The Splintered Gods

by Stephen Deas

  The scraping of claws on stone, moving with furious intent around the curve of the tunnel, echoed fast towards her. She raised the wand and hurled a bolt of lightning as soon as she saw the first sight of something moving, straight into the hatchling’s face. The sound, trapped between the hard white walls of the passage, stunned her – it was like standing next to the firing of a cannon. The flash blinded her too, but she saw the dragon for an instant, burned into her eyes by the light, head low, looking at her, fangs poking from its mouth like a crocodile’s, crouched low and ready to spring. She must have hit it – it was far too big and close for the lightning to have arced around it – but she raised the gold-glass shield anyway, willed it to be wider and cringed behind it.

  What manner of sorceress are you? A furious voice crashed into her head, streaked with rage and pain. Immediately she felt herself answering, conjuring memories of her life, of the places she’d been, the wonders she’d seen. Khalishtor, the Crown of the Sea Lords, the Dralamut, her studies at Hingwal Taktse, the powers she’d learned, the when and the how and what she could do. The Elemental Men . . .

  The dragon was rifling her memories. She forced them back and thought of what first came to mind and held it there: Diamond Eye up on the eyrie, staring at the Godspike and the maelstrom of the storm-dark.

  The wounds of this splintered world. The passage bloomed into flame. Her eyes hadn’t recovered from the lightning and now she was blinded again as the fire came; she could smell it, smell the blistering skin of the dead slaves behind her, the charring blood, the crackling fat and still the fire didn’t stop. It licked around her shield and the shield held it back but the heat rose fast around her. With a flick of will she turned the glass from a shield into a shell, hard and thick and complete. The heat fell back. The fire stopped.

  For a moment everything was dark and dim, the soft moonlight glow of the walls too feeble for her dazzled eyes. When she closed them, the image of the dragon was there, lit up by her flash of lightning. When she opened them again it was right in front of her, peering through the gold-glass. It sniffed and cocked its head and tapped with a talon as if to see what sound the shell would make, then shuffled back and stopped and watched her. Its eyes changed as though looking past her at something far away. Then abruptly it lunged, battering its head into the glass. The shell flew back and tipped over with Liang inside it. The glass starred and cracked. She willed the fractures away and changed its shape around her to something more stable as she scrabbled back to her feet – a pyramid – and barely in time before the dragon came at her again, this time with a crack of its whip-like tail which sent her spinning across the passage. Her head hit the inside of the glass hard enough to draw blood and burst fireworks in front of her eyes. There was something about the way the dragon was looking at her now, as though it was enjoying itself.

  ‘Enjoy this.’ She changed the gold-glass so the lightning wand poked through it and let fly another bolt. She closed her eyes this time, but the dragon had been right there, the wand pointing at its face, and she’d seen it, at the last moment, turn away as though it understood what was coming. The blast sent it flying down the passage in a tumble of claws and wings. It took a second or two to recover itself. Liang watched the glow inside her wand grow brighter as it charged again, gritting her teeth as she waited to see who would be quicker.

  This world is less dull than the last, Chay-Liang. I will remember you, little one. It was mocking her. She sent another charge of lightning at it but this time it seemed to know even before she willed the wand to fire. It sprang, fast and high and straight over her head, vanishing into the gloom, back towards the surface. For a moment Liang stayed where she was, wondering if it was truly gone and why it had come here in the first place, but then she realised she already knew the answer to that. It had come to kill the dragon-slave.

  She ran on, looking for Bellepheros.

  ‘Run, alchemist! Now!’ Bellepheros hadn’t needed telling twice. A woken hatchling? The worst thing there could be. He turned and fled, running deeper into the eyrie until he reached the rooms at the very bottom that Baros Tsen T’Varr kept for himself and his slave Kalaiya. He stopped only when he reached the door at the very end that led into the bathhouse, the deepest and largest chamber under the eyrie. Which should have been the hatchery, but there was no point going over that argument again, certainly not now. He hesitated. The door was ajar and there was blood on the floor and he didn’t know what might be inside . . . but whatever it was, it couldn’t be worse than a hatchling dragon chasing him. Awake! Great Flame, not awake! He fumbled his fingers around the iron door, pulling it open.

