'Yes. Chay-Liangs whisper was hoa.r.s.e.

'And does your slave? No answer. Lin Feyn closed her eyes and tried to think. How was she here? As Red Lin Feyn or as the Arbiter of the Dralamut? Could she draw a line between them? 'Two of my killers are outside, Chay-Liang. How long have you known this was possible?

'A day. No more.

The killers would find out. They had to. She should tell them because that was her duty. They would take the alchemist and end him for this. Without the alchemist there could be no dragons. It was over. All of it. Might as well go outside here and now, set free the gla.s.ships that held the eyrie aloft and let everything and everyone sink into the storm-dark. Or she could say nothing and be complicit in what theyd done.

The moan of the dead man startled her out of her thoughts. Lin Feyn bared her teeth and hissed. 'Did you hear what I said, Chay-Liang? There are two killers outside this door. I should open it. It is my duty to show them what youve done.

Chay-Liang bowed. 'I know.

'And you presume my duty will defer to my curiosity in order to- 'Corpse, who told you to kill Chay-Liang and her Holiness Zafir? The alchemists voice rode over her.

'MaiChoiro Kwen, groaned the dead man.

Red Lin Feyn threw out her hands. The gold-gla.s.s shards of the Arbiter which hung over her shoulders and neck flashed into a whirlwind of knives and sliced the dead man to pieces before he could say any more. It was done in an instant and then the shards returned. Chay-Liang and the alchemist were too shocked to speak. Lin Feyn tore open the iron door; wind rushed past her and the killers appeared at once, one standing between her and the alchemist, the other behind Chay-Liang, their bladeless knives glinting in the gloom.

'Stop! Lin Feyn hurled the word like a weapon, shivering the air, dazing them all. 'Let them live! She waited a moment and then spoke more softly. 'Confine them both. Keep them apart. Let them continue their duties, but no more. She pointed to the shredded body of the dead slave. 'Take that abomination and throw it into the storm-dark! She turned and plunged through the door. Might have run, except an Arbiter never ran.

'Baros Tsen TVarr, shouted the alchemist after her. 'His body is still here!

She didnt look back, not until she was in her gondola, safe and alone. Except not alone. Another killer was there. Always. He whispered into being beside her and knelt. 'What would you have us do, lady?

Allow me to unsee what I have seen. Allow me to unhear what I have heard. But that was beyond him. 'Nothing, she said.

The dragon Silence flew across the desert. In the dead of night it felt the storm-dark and the G.o.dspike drawing close. It felt other dragons and they felt it in return, but the little ones who tended them slept.

Do not speak of me, it whispered to them. It thought of freeing its kin and burning the little ones and devouring them until all of them were gone, then pushed those thoughts aside. It had come with another purpose.

In the memories it had taken from the soldier Tuuran who thought he could kill dragons, Silence saw more of these strange wizards, these Elemental Men who had come hunting with the dragon-queen. Creatures who masqueraded as little ones but had the power of the dead G.o.ddess of the earth running through them. Not so easy to kill with tooth and claw and fire a creature who might turn into flames or air in an instant.

Elemental Men.

There had been one in the dragon-realms two of its lifetimes ago. In the Adamantine soldiers memories one had taken Tuuran to a city and shown him words from long ago and sent him to watch the echo of the Black Moon. Tuuran hadnt understood what had been asked of him or why, but perhaps somewhere here was the one who had sent him on his way. That one would have answers.

The dragon Silence found itself a place beneath the eyrie, clinging to the underside of the black rock as it floated above the storm-dark, and poked into the minds of the little ones and the creatures who called themselves Elemental Men one by one, searching their thoughts, looking for anyone who remembered the name plucked from Tuurans memory. The Watcher. Days pa.s.sed. It probed, still and unseen, listening until it found what it needed. The Watcher was dead. Crushed by the dragon that had chased it into the abyss and almost to Xibaiya. While the little ones slept it asked the other dragon where and how it had done this thing. The great dragon answered and showed its memories of the place.

Content, the dragon Silence emerged from its hiding place.

29.

