by Stephen Deas
After a bit the riders and their wagons went away, splitting off in four separate directions like they were in a real hurry or there was a devil after them, but none of that seemed to bother Crazy. He eased closer to the glasship once the riders were gone, walking his linxia through the jumble of tracks until they reached the gondola. He dismounted and went inside and Tuuran followed. Crazy hardly seemed to notice the dead men lying in the sand outside, nor the live one in the gondola, sitting propped against the wall, gasping with a spear stuck through him. ‘We can use this, right?’ he asked. ‘We can use this to get up there.’
Tuuran shrugged. ‘Never saw how they worked.’
Crazy poked the man by the wall. ‘You. You dying or living or what? How do you make this thing work?’
The man got slowly up off the floor. He kept twitching and writhing as though he had some sort of madness inside him. Tuuran moved to one side. The man had a big slash in the back of his robe as well as the spear in his gut. He was soaked with blood. Odd thing – the robe looked a lot like an alchemist’s robe but the man inside was clearly Taiytakei.
Crazy Mad prodded him. ‘Stop jiggling and answer!’
The madman spasmed and doubled over. He picked up a sword and rammed it into Crazy Mad’s belly as he came up. Or at least he tried to. He might have done a good job of it too if Crazy hadn’t been who he was, wriggly as an eel, but Crazy saw it coming, dodged sideways and caught the madman’s arm. His eyes flared brilliant silver. The sword turned to black ash and the madman gasped and gaped, pretty much like Tuuran did inside each time he saw it happen. The madman stumbled back, tripped and scrabbled back to the wall of the gondola. Tuuran winced, imagining how much it must hurt, all that banging about with a spear stuck through the middle of you. Amazing the man wasn’t already dead.
When he couldn’t scrabble any further, the man with the spear through him closed his eyes. He started mumbling something to himself over and over. Tuuran didn’t much like the sound of the mumbles but Crazy didn’t seem to mind. The words meant something. Tuuran backed away, but Crazy went and crouched beside the madman and lifted his face.
‘You know me then? Who am I?’ asked Crazy.
‘Black Moon,’ whispered the madman. He was weeping tears of blood. Tuuran edged to the gondola’s ramp and checked outside, making sure he had a good clear open space in case he suddenly had to run like buggery. Crazy put his other hand to the madman’s brow. The silver in his eyes, bright as lamps, lit up the gondola, but the madman didn’t look away.
‘You’d best tell me everything, earth-touched.’ Crazy’s voice was gentle and hard all at once. Kind and yet irresistible. The madman whimpered. For a long time he didn’t say anything and the two of them stayed as they were, Crazy with one hand on the madman’s brow and the other lifting his chin, the madman looking into Crazy’s eyes like he was having his soul sucked right out of him. Then, very slowly, Crazy let go. ‘Loyalty is a touching thing,’ he said softly. Tuuran took another step back. ‘Clever thought, using a dragon’s soul. Clever of you to know what they really are. But it won’t work without the dead goddess. It took both of us, and she’s not there any more. Where did she go, earth-touched?’
No answer. Crazy shook his head. And then he chuckled, a nasty little sound that set the hairs on the back of Tuuran’s neck scrambling down his spine looking for a way out. The light faded from Crazy’s eyes. He stood up and sounded like his old self again. Berren the Crowntaker, or Skyrie, or the Bloody Judge, or whatever he chose to call himself that particular day. ‘You have a debt, skin-shifter,’ he said. ‘Pay it and then be gone.’
The madman looked as though he hadn’t the first idea what Crazy was talking about, and then something flashed in his eyes and he nodded. Crazy went outside and hauled in a pair of corpses. The madman crawled over and put his hands on them. Their skin started to move and writhe as though filled with maggots. Tuuran’s eyes bulged. He gagged and took another step back but he couldn’t stop himself from staring. The faces of the dead men were changing; worse, they were changing into faces he knew – the eyrie’s t’varr and his slave woman. Months had passed since he’d last seen them but he still remembered.
‘Good,’ said Crazy and caught the madman’s arm. ‘Now be done.’
