Authors: Stephen Deas
Red Lin Feyn didn’t look up from her inspection of the stone. ‘Yes. To release the glasships that towed the eyrie. To drop it into the storm-dark to hide his theft of the eggs. I know.’
‘He held my Kalaiya, but I like to think I might have done it for him anyway. An end to dragons and everything around them. I did not see if it worked, but I fear it did not. Was there another enchanter? Did more glasships come in time? I never knew how quickly it would fall. In the end it was more like a feather than a stone. Sivan did not linger to see the result.’ He looked out over the jumble-maze of cliffs and mesas, hundreds of miles every which way he turned.
I should have brought my eyrie here and sunk it low. Shonda might never have found me.
‘Your dragon-queen saved them,’ said the Arbiter softly. ‘She dragged the glasships down after the eyrie, the ones you set free, so their chains could be fastened once more.’
‘She has a knack for ruining my schemes, I will confess.’ Tsen took a sip of wine and then, on a sudden petulant whim, hurled his black rod as far he could over the mesa cliff. He watched its arc, up dark against the burning blue monochrome sky, and then down, following it with his eyes against the facing crags. He had no idea where it ended up. Somewhere inaccessible, that was all. ‘There. The last of all I used to be. Gone. And good riddance.’ He took another sip of wine, a big one this time. It wasn’t as though he had anything much to lose.
At least drunks die happy.
Who had said that? Vey Rin probably, back in their days in Cashax.
Red Lin Feyn laughed. ‘Lord Shonda decided he would leave the eyrie against my order. Your dragon-rider slave returned him. When she came back she found the eyrie falling. I wonder, sometimes, why she didn’t simply let it go, but she didn’t. She brought the glasships down one by one. When she was done she branded Shonda with his own slave mark. Twice.’
Tsen almost choked on his wine. For that alone he would have given the dragon-queen her freedom. ‘I suppose you sentenced her to die for what she did in Dhar Thosis. As you sentenced me?’
‘Everyone stood and watched, and did nothing. I suppose by then no one was in much of a mood to try and stop her.’ Red Lin Feyn shook herself. ‘She was a slave who obeyed her master, t’varr. I could have let her live, but she showed no mercy, no remorse, nothing but a gleeful delight at the murder she had brought. You sent your Elemental Man to stop her, and she killed him. She knew you meant to call her back, and she did it anyway. That is what saves you, and what damned her.’ Red Lin Feyn ran her fingers across the dark-stained earth again. ‘This is where it happened. This is where your Elemental Man confronted her. This is where her dragon killed him.’
Tsen wondered how the Arbiter could know, how she could pick one mesa from a thousand others that all looked much alike. He went and squatted beside her, fascinated by the stain on the stone.
The blood of an Elemental Man.
That was twice in two days he’d seen such a rare thing.
Kalaiya came and sat beside him. Red Lin Feyn watched them, looking from one to the other and back again. She seemed sad. Distant, at least. ‘A dragon hatched and escaped on the night you left,’ she said. ‘Amid the chaos. Weeks later your dragon-slave hunted it. She killed it here in the exact same spot. Curious, don’t you think?’ For a moment Lin Feyn’s face grew dark. ‘A city, Baros Tsen. A whole city, and you sent her to burn it. How could you take such a gamble with one like her?’
‘To show the Vespinese for what they were! To save my sea lord’s house and fleet! Because I had an Elemental Man ready to stop her, and I did not consider that he might fail, because Elemental Men
never
fail!’ He wrung his hands and glared. ‘Or so we are told, lady.’ Easy to be dry and cynical about most things, especially when most things seemed to revolve around some new way to die or somebody else who wanted to kill him; but Dhar Thosis … Dhar Thosis would be with him for ever. No matter that he’d tried to stop it, a sea lord had been hung from the broken shards of his own palace, the heart of his city burned to cinders. That’s why Baros Tsen deserved to die.
