by Stephen Deas
‘. . Berren the Crowntaker. The Bloody Judge.’ Fingers caught hold of a flapping cowl. He pulled. Slashed the knife. Warm blood showered his hand. The warlock jerked back. Opened his mouth to scream and vomited blood and a few gargling gasps. Last one now. Backed against the far wall. Whimpering and shrieking. The Crowntaker tossed the knife from hand to hand. Movement, corner of his eye, up on the rim of the pit. Soldier. But he'd stood up there himself once and he knew how dark it was down here. They could hear but they couldn't see. He pressed his knife to the last necromancer's throat. Hatred pulsed through him. ‘What have you done to me. . ?’
Skyrie clawed at fragments of himself, slowly drifting apart. For every one he pulled back another escaped and vanished. He was falling to pieces. He tried again to scream, to beg for help as his brother did, but the only words that came were from the other, the thing he'd brought back, the Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge himself. The whites of his brother's eyes glistened in the darkness. Sicel, that was his name, and they slept in the same room, cots one beside the other. He would have wept if his tears had been his own to shed. I'm sorry, brother. I cannot stop him. In the darkness above someone lit a lantern, and Skyrie knew well what would happen next. The soldiers would peer in. They'd see what he'd done and remember clearly how precise and explicit their orders were. They'd take up their crossbows and they'd riddle him with iron and wood. They'd watch his blood leak across the ground and soak into the dirt and then they'd throw down oil and torches and burn whatever was left. He knew. He remembered the warnings. The Bloody Judge may find the body you leave behind. So they knew he might come and they were ready for it, but not like this, while the voice that wasn't his snarled and snapped like a cornered wolf and Sicel's eyes rolled in terror and dismay filled his words. Vallas wasn't even here. Vallas was with their queen, facing the Bloody Judge's Fighting Hawks to put an end to him at last. The Bloody Judge who was right here. And all the while the lantern was coming down on its rope and the end would quickly follow. Deep inside, Skyrie squirmed and writhed and fought and found no purchase to throw the Crowntaker aside. Sighed and stood ready to be released. I am Skyrie! I am your brother! Vallas help me. .
The Crowntaker slit the last warlock's throat. Held him close. Let blood gush over his clothes, rich and heady. Couldn't see much in the dark. Could feel his skin, though. Wasn't the skin he knew. Arms were scrawny and thin like a boy's. All the battle-corded muscle gone. He didn't understand the how but he knew what they'd done to him. The memories were right there. Right there in front of him. For a moment he paused. Clenched that piece he'd seized as he fell out of the light of the battlefield and squeezed the memories out of it. HOW DO YOU TURN IT BACK?
The lantern was almost down. For a moment, as the Crowntaker clawed at his memories, Skyrie felt a mastery of himself again. He ran a hand down his leg. The scar was still there, the huge axe cut he should never have survived. This is who I am! Skyrie! My body, my flesh, how it always was. Skyrie. He sank to his haunches, hugging himself. The lantern came to a stop a foot above the ground. It swung slowly back and forth. He knew what Vallas had told the queensguard here over the pit because he'd been there, standing beside them, and they'd put him down here for a reason, after all. If he finds a way back then nothing comes out of here alive. Throw oil and a torch until everything is scorched to ash. He opened his mouth to shout up at them to do it, to burn him. Nothing. And now he couldn't move any more. And then he understood: he wasn't free at all. The Crowntaker lurked behind him, seeing it as he remembered it. Too late. His gaping mouth slammed shut, his legs leaped, his arms reached out and there was not a thing he could do to stop it. He screamed in silence yet again, Do you as you were told! Burn me! Burn me before it's too late!
The lantern hung from a rope. A good thick one. He jumped, swift and sudden. Seized it. Pulled sharply. The soldier at the edge of the pit holding the other end cried out, teetered, toppled over the edge and landed hard. Stupid. The lantern smashed and its rope fell in loops and then hung taut, tied to the winch and crane they used to lower people down. The Crowntaker gripped the knife between his teeth. He had the soldier's sword out of its scabbard in a flash. Hurled it up out of the pit and over the edge. Scampered up the wall, clinging to the rope, climbing like a monkey. All those years at sea. A skag. Never forgotten. At the top he picked out the other soldiers. They'd seen him. Were coming. Shouting. Didn't matter. He took it all in. One glance. Where they were. What they carried. What they wore. Bared his teeth. They were too slow. Too late to stop him. .
