The Silver Kings (33 page)

He went back to the villa tired and aching, still not used to ­riding any animal at all, and certainly not some barrel-chested mule set on tipping him sideways with every plodding step. Come next morning he and Kalaiya were up bright and early with their baskets, scouting the orchard, picking the first windfalls and spying out the ripest fruit. Demarko slouched sleepy-eyed at the front of the villa, snoozing in his rocking chair in the sun, eyes slitting open now and then to direct the straggle of visitors to the orchard for work and a penny for every apple basket returned full. Tsen toiled until the sun rose high, then walked to the little meadow at the edge of the orchard where he and Kalaiya liked to picnic. He lay and dozed and fell asleep; and when Kalaiya woke him she took him to the house and they spent the lazy midday hours swinging in hammocks in the shade, chewing grass and drinking air as thick as syrup. When the heat loosed its grip, Tsen went back to work, and as he walked to the orchard he saw a ship gliding into Dahat, her sails the bright yellow of the Sun King. He put his arm around Kalaiya and hugged her.

‘You were right about starting a day early.’

‘I’m always right.’ She hugged him back.

The days of harvesting were a warm glow of hard work and effort well spent. A clear autumn sun kept the air thick and still, heady with the fresh smell of apples. The ship remained in Dahat harbour. When it looked like the orchard might be picked clean before the exalt left, Tsen found other things for his hired hands to do. He grew used to seeing the same faces up in his orchards day after day, and took the time to talk to them and learn their names. They laughed behind his back at the colour of his skin and the disfiguring of his face, but it didn’t trouble him. They weren’t unkind, these Dahat lads, or cruel; they laughed at Demarko for being old too, but thought no less of him.

The harvest was all but done. They sat outside, him and Kalaiya and Demarko, the evening air warm and pleasant, crickets buzzing in twilight scents of jasmine and heliotrope laced with the inevit­able warm-breath wafts of Xizic, the table lit by a dozen ­candles. Demarko, unasked, had made a feast for them, and now he fussed and tutted from the kitchen, and flitted about them carrying dishes of pickled urchins drenched in lemon, baked fish, roasted flaked nuts and some strange concoction of sweetened milk curd flavoured with mint. When they were done, while Tsen stretched back, bloated and rubbing his belly, Demarko brought out another letter that must have arrived earlier in the day. Tsen read it, bored and not really interested.

Then he read it again.

‘Well that can’t be right,’ he said. Couldn’t be, could it? Because if it was then all he wanted was to scream his lungs out and then dig a very great big hole in the earth and dive into it and pull the soil back on top of him. The letter was short and to the point. A flying mountain had come out of the storm-dark. It had come across the ocean to Merizikat and sacked the city. And he’d wanted to know any word of dragons, hadn’t he? Well now he had one almost next door.

His eyrie. It couldn’t be anything else.

‘What is it?’ Kalaiya asked.

Tsen held Kalaiya’s arm, fingers tight and digging into her, then forced himself to let go. ‘It’s nothing, my love. Nothing for us to worry about.’

‘Then may we go to bed now?’ she asked. ‘I’m tired.’

‘Yes, my love. We have apples to press in the morning.’ He pulled Kalaiya close. They wrapped each other in their arms and turned away. As he took her hand he touched the letter to one of the candles, watched the flame take hold of the paper and burn it to ash.

Peace, t’varr
.

Far across the waiting sea the dragon Silence bursts in blood and broken bone upon the ground and returns once more to Xibaiya, realm of the dead and their murdered goddess. In sanctuary there she lurks and heals from the wounds the warlocks have given her. Slowly and painfully. She has found the Bloody Judge but not the Black Moon, and though the one is clearly a part of the other she cannot fathom the how of it.

The Nothing, unbound, creeps from its prison. The tear grows ever worse.

She is a dragon. She hunts for her next hatching with care. The ancient half-god, split in two; she has hunted one splinter and failed. The other, then, will have to do. It will end, one way or another, in flames.

It always does.

The Adamantine Palace

The Silver King muted dragons and made dull servants of them. In fear and envy the blood-mages drove a spike into his head. Now they drink the silver ichor of the moon that drips from his wound and call themselves alchemists, but half-gods are not so easily bound. The Isul Aieha foresaw his fate and, as the Black Moon had once done, cut a piece of himself apart and made it into a seed. Along the Yamuna River, beside the Moonlight Garden, a man called Sif carries that seed to the Black Mausoleum of legend, bringing with him the one thing the Isul Aieha needs to open the way home: a memory of himself, carried in the blood of the alchemist Kataros.

