The Silver Kings (17 page)

‘I remember him, Holiness.’ He chose his words with care. ‘But I did not know him.’

Zafir smiled with a savage glitter to her eye. ‘Not much
to
know,’ she said. ‘A selfish piece of shit just like any other prince. I suppose we were made for each other. He was a marvellous lover, though.’ She walked on into another hall, round-walled this time, curving up and down and from side to side, growing wide and tall and then narrow and small with no rhyme or rhythm that Bellepheros could see. There were no more arches here, but every surface, even the floors, was covered in carvings. He paused, reluctant to tread on them.

Zafir laughed. ‘Don’t concern yourself that you might wear down the stone, Grand Master.’

Bellepheros tried to crouch, gave up when his knees howled, and dropped to his hands. He ran his fingers over the white stone floor. Like the stone of the eyrie it was as smooth as glass and hard as diamond, the carved edges knife-sharp as though chiselled only yesterday.

‘It’s all like this.’ Zafir tossed the words over her shoulder as she might have tossed a pinch of salt for luck. ‘All of it. I couldn’t tell you how many hours I spent here after I mastered the Hall of Mirages. I think the whole story of the Silver King is in these walls, if you’re clever enough to understand it. Perhaps even the whole history of the world.’

Bellepheros looked down. He paused, trying to make out the picture beneath his feet. Four men walking together, each, if you went by the carving, with a small hole in his head. One was carrying a spear that might have been the Adamantine Spear; one held a knife etched with eyes, the Crowntaker’s Star
k
nife; one wore a coat from which sprang rays of light, and one carried a circlet around his brow. In the next scene they were entering a cave. A little further along the floor they were in another, bowing before a woman on a throne.

‘The ones with the marks on their heads are the half-gods,’ said Zafir. ‘Or at least I think that’s the way it works. Come here.’

She was a good way further down the hall, looking at the ceiling. As Bellepheros wandered towards her, another sequence caught his eye: what must have been the Silver King, conjuring his tunnels under the earth. Beside it a circle of half-gods held down one of their own and plucked out his eyes. When he came alongside Zafir
and looked up he saw a half-god standing beside a broken egg. A dragon’s head poked through the shell.

‘I was eight years old when I found this place.’ Zafir smiled and shook her head. ‘For a long time this was my favourite. I used to lie on the floor and stare up at it for hours. The first dragon. I think.’

The dragon, like the half-gods, seemed to have a hole in its head among the lines of its scales. Bellepheros stared.

‘You had something to say about the Crowntaker.’ Zafir was giving him a look, eyebrows raised, and he couldn’t tell how much was curiosity and how much might have been simple pity. ‘I ­imagine you mean the Black Moon? Speak, then. We are as alone here as we can ever be.’

It was hard not to be distracted by the carvings. If Zafir was right then there was so much they could learn, so much
he
could learn. ‘Yes. He is …’ He knew exactly what he wanted to say.
He’s taken his knife to the riders here. He’s cutting the souls out of men and making them into his slaves.
But the words wouldn’t come. They were in his head, clear as anything, yet somehow stuck. ‘You said there would be no more slaves.’ It was the closest he could get.

‘I did.’ Zafir cocked her head.

‘And yet …’
The Black Moon is
… ‘Yes. But …’ But that wasn’t what he wanted to say! ‘Holiness, forgive me … It is not something about which I should speak. I have overstepped my bounds.’
No, I haven’t!

‘Whom have I enslaved, Grand Master?’

Everyone the Black Moon has cut with his knife!
‘Your maids.’ His hand flew to his mouth.
What? WHAT?
‘Forgive me, Holiness. I did not mean to say that …’

The Zafir he’d come to know in Takei’Tarr, the dragon-queen who’d burned Dhar Thosis, would have flown into a rage. She would have lashed him with her tongue until he grovelled for forgiveness, and then still might have had him whipped and hanged. Here, in her palace, she only frowned. The look on her face was strange. Alien. Was that … hurt?

