Dragon Queen (68 page)

‘Rin!’ Tsen stopped fifty paces short, safely further than the length of the dragon's tail. Rin didn't. ‘What are you doing?’ In a flash of madness he found himself almost hoping that Rin
did
get too close, that some accident
did
happen.
And then I should just get on with it and burn the Kabulingnor while I'm at it? Idiot! Shonda would murder us all!

Rin turned and Tsen could see the strain on his face, the fear. ‘I want to touch it,’ he called. ‘Before I go.’

‘Are you mad? You sound like Chrias. He did the same, but he's a kwen and you expect that sort of foolishness from kwens! Rin, please!’

Rin walked right up to the dragon. The Scales was waving him back but the Scales was a slave and Rin was a t'varr, the Hands of the Sea Lord Shonda. He reached out and touched the dragon's foot. The dragon didn't seem to notice. Rin backed away, turned and walked as fast as his dignity would allow and it was over and no one had died. Tsen found he was sweating and panting and he hadn't even moved. Rin was shaking when he came back. He still had that bloody bird on his arm too.

‘Are you happy now, Rin? Or would you like to dive off the rim of my eyrie and see if my dragon can catch you? Would
that
be enough excitement for you?’

Rin's eyes were wide. He grinned, and for an instant he wasn't a t'varr but just a man, one that Tsen had once rather liked. ‘I remember a Baros Tsen who would have raced me to be there first.’ He stared at the dragon. ‘It's so . . .’

‘Big?’ That was a word for the dragon. Big.

‘Yes, but not just its size.’ He was gasping for breath. ‘We're safe here? Yes? Out of its reach?’ There was a quiver in his voice. Fear. Not surprising after what he'd just done but there was more, something . . .

Rin clucked and clicked his tongue and lifted his arm. The jade raven launched itself into the air and flew straight at the dragon. Tsen stared in disbelief. ‘Rin!’ His mouth stopped working and simply hung open. No words. He had no words for this.

‘I'm sorry, my friend,’ and for once Tsen truly believed him, ‘but Lord Shonda commands it.’

‘Why?’

‘There are sorcerers in Aria.’

The bird landed on the dragon's back. The dragon ignored it. ‘Couldn't you have at least tried it on one of the small ones?’ Tsen wanted to punch someone.
No. Because if it works then everything changes and I have almost nothing and Shonda has the power again. And to think I called you a friend once. You bastard!

The dragon's head snapped round. The jade raven jumped into the air. The dragon shot fire, missing it but spraying flames across half the dragon yard as the bird flew between its legs. The dragon stamped, the shock shuddering through the whole castle. Tsen staggered into Rin. ‘You stupid t'varr! What have you done?’

The bird flew out into the open space outside the eyrie. The dragon's tail flicked out, precision perfect. The jade raven plunged at the last moment, but the dragon seemed to anticipate the dive. The very end of the dragon's tail caught the raven like a whip and the bird exploded in a cloud of gleaming green feathers that hung for a moment in the sky before they floated slowly away. What was left of the bird fell towards the desert and out of sight, as broken as the slave it had just eaten.

‘It didn't work.’ Rin's eyes gleamed. ‘It didn't work, but it felt it!’

Tsen gaped. ‘And are you pleased or disappointed? I have a mind to put your name to my Elemental Man for that.’ And he might have said more, or simply pushed Rin off the edge of the eyrie himself, but now the dragon had turned. Its eyes fixed on Tsen and Vey Rin and it stared, exact and calculating, hungry and malevolent. Tsen cringed. The alchemist had said fifty paces but even a thousand would have felt futile now. He couldn't move and the monster was towering over them both and it seemed almost as though it was inside his head, pinning him to the stone beneath his feet. When it came it came fast, crushing the Scales beneath its feet as though it had forgotten he was there, intent focused entirely on Tsen. He felt himself falling apart on the inside and
still
he couldn't move. Was this what happened to Quai'Shu?

The dragon lowered its head right down, as big as a cart, with eyes like glistening boulders of glacier ice and teeth like swords.

‘Rin,’ whispered Tsen in such a broken voice that he wasn't sure he'd even spoken at all. ‘It was Rin.’

The dragon's eyes shifted very slightly, and then it reached out one massive claw and picked up the t'varr from Vespinarr. For an age everyone was frozen where they were, Tsen still rigid with dread, Rin held in the dragon's claw high up in the air, eyeball to eyeball with the monster. A strange noise echoed over the eyrie, and it took a moment for Tsen to realise what it was. Rin. Screaming.

