by Stephen Deas
She looked at what she had. Vespinarr, the richest city in the world. A scheme cast over more than a decade, backed and aided by the invincible Elemental Men themselves and yet a creature that could kill them? As she read from the start one last time, she knew that hers had become, briefly, the most powerful voice in the world.
The killer was waiting for her as he’d promised, in the landing fields at the foot of the Silver Mountain by the Visonda Palace of Vespinarr. There were dozens of gondolas and seven glasships tethered there, gold-tinged glass discs slowly rotating as they drew energy from the black enchanter monoliths that ringed the field. Horses and elegant carriages stood waiting while a steady trickle of flying sleds moved back and forth to the Visonda itself. There was even a glass-and-gold carriage shaped like a sailing ship, floating a little off the ground.
‘This is how the sea lords and their minions live,’ she murmured. ‘Swathed in gifts from their enchanters.’
The killer bowed and kept a respectful distance. ‘Sea Lord Weir sends his greetings and wishes you luck. The glasship from Tayuna will be here tomorrow.’
‘I’ve read your papers, killer. We will fly this glasship to the Kabulingnor itself. I will require your presence.’
The killer frowned and Red Lin Feyn smiled behind her Arbiter mask. She understood. His first thought would be: Sea Lord Shonda’s kwen, whoever holds that title here with Mai’Choiro indisposed elsewhere, will shoot an uninvited glasship out of the sky. His next thought would be the realisation of his responsibility to prevent that. The one after would be that she was deliberately provoking a battle of wills that Lord Shonda, possibly the most powerful man alive, must somehow lose.
‘How long will it take for us to rise to the top of the mountain?’ she asked when he still didn’t answer. He’d be right about the battle of wills, if he’d got that far yet. If she couldn’t coerce Sea Lord Shonda into line right now then she might as well turn around and go home.
‘Not long.’
Not long enough, he was telling her. Perhaps she could concede a little. ‘I will need some time to prepare.’ She drifted to the window and looked outside. They’d left the Dralamut early in the morning. The afternoon was already old, but the summer evenings in the mountains were long. ‘I will arrive at dusk,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard the Kabulingnor is at its most impressive when the sun sets fire to the distant mountaintops. So yes, I will come at dusk.’
‘As you wish, lady.’ There was, perhaps, a very slight hint of gratitude in the killer’s voice; although she’d given him this little delay not to spare him but to spare the men he might have killed to make his point more swiftly. She watched him open his little window, about to vanish without reply, when a malicious demon piped up inside her.
‘Don’t kill anyone,’ she ordered, a moment before he was gone.
Alone, she closed the window behind him and all the little blinds around the gondola so no one would see inside. Modesty in part, but more to keep prying eyes at bay. She opened the chest that the slaves from the Dralamut had loaded aboard, the chest with the false bottom and a secret inside, and took out the glass shards of the Arbiter.
The sun sank. She had no idea when the right time would be to leave so she opened the little shutter door to where the pilot golem sat. It was a short squat clay thing, a creature a little like an inverted urn with stubby little arms and stubbier little legs. They could walk and even talk but they never did. She told it to be at the top of the Silver Mountain where the glasships landed, very shortly before dusk, and left it at that. The glasship began to rise at once, but slowly, very slowly, and long before they arrived she was ready. Dressed. Painted. Red Lin Feyn was no more and the Arbiter of the Dralamut stood in her place. She looked at herself in a mirror and adjusted the glass needles that ran through her hair. It wasn’t often she dressed this way, mostly because it was a pain and took an age to get right, but she’d practised it because it was part of the point of who she was.
