The Silver Kings (60 page)

Li’s sled drifted serenely into the Grand Aisle behind the Queen’s Gate. Beyond the colonnades the air was unbridled fury. Dragons shredded one another. Fire raged. They fell, wrapped in furious tearing balls, curled up together and ripping each other to pieces. Bellepheros saw three dragons crash into a fourth. He saw them fall, plunging down the cliffs of the Moonlit Mountain towards the ruin of the Silver City below.

‘You should get off,’ Li said. The Queen’s Gate was open wide, a maw in the mountain summit big enough for a dragon. The sled eased towards it. Li started lining up pieces of glass around her, slowly shaping them.

‘What are you doing, Li?’

‘Off, old man!’

Bellepheros levered himself over the side of the sled and slid ­gingerly down, wincing as his knees bent. Li helped Jeiros to follow. From the height of the Queen’s Gate the flat top of the mountain summit spread below. Bellepheros saw the Black Moon, arms aloft, wreathed in moonlight. Dragon murdered dragon in the sky, jarring the mountain as they crashed bone-breaking into stone and wrestled on the ground. Two pinned a third, holding it down, and ripped out its throat. Another limped away, dragging a mangled wing. Others threw themselves back aloft. A monstrous shape fell, fast and hard as a stone meteorite. It shattered and exploded on the edge of the cliff. Pieces arced into the void below. Bellepheros looked up. He squinted.

‘Li, what are you doing?’ he asked again.

‘Someone has to stop her.’

‘Who?’

‘Zafir, you blind old man!’

‘She’s here then? Where?’ he asked. ‘Li! Where is Zafir? What’s she doing?’

Li pointed into the sky and the thunder-swirl of dragon-fire. ‘Killing dragons. Turning them to stone. She has the spear, Belli.’

‘On whose side does she fight?’ Bellepheros threw himself flat as an emerald hunting dragon dived from the sky, claws outstretched, and shot over his head. It struck the Black Moon’s silver halo and dissolved into a cloud of ash. ‘Does she fly for the Black Moon or against him?’

‘How in Xibaiya do you suppose I can tell? For, I think. Does it matter?’ Li finished whatever she was doing with her glass and rubbed her hands. ‘So how do I stop him, Belli? How do I stop the Black Moon?’

‘The Black Moon? You don’t, Li. You wait and bide your time and we poison him, remember?’ He struggled to her side. ‘Li … He’s the only thing that can make everything back as it was, Li. Leave him be. Leave it all be. Let them fight. I don’t want to lose you.’

The glass around Chay-Liang shifted and grew, spreading slowly around her. She watched him sadly as she worked. ‘Back as it was? It’s too late for that, Belli. Far too late, and you know it.’ Her eyes lingered on him and her face softened. ‘You always came through, Belli. You always sought the truth that lies beneath and you never gave up until you had the answers. You always had a trick up your sleeve, and you always did what was right. More than anything that’s why I came to love you. Gather your alchemists and do what you can. The Black Moon is the end of everything, and I believe you know that. Stop him for me, Belli, and I will see to his dragon-queen.’ She looked back to the hall as Jasaan and Kataros crested the Grand Stair. ‘You! Adamantine Man. Bring those and come here!’

Jasaan trotted forward, puzzled. He had one of Li’s rockets slung across his back.

‘You wanted to kill dragons? Now’s your chance.’

There were rules for war. When a dragon-rider flew, she flew with the words of Prince Lai’s
Principles
filling her head. Height and speed. Death from above. The rider is the weakness, so ignore the dragon and kill the rider. Strafe with fire to burn a harness until it snaps. A slash of a tail, enough to break every bone in a man’s body. Never claw and fang, though that would be the dragon’s desire, because claw and fang meant first flying through fire and tail.

But there were no other riders today. Dragons for the Black Moon and his cause, others against, and Zafir had no way to tell them apart, knew only that she was alone, that these dragons, though all had once flown for Prince Lai in different scales and colours, cared nothing for the rules of
Principles
. There was no fire, because what was fire to a dragon? Time after time they crashed together and fell out of the sky, wrapped around one another until one was torn to bloody shreds or both smashed into the ground. Nor were they afraid, for what was death but a chance to be reborn?

In slow steady defeat the Black Moon’s dragons were beaten down, torn apart, battered to the ground of the Moonlit Mountain. Alone, Diamond Eye flew undiminished. Wherever he soared dragons fell, turned to stone by Zafir’s lethal spear.

