by Stephen Deas
It is not an end. It is a beginning.
‘Baros Tsen T’Varr!’
The evening peace of the desert took him in its arms, wrapped like an old lover, a faithful familiar warmth. From the top of a lonely mesa far away from anywhere he watched the sunset, glorious fiery reds in the sky while the sand turned to liquid gold. He heard Kalaiya call his name, and then felt her warmth beside him, leaning into him. Another day and all this peace would be over …
‘Baros Tsen T’Varr!’
Baros Tsen T’Varr opened his eyes. A light flared and flickered, near, bright enough to stir him, then vanished. The voice echoed through the tunnel. There was something not quite human about it. He shook himself and sat up where he’d drifted asleep, sprawled on the front of a gold-glass sled. The only light down here came from flakes of white stone that glowed through splits and cracks in the walls around him. The same stone as inside his eyrie, with the same soft light, waxing and waning with the rise and fall of the sun. It might have been something to think about, how the same enchanted stone appeared again and again in so many disparate places, but the queue for his attention was long and loud just now, and didn’t have much space in it for anything that wasn’t about death, and how to avoid it.
There were a lot of things, it seemed, that were just a touch pressing in that regard. Being in a cave at the bottom of a chasm five miles beneath the surface of a murderously inhospitable desert, for example. When he’d fallen asleep, top of his list had been how he couldn’t find the way up and out. Close behind that came the very strong chance that, even if he did find a way, the climb would simply be beyond a fat old t’varr whose idea of exercise was levering himself in and out of the bath, and occasionally shouting at slaves. A strong third was the part about dying parched in the desert even if he did ever get out, and then there was always the small matter of the dormant dragon’s egg on the sled behind him that might hatch at any moment. He could never quite figure where on the list that one ought to go, but definitely above weird glowing stones.
A figure stood at the edge of the darkness.
‘Kalaiya!’ Tsen sat up and nudged Kalaiya awake. So there was someone else here after all. Given all that had happened in the last month, it was natural to assume that whoever it was would want to murder him. Pretty much everyone wanted him dead these days, and he couldn’t even blame them, not really. He hadn’t meant Dhar Thosis to burn down, but he had sent his dragon and its murderous rider Zafir, and when he’d tried to stop her, well, that had worked out rather badly. After that everything had gone horribly wrong, and thousands had died in fire.
His slave. His responsibility. Everyone knew it, even him.
The figure at the edge of the darkness held out her hands. Specks of light flashed across the space between them. Tsen tried to duck. Kalaiya opened her eyes and screamed. Something hit him like a fist in the chest; he felt it shift into liquid and skitter up his skin like a giant centipede. It wrapped itself around his neck and instantly set as hard as metal. He struggled and clawed at it, panicked for a moment and then, as nothing else happened, calmed himself. It was there now, whatever it was, and he’d already been doomed anyway.
Kalaiya had a collar around her throat too. It was made of gold-glass. Tsen sighed. He just didn’t have the strength any more.
‘Do you know who I am, Baros Tsen?’ rang out the voice.
Tsen tugged at the collar one more time, not that it did the slightest bit of good, and then gave up. You don’t have any friends any more. None. Everyone simply wants you gone, and they have their reasons, and they are good ones. So just take it, you stupid fat t’varr, and die with as much grace as you can, because frankly you largely agree with them. And he did. A whole city, its glass palaces smashed and shattered. He hadn’t meant it, but if the whole ravening world crying for his blood frankly didn’t give a fig for whether or not he’d meant it, well, frankly he couldn’t really see how they were wrong. Sorry didn’t really cut it, not when you’d carelessly flattened a city.
Thought you were so clever, didn’t you? He sighed and held out a hand to Kalaiya. Some day, maybe, he might stop hating himself. Some day very soon, by the looks of things.
‘I’m sorry, my love.’ He closed his eyes and squeezed Kalaiya’s hand and wept, because really, after everything he’d done and all he’d been through, he’d well and truly had enough. All this way and then days starving in a cave in the dark, unable to find the way out, and now this. I don’t want to run any more. Just let it end.
Red Lin Feyn, the Arbiter of the Dralamut, stood as a shadow amid the dancing lights of her enchanted globes. There didn’t seem to be anyone with her, but wherever the Arbiter went her killers were always on hand. Stupidest thing of all was that he’d never wanted to run away in the first place. Take it like a man. Die with honour. All that claptrap; but for a while he’d really meant it.
