The Splintered Gods (53 page)

The eyrie shook as the cannon behind him blew apart.

Liang’s eyes bulged. The hatchling came at her, and the air was full of men on sleds and lightning, and any moment now one of them was going to see her, just another slave in the open, and shoot her down. She reached for a piece of glass to mould and throw at the dragon, but as she did, the hatchling suddenly turned and Liang saw the flicker of a man appear beside it and then vanish again. The hatchling jumped back and spat a gout of flame. The moment was enough. Liang threw the glass into the tunnel entrance, shaping it as it flew to seal the tunnel shut and the hatchling inside it. It wouldn’t hold for long but maybe long enough. She turned and ran back for the wall, up the steps and over the other side, looking for a place to hide.

The air popped beside her. A killer. She whimpered and looked down at herself but there was no cut, no bladeless knife drawing away already dripping red with her blood. He looked at her. The knife was in his hand, ready. ‘For whom do you fight, enchantress?’

She was shaking so much that she could hardly speak and she couldn’t stop looking at the knife. Any moment now and he’d use it and then she’d die, but worse Belli would die too. She had more glass and she could make a shield, but it wouldn’t matter because she didn’t have time and he could appear anywhere he liked and the bladeless knife would cut through metal and glass as though it was air, and then she’d never finish severing the moorings to sink them all into the storm-dark, and even if he didn’t kill her here and now, she’d sealed the hatchling into the tunnel and the bombs she’d made were in there too and she’d never get to . . .

She stopped. Froze for a moment, consumed by her own quivering and the pounding of her heart. The knife . . .

‘I would sink this eyrie into the storm-dark,’ she quavered, still staring at the knife. ‘I was trying to do that. I was cutting the chains. But
you
could do that. You could cut them all. In a blink. Any one of you could.’

His face was a blank mask. She had no idea whether he understood. She went from terror to wanting to shake him.

‘Cut the chains that tether the eyrie to the glasships! Finish what Tsen tried to do! It will all sink into the storm-dark and be gone for ever.’

He didn’t move. She closed her eyes and waited for the cut to end her life, but it didn’t come. When she opened them again, he’d vanished.

Diamond Eye was gone, lost to hunger and rage. Zafir felt his sense of death, his own coming end, but greater still his hunger to be a storm as he fell upon the glasships yet again, a frenzy of tooth and claw and lashing tail. Twice he tumbled towards the storm-dark below, helpless and dazed and dazzled with pain, mind ragged and jumbled and askew, and twice Zafir had screamed him back. She’d torn through the cacophony and the madness and rammed the order of her will into him.
Fly! Fly! Spread your wings and fly!
The second time they’d fallen they’d almost touched the maelstrom, but she’d done it. She’d saved them both and the dragon knew it.
See. We have a use.

Diamond Eye didn’t answer. He powered up in renewed fury towards the glasships as another one splintered and cracked under a hail of iron from the eyrie cannon. There was nothing their enemies could do but hang helplessly in the sky and hurl their lightning. Diamond Eye flew higher then turned and fell upon them, crashing into the highest, slashing and biting at the discs at the heart of it until the glasship tipped and began to slide to its end. He fell upon another and tore out its heart and gripped it with his claws, dragging it towards the next, shielding himself with it from the lightning that flashed and thundered around them. The glasships crashed together and exploded into shards while the dragon stormed on, slashing with his shattering tail, swooping and soaring as their gold rims glowed with white-hot light and Zafir felt the air prickle and scratch in the hail of lightning. They were almost over the eyrie now, the glasships raining death over everything, the battle already lost, the end coming close. Zafir closed her eyes. Her heart sang. They were primal beings now, both of them, locked together in this, dying as a dragon and a dragon-queen
should die. Lightning shattered the air above her, beside her, all around her. Noise deafening, light blinding, yet Diamond Eye jinked and dived and rose and rolled between the thunderbolts. The air smelled of fire and sorcery, that burning tang that rose sometimes from the depths of her old palace where the Silver King had made his miracles.

Lightning from the glasships was hitting the walls. Crazy didn’t flinch. Tuuran shook his head and turned his back and ran for the tunnels because now there was nothing he could do except find a sled and go. The eyrie shuddered again. He had the strangest feeling as though it was tipping, like a ship rolling in the swell of the sea.

