Authors: Stephen Deas
Berren couldn't take his eyes off the monster.
Do you remember them?
He was the orphan boy from Shipwrights’ in the city of Deephaven and the warlock Saffran Kuy had just told him his future.
Dragons for one of you. Queens for both!
He was Skyrie, a nothing farm boy from the edge of a swamp.
Don't be daft. No dragons where I come from!
But he was something else too, and he
did
remember them because he'd made them. Forged them out of the souls of fallen half-gods and skinned them with his own will.
They're in your dreams
.
Yes, and the air was black with them, thick with their cries, flying to war to burn the enemy once and for all. In their thousands, arrayed under the sun, the light gleaming from their scales so bright it blinded, massed among flawless white stone spires that scratched the clouds in the sky; and then in the darkness of the night the silver light of the moon shone down, hard and violent and it burned, and he clenched his fist but he would not bow, not ever, not even to the god that had made him because he knew, he
knew
what lay beneath and behind and beyond.
Isul Aieha? ‘
He carried a spear, did he?’ he asked without really knowing why.
Tuuran nodded and there was that wary look back on his face in a flash. ‘Yes.’
Isul Aieha? That's not who I am. But I do remember you, and by another name too. I call you Worldbreaker
.
Diamond Eye was beyond her reach once more. He smashed another of the stone giants from the sea into the ground with such force that the world shook, and even while Zafir was trying to find her breath he flared his wings and she was crushed against his scales yet again. Her armour was falling apart now, pieces breaking off with every dive and every turn.
She coughed, choking on the dust and the smoke that filled the wind. But there was something else, something in the air. From the very first day she'd flown with him from Baros Tsen's eyrie, Diamond Eye had been different, a frenzy inside him unlike any dragon she'd ever ridden before, but now there was something even more. He sensed prey, like a hunting dog catching the scent of a rabbit, bright and fresh and close, and yet he couldn't find it. She'd never known a dragon be so wanton. He drew her in with his abandon.
Another dragon?
Diamond Eye leaped into the air and soared away again, out over the sea without waiting for her command. His frustration seeped into her. Something was here. Something that meant more than she did. He was dulled by Bellepheros's alchemy and couldn't think but he was trying so very hard to remember something. But
what
?
She nudged him towards the last of the glasships and let him vent his rage, punching straight through the fragile heart of the first, lashing at another which tilted and spiralled away. A thunderbolt sundered the air and he reared and caught the lightning between his claws. Pain and rage seared into them both as sparks cracked over his scales but Diamond Eye devoured it, fed on the fury and shattered the glasship into a jagged rain that fell like spears onto the swarming battle below. He powered beneath another too low
to reach the discs and so he snatched at the fragile gondola instead, tore it away and hurled it across the sky to plunge into the distant speckled sea. Nothing was enough. When the last glasship fell he turned back towards the golden bridge that joined the two islands. He flew under and then over it and around and around, oblivious to the battle that raged across it until Zafir almost screamed, ‘Burn! Burn them!’
Another glasship came, this one with a ball of fire hung beneath it. Diamond Eye tore it down and hurled a murder of glass and flames into the seething ground below. He turned his eye to the last stone giant, shaking the earth as it walked, crushing the dead beneath it. Turned away again.
Somewhere near!
Whatever the dragon was looking for was close, but he couldn't find it.
A chance. ‘The stone man then!’ howled Zafir.
Diamond Eye wheeled. With white burning towers of rage he fell on the last giant and snatched it up, pulled himself high and then dived, slamming the creature into the mass of towers and fighting Taiytakei and then followed it down, shrieking and burning, tail whipping in fury to tear down everything around him. And then on, half leaping, half flying in great bounds up the steepening sides of the island until he was in among the towers of glass and gold that grew together like a giant copse of gleaming trees. He barrelled into them, cracking and tearing until he brought them down, one by one crashing in shattered shards to the earth.
‘Enough!
Enough!’
He'd forgotten she was there again. A spike of glass tore a great rent in his wing but Diamond Eye barely noticed. A broken splinter struck a hand's breadth from where Zafir clung to his back, driving deep through his scales.
