by Stephen Deas
‘As far as I can tell, lady. They await your order.’
‘Is it windy out there?’
‘No, lady. Still as a mirror sea.’
‘Well thank Feyn for that!’ For a moment Lin Feyn wasn’t the Arbiter any more. ‘You have no idea how sick I got of that bloody wind.’ She chuckled and cocked a smile at Liang. ‘Or perhaps you do. Do you ever get used to it, up there all the time?’
‘Not really, lady.’
The gold-glass hairpins finished their knitting and settled into place. Red Lin Feyn rolled her eyes and let out a tiny sigh, then lifted the headdress and put it on, the white feathers rising high above them both. She strode past Liang as the face-painted Arbiter once again. Outside she spoke to the golems in whispers.
‘Lady, why are we here?’ asked Liang.
Red Lin Feyn put a finger to her lips. ‘You know of the Azahl Pillar?’
Before Liang could answer, the air shivered and another Elemental Man stood before them. He bowed low. Liang didn’t recognise him. They came and went so much she was losing track.
‘Lady, there have been difficulties. Lord Shonda has left his brother Vey Rin T’Varr to speak with his voice. He refuses you passage to the Konsidar.’
‘Vey Rin? I go as I please. Anyway, didn’t he go mad?’
‘His mannerisms are . . . unusual, lady. But the fact remains.’
‘No matter. You are killers and he is bound to obey you.’
‘Lady, he is bound to obey you. We are but guardians.’
For a moment Liang thought the mask might crack. Impatience. Exasperation. Exhaustion. Maybe even a little fear. Outside the Dralamut no one ever saw the Arbiter as anything other than the voice of the Crown of the Sea Lords and the Elemental Men. It was such a rare thing for the Arbiter to be invoked that some sea lords had never seen one except at a distance. For the most part the Arbiters stayed inside the Dralamut, listening to the few arguments brought before them when they couldn’t be settled in Khalishtor in the Crown. But for the four days it had taken to cross the Empty Sands from the eyrie to Vespinarr, Liang and Lin Feyn had been alone together. Liang had asked her questions and Lin Feyn had begun to teach her the secrets of the storm-dark, and now and then the mask had dropped and Liang had seen an ordinary woman beneath it. Sharp and clever and wise perhaps, an enchantress in her own right and a navigator and powerful within her own skin. Far more than an empty mask. Beneath their surfaces they were alike. They might, in another world, have become friends.
The Arbiter gathered herself perfectly and turned back for the gondola. ‘I must go myself? So be it. Come with me, Chay-Liang.’
There was no space in the gondola for the golems so they stayed where they were on the landing fields, infinitely patient. The glasship rose slowly up the side of the Silver Mountain and Red Lin Feyn allowed the blinds to be open so Liang could look out over the city. Lin Feyn pointed to the huge open space sprawled in front of the Visonda Palace, to the circle of intersecting lines that came together in its centre. ‘Chay-Liang must see the Azahl Pillar before we travel into the Konsidar. On that I insist, killer.’
The Elemental Man bowed. ‘You know the conditions of the peace, lady.’ He was looking at Liang. ‘I am concerned, lady, for your safety. It would be better to bring those who must answer to your court.’ For a moment he looked almost human. Touched by real fear.
‘I cannot bring the Righteous Ones to my court. You know that as well as I do.’
‘Lady, what have they to do with Dhar Thosis? If you tell us . . .’
The Arbiter and the killer dropped to whispers. Liang turned away. At the window she watched the Silver Mountain slip beneath them until they passed over the yellow inner walls of the Kabulingnor and began their descent towards the three towers of the Polsang Palace. A thousand men were arrayed to welcome them, but as the gondola came closer Red Lin Feyn closed the blinds. ‘You will remain here, enchantress. You will not believe nor heed any summons that does not come either from my own lips or from this killer. Remember that the Vespinese have already tried to murder you. Practise what I have shown you while I deal with this, and know that we are not safe here.’
