The Silver Kings (29 page)

It was, for a while, as though the Black Moon was gone and everything else forgotten except here and now and the friendship between them, and if Tuuran’s eyes glanced now and then to the strange knife Crazy still carried at his hip, he never mentioned it, and nor did Crazy; and deep down perhaps Tuuran understood that they never spoke of these things because they were both afraid, because they both knew that it was only a matter of time, that things as they were couldn’t last.

Five months after they reached the archipelago, give or take, he and Crazy at last climbed the island together to the very top. They’d talked about it for weeks, and finally they did it. Took a couple of days to get there, scrambling up crags, clambering between precarious-rooted trees, following the stream until it became nothing more than a trickle here, a puddle there, a pool between stones. They took their time, foraging now and then until they reached a place no one had ever been, the very crown of the island, covered in trees and with no place for a dragon to land even if her Holiness had long ago flown overhead and scouted to see what she might find. At the crest they stopped, amazed, for the peak of the island fell away into a giant sinkhole, perfectly round and huge, a hundred yards or more across and vanishing into a depthless black. Tuuran peered with his torch, but there didn’t seem to be any way inside. The walls were stained and covered in dirt and tiny cracks, and out of every crack some grass or creeper clung to life; but they were too sheer and smooth to climb. He broke open an alchemical lamp and tossed it inside and watched it fall until it was a speck and then disappeared, but all it taught him was that there were bats down there, lots and lots of bats, and they didn’t much like his light, thanks.

They left the sinkhole and clambered up a tall tree nearby and sat high in its branches, looking out through the leaves over the sea, and over the islands like a scatter of dead monsters.

‘I still think they look like giant octopuses.’ Tuuran nestled his back against the curl of a branch and let his legs dangle. He tossed Crazy a fruit. Didn’t have names for most of the things they ate nowadays. Bellepheros had tried a few long and complicated words, but mostly they called things by the way they looked. So this was a spiky pink. Spiky pink tasted like sucking sweet lemon water out of a gauze-like pith. ‘I got a couple of dragon eyes and some dried shitberries and a couple of boiled gull eggs. And some pickled fish if you want.’ They still lived off fish most of the time.

‘Bloody fish. Be growing gills soon at this rate.’ Crazy laughed. ‘So, big man? Myst and Onyx? One of them yours, you think?’ Her Holiness’s handmaidens were pregnant, and one of the women in the village too. Babies. New life.

Tuuran shrugged. ‘Can’t say as I’d given it much thought.’ Certainly not enough to wonder about one of them being his. Just hadn’t thought of them that way. Made for strange feelings deep inside, now Crazy had made him look at it. A child. A son, maybe. A daughter. Did it matter? Hadn’t ever imagined anything except leaving a litter of bastards behind him. The wandering life of a soldier and a sailor. Was odd, thinking about it. Awe and terror both at once.

‘Be something to think about,’ said Crazy. ‘About where all this is going to go.’

The way Crazy said it wasn’t right, was just a little off, like he knew something and couldn’t quite figure out the words to share it. Tuuran didn’t say anything. Wanted to, but couldn’t think what, so they sat in the tree in the quiet and didn’t say much, just the companionship of old friends who knew each other so well, of being in the same place together. They watched the sunset, and Tuuran thought it was the most glorious spray of colour he’d ever seen. Afterwards they climbed down in the twilight and set a fire and watched about a million bats fly out of the hole in the island’s crown, and chatted about this and that and nothing much until the darkness was so thick they couldn’t see a thing, and that was when Tuuran noticed the tiny gleam of silver light in Crazy’s eye, the faintest sliver of moonlight silver.

‘He’s coming back, is he?’ whispered Tuuran, not much wanting to say it, wishing with every bone that the sliver of light had been something else, that it would go away and be some devilish trick of his imagination. But it wouldn’t.

‘Yes,’ breathed Crazy, with a crack of a tear in his voice. ‘He is. Don’t tell anyone.’

They didn’t either of them get much sleep that night.

Another month passed. Tuuran watched hard, kept his eye on Crazy and stared when he thought Crazy wasn’t looking, but he didn’t see the flicker of silver again for long enough that he began to wonder and hope that what he’d seen on the island summit had been in his head after all, but Crazy wasn’t the same. The rest of life went on and no one else seemed to notice, not even the witch Chay-Liang, who of all of them kept her eyes wary and never forgot who they were and how they’d come here and how, in the end, it wouldn’t last.

