Read The Splintered Gods Online
Authors: Stephen Deas
The Splintered Gods (11 page)
Shifter skin? But her eyes . . . ‘You’re not her. You’re not.’
Not-Kaliaya shook her head. ‘Your slave is who you think she is, nothing less, nothing more. I borrowed her face because I knew you wouldn’t come here without her.’ She touched his cheek and a horrible pain flowed across his face and into his head. He felt his skin writhe as something terrible happened inside him. She caught him as he fell. He waited as the lights went out for some last snide remark from his little voices but they had nothing to say, not for this.
The dragon Silence hurled itself through the tunnels. There was blood in the air and war on the wind. There were dragons, dulled maybe, but perhaps they would have followed had it asked. Perhaps if it had spoken its thoughts into theirs and broken their chains then they would have turned on the little ones, but as Silence reached the open air, it swiftly forgot them amid the chaos of thunder and lightning as the little ones fought one another. And it might have circled and listened to their thoughts and revelled in them, in their pain and hope, in their despair and fear, but it saw, as it took to the wing and slipped into the darkness of the night past a falling glasship, what lay below.
The storm-dark. It had seen it before, in the life before this at the end when the moon sorcerers had thrown its flesh into the sea and sent its soul to Xibaiya. An unravelling of the very stuff of matter. Silence dived and skimmed the surface, tasting the scent of it, touching its smell, and it knew as it did that it had been right. But this was different. In tiny subtle ways but there was a smell and a taste of a wrongness, of the creeping hole of the Nothing it had found in the realm of the dead. It tasted the Nothing here in the air. The dead goddess and the Black Moon, her killer, were no longer the walls and door to the prison that had kept the Nothing locked away.
The battle raged above, forgotten. A vast disc of glass, spinning slowly, fell past the dragon, too slow for gravity alone to be at work. A silver orb dangled beneath from a dozen chains, half of them broken. The dragon watched the glass touch the Nothing and piece by piece cease to be. Not shattered or smashed or burned or transformed or destroyed but annihilated, every piece of history and future taken away. Matter that was not and had never been. The dragon watched and remembered its purpose, why it
had chosen this place as it flew across the roiling black clouds and the purple lightning, the shroud that kept the Nothing ever out of sight. It circled the Godspike, unexpected and vast, piercing the cloud and piercing the Nothing as well, an impossibility standing proudly before it. The dragon Silence flew closer and touched the shaft with its talons and then flipped away. It knew this stone well.
Bellepheros cowered under Diamond Eye, sheltering from the wind and the fight and the bursts of lightning. The Vespinese on their glass sleds scoured the yard in circles, hurling their thunderbolts until nothing moved. Others landed, throwing themselves in waves against the beleaguered defenders until, hopelessly outnumbered, Tsen’s men finally surrendered. Most of the Vespinese then headed off into the tunnels while a few handfuls stayed in the dragon yard, stripping the survivors of their glass and gold, rounding up everyone who was still alive to pile the bodies of the dead. Amid the smashed ruin of the fallen glasship, some of the hatchlings were loose from their chains. Like Diamond Eye, they were oddly still and strangely quiet. They kept looking up at the great red-gold dragon while Diamond Eye himself stared fixedly across the eyrie. Bellepheros squinted. The dragon was looking at two figures standing together and yet apart, but the glass lenses Liang had made for him were down in his laboratory, and without them he couldn’t make out who the figures were.
More and more Vespinese landed. They poured along the walls and through the five iron doors into the tunnels and passages that spiralled through the stone, rooting out anyone who was left to resist. Bellepheros sat down, miserable and cold, and huddled against the dragon’s warmth. Out over the great cyclone of the storm-dark the Vespinese fleet drifted closer, so slowly that by the time they reached the eyrie, Shonda’s victorious soldiers were herding everyone into the yard, dividing them by caste. Slaves. Scales. Tsen’s soldiers. Kwens and t’varrs and hsians. Bellepheros squinted and finally saw Zafir, still with her head held high as soldiers pushed and shoved her. A body hung limp beside her, dragged between two Vespinese.
Li!
