Authors: Stephen Deas
He reached the other end of the bridge and slowed as he emerged into the open. Tall and handsome buildings had once lined a wide paved road. They were broken shells now, filled with smoke and rubble that spilled out of them like the guts of a man with his belly sliced open. The bodies scattered about here were sword-slaves again, charred and burned.
Tuuran caught up with him. ‘More rockets, eh?’ The stubby glass and gold tower at the end of the bridge had been shattered from within. Only the side facing back across the water remained. The first stone giant reached the bridge, and Berren watched as it stopped and raised its fists and brought them down. The ground trembled as the centre of the bridge dissolved into dust and glittering fragments. Tuuran looked forlornly back. ‘There were enough
dead night-skins back there to find ourselves at least
some
armour that fitted.’ He gave Berren a nervous up-and-down glance. ‘Something without a hole in it, you know? That gold and glass stuff they have that stops the lightning.’
The streets were ghostly empty past the destruction at the end of the bridge, abandoned, the only sounds the cries of fighting wafting down from higher up the island. Tall stone walls lined the road ahead. They were peppered with grand entrances festooned with bright banners in reds and yellows and vivid greens. Colourful signs hung overhead. Merchants for rich folk. Traders bringing in exotica that no one else had a use for or could afford. There was surely money here, yet there were no signs of looting. Nothing was on fire, nothing broken, no murdered men or screaming women. The quiet was almost eerie. The sword-slaves hadn't been this way or else somehow they'd been kept in check. Here and there Berren saw furtive faces at windows.
Tuuran dragged him into a doorway and pushed him into the shadows. A shape flashed through the sky. ‘Dragon.’ He made a sign, the warding against evil that Berren had seen so many times on the slave galleys. When it passed they ran on. ‘You sure you going to find what you're looking for up here?’
Sure? How could he be sure? But where else was there to look? ‘This is where the Taiytakei soldiers came, right? The rest . . .’ He frowned. The rest had been a ruse, a distraction. The destruction of a whole city in a whirl of fire and hell – but this,
this
was what the fleet had come for. For the palace they'd seen from across the sea.
He heard shouts up ahead that grew louder as they ran on, interrupted now and then by cracks of lightning. The street spilled them into a square. Berren slowed. There were Taiytakei ahead, soldiers, the sort that carried lightning wands. On the far side of the square the road ran between two stone bell towers and started to rise, climbing the island towards the golden towers at the top. A little way beyond the towers a barricade barred the way. Now and then lightning flashed out from it, but the Taiytakei in the square had golden shields and it splashed off them and crackled harmlessly into the stone underfoot. A few sword-slaves cowered in helpless clusters under whatever cover they could find, but
nearly all the soldiers were armoured in glass and gold. They were running back and forth and yelling at each other, looking for a way to outflank the barricade. They kept looking up too. Pointing. Another glasship was drifting down from the peak with a bright burning orb hung beneath it. More fire.
Something whizzed past Berren's head and smacked into the stone behind him. An oversized crossbow bolt. Almost a small javelin.
‘Scorpion.’ Tuuran wrinkled his nose. ‘Baby one. We used to have little ones that two men could carry between them. Not much use against a dragon.’ He scurried along the side of the square and into an alley – anywhere not to be out in the open – and sat on his haunches against a wall. He yawned and stretched as if making himself comfortable. ‘Since we seem to have caught up with the fighting, I say we sit and wait for the night-skins to finish killing each other.’
‘No.’ Berren kicked Tuuran back to his feet. ‘We're not staying here.’ He raced back into the square, across it, jinking and weaving towards the bell towers. Sitting and waiting was . . . No, he didn't want that. From the towers he'd be able to see whatever there was to see. Something to tell him where to go.
‘Crazy Mad, you daft turd!’ The big man stayed with him though. Berren sprinted for the door at the base of the nearer tower. Shouts rang out from among the Taiytakei. Lightning flared and roared and cracked. A flash blinded Berren but he was still running. Something thumped into his arm, spinning him round. He staggered, facing the wrong way for a moment, almost falling until Tuuran scooped him up, screaming his head off, and hurled them both through the open door at the bottom of the tower. They slid across a dusty wooden floor and thumped to a stop.
