The Splintered Gods (39 page)

Sivan handed Tsen his black rod. ‘Release the chain!’

Tsen touched the rod to the enchanted glass welded into the stone and thought of the chain coming loose. The glass shifted and parted and the chain jerked free. Sivan nodded to the gondola.

‘Inside now! Get this over the yard where the eggs are.’

Tsen shook his head. ‘Kalaiya first.’

The shifter shoved him hard. Tsen almost tripped and fell. He stumbled halfway up the ramp and staggered into the gondola. And there she was, scared and shaking like a leaf, but it was her.

‘Kalaiya!’

Zafir flew in straight and fast. Shonda’s glasships couldn’t possibly miss her.
It will hurt, deathbringer. It will hurt us both. But it has to be this way.
The lightning cannon of the nearest glasship began to glow. They’d seen her. And after one lit up, another followed and then another. She’d felt it in Dhar Thosis. Lightning hurt but lightning didn’t kill, not a dragon. And she had the armour that Chay-Liang made for her, while the Elemental Man behind her had nothing. Bound to the dragon by his harness, he couldn’t simply shift away into the air, and when the lightning came he would die. There was no way to be sure that he would die and she would not, but she didn’t care any more. If Shonda killed her too, then so be it. Another gamble poorly made.

At the last moment Diamond Eye veered just as the first bolt hit him square in the shoulder. Zafir felt his mind blank and squealed in shared pain as his wing fell limp and he spiralled sharply down. A second blast hit him close behind her. Sparks arced over her glass-and-gold armour.
The Elemental Man . . .
But she had no room for those thoughts any more. She screamed as Diamond Eye tumbled and tipped onto his back, plummeting through the air towards the distant sand. A third blast hit him in the belly. The world spun, sky, earth, sky, earth, all roaring closer. The wind ripped at her head, trying to tear it off her shoulders. She clung to him. Her vision narrowed. Red tinged everything. For a moment she heard only a roaring, louder and louder in her ears, more than a hurricane wind – the screaming wail of death and a thousand vengeful ancestors. The glasships drifted away, lost into the darkness and a million twinkling stars. The desert sand rushed at her face. Zafir screamed again, one last savage burst of will to live, to stay breathing, for hearts to keep beating. Screamed into the chaos that was the dragon’s mind.

And lit, for a moment, a spark. A flicker of order, a surge of instinct. Diamond Eye’s wings stretched and flared and tore at the rushing wind with a savage bite that crushed her into his scales and
squeezed every gasp of air out of her and then squeezed some more. She felt her ribs bend and creak, and there were her ancestors, riding their whirlwind to take her, and this time she had nothing left.

They hit the ground hard, hard as the smack of a dragon’s tail, and for a moment everything went dark; but her ancestors never came, and when she opened her eyes Diamond Eye was on the ground, his wings stretched wide, glaring at the sky while her body was one long tortured shriek of pain. She weathered it, waiting for the waves to fade enough for her to move. Three long painful breaths and then she sat up and never mind the hurt. Her face was bleeding where her helm had been slammed against it. Her ribs had taken the worst but those pains were hard throbbing aches, not sharp stabs. Nothing broken, then. Cracked maybe, but not broken. Diamond Eye pawed at the sand, hungry to smash and shatter and burn and rend, waiting for her to release him to be what a dragon should be but she didn’t. He let out a cry, a challenge of fury and pain.

Is the killer dead?
She couldn’t feel him behind her but she couldn’t turn her head enough to see. It hurt too much.

Diamond Eye threw himself into the air. Patience was something for others. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t matter. Death was the little death, and then came rebirth and he’d come again, over and over until the creatures that flew and spat their white fire were smashed and gone. Zafir rode his rage, taking it in, mingling it with her own – and the Great Flame knew she had plenty enough of that – turning it and guiding it. Nudging him until he eased gently down from his fury. She let him race back and forth, burning the sand to glass to let the fire out of him until at last he was ready to listen.

Wait. Just a little
, she soothed him.
Just a little. Is the killer dead?

She brought him down and this time he stayed long enough for her to turn her head to the Elemental Man who’d come to make sure that she obeyed. Neck snapped, lightning-charred, doll-limbed. Very, very dead.

She was free.

From above this time
, she told the dragon.
The way it should have been.

She started to laugh.

