge tossing racing sticks into the water. Didn’t seem right to choose Crazy either.

Zafir patted the stone beside her. ‘Loom behind me like that and I can’t shake the sense you’re about to pitch us both over the edge,’ she said.

‘Land, big man,’ said Crazy as Tuuran did as he was told, and for once Crazy sounded almost his old self. ‘You did this.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Tuuran snorted. ‘I yelled at people and did some fishing and a lot of fetching and lifting and carrying stuff about. That’s all.’

‘You were a part of it, Night Watchman,’ said Zafir, and Tuuran knew she was smiling.

Tension drained from him as though someone had pulled a plug. He let it and smiled too, and leaned back and revelled in the cold dawn air washing over his face. Because yes, he
had
been a part of it. They all had, every one of them together, and that was what made it special, and there was that pride again; and they sat, the three of them, and watched the sun rise and light up a land that no one had ever seen until today. They’d left Takei’Tarr in thunder and lightning and fire, every one of them expecting to die, most of them slaves with nothing much to live for. They’d travelled to the Silver Sea, the moon itself, and yet now here they were. Free men and women, alive, every one of them.

The sun rose and Tuuran knew he’d never see anything like it in all the worlds ever again. There were maybe a dozen islands in the archipelago, all different sizes but all shaped much the same, each a huge dome-like mass, two miles high perhaps and maybe five across, with one side sheer cliffs and a massive bulbous overhang of dark cracked shadow and deep looming caverns shrouded in curtains of hanging green; while on the other side the slope was steep but not sheer, and a sea of trees tangled together to bury whatever lay beneath. Strands of bare white rock ran for miles out among the waves around the bottom of the domes, long tapering tentacles cracked and barren, tufted with dune-grass, sprinkled with sand and shells, and scuttling with giant crabs that must each have been as big as a man.

‘It looks sort of like a giant dead octopus,’ he said at last. ‘With a forest on top.’

Zafir laughed. Even Crazy Mad had a chuckle at that.

‘This is where we make our new life, big man,’ he said. ‘Though it won’t be easy.’

Damn straight it wouldn’t. But if there was anything that ­bothered Tuuran, it wasn’t all the hard work that would come in simply trying to survive, because they’d done that once already and he’d seen it, and he knew that they could, and so did everyone else. No, if there was a murmuring in his heart then it was that whatever they built here wouldn’t last, because neither Zafir nor the Black Moon would allow it.

The sun crept past the horizon. Copper fire lit the sea. Diamond Eye nudged the eyrie up close to a shore between two white strands of beach. Zafir found a stream of water that rattled and cascaded through a sharp cleft down from the island’s mountain heart. The eyrie drifted to a halt over the nearest piece of open ground, a bone-hard yellow-white stone shoulder to one of the tentacle beaches. Tuuran ordered the cranes lowered and was the first to step off, the first to set foot on this new world they’d found. Coarse pale sand crunched under his tattered boots, more holes than leather by now. He took them off and let his bare feet feel it, curled his toes. He squatted. The air was humid, the sun bright. It would be merciless out here in the heat of the day, but now, so early in the morning, it felt glorious. He ran his fingers over the dry pale rock. It looked like old bleached bone.

‘Right then. Time to find ourselves a place to live.’ He pulled his boots back on his feet, took up his axe, chased the nearest crab and split its shell in two. ‘Who else wants to eat something that’s not fish for once?’ And then he set off for the jungle.

Crazy was right: it wasn’t easy. Tuuran found the stream quick enough, and between them they hacked a path back to the first beach, but the stream came down a cleft in the side of a mountain that sloped more up than sideways, and the only pieces of nice flat ground to be had anywhere were the beaches, and they were no good because that wasn’t where the water was and the midday sun shrivelled and burned every bit as bad as the desert sun of Takei’Tarr, and you had to be pretty stupid or desperate to stand out in it without shelter.

‘There are fourteen islands,’ her Holiness said as they sat around together in the dragon yard after the first couple of days of expeditions and wondering what to do. ‘All clustered together here in the middle of the open ocean. They all look much the same to me. I don’t think we’ll find a better place, and I don’t think there’s any other land for thousands of miles. Certainly no other people. Diamond Eye would know.’