They built a little watermill and a bakery. Not that they’d had anything to mill or bake for months since they’d long ago finished the stores of grain from the eyrie, but they built them anyway, and when they were done they celebrated on the beach around the fires, and even her Holiness came down from the eyrie and brought what might have been the last of Baros Tsen’s apple wine, and sat and watched and smiled. Maybe she saw Tuuran too, standing a little apart from the others, watching Crazy Mad at the edge of the sea, staring out at the gentle phosphorescent waves.

‘Come and fly with me tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I found some caves. I’m curious, but Diamond Eye is too large to go inside, and I’d prefer not to go alone.’

‘I found some caves too,’ said Tuuran, but when they flew on Diamond Eye’s back the next day across a few miles of water and up the hill at another island’s heart, the dragon didn’t fly them to the top. Zafir circled and pointed down into the trees. The mountain here had two massive hollows in the side of its dome, side by side and each far bigger than a dragon’s outstretched wings. They looked like eyes, Tuuran thought. Or at least old empty sockets.

Zafir flew around to the island’s dark side of cliffs and overhangs and creeper veils, its sheer behind where no one ever went. She landed Diamond Eye on a rocky outcrop.

‘You ride well for an Adamantine Man, Night Watchman.’ She slid down the mounting ladder.

‘I flew with Hyram’s riders when he went on his grand tour after he became speaker.’ Tuuran clambered after her. ‘We flew to Bloodsalt. Then the Silver City. The hard part is not shitting yourself at getting up so close. The rest …’ He shrugged, and then stopped as it struck him that Zafir was still the speaker of the nine realms, even if the nine realms were far away right now, and he was still Night Watchman of the Adamantine Guard even if his hotchpotch of guardsmen had largely turned into village farmers, and maybe he should be a bit more mindful of his tongue. He bowed as he landed in the grass, and then wondered if that was enough and dropped to his knees.

‘Oh, stop it!’ Zafir forced him to look at her. ‘We’re not speaker and Night Watchman here. I’m not sure either of us are those things anywhere any more. But certainly on this island where no one will know any better, you are Tuuran and I am Zafir, and that’s all there is.’

For a moment it seemed to Tuuran that they leaned towards one another and that she might kiss him again, but she didn’t. Her eyes stayed on him, though. Shining bright. Tuuran hesitated. Wasn’t sure he should trust himself. ‘From birth to death, speaker,’ he said. Zafir snorted and turned away.

The climb to the caves was hard, sheer in places, and dark and damp under the shadow of the summit’s overhang. They picked their way through tree roots and climbed up inside a cleft in the rock, and by the time they reached the cave mouth they were breathless. Zafir took a bag off her back, dropped it and gave him two glass rods, torches from Chay-Liang. She had lightning wands too, and more enchanted torches of her own, strapped to her arm, gifts while the truce between her and the witch remained. Another decade or so and Tuuran reckoned they might even get to thinking about liking each other.

Zafir slid a finger along a torch. A beam of light shone from it brighter than any lantern he’d ever seen. She looked at him and grinned.

‘Makes me wonder what else she can do,’ she said.

The entrance to the cave was narrow and wet. A steady trickle of water crept between Tuuran’s feet. More an extension of the cleft they’d climbed than a proper cave. He peered inside, wary.

‘I don’t suppose there’s anything interesting in here. But if we don’t look, we won’t know.’ Zafir strode ahead, quick and confident as if she’d been this way before, but with a brittle sharpness to her that Tuuran had never seen. He followed, stepping carefully. The cleft widened and the floor turned into a pool of water, shallow but cold. The cave cut several hundred yards straight into the island’s heart, and then stopped. A trickle of water ran down the end wall from a shaft in the roof above. The stone here was smooth and water-worn, but when Tuuran shone his torch it lit up with an oil-sheen of colours, bright rainbows of blues and greens and yellows and reds like the plumage of a strutting paradise bird. Everywhere his light touched danced with rainbows, not like the bleached-bone yellow-white outside. He ran a finger over the cave wall. It was dry though slick, not rough and porous, and it reminded him of the inside of a pretty shell. Mother of pearl or something like it. He looked back.
The entrance was a bright white ball of light, everything else black or brilliant reflections of the sun and his lamp.

Zafir started into the shaft. She moved easily from stone to stone and disappeared upward. ‘It doesn’t go far,’ she called. ‘It opens out into another chamber.’ He watched her as she climbed. Maybe twenty feet up the shaft she disappeared. He saw her light flicker, dim and bright as her torch waved back and forth. When he took a deep breath and followed, he found her sitting at the top of the shaft on a stone shelf jutting out over flat still water at the lip of a second chamber, wide at first and high-ceilinged, though the witch’s light was strong enough that he could see how the cave narrowed as it led deeper into the island, how the roof dropped until it almost touched the water. Again the walls shimmered rainbows at him as he raked them.