‘Crazy Mad! I knew that was going to be your name the moment I saw you. Daft as a Scales! Flame, I don't even know which lot was trying to kill us. Both of them, I think.’ Tuuran was blinking. He looked at himself and patted his chest as though faintly surprised not to be bleeding. Then he rummaged in his knapsack and pulled out two fire-globes burning a bright orange. The tips from two Taiytakei rockets. ‘So who gets these, then? The ones we came to kill or the ones stabbing us in the back?
You
choose!’
‘You had those in there all the time?’
‘Since the ship.’ Tuuran frowned and then his face split into a great big stupid guilty-looking grin. ‘What?’
‘One slip, you even lean too hard against that wall, and boom! You know that, right?’
Tuuran sounded almost hurt. ‘I'm an Adamantine Man, sword-slave. Adamantine Men don't
slip
. I keep telling you that.’
‘You just threw us both across the floor!’
The big man ignored him. He poked at Berren's arm, at where whatever it was had hit him. The bottom part of his left pouldron was bent and mangled. It pressed uncomfortably against him. When Berren took it off and looked at himself, he was barely even scratched. ‘That was lucky,’ he muttered.
‘Luck?’ Tuuran jabbed a finger into the hole in the brigandine over Berren's chest. ‘Luck? Maybe or maybe not. But still, that's what you wear them for right? Me, I'm just going to stand behind you from now on. And duck because you're a short-arse.’ Tuuran loped up the steps that spiralled to the roof of the tower, past little landings with a tiny door on each one. Berren counted twenty and then they were pushing on a trapdoor and standing up in the open beside a huge bell. The Taiytakei were spread out in the square below. They could simply toss the fire-globes in their midst. He looked down at the barricade and its Taiytakei defenders, hunkered down behind carts and wagons and sacks and their shields. From up here they all looked the same. Tiny people in glittering gold. Past the barricade the road climbed further. As the island grew steeper it began to zigzag. The palaces and castles up there were built into the bedrock, dozens of little clusters of glass and gold bursting from the black stone like mountain flowers.
‘Don't touch the bell, eh?’ he said. He could see the scorpion things Tuuran had meant lined up behind the barricade. Six or seven of them.
‘Oh, we won't be here that long.’ Tuuran weighed a fire-globe in his hand and threw it. It arced over the street and shattered directly behind the barricade, exploding in a ball of fire. By then he'd thrown the second as well. A touch further, perfect for catching the Taiytakei reeling away from the first explosion. The soldiers in the square saw their chance and surged forward behind
their shields. Bolts of lightning danced back and forth and then the two sides were on each other, still flickering with lightning, their spiked ashgars swinging. More Taiytakei rushed at the barricade, swarming over it with a few ragged bands of sword-slaves whipped in their wake.
A flash of light and a crack of lightning rattled the tower. Stone splinters showered around Berren's head. He turned and ran, the two of them leaping down the stairs as fast as they could. Back in the square the air stank of lightning. Soldiers swarmed past, running for the road, pushing them on, a sudden horde of sword-slaves. Berren stooped to pick up a discarded shield. Curved glass lined with gold.
‘Not much use when a man comes at you with an axe,’ Tuuran grunted.
‘It stops the lightning, though.’
The big man paused. He nodded and picked one up for himself, then hauled Berren out of the surge of soldiers and into a doorway. He had the strange look on his face again. That gleam of hunger he always got when there was fighting to be had, but something else as well. Reverence, perhaps. Awe. Berren tried to pull away.
‘Oi! I got warlocks to kill and I need them alive long enough to answer a question or two first. Fat lot of use it is if I just find a corpse.’ He pulled harder. This time Tuuran let him go. ‘Anyway, I'd have thought you'd want to be one of the first across that bridge up there, yelling like a mad thing.’
Tuuran was grinning. ‘Oh I do, Crazy, it's just—’
There was an explosion. The air was suddenly full of glass, spears of it flying thick and fast through the air, and stones big enough to squash a man's head like a melon. Soldiers fell around Berren, scythed down, speared and lifted clean off their feet; and then a wall of searing fire and howling wind almost threw him into the air. Hands grabbed him. Tuuran again, yanking him out of the way of the stones and the flying glass. The ground trembled, a rhythmic pounding. ‘Sun and moon! What was that?’