Tuuran snorted. Sunny and hot and overgrown and lush with life, but they were on their own. Live in the eyrie? They might as well move on. And he was all ready for her Holiness to tell them that that was what she wanted, or maybe to simply get on the back of her dragon and fly on alone and leave them all behind, but she didn’t, and Crazy didn’t say anything either; and as for old Bellepheros, Tuuran could almost see him drooling over a whole new world of plants and trees and roots.

‘Well?’ he said, because in the end someone had to ask. ‘Do we move on, or do we stay?’

‘We could live up in the trees,’ said a slave Tuuran had taken to calling Halfteeth.

And even then when no one said anything, he still didn’t believe it, still woke up every morning waiting for her Holiness to decide it was time to go home, but no one argued, and so that was how it was. They stayed.

They had to do everything for themselves, of course. They had what tools they had and nothing more, nor any means to make any; but they had a dragon with the strength to uproot trees and flatten the earth and with fire to melt stone; they had an enchantress with the skill to make glass automata, and sleds to lift them into the air to pick fruit and hunt monkeys, and she made devices Tuuran had never seen before, enchanted lamps and torches, engines to drive saws, all the things for which the Taiytakei used slaves; they had an alchemist who wandered through a cornucopia of unfamiliar flora and fauna in a daze of delight, taking samples and telling them what was safe to eat and what wasn’t, and all the properties of leaf and root and organ; they had the memories of three different worlds and how the ordinary folk in each had lived their lives. They put all that skill with needle and thread to use. They started with shelters little more than sails and sheets hung over fallen branches beside the stream. Some hunted and gathered fruit while others fished from the eyrie over the sea. The gardener slave who knew all about fruit trees took to wandering with Bellepheros, his unofficial apprentice. They felled trees with axes meant for fighting, or else the dragons simply tore them down and carried them to the beaches. They set up workshops there, out in the open, and cut beams and planks with gold-glass saws until Chay-Liang made automata to do it for them. Shelters grew to huts and houses up in the trees. They built ropes and ladders and bridges, a whole shanty town nestled in branches skewed up the teetering slope of the island, or perched on the juts of bone-white stone that poked through the thin earth.

Weeks passed into months. They cleared the land on the ­shoulder of the beach and built a hall and a firepit. They dammed the stream past the bottom of a waterfall and made a little pool, and felled trees and carved little terraces into slopes and planted the last of the grain from the eyrie larder in the wild hope it might yet grow. Grand Master Bellepheros moved his old laboratory down and began an apothecary, though he kept his own house firmly on the ground and refused to climb up into the trees like everyone else. Chay-Liang moved her workshop to the beach to be with him. The eyrie was slowly deserted, left to float alone over the shore, abandoned except for her Holiness and her dragon, for the occasional fishing party who still used its platforms, and for Myst and Onyx, who refused to leave their mistress. Silk sheets were cut into tunics as old clothes wore through; animals were trapped and skinned, and their furs made into cloaks and coats and blankets for when they were needed.

Tuuran lost track of days. Most of the survivors were men. There was a bit of trouble now and then, and Tuuran had to wave his axe once or twice, but nothing more. The dragon kept them all in line in the end, the dragon and its mistress. An arrangement came about whereby the two women who made their home in the village took whomever they chose when it suited them. Myst and Onyx had their lovers too, and Tuuran was one of them, though they took him quietly and in secret while her Holiness and her dragon were away; and they took Crazy Mad as well, and sometimes Tuuran and Crazy went up to the eyrie together and got drunk on the secret stash of Baros Tsen’s apple wine that Myst and Onyx kept hidden, and it was like the old days when he and Crazy had been sail-slaves, only now they weren’t slaves any more; and on most days they worked, the hard honest work of building and hunting and making a better world; and on some they walked away into the jungle together just to see what was there, and took a little food and a skin of stolen wine from the eyrie, and in the evening they made a fire and told the same stories they’d both heard a hundred times before of the lives they’d known and seen: the day Tuuran had picked Crazy out of a prison hold to be an oar-slave for the galley he worked; the day Crazy had come up from the oars to be a sail-slave instead and Tuuran had branded him and marked him to show his worth; fine old times after the fire witch of Aria had burned their slaver masters, whoring and drinking in Helhex and Deephaven, all with the irresistible sheen of glowing nostalgia that made those days seem glorious and free and a wonder of opportunity, with the grubby dirt of truth polished away; and Crazy never glimmered with silver light, and the Black Moon never rose behind his eyes, and they never once talked about Skyrie or warlocks or all the things that had filled Crazy’s life before he was a slave.