Burn me! Please burn me!
The first queensguard reached him. He danced past the thrust of a sword. His legs felt awkward, not his, not used to such sudden hard motion. He took the knife from between his teeth. Slammed its blade under the soldier's chin. Felt a twinge from his arm. Switched hands and almost fumbled the knife, but not quite. Snatched up the sword from the ground. Almost lost his balance but still caught the next queensguard. Barged through him, tumbling him shrieking into the pit and almost fell back in himself. Stupid body didn't do what it was supposed to. Arms and legs too long. Centre of balance in the wrong place. He looked up. Three queensguard still standing. He stopped. Opened his arms to them, soaked in blood, beckoning them forward. ‘Run if you want to live.’ Grinned wide at the new sound of his own voice. Savage like a wild animal.
O Earth Goddess! Lords of Xibaiya! Help me! Help me now! Your acolyte pleads for your aid! Make it stop!
The soldiers backed away. The knife in his hand dripped blood over his naked feet. He smiled at them one after the other. That was enough. They broke and ran, screaming alarms to anyone who might be left to listen. The Bloody Judge of Tethis let them go. Walked the other way and slipped through a half-hidden crack in the cave around the pit. Down a steep narrow slope, squeezing between the walls, inch by inch in a darkness that was absolute. He moved with purpose. Knew exactly where he was going because he'd been here before, a long time ago, with someone who'd once been a thief-taker, but now the others were all dead and there was no one left who knew this way but him. Crept carefully forward, looking for the pool that hid the sump and the secret path in and out. Found it. .
The cold touch of water on Skyrie's feet jogged a memory. Something colossal but too fleeting to grasp. He chased it as the icy water rose around him, as it swallowed him, but the harder he reached, the more it slipped through his fingers, and then the water was falling away.
Out the other side of the sump. Gasping for air. Clawing his way into another cave. Familiar. Knife-rays of sunlight shining in from a narrow entrance. He'd come in the dark before. Dark was better. He crouched and waited. His arm hurt, and his knees, and all his muscles ached, twisted into unfamiliar action. Four warlocks. Three queensguard. As easy as snapping twigs. It helped in remembering. The Bloody Judge, that's who I am. The Crowntaker. Had to hang on to that. Had to hold it tight. So he did, right on until the sun set and night fell. Then out. Into the gorge. Then what? Didn't know. Didn't dare think. Find who took his body, that's what. Take it back. Kill him. Something. Didn't know. All that hiding and waiting had left him with a thirst, though. Start with that. Afterwards a reckoning. A terrible one. Where and when and who, that was the question. Made him angry. Uncertainty and doubt? Didn't have a place for those now. Didn't dare. I am the Bloody Judge. He slipped down the slope of the gorge. Dark as shit. Moon hadn't risen yet. Crept to the edge of the river and knelt down to drink. A face reflected back at him. A face that belonged to someone else and all he could do was stare as the horror surged through him. .
Water? He remembered the water. Me! It belongs to me! Mine! My face! Skyrie! Staring at himself, for a moment Skyrie threw off the horror. He screamed, and this time, finally, he had a voice.
9
The Empty Sands
The Watcher stood atop the Palace of Leaves among the seventeen slowly turning discs of gold-tinged glass from which it hung, each thicker than a standing man and a hundred paces from edge to edge. Their motions w
ere hypnotic. They drew novice eyes inside them and held them fast and sometimes didn't let go for days. The core of each was more deeply tinged with gold, separate and still, held apart by bearings and a heavy frame of Scythian steel. More steel hung from the cores, chains laced with silver and gold carrying the weight of the jewelled pods and orbs of the upper palace. For most who came here, this was the marvel of the City of Stone. And it was magnificent, every part laced with power drawn up from the earth by the black monoliths below, a monument to the enchanters’ arts. But to the Watcher, the real glories of Xican were the earth and the sea and the sky, things that would remain long after the palace had fallen and shattered. There was a boundless joy to standing at such a height, with the clouds close enough to part them with his fingers, with Xican a warren of black and grey spires spread beneath his feet, a thousand termite mounds jammed together and transformed by some divine hand into a grand scale. The Grey Isle was made like this from end to end, this orderless tumble of stone on stone, yet across all the worlds he'd seen it was the place he loved the most, where air and earth and water mingled, their boundaries intertwined as closely as could be like lovers wrapped around one another, limbs tangled. It was a colourless landscape of deep blues and slate-greys, but he loved the stone, the wind, the rolling salty sea, the raw kaleidoscope of shapes and angles and changes that nature had made. A rare smile forced its way onto his face. Up here, alone, he belonged to no one. The freedom was joyous and the knowledge was exhilarating, the knowledge that he was all of this and more.
