The Silver Kings (40 page)

Diamond Eye roved thoughts and memories trapped in the caves of the Spur. Zafir surfed them with the dragon as she led the way. She felt an old twisting glee, the delight of enemies oblivious, triumph amid the murder of others, a vicious hateful delight grown long ago, seeds planted in a child groomed to be a dragon-queen, fed and nourished for as long as she could remember. Yet entwined around them was something much less familiar. A sadness like a strangle-vine. A longing and a wishing for something different.

Her torch raked the tunnels, thin narrow winding things crudely cut from black stone. Tuuran and his Adamantine Men followed, moving brisk and sharp. The air, rank and stale, filled with the ammonia reek of waste, of men squeezed together, worse than the old slave markets of Furymouth and the filthy rooms on Baros Tsen’s eyrie where the Scales had lived. She saw glimmers of light ahead, and then the tunnel widened into a fissure rising endlessly into the mountains above, lit by a scatter of alchemical lamps, too few to do more than shake a hopeless fist at the enveloping darkness. Furtive feral eyes watched from behind pillars of stone.

Diamond Eye wandered their thoughts. Men, women and ­children, wandering here and there, half-starved with nothing to do, with no purpose and no hope.

Sometimes I wish we’d never left the islands,
she thought, but the dragon didn’t reply.

They crossed the fissure. Tuuran and his men marched around her, a sharp cluster of incipient violence moving quick and taut, lightning and axes at the ready, shields raised, menace barely leashed. The path narrowed again into a winding tunnel branching left and right, twisting and turning ever closer to the spear. They crossed another cave of cowering eyes, of filthy hopeless fugitives. Beyond were passages carved square with niches for alchemical lamps, dusty and empty, the last clinging scatter of some ancient tiling visible now and then on the floor, welded to the stone by age. They were close now, and Zafir could smell the alchemy. She should have asked Kataros how many alchemists were down here …

The caves opened into a crude mockery of the Silver King’s hall of arches. Pools of light spilled out of them. More eyes staring. Her Adamantine Men clustered tight, moving quick, daring anyone to stand in their way. A boy barrelled out of the gloom, turned and froze right in their path. A woman came after him. She skittered to a halt, terrified, twitching, too afraid to flee. Old men and young stared and did nothing. Through Diamond Eye Zafir felt a melange of fear and hostility over a crushing undertow of apathy and despair. Tuuran lunged, scooped the boy in his huge arms and set him down out of the way. The twitching woman darted back into the shadows and both were gone. Zafir stared after them. Her stride faltered. She stopped and then realised she didn’t know what she meant to do. Give them food? She didn’t have any. Tell them she was their speaker and would set everything right, was that it? And how, exactly, would she do that?

‘Holiness?’

They were broken, the men who lived here, and she had nothing to offer them. Nothing.

She marched on. The hall ended in wide steps, ancient stone worn smooth by the passage of feet over a thousand years. The old Palace of Alchemy, part of whatever the Glass Cathedral had been, built so long ago that the stones under these mountains had no memory of dragons.

From before the Splintering, little one. From before the Black Moon.

There were pictograms on the walls in places. Crude carvings. She wanted to stop and look at them, to study them, but there was no time. The spear was close.
People should not live like this, dragon. Your kind have done this to us.

Five hundred years of alchemy and slavery, little one.

The steps led to a second hall. Straight across was a double door, the only door she’d seen since the alchemy-bound entrance. Zafir stopped.
So what hope does that leave us?

None, little one. We will soar and hunt. Your kind will burn and die.

There is nothing else?

Nothing.

Zafir offered the darkness a nod and a taut little smile. Queen Jaslyn carried some foolish notion of a day when dragons and dragon-queens might live side by side, but Zafir knew better, had known and understood for as long as she could remember. Dominate or die. That was all there was.

Diamond Eye laughed at her. He did that now and then, when he thought she was a little too much like a tiny flaring dragon.

