The Splintered Gods (35 page)

40

No Escape, Not Even for You

The sun rose over the storm-dark and the swirls of cloud lit up in a patchwork of dull orange light and deep black shadow. The sunward side of the Godspike glowed a brilliant pink and bright rays of dawn fire streamed over the eyrie walls into the little shelter. They sprawled through its sailcloth walls and over the sleeping face inside. Zafir sat up and pushed away her silken wrappings. She rubbed her eyes and blinked and then took a little water from the silver bowl beside her and splashed it on her face. She hitched up her shift and squatted over her chamber pot and then walked outside to greet the dawn. When she reached the wooden lean-to where Myst and Onyx slept, she ducked inside. They were gone, but she could still smell them so they hadn’t been awake for long. They fretted at how their mistress lived and yes, palaces and castles and gold and silks were fine things, but in her heart Zafir was a dragon-rider before she was a queen, and no dragon-rider was a stranger to a crude camp in an open space with a dragon beside her.

She walked out to the eyrie rim, through the litter of her first shelter, which Diamond Eye had crushed on the night the hatchling came to kill her. He was perched out on the edge this morning instead of at his usual post on the wall beside her. She sat down next to him, feet dangling over the void, peering between her knees at the storm-dark. Sometimes she thought about falling. Toppling forward and not stopping herself and tipping over and plummeting into the maelstrom below. But even if she wanted to, Diamond Eye wouldn’t let her. He’d come after her before she was even close to the cloud, catch her and bring her back. He’d keep her safe whether or not safe was what she wanted. That was why she slept beside him. To know when they were coming for her.

‘They’re thinking it,’ she whispered to him. ‘You first and then me. Even the ones who want to keep you want me to hang.
Everyone wants us gone. One day my alchemist will quietly poison you, though I’ve forbidden it. Then they’ll come for me.’ Here they were, she and her alchemist, both slaves of the rapacious sea lords, both taken from their homes, both from the same land. The alchemist should have been hers, body and soul, and yet he wasn’t. He tolerated her. That was about as much as you could say now. It cut deep, knowing he would betray her.

‘I want to go home,’ she whispered. The dragon didn’t move. His eyes stayed on the Godspike. His thoughts were distant and vague. Watching. Waiting. And Zafir had come to think that neither of them had the first idea what for. Just something.

‘The rest of them are waiting for doll-woman to come back. That’s when they’ll do it.’ Doll-woman? Yes, doll-woman because
Arbiter
smacked a little too much of
speaker
, and because she painted her face and kept it so absurdly still she looked like a doll, and because Zafir hated her for the gold-glass band around her head, and calling her doll-woman made her seem small and stupid.

She got up and tapped Diamond Eye on the foot. ‘Come on. Let me up.’ He turned his head and looked down at her, and she thought she caught a flicker of resentment. ‘I won’t be long. I need to check the harnesses.’

Diamond Eye shifted and lowered his shoulders and neck. Zafir shinned up the legbreaker rope onto his back. The Elemental Men who flew with her had taken to buckling themselves into the harnesses these days – not that they particularly needed to, but now and then she flew Diamond Eye in tight loops and rolls and spins for the sheer fun of it. When they didn’t buckle themselves in, she invariably threw them off. She could feel Diamond Eye in her thoughts too, felt his amusement and smiled, riding the memories beside him. ‘I told them a dragon was a dragon and they could fly you without me if they liked to try.’ So they’d taken to using the harnesses. It was a quiet and subtle victory. Strapped to Diamond Eye’s back, they couldn’t shift form, and when the time came she’d make the most of that: chasing the hatchling into the Queverra abyss, filled with fury and hunger, she’d understood that Diamond Eye could turn and dive and climb and loop with force enough to break her in two. He held back to keep from snapping her bones, that was all.

She finished checking the harnesses. The Elemental Men never bothered. She supposed they didn’t mind too much if she sabotaged them because if they fell off so what? But they never would. Each morning she checked with meticulous care. They were perfect and tight and would stay that way.

