Dragon Queen Read online

  Also by Stephen Deas from Gollancz:

  The Adamantine Palace

  The King of the Crags

  The Order of the Scales

  The Black Mausoleum

  The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice

  The Warlock’s Shadow

  The King’s Assassin

  Dragon Queen

  Stephen Deas

  GOLLANCZ

  LONDON

  My mother was an enchantress and my father was an alchemist.

  They taught me the magic of this world and of many others.

  They forged me as I am, and for that I am grateful.

  Note: This story contains a scene of a violent sexual nature

  No fear for consequence remains

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Stephen Deas from Gollancz

  Title page

  Dedication

  1 The Bloody Judge

  Bellepheros

  2 An Unexpected Departure

  3 Tuuran

  4 The Storm-Dark

  5 The Enchantress

  6 The Palace of Leaves

  Skyrie

  7 The Elemental Man

  8 Skyrie

  9 The Empty Sands

  10 Someone Else’s Skin

  11 Over Her Heart

  12 The Queen’s Road

  13 The Grey Dead

  14 The Dragon Slave

  15 Crazy Mad

  16 Priests of the Vul Storna

  The Dragon-queen

  17 The Speaker and Her Spear

  18 The Naked Dragon

  19 Fickle Fortune

  20 Silence

  21 Dragon-queen

  22 The T’Varr

  23 The Kwen

  24 An Understanding

  25 That Which a Dragon May Not Have

  Tuuran

  26 The Palace of Leaves

  27 The System of the World

  28 Knives

  29 Knowledge

  30 The Desert

  31 Harsh as a Desert Heart

  32 Regrettable

  33 Yena

  34 The Layers of a Man

  The Watcher

  35 The Day the Dragons Came

  36 In the Realm of the Dying Sun

  37 Feeding Time

  38 Khalishtor

  39 The Council of the Sea

  40 Dragon-rider

  41 Unnatural Selection

  42 A Dragon’s Touch

  43 The Sea Lord’s Granddaughter

  44 Hatchling Blood

  45 The Hsian

  46 Slaves and Executioners

  47 The Walking Man

  48 The Lord of Silver

  49 Men of Stone

  50 Damage

  51 Lessons in Diplomacy

  52 The Touch of the Wind

  53 Stiff Around the Edges

  54 The Devourers

  55 Need

  56 Dhar Thosis

  57 Shades of Entanglement

  The Bloody Judge

  58 Never Forgotten

  59 All Debts Paid

  60 An Orphan Boy from Shipwrights’

  61 The Point of Balance

  62 The Void

  63 Hatchling Disease

  64 The Diamond Isles

  65 Beneath the Skin

  66 Fireships, Golems and Dragons

  67 Purpose

  The Sea Lord

  68 Sail, Fight, Freedom

  69 Desert Twilight

  70 Death From Above

  71 Snake Dance

  72 Fire

  73 Lightning

  74 The Titans

  75 Vul Tara

  76 The Bridge of Eternity

  77 Men of Stone

  78 Shields of Glass and Gold

  79 Burn

  80 The Man in Grey

  81 Who Am I?

  82 Who I Am

  83 Blood

  84 A Crack of Light

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  1

  The Bloody Judge

  There was a peace to killing.

  Men pressed him from all sides, crushed together. His own soldiers pushed against his back and to either side. Ahead, the enemy were forced before him by their own sheer numbers. He met them with remorseless savagery, slashing and stabbing, reaching for any inch of unguarded flesh. The black moonsteel edge of his sword glittered in the sunlight. Dark as night and sharp as broken glass, it shattered steel and splintered bone with a hunger all of its own. Spears and swords broke. Armour ripped open like skin beneath a tiger’s claw. Entrails spilled across the ground to join the bloody mess of severed heads and arms. His feet slipped and slid beneath him. Sweat stung his eyes. The air stank of iron and death. Blood ran down his blade and over his gauntlets. He could feel it finding its way through the cracks and joints and seams, oozing down his arm underneath the leather and the metal scales. A part of him forgot his name, forgot why he was there, forgot everything and gave itself over to the savage he kept inside, letting it fill up every pore, every hair, every thought. The rest looked on as if looking down on the battle from above, ready to tell the madman when to stop. Yes, there was a peace to killing. He’d always found it so.

  A spear glanced off the scales covering his ribs. A bone cracked but he barely felt it; an instant later he split the spearman with a thunderous blow. The pain shot up and down his side with every breath. He screwed up his face and howled. Tasted blood in his mouth as he stepped over the fallen body and sheared an arm from the soldier behind him. Damned sword was a horror of its own. It would cut through anything.

  The Tethis soldiers broke and ran. He held his sword high, signalling his men to hold and not to pursue. He was breathing hard, and still each breath came with a wave of pain. Under the sun he was drenched in sweat. There was a breeze across the battlefield – he could feel it now he had some space in front of him. He wanted to take off his helm and let the wind cool his head, but he didn’t. He’d been in too many battles for that.

