The Splintered Gods (2 page)

He peered out and then ducked back as more lightning came his way. ‘I was on your side you mudfeet,’ he yelled at them, not that it was going to make any difference.

A movement caught his eye in the cracked stone and splinters of what might once have been a watchtower. A piece of burning wood flew from it onto the bridge. Another followed and then another. They skittered across the glass and landed around the Taiytakei and their barrels of black powder. Tuuran sank down, grinning. Lightning flew back, raking the wreckage of the watchtower but didn’t seem to make any difference to the burning sticks flying out onto the bridge. When the lightning finally stopped, Tuuran risked a look. Taiytakei were running full pelt away. The barrels sat still and quiet. Pieces of wood burned around them.

‘Hey!’ Tuuran threw a stone at the ruined tower. ‘Crazy? That you?’

Crazy Mad scuttled out from the rubble, hunched low in case the bridge exploded or some idiot started chucking lightning at him again. He hurdled Tuuran’s floating sled and dived into the dirt beside him. ‘And how far did you think you’d get without me, big man?’

‘As far as I bloody wanted.’ Tuuran smiled as he said it. Might have been true – probably was – but it felt right, the two of them side by side.

‘No ships to take me back to Aria here.’ Crazy shuffled closer, watching the bridge and peering at the Taiytakei on the far side. ‘No ships to take us anywhere at all, by the looks of it.’

‘Told you so.’

‘Smug piece of shit.’ Crazy crawled to the sled and poked at it. ‘What’s this then?’

‘Cargo sled. The night-skins use them to move stuff about when they can’t use slaves. Must have carried the powder up from the ships.’

Crazy poked at it some more. He seemed fascinated by the way it hovered over the ground and moved back and forth with even the lightest touch. ‘What happens if I push this off a cliff? It just keeps floating, does it?’

Tuuran shrugged. ‘Well I was hoping so. That or it plunges to the sea, tips everything off as it goes and then settles itself nice and happy a foot above the waves with everything else smashed to bits on the rocks below. Definitely one or the other. Maybe depends on how much you put on top of it.’ He shrugged. ‘How would I know? Do I look like a night-skin to you?’

Crazy gave him a dirty look. ‘Best I don’t answer that, big man. So, you planning on waiting here for them soldiers up at the palace to come and find they haven’t got a bridge any more and then for the two of us to fight a few hundred Taiytakei for the only way off this place? Or were you thinking more about slipping off somewhere quiet while they’re all still busy. Because I’m easy, either way.’ Crazy turned, tugging at the sled. After a moment Tuuran followed, walking back up the road out of range of the Taiytakei across the bridge. The barrels still hadn’t exploded.

‘You should have thrown more fire,’ Tuuran said.

Crazy Mad shrugged. ‘I threw enough.’ He chuckled. ‘You wait, big man. Just when you’re not ready . . . then boom.’ He snapped his fingers.

It was probably a coincidence that the bridge exploded a moment later, but with Crazy Mad these days you could never quite be sure.

2

Baros Tsen

Baros Tsen T’Varr, first t’varr to the mad Sea Lord Quai’Shu of Xican, blinked. For a moment the incongruity of his circumstances overwhelmed him. He sat in his bath, the gloomy air full of steam and the scent Xizic, lit by the soft light of the walls in the bowels of his dragon-eyrie. The dragon still roared its victory on the walls up above, but here, deep below, he couldn’t hear its calls. He was naked, alone in the near-scalding water with a woman whom a great many men desired. He’d put himself in her power because it seemed the only way to stop her, and now he was quivering with fear.

And how, exactly, did you think this was going to help?