Beneath the ruins of the Glass Cathedral the last alchemists brew their potions and their poisons and plot their way to freedom. They too have secrets. Closely guarded, in deep caves far out of sight, they keep the last enslaved dragon.

While in the Raksheh forest the Adamantine Man Jasaan searches for Kataros. He has failed her once, and swears he will not fail her again.

22

Kataros

Twenty-two days after landfall

It hadn’t been the easiest journey after Kataros and Skjorl escaped from the flying eyrie, but Kataros hadn’t given up. She’d followed the Yamuna upriver into the deep Raksheh, where the trees were a thousand feet tall, to where the banks rose in pale cliffs from the water, to the falls under the Moonlit Garden with crags of rock to either side, a little beach below now littered with dead, to the entrances to the Aardish Caves. In the dragon-smashed ruins of the little eyrie that had once stood there she’d found a boulder torn asunder, a hole smashed into the ground, tunnels of white stone which glowed like moonlight. She’d found the Black Mausoleum, the lost tomb of the Silver King, a simple hemisphere room of soft moonlight, and at its heart a ring of archways. She’d brought him here, led him here, the last echoes of the Silver King himself, the Isul Aieha, hidden inside the Outsider she’d found trapped in the Pinnacles and waiting to die.

She lay between them now, those arches, pale and half bled out on a white stone plinth. Spatters of her ran red and fresh over the arches around. Touched by the essence of a half-god, they shimmered silver. She felt the power coursing through the vault.
His
power. The Isul Aieha. They would open now, if he asked them. The distant sound of the Yamuna falls rumbled through the tunnels. Outside there was a dragon, but it had come too late to stop them.

The Silver King looked at her, almost sad. The stone around him was covered in her blood. It was everywhere. ‘Such a shame you couldn’t see this,’ he said. ‘Such a shame.’ Moonlight serpents wriggled from his fingers. The gateways beside him opened. Through the arch of white stone a sea of liquid silver appeared before him, and when he reached to touch it with his hand there was no resistance, no shimmer. This time the door was open. A giant moon hung low in a night sky bedecked with stars. ‘Such a shame,’ he said again.

Kataros watched through half-closed eyes. She couldn’t blame him for what he’d done to her. She’d seen him tethered and roped under a mile of mountain stone, frozen in a silent rictus scream with a hollowed-out spike driven into his head from which dripped, slow as tar, the silver essence of the half-gods, one drop enough to give an apprentice alchemist power over dragons for life. As far as she knew he was still there, yet he was here too. The Silver King. Half alive and full of wonder, and she knew that the Silver Sea beyond the gate beside him was his home. There were others there, others of his kind, the half-gods who had once fled their own catastrophe. They were waiting for him, beckoning him to join them, to leave her world behind, and here he was. The last of his kind to linger, or so she supposed. The last relic of a tragic age lost in cataclysm, of a time when even dragons had been young and the silver half-gods had strode the world in their multi­tudes.

She looked at the Silver Sea. The stones drew their power from her. They needed her blood for the tiny echo of his essence she carried within her. She could take that away, but past that they were a mystery to her. Artefacts of another time and beyond her comprehension.

‘Everything is wrong,’ whispered the Silver King to the emptiness. ‘The Great Flame? No. This.
This
.’ He sobbed, overwhelmed, and maybe he was right. With exquisite caution he reached one foot through the gateway. His foot touched the silver beyond and he gasped.

His boot had her blood on it. She reached through the link it made to touch the Silver Sea with her mind. To see, but the quicksilver consumed her as though she was nothing, washed her down, a tidal wave against a sand castle, immense and vast and ever beyond her understanding. In a blink it looked at her, took her in, absorbed her. She felt its size and its age and its utter indifference, and realised that yes, she
did
know what it was. She knew exactly.
This
was the Silver King, not the man standing in front of her. It had to be. Whatever old crippled Jeiros had said, there was nothing else that could be so colossal.

‘Alchemist! Kataros!’ A voice so distant it seemed to come from another world, one far behind her.