‘Put him down! Put him down!’ Dimly Tsen registered that the alchemist was shouting too, but the dragon didn't move and the alchemist was left to wave his stick in futile anger until at last the rider came out and told the dragon to leave Vey Rin T'Varr alone. Much to Tsen's surprise, Rin was still alive.

Later they had to help him to get into his gondola. He didn't say much. Tsen didn't think he'd be saying much for a long time, but at least Shonda still had his brother. He might need a new t'varr now, but no one had died and so they weren't going to war, and maybe there would be an Elemental Man coming for him or maybe not, but with a bit of luck not as long as he gave Shonda exactly what he wanted and sent the dragon to burn Dhar Thosis.

The thought made him smile and weep both at once. Shonda had something else now too, something unexpected. He had someone who understood exactly what had happened to Quai'Shu.

For what that was worth.

Goodbye, Rin, old friend
.

60

An Orphan Boy from Shipwrights’

He lay in bed at night, wide awake, shaking and sweating and shivering. Trembling at the memory of a dream he could barely hold but to which he clung with every finger of memory hooked into it like talons. All his people were dead. His family. But he knew who he was and he knew his purpose
.

In his dream he'd been someone else. More than someone else. The hooded man with the half-ruined face and the one blind eye had been there
.

He'd been begging, pleading on his knees. There was someone inside him. Another name. He scratched and scrabbled at the dream, clawing at it to drag the memory back but it wouldn't come. All he remembered was the name
.

Skyrie
.

Berren Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge of Tethis, sat up, fists clenched and eyes wide. He was surrounded by straw and everywhere was dark, so dark he couldn't see even a glimmer around him. He didn't know where he was.
Tethis? The Pit?

The shades from his dreams lingered. There was another pit, one they remembered but that he'd never seen. In another dark place lit by a column of golden light and the broken goddess of the dead earth was there and the Black Moon, and he'd come so close. So close to . . .

So close to what? It made no sense.

He stared around him. The dream was fading but in the darkness he could still see it. He saw a woman bent over a man, and the man had an arrow in him and he was going to die; and the woman was trying to save him, but that didn't matter because the woman needed to die too because she was the last lock on the gate he'd so very nearly opened, and there was something about her, something
inside her that made her like him, more than one person at once, but there was another voice far away calling him and his hands wouldn't move, wouldn't make that last tiny little gesture to make him free, and the rage and the frustration and the despair were like tidal waves crashing through him one after the other.

He roared and jumped up off the floor and lunged for the door he couldn't see. ‘Leave me alone!’
Not my memories. Not my memories
. It was there somewhere. He knew it. He still couldn't remember where he was but he knew this place. He fumbled for the wall.

A hand landed on his shoulder. ‘Great Flame. Again?’

He jerked. Tuuran. And with his name the memories that didn't belong shattered to glittering shards and faded like smoke in the wind and yes, he knew where he was: he was in Deephaven. The place he'd once called home. Deephaven, looking for Taiytakei and their ships to take him to Vallas Kuy.

‘Come on. Out, out!’ Tuuran was pushing him through the door into a passage every bit as dark as the room where they'd been sleeping. He thrust Berren ahead of him up a steep flight of stairs. There was light here now. Gleams and slivers of something bright at the top. A trapdoor onto a rooftop.

Deephaven. His head was clearing. He remembered now. They'd found a ship and worked their passage up the coast and he'd let himself sink away again and for a time he'd become . . . the other one.
Skyrie
. Still in there. Lurking. Hiding. But now he was where he'd been born and Skyrie was the weak one, and he wanted this, this place with its memories.

