by Stephen Deas
Liang smiled. ‘Old, lady? You’re younger than I am.’
Lin Feyn snorted. ‘Old enough, Liang. Now go and make the storm-dark in that globe bow to you.’
The glasship drifted over the Vespinarr basin to the flanks of the Silver Mountain and sank lazily to the landing fields of the Visonda once more. Red Lin Feyn had become the Arbiter again, although this time without the headdress. She handed Liang two wands – the lightning wand and the black rod she had confiscated back on the eyrie.
‘I believe we may still be in danger. Nevertheless, there is something here I wish to see.’ She opened the ramp, walked out with the Elemental Man at her heels and found the two golems standing exactly where they’d been two days before. People stopped to stare at them, though Lin Feyn seemed not to notice. Perhaps she was used to it. She walked with Liang beside her, her golems behind and the Elemental Man ahead, across the landing field into Visonda Square where the huge walls of the old palace towered over them. Knots of brightly-dressed people stood about in idle conversation and dozens of slaves in their white tunics hurried to and fro on their errands, but the square was so vast that it felt empty. It was a pale stone wilderness, Liang thought, touched with a faint morning mist that dimmed the far-off jubilant chaos of the Harub on the opposite side to a lurking silhouette and leached the many colourful robes to dull dark grey. A space like this would swallow the eyrie’s dragon yard whole. Even the dragon itself would look small.
The morning mountain air felt cold and damp and unnaturally still.
Red Lin Feyn stopped and pointed at her feet. Patterned lines of a darker polished stone ran from the corners and the sides of the square, converging on the middle where the Azahl Pillar rose, its white stone almost invisible in the haze until they neared it. The pillar had come out of the Konsidar hundreds of years ago. Its exact dimensions had been measured and recorded by the enchanters of Hingwal Taktse, who’d meticulously copied and studied the unknown runes that covered its surface, but that was about as much as Liang knew. Now she saw it with her own eyes, one thing struck her above all else. It was the same white stone as the insides of Baros Tsen’s eyrie. The same white stone as the . . .
‘The Godspike!’ She couldn’t help herself. Her hand flew to her mouth. It was exactly like the Godspike except several thousand times smaller and covered in sigils.
‘Very good.’ Liang heard the smile in Lin Feyn’s voice. The Arbiter walked up to the pillar. ‘Touch it,’ she said.
Liang did. The stone under her fingers was smooth and hard and cold, the edges and corners still sharp, the surface unweathered. It felt fresh from the stone cutter, polished only yesterday, exactly, again, like the white stone of the eyrie. ‘How old is this?’
‘At least a thousand years. Perhaps many more. Vespin brought it out of the Konsidar, but it was made before the cataclysm that spawned the storm-dark. Charin knew it as soon as he saw it.’ Red Lin Feyn ran her fingers over the carvings and smiled. There was an edge to her now. ‘No one can read these words, but I can tell you that they are dedications to a general whose name is lost. They give an account of his services to the long-forgotten king of a realm no one remembers. Or so my ancestor claims in his journals. In the Konsidar you will see many more of these.’
‘It feels so new.’ Liang stared at the pillar and an icicle ran up her spine. ‘I’ve seen words like these before. Tattooed across the skin of the killer who nearly slit my alchemist’s throat.’
‘Yes.’ Lin Feyn was nodding. ‘I saw the skin of that man your alchemist kept so carefully preserved. I think they were not as strange to him as they are to you and me. Quai’Shu’s Elemental Man had an interest in them before he died too. Did he speak to you of this?’
Liang shook her head.
