The Splintered Gods

by Stephen Deas

  We tried, she told him. We tried and we died well. Then she urged him: Fly! Fly! Flare your wings and fly, damn you! But Diamond Eye was too far gone to hear or care for her tiny voice. He almost managed to right himself at the last, flaring one wing to break the fall, but he couldn’t flare the other and rolled. The dragon yard was suddenly above her, spinning wildly. He slammed into the stone on his side. The crash smashed her hard against his scales and yet her harness still held, and though bones and muscles screamed and tore, somehow she was alive. Luck, this time. Diamond Eye had forgotten she was even there.

  He moved sluggishly, unsteadily. Trying to right himself. Lightning flared again, striking the last cluster of cannon. She heard them die, exploding in showers of fireworks and flying twisted metal. The dragon yard was littered with shattered glass and dismembered dead. She tried to make her arms move, to make her hands uncurl from the fists they’d become.

  Lightning struck from above. Diamond Eye spasmed. Zafir gasped as the shock of it ran through her. Her fingers were too numb to undo the harness but there was still the bladeless knife. She forced her shaking hand to pull it free and cut, slashing at the ropes, cutting the dragon’s scales and the flesh beneath in her frenzy to be free. Another bolt struck and then another. Diamond Eye writhed and curled and the sky went dark as one wing covered them both and she fell, sliding and tumbling over his burning scales to land on the stone, pressed up beside him, too broken to even move. Her eyes closed as thunder burst around her.

  Liang made it to another tunnel. She felt the shift of the eyrie through her feet as she reached it, the lurch as it started to fall. Tsen had shown them all how long it would take, that the eyrie would fall slowly like a stricken glasship, not plunge like a stone, so she knew she had time. She paused and looked up before she entered the tunnel, watching the glasships overhead, dozens of them raining lightning in a storm around the dragon as it finally fell, and then picking out the glasships that had once belonged to Baros Tsen T’Varr, drifting up now, their dangling chains slack beneath. She stayed until she’d counted them and knew for certain that the Elemental Man had finished what she’d started.

  The shock as the dragon hit the stone of the yard almost knocked her off her feet. She turned and ran as fast as she could and never mind how her legs burned and her feet hurt. She was in tunnels that had been the barracks once, an unfamiliar place, but that didn’t matter. They all spiralled in the same downward fractal pattern to the chamber at the eyrie’s core where Baros Tsen had built his bathhouse amid the ring of white stone arches. She met no one. Everyone was dead or had fled to the darkest corner they could find. She stumbled and fell as she ran, legs pumping too fast for the rest of her to keep up until she sprawled across the white stone floor. She got up again, dimly aware of the pain, raced on, deeper and deeper, dodging and hurdling the ripped bodies that still lay scattered about until she reached the open doorway to the bathhouse. Cold air billowed out, chilled by the enchantments she’d made for the bath house to become a morgue.

  She stopped. The arches. She’d seen them on the very first day she’d come to the eyrie, when Tsen showed her around. What do you make of these, enchantress? And she’d made nothing of them at all because they were simply a ring of white stone arches around a white stone slab. An altar to old forbidden gods perhaps, that was all she could say, and Tsen had laughed and declared it as fine a place as any to build his bath and drink his apple wine. After that, she’d not spared them a second thought.

  The archways shimmered silver now. Shining liquid moonlight. She went up to one and almost touched it to see if it would ripple, then shook herself and shivered in the unnatural cold and ran on. She was here for Belli, to get them away before the eyrie plunged into the storm-dark, because when it did, everything here would be gone as though it had never existed. She ran past Tsen’s old rooms, past her workshop to Belli’s study, praying to the forbidden gods that he was still there, that he hadn’t moved, that she would find him; and there, waiting for her, was the crippled hatchling.

  Liang skittered to a stop. The hatchling almost didn’t see her, but then it turned and shrieked and its talons scrabbled at the stone, clawing for purchase. Liang dived back into her workshop, looking for a globe of glass to throw, grabbing the first that came to hand. She stumbled, turned as she fell and threw the glass back at the doorway as hard as she could, willing it into a cage. The dragon pushed inside but it was slow and hampered by the narrow entrance. The glass missed its head and hit its flank and burst in a thunderclap of imploding air. The dragon lurched and seemed to shrink in on itself. It fell dead at once, a gaping hole in its side where a festering dark black mass now floated in the air, lit from within by tiny flickers of purple.

