The Splintered Gods (25 page)

Content, the dragon Silence emerged from its hiding place.

29

Consequences

Red Lin Feyn sat on her crystal throne in the splendour of her court and listened to her killers while she waited to receive Sea Lord Shonda of Vespinarr. The lord of the mountains was somewhere over the desert, answering her summons as slowly as he could possibly manage. His dawdling didn’t trouble her; she would receive him as an almost-equal and say nothing of his tardiness. In return, he would be courteous and polite and charming and of course furious. He would answer her questions with a mix of lies and half-truths and politely demand that he and his kwen be allowed to go. He would tell her that great cities like Vespinarr, great trading empires like those it controlled, did not run themselves. He’d remind her that he’d already lost Vey Rin, his t’varr and also his brother, to Baros Tsen T’Varr’s dragons, and would ask how such a great empire of ships was to govern itself if now its kwen and sea lord were imprisoned in a flying castle three miles above the desert and three hundred from the nearest thought of civilisation. Sea Lord Quai’Shu, he would point out, owed him a very great deal of money. He would like this debt repaid, and Baros Tsen’s dragons would do nicely.

Shonda would come with all these requests, and she would refuse them, throw Mai’Choiro’s confession in his face and wonder as she did why he even bothered to ask. Once she’d trapped him, she’d ask him why he’d done it, because surely a man as canny and wealthy as the sea lord of Vespinarr could contrive a more subtle scheme to get what he wanted, one that didn’t bring with it such risk of ruin? The question she wanted to ask Lord Shonda of Vespinarr, before she condemned him to hang before the Crown of the Sea Lords in Khalishtor, was no longer
what
, but
why
?

Whatever the killers were saying to her now, she wasn’t hearing a word. She wasn’t hearing a word because the alchemist had
made a dead man speak. In the eyes of the killers that made him a sorcerer, and sorcerers were put to death. As the Arbiter of the Dralamut, all of that had nothing to do with who had burned Dhar Thosis and so wasn’t her concern. As Red Lin Feyn, navigator and dutiful citizen of Takei’Tarr, it bothered her considerably, and not in ways the killers would have been pleased to know. A part of what bothered her, and would bother the killers most of all, was that she hadn’t told them.

With an abrupt wave of her hand she silenced them, and then, with another, she sent them away. All of them, winkling them out. When she was sure she was alone, she went up the stairs to her bed and the chest beside it and took out the glass globe that held a snip of the storm-dark. It wasn’t much more than a novice’s training toy. She held it in her hand.

Beneath the layers and masks of her rank, Lin Feyn remained the daughter of daughters of Feyn Charin, the first navigator. His blood was in her and what had he been if not a sorcerer? Oh, the world had dressed it up and called him something else because of the one great trick he’d shared, the crossing of the storm-dark, but he was more than that. He’d been apprenticed to the Crimson Sunburst of Cashax, who’d gone to war against the Elemental Men and almost won. Some said he’d been more than an apprentice. Lin Feyn hadn’t ever found any reason for such a belief but she secretly favoured it because it made her blood the blood of the Crimson Sunburst herself and was a poke in the eye for the killers, who claimed to serve her but in reality served only themselves. And the truth, though few knew it, was that the Sunburst had never sought to confront them.

She’d been the first enchantress, and her court had grown to be filled with magical creatures and devices, animated wonders of glass, automata and the first golems. The library of the Dralamut, in its forbidden rooms where the killers couldn’t enter, contained journals in which the Crimson Sunburst spoke of old books, of reading the anathema of the Rava, of the old white-faced silver-skinned half-gods who existed before the world broke into splinters. The journals were full of awe and wonder, gleeful childish fascination with the miracles she found she could perform, yet Red Lin Feyn had found no ambition for domination or such worldly
hungers, only a relentless curiosity and the Sunburst’s constant air of surprise that her spells did more than make a sour taste or a bad smell. In the end her unfettered curiosity had brought the killers down on her, yet Red Lin Feyn had never found anything to suggest that the Crimson Sunburst had wanted more than she already had. The Sunburst had been queen of Cashax before her twentieth birthday, back when Cashax had been the greatest city in Takei’Tarr. She’d wrought her sorceries simply because they were there. To see if she could.