‘Give me what I want,’ said the dragon-queen, ‘or I will find another who will. Your friends from the mountains perhaps.’ She was looking right through him. Her copper hair, cropped in the manner of a slave, was plastered in haphazard spikes and tufts across her scalp. Her face was bruised and fresh streaks of dried blood stuck to her cheeks. Her eyes were ferocious. He turned away, trying to think, looking at the walls. They were the same white stone as the rest of the eyrie and shone with an inner light that waxed and waned with the rise and fall of the sun and the moon. The bath sat in the centre of a large round room, on the floor instead of sunk into it because no one had found a way to cut the enchanted eyrie stone. A ring of arches surrounded it, simple and unadorned. Beneath the bath was a plinth, a slab of white stone that struck Tsen as uncomfortably like a sacrificial altar. They hadn’t been able to move it and so he’d had the bath placed on top of it and not given it another moment’s thought. Until now. Now the idea of being naked with that altar beneath him made him shiver. He felt very much like a sacrifice. Very much indeed.

She’d killed the Elemental Man he’d sent to stop her, which was laughably unbelievable except she’d come back with his knife to
prove it. She’d burned a city to ash and shattered its towers into a desert of splintered glass. She’d done it in their Sea Lord’s name and by doing so had ruined them all.

Beside the bath sat a brass bowl on a pedestal filled with water and a little ice. Tsen usually kept a bottle of his best apple wine there, comfortably chilled for him to sip at his leisure. The dragon-queen had smashed it just a minute ago, but he always had more. He flipped the ice out to the floor and then dipped his middle finger into the water. As the ripples shimmered, he told the dragon-queen how he and Shrin Chrias Kwen were bound together and how they could, if each other allowed it, watch over one another.
Or spy, as we all prefer to think of it.
Chrias who led Quai’Shu’s soldiers. He’d never seen a vitriol quite as pure as that between the dragon-queen and Quai’Shu’s kwen.

He tried to show her but Zafir made no move to look. Tsen shook his head and pulled his finger out of the water. ‘I will consider your proposal, Dragon-Queen.’ He tried to keep his face still, to give nothing away. The Chrias he’d glimpsed in the water had the dragon-disease, the incurable Statue Plague that the alchemist from the dragon-realms had tried so very hard to contain. Tsen had no doubt at all that Zafir had done that.

‘To life and its potency.’ Zafir smiled and raised her glass. When she saw that Tsen’s was empty, she leaned across and tipped him some wine from her own. There were drops of blood in it from when she’d smashed the empty bottle and pointedly cut herself in case he’d forgotten how dangerous she was. He made himself look at her again. Her skin was red and raw where her armour had chafed. There were three fresh cuts on her face and deep dark bruises, black and purple, one around her eyes and many on her arms. When she ran a hand through her hair it stuck up and out at all angles. Her bared teeth gleamed in the light of the white stone walls. Tsen forced himself to smile back.

‘To life, Dragon-Queen, although I am bewildered by the idea that either of us may cling to it much longer.’ He pretended not to notice the blood as he lifted the glass. The smile on her face stayed exactly as it was, fixed in place.

‘I’m glad Shrin Chrias Kwen wasn’t killed,’ she said. And Tsen understood perfectly well, for the alchemist in his eyrie held the
only cure for the Plague and the alchemist was beholden to the dragon-queen. Chrias would die, slowly and in agony. He could see it in her eyes.
But you always knew she was dangerous. You chose to play with the fire, Tsen, when you could so easily have simply snuffed it out. Are you feeling burned enough yet? The people of Dhar Thosis surely are.

The dragon-queen raised her glass and then hesitated. She was watching him, a strange play of emotion flickering across her face. Victory and doubt. Joyous glee and shame and a terrible guilt. A hopeless, relentless drive. Tsen couldn’t begin to fathom it. As he touched his glass to his lips, she suddenly sprang forward and slapped it out of his hand. It flew off into the steam and shattered somewhere on the floor; and it was all so unexpected that Tsen didn’t move, didn’t even flinch, just sat in the water, paralysed as they stared at one another, each apparently as surprised as the other. A moment passed between them and then the dragon-queen climbed from the bath, her movements sharp and fast. Throwing on her shift, she stooped and picked up the bladeless knife of the Elemental Man she’d killed. ‘The Adamantine Man who served our alchemist,’ she said, her voice twisted and choked. ‘By whatever gods you believe in, you find him. Bring him here! And when you do, you fall on your knees before him, Baros Tsen T’Varr, and you thank him. You thank him as though you owe him your life. Because you do.’ Then she was gone.