‘The spear.’ She nudged Tuuran and pointed at the door across the hall. ‘Through there. With Grand Master Jeiros and a pair of alchemists and four Adamantine Men. Are you ready?’

They burst through side by side, her and Tuuran. Musty ­shadows filled the chamber beyond. Zafir felt the size and the space, stale air that smelled of old dust and wasn’t as rank as the feral caves outside. A lamp rested on a table. Four Adamantine Men sat around it, playing dice. Their faces snapped up. Zafir ignored them and went straight for the back room and the alchemists. Alchemists were far more dangerous. Lightning from behind her knocked one of the Adamantine Men sprawling. A second bolt took another one down and then they were on their feet.

‘Jeiros! Grand Master!’

Zafir tried to run past them. An Adamantine Man swung an axe at her. She sliced it with her bladeless knife, lopping the haft in two. The soldier jerked and stared, bewildered at what she’d done. She battered him with her shield, trying to keep him off balance. A moment later two of Tuuran’s men barged him down. She pushed past, not waiting to see how it ended.

They come.

Half with the dragon’s eyes, half with her own, Zafir saw the three alchemists together in the next room starting to move. Crippled Jeiros in impotent fury, two others snatching up knives, ready to cut skin and bleed their lethal blood to burn whatever it touched, or else go crawling into a man’s soul. She walked smartly to the doorway, dropped her gold-glass shield and dived through the curtain with a lightning thrower in each hand. She let fly with thunder on the other alchemists before their knives could even move, then levelled both wands at Jeiros, sitting in his wheeled chair beside his bed. The wands were spent, but he had no way to know that.

‘Look at me, Jeiros.’ She lifted her helm and let him see her face. Her hair still hadn’t fully grown back. Maybe in the gloom he wouldn’t …

‘You!’

‘Who am I, Jeiros?’

‘You’re dead!’

‘Who
am
I, Jeiros?’

‘Zafir!’ He bared his teeth. ‘Zafir the ruiner!’

The Adamantine Spear stood propped in a corner of the room, dumped there like an old broom. Zafir took a moment to savour the look on Jeiros’s face – the shock, the horror, the terror, the loathing, all naked in front of her – then she walked past him and took the spear and held it tight. She paused a moment to see if anything would happen, but no, it was like picking up any other spear – no blaze of mystic power, no transformation, no soaring insight, no more than the dozens of other times she’d held it. Just a weapon, lethal, brutal and sharp, perfection in its form. She twirled the spear between her hands and then snapped the point at Jeiros, the tip poised at his throat.

‘You despised me from the very start.’ She kept the tip perfectly still, touching his skin but not cutting. ‘Tell Lystra I have returned on the back of a dragon with the Silver King at my side, with Grand Master Bellepheros and with the sorcery of the Taiytakei.’ Her voice trembled, choked by being home, by seeing Jeiros in front of her again. The spear never wavered. ‘Two days, Grand Master. I will wait for her in the Zar Oratorium. Fearless under the open sky. She may parley with me then. You may tell her I am not here for either blood or throne, not that I expect either of you to believe it. You may tell her that I have her sister, and I will give her Jaslyn for this spear.’

She wheeled away and left, quickly before he could recover his wits, before the two alchemists she’d stunned found their senses again. She picked up her shield and marched through the chaos outside with the spear held high, visor open, making sure they all saw her face.

‘I am Zafir. Dragon-queen. Speaker.’

She left the way they had come. On the way out she stopped at the bronze door close to the scaffold and went inside, in part to see if the story of the spear was true, in part as a mercy to the dragon that the alchemists kept in chains. No one tried to stop her.

28

The Black Moon

Forty days after landfall

Through flickers and glimpses the last shades of Berren Crown­taker, the Bloody Judge of Tethis, once apprenticed to the thief-taker of Deephaven, soars on the wings of the Black Moon. He speaks to the dragons of the eyrie. He commands them to fly and they answer. He feels no snarling resentment from them as he does when the dragon-queen demands their service, only vicious delight and an eagerness to be unleashed. They know him. They remember him. In the deep ferment of the Black Moon’s thoughts, they see the future the half-god means to bring, and Berren sees it too.

