Read The Splintered Gods Online
Authors: Stephen Deas
The wagon rumbled on, hour after hour. The Silver Mountain grew and Tsen could make out the smudge of green that was the garden on its peak and then the glint of Shonda’s giant gold-glass screens which captured the sun. Closer in, he picked out the black spires of the enchanter monoliths around the Visonda landing fields; and then, in what seemed no time at all, they were on the landing fields themselves and Sivan was hissing in his ear as they lined up with other gangs of slaves to walk into the gondolas of three great glasships. They were packed together inside like fish in a fisherman’s barrel, standing room only, and flew for a day out over the foothills of the mountains and down to the desert, though Tsen was too far from any window to see much of it. Some of the slaves chattered, others stood silent and sullen. The ones Sivan had brought clustered around Tsen. Sivan himself stood beside him and said nothing at all.
Why a dragon’s egg but not an alchemist? To hatch a wild dragon of course. What other reason could there be? But why? Did he
want
the end of the world? But what if he did? What if Sivan was simply barking mad? Did it change anything? Presumably Tsen’s eyrie was still occupied by the Vespinese, and even if it wasn’t, did that make a difference? Thank you very much, Baros Tsen T’Varr. Now please step up to this noose . . .
I’ve become a pawn in a game I no longer understand. Kalaiya. Focus on Kalaiya. Just her.
But when he tried, he found that he couldn’t, simply because that was what Sivan wanted.
The glasships landed as the sun set, disgorging their slaves into a makeshift camp where the Konsidar and the desert and the Lair of Samim came together, an ugly land of arid stone and earth punctured by poisonous tepid lakes. The heat was dry and stifling, a shock after the cold mountain air. There were cattle here, more than there ought to be, herded out of the Lair of Samim and the fringe of the Konsidar, starving mangy animals with a few already lying dead among them. No one had bothered to move the corpses and flies covered them like a second coat of fur. A handful of massive cargo sleds spun slowly and hovered at the fringes of the camp. They were largely useless over crags and hills but marvellously cheap and efficient over open expanses of water or, say, sand. Tsen watched as a hundred animals were crammed onto the back of one, a huge white sail thrown over the top to cover them and tied down around the edges. A glasship hauled the sled a hundred feet into the air and then let it go. Tsen watched it drift off across the desert until it was gone and wondered how many of the cattle would get to where they were going and still be alive and whether it mattered. He had no doubt what they were for: to feed his eyrie. To feed his dragons.
A pair of Taiytakei slave masters in glass and gold armed with lightning wands started shouting, pushing their new slaves away from the gondolas and yelling at them to get to work. It was a dirty, dusty place and you could see at once who had been here a while – they were the ones with scarves across their faces. Tsen found himself rolling barrels of water onto a second great sled and heaving them upright. He’d been streaked with aches and pains to start with; by the time they were half done, he hurt in places he’d never hurt before, in muscles he hadn’t even known he had. He coughed and choked and his nose ran with thick dark snot. He stopped, gasping.
Sivan growled at him, ‘When was the last time you did any work, Baros Tsen? Real work? That’s why you hurt. You have no idea what it is to be a slave.’ The last words came out bitter, as though the shifter had spent most of his life pulling oars on a galley.
‘And you do, shifter?’ Tsen laughed in his face. ‘A shifter a slave, Sivan Bronzehand Kalaiya face-changer whoever you are? How long exactly since any man had
you
in chains?’
‘You know
nothing
!’ Sivan’s hand flashed to Tsen’s throat; a whip cracked the air over their heads and Sivan let go and went back to rolling barrels. Tsen did the same. When they were done, the slavers herded him and the other men onto the sled among their barrels. A glasship settled overhead, lowered its chains and lifted the sled into the air; and as they rose Tsen looked through the gold-tinted glass at the fires scattered across the edge of the desert, at the sprinkle of little shelters. Even now, in the small hours of the night, everywhere was movement, slaves and Taiytakei shifting crates and sacks and barrels and animals from one place to another. Some of them looked up as the sled rose over their heads, but it was dark and Tsen was too high to see their faces.