The Arbiter reached out a hand. The sled beneath him moved, drifting closer until it stopped in front of her. Tsen looked up. Dear forbidden gods but this chasm was deep. And yes, yes, he knew – because his dutiful tutors had told him so and he had dutifully memorised it – that the depth of the Queverra from its lip to its very lowest tier was some five miles. But five miles was just a number when heard in a school room, a curiosity and a raised eyebrow. Far different if you had to climb it. Which, of course, could be avoided if the Arbiter summarily strangled him on the spot, so maybe that was no bad thing. In that haphazard madness of hopeless resignation Tsen almost laughed. As a way to avoid a lot of steps went, strangulation struck him as perhaps a bit extreme. But we could also strike exhaustion, dehydration, starvation and falling off a cliff from the list of things that might shortly kill you. Isn’t that simply wonderful?
No. Shut up.
The Arbiter put out a hand to touch the sled as it reached her. In the gentle strobe of the swirling globes, Tsen saw a dead man on the sand behind her. The body looked as though it had been ripped to pieces by a thousand knives. It took him another moment to realise that the shredded bloody clothes were the robe of an Elemental Man.
Oh.
Despite everything else, that was truly terrifying. It made even the voices in his head shut up for a second.
The Arbiter of the Dralamut cocked her head. She didn’t wear the headdress or the flaming feather robe, only the plain white tunic of an enchantress. For all he knew this was another skin-shifter. She was draped in the Arbiter’s shards of glass, though, and they were stained red and dripping with fresh blood, and there was a dead killer on the ground behind her, and so, really, did it matter right here and now who she really was?
‘Another pretend Baros Tsen?’ she asked. ‘Or is it truly you?’
Tsen dropped to his knees and bowed. ‘Lady Arbiter. Judge me as I know you must, but my slave is innocent.’
‘I am Red Lin Feyn, daughter in blood of Feyn Charin and the Crimson Sunburst, enchantress and navigator. I was the Arbiter of the Dralamut until two days ago, but I no longer claim that right. I have discharged that duty.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Who are you really?’
‘I am really Baros Tsen T’Varr,’ said Tsen.
The collar around his neck contracted. He choked and clawed at it. Beside him Kalaiya screamed, but Tsen found he couldn’t make a sound. He couldn’t breathe no matter how his lungs pumped and his ribs and belly heaved. He flailed, staggered to his feet, lurched a few steps, but the Arbiter simply backed away with such grace that she seemed almost to be floating. The chasm darkness closed on him. He fell forward. As he closed his eyes he saw Kalaiya clutching at her throat.
I’m sorry, my love.
He came round again a minute later. The Arbiter was sitting between them, perched on the edge of a gold-glass disc. ‘Baros Tsen T’Varr. The real one then.’ She smiled and then laughed. ‘Welcome to the Queverra. You are free to go.’
‘What?’ The collar had gone from around his nec
k.
‘The Arbiter has passed judgment. I found you guilty in your absence of complicity in the razing of Dhar Thosis. Your body was found in a gondola close to the Godspike. They will take it back to Khalishtor to be flayed and hanged by the feet. Your name will be damned and stricken from history. Your family and slaves will be put to flame and spear, except you don’t have any, so that’s not so bad. They will parade your corpse through the streets of Khalishtor bound in your own entrails. Half the city will line the way to spit on you, and then they will bury you in a communal latrine somewhere in the hills and no one will ever know where. They have your body for a second time, which is what matters to them, and so I doubt anyone else is still looking for you. Although given that it is the second time, I would still be careful. Nevertheless, you may go. I suppose the second body was the skin-shifter then, was it?’
Tsen shrugged. Last he’d seen Sivan, the shifter had looked like himself and had had a spear stuck through him. Seemed best not to mention that, though.
‘Free, lady?’
‘In the end I believed you. I believe you tried to stop it. Because of your enchantress’s faith. Because of your rider-slave’s murderous honesty. You were stupid, Tsen, but not evil, and the Dralamut has more use for you alive than dead. Many questions remain. The Arbiter condemns you to death because the Arbiter must, but I no longer wear that mask. I am merely Red Lin Feyn of the Dralamut once more.’
