The Silver Kings (25 page)

She pushed her fingers into the silver. There were no ripples – it simply seemed to swallow her. She pressed her hand in deeper until the silver was up to her wrist. When she drew back, her hand jumped out as though fired from a spring. A single circular ripple bloomed, sluggish and fat and quickly dying away. Not water, this sea, but quicksilver. That most precious thing and twice as heavy as lead, but the sled didn’t seem troubled by its weight.

She rode back to the eyrie, through the fractal spirals of the tunnels to the bathhouse, and emptied the precious quicksilver into Baros Tsen’s bath as the Black Moon commanded. The Adamantine Man Tuuran now waited there too, cradling Zafir’s body with the delicate care of a lover. The rider-slave’s eyes were closed, and Liang couldn’t tell if Zafir was still alive. When the bath was full, Tuuran laid her on its surface. She barely sank at all.

The Black Moon watched. ‘Push her under,’ he said. Tuuran shook his head. ‘Push her under,’ said the Black Moon again and put a gentle hand on Tuuran’s shoulder. ‘It’s going to save her, big man. You have to trust this.’

The pain on Tuuran’s face was as clear as the sky. He nodded and pushed Zafir’s head down, trying to force her into the quicksilver, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t strong enough. So they turned her over, him and the Black Moon together, face down, and drowned her, killing, it seemed, what little spark was left. Zafir kept breathing right to the end. Thin shallow breaths. She shook a little and then was still.

‘We’ve killed her.’ Tuuran looked at his hands in horror, then at the Black Moon. ‘Crazy Mad? If that’s you? Tell me we haven’t killed her!’

‘You haven’t killed her, big man,’ said the madman. He let Tuuran turn Zafir back to lie with her face up, and then the Black Moon ushered them all away. And Liang, more than anything, was left to wonder why, why not let her die?

Time drifted around Chay-Liang in the months and moments that followed, seeming to pass her by, seconds and hours and even entire days falling wilfully between the interstices of the moments she remembered. She wandered in a daze or else sat in her room, staring at nothing. When she went to the walls the Silver Sea lapped at the eyrie rim. She didn’t remember landing – it happened so softly that no one seemed to notice. The great dragon Diamond Eye perched silent and unmoving, one surviving hatchling to either side. A sadness poured out of the three dragons, a longing so deep and profound that Liang had to turn away; and even then it followed her. She caught herself weeping now and then for no reason she could find. She wasn’t alone. It seemed that a doom weighed on them all, the few survivors, a crushing weight of mourning for something lost that they’d never even known they had.

Later it struck her as strange that the eyrie didn’t float in the air the way it had in Takei’Tarr, but rested in the quicksilver sea. Later still it struck her as even stranger that she never once remembered eating or drinking, or feeling hungry or thirsty. And all the while the sea called to her. Her dreams filled with it, and with the moon, giant and full, silver in the sky, beckoning. Awake she stood on the eyrie walls for hours, staring at nothing. Some­times the Black Moon stood too, unblinking, with silver light pouring from his eyes, the same light as the sea. He felt it as the dragons did, an unbearable hurt at his very core; he tried to hide it but he might as well have tried to hide the sea itself. She had a sense of him building his strength, readying to leave, but also that this was somehow a place where he belonged, against which he had turned his back long ago.

She took a sled. No one had said that she couldn’t. She flew away without knowing why, except that something called her, on and on, barely aware of the passage of time until she came upon a city built of the white stone of the eyrie and the Godspike and the Azahl Pillar of Vespinarr, and other places too. Gleaming spires rose above the sea, thin and tall and impossible, with webs of silver strands between them. She stopped and snipped a piece of glass from her sled and made a farscope, shaped it with implausible ease, moulding it sharper and more perfectly bright than any she’d ever made, and with it, among the towers, she saw the silver-clad men who walked upon the surface of the sea itself. They looked back, wafting a warm and gentle curiosity at her intrusion. Their questions roamed about her in an instant, playful enough to make her smile. They toyed with who she was and where she had been and how she had come here, harmless and kind. She felt them spread around and through her, winged sprites of imagination full of joy and seeking answers, skimming the mirror sea, flitting ever-wider patterns, looking for her source.

