Wind in her face, tugging at her hair. Wind in her face, tugging at her hair. ‘I understood the tunnels under the cathedral reach as far as the deep cellars of the gatehouse and elsewhere around the palace. I've heard they might even stretch to the City of Dragons itself. Yet it seems to me we've travelled in the wrong direction for that, and too far to be within the bounds of my palace. Vioros spoke of caves beneath the Spur. I think one of you must tell me a little more now we have gone so far.’ She had to work to keep the tension out of her voice. They'd chosen a bad day to bring her to a place like this.
‘Are those the only stories you've heard, Holiness?’ asked Jeiros. ‘I've heard far more. Stories that these tunnels reach the Fury, that they cross the realms as far as the Pinnacles and Bloodsalt and Bazim Crag. They don't, but they go quite a way. This path will bring us to caves that lie beneath the Spur, as you have said. Behind the Diamond Cascade.’
‘That's a very long way to walk under the ground, alchemist, when a horse might have carried us instead. I am displeased, Jeiros.’ Stop being scared! Stupid woman! It was done and finished long ago. They're gone, all of them. Dead. You killed him, remember? The darkness has no hold on you now! But the darkness only laughed at her. All the gleeful joy of before, they'd leeched that from her, bringing her down here. Alchemists liked their caves and their small dark places. But not her. She gritted her teeth. Hated it, but they wouldn't see it, none of them, not a flicker of it.
‘A horse could not have carried us where we are going, Holiness.’
Down into the bowels of the earth: hours of the same rough-walled tunnel that ran straight to the heart of the mountains. At least the alchemists carried plenty of lamps. Zafir closed her eyes and summoned the wind to her face. Space. Space around her, below her and above her. And light. And no one for miles, no presence lurking right beside her. Caves were for alchemists, not for dragon-riders. Not for her. The panic gnawed at her but she'd lived for years with this foolish fear of the dark and had learned the tricks to hold it at bay. And he's gone! Get over it!
‘There was a river here once,’ Jeiros told her. The alchemists were breathing heavily by now, both of them out of breath from so much walking. ‘Its course was changed to create this passage.’
She had no idea how far they went but she was aching by the time the alchemists stopped, gasping, at yet another great door. As Jeiros struggled to open it, the wood two inches thick and bound in iron, pulling at it with all his strength, she saw a slash of blood across his palm.
‘You're bleeding, Master Alchemist.’ As much as anything she wondered how he'd cut himself down here. She was a dragon-queen and the speaker now and knives were always a danger, and she'd spurned her two guardsmen from the Glass Cathedral. .
Jeiros flashed with anger. ‘The doors are bound closed, Holiness,’ he said. ‘Only an alchemist may open them.’
‘Oh really? Not a speaker?’ Blood-magic? Sealed doors? And there was the damned fear again, reaching out of its pit to grab her. She slammed the lid on it and stamped it back. Dark places. Never again!
‘No, Holiness. Although a speaker can, of course, command that they be opened.’
‘How very interesting. How many more such doors do you have?’
Jeiros didn't answer, and she might have pressed him on it but the sight beyond the door changed her mind. Such questions could wait. Ahead a great cave swallowed the light, black as pitch but for a single lamp by the entrance. Zafir had no idea exactly how large the space was but it must have been immense; she could feel that much simply in the taste of the air. Enormous. A Flame-blessed relief from the claustrophobia of the tunnel.
‘Keep the door directly to your back, Holiness,’ said Jeiros, ‘should you ever need to come this way. There's always a light left here.’ Which threw up the thought of being stranded in a dark place that was huge instead of small and somehow that was worse.
She snapped back at him, ‘How am I to come this way if I cannot open the door, Master Jeiros?’ Shame about Bellepheros. His facade of fawning diplomacy had been exactly that but at least he tried.
They crossed the cave, flat and smooth and covered in sand. At one point Vioros stooped and put down his lantern. Zafir wondered why until she looked back and was shocked to see that the lamp by the door was a tiny speck, barely visible. How large was this cavern?
As they walked on, a whisper of rushing water touched the stillness and grew steadily louder until, when they stopped at a scaffold set in the sand, the whisper had risen to a roar and Vioros had to shout over the noise of it. ‘There used to be a lake here, Holiness. There are others. The Silver River flows through these caves under the Spur.’ Behind her, the lantern Vioros had left was a dim speck, a single lonely spark in the dark and she still couldn't see any sign of the cave walls. They had to be close, didn't they? The rush of the waterfall, somewhere nearby in the dark, was enough to shake the ground, but in the feeble light of the alchemical lamps she couldn't see it. The air tasted moist. She took a step forward alone and then stopped herself. Why had they brought her here? To test her? To pick on her weakness and see if she'd break? Well, she wouldn't.
A wooden platform descended slowly through the middle of the scaffold, lowered by ropes. When it reached the ground Jeiros climbed onto it. He offered his hand. Zafir disdained it. Another little strike against him. Would he have offered it if she'd been Hyram or Jehal? No. If it turned out one day that Jehal haddisposed of Bellepheros then she was going to be angry with him, she decided, for leaving her with this stuffed shirt.
The platform rose. Pulleys and ropes, she supposed, not that she knew much about such things. It took a very long time and was very dull and very dark and the waterfall stayed very loud, but the wind of it and the stray specks of water on her face helped keep the dark in its pit inside her head. By the time she felt stone close in around her again, the lanterns that marked out their path were too dim to see. When they reached the top and she peered over the edge, the base of the scaffold was so far away that she couldn't tell if they'd risen a hundred paces or a thousand.
The rush of water was as close as before. ‘We are at the back of the caves behind the Diamond Cascade,’ Vioros told her. ‘The Zar Oratorium isn't far from here. There is another door-’
‘But we are going another way,’ said Jeiros curtly. He walked quickly now, leading the way through more tunnels, smooth things once bored by water, then down a rough-hewn passage to a small bronze door. Three heavy bolts held it shut. Jeiros pulled them back one by one. He beckoned her forward and stood aside as she opened it. Warm stale air washed over her, full of the smell of dragon, familiar and comfortable. The tension she'd carried all the way from the palace eased a little.
Why bring her to a dragon? What could there possibly be here that she didn't already know? Her heart jumped with anticipation. A gift for the new speaker? Surely not. But now she'd thought of it, she wanted it, and anything else would be a disappointment.
As well as the smell, a little dim light spilled out from behind the door but she couldn't see much more. When she stepped forward, she realised why. The door opened on to a balcony fifty feet up a sheer wall and the lights were all down below on the ground, alchemical lamps, hundreds of them. There were people moving down there too. She saw them, glimpses of shadows flitting here and there, three or four or maybe half a dozen. But what held her eye was the dragon in the middle of them, bound in chains. It was looking straight at her.