Free The Silver Kings by Stephen Deas Page A

Hundreds of them teeming through the mountain, but there are no alchemists here. They have a taste to them. It makes them easy to pick out .
    Unless they choose to hide themselves , she reminded him.
    She circled one last time. There had been beauty to the mountain-­top once. The Reflecting Garden was here, a toy of the Silver King, an eternal fountain feeding pools of water that didn’t lie flat but ran along in arcs, tiny flowing rivulets twisting cold through the air, suspended in the last echoes of the Silver King’s sorcery, all of them leading to the glimmer of the Silver Onion Dome, so old that no one could remember its proper name, where the air was bright and fresh and dry and always smelled of spring in defiance of the seasons. Zafir looked at the remains, at the shattered stones and gravel. The Onion had been smashed flat. There was almost nothing left of the Silver King’s water garden except a stream bubbling out of the rubble into a few haphazard pools, with raindrops bounding patterns across them before they drained into the mountain below. That was all.
    What was it for? As a girl she’d played in the water, oblivious to its mystery. She’d taken it for what it was, no sense of wonder at how it had been made, just a simple joy that it had.
    She shuddered. There had been a happiness to the Moonlit Mountain once, but it was so long ago that she doubted she could ever find her way back to it.
    To amuse himself. They were all that way. Diamond Eye landed on the stones around the shattered dome. There were no spikes to keep dragons away here, only in the fortress of broken scorpions. Stars Cascade landed beside them, impatient and hostile. The dark shape of the eyrie was coming down from on high now, a sinister blackness laced with purple veins pushing through parting cloud, dropping slowly as the dragons let go their chains. Zafir had made them lift it up above the clouds in the night, sick of rain and wanting to see the stars. She supposed she ought to wait now for Tuuran and his Adamantine Men to march beside her, but she was here, so close, and the urgency to finally see with her own eyes, to know whether her sister or any others lived, to understand how much her world had changed, was impossible to resist.
    She slipped from Diamond Eye’s back. Keep watch, if you will. Give warning of what you can. However hard she kept her expectation in check, however much she quashed the unruly sprouts of hope, both grew virulent like weeds the moment she looked away. Tuuran would be furious with her. Diamond Eye didn’t much like her impatience either, though he tried to hide behind aloof indifference. She didn’t understand him. Stars Cascade simply wanted to eat her. That she understood.
    The entrances into the mountain from the dome were rubble-choked. Zafir climbed to the great Queen’s Gate at the top of the fortress. The gate itself had been smashed to splinters, the Grand Aisle beyond collapsed, the stair to the High Hall below packed tight with shattered marble. Clumps of grass grew in niches of earth. She went to the lower Humble Gate instead. The rubble there was looser – wood, not stone – and when she pulled a fallen door aside she could see the old Servants’ Passage leading down. She smiled to herself. So this was where the watchers had gone, was it? And rightly too, for the Queen’s Gate was for queens alone.
    ‘Hello?’
    She lit her torch, as bright as a thousand lanterns. Whoever was here would come up to parley, wouldn’t they? Hidden away in their magical tunnels and caverns, kept alive by the relics of a long-dead sorcerer, trapped in an enchanted cage by rampaging dragons. Perhaps they were all mad by now. Everyone said that about the queens of the Pinnacles. Not right in the head. Her own mother. Her …
    No. Not a time to go to that place. She looked down the steps. They had to talk to her, didn’t they? A rider come down on a dragon for the first time in … she didn’t know