by Stephen Deas
Tsen shuddered. Maybe the magic that made his eyrie fly would work better. No one understood that either, after all.
The clouds grew, spreading across the sky as the gondola came closer, high overhead like a dark hand reaching down to devour him. He saw the ring of spires around the edge of the cloud, caging it, their tips touching it; and, deep inside, the white stone spire of the Godspike itself, piercing it, gleaming in the desert sun, a pillar of light rising through the churning black cloud up into the sky beyond, towards the stars until it vanished into the deep and blinding blue. The spires held the storm-dark at bay, the navigators said. Truth was, Tsen reckoned, no one had ever had a clue except maybe Feyn Charin himself – and in the end Charin had gone every bit as mad as Quai’Shu, drooling in his rooms in the Dralamut and mumbling about dragons.
The air thinned as the glasship rose. Tsen felt it as the roiling black mass spread slowly around them, filling the sky. The storm-dark seemed like a hole in the world and there were some who said that’s exactly what it was. He saw the flashes of lightning as the gondola rose higher, deep inside the darkness, bright and violent. Travellers between worlds saw that same lightning as they crossed, either side of the heart of the darkness where everything, even time perhaps, stopped and there was simply nothing.
The glasship rose past the edge of it. For a full minute the storm-dark blotted out the sun, and from one side of the gondola he was dazzled by brilliant afternoon sunlight while from the other all he saw was black. His knuckles were tight, the rest of him as tense as a lanyard. Kalaiya was shaking. He put his arm around her. Shameful, but he was glad of her fear. It gave him something to do and helped him to hide his own.
‘We won’t. Fall.’ He gasped out the words between shallow breaths. ‘It almost. Never. Happens.’ He was starting to feel how thin the air was up here.
A strange thing happened as they climbed above the rim of the maelstrom. From underneath it was simply a black void in the sky; now, from above, with the sinking sun lighting its clouds, it became a sea of colours stretched out before him, swirls of purple and violet streaked with white and wisps of orange fire like frozen flames, flickering with inner lightning. The sight of it filled him, showing him how small he was, how tiny and irrelevant. He ran from one window to the next to the next around the gondola as the storm spread slowly out beneath them, unable to take his eyes from it except to run on and then stare again. His head pounded. And yes, he was still afraid, but not of being consumed by the maelstrom. He was afraid of what might be waiting, from knowing their journey and their time were almost done. His heart seemed to beat too quickly for his chest to hold it inside him. The cloud of the storm-dark, the majestic uncaring size of it, became a peculiar comfort. Beside it everything diminished.
He took out a farscope and peered through the gondola windows. Near the heart of the darkness where the Godspike punched through and streaked towards the stars, he spotted a dark speck in the sky. The eyrie. Chay-Liang was flying it high. The air was so thin now that he was gasping. His head was throbbing and getting worse as they rose. Kalaiya lay back on the silks and cushions, clutching at her hair, frenziedly chewing Xizic resin. Xizic helped with the headaches but Tsen couldn’t look away, couldn’t take his eyes anywhere else or even close them, until at last the glasship drifted over the top of the eyrie and the familiar craggy rocks and then the white stone circle of sloping walls and the flat bright open space of the dragon yard, a mile above the storm. As it slipped beneath him, he clung to the familiarity of the shapes. The dragon, red and gold and huge, perched on the eyrie wall, staring towards the Godspike. The lightning cannon and the black-powder guns, the hatchery, all as it had always been. He saw the moving specks of men and women, slaves about their business as they always were, and still it didn’t tell him whether the Elemental Men had come or whether Shonda and the Vespinese were waiting for him. His blood was pounding, pulsing fit to burst every vein. The gondola came slowly to a stop over the middle of the dragon yard and he saw Chay-Liang running towards him, waving, but whether in welcome or warning he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t breathe. The air was too thin. He couldn’t think any more.
He was going to be sick. His head felt ready to explode and his skull was too tight. There just wasn’t enough air. He barely waited for Kalaiya when the gondola touched the white stone of the dragon yard before he cracked the ramp open. A wind worse than the one in Dhar Thosis howled about him. It buffeted him when he stepped out and he stumbled and almost fell, too dizzy to bother with righting himself, then staggered again and dropped to his hands and knees and vomited over the perfect smoothness of the dragon yard’s white stone. A slave came running to help him up. Tsen clutched at him.
