The Silver Kings (48 page)

And why?
Zafir sat back in her improvised throne, wishing for a moment that it was Jeiros bound before her so she might kick him down and needle her feet into his old skinny ribs.
Why? Because I was young and pretty? Because I wasn’t old like you? Because I was a queen of the Silver City and you hated us all for keeping the Silver King’s secrets to ourselves?
Restless pacing would have suited her better than sitting on this throne, waiting for Lystra. A dull uneasy fury at the Black Moon for taking her eyrie swatted at any calm and flushed it away
.
And where were the dragons? Hiding? But that wasn’t how dragons were. Why hadn’t she seen them? Why hadn’t they fallen on the eyrie, the Pinnacles? Where was the storm of fire and fang?

They come
. Diamond Eye peered into the thoughts and souls of everyone around her, but she still wished she was on her throne in the Pinnacles with its white stone dragon that sought out deceit and glowered it naked into submission or revolt. So easy to fall into old habits, tried and tested and found wanting, but habits nonetheless. Kill them all. A clean sweep. Alchemists, dragon-riders, everyone who would not submit; but whatever she did, mercy or murder, it made no difference to what was coming. The Black Moon would have his way with the world. None of the rest mattered.

None of us are anything but insects to him. Even you, dragon. Ants.
Diamond Eye bristled at the truth she threw at him.
Will Lystra bend her knee to me?

No.

Good.
Wouldn’t have believed it anyway. Better Lystra’s animosity come open and raw.

A trumpet sounded, garish in the still air of the Oratorium, blazing her Adamantine Men into silence. Zafir stayed still, stiff as a rod, the Speaker’s Spear firm in her right hand and the ring worn on the left.
She heard the tramp of boots through the secret entrances under the stage to the tunnels and caves of the Spur. She pictured Lystra, murderous defiance, the two of them face to face, spittle-flecked. Diamond Eye whisking Lystra into the air and ripping her apart. But no, that wouldn’t do. The spear then. Rammed through her black treacherous heart.

Or another way. Lystra mute and humble. Bowing and scraping and begging forgiveness. But no, that way too ended in the spear and blood.

I made a promise …

She was sweating under her gold and glass. She wished there was a breeze to cool her; no, not a breeze, a gale to blow out the detritus of past lives clawing inside. Staying so still, waiting like this, next to impossible not to twitch …

Lystra emerged from the tunnels. She came alone. Jaslyn’s ­little sister, smallest of them all, and yet she walked like a speaker, like a queen; and she didn’t come to the stage to tower or grovel before Zafir’s pretend throne, but instead climbed the first tier of the Oratorium seats and sat on the stone benches with the three Adamantine Men she’d sent ahead of her. Meeting Zafir eye to eye across the still air and open space where musicians once played between the speeches of each performance, where jugglers tumbled and frolicked between the acts of
Narammed the Great
. They watched one another. She deserved respect for that, Zafir thought. Sitting on her throne with her guardsmen arrayed about her with their lightning throwers and their Taiytakei armour, with her dragon circling his obvious and irresistible menace above, Zafir had imagined herself appearing strong and terrible. But to come alone and sit apart, Lystra took that away.

She’s more like me than I thought.
And in that perhaps she found a chance they might part with no blood spilled, and so she rose and walked to the edge of the stage and waved Tuuran to stay where he was, and jumped down into the space between them. She stood in the middle of it, straight and tall with the spear in her hand, with everyone looking down on her, and made it her own.

‘I am Zafir of the Silver City,’ she said, strong in this place made for strident voices. ‘These realms were once mine. All of them.’ She looked Lystra in the eye and saw strength there, and frailty too. ‘Lystra, daughter of Shezira of Sand. Queen of Furymouth. Our realms are ashes. Everything between us is burned in fire. We begin anew. The slate clean. That is what I offer.’

She snapped her fingers. Tuuran cut Kataros free. Zafir turned and looked at Jaslyn, nodded and tipped her head, beckoning her. Other words of building the realms back to glory wandered through her thoughts, but they tasted of ash and crumbled on her tongue. The realms would be built into whatever vision the Black Moon saw, and nothing anyone here said or did would change a whit of it.