  Horror gripped Liang as she realised what she’d done. The glass she’d thrown had been Red Lin Feyn’s captured piece of the storm-dark and now a tiny cloud of it hovered free in the doorway, the dead hatchling underneath blocking the rest of the way out.

  She had to find a sled. She had to get to Belli. She had to . . . but there was no way she could move the hatchling on her own . . .

  Lin Feyn had never said what would happen if the globe broke. Something bad, surely. Maybe not so bad if they were all doomed anyway, but now she couldn’t get out and so Belli would die and so would she, and she wasn’t ready for that, not after everything they’d been through. She reached her mind into the storm-dark as she would into her enchanted glass. There was a twist, Lin Feyn had told her. A reaching in and then doing something different. Not a bit different but completely alien.

  Glass was all about control. Delicate, intricate, precise thoughts.

  Maybe she could pile up some furniture and climb over. Maybe there was enough space . . . But the eyrie was falling and it would all take too long.

  She reached out and touched the storm-dark. She screamed all her pain and desperation and anguish, knowing that she’d never make it move, that it had her trapped.

  Before her eyes the storm-dark obediently curled into a ball and floated in her palm.

  Kill me, whispered the dragon through the lightning and the screaming pain. Zafir opened her eyes and shuddered awake. Every thing ached, but worse than that was the dull numbness inside. When she tried to move, her arms flailed. Her legs twitched. She tried again and cried out at a stabbing pain that ripped through her insides. The doll-woman’s circlet felt tight around her skull. Squeezing her.

  I can’t. I’m dying.

  Kill me, little one. We are falling into the abyss.

  Then the storm-dark will kill us both. You’ll come back.

  The storm-dark will unmake me. It will be the end.

  She saw the dragon’s thoughts and understood. A final end and the dragon was, at last, afraid. With gasping effort she forced her eyes to open and looked for the bladeless knife. It was right beside her. Her fingers clawed at the circlet. Somewhere, the doll-woman was trying to kill her. She’d always supposed it would be sudden and quick. Not like this.

  Her hand closed around the hilt of the knife.

  Drive it deep, little one.

  Diamond Eye shuddered as lightning hit him again. She’d have to leave the wing that lay over her, shielding her. She’d have to haul herself out. Have to drive the knife through his skull. She started to crawl. Standing up was too much. She pulled herself with her arms and pushed with the one leg that still worked, inching along his body. She wondered briefly why she was doing this, what difference it made, then threw the thought away. Diamond Eye was hers and she was his. She pushed her way out from under his wing, hauled herself up with her hands, tugging on his scales until she was standing on one leg. The other would barely take any weight. She whimpered at the pain around her head. The pressure was crushing her skin.

  I’m cold, she told him. She was bleeding inside. Had to be. She could feel blood inside her armour too, drying, tacky, sticking her silk shift to her skin.

  I will keep you warm.

  Yes. As he burned from th
e inside after she’d killed him. She hopped a little further and looked up.

  The glasships were high overhead, far higher than they’d been before, receding into specks. The eyrie was falling. The lightning had stopped. Maybe they were out of range. She glanced at the walls but everything around her was lifeless ruin.

  She dragged herself to Diamond Eye’s head. She’d have to climb on top of him to drive the knife through his skull. She wasn’t sure she could. She threw off her helmet and wiped her eyes, brushing away the pain, reached for the ruins of his harness to pull herself onto his shoulder, took hold of a rope and then howled in frustration when her arms didn’t have the strength and she fell back. Another wave of pain washed over her. She could feel herself failing. I can’t. And she couldn’t. Just couldn’t.

  You were worthy to ride me, little one.

  She wept. Nothing anyone had ever said had meant so much. And at the same time the pain in her head was like drowning.

  ‘Hush.’ She felt a shadow move over her. The Crowntaker stood there, eyes burning silver.