They landed in silence. Red Lin Feyn stepped out into sunshine and crisp flower-scented mountain air in a fanfare blast of trumpets and horns; then the ramp closed behind her and Liang was alone. She spent the afternoon staring into the glass globe that Lin Feyn had given her, the one that contained a fragment of the storm-dark inside it. She focused her mind on the glass itself at first – a thing she now did every day that came with unforced ease – and then tried to move it into the storm-dark. After an hour of getting nowhere she put the globe away and read. Lin Feyn had some of Feyn Charin’s journals, books that usually never left the library of the Dralamut, and Liang devoured them hungrily, dutifully returning to the globe now and then with the same lack of success. ‘This is the hard part,’ Lin Feyn had said, laughing at the look on her face the first time she’d tried it. ‘Many never succeed but you will. You have the mind for it. Apply yourself. Master the globe and I’ll take you to the storm-dark itself.’ She’d been banging herself against the globe for four straight days, almost to the point of wishing she could spend her time measuring the rider-slave for her next set of armour instead. But she kept trying because that was who she was.
No one came to the gondola that night, nor until late the next afternoon when the ramp suddenly opened again. Lin Feyn came in, looked about, wrinkled her nose and waved a hand in front of her face and beckoned Liang. ‘Come, Chay-Liang, walk with me. Killer, this gondola is no longer pleasing. The air is bad. See that another is found. A Vespinese one will do.’
If an Elemental Man was somewhere around them then Liang didn’t see or hear him, but that didn’t mean much. She put the storm-dark globe away, smoothed the creases in her robe and followed into the evening sunshine. The Arbiter walked briskly and Liang almost had to run to keep up.
‘The gardens of the Kabulingnor are most striking at this time.’ Lin Feyn kept her eyes straight ahead as she spoke. ‘It would be a shame for you to come here and miss them. I suppose you don’t have much opportunity, even though the enchanters of Hingwal Taktse built most of this. It’s marvellous, don’t you think, how lush green pasture land and forest have been created on the top of this barren mountain? The entire peak has been reshaped over the years. Sadly we shall see only a little, but the grounds of the Kabulingnor boast gardens of roses unrivalled anywhere and a dazzling array of flowers from across Takei’Tarr and the many realms beyond. Your alchemist slave would weep with delight at the variety of herbs and rare plants here. Look up.’ For a moment she stopped and pointed. High above the palace slabs of gold-glass drifted like the Palace of Leaves in Xican except here nothing hung beneath them. They caught the sun and showered rainbows across the towers of the Polsang and the Ziltak Palace nearby. ‘They warm the entire mountaintop. If you stand and watch them, you would see they turn to follow the sun. They extract water from a spring that has always risen out of the peak – strange behaviour for a spring if you ask me, but it was there long before even Vespin chose to make this his capital.’ She leaned in closer and lowered her voice. ‘We are both in danger, Liang. They know you are here and we will not have much time.’ She leaned away again. ‘The grounds also possess wildlife in many forms, a true menagerie of creatures from across our realm and beyond. One thing has always puzzled me: they say that one can walk among the three towers of the Lake Palace without ever leaving their walls. Doors that lead from one tower to another without any passage or bridge. Is that possible? I was an enchanter once and never heard of such a thing. Do you see how it could be done?’
‘I do not, lady.’
Again Lin Feyn’s voice dropped. ‘When they bring a new gondola I shall change my mind. Nevertheless, be wary. Move quickly when we leave. Go directly to the gondola in which we came. Do not hesitate. We will find out here and now whether our killer is to be trusted.’ She turned and swept back t
he way they’d come, her voice rising as she did. ‘I command you to find a reason to come here again, Chay-Liang, if the opportunity presents itself. Perhaps the lords of the Kabulingnor would wish to employ you for some task. It would be worth your while simply to see the marvels that past masters and mistresses of our art have wrought here.’ She leaned in close to Liang. ‘Someone does not wish us to go to the Konsidar.’
She talked on but Liang found it hard to listen. She could see a second glasship wafting towards the open space where their golden gondola waited for them. It carried a new one beneath it, silver this time, because only the lords of Vespinarr could afford to build gondolas from silver and they liked to remind the world of their wealth. Liang did as she was told and ignored it. Red Lin Feyn stopped to nod to the dozen or so kwens and t’varrs who came to see her off, then followed Liang back into the same gondola in which they had arrived. She closed the ramp and told the golem to leave immediately. The Kabulingnor fell away beneath them, there were no booms of black-powder cannon, and Liang supposed she would never know how close her escape had been, or if it had even been an escape at all.