A Taiytakei soldier released the chains and swung back to the glasship, holding on to the last of them, and the sled floated off into the desert alone, straight and steady and unswerving, adrift with hundreds of barrels of water and two dozen slaves, no soldiers to watch over them, only the vast empty skies. Below, more slaves were already loading the next one. The t’varr in Tsen did the calculations: a sled was cheaper than a glasship and faster too. Not greatly but a little. From the Lair of Samim to the Godspike was a distance of about seven hundred miles. Four days then. Four days out in the desert sun. They didn’t have enough food. They barely had shelter.
When he was sure no one was looking, he opened a barrel of water and wetted his middle finger.
Are you listening, Chrias? Or have the killers found you at last?
He dozed through the first night. The sled drifted on, relentless and oblivious, and when the sun rose, Tsen spent the morning lazing in whatever corner of shade he could find, doing what he could to keep out of the heat, watching the broken barren yellow stone drift beneath them, spires and canyons, mesas and gorges, a landscape cut apart by water once long ago but now dry and dead. The heat grew. The sun passed its zenith. The air became thick and stifling until all the slaves simply lay still among the barrels, panting, eyes nearly closed; and then, in the middle of that afternoon
when the heat was at its worst, Sivan and his sword-slaves killed the others. They didn’t make any fuss about it. They whispered among themselves, picked the two slaves who looked the strongest and simply heaved them over the side. The first Tsen knew of it was when their screams, short and sharp and cut off as they hit the ground some fifty feet below, jerked him out of his snoozing. For a moment Tsen stared like a startled rabbit, not understanding what was happening as three more slaves went wailing and pleading over the edge. He heard screams, shrieks and then a howl as the sled drifted on. Even after the screams stopped, he still didn’t understand, still thought he might be next, until Sivan grinned in his face and patted him on the shoulder.
‘Who’s to say what happened? Who’s to say how many slaves were sent on this barge or why?’ He bared his teeth in the most horrible smile Tsen had ever seen. The smile of a madman. ‘When we reach the Godspike, there will only be us. A handful of slaves who know nothing. What did you see, T’Varr?’
Tsen shrugged. ‘I saw nothing.’ If he’d had any doubts before, they were gone. Sivan’s freedom was a lie. The shifter would murder him and dump him in the desert as soon as they were done.
Or maybe just leave you to fall into the storm-dark with everyone else.
‘That’s right.’ Sivan let his face slip. His eyes darkened, his nose sharpened, his cheeks narrowed and he became Kalaiya again. ‘I could change you, T’Varr. I could leave you as an oar-slave and sell you to a galley with little fractures and weaknesses in your bones and sinews so they break and snap. I could take your face and take your Kalaiya and give her to . . .’ He peered at Tsen. ‘Who hates you the most? Mai’Choiro Kwen? The heirs of Sea Lord Senxian, the sea lord left hanging dead by his ankle from his own ruined palace?’ His eyes glittered. His features melted and he became Sivan again. He reached out but Tsen jumped away.
‘You’re a monster!’
‘Remember why you’re doing this.’ The shifter walked away and sat among the barrels, laughing with his sword-slaves as they re-enacted the terrified faces and strangled cries of the men they’d murdered; and the most terrible thing to Tsen was how he wanted so much to be with her again, how much he’d wanted Sivan-Kalaiya to take his hands and look into his eyes and whisper sweet
lies about how things would be once this was done, how the two of them would slip away to another world and no one would come after them because everyone would think he was dead, how they’d lounge together in baths laced with Xizic oil and grow apples in their orchard and make wine and drink it together in the steam and be happy for as long as they were alive. Even if it was all a lie, even if he
knew
it was all a lie, he still wanted it.
After the murders there was more food to go around, so that was something. More shelter too, even if he lay and stared unblinking at the canvas over his head while Sivan’s slaves snored. He wondered briefly whether he might push some of
them
off the edge, but he was too afraid to try. He wondered about jumping and found he was too afraid for that too. Sometimes hard things had to be done, or so he used to tell himself, and that had been fine when he could simply hire a few men to do whatever dirty work it was. Yes, wash his hands of it. Have a bath and a glass of apple wine and tell precious Kalaiya all about it and then never let it trouble him again. Not so fine when the hands to be dirtied were his own. No, not fine at all.
