The Silver Kings (44 page)

‘You want me to turn the lamp out?’ Tuuran asked.

Zafir slapped him. ‘How many people, Night Watchman? To how many has he done it?’

Tuuran rubbed his cheek. ‘Done what?’

‘The knife!’ Zafir shoved him. ‘How many has he stabbed with that knife? All these men you now command? Every one of them?’

Tuuran had his back to Liang. She couldn’t make out his face, but she saw his shoulders slump. He turned away from Zafir for a moment, bowed his head and mumbled something.

‘What?’

‘All of them, Holiness,’ said Tuuran quietly. ‘Everyone except you and me. Perhaps Myst and Onyx. I don’t know. Maybe a few others he’s missed.’

‘Merizikat too?’

‘Every single one.’ He shrugged hopelessly. ‘I thought you knew.’

‘You did, did you? And you thought I’d do nothing? I said there would be no more slaves. Are my words so empty?’

‘You think that thing inside Cra— inside the Crowntaker’s head listens to you?’ Tuuran rounded on her. ‘Or to me? Or to anyone?’ He grabbed Zafir by the shoulders. ‘He’s a half-god! The Silver King!’

‘No.’ Zafir pushed him away. ‘Not
our
Silver King. Not the Isul Aieha.’

Tuuran shook his head. He let out a long heavy breath. ‘He’s my friend, Holiness. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Why us?’ Zafir asked after a moment. ‘Why spare only us?’

‘The Black Moon spares you because of the spear you once ­carried. The Adamantine Spear of the Speaker. Without that he’d cut you in a blink. Me? Because there’s still enough Crazy in there to stop him, that’s why.’ He shrugged again. ‘That’s what he told me anyway. You and I alone are free to go.’

‘But we’re not.’

‘No.’

Zafir took a step closer. ‘He’s not going to stop, is he?’

‘No, Holiness.’

She took another step and then, to Liang’s surprise, pressed her forehead against Tuuran’s chest, drew back and gently butted him a few times as if banging her head against a wall. ‘As you say, Night Watchman. He is a Silver King.’

‘No. More. He was my friend.’ Tuuran flapped his arms as though he didn’t know what to do with them. He made as if to stroke Zafir’s hair and then thought better of it. In her workshop Liang took a little step back. It was so unexpected.

‘Why has he got you down here?’

Tuuran swept his arm across the vault, the scaffold and the gallows. Liang froze for a moment as the big man looked straight at her, but in the gloom he must not have seen the little glass dragon. ‘He told me about this place years ago.’ Tuuran walked from the scaffold into the dark. Zafir stayed close by his side. Liang crept after them, claws clicking on the stone floor. ‘Merizikat, where the worst come to die. I’ve seen it in galley slaves, Holiness, men taken from here, what they’ll do to breathe their last under the sun and not some other way. Night-skins didn’t ever give a shit for what slaves from other worlds believed when it came to gods and the like, but I paid heed for my own reasons. Crazy …’ Tuuran stopped and seemed to choke on something for a moment. ‘Beg your pardon, Holiness. The Crowntaker used to tell stories. Stupid things about how he used to be someone else until some warlock pulled his soul out of his body and trapped it in another. Didn’t used to believe a word of it until the Black Moon came. Now …’ He shrugged.

‘What did he tell you about Merizikat?’

Another heavy sigh. ‘That the sun-fearing folk of the Dominion bring all the worst men here. In the dead of night in the middle of winter they execute them. They hang them in this vault underneath the ground where the sun never reaches. They leave the bodies here to rot in dry lightless still air, in alcoves untouched by any whisper of sun or moon or stars, damning their souls to a listless lingering in Xibaiya. That’s what he told me. I’ve heard from others, more lately, that the men they hang here have developed a penchant for getting up again, even after their necks are broken.’

‘The Black Moon told you that?’

Tuuran shook his head. ‘Galley slaves from hereabouts. Started before I ever met Crazy. Didn’t pay it much heed at the time. Slaves tell all manner of wild stories just to have a story at all.’ He laughed. ‘Except me. I never told mine to anyone but you, and you already knew it. You want to see a walking dead man? We’ve got a few down here. They’re a bit delicate, mind.’

In her tower Liang squeaked.