A thunderbolt struck Diamond Eye’s wing near the shoulder, punching another hole through the skin. Sparks arced along his wing and rippled over his scales. He tipped sideways. The glowing golden rims of the glasships brightened to fire again. Another bolt hit him in the belly. He shrieked and tumbled into one of the glass discs, a savagery of tooth and claw and tail and fire, blindly smashing it down. Straps in Zafir’s harness groaned and snapped as he wheeled and tried to recover. She felt his rage at these ships-that-flew, burning her on the inside as his flames scorched the air without. Another bolt hit him at the base of his tail. She felt the shudder. Sparks ran over his scales and then there was another thunderclap and she felt her skin prickle . . .

A bolt hit his neck a yard in front of her. For a moment her mind went blank. The noise drowned everything. She almost flew from the saddle but the remains of the harness held. Her heart stopped and then began beating again. Every muscle turned rigid. Diamond Eye fell, blind, dazed with pain, one wing paralysed. He couldn’t lift his head.

We tried
, she told him.
We tried and we died well
. Then she urged him:
Fly! Fly! Flare your wings and fly, damn you!
But Diamond Eye was too far gone to hear or care for her tiny voice. He almost managed to right himself at the last, flaring one wing to break the fall, but he couldn’t flare the other and rolled. The dragon yard was suddenly above her, spinning wildly. He slammed into the stone
on his side. The crash smashed her hard against his scales and yet her harness still held, and though bones and muscles screamed and tore, somehow she was alive. Luck, this time. Diamond Eye had forgotten she was even there.

He moved sluggishly, unsteadily. Trying to right himself. Lightning flared again, striking the last cluster of cannon. She heard them die, exploding in showers of fireworks and flying twisted metal. The dragon yard was littered with shattered glass and dismembered dead. She tried to make her arms move, to make her hands uncurl from the fists they’d become.

Lightning struck from above. Diamond Eye spasmed. Zafir gasped as the shock of it ran through her. Her fingers were too numb to undo the harness but there was still the bladeless knife. She forced her shaking hand to pull it free and cut, slashing at the ropes, cutting the dragon’s scales and the flesh beneath in her frenzy to be free. Another bolt struck and then another. Diamond Eye writhed and curled and the sky went dark as one wing covered them both and she fell, sliding and tumbling over his burning scales to land on the stone, pressed up beside him, too broken to even move. Her eyes closed as thunder burst around her.

Liang made it to another tunnel. She felt the shift of the eyrie through her feet as she reached it, the lurch as it started to fall. Tsen had shown them all how long it would take, that the eyrie would fall slowly like a stricken glasship, not plunge like a stone, so she knew she had time. She paused and looked up before she entered the tunnel, watching the glasships overhead, dozens of them raining lightning in a storm around the dragon as it finally fell, and then picking out the glasships that had once belonged to Baros Tsen T’Varr, drifting up now, their dangling chains slack beneath. She stayed until she’d counted them and knew for certain that the Elemental Man had finished what she’d started.

The shock as the dragon hit the stone of the yard almost knocked her off her feet. She turned and ran as fast as she could and never mind how her legs burned and her feet hurt. She was in tunnels that had been the barracks once, an unfamiliar place, but that didn’t matter. They all spiralled in the same downward fractal pattern to the chamber at the eyrie’s core where Baros Tsen
had built his bathhouse amid the ring of white stone arches. She met no one. Everyone was dead or had fled to the darkest corner they could find. She stumbled and fell as she ran, legs pumping too fast for the rest of her to keep up until she sprawled across the white stone floor. She got up again, dimly aware of the pain, raced on, deeper and deeper, dodging and hurdling the ripped bodies that still lay scattered about until she reached the open doorway to the bathhouse. Cold air billowed out, chilled by the enchantments she’d made for the bath house to become a morgue.

