Authors: Stephen Deas
Diamond Eye still arrowed for the ship.
‘Stop!’
They had always,
always
obeyed her, even Diamond Eye, but in this world he'd become different. He was right on the edge of her control, had been from the first moment she'd sat on his back. She winced and leaned forward to press herself into his scales again.
He was exhilarating and terrifying both at once.
Why? Why have you changed?
He took the ship from the stern, flaring his wings and crashing into the mizzenmast and snapping it like a twig. Zafir made herself as small as she could. Diamond Eye ploughed on, smashing through the next two masts and into the centre of the deck, splintering the wood beneath. He powered up again, clutching at the ship with his claws as if trying to tear it clear out of the water. The screams of the sailors fought with the cracking of wood and then Diamond Eye shrieked and let go and soared away again as the ship pitched sideways. As the dragon flew up he bent his head between his legs, throwing Zafir forward so she was hanging helpless from the saddle, and poured fire over the receding deck.
Stop!
He lashed the bows with his tail as he passed. The top half of the last mast cartwheeled into the air.
Stop? No
.
Yes!
Zafir stared at the island ahead. A hundred ships sat in the water, half of them on fire, some no more than shattered hulks. Rockets flew to and fro. Bright flashes of lightning arced over the waves, and with each one another ship exploded. She screamed at him, her words ripped away by the howling wind. ‘There! Go there! Tooth and claw! Tail and Fire!’ The ship they left behind was listing. Sinking. Was that where Shrin Chrias Kwen had been? She wasn't sure what answer she wanted to that. Crushed and burned by a dragon would be a fitting end but she'd already made him another, slower and more painful and more delicious by far. Let him die in slow agony, knowing he'd brought it on himself. Not glorious battle-death.
There were boats in the water, soldiers and oarsmen struggling through the waves to the shore. Fires raged across the island too, in and among its fortresses. More glasships were drifting from the top of the Kraitu's Bones, the spike of stone with a palace on its crown that reminded her of the Pinnacles, of her home. She'd go there last of all, she decided. When all else was done and she could work slowly and at her leisure. She fought for breath, sought for a calm to push away the urges that threatened to devour her.
The glasships first. Then the island
. That's what the kwen from the mountains had said might destroy her and so she faced them, head on, to
see. She urged Diamond Eye lower. Soldiers were fighting in the streets. Metal tubes pointed in clusters up into the air around thick walls, the black-powder cannon that fired stone shot to shatter any glasship that came too close. She wasn't sure what they might do to a dragon. ‘Those!’ She pictured them in her head. ‘Keep away from them.’
But she knew at once that she should have learned from the ship. Diamond Eye did exactly the opposite, turned and arrowed straight at them, as though he'd heard her clearly but had made his own decision. The largest of the fortresses sprawled before them, batteries and batteries of rockets with Taiytakei soldiers racing back and forth. Four glass and gold lightning cannon pivoted towards her, one from each corner and each with a hedgehog of black-powder tubes pointing into the air. Diamond Eye soared across the walls and straight over the middle of it all. He unleashed a torrent of fire, sweeping his head back and forth. Men screamed and burned and ran, flames all around them.
An explosion rocked Diamond Eye. Rockets fired off at random, flinging themselves up into the air, some of them arcing away across the sea, others across the land, some straight over Zafir's head. Diamond Eye dived through them and turned, banking into the first lightning cannon. He did the same as he had to the ship, crashing into it with his bulk as hard and fast as he possibly could, wings flared, claws outstretched, tail whipping in front of him as he came down. Zafir, on his back, the last to arrive, small and helpless. The stone embrasures holding the cannon shattered. Glass exploded, metal toppled and fell. Diamond Eye tipped forward and stood still for a moment amid the ruin. He threw up his head and shrieked, the unmistakable challenge she knew so well, then turned slowly, head low to the ground, and poured fire over the remains. Cases of black powder fizzed and burned and exploded. Wooden shrapnel and fragments of stone peppered the dragon's side. Stones and splinters pinged off Zafir's armour. Something hit her hard on the arm and one gold-glass vambrace cracked. In the midst of the chaos, with the dragon's inferno around her, the broken piece of armour filled her with outrage. Or maybe it was simply the dragon's hunger and for an instant that her guard was down for it to slip inside, but either way Diamond Eye took that
moment and devoured it. He didn't launch himself back into the air this time but ran across the open ground inside the fortress walls, crushing everything in his path and setting light to anything that wasn't already aflame. It reminded her of Evenspire, of the Palace of Paths burning under the onslaught of a hundred dragons, the heat and the flames and the smoke.
