The Splintered Gods (52 page)

‘The cannon, Tuuran!’ The great red-gold dragon climbed from the yard onto the eyrie wall and launched itself over the side, swooping out of sight and then climbing in long slow circles as the glasships came closer. Crazy was out in the middle of the yard now. He sat down as Tuuran watched him, tipped back his head and put his hands on the white stone almost as though he was praying. His eyes blazed. Tuuran looked away. His own world hadn’t had much use for praying, but if you were already half a god then maybe that made all the difference. Maybe Crazy could make all these glasships simply vanish. He’d do what he’d do, whatever that might be, and after what Tuuran had seen these last few weeks, he reckoned that could be almost anything or nothing at all.

Cannon then. He shook his head and started yelling, dividing his men into four squads, one for each of the cannon that still worked – three groups of Crazy’s Taiytakei with their dull eyes and a fourth he took himself with the last free fighting men on
the eyrie. He sent them with orders simple enough even for an Adamantine Man.
Hold your position. Destroy as many glasships as you can. Keep firing until either you or they are dead. Nothing else matters
. He might have added something about running away at some point, only to where?

The hatchlings took to the air to circle. The dragon and the dragon-queen dived. The rims of the glasships glowed a brilliant white like the sun, and Tuuran heard their thunder rumble over the roar of the wind as the first bolts arced. The dragon twisted as though it knew what was coming, jinked, wheeled and dodged and shot suddenly up through the glasships. Tuuran squinted. Dazzling shards exploded in its wake. A first glasship began to fall, and the soldiers around Tuuran jumped and punched the air and howled and cheered. Then the dragon fell and a cascade of lightning flew after it. Another glasship shattered and broke apart and the soldiers let out another cheer. The dragon flared its wings and began to rise again, powering up with a strength Tuuran didn’t remember from any dragon in the realms of his home.

He felt the air tingle. Lightning arced from the nearest glasship but it fizzed into nothing before it reached the eyrie rim. They were coming low, level with the eyrie where the cannon couldn’t bear on them. Black-powder cannon were designed to fire from the ground at glasships attacking from the sky. No one had thought that on an eyrie already flying a mile over the ground that wasn’t so clever. The alchemist had explained this to Tuuran long ago and they’d had a bit of a laugh at the Taiytakei for not being as smart as they liked to think; but the alchemist had also whispered a little secret in Tuuran’s ear that he’d never have thought of himself but was so patently obvious. What goes up must come down. And glasships, unlike dragons, were big and slow.

They had the cannon turned toward the glasships, the barrels cranked for the furthest range they could manage. He’d seen it done with scorpions before and archers did it all the time, arcing up-and-over shots instead of shooting straight. No one had ever hit a dragon with a scorpion doing something so daft, but dragons were fast and agile and glasships weren’t. And there were a lot of them and they were clustered together, concentrating their lightning to drive the dragon away.

He winced as the first cannon fired, as loud as any thunder, then squinted to see whether it made a difference. He hadn’t the first idea, but the glasships were coming straight towards the eyrie, and all he had to do was keep making it rain iron balls somewhere between them and eventually he’d hit something. And he had a lot of iron balls and a crew of a dozen men for each cluster of cannon and a whole pile of conveniently abandoned sleds to carry all the powder and shot.

Sleds.

He didn’t know where the warning came from but it made him suddenly look back behind him, away from the glasships.

Liang ran out into the hatchery, hugging the eyrie wall, eyes darting everywhere for the next thing that would try to kill her. Sleds shot overhead and lightning rained from the sky. The hatchling dragons screamed and burned and lashed their tails and tore apart any who came near the cannon. A killer appeared and slashed, severing a hatchling’s wing as he burned in the dragon’s fire. Out over the rim and beyond the wall, soldiers on sleds swarmed around the black-powder cannon. The air fizzed and flashed with thunder as the Taiytakei swung their ashgars and slaughtered each other. Dozens of men fell, and then a spark must have set off some powder and one of the cannon exploded. Liang reeled. Over the roar of the wind and the lightning, the detonation rang in her ears. Debris – irons balls, bits of cannon, shards of mangled gold-glass, limbs and broken bodies – fizzed across the eyrie and showered over the far side of the dragon yard and the rim beyond. The Taiytakei around the cannon were pulverised and the blast picked up and shook every sled within a hundred yards, flinging them through the air, shrugging off riders to crash to the yard or the walls or fall screaming to the all-devouring storm-dark a mile below. More soldiers on sleds swarmed around the other cannon. Hatchlings shrieked and tore them down.