Tuuran's face was full of savage joy. ‘What I was trying to tell you. That glasship we saw from the square? The dragon brought it down. Blew it to pieces. Learn to keep an eye on the sky, eh, Crazy?’ As Berren started to rise Tuuran pushed him down again,
hard this time. ‘Wait! You feel that?’ The pounding through the ground. Berren nodded. ‘That's the golem that smashed the bridge.’ He nodded back to the square and then up towards the island's peak. ‘Stone monster one way, dragon the other. This is where we hide, Crazy Mad or whatever-you-are, and stay the Flame out of their way.’ He gripped Berren tight as though afraid he'd run off. ‘Fight like that, you don't want to be near it, my friend.’
Berren crouched beside him. Tuuran probably had a point. ‘What was it you called me back before we crossed the bridge. Issle Ayer or something?’
‘Isul Aieha.’ The tension in Tuuran's face was sharp enough to cut.
‘So what's that then?’
‘I told you. Dragons once roamed free where I come from. Isul Aieha was the Silver King. He tamed them and showed the first alchemists how to master them.’ The trembling in the ground was getting worse. Berren peered out of their hiding place. Stones and shattered shards flew past his face. The stone giant was crossing the square. ‘Still don't know whose side those are on.’
‘Not ours.’ Berren was sure of that. ‘Go on. Tell me about this Silver King while we're sitting on our arses. What happened to him?’
‘There were alchemists who followed a different path. Blood-mages.’ For a moment Tuuran's voice turned sour. ‘Not so much difference between them as I used to think. Anyway. The Silver King wrought sorceries that would make everything you've seen here seem dull and plain. Yet in the end the blood-mages still tore him down.’ A barrage of rocks and lightning flew down the street. The sea titan was closer. Hurled stones pinged off its legs and exploded into shrapnel. Lightning crackled over it. It barely seemed to notice. Tuuran winced and shrank back into the wall. ‘They ripped him to pieces. They tore out his soul and shared it among themselves. An alchemist once told me that he had the Silver King's own blood in his veins.’ He shrugged. ‘There's other stories as say the Silver King simply had enough. They say he made a tomb for himself, the Black Mausoleum, and took himself away to it to rest and rise when he was needed again. Bullshit, if you ask me. What sort of idiot would do a thing like that?’
There was something odd in Tuuran's tone, something very off, but Berren was too busy watching the rock monster to pay much attention to anything else. ‘I think we should—’
A shape fell out of the sky, huge and dark against the morning sun. The dragon. It plummeted down and flared its wings, and the next thing Berren knew he was flying through the air as though a great hand had picked him up and thrown him away while a wind like a hurricane ripped at his skin. When he picked himself up again the dragon was rising into the air, the rock monster hanging from its talons. ‘Sun and moon!’
‘Do you remember them?’ asked Tuuran.
‘What?’
‘Do you remember them? The dragons?’
‘
What?’
Berren snorted and shook his head and laughed. ‘Don't be daft. No dragons where I come from – even
you
know that.’ He peered around the street. The dragon flew up high over the island and then tucked in its wings and fell, arrowing towards the glass towers around the peak. At the very last it let the stone giant go and spread its wings. The air thundered and groaned, and even from so far away the shock was enough to stagger him; and then the ground roared and squirmed and shook as the golem smashed into the island. Berren almost fell, and then the air was full of flying stones again. The walls either side of him trembled and cracked. The bells in the towers clanged and the towers themselves groaned and started to sag. A third of the way up the nearer one a great split opened. Berren clutched his head and dropped, crouching against the wall behind him. The air still roared and now it was warm and then hot, hot enough to hurt his lungs. Tuuran took hold of him. They huddled together, making themselves as small as they could.
‘They're in your dreams, Crazy. I know they're there, and don't you try and pretend they're not!’
With a long rumble the tower fell. The air tasted of hot broken stone. Chunks of tortured masonry shattered around them. Grit and gravel fell like rain. As the shaking stopped and the roaring fell away, a haze of choking white dust swept over everything. Berren peered back into the street. No one was throwing stones any more. Where the defenders had been there was only a huge crater scattered with rubble, half lost in haze now. From what he
could see almost everything from where he was right to the bridge up on the peak had been smashed to ruin. The dragon sat in the middle of it, a shape in the smoke and the dust. Here and there handfuls of figures were moving further up the slope. Not many. A small miracle that anyone at all was left alive. As Berren stared, the dragon spread its wings and leaped into the sky, churning whorls of smoke twisting in its wake. Tuuran stood at his shoulder. ‘Do you see now why the Adamantine Men have no fear? When
that
is the enemy and you have learned to face it, what else is there?’