The Splintered Gods

by Stephen Deas

  A shadow broke her thoughts. Three other glasships passed above, keeping station with the eyrie. She’d seen more on her approach to the storm-dark, a dozen Vespinese ships keeping pace with the storm’s edge. The Vespinese had made quite a little camp down in the dunes, and she thought she might have a use for that. The killers, meanwhile, had counted more than a hundred glasships loitering out in the desert now, many of them Vespinese but many of them not, some from Xican still loyal to Sea Lord Quai’Shu and waiting to see what would happen, a growing few from other cities, come as voyeurs. There would be more of those before long, a gathering of vultures, but she dismissed such things as beneath her concern.

  She closed the last blind and painted on her Arbiter’s mask. She would make her judgement and return to the Dralamut. What happened after was for the killers, not for her. She lifted the headdress, put it on and roundly cursed it and then sat and waited until she felt the gondola arrive and cease its drifting. Every slave and every soldier of the eyrie would be outside, assembled in the dragon yard to greet her, Vespinese and Xicanese alike, chased from beds and duties and chores to abase themselves. The Arbiter of the Dralamut had come.

  As before, she counted to a hundred and then again. When she was quite certain that she was ready, the gondola opened. She stepped delicately down its ramp and let the world see her.

  The wind caught her at once. It whipped across the ramp and caught the headdress like a sail, and it took all her strength not to sway and take a step to the side. And at the same time the first thing she saw was the dragon, straight across the yard and perched on its wall directly in front of her. The ramp led straight towards it, so perfectly aligned that she knew someone cleverer than the killers was waiting for her. The dragon gazed at her, eyeball to eyeball across the space between them, at her and through her, its massive armoured head craned forward, the vast sails of its wings spread wide and the rider on its back; and all the men and soldiers, the slaves and kwens and t’varrs and even the killers kneeling between them immediately lost all purpose. A part of her screamed. She let it. Let it scream and scream and keep on screaming as she locked it in a quiet place in her head where it wouldn’t be heard.

  She looked to her left and right and then tossed two small gold-glass spheres, one to either side. They grew into shimmering golden screens, shielding her from the wind. Her voice was like thunder. ‘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.’

  The force of her voice caught them all. Even the dragon seemed somehow diminished. She felt it looking at her, suddenly curious.

  ‘Mai’Choiro Kwen is relieved of all duties and responsibilities. He will remain as an honoured guest of my court.’

  An Elemental Man shifted to stand beside Mai’Choiro before she’d even finished. The killers had known what she’d say for days and she’d told them exactly what they must do. The Elemental Men had said they were her eyes and her armour and her lightning. Well, if that’s what they thought then they could work for it. The killer took Mai’Choiro’s lightning wand and the black wand that gave him access to almost every gold-glass structure in Vespinarr. She was humiliating him out in the open and in front of everyone. He wouldn’t ever forget that. Nor did she care.

  ‘The t’varr Perth Oran. The enchantress Chay-Liang. The slaves Bellepheros and Zafir. Attend me!’ She tossed a third gold-glass sphere into the air, paused for a moment to see it zip away towards the dragon, then turned and walked into the gondola and sat with her back to the open ramp, forcing herself not to look at the consequences of what she’d done. With elaborate care she took the white feather headdress off and laid it on the floor beside her. A miscalculation was always a possibility, but there were no screams yet, no roar of fire . . .

  She glanced at the headdress. It was too hot and heavy to wear for long and quite impossible out in so much wind.

  Still no screams, still no fire. Perth Oran T’Varr came nervously up the ramp and pressed his head to the floor beside her. She waved him away, haughty and dismissive, but in truth because she was too distracted.

  Still no fire. Her killer appeared next. He bowed. ‘Lady, the enchantress Chay-Liang is too weak to come to you. It remains unclear whether she will survive.’

  Lin Feyn nodded absently. Yes, yes, poisoned some days ago. But if the enchantress wasn’t dead by now then she’d probably live, wouldn’t she? ‘Did it work, killer?’ She had to ask.

  ‘The dragon-rider is coming, lady.’