As easily as another man might blink, the Watcher became a wind that blew across the Grey Isle's great teeth. For no other reason than the sheer delight of it, he became the water as he reached the other side, a wave top skipping and surfing across the reach of sea between the Grey Isle and the coast of Takei'Tarr, the heartland of the Taiytakei. At the Hangpoor delta he leaped into foam and then to the air, hanging among the clouds, drinking the sight of the Hundred Rivers glittering in the morning sun, a giant tree laid out in silver across the plains. And Zinzarra too, City of a Thousand Bridges with her air harbour in the sky, higher and larger than even the Palace of Leaves, where the Zinzarrans stored the jade they took from the mountains of the Konsidar. They boasted of it, the greatest device the enchanters had ever made, but to the Watcher the beauty here was in the delta, in the water and the weaving maze of quicksilver threads, always shifting and changing.
He turned his course westward to the fringes of the Konsidar itself. On top of the peaks he stopped a while to stare. Becoming one with the world was no effort once you knew the trick of it. Air or stone or water, or any element at all save for unruly metal, it was simply another nature, as easy and natural as breathing. He took it to be a gift too, a window to wonders that other men wouldn't ever see, and so he stopped now and then to stare at the landscapes of the world the way men from other lands might stop for a moment to pray and to give thanks to their blasphemous gods.
He chose his course with care across the mountains, skirting the domain of the Righteous Ones who dwelt in the majestic Konsidar. Though they dwelt below rather than among the mountains and would not have noticed an Elemental Man crossing high overhead, they had been more unruly of late, emerging from their holes and rattling their sabres like angry ants whose nest someone had disturbed. Best not to give any reason to add to their ire, whatever had caused it.
He turned south as the peaks and crags fell away into the desert of the Empty Sands, the wasteland that filled half the continent from the Konsidar to the Godspike and beyond. Dunes as tall as an enchanter's tower rippled beneath him, then the flats, a hundred miles of gravel, of milky-white powdered glass and hard dark lakes of clay. In the stories of the desert tribes there had been water here once, vanished now after the old cataclysm of the Splintering, pouring into the lost depths of the Konsidar and stolen away by the Righteous Ones. Or so their stories said.
Dunes rose again, reddish-orange now instead of yellow and pale. He crossed a fresh slick of black ooze streaking the sands, with a scatter of white specks at its edge that were the tents of the desert men there to collect it, scraping it into barrels to sell to the enchanters in Cashax or Vespinarr. That they'd been there long enough to build a village of tents reminded the Watcher of how long it was since he'd last come this way. Further still he passed over a faint line across the desert, invisible from the ground. Just as there had been lakes out here once, so too had there been paths that criss-crossed the wasteland. Roads. There had been cities even, but now they were ruins and the only things that lived in them were spiders and scorpions, rats and snakes and desert hawks. The desert men came here on occasion too but never lingered, not without good reason.
Amid this emptiness Baros Tsen's castle beckoned him, a huge lump of stone floating above the sand on a dazzle of purple lightning. The Watcher felt it before he saw it, the slightest thickening of the air so that being one with the wind was no longer effortless. No one knew the castle's origin. It had been in the desert for as long as anyone could remember, hanging in the sky, empty and forgotten. It was stone rather than glass, and though it floated like an enchanter's glasship, it was vastly greater than anything any enchanter had ever made, a wide bowl-shaped slab larger even than the Palace of Leaves in its entirety. Its underside was torn and jagged, as though it had been ripped out of the earth by giant hands. Purple lightning flickered and flashed through the shadows of its belly to the dunes below like a tiny fragment of the storm-dark snipped away and captured in glass. The upper side was dull and flat, a shallow-sloped white stone wall around a huge and perfectly circular space. It had no black monolith to feed it, to draw power from the earth, and yet it sustained itself. How? No one knew.
