The Splintered Gods

by Stephen Deas

  Tsen looked through the gold-glass walls of the palace and saw a bathhouse built to look out over the city and the sea. It must have had a fine view once. He didn’t see any bodies. The upper tiers of the tower were deserted. Empty. The men and women who had lived here had had plenty of time to see what was coming. Perhaps some had escaped?

  The gondola stopped to hover by the balcony with the raven cages. The stern ramp hinged open and a howling wind rushed in at once, flapping the silk curtains on the windows and tugging at Tsen’s robe. He had to shout over the roar of it, over its angry whistling through the chains dangling the gondola from the glass-hip high above. ‘You might want to stay here and wait,’ he told Kalaiya, more in the spirit of a noble gesture than anything else.

  A derisive ‘Ha!’ let him know what she thought of that. ‘Who’s the graceful and nimble slave and who’s the fat old man?’ Kalaiya pushed past him onto the ramp. His heart jumped as the wind caught her and she swayed, but the ramp was wide and the balcony even wider. She turned and held out her hands and beckoned him to follow. When he did, the wind thumped into him and knocked him a step sideways.

  ‘They’re gone.’ Where the balcony opened into the innards of the tower, empty raven cages lined the walls. Scattered around them were pieces of what looked like bright green glass, strewn across the floor. Chunks of it, nothing all that remarkable until you looked closer and saw, now and then, that one was shaped as a finger, or maybe a foot or a piece of a face. Kalaiya stopped to stare, hand pressed over her mouth. Tsen pulled her on deeper into the tower.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ she asked, and he realised that she’d never seen this before. In all her years at his side she’d never been up close and seen what a jade raven truly was. Did it hurt? He had no idea. The slaves who died tended to scream a lot but that was probably mostly the fear.

  ‘I don’t know. Come on.’ The scribes would live and work near the rookery. Out of the wind his feet felt sure again. ‘I don’t like it here. It’s Senxian’s mausoleum and it gives me the shivers.’

  He’d feared they’d meet a gold-glass wall, the sort that needed a enchanter’s black rod to open, that he’d have to go back to the gondola and get the silver globe Chay-Liang had made for him for cutting through; but this high up in the tower Senxian had seen no need to keep people out. A mere iron door barred the way – iron so no Elemental Man could pass through – which swung open at Tsen’s touch. Beyond was the Tying Room, where the jade ravens were fed while the scribes’ messages were tied to their feet. More pieces of green glass covered the floor. Bits of what had once been people. There must have been three or four before the ravens touched them, turned them this way and shattered them. No one had cleared away the remains. The scribes had left in a hurry. More cages hung open in the corners of the room, large and silver – cages for men this time – and the litter of green chunks was thickest around them.

  Kalaiya squealed; when Tsen looked round she was holding most of someone’s face in her hands – everything from the eyebrows down to the chin, where a large chip was missing. If you’d known the man in life, you’d know him now, clear as anything. Tsen gently lifted it away. The pieces the ravens left looked like jade-coloured glass but to the touch felt more like a resin, like Xizic, with a little give beneath the fingers if you squeezed hard, not the cold unyielding sharpness of brittle stone.

  He led Kalaiya away. She was shaking. ‘They were slaves,’ he said as if that somehow made it better, and then remembered that she was a slave too. He forgot that more than he should. ‘Criminals,’ he added quickly, guessing how Senxian would have chosen them. ‘Murderers. Rapists. The worst sort.’ They’d have been the sick and the old, though, the ones Senxian couldn’t put to useful labour. ‘They were going to die anyway.’ That at least was probably true.

  A screen of metal chains passed for the next door, another device to stop Elemental Men from entering. Tsen pushed through into a hall. They eventually found what he wanted – the Writing Room – up some narrow stairs. He clucked his tongue in frustration when he saw the bronze mesh basket where the scribes threw the letters after they transcribed them. It was blackened and full of charred pieces. He crouched beside the basket, fingering the few corners of paper that survived, looking for anything that might still be legible. Fragments of words, that was all. The rest crumbled into ash, staining his fingertips grey.

  ‘Tsen?’

  He shook his head. A waste of time. ‘It was a fine idea, my love.’

  ‘Tsen! Look!’ She was standing over one of the scribing desks. There were pieces of paper in her hand. She thrust them at him. ‘Look!’

