The Silver Kings (4 page)

She ran her fingers over his brittle places of dead white skin. ‘You have it too, don’t you?’ She needed him to say it. ‘The dragon-disease.’

‘Yes.’

And that was the last of her reasons gone. ‘How long?’

‘Since before Merizikat.’ Dust flew in clouds as they fell onto the mouldy bed together, where she and Jehal had once made love. He drove inside her, harsh and hungry, so different and so much more honest. She came almost at once and so did he, howling like animals, half mad, clinging on, each looking at the other as though
at a stranger they’d never seen before, eyes as wide as the world. It wasn’t enough. She coaxed him back and straddled him, demanding him, pulling his hands over her. She felt the dim pain of bruises and half-healed wounds, dulled by lust and wine. She rode him, half blind, half forgetting he was even there, until she stuttered and gasped and arched and cried out again, and even then it wasn’t enough. She lost herself inside him. Exorcising the pain and the old betrayals, though they’d surely be back with the sunrise, burning sharp as ever. Twice more, and then the wine finally took her and she passed into dreamless sleep, a black oblivion as deep and silent as the void of the storm-dark’s heart.

It was still dark when she woke. Her head thundered. Beside her, Tuuran was snoring, sleeping the sleep of the damned and the just. She looked at him lying there and knew she’d done a terrible and stupid thing. One more to add to the list. She dressed and slipped outside, found a quiet corner to squat and take a piss, and called to Diamond Eye; he came and cocked his head at her, as if to ask what
that
was all about, and she had no answer but to fly together, soaring to the freedom of the sky, through rain and cloud to the endless blue beyond for hours and hours. She leaned into him and hugged his scales and dozed until her head was clear.

The ships reached the city later that day, and the eyrie came not long behind. Zafir kept to the skies, high and watching out for other dragons, but swooped beneath the cloud now and then, ­gliding above the steady stream of boats from the ships to the shore, all carrying men and supplies from Merizikat. She watched the cranes on the side of the eyrie with their up and down, over and over all through the day, lifting everything inside, filling it ready to burst. The dragon yard swarmed with men and sacks and crates, and it took the next day and most of the one after before they were done. By then the dragon yard had become a village of tents and shelters strung with ropes and poles as men looked for places to lay their heads. She brought Diamond Eye to land on the rim and surveyed their work. The eyrie was full, every nook and cranny, every room stuffed wall to wall with food and water and ropes and Flame-knew-what, or else strung with hammocks. She sought out Tuuran and told him he’d done well, and if there was any thought
in either of them of that night in dead King Tyan’s palace, they both kept it carefully hidden.

Eventually, because there was no getting away from it, she sought out the Black Moon, sat on the eyrie rim, eyes dim glowing silver, oblivious to the hive of bustle around him.

‘You know where to go,’ he told her.

The eyrie left Furymouth that night. It drifted sloth-like north along the course of the Fury towards the Pinnacles, guided by the Black Moon’s dragons. In the morning Zafir found Tuuran with White Vish and his two favoured lieutenants. Halfteeth and Snacksize, born in the Worldspine and sold in the slave markets of Furymouth, both of them, so she wasn’t the only one coming home to find old wounds bleeding again. The Furymouth slave markets were overgrown with weeds now, but Halfteeth was still looking for someone to hurt. He wasn’t much liking White Vish and his Adamantine Men, and there would surely be blood if he ever found himself facing a dragon-rider with no one nearby to keep him in check.

‘Farakkan.’ Zafir led Tuuran to the eyrie rim and pointed into the distance. The cloud above and the fields below hazed into a grey fade of rain, but somewhere out there, if they followed the river’s meanders, was a heap of shacks and a mound of mud called Farakkan. A bustling stinking hole of a place that became an island every spring when the Fury burst its banks. Zafir had seen it often enough from above, but she’d never been there. She couldn’t think of a single reason why a dragon-rider would ever want to.

‘Holiness?’

‘Survivors, Night Watchman.’

‘In Farakkan?’ He snorted.

‘Someone needs to go and look.’ She kept her face a mask.

‘Right. In Farakkan.’ They both knew she was sending him away to keep them apart, though she might have sent him to do this either way. There probably wasn’t anyone left alive in Farakkan because there wasn’t anywhere deep underground to hide, but what if she was wrong? They should at least look, shouldn’t they?

