The Splintered Gods (6 page)

The jade raven eyed him from its cage with interest. The gale and its swinging perch didn’t seem to bother it. Tsen turned away. As he did, the wind caught his robe and almost lifted it over his head, making him look even more of an idiot. He looked across the rim of the eyrie at the violet storm below.
I should just jump, I really should. Save us all the bother . . .
But instead he struggled back down to the yard and aimed for the tunnels that would take him out of this hellish wind. State he was in, he’d probably pick the wrong entrance without thinking and end up among the Scales or something like that.

Chay-Liang caught up with him before he could get away. ‘Tsen—’

‘Send a jade raven,’ he mumbled.
She
could do it. Saved him from thinking. ‘Send a jade raven to the Elemental Men in Khalishtor. Tell them what we did. All of it. Do it now.’

‘Tsen . . .’

He stopped for a moment and looked at her. ‘Dear gods in whom we don’t believe, Liang, is it always like this up here?’

‘So far, yes.’ She was grinning now as though she liked it, and for a moment, through all the pain in his head, Tsen hated her. ‘Tsen—’

‘Later.’ He pushed past. She was mad, that was it. Happened to enchanters, didn’t it? They cracked and all sensible thought oozed out of their edges . . . He forgave her though, five minutes later when he found she’d had his bath prepared when she’d seen him coming; and the next few hours were a blur of warmth and pain and Xizic resin and Kalaiya and relief that no one was here to hang him yet, all a little marred by a lethargic dread of what was yet to come. Chay-Liang brought him something from the alchemist to help him sleep; he drank it without even thinking, and when he woke up again, his head was clearer and only throbbed like a badly sheeted sail. He called her back and they walked the walls together, battered by the relentless gale as the eyrie drifted in its lazy orbit around the Godspike.

‘Couldn’t we go lower?’ he shouted at her over the wind. Liang had six glasships dragging the eyrie through the sky. As far as Tsen could see, she’d moved the eyrie higher and higher until they were as far from the storm-dark as her gasping lungs could stand.

‘We could,’ she yelled back. ‘But you get used to it. Give it a few days.’

‘I may not have a few days! And if I do, I would prefer them not to hurt so much.’ Was it possible to sound plaintive and shout at the same time? He rather thought he’d managed it.

She offered him some reeking drink or other. When he asked her what it was, she shrugged and shouted over the gale, ‘Bellepheros makes it. It helps with the thinness of the air.’ He waved her away then watched as she shrugged and drank a mouthful and offered it again. Bellepheros. The alchemist from the dragon-lands.

‘You trust that slave too much.’ Far too much, for what they had between the two of them was nothing like the way it should be between mistress and slave.

‘What?’

He leaned into her and shouted back, ‘I said you trust your slave too much!’

She looked at him then. Not a word, not a flicker of her eyes, not the shadow of a smirk, but he knew she was laughing at him. After a second or two he had to laugh as well. Kalaiya knew his soul. That was simply the way fate had turned. Maybe it was the same for Liang and her alchemist. At any rate, he was the last person in the world to lecture anyone when it came to overly liking their slaves.

He pulled Liang into some shelter where at least they were out of the wind and he could hear himself think, snatched the cup out of Liang’s hands and drank. ‘Yes, yes.’ And he half-listened as she told him how breathlessness and nausea and splitting heads had blighted everyone until the alchemist started making his potions. Everyone except the rider-slave Zafir of course, who laughed at them all for being so pathetic. When Liang was done, Tsen looked about him. His eyrie, still
his
eyrie, kept aloft by hostile uncaring sorcery from another age.

‘We’re not safe here,’ he said. He looked up at the glasships. ‘Sooner or later they will fail.’

‘I have more, loitering over the desert, out of the way and out of sight. Belli and I talked it through while you were gone.’

Belli?
Tsen chuckled and shook his head. What, were they lovers now? ‘You trust that slave
far
too much.’ He spoke with a twinkle in his words this time. So what if they were? ‘Borrowed time, Liang. We’re all on borrowed time. We must make the most of it.’