‘Lady—’ Lin Feyn cut her off with a gesture and cocked her head. After a moment she nodded. ‘Lady, why are we here?’
‘We’re looking for Baros Tsen T’Varr.’ When Liang looked bemused, Lin Feyn smiled. She wouldn’t say any more.
They drifted through the early evening, suspended somewhere high over the Vespinarr basin towards its northern edge where the sheer water-carved gorges of the Jokun and the Yalun Zarang cut into the heart of the Konsidar. From on high the basin looked like an enormous crater scooped out of the mountains. Green fields laced with threads of silvery water spread for miles on either side of the two rivers. In the distance the peak of the Silver Mountain was still in sight, with the Kabulingnor on its crown and Vespinarr at its feet. Liang watched the sun set over the western sky. The clouds lit up in sprays of ochre and flaming orange that tinged the snow on the mountaintops and set them aglow.
‘It’s beautiful up here,’ she said. She didn’t expect a reply – an Elemental Man sat quietly in the corner and the Arbiter had her mask firmly back in place – but to her surprise Lin Feyn came and stood at the window beside her. Together they watched the sun go down.
‘I am, through some arcane path, a descendant of Feyn Charin himself,’ said Lin Feyn. ‘The Dralamut keeps careful track of these things. It’s one of the duties of the Arbiter to maintain the records of her bloodline, although of course we have many slaves to keep them for us. A long time ago someone decided it might matter – that perhaps the sons and daughters of Feyn Charin carried something in their blood which made them special.’ She raised an eyebrow slightly. ‘There is a little truth to it. The sons and daughters of the first navigator make fine enchanters. But so do many others.’ She didn’t move from the window but the tone of her voice changed and grew subtly wistful. ‘You’ve read some of his journals now. In the Dralamut I have them all, written at the time of the Crimson Sunburst. He was in love with her, that much is clear. Now and then people whisper she was his mother or his half-sister or his lover or perhaps all of those things. Some people nurse a prurient hunger to read his journals to find the answer, but it’s not there. What always strikes me most is the power in his words. The joy of them. I think perhaps he was in love with everything, with the world and all its beauty. He would have liked this sunset, Chay-Liang.’ She turned away. ‘The journals of which I speak were written when he was young. Before everything changed.’
Liang opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again. What did you say to that? ‘He was a very great man.’ There. As trite and bland and meaningless a thing as anyone could possibly imagine.
‘He was. He spent a great deal of time at the Godspike. He was there when the killers came for the Sunburst. History would have us believe he stayed there while she hid in the Empty Sands and that the two had no further dealings with one another. History says he was absent when her golem army made its unexpected appearance at Mount Solence and attacked the Elemental Men in their own home, just as they had done to her. I have read his journals and there must be something else, something that was erased or lost. For a long time he kept no records or else destroyed them. The stories would have us believe he remained at the Godspike all through the insurrection and its aftermath and that the Elemental Men left him entirely alone. Years he spent there, and in that time what do we have of him? Almost nothing until he finally entered the storm-dark and returned, and then everyone knows his story after that.
‘I’ve seen the journals from start to finish. The man who wrote in those later years was different. Changed. He was troubled and paranoid and always looking over his shoulder. He hints at things he saw when he crossed the storm-dark and it seems they affected him deeply. A realm made of liquid silver. A different time when a black moon rose into the sky to blot out the sun. All that love he’d once had for the world, somewhere he lost it.
‘He spent most of his later years refusing to leave the Dralamut, constantly building and improving it. He showed a few of the other enchanters how to cross the curtains that lie out to sea, a handful of men and women he knew and who’d learned their powers from the Crimson Sunburst as he had. Then he left them to it. When the Elemental Men all but forced him back to the Godspike, he refused to enter the maelstrom or to teach any others. In his last years he drifted into madness, filling book after book with bizarre rantings that make no sense. Most of it’s illegible. Some is in code. When he was lucid, he was bitter and dark. For years they shut him away, left a few slaves to take care of him and quietly wished he’d die. Eventually he did.’