There wasn’t any ceremony to it. Nothing more than that simple sentence and then the madman dissolved into black ash before Tuuran’s eyes. Tuuran let out a howl and ran. Then stopped. Took long deep breaths. Adamantine Man. Not afraid of anything. No fear at all. Made to kill dragons. But Flame, holy Flame . . .!
Crazy caught his arm. Tuuran whirled and reached for his axe, not that it was going to do him a blind bit of good, but the silver light was gone now. Crazy was just Crazy again, whatever that meant. He looked at Tuuran. ‘What’s up, big man?’
‘What’s up? What’s up? Shit, Crazy, you just turned a man into dust. Or ash. Or some other crap I don’t understand. Like you did in Dhar Thosis. Like you did to those slavers. Like you did to who the Flame knows else!’
Crazy shrugged as though it was barely worth a mention. ‘Well, now I know we can’t get up there with this. But I also know another way. Things to be done, big man. Things to be done.’
He turned away, mounted up and rode hard off into the desert, and Tuuran watched him go and swore a lot and clenched his fists, and then, when he really couldn’t think of anything else to do, rode after him; and after a bit, the sun came up and they reached a camp in the desert where all hell was breaking loose.
*
Soldiers ran screaming in all directions. A few had the sense to throw themselves down. Those were the ones who lived. Briefly. Tsen wasn’t sure how many Elemental Men were here now, but at least two. They appeared, killed and vanished again, flickering in and out, there and gone as fast as a bolt of lightning. They ripped two fighting circles to shreds so fast that the last soldier died while the first was still falling to the sand. Those who saw didn’t wait for it to happen to them too. Tsen wondered what made them think they could get away from the killers, but since he was running too then maybe it was best not to ask because maybe that made him every bit as stupid as they were. Missing foot or not, even Chrias was doing his best, limping and falling and crawling and hopping. He was heading for the same place as Tsen and Kalaiya – the pavilion with the cave where the dragon egg had gone.
A killer appeared behind and above the kwen and landed on his back, knocking him down. Tsen threw himself to the ground. Chrias roared. The Elemental Man wrenched the kwen’s helm off his head and brought the pommel of his bladeless knife down hard. He vanished again. Chrias twitched, lifted his head, dropped it, lifted it again, clawed his way another couple of paces across the sand and then fell still. Kalaiya pulled Tsen up again and they kept running. He wasn’t sure why the pavilion and the cave. Maybe it was a place to hide but inside, Tsen was already laughing at himself. Hide? From a killer? Next stupid thought?
Zafir wheeled Diamond Eye over the storm-dark. She’d killed an Elemental Man where no one would know but it was only one. She didn’t know how many there were. Dozens. For all she knew there were thousands. No matter. From now on, as the chances came, she would take them one by one.
She turned back over the maelstrom. Diamond Eye whipped the fringes of its darkness with the wind from his wings. She aimed him for the nearest place where there were men and dived over the lip of the storm, thinking she might burn them, all of them, whoever they were, and lay out her challenge to the killers that remained: Take me if you can.
Khalishtor. The Crown of the Sea Lords in Khalishtor, their great palace of government with its shimmering glass jewel floating high overhead and filled with navigators – she’d seen it and dreamed of smashing it down, of Diamond Eye rending it to splinters with tooth and claw and tail, shattering the thirteen towers of the Crown and smashing the glass bridges they called the Paths of Words. Khalishtor . . .
There was already a fight sprawling across the ground. There were killers. How l
ong before they came looking for her? How long before someone had enough of her and made the circlet on her head constrict and crush her skull.
But doll-woman’s not here . . .
Perhaps Khalishtor was too far. Vespinarr then. Closer. Burn the richest city in all the worlds to cinders. She pulled away, skimmed over the heads of the men fighting in the sand and veered west but Diamond Eye circled back. Just the once but he did it on his own, as though searching for something. Zafir let herself sink into him and found a whiff of a taste that he wanted, that he wanted enough to forget her for a moment, and when she let herself drift deep inside him, she understood the scent was the one he’d found in Dhar Thosis. The short man who’d been with Tuuran. The one who called himself Crowntaker.
She shivered. The Adamantine Man was here?
