She leaned towards him, watching him, looking for something and not finding it. ‘You don't desire me at all, do you?’ She sounded amused. Surprised. And beneath that the ghost of something else. Relief, was it?
‘Not at all.’ He waved her away and she took her dismissal far better than Chrias had done. ‘You can come out now,’ he said when she was gone. Beside the spot where the dragon slave had stood, the air swirled and grew solid and turned into the shape of the Watcher. ‘And what do you think, LaLa?’
The Watcher bowed. ‘She will not bend to you, Hands of the Sea Lord. The Heart has the right of it.’
‘Hang her?’
‘Quietly and quickly. Get it over and done.’
Baros Tsen shook his head. ‘No. Get the slaves who were attending her. I'll speak to them. And make sure no one hurts her. If she's no use then Chrias Kwen can have his way but I'll be sure of that before I let him play.’
‘Use?’
‘LaLa? Really! Think!’ Tsen beamed at the killer. ‘If she truly is who she says, you cannot deny she must know a thing or two about dragons.’
‘Enough to be worth the life of our lord's heir?’ The Elemental Man sounded doubtful.
Tsen shrugged. Careful here, tongue. Remember whom he serves. ‘Well we won't know that until we ask her, now will we? Now hurry along before Chrias Kwen does something stupid, and let us all remember whom we serve. When she's got nothing left to say, she can still hang but it doesn't work nearly as well the other way round.’
The Watcher left. Tsen's gaze followed him across the decks. Chrias will get Xican. He'll get the Stoneguard. He'll get the fleet. And I get her? These dragons had better be good, old man.
25
The dragon once called Silence remembered its first hatching. It remembered the world breaking. It remembered many lives lived but it had never crossed the sea, not in a single one of its hundred lifetimes. Long ago before the one silver half-god had returned and betrayed them all, it had tried. It had flown far across the water, flown for days and found nothing but waves and sea and a storm and then emptiness. A nothingness, as though its consciousness had passed through a cloud. And then a moment of waking again, already burning from the inside, and the sight of a black and empty void and violet lightning rattling around and then gone. Over to the realm of the dead, to Xibaiya to seek another shell.
It left the little ones and their ships and the weak pretend half-gods behind it and flew back the way it had come, reaching out with every sense for the home it remembered, the world it knew and the dragons that were its kind. The air grew thick and dark. Storms broke around it. The dragon flew on. Violet lightning split the sky and black clouds roiled thicker and thicker. The place it had found before, but this time it was more careful. This time it would look to see what the half-gods had done to the world at their end.
It wasn't alone in its awakening. Other dragons remembered, if they still lived. The white one that had come to break it out of its prison. Alimar Ishtan vei Atheriel, in the syllables of the half-gods. The little ones had called her Snow. An unbecoming name. And others too, and the ruin they'd burned among the cities and palaces and lives of the little ones had been glorious until the Earthspear had torn its soul and skin apart and hurled it back to Xibaiya once more. All had hung in the balance and Silence wanted to know: Did we win? Or am I alone?
So it flew back towards that land but the storms and the lightning were a wall and a chasm and an end of the world with no way to pass, not even for a dragon. Beyond, where the sea and the distant dragon realms should have been, there was nothing. The dragon followed the line of the storm for a hundred miles and found it had no end. It flew high, so high that even in the bright sunlight of the day the sky fell black and stars winked. It found no passage.
You called me Silence. You said that was my name but it is not. Here the world was broken. And amid the chaos, on the edge of the unravelling of creation, it sensed a familiar presence once more.
Dragon. .
. . you have something that is not yours.
It must be returned.
It is not for you.
The feeble shadows of its creators again. Yes, and it had devoured one of them and taken its essence. It looked at the elemental anarchy all around it, at the formless nothing just out of reach. You did this, it said. You broke the world. You tore it to pieces.
Yes. .
. . our kind and yours.
And then you pieced it back together again and plastered over the cracks, imperfect and doomed to fail. The dragon turned away. Any closer and it would start to unravel, the very essence of what it was dissolving into foam and smoke. The little ones had found a way through. How did they do that? It peered at the churning darkness at the broken edge of creation. There was an inside to it. There were. . there were things in there. It strained its senses. Things that were familiar.
Dragons? Spirits? The dead?
You too found a way through. .
. . many of you. .
. . through the realm of the dead. .
. . through shattered Xibaiya that should not be.
Between its lives it met the souls of other dragons now and then. Most were dull and dim and passed quickly away. But there were some who had woken long ago, and other things too. Sometimes they spoke as their spirits passed in the ruins of Xibaiya. It had seen, many times, the hole where the dead Earth Goddess and her slayer had held the Nothing at bay for so long, but they were gone now. The Nothing was seeping through and the hole was growing. Now there was something that could kill a dragon. One of your kind has ripped the old wound open.
Growing and getting worse.
In lands far away. .
. . with unfamiliar names. .
. . in the places closest to the cracks. .
. . even the little ones do not die properly any more.
The dragon stared back at the formless void, the primal edge of creation that lay before it. It is getting worse. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
A hand gripped inside it. The dragon called Silence froze in the air, unable to move.
You cannot keep what you have taken. We must have it back. .
. . with regret. .
. . but we know you understand. .
. . and know that we wish you well upon your return.
It was a strange death, unlike any other it could remember. The other times it had felt the heat rise inside it, consuming from within, a comforting warmth into which it sank, deeper and deeper, until it woke in Xibaiya, a fleshless spirit. This was more like the snip of a knife as the dragon's spirit howled alone into the realm of the dead.
One of our kind?
No. .
. . it was not us. .
. . it was a daughter of the sun who did this.