I am the dragon.
A wall of fire burst inside her. It burned her sweat to steam and scorched her skin to ash. She was high, high as the stars and falling into the hurricane, wings tucked back, shattering the sky and the fire filled her, tooth and claw and tail, with a strength to smash the world itself to pieces.
I am the dragon.
The feeling faded as it always did. She remembered where she was again. She felt the kwen stabbing away inside her, listened to his grunts and quietly remembered another time and place and said nothing. When he was done and drawing away from her, she rolled onto her back. Her eyes glittered. Her lips curled for him, a smileful of hate. Still in his armour except for one shrivelling piece. Men. Wherever they are they make their armour the same so that can be the first part of them to come out of it. What does that say about what you are?
‘I remember you,’ she breathed. ‘So full of what you are and so empty of any meaning.’
The kwen shouted at his soldiers and stormed away, and whatever he said was so harsh and sharp that she couldn't understand; and it was only when the soldiers came down on her, one after the other, that she knew. She fought these ones — couldn't not — but they'd left their knives outside and there were six of them and only one of her. She remembered the faces, though, of the ones who took her with gleeful lust, the ones who twisted their lips in disgust, and the one whose eyes showed pity. The one who didn't touch her at all would be the one who would live. The rest had sealed their fates right there. Each one would die, and she wouldn't even have to lift a finger.
They left her on the floor when they were done. Myst and Onyx stared, untouched. The dragon inside looked down as if to ask why and what she meant by this. She met its eye. No regret or sorrow. I sought this out. The pain will go and the vengeance, when it comes, will be a long and lingering joy and I will feel not one iota of remorse. No one can touch either of us. Not while we can fly.
She struggled to her feet. Painfully. All three of them were still alive. That was something. Better than she'd feared. For a time they huddled together, and for a little while Zafir wasn't the dragon-queen any more, she was just Zafir, and the locked dark room was a thing that hadn't happened yet. She whispered softly in the ears of her broken birds, ‘They came because I made them come.’
‘Mistress?’
‘And I was afraid for you. I was afraid of what they'd do to you. And I should have sent you away, but I couldn't bear to be alone.’
Later, when Myst and Onyx had bathed her and clothed her and oiled her bruises, she went back to Bellepheros. She couldn't quite hide the awkwardness of her gait. She waved the gourd around her neck.
‘More.’
‘You don't need more, Holiness. It will not help.’
‘All of it. I want all that you have. Every single last drop.’
He frowned and looked her up and down and then frowned some more. ‘Has there been a change, Holiness? Are you hurt?’
Zafir smiled, sour and tired. ‘I have ridden long and hard today and it has been a while. I am stiff and sore from the saddle, Master Alchemist, nothing more. Why? Do I concern you?’
‘My duty is to keep these dragons dull, Holiness. You will understand that, I know, for you were speaker once. But beyond that my duty and my love are yours.’ He began to gather the potion. Zafir watched where he went. One bottle from his desk, two from a chest beside his bed. ‘I do need them, Holiness. The Scales will die far more quickly without the potion.’
‘Then they will die but you may give them something to think they are still loved. Is that all you have? Give them to me. All of it.’
He did, and he looked infinitely sad as she tipped them out onto the floor, one by one. When she was done, he held up another bottle. ‘And I, Holiness? May I keep the Hatchling Disease at bay?’
She smiled at him. He was an old alchemist and so of course he carried it. ‘Yes. But keep it safe and keep it close.’ She tapped the gourd around her neck. ‘There will be others, you see. Taiytakei. And when they come to you with the Hatchling Disease, the potions you give them will do nothing at all; and when that comes to pass they will take whatever you have, for that is what desperate men do. Be ready for that day, Master Alchemist. I'm sure you'll make more. I won't forbid it, but hide it well.’ She turned to go and then turned back. ‘I almost forgot. I require another gift from you. A small thing, one that's so far beneath you I hesitate to ask but I must. Dawn Torpor.’
Dawn Torpor so I will not grow fat from you or your men, Shrin Chrias Kwen. She watched the alchemist's face, watched his eyes go wide and his mouth hang open, his face blanch.
‘Holiness! What-’
She cut him off with a fierce clenched fist. ‘They took what they wanted, Master Alchemist, as they took us from our homes and made us slaves. They did not ask, they were not kind, they are not dragons and you owe them nothing. When the Hatchling Disease begins to take them, they will come to you. You will do nothing to help them. They will all slowly die in lingering fear and agony and I will watch and spit in their faces. Do you understand, Grand Master Alchemist?’
When she left, she was on Diamond Eye again, tearing the air, clouds of sand billowing in their wake as they burned the desert to glass. She was almost singing.
56
The Watcher appeared on the Divine Bridge a thousand feet above the sea. To his left, rising still higher, stood the Dul Matha, the Kraitu's Bones, which rose half as high again from the sea below in rings of walls and steps with the gatehouses that guarded the Palace of Roses at its peak, the home and dwelling of the ninth sea lord Senxian. It had been a shrine once, in the very distant past before the enchanters had made the first glasships. Pilgrims had come thousands of miles from every city, from every fledging realm, to bring their offerings of hope to the Goddess of Fickle Fortune.
Dhar Thosis. The City of Golems, they called it, although there were hardly any here and the name belonged better to Xican with its Stoneguard.
The Watcher looked past Dul Matha to the larger but much lower island a little way beyond it, Vul Tara, known as the Pilgrims’ Island because visitors to the shrine always came that way if they arrived by ship. It was a fortress now, armed with bolt throwers and black-powder and lightning cannon, but the shelters remained, the refuges and the hostels. Unclean godliness remained scattered across Vul Tara, despite its weapons. He couldn't see the seaward side from the top of the Divine Bridge, but that was where sheer-walled monasteries rested on the tops of low black cliffs, and on the lower parts of the island poor pilgrims still came to pray to the relics from the shrine that Ten Tazei once built on the top of the Kraitu's Bones.
The pilgrims’ ships would have anchored where ships still anchored now, in the sheltered open water between the shore, Dul Matha, Vul Tara, and the third and largest island, the Eye of the Sea Goddess where the sea titans slept and where Senxian's administrators and sea captains now lived, each in their own palace with their own kwens and t'varrs and hsians, servants and soldiers and slaves. A whole island of palaces now, each striving to surpass its neighbours, but it had not been so back in the time of the shrine. They called the island the Eye of the Sea Goddess but they should have made it her nose because that was the shape of it from far away, rising gently from the sea beside the shore, curving up ever sharper to a rounded summit that fell away to a sudden sheer nothing from a thousand feet in the air. Sprawling stone villas loosely jostled one another down by the sea, while at the top rose a forest of gold-glass towers, packed together like slaves in a gondola. The towers were the richer palaces. Few could afford a home built by enchanters.