  There was a corpse tucked into the shadows of the alcove to one side where Tsen kept towels and robes and the cheaper end of his stock of Xizic oils, an armoured soldier with his throat cut. Bellepheros tugged at the door and slipped in the blood and almost fell, and then the door opened on its own, so abruptly that it knocked him down. He wailed with fear, sure he was about to die in a whirl of talons and teeth and fire, but it was only a woman, a slave in a white tunic. She hurried out and grabbed him by his robes. ‘Where is he? Where is he?’

  He knew her face – Tsen’s mistress or lover or whatever she was. Kalaiya. Bellepheros shook his head and glanced back over his shoulder. ‘I don’t know. But don’t go that way! There’s a dragon loose behind me.’

  She pushed him away and ran past, shouting Tsen’s name.

  ‘Kalaiya!’ Bellepheros wrung his hands for a moment and then closed the door when she didn’t look back and barred it behind him. Which might or might not be enough to keep a hatchling back but he wasn’t about to wait and find out. Across the bath-house, a second door hung open into the tunnels that led up to the Scales’ quarters. He ran for it, back up to the dragon yard to look for Chay-Liang.

  By the time he reached the surface, he was panting and gasping, almost doubled over, hobbling and cursing his knees. The yard was alive with lightning and armoured men smashing each other to bits and glasships overhead and sleds whizzing past the walls and chaos and mayhem. He cringed and ducked back into the tunnels away from the madness, then screwed his eyes shut as an explosion shook the eyrie. In the flashes of light and thunder after he opened them again, he saw Diamond Eye, perched on the wall, watching with distant interest. Bellepheros sank against the tunnel wall. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t go back, not with a hatchling down there, and he certainly couldn’t go outside, and so he did nothing but curl up small and try not to be seen and quiver with fright as he watched Tsen’s men and the Vespinese shatter one another with their ashgars while sleds darted overhead.

  The hatchery outside the tunnel was wrecked, eggs ripped open by massive razor-edged shards where a glasship had come down and smashed into the white stone. As he watched, another fell to Tsen’s rockets, tipping out of the sky and crashing into the eyrie rim, shattering as it bounced away and fell in glittering rain towards the void below. The third glasship came down low, close enough for the gondola it carried to unfurl and spit out its soldiers. Rockets exploded around it. It lurched and drifted away.

  Diamond Eye shifted. The soldiers from the gondola had caught the dragon’s attention as though they were strange and new, although what was different about them Bellepheros hadn’t the first idea. He watched them fall, one by one, though they died far harder than Tsen’s soldiers. Across the yard, in a flash of lightning, he thought he saw Chay-Liang. His heart jumped and he forgot for a moment how afraid he was. He almost ran out, but then he lost her amid the flashes and screams.

  Diamond Eye shifted again and turned his head. The fighting had spread across the dragon yard now, broken into pockets, everywhere except around the hatchlings. A handful of Vespinese ran towards the eggs, straight past Bellepheros. One turned his head, saw him and slowed, but then a bolt of lightning crashed among them, skittering sparks from their gold-glass armour as three of Tsen’s men charged, screaming and swinging their ashgars. Bellepheros scuttled and jumped lik
e a nervous beetle out into the open and ran up the steps to the wall. His knees were killing him but he kept running as fast as he could around the top, robes flapping around his ankles until he reached Diamond Eye. Back in the dragon-realms he’d seen men carelessly trodden on, seen them sent flying by the thoughtless flick of a tail and, most common of all, picked up and tumbled across the ground when an idle dragon decided to stretch its wings. Sometimes men got up and walked away from that, but not often – but at least with a dragon he understood the danger. Better than lightning, anyway. Better than howling screaming men charging at him with great spiked clubs. He shifted nervously. It said something about the state of the world when the safest place he could think of was nestled between a dragon’s claws.

  Diamond Eye was gazing out into the night, back the same way it had stared before.

  ‘What do you see out there?’ Bellepheros asked. ‘What?’