‘One glasship is enough to keep us aloft, T’Varr, and we have six. See how they all pull at slight angles to one another –
that
was the hard part to get right. If any one fails then it will fall clear of the outer rim of the eyrie. There will be plenty of time to summon another. We’ve been here for days and I haven’t lost one yet.’

‘It will be quite a sight if you do.’ Tsen shook his head. ‘But I wonder if we should release them. All of them. Let this eyrie and its monsters sink into the storm-dark and be gone. Evacuate everyone. Leave me behind. Wipe it all out. Mai’Choiro can stay in his cell. We’ll go down together, he and I.’ He took a deep
breath and turned to look at the dragon at last, the terror that had destroyed Dhar Thosis. Its wounds were already healing. The eyrie wall where it sat was marked by dried blood. Was there anything magical about dragon blood? There ought to be, he thought, but neither the alchemist nor Chay-Liang had run around clearing it up and cackling gleefully to themselves as they did, so he supposed there wasn’t.

He frowned and touched his temple. His head wasn’t hurting any more and Chay-Liang was smiling at him. He rubbed his fingers into his skin, trying to chase away the last ghosts of the pain, then he turned and stared out to the west to where, if you flew for long enough, the Konsidar rose out of the sands.

‘Ravens flew from Dhar Thosis to Vespinarr on the day the city fell,’ he said. ‘Shonda knows what has happened. They would have reached him before I reached Senxian’s palace. He’ll be looking for us. As big as the desert is, it won’t take him long to find us. It’s a race now – Shonda or the Elemental Men.’ Tsen shook his head. ‘I left in too much haste. I should have sent a raven to Khalishtor at once. Another mistake.’

He paused and then put a hand to Chay-Liang’s shoulder. ‘He’ll come with the best and most deadly of what his money can buy for him, Liang. He won’t wait for the Crown of the Sea Lords to decide what’s to be done. He’ll seize everything we have in the name of his “friend” Senxian and offer the new lord of Dhar Thosis some marvellous reparation. He’s probably prepared a suitable puppet already, skulking somewhere in the shadows. Probably even made that deal before Dhar Thosis burned. He’ll take everything that was ours and destroy every threat to his ambition. Quai’Shu will be allowed to live because he’s a broken old man who can’t string two sentences together any more, but only so they can try him and hang him for the look of it when it suits them. The rest of us?’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘He’ll kill every last one of us if he has even the slightest reason. You, me, Kalaiya, all of us. The only ones he
won’t
kill will be the ones who deserve it most.’

His eyes drifted to the far side of the wall, to the dragon staring down into the maelstrom beneath them. He’d never seen it do that before. Usually it stared across the dragon yard, eyeing everyone with greedy hunger, or else it stared at the sky. At night in
particular it sometimes looked up for hours, as though mesmerised by the stars.

‘Whatever he does, however terrible it is, you mustn’t stand in his way. He needs your alchemist. Make sure he needs you too. You must survive, Chay-Liang, no matter what fate comes to the rest of us. Close your eyes and look away. Hold the truth close to your heart and never let him see that you have it. Keep it until you can destroy him.’ His grip on her shoulder tightened. ‘But when when that time comes, Liang, you must annihilate him. You must remove him from existence, utterly and completely, or he’ll grow back like a badly excised cancer.’

Chay-Liang met his gaze and, gods help him, even looked sorry for him. ‘Perhaps if you hanged the rider-slave yourself before they came it might help show she acted without your order?’

‘No.’ Tsen shook his head. ‘I will hang beside her for letting it happen, no matter the who or the how, and so I should.’ He leaned into Chay-Liang and hissed in her ear, ‘I played a stupid game and I lost, but I will take him down alongside me before he does it again. I’ll not hang the dragon-rider and nor should you. Not until she speaks. She’s the one other person who knows the truth and she has nothing to lose by telling it!’ He let out a bitter laugh and pulled away, shaking his head. ‘Although if you have any useful enchanter tricks to spirit me away to a quiet little countryside villa while making me appear to be dead and hanged, I’ll become a most enthusiastic listener. I have one, you know. In the Dominion, a hundred miles along the coast from Merizikat. With a nice orchard full of apples and a winery. And a good bathhouse.’