Zafir slid back down the legbreaker to the eyrie rim and sat against Diamond Eye’s claws. She wasn’t sure what she’d do when the doll-woman returned. Maybe nothing. ‘Or maybe we’ll fly together for one last time and bring that glasship down and burn her to ash, and I’ll push you to my limits or yours, whichever we find first. And the killers will be trapped in their perfect harnesses, unable to shift away, and their bones will snap like twigs.’ She snapped her fingers. She could feel Diamond Eye coursing through her thoughts, adding a savage edge all of his own. ‘Then we’ll fly away, far far away where they’ll never find us.’ She sighed. Would she, if she could? She honestly didn’t know but it didn’t matter anyway. The gold-glass crown around her head meant she could only dream.

Myst and Onyx came hurrying along the top of the wall, tunics flapping in the wind, clutching their bronze trays. Zafir got up and left Diamond Eye to the Godspike. Yes, she’d tear the doll-woman out of the sky, and then the circlet would kill her and Diamond Eye would shatter them all and burn them, everything, all of it, as much as he could before they brought him down. She’d been teaching him that. No plunging after his fallen mistress to sit mute beside her corpse until another rider led him away, not this time. No. Rage. Unfettered rage, the thing dragons did best. She’d die in fire and fury as a dragon-queen should. There would be nothing left of her to dangle by a foot from a rope, for them to mock with their jeering scorn, not like they’d done to Tsen. She almost felt sorry for him for that.

The wind howled across the desert sky. Zafir went to help her slaves but they shied away. She had no idea how they managed to balance themselves and carry their trays and never drop anything in the teeth of all that wind but they always did. They shooed her off as if mortally offended at the suggestion they couldn’t manage on their own. Zafir let them. She could understand that.
I need no one’s help.
She crawled back into her shelter instead and sat,
waiting, legs crossed. Onyx shuffled in on her knees and bowed and offered a bowl of steamed stuffed dumplings. Zafir had tried a few times to have them all sit and break their night fast together but Onyx simply refused and Myst looked as though she’d rather take a running jump off the edge of the eyrie. The way they sat mute and watched her while she ate set her teeth on edge so she simply ate as quickly as she could, stuffing dumplings in one after the other and washing them down with a jug of fresh milk. It left her feeling bloated.

‘Mistress, Lord Shonda is out in the dragon yard,’ whispered Myst.

Zafir pursed her lips. Shonda of Vespinarr. She had to wonder about him, whether there was some way to use him. Whether their interests could somehow align. The doll-woman had trapped him here and he hated it. Zafir had seen him strutting about in his electrum feather robes with his enchanters around him to keep the wind from ruffling them. He hadn’t ever come close to Diamond Eye. She wasn’t sure whether she thought more or less of him for that. Most men came, sooner or later. Most men had to test themselves against their fear and most were found wanting. Or maybe what had happened the last time had been enough for him, when he’d had one of his soldiers throw lightning in Diamond Eye’s face and the dragon had swatted the man off the eyrie wall. Diamond Eye certainly hadn’t forgotten. Presumably Shonda hadn’t forgotten either.

She crawled back out of the shelter, looked over the top of the wall and there he was, walking with a measured purpose around the yard with Mai’Choiro Kwen at his side and four enchanters around them holding up their gold-glass screens. A pair of lesser kwens followed behind. Zafir watched for a while. Every now and then Mai’Choiro would point to a spot in the dragon yard and one of the kwens would run, check he had the right place, then make a mark with a piece of charcoal. From up on the wall Zafir couldn’t make out what the marks might mean, whether they were numbers or letters or . . .

Abruptly Shonda stopped and looked straight at her, as if suddenly aware of being watched. Zafir looked back. He held her eye for ten long heartbeats, and with that look she felt he was telling
her that they were the same, that neither of them could ever bend or break for another, that it simply wasn’t in the way they were made. She thought he almost smiled at her. And then he turned away and raised his arm and tapped it, and she understood exactly what he meant.
I am no slave.

‘He means to leave,’ murmured Zafir.

She was good to the killers that morning. She waited until they were strapped in tight, let Diamond Eye climb until the air was so thin it made her gasp, and then dive, wings tucked in so the wind tore into her like a hundred furious fists. Before they took to wearing their harnesses the wind of a dive like this would tear the Elemental Men off Diamond Eye’s back and blow them away like leaves. One day she’d let Diamond Eye fall like he really could, the way they used to dive together off the Great Cliff and even off the top of the Pinnacles, like a spear straight down at the ground, and the killers on his back, strapped in tight and unable to escape, would be ripped to pieces by the wind. There were tricks to riding a dragon through a dive like that, tricks they couldn’t possibly know.

