The Splintered Gods

by Stephen Deas

  Now!

  Inside its egg the dragon Silence bunched its muscles and clenched its claws. It built a fire as hot as its new body would allow and burst its shell apart. It leaped and spread its wings and spewed forth flames. The scattered men with their hooks and nets were too slow. It was free.

  I am Silence, the dragon whispered to the air, and I am hungry.

  It jumped high for freedom and flew into an unseen web of chains overhead. For a moment it was caught. It shook itself free. The men who were waiting for it were fast but not as fast as a dragon already listening to their thoughts. A dazzling flash of lightning blinded them all, and in their hesitation Silence burned them where they stood. Its newborn fire was weak. The little ones didn’t char and die on the spot but turned and ran and stumbled and even screamed before they fell, but fall they did. Good enough. The dragon caught the closest and clawed out his spine and then bit the head off a fleeing second. Lightning flashed again, thunder roared and the noise and the light surged into the dragon’s blood, urging it on. Out of nowhere a little one ran past and staggered and fell to his knees. Silence tore him down and ate him. There was always a hunger fresh out of the egg and fury came easily to any dragon, but that fury had snared them once long ago. The dragon Silence forced back the rage and made itself wait for a moment. Pause. It had come back with a purpose. It struggled to remember.

  The hole in Xibaiya. The unravelling of creation. The empty prison. You came to find the Black Moon and force him back where he belongs before the Nothing consumes even dragons.

  The dragon Silence closed its eyes and listened to the rumbles of thunder that weren’t thunder at all, to the cracks of lightning though there was no storm. It reached into the thoughts that filled the eyrie and tasted war and delicious fear. Beyond, out in the skies, it found a scattered haze of hunger and elation. In the moonlight it scurried away, leaving eggs still waiting to hatch, out from under the nets and tents of chains to the sweet open air where the little ones would never hold it. On the threshold of its freedom it paused, lurking in the shadows.

  There was a thought beneath it. A mind it had tasted before, the mind that wouldn’t break after it had snapped the mighty sea lord Quai’Shu. The dragon Silence scratched at the old white stone of the dragon yard with its claws but it didn’t fly. It listened.

  The dragon-queen was still alive.

  Chay-Liang cringed and cowered as another flash of lightning exploded over the roar of the wind, as another black-powder cannon was blown to pieces. Shrapnel zinged through the air past where she lay. A soldier nearby toppled as something hit him and his head disintegrated into a smear, a cloud of red caught in the wind, garishly lit up by another flash. A second glasship was rising past the rim. Across the yard the hatchlings were straining at their chains. Liang staggered to her feet, stared in disbelief, and then threw herself flat again as a score of sleds shot out of the darkness over the wall, each with a Vespinese soldier flinging lightning at anything that moved. Tsen’s men poured out from the tunnels. They hurled lightning of their own. Sparks cracked and fizzed over glass-and-gold armour and the night filled with flashes and thunder. The great dragon on the wall snapped at a sled that flew too close, snatching the rider off its back and swallowing him in one gulp. Liang felt its tension. She fumbled in her pockets until she found a globe of glass and shaped it into a makeshift shield. She stumbled to her feet and looked wildly about. The shield would keep the lightning at bay but only if she had it facing the right way.

  ‘Tsen!’ she screamed at anyone who would listen. ‘Get the t’varr! And get the dragon-rider!’ The witch would have to ride without her armour tonight.

  The first glasship rose further over the eyrie, drifting towards the centre of the dragon yard, its golden rim shining bright as the sun until it discharged again, another thunderous arc that blew yet another cannon to smithereens. Liang ran, jinking back and forth, half-blind, turning the shield to wherever the worst of the lightning seemed to be. More armoured soldiers were running from the tunnels into the dragon yard, into the teeth of the storm. A sled shot overhead, far faster than the rest, tumbling end over end, swatted by the dragon’s tail. Mostly the Vespinese kept away from the monster. Who wouldn’t?