*

‘Kalaiya!’ Tsen gazed at her face, and Kalaiya stared back as though he was mad and a complete stranger.

‘Tsen? You’re not dead? But I saw—’

‘The rod. Quickly.’ Sivan pushed her away, none too gently, and if Tsen had had a knife on him he might have used it, but as it was he clenched his fists and did as Sivan asked. The glasship moved over the dragon yard. He felt Kalaiya’s stare on his back as he lowered the gondola and watched in a daze as Scales brought four dragon eggs and rolled them up the ramp, doing exactly as alchemist-Sivan ordered. When they were done, Tsen brandished his black rod at the shifter. Sivan pointed to a small sled. The Scales loaded that too.

‘Now do as you promised,’ Tsen hissed. Kalaiya was still staring at him. She wasn’t stupid. She’d seen him use the rod and knew he was no illusion, and yet her eyes wouldn’t have it.

‘I saw you dead,’ she said. She touched him and his vision blurred with tears because she brought everything he loved back into the world simply by being there. Baros Tsen T’Varr, short and fat and happy, only without much of the happy just now.

‘Touching.’ Sivan pulled Kalaiya aside for a second time and stood at Tsen’s shoulder, a hand on his back. ‘Down to the desert! Now! And quickly! We don’t have long, T’Varr. The Elemental Men will not be kind to you if they catch us.’

Tsen touched the black rod to the pilot golem and they drifted away from the eyrie. ‘What happens if they catch
you
, skin-shifter? Do the rest of your brother Righteous Ones under the Konsidar pretend you don’t exist? Is it war between us?’

He didn’t get an answer. Sivan stood at his shoulder, tense as a drum. He flinched as Tsen almost skimmed the edge of the storm-dark in his haste to be away and only relaxed when they were underneath it where they wouldn’t be seen. ‘Now tell the golem to take us to the ground.’ Sivan clambered past the eggs and opened the gondola’s ramp. A great wind rushed in and swirled around them. He grabbed Tsen and pushed him at the sled the Scales had loaded with the eggs.

‘I’ve done my part, T’Varr,’ he shouted over the howl of the air. ‘I’ve got your woman for you. Now you do yours. Ride with me!
Release the other glasships. Drop your eyrie to be devoured by the storm-dark and no one will ever know!’

Far away, out in same the desert night, Diamond Eye tucked in his wings and dropped from the sky like a falling star, straight and hard and fast, and this time the Vespinese never saw him coming. He hit Shonda’s gondola like a ball from a cannon, ripped it off its chains and fell on, and all the Vespinese saw was a blur and a mighty shape and a gondola that was hanging in the air one moment and gone the next, while the heart of the glasship above cracked and then shattered into fragments. The great glass disc shuddered in its spinning and began to slide out of the air. Diamond Eye barely even slowed. He levelled out across the dunes and not a single lightning cannon glowed in his wake.

How it should have been.

Zafir flew him skimming across the sand, miles and miles, and then brought him down. She unbuckled the corpse of the Elemental Man and threw it off and then slid down beside it. It was hard to resist the temptation to have her dragon pick up the gondola and shake it, but she simply knocked on the ramp instead. When nothing happened, Diamond Eye bit the ramp open and ripped it off. A crack of lightning shot out at once and hit him on the nose. She felt its sting but the dragon understood her mind and, dulled or wild, dragons always enjoyed playing a little with their food before they ate. He backed away and waited, watching her.

Zafir peered warily inside. One battered Taiytakei in emerald robes crouched behind an upturned table. She ducked instinctively as he fired his wand, but he was shaking so badly that the lightning hit the inside of the gondola. Behind him Shonda quivered under a table cut from a single diamond. The gondola walls were silver and jade, carved into dragons and lions. Six chests of gold sat against the walls, and three glass cabinets. The cabinet doors had fallen open and golden bottles and white clay pots rolled around the floor. Behind the diamond table a silver staircase curled up to a second level. Zafir narrowed her eyes. Diamond Eye felt three souls, all of them deliciously terrified, but she saw only two.

‘It’s up to you whether we make this bloody.’ Zafir stepped into the hole where the ramp had been, trusting to the armour
the enchantress had made. ‘Where’s the third of you? I know he’s here.’