  Red Lin Feyn closed her eyes for a moment and let out a tiny breath. The old slave arrived next, the alchemist, grumbling and complaining at the killer who brought him. The dragon-rider followed last of all, silent and haughty and with a furious scowl dancing over her face. There was no ceremony, no respect – she simply threw herself into a chair and sprawled. As far as Red Lin Feyn could see, she wore nothing more than a long heavy tunic belted around her waist, the clothes of an ordinary slave, but now with a collar of gold-glass around her neck, the last sphere that Red Lin Feyn had tossed into the air after she’d spoken. That was what had brought her down from her dragon’s back.

  ‘Waiting on the witch?’ drawled the rider-slave. ‘Oh, she’ll live. Grand Master Bellepheros of my Order of the Scales was the best alchemist in the realms before your people took him to be a slave.’ The rider looked at the killers at first, not at Lin Feyn, but then her eyes shifted and a boundless fury flared within them. She cocked her head at Red Lin Feyn and tapped the collar. ‘Take this off. Now.’

  Lin Feyn drew a hand across her face, palm out, fingers splayed, and cast a wall of silence across the table between them. The rest could all talk as much as they liked now and not a sound would come out of them.

  ‘You know my purpose here is the devastation of Dhar Thosis. We will speak of that later, and also of the death of Baros Tsen T’Varr, but first we will speak of dragons. You will do what needs to be done and you will do it without being noticed. If one of you fails then I will cast all three of you, your Scales, your dragons and your eggs into the storm-dark below. I do not need dragons. I do not want dragons.’ She gave them a moment to digest that and then went on. ‘Perth Oran T’Varr, you will make arrangements for animals to be brought to the eyrie for the smaller dragons to eat. Purchase them from the desert men who trade in the shadow of the Godspike or ship them from Vespinarr or conjure them from your chamber pot, I do not care nor do I wish to know.’

  The alchemist slave started forward from his chair. He opened his mouth and got out a good few words before he realised there was no sound coming from between his lips. The Arbiter turned to him. ‘You, alchemist, will do whatever Perth Oran T’Varr requires. You will be his slave. You will keep your enchantress mistress alive and ensure she has whatever she needs to do what I require of her, which is to keep the adult dragon compliant, docile and available to me for any purpose I see fit, as and when I desire it.’

  The killer next, a little deviation from what she’d told him she had to say. ‘The Elemental Men will find the missing dragon and destroy it.’

  The killer twitched and then bowed. Lin Feyn turned to Zafir, the one who was always going to be the most difficult. ‘You will fly the adult dragon. You will hunt food and water and whatever it requires to sustain it. When you fly, my killers shall fly with you. If you are disobedient to my will then I will end you, summarily and without thought or hesitation.’ She leaned forward and tapped her own neck with a finger. The dragon-rider had been clever enough to station herself on the walls for this stupid ceremony so presumably she was clever enough to understand that the collar would kill her whenever Lin Feyn felt the urge. ‘That is all. I will summon you again when I require you. You may leave.’

  She opened the gondola ramp with a wave of her hand. Perth Oran T’Varr stumbled out as fast as his legs would carry him. The alchemist wasn’t much slower and only because his knees clearly troubled
him. He looked much more content than the t’varr. Pleased even.

  The rider-slave didn’t move, which was more or less as expected. Lin Feyn waved the ramp closed, feeling the glasship lift back up off the ground. She met the slave’s eye, kept the wall of silence between them for a minute longer as they stared one another down, then finally let it go. ‘Speak.’

  The rider-slave gave the very slightest tilt of her head. ‘Take. This. Off.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ The rider-slave smiled and lightly shook her head. ‘Then I will do nothing for you, nor for any other.’

  Red Lin Feyn nodded. ‘That is your choice to make. You know there is no good end for you here. We can finish this between us here and now if you wish.’

  ‘I am a dragon-queen.’

  ‘I know what you were before you were taken. You have your pride. I acknowledge that matters to you. Hence we do this here, in private.’

  The killer vanished and appeared behind Zafir’s chair. Lin Feyn placed two fingers in front of her mouth and gently blew over them. The rider-slave’s eyes went suddenly wide and her jaw dropped. She gasped and both hands flew to the collar as she choked.