A thunderclap jolted the air. A flash of lightning. Diamond Eye lurched as if stung.

Liang dived over the edge of the cliffs and hugged her sled to the cleft-riven stone, mindful of dragons falling from above. She swung around the side of the mountain and shot across the Black Moon’s throne. A dragon came at her. She veered. Fire washed over the sled. The dragon dissolved into ash. Liang swore. She banked and looked over her shoulder. The Black Moon was watching her. Laughing. She swerved sharply, flipped, shot back over his head and scattered him with glass-wrapped snips of the storm-dark. Blackness swirled around the half-god. His wreath of silver flickered and waned, and then flared bright. He arched and flexed and tipped back his head and roared.
I see you, Chay-Liang. Weep, little one, for I
am
the storm-dark.
Silver light poured from his mouth and burst in a cloud of glittering rain. Droplets of silver blossomed about him. Where they fell, the stone of the mountain top turned white and smooth and lit up like the sun. A flock of silver birds sprouted and took to the air, chasing after Liang and her sled like winged arrows. She dived behind the mountain cliffs again, out of sight. When she looked back, the birds were gone.

How could they stop him?

Zafir’s spear.
That
was how.

She sought Diamond Eye then, and found him where blood rained from the sky. A dragon fell, back broken, another turned to stone. She rolled the sled and hurled lightning into Diamond Eye’s tail. The dragon wheeled and snapped at her as she flew in a corkscrew around him. She glanced back, half fearing she must have thrown Jasaan away into the sky, half terrified Zafir’s dragon would murder her, but Jasaan clung grimly on. He fired lightning at Zafir, missed and hit the dragon again. He reached for the glass tube with a rocket inside. Liang levelled the sled for him, a moment of stillness. Jasaan shouldered the glass. Sparks showered from the back of it. Her rocket shot out on a plume of fire and smoke.

‘Jasaan!’ A dragon roared at her. Liang fled, dived and dodged and wove. The dragon followed, closing fast, but then another smashed into it from above. They tumbled away down the face of the cliffs, a jumble of claws and teeth. Liang looked again for Zafir. Diamond Eye was being mobbed, seven or eight dragons taking turns to swoop and strafe, streaming flame, drowning the dragon-queen in fire.

Kataros bounded from the Queen’s Gate, yelling at the Adamantine Men. They ignored her, spreading out in the rubble, taking shelter where they could, lifting their Taiytakei rockets, firing them in among the dragons. She saw one shoot through the middle of the swarm and on, up into the sky until its trail of smoke faltered and died. Another streaked low across the stones and exploded around the Black Moon. The silver light flashed and flared. More flew skyward. A rocket struck a dragon in the belly and burst, and a terrible black nothing spread across the dragon’s scales. Pieces of it disintegrated, annihilated by the touch of the storm-dark. The ruined dragon spiralled and dipped and fell. It crashed dead to the ground.

Dragon after dragon came down as they tore at each other. The rockets from the Adamantine Men petered out and died. A handful of dragons flew in low, raking the stone with fire, burning everything that moved. The lightning throwers left by the night-skin witch might as well have been feathers. The Adamantine Men, with nothing left to save them, turned and ran.

Kataros looked to the sky. She saw the witch chasing a red and gold monster. The sun glinted from something on the dragon’s back. Gleeful and grinning, Kataros reached into her blood and across the binding between them to stop the dragon-queen’s heart.

Chay-Liang
! The Taiytakei rocket struck Diamond Eye on the shoulder. A spray of black flew out like acid, burning gouging holes in Diamond Eye’s side. A streak flashed past Zafir and glanced her. Where it touched, glass and gold and dragonscale disintegrated into black dust and nothingness. It burned her skin to scars.

She’d seen that before, from the Black Moon.

Diamond Eye shrieked and turned. The sled was pelting away, dragons diving after it. He wheeled to give chase, then veered full of warning. Three hunters stooped as one, shrieking fireballs streaking the air. Zafir drew a deep breath and held it as flames engulfed her, pressed her arm over the storm-dark rent in her dragonscale as they washed over, drowning her. Through the perfect glass of her visor the air burned. The ornate gold on her helm and her gauntlets, battered and scratched and bent, softened at the edges; but underneath the glass and gold of the Taiytakei she wore dragonscale, all but impervious. She twisted and hurled the spear into the flames. Diamond Eye bucked and flared his crippled wing. The spear came back to her hand. She threw again. Two dragons arrowed past. Diamond Eye rolled, shivered and shuddered as something hit him, then another came with fire and she was engulfed once more. She gasped for air as the flames stopped, threw, howled in pain and exhaustion, and threw again. Her shoulder screamed at her, muscles beyond ragged. Close to the end of her strength.

