The Splintered Gods Page 18

  ‘Keen to die are you, slave?’

  ‘No keener than any man, but nor am I afraid of it.’

  ‘Then live, slave whose name is Tuuran. What realm were you born to?’

  ‘The realm where there are dragons.’

  Skinny paused, then dismounted. ‘Some of my men say they saw a dragon a few nights back.’

  ‘So they did.’

  ‘Others say it was a dragon who burned Dhar Thosis.’

  ‘That it was. It had help from a great many men, though I dare say it didn’t need it.’

  ‘What else did you see on the night you saw a dragon, Tuuran who has earned his name?’

  Tuuran eased down onto his haunches. He made a show of putting the stone down and rose again. Letting him have his name probably meant they weren’t planning to kill him, not yet. Probably. ‘I saw the return of the Silver King, who tamed our dragons.’

  ‘And what is this Silver King?’

  ‘A half-god sorcerer. Beyond your understanding or mine. Worse than any dragon, I dare say, or better by far. Depends what he wants. Depends if you’re on the wrong side of him or the right.’

  ‘You serve this man?’

  Tuuran laughed. ‘I serve no man. No man, no monster, no god, no magician, no one but the dragon-queen of my far-off realm.’

  Skinny made a show of looking about him. ‘Well, Tuuran who has earned his name, I see neither dragons nor queens about me. Just a lot of men with sharp spears and hungry bellies. You belong to me now, pale skin. We’ll see about your name.’

  ‘Oh you’ll get a good price for me. Guard me well and keep me shackled, and once I’m sold, spare a moment of pity for the man who thinks he owns me.’ Tuuran shrugged. ‘Or give me my axe and run fast and far. You’re still the first one I’m going to kill.’

  Skinny rolled his eyes. ‘The man who came with you from the city of Dhar Thosis. You know him. He’s this Silver King, this half-god sorcerer is he? Yet he seemed to me just a slave like any other. How is this, slave who might be called Tuuran?’

  Tuuran shrugged. ‘You’d need a man far less ignorant than I am to answer that. The dragon brought it out of him, of that much I’m sure. Why? Given you some trouble, has he?’ Although after what he’d seen, if Crazy had come this way then it was something of a surprise there was anything here but ash.

  ‘He came this way, slave. He paid no heed to anything around him but went into the Queverra. He can stay down there for all I care.’ Skinny shook his head and climbed back onto his horse. ‘Keep this one close. Watch him. I’ll have fingers and heads from the lot of you if you let him escape. But I don’t want him hurt.’ He grinned at Tuuran. ‘At least not yet, although if his eyes blaze silver like the other then you should either run or throw him into the abyss, I’m not sure which. And give some thought, slave who might be called Tuuran, to where you are. No water, no food, just desert and sun and snakes and scorpions for a hundred miles.’

  ‘And a dragon.’ Tuuran laughed back at him. ‘You might want to keep a piece of your mind on that. They get very hungry, you know.’

  The slavers turned and left, and when it came to it, Tuuran held up his arms and let them tie him back to his pole and lead him through the camp and push him into a pen with the rest. Skinny had a point about there being nowhere to run, and Tuuran had long ago settled on the notion that alive was better than dead. Chances would come, the way chances always did for a patient man. So he took his water when they brought it and made no fuss and ate his food, every last drab scrap of it, and settled back and closed his eyes to sleep. Crazy was somewhere near here, was he? Maybe he wouldn’t punch the stupid bugger’s lights out for leaving him then. Not if he came back and did something about it.

  Crazy Mad. Maybe thinking about him as he closed his eyes was why he had Crazy in his dreams. Crazy and his wild stories of being the Bloody Judge, of being ripped out of one body and tossed into another by some mad warlock. In his dreams he saw the sorcerer they’d killed in Dhar Thosis, the one he’d seen on the galley when Tuuran had thrown Crazy into the sea to hide him.

  Hide him?