That’s why, little voices, I don’t listen to you any more. Call me a coward all you like!
The three of them left, drifting away across the sky in Lin Feyn’s golden gondola. They talked a little more as the night wore on and through the day that followed. The fractured stone of the mesas and canyons gave way to sand and spires and wadis, and then a gentle rise to a plateau and a jagged cliff, and beyond that a sea of dunes, the fringe of the Empty Sands. Tsen and Kalaiya took turns to stand at the window and watch it pass as Red Lin Feyn asked question after question about the skin-shifter Sivan, about where they had stopped and when, how they travelled, until Tsen had told her everything he could possibly remember about the Lair of Samim and the Xizic harvesters, about the strange shaft in the desert and the white stone tunnel deep under the dunes, about the Jokun gorge and Sivan’s little cave-home tucked behind a waterfall, until it was clear that he didn’t have the answers that Lin Feyn sought. As they crossed the last cliff and started over the sands, Tsen saw the stain of the storm-dark around the Godspike in the distance. And yes, he was afraid to die, no matter Lin Feyn’s promises, but the shame was worse. The thought of ever looking another soul in the eye and having them know what he’d done.
Why
, they would all ask, as he asked himself,
why would you do such a thing?
And he had no answer. Hubris. Stupid arrogant pride. What else could it be?
The glasship began its ascent, rising past the cloud of the storm-dark. Tsen saw scattered specks on the ground that caught the sun and seemed to glow. Red Lin Feyn peered through her farscope, trying to find the eyrie, and found the sky around the Godspike filled with bright glasships glittering in the sun, dozens of them. Dozens upon dozens, but the eyrie wasn’t there.
They returned to the ground to search for someone who might know where it had gone, and there Tsen again saw the shapes that had shone in the sun, only now he saw them for what they were: bodies. The traders from the desert tribes who made their camps out here, butchered, sprawled in brilliant-white ankle-length robes stained with blood, scattered like confetti across the sand. Among them were other men, naked but with their skin painted white. The ghost-men of the Queverra had swarmed the camps, slaughtering everyone, and been slaughtered in their turn by lightning from above. There was no one left alive. Yet more glasships hung around the fringes of the storm-dark, some high, some low, some alone, others in twos and threes. Meandering aimlessly or simply floating adrift like bewildered cubs beside a murdered mother. Eventually Red Lin Feyn spotted a camp on the edge of the storm-dark’s shadow. The Vespinese. She went alone. Tsen, knowing what was good for him, kept well out of sight.
‘The Vespinese sent the eyrie into the storm-dark after all,’ Lin Feyn told him when she came back. She smiled and then laughed, as if relieved and also bitterly sad. ‘You got your way. Shonda is gone. The Vespinese are left with nothing.’
‘The
dragons
are gone,’ said Tsen. ‘That’s all that matters.’ And everyone who lived on the eyrie presumably gone with them. All dead now. He closed his eyes. The dragon-queen, yes, she was wicked and heartless, but the rest … the alchemist Bellepheros, in another life, could have been a friend. The enchantress Chay-Liang was as close as he’d had to one for a long time. There were others. Many good men and women, and none had deserved to die. ‘Did any escape?’ he asked, but he already knew the answer from Lin Feyn’s eyes, and so he shuddered and tried to shake away the memories of all those faces.
Best not to think about it.
Nothing you could have done to stop it anyway.
And maybe, perhaps, with a bit of luck, mostly it was those bastard Vespinese who’d gone crashing into the storm-dark, or else got themselves eaten by the monster dragon before it fell, and as for the rest, surely some must have slipped away? Scuttled to hide in the desert? There had been no shortage of sleds after the Vespinese came …
Yes. You keep telling yourself that, t’varr. Keep hiding from what you’ve done.