‘She’ll die as soon as she speaks. I’m sure she knows that.’

Tsen stopped, struck again by the memory of the two of them in his bath together, how she’d knocked the poisoned wine out of his hand after so carefully putting it there in the first place. Why? He still hadn’t the first idea. ‘So will I,’ he said. ‘And you know, I sometimes wonder how much that matters. Maybe we promise to send her home.’

He watched his enchantress closely after he said that and saw the conflict plain across her face. The dragon gone and the rider-slave with it: dead would be better but gone was still good. Then hunger to get it done. And happiness for the alchemist who would surely
go too. And then sadness, and for the same reason. Rather too much sadness, Tsen thought. He kept on watching though, until the play was done, and then squeezed her shoulder. ‘You made her armour. She ruined it. You should start making more. If you have something Shonda needs then he won’t kill you until it’s finished. Be slow. Let it buy you time. Make a few adjustments to keep her in line if you like.’

He let Liang go, and together they watched the dragon again. It was staring at the pillar of the Godspike going on and on and vanishing into the deep blue of the desert sky overhead. Tsen stared too. You didn’t get a blue like that at sea, nor in Xican or Khalishtor – though in Khalishtor you rarely got anything except rain-cloud grey. Only in the desert a blue like this.

‘Do you think it knows what the Godspike is?’ he asked.

Chay-Liang chuckled. ‘I’m not sure it knows much more than that it’s hungry.’ She sighed. ‘If you come out here at night, the Godspike has a light to it. But if you do, remember to bring a blanket. It’s a bitter cold under the stars up here.’ She left him there, staring. Presumably she had things to do. Presumably Tsen did too. He just couldn’t think what any of them were.

She was right about the cold. He came out again to look at the Godspike that night because yet again he couldn’t sleep and, well, because there were probably only a handful of people across the whole of Takei’Tarr who’d flown above the storm-dark cloud and stared up at the spike in the darkness and he wasn’t sure that he’d have another chance; but in the end there wasn’t much to see. A dim pale glow, barely even visible and quickly lost among the sparkle of stars. After he’d looked at it for a while, he made the mistake of walking out over the wall and across the rim to the very edge of the eyrie itself, standing in the howling wind and looking over the lightning-tossed storm below. He stood, swaying, almost hoping that a sudden gust might catch him and make him stumble. Toss him over the edge, but it didn’t. Mostly, after that, he stayed in, down in his bathhouse with Kalaiya and his wine. His Bronzehand finger tingled now and then but he ignored it. There wasn’t much to show any more. All that was left was waiting for his killers to come and guessing which ones would get to him first.

6

Silence

The dragon Silence darted and danced through the underworld of Xibaiya until it found a waiting egg. It eased into the dormant skin as a man might slip on an old shoe and was reborn as flesh and bone. The sensation was a familiar comfort and yet always new. Every skin was different.
What colours will I be? What sex? Will my tail be long? My neck? How many fangs shall I have?
All these things were a joy of discovery with every hatching, yet this time it paused and held back the urge to writhe and smash its way to freedom. Inside its egg it opened its brand-new inner eye and let its senses roam, searching for thoughts and other things to which the little ones were blind.

Within its egg the dragon called Silence remained quiet. It found much and looked at all the things its mind could touch in this strange and wonderful place where it soon would be born, filled with alien thoughts. It found sorceries that were fresh and strange and one that was ancient and familiar and colossal and overwhelming, older than the dragon itself. Something made before its first ever dawn, remembered from a joyous lifetime more than a thousand years ago.

It looked and bided its time. Men with ropes and chains were always watching, waiting for an egg to hatch. Men with lightning too, which was new. It slid inside their thoughts and sang songs of faraway dreams. It watched and listened and waited with a patience that strained its nature for the moment to be free. While it did, it wove mysteries into the wandering memories of those who watched over it, lullabies to make them dull.

When the killers came, flying on their weaves of magic and sorcery, the dragon felt them first.

The Lords of Vespinarr