  More sleds poured over the rim. The noise and light left her dazed and dizzy. She tripped over something and sprawled flat. Lightning shot all around her, death to anyone without gold-glass to protect them, but the real battle would be fought hand to hand. Think! The shield she’d made was no substitute for armour. A single bolt would fry her skin and stop her heart. The notion struggled up through the terror and she held on to it and stayed where she was, lying very still with the shield on top of her. The Vespinese circled, picking off anyone who wasn’t wearing armour, and then began to land, coming down in groups and jumping quickly clear while Tsen’s soldiers charged into them as fast as they could, howling and shrieking and swinging their spiked ashgars, trying to batter the enemy down before they could establish a foothold.

  As the melee spread, the rain of lightning eased. Liang picked herself up again and sprinted through the chaos, bolting for the nearest entrance into the spiralling passages under the dragon yard. There she stopped, breathing hard, shaking with exertion. She winced as another crushing thunderbolt picked out one of the watchtowers. On the far side of the eyrie yet another black-powder gun blew apart. The guns were useless. Glasships were supposed to fly high and drop fire, and the cannon were built to point up at the sky. They were supposed to be mounted on the ground, around harbours and fortresses where glasships couldn’t come from below, not on a floating castle three miles in the air. It made her think of the dragon-queen again. What she’d said when Tsen had first shown her his cannon and asked if he might shoot her dragon out of the sky. She’d laughed at him. I will come at you low and fast. That is the dragon-rider’s way. I will see your face as you burn. Apparently Shonda had thought the same.

  She heard a dragon scream. A hatchling. Another crack of lightning shattered the night, one from the eyrie’s own lightning cannon now, turned to point back into the dragon yard, blowing a cluster of sleds to pieces and hurling screaming Vespinese high into the air. In the flash of it she saw something move in the shadows, too fast and too large to be a man. It was the shape of death, of teeth and claws and wings and a long whipping tail. Liang hissed.

  ‘Tsen!’ Where in bloody Xibaiya was Tsen to tell them all what to do? Amid the lightning flashes she saw the hatchling again, bounding across the open yard, ripping men apart as it went, oblivious to who they were. Straight for a tunnel entrance on the opposite side of the eyrie. The one that would take it to the dragon-slave.

  And, she realised, to Belli.

  Liang forgot her fear and raced in its wake.

  An unfamiliar rumble trembled her cell and jerked Zafir from her drifting thoughts. She wiped her eyes and straightened. A second tremor followed. It felt like Diamond Eye slamming into the dragon yard after a glorious flight, except no one flew Diamond Eye any more.

  The black-powder cannon. Baros Tsen had shown them to her once, weapons for shattering a glasship and maybe even a dragon if it would stay still for long enough. She understood. Other Taiytakei had come to hold Tsen and her to account for the lives she’d burned. She’d hang or whatever it was the Taiytakei did to the most vile among them. She looked to see if she was afraid and found that she wasn’t. If anything it was a relief.

  ‘Holiness!’ A hammering on her door. ‘Holiness! Holiness! Are you awake? Rise, please, Holiness! We have need of you!’

  She recognised the alchemist’s voice, the only other voice she’d heard in six months that came with the familiar accent of her homelands. Her alchemist, though she doubted she owned his heart any longer. Laughter ambushed her, though the spasms that shook her were as bitter as juniper. ‘You have need of me, Grand Master Alchemist? Need? What do you know of need? What do any of you know of need?’

  ‘Holiness!’ Bellepheros banged on the door again – did
he forget that this was a prison, opened from without and not from within? ‘The enemy are upon us! You must come and ride Diamond Eye and tear them down.’

  ‘“Must” now, is it? I must?’ The laughing edged into screaming. ‘Must?’ Yet she was tempted – she might at least admit it, if only to herself. Yes. Ride the dragon once more and die in fire and lightning, tearing her enemies to pieces. Better than this slow, cold, lonely end. ‘Tell me, alchemist, will they hang me a second time for this?’ But still, to ride . . . Better than a rope. Better than . . . Wasn’t it better to die free?

  She thought all these things, still laughing her bitterness, entirely trapped by her own design because no, in the end she couldn’t refuse, not if it meant she could fly; and yet as she opened her mouth to answer, to say yes, to say she’d ride her dragon once more for Baros Tsen and damn them all, her thoughts awash with possibilities and doubts . . . As she did, her mind seemed to sharpen and she felt aware of another presence listening, except there was no one. It took a moment before she understood what this new feeling was.