Consequences Red Lin Feyn sat on her crystal throne in the splendour of her court and listened to her killers while she waited to receive Sea Lord Shonda of Vespinarr. The lord of the mountains was somewhere over the desert, answering her summons as slowly as he could possibly manage. His dawdling didnt trouble her; she would receive him as an almost-equal and say nothing of his tardiness. In return, he would be courteous and polite and charming and of course furious. He would answer her questions with a mix of lies and half-truths and politely demand that he and his kwen be allowed to go. He would tell her that great cities like Vespinarr, great trading empires like those it controlled, did not run themselves. Hed remind her that hed already lost Vey Rin, his tvarr and also his brother, to Baros Tsen TVarrs dragons, and would ask how such a great empire of ships was to govern itself if now its kwen and sea lord were imprisoned in a flying castle three miles above the desert and three hundred from the nearest thought of civilisation. Sea Lord QuaiShu, he would point out, owed him a very great deal of money. He would like this debt repaid, and Baros Tsens dragons would do nicely.

Shonda would come with all these requests, and she would refuse them, throw MaiChoiros confession in his face and wonder as she did why he even bothered to ask. Once shed trapped him, shed ask him why hed done it, because surely a man as canny and wealthy as the sea lord of Vespinarr could contrive a more subtle scheme to get what he wanted, one that didnt bring with it such risk of ruin? The question she wanted to ask Lord Shonda of Vespinarr, before she condemned him to hang before the Crown of the Sea Lords in Khalishtor, was no longer what, but why?

Whatever the killers were saying to her now, she wasnt hearing a word. She wasnt hearing a word because the alchemist had made a dead man speak. In the eyes of the killers that made him a sorcerer, and sorcerers were put to death. As the Arbiter of the Dralamut, all of that had nothing to do with who had burned Dhar Thosis and so wasnt her concern. As Red Lin Feyn, navigator and dutiful citizen of TakeiTarr, it bothered her considerably, and not in ways the killers would have been pleased to know. A part of what bothered her, and would bother the killers most of all, was that she hadnt told them.

With an abrupt wave of her hand she silenced them, and then, with another, she sent them away. All of them, winkling them out. When she was sure she was alone, she went up the stairs to her bed and the chest beside it and took out the gla.s.s globe that held a snip of the storm-dark. It wasnt much more than a novices training toy. She held it in her hand.

Beneath the layers and masks of her rank, Lin Feyn remained the daughter of daughters of Feyn Charin, the first navigator. His blood was in her and what had he been if not a sorcerer? Oh, the world had dressed it up and called him something else because of the one great trick hed shared, the crossing of the storm-dark, but he was more than that. Hed been apprenticed to the Crimson Sunburst of Cashax, whod gone to war against the Elemental Men and almost won. Some said hed been more than an apprentice. Lin Feyn hadnt ever found any reason for such a belief but she secretly favoured it because it made her blood the blood of the Crimson Sunburst herself and was a poke in the eye for the killers, who claimed to serve her but in reality served only themselves. And the truth, though few knew it, was that the Sunburst had never sought to confront them.

Shed been the first enchantress, and her court had grown to be filled with magical creatures and devices, animated wonders of gla.s.s, automata and the first golems. The library of the Dralamut, in its forbidden rooms where the killers couldnt enter, contained journals in which the Crimson Sunburst spoke of old books, of reading the anathema of the Rava, of the old white-faced silver-skinned half-G.o.ds who existed before the world broke into splinters. The journals were full of awe and wonder, gleeful childish fascination with the miracles she found she could perform, yet Red Lin Feyn had found no ambition for domination or such worldly hungers, only a relentless curiosity and the Sunbursts constant air of surprise that her spells did more than make a sour taste or a bad smell. In the end her unfettered curiosity had brought the killers down on her, yet Red Lin Feyn had never found anything to suggest that the Crimson Sunburst had wanted more than she already had. The Sunburst had been queen of Cashax before her twentieth birthday, back when Cashax had been the greatest city in TakeiTarr. Shed wrought her sorceries simply because they were there. To see if she could.