His heart jumped. The soldiers dropped her on the ground. She lay still for a moment then rolled onto her side. One of the
Vespinese kicked her. He would have kicked her again but Zafir stepped between them. Diamond Eye suddenly shifted. The soldier drew back his fist. Zafir didn’t move. Even as the punch knocked her down, Diamond Eye’s wings flared, and Bellepheros had only a moment to throw himself as flat as he could and grab the edge of the wall before the wind of the dragon’s leap grabbed him by his cloak and tore it away and almost flipped him into the air. His cloak fluttered off into the night, drifting away to die in the maelstrom below as Diamond Eye skimmed the dragon yard. There was a short sharp scream as the dragon plucked up the soldier who’d struck Zafir and then crushed him, still in mid-air, bits splattering over those below. Diamond Eye tossed the mangled corpse among the Vespinese, landed softly on the far wall and turned his back to stare at the Godspike again. For three long breaths no one moved, waiting to see what would happen next. When Diamond Eye stayed where he was, the Vespinese slowly returned to sorting their prisoners. They left Zafir and Li well alone.
Bellepheros picked himself up. The Vespinese still hadn’t seen him. He ducked over the far side of the wall, rolled and stumbled down its slope onto the eyrie rim, scrambling through the ruins of black-powder cannon, around the cranes that dangled over the edge, through the rubbish and detritus. Li was the worst, insisting that nothing ever be thrown away, and so the rim was covered with piles of wood and stone and metal and boxes of broken glass as well as coils of rope and heaps of half-cleared sand. He circled the eyrie until he was close to Diamond Eye again and then stopped. A mile below swirled an utter darkness, fractured by violet flashes deep within. The Godspike rose before him, punching through it all, lit by its own starlight glow, a dim light climbing to the heavens and perhaps beyond. In that moment he thought perhaps he understood why the dragons stared at it so – to them everything else was small. So immeasurably insignificant.
He shook himself and scrambled clumsily up the shallow slope of the wall and stood beside Diamond Eye’s talons as he had before, carefully out of sight. The sky was getting lighter. He hadn’t thought much of it, scrambling round the rim, but the eyrie was lit up now by a light brighter than any full moon – the light of the glasships clustered above, a hundred of them jostling for space,
their lightning-cannon edges glowing bright white, illuminating each other and the dragon yard below. They lowered more gondolas as he watched. Soldiers crowded the eyrie and lined the walls, making everything theirs while the remnants of Tsen’s men stood in beaten huddles, ringed by soldiers in glass and gold. The yard fell quiet save for the rush of the wind. The faint glow of a hundred lightning wands gleamed off the white stone of the yard.
No one came close to the dragons.
Soldiers marched out of the tunnels. They had Tsen’s prisoner with them, Mai’Choiro, the kwen of Vespinarr. There was some shouting but Bellepheros couldn’t make any words out over the constant rush of wind. Mai’Choiro dragged one of Tsen’s men away from the rest. Lightning flared and thunderclapped. The man arched and lurched across the stone, twitched a while and then lay still. Mai’Choiro moved on, inspecting his prizes. He stopped by Zafir, and all at once Diamond Eye quivered and changed in the snap of a finger from boredom into a killer on the brink of attack.
‘Don’t,’ whispered Bellepheros, as if the dragon would either hear or pay him any attention. It felt the threat to its rider in the Taiytakei’s thoughts and that was all that mattered. They’d seen it once already. How stupid could they be?
Whatever passed between Zafir and Mai’Choiro, the wind stole their words. A Vespinese kicked the back of Zafir’s leg, forcing her to kneel. Diamond Eye flinched and bared his teeth, fire building inside him. With a sigh of exasperation Bellepheros jumped up and ran along the wall, flapping his arms and shouting, making as much fuss and noise as he could over the howl of the wind, hoping someone would notice him in the gloom. ‘Mai’Choiro Kwen! Your Holiness! Do not! For all our sakes, do not!’ He reached the nearest steps and came down as fast as his old knees would take him, but by the time the Vespinese noticed, Mai’Choiro had already moved on and Zafir was still alive.
At the bottom of the steps soldiers seized him. When Bellepheros told them who and what he was, they dragged him to Mai’Choiro, but the kwen only shook his head and waved them away after asking, ‘And you, alchemist. Do
you
know where Baros Tsen T’Varr can be found?’
*
White. Impervious. The eyrie had been the same. The enchanted stone of the half-gods before they fell. The Silver Kings. The dragon Silence flew higher, on and on, chasing the very top of the spike until the air was gone and the desert stars were joined by a million more, and the mile upon mile of the swirling maelstrom was made small by the limitless world stretched beneath it. At the very top the dragon Silence sat and perched and knew that no other creature had ever been to this place, not a single one in the whole course of history. From its height atop the world it reached out its thoughts and searched and searched until it found a fragment of something remembered, like a reflection or an image cast in smoke, fleeting and flickering but impossible to forget. It was far away, but the dragon knew it of old, and the treacherous gift of the stars it carried too. It knew them from before the world had shattered into splinters and been so haphazardly stitched back together.