For a long while the Arbiter didn’t speak. She guided her glasship around the storm-dark through the night among the camps, and through the next day too, looking. She didn’t say, but she was searching for someone quite specific, Tsen thought, and he could see from the slump of her shoulders how it saddened her she didn’t find what she wanted. She looked older. Older and beaten and defeated by some loss of which she would never speak.
‘Where now?’ Tsen asked, as the next day’s light began to fade. Lin Feyn would surely return to the Dralamut, or to Khalishtor, and he was quite certain he didn’t want to be going anywhere near either, and equally quite sure he wasn’t about to be given a choice; but there didn’t seem to be an obvious way to ask if Kalaiya might get dropped off somewhere along the way. Tayuna for preference, but anywhere would do if it had a harbour and plenty of ships and there was a chance she could get a passage across the storm-dark to the Dominion and the little Dahat estate he’d quietly bought for their later years.
With apple orchards and a winery and one of the best bathhouses in the province …
He let out a little sigh.
‘I told you, Baros Tsen. I will take you to the Bawar Bridge.’ It took him a moment to realise that she didn’t mean only Kalaiya. She meant both of them. And yes, she’d said it, but he hadn’t ever truly
believed
her.
‘Lady …’
‘I said you were free, Baros Tsen.’ She turned away. ‘There are dead enough for the ghosts of Dhar Thosis, and too many honest souls already sent to Xibaiya. I’ve had enough of it. You can go.’
Free?
While the Arbiter retired to her little upstairs cabin, and Kalaiya dozed propped against his shoulder, he mulled the word over. Rolled it around in his head. He even believed it this time. The Bawar Bridge. Close to Hanjaadi, which was an entire city of Vespinese lapdogs, which in turn brought problems of its own, and Tayuna would be much more preferable indeed; but it seemed churlish, under the circumstances, to object …
Free.
He couldn’t stop rolling it around in his head.
A tapping on the window disturbed his musing. He tried to ignore it at first, but they were a thousand feet in the air out in the Empty Sands and it didn’t go away, and that was quite distracting since he really couldn’t imagine what it could be. A bird? Out here? He opened his eyes and peered.
A claw was tapping on the glass. At the window a hatchling dragon looked in at him. Baros Tsen T’Varr screamed as he’d never screamed before and fell off his chair, and stared and rubbed his eyes and looked again, but the dragon was gone.
‘A dream.’ Kalaiya held his head and stroked his hair. ‘You fell asleep, Tsen. It was just a dream.’
He wasn’t at all sure he’d been asleep, but he decided to believe her anyway.
The Jokun River
There were ports and there were ports. There was Tayuna, where the Vespinese were universally despised, and then there was Hanjaadi, vassal state to the mountain lords whose distant masters were merely roundly disliked, but it felt graceless to complain to the Arbiter about her choice of destination. Not handing him over to the Elemental Men to be hanged in Khalishtor or flying him out of the desert in her glasship – those seemed quite magnanimous enough and, if Tsen was honest and chose to look at it with any kind of critical eye, bewildering to the point of suspicion. He couldn’t quite shake the notion that something bad waited for him by the Bawar Bridge, but pushing his luck, a trait indulged too often of late, struck him as an invitation to Red Lin Feyn to change her mind and drag him back to the Dralamut, and such alternatives didn’t bear much scrutiny. Besides, there was Kalaiya to think of. Thus Tsen opted to be small and discreet, to be as innocuous as possible in the hope that the former Arbiter might begin to forget that he was even there. Which, in a gondola where three people shared a space no larger than one decent-sized room, was a challenge, but one he took with relish.
It must have been an odd sight, he thought, when Red Lin Feyn brought her glasship down across the Jokun river in the small hours of the morning darkness, a little before sunrise with the sky already lightening across the desert at their backs, ochres on the horizon to violet and to a deep purple straight above, and still dark enough for the last dawn stars to shine in the west. The gondola came to ground a mile from the bridge where the old desert road ran out into the Lair of Samim and then to the Empty Sands beyond. The road was quiet and, well, deserted, rarely travelled in these days of sleds and glasships, but he still wished the Arbiter might have chosen a more subtle landing place. He kept thinking this while he bowed and scraped and smiled and gave her his thanks.
