The Silver Kings (37 page)

What use?

As it was he didn’t even make it to the Octagon before Big Vish caught his arm.

‘Boss?’

‘Go away.’

‘You need to come, boss.’

Tuuran brushed him off. ‘Find someone who cares, Vish. Aren’t you supposed to be watching Hyrkallan’s corpse?’

‘You told me to mind the grand master alchemist, boss. So should I take him?’

‘What?’

‘Boss?’

Tuuran stopped. Took a breath. Because no, Big Vish just wasn’t going to leave him alone, not unless Tuuran put an axe blade through his head, because Big Vish was just too damned dumb to ever take a hint. The world wasn’t that kind. ‘Take who?’

‘The grand master, boss.’

‘Take him where?’

Vish took a deep breath, as though Tuuran was being unreason­ably obtuse. ‘To Jasaan. You know, the Adamantine Man who went off looking for the alchemist Kataros.’

Tuuran blinked. ‘What do you mean “take him”? Wasn’t Jasaan the one who jumped off the summit with a pair of dragon wings strapped to his back? He must be smashed to a bloody pulp somewhere at the bottom of the cliffs.’

‘Yes. But he’s back. And he found her.’

‘What?’

‘The alchemist Kataros. He found her and he’s brought her back.’

Tuuran’s mind started racing. Was it possible? They’d actually found her? They’d found another alchemist? Bellepheros would practically piss himself with relief. And maybe, if he could give the grand master something he wanted, maybe things might start to change at last. ‘Alive?’ Vish nodded. ‘And this Jasaan, he’s got the alchemist with him? She’s here? In the Pinnacles?’

‘She’s down in the ruins, boss. Hiding. We’d have to go and get her. So … do I get him, boss?’

Tuuran almost said no. Let him see for himself whether it was real. But old Bellepheros deserved better, didn’t he? And an alchemist wasn’t just some other feral.

‘No, Vish. We get him together.’ Tuuran quietly thanked the Great Flame for giving him a ray of something that might turn out to be hope. Wasn’t much, but it was enough that drowning in wine could wait another day.

24

A Conspiracy of Alchemists

Thirty-four days after landfall

Kataros crouched in what had once been a cellar. They’d had a conversation, her and Jasaan, as they’d come to the outskirts of the Silver City.
You hide while I go inside. And if I don’t come back, you don’t follow. Good men died so I might find you and keep you safe.

She’d nodded, not really meaning it. Good men died all the time, some for better reasons, some for worse. But she’d gone along with it, and that was why she was in the cellar of what had been the Silver City’s Laughing Dog tavern. The Laughing Dog had once been infamous enough that salacious rumours of its outrages permeated even the creaky old walls of the Palace of Alchemy. If you were willing to believe the stories then there wasn’t any excess of debauchery or lewdness or violence that hadn’t once been witnessed in the Laughing Dog.
Bellepheros had even mentioned it in his
Journal of the Realms
, but the tale on which its infamy was founded was of a queen of the Silver City disguising herself as a whore and spending three days and nights on her back in a wager with the tavern’s madam. The story was a century old and then some, and Kataros had never believed it, but whatever the truth, the Laughing Dog’s days of bare-knuckle fights and snapper baiting were gone. So were the roof and most of the walls past the first storey. Half the grand old staircase was left, rising into nothing; everything that would burn had been charred black by dragons; and everything that could move had been taken long ago by the feral men who cowered underground.

The cellar was all that was remained, and the hidden door in the floor that led into the old tunnels of the Silver King. Kataros was thirsty and famished and so weak that the world blurred in front of her eyes now and then. She had a knife and a last few tattered shreds of hope and not much else. It had been a day since Jasaan had left her. An hour or two of dumb blind anticipation and then the rest spent realising how stupid she’d been to come back here, a growing certainty that Jasaan wouldn’t return.

Someone was coming up through the trapdoor. It cracked open. A knife trembled in her hand. She held the blade ready to cut herself and fling her most potent weapon, her own blood. Not that she had much of it left.

‘Kataros? Kat?’

‘Jasaan?’ All he was was a shape. But she knew his voice. She almost collapsed in relief.

The trapdoor hesitated. A second voice echoed from the shaft beneath. An old man complaining about his knees. Then the door flew abruptly wide and Jasaan ran over to her. ‘Kataros! It’s the most amazing thing! Hyrkallan is gone!’

‘Oh help me up then, will you? Let me see her!’ The old man again. Jasaan turned back to the trapdoor and hauled another ­figure out of it. ‘Careful, you clumsy great—’

‘It’s safe here,’ Jasaan said, still talking to her. ‘They have al­chemists of their own.’

She was shaking. Fear and tension. No. Not fear. Jasaan hurried back to her side.

‘Kat? What’s the matter?’ The tremors were getting worse. There were tears in her eyes. Hope, that’s what it was. A ludicrous hope that at last she might be able to stop running for her life.

The second man lit an alchemical lamp, a cool familiar light, and at last she could see their faces.

