The Splintered Gods (26 page)

It reached its mind to the one thing that would never let it escape.

The others are scattered, brother. Lead the little one. Bring her to me.

It was a trick. Of course it was a trick. It had played this hunt in its mind days ago. It knew how it ended. Prey hoped to escape. Silence did not.

Zafir felt the change in Diamond Eye’s thoughts. An Elemental Man had found the hatchling. Diamond Eye strained to be faster, filled with a furious hunger. This kill was
his
. The dragon watched and listened as the hatchling felt the killer come close and pried at his thoughts and peered into his intent, and at the moment the Elemental Man changed to flesh to strike with the bladeless
knife that would cut through even a dragon’s scales, the hatchling Silence veered and arced and dipped a wing and lashed its tail. The bladeless knife cut only air. The killer shifted once more but it was hard so close to a dragon, no longer as easy as breathing. Silence’s tail whipped flesh and cracked bones and the Elemental Man fell like a broken doll and dissolved into darkness. The hatchling rode his thoughts. The killer was crippled but he didn’t die, not this time. He was lucky, then.

Diamond Eye watched. Through him, Zafir saw it all.
That
was how they fought. Yes, dragons read the desires of their riders, but like this . . .? She’d never imagined. The knowledge chilled her and thrilled her.
That
was how Diamond Eye kept her safe. Always.

She urged him on. The Elemental Men were faster, howling in tiny hurricanes of wind, dancing from light to shadow. They raced around her and past with their knives, searching and finding. Diamond Eye felt each duel as it happened and so Zafir felt it too, the sharp glee of a victory, the pain of another cut, the jubilation of another earth-touched smashed out of the sky. It mingled with her own –
Yes, let them fight
– and she cheered the little dragon on even after all it had done to her, because every killer whose bones were smashed and whose flesh was burned was one more enemy sent to Xibaiya. It had learned after the first and struck harder now, killing them.
Yes, little dragon. Fight them! End them for me!

The hatchling shot back a vicious glee.
Not for you but for me, little one. Come close enough and you will follow.

The sky began to lighten. The hatchling was hurt, stabbed a dozen times by the knives of the Elemental Men, but it had broken and burned five of them and now the others held back, lurking in the wind, watching. A hatchling. A hatchling had beaten them. In time she would show them what a real dragon could do.

Silence raced on, hard and straight into the teeth and fiery glare of the rising sun. Sometimes, in the distance, Zafir thought she saw him as they flew, and then at last the hatchling came to the earth and stopped atop a mesa, waiting for her, and Zafir realised she knew this place, that she’d been here before. Caution narrowed her eyes. She circled Diamond Eye once around the cliffs to be certain, then again, lower until she could see the hatchling waiting for her. And it
was
waiting.

Why here, little dragon?

Diamond Eye landed gently and the two dragons sat and watched one another, a dozen yards apart. This was where she’d stopped for the night on the way to Dhar Thosis. This was where the Watcher, Baros Tsen T’Varr’s Elemental Man, had tried to kill her. Now the hatchling squatted where Diamond Eye had squashed the Watcher flat. Not close to where he’d died, not nearby, but on the exact spot. The dark stains of the Watcher’s blood on the pale stone left no doubt.

Why here?
she asked again, but the hatchling didn’t answer. It seemed impatient. Keen to be done with this.

To show you something. In Xibaiya among the wandering dead, the rip is opened again. Diamond Eye will understand.
Embedded in that thought came a sliver of memory, of moving among the ruins of what the dragons called Xibaiya to the edges of a hole and oozing out from that hole a spread of void and chaos. It crept hither and yon, devouring what it touched, and the prison that had once held it back was no longer there. Zafir frowned fiercely. The memory made no sense.
How long will it take?
mused the hatchling.

It was a trick. A trap. It had drawn her here but she couldn’t resist. Not that it mattered. Diamond Eye took a pace forward and then another, and the hatchling still didn’t move. Zafir cocked her head. ‘Why, little dragon?’

Diamond Eye lunged. His jaws snapped shut. He crushed Silence between his fangs and spat the hatchling’s head over the mesa’s edge. The decapitated body fell limp and Zafir felt a strangeness in Diamond Eye’s thoughts as the dragon stared at what it had done. Dragons killing dragons wasn’t a thing it knew.
You did well
, she told him, though she’d understood long ago that dragons had no use for such praise. His disquiet echoed inside her.
A trick. A trap.
She’d known it, knew it still, yet didn’t see how it might now be closing around her.