‘Be gone, Baros Tsen. Let your name be forgotten. Find your ship and sail away and let our paths never cross again. Just remember that
I
will not forget. When someone comes to ask a favour of you in my name, no matter how great, remember this day.’
Tsen watched the gondola rise and leave them by the roadside. Lin Feyn had said little about what might happen next among the great and the mighty of Takei’Tarr. Perhaps he shouldn’t care. It no longer concerned him, after all, a simple ordinary citizen looking for a way across the storm-dark to visit a business partner at the Sun King’s court; but he thought about it anyway. Couldn’t not. Red Lin Feyn would be on her way to Khalishtor and Mount Solence to repeat her Arbiter’s judgment, but he’d have wagered a deal of what little he had that she’d go to the Dralamut first and the navigators there. Hand in hand, the navigators and the Elemental Men steered the great ship of Takei’Tarr towards whatever destiny awaited it. They did it quietly, and the sea lords barely noticed, but Tsen had had his eyes opened these past months. They were the guides and the enforcers, the helmsmen and the first mates.
The desert air was still. Cold enough to make him shiver. He’d not easily forget the corpse he’d seen at the Arbiter’s feet in the Queverra.
‘We’d do well to be away from here,’ he said and took Kalaiya’s hand. A change was coming, was it? A catastrophe? If he was honest, Tsen didn’t much understand the meaning behind things like cracked Godspike needles and necropolises and the dead not staying dead, wherever they happened to do it, nor of skin-shifters trying to steal dragon eggs, or oblique insinuations about the Crimson Sunburst; mostly what he knew added up to being very certain that he didn’t like the looks of any of it, and should do best to keep as far away as he could. He started to walk then, meaning to do exactly that, setting an easy pace because they were still a mile from the bridge and some twenty more from the city itself, and walking would take the whole day, and there was no point in exhausting himself before lunchtime, not that either of them carried any food. He could barely remember the last time he’d actually walked anywhere. If you didn’t count traipsing about the desert after the skin-shifter Sivan, at least.
‘There were two villages here once,’ he told Kalaiya as they followed the dusty old desert road, arrow-straight with the sunrise building behind them and the last dawn stars fading as the sky ahead turned a deep deep blue. ‘A long, long time ago before the Splintering. Each grew and prospered, one each side of the Jokun estuary, both rich from all the trade around the southern tip of the Konsidar. The desert wasn’t so much of a desert back then.’ He chuckled. ‘Isn’t it quite bizarre? Almost everything from before that cataclysm was written into a single book by a secret conclave of half-mad priests. The Rava. All their lore and knowledge, the very speaking of which summons death by Elemental Man. What else do we have? A handful of scraps. A detailed document on the merits of the various Xizic regions, a complete inventory of the treasury of Uban, a description of a town that one day became this city …’
Kalaiya squeezed his hand and laughed. ‘“A town full of rich merchants, and all are large. Bread and meat are abundant, though you cannot find wine or fruits. Melons and excellent squash are plentiful and there are enormous quantities of rice. There are many sweet-water wells. There is a square where on market days huge numbers of slaves are sold, both male and female. A young girl of fifteen is worth about six talons, a young man almost as much; small children are worth about half as much as grown slaves.”’
Tsen stopped. He held her hand tight and pulled her close. He was shaking. Sobbing, almost. He didn’t really know why. Relief, probably. Just to hear her. To be with her still, after everything they’d endured. To talk, for once, about something entirely dull and mundane and ordinary.
‘It is the story of every town that was once a part of the desert!’ Kalaiya laughed. ‘It is Uban, Hanjaadi, Shinpai, Sarrai. All of them. A story we keep because it tells us of a way of life we once knew, but no longer. A kinder life than the desert gives us now.’