‘You know, I had the same conversation with Chay-Liang. It was a year ago, when we were all lost at sea. I will tell you the same as I told her, that Myst and Onyx may leave my side whenever they
wish, and with no fear for consequence. Any one of you may do that. You, Tuuran. Anyone.’

He wondered if he might even come to believe her one day. ‘But we cannot …’
But we cannot leave the Black Moon.
‘That is …’ He screwed up his face and clenched his fists. He couldn’t say the words. He couldn’t even tell her how he was silenced. The worst was that he felt no sense of another presence the way he did when Diamond Eye intruded on him. He simply found that, whatever he’d meant to say, the words reached his tongue and stopped, and then he didn’t want to say them any more.

‘We are slaves of circumstance.’ It was the best he could do, the closest he could come. And he
knew
that she’d seen the Black Moon cutting men into slaves back before they’d crossed the storm-dark, back in Merizikat. She had to, didn’t she? How could she not? ‘You must know,’ he whispered. ‘You must at least suspect.’

A strange look crossed her face, as if perhaps she understood him after all. ‘Slaves of circumstance.’ She nodded. ‘Yes, Grand Master. We are all of us that.’

A tremor shook the hall, and then another. Zafir ran back the way they’d come, and Bellepheros scurried after her as best his old knees could manage. He turned the corner into the hall of archways and skidded into the back of her when she abruptly stopped. The Black Moon was coming towards them, eyes blazing bright, while every arch etched into the white stone walls now shimmered with liquid silver. The half-god moved from one to the next, pressing his hand against their fresh mirror skin until each rippled and dissolved into something else; and Bellepheros couldn’t see what lay on the other side as the half-god reached through, but sure as he was that dragons were monsters, there
was
another side.

‘Holiness …?’ he croaked.

Zafir ignored him. ‘Crowntaker! What are you doing?’

The Black Moon didn’t answer. He didn’t look at them, didn’t even seem to see that he wasn’t alone. He stopped in front of one more gateway, opened it, paused a moment longer than before the others, and then stepped through and was gone. The walls quaked, and the silver gates trembled back to blank white stone. Zafir ran to where the Black Moon had vanished. She touched the wall, and tapped it with a fingernail.

‘As a child I heard stories,’ she murmured, ‘that now and then an archway would open to somewhere else. To some other world. But they were stories, and I later came to suppose that that’s all they were. No one had ever seen it.’ She couldn’t hide the touch of wonder in her voice.

Maybe now, maybe now he’s gone
… Bellepheros tried again. ‘The Black Moon …’
has been cutting souls! Every man he meets! Making them into slaves!
But nothing had changed. He turned away so that Zafir wouldn’t see and howled a silent scream. ‘Where did he go?’ he asked. A stupid question. How could she possibly know?

‘Who can say?’ murmured Zafir. ‘But the world goes on. We managed without him once before, after all.’ She gave Bellepheros a hard look. ‘Whatever the Black Moon was doing to rile you so, he won’t be doing any more now, will he?’

Said, Bellepheros thought, with a little of the old petulance, for which – and this surprised him – he found himself profoundly grateful.

Dear Flame, is she our only hope? Is
that
what I’ve come to?

He’d never missed Chay-Liang so much.

10

The Dragon-Queen’s Sister

Eight days after landfall

Tuuran pushed his way past an old curtain hanging across a crude tunnel. A stair ran down into darkness. He peered and tossed an alchemical lamp into the gloom; it hit the stone and shattered, a dull glowing splatter across the walls some forty steps down. Halfteeth thought he was daft for carrying around these old lamps when he had a Taiytakei light-maker strapped to his arm.

‘Can’t do that with gold-glass,’ Tuuran muttered under his breath. Sadly Halfteeth wasn’t here to eat his words. Then much louder: ‘Anyone down there?’

