The Splintered Gods (51 page)

There. They are gone.

Zafir quivered with rage and shock. For a moment the Crown-taker rounded on her, eyes blazing. His fingers closed around her throat, crushing her. Then he let her go and turned her face to look at the glasships drifting in across the sky.

‘You have a little time, spear carrier, but those are yours and this storm has barely started.’

Diamond Eye shifted beside her.
I will take them in the air as I did before. You will not ride me for this.

‘Yes, I will.’ Zafir walked into the tunnel.

Then you will die.

‘So be it.’ Better to die on the back of a dragon than helpless and alone.

57

The Storm-Dark

Zafir pushed open the door to her little room, beckoned to Myst and Onyx and wondered why they’d come to mean so much to her. The answer was complicated and she found herself shying away whenever she came close to it. Maybe it didn’t matter, but she wasn’t who she used to be. Her old lover Jehal would have laughed and then maybe frowned and been a little scared to see her like this. Her mother would have had nothing but contempt for her, but neither of them mattered any more. That felt strange too. And then she thought of Brightstar and wondered if this new Zafir was such a stranger after all. She held Myst and Onyx close. ‘What can I promise you? Not much. Hide until it’s done. I will do what I can.’ It most likely wouldn’t be enough but that didn’t seem to matter either.

Onyx dropped to her knees and kissed Zafir’s feet. ‘We are yours, Holiness.’ Holiness? That was new. They must have picked it up from Tuuran.

‘We have a little time.’ Zafir stripped off her armour and stepped back and held out her arms. ‘Tend to my wounds and then dress me again for war. Please.’

They unlaced her tunic and lifted off her shift and Zafir looked at herself naked. The cuts from the Elemental Man were the worst, long and razor-sharp. They weren’t deep, but every time she flexed her shoulder or twisted, she tore them open again. Onyx cleaned them with the last of their water. Myst went out and came back with curved needles and thin silk thread. She gestured to Zafir to be still and set to work sewing the wounds closed. Zafir looked over the rest of her skin while Myst worked. The bruises from riding Diamond Eye over Dhar Thosis were gone, but she had new bruises instead from other things, from the wild ride to seize Lord Shonda’s gondola and from the hunt for the missing eggs when the
wind had killed the Elemental Man behind her. She had two little scars on her ribs from when Diamond Eye had saved her from Mai’Choiro’s noose and, older still, a trace of white skin on her side from when she’d almost hanged herself on the Taiytakei ship all those months ago. Her ankle twinged now and then, never quite right from her duel with Queen Lystra, Jehal’s wife. She laughed.

‘Holiness?’

She shook her head. Lystra. How she’d hated Jehal’s little starling bride. Now? Easier to imagine them sipping sweet tea together, sharing smirks over Jehal’s shortcomings, than going at each other with sword and axe.

‘I was thinking of home,’ she murmured, though she knew she’d never had a home as Myst or Onyx or even Tuuran would understand it. Never a safe place of comfort and kindness – wasn’t that what a home was meant to be? But such things made for weakness and a dragon-rider could never be weak. The nature of dragons made it so. Strength born of cruelty.

Onyx tore strips off Zafir’s filthy silk shift to make bandages and handed her a new one. It was stained with a streak of dried blood. In the Adamantine Palace she’d have hanged a servant who offered her something so dirty to wear but not any more. It was her own blood after all, and the best cloth they had. After the shift came the wraps of dragon-scale she’d worn over Dhar Thosis, scratched and marked. They stank of her sweat and didn’t fit very well – the alchemist’s enchantress was no tailor. She had Myst rip the rest of the torn shift into strips and pad her hips and under her arms where the chafing was worst. After the dragon-scale, she did the rest of the armour herself because it was a point of pride for a dragon-rider to dress alone when they went to war. Perhaps once there might have been a reason for it – perhaps a traitorous servant who had sabotaged a rider and made her armour fail. If so then the story had long been lost. A dragon-rider stood on her own two feet, that was all. They needed no one, not ever, not for anything.

She was almost done when Tuuran knocked. She let him in. When he saw her not quite fully dressed, the look on his face made her laugh. He dropped to his knees at once and pressed his face to the floor. ‘Holiness, they come.’

Zafir put a hand on Tuuran’s head. ‘Get up, Night Watchman.
If there’s anyone left, find them. When the glasships come you must hurt them if you can. The black-powder cannon are for that.’