  Because the warlocks were looking for him, that was why. It had been obvious. And because of the tattoos they’d had in the same strange writing he’d seen on the pillar in Vespinarr when the Elemental Man they’d called the Watcher had taken him from Baros Tsen’s eyrie to send him back to sea. Tuuran had never quite understood why the Elemental Man had been so interested in Crazy, only that he was, and that Tuuran was supposed to find him again and watch him, and that doing so was supposed to earn him his freedom, though a fat lot of use that looked like it would be now. But still, right there was reason enough to make his way back to the dragon of Dhar Thosis. That and the dragon-queen who rode it.

  He felt a strange surge of something there. A flash of interest that seemed out of place, quickly gone.

  Why?

  In Vespinarr the Watcher had taken him to an ancient obelisk whose name he’d never bothered to remember. Something to do with Crazy Mad’s scars, if that’s what they were. The marks on his leg. The obelisk had weird writing on it. He only vaguely remembered what it looked like now, but he recalled how the writing and the marks on Crazy’s leg and the tattoos on the back of the assassin who’d ripped out a piece of the alchemist’s throat up on the eyrie were all alike. Mostly, though, what he remembered was how they were the same as some of the old writing he’d seen in the dragon-lands. In the dragon-queen’s palace inside the Pinnacles. A world away but the marks had been the same, sigil for sigil for sigil . . .

  He was trying to remember. Trying so hard that it woke him up. He sat and rubbed his eyes, fuddled for a moment by sleep. The Watcher had sent him to find Crazy. To watch him and watch for the warlocks. The grey dead men, he called them.

  Why?

  He didn’t know. Never had.

  The sigils had been like the tattoos on the assassin who’d tried to kill Bellepheros.

  He’d gone. Willingly. Glad to be away from the alchemist and what he was doing. Glad to be going back to sea. Glad to see Crazy Mad again.

  What did they want?

  What of the knife?

  What is he?

  Who were they?

  Where is this Watcher?

  And then the last thing Crazy Mad had said, after his eyes had become his own again. The dragon was in my head. Taking my memories. It showed me everything . . .

  Tuuran sat bolt upright and hissed, awake as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice in his face. The dragon was back. It was right here and rifling through his head like he was some dusty old book. ‘You little shit! Where are you?’

  There, out in the darkness, hardly visible at all, a shape of shadows in the desert night. But there nevertheless, its eyes agleam in the moonlight, not far from the cage where Tuuran sat and staring right back at him. The dragon he’d seen on the night Crazy Mad had gone crazy again. It was a hatchling barely out of its egg, not that that made it any less deadly to a man trapped in a cage with no axe and no dragon-scale to shield himself. Tuuran bared his teeth. Slowly he stood up, kicking the snoring slaves around him. ‘Come on then. You know what I am.’

  I know. And I am hungry, Tuuran.

  For a moment he caught a flash of something. Of being somewhere else. Of being the dragon in the mind of some other. I will think of you as I kill him, little one.

  Then came the fire.

  21

  In the Blood

  ‘The whole eyrie in quarantine and we’re not allowed to even move.’ Li was in one of her huffs again. ‘They might as well drop us into the storm-dark, dragon and all. It’s three hundred miles of desert to the nearest city and that happens to be Dhar Thosis, so that’s no use. Who’s going to bring everything we need to survive out here?’ They were in the alchemist’s study, since his laboratory was still a charred mess from when the hatchling had escaped. Li’s workshop looked, if anything, even worse. Not that a dragon had run around smashing everything and setting fire to i
t, that was just the way her workshop was all the time.

  Bellepheros mumbled into his cup and nodded agreeably. He had no idea, but then he never had. He was merely a slave and that sort of thing was someone else’s problem. ‘I’m just glad you didn’t get hurt in all that fighting. It’s not your trouble, Li.’ When it came to troubles he had enough of his own, the first being to persuade Zafir to take Diamond Eye hunting after the missing hatchling. He picked up a glass retort on his desk and stroked it absently. It was beautiful work, Li’s own.