Useless fat t’varr.
He was afraid, dear gods, but how he was afraid. And yes, useless. Shamefully, pathetically useless.
They wafted above dead dry valleys and crossed the Tzwayg escarpment. The ground fell away beneath them and the Empty Sands stretched ahead, a thousand feet below. The sled drifted on, blind and dumb, always in the same direction, day after day over the endless rise and fall of the dunes, a great red and yellow sea frozen stiff, until in the distance on the fourth day Tsen saw the smear on the horizon that was the storm-dark of the Godspike and the unmistakable flashes of lightning in the sky. Every night he dipped his middle finger into one of the barrels of water and tried to see through the eyes of Shrin Chrias Kwen; and every day that finger tingled back at him as he sat in the sun looking out over the desert. For better or for worse, Quai’Shu’s kwen knew where he was. Chrias wasn’t stupid either, so he could probably guess where Tsen was going – whatever good that might do him.
High overhead, off in the distance, a swarm of glasships drifted, sparkling as they caught the sun. Tsen squinted. They were far too far away for him to make out whose they were, but only one person
had so many. Shonda. Tsen watched until he saw that they were heading away.
Pity.
Climbing out from the abyss of the Queverra was every bit as long and hard and tedious as Tuuran had imagined. His legs didn’t thank him at all. There would be a reckoning, they told him, in aches and pains that simply wouldn’t go away. One day he’d want something of them and they wouldn’t budge and he’d have to manage without. Walk on his hands or something. Maybe on his head. Let the bit that made all the ridiculous decisions see how it felt. Tuuran tried pointing out how it could have been worse, how he could have been on his own with no food and no water. Could have done the stupid thing and gone back up the way he’d come, not knowing any better. Could have come all this way and not found Crazy and his naked men with their white-painted faces who thought Crazy was some sort of god. But his legs were having none of it. Food and water were all well and good for other bits and pieces, they said, and the same went for company, but climbing the however many thousands of steps it was back up to the top was still down to them.
Tuuran did his best to ignore them and watched Crazy Mad’s new friends instead. They were weird little men but they knew a path out of the Queverra that wound back and forth past the river that cascaded into it, one that passed little pools full of beautiful cold clear water that tasted divine, and they carried food on their backs and never complained even if they watched Tuuran with a strange mix of awe and envy and fear while grovelling in the dirt whenever Crazy so much as looked at them. Weird, but hard not to like, all things considered.
They acquired more as they climbed. Crazy Mad started at the bottom with seven following him. After the first day there were still seven but in the morning there were a dozen. Tuuran never saw
them arrive. They were simply there when before they weren’t. By the next morning there were twenty.
‘Why?’ he asked no one in particular. Not that any of them were much for talking with the strain of the climb, and Crazy Mad was setting a pace as though
his
were the legs of an Adamantine Man. For a while Tuuran thought he didn’t know. But eventually Crazy spun some ridiculous story about a great tunnel of white stone that ran off under the ground for ever, and how the painted men had found him staggering out of it without the first clue who he was. Didn’t remember much about how he was in there in the first place, he said, though he had that funny look in his eye that made Tuuran think maybe Crazy remembered more than he cared to say. It was a funny enough look for him to think better of asking, but eventually his not asking was so loud that Crazy huffed and sighed and said that as far as the painted men were concerned, it meant that he’d walked out of Xibaiya, and apparently that made him special. And obviously no, he had no idea what they were talking about and it was a pile of utter crap and nonsense, and yes, he might have been a bit delirious by the time he reached the bottom of the abyss, and yes, his wits were a touch addled, but he was pretty sure he’d remember if he’d happened to take a little excursion into the realm of the dead thanks very much.
And there was that funny look again, and Tuuran took a deep breath and let it slowly out and rolled his eyes and let it go because by now, after all he’d seen with Crazy, it was just one more thing. Water off a duck’s back.
Best not to think about it
.