  ‘Shield line!’ he roared. The ground right ahead was churned to mud, littered with spears and shields tossed aside by the fleeing soldiers. Bright sun glinted off discarded helms. He watched the Tethis soldiers go, scattering into the long grass, racing for the line of trees ahead. On another battlefield cavalry would have charged them down and made the slaughter complete, but Queen Gelisya had chosen her field well, edged with hummocks and holes and hidden ditches, and so he made himself be still and watch them go. The savage inside wanted their blood but the savage was always on a leash – always except in the thick of battle.

  He looked up and down the line of his men, the shield wall packed hard again. Berren. My name is Berren. Berren the Bloody Judge. Berren the Crowntaker. Berren who’d once been a thief-taker’s boy. He’d killed a king. Queen Gelisya’s father. Ten years of hell and misery and now I will end it. He still tasted salt and iron. Blood. His or someone else’s? He didn’t know and he didn’t care. His men raised their swords and their spears and banged them together and roared. One tight line of them. A wall of shields and deadly steel.

  ‘On!’ He lowered the moonsteel sword, pointed to the trees and snarled at the pain from his side. His hands felt sticky inside his gauntlets. A steady march. No reckless charge at the wood. If there was a trap then he’d not fall into it. They’d come at the enemy one last time, if there were any of them left. He’d smash them before the Dark Queen could rally. Ten years and she’d cost him every drop of blood she could take from him, her and her vicious coven. Their feud had defined them both.

  A knot of the enemy emerged from the trees, half a dozen swordsmen packed tight. They ran straight at him, one mad suicidal charge. Pressed around by hi
s own men in the wall of shields he had nowhere to go. He bared his teeth. The men either side of him readied their steel, and then Berren saw the seventh man, hidden between the screaming swords, and a flood of rage swept through him. A man in the colour of death – grey robes, grey cowl – and at the sight bloodlust clamped his head in a vice and roared, all else forgotten. As the swordsmen reached him, crazy-eyed and wild, he bashed and battered their swings aside with his shield. The men either side of him lunged and slashed. One of the swordsmen barged into him, staggering him back, but the press kept him on his feet and he drove the moonsteel blade straight through the man’s mail and into his heart. Blood sprayed over him as he snapped the sword away and the man fell, already dead. Another struck at him but his armour took the blow and turned it aside, and then the grey sorcerer was in front of him and it was the easiest thing in the world to drive his moonsteel through the heavy robes, through flesh and blood and bone until the point emerged from the man’s spine and only its hilt stopped Berren’s hand from reaching inside to pull out the warlock’s entrails. The surviving swordsmen turned and ran, four of them still on their feet. Madness.

  ‘For Talon and Syannis!’ he hissed. Vicious triumph coursed through him, blood pumping hard and full of victory. He stared at the warlock, at the pale pasty skin of the sorcerer’s face, the lines, the wrinkles, the sheen of sweat, the tattooed sigils, the dark flecks of blood, the dying gleam in the eyes, then snapped back his sword. ‘One less of you.’

  The warlock’s lips drew back. ‘For Saffran,’ he whispered. The sorcerer’s hand emerged from the sleeve of his robe and pressed a strip of paper covered in sigils to Berren’s breastplate. Berren lurched back but there was nowhere to go in the crush. With a finger from his other hand, the warlock slashed one last bloody mark onto the paper.

  Berren reached for the warlock and grabbed him. ‘What have you done? What is this?’

  The warlock was laughing. Blood ran out of his mouth and down his robes. He clutched at himself and clawed handfuls of it and threw it at Berren’s face, then crumpled and fell, lips drawn back across his teeth, grinning blankly at the clear blue sky. Berren felt dizzy. For a moment his vision blurred.

  Madness? They’d come at him to do this. They’d been ready to die. The warlock had given his life.

  The sigil clung to him, fluttering in the wind. Cold fear spread across his skin. He tore at the strip of paper with his gauntlet but the metal fingers were too clumsy. It seemed stuck. He plucked at the strip of paper again but it wouldn’t come free. Stuck fast. His heart was pounding now, harder even than in the thick of the battle. Sweat ran into his eyes. He tore off his helm and lifted his sword. ‘Stop! Stop!’ Then the sword fell out of hands. He was shaking so badly he could barely stand any more. He threw off his gauntlet and tore at the paper with his fingers, but when they touched it they tingled and went numb. The numbness spread up his arm. He pawed at the thick leather straps of his breastplate but his fingers had lost all feeling. They seemed to belong to someone else.

  His friend Tallis One-Eye beside him him threw down his sword and shield and grabbed at the paper too but it slipped through his grasp.

  ‘Get it off me! Get it off me!’

  Tallis gripped Berren’s shoulder. Threw off his own gauntlet.

  Berren fell to his knees, gasping shallow panicked gulps of air as though he was dying. The world slowly spun. Tallis’s fingers closed over the strip of paper. The spear-pinned and arrow-pricked bodies lying in the grass ahead shimmered into darkness. He could hear the dying warlock’s laughter.

  The sigils began to tear.

  Skyrie … The name oozed inside his head.

  Bellepheros

  2

  An Unexpected Departure

  Nine months before the Adamantine Palace would burn in the rage and fire of woken dragons, Bellepheros wiped his brow. It took him a few seconds to realise that Queen Shezira’s knight-marshal hadn’t followed her mistress away. She leaned in to speak quietly in his ear.

