by Stephen Deas
He watched the river. Past the cataracts and falls of its upper gorge, the Jokun was the artery that linked Vespinarr to the sea at Hanjaadi and thus their ships and their fleet and thence to the rest of the world. In late spring, when the Jokun waters were at their highest, even the lower parts of the river became impassable. Then the Vespinese were forced, for two or three months of each year, to rely on glasships and the long tedious land route from Shevana-Daro. The Yalun Zarang river to the west was shorter and quicker, but the Yalun Zarang led to Tayuna, and somehow the lords of Vespinarr and the lords of Tayuna had never managed to see eye to eye. They’d failed, over the last couple of centuries, to see eye to eye on rather a lot of things in fact, but mostly what they failed to agree on was whether Tayuna should follow the example of its Hanjaadi neighbours and allow itself to settle into the comfortable life of a Vespinese vassal state. The Vespinese were very much in favour of the notion, frequently urging the lords of Tayuna to see things their way through encouragements such as sinking their ships, setting fire to their city and occasionally dragging them into unwanted wars in other realms, yet despite these marvellous incentives, the lords of Tayuna remained strangely intransigent, perversely preferring to keep their independence and telling Shonda where to stick it. As a t’varr in distant Xican, Tsen had sometimes wondered why Tayuna didn’t take the easy choice and give in. Now, after what he’d seen these last few months, he felt like giving them a round of applause. Maybe they’d give him a job once this was all done. There certainly wasn’t much of a future for him as a t’varr of Xican any more.
If you’re honest with yourself, there isn’t much future for you as anything at all, except perhaps as sustenance to the vulture population in some remote part of the desert for a day until they pick you clean. Or perhaps the fish off some distant shore . . .
He rolled his eyes and laughed at himself and wondered if perhaps he was finally going mad, and was grateful when a hold-up in the road distracted his thoughts. There was some shouting and milling about as Sivan and his men squeezed between the overhanging cliff wall on one side and a sullen team of broad-backed bison towing a barge against the current on the other. Men cursed and did their best to get out of the way while Tsen mentally checked off how many new words he was learning. Sometimes he wondered what would happen if he turned his horse and tried to bolt back down the road, but the chances seemed good that even if he could muster the skill to make his horse do something other than follow the one in front, trying to escape would simply end with him being dumped in the river, followed either by a quick death from drowning or maybe a slightly slower one from freezing. Doubtless either outcome would irritate Sivan no end after all the trouble he’d gone to, but being dead and washed into the Samim to be gnawed on by crocodiles seemed a poor way to appreciate such frustration.
As the sun sank low, the gorge widened. The cliffs fell away and spread out around the shore of a wide lake where the Jokun paused in its eager plunge towards the sea. Hundreds of boats bobbed, rocked by the brisk cold winds that blew off the mountains, everything from little skiffs with barely a shred of sail to massive Vespinese river barges. Upstream of the lake the Jokun came down from the mountains around Vespinarr through a series of gorges and cataracts, and so the lakeside had grown a shanty town of warehouses and sailors and sail-slaves, of mules and the teamsters who drove them up through the mountain passes, of rough edges and straightforward words. It stank of sweat, cheap spirits and even cheaper Xizic, and of men and women who filled their lives with hard back-breaking work and came at you with all you might expect.
Sivan stopped at a house on the fringes and Tsen meekly ate his supper and went to bed. He pretended to sleep while he stared at the ceiling for much of the night, listening to the snores of the sword-slave who was supposed to be watching him. He supposed he ought to slip out from under the sheets and climb through the window or something equally dramatic. Run away as fast as he could and get on one of those boats and stay on it to Hanjaadi and cross the sea and never come back. But he didn’t, and when he looked to see if any of those nasty little voices were going to taunt him for being scared, he found them silent. They knew better. He wasn’t scared, not any more. Staying with Sivan had become the cold hard calculation of a t’varr. Question was, what did the shifter actually want?