Kataros edged around the side of the stage to sit quietly beside Lystra’s Adamantine Men. She whispered to them. Queen Jaslyn, hesitant as a butterfly, climbed down to stand at Zafir’s side. She wore a helm that hid her face and she didn’t take it off. Zafir lowered her spear and cocked her head. She looked up at Lystra, meeting her eye.

‘Well?’

Lystra regarded her in silence a moment, then rose and stepped nimbly down the tiers of the Oratorium. Like Zafir she came alone, and as she came closer, Zafir saw her clearly at last, how thin and gaunt and tired she was, and how young, though a year and then some under the Spur had aged her. Lystra stopped a few feet short. She met Zafir blaze for blaze. A void of animosity settled between them. She held out a hand for the Adamantine Spear. ‘Return what you stole,’ she said.

‘No.’

She looked Zafir up and down. ‘Why did you come back?’

‘Because this is my home.’ As close to one as she’d ever had.

‘Now it is mine.’ Lystra turned her back to walk away.

‘Wait!’ At last Jaslyn took off her helm. Lystra froze. When she looked back, just for a moment, it was with a look of wonder. Joy, even.

‘Jaslyn?’

‘My gift to you,’ said Zafir softly. ‘Did Jeiros not pass on my words?’

‘I took them to be lies,’ Lystra said.

Jaslyn stepped forward to greet her. For a moment the two sister queens faced one another. Lystra pulled off a gauntlet and touched her fingers to Queen Jaslyn’s cheek.

‘You’re alive. You’re real.’

Jaslyn pulled back a pace, tight, full of anguished tension. Her face seemed to crumple. ‘Speaker Zafir, queen of the Pinnacles, greets you,’ she said. ‘She offers you a gift.’

Jaslyn’s hand went to her side. Zafir caught a glint of steel.

Far away, dragons fly. Hundreds pouring from the Worldspine in a wind of wings and scales, racing turbulent over the rapids and cataracts of the Silver River, leaping and diving under the shadows of the Great Cliff. Hatchlings, young adults, great old war-dragons, sleek agile hunters, they come. Silence drives them on, and the white dragon Snow above. A hundred hatchlings peel away as they reach the tumultuous sink hole where the Silver River plunges into abyssal depths under the cliffs of the Spur. Dragon after dragon dives into the chasm and soars into darkness, spewing bursts of flame to light their way, a hundred flaring mouths in a cathedral of space that makes even monsters small. Behemoths birthed these mountains, and here is their abandoned shell, hollow and vast, the mouth of a fissure that cracks the Spur in two. A mile overhead scatter-specks of sunlight filter through, brilliant-bright like morning stars. The dragons fly on, searching, diving, wheeling until they find the caves and tunnels that lead away, that wiggle from the great fissure of the Silver River. The dragons call to one another. Far it runs, this abyss, old as time and deep as the ocean, through the mountains to the other side, carrying the water that feeds the bottomless wells of the Mirror Lakes.

Through secret paths to where the little ones hide, newborn dragons race and leap and bound. Through the deep unlit caverns of the Spur, the unknown places, unexplored, untouched for more than a thousand years but not forgotten. They shriek and light their way with fire, while far above and high, those dragons already grown too large for such places slice onward across the open dust of the Hungry Mountain Plains, ripping the wind.

The spear.

Across desert plains and high valleys between skyborn peaks they scour stone and forest with their thoughts. They sing old songs, words in strange dead tongues long rotted to dust, rhythms born in the first shaping of the world. The spear of the earth hears them, and answers their call.

Zafir caught a glint of steel. Jaslyn already had the knife in her hand. Zafir lunged to stop her, already too late, but the knife never struck. Jaslyn reversed it and held the blade pointed back towards herself.

‘Life.’ Jaslyn’s voice broke. ‘Speaker Zafir offers us the gift of life, sister.’ The knife slipped from her fingers and clattered to the stone. Queen Jaslyn, weeping, fell towards her sister’s arms. Lystra backed away.

‘No!’ She shook her head. ‘This woman beheaded our mother, Jaslyn. Our mother!’

