The Splintered Gods

by Stephen Deas

  ‘They’re killing everyone,’ he said, when Tuuran finally stirred and rubbed his eyes. ‘They’re wiping this city away, all of it.’

  Tuuran shrugged.

  ‘That’s not how you make war. I spent three years with the Sun King’s armies when Merizikat and half the western provinces of the Dominion rose in revolt. I saw things there I thought I’d never see again. Men lining the road crucified and left to die. Thousands of them. But I never saw this. This isn’t war.’

  ‘This is the night-skins showing their true colours.’ Tuuran spat. ‘Pretty on the outside, black with rot underneath.’

  They crept through the dawn light, past the sleepy-eyed watchmen and on down the length of the island, stopping often behind outcrops of rock or deep in the undergrowth, pressed into the shadows, picking their way around sentries and patrols. They skirted what had once been a thriving market, the stump of a bell tower marking the square behind it, full of soldiers now. The slope of the island eased after that. Berren saw the smashed remains of one of the giant rock-men poking up among the lavish stone mansions of the lower slopes, Senxian’s sea titans who’d risen to fight the invaders, stone men as tall as a barn. When he looked out to sea, he saw another, wading through the shallows close to the mainland, wandering aimlessly. A lucky survivor? The dragon had plucked the others out of the water. It had dropped them high above the cliffs and smashed them, and Berren wondered how that was possible, even for a monster with wings bigger than the largest sails. The stone men surely weighed as much as a galley.

  They haven’t been to this world for a very long time. It is rich. The very air itself to them is like pashbahla. The thought came out of nowhere, his but not. He’d never heard of pashbahla and had no idea what it was until he found a memory of a leaf, long and thin and a deep dark red and knew that chewing it or brewing an infusion gave a man enough energy to feel he could do anything. How do I know that? And then Tuuran had his arm and was pulling him sideways.

  ‘Trying to get seen, Crazy? Wanting to draw a little attention to yourself so we can test whether their lightning still passes straight through you?’

  And there was another thing. He fingered the hole in his brigandine coat. Its edges were smooth and charred, melted metal and burned leather. Tuuran said there was another in the back, but Berren didn’t remember being struck by lightning and he didn’t have any mark on his skin. A man would remember that, wouldn’t he? Being hit by lightning? If he survived, that was . . .

  ‘I need to find the warlock who did this to me,’ Berren hissed. The warlock with the ruined face and the blind eye. ‘I need to find him. I need to know what he did. I need to know what I am!’

  ‘And I’m going to find my queen of dragons. But first we need to get off this blasted island.’

  They moved on, skirting the shore, slow and careful, passing through the abandoned grounds of grand houses, past the ornate and colourful homes of traders in luxury and the exotic, with fancy gardens and pretty cottages by their sides. The stonework was scarred here and there, hit by flying debris during the explosions of the battle, but the whirlwind of the dragon had mostly passed this part of the island by. Tuuran climbed laboriously onto the roof of one and shielded his eyes against the sun. Berren vaulted lightly up beside him.

  ‘There.’ The big man was pointing at the bridge to the mainland maybe a half-mile further on. The bridge itself had been smashed during the battle but there was a causeway underneath it. Berren scanned the buildings on either side. Wisps of smoke rose between them. They were wreckage and rubble now, bombarded by rockets at the start of the battle and then burned by the dragon. One of the sea titans had smashed its way through them, heading up the slope until the dragon had torn it away into the sky. Tuuran swore and ducked back out of sight. There were Taiytakei everywhere.

  ‘Even if we wait for nightfall, they’ll see us if we try to cross. Question is, will they catch us? They’ll have more sleds. Maybe we should try taking one.’ He bared his teeth. ‘That would do nicely, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘We could cross somewhere else?’

  ‘Don’t fancy swimming with all this.’ Tuuran patted his axe and his shield. ‘Don’t much fancy leaving it behind either, all things considered. We need a place to hide and sit this out for a bit. Somewhere nicer than that gully we had last night if you don’t mind. Stones for pillows is all very well but I fancy myself some nice silk sheets.’ He squinted, then pointed inland. Berren followed his finger. Movement beside one of the houses. Too sly to be soldiers.