The alchemist, when Lin Feyn watched him at his work, reminded her of the woman from those journals meticulous, curious, fiercely clever, someone who did what he did without any hunger for power or prestige. Which brought Lin Feyn right back to the thing she was trying very hard not to think about, the question that circled her with the predatory malevolence of a shark: What do I do with you? He was probably a kind man. Lin Feyn, whose life had been built on knowing such things, saw no reason to think otherwise. Yet he did things that others could use, others who were not so kind, and for that the Elemental Men would kill him. After what shed seen shed told the killers to lock him up but hadnt yet told them why, and now found she didnt want to, even though she should. She wondered how much theyd seen, how much they already understood for themselves.

She sat alone on her crystal throne in all her splendour and considered these things deep into the night, then rose and undressed and slipped between the silks to sleep and considered them some more.

She was still musing on them when the dragon yard burst into flames.

Zafir woke filled with a sense of warning, a sharp and dire immediate threat. She barely had time to throw back her silk sheets before the poles that held up her shelter out on the eyrie wall snapped like twigs. Gold-gla.s.s shattered into splinters, crashed down on top of her and crushed her almost flat. The sail-cloth canopy smothered her and the bulk of something vast almost crushed her, almost but not quite. Through the silks tangled around her face she thought she saw the night outside light up with flames.

The hatchling.

The Elemental Men had said they would see to it themselves. Shed laughed and said shed hunt it when she pleased, but she hadnt. Now a surge of anger shot through her. Shed hidden herself from its searching on the night it had come to kill her and now here it was, back for another go.

She could feel it already flying off. Diamond Eye was rising, the wings hed wrapped around her shelter like a coc.o.o.n folding back. She sensed his hunger, tense and sharp and ready for the hunt, exactly as she wanted him. She threw off the silken sheets and the debris of the smashed shelter and ran up the wall. Across the dragon yard everything that would burn was in flames. The hatchling was already far out of sight. Diamond Eye turned his head to look at her as if asking something, and she knew exactly what. She nodded.

'Yes, my deathbringer. No matter what they say. And by the time the first Elemental Men vanished into the darkness in pursuit, she was already in her armour and on the dragons back.

Red Lin Feyn barely had time to make herself decent before the killers appeared around her. 'Lady, it is the hatchling. We require your leave to pursue.

Lin Feyn took a moment to compose herself. Require it, do you? And she might have taken them to task for that but then another thought struck her. She nodded her a.s.sent. 'All of you. Go. Finish it.

They bowed, eager to follow their nature. 'Stay here, lady, with wards on the door. We will not be gone for long.

Telling her what to do again. They were losing their perspective. Fear was making them careless, opening cracks and letting their true natures show. Lin Feyn nodded and said nothing, watched them leave and shut the gondola window behind them. She closed her eyes and waited another few minutes, stretching out every sense for the whisper of wind that might tell her that one had disobeyed and stayed to watch over her. When she was certain she was truly alone, she opened the gondola and hurried into the night. Flickering fires from the hatchery and the remains of the Vespinese scaffold shot a dark orange glow over the dragon yard stone, pulsing in the ever-present wind whose fingers gripped her and shook her and almost picked her up and blew her away. She held her robe tight not the dress of the Arbiter that shed become but the simple robes of the enchantress shed been before they took her to the Dralamut to learn the secrets of the storm-dark. The adult dragon was gone from its perch on the wall. Beneath, the hatchlings in their chains stared at her and at the eastern sky, shrieking their agitation. She ignored them and slipped down the tunnels to the alchemists room. A bleary-eyed kwen came stumbling the other way, dressed in bits of armour.

'Go back to bed, she told him sharply. 'It is a matter for dragons and killers. The Elemental Men have it in hand.

He blinked a few times and frowned, then shook his head and ran on, and it was only after hed gone that she realised he didnt recognise her without her painted face and gold-gla.s.s shards and wreathed in flames of feathers. She smiled then, surprised by an unexpected sense of freedom.