Liang kept as far away as she could. She scurried to the closest set of steps, well away from any of the cannon clusters on the rim. The crippled hatchling turned its head to look at her, more curious than anything, as if trying to understand what she was doing. Liang climbed to the top of the wall. She slipped and slid down
the outside and then she was on the rim. The cannon here were already ruined, destroyed in the Vespinese attack weeks ago when Tsen had vanished. It was almost quiet here except for the wind. There was one other thing out on this side though.

Liang looked up at the glasship floating overhead, one of the five now keeping the eyrie aloft.

A sled shot past Tuuran’s head as he dived around the bulk of the cannon. Lightning cracked and sparked along the barrel. Another sled whizzed past. The soldier on it levelled his wand and then vanished, torn off and thrown away by a furious hatchling. It was all wrong, fighting
with
a dragon and not against it. Then again it was all wrong fighting men on flying glass sleds who threw lightning, especially when he didn’t have any of their nice fancy armour. A solid brigandine had done him fine in Dhar Thosis, but now he was buggered.

He cringed behind his gold-glass shield. Lightning slammed into it, dazzling him. He picked up a stone, ready to throw it, but the sled had shot off over the dragon yard and now another raced overhead. The soldier on the back swung his ashgar and sent one of Tuuran’s sword-slaves flying. The Taiytakei had wands, armour and their sleds. Tuuran’s soldiers had sleds too, but the Vespinese Taiytakei were practised with them, and knew how to fly, and that made all the difference.

The lightning from the glasships was getting closer. They were coming in range. Another minute or so and they’d start hitting the eyrie rim. Another minute after that and they’d reach the cannon and then . . . well, never mind then. Had to last that long first.

‘Keep firing the cannon!’ he screamed, not that anyone could hear him over the roar of the wind and the cacophony of screams and dragon shrieks and thunderclaps. Four bolts hit a hatchling all at once. It crashed out of the air and smashed into the rim, rolled and jumped up and shook itself and was back in the air at once, mad with fury, but for a moment the Taiytakei had him and his men at their mercy . . .

A thunderous explosion shook the eyrie. He felt it through his feet a moment before he heard it and then a thumping wall of air hammered into him, staggering him, almost knocking him down.
Pieces of stone and flying metal fizzed overhead. Something hit his shield hard enough to crack it, almost knocking it out of his hand. He saw a plume of bright fire, smoke trails arcing away before they were torn apart by the buffeting wind. Men and sleds tumbled and fell all around him. A Taiytakei landed heavily in front of him and groaned, dazed. Tuuran brought his axe down before the man could get up. Two cannons were still firing but his own sword-slaves were too busy fighting for their lives to tip bags of powder and iron balls into the barrels. He saw one on a sled turn and flee and then another, and he couldn’t say he blamed them for it, and then one of the hatchlings shot out from the eyrie and tore them both to pieces. ‘Our side!’ Tuuran screamed, not that the dragon could hear, but he was sure it knew exactly what it was doing. They had no mercy, no fear, no remorse, and certainly no kindness.

He cowered behind his shield as another barrage of lightning flew at him. He was right next to the powder store. Deliberate choice, but now the Taiytakei knew what they had to do and they were firing at him again and again, and all he could do was hide behind the shield and wait for a spark and . . .

Shadow engulfed him. The red-gold dragon swooped and shot over the top of his cannon as it sped back towards the glasships. The wind of its wings tumbled sleds, tossed riders into the air and scattered them to the stone below, Taiytakei and his own sword-slaves alike. One sled smashed into the cannon. Tuuran looked about. Half his men were dead. The rest were running. He was on his own. He picked up the broken sled, thought for a bit about propping it over the powder store and then reckoned that was pointless given there wasn’t anyone left to load the cannon anyway. He jumped on it and tried to make it fly but it just sat under his feet and did nothing except make him feel stupid. The hard way then.

