Dragon Queen sk-2 Read online

  ‘LaLa!’ The t'varr liked his little names for those around him. Tsen was like that, had a childish streak to him and a way of making men see him as less than he was. He slouched. He was fat and he always looked either bored or half-asleep — often both — but he had sharp eyes behind the facade and his vices were surprising and few. The Watcher wondered sometimes how many people he really fooled. ‘Quai'Shu has returned then, has he? Planning a visit? He must be. We've had the emerald cages installed for weeks now and jade ravens carry news well enough for the rest of us. Just not quite as quickly, eh?’

  The Watcher shook his head. ‘Our sea lord plans to return at once to the Western Realm, T'Varr, to oversee the further stages of his design. Enchantress Chay-Liang will join you here shortly.’

  Tsen pouted. ‘Well, you certainly didn't come all the way here just to tell me that! What news do you really bring?’

  ‘Our sea lord has acquired the alchemist. He is in Xican. Enchantress Chay-Liang will bring him to you when she comes.’

  A broad smile spread across the t'varr’s face, so wide it ran halfway up his cheeks. ‘And dragon eggs, LaLa? Any sign of those?’

  ‘Our sea lord advises less than a year, T'Varr.’

  ‘Delicious.’ The t'varr clapped his hands. ‘Then we shall be busy soon. I'm sure this alchemist will be most demanding. But good. Good.’

  ‘Sea Lord Quai'Shu also commands that his castle be taken to the northern edge of the Lair of Samim. The alchemist will offer further advice when he arrives.’

  The Watcher left him to it. The glasships with their chains would move the castle, inch it to the edge of the great salt marsh where the Samim, the mother of snakes and scorpions and all things poisonous, was said to live.

  He went that way himself too, but for entirely other reasons.

  10

  Someone Else's Skin

  Beside the river of Tethis he forgot his thirst. He was Skyrie, but the Crowntaker was inside him. Panting, sweating, he stripped off his clothes and stood in the water and looked at himself naked in the moonlight. He didn't know how long he had before his skin wouldn't be his own again. He touched himself, looking for the marks that came with ten years of soldiering. Not his marks, but those of the Bloody Judge. But all he found was the huge scar on his left thigh, old and puckered and familiar and comforting, the size of his splayed hand. At least his skin was still his own.

  He waded to the bank and fell to his knees at the edge of the water and started to sob. The thing was still there, writhing and screaming in impotent agony and rage, and he wanted it gone, but he didn't know how. Oh gods, he'd killed four of his brothers! Friends! He howled at the sky, ‘It wasn't me! It wasn't me! It was him! Oh Xibaiya! Someone help me!’

  He was young, a boy coming into the first flushes of manhood. He was hiding. Cowering in the crude hut that was his home. Outside, open and in the daylight, something terrible was happening. Women were screaming. Men roared and howled and he heard horses. They came every year, the riders, had done ever since he was small. Came and took what they wanted and left; and whenever they came, he and his brothers and sisters hid away. He was shaking. Trembling. The Bloody Judge's men. Hadn't known then, but Vallas had told him later who had done it.

  The sobs turned to howls. He buried his face in his hands.

  A giant burst in and pulled him from his hiding place. Immense and as tall and as broad as the doorway. Long dreadlocked hair hung to his waist and a short spiked axe hung on a loop of leather from one wrist. The giant picked him up and flung him against a wall. The axe swung and Skyrie lost all will to move and simply slumped. He looked down. He was sitting in a lake of his own blood. His leg had been cut open, so deep that it was more off than on.

  And then later the water.

  He got back to his feet, the river dripping off his legs. He was cold, the water icy, the night air chill and he was naked. He looked at the scar again in the moonlight, long and hard. The skin looked as though it had melted and then frozen again, twisted out of shape. In the moonlight it was speckled with pale and silvery streaks, thousands of little marks left in the skin as it had healed.

  That's no axe scar, warlock. In his head the Crowntaker was right behind him. He squealed and turned and ran a few steps and then stopped, helpless, and wailed, because how did you run from something that was inside you? The Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge. There. Watching and looking and waiting.

