Dragon Queen (42 page)

‘Come, slave!’ The Watcher ushered him to the waiting gondola.

‘We all want to fly,’ the alchemist said. ‘I'll not have time to make a rider for this one. When I poison it on my return, by then you'll see why it has to be done, both of you.’

The Watcher sealed the gondola around them. When he'd done that, he bowed. ‘There will be no need for that, slave. A rider waits for you in Khalishtor. Her name is Zafir. I hear she claims to be a queen.’

The look on the alchemist's face was delicious.

38

Khalishtor

Years ago, in the dragon realms in the court of her mother Queen Aliphera of the Silver City, ambassadors of the Taiytakei had come to pay their respects. Zafir had watched them carefully. Their colourful silks had made their faces seem even darker than they were. Their cloaks of bright feathers and gold and silver thread which they wrapped right around them swirled like wings when they threw out their arms to prostrate themselves before her mother's throne; and with the long braids of their hair scattered in an arc around their heads as they kowtowed, they reminded her of the ornamental birds of Bazim Crag. But what stuck most in her mind, what had lingered in the air of the Octagon long after they were gone, was the smell, the sweet musky smell that followed the Taiytakei everywhere. Xizic. The sailors chewed on lumps of it, the soldiers sprinkled it into their pipes. Even her slaves smelled of it. That morning when they killed Brightstar, she caught a whiff of it on the black-cloak's breath.

They forced her down to her knees and pressed her head hard into the floor. Beside her, the light hadn't gone from Brightstar's eyes. ‘Like this!’ snapped the black-cloak whose sword still dripped. As they pulled her up and dragged her away, her foot slipped in Brightstar's red blood, still warm. She almost fell and a trail of sticky red footprints followed her, quickly fading. Her head buzzed with what the Heart of the Sea Lord had done while his soldiers’ hands held her arms hard enough to bruise. The urge crackled inside her to pull away and fight them, to kick them, steal their swords and stab them, but she pushed it away and walked between them straight and erect. She would
not
lose her control. She would not let them have that victory. A dragon-rider knew her passions. She revelled in them, embraced them and rode them like the hurricanes they were, but a dragon-rider was always,
always
,
their mistress. If they couldn't ride their own, how could they ride the fury of a dragon?

The soldiers pushed and pulled her through the narrow companionways of the ship, up a tight flight of steps to the open air. Above the wooden masts and spars vast discs of glass and orbs of gold and silver hung in the sky, looming down and threatening to crush her. They were everywhere, spinning slowly and streaming bright shapes of sunlight across the deck in ever-shifting patterns. Others drifted languidly further out among the ships of the fleet and the smooth sculpted islands that surrounded them. They made her feel small.

No
. She bit her tongue and made it bleed. Awe, rage, love, fear, they were all her children, not her masters. No, she would not gawk like some ignorant savage. She was the dragon-queen and nothing the Taiytakei could put in front of her could compare with the monsters that had been a part of her life from the very moment she'd been born. She let the cold breeze cutting through her silks fill her head, made herself look straight ahead and nowhere else, dismissed the bright sun-dazzled thing above her that was as large as a war-dragon with its wings outstretched. When they stood her in front of a gondola carved from solid gold, almost resting on the deck right in front of her, at first she refused to see that too.

But no,
that
wouldn't do either, and so she lifted her eyes and went to war. The gondola floated a few feet above the deck and seemed to move up and down but that was the ship rocking in the gentle swell. The egg hung motionless. It was the size of a small hall, large enough for perhaps a dozen men to stand upright before they felt pressed together. On the outside it was smooth-skinned, made of polished gold that shone brilliant in the sun, featureless except for windows of perfect clear glass in a single ring around its belly. At the tapered end of the egg in front of her a ramp hung open, yet more gold, ending in a few steps that hung by silver chains. The steps were clear. Glass. It all hung from chains of gleaming silver. Above her the gold-glass disc spun slowly, casting its fractured light over everything.

Zafir looked and took it in, every bit of it, and then held it up against her dragons, her Onyx and her Mistral and all the others, and made it small.