On foot he bolted around the rim for the cannon that were still firing.

Liang moulded her bomb until it was wrapped around all of the silver chains that connected the eyrie to the glasship above. Everyone was missing the point. They were fighting over the eyrie but why did it matter? The dragons, Zafir, the sorcerer sitting quietly
in the middle of it all while anarchy and chaos and the end of the world exploded around him . . . no one would ever truly own any of them. They had to go. No eyrie, no more dragons.

She fired her lightning wand at the bomb, reeled from the light and then staggered and fell as a wall of hot air slammed into her. As she lay dazed, she wished she hadn’t fought Tsen so hard for so many glasships to keep them from falling into the storm-dark and cursed Lin Feyn for setting enchantments she couldn’t break.

She picked herself up. The silver chains were severed. Four more to go. She’d stand a little further away for the next lot.

A second cannon exploded. The blast knocked Tuuran off his feet and more of the Taiytakei off their sleds but they still kept coming. There were several on the ground again now and Tuuran kept waiting for Crazy to do something instead of sitting there with his head back, staring with his silver eyes up at the sky, but he didn’t. He just sat, and anyone who went near him simply vanished into black vapour and blew away in the wind.

The rim was still littered with junk and all manner of detritus. Liang spotted a slave hiding, curled up under the ruin of a crane that had once lifted supplies from the desert. The eyrie had never struck her as particularly large, but running around the rim with a bomb in her hands to the second mooring, it felt vast. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d run so fast, or if she’d ever been as terrified as she was now.

She glanced at the approaching glasships. Their lightning was almost at the walls. She couldn’t see the dragon rampaging in their midst but she didn’t dare hope it was dead. Nothing ever seemed enough. Dragon and rider alike, somehow they survived everything.

She reached the second mooring, set off her bomb around the silver chains, stayed long enough to see that all of them were severed and then ran back the way she’d come, flooded with relief to be free of the cursed thing, only to have the great red-gold dragon shoot up from under the rim straight over the top of her, flattening her and almost making her heart stop. There were holes in its wings, charred and ragged. The dragon circled the eyrie once, caused
havoc among the Taiytakei on their sleds, knocked half of them out of the sky with the wind of its passing, and then shrieked and arrowed away. On the far side of the rim another detonation shook the ground as a second cannon exploded. Liang picked herself up, shaking. Three more moorings and then it would all be over, and it was just a matter of finding a sled that still worked and getting Belli to stand on the back of it with her – never mind his terror of heights – and then not being eaten by a dragon or shot down by lightning as they fled, and maybe, just maybe, escaping all the way from the Godspike to the Dralamut.

It made her laugh sometimes, her own boundless optimism that somehow everything would end not too badly after all. Helped with the shaking though. She ran back around the rim and over the wall to the mouth of the tunnel where she kept her bombs and her sled; and it was only as she reached the entrance to the spiralling passages that she saw the crippled hatchling, waiting for her there.

Tuuran’s cannon were silent. The lightning from the glasships had reached the wall now and they were climbing. He saw a hatchling struck again and again by Taiytakei wands until it crashed into the dragon yard, and then a dozen soldiers struck it with more lightning from the air, over and over, keeping it writhing and helpless while three men on the ground with ashgars clubbed at its head. Another hatchling shot through them, scattering the soldiers on the sleds and tearing two of the Taiytakei from the ground in its talons and hurling them away, but too late. The fallen hatchling didn’t move.

Tuuran half ran and half fell down the steps to the dragon yard. What defence was left was clustered around the last cannon now, two hatchlings and a few dozen soldiers, but they were being swamped, the men cowering behind their shields under a deluge of lightning. The glasships were still falling, one by one, smashed by cannon fire or torn from the sky by the raging dragon, but nowhere near fast enough. Once the eyrie was in range of their cannon, everything would be over. He raced into the middle of the yard.

‘Crazy!’ Somehow the wind was blowing more strongly in his face. ‘Crazy! Do something! Look!’

But Crazy Mad didn’t look up, and as Tuuran tried to get closer, he found the air thicker and thicker until a few feet away from Crazy it was like trying to walk through a wall and he simply couldn’t. ‘Crazy! You’ve got to . . .’