Help us!
she thought, simply hoping to be noticed.
We need you!

The Silver King turned slowly to look at her. Trying to shake away the presence. Trying to bring himself back to the simple world of stone and flesh.

‘Siff,’ she breathed. ‘Look at it.’

Blood and snarls whirled. An armoured man skittered between them, all edges and motion and wide urgent eyes; and Kataros thought at first that it was Skjorl, but he was too short for that, too small. He came, blade raised, and it seemed that he hardly saw her.
Silver rose from the sea beyond the gate. It flowed across the Silver King’s skin and shattered the soldier’s sword as it came down. Steel slivers flew like arrows among the arches.

Jasaan?
Her thoughts were muddied, distant and lost, dispersed through her scattered blood and deep in quicksilver. Jasaan stood before her, before the Silver King and his gateway, panting, holding the stump of his sword.

‘Jasaan!’ she gasped. ‘Don’t …’

The Silver King stood through the gate now, the Silver Sea wrapped around him, clothing him. The other arches flickered and failed, their mirrors falling black and dead and then fading to nothing, until each was simply an arch of old white stone and nothing more. All except the one where quicksilver grew into an armour around him, hard plates in layers and layers, exquisite and complex. Two silver swords grew too, short and curved, one in each hand. There were pictures in the Palace of Alchemy of this man. Drawn five hundred years ago, and exactly the same.

‘Isul Aieha,’ she said softly.

The Silver King pointed a sword at her. History crashed in as their memories merged. She saw herself call the dragons and tame them with a single word. She ruled over men, but they were nothing to her. A distraction. She was looking for something, always. Something about the spear she carried and a great and terrible thing she had once done. An age of looking but never finding, and all the while a building despair inside her, a loneliness until she could bear it no more. She saw herself come to this place and conjure these arches, saw a glimpse of her future and the end that awaited her. She saw men, blood-mages, alchemists in another guise, tear her apart and take her body to their mountains to some distant cave, saw them hold her there caught at the edge of life and death. They drank her in tiny drops, not the blood of her veins but the silver god-blood, and as they did each took a morsel of her power. Through a thin veil far away, the alchemist Kataros knew the truth. She’d been there. She’d swallowed him too. He was inside them all.

The Silver King lowered his sword and turned away.

‘No!’ Kataros struggled to her feet. She had almost to claw her way up Jasaan to rise. ‘Don’t! Don’t leave us! We need …’

The Silver Sea became a silver mirror that faded to black and died.

‘ … you.’ She began to sob. Her blood was all over the arch. She reached through it, trying to open the way again, but there was nothing. Dead stone, that was all it was now. It wanted more than a mere alchemist, and the Silver King was gone, and the world would not be saved. Tears blurred her sight. Jasaan hovered about her, mumbling words she didn’t hear. She didn’t want him, didn’t want to leave this spot, alone and desolate though it was. Eventually he left and went and did whatever it was that Adamantine Men did. Wandered around the other tunnels probably, looking for things to hit. Not here, that was all that mattered, all she cared about.

Alone, Kataros stared at the archways. The Silver King. She’d come here to find his secret, and all she’d done was take him home.

The Black Moon comes again
, whispered the last echoes of his memory inside her.
Make right what I could not.

‘But we need you,’ she whispered, over and over. She’d lost so much blood. Everything was a haze of missed possibilities. She drifted off, taken by her own weakness, and when she opened her eyes again Jasaan was standing over her. He offered her water. She gulped it greedily.

‘I came to find you,’ he told her. ‘I’m supposed to bring you back to the Pinnacles. All the riders who came with me are dead now. So it’s just you and me, and I never meant to take you back there anyway.’ He shrugged. ‘Tell me what you want me to do.’

He’d come to save her then, had he? Hadn’t ever crossed his mind that she didn’t
want
to be saved, but too late for that now. She shivered. Her fingers and her arms were stained red. ‘We go back to the Spur,’ she said. ‘Back to Grand Master Jeiros and the other alchemists who survive. We tell them what we’ve found and we come here again, and Jeiros will make these gateways open and beg the Silver King to save us. That’s all we have left.’
The Black Moon comes again
. Another half-god. Another who had lingered, and so the Silver King wasn’t the last after all, and so perhaps there
was
still hope.
Make right what I could not.
Something to do with the Adamantine Spear that Jeiros guarded under the Spur. That was all she knew. All the echo had shown her.