‘Yes.’

To her surprise Tuuran laughed. ‘I suppose anyone who survived living there all their life might survive living anywhere.’

There wasn’t any more to say, but she couldn’t bring herself simply to turn and walk away. He deserved better than that. On impulse, struggling to find anything else, she saluted him, fist pressed to her breast. ‘Have a care, Night Watchman. Return. I will watch for dragons for you.’

He grew an inch taller right there in front of her. Pride. Flame, he almost grinned as he glanced at Halfteeth. ‘I’ll take White Vish and the new men, since they know the land. Halfteeth, you’re in charge while I’m gone.’ He bared his teeth, letting that grin out this time, and slapped Halfteeth on the shoulder. ‘Try not to be an idiot.’

Halfteeth snorted. Snacksize nudged him and gave Tuuran a nod. ‘I’ll keep an eye on him, boss. Bring us back a present, will you? Something nice.’ The three of them laughed while Zafir, suddenly an outsider, stood in awkward silence. If Halfteeth and Snacksize had real names, she’d never heard them, and she never would.

They passed over Farakkan later that morning, not that there was much left of it. The town had been built of wood, and the only thing that had saved any of it at all from the dragons was the constant wetness there. There were outlines that might once have been houses, but most of it was a black char-smear across the hilltop and sodden fields. The eyrie paused while cranes lowered a pair of cages with Tuuran and White Vish and a dozen other men, and then moved on, stopping again for the night a few miles further north, close to where the Ghostwater emerged from the hidden tunnels of the Silver King’s Ways, which ran all the way under the ground to the Pinnacles. Zafir looked over the eyrie as the sun set, over the dragon yard sloshing with half an inch of water. The rain hadn’t stopped for the best part of three days, and the yard had no drains. They’d have to do something about that before they had rivers running through the eyrie tunnels and people drowning down there. There were too many Merizikat men setting up their tents and shelters too. If the dragons came – and come they would, and soon – everything that wasn’t underground would burn. The dragons loitering about her old home, Diamond Eye told her, were paying attention now.

She sent for Halfteeth. ‘Set some people to bailing out that water,’ she told him. ‘I don’t want it getting any deeper. And is there really no space below for all these men?’

Halfteeth looked at her hard. No bowing or kowtowing from this one. He took a breath and nodded. ‘Some of us like it better up here.’ He smiled, half-mocking her. ‘Out under the sky, no roof, no walls. At a guess I might say you do too, your Holiness.’

So he knew of her fear of small cramped places in the dark? But the eyrie innards weren’t dark at all. The Silver King’s white stone glowed soft as the moon in the night, gentle as an early-morning sun in the day, warm and comforting, and she’d grown up and lived half her life in a place exactly the same; but before she could answer him, his face changed. The smug self-satisfied lurking murderer shifting in an instant to a taut-faced killer cornered by something much bigger.

She knew that look. The Black Moon was behind her, eyes glowing silver, moonlight bright.

‘There’s someone on the ground,’ he said to Halfteeth as though Zafir wasn’t even there. ‘Someone curious.’ He pointed to the west. ‘Bring them here.’

Halfteeth scurried off. He didn’t have a choice, because, like almost all of them, Halfteeth had met the Black Moon’s deadly knife, and the half-god had cut away a piece of his soul and made him into a slave.

Zafir rounded on him. ‘If you …’ But the Black Moon was already walking away.

One day, half-god or not, I will
make
you look at me.

Have a care, little one
, warned Diamond Eye.

Zafir found Snacksize and told her to deal with bailing out the dragon yard instead, then took herself into the tunnels and to the cell she shared with Myst and Onyx. She curled up with them to sleep, and it was only after the next dawn that anyone bothered to tell her that Halfteeth had come back in the night with an alchemist, and with a couple of others, and that one of them was an Adamantine Man, and that Halfteeth was busy kicking the shit out of him.