  It looks like a burn, warlock. But it came from an axe. The one the giant had swung at him. He tried to scream: I was there! It was me! I felt it! But though his mouth opened, no sound came out. He was losing control. The Judge was taking him back.

  The Crowntaker had seen those silver streaks before. There were patterns in them, staggering and intricate and they looked like writing of a sort. The sigils that warlocks used, perhaps. Or maybe the sunburst marks of the sun priests. The thought came with a trail of wistful regret strung out like gossamer behind it, lingering.

  He looked at his hands. The fingers were long and slender. The callouses that came from years of gauntlets and swords weren't there. They were soft.

  He put the grey robes back over his head.

  The warlock was screaming. Endless screaming, battering against the prison of his own mind, howling to be let out, but that would never happen, not again. Flickering memories flashed by, not his own, dancing past, revealing a little of their skin and dashing away. Then a great slew of them came like rocks tumbling from the face of a cliff to reveal new strata beneath, pristine and clean. Memories of the death-mage sticking that paper to his breastplate, fierce and hot, striking the last stroke of the last sigil in his own blood and casting his incantation as he died. Everything that came after.

  I am the Bloody Judge. For a moment he faltered, bewildered by the enormity of what they'd done to him, frozen by it. He looked at the hands that weren't his. Stared at them as they shook. How could they be real? Then forced the horror away because what use was it? The sigils were gone, the spell cast. What was done was done. There would be time later for fear and anguish and dread — now was for bloody vengeance. Vallas Kuy, the master warlock. He needed to find Vallas and his golden knife that cut pieces out of the souls of men.

  He remembered his thirst again, knelt and touched his lips to the water, taking care not to look at his own reflection. The river was clean here, the smells of the docks mere whispers on the breeze. Afterwards he danced from stone to boulder across the hiss of the water and slipped in and out of the alleys that nestled among the houses of the rich on the other side. He found a wall that was low enough to climb. Jumped onto the edge of a storehouse roof, crept to the top and then along the ridge of it, skills the warlock Skyrie had never had, old skills the Bloody Judge had learned long ago as a thief in far-off Deephaven. He slipped through the town unseen, running down the Galsmouth Road towards the battlefield where he belonged.

  11

  Over Her Heart

  Long ago the Elemental Men had come down from Mount Solence. They'd fallen on the squabbling coast of Takei'Tarr and cut away the old sorceries and religions in a swathe of blood and fire. It had been a necessary thing, an act of mercy to save this piece of the now-broken world from another cataclysm. Some places had taken to the new order well. The old Mar-Li Republics had acquiesced almost at once and so became the model for the society that now grew under elemental eyes. Others had not. Yet it struck the Watcher that two cities in particular had resisted most furiously. They were the cities furthest from the first Elemental Men, with the most time to prepare and who should have seen the inevitability of history sweeping inexorably towards them but whose pride was matchless. Cashax in the far north of the desert with her inexhaustible supply of slaves; and worse, Vespinarr, deep in the southern mountains on the edge of the Konsidar with her silver and her bottomless wealth. They had fought the hardest and so had been cut the deepest. Vespinarr had given birth to the sorceress Abraxi, Cashax to the indescribable abomination of the Crimson Sunburst. Bo
th had been crushed in the end, conquered and ruled and their histories rewritten by the Elemental Masters, and yet now they quietly ruled the world despite their pasts. Every conflict among the Taiytakei, if you looked hard enough, was underpinned by their rivalry.

  The Watcher blew high above mountain peaks shining white with snow and swirled down between them. Vespinarr lay spread across the plateau beneath, ringed by snow-capped stone, the bright gleam of the Yalun Zarang river running through it, the roiling waters of the Jokun not far away. The city glittered silver and gold under the clear blue sky, while the land between the two rivers was threaded with silver strands through green fields dappled with bright yellows and brilliant blue. The Elemental Men had come late to Vespinarr when perhaps they should have turned to it first. They'd done what they'd done everywhere, destroyed and desecrated the city's sacred sites, culled its priests and sorcerers. But here more than anywhere else the old ways still survived in secret.