  ‘My killers tell me that when Mai’Choiro Kwen tried to hang you, your dragon plucked you from the gallows.’ Lin Feyn lowered her fingers. The rider-slave shuddered and gulped a lungful of air. Her eyes were murderous. Red Lin Feyn clasped her hands together and bowed in apology. ‘I do not yet mean you harm, dragon-queen. I will send men with you when you fly, but you have already killed one Elemental Man, haven’t you? So if you do not return, my collar will kill you as the whim takes me. You will both be far away and your dragon will not save you from me. I hope you understand.’

  The rider-slave spat. ‘Take this off me or kill me here and now.’

  Lin Feyn opened the glasship’s ramp. They were up in the air again now, only a few hundreds of yards from the eyrie but they might as well have been miles. A howling wind blew in between them, whipping at Lin Feyn’s dress and at the rider-slave’s tunic. Lin Feyn went to stand at the ramp and looked down to where the vortex of the storm-dark twisted its slow spiral about the Godspike a mile beneath her. The slave Zafir could get up and push her out. If the killer wasn’t quick enough to stop her she’d fall and the storm-dark would eat her. Or she’d ride it as her Father of Fathers had done.

  ‘I am daughter of daughters to Feyn Charin himself, first navigator!’ she cried over the wind. ‘Feyn Charin, who entered the storm-dark of the desert and returned, the only man who ever did. He taught a handful of apprentices how to cross the lesser curtains out to sea, and from that one piece of knowledge everything that we are was built. He never returned to this, dragon-queen. The Elemental Men forced him back to the desert in the end but he would not go into the storm-dark. He refused them. By then he was a good part mad, closeted away in the Dralamut, filled with obsessions – the forbidden Rava and the half-gods and sorcerers who once strode the world before they shattered it. But I’ve read his words, dragon-queen, and it all came from what he saw in there; and now here it is, laid before us! I have his blood. I’ve crossed every curtain line of the storm-dark to every realm the sea lords know. I am but halfway through my life but one day I will come here and follow him. I know this as surely as I know the sun will rise each morning.’ She reached out her hand towards Zafir. ‘So jump, dragon-queen, if that’s what you want,’ she cried. ‘Push me, if you think you can. Let us go together if death is what you so greedily desire, and see how true my Father of Fathers’ blood runs! Shall we?’

  She waited. Counted out a minute then counted out another, then turned and looked back. The dragon-queen was now sitting straight in her chair, staring right through her. All full of a great deal of murder and wondering what Lin Feyn truly was. Lin Feyn closed the ramp, stepped calmly back to her seat and sat down.

  I thought not. But she kept that to herself.

  ‘Take. This. Off.’

  ‘I will not.’ Lin Feyn shook her head. ‘But if it is because a collar is the sign of a slave, I will change it.’ She rose again and came behind Zafir, placing delicate fingers on her neck. As she touched it, the gold-glass began to flow. ‘There is a story,’ she whispered as she worked, ‘that in the times before the Splintering, each of the old gods put a piece of their essence into an object and gave it to their most holy priests. Over time the objects changed hands but they never changed what they were. The sun put his fire and strength and power into a coat of burning mail. The earth put her immutable will into an Adamantine Spear. The moon filled a circlet with thought and transformation and seduction, but, fickle lord of night as he was, he couldn’t bring himself to bestow his favour on just one and so split it in two and set them loose on the world together. The lady of the stars, not to be outdone, placed power over spirits in a pair of knives whose golden hafts were carved with a thousand eyes.’ The glass oozed up over the rider-slave’s neck and around her chin, across her face. ‘We Taiytakei are forbidden these stories. To us they are fables. Yet an Adamantine Spear? You held one once. A suit of burning mail? The immortal Sun King of the Dominion wears such a coat. Golden circlets of moonlight? The Ice Witch of Aria claims them as her own.’

  Red Lin Feyn stepped away. The gold-glass was a circle around the rider-slave’s brow now.

  ‘Fables. Stories. To me they are simply that, but perhaps you might think otherwise. I cannot and would not give you your spear, but you may have a crown, queen of dragons, if that suits you better. If you try to take it off, or if you displease me, it will still burst your skull.’ She glanced at the ramp, closed now. ‘If you ever prefer the other way, no one will stop you.’