Once she was finished, once she was safe from prying eyes, she opened the blinds again and looked down. Vespinarr lay beneath her now. Beside the landing fields the Visonda Palace rose up the lower slope of the mountain in layers, fortress-like, with its vast inward-sloping walls broken only in their upper parts by straight rows of many windows and sliced by layers of flat rooftops. The Visonda was built on an outcrop of rock jutting from the base of the mountain. The side facing the city was a large space enclosed by walls from which great open gates led out to the Visonda Square, while more great gates on the inner side stood ajar and opened to a series of grand stairs, miniature palaces and castles and towers between a gently sloping path that led up to the peak of the outcrop. A quadrangular mass of gilt-canopied buildings packed the little summit so tightly that it seemed a marvel to Red Lin Feyn that none had ever toppled off.
Beneath the walls lay the vastness of the Visonda Square, a plaza of pale grey stone. Dark lines ran in from the corners and the edges, converging on an annulus at the centre pierced by a small spire, the mysterious Azahl Pillar. Further across the city, more gilt canopies loomed like monsters out of the packed narrow streets of the Harub. The Temples of Jokung and the Sun and Moon, where whispers murmured of forbidden gods who still took sacrifice.
She lost sight of individual streets and palaces as the glasship rose higher. Instead, she saw how the city sat at one end of a basin surrounded by snow-covered peaks with the silver-gleaming ribbon of the Yalun Zarang, the ‘merry blue’, running through the southern quarter and, a few miles to the east, the second river, the Jokun. The swamps to the north glittered in the twilight sun while the gullies of the southern Konsidar beyond fell into shadow and their snow-peppered peaks glowed pink in the sunset. There was a beauty here, an elegant soaring natural grace to the land that the cities on the coast somehow lacked; and she thought she understood for a moment the arrogance of the Vespinese. There was more wealth in Vespinarr than mere silver.
She went back to her chest and took out a glass globe roiling with black cloud. Put her hands on it to soothe the tiny snip of the storm-dark kept trapped within. Sometimes, all alone, she imagined that Feyn Charin himself was trapped there.
‘I am ready,’ she told it, and looked at herself once more in the mirror. The Arbiter’s robe was of firebird feathers stolen from the deep jungles and lava runs of Qeled, feathers that seemed to burn like flames, the deeper darker ones around her feet where the robe flared, then growing lighter in strands that wrapped her body in spirals like the weave of a rope and made her appear a tornado of swirling naked flame. Gold-glass shards hung from her arms and across her chest and tiny sparks of lightning flashed between them. Her hair was piled high and shot through with threads of gold and silver fire. She lifted the headdress off the bed and fitted it carefully in place. Pure white feathers rose behind her now, almost as tall and as broad as her outstretched arms. In the midst of all this fire and light, her face was painted white and black, split straight down the middle, black on the right, white on the left. Her lips were as red as ripe cherries and a second line of red crossed her face from side to side, ear to eyes to ear.
‘I am ready,’ she said again.
They were reaching the top of the Silver Mountain, crossing the outer wall of the Kabulingnor, twenty paces thick of bland dark stone, and then the inner, painted yellow, wide enough that the lords of the mountains sometimes had chariot races on it when they were bored. Inside these walls rose the twin gold-glass towers of the Ziltak, the place for receiving honoured guests. Deeper in the mountaintop gardens were the marvels of the Chensdong and Polsang Palaces, almost hidden among giant trees. She couldn’t see the fabled Golden Quintarch at all. It was said to be the most magnificent of the five palaces of the Kabulingnor but it was also Lord Shonda’s innermost court and hardly anyone born outside the walls ever penetrated so far.
Around the Ziltak, Shonda’s court had assembled to receive her in the open. Lin Feyn closed the blinds with a thought as the gondola touched the grou
nd. She counted to a hundred and to a hundred again and Red Lin Feyn dropped away. As she stepped outside and let the crowds see her majesty, she became the Arbiter, heart and soul. She lifted her right arm high and to one side, a finger pointing firmly and strongly to the sun. Her left hand rose more slowly to the Vespinese until she saw Shonda in all his finery, here to receive her as he should. She lifted her arm a little higher and then let her finger droop to point at him, and when she spoke, her voice boomed like thunder, strong enough that everyone would hear, so loud that the front ranks of waiting t’varrs and kwens quivered and tried their hardest not to tremble. It was a voice that could be heard across mountains and down the slopes in the city itself. Everywhere throughout the seven worlds in tiny echoes.