She turned and put a hand on Liang’s shoulder.
‘He saw something in the storm-dark that left him desperately afraid, and now and then, in his later notes, he speaks of what can only be dragons. I believe, in part, we are following his path. Do not end your days like him. Keep your love of the world, Chay-Liang.’ Her eyes glistened.
‘And you, lady.’
The Arbiter turned slowly back to the window and stared at the distant darkening sky. ‘For me it may already be too late. I have begun to look over my shoulder more than I look to where I’m going.’ She watched until the sun had gone and the first stars began to shine, then quietly went to her bed.
36
The Azahl Pillar
Liang woke the next morning to find the gondola filled with golden light. The rising sun burst over the eastern mountains and blazed through the windows. When she crawled down from the tiny space that was hers, food was on the table. Honey and fresh bread and fruit, and the bread was still warm inside. When she wondered how this could be, Lin Feyn actually laughed. ‘A perk of being the Arbiter. I sent the killer to bring us food. He might as well. He has his uses.’
‘Is he here, lady?’
‘Not now.’ They were sinking back towards the city. ‘There are places in Vespinarr I wish to visit. Tomorrow we leave for the Konsidar. He’s making the arrangements.’
‘Surely you have a t’varr?’
Red Lin Feyn shook her head. ‘The Arbiter does not need a t’varr, nor a hsian nor a kwen. The Dralamut has all these things. When the Arbiter ventures elsewhere, it’s always to the Crown of the Sea Lords to hold her court, and Khalishtor is filled to the brim with more t’varrs that you could count. Should it be that the Arbiter travels elsewhere then she sends a killer to warn of her approach. Wherever she goes, all men lose their masters and become hers. That is the way of things, and the threat of the killers sees to it that the way is obeyed.’
‘Lady, why did you tell me about Feyn Charin last night?’
Lin Feyn drizzled honey over a torn piece of bread. The look she gave Liang was full of sadness. ‘To have told someone at all. We all grow up to see him as such a hero, such a great man, the maker of Takei’Tarr as we know it. Without him, we couldn’t cross the storm-dark. Perhaps the secret would have been found in another realm instead. Perhaps in the
Dominion with their priests, or in Aria with their sorcerers. Perhaps their ships would have come to our shores as we go to theirs, taking what amused them. Perhaps we would be their slaves and not they ours. And all these things are true, and yet among them other truths become lost. He was a sorcerer, apprenticed to the worst of them all – when I say worst, perhaps I should say most threatening – after all, the Sunburst never did anything particularly wicked. She was no Abraxi. In fact, as a sea lord, she was good to her people. By far her greatest crime was to make the killers afraid of her.’
Lin Feyn bit into a ripe dragonfruit with a touch of savagery. Its juices dripped down her chin.
‘Our great hero was everything the killers swear they exist to destroy and yet they exalted him. They gave him the Dralamut and made him a teacher.’ She shrugged. ‘Much good came of it: our world is what it is because they made that choice. But why him, when he was against everything they exist to do? Do you see, Liang, why I don’t trust them? They are founded on sand.’ She shook her head. ‘And then the great hero of Takei’Tarr becomes an old man with a terrible darkness. We don’t talk of that. You see him sitting in a room, old and grey, poring over his notes, writing the secrets of the universe, but I’ve seen the actual words he wrote with my own eyes and I know better. He was afraid to his very core of what he knew.’ She wiped her mouth. ‘I do not wish to become like that, Chay-Liang. The Sunburst – her journals are those of a visionary. How different things might have been had their positions been reversed.’
For a few seconds she stared past Liang out into the empty space beyond the gondola as if trying to see into some other far-off world. Then she wiped her mouth again and rose. ‘I should not burden you, enchantress. These things do not matter. I am what I am, and they have no relevance. Leave now, please. I must dress myself. The world will expect the Arbiter of the Dralamut, not a tired old woman.’
