by Stephen Deas
Perched up on the eyrie wall, the dragon looked down at him, unbearably huge, the sun gleaming off its ruddy golden scales between dark streaks of blood. It had claws big enough to pick up a cart and crush it, could swallow a man whole or bite an armoured knight clean in half. Tsen had seen both. He turned his face away, refusing to look at the monster; instead he climbed the flawless white walls to stare out with his back firmly to everything, looking over the desert. There weren’t any places to hide an enormous floating castle out here. The Empty Sands had earned their name for being, well, empty. Maybe he could tow the eyrie west to the Konsidar and try to hide it in the mountain valleys, but the Konsidar was a forbidden place by order of the Elemental Men. To trespass there was death, and so . . .
He stopped himself. Couldn’t help but laugh at that, because the punishment for burning Dhar Thosis was surely going to be death at the very least, and a lot worse if anyone could think of something. He was as damned as he could possibly be and so might as well go to the Konsidar or do anything that damn well pleased him. They could only kill him once.
He let the desert and the breeze and the quiet enrapture him and the thought faded silently into nothing. He didn’t hear Chay-Liang come up behind him. He only knew the enchantress was there when he felt her hand on his shoulder.
‘You aren’t responsible,’ she said quietly.
‘Nor have I ever been.’ Tsen smiled. ‘My father used to say it was mostly my bones. I have irresponsible bones. That’s what he used to tell me. It seems he was right.’ He felt the hand on his shoulder tense. Chay-Liang thought him too flippant for a t’varr but that was because she entirely misunderstood his need for humour. As was often the way with the scholars of the Hingwal Taktse, she was immensely clever and desperately naive. He turned and smiled at her. See, now here’s a reason to face what you’ve done. You can save her from hanging beside you. You can at least do that, can’t you? Chay-Liang and Kalaiya and all the others . . .
‘You did not—’
Tsen cut her off. There was no hiding. No point even trying. ‘I tried to play a game and I lost, Liang, that’s the long and the short of it, the be-all and the end-all. The only shred of anything decent left is to stand and face the consequences. I am responsible. Or, at the very least, I am accountable. The dragons are mine and I will go to my fate for what they have done.’ He kept smiling but his eyes glistened. ‘Look after my Kalaiya when the time comes. And look after the truth. Make sure it reaches those whose ears most need to hear it. Do not let Mai’Choiro Kwen spin lies about us. He will try.’ He saw himself in the bath again, the glass flying out of his hand. Why? ‘I’d send you somewhere safe if I could think of such a place,’ he said.
‘There is no place.’ And they both knew she was right. ‘Better we stay here and face the wrath of the Elemental Men together. I will not run either, Baros Tsen. I was there, remember? Hiding where the glasship’s golem pilot should have been and I heard every word. No one else knows that. I will testify for you.’
Tsen nodded. Not that it would make any difference except to make sure that he and Mai’Choiro Kwen swung on the gallows side by side. Oh and you were so clever, Tsen. So very very clever trapping Mai’Choiro so many times and in so many ways. How clever do you feel now? ‘Have your glasships drag us east towards the Godspike, Liang. I want you to do a thing that no one has done for a long time. I want you to fly above the storm-dark that encircles it. It will buy us a few days while I go to Dhar Thosis and see for myself what Chrias and my dragon have done.’ Yes, and perhaps your glasships that pull my floating eyrie across the desert could simply let go when the Elemental Men come, let the eyrie sink into the stormdark and die, dragons and everything. Wipe us away as though we never existed. Yes, he could quite see how that might be for the best.
He led Chay-Liang back to his study and offered her a glass of apple wine while he changed into the formal robes of a t’varr who answered to none but a sea lord. His slaves braided his hair down to his ankles and dressed him in his robe of golden feathers. It might be the last time he’d get to wear it so best to make the most of it. There was a good chance the Elemental Men would be waiting for him when he came back.
‘What about the slave?’ Chay-Liang couldn’t quite keep her loathing out of her voice. I should have listened to you, eh?
‘Zafir? Lock her away until I return.’
‘I’d rather hang her and be done with it.’