‘Stop!’ She summoned all that she was.
I am the dragon-queen and you are mine to command. Enough, my deathbringer. ENOUGH!
Enough?
He rose, reluctant and sulking, spiralling back into the air. Torn and slashed by the glass, a trail of blood dripped behind him, a scorching red rain. His heat was burning her even through the dragon-scale between them, and so Zafir coaxed him away between the islands, down into the cooling sea. Clouds of salty steam billowed around them. She looked at the savaged city, at the devastation the dragon had wrought, yet felt nothing but more madness and rage.
Enough?
Never enough. And he was a dragon;
and dragons did not tire.
He rose from the sea, hers again for a moment, and she flew him high towards the palace now. The Palace of Roses they called it, a last cluster of towers on a single pinnacle of rock that reminded her of home. A glittering glass bridge reached across from the lower island. The road beyond wound up through three rings of stone walls, each with a gatehouse, and then to a small forest of dazzling towers. Each of the three towers at its heart was as tall again as the Tower of Air that had once been hers; around those stood six more, arranged in a ring and joined together by a curtain wall of golden glass. Out further still rose three black monoliths, the enchanters’ power stones for their glasships.
‘Burn it.’ She spoke calmly now, for this moment while Diamond Eye was hers again. ‘Burn it all.’
They started with the bridge. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of Taiytakei were advancing through the rubble at its lower end. Others were waiting behind barricades at the far side to meet them with stones and arrows and lightning. Diamond Eye burned them until they were gone and everything was ash. Then on to the first gatehouse, pouring flame over the stone until it cracked in the heat. A lash of the tail and the gates flew apart. At the second the Taiytakei were already scattering. She let Diamond Eye burn them and then land among them, sweeping the ground clean, battering them high into the air or plucking them from the earth and devouring them. A few turned their lightning wands on her as the dragon came but their tiny bolts were little more than an insect's sting. One struck her in the arm. Sparks ran over her armour, cracked and battered, but she felt nothing and then Diamond Eye's fire incinerated them. When he was done he stepped between them, eating the charred remains.
The third gatehouse was empty and abandoned by the time she reached it. She passed it by. On to the palace itself. The way it was built reminded her of the Crown of the Sea Lords in Khalishtor and the thought made her smile.
Show them what a dragon can do
. Tsen had asked for that, so they would understand how much they had to fear. And she would oblige them. The Taiytakei across this blighted world would understand
her
. What
she
could do, the dragon-queen.
And we are but one. Think, my deathbringer, think
what we would do to them if we flew in our hordes!
From her throne in the Adamantine Palace the Taiytakei had seemed distant, barely even there, a perpetual splinter in her finger but nothing more. Now she knew them better. And weren't there other realms too? Places she'd never seen. Places of which she'd never even heard until they'd taken her as their slave. And no dragons in any of them. Waiting to be plucked.
Look at us, Diamond Eye! Look at what we are!
Nothing stood between the dragons and their desires but their riders and the alchemists, and
they
were all beholden to
her
, the speaker of the nine realms, and all she had to do was find a way to return. And then? No more Councils of Kings and Queens eyeing one another across a table, constantly seeking some advantage and always achieving nothing. Worlds waited, there to be taken! They could build an empire like Vishmir had done but unimaginably greater! An empire to put even these slavers to shame.
She turned Diamond Eye towards the gleaming spires of the sea lord's palace and set about their destruction. There would be a way. Somehow she would find it.
Tuuran watched, crouched beside their broken wall, keeping Crazy Mad's head pressed down. In the haze of dust and smoke, amid the ruined stone and the shattered glass, the dragon took to the sky at last. The air fell quiet and still, and then he heard sporadic shouts from off among the broken streets. He waited, eyes following the Taiytakei soldiers who'd survived the destruction of the sea titan as they scrambled through the debris, skirting spatters of still-liquid gold, the dull red glow of molten glass, the stones cracked and steaming by the dragon's heat. He watched them climb the switch-backs of the road towards the near end of the Divine Bridge, the thread of gold across the abyss to the Palace of Roses. Crazy Mad kept trying to get up and Tuuran kept pulling him down.