The smell of cloves. .h.i.t her as soon as she opened the door to the alchemists study. She closed it behind her and listened again for any whispers in the air, felt for flickers of breeze and found nothing. The killers were about their business, hunting monsters. The room was empty. She searched and let her nose guide her to the alchemists potion for waking the dead, took it and left and ran barefoot through the deeper pa.s.sages of the eyrie, spiralling ever down to what had once been Baros Tsen TVarrs bathhouse, the smell of cloves trailing after her. Tsens bathhouse had become a morgue now. Dead slaves were simply thrown over the side or fed to the dragon and a good few of the men whod died before shed come had gone that way too, but the rest of the Taiytakei dead waited here, to be burned one day with all due funerary dignity or else hung by the ankles from the spires of Khalishtor for the world to see. One word from her either way was all it took. Tsens corpse was among them. One of the ones whod hang by his ankles.

The iron door was cold to the touch. It opened for her and a wash of chill air rushed out, enough to turn to mist as it reached in tentacles into the corridor. Chay-Liangs enchantments had been strong enough to glaze the water in Tsens bath with ice. The doors that led to the other spirals of the eyrie were closed. She listened again, felt for any movement in the misty air, then closed the door behind her and hurried into the pa.s.sages where the Scales lived, where the alchemist and the enchantress were now shut in their prisons. When she reached the guards who stood watch over them, she beckoned them away and had them follow her to the bathhouse morgue, hurrying them inside. They didnt recognise her either but they were mere soldiers and her voice still carried all the force of an Arbiters command.

'Bring out the body of Baros Tsen TVarr, she told them, then left them to find it and ran to the alchemists cell. She went inside and shook him awake.

'I will bring you Baros Tsen TVarr, she told him. 'You will make him talk. Then we will know.

Zafir didnt see the Elemental Men vanish into the night but Diamond Eye felt their thoughts rush away into the wind, full of hunting and sharp blades and the tang of death. The dragon felt them and so Zafir felt them too.

This time you dont stop, she told him. This time you fly on no matter what they do. Whatever they think, they will shy from it at the very last. They dare not kill me. My death will be my own. In flames, and many will burn with me.

The dragon launched himself into the void. Zafir felt his purring approval and in him an awareness of her and of the world that was greater than anything shed known back among the dragons of her home. He powered after the hatchling, eager and hungry, fast and strong. The air was different here, filled with a tense incipient energy, a lightning-crackle of expectation and potency. She felt the distance diminish. The chase might take hours but she would succeed this time. No escape, little dragon, no trick.

But it was a trick, of course it was. A lure. It slipped out of the hatchlings mind, unwatched. Slipped from hatchling to dragon and from Diamond Eye to her. Hed come here to tease her out. He wanted this chase. She caught the flash of a half-seen place where he wanted her to be.

Careless.

Show them the way, she cried, and Diamond Eye lit up the sky with fire, and from every compa.s.s point the Elemental Men saw and stopped their blind searching rush and came.

So this is how it is to be prey. The dragon Silence raced through the night. The feeling was strange, to be tearing away from something, and stranger still from something that couldnt be outrun. The earth-touched Elemental Men had given chase this time. It felt their thoughts. They were like little ones in their form and their nature but not in their essence in that they carried something else, a tiny echo of the dead G.o.ddess just as the alchemist carried a lingering memory of what had once been a half-G.o.d. The dragon told itself to remember these things, that they mattered, but for now the rush of the chase was irresistible. The alchemist knew exactly what he was, but the earth-touched were ignorant. The dragon didnt understand how that could be. It would ask one, when the chance came, but for now they raced like the wind towards it, the endless chattering of their thoughts like tiny beacons in the sky. Silence felt their searching. They couldnt see it, not in the darkness, and so the little dragon skimmed the rim of the storm-dark and dived beneath it and flew a different way and zigged and zagged between their dispersing thoughts. It learned something it had missed as it listened to their minds. They were afraid. Dragons made them weak. Dragons devoured their powers as dragons devoured everything. They were quick though, quick as the wind and faster than a dragon could dream. Quick but blind, so none of them would catch it.

It reached its mind to the one thing that would never let it escape.

The others are scattered, brother. Lead the little one. Bring her to me.

It was a trick. Of course it was a trick. It had played this hunt in its mind days ago. It knew how it ended. Prey hoped to escape. Silence did not.