Too good to be true, t’varr. Life isn’t this kind. Wisdom suggested shutting up and taking Kalaiya’s hand and walking away as fast as he possibly could and seeing how far he got, but the devil inside wouldn’t let go. And there was still the list of things that were going to kill him, and he had a hundred questions of his own about how she’d found him and why she’d thought he was a shifter, and how much she knew about what lay beneath it all, but one thing more than anything else … ‘You called yourself daughter of Feyn Charin and the Crimson Sunburst, lady. Why, when the Crimson Sunburst was an anathema?’
Red Lin Feyn chuckled and nodded. She let out a long deep breath. ‘A change is coming, t’varr. A catastrophe, perhaps. You see it in the swelling of the storm-dark and in the cracked needle beside the Godspike. You see it in the rise of the sorcerers of Aria and in the necropolis of the Ice Witch and in the dead that do not rest in Merizikat and even here. In other things. In the storm-dark itself. The skin-shifters know.’ She looked across the darkness at the shredded killer on the sand, paused again and smiled. ‘In your history, when the Crimson Sunburst appeared at the foot of Mount Solence with her army of golems, what became of her, Baros Tsen?’
‘The Elemental Men fought her, and she was defeated.’
‘So she was.’ Red Lin Feyn turned away. ‘Disappear, Baros Tsen T’Varr. You, too, will find it is not so hard.’
‘Why do you want the egg?’ Tsen blinked. Of all the questions you might have asked, you ask her that? What do you care about the Xibaiya-damned dragon egg? Let her have it and good riddance!
But the question had popped into his mind from somewhere else. He looked about, bemused, as Red Lin Feyn shook her head.
‘But the answer is in your thoughts, little one,’ he said. ‘The grey dead have called the Black Moon to rise …’ Tsen flew a hand to his mouth and gasped. The words had come from his own lips but they didn’t belong; they weren’t his at all, as though a stranger had somehow put them there, and they made no sense. ‘I …’
He jumped as a sharp cracking noise broke the quiet. It came from the sled, and it took Tsen far too long to understand what it was. He gawped as the dragon egg cracked and burst apart in a flurry of wings and claws …
Two furious eyes gleamed. I am Silence.
Tsen squealed. Red Lin Feyn snapped out an arm and hurled a marble of glass. The hatchling dodged and shot into the air, vanishing into the shadows of the Queverra’s stifling gloom. The Arbiter’s light-globes raced after the dragon, illuminating a wheel of wing, a whip of tail, a slash and arc of neck and claw as Silence wove and flew. Red Lin Feyn’s glass marble hit the sled and flashed into a hollow sphere, swallowing both the sled and the broken remains of the egg. She threw another and then another, streaking up into the chasm, but the dragon darted between them, racing ever further away.
I will not be made into a tomb.
‘I cannot give you a choice, little dragon.’
The hatchling wheeled and dived back at them, spitting fire. Tsen scuttled to the sled, cowering behind the Arbiter’s glass. The Arbiter grew a shield around them. The fire washed over it.
Choices are not yours to give, little one. I am far more than you. The dragon soared upward. The Arbiter threw down a piece of glass and grew it into a sled of her own; but when she stepped on it she only watched, staring as the dragon flew away into the darkness above.
‘I’d need an Elemental Man to catch him.’ She shook her head and looked at the body beside her on the floor, cut to ribbons. ‘Sadly, we are no longer on speaking terms. This is unfortunate, Baros Tsen. I think it was important that the skin-shifters of Xibaiya had their dragon soul. I wish I could be sure. I do not yet understand what it was for.’
Tsen tried to pretend he hadn’t noticed the dead Elemental Man – better to gouge out his eyes than see something like this – but there was no getting away from it. A killer, murdered by the Arbiter of the Dralamut. He’d heard of Elemental Men being killed exactly three times in the entire history of ever, and it had always been by a dragon. See, t’varr? She can’t let you go, not really, not with what you’ve seen. She has to kill you now. Both of you. Any chance you might do something about that? Or are you simply going to walk onto the knife when she holds it out?
‘I see nothing,’ he muttered. Do something? Like what? Wag my finger and tut at her?
The Arbiter smiled. Tsen curled up and withered inside. Anything, t’varr. Just at least try not to be so miserably useless.