She had no idea who they were. It barely occurred to her to wonder.

Her thoughts rode back among them, drawn out of herself with no desire to resist. She led them gambolling back to the eyrie, happy to have found them, sure they would ease the sadness that infused the Black Moon’s palace. They darted and danced to the eyrie rim and climbed its walls, and sang with joy as they found the great dragon and tried to welcome him home, but in that moment the Black Moon turned his baleful eye and set his gaze upon them, and burned them into shrivelled screams and sent them howling away. They scattered and were gone. They took their joy and delight and left Liang alone and hollow on her sled. She called after them, and tried to give chase, but they didn’t come back.

Then, from the quicksilver sea, came a dark moan of wakening, and a shiver as a different mind fixed itself upon her, as colossal as the light of the moon itself, hostile and terrible and bleak as winter stone. Liang fled, racing to the eyrie as a thousand eyes of burning silver set after her, each a gleaming gaze of murderous animosity. The sea shuddered and swirled; a whirlpool sank beneath her and grew until it was a hole as vast as the sun, as depthless as night. Liang wept and howled her fear and clung to her sled until she crashed into the dragon yard and fell, but she felt no pain from it. She ran to the tunnels and ran for Bellepheros to hide inside him as deep as she could; and as she did, she felt the eyrie lurch and twist and sink, and the Black Moon howl with depthless rage and furious despair.

She clung to Belli and he seemed to speak: ‘What is it, Li, what’s happening?’ His words carried every edge of her terror as the Silver Sea swallowed the eyrie whole and spat them out and cast them all into darkness. The eyrie shook and shivered and shuddered, and then as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped, and Liang found her mind clear and sharp again. She stumbled and shook away the cobwebs and climbed the fractal spirals of the eyrie into bright sunlight. The sky over the dragon yard was blue, a mackerel of cloud far overhead, thin and pale, not stars and darkness. The Black Moon hunched curled up into a ball in the middle of the yard, rocking back and forth. The dragon Diamond Eye perched on the rim with the hatchlings beside it, both as she remembered, unmoved, their eyes tuned to a dark curtain of cloud that reached into the sky as far as Liang could see, cutting this new world in two. Dim dull flickers of muted violet lightning flashed and pulsed within it.

A storm-dark line. Liang blinked. The memories of the Silver Sea were clear and sharp and yet somehow unreal. She couldn’t quite be sure that it hadn’t been a dream. The eyrie was aloft again, drifting through the air a hundred feet above some ocean, and what little wind there was nudged them slowly away from the curtain cloud of the storm. The dragons stared, eyes fixed, blind to all else, and Liang felt their yearning, a sweeping sense of loss and want.

It was real, then, the Silver Sea?

The dragons didn’t answer. The handfuls of slaves and soldiers who stood on the walls gazed into the storm-dark too. They stood apart from the dragons, carefully distant, suffused with fear and dread and loss. Liang found Belli among them. She slipped beside him and took his hand and squeezed it tight. The ocean below was an ordinary sea this time, of water with its familiar colour of hammered steel and its stippled skin of waves, patient and restless.

‘I had the strangest dream, Belli,’ she said, and then shivered because it had felt so real, and yet how could that be?

‘No dream, Li,’ he said.

The glittering sea stretched to the horizon like the taut skin of the world. No one seemed to know what to do except to look at the storm-dark as it left them behind. No one spoke. It had them mesmerised.

‘I saw the Silver Sea,’ Liang said.

‘So did I.’ Bellepheros squeezed her hand.

‘What was it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘There were people.’

‘They were not people, Li, not like us.’

‘I felt a yearning to stay. The dragons too.’ Liang shuddered. ‘Did not you feel their sadness?’

‘I felt my own.’ Belli turned to face her. ‘I have the Silver King in my blood, Li. Just a touch, but the longing was … unbearable. It felt like it had … as though I had come home.’ He blinked a few times. ‘I don’t know where we were, Li, but I know what we saw. We saw the Silver Kings. As they once were.’

‘They would have let us stay with them,’ she said. ‘All of us. I felt their joy. Delight. But the Black Moon spurned them, and so they sent us away.’

‘Is that what happened?’

‘In my memories, yes.’