3

The Crowntaker

Three days after landfall

Crazy Mad, Berren the Crowntaker, the Black Moon, whatever he was today. Not the Black Moon, because his eyes burned with silver moonlight when he was that. The Crowntaker, then. He was already there when Zafir reached the round stone cell. He twirled the Starknife in his hand. It was a strange thing: the blade shone like polished silver and patterns swirled inside it. The shape was odd, more like a cleaver than a knife, while the golden hilt was carved into a pattern of stars that made a thousand eyes. It cut souls, not flesh, cut pieces out of people and made them into what they were not. The Black Moon used it to cut away the will of men and make them into his slaves. His instruments, he said. Extensions of his desire. And Zafir had told him there were to be no more slaves, neither men nor dragons, but he did it anyway when he thought she wouldn’t see. He was as he wished to be, and would not be changed or swayed, and the only thing that struck her as strange was that he bothered to try and hide it from her at all.

It was a terrible thing, that knife, and so was the Black Moon who held it. But behind his eyes Zafir saw it was the Crowntaker with her today.

There was a man tied to a chair. The Adamantine Man Halfteeth had found, at a guess. He’d already been beaten half to death.

‘Where is he?’ Zafir hissed. ‘Where’s Halfteeth? I’ll have him skinned for this!’ She could talk to the Crowntaker easily enough when the half-god inside was asleep or resting or … elsewhere, or whatever it was he did in there. Then the Crowntaker was simply Tuuran’s friend. Which was a shame, because he was doomed, and he knew it, and so did she, and the only one who refused to see the inevitable was Tuuran himself.

‘His name is Skjorl,’ the Crowntaker drawled. ‘And I sent Halfteeth away before you got here in order to save him from being strung up by his balls. Let the big man deal with it when he’s back from Farakkan.’

‘And your half-god?’ she asked. The Crowntaker winced as though she’d stabbed him. The look he gave her was half pleading, half sharpened edges.

‘Not here just now. He’s weak from crossing the storm-dark. But I’m sure he’s watching.’ He spat and turned away and then turned back. ‘This lot think they know something about the Silver King’s tomb. Does that mean anything to you? Because it certainly does to the Black Moon, and if we don’t get it out of them nicely then he’ll wake up again and do it the only way he knows.’ He paused, desolation in his face. ‘This one, Skjorl, he was an Adamantine Man back when that meant something.’ He paused in case she knew the name, but of course she didn’t. A speaker never knew her legions. ‘Anyway, he doesn’t know much. The alchemist’s the one. Skjorl here says her name is Kataros. You heard of her?’

Zafir shrugged.

‘He says the third one with them claims to have found this tomb, but he’s not in a good way, and so I was saving him for last. I’m guessing an alchemist might know best anyway.’

‘Says he’s found the Silver King’s tomb?’ Zafir scoffed. ‘Then he’s a liar. But an alchemist would be useful. Be gentle if you can.’

She watched the Adamantine Man Skjorl hauled away. Tuuran would have a use for him, if he could be willingly turned – if
he could manage to live in the same legion as Halfteeth after what Halfteeth had just done to him. Maybe he could. She was the speaker of the realms, and the Adamantine Men served without question. It was their creed, drilled into them as children. Was that slavery? They could always choose otherwise, couldn’t they?

She watched as the alchemist Kataros was dragged in and tied to the same chair. She winced at that. Wouldn’t it be better to ask them in a quiet calm? As friends? Feed and water them, shelter them and then get to what mattered? But she could feel the Crowntaker’s impatience, the lurking sense of the Black Moon beneath the surface, and none of them wanted that. She snapped her fingers at one of Halfteeth’s men. ‘Go and get Bellepheros. Quick, now!’ Another precious alchemist. He would thank her for that, and Bellepheros, of any of them, would seem like a friend.

‘Where is it?’ asked the Crowntaker. He spoke slowly and carefully. Zafir watched, trying to decide whether she remembered this alchemist’s face. Months had passed. Years. It was still a shock to suddenly remember, again and again, that this ash-scarred ruin of a land was her home, that everything she once knew had changed.

No more slaves.
But tell that to the Black Moon.

‘Where is what?’ The alchemist clenched her fists. ‘Who are you?’

‘The Silver King’s tomb,’ whispered Zafir, because that certainly
did
mean something, and possibly everything. ‘That’s what you’re looking for. Where is it?’ Was that where she might find an answer? In the relics of the Silver King, the Black Moon’s half-god brother who had once taught blood-mages how to steal the memories of a dragon and dull them into pliant beasts? The woken dragons remembered him with a simmering fury. The Silver King. The Isul Aieha. Diamond Eye spat fire at his name for what he’d done, a sure way to arouse his ire if ever she needed it.