And that went well, didn't it just? Get back into the air, my death-bringer
! But he wasn't hers any more, not now, and she couldn't help a glance up back over her head for the other dragons and the great betrayal coming down from the skies to rip her off his back and tear her to pieces; and with that glance she felt another surge of rage at Jehal for what he'd done to her. It seared through her and left her as helpless as a child, all reason finally crushed by Diamond Eye's overwhelming hunger. She wanted to smash and destroy everything, to slaughter every single last one of these men who'd made her a slave.
They closed on the next cannon. She couldn't see it through the flames Diamond Eye was already pouring towards it, running on his back legs as if about to spread his wings and fly, head held high so his fire would have its greatest reach. The whole cluster exploded. Pieces of stone and metal the size of horses flew into the air in whirling arcs of smoke. The metal cannon spun skyward and fizzed like fireworks. A wall of scorched air hit them both, and if Diamond Eye hadn't been her shield it might have torn her to pieces. It lifted the dragon up off his feet and threw him back, all fifty tons of him. The world spun around her and she was flying, hanging upside down, hard stone and a litter of burning debris scattered beneath her and the unstoppable mass of a dragon falling from above. She was about to be crushed between them but at the last Diamond Eye twisted. Did he remember she was there? Or was he simply doing what any animal would do and trying to land on his feet? She'd never know, but it saved her. He came down sideways, hard and heavy, and slid across the stone. The impact savaged and rattled her every bone. Something in her back wrenched and twisted. The pain and the fear were enough to make her cry out but the harness held. She clung to Diamond Eye's scales so tightly that she might easily have snapped her own fingers.
They ground to a stop. For a moment she hung helpless, and
then with a sudden jerk Diamond Eye righted himself. The blast had flattened half the fortress, blowing the fires out and scattering burning pieces up into the air like blossom in a gale. She watched as three burning globes fell out of the sky and hit the ground and bloomed into balls of fire, but there was nothing left to burn. There was no one moving any more. Zafir felt the dragon's puzzlement. For a moment he didn't know what to do.
Her skin tingled. The air around them fizzed. Her thoughts became muddled. She didn't quite know where she was any more, or who, or why . . .
The lightning from the third tower hit Diamond Eye squarely in the face. Zafir caught a flash of light so bright that it left her momentarily blind and a thunderclap so loud that her ears screamed. She couldn't see and she couldn't hear. Diamond Eye fell limp beneath her. The rage and the hunger and the fury all vanished at once. Suddenly she couldn't feel his presence at all.
The room. The locked room. Wrapped in darkness. Fear of the light. That was all she was. It took her with it and the world went black.
There wasn't much fighting left to be had by the time Tuuran and Berren reached the sea again. Hundreds of sword-slaves, thousands maybe, had come ashore from their little boats. No one had stopped them and now Tuuran and Crazy Mad passed them running the other way, heading deeper into Dhar Thosis and away from the sea and the spreading fires.
No quarter –
they'd all had that shouted at them until their ears were ringing. They were sword-slaves, bred to the lash at the oars of a galley but strong enough to have survived; and now here they were, let loose on the very people who'd enslaved them. They would not be kind. The roaming gangs had hungry faces and violent eyes. They looked Tuuran and Crazy Mad up and down, saw the colour of their skin and the swords and armour they wore and passed on with a nod and a growl. Closer to the shore, as the gangs thinned, houses burned, sometimes with men and women still inside and knots of sword-slaves at the doors with spears, laughing and poking them back into the flames. They passed bodies in the streets, Taiytakei torn from their beds and hurled out of their houses and ripped to pieces. Crazy Mad didn't like it but Tuuran couldn't have cared less. They deserved it for what they did, all of them.
