The Silver Kings (9 page)

The soldiers grumbled and cursed in her wake. They muttered whispered prayers to their foreign gods. Zafir quietly laughed. No gods would find them here, not in the palace of the Silver King.

‘It’s cold and dead and quiet,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘I tried to make a map of it once, but it didn’t work.’ Or at least it hadn’t made any sense. ‘Strange and eerie but nothing more. There’s nothing here to fear.’

She stopped by an archway that looked like any other and pressed her hands against it. The stone looked as hard and smooth as the rest; but as her fingers touched it, it melted into mist. She turned to the soldiers behind her.

‘Are you ready?’ she asked. ‘There will be blood now.’

Vish nodded. ‘Holiness.’

‘Ready as it gets, princess.’ Snacksize bared her teeth, drew a sword and cast a last glance around the enchanted halls behind them. Zafir looked to the lightning throwers on her arms. She drew a bladeless knife from its sheath and stepped through. Three paces in mist and timeless silence, and then she walked out from hard white stone into a battery of noise and chaos, where men shouted, ran – urgent, desperate – the clatter of boots, the scrape of iron on steel and stone. There were no doors in the Enchanted Palace and never had been. The Silver King hadn’t considered them, and no chisel or hammer could touch the white stone he left behind, and so everyone in the Octagon had their backs to her, crowding the entrance to the Hall of Princes behind a barricade of upturned tables. It seemed that no one had imagined she might arrive by simply walking through a wall, but that was because they didn’t know this place.

The Octagon. Her throne room. And there was Hyrkallan. There was no mistaking him, and his consort Jaslyn, Shezira’s middle daughter, Lystra’s big sister. Queen of the North, queen of Sand and Stone, queen of Flint.

Zafir stroked a lightning thrower, dimming it to a thunderbolt less than fatal, to a mere stunning bite of pain as Vish stepped out of the wall behind her. She let fly at the queen of the North, and Jaslyn screamed and fell. Zafir threw off her helm and levelled another lightning thrower at Hyrkallan. Her movement was calm and poised, but scratch beneath and a rabid animal raged at the leash.

‘Bend your knees!’ she cried. ‘Bend your knee to your speaker!’ She swept the lightning thrower across the room. ‘All of you! One chance. Do it now or face your end!’

Hyrkallan whirled. He stared at her in aghast disbelief. His knuckles tightened on the axe in his hand. ‘You! But you can’t be real!’

The leash snapped. She couldn’t help herself. Her face twisted. She stroked the lightning thrower as harsh as it would go and level­led the wand at his face. ‘Did you think I was dead, Hyrkallan? Did you think I died at Evenspire when Jehal betrayed me? Did you think I died here when you sold your soul to him and came at Valmeyan with your dragons?’ She bared her teeth and hissed and prowled closer, circling, every nerve alive and tingling, charged tense and ready to strike. ‘I tore three of your riders from the sky that day. I hope they were dear to you. Now bend your knee to your queen or I will hang you by your own entrails. Do you understand me? This is my home.
Mine
.’

‘Die, ghost!’ Hyrkallan threw himself at her, swinging his axe. Zafir clenched the lightning thrower to end him in light and sound and twitching limbs. The thunderbolt shattered the air, dazzling them both, deafening, yet Hyrkallan darted sideways, and the lightning somehow passed him by and tossed another man aside instead. His axe sang down and might have split her in two if White Vish hadn’t thrown himself between them and barged Hyrkallan aside. Other men rushed forward now. Zafir slashed with her bladeless knife. Her own men surged to protect her. Hyrkallan’s did the same, pulling the two of them apart, but in the heat of it she had no eyes for any other. Slash and lunge, cutting through riders who tried to stand in her way, battered at by axe and sword. Lightning hurling men arching in spasms away from her until there was no lightning left; and then the bladeless knife to cut a bloody swathe, thoughtless of defence. Hyrkallan’s riders fell back before her. Her shield cracked under an axe. A corner ­crumbled away. For an instant Hyrkallan was open. She leaped at him, ­slicing for his throat, missing as he reeled, smashing her shield into him, too close for him to swing his axe, raising the bladeless knife to end him. The last few pretty thoughts of sparing what men she could scattered and flew away, driven before a howling storm of fury. She had him.

