by Stephen Deas
Downstairs, Red Lin Feyn wasn’t in her formal dress as Arbiter of the Dralamut any more but wore a simple white enchanter’s robe. Two glasses of wine stood on the table in front of her. She patted the chair beside her and offered a glass to Liang.
‘The killers have gone,’ she said. ‘Off to the Dralamut to bring our sentinel golems. Sadly we won’t be taking them into the Kabulingnor with us, but I should hope that having both their kwen and their sea lord hostage in my court will deter the Vespinese from anything foolish.’ She smiled faintly and sipped from her glass. ‘You will find, Chay-Liang, that I will talk to you very differently when they return.’
‘We are still going to Vespinarr, lady?’ Liang frowned. She’d assumed Red Lin Feyn had meant to question Sea Lord Shonda there, but clearly not.
‘Ironic, isn’t it? Still, he shouldn’t have delayed so long in answering my summons. He can stew for a while.’ Her eyes brightened and she smiled. ‘Did you see his enchanters, Chay-Liang?’
‘Yes, lady.’
‘One can’t help feeling a little satisfaction at humbling a man who flaunts his power quite so openly. Very helpful of him too.’
‘Lady?’
Lin Feyn shrugged. ‘Between the dragon and its rider and Shonda’s entourage, I think my killers will be kept very busy. All the better. The less attention they pay to us on this little journey, the more I am pleased.’ She frowned. ‘He seemed genuinely surprised when I asked him about Tsen, though. The one thing that caught him off guard.’ She frowned again and then shrugged. ‘Well, it can’t be helped. Doubtless our arrival at the Kabulingnor will cause a great deal of confusion and there can’t be many left there who have the authority to act in Shonda’s stead. I suppose you realise that one reason I brought you with me was to keep you safe? One reason, although not so much the reason.’
‘Me, lady?’
‘Yes, Chay-Liang. You. The killers are in charge of the eyrie now. With luck they won’t do anything much. They are very prone to inaction. It’s their nature. Watch and watch and watch; although when they do strike, I will admit they do so with alarming thoroughness. One must always keep in mind their true purpose. I am a little uncertain as to where it will lead them at present.’
‘Their purpose is to hunt sorcerers,’ murmured Liang. She struggled to see what that had to do with anything except maybe Bellepheros, but . . .
But Lin Feyn was laughing and shaking her head. ‘To hunt sorcerers? No, Chay-Liang, that is an expression of their purpose. They exist to prevent the world from being shattered. Sorcery offends them because of what it can become. Gods – and devotions to those gods – upset them in the same way. You wanted to stay because you think you can protect your alchemist slave but you can’t. He’s safer without you.’ She turned a little and peered at Chay-Liang. ‘I’ve not told them, not yet. I give you the chance to explain him first. What else can he do? Tell me about the disease that the Scales carry. This Statue Plague.’
‘Bellepheros makes potions that keep the disease in check. He gives it to the Scales.’
‘And? What else can he do?’
Liang thought for a moment. What could she dare say when Belli’s life might hang in the balance?
‘The whole truth, Chay-Liang. The killers are gone and we are alone. At this moment I am merely Red Lin Feyn, enchanter of Hingwal Taktse and navigator of the Dralamut, but even as the Arbiter, I’m interested in Dhar Thosis and nothing else. Sorcerers and Rava readers are for the killers, not for me. Now, Liang. Your alchemist slave. You may speak in confidence. What is he?’
Liang bowed her head. ‘I saw an assassin rip his throat so deep he should have died in heartbeats and yet he lived. He gives the Scales potions that dull their minds as he dulls the dragons. He calls it a mercy. Given the disease they carry perhaps that’s so but I am . . . unsure.’
‘Could you not use golems?’
‘Perhaps for some things, but for others I suspect the dragons require living thoughts from living minds. Lady, you said I may not ask questions but may I ask one? Why do you not trust your Elemental Men?’