For a long time it watched, long after the battle in the eyrie was done. It watched and it thought until finally it spread its wings and let itself fall.
I see you
, the dragon whispered.
Tuuran stroked his axe. ‘I’m hungry.’
They separated. Tuuran went one way, Crazy the other, circling the house and coming up on the night-skins one from each side. Up close Tuuran could smell the taint of smoke on the soldiers’ clothes. He’d spotted the night-skins heading away and was reckoning to slip in behind them, so it was a bit of a surprise when he almost walked straight into them coming towards him. Must have turned to head for home. Just luck who saw whom first, but maybe luck figured she owed him for making him a slave. Either way, he took that luck and rode it, let out a roar, jumped out of the trees in front of them and took the first night-skin’s head clean off. The second got his wand half-raised before Tuuran caught him with the backswing, caving in his ribs. The wand went off, blasting lightning into the ground. The Taiytakei dropped to his knees. Blood poured out of his mouth. He fell over, face first, and didn’t move.
‘Bloody bollocks.’ Tuuran stamped out the smouldering fire from the lightning bolt. ‘Shit, fuck and bugger.’ Now they’d have to be keeping their eyes peeled for the rest of the day, watching out in case any other night-skins had heard and came looking.
He heard another noise then, jumped up and had his axe ready in a blink, but it was only Crazy rushing in from the other side. Behind Crazy, Tuuran saw a dozen eyes cowering in the shadows. Faces. Slaves.
‘Yeh,’ said Crazy. ‘I thought we passed a few night-skins having a bit of a doze a few miles back. Good of you to wake them up.’
Tuuran wiped the blood off his axe. ‘Bit of a dragon’s testicle, that. We’d do best to drag these bastards somewhere away from where their friends can find them.’ He glared at the cowering eyes in the trees and raised his voice. ‘We’re slaves like you. We’re not
going to hurt you. You can come out now, or run away. It’s up to you, but frankly I could do with some help here, thanks. Heavy buggers these night-skins, especially in all that armour. Mind you don’t slip on the mess, though. Mostly it’s blood but I think that bit over there might be brains.’
Once he’d rooted the slaves out from where they were hiding, Tuuran paced up and down, taking a good look at them, same as he used to with new slaves taken for the galley oars only with a lot less shouting. They were a mixed lot: a couple of night-black Taiytakei men from the deserts with brands on each arm, three brown-skinned women from the southern reaches of the Dominion and an olive-faced man from Crazy’s old home of Deephaven. The women had one brand each and the man from Aria had none at all. Tuuran showed off his own.
‘But these don’t matter any more,’ he said. ‘We’re all the same now.’ He looked at them hard and then decided he might as well have said the moon was made of lettuce and it would have made more sense. He sighed and had the men help him carry the dead soldiers off the path and then asked why they were all out here instead of inside the grand stone house right here next to them, which presumably had lots of useful things inside it like food and wine and places to hide and things for hitting people. Or was that because there were already people inside who’d barred the doors? They told him no, the house was empty, but the doors were locked and they didn’t have a key. That, Tuuran replied, was pretty damn pathetic. He showed them how a big axe could pass very nicely for a key when it had to, and they went in together and scoured the place like starving rats. Food, water, wine, fruits, Xizic, silk sheets, gold, jade, silver – all that a freshly freed slave could want except for a ship to take him home.
They made a feast for themselves and he asked them who they were and had them tell their stories like he used to on his galley. The desert men had stupidly complicated names, something like B’zaiyan Barrati and Josemarinn Dul’Tarras, names that probably meant something very important to them but simply wouldn’t stick in Tuuran’s head. He took to calling them Tall and Short. Same as on the ships he’d sailed, because slaver galleys picked up oar-slaves and sail-slaves from all over, with as many names and
skins and voices as you cared to conjure and all with their own gods and devils and cities and songs, and there wasn’t a sail-slave he’d met yet who could be bothered with getting his tongue around any name too long to be shouted across the deck in one loud bark. Desert Taiytakei, it turned out, had a fondness for selling each other to the city slavers, which was was how Tall and Short had ended up in Dhar Thosis. Tuuran told his own story after he’d listened to theirs, the way he used to at sea. Made them brothers, that did.
