Dragon Queen by Stephen Deas Read Free Book Online

thinking and shatter half the bones in his body. Kill him without reason or warning, just the way the life of an alchemist was, a thing to be accepted. You moved on or you never survived, never slept at nights and never learned to be not afraid. That part had kept him safe all the way from the carriage, kept him from losing his mind, kept his thoughts clear and reasoned, but the storm-dark confounded everything. He couldn't think.
    Tuuran's potion was wearing off. He was starting to feel sick again. He let out a long sigh, sat up and pressed his head against the wall, looking out the broken window. Fresh air blew over his face. That helped.
    They were closer to the shore now, sailing in at good speed. The land outside – Xican, was it? – began as a few jagged stones, pale grey spires scattered among the waves, each one rising higher than the last as the ship raced between them. A shadow crossed the sun as something passed overhead, but whatever it was, Bellepheros couldn't see it, and the window was too small for him to lean out and look up. The sharp grey cliffs brought back memories. Every dragon-rider had a first time. Perhaps the kings and queens andgreat lords and ladies of the dragon realms sat on the backs of their monsters from such a young age that they didn't remember but Bellepheros had been more than twenty years old and about to become a true alchemist. The ceremony for most alchemists was held in the caves under the Purple Spur but he and two others had been chosen for something special. He hadn't understood why, only that he would ride on the back of a dragon at last, and every moment of that flight remained etched into his memory, though not as deep as what he'd seen and heard after they'd landed. When he closed his eyes, he could see the mountains of the Worldspine, huge towering things that glowered at one another but kept their distance across deep wide valleys. Then they'd flown deeper and further north where the valleys vanished and the mountains were piled up next to one another, squashed together as though some giant god had scattered mile-high shards of rock over the ground, jumbled and haphazard and without thought. The spaces between them were gorges, gulches, ravines. From above it had been impossible to imagine how anyone could live in such a sterile vertical place, but they did.
    The Nothing of the storm-dark crept back into his head. He sighed and opened his eyes and looked again at the new world around him. As the ship moved on, it slowed. The stones grew taller and wider and more numerous, scattered around the sea, rising from the waves like the petrified fingers of ancient giants. They were flecked with green and some were marked with holes. Caves or windows but too regular to be wholly natural. As the ship turned he saw more, a coastline of grey saw-toothed cliffs jumbled one upon the other. Black spots covered them like boils of the pox. Buildings jutted out of their sides, wooden platforms and gantries like scars running from side to side and up and down, more still perched on their tops. Closer in he could make out the shapes of men scurrying back and forth along the ones closest to the sea, up ladders and across rope bridges, dangling from the faces of cliffs that rose far higher than any mast, while between the dizzying spires other ships, made small by the towers of stone around them, wallowed in the waves, rolling languidly from side to side. But none of that was what held his eye. As he pressed his face to the wall to see, he saw a palace of bright and shining gold rising overthe heaviest thicket of cliffs. It hung in the air, glittering orbs of sparkling silver dangling beneath great discs of glass like golden clouds; while from below more spires of glass and gold rose up behind the cliffs to meet them. Tuuran had spoken of them, seen far off in the distance, but not like this. Here was a creation that dwarfed even the marvels left by the Silver King. A golden palace in the sky.