The alchemist, when Lin Feyn watched him at his work, reminded her of the woman from those journals – meticulous, curious, fiercely clever, someone who did what he did without any hunger for power or prestige. Which brought Lin Feyn right back to the thing she was trying very hard not to think about, the question that circled her with the predatory malevolence of a shark:
What do I do with you?
He was probably a kind man. Lin Feyn, whose life had been built on knowing such things, saw no reason to think otherwise. Yet he did things that others could use, others who were not so kind, and for that the Elemental Men would kill him. After what she’d seen she’d told the killers to lock him up but hadn’t yet told them why, and now found she didn’t want to, even though she should. She wondered how much they’d seen, how much they already understood for themselves.

She sat alone on her crystal throne in all her splendour and considered these things deep into the night, then rose and undressed and slipped between the silks to sleep and considered them some more.

She was still musing on them when the dragon yard burst into flames.

Zafir woke filled with a sense of warning, a sharp and dire immediate threat. She barely had time to throw back her silk sheets before the poles that held up her shelter out on the eyrie wall snapped like twigs. Gold-glass shattered into splinters, crashed down on top of her and crushed her almost flat. The sail-cloth canopy smothered her and the bulk of something vast almost crushed her, almost but not quite. Through the silks tangled around her face she thought she saw the night outside light up with flames.

The hatchling.

The Elemental Men had said they would see to it themselves. She’d laughed and said she’d hunt it when she pleased, but she hadn’t. Now a surge of anger shot through her. She’d hidden herself from its searching on the night it had come to kill her and now here it was, back for another go.

She could feel it already flying off. Diamond Eye was rising, the wings he’d wrapped around her shelter like a cocoon folding back. She sensed his hunger, tense and sharp and ready for the hunt, exactly as she wanted him. She threw off the silken sheets and the debris of the smashed shelter and ran up the wall. Across the dragon yard everything that would burn was in flames. The hatchling was already far out of sight. Diamond Eye turned his head to look at her as if asking something, and she knew exactly what. She nodded.

‘Yes, my deathbringer. No matter what they say.’ And by the time the first Elemental Men vanished into the darkness in pursuit, she was already in her armour and on the dragon’s back.

Red Lin Feyn barely had time to make herself decent before the killers appeared around her. ‘Lady, it is the hatchling. We require your leave to pursue.’

Lin Feyn took a moment to compose herself.
Require it, do you
? And she might have taken them to task for that but then another thought struck her. She nodded her assent. ‘All of you. Go. Finish it.’

They bowed, eager to follow their nature. ‘Stay here, lady, with wards on the door. We will not be gone for long.’

Telling her what to do again. They were losing their perspective. Fear was making them careless, opening cracks and letting their true natures show. Lin Feyn nodded and said nothing, watched them leave and shut the gondola window behind them. She closed her eyes and waited another few minutes, stretching out every sense for the whisper of wind that might tell her that one had disobeyed and stayed to watch over her. When she was certain she was truly alone, she opened the gondola and hurried into the night. Flickering fires from the hatchery and the remains of the Vespinese scaffold shot a dark orange glow over the dragon yard
stone, pulsing in the ever-present wind whose fingers gripped her and shook her and almost picked her up and blew her away. She held her robe tight – not the dress of the Arbiter that she’d become but the simple robes of the enchantress she’d been before they took her to the Dralamut to learn the secrets of the storm-dark. The adult dragon was gone from its perch on the wall. Beneath, the hatchlings in their chains stared at her and at the eastern sky, shrieking their agitation. She ignored them and slipped down the tunnels to the alchemist’s room. A bleary-eyed kwen came stumbling the other way, dressed in bits of armour.

‘Go back to bed,’ she told him sharply. ‘It is a matter for dragons and killers. The Elemental Men have it in hand.’

He blinked a few times and frowned, then shook his head and ran on, and it was only after he’d gone that she realised he didn’t recognise her without her painted face and gold-glass shards and wreathed in flames of feathers. She smiled then, surprised by an unexpected sense of freedom.