  A shape shot high overhead. And then another, at the end of the wall, much lower. Bellepheros glimpsed the outline of a man crouched, one knee bent forward, head pressed firmly into the wind; and then all of a sudden there were hundreds of them over the yard. They skimmed the ground and hurled their lightning and jumped down with their ashgars swinging, and in minutes the battle was done. Over. The last of Tsen’s men dropped their ashgars and their wands and raised their hands over their heads. The eyrie was lost.

  ‘You could burn them, you know,’ he whispered to Diamond Eye. ‘All of them. Under the circumstances I don’t think anyone who mattered would mind.’

  But the dragon was staring across the yard at something else.

  The rider-slave wasn’t in her prison. The door was open. A cold panic settled over Liang because where else would she be if not up fighting Shonda’s soldiers? Maybe she’d found some other way to escape – dear gods, was that why the hatchling had come down here? To help her? But she bit that back. Zafir hadn’t passed her, and the rider-slave would hardly leave without her dragon.

  Bellepheros! Liang ran to his laboratory and threw open the door. No Bellepheros, but Zafir was standing there in the ruins of it. She wasn’t even trying to hide. She simply stood, wrapped in dragon-scale, holding a vial in her hand. Everything had been smashed and burned. Liang pointed her wand. Tempting to let the lightning have her and be done with it, whatever Belli said, whatever Tsen said. The world would be better for it.

  ‘Get up and go to your dragon and do what you do best,’ she snapped. She looked at the devastation, at the smouldering wreckage, the charred books. She felt the heat and it slowly dawned on her what had happened. Zafir hadn’t done this; the hatchling had. And for a moment, as Zafir looked up, her face was so anguished that Liang wondered whether she was wrong. Didn’t everyone deserve at least a little pity? But the look was gone in an instant and the thought with it too. Pity? The rider-slave didn’t know such a word even existed.

  Zafir shook her head. ‘All his potions. All gone.’ She looked at the vial in her hand and shrugged. ‘Well, almost.’

  Liang grabbed Zafir’s arm and spun her round, forgetting herself for a moment. Distant shouts echoed through the tunnels, getting closer. Zafir snapped her arm away. Her eyes scanned the room, place to place to place with the tiniest little smile. Liang grabbed at her again. This time Zafir danced away. Liang levelled her wand.

  ‘Why don’t you just kill me and be done with it?’ Zafir sounded tired. Bored, which made Liang want to slap her.

  ‘It’s not like you don’t deserve it.’

  ‘So do it.’ A crippled smile crept into the corner of Zafir’s mouth. ‘You’ll be doing it for the wrong reasons of course. But you want to, you always did. So go ahead. The hatchling came to do the same. Perhaps it would have changed its mind but I doubt it. Dragons are not merciful creatures. I’m afraid I can’t fly Diamond Eye for you just now.’

  Mercy? Another word the rider-slave claimed to know but surely didn’t understand. Liang shook her head. ‘Get up and do as you’re told, slave! Win this day and you can have your freedom. I’ll take you back to your own land myself if I have to.’

  Zafir’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is that yours to give?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tsen had as good as said so.

  ‘And my alchemist, will you let him go too?’

  ‘If that’s what he wants.’ It surprised Liang how sure she sounded of that. Not by how much the thought hurt, though – that didn’t surprise her at all.

  Zafir strode past Liang, out through the door and into the moonlight glow of the white stone tunnels. She spat out a bitter laugh. ‘Ha! Perhaps you’d like to come too. I doubt we’d do well sharing him but I think I might put up with you anyway. You make a good armourer. Have more for me yet?’ She snorted. ‘But no, why would you? I’m to ride to war in silks and dragon-skin then, am I? I suppose it’s a better death than hanging.’ She stopped. ‘But I can’t ride Diamond Eye just now, Chay-Liang. I took a potion to hide from the hatchling and so Diamond Eye won’t know me. I’ll fight for you anyway, if that’s what you want, and if I live then you keep your word, whatever happens, or I will kill him. Not you. Him.’ Zafir laughed again. ‘It’s a trick I learned from a dragon.’

  ‘You will ride!’ Liang hurried out, heading for the surface. When she looked back, Zafir was walking in long slow strides, falling away behind her. ‘Come on! Run! Run for me!’ But Zafir only laughed.