  A dragon. One that was awake and listening to her thoughts.

  Diamond Eye? A flicker of hope came and then guttered and died. Not her Diamond Eye. She’d know. The dragon’s thoughts had a familiar taste. It had been inside her before. The dragon from Quai’Shu’s ship. The one once called Silence. The dragon that had driven Quai’Shu mad.

  Her laughter turned hard and cold. ‘Bellepheros! Alchemist! There is a hatchling very close and it is awake and listening to us.’ The dragon that had cut her and given her its disease and then left her to die in lingering agony. ‘Run, alchemist! Now!’ Why warn him? Did she think she was saving him? And if she did, why? Because he kept the dragons tame and kept the Statue Plague at bay? Fat lot of use when the Taiytakei meant to hang her. Fat lot of use when a dragon had come to devour her. And yet . . . alive wasn’t dead. As long as he was alive then he would keep her Diamond Eye tame for her to fly. Alive could mean a glimmer of hope, even if she couldn’t find it.

  The alchemist didn’t answer. Through the iron door she couldn’t hear whether he’d fled or was still there, but she could feel the mockery in the dragon’s thoughts as they wandered through her own. ‘He’s still here,’ she whispered. ‘Quai’Shu. The Taiytakei who thought to steal us both. Still here.’

  I taste him.

  ‘You broke his mind.’

  I know.

  ‘You will not break mine.’

  I do not need to. I see you, Dragon-Queen. Others did that long ago.

  Memories burst like fireworks inside her, snap-firing in dazing succession, flashed then gone again: knocking the blood-tainted glass out of Baros Tsen’s hand; the Adamantine Man in Dhar Thosis, his voice, familiar, remembered – Get off her, you fat prick – and then a moment later slipping the knife off his belt ten years earlier as the words came out of his mouth, driving it through her father’s ribs, again and again and again until he stopped, the father who thought she was nothing better than his own personal whore to share with whoever might offer him the prettiest crown; Jehal on the day he’d told her that her mother was dead, the mother who’d done nothing but birth her and then betray her; riding Diamond Eye over the flames of Dhar Thosis, deliriously out of control and yet free, a fleeting moment when she’d been mistress of her own self; the dark room of fear and despair, always waiting for her and yet always waiting for the inevitable something worse; imprisoned from birth by who she was, who she must be. Piece by piece, the dragon Silence ripped it out of her and showed her the wreckage.

  ‘Have you come to kill me this time?’ she asked the darkness. The dragon didn’t answer, but why else was it here?

  The door of her prison was ajar. Bellepheros must have opened it, but he could have flung the iron door wide and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. She slumped onto her bed and lay back, arms spread across the silk sheets of her prison. The dragon moved through her. She was in Dhar Thosis. The Adamantine Man was bowing his head and she was remembering his voice. There was a man beside him. She’d had no interest in him then and had no interest in him now, yet she found herself straining to remember his face; and then she knew it wasn’t that she was trying to remember his face, it was the dragon trying to pull it out of her. She sensed its edge of wonder.

  Who is he, little one?

  A longing for something different filled her, for possibilities so long dead they were nothing but dry husks. She pulled the Adamantine Man close, the memory of him, his moment of unexpected kindness. Pulled it close and held it like a lover. Memories inside her burned full of flames.

  I will think of you as I kill him, little one.

  Zafir sat up. Ice filled her. ‘Thank you, little dragon.’ She bared her teeth and set her mind against the hatchling, barring it from her thoughts. ‘Thank you for giving me purpose, little dragon.’

  Purpose, little one?

  ‘I will take him home. And I will change the world.’

  The dragon laughed at her. How?

  ‘You’ll see.’ She threw its laughter right back in its face, walked to the door of her prison, opened it and ran outside.

  Chay-Liang raced into the open. Thunder and lightning flashed between the eyrie and the glasships, three of them now, right overhead, picking off the black-powder guns and the watchtowers. Tsen’s soldiers were dragging rocket carts into the dragon yard. She dodged around them, smiling grimly. Belli had been loud about the dangers of mixing dragons with things that exploded but Tsen had brought them anyway. Clever t’varr. Already, the first few streaked into the night to detonate in showers around the glasships.