‘Are they here?’ His eyes were wild. The slave only looked bewildered. Tsen shook him. ‘Are they here? The Elemental Men? The Vespinese? Are they here?’
The slave pulled away in alarm and shook his head. ‘No, Master T’Varr. No.’ He kept backing away but Tsen couldn’t give a shit any more. All the strength had drained out of him. He could barely stand. He swayed in the wind. They’re not here yet. His head was killing him. Suddenly all he wanted and all he was good for was a bath. A long soak, a lot of Xizic tea and maybe a glass or two of apple wine. Anything to be out of this flaying wind, anything to make this headache go away. Some sleep. A lot of sleep. Hadn’t had much of that these last few days.
They’re not here. He felt like a puppet with his strings all cut. Chay-Liang was waving again but his skull was splitting open and he ignored her. Even ignored the dragon, the towering looming angry monster that glared at him as it glared at everything with its ravenous resentment. Right now he would probably have ignored an Elemental Man with a drawn blade held to his throat.
A silver cage swinging back and forth in the gale caught his eye. Mai’Choiro Kwen had brought it with him for Lord Shonda’s jade ravens. Through the haze of pain, the cage reminded him there was one thing he had to do right now, no matter how many needles he felt stabbing through his eyes. He stumbled to the top of the wall, stopping to catch himself now and then against the howl of the wind before the gusts picked him off his feet. It was only when he reached the cage that he realised he was being ridiculous. To send a raven, Baros Tsen T’Varr sat at his desk in his nice quiet study, very much out of the wind, with the pretty quill pen that Kalaiya had given him and his perfect white paper shipped from Zinzarra. He wrote his words in glorious peace and quiet and then summoned a slave to take it to a scribe. And, thank you very much, went nowhere near these horror-touched birds at all.
The jade raven eyed him from its cage with interest. The gale and its swinging perch didn’t seem to bother it. Tsen turned away. As he did, the wind caught his robe and almost lifted it over his head, making him look even more of an idiot. He looked across the rim of the eyrie at the violet storm below. I should just jump, I really should. Save us all the bother . . . But instead he struggled back down to the yard and aimed for the tunnels that would take him out of this hellish wind. State he was in, he’d probably pick the wrong entrance without thinking and end up among the Scales or something like that.
Chay-Liang caught up with him before he could get away. ‘Tsen—’
‘Send a jade raven,’ he mumbled. She could do it. Saved him from thinking. ‘Send a jade raven to the Elemental Men in Khalishtor. Tell them what we did. All of it. Do it now.’
‘Tsen . . .’
He stopped for a moment and looked at her. ‘Dear gods in whom we don’t believe, Liang, is it always like this up here?’
‘So far, yes.’ She was grinning now as though she liked it, and for a moment, through all the pain in his head, Tsen hated her. ‘Tsen—’
‘Later.’ He pushed past. She was mad, that was it. Happened to enchanters, didn’t it? They cracked and all sensible thought oozed out of their edges . . . He forgave her though, five minutes later when he found she’d had his bath prepared when she’d seen him coming; and the next few hours were a blur of
warmth and pain and Xizic resin and Kalaiya and relief that no one was here to hang him yet, all a little marred by a lethargic dread of what was yet to come. Chay-Liang brought him something from the alchemist to help him sleep; he drank it without even thinking, and when he woke up again, his head was clearer and only throbbed like a badly sheeted sail. He called her back and they walked the walls together, battered by the relentless gale as the eyrie drifted in its lazy orbit around the Godspike.
‘Couldn’t we go lower?’ he shouted at her over the wind. Liang had six glasships dragging the eyrie through the sky. As far as Tsen could see, she’d moved the eyrie higher and higher until they were as far from the storm-dark as her gasping lungs could stand.
‘We could,’ she yelled back. ‘But you get used to it. Give it a few days.’
‘I may not have a few days! And if I do, I would prefer them not to hurt so much.’ Was it possible to sound plaintive and shout at the same time? He rather thought he’d managed it.