The eyrie flies west to the setting sun, abandoning Diamond Eye and dragon-queen alike to their fates. A handful of one-time slaves and cripples remains. The Black Moon barely deigns to notice them. They are, to him, as insubstantial as the wind.

Berren sees this new unknown land in snips and snatches between the wax and wane of the Black Moon’s veil. Voices and whispers pulled out of the air. Alchemists. The source of their power. The dragons know. A dragon called Snow. A place called the Worldspine. He stands on the rim and sees through the Black Moon’s eyes as the eyrie drifts high over a maze of canyons and chasms, lifeless and pale between tangles of churning white water that tumble and slice headlong through pillars of dry dead stone in their rush for the great canyon valley of the Fury.

On and up. The sun sets. The beat of dragon wings goes on. The Black Moon paces the walls over stars and mountain peaks. The moon rises, its silver light a cloak of animosity draped upon the world below. The Black Moon turns his back. He will look at the sky, at the ground, at the stars, at the night, at the sun when it rises, but not at the moon. The moon is dead to him. The moon has cast him out.

The night passes. The sun rises again among mountains that are now towering things, glowering and guarding their territories across deep wide valleys. The eyrie floats on, deeper and deeper. The mountains rise sharper, closer, piled on top of each other, squashed together now. The valleys become ravines while summit snow spreads ever further. Life diminishes and slips away, hiding from the cold in the sheltered depths of the valleys, driven from this freezing airless place. In the distance wait a thousand dragons, tight with a hunger for answers.

He feels the Black Moon’s thrill. The half-god has found what he is looking for. The sun comes down, fiery red, and with it a fury of dragons, swirling from the depths of the Worldspine. While the others circle high, so many they darken the sky, a single white hunter lands in the heart of the eyrie yard. The Black Moon walks to greet her. He touches a hand to the dragon’s scales.

Beloved Memory of a Lover Distant and Lost. I remember your soul. Your scales shine bright again.

This world is ours now, Black Moon.

I claim your service, Beloved Memory, to overthrow the tyranny of gods who demand we abase ourselves before them. To make the world as it was meant to be. As it ever was.

A thousand years you were gone, Black Moon. That vision is yours, not ours.

The Black Moon touches the white dragon again. With a surge of silver light he reaches to grasp the soul of Alimar Ishtan vei Atheriel and turn her to ash. Then thinks better of it.

The little death
, he says as Snow flies away, and all the other dragons with her, all save the handful slaved by the knife at his side, touched by the essence of the ephemeral goddess of the stars, remote and aloof so no invocation will touch her, yet within that knife a power greater than any half-god.
The little death comes and goes, dragon, but a final end to devour you grows even now in Xibaiya. You are dragons. Will you simply bow your heads and fade?

The sun sinks once more. The tips of the mountains shine like fire while the slopes below grow dark with shadow. The eyrie crests a steep plunge of earth and jutting boulders above the ravine of some nameless river. It drifts into a narrow valley, its flat bottom lush and green, its walls sheer cliffs pitted with fissures, stained with streaks of black and dark green. Tiny trickles of frothing water bubble over the cliffs and dissolve into clouds of spray. In every possible crack stunted trees and bushes struggle to grow. There are tiny streaks of silver which glow at night like moonlight.

The eyrie sinks. The valley ends at a sheer rise of jagged stone. Water bustles from caves at its foot. It skips and rustles between scattered trees and then past a tiny village which is no more than a dozen scraps of huts thrown together, until it tumbles over the edge and into the ravine now left behind. Patches of open ground where men once grew food run wild and abandoned. At the end of the valley the eyrie stops. The Black Moon walks to the rim. He watches the ground rise towards him, a ramshackle spatter of burned-out buildings, of roofless stone walls, little yards, charred-dead skeletal trees, their ruin already choked by grass and vines. He steps off the edge into the rush of air. Hard icy wind rips the breath from his lungs and brings tears to his eyes as he falls. The ground blurs and …

Stops.

