Free The Silver Kings by Stephen Deas

corpse that now filled a good part of it, but they could clean away the rest. For a while she went to sit with Myst and Onyx, to watch them nurse their newborns, hoping to make all the leaden feelings go away. She played with them a little. Sometimes it helped, seeing the blind hope of new life and the fierce love that surrounded them, but not today.
    Much later, when it was dark, one of the hatchlings landed in the eyrie. Dark meant the dragons would keep to themselves, and so Zafir had changed out of her armour, although queenly dresses hardly suited the wind and steady rain and so she was wrapped in a soldier’s leather coat, up in one of the five watchtowers that ringed the yard. She knew the hatchling as it came down, as she knew each and every one of the eyrie’s dragons – Stars Cascade Over a Dying Mirror Sea in her first life – and Zafir wondered why the half-gods had been so melancholy with their names, but Diamond Eye had no answer to that. Stars Cascade had something in her claws. Zafir watched the something get up, then climbed from the watchtower and walked across the yard through the rain. The shanty-town debris of huts and sails and ropes had been cleared. Everyone would sleep in the tunnels now, and if that meant they were crowded, it was still better than being burned.
    The figure in the dragon yard came towards her, eyes blazing with silver light in the twilight. The face was still the Crowntaker, but behind it seethed the Black Moon.
    ‘You have something of mine.’
    Zafir had the Starknife already in her hand. Without a word she offered it. Without a word, the Black Moon took it and walked away.
     

 
     
    4
     
    The Moonlit Mountain
     
     
     
    Four days after landfall
     
    The mountains of the Pinnacles poked from the plains of the Silver City like three thousand-yard fingers, sheer-sided, snub-topped, draped in clinging green veils of vines and stubby thorn trees, whatever could find a crack in which to root. Within them lay the arcane labyrinths of the Silver King’s Enchanted Palace where Zafir had been born. Between their feet sat what remained of the Silver City, once the greatest metropolis of the nine realms.
    Zafir and Diamond Eye plunged out of the cloud towards the sprawl of stone fortress that covered most of the Moonlit Mountain’s flat-topped peak, the tallest of the three giant fingers. There had been scorpions here once, giant crossbows that fired iron-tipped spears with enough force to tear a man in half and sting even a dragon the size of Diamond Eye. The scorpions were gone now, smashed and ripped from their mounts. Where they’d stood, spikes protruded from the ground, ten-foot iron barbs meant to stop a dragon from simply slamming into the walls. Several were bent, and a few were torn away. Ceramic tiles painted with pictograms were scattered and strewn across the ground. Most were broken. Some had been stamped to powder by crushing dragon strides.
    There were men here. Watching. Diamond Eye felt them and plucked at their thoughts. As she punched through the cloud Zafir watched them run. They ran because they’d seen a dragon, and running was what men with any sense would do. And though she told herself over and over that she meant no murder to whoever had taken her home, watching them run she felt her veneer flake, a seething core of vengeful animosity burning it away.
    But I will try , she told herself.
    They wouldn’t let her though, whoever held her palace. Deep down, simple and primitive, she knew it. They would fight her, and she was content with that knowledge. Glad even, because it let her pretend it wasn’t what she wanted …
    She swept Diamond Eye low across the top of the mountain through the ever-present drizzle, scanning the ground. Perhaps there wasn’t any point, but she’d already found one alchemist here, and alchemists were more dangerous than she’d ever imagined. How dangerous, exactly? She didn’t know.
    I feel their thoughts, little one.