Six glasships hovered over the castle today. They were dwarfed by it yet they captured the Watcher's eye, brilliant things, concentric spinning discs of glass twisted at different angles, tinged and rimmed with lightning-thrower gold which shone and caught the sun. They were like brightly coloured cleaner fish flitting to and fro over a kraken's back, tethered to it by chains of Scythian steel.
The Watcher slowed. The thickening of the air grew worse. He felt the castle's resistance to him, a tiny force trying to knock him back to the form and shape of his birth. The Picker had said it was like this in the dragon lands only a thousand times worse, remorseless and relentless and everywhere.
He swept over its surface. A hundred men and women lived here now, slaves and Taiytakei alike, but most worked underground and he saw only two slaves aloft. They were slowly clearing sand and litter and desert plants from the edges of the castle outside the white stone walls, sweat gleaming off their backs as they scraped away to the ancient rock beneath. One was tall, a black-skinned desert man from a tribe like the one he'd seen camped by the ooze slick in the sands. His native people were probably less than a few hundred miles from here, out in the desert. The other was short and olive-skinned, from Aria or from the Dominion, either of which meant thousands of miles and a crossing of the storm-dark, but both men had been bought and sold at the skin markets of Cashax or Xican. They were slaves now, nothing else. The Watcher drifted past them, a hint of a breeze in the still and baking air.
The paler of the two clutched his leg and cried out and then stared at his hand. ‘Kelm's Teeth!’ Kelm's Teeth. From Aria then, that one. The Watcher had heard a great deal of Aria in the last years. The Ice Witch. The sea lords were talking of another Abraxi or a Crimson Sunburst, or something even worse, if such a thing was possible. There were whispers that the Ice Witch had found a way of her own to cross the storm-dark. Whispers that the cherished secrets of the Scythians and their steel and of the enchanters and their glass were finding their way to her empire. Whispers though. As yet nothing more.
‘It jumped! Ow! Bugger, but that hurts!’ The short one had a small ball of spikes stuck in the back of his leg. The desert man was peering over at him. The Watcher paused for a moment and did what he did best. Watched.
‘They don't
jump.’ The desert man knelt beside the other slave, plucking with delicate care at the spikes. Patience. Always the key and always the greatest weapon of the Elemental Men. They struck when they were ready, and struck true. They'd done so many times before and would do so again. Aria and this Ice Witch would be no different.
‘Bugger you, dark-skin. I saw it.’
The desert man shook his head. ‘Be still.’
‘I tell you. .’
Patience and careful observation. The Watcher appeared beside them. ‘They do not jump,’ he said. ‘Yet this one did. Had you the eyes to see, you would have deduced my presence.’ The two slaves froze. They stared at him, dumbstruck. ‘Where is Baros Tsen T'Varr?’
The desert man fell to his knees and bowed his head. He pointed across the wall and beyond. ‘Inside, Demon Lord of Earth and Sky.’ The Watcher bowed and with a flicker of effort became the wind again, sweeping into the labyrinthine bowels of the castle, swirling ghost-like through the rune-carved tunnels of glowing white stone that ran within. The air here was at its thickest so close to the old enchanted stone. The Picker said he'd grown used to the fierce animosity of the dragon lands. It was hard, but with practice you built a tolerance to it. But then the Picker had always been a little strange, a little different. He was the only Elemental Man ever taken from another world. The Watcher knew now that he wouldn't see the Picker again. The moon sorcerers’ visions had told him so.
It would have been easier to search through the stone than through the air but the white walls of the castle were yet another mystery. Stone, yes, but as impervious to his gift as metal. Still, he found Baros Tsen T'Varr in the first place he looked, supervising some change to the bathhouse at the castle's heart. The Watcher shimmered out of the air far enough away to show his respect, and bowed. ‘T'Varr. Hands of the Sea Lord.’