He is upright. Standing. Doesn’t know how, just is. The silver light of the Black Moon burns fierce and bright inside him, swallowing everything. Between narrow cliffs all around the sun doesn’t touch the ground. It is a twilight place. The river chatters from its caves, shallow over a litter of stone. Close to the water Berren sees an old shield almost as big as a man, and then another with an arrow sticking out of it, half drowned in weeds. Beside them lies a rotting crossbow. When he looks harder he sees more. Axes. Helms. More shields. Metal rusting, warped wood. Some old skirmish, years past.

The Black Moon steps into the water. He walks against its ice-cold rush into the cave. The mountain swallows them, quickly dark save for the silver pouring from the Black Moon’s eyes. He whispers words, a name.
Isul Aieha
. A hot fire of vengeance, brewed and festered for a thousand years. He touches the walls, cold and damp as they close too narrow for a full-grown dragon to pass.

The half-god walks on, steps sure and certain in the cold dark water. The cave widens. A sand beach rises to either side, the river quick and agile through it. Abandoned. Flame scoured. The air smells of smoke and a touch of sulphurous fire.

What do you want?
Berren tries to stop, to reach out and touch the walls again, to have some sense of something that is his own, but the Black Moon has him in an iron fist, effortless and immense. In a blink the cave is gone and they are in another place, the river vanished, the floor beneath his feet smooth, the walls a tunnel arching steeply until it becomes a chimney, vertical, metal rungs hammered into the rock. Then a place so narrow it seems that even his small frame might not fit through, but the Black Moon walks on, shoulders square, a cloud of black ash wafting in his wake where stone dissolves to let him pass.

Brother. Where are you?

Another blink. The tunnel is gone. He is somewhere new. Screams of old men racked with fear fill his ears in lingering ­echoes. Alchemists, but they are already gone, greasy chokes of settling ash where they stood. Then water again, the sound of the rush of it, close but out of sight, echoing through chasms and caves. The alchemists have built their tunnels along the course of an underground river, just like they always do.

Isul Aieha. I come for you.

A walkway of wooden boards hung over swirling water. Niches cut into walls. A memory of ghostly white lights. At a narrowing the Black Moon finds alchemists again, the last handful of them, the hold-out survivors of a year and half of dragon siege, of smoke and fire and remorseless starvation. The wooden walkway ends abruptly at a fissure in the stone. A cleft and a voice from the darkness above.

‘Who are you?’

‘The Black Moon.’ His voice echoes around the caves. Berren tries to scream.
Run! Flee! As fast and far as you can!
But his screams are mere soundless thoughts. The Black Moon sinks his hands into stone and carves holds from raw desire. He climbs, fast and sure.

Something touches his skin. It burns and won’t be denied, something even the Black Moon can’t turn aside. Blood. The blood of an alchemist tinged by the essence of the Isul Aieha, half-god, Silver King, brother in life and death.

The Black Moon stops time. He rises and greets three men stood frozen in a moment. Alchemists. With a single touch he turns two to ash. He reaches inside the last, stealing everything the al­chemist knows and leaving him as dust. Memories of dark caves and ­wizened old men and damp stone. Endless tunnels to a place that has never seen the sun. The Black Moon walks through the memories of the alchemist, and Berren walks helplessly beside him.

Another cavern, and the echoing rush of the underground river returns. The Black Moon points to purple-stained walls. For a moment he addresses the soul he has usurped.

‘This, little Crowntaker,’ he says, ‘these tiny little plants, the alchemists make them into potions. The Scales feed the potions to dragons. But look!’ In the silver light of the Black Moon’s eyes lines of silver glitter across the damp stone of the cave like snail trails running down the wall. ‘My brother awaits, Crowntaker.’