Behind him Snacksize hawked up a gobbet of phlegm and spat it between his feet. ‘I saw something come this way. I saw the curtain move and it wasn’t a rat.’ Snacksize, sold to the Taiytakei years ago. The whole idea made him laugh, but whoever had bought her hadn’t done much laughing by the sound of things. Way Snacksize told it she’d been taken to Zinzarra, where no one would touch her. Ended up a night-soil slave, escaped, ran away, got caught, then worked in someone’s gardens for a couple of years until the old sail-slave who’d watched over her died and a new one came in, which apparently led to some minor disagreements about the proper care of mint plants. Tuuran thought he probably wasn’t getting the whole of the story around about there, given that it ended up with the new overseer having a trowel driven though his eye, but he didn’t ask out of the respect that one slave gave another. You talked or you didn’t, and that was always your choice to make.

Didn’t matter. She was Adamantine now. Didn’t look like much, and Tuuran didn’t think there had ever even been any Adamantine Women – nor any Adamantine Dwarves for that matter – but, like Halfteeth, she’d been with the eyrie since the Godspike. They’d survived, and in the end that was what an Adamantine Man did.

They weren’t getting any answers from the stairs. Tuuran started down, slow and cautious. Hard to see how far it went. Even her Holiness was no help here. He called out again: ‘My name is Tuuran. Night Watchman of the Adamantine Guard. I serve the Speaker Zafir, queen of the Silver City. If there’s anyone there who can hear me, we have food and water and shelter to share.’ He almost said they came in peace, but coming in peace hadn’t done much good in the Octagon. At least someone had cleaned the blood off the floor now.

Snacksize at his back and then a dozen men behind. Really didn’t want another fight though. He called out again: ‘Did you hear? Fresh water and food. You can take as much as you want.’ There were three mountains around the Silver City, but only the Enchanted Palace had water streaming through the middle. Tuuran had quietly assumed the other peaks would be empty and dead, but Zafir had sent him to come and have a look anyway. Turned out this one wasn’t as dead as he’d supposed.

‘They get their water from the rain,’ said Snacksize as though that was some miraculous insight. The clouds had come back in the night and it was drizzling again.

‘Being from the Worldspine,’ grunted Tuuran, ‘I imagine you’re feeling right at home, crawling around mountains and being rained on.’ He stopped and flicked his Taiytakei light back and forth down the steps, hoping to see something useful, but the stair just carried on down. He called out again: ‘If there’s anyone down there, you could make both our lives easier by talking back, you know. I’ll stay right here if that helps.’ He turned back to Snacksize. ‘All right then, clever bastard, where do they get their food? Because they’re not living up here near the top if there’s nothing up here to eat, but if there is then where is it?’

‘They grow things.’

‘What? On sheer cliffs?’ Tuuran snorted and started on down. ‘You disappoint me, woman. I was all ready to ask our one and only alchemist if he’d like to take on an apprentice. But he’d need someone bright—’

‘Birds,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you see? The cliffs are full of old birds’ nests, and full of caves too. They put out traps and they raid nests for eggs. We used to do that all the time.’

‘Can’t be many of them up here if they’re living off eggs …’ Tuuran stopped. In front of him the stair opened into a fissure, a void that stretched down as far as he could see and disappeared into darkness. The size of it stole the breath from his lungs. The steps carried on, gouged steep and precipitous into its side. One great abyss. He remembered something Bellepheros had told him when they’d been stuck on a ship together with nothing else to do but read books and tell stories. ‘Oh, bugger. Not
this
again.’ Two years ago that had been, and he’d travelled to four different worlds in between. Could hardly blame a man for forgetting, but still …

‘What’s up, boss?’ Snacksize looked across the fissure, scanning her enchanted torch back and forth, looking for the other side, or for a top or a bottom. The space devoured light. There was no telling how big it was.