A black stone fortress full of Vespinese soldiers looked across the lake from an outcrop of rock on the far side – full, it was said, with a fortune in Vespinese silver. By the middle of the next afternoon they were riding under the shadow of its walls. Tsen examined it as they passed and found himself wondering how it would fare if a dragon came. Badly, he supposed. And then they reached a bridge across a narrow gorge, and after crossing it Sivan led them off along a winding track into the hills until the evening, stopping where a waterfall crashed over the lip of a cliff. The sword-slaves dismounted. By now Tsen could barely move, exhausted and in agony from all the riding, and they practically had to lift him off his horse, which none of them appreciated because he was heavy. As they did though, he took the chance to look at the brands on their arms. Vespinese, all of them. It’s not my fault, he wanted to tell them. Some djinn crept past your snoring watchman in the night and swapped my back for a pain-soaked plank of wood . . . or maybe glass. Cracked and broken glass that made horrible grinding sounds every time he moved but was still as stiff as a beam. That sounds about right . . .
A path slipped around the back of the falls to a cave behind the roaring water. The sword-slaves pushed him inside through a thick curtain of metal chains, the sort used to keep Elemental Men at bay, and then through a heavy iron door fitted carefully into the rock. Sivan was already there, flitting from wall to wall, lighting lamps while the sword-slaves poked and prodded Tsen as far as a soft couch. There were chairs carved from Zinzarran rosewood, a silver and glass table and a cabinet well stocked with crystal bottles, even a shelf of books. It felt like a home, cared for and lived in with plenty of comfort and not what Tsen had imagined at all. Sivan poured himself a glass of wine. When he didn’t offer to share it, Tsen lay back and sank into the couch. It really was deliciously soft, quite big enough to make a bed, and he couldn’t see himself getting up again in a hurry. The roar of the waterfall was muted, though he could feel the vibration through the floor.
‘So what do you want from me?’ he asked. He supposed some sort of enchanter’s device must be hidden somewhere, keeping the air as fresh as it was. It was certainly the most unexpected cave he’d ever seen.
As Tsen watched, Sivan’s face changed. Sivan slowly vanished and another man took his place, a man Tsen knew well. Bronzehand, although Tsen knew perfectly well that Bronzehand was on a ship and had sailed to Qeled to find an answer to all their problems, or possibly just to run away from them all. He’d seen it through Quai’Shu’s rings, and the rings didn’t lie. He snorted.
‘Another face you’ve learned to steal? Can you do Shonda of Vespinarr too so I can punch both of you at once? Although you’ll have to come closer because I don’t think I can get up. Again, what do you want from me?’
Sivan held up Tsen’s black rod. ‘I already told you.’
‘Dragon eggs?’ Tsen shrugged. ‘You’re mad, but I can hardly stop you. I don’t see how I can help you either. Nor why I should.’ Maybe he should run away just for the sake of it, even if he didn’t have anywhere to go, but given the state of his back, Sivan could have taken his sword-slaves out for a riotous night at the lakeside whorehouses and it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference. Old, fat and crippled, t’varr. Could you be more useless? He looked around some more. Pictures hung on the walls, odd paintings in a style he didn’t recognise: they weren’t of people or even of places but streaks and splatches of dull slate and tan and deep greens and reds all run together. If someone had decided to make an art out of painting mud, he thought, this was what it would look like.
‘If you’re going to be Bronzehand, his tastes run more to lewd nudes. Gold and silver frames t
oo. Ostentatiously expensive.’ The more he looked around, the more the cave struck him as slightly off.
Sivan tapped Tsen’s black rod. ‘I saved you from the Vespinese, Baros Tsen T’Varr. I left a body for them. I killed a sword-slave and changed his shape and face to be yours. You saw it. So you know it’s true when I tell you that the world believes Baros Tsen T’Varr is dead. You are free. That’s my gift to you. Freedom. Freedom to vanish far away across the storm-dark if you wish, or into the desert or the Samim swamps if you prefer, but vanish you must.’ Sivan sucked in his cheeks as if tasting something sour. ‘I’m offering you both your freedom and your life.’
‘Is that all? Pity.’ Tsen shrugged. ‘Everything back the way it was would be nicer, but failing that I’ll take Kalaiya and a quiet passage across the storm-dark to a comfortable retirement on the fringes of the Dominion. Somewhere across the mountains from Merizikat. I have a villa waiting for me there with a bath house and an apple orchard.’ Free? His heart leaped at the idea. Free to fly away and grow old and even fatter in peace and quiet, but the voices in his head were shouting at him, full of warning. Much too easy. Much too pretty. ‘But you wrap me in rope and sword-slaves, skin-shifter. I do not feel free at all. Again and for the last time, what do you want?’
‘I want you to help me steal a dragon’s egg.’