Bellepheros looked away. ‘What I saw was different. When they came there was no joy. When they came, they scorned me and cast me aside.’ He shifted and let go her hand.

17

Truce

The glasships were high overhead, far higher than they’d been before, receding into specks. The eyrie was falling. The lightning had stopped. Maybe they were out of range. Zafir reached Diamond Eye’s head. She’d have to climb on top of him to finish him, to drive the knife through his skull and send him to the little death before the oblivion of the storm-dark annihilated them all. She wasn’t sure she could. She threw off her helmet and wiped her eyes, brushing away the pain, then reached for the ruins of his harness to pull herself onto his shoulder, took hold of a rope and howled in agony and frustration when her arms didn’t have the strength. She fell back. Another dull wave of pain washed over her. She could feel herself failing.

I can’t
, she said. And she couldn’t. Just couldn’t.

You were worthy to ride me, little one.

She wept. Nothing anyone had ever said meant so much.

‘Hush.’ A shadow moved over her. The Crowntaker stood, eyes burning silver.

‘Why didn’t you …?’ She let out a long breath. What was the point? ‘You could have been my Vishmir.’ She lifted the bladeless knife to him. ‘Finish us. Both of us.’ The glasships above were little more than specks now, glints catching the sun.

The Crowntaker, the Silver King, whatever he was, crouched beside her. ‘I’ll not be your Vishmir,’ he said; ‘I’ll be your Isul Aieha.’ And she might have laughed if they weren’t all about to die. A darkness swelled around the eyrie. The storm-dark was coming.

He reached and touched her brow, and the gold-glass circlet Red Lin Feyn had cast around her to remind her she was a slave dissolved into ash. ‘Be free,’ he said.

The storm-dark swallowed them.

She sank into darkness.

Zafir stepped into the sunlight of the dragon yard, slow and wary and a little bewildered. She looked about. Men milled on the wall in little clusters. They stared and pointed at the curtain of darkness that towered across the sky. Some seemed in raptures, some suicidal with despair, others simply bewildered. The eyrie yard was empty except for the Black Moon, crouched curled in the middle of it, rocking back and forth. Diamond Eye perched on the rim, staring. The storm-dark. There was nothing else it could be.

Zafir frowned. The sight of it should have rocked her, perhaps, a colossal darkness spread out across the sky as far and high as she could see. But it didn’t. She felt numb. She’d been dying. She
had
died, hadn’t she? The Crowntaker, the Silver King, whatever he was, had crouched beside her. She remembered his words. The alchemist had come too, Bellepheros. The storm-dark had been about to devour them. Then suddenly she was in Baros Tsen’s bath, coughing and spluttering. The bath was bone dry, and whatever hurt she’d suffered, it was gone.

She down looked at herself. Dressed in her armour, the same mangled glass and gold she’d flown in to battle by the Godspike of Takei’Tarr. She had no idea what had happened since.

Where are we?
She quickened her stride and marched to the wall where the dragons perched, to Diamond Eye on the rim. She sat beside him and hunched against his talons, her head leaning against his scales, both of them settling to watch the receding storm-dark. His presence was a reassurance. He was warm.
What happened?

The Black Moon took us home.
Diamond Eye’s thoughts were odd. They had an unfamiliar shade she’d never tasted. Bitterness and a regret embraced his usual distant hostility.
Home
, he said again
. To the Silver Sea where the half-gods went when the war came. We felt it as strongly as a mountain, but the Black Moon would not let us go, and then they cast us out.

They?
But all she saw in the dragon’s eye was an endless Silver Sea. It made no sense, and came from Diamond Eye with a searing pain, a tearing wrench of anguish and loss. She withdrew and looked over the rim’s edge instead. Another endless sea, but water this time, not quicksilver. She shivered. The storm-dark towered
over them. The size of it made her cold. It went on for ever. Up and to each side. Endless.

What happened to me?

You were on the cusp of life and death. The Silver Sea brought you back.

And then?

The dragon seemed to shrug as if he didn’t much care.
The Silver Sea cast the Black Moon out, and us with him. It threw us into the storm-dark. He brought us here.

And where is here?
she asked again.