She stopped. The arches. She’d seen them on the very first day she’d come to the eyrie, when Tsen showed her around.
What do you make of these, enchantress?
And she’d made nothing of them at all because they were simply a ring of white stone arches around a white stone slab. An altar to old forbidden gods perhaps, that was all she could say, and Tsen had laughed and declared it as fine a place as any to build his bath and drink his apple wine. After that, she’d not spared them a second thought.

The archways shimmered silver now. Shining liquid moonlight. She went up to one and almost touched it to see if it would ripple, then shook herself and shivered in the unnatural cold and ran on. She was here for Belli, to get them away before the eyrie plunged into the storm-dark, because when it did, everything here would be gone as though it had never existed. She ran past Tsen’s old rooms, past her workshop to Belli’s study, praying to the forbidden gods that he was still there, that he hadn’t moved, that she would find him; and there, waiting for her, was the crippled hatchling.

Liang skittered to a stop. The hatchling almost didn’t see her, but then it turned and shrieked and its talons scrabbled at the stone, clawing for purchase. Liang dived back into her workshop, looking for a globe of glass to throw, grabbing the first that came to hand. She stumbled, turned as she fell and threw the glass back at the doorway as hard as she could, willing it into a cage. The dragon pushed inside but it was slow and hampered by the narrow entrance. The glass missed its head and hit its flank and burst in a thunderclap of imploding air. The dragon lurched and seemed to shrink in on itself. It fell dead at once, a gaping hole in its side where a festering dark black mass now floated in the air, lit from within by tiny flickers of purple.

Horror gripped Liang as she realised what she’d done. The glass she’d thrown had been Red Lin Feyn’s captured piece of the storm-dark and now a tiny cloud of it hovered free in the doorway, the dead hatchling underneath blocking the rest of the way out.

She had to find a sled. She had to get to Belli. She had to . . . but there was no way she could move the hatchling on her own . . .

Lin Feyn had never said what would happen if the globe broke. Something bad, surely. Maybe not so bad if they were all doomed anyway, but now she couldn’t get out and so Belli would die and so would she, and she wasn’t ready for that, not after everything they’d been through. She reached her mind into the storm-dark as she would into her enchanted glass. There was a twist, Lin Feyn had told her. A reaching in and then doing something different. Not a bit different but completely alien.

Glass was all about control. Delicate, intricate, precise thoughts.

Maybe she could pile up some furniture and climb over. Maybe there was enough space . . . But the eyrie was falling and it would all take too long.

She reached out and touched the storm-dark. She screamed all her pain and desperation and anguish, knowing that she’d never make it move, that it had her trapped.

Before her eyes the storm-dark obediently curled into a ball and floated in her palm.

Kill me
, whispered the dragon through the lightning and the screaming pain. Zafir opened her eyes and shuddered awake. Every thing ached, but worse than that was the dull numbness inside. When she tried to move, her arms flailed. Her legs twitched. She tried again and cried out at a stabbing pain that ripped through her insides. The doll-woman’s circlet felt tight around her skull. Squeezing her.

I can’t. I’m dying.

Kill me, little one. We are falling into the abyss.

Then the storm-dark will kill us both. You’ll come back.

The storm-dark will unmake me. It will be the end.

She saw the dragon’s thoughts and understood. A final end and the dragon was, at last, afraid. With gasping effort she forced her eyes to open and looked for the bladeless knife. It was right beside her. Her fingers clawed at the circlet. Somewhere, the doll-woman
was trying to kill her. She’d always supposed it would be sudden and quick. Not like this.

Her hand closed around the hilt of the knife.

Drive it deep, little one.

Diamond Eye shuddered as lightning hit him again. She’d have to leave the wing that lay over her, shielding her. She’d have to haul herself out. Have to drive the knife through his skull. She started to crawl. Standing up was too much. She pulled herself with her arms and pushed with the one leg that still worked, inching along his body. She wondered briefly why she was doing this, what difference it made, then threw the thought away. Diamond Eye was hers and she was his. She pushed her way out from under his wing, hauled herself up with her hands, tugging on his scales until she was standing on one leg. The other would barely take any weight. She whimpered at the pain around her head. The pressure was crushing her skin.

I’m cold
, she told him. She was bleeding inside. Had to be. She could feel blood inside her armour too, drying, tacky, sticking her silk shift to her skin.