Zafir bared her teeth. ‘Because she threw Hyram off a balcony when he chose me instead of her, Lystra. You can’t simply kill a speaker and expect it not to matter!’

‘I will never bow to you. Never!’ Lystra backed further away.

‘Then I will not ask you to.’

Lystra didn’t stop shaking her head. ‘No. Not to you. Keep my sister, whatever you’ve done to her.’

‘Lystra!’ Jaslyn fell to her knees sobbing. Zafir hammered the haft of the Adamantine Spear into the ground.

‘Shall we murder one another then,’ she shouted, ‘while dragons own our skies? The last few of us left railing bitter about who shall be queen of the ash pile? Which of us shall be the last sour relic?’ The spear in her hand felt firm and cold. If she listened hard she thought she heard it murmuring, but more likely that was her own growing madness.
I could throw it. Pin her to the stone and take it all away. Let more blood run.

Lystra paused, fierce and furious. ‘You took the Adamantine Throne by treachery, murder and poison. You made it into a pile of skulls and bones, and look what you brought! These caves and tunnels are all that’s left of our brightness, and you claim it as yours? No. There will never be peace between you and me. Never!’

Zafir gripped the spear. Teeth bared on the edge of fury. She took a step and levelled it ready to throw. ‘Whom did I murder? Your dear Jehal was the master of poisons, not I.’

‘You murdered my
mother
!’

Zafir shrugged. ‘I have brought a half-god, starling Lystra. One way or another he will tame the dragons again. He will make them his, for better or worse. He will have his spear whether you like it or not, and he will do what he will do, and none of us will matter a jot.’ Her anger seeped away, scurrying shamefaced into the dark corners of her thoughts, withered and sucked dry by a bottomless fatigue.

‘I see no half-god; I only see a murderess.’ Lystra walked away for the tunnels under the stage. Kataros and the three Adamantine Men followed. Zafir watched them leave.

What did I expect?
Old anger still bubbled and simmered in its corners, refusing to die, growling under its breath that she should strike them all down. Zafir took a deep breath and turned to the men assembled on the stage. She hauled weeping Jaslyn from her knees. ‘You are all free to choose,’ she cried. ‘Follow her if you wish.’

For a moment no one moved. Then the Adamantine Man Jasaan headed for the tunnels, following in Lystra’s wake. A murmur and a shuffling of unrest rippled through Queen Jaslyn’s riders, until at last one of them moved. They came together then, fearful as though they expected Zafir to change her mind at any moment and cut them down, that it had all been a trick. They gathered Queen Jaslyn among them and left, and Zafir watched them vanish into the tunnels under the stage. She stood, long after they were gone, fixed to the spot. Her fingers gripped the spear, still pointing it where Lystra had stood. They were tight as stone. She had to put her other hand to them to make herself lower it.

‘Night Watchman,’ she said, raddled by exhaustion, ‘we have what we came for. We have what he wants, and we are not welcome. Leave them to their troglodyte ways. We’ll ask no more.’ For a moment the world shimmered and blurred. She closed her eyes against a wave of fatigue and nausea. ‘We await the pleasure of the Black Moon.’ And to do whatever must be done, and as always she would do it alone.

Little one!
Diamond Eye pierced her, sharp and urgent. She saw in his mind a swarm of hostile wings skimming cliff walls, coming fast, minds closed to his questions but brimming with fire and murder. The dragons of the Worldspine had chosen their course.

Little one, run!

35

One In, One Out

The old redoubt was a labyrinth, impossible to navigate if you didn’t already know your way or have a guide, and even Bellepheros didn’t know where half its passages led or what was really at the end of them; but he’d been here enough times to get to anywhere that really mattered, and he knew where the half-god was going: to the Silver King, trapped on the brink of death. He walked through the passages and tunnels that would take him there, climbed shafts and ladders and winced at the pains in his old knees, and wondered in the name of Xibaiya what he thought he was doing. How, exactly, was this going to work? Did he simply pull the spike out of the Silver King’s head and wake him up? And then what? Even if that worked, he probably wasn’t going to exactly be pleased …

He reached a bridge across a fissure. A rustle of water echoed from below. He put one tentative foot forward and then stopped, trying not to think of the gaping abyss beneath him. Yes, he’d been this way a dozen times before and more, but it never got any better. He stuffed his lamp inside his robe. Better not to see. Better to close his eyes …

A gleam flickered below. Not the pale white glow of an al­chemical lamp but a silvery sheen. Bellepheros froze, heart hammering fit to burst from his chest as the Black Moon walked along the sand beside the river at the bottom of the fissure, and he was sure the half-god would somehow know he was there, but the Black Moon passed on and vanished, the last sight of him a lingering flicker of moonlight. Bellepheros waited to catch his breath.