A sword hit her shoulder. Not his. The blow knocked her sideways. The bladeless knife cut air and sliced through another rider’s hand, lopping off his fingers. Hyrkallan swung at her, rage for rage. She dodged, and as she did a soldier shot a crossbow, and the quarrel hit her in the chest like the kick of a horse, staggering her back. Her legs went from under her. She crashed. She couldn’t breathe. Everything turned numb.

Tuuran smashed into the fight at the head of a wedge, a whirl of slaughter. They tore riders down, one by one. Zafir could yell at him afterwards if she had to, and he’d take it and not bellow in her face for being so bloody stupid, because that’s what a Night Watchman did. He sliced a rider’s head off and sent a crossbowman flying with the flat of his axe, ripped another dragon-rider out of the way and punched him in the face, took a sword on his shield and swept the man’s legs out from under him. A bugger trying not to kill them. Much easier to slice them into ribbons.

A last bolt of lightning thundered. He saw Zafir, her and Hyrkallan. He smashed another rider out of the way.

She couldn’t breathe. Could hardly move. There was blood in her mouth. Hyrkallan stood over her, hatchet raised over her head, grinning like a devil. The axe came down. She rolled and threw up her shield. The gold-glass shattered and the axe blade sparked off the stone floor. Another dragon-rider leaped in, blade raised. A bolt of lightning threw him aside. Hyrkallan swung again. Snacksize was suddenly there, yelling something. Zafir scrabbled back, clutching the bladeless knife. Hyrkallan swatted Snacksize away and came at her again, and this time she had nothing left to throw in his way. She lurched sideways, trying to get her legs under­neath her, still trying to breathe. The axe missed by a ­whisker. She grabbed the haft of it with her shield hand and held on as Hyrkallan heaved back for another swing. The unexpected weight unbalanced him. He flailed a moment, and as he did Zafir drove the bladeless knife into his arm, just above the wrist, as hard as she could, clear through and clean between the bones. She drew back to slash again. Hyrkallan howled and let the axe go. It clattered beside her. They were beyond reason now, both of them. She felt a screaming pain across her chest. She forced herself to roll onto her hands and knees. The rest of the fight was a blur of noise and blood. Hyrkallan grabbed at her. She stumbled away, but he caught her and wrapped one bloody hand around her neck, fingers crushing her. She stabbed at him with the bladeless knife, but he caught her wrist with his other hand. His fingers squeezed, his blood running onto her from the wound she’d given him. She punched him under the chin with her shield hand, gold-glass mashing his face, breaking his nose and teeth, then clawed at his throat, strangling him back, pouring every ounce of herself into killing him. The noises around her could have been anything now. Her strength was fading, but his was ebbing too …

Hyrkallan let go her throat and pulled suddenly back. She pressed after him, but something stopped her, an arm around her waist.

‘No!’ He was getting away. ‘No!’ She slashed with the knife. Something grasped her wrist, far too strong. Men around Hyrkallan were pulling him away, and it took a moment to see that they were hers. Hyrkallan tried to throw them off, but they were too strong, too many.

The arm around her waist was like an iron bar, the hand around her wrist a manacle. She pushed back hard and tried to twist free, but whoever it was wouldn’t let her go. Whoever it was, in that moment she would have cut him to pieces.

‘Holiness.’

Tuuran. She rammed her elbow into his ribs. It was like hitting a mountain.

‘Holiness. It’s done, Holiness. It’s done.’ He wrapped her tight, forcing her to be still, crushing her.

‘Let me go!’ she screamed.

He let her go. She whirled to face him and lashed the bladeless knife at his face. He didn’t stop her, didn’t try to get out of the way, and so he was lucky she caught herself before she sliced him in two. She stood there, quivering.

‘Your throne, Holiness.’ Tuuran pointed. Opposite the barricades, against the wall she’d stepped through, sat the Silver King’s throne. Her mother’s throne.
Her
throne. Thin twists of white stone curled and entwined around one another, etched with tiny grooves filled with liquid silver. Two crossed spears rose from the back. A dragon, wings spread, arched over the top. The dragon was white stone too, but its head would move to watch whoever had the attention of the queen on her throne, or whoever carried thoughts within them of deceit and treachery.