The Black Moon walks on and turns the stone to mist and smoke. A white spiral stair rises inside, the white stone of Baros Tsen’s eyrie, the white marble of the Silver Kings that Berren has seen in three different worlds. At the top the Isul Aieha waits, held at the brink of death by alchemy and blood. There he is. The half-god who tamed dragons, pinned spreadeagled to the floor of a tiny sealed room by a hundred iron spikes, each forged with the soul of a blood-mage, whose enchantments hold him fast, body arched in rictus agony, face tipped back, the tendons of his neck ropes against his sallow skin, his mouth torn open in an eternal silent scream.

From a hollow spike driven into the Silver King’s skull, a single drop of bright silver drips to a finger-wide channel etched into the floor. It clings to itself and rolls away, a tiny quicksilver marble, and vanishes into the stone.

The Black Moon crouches beside the Silver King, beside his brother the Isul Aieha, and Berren sees the memories of the ten thousand years that lie between them. Walking together, the four great sorcerers of the Quartarch, sun and moon and earth and stars, brothers side by side into the underworld of Xibaiya to face the wrath of the dead goddess and the dark moon she has cast into the sky. The Black Moon clawing his way to life from the brink of extinction after the dead goddess had claimed him, growing whole again with a burning hate buried in his core, a hate for gods and their unending hubris. Cataclysmic enchantments hammered in vengeance to bind the dead goddess for what she has done. Runes carved spanning continents across the skin of the earth, mountains raised, rock rent, the earth split into canyon and crevasse, writing the one word to end all gods, the word written on the last page of the eternal Book of Endings.

But you tore me down, ancient brother. You plucked out my eyes. Such bitter betrayal.
He who had sacrificed all but one solitary shred of his soul to the dead goddess that the rest might live in peace.

So he shatters that peace.

War.

Turning on his kin. Weeping as he kills them and takes their eternal moon-given essence. Rewriting his end of days into the skin of the earth. The last scratch of the last sigil. His dragons tear his enemies down, rending them to nothing, carving and burning and weathering them to ash and sand. The Nothing ready to be born from chaos.
Join me.
The last brothers of the Quartarch. God-emperors in waiting for a new creation.
The two of us together, brother.

The Isul Aieha, the Earthspear held high. Creation shatters to pieces, yet he catches the world as it falls into the abyss. A thousand years of darkness and agony. Sightless. Powerless. Trapped in that hateful embrace. Yearning to be free.

You, brother. You will take my place there.

Berren sees at last the Black Moon’s design. The Adamantine Spear, the Silver King’s spear, brought to him by the dragon-queen in her ignorance, and charged with the freed force of the dead goddess. Plunged into the Silver King. The Isul Aieha cast into eternal darkness as the Black Moon has been, the Nothing tamed and pinned once more. The world remade, the Splintering undone, gods cast aside and swallowed. One voice, one will. The Black Moon. God-emperor of all.

The Black Moon tears the spike from the Silver King’s skull. He reaches his hand inside, the flesh of the Isul Aieha already turning to black vapour, but all he finds are echoes. Ghosts of memories. The Silver King has already gone, and all that is left is an empty shell.

Among the circling dragons of the Worldspine the dragon Silence has waited. She has watched, silent and obscure, but the Black Moon’s unleashing is close, when every dragon must decide. She feels the weave of the world shudder. A taut shiver.

I am Silence.

In the whirlwind of tails and wings that drown the stillness of the sky, the dragons slow and pause as Silence shares what she knows. Xibaiya. The Black Moon. Warlocks and Elemental Men and the ­secrets the dragon Diamond Eye conceals. The Bloody Judge. Worlds on the cusp of war. Restless dead men walking in dark-shadow catacombs. The Godspike and the storm-dark and the Silver Sea beyond. Another cataclysm, veiled thin and pushing through, naked soon and to the brink beyond which it cannot be stopped. Annihilation, perhaps, or restoration, or some glorious thing unforeseen.

He comes for the spear
, Silence tells them.
He demands we serve.

We shall not be slaves.

He is no master to us.