‘In fact, I don't think we'll be troubled much at all until the remnants of Sea Lord Quai'Shu’s fleet make it back to Khalishtor harbour, charred and ragged by the sounds of things. And surely the worst of whatever they carried is here already. It is already here, Belli? There's not some other secret about dragons that I should know?’
Bellepheros laughed, slightly hysterical. ‘Why? Isn't this enough for you?’
Li raised her cup and clinked it against his. She smiled. ‘I know. You're terrified!’
Bellepheros giggled again. Couldn't help himself. ‘Terrified? Yes! Of course I'm terrified. And if you're not then you don't understand them! One egg! I was ready to start from one egg and work my way up, not this. One slip, one thing forgotten. . and boom!’ He threw up his hands. ‘Woken dragons. Your world ends!’
She rolled her eyes. ‘We're not helpless, Belli!’
‘Really?’
‘Really. The little ones don't bother me much.’ Then she frowned. ‘The big one? Yes, all right. Yes, that one. . troubles me. Is that what you wanted to hear?’
Bellepheros sipped at his qaffeh. Swilling its bitter taste around his mouth calmed him a little. ‘Not really. But perhaps it helps to hear you say it.’
‘You'd have to be mad not to feel it. It's so. .’ She threw up her hands. ‘Big. That's all there is to say, really. I could cage the little ones in glass and gold if I had to, or batter them with lightning. But the big one? No, I'm not sure I could make something to hold it.’ She reached across the desk and took his hand again and squeezed. ‘But you, you scrawny old man, are the master alchemist. They shouldn't frighten you.’
He gazed at her face, so full of compassion and determination. ‘Did you sleep at all, Li?’
‘Don't be silly!’ She laughed. ‘How could I?’
‘There are too many. They don't even fit in the eyrie!’
‘Very true.’
‘And I don't have enough Scales.’
‘I can see that.’
‘I don't even have enough potion! Not for so many. Not for long.’
‘Well, admittedly I can't see that. But I believe you, Belli.’ Her hand was still on his, still squeezing tight.
‘We don't have enough food.’
‘That I can help with.’
‘No, no. There's not. . there's not enough. Of anything!’
‘I agree.’
He blinked. ‘What?’
She let his hand go and took a sip of qaffeh. ‘I agree. There are too many dragons. The eyrie isn't big enough. I'm sorry, Belli, but you'll have to get rid of some.’
‘What did you say?’ Was that a twinkle in her eye?
‘I said you'll have to get rid of some. Quite a few, I'd imagine. I'm sorry if that upsets you but sometimes hard decisions must be made.’ She watched him steadily and smiled. He probably imagined it but he could have sworn she winked too. She raised her cup. ‘To us.’
He raised his own but his hand was shaking so much that he dropped it and spilt qaffeh all over his desk. ‘Bloody bugger!’
‘Belli! Language!’
He got up and found a cloth to wipe up the mess. His legs felt wobbly. ‘Nigh on sixty dragons waiting outside means I can say bloody bugger if I want to! Bloody bugger, bugger bloody, bloody bugger!’ For a moment the world spun and he had to hold on to the table so as not to fall, forcing himself to take long deep breaths, slow and steady. Li was on her feet in a flash, holding him, holding him tight, murmuring in his ear.
‘You're a cranky old man but you're also brilliant and strangely likeable, and you can do this. You can.’ She held on to him tightly until the shaking stopped.
‘And you're a mad woman and a slave driver,’ he said softly. She let him go and filled his cup again.
‘You are my slave.’ She gave him his cup. ‘So tell me, truthfully, how many of them of them have to go? No, wait, let's have a wager. I'll wager I can guess. If I'm close, you make the qaffeh every day for a week.’
‘And if you lose?’
‘Well, it's not down to me to set you free and send you home, otherwise obviously I would, but since I can't let's just say that I make the qaffeh. I guess half.’
He told her how much more than half it would have to be. She simply nodded and didn't flinch at all and later, when she was bringing fresh qaffeh to his study each morning while the dragon yard was littered with hatchling corpses burning from the inside, he wondered whether that was when he'd fallen in love with her, or whether it had been much, much earlier.
36
In the stillness of the underworld the spirit of the dragon called Silence moved with wonder and deliberate purpose. It had come this way many times but on the previous occasions it had moved swiftly, eager for the call of a new skin, dulled dreamlike by the alchemical potions of the little ones. This time it was awake. This time it remembered. How? How did you make a poison that lingered even with the dead?
The dragon mused on that and then threw the thought away. It didn't move swiftly this time, but slowly. Carefully. Creeping among the ephemerals around it to the hole where the dead Earth Goddess and her slayer had held That Which Came Before at bay for so long. They were gone now and the hole was getting bigger and the Nothing was seeping through. The Nothing would kill more than dragons. The Nothing killed everything, annihilating all it touched. That was the nature of the Nothing. What it was called was what it was.
The dragon Silence lingered at the edge that crept ever further, staring, reaching in with its senses.
The Nothing. But its taste had a tang of the familiar nevertheless. The dragon dredged through ancient memories of its very first lifetime, hazy and dull from the centuries of alchemy it had suffered, until it found what it was looking for. When the Silver Kings had owned the world and the half-gods and the sorcerers had gone to war, it had scented this Nothing then. Just the once, right at the end.
Crazy Mad. Sinking into the sea, down and down, deep and dark and icy cold but at last he knew who he was. He was Berren, the orphan boy from Shipwrights’ in the city of Deephaven, and the warlock Saffran Kuy was upon him. ‘Dragons for one of you. Queens for both! An empress! The future, boy! See the Black Moon!’ And the gold-handled knife jerked and the blade pushed into his skin and his own hands pressed it deeper and deeper towards his heart and he screamed but there wasn't any pain. Instead he saw himself as though looking in a mirror, but he wasn't seeing his skin, he was seeing what lay underneath, his soul, an endless tangle of threads like a spider's web wrapped within itself.
In the mirror there was something staring beside him.
Gelisya the Dark Queen, a child back then, standing in front of him and holding something out. A black stone pressed into Berren's hand. She closed his fingers around it. ‘I suppose I have to give him to you now. I don't really want to because he's my friend. But I suppose you want him back.’
Facing him, no more than a few dozen yards away, he saw himself. He raised his javelin ready. His own face stared back at him, wild-eyed, spattered in blood.
‘Well? Are you going to throw it or not?’
Silence remembered. It remembered fighting the gods themselves, burning the armies of their minions, crushing them, slaughtering their sorcerers. The splitting of the Quartarch. The scent of this Nothing belonged to the very end when the Black Moon had forged his greatest work of ice and the last of the silver ones had struck him down and the Earthspear ripped the world to splinters. The dragon had tasted the Nothing in that moment, a whiff of it, quickly clenched and crushed and buried away by the dead goddess and her slayer. Here. They'd trapped it here, all three of them locked together, the Nothing in its prison, the goddess the bars and the walls, her slayer the lock to its cage. In that moment the dragon called Silence had not understood. None of them had. No one except perhaps the silver ones and by then so very many of them were gone. Vanished away to wherever their abstention had taken them.