Red Lin Feyn walked to the glass globe that enveloped the sled. She touched it and it shrank back into a marble, crushing everything inside out of existence. Tsen thought he caught a glimpse of something dark and a flash of purple light as the glass collapsed. A flicker of the storm-dark? He shivered.
Coward.
‘Come with me,’ said the Arbiter. She beckoned him on to her floating disc. ‘You can answer my questions about your skin-shifter friends, and we shall see where that leads us. Then you may go.’
Pathetic useless coward. I hope she takes Kalaiya first so you see the light go out of her eyes and know you did nothing, tried nothing, to save her. ‘Am I offered a choice?’ His voice trembled. Shame at himself, that was.
‘Stay at the bottom of the abyss if you prefer, Baros Tsen!’ Red Lin Feyn laughed. ‘Or confess yourself to the Elemental Men, or to the Crown of the Sea Lords!’ If she was laughing at him, he deserved it.
I am not a murderer. I’m not a killer.
His voices laughed. Stupid t’varr. Tell that to the thousands who burned in Dhar Thosis!
But he did nothing in the end, and so Red Lin Feyn carried him and Kalaiya out of the chasm on her sled, and Tsen spent every moment of their flight expecting her to push him off, and every moment in between thinking that he should do the same to her, and yet neither ever moved.
When they reached the top, Red Lin Feyn let him and Kalaiya off by the rim of the abyss. The desert air was quiet and still and rasping hot, dry, scraping at his throat and tight across his skin. He sat quietly and held his head in his hands, waiting for his eyes, accustomed to days of starlight darkness, to embrace the desert sun. When they finally acquiesced enough to see more than bright, bright and more bright, he looked about him. They had stopped amid the chaos and debris of what had once been a dozen slaver camps. Across the abyss of the Queverra the chasm cliffs rose higher, bright in the sun, a pale ruddy pink in the shade. Closer in, juts and spars and mangled walls of mustard stone erupted from the sand, etch
ed and carved and sliced into curls and arcs and windswept bubbles. Swirls of pale-coloured lines stained them in twists and turns, while littered across the sand lay a tale of slaughter and ruin, bones picked clean but not yet bleached white by the sun, rags of clothes, broken tents, abandoned sleds for dragging things across the dunes, slave cages torn down, their doors smashed open. The sky burned a dazzling blue that scoured his eyes. The disc of Red Lin Feyn’s glasship turned lazily, catching the sun and casting bright will-o’-the-wisp sparks dancing across the sand. There was a skeleton nearby with its skull split in two. An axe, perhaps?
Still and quiet and death everywhere. In the distance Tsen heard the mournful cry of an eagle.
It struck him then: he was alive. He sat there, mute and acquiescent, and took it all in, half of him wondering when the Arbiter would get bored with her charade and kill him, the other half dreaming ridiculously impossible ways he might make an escape, both halves berating him for being such a pathetic and useless coward.
‘It won’t be easy.’ Kalaiya sat beside him and stroked his hair. ‘But you’re a resourceful man. No one is looking for us.’ Yet she had him wrong for once – it wasn’t fear of a new life that had him clenched up so tight.
Dress your cowardice as you will, t’varr; that doesn’t change its colour.
Red Lin Feyn was at her glasship, sitting on the steps of her golden gondola agleam in the sun. She was staring at the maw of the Queverra. An Arbiter killing a killer. Something never done, and so perhaps she had her reasons for contemplation; but she had a glasship to take her home, too, and a home to go to, and Tsen had neither.
This wouldn’t do. He picked himself up, took a deep breath, dusted himself down and took Kalaiya’s hand. Here was the death and ruin of a camp overrun right enough, but sooner or later Red Lin Feyn would ask her questions, whatever they were, hear his useless answers, and then, at best, do as she’d promised and leave; and among the discard and scatter were surely all manner of useful things for a fat old t’varr left alone in this wilderness. Probably no food, but perhaps a sled? Whoever had been here, they’d left in a hurry, and once he started rummaging it didn’t take long to find everything he’d need to live for a few days and a few more things he might sell or trade. He supposed it wasn’t a bad place to wait around for a while, not with the river running into the end of the abyss. Sooner or later they’d have to walk, of course, and when they did they’d end up in Dhar Thosis because there simply wasn’t anywhere else to go for the best part of a thousand miles. If whoever was left in the ruin of that place made him into a slave or recognised his face and hanged him, well then he probably deserved it.