The soldiers pushed her forward. The ramp was laid with a deep red carpet. Under her bare feet it was thick and soft and warm. It caressed her skin.
Like a pool of warm fresh blood. Like Brightstar's blood
. The thought startled her. And then she was inside the egg and the black-cloaks had hold of her again and there was a man staring at her, fat and black-skinned with a jovial sort of face but also a sharpness to him. She forced herself to look at that face and nothing else: not at his brilliant blue silk robe with its streaming patterns of emerald and silver and crimson and gold, not at the cascading braids of his hair which spread across the floor around his throne of yet more gold still, with its arms carved in the shape of ships and its back sculpted to look like a sail, not at the white and silver and crimson feathered cloak that wrapped him nor the carved symbols that lined the golden walls, nor through the too-perfect glass of the windows nor the tiny door behind him that led to the front of the egg, hanging ajar. No, she looked at
him
. She met his eye and stood erect and let her mouth fall imperceptibly open. She cocked her head and imagined how it would be if he'd been her treacherous lover Jehal.

Not a flicker.

‘I am Baros Tsen,’ he said. And they talked, and as they did, she made sure to draw his gaze with her hands to her breasts, to her hips, to all the parts of her that every man she'd ever met stared at with their blunt hungry eyes. Yet not a flicker. It was strange. Confusing. Unexpectedly disarming.

‘You don't desire me at all, do you?’ She couldn't help herself.

‘Not at all.’ He waved her away; and when she went it was with a lightness to her step that she couldn't explain until the black-cloaked soldiers waiting outside seized her.
Their
eyes roamed freely, stealing devouring looks that perhaps they imagined she didn't see. She smiled at them. When she was a queen again, those were the eyes she would have gouged out first. They shoved and pulled her back down to her cabin. Brightstar's body was gone but her blood still stained the wooden floor. Myst and Onyx cowered and kowtowed as the black-cloaks chained her wrist once more and left, locking the door behind them. None of them spoke. Zafir put a hand on each of them and made a silent promise.
It will not happen again
.

Silent Onyx offered her a piece of Xizic. The taste was strong and made her gag at first but she chewed at it anyway, torn between disgust and curiosity while her slaves undressed her and bathed her and dressed her again, and as she did the world seemed to take on a new edge of colour. Sounds became crisper and a delicious warmth spread inside her. She almost forgot where she was. As they brushed her hair and oiled her skin she closed her eyes and couldn't help but see Jehal. The silks they put her in were tantalising against her skin. Jehal at his best with his fingers and his lips. With the olisbos he'd brought to her that last time they'd been alone. She could have lost herself in those thoughts but before they could grow into something more, the door of her cabin burst open once more and the black-cloaks were back, pulling her to the floor. They took the silver chain from her wrist and bound her with another, one that tied her hand to her ankle so she could barely walk, and when they were done they hauled her up and pushed and shoved her back to the deck. The golden egg was gone, a bronze one in its place; and this time she stopped and looked up at the glass disc in the sky, almost as long as the ship, and tried to make sense of it. It spun slowly around a lattice of silvery metal and more glass. Inside was another glass disc, spinning faster, perpendicular to the first, and then another and another and another, and then inside that a sphere and another disc, the last one turning so fast that its spokes were a blur. It reminded her of an object that her alchemist Vioros had once had, all concentric metal rings at strange angles to one another. An orrery, was that what he'd called it? Except his had been the size of a dinner plate while this dwarfed even a dragon.

But it doesn't breathe fire and it's made of glass
. She tried to imagine what would happen if a dragon came upon something like this. It helped with the breathless wonder that threatened to overwhelm her. ‘What is this thing?’

The soldiers hanging on her arms forced her forward. One of them said something like ‘Glasship,’ although through his accent she couldn't be sure. Then he said something else, guttural, and they both laughed. She didn't understand the words but she caught the meaning clearly enough:
ignorant savage
. She looked at the two of them, one and then the other so she could be sure to remember
their faces. First their eyes and then their tongues, and then they would see how truly amusing a dragon-queen could be.

‘I saw them fly,’ she said with a smile. ‘They are slow and clumsy.’

