by Stephen Deas
The sled drifted on, apparently aimless until the saltmarsh gave way to a small grove of summer moon trees. They had bands around their trunks, little gashes in the bark and strapped-on pots to collect the resin that oozed from the wounds. The smell in the air was unmistakable – Xizic. Sivan stopped the sled in the middle of the grove and stepped off. He made a slight gesture and clucked his tongue a few times. The rope around Tsen wriggled and shifted and looped around his legs until Tsen was trussed like a fly in a spider’s larder. He couldn’t even wriggle enough to pull the rings from his fingers. Sivan walked off among the trees; ten minutes later he was back with three scruffy Taiytakei who stank of cheap Xizic. He clucked at the rope again. It unwound itself and snaked across the ground to coil around the shifter’s waist. Sivan tossed Tsen a Xizic tear. ‘Have some.’
Tsen caught it, looked, sniffed it and tossed it back. ‘I never had much taste for it.’ Hanjaadi Xizic. Cheap nasty stuff.
‘Suit yourself.’ The shifter patted the rope around his waist in case Tsen was thinking he might try running off. The idea struck Tsen as vaguely absurd – maybe slightly less absurd than when they’d been in the middle of the desert with no one around for a hundred miles, but still pretty ridiculous. I mean, look at me! ‘You know these trees grow everywhere, as long as it’s hot?’ Sivan asked. ‘Sometimes they seem to grow straight out of solid rock. The really hardy ones have a bulbous swelling of the trunk at the base to keep them from being torn away by the wind. The tears they shed are supposed to be the best. They have a more fragrant aroma. I suppose, being a lofty t’varr, you prefer those.’ He chuckled. ‘Xizic was traded across Takei’Tarr since before the Splintering. You can see sacks of Xizic in the murals on the walls of the temple of Mokesh. They mention Xizic in the rituals of the Rava.’ He laughed as Tsen winced. ‘Still no Elemental Men watching over us out here, T’Varr, and if there were, I think perhaps speaking the name of an old forbidden book is the least of my worries.’
‘You speak as if you’ve read it.’
‘Maybe you should read it. You’d learn a thing or two about your dragons.’ Sivan scratched his neck, swatting at a fly. There were a lot flies in the Lair of Samim, bloodsucking things that carried all manner of disease. ‘In the Dominion of the sun king, followers of the old gods use Xizic from these very trees. They mix it with other oils in all their rituals. The desert men use it in medicines. They say it’s good for digestion and healthy skin, for the joints, healing wounds and purifying the atmosphere from undesirable spirits. Almost everything. If you throw some on the fire then the perfume repels mosquitoes.’ He laughed, swatting at his neck again. ‘You’ll smell it a lot here in the swamp. A miracle tree.’
They reached the edge of the grove where the mud gave way to a shallow lagoon. A small flat-bottomed boat was moored by a frayed rope to a dead tree stump. The three Taiytakei stepped in while Sivan waited for Tsen. ‘In the spring, when the floods come, the Lair of Samim is cleansed. Then the floods go, and the lakes and the lagoons are cut off from the river again. You know there’s nowhere to run, don’t you?’
Tsen didn’t bother to answer. He stepped into the boat and sat down. ‘You’re going to leave that sled in the middle of those trees, just like that? I know how much those cost. A great deal more than a Jokun Xizic boat and crew.’
‘They’ll be back for it.’ Sivan threw a tattered poncho at Tsen. ‘Put this on.’
It made him look like one of them, a Samim Xizic man. He wondered, as he sat in silence watching them punt across the water, why they were leaving the sled and thought perhaps he understood: Sivan didn’t want to be seen. He didn’t want any word or whisper of something unusual creeping up and down the river to Vespinarr or Hanjaadi. There were enough people out here in this wilderness that a sled would catch the eye. It might be remembered. Xizic men, though? Still, the thought gave him hope. Despite what he’d said, Sivan was afraid there would be people looking for him after all.
Only so they can hang you, Tsen reminded himself.