‘Grand Master Bellepheros?’ She couldn’t hide her disbelief. It really was him. ‘How are you alive again?’ Her head surged. She’d lost so much blood in the Black Mausoleum, and then everything since had been so hard, and she simply didn’t have the strength, and Grand Master Bellepheros had gone missing more than two years ago, and everyone supposed he was dead, and yet she’d know his face anywhere – every alchemist in the nine realms would know it – and the roaring noise was louder and louder, and above all his being here meant she was safe because …

The relief was too much. She fainted. When she came to, Bellepheros and Jasaan were crouching over her.

‘Grand Master?’ Impossible, still, to really believe it.

‘You must be Kataros.’ Bellepheros smiled, a great beaming smile full of joy as though she was his long-lost daughter. She didn’t understand. She knew his face because he was the grand master and she must have seen him a hundred times, but how did
he
know
her
? He’d probably spoken three words to her in as many years. ‘Your friend exaggerates; I am the only alchemist here. But now we are two.’

Jasaan offered her his hand to help her up. ‘You’re safe now. The Pinnacles have changed, alchemist Kataros. Your order is welcome here again.’

Your order …
Kataros glanced at Bellepheros. ‘The others? Speaker Hyrkallan …’

‘King Hyrkallan is gone.’ A darkness crossed Bellepheros’s eyes. ‘And your friend is right: the Pinnacles are indeed a safer place for alchemists now.’ His words carried more meaning than they said. Saf
er
, but still not safe, was that his message?

She followed the two of them down the shaft, taking the rungs slowly and carefully, wary of her own weakness. Bellepheros went ahead, babbling happily about things that didn’t make much sense and shying away from telling her anything that really mattered in between complaining about his knees. It was just as well; her own thoughts buzzed and floated, her mind too light-headed to properly focus, too crazed with relief. Fatigue settled more heavily across her shoulders with every step, drooping her eyes and her head until it seemed to want to crush her flat to the floor. Bellepheros could have been telling her the secret to ending the tyranny of the dragons, but it wouldn’t have stopped her from thinking how there might be a bed in her future, and how deliriously happy that would make her.

There was a monster waiting in the moonlight gloom of the Silver King’s tunnels, a huge clattering giant of a man covered in plates of golden glass. A light flared, dazzling, straight at her face, bright as the midday sun. She gasped and shied away from it, screwing up her face.

‘This idiot lump is Tuuran,’ said Bellepheros, as testy as she remembered him. ‘Night Watchman of the Adamantine Guard now, Flame help us all.’

The light dimmed. In the tunnel glow she could see more clearly now. Jasaan was grinning like an eel. She could have hugged him. Another wave of relief staggered her. Her knees buckled and almost gave way. Jasaan caught her. Beside the monster Night Watchman were two other Adamantine Men she knew from the Spur, Big Vish and Bishak, and a woman, short but armoured again in glass and gold.

‘Snacksize,’ grunted the monster, ‘you look after her until I say otherwise.’

Old Bellepheros hobbled beside her as they walked through the tunnels, taking their time while he told his wild tale of being kidnapped by the Taiytakei, of being carried across the sea and building an eyrie for the night-skins, of dragons and the dragon-queen Zafir. Kataros half heard, dizzy and too bewildered to listen to anything much. She told him how she’d been in the Worldspine when the first woken dragons had fallen on one of Valmeyan’s eyries and torn it to pieces, how she and a sell-sword had escaped and made their way down the Fury intending to flee to the sea.

‘If we’d managed to get that far, you and I might have met again long ago.’ She laughed, and then her voice choked, thinking of the sell-sword Kemir and what they’d been through together, that he was gone and almost forgotten. ‘We got as far as Hammerford. Dragons came …’ The memory seized up inside her and clenched her throat tight. Months of running and hiding, dragons and dragon-riders and feral men. The Spur and its hopeless starvation. Her whole life as long as she could remember. Running and running and fighting and running. No peace.

‘In the Spur we call her the spear-carrier,’ said Jasaan, filling the silence. He stayed close, protective, and she was grateful for that. ‘In the last days someone stole the Speaker’s Spear from the Adamantine Palace. The alchemists say it was meant for the Taiytakei, but Kataros found it in Hammerford and brought it back.’

Kataros stopped for a moment. ‘I didn’t do much more than survive and then pick it up when everyone else was dead,’ she said, quiet yet loud in these tunnels that reverberated even to a whisper. ‘Dragons came. They burned the town. Then the spear. I didn’t see who carried it at first, but it turned the dragons to stone. They all killed each other. I was the only one left.’

‘Turned to stone?’ spluttered Bellepheros. ‘The Speaker’s Spear did that?’

‘The old story of Narammed and Dragondale, Grand Master.’ Jasaan sounded smug. Almost jaunty. ‘When the dragons came to the Adamantine Palace, Night Watchman Vale Tassan carried the spear into battle against them. Many stone dragons guard those ruins now.’

Tuuran grunted something and nodded approvingly. ‘See, alchemist. Not all the old stories of the legion are nonsense.’