  ‘Why didn’t you . . . ?’ She let out a long breath. What was the point? ‘You could have been my Vishmir.’ She lifted the bladeless knife to him. ‘Finish us. Both of us.’ Above them the glasships were little more than specks now, glints catching the sun. The Crowntaker, the Silver King, the Black Moon, whatever he was, crouched beside her. The circlet tightened a little more. She cried out and arched and then cried out again at the fresh wall of pain.

  ‘I’ll not be your Vishmir; I’ll be your Isul Aieha.’ And she might have laughed if they weren’t all about to die. A darkness seemed to swell up around the eyrie. The storm-dark.

  He reached out and touched her brow and the gold-glass circlet dissolved into ash. ‘Be free.’

  The storm-dark swallowed them.

  Liang found Belli where she’d left him, sitting in his study, rocking in despair. She pulled him up by the arm and dragged him onto her sled and into the tunnels. They were glowing brilliant silver now. ‘Come on, come on! The eyrie’s falling. It’s all going to the storm-dark now.’ Driving the sled faster, holding him tight. ‘Dragons, hatchlings, eggs – everything, all of it.’ Up the spiral to the surface. ‘Everything it touches.’ Past the rooms where Tsen’s t’varrs and kwens once lived. Maybe they were still there, for all she knew. ‘We have to get off before it’s too late.’ Past the rooms where some of his favoured slaves once slept. ‘We have to fly—’

  She reached the end of the last twist and emerged into the dragon yard. The madman with silver eyes stood in the centre, arms stretched wide, head pitched up, light blazing out of him. The red-gold dragon Diamond Eye lay curled up on its side behind him, still. Two hatchlings flanked him, watching like sentinels. A handful of men and women stood nearby – a few Taiytakei soldiers, a dozen slaves from across the different worlds, maybe a few more – the last survivors. They seemed entranced. Enraptured.

  Belli stepped off the sled and walked to join them but Liang barely noticed the people. She barely even noticed the wind.

  The sky above and beyond the eyrie walls was black churning cloud and flashes of purple lightning. They were too late. She was too late. She knew what happened next.

  The wind stopped.

  The darkness turned absolute.

  Silence.

  58

  The Silence That Comes After

  A light flared and flickered somewhere about Baros Tsen, bright enough to stir him. When he opened his eyes, a figure stood at the edge of the darkness. ‘Baros Tsen T’Varr!’ A voice echoed through the tunnel. There was something not quite human about it.

  ‘Kalaiya!’ Tsen sat up. He nudged Kalaiya awake.

  The figure held out its hands. Two specks of light flashed across the space between them. Tsen tried to duck. Kalaiya opened her eyes and screamed. Something as large and solid as a fist hit him in the chest and he felt it run up his skin like a giant centipede, irresist ibly quick as it wrapped itself around his neck. He clawed at it but it was as hard as metal. He struggled, panicked for a moment, then, as nothing else happened, calmed himself. He looked at Kalaiya. She too had a collar around her throat. It was made of gold-glass.

  ‘Do you know who I am, Baros Tsen?’ rang out the voice.

  Tsen clawed at the glass collar around his throat and then gave up. All this way and then days starving in a cave in the dark, unable to find the way out, and now this. He closed his eyes and squeezed Kalaiya’s hand and wept, because really, after everything he’d done and all he’d been through, he’d well and truly had enough. The Arbiter of the Dralamut stood, a shadow amid the dancing lights of her enchanted globes. There didn’t seem to be anyone with her but wherever the Arbiter went, killers were always on hand. Stupidest thing of all was that he’d never wanted to run away in the first place.

  ‘I’m sorry, my love.’

  The Arbiter reached out a hand. The sled began to move, drifting closer until it stopped in front of her. There was a dead man on the sand behind her. He looked as though he’d been ripped to pieces by a thousand knives. It took another moment for Tsen to realise that the shredded blood-soaked clothes were the robe of an Elemental Man.

  The Arbiter of the Dralamut cocked her head. She didn’t wear the headdress or the flaming feather robe, only the plain white tunic of an enchantress. For all he knew this was another skin-shifter. She was draped in the Arbiter’s shards of glass, though. And they were stained red and dripping with fresh blood.

  ‘Another Baros Tsen?’ she asked. ‘Or is it truly you?’