  Vespinarr. Shonda.

  Senxian’s glasships lie in broken pieces. The Vul Tara burns. Nothing remains. The creature has shattered two of the towers of the palace. I am in the third. Somehow we are spared. Everyone is fled. All is ruin . . .

  He read on then walked back through the Tying Room and onto the balcony again, into the roar of the wind, seeing the scene as it might have been. Perhaps whoever wrote the message had been standing here, fighting to hold his paper and pen. The writing was scratchy and erratic, hard to read, scribed in haste and panic, but what sort of man would stand here at all with a furious dragon tearing the towers around him? He tried to see it: across the sea a pall of smoke over the city as he watched the dragon burn everything in its path. It came to the palace itself. They thought they were safe inside their mighty towers of glass and gold but the dragon had smashed their walls and shattered their ramparts. It had ripped lightning cannon and the black-powder guns alike from their mountings and tossed them over the cliffs into the sea. It had gouged holes in stone and glass and filled the palace with fire. Panic spreading as fast as the flames, the scribes opening the cages and letting their ravens fly, turning and running . . . but the man who’d written this, whoever he was, had stopped them. The two other great towers of the Palace of Roses had come down, cracking like rolling thunder, showering every part of the palace below with shards of golden glass as large as houses. He’d stood and watched them fall. And when the two towers had fallen and the third stayed standing, when he found he wasn’t dead, he’d written of what he’d seen. Terse and concise yet eloquent. One last scribe and one final raven.

  It destroys everything with ease. There is nothing left to stop it. Quai’Shu’s soldiers are advancing in its wake. It gouges lesser structures with tooth and claw. It lashes the great towers with its tail until they crack. It makes holes in them and fire bursts from its mouth and pours inside. It strikes the towers then it hurls itself at Senxian’s own and clings to it until it cracks and a full third falls away. The falling tower strikes the Rose near its base. The Rose disintegrates. I watch it crumble and die.

  Tsen edged to the lip of the balcony. Those other towers were in full view, or would have been. He tried to think what it would have been like to stand with their bulk looming over him and then watch them shudder and fall. The noise, the cacophonous thunder of splintering glass . . .

  It shows no sign of weakness or fatigue but it has left the Thorn untouched. Perhaps its force is spent? Though I have no doubt Quai’Shu’s soldiers will not spare us.

  Tsen stuffed the papers inside his robe and decided he’d seen enough. Enough of what the dragon had done to Dhar Thosis and enough of what the mysterious scribe had written, addressed to Lord Shonda of Vespinarr. In the gondola, as the glasship drifted away from the corpse of Dhar Thosis and the taint of smoke that hung in the air, he had Kalaiya pour some water into a bowl. He took off all his rings and dipped his fingers in and kept them there to see whether any remnant of the old alliance would answer. Shrin Chrias Kwen and Baran Meido were blank. Hardly a surprise. Quai’Shu was sitting in his eyrie, mad as a hare. That left the youngest of Quai’Shu’s sons, Bronzehand. He went to the window and let Bronzehand look through his eyes for a while, taking it all in. Bronzehand who was dallying in the island fleshpots of the Scythian steelsmiths when he should have been on the shores of Qeled. H
e’d been clever, Tsen saw. He’d left when the dragons came. Bronzehand also had another ring, linked to someone outside Quai’Shu’s cabal. He toyed with it a lot. Tsen didn’t think any of the others had noticed.

  He sighed, forcing himself to have a good long look at what the dragon had done so that Bronzehand would see it too. It would have been nice to talk to someone who wasn’t Kalaiya, someone who could actually do something, but Bronzehand was in another world. Maybe he’d prefer to stay away. Tsen could hardly blame him for that. Xican was doomed. There would be no more sea lords of the Grey Isle. Better to waste away a happy life in the fleshpots of Scythia than come back to this.

  What have we done? What have I done?

  He read the pages again, all of them, one after the next, slowly and meticulously, then slipped the last ring on his finger and pushed Bronzehand away. Perhaps other sea lords would come to see for themselves, perhaps not. Most of Senxian’s fleet was at sea, scattered across the many worlds. His heirs would claim the ruins. They’d rebuild Dhar Thosis and maybe wipe away the scars, but the world would never be quite the same. Shonda had shown it could be done. The five-hundred-year peace, broken. The Elemental Men defied. Thwarted.