‘Nor to anyone else I’ve found. But I’m convinced he had, nonetheless. He was pursuing some . . . other purpose. It’s a shame we can’t speak to him and ask.’ She turned slightly and fixed Liang with a steely look. ‘Enchantress, I know you have your views, but the duty of the Arbiter is to determine where responsibility truly lies. I must consider the possibility that even Shonda of Vespinarr is a paw—’
A flash of light caught Liang’s eye from the narrow busy streets of the Harub’s morning gloom. A huge golem hand grabbed her and a massive glass shield slammed down in front of her as a bright streak hurtled towards them. Another erupted from a doorway and a third from a window. Rockets. The first hit the pillar and exploded into a ball of flame that washed over the glass in front of her. The second fizzed past and struck the ground behind her. Fire billowed everywhere but the golem had stepped close and placed its shield around her, caging her in a gold-glass shell. She heard the third rocket detonate, so loud it must have exploded in front of her face, but by then she was huddled down into a ball. A terrible thunderclap made her ears ring. As she tried to blink away the flashes, a second thunderbolt erupted, this time from the golem wrapped around her. It struck the window in the Harub from where one of the rockets had come and the entire house blew apart.
The Elemental Man had vanished. Behind and beside her the other golem had Red Lin Feyn protected in its embrace. They stood as still as statues by the Azahl Pillar while the square erupted into screams and people ran helter-skelter away.
‘For your safety, Chay-Liang of Hingwal Taktse, step into the shield.’ The golem sounded so distant over the ringing in her ears. The one wrapped around Red Lin Feyn started moving, fast. Liang fumbled with her feet. Yes, on the inside of the shield was the step. She climbed onto it and the golem started to run.
Another explosion erupted out of the Harub, this time with a cloud of pale smoke. The shoulder of the golem carrying Red Lin Feyn exploded, spinning it around and almost knocking it down. Gold-glass shattered and shards of it pinged off the shield in front of Liang’s face. The Arbiter’s golem had lost both the arms on its right side. It staggered, righted itself and kept running. A rocket streaked past and exploded in the distance against the walls of the Visonda and then another hit the Arbiter’s golem yet again. For a moment the flash was blinding. The air swirled with smoke and Liang could smell the reek of sulphur, of burned black powder. Her eyes stung. Another thunderclap seared her ears. She hunched forward and cringed inside the golem’s shield as it pounded towards the Harub. She didn’t understand why they were running towards their attackers instead of away, didn’t understand why someone was firing rockets at her. Not lightning or arrows but rockets! Xibaiya!
A cluster of explosions erupted around the golems and the air filled with sulphurous smoke. Her own golem staggered and shuddered as something hit it hard, then spun. It tipped and fell on top of her, slamming her face first into the ground as it rolled inert onto its back. Its arms dropped, limp. Liang was sprawled behind the shield across the hard smooth flagstones of the square. She started crawling and then stopped. She had no idea which way she was facing. Look for Lin Feyn, that had been her first thought, protect the Arbiter, but the golems had taken them to the edge of the Harub, to the closest shelter but also towards their attackers, and the air was so thick with stinging smoke that she could barely see a thing. Her eyes filled with tears. She coughed and the smoke burned her lungs, hot and acrid. She still had her lightning wand at her waist and three unmoulded glass spheres in her pockets. She pulled one out now, hastily moulded it into a shield that wrapped almost all around her, and ran with no idea where she was going. She saw the shapes of men. Soldiers. She turned and ran the other way instead. More thunderclaps and lightning bolts split the air. One of them hit her shield. Sparks scattered in front of her eyes.
The shape of a narrow street loomed from the smoke, empty except for three bodies and the metal tubes of a rocket launcher. In the distance she heard screams. Her heart was racing. The air here was thick with the same sulphurous smoke again. She darted to the side of the street and looked for a door, any door, kicked it open and ran into a dark little shop filled from floor to ceiling with shelves of pottery jugs. The air was a litt
le better, at least. She ran through, looking for steps to take her up, but only found an alley no wider than she was and too narrow for her shield. She changed its shape and made it smaller and ran on. The Harub was usually packed with crowds. Find them and she’d be safe.
‘Arbiter!’
The voice came from behind. She froze, but before she could turn, a hammer blow struck her shield and shattered it and then she felt something sharp and deadly hit her back. Pain shot through to her heart. She turned but all she could see was the shape of a man, a miniature black-powder hand cannon at his feet, his arm raised to throw another knife. She ducked, tripped over her own feet, stumbled to her knees as she whipped the remains of her shield over her face. The second blade struck the glass and skittered away, and then the man was gone even as she snapped her wand towards him. The pain in her back was like fire. When she tried to stand, she found she barely could. There was no way to tell how bad the wound was.