  Tsen dropped to his knees and bowed. ‘Lady Arbiter. Judge me as I know you must but my slave is innocent.’

  ‘I am Red Lin Feyn, daughter in blood of Feyn Charin and the Crimson Sunburst, enchantress, navigator. Arbiter of the Dralamut until two days ago but I no longer claim that right. I have discharged that duty.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am Baros Tsen T’Varr,’ said Tsen.

  ‘Really?’ The collar round his neck contracted. He choked and clawed at it. Beside him Kalaiya screamed but Tsen found he couldn’t make a sound. Couldn’t breathe no matter how his lungs pumped and his ribs and belly heaved. He flailed, staggered to his feet, lurched a few steps forward, but the Arbiter simply backed away with such grace that she seemed almost to be floating. The darkness closed on him. He fell forward. As he closed his eyes he saw Kalaiya too clawing at her throat.

  He came round perhaps a minute later. The Arbiter was sitting between them, perched on the edge of a gold-glass disc. ‘Baros Tsen T’Varr.’ She smiled and then laughed. ‘Welcome to the Queverra. You are free to go.’

  ‘What?’ The collar had gone from around his neck.

  ‘The Arbiter has passed judgement. I found you guilty in your absence of complicity in the razing of Dhar Thosis. They found your body in a gondola close to the Godspike. They’ll take it back to Khalishtor to be hanged by the feet so I doubt anyone is looking for you. Although given that that was already the second time your body was found, I’d be careful. Nevertheless, you may go. I suppose the second body was the shifter, was it?’

  Tsen shrugged. Last he’d seen Sivan, the shifter had looked like himself and had had a spear stuck through him. Seemed best not to mention that though.

  ‘Free, lady?’

  ‘In the end I believe you. I believe you tried to stop it. Because of your enchantress’s faith. Because of your rider-slave’s honesty. You were stupid, Tsen, but not evil.’

  ‘Yes.’ Wisdom suggested shutting up and taking Kalaiya’s hand and walking away as fast as he possibly could, and yet the devil inside wouldn’t let go. And he had a hundred questions about how she’d found him and why she’d thought he was a shifter and how much she knew about what lay beneath it all, but one thing more than anything else . . . ‘You called yourself daughter of Feyn Charin and the Crimson Sunburst, lady.’

  Red Lin Feyn paused and then chuckled and nodded. She let out a long deep breath. ‘A change is coming. A
catastrophe, perhaps. You see it in the swelling of the storm-dark and in the cracked needle beside the Godspike. You see it in the rise of the sorcerers of Aria and the Necropolis of the Ice Witch and in the dead that do not rest, in Merizikat and also even here. In other things. In the storm-dark itself. The skin-shifters know.’ She looked across the darkness at the shredded man on the sand, paused again and smiled. ‘In your history, when the Crimson Sunburst appeared at the foot of Mount Solence with her army of golems, what became of her, Baros Tsen?’

  ‘The Elemental Men fought her and she was defeated.’

  ‘So she was.’ Red Lin Feyn turned away. ‘Disappear, Baros Tsen T’Varr. You’ll find it’s not so hard.’

  ‘Why do you want the egg?’ Tsen blinked. The question wasn’t his. It had popped into his mind from somewhere else. He looked about himself. Nothing.

  Red Lin Feyn shook her head.

  ‘But the answer is in your thoughts, little one. The grey dead have called the Black Moon to rise . . .’ Tsen gasped. A hand flew to his mouth because the words didn’t belong, made no sense, weren’t his at all. ‘I . . .’ Then he jumped as a sharp cracking noise broke the quiet. It came from the sled, and it took Tsen far too long to understand what it was and so he simply gawped as the dragon egg cracked and burst apart in a flurry of wings and claws and two furious eyes gleamed.

  I am Silence.

  Epilogue

  The dragon Snow circled high over the mouth of the Fury, enraptured by the ripples in the water. On a clear fine day like this there was still a dark stain across the earth where the city of Furymouth had been. The ruins were overgrown with weeds and grass and briars now, but underneath them the stones remained black with soot and the air carried a tang of ash. There were little ones down there. She could feel their thoughts, pick them out and read them if she wanted to. They lived in cellars and damp old tunnels and came out to hunt for food when they thought it was safe.