The Splintered Gods (54 page)

I will keep you warm.

Yes.
As he burned from the inside after she’d killed him. She hopped a little further and looked up.

The glasships were high overhead, far higher than they’d been before, receding into specks. The eyrie was falling. The lightning had stopped. Maybe they were out of range. She glanced at the walls but everything around her was lifeless ruin.

She dragged herself to Diamond Eye’s head. She’d have to climb on top of him to drive the knife through his skull. She wasn’t sure she could. She threw off her helmet and wiped her eyes, brushing away the pain, reached for the ruins of his harness to pull herself onto his shoulder, took hold of a rope and then howled in frustration when her arms didn’t have the strength and she fell back. Another wave of pain washed over her. She could feel herself failing.
I can’t.
And she couldn’t. Just couldn’t.

You were worthy to ride me, little one.

She wept. Nothing anyone had ever said had meant so much. And at the same time the pain in her head was like drowning.

‘Hush.’ She felt a shadow move over her. The Crowntaker stood there, eyes burning silver.

‘Why didn’t you . . . ?’ She let out a long breath. What was the point? ‘You could have been my Vishmir.’ She lifted the bladeless knife to him. ‘Finish us. Both of us.’ Above them the glasships were little more than specks now, glints catching the sun. The Crowntaker, the Silver King, the Black Moon, whatever he was, crouched beside her. The circlet tightened a little more. She cried out and arched and then cried out again at the fresh wall of pain.

‘I’ll not be your Vishmir; I’ll be your Isul Aieha.’ And she might have laughed if they weren’t all about to die. A darkness seemed to swell up around the eyrie. The storm-dark.

He reached out and touched her brow and the gold-glass circlet dissolved into ash. ‘Be free.’

The storm-dark swallowed them.

Liang found Belli where she’d left him, sitting in his study, rocking in despair. She pulled him up by the arm and dragged him onto her sled and into the tunnels. They were glowing brilliant silver now. ‘Come on, come on! The eyrie’s falling. It’s all going to the storm-dark now.’ Driving the sled faster, holding him tight. ‘Dragons, hatchlings, eggs – everything, all of it.’ Up the spiral to the surface. ‘Everything it touches.’ Past the rooms where Tsen’s t’varrs and kwens once lived. Maybe they were still there, for all she knew. ‘We have to get off before it’s too late.’ Past the rooms where some of his favoured slaves once slept. ‘We have to fly—’

She reached the end of the last twist and emerged into the dragon yard. The madman with silver eyes stood in the centre, arms stretched wide, head pitched up, light blazing out of him. The red-gold dragon Diamond Eye lay curled up on its side behind him, still. Two hatchlings flanked him, watching like sentinels. A handful of men and women stood nearby – a few Taiytakei soldiers, a dozen slaves from across the different worlds, maybe a few more – the last survivors. They seemed entranced. Enraptured.

Belli stepped off the sled and walked to join them but Liang barely noticed the people. She barely even noticed the wind.

The sky above and beyond the eyrie walls was black churning
cloud and flashes of purple lightning. They were too late.
She
was too late. She knew what happened next.

The wind stopped.

The darkness turned absolute.

Silence.

58

The Silence That Comes After

A light flared and flickered somewhere about Baros Tsen, bright enough to stir him. When he opened his eyes, a figure stood at the edge of the darkness. ‘Baros Tsen T’Varr!’ A voice echoed through the tunnel. There was something not quite human about it.

‘Kalaiya!’ Tsen sat up. He nudged Kalaiya awake.

The figure held out its hands. Two specks of light flashed across the space between them. Tsen tried to duck. Kalaiya opened her eyes and screamed. Something as large and solid as a fist hit him in the chest and he felt it run up his skin like a giant centipede, irresist ibly quick as it wrapped itself around his neck. He clawed at it but it was as hard as metal. He struggled, panicked for a moment, then, as nothing else happened, calmed himself. He looked at Kalaiya. She too had a collar around her throat. It was made of gold-glass.

‘Do you know who I am, Baros Tsen?’ rang out the voice.

Tsen clawed at the glass collar around his throat and then gave up. All this way and then days starving in a cave in the dark, unable to find the way out, and now this. He closed his eyes and squeezed Kalaiya’s hand and wept, because really, after everything he’d done and all he’d been through, he’d well and truly had enough. The Arbiter of the Dralamut stood, a shadow amid the dancing lights of her enchanted globes. There didn’t seem to be anyone with her but wherever the Arbiter went, killers were always on hand. Stupidest thing of all was that he’d never wanted to run away in the first place.

‘I’m sorry, my love.’

The Arbiter reached out a hand. The sled began to move, drifting closer until it stopped in front of her. There was a dead man on the sand behind her. He looked as though he’d been ripped to pieces by a thousand knives. It took another moment for Tsen to
realise that the shredded blood-soaked clothes were the robe of an Elemental Man.

The Arbiter of the Dralamut cocked her head. She didn’t wear the headdress or the flaming feather robe, only the plain white tunic of an enchantress. For all he knew this was another skin-shifter. She
was
draped in the Arbiter’s shards of glass, though. And they were stained red and dripping with fresh blood.

‘Another Baros Tsen?’ she asked. ‘Or is it truly you?’

Tsen dropped to his knees and bowed. ‘Lady Arbiter. Judge me as I know you must but my slave is innocent.’

‘I am Red Lin Feyn, daughter in blood of Feyn Charin and the Crimson Sunburst, enchantress, navigator. Arbiter of the Dralamut until two days ago but I no longer claim that right. I have discharged that duty.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Who are you?’