Zafir felt the change in Diamond Eyes thoughts. An Elemental Man had found the hatchling. Diamond Eye strained to be faster, filled with a furious hunger. This kill was his. The dragon watched and listened as the hatchling felt the killer come close and pried at his thoughts and peered into his intent, and at the moment the Elemental Man changed to flesh to strike with the bladeless knife that would cut through even a dragons scales, the hatchling Silence veered and arced and dipped a wing and lashed its tail. The bladeless knife cut only air. The killer shifted once more but it was hard so close to a dragon, no longer as easy as breathing. Silences tail whipped flesh and cracked bones and the Elemental Man fell like a broken doll and dissolved into darkness. The hatchling rode his thoughts. The killer was crippled but he didnt die, not this time. He was lucky, then.

Diamond Eye watched. Through him, Zafir saw it all. That was how they fought. Yes, dragons read the desires of their riders, but like this . . .? Shed never imagined. The knowledge chilled her and thrilled her. That was how Diamond Eye kept her safe. Always.

She urged him on. The Elemental Men were faster, howling in tiny hurricanes of wind, dancing from light to shadow. They raced around her and past with their knives, searching and finding. Diamond Eye felt each duel as it happened and so Zafir felt it too, the sharp glee of a victory, the pain of another cut, the jubilation of another earth-touched smashed out of the sky. It mingled with her own Yes, let them fight and she cheered the little dragon on even after all it had done to her, because every killer whose bones were smashed and whose flesh was burned was one more enemy sent to Xibaiya. It had learned after the first and struck harder now, killing them. Yes, little dragon. Fight them! End them for me!

The hatchling shot back a vicious glee. Not for you but for me, little one. Come close enough and you will follow.

The sky began to lighten. The hatchling was hurt, stabbed a dozen times by the knives of the Elemental Men, but it had broken and burned five of them and now the others held back, lurking in the wind, watching. A hatchling. A hatchling had beaten them. In time she would show them what a real dragon could do.

Silence raced on, hard and straight into the teeth and fiery glare of the rising sun. Sometimes, in the distance, Zafir thought she saw him as they flew, and then at last the hatchling came to the earth and stopped atop a mesa, waiting for her, and Zafir realised she knew this place, that shed been here before. Caution narrowed her eyes. She circled Diamond Eye once around the cliffs to be certain, then again, lower until she could see the hatchling waiting for her. And it was waiting.

Why here, little dragon?

Diamond Eye landed gently and the two dragons sat and watched one another, a dozen yards apart. This was where shed stopped for the night on the way to Dhar Thosis. This was where the Watcher, Baros Tsen TVarrs Elemental Man, had tried to kill her. Now the hatchling squatted where Diamond Eye had squashed the Watcher flat. Not close to where hed died, not nearby, but on the exact spot. The dark stains of the Watchers blood on the pale stone left no doubt.

Why here? she asked again, but the hatchling didnt answer. It seemed impatient. Keen to be done with this.

To show you something. In Xibaiya among the wandering dead, the rip is opened again. Diamond Eye will understand. Embedded in that thought came a sliver of memory, of moving among the ruins of what the dragons called Xibaiya to the edges of a hole and oozing out from that hole a spread of void and chaos. It crept hither and yon, devouring what it touched, and the prison that had once held it back was no longer there. Zafir frowned fiercely. The memory made no sense. How long will it take? mused the hatchling.

It was a trick. A trap. It had drawn her here but she couldnt resist. Not that it mattered. Diamond Eye took a pace forward and then another, and the hatchling still didnt move. Zafir c.o.c.ked her head. 'Why, little dragon?

Diamond Eye lunged. His jaws snapped shut. He crushed Silence between his fangs and spat the hatchlings head over the mesas edge. The decapitated body fell limp and Zafir felt a strangeness in Diamond Eyes thoughts as the dragon stared at what it had done. Dragons killing dragons wasnt a thing it knew. You did well, she told him, though shed understood long ago that dragons had no use for such praise. His disquiet echoed inside her. A trick. A trap. Shed known it, knew it still, yet didnt see how it might now be closing around her.

An Elemental Man appeared on the mesa and walked cautiously to the hatchlings body. Earth-touched. The hatchling, in its thoughts, had called them that.

'Is it dead? he asked.