The climb took five days. By the time they got to the top, Crazy’s band of white-faced men had grown to a horde. There were . . . Tuuran didn’t know. A thousand? Two thousand? They spilled over the lip of the Queverra and swarmed through the camps of the desert men scattered around its rim. The painted men were naked, armed with nothing more than stones and whatever else they could pick up, but they came like a sandstorm, rushing through one camp and killing everyone in their path and not even stopping for plunder except maybe to pick up a sword or a spear before they charged on to the next.
The desert men had no idea what hit them. The first camp didn’t even see them coming. The next made the mistake of trying to
put up a fight. In his time Tuuran had seen how a few dozen well armed soldiers could put a mob to flight if they knew what they were doing and held their nerve, but not
this
mob. The painted men were as crazy as Crazy. Dying didn’t bother them. A few dozen were cut down and so what? The rest didn’t even seem to notice as they swarmed over the Taiytakei and tore them to shreds with their bare hands. After that, the rest of the slavers had the sense to flee, grabbing what they could and jumping on the first horse or camellike thing they saw and putting as big a cloud of dust between them and the Queverra as they could. When it was over, Tuuran put up his feet and dozed – about time they had a bit of that, said his feet – but he’d barely closed his eyes when Crazy was poking him up again, dragging one of the bad-tempered humpbacked camel-things after him. It was called a linxia, or something like that, but they’d always looked like hump-backed horses to Tuuran.
‘Get up,’ said Crazy. ‘We’re leaving, big man.’
‘Where?’ Though
Why?
might have been a better question, but Crazy had that look in him again, the one that said best not to argue in case his eyes did their silver thing and people started disintegrating.
‘Where the dragons are. Some place called the Godspike.’
Tuuran looked at his boots. ‘Sorry, feet.’ He got up.
They didn’t leave until the next morning on account of Crazy not having thought of anything much more than where he wanted to go and grabbing an animal to carry him there. The small matter of it being a ten-day trek across what was as close as made no difference to desert didn’t seem to have entered his thinking. And maybe he could just go all silver-eyed and disintegrate being thirsty, but Tuuran certainly couldn’t and neither could the painted men – well, probably – and so Tuuran spent half the night shouting at Crazy Mad not to be crazy and the other half yelling at the white-faced men to find someone who actually knew where they were going and to sort out the things commonly used to stave off the various irritating ways to die that deserts tended to throw about in their thoughtless way. Took a while but he did it. He was good at that sort of thing. When they did leave, they left with a couple of thousand men trailing after them. Trailing after Crazy Mad, anyway, Tuuran reminded himself.
They rode on their humpbacked horse-camel-things through day after day of broken cliffs and stone spires and scrubby dusty earth. The white-faced men led them to a shallow river running through a deep canyon, where the sun rarely touched the surface and where they drank and refilled their stolen water skins. After that, they climbed for three days until they emerged on the top of a great cliff looking out over a sea of sand, and there it was, fifty miles to the west, a dark smudge in the distant sky: the Godspike with the storm-dark wrapped around it. Tuuran and Crazy Mad walked to the cliff’s edge and sat together with their legs dangling over the drop while the maelstrom turned a livid purple and the sea of sand gleamed like burnished copper.
‘What is it, Crazy?’ asked Tuuran. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘A big dark cloud on the horizon,’ Crazy said after a bit. ‘That’s what it is.’
Tuuran shoved him. He thought about shoving him right off the cliff. Maybe plummeting to his death would turn Crazy Mad into Silver Eyes, and Tuuran reckoned Silver Eyes might know a thing or two more than ‘big dark cloud on the horizon’.
‘You going to go all weird on me again, Crazy?’ Crazy didn’t answer, and it was, Tuuran realised, a bit of a stupid question. Crazy hadn’t stopped being weird since they’d left Aria. ‘They’re a funny lot, these dark-skins. Don’t have any truck with gods yet they have this. In the Dominion all that desert would be one big temple, the whole of it. They’d have twenty thousand people out there in a city of tents and every one of them a priest. Maybe even in Aria too. Here it’s all just, yeah, yeah, some half-god left behind a spire of stone that reaches all the way up to the sky and there’s a hole in the world that eats everything that enters and no one has the first idea why or what it’s for but never mind, just ignore it, just leave it be and everything will be fine.’ He paused. ‘That’s what you’re after, is it, Crazy? That why we’re out here in the desert? What happens when we get there?’ The last fire of the sun blazed around the black smear of cloud. As it died, the desert began to fall dark.