‘I have followed the path of Feyn Charin. I have crossed worlds. I have bent the storm-dark to my will. I am Red Lin Feyn. I am the Arbiter of the Dralamut and I will be your judge. Shonda of Vespinarr, you are called to my court among those who have cavorted with dragons.’
She held the moment, let the words sink in and the echoes of them ring around the mountains. Then she turned her head and looked away and slowly walked back inside the gondola – slowly because beneath the weight and bulk of the headdress anything else was impossible.
The killer was with her in the air, but no matter. As the ramp closed behind her, she sat and carefully lifted the headdress, put it on the floor and became Red Lin Feyn again. The temptation to throw the blasted thing across the room and kick it was strong. Loathsome burden.
‘All for that?’ the killer asked.
Lin Feyn nodded. ‘All for that.’ The Arbiter had said what the Arbiter had come to say. There was no need for more. Something had started. Lin Feyn couldn’t yet begin to see where it might end, but the Arbiter of the Dralamut wasn’t meant to care.
Dragons. The symbol of Vespinarr was a snow lion and three dragons entwined. Some said dragons had lived here once but they were only repeating stories.
23
A Matter of Blood
Liang had a dream. In her dream Belli raced through tunnels of soft light to find her. She saw him stumble and slide and almost fall as he reached her. She was on the floor and she had no idea why, but something was terribly wrong. Everything was sideways. She was in his study and there was something under his desk, a vial lying on its side that must have dropped and rolled there and been lost. She tried to reach it but it was so difficult to make her arm move. She watched it instead, quite certain it would roll away and hide the moment she took her eyes off it. And Belli would want to know. He’d want it back. So she lay still. Watching.
‘Li! Flame! No!’
She felt his hands on her, moving her, turning her onto her back. She felt the movement inside her but her skin was numb and she didn’t feel his fingers at all. The world shifted suddenly and she wasn’t looking at the vial any more but up at blank white stone. She whimpered. The floor, was it? Was she floating and about to fall? Then he was looking over her.
The vial. ‘Belli?’
‘Hush.’ He drew away. He was holding a glass with a pale amber liquid in it. She wanted to warn him, tell him something was wrong, tell him about the vial under the desk before it rolled away and was lost, but her lips wouldn’t move. He ran his tongue around the rim of the glass, tasting the amber liquid. Then he screwed up his face and smashed it. Shards rained over the floor and there was a blaze of fury in his eye. He picked one up and came close to her again. ‘Live, Li.’
She could barely hear him. Her eyes wouldn’t stay focused. He brought the glass shard close to her face. She watched in horror as he cut himself and dipped a finger in his own blood and ran it over her lips. She closed her eyes. The pain was going away and a delicious numb warmth swept through in its place.
‘Live, Li,’ he said again.
And for a while after that she remembered nothing.
24
The Collar of the Moon
The gondola from Tayuna was every bit as pleasant as the one from Vespinarr, although made of gold instead of the more expensive and ostentatious silver of the mountain lord. Red Lin Feyn watched from her windows as they drifted away from Vespinarr, over the silver cascades and cataracts of the Jokun river on its way to the rebellious desert princes of Hanjaadi and the sea. She watched as the glasship crossed the southern fringes of the Konsidar out into the desert beyond. The desert was dull but she watched that too. She let her mind wander, contemplating the intricacies of power that laced Takei’Tarr like an invisible web. On and on out into the sands and the gravel flats and the bare sculpted stone, and each day the killer came back with hastily written reports and words of his own, telling her everything she should know before she arrived. No, everything she could know, except not even that. Everything the killers had found and cared to share. Chose to share.