On the far side of the lagoon a narrow channel a foot deep ran off into the swamp. A half-mile later it reached the expanse of the Jokun, bright clear water at last. Even the air smelled better: fresh and without the swamp stink of rot crawling into his nose with every breath. A riverboat with a little mast and two more Taiytakei sat tethered to a thick post sticking up from the water. When Tsen clambered aboard, the other men set about pulling the punt on deck. Tsen sat himself on a basket full of Xizic tears. He watched the sailors raise a sail and lower a pair of oars and caught the eye of the nearest as he passed, cocked his head at Sivan and whispered loudly, ‘I don’t suppose he’s told you who I am or how many people are looking for me or what’s going to happen to you if they find out you had a part in this? Hmm?’ He clucked and shook his head. ‘No, I don’t suppose he has. Whatever he’s paying you, I will pay you ten times as much for you to throw him in the river right here and now and take me to Hanjaadi. You have but to name your price.’ They weren’t turning the boat, he saw, so they weren’t heading for the Bawar Bridge and the sea; they were taking him upstream. And where does following the Jokun upstream take us?
Vespinarr.
The sailor turned away. He muttered something to the others and none of them would even look at him after that. They didn’t speak to him, not once, all the way through the Lair of Samim and up towards the Jokun cataracts.
Sivan came and sat beside him a little later, once they were under way. ‘In your place I might have done the same. But they won’t help you.’
‘I can’t tell if it’s me they hate or you they fear,’ Tsen said.
‘Try to remember: I did rescue you.’
‘I don’t feel very rescued.’ Tsen shrugged. ‘I’m not sure, but it might have been the rope that did that.’
Sivan offered him another piece of Xizic, clear and pale and clearly not from the marshes. This time Tsen took it. ‘They don’t hate you,’ Sivan said, and Tsen wondered how much he should read into that. ‘They don’t have the first idea who you are.’
‘Why all this trouble?’
‘This isn’t my face, Baros Tsen T’Varr. Not my real one, but I can’t show that here. None of this is what you think. Let us say that, whoever I am, I’m neither slave nor lackey. Let us also say that I have many ears in the court of Vespinarr.’ He smiled widely and drew out a black rod, the sort that any Taiytakei of significance carried to enter the towers of glass and gold and make the device-gifts of the enchanters come to life and do their bidding. Things like sleds and glasships. ‘Yours,’ he said. ‘It opens many doors. I took it when you were staring at me from your bath all bewildered at what was going on. That’s what’s in it for me.’ He leaned in and whispered in Tsen’s ear, ‘T’Varr, I went to your eyrie to steal a dragon’s egg.’
Tsen laughed. ‘And my alchemist and my rider and some of those Scales slaves with their vile disease too? Why not simply steal the lot?’
‘Just an egg. One would have done, although I would have preferred several to be safe. Unfortunately, events caused a change of plan and so I stole you instead. You will help me. In return I will steal your Kalaiya for you.’
He wouldn’t say any more and so Tsen sat back and enjoyed the shade and the warm air and the cold fresh water of the river. He moved to the bow of the boat and stared up the river. The Jokun came down from the mountains less than a hundred miles away. The water there was like ice, and it flowed down into the desert quickly, keeping its freshness. The odd thing was that there were creatures living in the waters of the lakes and lagoons that would die of cold if they tried to swim in the river, and other creatures in the river that would slowly cook in the warmer pools of the Lair of Samim. Two different worlds joined together but unable ever to meet. Like the Taiytakei and the Righteous Ones of the Konsidar.
Oh, look at you, with your clever metaphors for life. How useful. Got any metaphors to get us out of here? Tsen had a bit of a think about that and found that no, he didn’t
. Instead, he quietly decided that Sivan must be a lunatic because only a madman would know what a dragon was and then try to steal an egg without an alchemist to control the hatchling that would eventually come out of it.
In the night his Bronzehand finger tingled. He slipped the ring off and let Bronzehand see where he was, for all the good that might do him. He didn’t have a bowl of water handy to return the favour but he walked out into the cool dark air and the breeze off the mountains and trailed his hand in the water of the river, letting Bronzehand see the Lair of Samim around him. He kept the ring off. Didn’t seem to matter much now. Maybe Bronzehand had a way to tell some of the others, but if he did, none of them tried to see through him to find out where he was. Besides, unless Sivan was a liar, Bronzehand was probably very happy with matters just as they were.