An Elemental Man appeared on the mesa and walked cautiously to the hatchling’s body.
Earth-touched
. The hatchling, in its thoughts, had called them that.

‘Is it dead?’ he asked.

‘It has no head!’ Her voice tripped in her throat. Something wasn’t right. It had led her here, brought her to this place, all this
way and then . . . ? No fight, no struggle, no resistance. Why? Why
here
?

‘Return at once. Bring the body so the alchemist may say whether your words are true.’

It struck her at last as she flew back with the headless corpse of Silence clutched between Diamond Eye’s claws. The hatchling was dead and so there was no longer any need for a dragon to hunt it. No longer any need for her. She had nothing left to keep her safe. It had given her its death and sealed her own.

A trap.
She looked for the elation of victory she ought to feel and found nothing but emptiness and a longing for the home she’d never had.

In the gloom of the alchemist’s laboratory in the hour before dawn Red Lin Feyn watched as the cold dead lips of Baros Tsen T’Varr began to move.

‘Why did Dhar Thosis burn?’ she asked. ‘For what reason?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Why did Mai’Choiro give the orders he did?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Did you force him? Was this the design of Sea Lord Quai’Shu? Was this all to free yourselves of your crippling debt?’ Too fast, too much. She was getting ahead of herself. Perhaps, faced with a dead man who spoke, even an Arbiter might fray a little at the edges.

‘I do not know.’

‘How can you not know? What were your orders to the rider-slave?’

‘I gave no orders.’

‘How so? Were you not there? Were you deaf?’ Lin Feyn rounded on the alchemist. ‘What trick is this? You play with me? Your life hangs by a thread, slave! Do you think this saves you?’ But when the alchemist shook his head, she saw his own bewilderment and found she could not doubt it.

‘The dead do not lie, Lady Arbiter,’ he said. ‘They do not.’

‘What’s your name?’ asked Chay-Liang, the first of them to see the truth. The simplest question that surely should have been Lin Feyn’s beginning had she had her wits properly about her. Lin
Feyn didn’t quite catch the reply the corpse gave but she heard it well enough to know that it was wrong.

‘Say it again!’ she demanded. ‘What is your name?’

‘Darris Veskai Kwen,’ said the corpse.

Red Lin Feyn glazed at the naked flesh. A face she’d seen only once and years before, but it was him, she was sure. His skin. His face. Baros Tsen T’Varr.

The enchantress asked who he was, where he came from, how he came to the eyrie, question after question in a voice of rising horror and confusion. The alchemist simply gaped. The corpse related that he was a slave from across the storm-dark who’d earned his sword brands. He’d been born in the Dominion of the Sun King. How was it that he had the dark skin of a Taiytakei and the face of the eyrie’s t’varr? He didn’t know, but he knew that he wasn’t Baros Tsen.

‘Why is he lying?’ screamed Chay-Liang. She shook the al-chemist. ‘Why doesn’t he know who he is?’

‘It is the wrong spirit.’ The alchemist looked lost. ‘The wrong soul. I do not understand how. There’s no precedent—’

‘What is the last thing you saw?’ Lin Feyn asked.

He told her: standing watch in his tower when the Vespinese came, staying at his post, waiting to see how the fight would go, then Baros Tsen T’Varr on the wall with his slave Kalaiya, both of them dressed in black silk. Kalaiya’s face changing, becoming something with no face at all. The kwen opening his mouth to cry an alarm but making no sound. His hand in hers on the end of an arm impossibly long. His skin rippling and changing. The dreadful horror of trying to breathe, of gasping to draw air through a mouth and nose he no longer had. Then shrinking and dissolving to the ground. Baros Tsen T’Varr lying beside him, heaving for breath. The world going grey and then black. The corpse spoke it all in a dispassionate monotone, oblivious to the horror of its own demise and yet aware, in a cold way, of how it had felt.

‘It’s not him?’ said the alchemist, the last of them to understand. ‘It’s not Baros Tsen?’ He stared at the dead man’s face. ‘But it is. How . . . ?’

‘Wait! Wait!’ Lin Feyn tore at her hair, trying to see what this meant. ‘This isn’t him? You’re certain?’

‘Either this corpse is a liar or Tsen’s not dead at all,’ said Chay-Liang. ‘Why else go to such trouble?’ She chuckled, an edge of hysteria creeping through. ‘Clever t’varr. Clever, clever t’varr. Although it’s not possible . . .’

‘Corpses don’t lie,’ mumbled the alchemist. He was shaking his head, utterly bemused. Lin Feyn went to grab the corpse and shake it for answers, then thought better of it.