The last was important, she felt sure, and when he came back from his first visit to the eyrie, she knew she was right not wholly to trust his reports. He told her in a carefully calm and measured voice how things were and what to expect, but something had shaken him, and by the time he bowed and begged her leave, she knew it was the dragon though he never told her nor gave her any clue as to why. She couldn’t have said what betrayed him. A flicker at the corner of his mouth one time. A slight tone out of place in his voice. The instant of hesitation when she asked him if there was anything else she should know before he’d shaken his head and told her that no, there wasn’t. He was hiding something. But the killers were good at hiding things and clever, and she couldn’t be sure whether he’d meant to let her know there was a secret he couldn’t share or whether it had slipped out to kiss her all on its own. She didn’t trust them though, not quite. It wasn’t in her nature, and her nature was why she was what she was.
Why would a killer keep a secret from the Arbiter of the Dralamut? Why would he let her see that he had one but not share it? Were there other killers watching them both? They had a hand in this somewhere, far deeper than they cared to show, that much was clear.
No matter.
In time she saw the stain of the storm-dark on the far horizon ahead. She dressed and opened the gondola window. The Elemental Man was waiting for her, a whisper of wind that curled around her robes and then was gone as he appeared three steps behind her, head bowed.
‘Without the glasships that tow it, Tsen’s eyrie will sink, will it not?’ she asked.
‘The enchantress Chay-Liang who served Baros Tsen T’Varr claims so. Glasships may lift it higher or drag it down, but without them it slowly returns to float a hundred feet above the ground.’
So yes, without the glasships the eyrie would sink, and so if the worst came to the worst they could simply drop it into the storm-dark and be rid of it. She wondered if Baros Tsen had had the same thought on his mind when he brought the eyrie here in the first place. She wondered too if the dragon would be so easy.
As she reached the edge of the maelstrom, she watched the storm-dark spread out beneath her. Sea Lord Weir had had the windows in his gondola set at the perfect height for his own comfort and he was a tall man. Lin Feyn found herself pressed to them, on tiptoe, craning her neck like a curious child. After a while she made a pile of books and stood on it. Better. Hardly how an Arbiter should behave, but she was alone, and alone she was merely Red Lin Feyn, enchantress and navigator, initiate of Hingwal Taktse and the Dralamut. For an hour she stared out at the swirling black cloud and the sullen purple lightning deep within while the glasship drifted into the storm’s heart and to the Godspike that pinned the maelstrom to the desert of Takei’Tarr.
The Elemental Man flitted ahead of her on a sled, a tiny bright speck over the dark vastness of the storm. She wasn’t sure why when he could simply become the wind, but she envied him. Glasships suited her, but here and now she would have joined him, unsheltered from the enormity of everything, the timeless colossal sky overhead, the unfathomable endless depth of the storm-dark, the ancient immensity of the Godspike towering over everythi
ng, the constant rush of the wind, the sheer size of space and time all around her making her as small as a speck in the desert. That was how the world truly was and it was good to be reminded now and then. We are all so insignificant.
Yes, she envied him but she stayed where she was. The Arbiter of the Dralamut did not cavort through the sky, even if she wanted to. Instead, she closed the blinds and dressed herself as she’d dressed for the lords of Vespinarr, all except for that blasted headdress; and when she was done, she stood half in her majesty and half not, perched on her pile of books, and peered through the window again. When she looked hard, she saw the dark mote of the eyrie beneath six pinpricks of light glittering in the late-afternoon sun. She watched the walls as the glasship drifted closer until she saw the dragon. The killer had warned her above all else about the dragon. He’d told her how big it was but they’d both understood that he could do as much telling as he liked; it was a monster she would have to see with her own eyes. She let the sight of it settle inside her as she floated closer, but it was hard out here in the shadow of the Godspike to be impressed by size. In a place like this everything else amounted to nothing. Perhaps the dragon felt the same? The killer claimed the creatures had been restless things until Tsen had brought his eyrie here, and now they seemed quiet, almost as though entranced by the unfathomable monolith of the desert.