For a long moment Red Lin Feyn gazed at her. The hint of a smile played at the corner of her mouth. ‘The second reason I chose you to come with me, Chay-Liang, is because you are the cleverest woman or man on that eyrie. We head for Vespinarr, but we will enter the Konsidar when we are done there.’ She must have seen how Chay-Liang’s face froze because she held up her hands and cocked her head and smiled broadly. Across her painted face the expression seemed out of place. ‘The killers will permit it, although they will watch us every moment.’ She paused, as if mulling what to say. ‘Liang, when the half-gods broke the world, the Elemental Men and the Righteous Ones hid themselves in Xibaiya, the only place that was safe for them. The Righteous Ones of the Konsidar are shifters too, but where the killers change to earth and air and fire and water, the Righteous Ones change their flesh and bone. They are skin-shifters, and one of them came to this eyrie and took Baros Tsen. I would very much like to know why.’ She let that sink in for a moment. ‘And yes, the caves and tunnels of the Konsidar reach all the way into Xibaiya and the land of the dead. In places they cross over. The killers chose this world, the Righteous Ones chose the other. No, I do not trust my killers.’
‘Baros Tsen?’ Liang couldn’t keep the amazement out of her voice. ‘He’s in the Konsidar?’
‘It’s a place to start.’ Red Lin Feyn smiled faintly. ‘Either the killers don’t know or they have allowed it. Perhaps they have encouraged it. The dragons too. Think it through, Chay-Liang. Think it through. Two of them given to Quai’Shu to do with as he pleased?’
Liang was still trying to get her head round the idea that a creature whose existence she’d thought was a mere story had actually come up from the land of the dead and taken Baros Tsen. ‘Dear forbidden gods, why?’
‘That is what you and I shall endeavour to uncover.’ Red Lin Feyn shrugged her shoulders. ‘The killers will leave us alone until we reach Vespinarr. You may ask your questions and then I shall begin your instruction as a navigator. The third reason you’re here. I suspect you’ll find it utterly disappointing.’ She started to get up then froze as if struck by a thought. ‘The missing hatchling is dead. The dragon-rider hunted it down. The killers tell me it went to the Queverra at first. I don’t supposed you have any notion why?’ When Liang shrugged, Red Lin Feyn shrugged too. ‘No, I couldn’t see that you would.’
34
The Queverra
Tuuran shifted his axe from one shoulder to the other. There weren’t many good things you could say about climbing down an endless set of steps into a sodding great abyss with two dragons chasing each other down below and an ants’ nest of riled slavers above. Not much except how it had seemed like a good idea at the time. But he went on anyway because he was an Adamantine Man and that made him as stubborn as any mule ever born. It was better than climbing up anyway.
Best not to think about that.
He stopped and watched the pinpricks of light that were the two dragons hurling fire at each other, so distant beneath him that they weren’t much brighter than the stars overhead. It was a long way down, a long, long way. Years clambering around rigging as a sail-slave had seen to it that heights never bothered him much, but this drop . . . well it was just unreasonable. Best not to think about that either. In fact, ever since he’d got back together with Crazy Mad on the galley, his life had become quite crowded with things best not thought about.
He thought about all of them anyway, of course. It never helped and he usually ended up wishing he hadn’t.
By the time he got to the first ledge, he could feel how the air was thicker. There were huts here, a few crude wooden things and shelters made of poles and sailcloth and not much else. Someone had been kind enough to line the edge of the drop with white stones he could just about see in the abyssal gloom, so at least he had a clue where it was, although a bigger clue came from the knots of black-skinned Taiytakei with white-pa
inted faces and torches. They stood right up close to the edge, apparently not too bothered by any notion of falling, peering down and jabbering to each other with exactly the animation of a crowd of people who’d had their first sight of a fire-breathing monster shooting past their doorstep. If they had doorsteps, that was. Or doors. A few of the white-painted men stopped to look at him as he sauntered past but they didn’t seem very interested.
‘My job’s killing them.’ He couldn’t resist. He patted his axe. ‘Just as soon as I catch them. Which way is down?’