‘Great Charin! He’s not dead!’ The enchantress was almost laughing with glee now. ‘He’s not dead! He escaped! He could be anywhere at all by now! But how . . . How was it done? I don’t understand how it was done . . .’ She frowned. ‘And if he escaped, why didn’t he take Kalaiya with him? He would have taken her. He would!’ Chay-Liang shook her head, momentarily too puzzled to remember she was standing next to a corpse that talked back. ‘And I haven’t the first idea how . . .’

Red Lin Feyn did though. ‘A skin-shifter,’ she said. ‘From the Konsidar.’ She closed her eyes, trying to think. A skin-shifter in the form of his slave. One who’d killed a man and then changed the corpse to fool them into thinking that Tsen was dead so no one would come looking. Clever. Almost perfect. ‘This was no escape.’ She closed her eyes. A chill swept through her. ‘Someone took him. And so everything is changed.’

The dragon Silence fell through the weft of the world to Xibaiya. It had chosen its dying and chosen the place of it, the place where Diamond Eye had killed the Watcher, the earth-touched who had sent Tuuran to watch over the echo of the Black Moon. In Xibaiya the dragon Silence looked for the trail of the dead killer and found it easily enough. It would ask the Watcher why, and how it knew. With tooth and claw wrapped around the dead spirit’s throat if it had to.

It started to hunt.

Baros Tsen T’Varr

30

Shifter Skin

The last thing Baros Tsen T’Varr remembered, the Vespinese were attacking his eyrie. The next thing he knew, he woke lying on something hard. His head hurt and he had no sensation in his arms, his legs or his face except to feel the wind on it, the same bloody wind as ever tearing at his braids and tugging his clothes. What he
could
feel was someone pulling at him.

He opened his eyes and wished he hadn’t. A mile straight below were dull purple flashes of lightning that could only be the storm-dark. Between him and it there was, well, nothing. Everywhere else was dark – no, not quite dark; he could make out a deep purple tinge. It took a moment to realise that he wasn’t, in fact, falling to his death.

He was underneath the eyrie.

Instinct made him push against whatever invisible force was holding him, but his arms weren’t working properly and he supposed he must look rather like a fish flopping about on a riverbank. He managed to roll over. At least he wasn’t staring down at the storm-dark now, though looking up at the black stone underbelly of his eyrie a few feet over his head didn’t strike him as a great deal better.

‘Hush.’ The voice sounded like Kalaiya but he knew better. She’d touched him and, in a crippling flash of pain, stolen the strength from his legs. He remembered falling, the pain getting worse. He remembered not being able to move, seeing another man topple beside him, seeing the man’s face swim and change and morph into his own, the doppelgänger Kalaiya crouching beside him, her hand never leaving him. Actually, he remembered everything with grim clarity. He rather wished he didn’t.

Not-Kalaiya crouched beside him, one foot pressed on his chest, pushing him down. Shifter skin. She’d said she had shifter skin
hiding a glass sled. Was that how she’d changed her face too?

‘What are you?’ he asked. He tried to move but she wouldn’t let him and so he lay still, terrified he was about to die. No, not die, because if that was what she wanted then he’d already be dead. Something worse.

‘Be careful, Baros Tsen T’Varr. It’s a long way down and this sled is a touch small for any rolling about. I wouldn’t want you to fall after I’ve gone to so much trouble to get you here.’

A distant flash of purple lightning lit up Not-Kalaiya’s face. She was wearing a very Not-Kalaiya smirk. It was cold and mocking and heartless and turned her into someone he’d never seen. It was a smirk that made him unreasonably angry. He tried to sit up but that clearly still wasn’t going to work for a while.

‘What did you do to me?’ He winced as a jagged line of bright violet arced from the belly of the eyrie to the storm-dark a mile below. The thunderclap rattled his bones and set bells ringing in his ears. ‘Who are you? Where is Kalaiya? What have you done with her? If you’ve hurt her, I’ll . . . I’ll get . . .’ He faltered. He’d get what exactly? Angry? Well he was already fairly angry and so far it hadn’t been much use. He’d throw this impostor into the storm-dark? But if he could do that then why hadn’t he done it already? Because he was a stupid fat t’varr, that’s why, and no match for a skin-shifter.

Skin-shifter.
The thought rolled around inside his head. He’d heard things about skin-shifters, hadn’t he? ‘I will make you suffer,’ he finished. ‘A thousand times.’