The bridge was a rickety wobbling thing held up by old creaking ropes. He crossed it with his eyes tight shut and let his feet feel their way, clung to the ropes either side and tried to imagine the ground just a short step beneath his toes. He counted the steps as he’d always done until he felt stone under his boots again, welcome as an old lover. When he opened his eyes another alchemist stood less than ten feet in front of him down the tunnel. He was holding up a lamp and peering in disbelief.

‘Bellepheros? Grand Master Bellepheros?’

Bellepheros gawped. He hadn’t expected to find anyone still alive in the redoubt. ‘Who are you?’ he blurted, the first thing that came into his head. He wondered if the other alchemist was some desperate delusion, but the alchemist stubbornly didn’t vanish. Bellepheros peered. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked. Then fear got the better of him, and he scurried forward and wrapped his hands over this strange alchemist’s lamp.

‘Grand Master Bellepheros? How—’

‘Hide the light!’

The alchemist pulled away. ‘It
is
you!’ he whispered. ‘Where have you been? Grand Master, the dragons can’t reach this far into the caves. There’s no need to fear them here.’

‘Dragons?’ Bellepheros shook his head. ‘It’s not dragons I’m worried about! There’s a half-god loose in here!’ He poked the alchemist to be sure he was real. ‘I thought the redoubt would be dead and abandoned long ago. How many of you are here?’

‘A half-god?’ The alchemist’s mouth fell open. He looked at Bellepheros as though he was mad. As though he was a ghost.

Bellepheros shook him. ‘How many? And what’s your name?’

‘My name?’

‘Your name! You still have those, don’t you?’

‘Vatos, Grand Master.’ They were walking fast now, Bellepheros tugging Vatos along, almost running, which in these caves was often a quick way to end on your arse with sore knees and elbows, but right now Bellepheros didn’t care. He felt on the brink, right on the edge of something he couldn’t grasp. Another alchemist!

‘Vatos! Are there others here?’

‘Y-yes. But you were dead, Grand Master! Everyone said. You went to Furymouth and never returned and—’

‘How – many – others?’
Vatos. The name didn’t mean anything. ‘Don’t you see how important it is?’

Vatos stopped. ‘How did you get past the dragons, Grand Master? Where did you go? Why did you leave us?’ He clutched at Bellepheros. ‘Tell us what to do! There’s nothing left!’

A wild plan already swarmed in Bellepheros’s head. Gather the last alchemists. Trick the Black Moon’s dragons into taking the old poisons again then haul the half-god down. Let loose the blood-magic. Blood-mages once tore the Silver King from his perch, and one half-god was surely much like another …

He forced the madness in his head to be still and looked at it with cold hard reason. The arch-magus Pantatyr had led a ­thousand blood-mages at the height of their powers, not some ragged half-starved handful. Yet …

He stopped and took careful hold of Vatos. ‘One more time. How many other alchemists are in the redoubt, Vatos?’

A distant flash of silver reflected glistening along the damp tunnel wall. A scream echoed after it. Vatos’s fingertips froze on Bellepheros’s robe.

‘Grand Master?’ He sounded like a fearful child.

‘The Black Moon,’ breathed Bellepheros. ‘We need to find the others, Vatos, before
he
does. We need …’ He heard another scream. The words died. Too late. He felt numb.

Vatos stumbled away. ‘They’ve found a way in! Oh, Great Flame, they’ve found a way in. How did you get past them, Grand Master? What have you done?’

‘Not dragons. The half-god.’ Bellepheros leaned against the tunnel wall. He sank to his haunches and held his head in his hands. ‘The half-god struck down by the Isul Aieha’s spear. Alive again, and now he’s killing us. There’s nothing we can do, Vatos. You have to go now. You have to hide.’

