The Splintered Gods (18 page)

21

In the Blood

‘The whole eyrie in quarantine and we’re not allowed to even move.’ Li was in one of her huffs again. ‘They might as well drop us into the storm-dark, dragon and all. It’s three hundred miles of desert to the nearest city and that happens to be Dhar Thosis, so that’s no use. Who’s going to bring everything we need to survive out here?’ They were in the alchemist’s study, since his laboratory was still a charred mess from when the hatchling had escaped. Li’s workshop looked, if anything, even worse. Not that a dragon had run around smashing everything and setting fire to it, that was just the way her workshop was all the time.

Bellepheros mumbled into his cup and nodded agreeably. He had no idea, but then he never had. He was merely a slave and that sort of thing was someone else’s problem. ‘I’m just glad you didn’t get hurt in all that fighting. It’s not your trouble, Li.’ When it came to troubles he had enough of his own, the first being to persuade Zafir to take Diamond Eye hunting after the missing hatchling. He picked up a glass retort on his desk and stroked it absently. It was beautiful work, Li’s own.

‘Do you think she’d do it?’

‘Who?’ He frowned at the retort. Almost a shame to use it. They never got really clean again, not
really
clean.

‘Charin’s sails, Belli, you haven’t been listening!’ Li rolled her eyes and threw back her head. ‘Your precious dragon-riding slave who ought to hang. The one thing Mai’Choiro Kwen got right. Would she do it?’

‘Do what?’ Bellepheros put the retort back onto the desk and picked up his cup of qaffeh instead. ‘Li, my queen desires her freedom. If you want something of her, why don’t you ask her?’

‘Because she hates me!’

‘Because you hate her.’

‘And with good reason!’

Bellepheros laughed. ‘I don’t mean this personally, Li, for you’re far better than any of the dragon-lords I used to know, but her Holiness Zafir was a queen and your people made her into a slave. Does her resentment truly surprise you?’ Thing was, with Li, it seemed that it did.
You’re a slave. You might as well get used to it, and actually it’s not so bad if you keep your head down and do as you’re asked. You should be grateful for what we give you.
‘It’s different for me. I was always a slave to the dragons. I took that path willingly and knowing what it was. And even I begrudge what your people took from me. I begrudge the manner of it. The sense of entitlement and privilege, the quiet assumption that your way and your lives and your culture are somehow better. You take for granted many things you should question. Not all your achievements are gifts to be shared and received with fawning gratitude.’

Li snorted and poked at his cup. ‘Tell me that the next time I put some Bolo in front of you.’ He supposed she meant it as a joke, and maybe when it came to Bolo she had a point, but he didn’t smile.

‘Her Holiness doesn’t drink qaffeh, and if she eats Bolo then she does it very discreetly.’

‘The truth! I need her to tell them what Mai’Choiro said, Belli. Just the truth. Is that so hard?’

‘Do you think she doesn’t understand?’ Bellepheros laughed and drained his cup and stood up. ‘She was born to these games, Li. She has something that others want and she’ll extract the best price she can before she gives it up. She probably knows perfectly well that it’s the only thing keeping her alive. Can you blame her for clinging to it? They want to kill her.
You
want to kill her. You seem to want that very much.’

Li glared at the table. ‘Can’t see many who would blame me for that, given what she’s done.’

‘Never mind the rights and wrongs. She’s not stupid.’

‘Even you wanted to kill her once.’

A silence hung between them. Bellepheros opened his mouth and then closed it again, trying to frame an answer, to tell her that yes, he had, and how grateful he was that she’d stopped him, but that didn’t change things.

‘I’m sorry, Belli. That was . . .’ Li looked at him with her big
brown eyes as if struggling for words until a slave knocked on the study door. She jumped up like a jack-in-the-box and opened it and an old Taiytakei shuffled in carrying a silver tray and a crystal bottle. He looked around for a table or a bench with some space on it, didn’t find one, and then looked helpless until Bellepheros took some books off his desk and put them on the floor. The slave set down the tray. He bowed deeply. ‘Apple wine from Baros Tsen T’Varr’s cellar. The lady Kalaiya wishes to share it with those who were loyal before the . . .’ he coughed and looked over his shoulder ‘. . . before the murdering Vespinese bastards drink it all.’ As he backed away and Li laughed, Bellepheros stole a look at her. She had a lovely laugh and a lovely smile. Honest and unforced.