‘The Splintering put an end to both towns.’ Tsen stared off at the Jokun in the distance. ‘Traces remain on the western bank, but most of whatever was there was long ago washed to the sea in the spring floods.’ He looked at the boats drifting up and down on the river. Night or day made no difference to the endless flow of commerce. Little Xizic boats, the sort he’d come to know all too well as the skin-shifter Sivan’s prisoner. Vespinese barges, armed and armoured and all well guarded, carrying silver and silks and food; more barges going the other way, laden with gold and sand for the enchanters of Hingwal Taktse. The best sand came from the beaches of Qeled, they said. A desert full of it just a few miles behind him, and the Vespinese brought sand across the sea from another world in ships. He wondered what that said about his people, his race. Perfectionist? Obsessive? Just plain daft?
They crossed the pontoons of the Bawar Bridge, waiting a while for the structure to assemble itself between a gap in the river traffic before they could pass. The desert road where Red Lin Feyn had left them was empty, hardly used, but the road that ran beside the west bank of the Jokun was busy even at dawn; as he and Kalaiya stepped off the far side of the bridge, teamsters and drovers and sailors paused and stared to see who it was coming out of the Samim. Tsen bowed his head, trying to hide his face, and then realised that doing so probably only drew even more attention.
Stupid t’varr. None of these people will know you.
After another hour, as the sun started its morning climb, he left the road and walked to the riverbank. He squatted there and scooped up handfuls of water to drink, then took off his sandals and walked out up to his ankles. The Jokun came down from the mountains; the water was fast and cold, and his feet were hot and sore. The Xizicmen of the river claimed that the Jokun tasted sweet; that was simply because there were no cities to foul it from Vespinarr all the way to the sea, but right now, though his mouth might say the water didn’t taste of anything much at all, his feet thought it was delicious. He stayed a moment, savoured the sensation, and looked at his reflection. He wore a plain white tunic, the usual dress of a slave except that his was so badly ripped that he had to hold it together to stop it from falling off him. He had a belt and some wooden sandals. Apart from that, he had almost nothing. Kalaiya beside him wore a plain white robe, a gift from Red Lin Feyn since they were close enough the same size. She had the silk nightdress she’d been wearing when Sivan had snatched her from the eyrie, filthy now, and she had a sword, stolen from one of Chrias’s men. Her feet were bare. She didn’t even have any shoes.
We’re free
. He couldn’t stop thinking it, over and over. Was that what sword-slaves thought when they got their second brand and were no longer beholden to any master? When they were no longer owned?
A Xizic boat came drifting close to the shore. Its three sailors looked battered and worn, old skin weathered into leather, hair grey and tangled. No long braids, no bright colours, no feathered robes or cloaks. Kalaiya jumped up and waved as they passed.
‘We’ve been robbed!’ she cried. ‘Will you take us to the city?’
The boat idled on, but after a hundred yards it shifted its course and came to shore, and the men inside stood up and beckoned. Kalaiya ran to it. Tsen followed as best he could, holding his tunic around him.
‘Bandits on the road,’ Kalaiya gasped. ‘Not that we had anything to steal, but they tried to tear my husband’s clothes from his back. He knocked a man down and took his sword and chased them away!’
The sailors had a Xizic dullness to them. Their eyes stared into space, but they helped Kalaiya climb aboard and Tsen too. They were fishermen between their workings among the Summer Moon trees of the Samim, and after they pushed away from the shore and returned to their drifting, one of them asked Tsen for his tunic, and it took a moment for Tsen to understand that, far from wanting to rob him, the man had a needle and a thread that he used to repair nets, and was offering to stitch the garment closed. For the rest of the morning Tsen sat naked as the boat drifted on, lazy with the current, no hurry, just a little nudge here and there to steer its way, all in all a rather fine way to pit oneself against the vicissitudes of life. As the afternoon heat rose the sailors took it in turns to doze. Tsen dozed too, Kalaiya resting her head on his chest.