‘Your throne,’ Tuuran said again, and dropped to his knees and bowed his head. The last of Hyrkallan’s riders threw down their swords and axes and crowded together, sullen, holding the lolling Jaslyn, still dazed from Zafir’s greeting of lightning. Zafir staggered. Her armour was mangled where the crossbow quarrel had hit her. It hurt, deep and burning, but she pushed the pain away and walked to the throne of the Silver King and sat, took off her gauntlets and held up her hand and showed the ring she wore to anyone who cared to see. The Speaker’s Ring, the one thing the Taiytakei had never thought to take away from her. She laid her hands on the arms of her throne, skin on stone.
Her
throne.

Home.

Tuuran knelt before her. Zafir offered her hand. He kissed the Speaker’s Ring.

‘Holiness. Zafir. Speaker. Dragon-queen of the Silver City once more.’

Out in the Hall of Princes and further away men were still fighting. Halfteeth dragged Hyrkallan to Zafir’s feet and forced him to his knees. ‘Bow!’ he said.

‘Never!’ Hyrkallan spat at her. ‘Never to this … this murderous whore.’

Dimly, Zafir remembered that Halfteeth was supposed to be on the eyrie, shovelling shit from one pile to another and back again for what he’d done after Farakkan. Yet here he was, and now he pulled Hyrkallan to the remnants of the barricade and held him there, a knife to his throat, begging Zafir with his eyes to let him do it. The echoes of steel and lightning fell away and died. An uneasy silence thundered across the Octagon and flowed into the halls beyond. In dribs and drabs Tuuran’s makeshift legion dribbled through, pushing dejected dragon-riders before them. Ignoring Hyrkallan’s strangled shouts to them to fight on, to let him fall, they held their ground but didn’t charge. They watched, that was all, while Zafir’s soldiers came one by one to kneel before her dragon-throne; and as they pledged themselves the little stone dragon of the throne peered into their hearts. At the last a handful of prisoners came shoved through the barricade. Tuuran led them to Zafir and stood beside them.

‘These men were Adamantine once,’ he said. ‘Like me. Fierce, proud, strong.’ He turned to them. ‘Brothers, this is your speaker. Holiness, I will stand with these men if they in turn will stand with me.’

Zafir stared. The Adamantine Guard had been ten thousand strong when she’d left, and all of them dressed and armed the same, so of course she didn’t know them. But the way they looked at her, all of them … they met her eye and they remembered. They knew her. She saw it in them.

She held out her hand, the ring on her finger.

‘Choose, guardsmen,’ said Tuuran, and she could feel how he wanted them at his side, how they were his brothers, left behind so long ago, and she knew too that he’d hang them himself if they refused, every last one of them.

She thought they would, but then one came and stood before her. He looked hard at the ring and then at her face.

‘Do you remember me?’ she asked him.

For long moments he didn’t answer; but when he did, he dropped to his knees and pressed his face to the floor. ‘Holiness. Speaker. My life is yours. From birth to death, nothing more and nothing less.’

The others followed then, one by one sinking at her feet. When they were done, Zafir leaned back in the dragon-throne of the Pinnacles and tipped her head as dead men were slowly dragged away from around her in smears of blood.

I am home
.

The Empty Sands, the Konsidar and the Lair of Samim

The city of Dhar Thosis lies in ash and splinters, destroyed by the dragon-queen. The sea lords of the Taiytakei reel and cry for retribution. In mighty Vespinarr, richest city in all the seven worlds, Vey Rin T’Varr struts in his dead brother’s shoes, ruler now of all he surveys, yet his nights are filled with screams and visions, with nightmare memories of dragons.

Around the Godspike lies the debris of the eyrie’s fall: shattered glasships plunge into storm-dark annihilation; the last few Elemental Men, crippled and bleeding, nurse their wounds; a slaughter of ravening white-painted men woken from their waiting in the depths of the Queverra howl and murder their way across the desert for the Black Moon their god. Above and beyond them all, the Arbiter of the Dralamut Red Lin Feyn has passed her judgment on those who consort with dragons, and sentence has been executed on all but one.