  She passed the hatchery. Silhouetted in flashes of lightning, bodies lay twisted in ways no living man should be, dark stains on the white stone. Her foot slid on something wet and slippery; she tumbled in among the waiting dragon eggs, gasping, lay still and took a moment to catch her breath. The dragon yard was chaos. Men shouting, running. A madness of screams and flashes and thunder and a whirling of swinging clubs. She had no idea how anyone knew who was who.

  The fall had shaken her but she wasn’t broken. She took her lightning wand from her belt and ran her finger along it until the golden fire inside was as bright as the full moon. Bellepheros had erected a net of heavy chains over the hatchery to keep any newborns from flying away. It was sagging at one corner and there was a broken egg nearby, covered in sticky fluid. Maybe the chaos had confused the hatchling and it had gone down a tunnel instead of simply flying away. She didn’t know. Couldn’t.

  Nearby, the older hatchlings were lunging at anyone who came too close, spitting gouts of fire. On the wall, Diamond Eye sat impassive, watching it all with unblinking eyes. The great beast seemed almost like a statue until another sled came too close and the dragon swatted it out of the air with a casual flick of its tail. Liang picked herself up and ran again and was almost bowled over as a squad of grim-faced soldiers rushed past her, yelling and swinging their ashgars.

  ‘Tsen!’ she shouted at them. ‘Where’s Baros Tsen T’Varr?’ But she didn’t get an answer. They probably didn’t even hear her over the howling wind and the screams of the fight and the thunder-cracks of wands. She kept running, as fast as she could. Another flurry of shouts made her look up. The glasship over the dragon yard had a chunk missing from its outer disc, punched out by the last of the black-powder guns. Cracks ran into its heart and lightning crackled around its ruined rim. It wobbled erratically, drifting slowly. She bent forward, urging herself on. A spray of rockets exploded around the glasship’s core. A brilliant light flashed deep inside and then went dim. The glasship lurched and slid sideways, tipped and started to fall straight at the hatchery. Liang swore and sprinted, stumbling and tripping over her own feet as she reached the iron door into the spiralling tunnels where the hatchling had gone, where she had her workshop with Belli, where Tsen himself had his rooms. The door hung open. She threw herself through, tried to slam it shut without stopping, slid, crashed into the wall, sta
ggered, somehow didn’t fall and instead kept on running, and then the entire eyrie shook as the glasship smashed into the stone of the dragon yard. The impact shook her off her feet.

  Something huge and fast slammed into the half-closed door, buckling the iron and leaving it sagging against the stone. Another flash of light flared like the sun and then died. She heard screams and, for a few short breaths, simply lay where she was, unable to move. When there was nothing more, she pulled herself to her feet. There was a pain in her leg, a pulled muscle. Tomorrow she’d have a whole pile of bruises but right now that was the least of her worries. She brushed herself down and set off again and almost tripped over two dead soldiers sprawled across her path. One was missing his head, bitten clean off. A dozen paces further on she passed it, misshapen, crushed, chewed and spat out again amid a shower of splintered gold-glass.

  The hatchling. Liang slowed as she went on, holding her wand bright and ready in front of her.

  9

  Fire and Lightning

  Screams echoed through the curve of the tunnel, carried by the smooth white walls. Helpless terror screams. Liang followed the spiral deeper. She passed another dead soldier with his head torn off and his side ripped open. Another half-turn and the floor was slick with blood and gore and there were bodies all around, torn to pieces. Slaves. Four or five of them. Shredded enough that it was hard to tell. She was close to her workshop now, to Belli’s study and his laboratory. Zafir’s prison was just beyond. The corpses were fresh.

  She slowed. Strange sensations washed past her, thin and hard to touch but there. A savage glee, a swiftness of movement, a surge of vicious joy. She felt a sense of closeness, of a hunt nearing its end and then an incandescent towering rage, and she knew the dragon was close, very close, and that it had come here with a purpose, not driven by confusion or panic, and had been somehow thwarted. It came closer still, an inferno of anger, and Liang realised that she hadn’t given any thought to what, exactly, she was going to do when she found it.