  ‘Grand Master Alchemist. A private word, if you please?’

  They had their quiet word and she gave him a spherical glass bottle, stoppered and sealed with wax. It fitted nicely into the palm of his hand and, from the way its weight shifted, it was filled with a liquid of exceptional weight. The knight-marshal had no idea what it was, but Bellepheros did. There was nothing curious about what was inside, but what was intriguing was where it had come from and how several such bottles had found their way into the knight-marshal’s hands. It was a long journey home, though, and there would be plenty of time to ponder and plenty of comfortable inns and fine wine to help him think. Not that the knight-marshal’s bottle would be top of his thoughts. Queen Aliphera’s death – that was the mystery that needed thinking about. Fallen from the back of her dragon? A tragic accident? Absurd, but he’d been through the whole of Prince Jehal’s eyrie with his truth-smoke and questioned everyone he could think of and what had he found? Nothing.

  Who profited from the queen’s death, then? Her first daughter Zafir would take the crown. Was there something between her and Jehal? Maybe so. The other daughter, Kiam? Her brother Kazalain? But then you didn’t have to try too hard to find half a dozen kings and queens and princes who might be quietly joyful at Aliphera’s passing.

  He left the Veid Palace the next morning. He borrowed a carriage from Prince Jehal – the least the Viper could do for wasting so much of his time – and took a handful of soldiers for an escort while he was at it because apparently there were bandits on the road to Farakkan. From there, the Pinnacles and the Silver City – Aliphera’s palace and home – were straight on his way back to the Adamantine Palace. It wouldn’t seem odd for him to pass through and stay for a day or two. Maybe there he might find a clue.

  He tucked the knight-marshal’s bottle under his seat, carefully packed in straw. The alchemists at Clifftop could find their own way back. They had better things to do than smoke out a murderer. Alchemists had their business with dragons, not with men.

  Two days out of Furymouth, in the middle of nowhere, the carriage stopped. He had no idea why; but he was trying to read and it was hard work at the best of times squinting to make out the tiny words – he’d have to have some scribes make copies of books with bigger letters – and so it was a relief to have a pause in the jolting up and down. Going by river would have been so much easier and more pleasant. He’d been ruing his decision to visit the Pinnacles almost ever since he’d left, but it needed to be done.

  He heard a shout from outside. Alarm. Then several screams and cries of terror. Then silence. He sat very still, exactly as he’d been a moment before with the same words right before him but now they blurred as his eyes glazed. He listened, hardly daring to breathe. Not a sound.

  The carriage swayed slightly in a gentle gust of wind and then the door burst open. An odd-looking man stood outside. He was small and his skin was dark from the sun. His hair was black and slick and he was panting and sweating. Strangest of all, though, was the black robe edged in woven strands of red and blue and white. It struck Bellepheros as more suited to a palace or a temple than to robbery on the road.

  ‘Out, you!’ he snapped. He had an odd lilt to his voice.

  Bellepheros snapped his book shut. ‘Who in the name of the Flame are you?’ Indignation scoured a frown across his face. Then he saw past the man to the body on the ground outside. His heart skipped a beat and started to race. ‘What do you want?’

  The man reached in and grabbed him by the wrist and pulled. He was strong and Bellepheros almost fell out of the door on top of him, but the man moved nimbly aside and Bellepheros sprawled out into the road instead. Dry autumn leaves covered the ground, yellows and reds and browns rustling gently in the breeze. Birds sounded in the trees to either side. The carriage stood still, the horses standing in their harnesses as if nothing had hap
pened. One of them snorted and stamped a hoof. There was no sign of anyone else. Every bit a tranquil autumn morning if it hadn’t been for the blood and the dead man at his feet.

  ‘People call me the Picker.’ The odd-looking man climbed into the carriage. He rummaged around and came out holding Lady Nastria’s bottle and Bellepheros’s book. ‘That all you got in there?’

  Bellepheros sat up. Around the carriage Prince Jehal’s soldiers were lying in the leaves, every one of them. They weren’t moving. Bellepheros stared at them. ‘Are they dead?’ he whispered, his mouth suddenly dry.

  ‘Yes. Shame for them. Wrong place to be.’ The Picker climbed onto the carriage and hauled Bellepheros’s chest off the roof. ‘You really need all this? Can you do without it?’ He went over to the horses and set about freeing them from their harnesses. Bellepheros rose shakily. He looked up and down the road. He had no idea where they were. No idea how far it was to the next town or village or what chance there was of someone else coming along.

  ‘Are you a bandit?’ One man? Bellepheros crouched beside the closest of the bodies. Expertly killed. One slash across the neck. Blood everywhere, pooling about. The leaves were sticking to it. This one hadn’t even drawn his sword before he’d died. Bellepheros peered into the sun-dappled shadows between the trees. Jehal’s soldiers were spread around the carriage, six of them. They hadn’t had time to close up. It had happened with murderous speed. There had to be more than just the one man. ‘Where are the rest of you?’ He had a knife of his own, as every alchemist did. A little thing. He slipped it out of his belt and cut a little slash into his palm.