But not today. Today she was gentle. Diamond Eye flared his wings, crushing the breath out of her, and landed in the dunes, blowing a great cloud of sand into the air. Zafir looked at the faces behind her and saw the strain in them. They came every day, not the same killers each time, but every day in every face she saw the same. They were afraid of her dragon and afraid of what it might be, just as they should be.

The Vespinese camp out in the desert lay outside the shadow of the storm-dark. They kept a herd of bison here, all of them withering and dying in the sun. Zafir let Diamond Eye loose to do as he pleased. The bison stampeded, snorting their terror while the dragon gave gleeful chase. He caught them with ease, flipped them onto their backs with a flick of a talon, catapulted them into the air with a twitch of his tail or bowled them over with the wind from a flap of his wings. Once he’d scattered the herd, he picked a few to kill. He played with them more than he ate. These last few days he’d grown wasteful and vicious, bored and tense, swayed by Zafir’s moods while she waited for the doll-woman to return. Her own thoughts wandered as the dragon lunged and danced
and dived. She looked long and hard back up at the storm-dark. Glasships had been gathering before she left, Vespinese glasships. She wondered what it meant.

When the dragon was sated, she let him rest. ‘It makes them bad-tempered to fly after they’ve eaten.’ She’d said that to the Elemental Men once and they’d never told her she was a liar even though she was. Dragons didn’t care; it was simply that she liked to be down here for a time, out of the wind, basking in the desert heat and relishing the thick strong air. She sat beside her dragon and dozed a little while as the sun crept higher, and when the warmth became stifling, she flew him in a long gentle circuit of the storm-dark. She came back to the camp to let him feed a second time if he wanted, but he didn’t seem interested. He kept staring up at the sky, and so she let him sit and unstrapped herself and lay across his shoulders, dreaming dreams of what she’d do to the doll-woman if the circlet around her head were to suddenly fall away, wondering how to fill the long hours of the afternoon. Sometimes she laid her armour aside and simply sat beside him and stared at the same things as he did: at the swirling storm-dark and the Godspike towering to the top of the sky. Once she flew him up to it to see if he could cling to it with his claws, but the stone offered no purchase. Another time, because of something she remembered from long ago, she flew him underneath the storm-dark to the base of the Godspike. She’d dismounted and touched it herself, and it had seemed to her that it was the same stone as the eyrie, the same white stone that ran through and beneath the Pinnacles, riddled with archways, whose soft light reflected the wax and wane of the sun and the moon and the passing of the stars, whose gateways supposedly opened to other worlds now and then when no one was there to see.

Maybe that again today. A slight memory of home.

A sharp cry snapped her back to the present. She glanced at the killers and followed their eyes up. A swarm of glasships was drifting over the edge of the storm-dark and heading west, bright sparks of light in the afternoon sun. There must have been almost fifty of them, and Diamond Eye had gone very still. One of the killers jumped off Diamond Eye’s back and turned into the wind before he hit the ground.
Interesting
, she thought, then turned
herself so she could see the glasships without having to crane her neck. She settled back to watch.

The killer returned a few minutes later and the second Elemental Man jumped to join him on the ground. Zafir yawned. They obviously didn’t want her to know what they were saying and equally obviously didn’t realise that Diamond Eye, mute and dulled as he was, still picked up the impressions of their thoughts. If she concentrated hard, he could show them to her. Another little secret she kept to herself. She slid down and walked casually towards them, straining to pick up the emotions and images Diamond Eye pulled from their minds.
Anxiety. The glasships. A silver gondola. Shonda, surprise, anger. Uncertainty.
An image of gondolas sitting in the dragon yard, ramps open with dead men scattered around them. Vespinese soldiers. By the time she was close enough for them to hear, she knew she’d been right. Shonda had decided to leave and he hadn’t asked politely.

She paused, wondering.
I am no slave.
That last little jibe left her with a hunger to make him humble. She raised her visor and shouted at the killers, ‘Would you like me to get him back for you?’