Another flash of moonlight flared through the caves, carrying another scream. Silver light glinted off the walls, growing ever closer, ever brighter. Vatos looked with eyes wide in terror, looked over his shoulder and then back at Bellepheros once more, forlorn like a beaten dog, and Bellepheros couldn’t blame him for his fear. The very walls gleamed silver, and the Black Moon was coming, and Vatos simply stood there because they were in a tunnel and there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run. No nooks, no cracks or crevices for a man to crawl inside, only bare stone walls and shadows and the silver-bright of the Black Moon like the light of the sun, the midday moon, closing them steadily down. He stood
quaking while Bellepheros huddled against the wall and waited to see if he would die.

The half-god came. In the fire of silver fury that surrounded him, the glaring bright that filled the air, Vatos froze and arched and screamed. He rose helpless into the air, arms and legs windmilling, and hung adrift until the Black Moon stood before him. A ruddy haze filled the space between them. Bellepheros stayed where he was, careful and silent. The Black Moon didn’t seem to see him, but that couldn’t possibly be right.

‘I know your thoughts.’ Glee and triumph came in gaudy streamers from the Black Moon’s tongue. He tapped a finger on Vatos. ‘An alchemist should know there’s no such thing as a place to hide from a dragon as he peers into your soul.’

The crimson haze thickened, a red iron vapour torn from Vatos and oozing from his skin, slick and bloody now, silvery too, flowing into the Black Moon. The essence of the Silver King that every alchemist carried inside themselves. The Black Moon took it, and Vatos died, and the Black Moon let him fall and walked on; and Bellepheros pressed himself against the stone, as plain to see as a man on a rock under the midday sun, and yet the Black Moon passed him by, and he didn’t understand why, why the half-god would leave him be, but he did. It was as though Bellepheros wasn’t even there.

Vatos was a husk, what was left of him, dead and white-skinned and flaking as though a corpse left to dry in a cave for years. All the moisture had been sucked out of him. Every drop, every prick of blood. He was shrivelled. At a touch Vatos would crumble to dust.

Bellepheros moved away, on through the redoubt, already sure he was too late. He found more alchemists – his family, for want of anything better, their corpses sucked desert-dry in caves precipitately abandoned, lamps still lit, food half eaten. In some the air carried the taint of a greasy black ash, settling like silent corrosive death. The Silver King had vanished. Dead or raised to vengeful life, Bellepheros didn’t know, but it hardly mattered. He
was
too late; and it struck him hard then: there would be no more alchemists. None. Ever. He and Kataros might well be the last. He sat down and held his head in his hands and shook and heaved, racked by the irrevocable end of everything he knew.

He was there for a while, lost in grief and misery. By the time he forced himself back to the mouth of the caves the sun was sinking, the eyrie gone and the Black Moon with it. The distant clouds at the end of the valley hung edged in purple. He tried to remember why he’d come here and what he’d thought he could achieve. The stupid notion of a hundred alchemists united to his cause, their power and blood turned as one against the Black Moon after the dragons had been tamed. The stupid notion that there could be anyone left alive.

Ash. All of it. Ash and sand.

‘Belli?’

The voice came from deeper in the cave, hesitant and hurt. A voice that couldn’t possibly be real, but after a moment he looked up anyway, ready to see the Black Moon again, to see that the half-god had known he was here all along, and that everything had been one cruel trick.

Chay-Liang sat cross-legged on a bizarre and ornate gold-glass sled, looking at him.

‘You’re not real,’ he said flatly when he found his voice.

‘Belli,’ she said, ‘if that is so, then this mirage would nevertheless like some Bolo and qaffeh, if you have any. I am rather hungry.’ She gave a wan smile, and then she jumped from her sled and ran across the sand beside the little bubbling river, and Bellepheros started to get to his feet and his knees almost gave way, and then she had his hands, pulling him up and into her arms and holding him tight, quivering and shuddering as though she meant never to let go, and he knew exactly how she felt, a relief as though his blood had been made of lead and was suddenly turned to air.