‘Finding one that isn’t doesn’t make the rest of them any less foolish,’ muttered Bellepheros.

Kataros stumbled, legs too tired to go on. Jasaan caught her again. How could he still have any strength? All those days wandering through the Raksheh looking for her, and then coming back, with hardly any food, he must surely have been at the end of his rope, yet he would have carried her if she let him. She settled for leaning on him again as they reached the Undergates of the Pinnacles and marched inside. Bellepheros slipped beside Tuuran and whispered in his ear. The monster nodded. After they crossed the Gold Hall, Bellepheros and Vish and Bishak and the armoured woman went their own way, leaving her and Tuuran and Jasaan alone.

‘Something you should see,’ Tuuran said, and led them through twists and turns and long grand halls of dim-glowing white stone, until suddenly they were at a great staircase to the very top of the Moonlit Mountain, and Kataros couldn’t understand how they’d got so high so quickly; but a summit was a summit and there was no denying her eyes. As Tuuran led them out into the open, she cringed and shot a glance at the sky, old instincts driven deep. Open sky meant death from above. This was where the other alchemists from the Spur had died. Friends, as much as she had any.

A dragon was staring at her. A huge old war-dragon in shimmering red and gold. Kataros yelped and gasped and jumped away, stumbling for shelter. Jasaan did the same, but the big man Tuuran didn’t even flinch. He stood and glared while Kataros tensed with legs like coiled springs to bolt as soon as the dragon moved.

‘I bet she lets
you
in,’ he muttered, and it took Kataros a moment to realise Tuuran was talking to the monster. He took his time, him and the dragon staring each other down, and then he turned his back and sauntered to Jasaan’s side. He had a vicious look on his face. ‘The speaker’s dragon,’ he said. ‘Diamond Eye. He only eats people her Holiness tells him to.’

‘Is it tame, then?’ Kataros asked. ‘It takes Bellepheros’s potions?’

‘No potions.’ Tuuran shook his head. ‘I don’t know why this one doesn’t simply want to eat us like the rest of them do. You’ll have to ask her Holiness when the time comes. Or …’ He stopped himself, shook his head and instead walked to the edge of the summit, to a crane where something hung over the side of the cliff. It took a moment for Kataros to see that it was a man. ‘Hyrkallan,’ said Tuuran brusquely. ‘Thought you’d want to see him, all things considered.’ He nodded to Jasaan. ‘Big Vish told us what happened. Look, there are things that need to be said, and all isn’t as well as maybe it seems, but you take as long as you like here first. He’s been there a while so he won’t mind.’

Tuuran stalked back to the High Hall and the Queen’s Gate. Kataros looked out at Hyrkallan. He hung still and quiet, and she couldn’t tell if he was already dead, but she stared at him anyway. The killer of alchemists. This was where he’d done it. Pitched them off the edge and then said they’d been burned by dragons. She couldn’t find any feelings for him at all. Just too tired.

‘Is he dead?’ she asked Jasaan, but Jasaan wasn’t beside her any more, he was by the crane. He brought his axe down on the rope that suspended Hyrkallan’s wheel over the cliff. The crane shook. The rope jerked and twitched. Hyrkallan didn’t move.

Dead already then. But Jasaan brought the axe down a second time and then a third, and then jumped away as the rope snapped and whipped, and the wheel and Hyrkallan plunged over the cliff, away to the Silver City, tumbling slowly end over end. Kataros ran to the edge and watched them fall. She saw the wheel crash into the side of the cliff hundreds of feet below and shatter into splinters. She squinted, but she couldn’t see after that. She turned to look back at Tuuran, split by a flash of fear, but he was still up by the Queen’s Gate, waving his arms as though in the middle of talking to someone, even though no one else was there. Kataros couldn’t tell whether he’d even noticed.

‘Whether he was or he wasn’t, he is now,’ grunted Jasaan. He led her away. Tuuran, when they passed him, sniffed.

‘Think yourselves lucky it isn’t raining for once,’ he said, and led them back inside to Big Vish. ‘Find her a place she can have for her own. Quiet and out of the way. You tell me where you put her, and you can tell her Holiness if she asks, but you don’t tell anyone else. Not even the grand master. You got that? You don’t tell
anyone
else she’s even here.’

‘Why do I have to hide away?’ Kataros asked, but Tuuran had already gone back outside to argue with the dragon again, and Vish only shrugged and led her and Jasaan through the Hall of Princes and the Octagon, pointed out the Hall of Mirages and told her not to go that way, not that it would make any difference if she did, and then led her another way through halls with grand tapestries hanging behind rounded entrances of white stone that made her think of gaping mouths.

‘The grand master.’ Vish pointed to where Bellepheros had his room, then took her back through the Octagon. Kataros followed him back into the Hall of Princes and down a side passage, through a maze of tunnels curving everywhere left and right, up and down, gentle slopes and twists, not a straight line in sight, and all of it the same white stone with its comfortable glow of light. Wherever Vish was taking her, she’d never find her way back.