The second knife was on the ground in front of her. She bent to pick it up and saw the blade was wet. Poison. She staggered back the way she’d come, looking for the man who’d killed her, lightning wand ready to kill him in return, but she never saw him. Her legs started to wobble. She stumbled back into the little shop and its shadowy darkness and clutched at the shelves. They crashed in a shower of shattering clay around her. She fell to her hands and knees, coughed and tasted salt and iron in her mouth. Her breathing was too fast. Her eyes were swimming. And now there was the man again, standing over her, and she was too weak to even lift up her head.
37
The Gates of Xibaiya
Berren crept forward in the darkness. He wasn’t sure where he was any more. The dragon was a dull memory. It had been out there, picking at him, pulling at the strings of his soul. Digging and digging deep. He remembered a flash of purity as it touched the edge of something that didn’t want to be touched, and after that the world became strange. He could remember sending the dragon away without knowing how. Keeping himself safe. He remembered Tuuran, talking to the big man, starting to tell him what the dragon had done. He remembered walking away and leaving the big man behind with no idea why he’d done that. He could have let them all go. He could have done anything then. That was the most frightening part of it all. He could have done anything. He could have picked up the world and thrown it into the sun or shattered the moon and made it fall in fragments across the sea for each one to grow into a strange new island of silver stone.
The moon. He kept seeing the moon, the sullen hostile moon.
In the end he hadn’t done anything at all.
Afterwards he walked and walked and walked without much idea of where he was going or why but with an absolute certainty of where he needed to be. The sun rose and he went on. He should have burned. He should have been crawling on his hands and knees but he wasn’t. He didn’t remember being hungry or thirsty though he’d had neither food nor water and never stopped to look for either. He didn’t remember exactly when he’d started down into the crack in the earth. Maybe it had been night again by then and he hadn’t noticed. He had a vague idea of a lot of steps and a bridge and a whole lot of tunnels made out of white stone that lit his way with a soft moonlight glow, and great bronze doors held closed by four-armed guardians. He wasn’t tired, though he hadn’t ever stopped to rest. There had been people too, he thought, up near the top, with white-painted faces, but they’d kept away and left him alone and he’d gone on by.
He passed gateways, old, old places. He didn’t pay them much attention. It was as though he’d seen them before and knew what they were and understood that the words written over them were meant for him and him alone in a strange language that he couldn’t understand and yet did. They were guiding him.
And now this. The largest cavern he’d ever seen. The distant walls were smooth and rounded in all directions. A single span of white stone reached from his feet out into the void, and walking on it was like walking towards the centre of some giant bubble. When he reached that centre, the span splayed out into a circular platform ringed with archways, and the walls were so far away that he couldn’t even guess now how big the cavern was. Everywhere was a faraway unchanging pale glow, and within it distance lost its meaning. In the middle of the floor beneath him was a pitch-black hole. He couldn’t tell how wide or deep it was, but he knew it wasn’t just any hole. This was a hole in the world. Through it lay Xibaiya. The land of the dead.
He paced around the arches. The echo of the Black Moon had brought him here. The man with the ruined face and the one milky eye had put it into the warlock Skyrie. Now it was in him and it was looking for something.
Where are you?
The question came with the sense of a task not finished. The archways were empty, but only until he touched them and the Black Moon reached through his fingers and shivered them into life.
The first shimmered onto a sea of liquid silver. He felt a wistful pang of regret tinged with disappointment and murderous anger. The silver sea called to the Black Moon, begging him home, and for a moment he felt the pulse inside him waver, but then another sense came, a slowly growing awareness of his presence, huge and resentful. He let the arch go and the gateway shimmered and vanished. The regret lasted a little longer. He’d done something once. Something monumentally vast. What was it?
Get out of me. Get out! Berren screamed at the echo inside him with all the potency of an ant screaming at a tree.
The next arch shimmered like the first when he touched it. It opened onto a small round chamber, dark with no exits. There was a mosaic on the floor, almost lost to age. Three skeletons lay over it, long-dead men clad in bronze-mesh armour. There was a book . . . No. There had once been a book but now it was gone.
