A slave in white walked forward, approaching the perch. Her pale hair hung down her back and her scarred face looked up at his as she made obeisance.
“All is prepared, master. Koukis has sent word that the Drowned are in their places. The island has been undermined and they await only our signal.”
“And my soldiers?”
“They stand at ready.”
Inys bowed his head, his wings widening in an expression of unease. Erex nuzzled him again.
“Tell the slaves to prepare themselves, Drakkis. I am sick at heart and want this ended. One way or the other, let us finish this madness now.”
Drakkis Stormcrow turned, lifting her arms so that all the signalers among the uncorrupt could see her. In each unit, her gestures were echoed. In silent array, the uncorrupt shifted. Then, trundling out of the depths of the hidden city, the dragons came. Ust and Manad were first, broadening their crests in respect before taking the two of the uncorrupt in each of their foreclaws, then, beating their wings to hover, two more in each of their hind. They rose up into the distant sky, the first of his desperate and improvised army. Then Mus and Sarin. Then Costa and Saramos. Forty-eight times, his allies came and gave salute. He saw the resolve in their eyes and smelled both distress and resolve in their scents. At the last, only one dragon came out. A third-year still pale at the tips of her wings, her scales the blue white of glaciers. She flared her crest, and Erex stepped down beside the child and flared her own. The sorrow in Inys’s breast was almost unbearable.
“Return to me when this is done,” Inys said, his gaze locked deep with his lover’s, “and I will make you the empress of the wide world.”
“If being empress is the price of being at your side, I will pay it,” she said. They blew flame at one another, he prayed not for the last time. And then Erex and her youngest cousin gathered the last of the uncorrupt slaves and rose to the sky. Inys stood alone in the great hall. Alone apart from Drakkis.
“We must go, master,” she said. Her voice was gentle.
“Is there no other way?” Inys asked, though he knew the answer. Drakkis did not speak. She knew her place. Morade had to believe Inys destroyed or he would not return to the island. There could be no echo of him in Aastapal or in this hidden fortress. There could be no scent of him in the wind or taste of him in the water. He reached down a claw, scooping up his slave, and then rose himself. By the time he reached the open sky, his soldiers were little more than dots on the distant horizon.
The sleeping chamber stood at the side of the sea. The green of its lid called to him as he sloped through the air. He landed gently beside Drakkis’s kite and let the slave loose.
“Do not fail me,” Inys said.
“My life is yours for the taking, master,” Drakkis said. “When the task is finished, I will return and wake you.”
Inys pulled up the lid of the sleeping box. The slaves had put a bed of soft cotton there for him, and tiny torches burned in sconces set along the wall. As he stepped down into his hiding place, Drakkis Stormcrow strapped herself into the kite.
“Drakkis,” he said.
“Master?”
“You are a slave plotting to kill dragons.”
“I am, master.”
“There are many people who would have me put you to death for that alone, Morade or not.”
“If it is your will that I die, then I will die. But I beg to live long enough to see you named emperor before that.”
Inys smiled. He had the impulse to blow fire at the slave, though he knew that even such small affection would destroy her. Instead, he folded his wings pulled the lid closed over himself and sealed the jade against all intrusion. Only a small path remained, too small for even a new-hatched dragon to pass through. The passage that Drakkis would take when the war was over and Morade defeated.
Inys settled, closed his eyes. Invoking the silence was difficult. His mind was unsettled. It kept racing ahead of him, toward the sinking of the island and the surprise attack. The legions of the uncorrupt holding formation against the madness of corrupted slaves. The final battle of generations of war, which he could win only by subterfuge and dishonor. Only by sending his lover and his friends to fight in his place. Only by using the schemes and mechanisms of his cleverer brother.
But at last, the silence came. Time became nothing. He became merely flesh. All the cycles and systems of his body passed into nothing, waiting only for the voice of his slave to recall him to himself.
The silence was not meant for dreams, and yet dreams came formless and unreal. He had the inchoate sense of being adrift in a windless openness, floating without effort on an open and empty sky with neither land nor sea below him, but only an endless expanse of air. Then the sense of a presence, alien and unwelcome that almost drove him up from the depth of the silence. He felt uneasy and restless, like a hatchling trying to sleep when it wasn’t tired or else too much so.
Time passed without Inys. Even the sensation of waiting was gone. Inys surrendered to not-being.
Excuse me. You need to wake up now.
Awareness, but only the faintest prick of it, there and then gone again. Easy to ignore, easier to forget. The silence washed back in.
Hey! Nap time’s over! Wake the hell up! I don’t think this is going to be that simple. Do you think maybe there’s some sort of ritual or … I don’t know. A magic drum or something?
Awareness again, deeper. And this time, there was a sense of fear in it. He felt as if he were under a vast ocean, the weight of the water pressing him down. He had fallen too far into the silence. He had swum too near to death. Inys tried to come to himself, to reach up from the abyssal depths of his body to something else. He forced his eyes to open and had the sensation of light. He was still too deep to know what the light was or what it meant. He was not even seeing. Not really. Only he knew that somewhere, there was light.
He struggled like a drunkard to gather the pieces of his shattered mind, and felt them slipping from his grasp. Felt the silence reaching up to take him again.
It’s time to wake up.
He grabbed for the voice. The words were strangely inflected, as all slave tongues were, but they existed. They were real. He could actually feel the words in the dreamed flesh of his claws, and he dragged himself along them, up into the realm of mere slumber. He managed enough awareness to know that something was wrong. He was ill or drunk or poisoned. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t let himself sleep.
You need to wake up now.
He breached from dream to the world. The light became real. A torch in a slave’s hand. And another behind it. His body felt wrong, sluggish and dim. The straw he’d slept upon was gone and he felt grime and filth on his scales and in between them. The slave was wrong too. It carried a culling blade, though. The one behind it smelled corrupt. He reached out with his mind and felt Morade’s weapon writhing in the slave’s blood, but it didn’t move to attack.
“Drakkis?” Inys managed, and his voice sounded weak and cracked in his own ears.
The nearer slave shook its head.
“I’m Marcus Wester. That’s Master Kit.” It was the same voice. The one that had called him back.
“Morade,” Inys said. “Does Morade live?”
“No,” the slave said. “I’m going to have to go with no on that.”
Inys felt the relief pour into his soul. He tried to rise, but his body felt so weak. So heavy. The air smelled of rot and ice and the sea. He shook himself, trying to bring his mind to bear, and reared up on his haunches. Every muscle in his body was stiff, slow, and unresponsive. The sense that something was wrong grew.