  ‘Do you think she’d do it?’

  ‘Who?’ He frowned at the retort. Almost a shame to use it. They never got really clean again, not really clean.

  ‘Charin’s sails, Belli, you haven’t been listening!’ Li rolled her eyes and threw back her head. ‘Your precious dragon-riding slave who ought to hang. The one thing Mai’Choiro Kwen got right. Would she do it?’

  ‘Do what?’ Bellepheros put the retort back onto the desk and picked up his cup of qaffeh instead. ‘Li, my queen desires her freedom. If you want something of her, why don’t you ask her?’

  ‘Because she hates me!’

  ‘Because you hate her.’

  ‘And with good reason!’

  Bellepheros laughed. ‘I don’t mean this personally, Li, for you’re far better than any of the dragon-lords I used to know, but her Holiness Zafir was a queen and your people made her into a slave. Does her resentment truly surprise you?’ Thing was, with Li, it seemed that it did. You’re a slave. You might as well get used to it, and actually it’s not so bad if you keep your head down and do as you’re asked. You should be grateful for what we give you. ‘It’s different for me. I was always a slave to the dragons. I took that path willingly and knowing what it was. And even I begrudge what your people took from me. I begrudge the manner of it. The sense of entitlement and privilege, the quiet assumption that your way and your lives and your culture are somehow better. You take for granted many things you should question. Not all your achievements are gifts to be shared and received with fawning gratitude.’

  Li snorted and poked at his cup. ‘Tell me that the next time I put some Bolo in front of you.’ He supposed she meant it as a joke, and maybe when it came to Bolo she had a point, but he didn’t smile.

  ‘Her Holiness doesn’t drink qaffeh, and if she eats Bolo then she does it very discreetly.’

  ‘The truth! I need her to tell them what Mai’Choiro said, Belli. Just the truth. Is that so hard?’

  ‘Do you think she doesn’t understand?’ Bellepheros laughed and drained his cup and stood up. ‘She was born to these games, Li. She has something that others want and she’ll extract the best price she can before she gives it up. She probably knows perfectly well that it’s the only thing keeping her alive. Can you blame her for clinging to it? They want to kill her. You want to kill her. You seem to want that very much.’

  Li glared at the table. ‘Can’t see many who would blame me for that, given what she’s done.’

  ‘Never mind the rights and wrongs. She’s not stupid.’

  ‘Even you wanted to kill her once.’

  A silence hung between them. Bellepheros opened his mouth and then closed it again, trying to frame an answer, to tell her that yes, he had, and how grateful he was that she’d stopped him, but that didn’t change things.

  ‘I’m sorry, Belli. That was . . .’ Li looked at him with her big brown eyes as if struggling for words until a slave knocked on the study door. She jumped up like a jack-in-the-box and opened it and an old Taiytakei shuffled in carrying a silver tray and a crystal bottle. He looked around for a table or a bench with some space on it, didn’t find one, and then looked helpless until Bellepheros took some books off his desk and put them on the floor. The slave set down the tray. He bowed deeply. ‘Apple wine from Baros Tsen T’Varr’s cellar. The lady Kalaiya wishes to share it with those who were loyal before the . . .’ he coughed and looked over his shoulder ‘. . . before the murdering Vespinese bastards drink it all.’ As he backed away and Li laughed, Bellepheros stole a look at her. She had a lovely laugh and a lovely smile. Honest and unforced.

  ‘I have work,’ he said when the slave had gone. ‘But I’ll talk to her. Her freedom for the truth and the hatchling hunted down. How can you do it though? They’ll never let her go. Never.’

  ‘Ask her anyway. I was thinking perhaps, if we have to, we should all go. You and me and her, running away on the back of her dragon.’ Li snorted derisively. ‘She flies it; you feed it potions; I’ll find us a way to cross the storm-dark.’

  Bellepheros roared with laughter. ‘How far before you push her off? Do we get to cross the eyrie wall?’

  ‘Not before she pushes me off, I suspect.’