Tsen laughed, and then for some reason he couldn’t stop and kept on, so much it hurt, until there were tears rolling down his cheeks and his back knotted in agony. It had been funny the first time too, but here the irony struck him like a hammer between the eyes. ‘You bring me all this way only to take me back? Why didn’t you steal your eggs that night instead of stealing me? It’s not as if they’re kept under lock and key. Anyone can take one if they can carry it.’ The tears kept coming. ‘What? You need me to carry one end of it for you? Because there aren’t any other strong-armed men available?’ He hooted.
Sivan came and crouched beside him. He tapped Tsen’s black rod. ‘The glasships, T’Varr. You can still control the glasships that tether your eyrie.’
‘So? Shall we steal everything at once then? Do you think the Elemental Men perhaps wouldn’t notice?’
The shifter grinned as he stood again. ‘The beauty of my gift to you, T’Varr, is that no one will ever know. You’re dead. No enchanter, no Elemental Man, no navigator, has the gift to unravel my deception. It’s perfect. We’ll go to your eyrie. My men will take my eggs and your Kalaiya too if that’s what you want, and you will have your glasships pull the eyrie and everything inside it down into the storm-dark so it’s gone for ever.’ Sivan was almost giggling. ‘You will have your life and I will have my eggs, and no one will ever know what either of us has done!’
‘You’re mad.’
‘We can both have what we want, T’Varr, without anyone knowing. Anyone! You and your slave can vanish together. Somewhere far away to grow old in peace. Think on that.’ He went away and left Tsen to his thoughts.
In the morning Sivan was gone, and for the next five grinding days the shifter’s sword-slaves led Tsen onward, climbing past the Jokun cataracts until they reached open country again at last, a wide flatness of water meadows and fields with the Silver Mountain looming in the distance. There Sivan was waiting for them again, with slave tunics for all of them and a pair of heavy wagons. The sword-slaves changed their clothes and crowded with Tsen into a wagon, and they all rolled along a rutted road between neatly planted paddies glistening with water from the Jokun. Rows of slaves waded through the mud up to their knees. Thinning crops, Tsen decided. Somewhere was a t’varr who would know these things, who knew exactly what was in every field and probably accounted for every single plant if he was at all like Tsen. One group of slaves close to the road stopped work and waved, and Tsen saw the brands on their arms. Sail-slaves, trusted to work on simple things without supervision. The men around him in the wagon didn’t wave back. Their tension was like spring ice, sharp as cut glass.
When they stopped for a break, Tsen walked a few dozen yards into someone’s paddy, squatted and relieved himself. Sivan didn’t look up but Tsen felt the shifter’s eyes on him. When he was done, he paused a moment, slipped the ring off his middle finger, dropped it and then dipped his hand into the muddy water. That was the thing about paddies – always plenty of water. And the thing about the slivers of glass under his skin was that any water would do. A few seconds was enough. Well then, Shrin Chrias Kwen. Once you know I’m not dead after all, will you bite?
The wagon rumbled on, hour after hour. The Silver Mountain grew and Tsen could make out the smudge of green that was the garden on its peak and then the glint of Shonda’s giant gold-glass screens which captured the sun. Closer in, he picked out the black spires of the enchanter monoliths around the Visonda landing fields; and then, in what seemed no time at all, they were on the landing fields themselves and Sivan was hissing in his ear as they lined up with other gangs of slaves to walk into the gondolas of three great glasships. They were packed together inside like fish in a fisherman’s barrel, standing room only, and flew for a day out over the foothills of the mountains and down to the desert, though Tsen was too far from any window to see much of it. Some of the slaves chattered, others stood silent and sullen. The ones Sivan had brought clustered around Tsen. Sivan himself stood beside him and said nothing at all.
Why a dragon’s egg but not an alchemist? To hatch a wild dragon of course. What other reason could there be? But why? Did he want the end of the world? But what if he did? What if Sivan was simply barking mad? Did it change anything? Presumably Tsen’s eyrie was still occupied by the Vespinese, and even if it wasn’t, did that make a difference? Thank you very much, Baros Tsen T’Varr. Now please step up to this noose . . .
I’ve become a pawn in a game I no longer understand. Kalaiya. Focus on Kalaiya. Just her. But when he tried, he found that he couldn’t, simply because that was what Sivan wanted.