She stretched, easing the stiffness out of her aching back and surly bones, the last twinges of that wound from Merizikat that had close to killed her. Perhaps another alchemist would draw Bellepheros from the gloom that had settled over him since the loss of Chay-Liang.

‘I believe it to be in the Aardish Caves,’ said the alchemist at last. ‘Underneath the Moonlight Garden, where Vishmir always thought it was.’

Zafir tried not to laugh. Vishmir the Magnificent had spent twenty years looking for the Silver King’s Black Mausoleum and had never found it. Hundreds of dragons. Ten thousand men. And now, amid the end of the world, some scrawny alchemist claimed that Vishmir had been looking in the right place all along, and yet had somehow missed it?

‘Forgive me, Highness, Holiness, lord, lady, but, with the most humble respect, please, who are you?’

‘Who am I? Who am
I
?’ Zafir didn’t know whether to laugh or weep or fall into a rage. A little of all three, perhaps. Two years gone and the world turned on its head. ‘I am your speaker. Do you not know me?’ She searched for a glimmer of recognition as the alchemist looked her over, and found nothing. If anyone should remember, surely an alchemist …

‘Lady Lystra?’

A torrent of fury tore at her. The frustration of their months in Merizikat bursting its dam, the wounded pain since she’d left, forced to her bed as she healed, unable to fly. The searing sense of loss as she’d circled Furymouth and wandered the abandoned passages of Jehal’s old palace. All this way, all this time, and she was finally home and to what? To nothing. To an alien land where dragons had burned her cities and her people had forgotten her. And Lystra …? She gritted her teeth.
Little Lystra. Jehal’s starling bride.
Oh, but she was past that now, wasn’t she? Surely she was.

‘Forgive me, your Holiness.’

‘Forgive?’ Zafir heard her own voice, hard and cold as ice. Forgive? For what? For not remembering? Wasn’t that perhaps for the best?

The Crowntaker turned his head. He looked hard at Zafir, straight through her and beyond. There was a glimmer of silver in his eye. Not yet burning bright, but she knew the signs. The Black Moon inside him was on the verge of waking. ‘Do you know these places?’ he asked her. ‘Tell me!’

‘The Aardish Caves? I’ve been there. Follow the Yamuna river deep into the Raksheh forest towards the foothills of the Worldspine and there’s a waterfall, a cataract. The Moonlight Garden sits atop the bluffs on the south side overlooking the top of the falls. It’s a ruin. Across the river at the foot of the falls are the entrances to the caves.’ The words trotted out of her. She wasn’t really listening to herself but was watching the Crowntaker’s eyes for glimmers of the half-god. Sometimes little hints of desire leaked from his face at times like this. The Adamantine Spear. That, above all else, was why he’d brought them here. But the name of the Silver King stirred him too, the Isul Aieha. When chances came, she looked hard for the tiny tells of his secret avarice. ‘There’s a story about the Isul Aieha,’ she said, ‘that he created a mausoleum for himself before he died. “Made of black marble across the great river from the endless caves,” or so the legend says. Speaker Voranin’s riders thought they’d found it. Vishmir, who followed him, searched the
Aardish Caves for nigh on twenty years. It’s not there, Crowntaker, but Vishmir had a mausoleum of his own built in the same place. There’s an eyrie, a small one.’ Or there had been when she was last there. Most likely it was gone now. Abandoned and burned.

The veil across the Black Moon was paper thin now, and Zafir desperately didn’t want him to wake, not here and now, not with a second alchemist right here in front of him and the Starknife already in his hand. She poked Kataros. ‘We don’t need this one,’ she said sharply. ‘Get the third one in here, the one who really knows.’ Bellepheros could have her. He’d like nothing better. It might even cheer him up, but either way Zafir decided she’d be damned if she’d sit by and watch as the Black Moon cut this woman and made her his slave. An alchemist was worth too much …

She turned to Halfteeth’s guardsmen. ‘And get Bellepheros!’ Where was he? Why wasn’t he here already? ‘Is Tuuran back yet?’ Although how could he be?

