Crazy Mad. Holding fast to a weighted rope. Embraced by cold dark water but he knew who he was. Skyrie, bloodied and broken and crawling to his death in the swamps while the stars above winked out one by one. With a man standing over him in robes the colour of moonlight, his pale half-ruined face scarred ragged by disease or fire, one blind eye, milky white. Fingers that traced symbols over him. Air that split open like swollen flesh. Black shadow that oozed out of the gashes left behind.
‘It fills the hole, you see.’ Gelisya again. The Dark Queen as she would be, but back then she'd been only twelve. ‘Like the Black Moon and the dead Earth Goddess fill the hole in the world. He showed me. You have to keep it closed. Otherwise something will come through. Not yet but one day. Before you both come back for the very last time. You have to keep it closed.’ Even with her lips almost touching his ear, her whisper was so quiet he could barely hear. ‘He's making us ready. To let it in when the Ice Witch sets it free.’
But he'd lost that black stone with the little piece of him inside. It hung around another neck and so now the hole was there.
He looked inside and saw he was not alone.
The dragon perched on the edge of the unravelling of everything and wondered to itself what might be done but it had no answers to that and so it wondered something else instead. A more dragon-like question, filled with an acceptance that all must inevitably end. How long?
Water came and water went. Air too, now and then. Gasped mouthfuls. Holding fast to a weighted rope with a hard wooden cliff over his head, always battering, pushing him under. So little left. Dragons and ice. Falling and falling, locked in an embrace of death with a goddess, and he was the one who'd stopped their fall and he was the one who'd gripped her tight and he was the one who'd kept her from the final death, and it was he who had kept That Which Came Before from spilling into the world and unravelling the very weave of creation. He had done all of that!
I.
The Bringer of Endings. The Black Moon who once killed a goddess.
The Nothing was come again, seeping through the hole, slow but relentless.
The holethat he'd made.
*
Hours after the warlocks and the ship that had brought them were gone, Tuuran went and stood where he'd thrown Crazy Mad into the sea. There was a sounding rope there, marked and weighted at the end. The sail-slaves used it for unfamiliar shallow waters to measure the depth beneath them. Out here in open water they didn't need it but it was still there. Tuuran pulled. It was heavier than it had any right to be so he gave it all his strength, and when he reached the end of it he pulled Crazy Mad back into the galley, soaked and freezing, half drowned and three quarters dead.
‘Was the only way,’ he said. The grey-robes had gone through every slave. They'd come looking for the mark on Crazy Mad's leg.
Crazy Mad sat in his own puddle of water. Shaking. Barely even there.
‘They knew who you were.’ And Crazy Mad laughed, in between coughing and vomiting up the sea, because most of the time that was more than he could have said.
The Watcher
37
The Watcher approached. As he drew close he felt the air thicken as it always did around the eyrie, the tiny press of resistance, a drag trying to claw him down; but this time, instead of a tiny tug at the back of his thoughts, the thickening grew steadily worse. Instead of cutting though the wind like a sword through the air, the last mile felt like wading through an ever heavier sea. Like walking in treacle — that was what the Picker had said of the dragon lands, but that was there, not here. Here being the wind was no effort at all. Here he darted between Xican and the eyrie and half a dozen other cities like a bee between roses in his hunt for the elusive grey dead and it had hardly troubled him at all until the dragons had come. So it had to be them. Something to do with dragons.
For a few seconds after he materialised on the eyrie rim he couldn't do any more than catch his breath and look around the eyrie's outer edge, dotted with its cranes and shacks and crates and boxes. The gold-glass discs and spheres of two dozen fully built lightning cannon peppered the rocks among long tubes of Scythian steel pointing skywards — black-powder cannon to shatter any hostile glasship that strayed too close. Between them the litter of their building lay scattered higgledy-piggledy. The hands of the sea lord had moved quickly. Baros Tsen T'Varr had turned his eyrie into a fortress.
Once he'd recovered, the Watcher walked across the rim and up the steps shaped into the outer slope of the wall around Chay-Liang's dragon yard. His steps slowed as he reached the top. The monster, the big one, was wide awake and snarling, and even he couldn't help a shiver of awe. Its tail, thirty paces long, swished carelessly back and forth with enough restless energy to smash down towers. Its wings, when it stretched them out, were wider still. Its head was as large as a cart, big enough to swallow a horse whole, its teeth two neat rows of swords and knives. It towered over the dragon yard, dwarfed everything and made even the sun seem small. Its skin was a shining ruddy gold and every part was armoured with scales that shone and caught the light like plates of gold-glass. Its claws clenched and unclenched, its talons as big as a man and sharp enough to gouge stone. It was a thing to crush men simply by looking at them. Its eyes roamed, always hunting, never staying still.
Eyes. Those would be its weakness. He shook away the sense of awe. Every monster could be killed. He would just need a long enough spear. Yet even as he thought that, the dragon turned its head and looked straight at him as though it had read his mind and was already calculating how to kill him first. They sized each other up, monster and slayer. The smaller dragons stopped their restless pacings and snappings to stare at him as well, eyeing him as though he might be tasty. A dozen were awake, chained and tethered to the wall. The rest lay still, the forty or so more that the moon sorcerers had brought. Asleep, perhaps. The Watcher took them in, wondering how long it would take for them to grow. A year? Ten? A hundred? He didn't know.
The alchemist was there too, among the small ones and surrounded by his Scales, arguing with the enchantress Chay-Liang. Usually the Watcher would have merged with the wind and slipped through the air and appeared beside them, a constant reminder to them both of what he was and what he stood for, but not today. This close to the dragons he wasn't even sure that he could shift any more. Practice. The Picker said he'd grown used to it with practice. He'd have to try.
The alchemist turned and headed away across the dragon yard. The enchantress walked beside him. The Watcher followed them with his eyes and then looked back to the dragon. It was still staring at him, cold glacier-blue eyes never blinking. Then, as the alchemist entered the tunnels, the Watcher turned his back and walked down to the eyrie rim. With an effort he became the air again and forced his wind-self across the eyrie's heart and down into its tunnels. Passing the dragon was like walking into the teeth of a hurricane. He made himself do it though, then spiralled down to where the alchemist lived, passing the alchemist and the enchantress on his way. They were arguing, but as he blew between them the enchantress stopped and frowned and looked around her as though she sensed his presence. He kept on, and when he turned to flesh in the alchemist's room he was panting so hard that he could barely stand straight, and so perhaps it was for the best that he had another minute before they arrived. Thick as honey, those two, and better that neither of them saw his weakness before he left again and went back to his hunting.