Dragon Queen Read online

  From a distance the city had seemed much the same. The changes were small and subtle and it took being up close to see how deep they ran. And not so much see as feel. As he stepped off the boat and onto the docks, a tension had embraced him like a poisoned shroud. He’d walked up the Avenue of Emperors, drinking it in, the rich taverns on one side and the hostels for sailors who could afford decent lodgings. The Assayers’ quarter, as he remembered it. On the other side should have been the first fringes of the Maze, and that was where the city had changed. But not just changed. Every single street and alley had vanished, simply not there any more as though all the taverns and bawdy houses and the jewellers and the goldsmiths and the Moongrass dens and the sailors’ flophouses had all shuffled up while he was gone and quietly closed them off. Further on it was suddenly familiar again. The two great curved swords still reared over the top of the Avenue, the Swords of the Sun proclaiming the virtue of truth and a terrible fate for thieves and liars. The old statues he remembered were still there: the first emperor and the last, except the statue of Ashahn the Wise had now gone and there was another in its place, a young woman. She might have been beautiful and regal once but her face had been scratched and scarred and daubed with paint.

  Hang the witch.

  They’d found a place to stay. He hadn’t been paying much attention. Memories came at him from everywhere. He must have fallen asleep, and then the dreams, and now he sat beside Tuuran on a rooftop in the sun.

  ‘You never believe me when I tell you who I am.’ He said it without any bitterness but with a sadness that came of simply being here. From the rooftop they were looking over what had been the Maze, back when he’d been an orphan boy from Shipwrights’. He should have been able to see other places he’d known once: the Sheaf of Arrows where he’d hidden with Lilissa, the Barrow of Beer where old Kasmin had lived. He should have been able to point them out to Tuuran but he couldn’t. The Maze he remembered was all gone and a new Maze had risen in its place. The House of Embalmers and Morticians stood on one corner, a place that hadn’t existed in Berren’s day because burying the dead had been a terrible sin and still was. The streets of the Maze were covered over now, everything was covered over, windows boarded and curtained or bricked up and it didn’t take much to understand the why of it. The Maze had become the Necropolis, a city within the city, a city of the dead just as the oar-slaves in the galley had said. Every street he knew had been barricaded from within and then blocked by the living except for one – Taphouse Way once, but now they called it Dead Man’s Walk.

  ‘I know you think I’m mad.’ He didn’t look at Tuuran’s face but pointed out over the city. ‘There. Those towers up there. The Peak. The tower capped in gold is the Temple of the Sun. The one that seems to have wings is the Overlord’s tower. They’re the same height so neither overlooks the other.’ He peered at them. They were still exactly as he remembered them. His arm moved round. ‘That tower poking up over the rooftops is the Temple of the Moon.’ Old Garrent who had always put a smile on his face. ‘Beyond lies the Godsway, which runs from Arr estuary and the River Gate to the Square of the Four Winds.’ Right past the House of Cats and Gulls where Saffran Kuy once lived. His arm moved again. ‘Down there runs the Avenue of Emperors. All the way to the sea. The one we walked up yesterday from the docks. Next road along is the Kingsway.’ His arm swept further round. ‘Pelean’s Gate and the Sea Gate are over there. Then somewhere are the old city walls. On the other side there used to be a canal. It was supposed to go from the river to the sea and make Deephaven into an island but they never finished it. It’s mostly covered over now, but the canal’s still there underneath the slums. You go and see, Tuuran, and then come and tell me how I know all this.’

  ‘Never said you hadn’t ever met someone who’d been here.’ Tuuran snorted. ‘Just said you were too young to be the Bloody Judge, that’s all. Thought you were a bit pale to be from here too but I see they have all sorts.’

  Berren rocked on his haunches. ‘Bit of everything in Deephaven. Anything you want, you can find it.’ Almost anything. The boat from Helhex had brought them round the mouth of the river. He’d seen the Emperor’s Docks where his thief-taker master had killed his first love. The memory felt as fresh as dripping blood. He knew he’d never find someone like her again.

  ‘We could stay here. In Aria. In Deephaven,’ said Tuuran.

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s work for a good sword here.’

  Snuffers. He meant they could be snuffers. He was right too. The snuffers the young Berren inside him remembered, the old soldiers from the civil war, they were all gone now, dead or hung up their swords. The city hungered for more.

  ‘There’s a war coming.’ Tuuran said it almost like he was saying a prayer. A war, except there were no dragons here for him to slay.

  On the rooftop, sitting in the sun, staring out over the Necropolis, Berren Crowntaker turned. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re not staying.’

  Tuuran sniffed. ‘I’ve been listening out,’ he said. ‘Keeping my ears alive while you’ve been sleeping the day away. That Ice Witch rules here now, and these risen dead, their presence, the tolerance she gives them, the fact that she doesn’t have them all burned, that’s proof enough of what she is.’ Tuuran made a gesture of the sun, a warding away of evil. ‘You should look for your warlocks and your blood-mages here, not somewhere across the sea.’ He drew his knife and tested its edge with a finger. ‘They say she rules as regent for her younger brother but that when he comes of age he’s going to move against her. There’s going to be a war. They say she’s built a vast fortress up the coast from here, a huge thing as big as the Palace of Paths. All black stone risen out of the earth and welded into shape by her magic.’ He shivered.