Crazy Mad sat and stared and didn’t answer for so long that Tuuran was starting to think he’d fallen asleep, then he suddenly got up and slapped Tuuran on the shoulder. ‘I think we go home,
big man.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know. But I think that’s what it is. Wait and see.’ He puffed out his cheeks and blew, mumbled a bit to himself and then headed back towards the white-faced men waiting back with their mounts. After a few paces more, he stopped. ‘Your dragon’s there, big man. Somewhere.’
Tuuran stared up at the stars that night, tried to count them as he sometimes did when he couldn’t sleep and tried to remember the names of all the constellations – the ones he recalled from his home and the ones he knew from the seas around the Dominion and off the shores of Aria. Different stars in different worlds but not
all
different. Some remained the same but rose in different places in the sky. Were some stars always there no matter the world? The Adamantine Spear, they had that back in the dragon-kingdoms. Crazy said they called it the Earthspear in Aria. He didn’t know if the Taiytakei had their own name for it, but it was here too.
He didn’t sleep at all. Usually Crazy was the one kicking him, tossing and turning and complaining about his snoring while Tuuran was gone seconds after he closed his eyes, but not tonight. He watched the half-moon rise, and got up and went to sit at the edge of the cliff again. In the darkness he could see the horizon maelstrom aglow with its own dim inner light, lit by the same flashes of purple lightning he and the alchemist had once seen when they’d crossed the storm-dark together, two slaves on their way to Xican. He stayed there until the sky lightened and the sun rose. A pillar of bright orange light, needle-thin but brilliant, suddenly descended from the sky. The light of the rising sun running down the Godspike to strike the storm-dark and set the maelstrom alight.
Some of the white-faced men came to sit and watch too, although they kept their distance. Then Crazy came and chivvied them and they set off along the cliff and down a narrow trail through a steep cleft out into the sands. They camped again for the afternoon and crossed the sands at night, sheltered in the day and rode on in the dark, and all the while the maelstrom grew closer, swelling with each mile that passed, a black blot in the sky in the sunlight, a dark violet glow in the night, until Tuuran found it hard to look at anything else. It filled his thoughts – that and what would happen when he and Crazy Mad reached it.
As the sun rose on their third day in the desert, he saw other threads of light forming a circle from the desert sands to the rim of the maelstrom like bars in a cage. Tuuran rode the last few miles alone to the closest of them, a massive white stone monolith a mile high. He touched it and looked up at the black stain in the sky above. Its surface was as smooth as glass and unmarked, like the stone of the eyrie tunnels, the arches in the Pinnacles, the pillars in the Queverra and the one the Watcher had taken him to see. He felt the surge, the adrenaline kick when a fight was on its way. He could almost taste it. Crazy Mad swore the dragons were here so the eyrie must be here too. Maybe old Grand Master Bellepheros could make sense of it all. He closed his eyes and shook his head, throwing off the awe and dread that threatened to overwhelm him, turned away and rode back. He was an Adamantine Man. He dealt in simple things.
The painted men led them to the shadow of the maelstrom and a camp of desert slavers. The Godspike was a place of truce for the tribes that otherwise spent a good part of their time trying to kidnap each other to sell into slavery. Tuuran learned that yes, there
was
something above the storm-dark now. Glasships of the city men flew to and fro far overhead every day, and a monstrous creature lived there too, but that was mostly seen on the other side where the men from the mountains had their camp. He thanked them while Crazy rode on under the storm-dark. The painted men balked at that, but Crazy simply didn’t give a shit, so Tuuran told them to stay and wait while he went on at Crazy’s side, the two of them together and alone the way they’d been for years. The desert men didn’t look best pleased at having the white-faced men left milling about with nothing much to do, so Tuuran kept his mouth shut about the thousand or so more who would arrive during the night. Best, he thought, to let them have that as a surprise. Didn’t want to spoil their last day, after all.