‘Stupid slave! Wait! Let the night-skins kill each other.’ He looked up, trying to spot the dragon, but for the moment it was gone and so he waited, watching until the shouts moved on and the Taiytakei soldiers were all safely away. Finally he let Crazy Mad go and they started up the last part of the hill. The road to the island peak was littered with broken stone and shards of gold-glass. The walls from the little palaces around the top of the island were cracked and broken, the towers of glass and gold mostly smashed and toppled. Here and there in the few that still stood he saw people. Madmen. Idiots. Just staring numbly when the dragon might come back at any moment.
Why don't you run, you daft buggers?
He shivered. Towers were meant to be made of stone. A man shouldn't be able to look right through a castle's walls at its innards and find people looking back at him.
There were dead Taiytakei scattered where the dragon had been. Limp broken things, arms and legs twisted, their armour smashed to scattered pieces. That was dragons for you. There was something to be said for a good strong coat of steel and leather. It
might not do much for the lightning that came out of the Taiytakei batons; it might scorch and burn when people started throwing fire-globes about, but at least it didn't break. He crunched over the litter of golden glass. The sound was pleasing. Dead night-skins. The sound of dead slavers.
He saw the dragon again, storming up from the sea with water showering off its back and wings and a trail of steam behind it. He grabbed Crazy Mad and pulled him down, but the dragon flew high over their heads and off to the far end of the bridge this time. A distant shock of flame rumbled through the air, that old familiar sound that made his heart skip a beat.
The bridge drew him on, but when he got there he had to stop and marvel, just for a moment, even though there was still a dragon on the other side who might just smash it to bits. It was made of gold-glass over a skeleton of iron. The sun shone through its walls, through its steeply sloping roof and the delicate ornamentation carved at its peak. Below his feet lay glass as clear as water and then the island fell away towards the sea, a sheer craggy drop so great that the waves crashing against the cliffs far below seemed like mere ripples. The air smelled of fire, of scorched skin and burned hair.
A distant boom shook the earth. Tuuran stared down.
‘Trouble with heights? And you a sail-slave?’ Crazy Mad pushed past him. Tuuran didn't move. Bodies lay strewn over the bridge. Some of them had been shot. Crossbows, by the look of it, big ones with bolts as long as his forearm. There were sword-slaves scorched by lightning too, but fire had done most of the work here. Dragon fire. He took a deep breath.
One step at a time. Just enjoy the view
.
‘I can hold your hand if you want.’ Crazy Mad laughed and pushed on.
‘Another word out of you, slave, and you can hold my axe with your skull! I'm a sail-slave. I was climbing ropes and masts when you were still hiding up your mother's skirts!’ Looking up. Looking straight ahead. Anywhere, really, as long as it wasn't down. Looking at the dragon, except the dragon had vanished again in among the towers and walls of the palace, and he saw it only in flashes and glimpses.
‘Run, you lazy slave!’ yelled Crazy Mad from the other end. ‘I thought you Adamantine Men weren't afraid of anything!’
He walked faster. Still couldn't look down. Ropes, ladders, masts, rigging, any of those, even in a howling wind and a thrashing storm, they were home. Easy. Even with the alchemist, flying on the glass disc up to the Palace of Leaves. But this? Standing on what looked like nothing at all over an abyss of stone and water . . .
Halfway across the bridge a part of the roof had been staved in, nothing left but smashed iron bones. Chunks of glass lay scattered about. Somehow that made it easier. And then more bodies. The dragon. It had burned these so hard that the gold in their armour was smeared where it had melted. At the far side Crazy Mad was on his haunches, crouched beside something. An arm poked out from between pieces of broken stone, a strip of skin as pale as a ghost. Tuuran thought it must be covered in dust but then he saw the tattoos. Sharp shapes writhing through each other across the skin. The tattoos of the grey dead men. Crazy Mad looked up at him and Tuuran had to turn away. ‘You're doing the eyes again.’