Tuuran pushed the trapdoor up and Berren almost fell back down the steps as he reeled from the brightness outside. It was the middle of the day. He climbed up and looked, and all his strength was suddenly gone because he was
here
again and seeing it was like a punch to the gut. Twenty years since he'd trained with the sword-monks of Torpreah when they'd come to Deephaven for a summer. The start of a civil war, his master had said, but it had come to nothing. Twenty years and yet he could see Tasahre as though it was yesterday, dying at his feet as he knelt beside her. He blinked and shook his head, trying to tear himself away from the past and the deck of that ship, from the Emperor's Docks and
the Deephaven he'd known half a lifetime ago, but he couldn't. It had gripped him from the moment they'd sailed round the Blue Cliffs and the needle-like spikes of Deephaven Point. When the ship had brought them into the bay, it had all come crashing back. He'd seen the city from the sea before, but only the once, from the ship that had taken him away all those years ago. The docks were still there, the castle-like House of Records at one end where the harbour masters lived, the great warehouses, the Old Harbour Watchtower at the other leaning like a drunkard over the Kingsway but still not fallen down. He stared at it all, fifteen years old again, the Bloody Judge and the Crowntaker both names that hadn't yet found him. Just Berren, the thief-taker's boy, the day after his life was shattered. He felt as though he'd stepped back in time, as though he'd gone back to those days to walk through them again, only this time he was walking backwards ever further into the past. He'd watched the city come closer and he'd wept, because if he was walking backwards through his life he knew exactly what happened next; and also because he knew that he wasn't, that the sensations weren't real, and that however hard he wished, he wouldn't be seeing his Tasahre again.

From a distance the city had seemed much the same. The changes were small and subtle and it took being up close to see how deep they ran. And not so much
see
as
feel
. As he stepped off the boat and onto the docks, a tension had embraced him like a poisoned shroud. He'd walked up the Avenue of Emperors, drinking it in, the rich taverns on one side and the hostels for sailors who could afford decent lodgings. The Assayers’ quarter, as he remembered it. On the other side should have been the first fringes of the Maze, and
that
was where the city had changed. But not just changed. Every single street and alley had vanished, simply not there any more as though all the taverns and bawdy houses and the jewellers and the goldsmiths and the Moongrass dens and the sailors’ flophouses had all shuffled up while he was gone and quietly closed them off. Further on it was suddenly familiar again. The two great curved swords still reared over the top of the Avenue, the Swords of the Sun proclaiming the virtue of truth and a terrible fate for thieves and liars. The old statues he remembered were still there: the first emperor and the last, except the statue of Ashahn the Wise
had now gone and there was another in its place, a young woman. She might have been beautiful and regal once but her face had been scratched and scarred and daubed with paint.

Hang the witch
.

They'd found a place to stay. He hadn't been paying much attention. Memories came at him from everywhere. He must have fallen asleep, and then the dreams, and now he sat beside Tuuran on a rooftop in the sun.

‘You never believe me when I tell you who I am.’ He said it without any bitterness but with a sadness that came of simply being here. From the rooftop they were looking over what had been the Maze, back when he'd been an orphan boy from Shipwrights’. He should have been able to see other places he'd known once: the Sheaf of Arrows where he'd hidden with Lilissa, the Barrow of Beer where old Kasmin had lived. He should have been able to point them out to Tuuran but he couldn't. The Maze he remembered was all gone and a new Maze had risen in its place. The House of Embalmers and Morticians stood on one corner, a place that hadn't existed in Berren's day because burying the dead had been a terrible sin and still was. The streets of the Maze were covered over now,
everything
was covered over, windows boarded and curtained or bricked up and it didn't take much to understand the why of it. The Maze had become the Necropolis, a city within the city, a city of the dead just as the oar-slaves in the galley had said. Every street he knew had been barricaded from within and then blocked by the living except for one – Taphouse Way once, but now they called it Dead Man's Walk.

‘I know you think I'm mad.’ He didn't look at Tuuran's face but pointed out over the city. ‘There. Those towers up there. The Peak. The tower capped in gold is the Temple of the Sun. The one that seems to have wings is the Overlord's tower. They're the same height so neither overlooks the other.’ He peered at them. They were still exactly as he remembered them. His arm moved round. ‘That tower poking up over the rooftops is the Temple of the Moon.’ Old Garrent who had always put a smile on his face. ‘Beyond lies the Godsway, which runs from Arr estuary and the River Gate to the Square of the Four Winds.’ Right past the House of Cats and Gulls where Saffran Kuy once lived. His arm
moved again. ‘Down there runs the Avenue of Emperors. All the way to the sea. The one we walked up yesterday from the docks. Next road along is the Kingsway.’ His arm swept further round. ‘Pelean's Gate and the Sea Gate are over there. Then somewhere are the old city walls. On the other side there used to be a canal. It was supposed to go from the river to the sea and make Deephaven into an island but they never finished it. It's mostly covered over now, but the canal's still there underneath the slums. You go and see, Tuuran, and then come and tell me how I know all this.’