‘I walked into an abyss once before,’ grumbled Tuuran. ‘That’s what. And I’ll tell you for free that climbing out again afterwards was shit. My legs are holding a grudge even now.’ The steps in the side of the fissure were little more than an erratic and reluctant series of footholds. A decent person might at least have bolted a chain to the stone to give a man something to hang on to. He started on down, slowly and carefully. Years of scampering around the rigging of a Taiytakei slave galley had given him sure feet and hands and a head for heights, but this was taking the piss. ‘I hope you’re not scared of falling.’ At least he could be fairly sure that no one was about to ambush him. ‘King Hiastamir gave this place to the Order of the Dragon on his ascension to the Adamantine Palace. Any of you know that?’

‘Can’t say as I did,’ Snacksize grunted behind him, shifting down the holds.

‘Now that you do, do you even remotely care?’ Snacksize seemed sure of herself as she climbed. An Outsider from the Worldspine might know a thing or two about getting around a place like this, he supposed.

‘No, boss. Not even a tiny little bit. But do regale me with some more pointless shit if there’s any to be had. Might make me feel a bit better if I fall off and plunge to some horrid death to know that at least it’s sparing me yet another dull piece of history that no one, not even you, really cares about.’

‘Ha fucking ha.’ Tuuran snorted. He eased himself down ahead of her. ‘The temple entrance on the surface was destroyed during the War of Thorns. Did you know
that
, at least?’

‘The war of what?’

‘Flame preserve me!’ He squawked as he trod on a loose stone in one of the crevices and momentarily lost his balance. Snacksize caught his arm. ‘Never mind. Long story short … Great Holy Flame, will you look at that!’

They’d come down maybe fifty feet. Felt like it had been half a mile, but that was just the adrenaline. About the same again below them a narrow bridge reached out over the chasm. The bridge was white stone. Tuuran eased his way on down and crouched, took off a gauntlet and touched it. Smooth as glass and edges sharp like it had been cut yesterday. He grunted. Like the white stone of the eyrie, except here it didn’t glow. He got up.

‘Half-god stone,’ he said, which at least meant he’d trust it to take his weight. The bridge was narrow, half a stride at best, and he couldn’t see where it went.
Hopefully
to the other side, but the other side was out of reach of their torches, and half-god stone meant it had been made by the Silver King, and
that
could mean …

He shuddered. Could mean anything at all.

He looked down. The cliff below the bridge was sheer. Vertical. He had a good look along the sides of the cavern in case there was some other way down that he hadn’t noticed, but no, there very clearly wasn’t. Of course there wasn’t.

Snacksize jumped to join him on the bridge. Made for a bit of a crowd that did, all pressed up against the face of the stone with only a shoulder of space to share between two clumping pairs of boots. Pushed them close. Next soldier down would end up sitting on Tuuran’s shoulders at this rate.

‘Best you have a quiet word,’ he said. ‘See if there’s any who might have a problem with crossing this. Heights. I’ll start out on my own. I’ll call back when I see anything.’

‘No, boss.’ Her hand caught his elbow. ‘You’re the Night Watchman. The Night Watchman sends other people. He doesn’t do everything himself.’

Tuuran glowered. ‘This one bloody does, and what’s more he does it whenever he bloody well feels like it. I think, if you ­bothered to find out these things, you’d find most Night Watchmen very much the same in that particular.’ No sense of tradition, this hotchpotch legion of his, but after a moment of thinking it over he let her go first. Maybe she had a point, but mostly he did it because she wanted to, and because she was small. He watched her, step after step, taking her time, tense as a drawn knife, half his men spreading along the first few yards of the bridge, the other half backed up clinging to the stone … He watched the dancing of her enchanted light as Snacksize walked into the dark. It was a long way before she stopped and shouted back.

‘I see the end.’ The words echoed everywhere. The fissure took her voice and made it into the booming call of a god. Tuuran didn’t waste any time following, but he was still out in the middle when he heard her cry out. She shouted something, then came another shout, someone else, then a clash of iron, a howl of pain and last of all a crack of lightning and a boom of thunder that echoed and rolled about the cavern like a storm. He had to stop a moment, too dazzled by the flash to see where he was putting his feet; and then he wanted to run, but he didn’t dare, not on a bridge so narrow. Didn’t like to think too much about what might be waiting at the other end, though. When he reached it, he came with his shield raised high and his axe at the ready.