Zafir followed as Tuuran moved off. Liang skittered along behind. The Adamantine Man talked as they walked. ‘There’s a prison down here. The priests run it. They usually hang everyone on midwinter’s night, but
he
wanted it done straight away and so we did. The dead all got carted back to their cells to see what happened.’ Tuuran chuckled bitterly. ‘There’s an army coming for us, right? Come to get rid of us? And a bigger one on its way to Aria, to the Crowntaker’s old home and the necropolis there; but if the Sun King knew what was happening down here then he’d pause from his war across the worlds and fall on us with every force he has.’ He stopped at an iron gate set into the tunnel. A turnkey let them through. ‘I hear it was a bit of a problem when the dead started walking. That fire the sun priests make kills them good and proper so they stay down, but that went against the whole point of them being here. Same goes for ordinary fire and dragon-fire, and any other kind of fire, I suppose. So it’s all a bit of a bugger’s ­muddle. They went to chopping the restless dead to bits, but the bits wouldn’t be still. Brought rats to eat any bits that kept wriggling, or burned them with lime, but either way they just wound up with ghosts. The bastards they send to Merizikat to die come here to have their souls damned to the dead goddess of the earth. Nowhere else. Eternal torment, that’s what this lot reckon, earned by villainy done in life, but whatever they used to do here it doesn’t work any more. It’s been that way for some years now. Like the place they’re supposed to go simply isn’t there any more. Or maybe like they’ve found a way out.’ Tuuran shook his head. ‘All bloody stupid, if you ask me, but no one ever does.’

‘Dead is dead,’ sniffed Zafir. She was looking this way and that, head twitching like a nervous bird. ‘Our ancestors find us wherever we lie.’

‘Aye.’ Tuuran stopped at another gate and another turnkey. ‘People believe all sorts though.’ The tunnel was narrow now, tiny, claustrophobic and pressing, and Liang saw the dragon-queen breathing fast and shallow. Close to panic, though she kept it from her voice. Liang saw too how Zafir kept reaching to take Tuuran’s arm and then snapping her fingers away.
She’s afraid
.
Actually afraid.
Though whether it was of the dead or of the dark or of being so deep under the ground Liang couldn’t be sure.

Past the second gate came rows of tiny cells, little more than scrapes of stone scooped from the wall and barely big enough for a man to lie down. Tuuran shone his torch over them. The nearest body was missing one arm from the shoulder and the other from the elbow, and the rest was rotting off. Strips of skin hung from his skull; his belly had split open and a trail of guts hung from the hole, yet he wasn’t still. He sat and looked up. Zafir stiffened. In her tower behind her silk mask, Liang gasped. She backed away and flapped the little dragon’s wings. Glass scraped against stone.

‘He comes down here sometimes,’ said Tuuran. ‘He just looks at them.’

‘Burn them, Tuuran. All of them.’

‘But the Black Moon—’

‘Burn them.’ Zafir looked straight at the shadows where Liang’s dragon lurked as though she’d known it was there all along. ‘Alchemists can bring the dead back to speak,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s already quite enough.’

Liang fled. She spread her glass wings and flew away, weaving through the catacomb tunnels until she found daylight and brought her little dragon home. She hid it then, half expecting Zafir or Tuuran to come and smash it, but the days passed and neither did, though Tuuran came late the next night and rattled her out of bed with a hundred rockets from the city arsenal, their fire globe tips removed, with a curt request for Liang to extract the black powder and, too, to meddle with several enchanted torches to make them erratic. She did as she was asked, breathed a quiet sigh of relief and went back to bed. She tried to sleep, but sleep was as elusive as ever.

A change came after that day in the catacombs. Zafir, aloof in her eyrie until now, suddenly spent all her time in the palace and in the basilica and at the docks. Bellepheros supposed the wails of her handmaidens’ newborns had driven her away, but Liang saw other changes too. Zafir was everywhere, and Tuuran as well, and the handful of Adamantine Men he kept closest, Halfteeth and the like. The eyrie moved from the top of the palace hill to float over the docks, and its cranes winched up crates and sacks day and night. Tuuran brought new soldiers to Liang again, dozens of them to be refitted with armour she’d already made for others he’d brought before. He never said, but Liang slowly understood: Zafir was replacing the soul-cut slave-soldiers of the Black Moon with sell-swords bought with stolen Merizikat gold, with street fighters, with anyone she could find who would serve a dragon-queen for the promise of treasure and had little to leave behind. The dragon-queen meant to move against the Black Moon then, did she? And if she did, so be it, and Liang would rub her hands with glee. Let them fight. Let one kill the other. So much the better if Zafir won, because she would be so much easier to send swiftly to Xibaiya in her turn, right on the Black Moon’s heels.