The smell of cloves hit her as soon as she opened the door to the alchemist’s study. She closed it behind her and listened again for any whispers in the air, felt for flickers of breeze and found nothing. The killers were about their business, hunting monsters. The room was empty. She searched and let her nose guide her to the alchemist’s potion for waking the dead, took it and left and ran barefoot through the deeper passages of the eyrie, spiralling ever down to what had once been Baros Tsen T’Varr’s bathhouse, the smell of cloves trailing after her. Tsen’s bathhouse had become a morgue now. Dead slaves were simply thrown over the side or fed to the dragon and a good few of the men who’d died before she’d come had gone that way too, but the rest of the Taiytakei dead waited here, to be burned one day with all due funerary dignity or else hung by the ankles from the spires of Khalishtor for the world to see. One word from her either way was all it took. Tsen’s corpse was among them. One of the ones who’d hang by his ankles.

The iron door was cold to the touch. It opened for her and a wash of chill air rushed out, enough to turn to mist as it reached in tentacles into the corridor. Chay-Liang’s enchantments had been strong enough to glaze the water in Tsen’s bath with ice.
The doors that led to the other spirals of the eyrie were closed. She listened again, felt for any movement in the misty air, then closed the door behind her and hurried into the passages where the Scales lived, where the alchemist and the enchantress were now shut in their prisons. When she reached the guards who stood watch over them, she beckoned them away and had them follow her to the bathhouse morgue, hurrying them inside. They didn’t recognise her either but they were mere soldiers and her voice still carried all the force of an Arbiter’s command.

‘Bring out the body of Baros Tsen T’Varr,’ she told them, then left them to find it and ran to the alchemist’s cell. She went inside and shook him awake.

‘I will bring you Baros Tsen T’Varr,’ she told him. ‘You will make him talk. Then we will know.’

Zafir didn’t see the Elemental Men vanish into the night but Diamond Eye felt their thoughts rush away into the wind, full of hunting and sharp blades and the tang of death. The dragon felt them and so Zafir felt them too.

This time you don’t stop
, she told him.
This time you fly on no matter what they do. Whatever they think, they will shy from it at the very last. They dare not kill me. My death will be my own. In flames, and many will burn with me.

The dragon launched himself into the void. Zafir felt his purring approval and in him an awareness of her and of the world that was greater than anything she’d known back among the dragons of her home. He powered after the hatchling, eager and hungry, fast and strong. The air was different here, filled with a tense incipient energy, a lightning-crackle of expectation and potency. She felt the distance diminish. The chase might take hours but she would succeed this time.
No escape, little dragon, no trick.

But it
was
a trick, of course it was. A lure. It slipped out of the hatchling’s mind, unwatched. Slipped from hatchling to dragon and from Diamond Eye to her. He’d come here to tease her out. He
wanted
this chase. She caught the flash of a half-seen place where he wanted her to be.

Careless.

Show them the way
, she cried, and Diamond Eye lit up the sky
with fire, and from every compass point the Elemental Men saw and stopped their blind searching rush and came.

So this is how it is to be prey.
The dragon Silence raced through the night. The feeling was strange, to be tearing away from something, and stranger still from something that couldn’t be outrun. The earth-touched Elemental Men had given chase this time. It felt their thoughts. They were like little ones in their form and their nature but not in their essence – in that they carried something else, a tiny echo of the dead goddess just as the alchemist carried a lingering memory of what had once been a half-god. The dragon told itself to remember these things, that they mattered, but for now the rush of the chase was irresistible. The alchemist knew exactly what he was, but the earth-touched were ignorant. The dragon didn’t understand how that could be. It would ask one, when the chance came, but for now they raced like the wind towards it, the endless chattering of their thoughts like tiny beacons in the sky. Silence felt their searching. They couldn’t see it, not in the darkness, and so the little dragon skimmed the rim of the storm-dark and dived beneath it and flew a different way and zigged and zagged between their dispersing thoughts. It learned something it had missed as it listened to their minds. They were afraid. Dragons made them weak. Dragons devoured their powers as dragons devoured everything. They were quick though, quick as the wind and faster than a dragon could dream. Quick but blind, so none of them would catch it.