  ‘It’s my death, witch, and I’ll come to it in my own time. I’ll have that much.’

  Liang almost turned back to drag her, but no good would come of it and the rider-slave would overpower her with ease. For the third time in as many minutes she clenched her wand and almost killed the woman. There was a battle right over their heads. Time mattered, urgency was everything but no, Zafir never ran. A slave, but the dragon-queen always came as though the world was supposed to wait for her. Liang raced on, as fast as her tortured legs would take her. As she did, she whispered a chant to Feyn Charin, the first navigator, begging him for patience.

  The dragon yard was a seething morass of fighting men, yelling and shouting and scrambling between the ruin of the hatchery and the fallen glasship. Thunderclaps and flashes dazed and dazzled and the ever-present wind shrieked through everything, tearing at word and thought. Liang stood bewildered by the light and the noise. Another glasship hovered overhead, its rim glowing bright and angry. There were soldiers everywhere, Vespinese in glass-and-gold armour with their lightning wands, some with huge crossbows strapped to their other arm instead of a shield. She almost didn’t see as a Vespinese turned towards her and pointed his wand, barely a dozen steps away.

  Chay-Liang ducked back into the tunnel mouth and willed her gold-glass orb into a shield. Lightning cracked over its surface. The soldier started towards her and raised his crossbow. She jumped aside and he missed but the crossbow reloaded itself as she watched. She fired her own wand as he came at her. Lightning fizzed over his armour and sparked between his fingers but it wouldn’t do any more than daze, not with a glass-and-gold skin; and then another soldier, one of Tsen’s, loomed behind him and caved in his skull with an ashgar.

  ‘Enchantress! Look to yourself!’ The soldier pointed across the dragon yard and turned and ran to where the gondola from the last glasship had opened and more Vespinese were spilling out, throwing lightning all around them. The glasship’s cannon fired and rang her ears with a dazzling moment of light. She reeled, and then a stream of rockets streaked up from behind her, blowing two of the stabiliser discs in the glasship’s heart to pieces. Fragments of shattered gold-glass as big as horses fell like rain around the gondola, breaking into a million glittering shards as they hit the stone of the eyrie, crushing and skewering the men beneath them. The spinning glass disc tipped slowly sideways and began to drift.

  ‘Slave!’ Liang screamed back into the passage. She’d have to protect the rider-slave from those crossbows as well as lightning then, and the dragon was right over on the far wall. Bloody woman would bloody well learn to run once she got up here! Tha
t or she’d die. Can’t ride? My skinny arse she can’t ride! ‘Slave!’ Tsen’s knights were being hammered but were holding their own. She’d never seen these crossbows before, never anything like them but they were clearly enchanter-made. She reshaped her gold-glass into a wider shield and peered back outside, looking for Bellepheros.

  Flashes of lightning cracked in among shouts and screams. The last glasship slewed drunkenly over the edge of the eyrie and disappeared. The chains on the gondola snapped taut and tore it across the yard. Men caught in them howled as they were dragged away. Vespinese or Tsen’s she couldn’t tell, but either way she couldn’t do anything to help them. The gondola smashed into the wall. The chains snapped. Three of them whipped back across the dragon yard, slicing men apart as cleanly as an Elemental Man’s blade. Liang ducked and winced as a sled shot over the wall behind her. She loosed a lightning bolt in its wake.

  ‘Slave! Zafir!’ She couldn’t see Belli anywhere. Up by the dragon, maybe? Even now no one dared go near it. Still no sign of the dragon-queen but just maybe that wasn’t going to matter – Shonda’s soldiers might be better but Tsen had more, and now that the last of the glasships was gone they had no cannon left to turn the tide. Hard to be sure in the chaos but perhaps the first attack was going to fail! And the bulk of Shonda’s fleet was still a mile or two away. Liang whipped around. They didn’t need her here, not right now. What they needed was for her to go back down and drag that heartless whore to the surface by her hair and carry her onto the back of the dragon if she had to . . .

  Zafir was right there, head cocked, an amused smirk on her face. ‘Enchantress?’

  Liang pointed to Diamond Eye perched on the wall. ‘Go on then.’