The Silver Kings Read Online Free Page B

and belly. She remembered the palace alive and bright with bustle and colour. Servants, soldiers, dragon-riders. Movement everywhere. Commotion. There used to be horses. Sometimes elephants decked with gaudy harnesses, brought in ships from across the sea.
    A lump grew in her throat. She could almost see the ghosts moving about, the lives long lost. She walked into the shadowed dust-veils of the Veid Dome, the palatial hall of King Tyan with its three golden thrones arrayed to face her. A sweep of marble stairs arced behind them, curving to the upper balconies. The walls were black with soot, the floor a litter of ash and charred splinters and rubble; the thrones, when she came close enough to see, were half melted. She clambered past them. There had been a door hidden behind them into the rear arches of the dome once, but both door and wall had been smashed down. She stooped and picked up a fragment of cloth, the charred corner of a tapestry. Her jaw tightened. She remembered it. King Tyan the Fourth burning Taiytakei ships at night as they tried to raid his silk farms. Jehal had brought her here late one night. They’d sneaked away, consumed by the rapture of their nascent passion, and he’d shown it to her. Huddled between thrones he’d murmured the story, his hands on her skin and between her legs, his tongue on her lips.
    His hands. She remembered the touch of him as though it had been that very morning, as though she could still feel him now, some lingering tingle. She shuddered. Bit her lip and moved on, out through the arches into the little courtyard with its apple tree behind the dome, the secret garden where no one ever came except the royal family; and here was Jehal’s ghost again. Sprawled naked, making love, him inside her, their hands clenched and fingers clawed to the very edge. A savagery to them both, clutching at each other as though trying to climb into one another. The world blurred as a thought hit her: He could be alive . Was it possible?
    The loss of him. The betrayal. They were such colossal things. She staggered and held on to the tree and took a long ragged breath. There was no home for her here. There never had been. Perhaps the dragons had done her a favour, burning it all down and putting the truth inescapably before her, a world that was once so familiar now ruin and ash.
    What did you expect, little one?
    Is it all like this? Is there anyone left? The silence taunted her, a thickening of the air around her, stifling motion and thought.
    Yes. But they hide deep, little one.
    Zafir looked at the tree. Jehal had given her an apple from it once, and here and now she could almost taste it. She shook herself, put the courtyard behind her and walked on through colonnades and arches into the feasting hall beyond, into the kitchens and down into the cellars and pantries. Everything had been ransacked, everything that could move taken away, everything too large ­broken into pieces and carried off. The hangings, the wood panels, even patches of tiles from the floors. Just bare stone walls that became bleak shapes of light and dark under the harsh spotlight beam of her enchanted glass torch, colourless and without life.
    The darkness, the stark shadows, the suffocating closeness of stone wrapped about her, they tied her insides into knots. The old fear of being trapped in the dark banged at the cage where she kept it, threatening to break loose. She made herself think of Tuuran, his size and bulk a reassurance wrapped around her, waiting for her. Thinking of him like that helped. She walked on.
    Close now, little one.
    In the deepest cellars she found the ragged handful of men and women left alive, half naked, three-quarters starved, pale-faced, trapped in fright by her light. They looked on her in terror and wonder, and cringed away.
    ‘Who are you?’ she asked them. ‘Are there any more of you?’
    She was a stranger, fierce and terrible in her armour of Taiytakei glass and gold. None of them