For a while Tsen stared after her. He had no idea what had just happened, and all he could think of was how utterly hopelessly helpless he’d been when she’d moved. She was fast, but that wasn’t it. She’d taken him completely by surprise. And he still couldn’t move because even now it was so damned unexpected. Why had she . . .

May the slugs in my orchards pity me.
It dawned on him then, far too late, what she’d almost done to him. He looked in horror at the wine spilled across the rim of the bath and the shattered glass somewhere on the floor below and saw again Shrin Chrias Kwen as he’d been a moment before, shimmering in the water, rubbing at the hardening patch of skin on his arm where the dragon-disease was taking hold. Zafir had done that to him. She carried the disease, and
that
was how she’d given it to him, on the day when he and his
men had raped her to make her understand that she was a slave. It was in her blood, and her blood had been in the wine she’d shared, that she’d put into his glass. He’d taken it for madness when she’d smashed his decanter and cut herself, but no, she’d known exactly what she was doing. She’d brought him down here to give him the Hatchling Disease and then dangle his life in front of him. And he would have drunk her wine, too stupid to see the trap wrapping its embrace around him. If she hadn’t slapped the glass out of his hand . . .

But she had.
Why?

A tingling numbness spread through the middle finger of his left hand. The bones inside seemed to vibrate gently. His bond to Shrin Chrias Kwen. His ring was still off so the kwen was watching him now, seeing through his eyes, perhaps wondering why Tsen had done the same a few minutes earlier.
Too late, old foe. She’s gone. You don’t get to see her. And perhaps that’s as well, given what she’s done to you.
Lazily Tsen draped his arm over the edge of the bath and dipped his throbbing finger back into the bowl of water. Quai’Shu’s intent when he’d made all his inner circle bond like this had been to tie his most trusted family and servants more tightly. Words could travel faster. They would have an edge, he told them, over the other great houses of the sea lords. They would know things ahead of allies and enemies alike. In practice, they’d all done what anyone else would have done and taken to spying on one another. So now they wore the rings. The rings stopped the bond from working but didn’t stop you from knowing that someone was trying to use it. Once they had the rings, it had worked out rather better. Sometimes they even managed to do what Quai’Shu claimed to have wanted in the first place and simply talked to each other.

In the bowl and the iced-water within, Tsen found the kwen looking back at him. They watched each other, which was all very dull, and then in his cabin on his ship Chrias held out his arm and showed Tsen, carefully and deliberately this time, the unmistakable signs of the Hatchling Disease. Tsen muttered under his breath,
You deserve it!
But the visions were only visions and so Chrias wouldn’t hear.

The kwen moved from his bowl of water and sat at his writing
desk and wrote for Tsen to see, ‘If she lives, kill her. Do it now. Do it for your own good.’ He put down his pen and picked up a ring. He looked at it very deliberately for a moment, mouthed a single word and then slipped the ring on his finger. The vision in Tsen’s water vanished at once.

Goodbye.
Shrin Chrias Kwen’s last word and Tsen supposed that was the last they’d ever see of each other. If he was honest with himself, he couldn’t pretend he was particularly sorry about that. He stared into the water long after Chrias was gone. Zafir had had him at her mercy, and at the very last moment she’d changed her mind. Why?

He put his own ring back on and looked at his hands. There weren’t that many left of the cabal that Quai’Shu had thought would take over the world. Jima Hsian and Zifan’Shu were dead. Quai’Shu himself was alive but mad and mumbling nonsense to himself a few doors up the passageway. Baran Meido, Quai’Shu’s second son, had threatened to cut off every one of his own fingers rather than allow the slivers of binding gold-glass to be implanted under his skin. Which left Bronzehand, but Bronzehand was in an entirely other world.