The soldiers spat their disgust at her feet and pushed her inside the egg, all bare metal and empty except for the men already waiting there and a single polished handrail of dark wood running around the interior below the line of the windows. The floor felt warm. She might have moved to the windows to look outside, to see how this flying thing felt beside the sensation of sitting on the back of a dragon with a hurricane howling through her hair, but her eyes wouldn't let go of one of the men already inside the egg. He was a slave like her, the only one in the ship who wasn't Taiytakei, and he was old but it still took a second for the rest of her to realise how she knew him.

‘Alchemist?’

Grand Master Bellepheros. Older and thinner than she remembered, but it
was
him. He stepped away from the others and bowed. ‘Your Highness.’

‘I was crowned a queen, Bellepheros, to follow my mother, and then Hyram named me speaker. I've held the Adamantine Spear and it drank my blood.’ She shivered at the memory then held out her hand so he could see the Speaker's Ring still on her finger. Through everything, no one had thought to take that away. He stared goggle-eyed in disbelief, and then his eyes glistened and his jaw dropped. He fell to his knees in front of her and pressed his face to the floor the way her slave maids had done before Shrin Chrias Kwen, and a bubble of joy burst inside her.

‘Holiness,’ he murmured, and for that she would have made him a king, right there and then, if she could.

‘Rise, alchemist.’

The Taiytakei soldiers stared at them both in open amazement. Bellepheros struggled up, his old knees giving him trouble. As he rose, he stumbled and grabbed her arm. Zafir froze, flitting from crowning him to hanging him in a cage for the crows in an instant, but as he finished pulling himself up, his cheek brushed her ear. ‘Do not bow to them, Holiness,’ he breathed so quietly that no other would hear. ‘They need us both.’

She smiled and took his hands in hers.
Not a king! For that I will crown you an emperor!
‘It's good to see you again, Grand Master. We thought you dead.’ Bellepheros. Grand master alchemist. She'd barely known him. The last time she'd seen him had been in Furymouth at Jehal's wedding, spitting derision at him while her insides turned in knots, desperately afraid that he might peel back the riddle of her mother's death and unravel what she and Jehal had done. Before that she could barely remember him existing. Afterwards . . . After he'd gone she'd wished him back, but only because of spiteful vicious-minded Jeiros who'd taken his place. Yet here he was. An ally!

‘The Taiytakei took me. As you see, Holiness.’

The smile stayed while she tried to look inside him to see what else was there. ‘They took a great deal more,’ she began, but then saw from his darting eyes that she should be wary. She looked past him at the other men. More black-cloaks in their gold-glass armour and one more who wore a plain sable robe woven with simple coloured strands along its hem from his collar to his feet.

The floor trembled as the glasship rose into the air. She almost stumbled.

‘Perhaps you would care to share the view, Holiness?’ Bellepheros gestured to the nearest window and grabbed for the rail beneath it. ‘It is an interesting experience. Very different from dragon flight.’

‘Slow,’ she said. She moved beside him to watch as the ship fell away. The movement of the gondola was imperceptible at first; as it rose higher it began to sway a little, much like the ships down below rocking back and forth in the sea. Six more glass discs hung over the Taiytakei fleet. The closest, she saw, was being loaded with dragon eggs.

‘Indeed. But comfortable,’ said Bellepheros. ‘How many do they have?’

It took her a moment to understand that he meant the eggs and not the glasships. ‘Hundreds, I think. A good few hatched at sea. I don't know what became of them.’

‘The Taiytakei have them. I beg to ask, Holiness, how could they have taken our speaker?’

Zafir smiled and put a hand on his, wondering what news he'd had of the dragon realms since he'd been taken. None? But she
couldn't be sure. ‘A long tale for another time, Grand Master. They took me when I tried to stop them stealing these eggs.’ A tiny little truth. He could have that much. ‘How many of these flying things do they have?’

‘I don't know, Holiness. Many, but I'm rarely permitted to leave my eyrie.’

‘You have an eyrie?’

He nodded. ‘The Taiytakei have made one.’

She turned from the window and looked at him. There was something in his words that caught in his throat. Shame, was it? And she saw it in his face too. ‘You helped them.’ She couldn't keep the hardness out of her voice. He nodded. ‘Are you not a slave then, alchemist?’