Shonda fired straight at her chest. Her skin tingled, a few muscles twitched, a corona of sparks fluttered around her but nothing more. The man in the emerald feathers drew a long knife from his belt and threw himself forward. Zafir stepped back, letting him stumble past her and out of the gondola. He slashed. The blade skittered off her armour. She looked at him as he wheeled to face her, cocked her head and then laughed at him, wondering whether to have Diamond Eye squash him or burn him. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Him in his emerald feathers and her in gold-glass armour. It seemed hardly fair.

Another thunderclap sounded behind her. She shivered and twitched. Shonda had shot her in the back. The enchantress’s armour shrugged most of it aside, but the man with the knife took his chance and jumped, thrusting at her neck, and he might have killed her too if it hadn’t been for the dragon-scale she wore underneath with its high collar. As it was, she staggered back, choking from the blow to her throat, while the emerald-feathered man feinted a thrust at her face, quick as a snake, kicked at her legs, almost knocking her down, then slashed at her chest and cut at her hand so quickly she only just whipped it away. He was limping. It slowed him, and that was probably the only reason she was still standing. Careless.

‘You’re good.’ Zafir raised an eyebrow. ‘Bodyguard? If I wasn’t wearing this armour, you’d win. I don’t even have a weapon.’

He was circling, trying to manoeuvre her back round to the hole so Shonda could shoot her again. She folded her arms.

‘You realise I have a dragon?’

He still didn’t answer, though she could see it in his face. He understood.

‘I don’t know you. I have no quarrel with you. Don’t die for that pig in there.’

Nothing. Zafir sighed.
Pin him.

It was a hard thing for a dragon to take a man in his talons and not crush him to death, and maybe Diamond Eye was still smarting from the battering he’d taken from Shonda’s lightning cannon. His tail whipped in a silent arc and took the emerald-feathered man in
the side and caved in half his chest. Zafir shrugged, crouched beside him, took his knife and finished him. A quick kill. A mercy stroke.

Back to the gondola. Shonda was on his feet. Backing away, he trod on a bottle, lost his footing and fell over as he fired at her again. Missed. He didn’t get another chance. Zafir bent down and pulled the wand out of his hand.

A sharp warning from Diamond Eye. She ducked fast and low as a movement flickered from the top of the stairs and something came flying out and shot over her head and out through the ripped-open ramp. A glass sphere landed in the desert sand. In the blink of an eye it blew up into a huge sphere bigger than the gondola and as thin as paper. Diamond Eye smashed it and then flung the tip of his armoured tail like a spear straight through the gondola’s silver skin, rattling everything. Two of the cabinets fell over and smashed. Zafir felt the spark of life from whoever had thrown the orb flicker and die.

She looked at Lord Shonda, wondering what to do. He was trembling but at least he wasn’t begging. ‘So you’re the most powerful man in the world, are you?’

‘What do you want? What is your price to serve me? I have anything. Everything. You know that because you know who I am. Fly for me and I will give you worlds!’

She would think afterwards that there were so many other things she could have done. Pacts that could have been made. Bargains struck. Words spoken. Maybe he had an enchanter to take the doll-woman’s circlet off her head. But in the end he was just another fat old man who thought he could own her, and what she remembered most of all was watching him turn away from her, tapping his arms to remind her that she was a slave and he was not. What then struck her eye was the brand lying on the floor, of three dragons and a lion entwined together, and the realisation that she had a fire-breathing monster outside who could heat it to a nice cherry-red in no time at all. And when she thought afterwards of all those other things and remembered how the most powerful man in the world had screamed and screamed and screamed as she’d marked him, there was never even the slightest sliver of regret.

Except perhaps that she could have held the brand to his skin a little longer.

*

Sivan raced the sled back towards the eyrie. Tsen clung on as best he could. They were really going to do it. Sivan was really going to bring the whole eyrie down. One glasship, Chay-Liang had told him, one glasship was all they needed to hold it up, but with none it would fall. And he shouldn’t do it, he knew that, but Kalaiya . . .

Or maybe he
should
do it . . .

They reached the rim. Sivan crept the sled to where the first glasship chains merged into gold-glass were welded into the stone. Tsen didn’t even have to step off to release them.

‘Do it!’ hissed Sivan.

Chay-Liang is probably here. Others. Good men, good women. The storm-dark will swallow them all.
But hadn’t he had the same thought himself, back before the Vespinese had come?
Yes. But I was going to send them away first. Mai’Choiro and I would have gone together. And alone.