'It has no head! Her voice tripped in her throat. Something wasnt right. It had led her here, brought her to this place, all this way and then . . . ? No fight, no struggle, no resistance. Why? Why here?

'Return at once. Bring the body so the alchemist may say whether your words are true.

It struck her at last as she flew back with the headless corpse of Silence clutched between Diamond Eyes claws. The hatchling was dead and so there was no longer any need for a dragon to hunt it. No longer any need for her. She had nothing left to keep her safe. It had given her its death and sealed her own.

A trap. She looked for the elation of victory she ought to feel and found nothing but emptiness and a longing for the home shed never had.

In the gloom of the alchemists laboratory in the hour before dawn Red Lin Feyn watched as the cold dead lips of Baros Tsen TVarr began to move.

'Why did Dhar Thosis burn? she asked. 'For what reason?

'I do not know.

'Why did MaiChoiro give the orders he did?

'I do not know.

'Did you force him? Was this the design of Sea Lord QuaiShu? Was this all to free yourselves of your crippling debt? Too fast, too much. She was getting ahead of herself. Perhaps, faced with a dead man who spoke, even an Arbiter might fray a little at the edges.

'I do not know.

'How can you not know? What were your orders to the rider-slave?

'I gave no orders.

'How so? Were you not there? Were you deaf? Lin Feyn rounded on the alchemist. 'What trick is this? You play with me? Your life hangs by a thread, slave! Do you think this saves you? But when the alchemist shook his head, she saw his own bewilderment and found she could not doubt it.

'The dead do not lie, Lady Arbiter, he said. 'They do not.

'Whats your name? asked Chay-Liang, the first of them to see the truth. The simplest question that surely should have been Lin Feyns beginning had she had her wits properly about her. Lin Feyn didnt quite catch the reply the corpse gave but she heard it well enough to know that it was wrong.

'Say it again! she demanded. 'What is your name?

'Darris Veskai Kwen, said the corpse.

Red Lin Feyn glazed at the naked flesh. A face shed seen only once and years before, but it was him, she was sure. His skin. His face. Baros Tsen TVarr.

The enchantress asked who he was, where he came from, how he came to the eyrie, question after question in a voice of rising horror and confusion. The alchemist simply gaped. The corpse related that he was a slave from across the storm-dark whod earned his sword brands. Hed been born in the Dominion of the Sun King. How was it that he had the dark skin of a Taiytakei and the face of the eyries tvarr? He didnt know, but he knew that he wasnt Baros Tsen.

'Why is he lying? screamed Chay-Liang. She shook the al-chemist. 'Why doesnt he know who he is?

'It is the wrong spirit. The alchemist looked lost. 'The wrong soul. I do not understand how. Theres no precedent- 'What is the last thing you saw? Lin Feyn asked.

He told her: standing watch in his tower when the Vespinese came, staying at his post, waiting to see how the fight would go, then Baros Tsen TVarr on the wall with his slave Kalaiya, both of them dressed in black silk. Kalaiyas face changing, becoming something with no face at all. The kwen opening his mouth to cry an alarm but making no sound. His hand in hers on the end of an arm impossibly long. His skin rippling and changing. The dreadful horror of trying to breathe, of gasping to draw air through a mouth and nose he no longer had. Then shrinking and dissolving to the ground. Baros Tsen TVarr lying beside him, heaving for breath. The world going grey and then black. The corpse spoke it all in a dispa.s.sionate monotone, oblivious to the horror of its own demise and yet aware, in a cold way, of how it had felt.

'Its not him? said the alchemist, the last of them to understand. 'Its not Baros Tsen? He stared at the dead mans face. 'But it is. How . . . ?

'Wait! Wait! Lin Feyn tore at her hair, trying to see what this meant. 'This isnt him? Youre certain?

'Either this corpse is a liar or Tsens not dead at all, said Chay-Liang. 'Why else go to such trouble? She chuckled, an edge of hysteria creeping through. 'Clever tvarr. Clever, clever tvarr. Although its not possible . . .

'Corpses dont lie, mumbled the alchemist. He was shaking his head, utterly bemused. Lin Feyn went to grab the corpse and shake it for answers, then thought better of it.