‘Pretty,’ he muttered, ‘but I don’t like the look of this, your Holiness,’

‘No. Not much.’ Zafir waded out into the water anyway. It only reached her ankles at first, but as she went further she sank deeper. When she reached the part where the roof came down low, she was up to her hips.

‘Holiness?’

‘It’s just something to be done, Tuuran. Come, and please don’t question it.’ Her words sounded strained, and there was that brittleness again. Zafir headed on as soon as he started to follow, until the water was past her waist and the ceiling almost touched her head. The walls closed in hard from the sides and everything became narrow and tight. Now and then he did the stupid thing and let his hand with the glass torch dip into the water, and the world around him went dark. He settled to holding it between his teeth. By the time he caught up with Zafir he was having to stoop not to scrape his head, while the water was up to her chest and yet still she kept going. He could see where the tunnel closed ahead of them now, the top of the cave coming down to the water. Zafir kept on until the water was up to her neck. Bloody cold water too.

‘Holiness,’ he said as gently as he could manage, ‘it’s a dead end.’

‘I know.’

‘Then what are we doing?’

‘Are you afraid of the dark, Tuuran?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Then turn out your light.’

‘Holiness?’

‘Do it. Please. But don’t go anywhere.’

Tuuran ran his finger along Chay-Liang’s glass rod until the light dimmed and died inside. Zafir handed her own torch to him.

‘Take it.’

‘Holiness?’

‘Take it, Tuuran.’ She was breathing hard, gulping for air. And yes, it was cold and claustrophobic but it hadn’t been
that
hard to get here, yet Zafir looked on the edge of panic. Didn’t make any sense. Didn’t like it. Put him on edge.

Tuuran took her torch. ‘What is this place?’

‘An Adamantine Man should not be afraid of the dark,’ Zafir breathed, ‘and nor should a dragon-queen. But I am.’ He felt her fingers against his leg under the water, fumbling until she found his hand and held it a moment. ‘Now walk away. Go back to the top of the shaft. Put out the light when you get there and be silent. Do nothing but be there. Do not light either torch again until I reach you. Do not speak. Do nothing. Even if I beg. Do
nothing
! Do you understand me?’

Not really.
He felt Zafir’s fingers tighten on his own and then she let go. He hesitated, desperate to speak but commanded to silence, then turned and ploughed back through the water. He looked once over his shoulder and shone the torch on her and saw her staring back at him, a head in the centre of rings of ripples. He sat on the stone shelf at the top of the shaft, and put out the light as she’d told him. The darkness was absolute.

Silence.

Then a quiet splash, and a movement in the water. A soft whimper that hardly carried. His eyes slowly adjusted to the blackness so he could see the faintest outline of the shaft, a tiny bit of light making its way out.

‘Tuuran?’ There was a high quiver to Zafir’s voice. Not the speaker he knew but a frightened little girl. More splashes, faster and more frantic, and then a bigger splash and a yelp. ‘Tuuran?’ Another whimper, then more, coming in a steady rhythm. He could hear her getting closer. The whimpering stopped and a whispering took its place, laced with rasping breaths. ‘Kill him. Kill him!’

She was almost at the shaft. As she came past Tuuran reached out and caught her. She jerked away as though lashed by a whip, and howled and swung a fist that thumped into his shoulder hard enough to bruise. Tuuran lit his witch wand, just a little so as not to blind them, and saw Zafir stood in the water, hunched, fingers twisted like claws, breathing hard and harsh like she’d ­battled death and fought to the very end of her strength and yet, to her amazement, lived. She snarled and threw herself at him and pounded his chest with her fist as if driving an imagined dagger through his heart and out the other side, and then held on to to him, fingers wrapped around his shirt in a death grip, racked with heaving sobs. He wrapped his arms around her, gentle and uncertain, and she shuddered and pulled him into her like she was trying to climb inside his skin. He didn’t know how long they stayed that way. Probably not long, but in the darkness of the cave it felt like for ever. When she let go and sat beside him on the shelf she was shaking like a leaf in a storm. Maybe the cold, but Tuuran thought not. They stayed like that, her Holiness staring off across the cave slowly catching her breath, Tuuran wondering what the Flame
that
had all been about, until at last she took a deep breath and stood up.