‘Oh. . crap!’ He dropped. He pressed himself against a wall and curled up into a ball again, hauling Crazy Mad down while the world exploded around them.
71
She always rested well sleeping beside a dragon. Sleeping alone was the worst. She never quite relaxed. Alone you never quite knew who would come, silent and creeping into your room, and slide into your bed and clamp their hands all over you. Alone she slept with one eye open. To not be alone was one of the reasons she used to take as many lovers as she did. It was why Myst and Onyx stayed beside her in the eyrie, so she could sleep without her ears picking constantly at the silence. Lovers wanted things too though, and even when she gave herself willingly, in the end they all betrayed her. Dragons were different. Dragons had a purity to them. A singleness of intent and no pretence of being anything other than what they were. Kept dull, they were a part of her own will. Diamond Eye's unsleeping eyes watched over her, and so she slept well.
She woke before dawn. The desert air was cold now, the stars bright pinpricks in their thousands in the clear sky. She watched them for a while, searching for anything familiar. Some of the constellations she'd learned as a child were there but all in odd places, clustered around the horizon if they shone at all. Many had simply vanished in this strange alien world.
‘Where are we, old friend?’ Diamond Eye was calmer in the nights than he was in the day. Stupid really, to talk to a dragon. She had no illusions about what he was: a monster who'd eat her without a thought if ever the alchemists and their potions lost their grip on him. But then that was how a dragon-queen should meet her end, eaten by her own mount. That was her way, far better that than being a slave. ‘I could let you go,’ she said. ‘I could send you to fly away, on and on until you find the sea and then sink down beneath the waves where they'll never find you, and stay there still and quiet until you wake up and rise again and wreak vengeance for us both. Shall I?’
She put the Taiytakei armour on one piece at a time as she whispered to him, enjoying again each little miracle. If the Taiytakei had offered her marvels such as this back when she'd been speaker, this and not their tawdry farscopes which merely gave her headaches, perhaps she might have bargained with them from her Adamantine throne and freely given them the dragons they desired. But they hadn't. They'd taken what they wanted and now they'd suffer for it.
‘I am what I am.’ She climbed onto Diamond Eye's back, buckled herself into the harness and looked down one last time at the stain that had been the Elemental Man. The Watcher was right about that. Right about her in so many ways. ‘I am what I am, for aren't we all?’ And as she leaned forward, Diamond Eye turned and cocked his head and bared his teeth, and if she hadn't known better, she'd have sworn he was smiling. Her eyes sparkled. ‘Now they burn, my deathbringer. As many as we can before they bring us down so they will never ever do this again.’ And then when that didn't seem to be enough, she threw back her head and screamed at the dark and empty sky, ‘I am Zafir! Do you hear? I am a dragon-queen!’ And Diamond Eye took to the sky and roared up high into the air and surged on towards the sea and whatever awaited them.
They reached it as the sun began to rise. She felt the changes in the air, the moisture and the warmth; then lower she tasted the salt, and there was the sea and then, in the distance, flashes of light far off to one side, miles away but she knew what they were. Lightning. So she turned toward them and surged on, and as the dawn light split the desert from the sky, there it was, the city of Dhar Thosis as the kwen from the mountains had described it, three islands and its curving shore and two of the three islands rising like mountains from the waves. Sun-bright lightning lit up the morning twilight in flashes, flickering around the furthest of the three. The pitch-dark sea burned with a thousand fires and the sky above it filled with fizzing orange streaks. Rockets.
She urged Diamond Eye on. They would take this city from the desert and from the sky. No one would see them. Not until it was too late.
Thunder rumbled, a distant shake of the air. Another flash came, from over the city this time. Closer. Diamond Eye banked and rolled, and she saw the glasships floating over the city, a cluster of little brightnesses drifting across the sky beneath her towards the sea and the broken and burning ships that littered the shore. The glasship rims lit up one by one, light pulsing around them, brighter and brighter until each one let loose with a brilliant flash and a clap of thunder and ship after ship exploded into pieces.
Those, my dragon. Start with those. Diamond Eye heard her and tucked in his wings and dived towards them, and as he did she heard him sing, as dragons sometimes did, murmuring to themselves at the joy of being unleashed for war. The song curled around and writhed inside her and she embraced it and took it to be her own, and they were gone, both of them, lost to the hunger and the rage. With her dragon she fell upon the glasships, belching fire, though both of them knew that fire would be no use against these monsters made by men, these creatures of glass and gold — and so it came to tooth and claw and the lash of the tail. And if the enemy saw them coming then there was nothing they could do but hang helplessly in the sky and hurl their lightning.
Diamond Eye hammered into the first and slashed and bit at the glass and the gold discs at the heart of the ship, shattering and bending and ripping until the glasship began to fall; but the dragon spread his wings and held it in his talons, strained to lift it higher and then hurled the ship towards another. The two smashed together and exploded into shards while Diamond Eye stormed at the rest, slashing at them with his tail, swooping and soaring as their gold rims glowed with white-hot light and the air prickled and scratched; and as the hail of lightning began, Zafir saw something bright and burning fall. It vanished into the gloom of the streets below and the city beneath bloomed into a sweeping lake of fire. Her heart sang. Joy. Not hers, but Diamond Eye's.
72
Tuuran didn't see where the fire bomb landed. Couldn't have been far away. Two streets, maybe. The very air shook. He felt the wall beside him quiver and begin to tip.
‘Run!’ He pulled at Crazy Mad but Crazy had felt it too and was already up and moving. Ahead the street suddenly filled with flames, a burning cloud blooming fast towards them. The buildings were all coming down. Stone smashed into the road. Tuuran cringed and turned his back as the fire washed over them, wishing for the dragon-scale he'd had long ago. Crazy Mad did the same, tucking his head between his arms and his hands under his armpits. The fireball flashed by, a short sudden scorch and then gone.
‘Weak!’ Tuuran yanked Crazy Mad away. ‘At the end of its reach. Lucky for us.’ The air shook from another thunderbolt and then another, each one rattling the litter of rubble and stone around them. He didn't see where they struck. ‘We need cover! We need shields!’ More booms of lightning overhead, a whole string of them, and with each one the savaged streets shook. Yet more stone juddered loose from already broken walls and fell around them. As he and Crazy Mad ran, Tuuran turned to look up. ‘Holy Flame!’