  ‘What’s wrong with right here?’

  ‘Where there’s people there’s food.’ Tuuran patted his belly. ‘Did you eat yesterday? Because if you did then you didn’t share, and we’d need to have some serious words about that, Crazy Mad. Besides, if those were soldiers then we’d know about it by now. More runaway slaves means more eyes to keep watch in the night, eh?’

  Berren almost laughed. He’d learned the hard way to go days without eating if he had to. When Tuuran missed a meal, he usually started hitting things.

  ‘Did you see the two night-skin soldiers heading that way?’ Tuuran asked.

  Berren shook his head. ‘We should go the other way then, right?’

  ‘Nah.’ Tuuran grinned and stroked his axe. ‘I’m hungry.’

  4

  The Writing Room

  From the eyrie to Dhar Thosis took four days. The glasship crossed the Empty Sands and drifted high over the maze of cliffs and mesas and canyons and gullies that was the Desert of Thieves, a mosaic of parched broken stone, almost lifeless. Tsen kept the glasship low in case anyone else was out there, passing the abyss of the Queverra a few dozen miles to the north. From above, the landscape was like an unfinished puzzle, full of gaps and incongruities, disparate fragments forced where they didn’t quite belong. Tsen, in his golden gondola, felt much the same. Fractured. He paced. He chewed Xizic. He talked to Kalaiya about all the things they’d never done and now never would. He couldn’t hold her, not properly, not with the deep calm lasting embrace she deserved. He wanted to but he was just too tense. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she kept saying. ‘You didn’t send the dragon to burn Dhar Thosis. You tried to stop them.’ But it was his fault.

  Eventually she got sick of him saying how sorry he was and slapped him. A slave slapping the first t’varr to a sea lord was the sort of thing for which slaves were flayed, but here, where there was no one else to see, they were long past slave and master. ‘Mai’Choiro, kwen to the mighty Lord Shonda of Vespinarr with all his boundless wealth – the rider-slave’s orders were his, not yours,’ she hissed. She sounded petulant. She was angry because she was too clever, deep down, not to see that they were doomed, and her anger lashed out at him simply because there was no one else.

  Or so I tell myself. Of course, she might simply be angry with me because I was an ambitious fool who played and lost. He touched her gently. ‘I was with him,’ he said. ‘I listened and nodded and said nothing. I gave every sign of acquiescence, of being a loyal servant of Vespinarr, of accepting that fate.’ He smiled a wan smile. ‘Mai’Choiro is in the dingiest, muckiest most unpleasant room I could find. He deserves his prison even more than the rider-slave but it won’t make a jot of difference. Except to annoy Shonda.’ It was vindictiveness, really, nothing else, and a fat lot of good that did him.

  ‘You should kill them both. Hang them. While you can.’

  ‘If I do, the Elemental Men will destroy our families, our house. Everything.’ Not that he gave a fig for most of that. ‘No.’ He let her go and shook his head. ‘Mai’Choiro must be tried alongside me, and no one else knows the truth. No one except the rider-slave. Which means I can’t hang her either, not yet, no matter how much it’s the right thing to do, no matter how much I want to.’ It was all of course a lot more complicated than that. Kalaiya probably knew that too.

  ‘There’s no way out, is there?’ She was giving him a very deep look.

  ‘No. Shrin Chrias Kwen took our armies t
o Dhar Thosis. The dragon is mine, as is the slave who rode it. I took a great risk with the lives of many innocents and now they’re dead. The Elemental Men will summon the Arbiter of the Dralamut to pass judgement, and she will hang me. Knowing everything I know, I would do the same.’ He turned away. ‘All I can do now is make sure that no more suffer for my mistake than necessary.’ And try to see that Shonda gets the kicking he deserves after I swing from my gibbet.

  The glasship floated serenely on. Another day passed and then another until the sands returned, a last ridge before the sea which drew back slowly to reveal what lay beyond like an exotic dancer lowering a veil, slow and tantalising and at first hard to make out, until Tsen suddenly turned away from the window and sat with his back to it, refusing to look until the full horror was on show. Kalaiya put a hand on his shoulder. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. The city was a ruin, everything the rider-slave had said and more, far worse than he’d imagined it. The marvellous docks were a wasteland of ash dotted with the blackened bones of great warehouses and the shattered wreckage of fallen glasships. The heart of the city was gone, massive shards of glass lying amid the broken skeletons of what few buildings remained, smeared with ash in blacks and greys and white.