The women and the man from Aria came from further up the island. Slave stories were all the same: slavers showed up and you were too weak to stop them and too stupid or too slow to run away, that’s what they all came down to in the end, but Tuuran listened to theirs too because that was the courtesy every slave gave to every other, no matter what tale they spun. While they were eating and sharing their stories, the olive-skinned man from Aria slipped away and didn’t come back. Crazy went looking, though Tuuran couldn’t imagine why. If a man wanted to do his own thing then he reckoned a man should be left to do it, but Crazy went out anyway. Didn’t find him.
Day after day they stayed hidden in their little palace, waiting out the soldiers, eating food the fleeing Taiytakei princelings had left behind and drinking their wine and their water. Crazy mostly kept to himself, away from the other slaves, sitting in corners and staring into space, or else he went off wandering for hours, night and day, even while the Taiytakei soldiers were still scouring the Eye for anyone they’d missed. Trying to understand who he was and what he should do, Tuuran supposed. For his own part he mostly stayed inside the walls, carefully out of sight, and when he wasn’t keeping watch on the road in case any soldiers happened along, he wandered from room to room. Wrapped in silk sheets, he dozed on rich feather beds. He rummaged through chests and shelves and closets. He dressed himself in a Taiytakei robe of bright copper-orange feathers and found a white fur cloak and pranced around in it for a while issuing absurd orders until even Crazy Mad smiled. He dressed Tall and Short as masters of the house and gave the brown-skinned women fine dresses. He found a gold-glass sled in the cellars and dragged up a keg of wine and they all
drank together until his head was swimming. They rode the sled around the house, screaming and laughing, and then in the pantry he found a cask of something fiery and strong and got them all so blind drunk that in the morning he couldn’t remember for sure exactly who had fucked who the night before.
When his head cleared, he found some fine silk shirts big enough to fit him and a pair of strong leather boots that weren’t but had decent soles. He spent the rest of the day fixing the boots, watching the road.
The Taiytakei soldiers stayed another day and then at last they left. The morning after they were gone, a single glasship drifted out of the desert. Tuuran watched it float slowly across the burned-out ruins of the city and then out to sea, rising to crest the cliffs of the Dul Matha. It lingered a while and then went on its way and they were alone. It was a sign, Tuuran decided, that they should leave. Crazy shrugged and picked up his pack. Tuuran gathered the rest of the slaves together, told them he and Crazy were leaving and that they were all welcome to come along, and then started to pile the sled with jugs of water and wine and sacks of fruit.
‘Leaving for where?’ they asked him, and he could only shrug. ‘But the only ways from Dhar Thosis are across the desert or the sea.’
‘I don’t see any ships.’
They thought he was mad. Maybe he was. He’d seen enough to have a good idea of what the desert was like, from up in the eyrie, serving Grand Master Bellepheros back before they’d sent him away for being too much trouble. Mostly what he remembered was an endless sea of big and hot and empty. He had a go at Tall and Short, trying to talk them into it, but they only laughed and thought he was daft; and so in the end it was just him at the front dragging the sled and Crazy Mad beside him, slipping out into the night. They pulled the sled to the sea and then walked along the shore, and Tuuran saw that Crazy never once looked back. They reached the ruined bridge and waited for the tide to ebb enough to pick their way across the causeway. The path was choked with rubble and splinters that cast odd lumpen shadows in the moonlight where the bridge had spilled its guts into the water. Tuuran kept his eyes peeled in case the rock golems that had survived the dragon decided to come back, but all he saw were waves and surf.
‘They’re long gone,’ said Crazy.
The far side was much as Tuuran remembered it: smashed-up houses with gaping holes in them and streets filled with debris. The air still carried a tang of ash and lightning over the smells of sea and mud, while moon-born shadows peopled the night-time ruins with ghosts. The flames were long out, the ashes still and cold, but as they walked Tuuran’s feet kicked up a fine grey dust which swirled around them and smelled of soot. Now and then he heard noises, the skitter of tiny feet or paws, the rattle of a loose board, the scrape of a shifting pebble, and he couldn’t shake the sense of a hundred eyes watching their progress.