The glasships landed as the sun set, disgorging their slaves into a makeshift camp where the Konsidar and the desert and the Lair of Samim came together, an ugly land of arid stone and earth punctured by poisonous tepid lakes. The heat was dry and stifling, a shock after the cold mountain air. There were cattle here, more than there ought to be, herded out of the Lair of Samim and the fringe of the Konsidar, starving mangy animals with a few already lying dead among them. No one had bothered to move the corpses and flies covered them like a second coat of fur. A handful of massive cargo sleds spun slowly and hovered at the fringes of the camp. They were largely useless over crags and hills but marvellously cheap and efficient over open expanses of water or, say, sand. Tsen watched as a hundred animals were crammed onto the back of one, a huge white sail thrown over the top to cover them and tied down around the edges. A glasship hauled the sled a hundred feet into the air and then let it go. Tsen watched it drift off across the desert until it was gone and wondered how many of the cattle would get to where they were going and still be alive and whether it mattered. He had no doubt what they were for: to feed his eyrie. To feed his dragons.
A pair of Taiytakei slave masters in glass and gold armed with lightning wands started shouting, pushing their new slaves away from the gondolas and yelling at them to get to work. It was a dirty, dusty place and you could see at once who had been here a while – they were the ones with scarves across their faces. Tsen found himself rolling barrels of water onto a second great sled and heaving them upright. He’d been streaked with aches and pains to start with; by the time they were half done, he hurt in places he’d never hurt before, in muscles he hadn’t even known he had. He coughed and choked and his nose ran with thick dark snot. He stopped, gasping.
Sivan growled at him, ‘When was the last time you did any work, Baros Tsen? Real work? That’s why you hurt. You have no idea what it is to be a slave.’ The last words came out bitter, as though the shifter had spent most of his life pulling oars on a galley.
‘And you do, shifter?’ Tsen laughed in his face. ‘A shifter
a slave, Sivan Bronzehand Kalaiya face-changer whoever you are? How long exactly since any man had you in chains?’
‘You know nothing!’ Sivan’s hand flashed to Tsen’s throat; a whip cracked the air over their heads and Sivan let go and went back to rolling barrels. Tsen did the same. When they were done, the slavers herded him and the other men onto the sled among their barrels. A glasship settled overhead, lowered its chains and lifted the sled into the air; and as they rose Tsen looked through the gold-tinted glass at the fires scattered across the edge of the desert, at the sprinkle of little shelters. Even now, in the small hours of the night, everywhere was movement, slaves and Taiytakei shifting crates and sacks and barrels and animals from one place to another. Some of them looked up as the sled rose over their heads, but it was dark and Tsen was too high to see their faces.
A Taiytakei soldier released the chains and swung back to the glasship, holding on to the last of them, and the sled floated off into the desert alone, straight and steady and unswerving, adrift with hundreds of barrels of water and two dozen slaves, no soldiers to watch over them, only the vast empty skies. Below, more slaves were already loading the next one. The t’varr in Tsen did the calculations: a sled was cheaper than a glasship and faster too. Not greatly but a little. From the Lair of Samim to the Godspike was a distance of about seven hundred miles. Four days then. Four days out in the desert sun. They didn’t have enough food. They barely had shelter.
When he was sure no one was looking, he opened a barrel of water and wetted his middle finger. Are you listening, Chrias? Or have the killers found you at last?
He dozed through the first night. The sled drifted on, relentless and oblivious, and when the sun rose, Tsen spent the morning lazing in whatever corner of shade he could find, doing what he could to keep out of the heat, watching the broken barren yellow stone drift beneath them, spires and canyons, mesas and gorges, a landscape cut apart by water once long ago but now dry and dead. The heat grew. The sun passed its zenith. The air became thick and stifling until all the slaves simply lay still among the barrels, panting, eyes nearly closed; and then, in the middle of that afternoon when the heat was at its worst, Sivan and his sword-slaves killed the others. They didn’t make any fuss about it. They whispered among themselves, picked the two slaves who looked the strongest and simply heaved them over the side. The first Tsen knew of it was when their screams, short and sharp and cut off as they hit the ground some fifty feet below, jerked him out of his snoozing. For a moment Tsen stared like a startled rabbit, not understanding what was happening as three more slaves went wailing and pleading over the edge. He heard screams, shrieks and then a howl as the sled drifted on. Even after the screams stopped, he still didn’t understand, still thought he might be next, until Sivan grinned in his face and patted him on the shoulder.