‘I am Baros Tsen T’Varr,’ said Tsen.

‘Really?’ The collar round his neck contracted. He choked and clawed at it. Beside him Kalaiya screamed but Tsen found he couldn’t make a sound. Couldn’t breathe no matter how his lungs pumped and his ribs and belly heaved. He flailed, staggered to his feet, lurched a few steps forward, but the Arbiter simply backed away with such grace that she seemed almost to be floating. The darkness closed on him. He fell forward. As he closed his eyes he saw Kalaiya too clawing at her throat.

He came round perhaps a minute later. The Arbiter was sitting between them, perched on the edge of a gold-glass disc. ‘Baros Tsen T’Varr.’ She smiled and then laughed. ‘Welcome to the Queverra. You are free to go.’

‘What?’ The collar had gone from around his neck.

‘The Arbiter has passed judgement. I found you guilty in your absence of complicity in the razing of Dhar Thosis. They found your body in a gondola close to the Godspike. They’ll take it back to Khalishtor to be hanged by the feet so I doubt anyone is looking for you. Although given that that was already the second time your body was found, I’d be careful. Nevertheless, you may go. I suppose the second body was the shifter, was it?’

Tsen shrugged. Last he’d seen Sivan, the shifter had looked like himself and had had a spear stuck through him. Seemed best not to mention that though.

‘Free, lady?’

‘In the end I believe you. I believe you tried to stop it. Because of your enchantress’s faith. Because of your rider-slave’s honesty. You were stupid, Tsen, but not evil.’

‘Yes.’ Wisdom suggested shutting up and taking Kalaiya’s hand and walking away as fast as he possibly could, and yet the devil inside wouldn’t let go. And he had a hundred questions about how she’d found him and why she’d thought he was a shifter and how much she knew about what lay beneath it all, but one thing more than anything else . . . ‘You called yourself daughter of Feyn Charin and the Crimson Sunburst, lady.’

Red Lin Feyn paused and then chuckled and nodded. She let out a long deep breath. ‘A change is coming. A catastrophe, perhaps. You see it in the swelling of the storm-dark and in the cracked needle beside the Godspike. You see it in the rise of the sorcerers of Aria and the Necropolis of the Ice Witch and in the dead that do not rest, in Merizikat and also even here. In other things. In the storm-dark itself. The skin-shifters know.’ She looked across the darkness at the shredded man on the sand, paused again and smiled. ‘In your history, when the Crimson Sunburst appeared at the foot of Mount Solence with her army of golems, what became of her, Baros Tsen?’

‘The Elemental Men fought her and she was defeated.’

‘So she was.’ Red Lin Feyn turned away. ‘Disappear, Baros Tsen T’Varr. You’ll find it’s not so hard.’

‘Why do you want the egg?’ Tsen blinked. The question wasn’t his. It had popped into his mind from somewhere else. He looked about himself. Nothing.

Red Lin Feyn shook her head.

‘But the answer is in your thoughts, little one. The grey dead have called the Black Moon to rise . . .’ Tsen gasped. A hand flew to his mouth because the words didn’t belong, made no sense, weren’t his at all. ‘I . . .’ Then he jumped as a sharp cracking noise broke the quiet. It came from the sled, and it took Tsen far too long to understand what it was and so he simply gawped as the dragon egg cracked and burst apart in a flurry of wings and claws and two furious eyes gleamed.

I am Silence.

Epilogue

The dragon Snow circled high over the mouth of the Fury, enraptured by the ripples in the water. On a clear fine day like this there was still a dark stain across the earth where the city of Furymouth had been. The ruins were overgrown with weeds and grass and briars now, but underneath them the stones remained black with soot and the air carried a tang of ash. There were little ones down there. She could feel their thoughts, pick them out and read them if she wanted to. They lived in cellars and damp old tunnels and came out to hunt for food when they thought it was safe.

Nowhere was safe.

A speck in the sky far out to sea caught her eye. Another dragon. She reached out her thoughts to greet it. Perhaps they would hunt together, digging these little ones out of their holes . . .

She stopped her circling and almost fell out of the sky in surprise. The dragon had a rider.

Fly!
it said.
Just Fly!

Snow saw what was in the dragon’s mind, what was coming out of the storm-dark, and fled.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Simon Spanton, devourer of unnecessary prologues, who asked for dragons and got more than he bargained for. To Marcus Gipps and Robert Dinsdale for their editorial work. To Hugh Davis for copy-editing all my dragons and to the proofreaders whose names I’ve rarely known. To Stephen Youll for his gorgeous covers. To Sea Lord Jon Weir, even though he’s gone to other things.

With thanks to all the people who read
A Memory of Flames
and talked about it and weren’t afraid to be honest.
Dragon Queen
and
The Splintered Gods
are different books from the ones they might have been because of you.

It’s still very true that none of this would have happened without the trust and faith of the same special few as always. Thank you again. Thank you to lovers of dragons everywhere. Thank you to all the alchemists and enchantresses out there. Thank
you
, for reading this.

To any who want to explore the world of the dragons for its own sake, you can do so at the online gazetteer at
www.stephendeas.com
. There are other goodies there from time to time too.

If you liked this book and want there to be more, please say so. Loudly and to lots of people.

Also by Stephen Deas from Gollancz:

The Adamantine Palace
The King of the Crags
The Order of the Scales
The Black Mausoleum
Dragon Queen

The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice
The Warlock’s Shadow
The King’s Assassin