They passed a half-dozen sword-slaves dragging a pair of screaming women into an alley. The slaves had already left one body behind them, too small to be a grown man.
‘This isn't how an army should behave,’ Crazy Mad muttered.
Tuuran laughed at him. ‘This isn't an army, madman! This is a horde. A mob. Besides, war is war. Victory is to crush your enemy so utterly they can never stand against you again. Annihilate them if you can.’
Crazy Mad scowled back at him. ‘No. Victory is to be better than what you overthrow.’
‘Ha! Then slavers or not, I think you're on the wrong side of this battle.’ For a fraction of a moment, Tuuran hesitated and remembered the girl from the Pinnacles. It had been right, what he'd done, and was this any different? But then he shook his head and walked on. It
was
different. The Taiytakei were his enemies, all of them.
Berren stopped. The big man was right. Not that he
cared
, but he
was
right, and the Bloody Judge would never have let it be like this, and the screaming from the alley wouldn't let him go. He stopped and turned back, letting Tuuran walk on without him. The body left on the street was a Taiytakei, a boy no more than about ten. He'd had his throat cut.
He drew his sword. The Bloody Judge in him wanted to run into the alley, rush the sword-slaves and cut them to pieces. Kill maybe three of them before the rest could gather their wits. But he held the killing fury back. The alley was so narrow they wouldn't be able to surround him. He had a sword and good armour, and for all their numbers they had neither; so he came up on them and drew his sword across the alley wall hard enough to make sparks and get their attention. It was dark, shielded from the dawn light across the water, and the air was hazy with smoke from the fires around the docks. The sword-slaves had one of the women pinned against a wall, the other forced down on her knees. The women looked small and helpless. ‘Stop!’
The nearest sword-slave faced him down. ‘Piss off.’ He peered. ‘You could almost be one of them.’
‘But I'm not, and I'm telling you to leave these women be.’
‘Or what?’
‘Or I'll kill you, that's what.’ Berren opened his arms to them. Daring them.
The sword-slave spat and drew himself up. ‘There's plenty more. Go find your own.’
The fury came so quickly it took him by surprise. He let out a roar of rage and lifted his sword, but the fury brought something with it this time, something from deep down. Something that wasn't his, that had been left behind when the warlocks had ripped him from the battlefield and consigned him to the pit under
Tethis. He wasn't quite sure what happened after that but the sword-slaves were gone and the alley was empty except for the two women, screaming as though they'd been set on fire. A fine cloud swirled around them all, black ash that must have blown in from the docks. Berren took a step towards the nearer woman. She cried out and shrank down the wall, blubbering,
Please please please
.
‘I'll not hurt you. You should run. Run hard and run far. If anyone chases you, look for narrow places where big men in armour will be slow. Or high places where heavy men will fall or dark places where you can't be seen.’ The first rules a Shipwrights’ boy learned. He was surprised he remembered, but he was wasting his breath. The girl was lost to her fear. For some reason she seemed more afraid of him than she'd been of the sword-slaves.
‘There
you are,’ grunted Tuuran from the mouth of the alley. ‘Now what?’ Berren turned. Tuuran was frowning at the two women. ‘I thought you didn't approve of this sort . . .’ He stopped and stared. Then he looked at the women again. His voice became strangely calm and quiet. ‘You two, you should probably go now.’ Tuuran took a step back himself. ‘Run. Go! Shoo! Quick!’
Berren stared at the big man. He heard the two women run out of the alley and away. ‘What?’
‘You're doing that thing again.’
‘What thing?’
‘That silver eyes thing. Weren't there some of our comrades here just now?’
‘They ran away.’
Tuuran sniffed the air and took another step back. ‘Right . . .’
‘Well, they didn't just vanish into thin air.’
The big man shook his head as he turned away. ‘Really? And exactly how sure are you about that?’
Berren glanced back down the alley. The two Taiytakei women were gone. The black ash was settling on the ground and on his armour. It was greasy and it smelled bad.
‘You stink of burned man.’ Tuuran strode out of the alley and whatever had happened there back towards the sea. Fast. To be away from Crazy Mad too, but Crazy ran after him.