Most of them ignored him. A few looked at him as though he was mad, which he thought reasonable enough, all things considered, saw his shield and his axe and his sheer bloody-minded size and let him pass with a few mutters and pointed fingers. Let the daft bugger get himself killed. Well fair enough. He wasn’t going to argue, but now that he had their attention another thought crossed his mind.
‘Any of you see a short-arsed idiot with a tiny little sword come this way a few days back?’ No, that didn’t do it. ‘How about one with eyes made of silver that glow in the dark?’ The way their faces changed was all the answer he needed. They’d seen Crazy Mad right enough and he’d still been crazy.
By the time he got to the bottom of the next set of steps, he reckoned the sun ought to be coming up, but he was so deep he reckoned the sun hadn’t got much hope of reaching him unless they both got lucky somewhere around midday. How far down was he? No idea. Two miles? Three? His legs were starting to make a fuss. Mostly he told them they could shut up and save their complaining for when he had to climb back out again – how much fun that was going to be. His stomach was rumbling and he was thirsty too. Might have been a good idea to grab some stuff off the slavers in their camp before he’d set off. That was hindsight for you – smug and mostly useless.
The dragons had long disappeared by now. He had no idea how that had panned out, whether the hatchling had got away or whether the big one had caught it. He supposed he ought to give that a bit of thought. Hard for a full-grown dragon to hide itself in a place like this, but a hatchling . . . yes, a hatchling could hide out down here rather easily and that one had had a mean streak.
Another hour and his legs got to thinking about how the back of a dragon would make a nice easy way out. He had to point out to them that the world wasn’t that kind.
The hatchling had known his name. Alchemists always said that dragons could do that sort of thing – pluck thoughts out of heads – and that was how they knew what their riders wanted of them, but being on the end of it had turned out a whole lot different to being told it could happen to someone else. Crazy Mad had said the same. So maybe that was it. It had found his name inside Crazy’s head. Still bothered him, though. Not enough to make him scared or anything like that, because Adamantine Men didn’t get scared, but it tasted bad enough to get him moving again and gave his legs something to think about before they started back up with their moaning.
He reached a ledge that wasn’t much more than a few shrines to Flame-knew-what gods. Adamantine Men didn’t have much use for gods and suchlike – a few angry and neglected legion ancestors were all they ever bothered about and even then usually only when they were drunk. He had a quick look in case someone had gone by not so long ago and left an offering of something he could eat or drink, but all he found were bones carved into little totem men. The more he looked at them the more they made his skin crawl. He let them be.
When he looked up, it was definitely daylight. He could see the sky, a deep blue, but all he got on his ledge was twilight. When he looked down, he still couldn’t see anything except dim cliff walls getting ever darker. It had to have some sort of bottom to it, right?
He descended another mile. By now the air was so thick it was making him light-headed. The sky above was almost black, so little light made it down. When he squinted he could see stars, which he supposed made it night again, though he didn’t think he’d been going quite that long. Could have been. After that he gave up looking back because every time he did it made him think of how far up he was going to have to climb when he didn’t find Crazy down here after all, or, better still, how far up he’d have to climb with Crazy slung over his back, and his legs really really didn’t want to think about that.
And then he found himself standing in front of a pair of ornately carved pillars and a massive piece of stone that stretched out over the abyss like the trunk of a fallen tree across a river. The pillars looked a lot like some sort of gateway, while the carvings covering them looked a lot like the sigils he’d seen on the pillar that the Watcher had shown him, back when the Watcher had taken him to Vespinarr and put him on the riverboat to find his way back to Crazy Mad. The pillar had been in the middle of a great big square in front of a palace, and the Watcher had gone on about how old it was and how it went back to before the Splintering – which, if Tuuran was getting his head round the whole Taiytakei idea of how the world worked, meant pretty damn old and a little bit creepy. The sigils also looked a lot like the weird patterns he’d seen etched into the walls of the Pinnacles back in the dragon-lands and the sigils Crazy’s warlocks had tattooed onto their faces and Crazy Mad carried himself, in intricate little silvery marks all around the massive scar on his leg.
This way, they said. This way to what, well, maybe they said that too, but not in any words Tuuran had a use for.