  25

  A Holy Trust

  In a perfect world, Bellepheros thought, he might have moved some of his laboratory outside to the hatchery and done his alchemy while watching over the eggs, but the wind put paid to any notion of that – five minutes in that and only the Great Flame could know what potions he’d end up with! But still it was sometimes an irritation having to go all the way back to his laboratory when he needed a potion in the hatchery, and so he’d taken to keeping a few things closer to hand at the top of the tunnels where the Scales lived. He slipped away there now. The eyrie was crowded with the Vespinese and now the Elemental Men, but the spiral where the Scales lived remained almost empty. The consequences of the Hatchling Disease were there for everyone to see and, for those who’d been here and remembered, Tsen had been ruthless in keeping the plague suppressed. No one wanted to be anywhere near Bellepheros’s dragon-slaves, and that was fine: the eyrie had five separate spirals of tunnels and rooms and the Scales had one entirely to themselves. It gave them far more space than they needed, and what was an alchemist to make in dozens of empty rooms where he might work in the sure knowledge he’d not be disturbed? Mischief, clearly!

  He had a sled hidden in one of them, stolen from the Vespinese on the night of their attack. The Scales had found several when they’d been clearing the rubble from the ruined hatchery, and one of them hadn’t ever quite made it back in the chaos of the Elemental Men. In fact he had two sleds, but Perth Oran T’Varr knew about the second one and Bellepheros made sure to keep it out in the open where everyone could see it.

  The Scales weren’t the only the reason the Taiytakei avoided this part of the eyrie. It stank of death. There were bodies here. Tsen had started it, feeding the slaves who caught the Hatchling Disease to Diamond Eye, and somehow it had never quite stopped. Bellepheros hated seeing dragons eating the bodies of the dead even though in most eyries in the dragon-realms men had considered it an honour to feed their dead to the dragons. The Taiytakei saw things differently, but Perth Oran T’Varr was of a practical disposition – he was a t’varr after all – and considered any slaves who had died in the crossfire of the fighting nothing more than useful meat. So, what with one thing and another, Bellepheros had ended up with a larder of dead men. He’d had the Scales gut them so they didn’t rot and explode, and Li had mo
nths ago placed some sort of enchantment on a couple of the rooms to keep them cold, but the smell had gradually come anyway. It lingered.

  Bellepheros went to them now, his larder of the dead, because it was the one place he was sure to be left alone. He shivered and blew on his fingers. The corpses hung from hooks through their wrists, a gaping flap of skin and pasty flesh across their abdomens where their stomachs and intestines had been removed and emptied and replaced again as knotted sacs full of the potions he made to dull the hatchlings. It was a grisly gruesome little room and he hated that it even existed, but after the escaped hatchling had burned his laboratory and destroyed almost all his potions, he’d been glad of his little larder. If nothing else, the rogue dragon had taught him to keep his most precious things scattered in different places.

  He pushed through the hanging bodies. Another corpse lay across the floor behind them, one that hadn’t been gutted yet, the slave who’d poisoned Li and had tried to kill her Holiness. He stared at the man a while, as he did every time he came here, then turned away. Everyone knew the corpses hanging here had potions for the dragons inside them, but nowadays he kept other things here too. He took what he’d come for out of the open belly of a slave who’d once been one of Tsen’s cooks. He’d been a good cook and had liked his food so there was plenty of space inside him. He’d become Bellepheros’s favourite place to hide things.

  The thought made him shudder. He had a favourite corpse now?

  He put a knotted half-dried bladder in his shoulder bag and hurried out, through the hatchery and across the dragon yard to the spiral of tunnels where he and Li had their studies and their workshop and laboratory. Now was a fine time for what he had in mind. Perth Oran T’Varr had already gone below, doubtless off to shout at the lesser t’varrs who served him, who could shout in turn at their kwens, who would then bawl at their men to go and do something about feeding the hatchlings. Li was still sleeping off the poison. The killers would be busy. Her Holiness . . . He looked up. The gondola had lifted and drifted, out past the rim.