Tuuran rose and bowed. ‘There are few of us left, Holiness, but I will try.’ He jogged away into the depths of the eyrie. Zafir wrapped the last gold-glass plates around her arms and slipped her hands into her golden gauntlets. She put on her old helm from Dhar Thosis. The dragon carvings had smeared a little in the heat of Diamond Eye’s fire and no one had repaired them but the visor at least was new. She drew it down over her face and marvelled as she always did at how it almost wasn’t there. The joy of being able to ride a dragon through wind and fire and to see, for the first time to really
see
, made everything else almost worth it. A mirror would have been nice. She took a bladeless knife from the passageway where an Elemental Man had been turned to a smear of ash, buckling its sheath around her waist. A rider rarely carried anything more than a pair of simple knives for cutting themselves free of a damaged harness, but she thought she might make an exception. It was, if nothing else, a trophy of all that she’d done.

Somewhere outside she felt Diamond Eye surge with glee and leap into the air, and then the first cracks of lightning began.

‘Hide,’ she said. ‘Not here. Somewhere with an iron door. Hide and bar the door, and come out for no one until I come back.’

They were almost in tears. Myst fell at Zafir’s feet and clutched her ankle. Onyx only stared. ‘Live, mistress,’ she said. ‘Live.’

Zafir pulled gently away and bowed to them. ‘And you. Both of you. I could not have asked for better slaves but you are slaves no more. You are free.’ A lopsided smile curled her lip. ‘Though it may not last for long. But remember, nonetheless.’ She turned her back and walked away to where the battle had already begun.

Liang slipped out of Bellepheros’s study and crept back to her workshop. She woke a sled and loaded the bombs she’d made. There was an easier way than simply throwing them, there had to be. She pulled the sled through the chill of the bathhouse morgue, through the empty passages where the Scales had lived and up to the dragon yard. She lurked in the shadows, waiting for the monstrous dragon in the middle of it all to be gone.

*

Waves of gleeful joy pulsed in Zafir’s head. Chaos. Sleds sped through the air, racing over the edge of the eyrie. Hatchlings wheeled and snapped at them, peppered with lightning. It hurt them and they were all almost lost to their rage. Diamond Eye seized a soldier and crushed him, lashed his tail and smashed two sleds at once into pieces and their riders too. His head whipped round and fire washed over the white stone.

Zafir stepped out of the tunnels. A bolt of lightning struck her at once, dazing her for a moment as sparks crackled over gold-glass. Armoured Taiytakei soldiers were landing in the dragon yard, running for the tunnels. Three charged straight at her, waving their ashgars to smash her to pieces, clumsy weapons but deadly even to a glass-armoured knight. Zafir dodged aside and rammed the bladeless knife into the ribs of one and drew it out. He took another two paces before he even noticed. The other two rounded on her. She ducked another blow and sliced at a leg, cutting it clean in two. The third soldier caught her a glancing blow that knocked her flying. A sled zipped overhead. The soldier on the back leaned and swung at her, almost taking her head off, and then he suddenly wasn’t there any more as a hatchling shot out of nowhere and seized him, bit off his arm and threw him aside. The sled spiralled and smashed into the eyrie in a shower of glass. The first soldier she’d cut faltered, looked down at himself and then dropped to his knees, crimson flooding in sheets from his side and down his armour. The last of the three jumped in to finish her. She scrabbled aside as his ashgar slammed into the white stone and lashed at him with the bladeless knife. She barely felt any resistance as the knife’s blade severed glass and gold and flesh and bone. He screamed. Another Taiytakei roared and came at her as she rolled to her feet. She didn’t try to defend herself this time. Didn’t need to. As he lifted his ashgar to smash her, Diamond Eye’s tail swatted him, hurling him through the air, a rag-bag of broken bone.

Across the dragon yard, the Taiytakei around the Crowntaker were fighting among themselves. Zafir didn’t understand how so many men could have arrived so quickly, but she saw the Crowntaker walk calmly through the chaos, eyes burning silver. Here and there he reached out and touched a Taiytakei and they burst into a cloud of black dust, hanging for a moment in the shape
of a man before the wind whipped them away. Lightning struck him and flared like an aura around him; fierce silver light travelled back along frozen thunderbolts and soldiers burned in hostile moonlight fire. Others he simply touched with his gold-handled knife, pausing a moment as he made them his slaves.

Another lightning bolt hit her. It blurred her sight. She didn’t run but walked, as the Crowntaker did, to the side of her dragon, expecting death at any second – lightning or the bolt from a cross-bow or a hidden knife. She found it didn’t trouble her. She felt . . . serene. Men in glass and gold swung their ashgars at one another and let off lightning at anyone and everyone. A gang of slaves with Tuuran at its head burst out of the tunnels, mad with fear and fury. They ran this way and that, some of them bolting again for shelter, others throwing themselves at the first Taiytakei they saw, dragging them down, pulling off their helms and battering their faces against the stone.