  He circled the Kabulingnor Palace, whose shining towers of gold and glass were the highest in the world and could be seen from a hundred miles away, whose vast yellow walls sprawled like cliffs across the might of Mazanda's Peak, Sea Lord Shonda's colossal declaration of the city's power. He soared lower in arcs around the crags and bluffs, past two massive floating cargo sleds made of gold-glass, laden with crates and sacks and pens full of animals, slowly riding the air from the city below to the mountain-top palace; and smaller sleds too, moving through the sky, carrying just one man or two, messengers or guests not worthy of a glasship but in too much haste for the long winding mountain road. Then lower still to the tiers and scattered pavilions of the Visonda Palace at the mountain's feet, where a legion of t'varrs and kwens saw to it that the heart of the city kept up its merciless beat.

  There, in a quiet place, he became a man once more, hidden deep in shadows where no one would see. There were reasons today for stealth.

  Below the Visonda stood the Azahl Pillar. It had come from somewhere much deeper in the Konsidar, moved here long before there were such things as Elemental Men. He stopped in front of it as he always did. It had grace. The white stone was flawless, inscribed to an unnamed general, an account of his services to the forgotten king of a nameless realm, and ringed with symbols no one had ever deciphered. It belonged to the time before the Splintering, yet the stone hadn't aged. The Watcher ran a hand over it. Its edges were as sharp as they ever were, as though they'd been carved that very morning. The moon sorcerers belonged to that age. They'd seen the Splintering with their own eyes. On the beach they'd shown it to him because, beneath every other purpose, what an Elemental Man was for, what had brought them into life so long ago, was the fear that it might happen again and the resolve that it should not. It was why they did what they did, why they cast away every trace of the old gods, killing them down to the deepest roots, why they learned to hunt and kill sorcerers from any and every world.

  Beyond the pillar he walked through a leafy willow-shaded park and into the narrow bustling streets of the Harub, full of noise and colour. Slaves in white and Taiytakei in their feathered rainbow robes hurried past, throwing glances of alarm as they saw him. Pictures, statues and engravings of dragons surrounded him, some old and worn in faded stone, others gaudy and red in bright fresh paint. The dragons made him smile. The Vespinese claimed that dragons had once lived in the Konsidar, long ago. A few even claimed they were still there, deep under the earth in some strange harmony with the Righteous Ones in their chthonian domain. Dragons were the symbol of the mountain city — three of them intertwined with a lion — and that was why he smiled, for the dragons of Vespinarr were myths and stories, yet follow the Yalun Zarang and the Jokun out of the mountains and the Lair of Samim was right there in front of you, not so far away at all. Old stories were one thing, nice and safe. He wondered how the Vespinese would feel when they had real dragons on their doorstep again.

  Sea Lord Quai'Shu was in debt up to his eyes with the lords of Vespinarr. The Watcher knew he was meant neither to know nor care but they were a part of this somehow. They were not to be trusted.

  He reached the Sun and Moon Temple with its gilded pagoda tower-tops and stopped, looking up at the many dark arches that led inside. Here was how Vespinarr quietly defied the Elemental Men. When they'd come to the city in force to throw down the abomination that was Abraxi the sorceress, the temple had burned amid riot and mayhem. The Elemental Men had forbidden it to be rebuilt, as they forbade all temples to the old gods, and so the Vespinese had built a parliament of sorts in its place, though strikingly similar, and filled it with the kwens and t'varrs and hsians who kept the city in motion. A hundred years later they'd built the Kabulingnor with their endless silver and the sea lords had moved to the top of the Silver Mountain, to Mazanda's Peak. The t'varrs and kwens and hsians had moved in turn into the massive space of the Visonda and left the old temple empty, and now here it was: brazenly dedicated to the sun and the moon. Oh the Vespinese were careful. They made no reference to the rituals of the old gods and never named them, but there were chants at dawn and dusk and it was an open secret that those who came sent prayers and gifts to the ancient forbidden divinities.