Why? Why did she stop me from drinking it?

He stared at the question and found nothing. He played through every moment since the dragon had come back from Dhar Thosis and Zafir had slid off its back and stood before him, battered and bruised, bloodied and full of swagger, and had dropped the bladeless knife of the Elemental Man at his feet. He picked at each memory. He’d come down here with her, too bewildered by the horror of what she’d done to think properly. She could have burned them all from the back of her dragon if that was what she’d wanted, and for what she’d done they were both as good as dead. She’d ruined everyone and he’d felt nothing beyond an overwhelming sickening dread. It was his fault as much as hers. No point pretending otherwise.

But why change her mind?
Why?

He looked for a towel. On other days he might have called Kalaiya to listen while he poured out his heart and his worries until they were both wrinkled like prunes, but he couldn’t, not today. His bath was tainted, maybe for ever. Zafir’s blood was in the
water. Maybe now instead of Kalaiya’s dark skin, the ghost he’d see here would always be pale and bruised and bloodied and carry the vicious face of a dragon.

Is the water itself tainted now?
Once that crossed his mind he couldn’t get out quickly enough. He dried himself, dressed in a simple tunic, left his slaves to clean up the mess and walked briskly through the softly glowing curved spirals of the eyrie tunnels. The old luminous stone made him small and frightened today, and he was glad to reach the open space and the wide skies of the dragon yard, the hot desert breeze and the smell of sand.

Perched up on the eyrie wall, the dragon looked down at him, unbearably huge, the sun gleaming off its ruddy golden scales between dark streaks of blood. It had claws big enough to pick up a cart and crush it, could swallow a man whole or bite an armoured knight clean in half. Tsen had seen both. He turned his face away, refusing to look at the monster; instead he climbed the flawless white walls to stare out with his back firmly to everything, looking over the desert. There weren’t any places to hide an enormous floating castle out here. The Empty Sands had earned their name for being, well,
empty
. Maybe he could tow the eyrie west to the Konsidar and try to hide it in the mountain valleys, but the Konsidar was a forbidden place by order of the Elemental Men. To trespass there was death, and so . . .

He stopped himself. Couldn’t help but laugh at that, because the punishment for burning Dhar Thosis was surely going to be death at the very least, and a lot worse if anyone could think of something. He was as damned as he could possibly be and so might as well go to the Konsidar or do anything that damn well pleased him. They could only kill him once.

He let the desert and the breeze and the quiet enrapture him and the thought faded silently into nothing. He didn’t hear Chay-Liang come up behind him. He only knew the enchantress was there when he felt her hand on his shoulder.

‘You aren’t responsible,’ she said quietly.

‘Nor have I ever been.’ Tsen smiled. ‘My father used to say it was mostly my bones. I have irresponsible bones. That’s what he used to tell me. It seems he was right.’ He felt the hand on his shoulder tense. Chay-Liang thought him too flippant for a t’varr but that
was because she entirely misunderstood his need for humour. As was often the way with the scholars of the Hingwal Taktse, she was immensely clever and desperately naive. He turned and smiled at her.
See, now here’s a reason to face what you’ve done. You can save her from hanging beside you. You can at least do
that
, can’t you? Chay-Liang and Kalaiya and all the others . . .

‘You did not—’

Tsen cut her off. There was no hiding. No point even trying. ‘I tried to play a game and I lost, Liang, that’s the long and the short of it, the be-all and the end-all. The only shred of anything decent left is to stand and face the consequences. I am responsible. Or, at the very least, I am
accountable
. The dragons are mine and I will go to my fate for what they have done.’ He kept smiling but his eyes glistened. ‘Look after my Kalaiya when the time comes. And look after the truth. Make sure it reaches those whose ears most need to hear it. Do not let Mai’Choiro Kwen spin lies about us. He will try.’ He saw himself in the bath again, the glass flying out of his hand.
Why?
‘I’d send you somewhere safe if I could think of such a place,’ he said.