‘Bellepheros? He’s
here
?’
The alchemist looked startled at the name. So she remembered
him
, at least, did she?

The Crowntaker’s eyes flared.

‘Bring the other one,’ Zafir snapped. ‘Now!’ The one who’d seen the Black Mausoleum with his own eyes.
Get this alchemist out of here!

‘What about her?’ asked the Crowntaker. The Black Moon was a hair’s breadth behind the Crowntaker’s eyes, twirling the knife, and even if the Black Moon was looking elsewhere, the Crowntaker himself knew perfectly well how to use it too.

‘I’ll get rid of her. And the first one. As you wish.’ She could feel the edge of her own panic.

‘I suppose we should wait for Bellepheros …’

‘No. I said get rid of her. Both of them.’ Tuuran could have the first and Bellepheros the second. They’d probably all be very happy together, but not here, not now;
now
she needed this alchemist away. Safe. She nodded to the soldiers of Tuuran’s guard. They took the alchemist’s arms and held her down while they untied her ropes. Zafir kept her eyes on the Crowntaker. ‘I’ll get her out of here and keep her watched,’ she said. ‘I’ll come for her when I’m ready. It’s the third one who matters, isn’t it? The one who knows where it is?’
Bellepheros! Where are you?
As soon as he arrived she could be done with this façade …

The fortress shuddered. A tremor rippled the walls. The Crowntaker jerked. His eyes burned, and there, for a moment, was the Black Moon, the half-god inside, awake and potent, flaring before simmering back beneath the surface; but before she could say a word more, Halfteeth skidded around the corner and almost fell into her.

‘You!’ She grabbed at him. ‘I’ll—’

‘Dragons!’ he yelled, oblivious. ‘Dragons are coming. Dragons!’

The fear in him spread like plague to the men around her. The room fell into pandemonium. Zafir closed her eyes. Every day since they’d crossed the storm-dark she’d been waiting for this.

‘Get her out of here and get the other one!’ She rounded on the Crowntaker as Halfteeth’s soldiers bundled the alchemist away. ‘
You’re
the Bloody Judge,’ she hissed. ‘
You
deal with them. Wake up your half-god if you must.’ But the half-god wouldn’t help them. He never did. She might watch him burn with silver light and disintegrate anything that came close enough to bother him, but he wouldn’t actually do anything more until the very end, when out would come the knife to cut more slaves to his will. Harvesting the survivors. That was the way of him.

Halfteeth and his soldiers scattered. Zafir raced to the dragon yard and the shanty town of huts and sailcloth shelters. Grey clouds muted the daylight. It was still raining. There was still half an inch of water underfoot.

Where are they?
She launched the thought to Diamond Eye, high in the sky above, claws wrapped around one of the great chains by which the dragons pulled the eyrie through the air.
And why didn’t you warn me before?

They deceived me, little one. They hid their purpose from me.
The rest of the answer came as a storm of wind and flames. A dragon swept over the eyrie, fire pouring out of its mouth, tearing through rain, scorching wood and cloth dry and setting them alight. Plumes of steam rose where the dragon’s breath struck the yard. Zafir ducked back into the tunnel as the wind that followed the dragon’s wings ripped through the remains, sucking the debris into the air,
tearing rope and cloth, lifting and scattering them like autumn leaves in a gale.

Drive them away. When I’m ready, come to me.
She wasn’t ­armoured.

Diamond Eye answered with a familiar scorn, but she knew he would come. Screams followed the fire, men and women caught in the open even though they were told, always, to be close to shelter. Lightning cracked from a Taiytakei cannon mounted on the eyrie walls. A dragon shrieked in pain, and then the first of the Black Moon’s soldiers came running through the steam and fog and hurtled into the tunnel, barging into her and almost knocking her down. Zafir bolted the other way, out into the open, taking her chance, racing across the dragon yard, hugging the wall as fire rained again, as lightning and thunderbolts shook the sky. Clouds of steam scalded her face. She couldn’t see how many dragons had come.

Are they few or countless?
She reached the next tunnel entrance and dived inside with the last handful of soldiers. When it came to dragons, Tuuran had drilled them well: run fast and hide deep.