  ‘Stay if you want; I won’t.’ Berren got up, leaving Tuuran out in the sun, and clambered across the rooftops looking for a way down. On the whole he’d seen enough of war, and now he’d seen enough of Deephaven too, but he had to have a look at what had once been the Maze, just the once before he left. Had to, because what was now the Necropolis had almost been his home.

  ‘They don’t like the light.’

  Berren was following a man and a woman down Dead Man’s Walk, loitering behind them because the woman seemed to know what she was talking about. The man was obviously new to the city – it was all over him in the nervous way he walked and how his eyes darted from side to side, in the unease that clouded his face; and who could blame him, heading into the gloom to where dead men walked and spoke and haggled over pieces of bone. The windows overlooking Dead Man’s Walk were boarded up, the side alleys and streets blocked with rubble or walled shut. A patchwork of boards and blankets and sails hung between the rooftops overhead. The street became a tunnel. In places the stone was blackened and charred. There had been fires here.

  The man looked around him and gawped and Berren stared too. Fire destroys the walking dead. He wished he knew how he knew that.

  As they walked deeper in, only a few dim rays of sunlight filtered down to the ground. His eyes began to adjust to the strange twilight. He could see where daylight burst in again at the far end of the street, where the Necropolis ended once more. Between there and where he stood lay a small square, the Speaking Square in his day although it doubtless had another name now. A dozen or so figures stood within it, clustered in twos and threes.

  ‘This is where they do their business with the outside world.’ The woman was talking again. Berren stopped close enough to listen. She pointed down another street, a black hole leading away from the square. ‘There lies the heart of the Necropolis.’

  One of the figures in the square turned to look at him. It was the face of a doll, beautiful and perfect and cold and lifeless; and as Berren looked around he
saw they were all like this, and they were all turning and looking at him. They started towards him, all of them at once. Though they moved as though they could see as well as anyone, each had their eyes sewn firmly shut. The woman fell silent. Sudden fire flickered from the tips of her fingers.

  Berren turned and fled. Bolted like a frightened little boy until he was back in the summer sunlight once more, holding his side and gasping for breath. People passed him on the street with wry smiles. Someone running out of Dead Man’s Walk like his arse was on fire? They probably saw the same thing every day. He waited until he caught his breath but no dead men came shambling after him. Out here the rest of Deephaven, the rest of the empire and beyond, everything was exactly as it was when he’d entered. Perhaps ten minutes had passed, and yet as he emerged into the light he came into a different world. Nothing would be quite the same. His home was gone for ever. He’d leave on the first ship he could find now and Tuuran could do whatever he liked. He didn’t think he’d ever be back.

  He walked to the Temple of the Moon. The priest Garrent had been a friend once. Perhaps a priest might understand what the warlocks of Tethis had done to him, but when he went in and asked he found Garrent was dead five years, and when the priests of the moon looked at him closely a horror spread across their faces and moonlight began to shimmer around them and their fingers pointed at Berren’s heart and he backed away while they flung words like stones at him: Monster! Abomination! Anathema! The words Tasahre had hurled long ago at the warlock Saffran Kuy. He ran, scared again, and it was only when he was halfway down the Godsway to the river docks that he realised the moon priests had been scared too. They’d been terrified. Of him, and he had no idea why.

  Even as he thought that, he saw the one-eyed man in grey in the night with the stars winking out around him. Skyrie’s memories, haunting him.

  At the bottom of the Godsway he went looking for the old house of Cats and Gulls to see if it was still there, for the relics of his old enemy Saffran Kuy, but the rickety wooden riverfront warehouse was gone. It had been torn down and a stone one built in its place, and the cats and the gulls and the stink of fish were gone too. He stopped there for a long time, looking, but Saffran Kuy was dead. Berren Crowntaker had killed him on a ship in Tethis long ago. The warlock of Deephaven was gone. And yes, there had been others, but they were somewhere else now.

  He found Tuuran exactly where he’d left him, hours later, and it looked like he hadn’t even moved. The big man didn’t look up. Just grunted. ‘Well?’

  ‘First chance I get, I go.’

  Tuuran muttered something under his breath. He nodded. ‘War’s a year or two away yet. It’ll keep. I can always come back for it later, right?’ He grimaced and pointed towards the docks and the sea. ‘There’s your ship.’

  Berren peered down the slope across the maze and the docks to the sea and smiled. How many times had he done this? He remembered looking out over the bay almost every day, counting ships, seeing which ones were new and where they were moored so he could go and check the flags they flew in case the one that Master Sy was waiting for was there.

  The smile faltered and turned into a lump in his throat. Tuuran groaned and got up. ‘I hear they don’t come here as much as they used to. Don’t get on with this Ice Witch. Well we’ve seen how that goes, I suppose. But they still have their little palace up among the rich folk.’ He gestured over his shoulder towards the towers and spires of the Peak.