‘But I would not.’ The enormity of what she’d done in his name kept staring him in the face, standing in his way whenever he tried to move. He couldn’t simply have her executed because he needed her presence to remind him of his own guilt. ‘Liang, she knew the truth, and of all of us she has no reason to hide it. Her fate is certain.’ And perhaps a little because, in the end, when she’d had the chance to poison him, she’d turned it down and he couldn’t understand why. ‘I’m going to take Kalaiya with me. It’s an indulgence, I know, but I don’t think I can face this alone. If they’re waiting for me when I come back, they will try to use her to punish me. She deserves better. So do you, Chay-Liang.’
He sent her away and thought about having someone call Kalaiya to attend him, then changed his mind and walked through the eyrie to find her. On other days he passed through the ancient passageways oblivious to their age and their origin, but today, as unsettled as he was, Tsen saw them for what they truly were: relics beyond understanding, detritus left after the half-gods brought the Splintering upon the world and vanished. They were the unknown. Like the dragons, like so many things. Like the eyrie itself, a huge piece of rock, an enigma floating over the dunes of the desert, honeycombed with mystery, abandoned for hundreds of years and sitting for all that time, patiently waiting, its design unfinished and its purpose long forgotten. He tried to shake the feeling away. It was a perilous thing sometimes, to stop and take a long look at the world right there around him; that was when he realised how little of it he truly understood.
Kalaiya, of course, had known he’d come. She was waiting for him. Tsen opened the iron door to her room and she came to him at once, with neither haste nor ceremony, and wrapped her arms around him. Succour and comfort. She gave him his strength. He buried his face in her endless hair.
‘Do you remember,’ he asked, ‘how things were before all this started? At the very least, I could have called my life normal, or perhaps not very interesting, or frequently mundane.’ He took a deep breath. Six months since the dragons came. There certainly hadn’t been as many people who’d wanted him to conveniently drop dead back then. Couldn’t have been more than three or four. Now it must be more like . . . well, frankly, once it comes out what the dragon-queen has done to Dhar Thosis, pretty much everyone.
Kalaiya held him tight. ‘I remember.’ Her hair smelled of Xizic. His favourite, not hers.
‘It’s all over, Kalaiya. I will never be the next sea lord of Xican. There will be no Xican any more. They’ll hang me, and you know there’s no running from the Elemental Men. I’ll keep you safe as best I can. I need to go now. To see what . . .’ There was a lump in his throat, choking him. For years he’d built them a future full of promises and now they were all burned to ash. ‘I need to leave.’ She was shaking. Scared, no matter how she tried to hide it. He let her go and forced himself to look at her, to see her and remember her face. Look at her and look at what you’ve done. He could only die once, however unpleasant it was, but Kalaiya would be there to watch it and to remember, over and over. After he was gone, she’d be nothing. No one would want her. She’d be tainted by him for ever. ‘Come with me? Please?’ He couldn’t look at her any more. He turned and fled, but it didn’t help. The regret and the pain that tore at his chest came with him.
Outside, waiting in the middle of the dragon yard, Chay-Liang already had a gondola hanging by twelve silver chains from the sedate rotation of a glasship’s disc. Slaves hurried back and forth, carrying supplies. Apple wine. An enchanted bowl of never-melting ice that Liang had made
for him years ago. Barrels of water for the tanks on the gondola’s roof. Hard bread and biscuits, fruit, cheese, silken sheets and blankets and everything he’d need. He stood in the middle of them, doing nothing useful and simply getting in the way while they bustled around him as though he wasn’t there. The junior t’varr overseer stiffened when he saw Tsen but then decided to ignore him too. Tsen felt his resentment, his disapproval. You’re running away from what you’ve done. And, yes he was, but he was running towards it too.
Kalaiya, of course, didn’t come out until the gondola was ready to fly. She made him wait, which was her subtle way of telling him she was cross with him. When she came out to the dragon yard, she was dressed in the plain white tunic of a slave, in case anyone had forgotten. Tsen took her hand and led her inside. The ramp closed behind them. He tried to think of something to say, but as the glasship above rose into the sky and lifted the gondola away, he couldn’t shake off that vision of her, years from now, a penniless beggar eking out the barest sketch of a life on what charity she could find. All that they were, all that they could have been, all gone to waste because of his own stupid hubris.