Snacksize was standing with her light sweeping back and forth over a wide open space and an enormous façade like some great temple entrance carved into the chasm wall. Two bodies sprawled at her feet. Both were dressed in scraps of what had once been dragon-rider armour. One had a bloody hole in his neck from her sword, the other lay twisted up in the unmistakable rag-doll sprawl of death by Taiytakei lightning.

‘Just the two of them?’ he asked. Couldn’t take his eyes off the wall ahead.

‘More inside.’ She waved her torch at the centre of the façade, to a huge metal-bound door. ‘They just came at me.’ She was shaking. ‘They didn’t give me any choice.’

‘Well apparently that was very stupid of them.’ Tuuran scrunched up his nose. After all the things he’d seen, all the places Crazy Mad had taken him in their years together, he’d imagined there wasn’t much that would put the wind up him any more. This place did though. Couldn’t say why. He shivered. ‘The Temple of the Dragon. Men made it even before the Silver King came.’ Hard to credit, but there it was.

Most of it, anyway. Presumably the Silver King had added the bridge.

He waited until his men were all across and formed up into a wall of shields, then made sure they all had their lightning ­throwers out and the damned things were working. Wasn’t going to be much fun pushing through that door. Good chance he was going to lose someone, which never put him in a good frame of mind.
Still, needs must
… and he about had them all ready to go, gritting his teeth for a fight, when the door opened of its own accord, loud and grinding, stone on stone, old heavy hinges thick with rust or verdigris crying out for a touch of oil. A woman walked out, and Tuuran had to look twice and hold back a little gasp. First glance she looked like her Holiness. Bit shorter and dressed in rags, and her hair was a tangled mess, but the face … Most of all, though, it was in the way she walked. How she held herself.

‘Adamantine Men, is it?’ she asked, apparently not much ­bothered at standing in front of a dozen heavily armed and ­armoured soldiers, nor particularly fussed by the two corpses ­behind them either. She cocked her head and tilted her chin at him. ‘And what Speaker do you serve today?’ Flame, she even
sounded
like her Holiness.

‘Her Holiness Zafir,’ growled Tuuran. ‘Queen of the Silver City.’ He couldn’t stop looking. She was like a scraggeldy mirror image. Younger. Ragged and filthy and a mess, softer on the outside and maybe not so lined, but you could see the same steel underneath, hard as diamond. Zafir as she might have been five years younger.

‘Zafir is dead,’ said the woman. ‘Fallen in the dragon war brought by Hyrkallan and that cunt-licker Jehal. But
you
were dressed by the Taiytakei. So where are
your
masters? What did they do with Hyrkallan and his mad queen?’

Tuuran tried to imagine the woman in front of him in different clothes and twelve years younger. It was possible she was … ‘Princess Zara-Kiam?’ Zafir’s younger sister.

Zara-Kiam narrowed her eyes and looked at him hard and didn’t speak.

‘I came here with Speaker Hyram a decade ago and then some. You were younger. But I remember you. There’s a lot of her Holiness in you too.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve heard bits and pieces of this dragon war of yours, but I was busy at the time being a slave to the night-skins. Her Holiness Zafir didn’t die. She was taken. The night-skins took us both, each in our own time.’ A crooked smile settled on his face. ‘And they came to rue us both too …’
We brought the Silver King back with us.
But who would ever believe that? It was a thing you had to see for yourself, and rumour already had it that the Black Moon had pissed off somewhere, and who was to say he’d ever bother with coming back? He sighed. ‘Her Holiness returns to reclaim her throne and restore the realms to their glory.’ He was fairly sure that not one of them had the first idea how to go about doing that last bit, but never mind. ‘You’re welcome to—’

Zara-Kiam laughed shrilly. ‘Come back to rule the wreckage, did she? I flew to war that day too. It would have been better if we’d both died and been done with it. I’ve seen your flying castle, though. So that’s her palace now, is it?’