After two days on the river, the swamps of the Lair fell behind them, the banks turned rocky and barren and Tsen saw the first distant summits of the Konsidar ahead, the southern rim that cradled the Vespinarr basin before the greater peaks of the Righteous Ones further to the north. Another day and another night and the river changed again, became narrow, fast and angry. They left the boat and the silent frightened sailors behind and returned to the shore. Sivan had other men waiting – hired sword-slaves with little interest in anything but money, Tsen thought, but when he made the same offer as he’d made the sailors, they were every bit as afraid. Mortally, dreadfully afraid. When Tsen tried speaking to them, they looked away. They wouldn’t even meet his eye. He wasn’t sure, but he thought perhaps they pitied him.
‘Who is he?’ he whispered to one, but if he knew he didn’t say.
33
The Lords of Vespinarr
When they were done asking questions of the corpse that looked like Baros Tsen T’Varr but wasn’t, Red Lin Feyn and her soldiers took his body back to the bathhouse. Liang watched them go, left alone with Bellepheros. They looked at each other in silence for a long time and Liang tried to see the man she’d thought she’d known. He looked exactly as he always had – scruffy, tired and slightly irritable, the same Belli she’d worked with all these months – but now he’d brought a dead man back to life. Two, in fact. She was glad of the gloom. It meant he didn’t see how she stared at him. She took a deep breath and forced the lump out of her throat.
Belli sat down. ‘What now?’
‘What you’ve done is sorcery. The Arbiter . . .’ Liang shook her head. ‘She has to tell them, Belli. She has to. The killers. And once they know . . .’ Words kept trying to jump out of her mouth. He’d done this for her and now . . . ‘Sorcerers shattered the world, Belli. They made the storm-dark. The killers won’t allow it to happen again. It’s what they’re for. What now? I don’t know.’
‘I’m not a sorcerer, Li.’
Liang didn’t know what else to say. ‘Is it true? The dead can’t lie?’
The alchemist stuck out his bottom lip. ‘I’ve never known otherwise.’ He started towards her and then stopped. ‘Li, abyssal powders are not used often or lightly.’
‘Belli! It’s not what you choose to do. It’s what you can do. Oh Xibaiya!’ She had to turn away again.
After another long silence Bellepheros grunted, hauled himself back to his feet and paced across the room. ‘Your killers could send me home, you know, if they don’t like what I do.’
‘They could.’ But they wouldn’t. More likely, when they knew what he could do, they’d launch an expedition to the dragon-realm and put every alchemist they could find to the knife. ‘How long dead . . .’ She knew exactly what they’d think. Could someone with this sort of power dig up the corpse of Feyn Charin and pull out all his secrets? What about the monstrous sorceress Abraxi or the nightmare terror of the Crimson Sunburst? Never mind what the alchemist says, best to be sure.
Bellepheros was watching her. He looked sad.
‘They could send us all home, Li,’ he said. ‘Me and the dragons and the eggs and the hatchlings and her Holiness. Wouldn’t that be better? Just let us go back where we belong.’
Liang rounded on him. Her words came out hot and full of anger. ‘Why do you always call her that, Belli? Holiness? Look at her! Do you think her some sort of goddess?’
He laughed at her for that. ‘It’s tradition. Where I come from, failing to address one’s speaker properly can mean being fed to their dragons before the sun sets. Li, how is it possible for that man not to be Baros Tsen? He is Baros Tsen.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But if he isn’t then someone changed his face! How? And you tell me about sorcerers!’
‘I don’t know, Belli, I don’t know. It frightens me. You frighten me.’
‘Me? Ha!’ He sounded so full of hurt and disbelief that a part of her wanted to hug him and tell him she was sorry and that she’d find a way to understand and it would all be fine and not to worry and . . . And yet she didn’t move, didn’t speak.
The iron door eased open behind her. Red Lin Feyn slipped back in. ‘I’m sorry to intrude,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve been listening and I do know.’ The Arbiter closed the door and for a few seconds stood very still, eyes closed. ‘We are alone. That is good. Chay-Liang of Hingwal Taktse, you will listen to me now and do as I say. Do not ask questions and do not speak of this to anyone. I will explain more later when we are alone on a glasship to Vespinarr.’
‘Vespinarr?’ Liang blinked in surprise. Red Lin Feyn frowned at her.