‘I didn’t hurt her. I took her shape, nothing more. What will happen when the Vespinese are done here, I don’t know. By now your eyrie is theirs. Whatever happens to your slave now, your business is with them, though you may not be in a position to do much about it for a while. If I were you, Baros Tsen T’Varr, I’d worry a lot more about myself just now.’

‘Who
are
you?’

‘Someone who doesn’t want to see you hang from a Vespinese gibbet.’ The foot came off his chest. Tsen carefully felt for the invisible edges of the sled and sat up. Not-Kalaiya stood over him, watching. Above them both the jagged black underbelly of the eyrie was close enough to touch if he stood up. Veins of deep
purple ran though it. Another violet thunderbolt cracked between the eyrie and the swirling clouds below. He shuddered.
No one ever told me it did that. Did anyone even know?

‘You’re one of them!’ he said suddenly, grasping at the first thought he could and finding Not-Kalaiya’s words in the bath house.
When would be a convenient time?
‘You
are
a Regrettable Man! Or Woman, or whatever.’ He looked down at the storm-dark. No. That couldn’t be right either, and he wasn’t going to die, not yet and possibly not at all.
You’re not a Regrettable Man any more than you were Kalaiya. So who are you?

‘Don’t be stupid. I’m here to rescue you.’

‘I didn’t
want
to be rescued!’

Not-Kalaiya rolled her eyes. ‘Fine, then I’m abducting you. Would you like to go back?’

‘Not really.’ If she wanted, she could have killed him in his bath, as easy as anything. But rescue? ‘Who sent you?’

Careful, T’Varr. She’s not what she says.

Not what she says? Oh how marvellously astute!.

You’re really not helping much here.
‘How do you look like her?’

‘I’m a skin-shifter from the Konsidar.’

‘And I’m a dragon in a funny hat!’

‘You asked.’ Not-Kalaiya shrugged. ‘I really don’t mind if you don’t believe me.’

‘Shifter skin. That’s what it is. You have a shifter skin. So show me who you really are.’

‘Look away, T’Varr.’

‘Why?’

Not-Kalaiya watched him steadily until he turned away. He’d been in Cashax when he first heard of shifter skin, years ago when he and Vey Rin had been tearing up the city’s heart every night, looking for each thrill to be bigger than the last. Vey Rin had come in one night with a story of a woman – or maybe it was a man – who had a coat of skin and could become anything you wanted. They’d gone looking but they never found her, and Tsen was sure now that she’d never existed, because was
that
how you spent your time if you had the power to change into the shape of anyone at all? He remembered how he’d wondered what he might do with such a treasure.

But maybe it had been some sort of elaborate game. He and Vey Rin and some of the others back in Cashax had set challenges for each other. Stupid dares, and this would have been right up their street.
So, go and abduct the stupid fat t’varr from under the noses of the people who want to kill him. Then leave him naked in the desert with a bottle of apple wine and tell him he has to sing a song about the nymphs of the Yalun Zarang.
Sometimes, remembering what he used to be like made his skin want to crawl off and go and be with someone else.

‘You can look now.’ When Tsen looked back, Not-Kalaiya was gone and in her place stood a slender man of similar height and build. His face, in the dim light of the storm-dark and the dazzling flashes of lightning that spat down from the eyrie now and then, made him look little more than a boy.

‘What if one of those bolts hits us?’ snapped Tsen.

The man shrugged. ‘Then whether this is a rescue or not will be of academic interest and no one will ever find us.’ The man uncoiled a rope from around his waist and tossed it into Tsen’s lap. Instinct made Tsen grab it, but the rope writhed and wriggled in his hands like a snake. He yelped and tried to scrabble away. One hand went over the invisible edge of the sled and he fell back. The rope moved fast as lightning and wrapped itself around him, pinning his arms to his waist. He cried out as he began to topple over the side of the sled but the rope was tight around him, the far end held fast in the other man’s hands. Tsen glared at him.

The shifter pulled on the rope, dragging Tsen away from the edge. ‘Clearly, T’Varr, if I wanted you dead then I would simply have let the lords of Vespinarr have their way. So I want you alive, at least for a while. Frankly I’d been hoping for a little more gratitude.’

‘Really?’ Tsen looked pointedly at the rope wrapped around him. ‘Was that before or after you decided to pretend you were my Kalaiya?’