Diamond Eye didn’t know.
This world? It is unfamiliar, little one. The taste of the air is different. It is new to me.

Zafir looked at the wall of cloud.
Can you go back?

No.
Another blaze of regret. Wherever they’d been, the dragons hadn’t wanted to leave.

Can you pass beneath it? Around it?

We have not tried.

Tuuran was heading across the dragon yard. Last she’d seen, a small war had been going on and there were corpses littered absolutely everywhere, a good few of them ripped to pieces. The place had been awash with blood. Now the yard was empty.

How long were we there – wherever we went?

Time has little meaning on the Silver Sea. Months or hours or somewhere in between. Does it matter, little one? He has taken us away. That is all there is.

Where they were, how they were here, how long they were gone, the dragons didn’t care. Zafir looked for the cages she remembered by the walls, and the broken scaffold, but they were all gone. She was thirsty. Hungry. Ravenous, now she stopped to think about it.

‘Holiness.’

Tuuran. The hatchlings eyed him as though he was food. Tuuran glared back. Food that bites, said his eyes. The dragons quietly laughed.

‘Holiness, you’re alive. Are you …’ He looked confused. ‘You were hurt. It was bad. Crazy had you taken to Tsen’s bath and—’

‘I am well enough now, Tuuran.’ She cut him off. He could tell her the story of how she’d ended up in Baros Tsen’s bath some
other time, how she was alive and not dead. ‘Where has the Black Moon brought us?’

‘No one knows, Holiness. I don’t think he knows either.’ Tuuran frowned hard. He looked out at the storm-dark, at the sea and the sky. ‘Holiness, what do we do?’

She couldn’t stop looking at the dragon yard. How empty it was. ‘Last I saw there were corpses everywhere. There were cages. There was a man in one of them.’

‘No one survived, Holiness.’ Tuuran laughed bitterly. ‘I didn’t see what happened, but the night-skins killed everyone they could, and the dragons had much the same thought. We fell through the storm-dark. Crazy took us … somewhere.’

‘The Silver Sea.’

‘Yes.’ He frowned at her as if wondering how she could possibly know. ‘He … he got rid of it all. It all just vanished one day.’

‘The cages?’

Tuuran shook his head. ‘There was no one left, Holiness.’

So he was gone then. Shrin Chrias Kwen. The man who’d killed Brightstar. The man who’d told his soldiers to rape her, to remind her that she was a slave. Pity. She’d been looking forward to watching him die slowly of the plague she’d given him.

‘Holiness,’ asked Tuuran again, ‘what do we do now?’

‘You could start by bringing me something to drink. I’m parched.’

‘Yes.’ He shuffled his feet. ‘Thing about that, Holiness, as there really isn’t all that much left. I think we—’

‘Tuuran, if you glower any harder at my dragons, your face is going to rupture.’ He was her Night Watchman now. She remembered that.

‘Holiness, I’m just a soldier. Or sometimes a sailor, but it makes no odds. I don’t know much about anything. I don’t understand where we are or where we were, or how we got to wherever we went or how we left again. Truth is, I don’t remember much about it. It was a strange place. Real, but at the same time like it was only a dream; but if that’s what it was then we were all very hungry in our dreams, for the stores are almost empty.’

‘It was real, Tuuran.’ The dragons had no doubts, even if Tuuran couldn’t be sure. ‘Do you mean to say we have no water?’

‘We have little of anything, Holiness. We don’t know where we are. We don’t know what to do, or what any of it means. Holiness, we need you. We need someone to lead us.’

‘I died, Tuuran. For an instant, I actually died.’

‘I pushed your face into the silver water and watched you drown.’

Too much. Zafir took a deep breath and stood up. ‘Is Bellepheros still with us?’

Tuuran nodded.

‘And his witch mistress?’

‘Chay-Liang?’ Tuuran nodded again. Zafir looked into the dragon yard, at the Black Moon huddled in the middle of it. She remembered moonlight blazing from his eyes, but that was gone now.

‘Who is he, Tuuran?’

‘He was my friend once. Berren Crowntaker he called himself. Other names too. Now …’ Tuuran’s face soured. He shook his head. ‘Now he’s something else. The Isul Aieha, perhaps.’