She offered him some reeking drink or other. When he asked her what it was, she shrugged and shouted over the gale, ‘Bellepheros makes it. It helps with the thinness of the air.’ He waved her away then watched as she shrugged and drank a mouthful and offered it again. Bellepheros. The alchemist from the dragon-lands.
‘You trust that slave too much.’ Far too much, for what they had between the two of them was nothing like the way it should be between mistress and slave.
‘What?’
He leaned into her and shouted back, ‘I said you trust your slave too much!’
She looked at him then. Not a word, not a flicker of her eyes, not the shadow of a smirk, but he knew she was laughing at him. After a second or two he had to laugh as well. Kalaiya knew his soul. That was simply the way fate had turned. Maybe it was the same for Liang and her alchemist. At any rate, he was the last person in the world to lecture anyone when it came to overly liking their slaves.
He pulled Liang into some shelter where at least they were out of the wind and he could hear himself think, snatched the cup out of Liang’s hands and drank. ‘Yes, yes.’ And he half-listened as she told him how breathlessness and nausea and splitting heads had blighted everyone until the alchemist started making his potions. Everyone except the rider-slave Zafir of course, who laughed at them all for being so pathetic. When Liang was done, Tsen looked about him. His eyrie, still his eyrie, kept aloft by hostile uncaring sorcery from another age.
‘We’re not safe here,’ he said. He looked up at the glasships. ‘Sooner or later they will fail.’
‘I have more, loitering over the desert, out of the way and out of sight. Belli and I talked it through while you were gone.’
Belli? Tsen chuckled and shook his head. What, were they lovers now? ‘You trust that slave far too much.’ He spoke with a twinkle in his words this time. So what if they were? ‘Borrowed time, Liang. We’re all on borrowed time. We must make the most of it.’
‘One glasship is enough to keep us aloft, T’Varr, and we have six. See how they all pull at slight angles to one another – that was the hard part to get right. If any one fails then it will fall clear of the outer rim of the eyrie. There will be plenty of time to summon another. We’ve been here for days and I haven’t lost one yet.’
‘It will be quite a sight if you do.’ Tsen shook his head. ‘But I wonder if we should release them. All of them. Let this eyrie and its monsters sink into the storm-dark and be gone. Evacuate everyone. Leave me behind. Wipe it all out. Mai’Choiro can stay in his cell. We’ll go down together, he and I.’ He took a deep breath and turned to look at the dragon at last, the terror that had destroyed Dhar Thosis. Its wounds were already healing. The eyrie wall where it sat was marked by dried blood. Was there anything magical about dragon blood? There ought to be, he thought, but neither the alchemist nor Chay-Liang had run around clearing it up and cackling gleefully to themselves as they did, so he supposed there wasn’t.
He frowned and touched his temple. His head wasn’t hurting any more and Chay-Liang was smiling at him. He rubbed his fingers into his skin, trying to chase away the last ghosts of the pain, then he turned and stared out to the west to where, if you flew for long enough, the Konsidar rose out of the sands.
‘Ravens flew from Dhar Thosis to Vespinarr on the day the city fell,’ he said. ‘Shonda knows what has happened. They would have reached him before I reached Senxian’s palace. He’ll be looking for us. As big as the desert is, it won’t take him long to find us. It’s a race now – Shonda or the Elemental Men.’ Tsen shook his head. ‘I left in too much haste. I should have sent a raven to Khalishtor at once. Another mistake.’
He paused and then put a hand to Chay-Liang’s shoulder. ‘He’ll come with the best and most deadly of what his money can buy for him, Liang. He won’t wait for the Crown of the Sea Lords to decide what’s to be done. He’ll seize everything we have in the name of his “friend” Senxian and offer the new lord of Dhar Thosis some marvellous reparation. He’s probably prepared a suitable puppet already, skulking somewhere in the shadows. Probably even made that deal before Dhar Thosis burned. He’ll take everything that was ours and destroy every threat to his ambition. Quai’Shu will be allowed to live because he’s a broken old man who can’t string two sentences together any more, but only so they can try him and hang him for the look of it when it suits them. The rest of us?’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘He’ll kill every last one of us if he has even the slightest reason. You, me, Kalaiya, all of us. The only ones he won’t kill will be the ones who deserve it most.’