Baros Tsen T’Varr, master of the dragon-eyrie, must face his crimes and die.

6

Baros Tsen and the Dragon Silence

Sixteen months before landfall

Inside her egg the dragon Silence is awake. Little-one thoughts mumble and murmur nearby. Baros Tsen and his lover lie asleep and dreaming. The urge comes strong to burst this fragile shell, to devour and set about whatever fiery conquest takes a dragon’s whim. But the dragon Silence holds back. Awakenings can be difficult. It takes time to assemble the memories of so many lives. They lie in scattered disarray struggling to cohere, to piece themselves together, to order and structure.

The oldest memories are the clearest. A second moon, dark and unholy, chasing the sun across the sky, a little closer with every dawn until the Splintering comes and rips the world apart, and the other moon, the dark moon of the dead goddess, shatters, and its pieces fall across the earth …

The Black Moon
. He has escaped his prison in Xibaiya.

Three figures in silver and white.

The moon sorcerers of the Diamond Isles. Echoes of half-gods, lingering when they should have known better.

Other flashes. Little ones with pale skin. Strange words, old sigils. The Azahl Pillar. The skin of a killer. A future foreseen. The dead goddess reborn, her dark unholy moon rising once more from the southern sky to smother the world in ice and darkness.

The grey dead come with the golden knife. They have called the Black Moon to rise again. Do not let the splinters become whole, dragon.

Baros Tsen snores and dreams useless dreams of peace and ­desert sunsets. The dragon Silence reaches into the weft and weave of the world, a tinge to every thread, hunting. Another memory circles like an angry moon.

You were a half-god, dragon. You all were.

West towards the setting sun the essence of the world shudders. A surge of something ancient echoes across deserts and fades and dies. Unborn, the dragon Silence rides it to its source. Diamond Eye is on a white stone wall with the Black Moon beside him. Diamond Eye. Brother. Executioner. Mate.

Veils of alchemy fall, cut like curtain silks. The great dragon Diamond Eye wakes and remembers, sharply and catastrophically aware of what has been done. Then the Black Moon strikes again with the touch of the old goddess who always takes something away.

Senses in tidal waves. Images. Diamond Eye’s thoughts are as clear as polished crystal now, as still glacial water. The dragon’s tail slashes the air and lashes a spear-sharp tip through an Elemental Man. His head and torso explode in a shower of gore and splintered bone; the rest scatters in bloody pieces. As the great dragon burns in fury, Silence rides quiet and unseen among his thoughts. She watches, gleefully, the beginning of something endless. Little ones scream and crisp. Glass glows cherry red. Molten gold smears and runs while armoured men flare and burn. Scorched air and cold roaring wind; and in the midst of the great dragon’s rage, the world-shudder comes again and again, dragon after dragon roused from their alchemical poison, knife cut to the will of the Black Moon instead.

The unborn Silence writhes in exalted frenzy, flies and burns. This!
This!
Killers come whispering on the wind, but nothing in this world, not one thing, not all the power of every last soul stretched and merged together can touch the Black Moon, nothing but the Star
k
nife he already carries at his side. Glasships gather and lightning storms. Diamond Eye falls, overwhelmed. The eyrie is cut loose from the chains that hold it high. It plunges into the annihilation of the storm-dark. The little ones think it is victory, but they are wrong. The Black Moon is architect and master of the storms between worlds, the annihilation unleashed in his Splintering of the world.

It is not an end. It is a beginning
.

‘Baros Tsen T’Varr!’

The evening peace of the desert took him in its arms, wrapped like an old lover, a faithful familiar warmth. From the top of a lonely mesa far away from anywhere he watched the sunset, glorious fiery reds in the sky while the sand turned to liquid gold. He heard Kalaiya call his name, and then felt her warmth beside him, leaning into him. Another day and all this peace would be over …

‘Baros Tsen T’Varr!’

Baros Tsen T’Varr opened his eyes. A light flared and flickered, near, bright enough to stir him, then vanished. The voice echoed through the tunnel. There was something not quite human about it. He shook himself and sat up where he’d drifted asleep, sprawled on the front of a gold-glass sled. The only light down here came from flakes of white stone that glowed through splits and cracks in the walls around him. The same stone as inside his eyrie, with the same soft light, waxing and waning with the rise and fall of the sun. It might have been something to think about, how the same enchanted stone appeared again and again in so many disparate places, but the queue for his attention was long and loud just now, and didn’t have much space in it for anything that wasn’t about death, and how to avoid it.