Tuuran frowned. He had his axe at the ready for the soldiers scattering out of the camp but he was beginning to see he wouldn’t need it. The Taiytakei were scared as rabbits and didn’t give a shit about him and Crazy, or anyone at all except themselves and getting away as fast as they possibly could. Seemed odd to be riding into the middle of them, but that was Crazy for you. It took until they were a little closer to see why the soldiers were running and screaming. Other men – Tuuran couldn’t count how many because they moved so quickly – were moving between them, appearing out of the air to cut someone down and then vanishing again. Well, he’d seen a man like that before. The Watcher had been one, and the Watcher had carried him when he’d been dying from an assassin’s knife in Zinzarra. All in all the Watcher hadn’t seemed so bad, but Tuuran had seen what he could do too. You didn’t piss off an Elemental Man, not unless you were mad or really dim.
He eyed Crazy and slowed, waiting to see what he was going to do, because this he had to see – Crazy with his eyes turning people into ash and a gang of killers who could appear and vanish at will. Interesting one to watch, that, but preferably from a good safe distance. But Crazy simply rode up to the edge of the melee and threw his swords into the sand, climbed off the back of his linxia and calmly lay down with his hands spread wide. He looked back at Tuuran. ‘Come on, big man. This is how we get up there!’
A Taiytakei soldier in armour howled past Tuuran, face twisted and stricken with fear. An Elemental Man appeared in front of him, sliced his head clean off without moving anything except his arm and then stepped aside to let the body fall. He lingered long enough to catch Tuuran’s eye and then disappeared. Tuuran got the message, dropped his axe, lay down and kept half an eye on Crazy in case he suddenly got up and kicked off again, but he didn’t.
Off in the centre of the camp he could have sworn he caught a glimpse of the fat old Taiytakei t’varr Tsen from the eyrie, and then a dragon flew overhead and he couldn’t see shit for all the sand in the air.
The dragon flashed overhead and Tsen couldn’t help but look at it, so massive and so close with its wings and its neck and its tail outstretched. Vast. Overwhelmingly huge. And he was still paralysed when the wind that came behind picked up the pavilion, tossed it into the air and threw it away, picked Kalaiya and even Tsen himself off their feet and threw them bouncing and rolling across the sand. He heard Kalaiya yelp as she landed on him, but before he could blink, the air filled with sand.
Tsen stumbled to his feet. He could hardly see a thing but he knew the pavilion had been right in front of him, and behind it, in a cleft between two rocks, was the cave. Or maybe it wasn’t a cave; maybe the rocks were the old walls of some long-ruined tower and it was an entrance, but it didn’t matter, it really didn’t – a way out was a way out. He dragged Kalaiya, coughing and spluttering and never mind the Elemental Men – now was the time to run when none of them could find their own feet, none of them could see, these few seconds before the air cleared – and sprinted faster than he ever thought he could. The cleft loomed out of the haze. They ran inside and a gloom fell over them. The passage sloped slightly down. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw a soft glow ahead from the rim of a shaft, lit from the bottom.
‘Tsen!’ Kalaiya was looking back. It took him a moment to realise what she was showing him: recessed into the stone either side of the entrance were two huge bronze doors. They were clearly ancient but at the same time pristine and shiny. He tugged at one to see what would happen and of course it wouldn’t move, exactly as he’d known it wouldn’t, except that when Kalaiya tugged too, it suddenly did, and once they got it going it swung easily as though the hinges had been oiled that very morning, and then it occurred to him that maybe they had, because maybe this had always been the skin-shifter’s way out, because glasships didn’t travel fast, and he was hardly going to get very far drifting out over the desert in full view of every Elemental Man who happened to pass by.
The other eggs. He’d said he only needed one really but more would be useful. They were decoys. Distractions . . .
The second door closed as easily as the first. It had a huge bronze bar across the back. Together, he and Kalaiya swung it in place. The strike of it rang like a bell as it slid home and locked the doors fast. For a moment he stood and looked into the blackness, wondering how he’d managed to get away and which of the gods he wasn’t supposed to believe in was favouring him right now. Had to be one of them, though knowing the luck he’d had of late it was only so he could find the dragon egg in time for it hatch and eat him.
The shaft with the light at the bottom was bigger than he’d realised, big enough for the sled with the egg to descend through it – that or the sled had vanished into thin air – and was lined with the same white stone as the passages inside his eyrie. Someone had built crude wooden steps held up by rickety scaffolding spiralling around the inner circumference.