  Seventeen arches led into the temple and from the outside each was the same. Beyond lay a maze of tiny passages and nooks and shrines reached in different ways. The Watcher chose the central arch. Words were inscribed on it, innocuous and tucked away almost as though they were meant not to be seen but they were telling: The foundations here lie deep, pinned over the heart of the earth goddess by Seturakah, greatest of the silver kings and conqueror of Xibaiya. He walked beneath the words and chose a tiny winding flight of steps down into the earth. As the passage fell into darkness he became the stuff of shadow.

  Uneasy things shifted here, but Elemental Men were killers of sorcerers. When abominations like Abraxi and the Crimson Sunburst and Ren Shaha rose, the Elemental Men excised them from the world. It was a long time since the Taiytakei had seen such a creature among their own but abominations grew like weeds in the Dominion of the Sun King and now in Aria too. Wherever their power seemed too great, they were removed with care and precision and with a deal of time and thought. Sorcerers rarely died easily. Second chances were not sought.

  When the dragon-queen comes. .

  . . so the tipping point. .

  In Vespinarr he'd found his first clues. It had taken years but there was some sort of sorcerer here. A pale-skinned slave who dressed in grey and had a talent for speaking with the dead, a talent he sold for silver and jade. Subtle in his ways, harmless and leaving barely a ripple in his passing. The Watcher would never have found his scent if he hadn't already been searching for it.

  The grey dead ones are coming. .

  They are making something. .

  In the passages beneath the old temple the air smelled a little of fish. Odd, he thought, for the mountains. The smell grew stronger. The passage was dark and narrow, lit now by a scattering of dim candles. He was deep beneath the streets and yet more steps took him further down. He let the candles lead him until he found what he sought: a dead-end room, round and claustrophobic with a roof that was low and a hole bored into the floor, a shaft that sank perhaps for ever. More candles were set into scores of nooks in the wall. The smell of old fish was strong now. Facing the entrance with eyes closed, a man sat beside the shaft. He was dressed in grey and the Watcher knew he'd found one of those he sought: the grey dead. He wondered what would be the surest way to kill him: sever his head? Bleed him out? Cut out his heart? Let flames consume him? Sorcerers had survived all those things, but this one needed more than killing. This one needed to speak. He needed not to run, and so he needed to not know what it was that he faced.

  In the darkness of the passage the Watcher became flesh again. The grey dead's head snapped up at once. Around him the candle flames flickered. Shadows danced around the walls, ripping themselves free. The Watcher felt power sizzling in the air. Sorcery. ‘Who are you?’

  The
Watcher stayed in the shadows and bowed. ‘I am the mouth for the Regrettable Men. I have come to arrange the terms.’ Every Vespinese would know at once what he meant. The Regrettable Men were civilised killers of the highest order.

  ‘Terms?’ The grey dead stood up. He pulled back his hood. His head was shaved, his face and neck covered in tattoos. The flickering of the candles grew to a frenzy. Shadow shapes danced everywhere.

  The Watcher bowed again. ‘For our mutual convenience. If there is a poison you would prefer then we can discuss your choice.’

  The grey dead smirked and slowly nodded. ‘I see. Who wants me, assassin? Tell me and I'll change their outlook.’

  ‘I'm desperately sorry but that's not how this plays. There's no outcome save one. I'm here as our usual courtesy, to make your departure as convenient and easy as possible with minimal distress to those around you. You may have a few days to put your affairs in order. If there is a particular location or time of day you would like the assassination to take place, you may request it. We will do our best to honour your wishes.’

  The grey dead threw back his head and laughed now. ‘No, I don't think we'll be discussing those things. Tell me who sent you or I'll rip it out of you.’

  ‘I cannot, for I do not know. In three days at dawn then, if there is nothing to discuss. Those are our usual terms.’

  The grey dead threw out his hands. Shadows poured from his sleeves. The Watcher ducked into the darkness and shifted to become the fire of one of the candle flames and the light and the heat it gave. The shadows recoiled, screaming and wailing and whirling around him. He shifted again and led them away, became the stone, the air, the darkness of the unlit path. He led them a long and merry chase, dragged their mindless hunger far away and then left them and returned alone, back to the room that stank of fish and its candles. There he stayed, a little pinprick of flame, and did what he did best.