  He poured a glass of apple wine and gave it to Kalaiya, held her hand and squeezed it tight. ‘Thank you.’ He gave her the papers. ‘Keep them safe.’

  Kalaiya shrugged. ‘What use are they?’

  ‘Shrin Chrias Kwen flew no banners, but in these letters the soldiers are said to be Sea Lord Quai’Shu’s. How can that be? Because this was written by one of Shonda’s spies, sent to be his eyes. Someone who knew what was coming before it came.’ Proof of it. Proof that Shonda knew.

  ‘Then there’s hope?’

  Tsen laughed bitterly. ‘For me? No. For the rest of you? Perhaps.’

  It was a long journey back to the eyrie and he read the letters perhaps a dozen times, picturing with each what it must have been like, trying to see through the eyes of this spy, piecing it together with what little he’d wrung from the rider-slave Zafir. It would only be later that the last few words would snag in his thoughts.

  It landed amid the rubble. Two men came from among Quai’Shu’s soldiers and spoke with its rider.

  Zafir had never mentioned that. And it would occur to Baros Tsen to wonder, then, who could have had the courage and the audacity to walk up to a dragon, and what, exactly, did they have to say?

  5

  The Godspike

  Further from the sea, as the gondola drifted away, the city looked more as Tsen remembered it, stone streets and bell towers and houses and little market squares and then the shanty towns of the sword-slaves and the oar-slaves and the outcasts and the poor and the desert men who’d come and never left. He wondered who claimed the city now. Anyone? As they’d drifted over the desert from the eyrie, him and Kalaiya, he’d pondered whether he’d find the streets full of people hard at work rebuilding what they’d lost, ships clustered around the docks, the damage perhaps far less than he feared. Now he wondered: was there even anyone left? But surely there must be. Chrias and the dragon couldn’t have killed everyone. Could they?

  On the top of the sand ridge that marked the edge of the desert Tsen saw a short line of tents. Behind the peak of the ridge, out of sight of the city, they had cages. Slavers, already come to pick at the city’s corpse. He swept the glasship lower, filled with a fearsome fury, intent on scattering them with the ship’s lightning cannon, but after a few moments he pulled away. Exactly how much of a hypocrite are you, Tsen? It comes with the territory, but that’s rich even for you.

  The more he thought, the less he could see what good it did for Bronzehand, far out to sea and in another world, to see all this. When Dhar Thosis was out of sight, Tsen read the letters again, poring over them, searching for any nuance that might damn the lord of Vespinarr just that little bit more. Shonda had wealth beyond imagination. Did he not have a spy bound to him the way Tsen and Quai’Shu’s others were bound? Surely he’d seen it all with his own eyes as it happened, him and Mai’Choiro Kwen and Vey Rin T’Varr and whoever else had planned this ruin. Why the letters then?

  Evidence? He couldn’t let them go. Kept going back to them until Kalaiya took them while he was sleeping and hid them with the glasship’s golem. She told him where they were but with a warning look.

  ‘We have two more days,’ she whispered. ‘Two more days just for us when no one can touch us. After that it will be gone.’ She wasn’t beautiful, probably never had been, but she had a grace to her, an elegance, a poise. When she’d caught his eye, years ago, it hadn’t been with an obsequious smile or her perfect kowtow, it had been the slightest curl of disdain that came afterwards, the one she gave him now. A sort of pity, as though she knew how foolish he really was underneath his clever words and his braided hair that touched the floor and his dazzling rainbow feather robes. He’d come to look for that over the years, the wrinkle of her nose when he said something particularly foolish.

  ‘Did I tell you that ten years ago Quai’Shu went to see the moon sorcerers?’ he said. It was an odd affection between them, deep and solid. Not love exactly, certainly not lust, but something profound anyway. Somehow she’d become a necessary part of him and yet all they ever did was talk. ‘No, I didn’t, because I never told anyone. Quai’Shu only told me years later.’ She’d kissed him once, back when she hardly knew him, when she supposed that must be what he wanted, and it had been nice enough but it had told them both that it wasn’t.

  Kalaiya cocked her head. ‘They brought the dragons to the eyrie.’