He didn’t sound convinced. Zafir shook her head. ‘No, he’s not that. But he set me free, and he saved my life, and he took us to wherever it was we were, and then he brought us here.’

They stared together a while longer, each as mystified as the other, and then, since the Black Moon wasn’t moving or doing anything much except rocking back and forth, she sent Tuuran to get the witch and her alchemist, and made sure to have them wait a moment before she joined them in the yard.

What do we do?
A fine question.
She glanced at the three dragons, not that she expected any sort of answer. Not that they cared much one way or another.
Where are we and where do we go, and what happens next? Isn’t it a queen’s duty to have an answer?
Hard questions, too, but easier than the ones that vied to take their place.
What happened to me? Did I really die? What does he want?

The dragons didn’t know and they didn’t care. All she saw was the desire in them, singular, deep and bright. Wherever they’d been while she lay in Baros Tsen’s bath, they wanted to go back.

And I? What am
I
to want?

She didn’t know the answer to that any more than the dragons did; and now Tuuran had the witch and Bellepheros with him in the dragon yard, waiting. Zafir climbed down the steps to join them. Something practical to take her thoughts away from fog-laced far horizons. The here and now. She dealt better with that.

‘If you think you—’ Chay-Liang began, but Zafir cut her off.

‘Where are we?’ She looked at them, from one to another: Tuuran, Bellepheros, Chay-Liang. None of them had the first idea. All three looked like sleepers woken too abruptly from deep dreams, still fumbling for their senses. Underneath her façade she felt the same. She shook her head, trying to shake some sense into the world. ‘Bellepheros, you have a library of sorts. Find out. Tuuran tells me we have almost no food or water. We are adrift, and the sorcerer who brought us here –’ she glanced again at the Black Moon ‘– now appears unable to help us. So whatever happened to us, put it aside unless you plan to die of thirst and starvation. I suggest you find out where we are, and then tell me which way I should have Diamond Eye tow us to find land.’ She raised an eyebrow. Delicious, seeing her grand master alchemist and his enchantress mistress lost for words. ‘Tuuran, I don’t care if it’s the last cup of water we have, it’s mine and I want it.’ She smiled a broad tooth-bared beam calculated to climb as far up the witch’s nose as it could possibly go, and went back to her dragons. Space and time alone to think. She didn’t know how she was supposed to feel about any of this. Confused, mostly. She was supposed to be dead. The Black Moon had saved her.

She looked at her arm, at the little patch of rough skin on the inside of her elbow where the Hatchling Disease had started to take hold. It was still there, still dormant, still held in abeyance by Bellepheros and his potions. But not gone. He hadn’t saved her from everything then.

Tuuran came back to her a few minutes later and tossed a skin full of water into her lap. ‘There’s a couple of barrels and not many of us left.’ He glanced at the sky. ‘We’ll last a day or two yet. Perhaps our ancestors will favour us with some rain?’

‘Rain?’ Zafir snorted. The deserts of Takei’Tarr hadn’t seen much of that. She looked up anyway, but the clouds were wrong. No rain to save them, not here.

The eyrie drifted on, easing further from the dark curtain of the maelstrom, carried blind and helpless by a soft and gentle wind.
Are there thoughts out there
? she asked Diamond Eye.
Do you sense any others, far away? Land? A town? A city? A ship?

Nothing.

Anything we can eat?

The sea teems with life.

There were cages and cranes around the eyrie rim. No one had used them since Baros Tsen had dragged them out into the depths of the desert and over the top of the storm-dark. Maybe they’d all been smashed while the Taiytakei lords wrestled for the eyrie, but maybe not. She sent Tuuran to have a look. ‘Perhaps someone here knows how to fish?’ She drank half the water in the skin and took the rest with her up onto Diamond Eye’s back and launched into the sky, soared with him for hours, veering one way and then another, sweeping the sea ahead of the eyrie, looking for land but to no avail. By the time she returned the curtain of the storm-dark had become a distant darkness, riven with its muted violet flashes. She swept Diamond Eye in a single circuit of the eyrie and then flew him underneath, hugging the black stone underbelly and its veins of dull purple light. The storm-dark and the eyrie. The same light, the same lightning. It meant something, but she had no idea what.