A war-dragon slammed into Diamond Eye’s belly. They plunged, tearing at one another. Again fire bathed her. She lunged as it stopped, throwing herself sideways, reaching and stabbing at the claws ripping at Diamond Eye’s scarred flank. Both dragons screamed. The spear struck home. A moment before they all smashed together into the Moonlit Mountain Diamond Eye bucked and twisted free, tossing Zafir this way and that.

Something in the harness snapped, fire-scorched leather burned through. She felt herself slide. She grabbed at Diamond Eye’s scales, fingers of one hand turned to claws, the other still clutching the spear.

Let it go.

A suffocating wet fist burst inside her head. The feeling she’d had when the alchemist Kataros had let loose her blood-magic. Her arms slumped limp.

She let go.

Tuuran saw Zafir fall. He ran, jumping and bounding down among the stones, heedless of the storm of fire as if he might somehow reach her before she hit the ground. As if he might somehow catch her.

Kataros slid inside Zafir to pull her apart. She felt the dragon-queen slip. Deeper, tighter, further, but then a coldness bloomed inside her. An icy blackness that came with a soft old hand on her shoulder.

‘What are you doing, alchemist?’ Bellepheros.

‘By your own account, Grand Master, what you should have done long ago.’

His hand tightened on her. In the sky the great red and gold Diamond Eye had seen his rider fall. The dragon dived and snatched Zafir out of the air. He flared his crippled wings. Too mauled to break his plunge he twisted, curling around Zafir as he hit the mountaintop and tumbled, scattering boulder rubble all around him. Another dragon fell out of the sky in their wake, landing hard on Diamond Eye’s neck. Zafir rolled away, curled up and clenched with pain.

‘What are you?’ asked Bellepheros. ‘Alchemist or blood-mage?’

‘What’s the difference, old man?
What is the difference?
’

Zafir clawed at the ground, writhing. The spear lay beside her. She was screaming in pain. She knew. Knew what was happening to her and who was doing it, and that she was helpless. Powerless.

‘The difference is murder, alchemist,’ said Bellepheros quietly.

Another dragon slammed into Diamond Eye’s flank, and then another, holding down his tail. They were pinning him, as they’d already pinned a dozen others.

‘Without the Black Moon, the dragons will kill us all. Zafir knows this. Li would see the dragons free, the Black Moon ended, but this is not her world, and it
is
mine. So we disagree, but that is all. We argue with words, and we do not kill each other. I ask you again, Kataros. What are you? Alchemist or blood-mage?’

The ice spread inside her. Bellepheros, grand master alchemist and the greatest blood-mage of them all, and one way or another his blood was inside every last one of them. His potions.

‘Alchemist.’ Kataros let Zafir go.

Bellepheros nodded. ‘Then help me, alchemist.’

Zafir screamed. She’d never known an agony so taut, clawing its way though her insides as though some tiny dragon was tearing free. She felt herself fall and was glad. A relief to dash her head against the rocks below and end it.

The spear slipped from her fingers. Diamond Eye caught her. They crashed. She rolled free, half-blind with pain, holding herself doubled over, rolling like a death-stricken animal; and then as suddenly as the pain in her chest had come it left her. She staggered to her feet. Standing on the mountain top. Dragons pinning Diamond Eye to the stone. The Black Moon, arms spread wide, laughing at them all because of what a wonderful show they had put on for him, even if none of it mattered.

The spear stood where she’d fallen. Point first, driven into the ground, erect, waiting to be grasped. A dragon swooped towards her, lame and erratic and white. Snow. Zafir lunged for the spear and snatched it up, tripped and fell over her own exhaustion. Stumbled to her feet. Snow landed a little way short. The white dragon looked at the Black Moon. At the dragons left circling above. At Zafir.

You are beaten
. The dragon said it with her eyes, with the contemptuous curl of lip over fang.
Spear-carrier. Half-god. We defy you all. We choose to be free.