‘Li,’ he said, over and over. ‘Li. How?’ His head spun with why and what she was doing here, and when had she crossed the storm-dark, and how many others were with her, and so many questions spinning in his head like an unruly carousel, all tangled and tripping over one another before they could be made into words, but more than anything else she was here, and the relief and the joy and the sheer dazzling happiness to see her again almost knocked him flat.

‘I told you I’d find you again,’ she said. She felt different. Hardened and sharpened. Thinner than she’d been the last time he saw her in Merizikat.

They let one another go at last, but they held hands and never stopped touching, even if it was only fingers. Bellepheros led Li back among the caves and stopped in a hand-hewn cellar beside the underground river, the darkness of the fissure above them. Sturdy wooden stools sat around a stone-block table and three half-eaten bowls of pasty mush. Three desiccated corpses lay on the sand beside the water. Bellepheros set his lamp beside the bodies and held Li close, feeling her as she shivered into him – both dazed, both amazed to be alive – and he knew that the corpses at his feet could so easily have been either one of them. He imagined the Black Moon drawing out their lives, and didn’t dare peer at their ghastly upturned faces in case there was enough left that he would recognise them. He knew every alchemist alive well enough to at least flounder for a name. Many were old friends. Some he’d studied beside for twenty years. A handful he’d known since they were children. So no, he didn’t want to see their faces.

Li pulled away and righted a stool and sat on it, ravenously shovelling food into her mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I haven’t eaten for days.’

It seemed wrong to eat a dead man’s supper right beside his corpse, but Li ate like she hadn’t eaten for a month, and Bellepheros was sure the dead alchemists would have understood. Between mouthfuls she told him the truth of how Tuuran had helped her to escape Merizikat, how she’d found Red Lin Feyn and crossed the storm-dark. She laughed as she scraped the last bowl clean and her eyes ranged the floor for more. ‘My ship headed back into the storm-dark before I was even out of sight.’ She started to shake. Sobs, and Bellepheros wrapped his arms around her and they clung to one another again.

‘I wish you hadn’t come, Li,’ he whispered. ‘And I’m so glad you have. So very happy.’ He closed his eyes and basked in her, and for a while there was nothing else, and even the Black Moon was forgotten. Then he took her hand and led her further into the fissure, skirting as far around the scattered corpses as he could. One thing he could do: there would be food here, somewhere.

‘I had a map,’ Li said behind him. ‘I thought Zafir’s home must be easy to find. I never imagined all the cloud and rain you have in this land.’

They reached a shaft so narrow that even Bellepheros had to twist his shoulders. He went ahead, peering with his failing lamp until Li lit up a brilliant wand behind them, a glass torch like the hundreds she’d made in Merizikat and a hundred times brighter. A film of greasy ash covered the walls. Another desiccated body lay across the tunnel at the top. Bellepheros tried to step around it, lost his balance, stumbled and landed heavily on the corpse’s shoulder. It crumbled and cracked underfoot like a mound of dead wood, dry-rotten almost to dust. He shuddered.

‘What happened here?’ Li asked.

‘The Black Moon.’ Bellepheros told his own tale as they went from cave to cave through the redoubt’s stores, gathering what food they could carry. He stopped as he reached the tale of Zafir’s expedition to retrieve her spear, and shivered. Li leaned into him.

‘I’m sorry, Belli.’ She’d found a bucket of nuts and was gnawing on them.

‘These were my last few friends, and the Black Moon brushed them away as though they never existed. When
was
the last time you ate, Li?’

She wrapped an arm around him and rested her head on his shoulder. ‘You know I was born and raised in a city, Belli. We had two sail-slaves who cleaned and cooked. When I was eight, I was sent to Hingwal Taktse, where half of us forgot to eat when we were supposed to and wandered about suddenly ravenous at all odd times. The slaves there were used to it. Food was a distraction made by other people that came and went, to be dealt with as quickly as possible. An irritating necessity. I never truly appreciated it until now.’ She shook her head and stretched and got up and rubbed her belly. ‘I got lost. I was in the middle of nowhere and starving, and I didn’t have the first idea what to do, and there wasn’t some nearby market, and I couldn’t just have a slave prepare a salad …’