Where are you?
Get out! Get out, get out! But the Black Moon didn’t even know he was there, and Berren understood now how it had been for Skyrie when the two of them fought. Drowning. Powerless. Screaming silently in his own skin.
The next arch was a great throne room, grand beyond imagining. A king in a coat that burned like the sun. Then a room full of more archways exactly like the ones in front of him but at the top of some high tower. Then a gloomy cave at the bottom of a spiralling staircase and a spear, its pointed haft buried six inches into the floor, walls lit by alchemical lamps whose cold white light glittered on the spear’s silver skin. Then a place of shimmering rainbows and a woman, achingly beautiful, with a golden circlet on her brow. They meant nothing, any of them.
In the next he saw himself. Berren the Bloody Judge. Berren the Crowntaker. His own face, his real face, the flesh and skin that had once been his, taken from him years ago in Tethis. He saw himself staring at a knife, the other knife with a golden haft carved into a thousand eyes and a pale swirling blade. The Bloody Judge looked right back at him, and for a moment the Black Moon wavered, its substance turned to smoke. Berren lunged. ‘Help me!’ he shrieked. ‘Help me!’
The gate snapped closed. The Black Moon inside him shivered and roared, coalesced hard as black iron, too much to bear as it grasped at a memory that should have been within easy reach and yet simply wasn’t there. Brilliant silver light flared across the cavern, and all the arches shimmered and flared and opened for a moment and then closed. I built this! I made this! Silver light soared around him. I. Made. This.
The last arch shimmered into the black abyss, into the all-devouring void that was Xibaiya, land of the dead. The Black Moon took his legs and stepped through. Berren screamed and . . .
. . . ceased to be. Souls passed him by. Millions upon millions of glittering shards of the sun, flitting through him, dancing briefly on their way home. Now and then the memories of a dragon, lurking, searching to be reborn. Fragments of the earth which fled at his approach, knowing what he was. And he remembered. He was the singer of songs to the earth. Creator and maker of terror and monsters, of Zaklat and the Kraitu and a hundred others, defier and destroyer of gods, unraveller of terrible secrets. He was the Blac
k Moon, who turned his enemies to dragons and split the earth asunder and rose to wipe out the sun, trapped in useless flesh as futile rage and boundless despair crushed through him like a deep ocean storm and . . .
. . . sat up.
Blinked and took deep gasping breaths, trying to remember who he was.
Berren. Berren the Crowntaker. Berren the Bloody Judge.
Relief shuddered through him. A dream then.
A dream? But that didn’t . . . But best not to think about it. That’s what Tuuran would say. He was who he was.
He got to his feet, unsteady as an old man. He wasn’t in the cavern of white stone with archways any more, if he ever had been. He was lying on his back as though he’d been asleep, and that on its own made wherever this was a damn sight better. He was himself, not driven by some hungry thing he didn’t understand that some warlock had stuck inside his head.
Berren. Berren the Crowntaker. Berren the Bloody Judge.
He lay still, breathing hard until his heart finally slowed. Stupid dream. He sniffed the air. It smelled of Xizic, which made him feel slightly sick, but at least the smell was familiar. Taiytakei, slaves, everyone chewed the stuff here.
The night was black. There were no stars, no slivers of moonlight. He was in some sort of shelter. He could feel that by the stillness of the air. He was tired. Weak. His skin, already dark from years at sea, was sore, burned by the sun and sand and wind.
He sat up and felt around him. He wasn’t in a hut or a shelter after all, but some sort of cave. There was a jug of water beside him and a cloth. He drained the water, greedy for it, then got to his feet and felt his way about. When he moved too quickly, his head started to swim. Slow and careful then. A cave and he was at the back of it. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled around until a faint flickering of firelight lit the damp stone wall around a corner. The light led him to where the cave opened onto a dark expanse of black sand beneath inky-dark cliffs. The sky above was every bit as black as the sand. The middle of the night then, with clouds blotting out the stars. Three men sat around the tiny fire whose flames had led him. It lit up their faces. He froze, startled – they looked like ghosts and it was a moment before he realised they were simply painted. Three naked men with their skin painted white.