They reached Hanjaadi as the sun was setting, damp wooden huts strewn along the muddy shores, a scattering at first, then packed tight and close as the boat drifted towards the sea docks of the Jokun. Tsen could see the heart of the city further down the river, blocky warehouses, ships moored by the dozen in the estuary, a leafless winter forest of masts and spars, a smattering of stone watchtowers and a few of gold-glass, all lit aglow by the setting sun. The skyline was low and higgledy-piggledy, a haphazard pressing together of stone and glass and damp muddy wood, of merchants and craftsmen and kwens and t’varrs and mud and salt and dirt, siphoning off what wealth they could from the endless flow of the river and all-powerful Vespinarr.
The Xizicmen guided their boat to the shore by the shanty-town slums and let it ground on the muddy bank. Tsen reckoned the three sailors had said no more than a dozen words between them across the entire day, but they’d saved his legs some walking and stitched his tunic well enough that he didn’t have to hold it all the time, and so he thanked them and wished he could give them something more; but when Kalaiya tried to offer them her stolen sword their faces hardened and a flare of anger lit their eyes. They scowled and turned their backs and heaved up their baskets of cheap Samim Xizic-tears.
‘I don’t understand,’ Kalaiya said as she and Tsen walked away. ‘It was all we had.’
‘It was far too much, and what use do they have for it?’ He cocked his head. ‘Shall we carry a sword with us through the dark alleys of this city, looking as we do, walking as we must among men for whom hunger is a daily companion?’ A sword was good money, a great deal to a fisherman or Xizicman. But a sword carried meaning and intent. He took the blade from Kalaiya and threw it into the river.
‘Tsen!’
‘The less attention we bring to ourselves, the better.’ He turned away and set off squish-squashing through the river mud by the water’s edge. His feet sank with every step, and he’d barely gone six paces before he’d lost both his sandals. No matter. The feel of mud squeezing between his toes was oddly pleasant, and at least here on the shore he could see who was coming at them. Better to be filthy and stinking than nervous and scurrying through the animosity of alleys unlit and unfamiliar.
Fat old man like you must be rich, eh? What you got? Where you hiding it?
And then the inevitable disappointment when they found that he had nothing at all.
So close to the sea. So close to a ship and a way out. A new life, the two of them. He wanted to sing for joy, but best not, not now, not here; and so he kept himself to holding Kalaiya’s hand and squeezing it hard, and now and then turning to look at her, a bright smile on his face even when she didn’t look back.
They reached the river docks of Hanjaadi. Tsen walked through them, mucky as a beggar, with such a smirk on his face that Kalaiya kept asking why he was so cheerful when they had nothing, only their filthy clothes between them, and how were they going to get away and get a ship, if that was his plan? And he merely smiled, which annoyed her all the more, but a childish part of him wanted her to see for herself, for the surprise to come without warning. He took her into a seedy sailors’ tavern, the Golem, and almost got thrown straight back out for the river stink he brought with him until he asked to speak with someone who was dead; and Kalaiya must certainly have thought him taken by madness, but after a short pause a sail-slave came from the back and ushered them through a curtain and into a dark passage, and then through another curtain and left them to wait, and after a few minutes more an old Taiytakei came and sat with them. He was carrying a small wooden box. Tsen told the old man a story about a fisherman who lost a silver ring in the sea and spent ten years searching until he found it in the belly of the last fish he ever ate, how he choked on it and died. The old Taiytakei listened patiently and then handed Tsen his box and left. Inside the box was a glass sliver etched with words that would grant whoever carried it passage on any ship to any world. Underneath the glass were six small bars of silver and a purse of jade coins. Tsen smiled at Kalaiya. It was hard not to grin. ‘Three in every city,’ he told her. ‘One never knows why and where they might be needed.’