So Liang said nothing to anyone about what she’d seen, and did as she was asked, and tried not to think about the soul-cut soldiers Zafir must be murdering as she replaced them. Dragon fodder, perhaps. Day after day Tuuran brought her more while the eyrie filled with barrels of wine and water, and with sacks of grain. Some Taiytakei trader must have let slip about the enchanted cold rooms their ships sometimes carried to keep fruit and meat fresh over a long voyage; Liang found herself summoned to bind enchantments as she’d once enchanted Baros Tsen’s bathhouse, keeping it cold and close to freezing. She barely recognised the eyrie any more. The fighting men busy at work there were strangers, and Zafir had brought women to mend and fix and make and, yes, to fight too. A whole little town she was building, while the eyrie rim was piled high with food and rope and nails and thread and cloth and everything Liang could imagine, even animals in cages. She saw other Taiytakei too, though they quickly averted their eyes and scurried shamefaced away, and Halfteeth, who was her minder here, wouldn’t let her talk to them.

She built the enchanted cold rooms and ovens as she was asked, and returned to Merizikat exhausted only to find Tuuran’s other lieutenant, the one he called Snacksize, waiting for her, grumbling about gold-glass torches flashing erratically under the basilica and demanding that Liang come to fix them at once. There was a carriage ready and waiting, but instead of taking her to the basilica it drove Liang to the city walls over the peak of the hill where Tuuran stood looking out over the riverlands and the army that the Sun King had sent to crush them; and it was only then that she remembered Tuuran himself had been the one who’d asked for torches that would fail. That was how tired she was, forgetting something so obvious.

Tuuran sent Snacksize away. He pointed to the distant patchwork, to the sea of white tents camped two miles up the Merizikat river and spreading along some small tributary. Now and then sunlight glinted off polished metal.

‘Ten thousand men,’ he said. ‘A footnote to the Sun King’s army. Bigger than my Adamantine Legion, though. The Black Moon wants to know if you can make a lightning cannon to reach that far.’

‘No.’

‘Rockets.’

‘Not that far.’

‘Then you’re to pack your workshop and return to the eyrie. You’ll work from there instead of the palace. To be safe, enchantress. There are spies in our midst, and assassins too.’ He gave her a hard look. ‘In this you’ll do as you’re told.’ She would too. The Black Moon hadn’t given her a choice in that. Just as she wouldn’t run away. Couldn’t. None of them could except for the dragon-queen; and perhaps that was why Liang had come to hate her of late as much as she did: Zafir, of all of them, had the choice to leave, and yet she chose to stay.

‘What did I ever do to you, Tuuran, to make you despise me so?’ she asked. It came out with a twitch of bitterness.

‘Turned my alchemist master’s head, that’s what.’ Tuuran laughed harshly. ‘He told you it was wrong. He told you what would happen if you brought dragons across the storm-dark. And everything that happened after, you throw that at my queen’s feet with outraged condemnation, and yet you built this, enchantress, you as much as anyone. Her Holiness owns who she is. You do not. Yet you call her a monster.’ He guided her down from the wall. A company of soldiers fell in around her. ‘The Black Moon cut you with his knife. I know that, and so here in Merizikat you have no choice but to do his will, and that I must accept.’ He stabbed an accusing finger across the city at the eyrie hanging over the docks. ‘For that, though, lady, you
did
have a choice. You took away our freedom and made us slaves, and now you wail in horror at what we do to be free? You night-skins are so soaked in your own hypocrisy that you can’t see it even when it’s held jiggling and shouting before your eyes. Remember that. Now come with me to the basilica catacombs. Your lamps misbehave.’

He stayed at her side, silent and brooding, and snapped his ­fingers for two other soldiers to come as escort, not Zafir’s sell-swords but two solar exalts in golden armour, soul-cut men turned by the Black Moon’s knife. The carriage drove Liang past the palace and down the hill. As they drove Tuuran reached into his boot and handed her a sliver of glass wrapped in a torn strip of dirty linen.

‘Do you recognise this?’ he asked.

Liang looked at the glass. There were words etched into it. ‘It commands all Taiytakei sea captains to grant the bearer passage and transport to whatever destination they desire, by order of Quai’Shu, sea lord of Xican.’ She cocked her head at Tuuran in wonder. ‘From where did you steal this?’