Further on, bodies littered the streets in lonely clusters, scatters of men caught by rockets or lightning or the dragon’s fire. They lay as they’d fallen, untouched for all this time, ripening in the warm spring days. Even in the cool night air the stench of death and rot wafted in pockets strong enough to make Tuuran gag. Men, women and children, black-skinned Taiytakei, slaves of all colours. Ordinary people, not soldiers. Some lay sprawled in the street, others in piles in little squares around enchanted fountains which still chattered with clear sparkling water. Now and then clouds of silvery birds rose from the corpses and cawed their resentment before settling again after he and Crazy passed. Tuuran was glad to put his back to them.
The outer fringes of the city weren’t as bad, and as the sky over the sea began to lighten with the approaching dawn Tuuran climbed a small stone tower. It didn’t seem possible that no one had survived and so he looked over what remained of Dhar Thosis, searching for fires or smoke or other signs of life. The rooftops nearby were a colourful patchwork of clay tiles, reds and browns and ochres and—
He started. There were fires burning on the ridge overlooking the city. A line of four of them, strung out but too close not to belong together. Four fires, so maybe . . . fifty people? He took a good long look at where they were and climbed down again. Elsewhere the city seemed dead. Any other survivors were too wary to come out of their holes. The soldiers had only been gone a day, after all.
‘There’s people up on the ridge,’ he said when he came back down. ‘Slavers, maybe.’
Crazy seemed to give that some thought. ‘I want a ship to take me home,’ he said. ‘You want to find the woman who flies dragons. There’s nothing for either of us here so it’s either the sea or the desert.’ He shrugged. ‘And like you said, I don’t see any ships. They’ll want paying though.’ He set off again. Tuuran let Crazy pull the sled a while and rummaged through the bag of stuff he’d looted from the sea lord’s palace. Silver coins, golden feathers, jade carvings, polished stones, anything that had caught his eye. Like a magpie.
‘Plenty here,’ he said.
The outskirts of Dhar Thosis seemed as deserted as the rest, but Tuuran knew better because he saw signs now and then: a flicker of movement that was too big to be a dog or a lizard; a body too recent to have died in the battle; one time he heard the sound of running feet. He felt eyes on him again, only here the eyes were human, peering out through cracked walls and from behind closed curtains. Here, on the fringe of the desert, the streets, where there were any at all, were trampled sand and dirt. The houses were a mishmash of wood, of pieces of stone and mud brick, mostly simple huts. Doors were strips of sailcloth and roofs too. They passed burrows dug into the sand framed with old wood with hanging canvas or pieces of sacking for doors. When Tuuran peered inside, he found they were only a few yards deep, little more than places to sleep out of the sun. They were cool but they were empty, and after the third he stopped looking. Sometimes, when he was sure he was being watched, he stopped and held up his arms, palms outward, showing off the brands of a sword-slave, the lightning-bolt scars of the lord of Xican. He wore them with pride now, those brands, for the sea lord of Xican had faced a dragon and it had broken his mind, and Tuuran had faced many and never wavered once. Each time he showed off his brands he felt the air fall still and dead as if the streets themselves held their breath. Those brands had been here before.
Tuuran and Crazy walked on. The sea was a mile to their backs now and the land was barren earth where nothing grew but tufts of spiny grass. As they climbed the ridge, Tuuran could see men moving about or sitting under sun shelters around their morning fires. They ignored him at first, then, with the drilled precision of
a legion of the Adamantine Guard, a dozen of them stopped what they were doing, picked up spears with bulbous hafts and blunt hooks near their points for tripping and clubbing and beating, and started down the slope. Tuuran stopped and held up his hands, showing off his brands and making a gesture of peace.
‘We’re here to trade.’ He glanced along the ridge at the shelters but he didn’t see anything that looked like a slave cage. He opened his bag and took out a golden owl. Everyone liked gold, didn’t they? He cast a sideways glance at Crazy Mad. ‘If they come for us, you got my my back, right?’
The desert men came on, calm and without fuss, but they kept their spears high. A sinking sensation wormed through Tuuran’s guts. He dropped the golden owl back into his bag of treasures and took the axe off his back instead, shook his head and set his eyes on the leader of the desert men, a narrow wiry man, tall but thin.
‘Oi! Skinny! You don’t want to do this. You might have the numbers but you’ll be first. You
will
be first.’
A charge, a feint with the point of the spear and then a hook at the legs, that’s what he’d do, and Tuuran would jump over the hook, move in and split the skinny shit with his axe right down the middle. But they didn’t charge and they didn’t stop coming either. They circled him instead, keeping their distance, cautious but penning him and Crazy together. Crazy hadn’t bothered to draw his sword.