‘I have work,’ he said when the slave had gone. ‘But I’ll talk to her. Her freedom for the truth and the hatchling hunted down. How can you do it though? They’ll never let her go. Never.’

‘Ask her anyway. I was thinking perhaps, if we have to, we should all go. You and me and her, running away on the back of her dragon.’ Li snorted derisively. ‘She flies it; you feed it potions; I’ll find us a way to cross the storm-dark.’

Bellepheros roared with laughter. ‘How far before you push her off? Do we get to cross the eyrie wall?’

‘Not before
she
pushes
me
off, I suspect.’

‘A dragon-queen, an irritable old alchemist and a cranky enchantress flying away together on the back of a furious dragon?’ Bellepheros laughed again, shaking his head. ‘What are you thinking, Li?’ Somewhere under there she really meant it though, some little part of her anyway, and that wasn’t the Li he knew. She was troubled then, and deeper than she let on.

Li picked up the bottle and peered at the amber wine inside. ‘I hear she roams hundreds of miles. Hours every day, taking the dragon to feed while two Elemental Men always watch her. I’m thinking that I don’t understand why they let her live. And I’m certainly thinking that I don’t see what difference it would make or why it should bother them if she hunts for your hatchling while she flies.’

‘We shall see, eh?’ Bellepheros clucked and left Li there in his study and walked up through the white stone tunnels. They glowed bright today, like the sunlight outside but never so dazzling. Zafir
found the tunnels cramped and small and oppressive but they’d never struck
him
that way; but maybe that was just him being used to living under the ground. Alchemists spent a lot of time in caves because caves were safe from dragons. He’d grown used to it over the years and had never much liked the vast open spaces of the deserts and the plains, even back in his old realms and certainly not here. The craggy moors were easy enough, and forests, and the City of Dragons at the foot of the Purple Spur was manageable too. Mountains,
they
were best of all. As long as he was at the bottom of them and not at the top. Heights . . . He shuddered. Heights were worse than open space.
Far
worse.

Out in the dragon yard the wind caught his robe and whipped the hem around his feet. He was heartily sick of this blasted wind. It had a caprice to it that lifted up tunics and whipped a cloak over a man’s head when he least expected it, but underneath lurked a more sinister malevolence that blistered skin and flayed the edges of everything. It was a relentless grind, leaching the strength out of them all, battering and wearing him down until he was too tired to think. The only one who seemed not to care was Zafir, but then a rider was more used to wind.

Diamond Eye was perched on the far wall, staring at the Godspike as ever. Bellepheros sighed. Down in the yard, surrounded by walls, he could pretend he was on the ground, nestled close to the earth. Once he climbed up . . . He shuddered as he thought of being on the top of the wall, the wind rattling and shaking him, looking out and seeing yet again where they truly were, miles above the ground with a huge black storm circling beneath them, dark purple lightning flashing in its depths. Flame! The storm was so wide you couldn’t even
see
the ground, even though the desert air was bright and clear.

Heights. He’d never done well with heights. Never had and never would though he hadn’t the first idea why. A healthy fear of falling? Well yes, but . . . He shuddered, remembering the day he’d first met Li and she’d flown him off through the air on a tiny disc of glass. He’d been sick. He’d nearly fainted and fallen off. Probably would have done if the Adamantine Man Tuuran hadn’t been there to catch him.
And then none of this would have happened.

The thought caught him mid-stride. He faltered. Best not to go
there. Just best not to. Instead, he took a breath and forced himself to look up at the wall. Zafir would be there somewhere, up next to Diamond Eye in the gold-glass shelter Li had made. He couldn’t see her now but she’d barely left the dragon’s side since the Vespinese had tried to hang her, and the dragon wouldn’t let anyone near except him and the two slave girls who still devotedly served her – they’d even made their own little shelter outside the walls on the rim. No one else dared venture near Diamond Eye’s perch.

He wandered across to the hatchery, inspecting the hatchlings and exchanging a few words with the Scales. He checked under the chain nets where the eggs were kept. Any excuse. Maybe, if he was lucky, one of the eggs would hatch –
that
would give him a reason not to go up onto the wall – but the eggs were all resolutely quiet. With a sigh he wandered back and forced his feet to turn the rest of him to the looming bulk of the dragon. Damned monster cast a shadow right across the eyrie this late in the day.

Someone was ahead of him, he saw, climbing up the steps in the wall. He wondered who it could be. A Taiytakei in the white tunic of a slave, but that was common enough.