Kalaiya took his hand. ‘Tsen . . .’
‘I know,’ he whispered, and squeezed. ‘I know. If Sivan was coming this way then perhaps he has someone waiting to meet him.’ He glanced at the doors. ‘But I can’t go back, not out there.’ He stopped to take a long look at her. ‘You can, though. They’re not looking for you.’ But back to what if Sivan’s plan had worked and the eyrie was gone? ‘Perhaps you’d be safe?’ Couldn’t see how, though.
Kalaiya shook her head. Tsen took a deep breath and they started down.
There were fifteen of the Taiytakei left by the end, and they were all as terrified as small children. Tuuran reckoned he’d counted nearly a hundred dead too stupid or full of their own luck to throw themselves on the mercy of the Elemental Men. He wondered how many had got away and decided it was probably none. The survivors were rounded up and kept out in the desert sun for half the morning, sweating fit to drop, until a glasship picked them up and carried them away. It was the same glasship he and Crazy had found in the night, left under the storm-dark, with greasy black ash all over the walls. Tuuran kept away from that. He’d looked about for the fat old eyrie master but hadn’t seen him, so Tsen had got out some other way. That or he’d been caught in the fight, but Tuuran reckoned Tsen to be a smart one, too smart not to know when to give up.
Another thing that struck him was the man in the fancy armour who was missing a foot and probably wasn’t going to last all that long. The other Taiytakei were making a big fuss of him and seemed very keen to make sure that however long he lasted, they could at least get him up to the eyrie. It wasn’t odd that he only had one foot – more luck than anything that, under the circumstances – and it wasn’t odd that the Elemental Men treated him so well, not with all that flashy armour and those silks and the length of his braids. No, what was odd was that his skin was all hard and flaking. Take off that armour and he’d be a Scales. One with not long to go at that. He was bleeding a lot too. Tuuran kept well away. No one seemed to be bothered where all that tainted blood was ending up.
Crazy nudged him. ‘Told you we’d do it the easy way,’ he said and grinned. Time was, Tuuran had liked that grin because it meant trouble and mischief round the corner, and he’d had a soft spot for Crazy Mad’s brand of trouble and mischief once, b
ack when Crazy Mad’s brand of trouble and mischief had meant bashing heads. Time was, but not any more. Now it meant turning people into ash.
‘And then what? What’s waiting for you when we get there?’ But Crazy only shrugged. Didn’t help that the bugger kept touching that golden knife of his. He held it out in the open but somehow the Elemental Men just didn’t seem to see it.
The shaft went so far down into the desert that Tsen didn’t much like the idea of climbing back up again. It was wide enough for a dragon, if one had wanted to squeeze down it, although that would have been a quick and thorough end to the steps and their uncertain scaffolding. Halfway down, when he could see the bottom more clearly, he called out, but no one answered. A thousand steps, maybe? Deeper than the shaft the skin-shifter had found out in the desert near the ruins of Uban, but he wasn’t surprised when he got to the bottom and there were two more bronze doors like the ones he and Kalaiya had already closed behind them. They were open. Tsen stepped through into a tunnel – wide, reaching off in both directions, straight as an arrow and going on for as far as he could see, lined with white stone walls alight with their own soft starlight glow. Exactly like the one he’d seen with Sivan. Tsen discovered that he wasn’t much surprised. If he’d had any doubts that Sivan had meant to come this way himself, the tunnel silenced them.
The sled with the dragon egg was in front of him. When he climbed onto it, he saw a black rod. He wasn’t really expecting it to work but he tried it anyway. The sled shivered and lifted a few inches off the ground. He held out his hand to Kalaiya and tried to estimate how many times the steps had circled the shaft and which way the tunnel ran. East to west, he thought, and if he’d got it right then one way went off towards Uban and the other way headed east toward Dhar Thosis and the Queverra. Madness, it was all madness, everything he’d seen and been through these last few days. What did he want with a dragon egg? Nothing. What if it hatched? Well then it would eat them, wouldn’t it? And there wouldn’t be a thing he could do. Then why in Xibaiya take it?