  Two sea titans lumbered in the shallows, making their presence felt. A handful of ships were anchored in the bay, a few boats straining their oars back and forth to the shore; and Tsen wondered who they were and what they made of what had happened. He imagined the first few fishermen arriving home, full of that anticipation of land that sailors have, of spying the dark line of the coast on the horizon, the pall of smoke, the smell of ash and soot on the wind, the near-empty docks, the beached ships, the few surviving masts all askew. Or perhaps they’d spied the Palace of Roses as they strained for home and wondered why only one tower glittered in the sunset and not three.

  The gondola carried on, slow and unhurried across the water. The great bridges had been smashed; the dazzle of gold-glass towers looked as though a hurricane had torn through them, as though the island itself had stirred and shaken to throw them down. There were no glasships in the sky over Dhar Thosis, none at all.

  ‘I did this,’ he murmured to no one in particular.

  ‘No.’ Kalaiya squeezed his hand.

  ‘Yes.’ He could trust her. No one else now except maybe Chay-Liang, and it hit him hard then that the Watcher was dead. The only weapon he’d had for keeping the dragons and their rider in line, for keeping Quai’Shu alive and stopping the jackals of Vespinarr from taking his dream and making it their own, and he’d lost it.

  ‘No.’ He could hear the horror in Kalaiya’s voice. The worst atrocity in five hundred years.

  ‘Yes. And Lord Shonda will continue as he planned right from the very start. He’s got exactly what he wanted.’

  ‘He’ll kill you, Tsen,’ said Kalaiya quietly, ‘and make sure you take every drop of blame for this. He’ll do it quickly, as quickly as he possibly can. Someone has to die for this.’

  She was probably right. Yes, the Vespinese would kill him and his dragon-riding slave and they’d kill Kalaiya too. ‘They’ll dismantle everything Quai’Shu strove to build. They’ll tear down the Palace of Leaves, hand over the Grey Isle – whatever it takes to make reparation to Senxian’s heirs – generous and gracious in their apparent munificence while on the quiet and in the shadows they silence any and all who know the truth!’

  ‘And keep what they covet most: your dragons.’ They understood each other so well. The rest of the world saw only a slave, but to Tsen, Kalaiya was so much more.

  ‘He’ll come quickly, fast and deadly to silence the truth before it can spread, so no one will ever see their guiding hand in the horror that lies here at the edge of the sea.’

  Kalaiya gripped his hand so tightly it hurt. ‘But the Vespinese can’t act until they know it’s been done. They can’t act until they know, Tsen! You have time!’

  Tsen nodded. ‘Everyone across Takei’Tarr shall know the truth. That will be a worthwhile end to my life.’ And for that he hadn’t killed the rider-slave. It was for that, wasn’t it?

  The glasship drifted over the great fortress of Vul Tara, now a blackened smear. Tsen guided it up close to the cliffs of Dul Matha, up to what had once been the Palace of Roses. Two of the three towers were stumps. The dragon had done this, the dragon alone – up here, so far from Shrin Chrias Kwen’s ships, from their rockets and black-powder guns and lightning cannon, it could be nothing else.

  ‘Where are all the people?’ asked Kalaiya. Tsen didn’t answer. They were dead, of course.

  The glasship’s golem circled the ruined palace but no one came running waving their arms for rescue. Dul Matha was empty, a ruin left for ghosts. Chrias had done what any kwen would do if he could – cleansed the place. Killed everyone and then turned on the sword-slaves he’d brought with him and left nothing. The Doctrine of a Thousand Years. Eventually Tsen spotted Sea Lord Senxian himself, hanging by the neck from the jagged tip of one of his own shattered towers. Quai’Shu and Senxian weren’t even enemies, only rivals; and even then only pawns in the great dance between Vespinarr and the desert lords of Cashax. So much ruin and for what? Tsen stared at the murdered sea lord swinging lazily back and forth and couldn’t look away; instead he nudged towards the sea lord’s body to look more closely. He’d been right to come here. A city gone. Wiped away. A sea lord hanging dead from his own palace was a thing you had to see. There’d be no forgiveness. They were all dead men walking, every single man or woman who’d played even the most glancing part in this.