  ‘They did.’ He stared at her. Perhaps she was the missing piece of his soul, the piece he’d lost back in Cashax in his youth raising hell with Vey Rin and the rest. Perhaps he’d been lucky enough to find it again – unlike the others – but that just sounded ridiculous.

  ‘Tsen?’ She snapped her fingers at him. ‘Tsen. You’re staring right through me!’

  ‘Yes.’ He shook himself. ‘The moon sorcerers went with Quai’Shu to the dragon-realm. He was supposed to bring back eggs but the eggs started to hatch while he was at sea. We lost a dozen ships and Quai’Shu lost his mind.’ Tsen shrugged. ‘Or perhaps he lost it as they set sail, when the dragon-queen murdered Zifan’Shu on the decks of Quai’Shu’s own ship. But, years before, Quai’Shu went to the moon sorcerers to ask them for their help. He never said what it was that he gave them. I never knew how he bought them.’

  ‘I thought they were a myth.’

  ‘If Quai’Shu wasn’t my sea lord then I would have said the same. I would have called him a liar.’ There was something there, a deeper darkness around Quai’Shu’s dragons that went beyond Shonda and Vespinarr and Dhar Thosis but Tsen, for all his brilliance, couldn’t begin to fathom it. Nor did he want to. In his golden gondola, surrounded by silver and glass and pale wood, he snuggled close to Kalaiya, and they chewed Xizic and watched the desert sunset together. He lay in bed and tried to sleep, and when he couldn’t, she got in beside him and stroked his hair and told him stories of the happy days they’d had together not so long ago. When the sun rose, he spent the next day looking at her, then out of the window at the desert and then back again, living in that moment for what little time they had left. She never said, but she needed him exactly as he needed her. That was the miracle of her; perhaps he did love her after all, just for wanting him.

  He let the peace of the desert take him. In the evening he landed the gondola on the top of a lonely mesa far away from anywhere and the two of them watched the sunset together, glorious fiery reds in the sky while the sand turned to liquid gold and he felt Kalaiya’s warmth beside him, leaning into him. Another day and then they’d be back and all this peace would be over. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe the eyrie would be gone and the dragon with it and Mai’Choiro Kwen and Chay-Liang and all the rest, and everyone would think he was dead and he could fly away and be free . . . Or, more likely, the Elemental Men were already waiting for him.

  He put his arm
around Kalaiya as the sun went down. It had been an act of cowardice running away to Dhar Thosis to see what the dragon had done, a few last days together in quiet comfort and solitude before the end of everything jumped out of a wall and ate him. And so, because he was still a coward at heart, the desert stars were bright before he turned away and walked slowly back to the gondola, reluctance in every lingering step. He didn’t sleep much that night, and when the sun rose again he felt the coming end sink true and deep into his bone. The storm-dark was on the horizon ahead of them, a hundred miles away and already a dark smear over the gleaming sands.

  The world was full of things Tsen didn’t understand: dragons, flying eyries, glasships and lightning cannon, but none of them touched the mystery of the storm-dark. It floated a mile off the ground, twenty miles across, wrapped around that other great inexplicable marvel, the infinite pillar of the Godspike which pierced its heart. The cloud seemed to swell as the miles fell away, a great vortex of shadows racked by violet lightning, twisting in dark spirals, a solitary isolated fragment of the storm-dark curtain that cut the many worlds into pieces, trapped here in the heart of the desert by a ring of white stone spires each a mile high. As the glasship came closer, Tsen’s heart beat faster. Chay-Liang hadn’t said a word about him leaving her to bring the eyrie here, leaving her to do it alone, hadn’t even frowned though she’d surely seen right through him. No one flew their glasship over the top of the storm-dark if they didn’t have to because sometimes the magic simply failed up there. It happened over the Queverra too and, so he’d heard, in parts of the Konsidar. A glasship that failed over the storm-dark fell like a stone until the maelstrom swallowed and un-made it. It unmade everything it touched. The lines out to sea did the same unless a navigator wove their protective weave and used the rifts to travel to other worlds – from that one masterful secret the Taiytakei had become what they were – but the storm-dark over the Godspike was different. Feyn Charin, first and greatest of the navigators, had entered it and returned. No one else ever had.