The sled eased away from the shelter of the eyrie. The wind roared fierce and the shifter had to shout into Tsen’s ear to make himself heard. ‘Look up, T’Varr! Three glasships approached low, hugging the surface of the storm-dark. They sent their soldiers on sleds like this, so small you wouldn’t see them coming, so many your dragon wouldn’t be able to kill them all. The glasships were
to draw your monster into the sky while the soldiers passed beneath it, but you never saw them coming at all.’

‘And in the midst of that, you thought you’d rescue me? How kind. Show me your shifter skin, whoever you are.’ Tsen snorted. ‘You know where it comes from? Shed by the Righteous Ones of the Konsidar.’ He sniffed the air. ‘It should stink.’

The shifter paused for a moment. ‘You’re right, of course. Only we don’t exactly shed it, T’Varr. It has to be flayed from our still-living bodies. It has to be enchanted and cut and stitched into clothes. Abraxi the sorceress made exactly three sets from us before the Elemental Men made an end of her. Remind me, T’Varr: where were you when the Vespinese came?’

‘I was . . .’ The wind ripped the words off his lips and shredded them. Tsen sighed.
In my bath. Without a clue they were coming.
‘Take me back!’

‘No.’ The shifter shook his head. ‘T’Varr, I took the place of one of their soldiers. This is his sled. Sea Lord Shonda was very specific: we find you, we kill you. Very specific indeed.’

‘Shonda? Shonda himself?’

The sled was clear of the eyrie now. Tsen looked up and gasped. There must have been fifty glasships above the dragon yard, or sixty or perhaps even more. In the night sky they were lit up from within by the gold light at their hearts, sprinkled and sparkling through concentric annuli that spun one within the next and all inside the slow rotation of each great outer disc. The rims shone a brilliant white, their lightning cannons bright and ready, shining on the eyrie like a full moon. They were clustering slowly together, layering themselves so they were all huddled above the eyrie. Tsen had never seen so many so close together. They looked like a shoal of giant glowing jellyfish, only instead of seeing them from above and from the deck of a ship, he was seeing them from below as though he was some tiny fish.

‘These lords of Vespinarr came to your home with two things in mind,’ yelled the shifter. ‘To kill you and to take what was yours. I don’t know why and I don’t care, though if you wish to air your opinions then go ahead. We have a long journey and I’m fond of conversation.’ He guided the sled back towards the shelter of the eyrie.

‘Who
are
you?’

The man shook his head and chuckled. ‘A friend of Bronzehand.’

‘Bronzehand?’ The youngest of Quai’Shu’s sons. Bronzehand, who’d been trying to reach him right before this skin-shifter had come.
Well there’s a thing.
Bronzehand was possibly the one person in the world who might have a reason for keeping him alive, the only trouble being he was across the storm-dark in a different world, and people had a tendency to vanish when they tried to penetrate the jungles of Qeled. Another thought struck Tsen. He laughed. ‘Looks like Meido’s going to win our wager after all.’ Maybe that was why Bronzehand was so interested.

‘What wager was that?’

Well done, tongue. Anything else you’d like to share?
Tsen sighed again. ‘Nothing that matters now. We wagered this eyrie on how long Sea Lord Quai’Shu would live. I’m a month short.’
Bronzehand.
For some reason that made him feel safe.

Really? You feel safe?

Well, safer than I did a few minutes ago.

And why’s that, then, T’Varr?

Because Bronzehand could be an ally.

An ally? Ha! Walking corpses don’t have allies, T’Varr.

Well thank you for that little piece of joy.
Although the voices had a point.

‘What’s your name, boy?’ All this shouting into the teeth of the wind was making him think of being at sea. He hadn’t been at sea for a long time and hadn’t much liked it either.

The shifter yelled back, ‘If you knew how old I was you’d choke. I’ve more years than you, T’Varr, and let’s leave it at that.’ They sank slowly towards the maelstrom, keeping under the eyrie where the glasships wouldn’t see them.

‘Your face says otherwise.’

‘I’m surprised you put any trust in faces. As for names, I wear them every bit as easily. Call me Sivan.’ He grinned and bared his teeth.

‘Sivan. Well then, Sivan, I am first t’varr to a sea lord, and now you can take me back where I belong. I will not leave without Kalaiya.’

The sled dropped suddenly. Tsen screamed as they plunged like
a stone towards the storm-dark. ‘Kalaiya!’ They were really going without her. Somehow he had thought there might be a miracle, that he could change what would happen. ‘Kalaiya!
Kalaiya!’
He struggled against the rope, rocking back and forth until he almost threw himself off the plummeting sled, and screaming and screaming until Sivan whirled about and touched him and everything went black.