  Five days in the open being pecked at by seagulls hadn’t done Senxian any favours. His clothes were the only things Tsen could recognise. Maybe it wasn’t Senxian at all, but Tsen rather thought it was. He shook his head. ‘Ah, my Chrias, my kwen. What did Shonda offer you? They’ll hunt us to the end of every realm and you must have known it. But not me. I’ll be waiting for them. I’ll shout the truth as loud as I can before they hang me.’ He was alone except for Kalaiya but maintained the pretence of an audience anyway. Practice. Habit. All those things. You never knew when an Elemental Man might be watching, after all. ‘I tried to stop it.’ He shook his head and turned away. ‘I tried to stop it.’

  ‘I never understood why you had to let it go so far, Tsen.’ Kalaiya was weeping.

  ‘It had to be seen! The words had to come from Mai’Choiro’s mouth! The Watcher had to hear him speak them to know the truth of Shonda’s treachery! I told him to stop them! I sent him . . .’ He couldn’t finish. ‘I thought I’d bind them in their own tangled schemes and serve them up on a plate. I thought I’d buy us freedom from our debts. I thought I was cleverer than them. And I was too, but not as clever as I thought, and now the dragon-queen has ruined us all.’ The urge came again, as it did every time he saw the hurt in Kalaiya’s face, to reach out and touch her. ‘I will keep you safe, Kalaiya. Above all else, I will keep you safe.’

  Kalaiya held his hand against her cheek. ‘I live and die by your side now, Baros Tsen.’ And he almost wept and had to turn away and make a show of looking about the gondola.

  ‘Look at all this.’ He needed something to say and so he flailed at the walls panelled with their ellipses of perfect pale wood, exquisitely cut and carved around the silver edges of the curved gondola windows. At the plush thick carpet, the silver table, the bed where they slept with its silks as soft as goose down, at the glass cabinets with their silver frames with yet more glass inside, cups and decanters and spirits of every colour from every world the Taiytakei knew. ‘You’ll lose all this.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll lose you.’ She pulled away from him and pointed through the gold-tinged glass at the last of the three great towers still standing. Tsen followed the line of her finger. Near the top of the tower was a balcony lined with cages for Senxian’s jade ravens and the slaves that fed them. ‘Look!’

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘The cages are empty.’

 
; ‘Perhaps the kwen’s men let Senxian’s ravens fly when they ransacked the palace.’

  Kalaiya laughed. ‘No one would doubt you’re usually a clever and insightful man, Baros Tsen, but sometimes you’re an idiot. Who would open the cage of a hungry raven? Would you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Scribes fly the jade ravens. To the rest of us, they’re horrors.’ She shook her head at him. ‘Shrin Kwen’s men didn’t open them. The scribes of the Palace of Roses let their ravens fly before they died.’ She didn’t say any more now because she didn’t need to. He understood exactly: word had gone. Jade ravens had flown from the Palace of Roses as it fell. Of course they had. He should have thought of that.

  And then another thought sent a shiver through him: that scribes were creatures of habit. They copied every message in tiny words onto a silver ring to put around a raven’s leg. They copied every message exactly, word for word, line for line, but they didn’t compose them. If he was lucky, if the scribes had fled in a hurry, the original messages might still be there and he could see exactly what word had been sent, and to whom.

  He moved quickly now, driven by a surge of impatience. Here was something he could do at last, a useful thing, and so it must be done and be done now. He threw open the door to the cramped closet where the glasship’s pilot golem sat – dwarfish creatures made of clay, feeble-witted and barely intelligent, made by the Hingwal Taktse enchanters to fly glasships and nothing else. They were exquisite works of the enchanters’ art, each one months of effort, but Tsen hadn’t the first idea of anything except how much they cost, and right now he didn’t care. They weren’t clever enough to do what he had in mind on their own and so he stood over the creature, one eye looking out through the window, guiding it exactly. The glasship rose to hover over the top of the tower and then the golem lowered the gondola on its silver chains.