‘I told you to listen, not to speak. You will go back to your rooms, both of you. This did not happen. The guards will remain outside your doors. When my killers return, I will inform them I have decided on a further course of investigation. I will not tell them why, not yet. At first light you, Chay-Liang, and I will travel to Vespinarr. I will send a killer ahead to the Dralamut to demand additional guardians. We should not consider ourselves safe, either of us, so you may bring whatever you see fit to defend yourself. They will send a killer with us to watch over me. You will say nothing of what you’ve done or heard in this room tonight unless you are absolutely certain we are alone. Do you understand? Absolutely, unquestionably alone.’
Chay-Liang nodded, bewildered. ‘And Belli?’ she asked as the Arbiter turned and reached for the iron door.
‘Your alchemist slave will remain and go about his usual duties. I will leave orders for the killers to mind the eyrie and allow no one to leave. It will carry on exactly as it is until our return. They will be told this is my will. Whether they adhere to it will depend on truths yet to be unravelled.’ She fixed Belli with a hard look. ‘I will not tell them what power you have, alchemist, not yet. For now, I suggest you both consider any means by which a killer may be incapacitated or detained.’
Liang’s mouth fell open. ‘Lady . . . ?’
Red Lin Feyn opened the door and barked at her soldiers, ‘The enchantress is to return to her quarters. No one is to enter –’ she paused ‘– even if they appear to be me. Come, Chay-Liang. Back to your prison now.’
She walked away. Liang took a step after her and then stopped and turned back. She went to Belli and took his hands in hers. ‘I don’t know what you are any more, Belli, but you’re a good man. Stay that way. Be safe. Do nothing to make them suspicious.’ She looked into his eyes for a moment, felt the calloused skin of his hands under her fingers and found she wanted to do much more than hold them; but want would have to wait.
‘I’ll do my best, Li.’ He looked bemused, which made her want to laugh and cry all at once.
As soon as she was back in her room, Liang began to pack. Vespinarr? There were a lot of things she might have taken with her, the accumulated nonsense of a dozen years as enchanter to a sea lord. Things came her way whether she wanted them or not. Pieces of glass worked with different metals in them. No one had yet found anything that made glass as malleable to an enchanter’s will as gold, but that didn’t stop the journeymen in Hingwal Taktse from trying, and now and then they found an interesting property. Then there wer
e things people made to show off their skills, hoping to secure her attention and patronage; pieces sent to her as gifts; things sent to Tsen that he didn’t want; her own early pieces as an apprentice, kept for posterity. When her workshop had no space for it all any more, her room had become a cross between a laboratory and a museum. Little of it was actually useful. The Arbiter had already taken her lightning wand and her black rod.
She packed a dozen pieces of unworked glass and a spare robe. Over in one corner, stored carefully in a chest, were a dozen globes of trapped fire from the Dominion, where blazes were caught by the sun priests and imprisoned inside enchanted glass. The sea lords used them to tip the black-powder rockets their ships carried into battle; but after the dragons had arrived, Tsen’s rockets had been removed from the walls and put into storage. Liang had dismantled a few. She couldn’t remember what she’d been meaning to do with them now but she had the fire globes and three sealed pots of black powder.
She picked up a globe and looked at it. Fire globes set everything around them alight when they broke. Horrific and terrifying things when shot on rockets against wooden ships but not much use against dragons, which laughed at fire, and not much use against Elemental Men either, not when they could simply turn into the stuff at will. She fiddled absently with some gold-glass until she’d made a second shell around a fire globe and then filled it with black powder. It would explode with even more force now.
What am I doing? She was shaking. Her breathing was ragged. Did she want to go to Vespinarr? No. Did she have a choice? No. I’ve been told by the Arbiter. I have to. I don’t have a say. She shaped the glass some more, making it into a ball with needles sticking out so it would explode into a hail of sharpened slivers that would shred anyone near it. She fiddled, refined it, moulded it, changed it, changed it back and then changed it again. Yes, a fine thing for murdering a crowd of people, but what she’d made had ended up about the size of her head and covered in spikes – too heavy to be put on the end of a rocket, ridiculously awkward to carry and it still wouldn’t trouble an Elemental Man.