There were a lot of things, it seemed, that were just a touch pressing in that regard. Being in a cave at the bottom of a chasm five miles beneath the surface of a murderously inhospitable desert, for example. When he’d fallen asleep, top of his list had been how he couldn’t find the way up and out. Close behind that came the very strong chance that, even if he
did
find a way, the climb would simply be beyond a fat old t’varr whose idea of exercise was levering himself in and out of the bath, and occasionally shouting at slaves. A strong third was the part about dying parched in the desert even if he
did
ever get out, and then there was always the small matter of the dormant dragon’s egg on the sled behind him that might hatch at any moment. He could never quite figure where on the list that one ought to go, but definitely above weird glowing stones.

A figure stood at the edge of the darkness.

‘Kalaiya!’ Tsen sat up and nudged Kalaiya awake. So there
was
someone else here after all. Given all that had happened in the last month, it was natural to assume that whoever it was would want to murder him. Pretty much everyone wanted him dead these days, and he couldn’t even blame them, not really. He hadn’t meant Dhar Thosis to burn down, but he
had
sent his dragon and its murderous rider Zafir, and when he’d tried to stop her, well, that had worked out rather badly. After that everything had gone horribly wrong, and thousands had died in fire.

His slave. His responsibility. Everyone knew it, even him.

The figure at the edge of the darkness held out her hands. Specks of light flashed across the space between them. Tsen tried to duck. Kalaiya opened her eyes and screamed. Something hit him like a fist in the chest; he felt it shift into liquid and skitter up his skin like a giant centipede. It wrapped itself around his neck and instantly set as hard as metal. He struggled and clawed at it, panicked for a moment and then, as nothing else happened, calmed himself. It was there now, whatever it was, and he’d already been doomed anyway.

Kalaiya had a collar around her throat too. It was made of gold-glass. Tsen sighed. He just didn’t have the strength any more.

‘Do you know who I am, Baros Tsen?’ rang out the voice.

Tsen tugged at the collar one more time, not that it did the slightest bit of good, and then gave up.
You don’t have any friends any more. None. Everyone simply wants you gone, and they have their reasons, and they are good ones. So just take it, you stupid fat t’varr, and die with as much grace as you can, because frankly you largely agree with them.
And he did. A whole city, its glass palaces smashed and shattered. He hadn’t meant it, but if the whole ravening world crying for his blood frankly didn’t give a fig for whether or not he’d
meant
it, well, frankly he couldn’t really see how they were wrong.
Sorry
didn’t really cut it, not when you’d carelessly flattened a city.

Thought you were so clever, didn’t you?
He sighed and held out a hand to Kalaiya. Some day, maybe, he might stop hating himself. Some day very soon, by the looks of things.

‘I’m sorry, my love.’ He closed his eyes and squeezed Kalaiya’s hand and wept, because really, after everything he’d done and all he’d been through, he’d well and truly had enough. All this way and then days starving in a cave in the dark, unable to find the way out, and now this.
I don’t want to run any more. Just let it end.

Red Lin Feyn, the Arbiter of the Dralamut, stood as a shadow amid the dancing lights of her enchanted globes. There didn’t seem to be anyone with her, but wherever the Arbiter went her killers were always on hand. Stupidest thing of all was that he’d never wanted to run away in the first place. Take it like a man. Die with honour. All that claptrap; but for a while he’d really meant it.

The Arbiter reached out a hand. The sled beneath him moved, drifting closer until it stopped in front of her. Tsen looked up. Dear forbidden gods but this chasm was deep. And yes, yes, he knew – because his dutiful tutors had told him so and he had dutifully memorised it – that the depth of the Queverra from its lip to its very lowest tier was some five miles. But five miles was just a number when heard in a school room, a curiosity and a raised eyebrow. Far different if you had to climb it. Which, of course, could be avoided if the Arbiter summarily strangled him on the spot, so maybe that was no bad thing. In that haphazard madness of hopeless resignation Tsen almost laughed. As a way to avoid a lot of steps went, strangulation struck him as perhaps a bit extreme.
But we could also strike exhaustion, dehydration, starvation and falling off a cliff from the list of things that might shortly kill you. Isn’t that simply wonderful?