His eyes drifted to the far side of the wall, to the dragon staring down into the maelstrom beneath them. He’d never seen it do that before. Usually it stared across the dragon yard, eyeing everyone with greedy hunger, or else it stared at the sky. At night in particular it sometimes looked up for hours, as though mesmerised by the stars.
‘Whatever he does, however terrible it is, you mustn’t stand in his way. He needs your alchemist. Make sure he needs you too. You must survive, Chay-Liang, no matter what fate comes to the rest of us. Close your eyes and look away. Hold the truth close to your heart and never let him see that you have it. Keep it until you can destroy him.’ His grip on her shoulder tightened. ‘But when when that time comes, Liang, you must annihilate him. You must remove him from existence, utterly and completely, or he’ll grow back like a badly excised cancer.’
Chay-Liang met his gaze and, gods help him, even looked sorry for him. ‘Perhaps if you hanged the rider-slave yourself before they came it might help show she acted without your order?’
‘No.’ Tsen shook his head. ‘I will hang beside her for letting it happen, no matter the who or the how, and so I should.’ He leaned into Chay-Liang and hissed in her ear, ‘I played a stupid game and I lost, but I will take him down alongside me before he does it again. I’ll not hang the dragon-rider and nor should you. Not until she speaks. She’s the one other person who knows the truth and she has nothing to lose by telling it!’ He let out a bitter laugh and pulled away, shaking his head. ‘Although if you have any useful enchanter tricks to spirit me away to a quiet little countryside villa while making me appear to be dead and hanged, I’ll become a most enthusiastic listener. I have one, you know. In the Dominion, a hundred miles along the coast from Merizikat. With a nice orchard full of apples and a winery. And a good bathhouse.’
‘She’ll die as soon as she speaks. I’m sure she knows that.’
Tsen stopped, struck again by the memory of the two of them in his bath together, how she’d knocked the poisoned wine out of his hand after so carefully putting it there in the first place. Why? He still hadn’t the first idea. ‘So will I,’ he said. ‘And you know, I sometimes wonder how much that matters. Maybe we promise to send her home.’
He watched his enchantress closely after he said that and saw the conflict plain across her face. The dragon gone and the rider-slave with it: dead would be better but gone was still good. Then hunger to get it done. And
happiness for the alchemist who would surely go too. And then sadness, and for the same reason. Rather too much sadness, Tsen thought. He kept on watching though, until the play was done, and then squeezed her shoulder. ‘You made her armour. She ruined it. You should start making more. If you have something Shonda needs then he won’t kill you until it’s finished. Be slow. Let it buy you time. Make a few adjustments to keep her in line if you like.’
He let Liang go, and together they watched the dragon again. It was staring at the pillar of the Godspike going on and on and vanishing into the deep blue of the desert sky overhead. Tsen stared too. You didn’t get a blue like that at sea, nor in Xican or Khalishtor – though in Khalishtor you rarely got anything except rain-cloud grey. Only in the desert a blue like this.
‘Do you think it knows what the Godspike is?’ he asked.
Chay-Liang chuckled. ‘I’m not sure it knows much more than that it’s hungry.’ She sighed. ‘If you come out here at night, the Godspike has a light to it. But if you do, remember to bring a blanket. It’s a bitter cold under the stars up here.’ She left him there, staring. Presumably she had things to do. Presumably Tsen did too. He just couldn’t think what any of them were.
She was right about the cold. He came out again to look at the Godspike that night because yet again he couldn’t sleep and, well, because there were probably only a handful of people across the whole of Takei’Tarr who’d flown above the storm-dark cloud and stared up at the spike in the darkness and he wasn’t sure that he’d have another chance; but in the end there wasn’t much to see. A dim pale glow, barely even visible and quickly lost among the sparkle of stars. After he’d looked at it for a while, he made the mistake of walking out over the wall and across the rim to the very edge of the eyrie itself, standing in the howling wind and looking over the lightning-tossed storm below. He stood, swaying, almost hoping that a sudden gust might catch him and make him stumble. Toss him over the edge, but it didn’t. Mostly, after that, he stayed in, down in his bathhouse with Kalaiya and his wine. His Bronzehand finger tingled now and then but he ignored it. There wasn’t much to show any more. All that was left was waiting for his killers to come and guessing which ones would get to him first.