35
Palaces of Ancient Kings
As the landing fields beside the Visonda Palace of Vespinarr drew close, Red Lin Feyn closed the blinds on each window. She stepped behind a screen and busied herself with becoming the Arbiter once more. Liang, who’d been to the Visonda fields before, thought they looked empty. More than twenty glasships hung around the edges, clustered around four black monoliths, sucking up their energies from the earth, but the field was big enough for a hundred. Dozens of gondolas lay scattered about, some gold, most of them silver. Close to where their own settled on the earth two giant men of glass stood as still as statues. Golems. In Xican they’d had golems, hundreds of them made of stone, digging and tunnelling into the jagged grey cliffs to make the city ever larger. She’d seen golems like that made into soldiers, simple dumb creatures who followed simple dumb orders but had the advantage that nothing much hurt them, not fire or lightning or even a sword or an ashgar. Yes, they had that, but they were incredibly dim, easily fooled and quickly rendered useless by most black rods. They were automata after all, no more or less than the pilot of a glasship, imbued with a rudimentary intelligence usually stolen from a death-sentenced slave before they died.
But not these. These were the guardian golems of the Dralamut, a very different thing.
As the ramp opened, an Elemental Man appeared in a rush of air beside the Arbiter. He whispered in her ear. Liang couldn’t hear his words but his voice was harsh and angry. She watched. Lin Feyn walked back into the gondola and shut the ramp behind her, leaving Liang out on the landing fields alone. Liang pursed her lips and, after a moment, turned to inspect the golems. They were made of enchanted gold-glass tougher than steel, with four arms, two on each side. One ended in a shield easily large enough for a grown man to stand inside and curved almost to the point of turning back on itself, with a lip at the bottom like a step. A second ended in a miniature lightning cannon far stronger than any wand. The other two arms split towards their ends, each terminating in a pair of hands, one huge like a bear’s, one as small as a child’s with long spindly fingers. They stood slightly apart, their glittering heads turning now and then. Their eyes, seven of them, were golden orbs spaced evenly over their glass skulls. They didn’t need to turn their heads – they did it, Liang thought, to make themselves seem more human.
She felt their attention as she came close. If the stories were true then these guardians of the Dralamut carried within them the life-sparks of dying navigators, not of slaves.
‘Golems, state your purpose.’ Which was always how she began with the stone men of Xican.
‘We s
erve and protect the Arbiter of the Dralamut.’ They spoke together, their voices soft and melodious, out of keeping with their monstrous size. ‘Name yourself.’
Golems that talked back? Well that wouldn’t catch on. ‘Chay-Liang of Hingwal Taktse,’ she said. ‘Are you functional?’
‘We do not answer to you, Chay-Liang of Hingwal Taktse.’
Liang snorted. She walked around them, looking them over, wondering what else she could do. She knew how each part was made – could have made most of them herself – but she didn’t dare go close enough to touch them.
A glasship drifted from one of the black monoliths and lowered sixteen silver chains that wrapped themselves around a waiting gondola. A small group of Taiytakei went inside – a hsian, two t’varrs and a handful of lesser kwens, judging by the colours and feathers they wore and the braids of their hair. The ramp closed behind them and the glasship lifted slowly away, taking the gondola with it. Liang watched it go. North towards the Konsidar at first but then west. When she looked back, the Arbiter’s ramp was opening again and the killer was gone. Liang found Red Lin Feyn with her headdress on the floor and her hair let down, brushing at it with fractious force.
‘We’re alone,’ she said as Liang came to sit beside her. ‘The killer will go to the Kabulingnor to make the necessary arrangements. While we are here, there are places I wish to see. We shall walk.’ She sighed and looked at the brush, then shrugged. ‘Knots. I tell you, there are good reasons why we keep our hair in braids. The rest of you are lucky.’ She tapped a set of gold-glass hairpins and they rose into the air and set about piling the Arbiter’s hair neatly back on top of her head. ‘They ask me why we are here. I’ve not told them about Baros Tsen. Be careful what you say. They seem very much on edge. Are the golems in order?’