And then the Vespinese still in the air turned and sped away. The Crowntaker raised his hand and silver flashed from his fingers. The last fleeing sleds dissolved into ash, tipping their riders screaming into the abyss below, while those ahead tore off and vanished into the distance. There seemed no method to the Crowntaker’s fighting. He killed or enslaved or showed mercy or did nothing, all on a whim. The last few stranded Taiytakei left in the dragon yard fell to his knife. Zafir climbed onto Diamond Eye’s back. The glas-ships were closing. Fifty, maybe sixty of them. Too many. Soldiers turned by the Crowntaker’s horrible knife bowed at his feet as he sent them to Tuuran. Tight clusters of slaves huddled together in the mouths of the tunnels, transfixed by this killer they couldn’t understand, this half-god come among a people for whom the idea of any god at all was anathema.

‘The cannon, Tuuran,’ she cried. ‘We do what we can.’

Diamond Eye crossed the dragon yard and climbed the wall. He spread his wings and leaped and, when clear of the rim, allowed himself to fall, diving towards the storm-dark and then soaring up again in lazy circles, higher and higher as the glasships came closer. The hatchlings were taking to the air, circling the eyrie. The cannon were turning, slowly coming to bear.

The earth-touched are not all gone. A few remain.

How do you know?

I feel their thoughts, bewildered and full of dread. They are few now but they will return.
Diamond Eye banked sharply, tucked in his wings and fell out of the air as the first bolt of lightning flew at him. Over the roar of the wind Zafir barely heard the thunderclap but she felt it prickle her skin. Diamond Eye pirouetted and shot up, jinked as another bolt of lightning flayed the sky so close that the flash of it dazzled her. She clung to his back, and then he was in among the glasships at the edge of their formation.

He fell on one of the silver gondolas and sank his talons into it. Metal groaned and bent. The glasship swayed and sank under the dragon’s weight, and then one by one the silver chains snapped. They whipped past her, one of them striking Diamond Eye’s neck hard enough to tear his scales. Drops of dragon-blood spattered her visor. Diamond Eye fell like a stone as a cascade of lightning showered the air around him. He curled up into a ball in the air and his wings wrapped tightly around his back, covering her. She felt his pain as lightning struck him. Then he unfurled and hurled the mangled gondola fizzing through the sky. It smashed into the disc of a glasship. Fractured fragments of lightning arced madly as the glass cracked and then fell apart in a glitter of shards. Diamond Eye snapped out his wings, crushing her as he stopped his fall. He threw himself up into the midst of the glasships again, fast and close, twisting and turning like a shark in a shoal of jellyfish. His tail lashed and glass exploded. He crashed into the top of one ship and tore out its heart with his teeth, held it as a shield against a dozen flashes of lightning as the glasship fell, then tossed it arcing away to smash into the side of another and send both tumbling away into the abyss.

The first cannon fired from the eyrie, a distant boom and flash scattering a spray of iron. Nothing happened. More flashes and puffs of smoke and still nothing. Diamond Eye wheeled and Zafir clung to him. Lightning hit him and he screamed and fell, and she howled at him until he found his wings and surged up high and dived among them again, the rage surging through them both so nothing mattered except to bring every last ship to the ground and smash it into sand. And there had been a time when she would have guided and fought that fury, as every rider learned to do, but not today, not any more.

A rain of iron balls fell past her, dozens of them, each the size of her fist. Three clipped the rim of a glasship, cracking it so great chips fell away. Zafir saw it tip and slowly spin, falling in a leisurely spiral to its death in the maelstrom beneath the eyrie. Diamond Eye began to sing, the same murmuring joy of being unleashed for war that he’d sung over Dhar Thosis. He didn’t seem to know that he was doing it, but the song curled around Zafir. It was the song of a fight to the bitter end. It writhed inside her, hot and welcome.

Tuuran didn’t understand where the soldiers Crazy Mad sent to him had come from. One minute he was standing in the dragon yard swinging his axe to split a man in two, ready to bolt for shelter before someone fried him with lightning, the next moment the Taiytakei were all running away and he was chasing them, and then the one after that, the dragon yard was almost empty and the lightning and the fire had stopped, and there was Crazy, wandering about to the last few men who hadn’t got away. He didn’t make any pretence about what he was doing. He stabbed them in the chest with his golden knife and whispered in their ear and pointed at Tuuran. And when the soldiers came to him, their eyes were glazed and dull and each one said the same: ‘I am your slave,’ and then stood slack and patient like a golem.