  ‘Deephaven Square,’ said Berren.

  They walked down the darkness of the stairs and along the passage with its closed doors and boarded-up windows to keep the dead at bay. An invisible wall divided one Deephaven from the other. The Barrow of Beer, old Kasmin’s haunt, was only a few streets away on the other side of it but it might as well have been across the sea. Berren led Tuuran away, through the market and up into Weavers’ Row, past the little street to the Upside-Down Temple and then down the other side, through the heaving crowds until Weavers’ Row became Moon Street and Berren could see the corner of Godsway again and the Temple of the Moon with its tower which looked out over half the city. He kept away this time and cut through the side streets to Four Winds Square, right past the yard and the little house where he’d once lived, a thief-taker’s apprentice who’d only cared about learning swords. They crossed the endless parade of carts and wagons that rolled between the river and the sea and then they climbed the Avenue of the Sun to the beating heart of the city, to Deephaven Square. It was all as he remembered it. The guild house. The Golden Cup beside it. The Overlord’s palace at the far end and beside that the Temple of the Sun. For a moment Berren felt again as though someone had ripped his heart in half right there. Memories burst in another downpour, enough to drown. Swords. Priests. Monks. Tasahre. Master Sy. All torn away. The pain made his eyes water and the square started to swim. This was where his life had been cut clean apart by Kuy and his kind.

  Why me? Why me? But that didn’t matter. Him because he was there, because he’d been in the way, because he’d fallen in with the thief-taker and no other reason than that. Sometimes the why didn’t matter any more, sometimes the what and the how and everything they’d done to him, sometimes even that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he would find them, all of them, one by one, one after the other, and when he did they’d pay in blood and pain and suffering, because they had done this to him.

  I am the Bringer of Endings? So be it.

  Tuuran nudged him. ‘You still here?’ He was pointing too. ‘See? There’s the night-skins’ palace. Now as to getting them to take us where you want to go, you leave that to me.’

  He cracked his knuckles and strode towards it.

  61

  The Point of Balance

  Bellepheros understood the prickling in the air for what it was. The Adamantine Palace had felt this way after Queen Aliphera had died, when Speaker Hyram had set himself against Prince Jehal. He barely understood what had passed in the dragon realms since the Taiytakei had made him their slave; what little Zafir let slip spoke of a war, and that she had been on the losing end of it, and beyond that he couldn’t see past the half-truths and lies. Maybe Zafir was mad. They’d said that about her in the Palace of Alchemy, quietly where no one would hear. All the queens of the Silver City, hidden away in their fortress of treasures, surrounded by the relics of the Silver King which they could never understand. One by one they all lost their minds.

  Yes, he remembered how the palace had felt before he’d left that last time, and Baros Tsen’s eyrie felt the same now, full of unheard whispers of war. The Taiytakei told him nothing, of course, but there were no new riders, no new alchemists, not a word. When he asked Li, it was obvious she felt the same, and obvious too that she knew little more than he did. She tried to hide it, but he could see how much it bothered her.

  ‘I’ve done it. It’s made.’ She stood in the door of his study now. ‘Would you like to see?’ He turned and saw the twitch of a self-satisfied smile on her face and couldn’t help smiling back. The dragon-rider armour. She’d been working on it for weeks. It had sucked her into its novelty and complexity, however much she despised Zafir. Tsen had been nagging her to finish. Another little sign of war.

  ‘Will I be impressed?’

  ‘She liked the helm, didn’t she?’

  She. Hissed out with sour distaste as if someone had force-fed her lemons all morning. ‘You don’t fool me, Li. You’re pleased with yourself. Smug, and I like you smug.’

  The smile came back. ‘Yes, perhaps I am. I’ve surpassed myself for the rest, even if I say so myself.’ She gave a little bow and Bellepheros’s own smile widened. He couldn’t help but admire her. Dedicated, devoted, talented. You should be running this eyrie. But then he’d been thinking that for months. We should be running this eyrie.

  ‘You, who could build a glasship. But I like tha
t look on your face. Show me then.’ He put down the book he’d been reading on the flora of the Konsidar and let her lead him. He walked behind her, not at her side. He was supposed to be a slave and she was supposed to be his mistress after all, even if no one else in the eyrie gave any weight to that now. Outside her workshop he waited for her to call him in. There was always a sense of anticipation and he liked to draw it out, wondering what marvel she might have for him. The enchanters’ works filled every corner of the Taiytakei system of the world. They made it tick. Their constructs were everywhere; their engines drove and powered almost everything more complex than a horse or a mule and yet it seemed to Bellepheros that the enchanters themselves were treated little better than slaves, poor relatives to the revered navigators and the terrible Elemental Men. Always the fate of those who are builders. They were like alchemists, perhaps, servants to the dragon-lords of the nine realms, but every alchemist knew that that wasn’t really true. Alchemists were slaves to their dragons, not to men.