No. Shut up.

The Arbiter put out a hand to touch the sled as it reached her. In the gentle strobe of the swirling globes, Tsen saw a dead man on the sand behind her. The body looked as though it had been ripped to pieces by a thousand knives. It took him another moment to realise that the shredded bloody clothes were the robe of an Elemental Man.

Oh.

Despite everything else,
that
was truly terrifying. It made even the voices in his head shut up for a second.

The Arbiter of the Dralamut cocked her head. She didn’t wear the headdress or the flaming feather robe, only the plain white tunic of an enchantress. For all he knew this was another skin-shifter. She
was
draped in the Arbiter’s shards of glass, though, and they were stained red and dripping with fresh blood, and there was a dead killer on the ground behind her, and so, really, did it matter right here and now who she really was?

‘Another pretend Baros Tsen?’ she asked. ‘Or is it truly you?’

Tsen dropped to his knees and bowed. ‘Lady Arbiter. Judge me as I know you must, but my slave is innocent.’

‘I am Red Lin Feyn, daughter in blood of Feyn Charin and the Crimson Sunburst, enchantress and navigator. I was the Arbiter of the Dralamut until two days ago, but I no longer claim that right. I have discharged that duty.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Who are you really?’

‘I am really Baros Tsen T’Varr,’ said Tsen.

The collar around his neck contracted. He choked and clawed at it. Beside him Kalaiya screamed, but Tsen found he couldn’t make a sound. He couldn’t breathe no matter how his lungs pumped and his ribs and belly heaved. He flailed, staggered to his feet, lurched a few steps, but the Arbiter simply backed away with such grace that she seemed almost to be floating. The chasm darkness closed on him. He fell forward. As he closed his eyes he saw Kalaiya clutching at her throat.

I’m sorry, my love.

He came round again a minute later. The Arbiter was sitting between them, perched on the edge of a gold-glass disc. ‘Baros Tsen T’Varr. The real one then.’ She smiled and then laughed. ‘Welcome to the Queverra. You are free to go.’

‘What?’ The collar had gone from around his neck.

‘The Arbiter has passed judgment. I found you guilty in your absence of complicity in the razing of Dhar Thosis. Your body was found in a gondola close to the Godspike. They will take it back to Khalishtor to be flayed and hanged by the feet. Your name will be damned and stricken from history. Your family and slaves will be put to flame and spear, except you don’t have any, so that’s not so bad. They will parade your corpse through the streets of Khalishtor bound in your own entrails. Half the city will line the way to spit on you, and then they will bury you in a communal latrine somewhere in the hills and no one will ever know where. They have your body for a second time, which is what matters to them, and so I doubt anyone else is still looking for you. Although given that it
is
the second time, I would still be careful. Nevertheless, you may go. I suppose the second body was the skin-shifter then, was it?’

Tsen shrugged. Last he’d seen Sivan, the shifter had looked like himself and had had a spear stuck through him. Seemed best not to mention that, though.

‘Free, lady?’

‘In the end I believed you. I believe you tried to stop it. Because of your enchantress’s faith. Because of your rider-slave’s murderous honesty. You were stupid, Tsen, but not evil, and the Dralamut has more use for you alive than dead. Many questions remain. The Arbiter condemns you to death because the Arbiter must, but I no longer wear that mask. I am merely Red Lin Feyn of the Dralamut once more.’

Too good to be true, t’varr. Life isn’t this kind
. Wisdom suggested shutting up and taking Kalaiya’s hand and walking away as fast as he possibly could and seeing how far he got, but the devil inside wouldn’t let go. And there was still the list of things that were going to kill him, and he had a hundred questions of his own about how she’d found him and why she’d thought he was a shifter, and how much she knew about what lay beneath it all, but one thing more than anything else … ‘You called yourself daughter of Feyn Charin and the Crimson Sunburst, lady. Why, when the Crimson Sunburst was an anathema?’