Liang looked at the bottle on Belli’s desk and smiled. She’d made that. A simple piece of glasswork long since drained of any enchantment. Early work, but
her
work nevertheless. Maybe Kalaiya remembered and had sent it deliberately, a little message along with Baros Tsen’s apple wine. In her spare moments Liang felt for her. Everything she was had been founded on Tsen, and now he was gone and she was nothing, just a bed-slave like any other, wrinkled at the edges and unlikely to find any great favour. She’d fallen from the top of a mountain into a deep dark hole and all in a matter of days. There were probably plenty of slaves who’d spent years envying her and tittered at her fall, but she deserved better than that. They’d had a strange thing, Kalaiya and Tsen. She’d actually liked him.

I’ll buy her
, Liang decided.
She has half a lifetime left. Let her live it in peace.

She poured herself a glass. Maybe they could take Kalaiya with them. She wasn’t sure what use the slave might be but she probably
knew more of Tsen’s secrets than anyone except Tsen himself, and Tsen probably had more secrets than there were grains of sand in the desert. If there were hidden caches of treasure, secret alliances, debts unpaid, favours, then Kalaiya might know them. Things like that were currency for a man like Tsen, things you couldn’t put your finger on, ethereal and traceless.

Would it make a difference? She frowned. It actually might. Leaving on the dragon wasn’t much of a plan and she hadn’t been serious when she’d said it, but . . . could there actually be some sense to it? More to the point, could it
achieve
something even if it could be done? Steal the dragon while no one was looking? Vanish in the night. Or poison it and send it away – send Zafir with it if she could, but quietly Liang knew she’d never fool the dragon-queen so easily. Sink into the underworld of a city like Cashax where even the Elemental Men would have trouble finding her. Make their way to a ship bound for the dragon-realms. Vanish. Hope the Elemental Men wouldn’t follow. With Kalaiya and all Tsen’s old debts and favours in their pocket, it struck her that it might even work.

But no, that was the coward’s way. If she had to hang for Mai’Choiro Kwen and Sea Lord Shonda to be exposed for what they were, so be it. She sipped at the wine. It was good. She’d forgotten. Tsen had given her a bottle once but that was long gone. This one, if anything, was better. She smiled to herself. She actually felt slightly drunk and she hadn’t felt that for the best part of a year, not since she’d been sent here.

Bellepheros tried not to think of the wind up on the wall. The slave ahead was carrying a tray with a bottle balanced on top. Carrying it in one hand. Good luck with
that
in the wind; but the slave climbed the steps with ease. Bellepheros felt a pang of envy. Even thinking about going up there was making his knees wobble.

Practice, that’s all . . .

He could see Zafir now, sitting behind Diamond Eye. She was dressed in a simple white slave’s shift, her long legs crossed under her. He couldn’t tell if her eyes were closed but she looked as though she was meditating, a novelty among dragon-lords who were usually as restless as their mounts. As the slave with the tray approached, Zafir got up and walked to meet him, and then
without any warning kicked the tray out of his hand. The bottle went flying and something else too. Bellepheros ran up the steps, the wind and the horrible empty space all forgotten for a moment. The slave staggered and cried out. Zafir stooped and picked something off the ground and came up in a fighting crouch. The slave stooped to a crouch too, his hands weaving in front of him.

Bellepheros hauled himself onto the top of the wall. The wind smacked into him and almost knocked him tumbling back. He steadied himself and then stopped dead because Diamond Eye was watching the fight with a fierce intensity, snarling, fangs bare, wings half opened, tail swishing, held on the very brink of striking. But Zafir was stopping him. Why?

Zafir slashed the air. The slave jumped back and then forward again, rolling inside Zafir’s guard, only he wasn’t quick enough and she must have seen the strike coming. As he tumbled towards her, she took a nimble step sideways, right to the edge of the wall. Bellepheros caught a flash of the sun as Zafir brought her fist hard into the man’s back. The slave collapsed and lay still. By the time Bellepheros reached them, he was lying in a pool of blood. Zafir crouched low beside him, nose almost touching the ground, one hand on his head, pressing him into the stone, with an ear cocked to listen to any last words he might have had. She was snarling softly. She was also in the way and Bellepheros couldn’t see the man’s face, couldn’t see if he was alive or dead. If he was alive then it wouldn’t be for long but there might be something to be done about that . . . He glanced about, looking for watchers.