3
Hiding in Waiting
Tuuran called him Crazy Mad. The big man had called him that since the day Berren had first told him the story of how the warlocks had stolen his life, how they’d sucked him out of his body and trapped him in another one, and how he’d escaped and gone looking for the man who wore his face. How he had pieces of other souls trapped inside him – Skyrie the warlock and something else, something dark and huge and powerful. All I want is to find out who I am. All I want is to have my life back. He clung to those other names, the person he used to be. Berren the Bloody Judge. Berren the Crowntaker. Inside, that’s who he was and who he meant to be again one day, but first they had to get off this stupid island and away from this stupid war and all these murderous Taiytakei.
He found the remains of a wooden tower on the cliffs away from both the bridge and the palace, a half-tumbled-down ruin long before the dragon had come. An old lookout point perhaps, watching over the sea before Sea Lord Senxian had raised his golden towers. He and Tuuran hid inside, covering themselves in mouldy sacking and bits and pieces of rotting timber, waiting out the day. Now and then, when Tuuran fell asleep and started to snore, Berren poked him. He’d seen what the Taiytakei on top of the Dul Matha were doing, clearing it, killing anyone who wasn’t one of them. As twilight fell, he slipped out into the gloom and watched them leave. A pair of glass sleds ten times bigger than the one he and Tuuran had stolen ferried them to the few ships that had survived the onslaught. Before they left, the soldiers threw something from the shattered stump of one of the three towers to dangle by a rope. Berren heard a small cheer drift down from the ruins. A body, but he had no idea whose it was, nor any reason to care.
When they were gone, he woke Tuuran and they pulled their stolen sled to the cliff by the bridge. Berren tied a rope around it while Tuuran put a rock on top. They pushed it out over the abyss between the two islands to see what happened.
‘Well that’s a bit of a relief.’ Tuuran grinned when it didn’t plummet into the sea. ‘Would have been a bit of a bugger otherwise.’
They pulled it back, took off the rock off and sat on the sled. Tuuran pushed off as hard as he could against the cliffs and they crossed the divide between Dul Matha and the Eye of the Sea Goddess, drifting over the waves far below. Tuuran sat still, looking up at the moon and the stars bright overhead, glancing now and then at the far cliff coming towards them as though it was a perfectly normal thing to float a thousand feet above rocks and the sea on something your eyes saw right though if you could bring yourself to look. Berren tried not to think about it. He had no idea how the sled worked; it just did. Let that be enough. On the far side fires still burned in the ruins of what had once been rich palaces. He felt a restlessness stir inside him, roused by his fear and by the flames. He pushed it away but it persisted. The dragon had awoken something. Memories. Ideas. Desires.
The Eye of the Sea Goddess had been an island of palaces once, of shimmering glass-and-gold towers, but the dragon had smashed most of them in a fit of . . . what? Rage? Among the few that still stood were the dancing lights of swinging lanterns, and as they came closer, Berren saw they were gangs of soldiers, searching the ruins for survivors. When the soldiers found one, they dragged him out and killed him.
Tuuran left the sled by the bridge. Smashed pieces of glass lay scattered underfoot, sharp and dangerous, or else ground to a gravel that crunched with shocking loudness at every step. The silver light of the half-moon cast eerie shadows among the splinters and shards. A single road meandered down the island from the cliffs and the Dul Matha towards a causeway and another bridge to the mainland, but it was busy with soldiers camped out for the night. Elsewhere, the slope was steep and treacherous, rocks sticking out between thick tangles of grass and thorny vines or else hidden beneath them, hungry to snatch a foot and twist an ankle. Tuuran bulled through it, cutting a path to the seaward cliffs away from the debris and the hunting parties of Taiytakei until they found a gully overgrown with thorn bushes, the sort of place you couldn’t see until you as good as walked straight into it.