Jasaan looked sceptical. ‘Back through the Raksheh? There are snappers.’

‘We’ll use the river.’

‘There’s the worm.’

‘I will soothe it.’

‘We’ll get hungry.’

‘I’ll show you what you can eat. There was a dragon outside. Has it gone?’

‘Yes. Half buried under a landslide. Are you hurt?’

‘I’m weak, that’s all.’

Jasaan nodded and waited to be told what to do. While he was waiting, Kataros curled up and went back to sleep. Watch over her for a bit, that’s what he could do, and by the time she woke again night had fallen. She crept past Jasaan’s snores and sat in the mouth of the tunnel behind the dragon-thrown boulders that had once sealed the Black Mausoleum shut. She loitered there a while, listening. There weren’t any sounds of people out here in the forest, only the night noises of the Raksheh, the rustle of monkeys high up in the trees, the flap of bats, the now-and-then calls of owls and other nightbirds. The air here, far under a canopy of leaves that turned even brilliant sunshine into twilight, was still. The night sky cast an odd light across the overgrown landing field, a flicker now and then of a deep reddish blue …

A tinge of violet …

A chill rippled through her bones. She crept from behind the boulders out into the open and there it was, floating in the sky overhead, dropping into the gap between the monstrous trees that was the old eyrie landing field: a great black mountain of stone hanging between the stars, purple light crashing out of its jagged underbelly, flickering with now-and-then flashes of inner lightning. The flying castle of Farakkan. A dragon circled it. Only a small one, not the great gold monster that had come after her yesterday, but a dragon was a dragon all the same. A crude cage was coming slowly down from the flying eyrie’s rim. The same cages they’d used to lift her and Skjorl and Siff from the plains of the Fury valley.

‘Jasaan! Jasaan!’ She ran back into the Black Mausoleum and shook him awake, then dragged him out to see what had come in the night. The dragon swooped and soared up the scree of tumbled stone and clinging earth. It flared its wings and settled on the ruin of the Moonlight Garden over the cliffs of the Yamuna falls. The cage from the eyrie touched the ground, and Kataros gasped, for the eyes of the man who stepped from it glowed with a brilliant silver light, the light she’d seen in the eyes of the Silver King as he’d left her only hours before.

She knew at once who he was.
What
he was. The Isul Aieha had shown her before he left. This was the Black Moon, and as he passed where she hid, Kataros recognised him as the pale-skinned man from the eyrie who’d asked her questions when she’d been his prisoner. What was she supposed to do – follow him? She didn’t know.
Make right what I could not.
Chase him down and beg his help? But that didn’t feel right. She was supposed to stop him, but stop him from what? And how?

I’ll get rid of her.
That’s what the woman on the eyrie had said, that woman who called herself speaker. She’d said it twice.

Here was a half-god. Another who could tame dragons!

The Black Moon walked to the tunnel into the Mausoleum, blind to her, striding quickly. Kataros hesitated, torn by indecision …

The Black Moon crosses the open field, heading for a cleft between two stones. From behind the half-god’s eyes Berren Crowntaker sees two figures dart away to hide in the moonlight, but the Black Moon has no thoughts to spare for such trivial things. He has come here to finish what began a thousand years into the past, and will not be swerved. He walks through a cleft and into a tunnel of white stone that runs deeper into the earth, the silver fire from his eyes lighting his way until he reaches a circle of archways that seem to Berren much like a larger imitation of Baros Tsen’s bathhouse in the eyrie. The Black Moon stops in the midst of them, riven with anticipation, all-consuming hope and hunger, all-devouring fear and scorn. Beyond these gates lies something so yearned for, and yet so utterly despised.

The Black Moon stoops to look at the blood on the floor. He touches it and tastes it and finds an echo of his prey.
Isul Aieha. Brother.
He has been here. And he is weak, so very weak. The Black Moon reaches for the gates, and Berren finds himself whispering:
Don’t
.

Fingers touch stone. Everywhere blooms to shimmering liquid silver. A harsh violent light flays his flesh and pierces his heart, eating, burning, blinding. It is the same cold and hateful fire that cast him from the Silver Sea. The Black Moon screams, the taste of scorching knives driven into his head. He staggers and reels and flees into the night.