‘This’ll do.’ He pushed his way under the overhanging thorns and settled down, waiting for the dawn. He was snoring again in minutes. Berren tossed and turned and shifted. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the dragon of Dhar Thosis again, the red and gold scaled monster as he and Tuuran had stood before it in the freshly ruined palace. Its eyes had been all over him. It knew him, and memories that weren’t his had bubbled and boiled in his head, memories of another time and place when there hadn’t been one dragon but a thousand, and all of them were his.
The warlock Saffran Kuy had cut him with a golden knife once, long ago, and he’d seen a flash of his future. Yesterday he’d killed Saffran’s brother Vallas and taken that knife. In the dying warlock’s memories he’d seen the man with the ruined face and the one blind milky eye. Among the memories in his head that weren’t his own, he saw himself dying on the edge of a swamp with the night split open like swollen flesh and leaking black shadows, the stars winking out one by one. He saw the same man standing over him.
‘Are you death?’ he tried to ask, but the words never came out.
‘I carry the Black Moon.’ The eye bored into him.
That man. The man with the ruined face and the milky eye. He had the answers. He’d made all this happen, and now Berren had something in his head that didn’t belong. Something sleeping and crippled, but he felt it when it stirred. A splinter of some unbounded power.
‘I need to find him,’ he whispered to the stars. ‘I need to know what he did to me.’ Before it was too late.
After a while he left Tuuran to his snores and slipped through the night, crept back among the ruins to where the Taiytakei were camped, loud, bright with fire and easy to avoid. He slipped around them, watching and waiting for a lone sentry to settle just a little too far from the rest. Old familiar skills and they came back to him with ease. He’d been a thief once, an orphan from Shipwrights’ in Deephaven, a boy pickpocket, a cutpurse and a burglar. He smiled to himself. It was all so long ago and he’d been so many things since then, but he still remembered.
He found his sentry at last, sitting on a boulder that had once been a piece of some rich man’s home, head starting to nod. Berren gave him a few minutes to doze and then came up behind him and stabbed him through the heart with the gold-hafted knife. The blade went straight through flesh and armour as though both were made of mist, but then this was no ordinary knife – he’d learned that back in Deephaven too – and its blade wasn’t one for cutting skin and flesh. Beside the sentry a spectre shimmered into being, the web of webs that was the sum of what the soldier was and would be. Thoughts, memories, ambitions, ideals. His soul. Everything.
As Berren reached into them, the sentry started. He jerked up, eyes unblinking wide, mouth frozen open, sc
ream unvoiced.
You. Obey. Me.
Three little cuts from the golden knife to the strands of the soldier’s soul, precise and perfect, and they made the man into his slave far more perfectly than any Taiytakei galley master could ever have wished. There was so much more this blade could do but Saffran Kuy had never shown him and the knife kept its secrets mockingly close. Berren pulled the sentry to the earth and whispered in his ear, ‘Make no sound except in answer to my questions and speak in whispers that even the wind will barely hear.’ More words came out of him then, words he didn’t recognise and didn’t know and in some language he’d never heard, and yet he understood their meaning. They were a binding. You are my slave and I am your master. He had a strange sense then that, if he’d wanted, he could have crept on further among the sleeping Taiytakei and cut them all, one after another until every man was his.
The sentry stared at Berren and then at the knife in his chest. His eyes gleamed wide with terror. He whimpered and his hands trembled.
‘Do you understand?’ hissed Berren.
The sentry opened his mouth as if to speak and then closed it again. He screwed up his face. Nodded.
‘You’re killing everyone here. All the sword-slaves who fought to take the city in the first place too?’
The Taiytakei nodded again. Berren slid closer and clutched the soldier’s head. He met the man’s eyes.
‘All the slaves? Women and children too?’
Another nod. The soldier closed his eyes but it made little difference. Old or young, men or women, slaves were merely slaves to the night-skins. The lowest, the oar-slaves, were treated like cattle. Berren knew that all too well. He pushed the soldier away.
‘I’m done with you.’ He drew another blade, another knife, simple steel this time. ‘I’m going to cut your throat now. You won’t make a sound. Do you understand?’
Tears gleamed in the soldier’s eyes but Berren had long learned the folly of mercy. When he was done, he crept back to Tuuran and their gully and waited for the sun to rise.