  ‘A dragon-queen, an irritable old alchemist and a cranky enchantress flying away together on the back of a furious dragon?’ Bellepheros laughed again, shaking his head. ‘What are you thinking, Li?’ Somewhere under there she really meant it though, some little part of her anyway, and that wasn’t the Li he knew. She was troubled then, and deeper than she let on.

  Li picked up the bottle and peered at the amber wine inside. ‘I hear she roams hundreds of miles. Hours every day, taking the dragon to feed while two Elemental Men always watch her. I’m thinking that I don’t understand why they let her live. And I’m certainly thinking that I don’t see what difference it would make or why it should bother them if she hunts for your hatchling while she flies.’

  ‘We shall see, eh?’ Bellepheros clucked and left Li there in his study and walked up through the white stone tunnels. They glowed bright today, like the sunlight outside but never so dazzling. Zafir found the tunnels cramped and small and oppressive but they’d never struck him that way; but maybe that was just him being used to living under the ground. Alchemists spent a lot of time in caves because caves were safe from dragons. He’d grown used to it over the years and had never much liked the vast open spaces of the deserts and the plains, even back in his old realms and certainly not here. The craggy moors were easy enough, and forests, and the City of Dragons at the foot of the Purple Spur was manageable too. Mountains, they were best of all. As long as he was at the bottom of them and not at the top. Heights . . . He shuddered. Heights were worse than open space. Far worse.

  Out in the dragon yard the wind caught his robe and whipped the hem around his feet. He was heartily sick of this blasted wind. It had a caprice to it that lifted up tunics and whipped a cloak over a man’s head when he least expected it, but underneath lurked a more sinister malevolence that blistered skin and flayed the edges of everything. It was a relentless grind, leaching the strength out of them all, battering and wearing him down until he was too tired to think. The only one who seemed not to care was Zafir, but then a rider was more used to wind.

  Diamond Eye was perched on the far wall, staring at the Godspike as ever. Bellepheros sighed. Down in the yard, surrounded by walls, he could pretend he was on the ground, nestled close to the earth. Once he climbed up . . . He shuddered as he thought of being on the top of the wall, the wind rattling and shaking him, looking out and seeing yet again where they truly were, miles above the ground with a huge black storm circling beneath them, dark purple lightning flashing in its depths. Flame! The storm was so wide you couldn’t even see the ground, even though the desert air was bright and clear.

  Heights. He’d never done well with heights. Never had and never would though he hadn’t the first idea why. A healthy fear of falling? Well yes, but . . . He shuddered, remembering the day he’d first met Li and she’d flown him off through the air on a tiny disc of glass. He’d been sick. He’d nearly fainted and fallen off. Probably would have done if the Adamantine Man Tuuran hadn’t been there to catch him. And then none of this would have happened.

  The thought caught him mid-stride. He faltered. Best not to go there. Just best not to. Instead, he took a breath and forced himself to look up at the wall. Zafir would be there somewhere, up next to Diamond Eye in the gold-glass
shelter Li had made. He couldn’t see her now but she’d barely left the dragon’s side since the Vespinese had tried to hang her, and the dragon wouldn’t let anyone near except him and the two slave girls who still devotedly served her – they’d even made their own little shelter outside the walls on the rim. No one else dared venture near Diamond Eye’s perch.

  He wandered across to the hatchery, inspecting the hatchlings and exchanging a few words with the Scales. He checked under the chain nets where the eggs were kept. Any excuse. Maybe, if he was lucky, one of the eggs would hatch – that would give him a reason not to go up onto the wall – but the eggs were all resolutely quiet. With a sigh he wandered back and forced his feet to turn the rest of him to the looming bulk of the dragon. Damned monster cast a shadow right across the eyrie this late in the day.

  Someone was ahead of him, he saw, climbing up the steps in the wall. He wondered who it could be. A Taiytakei in the white tunic of a slave, but that was common enough.

  Liang looked at the bottle on Belli’s desk and smiled. She’d made that. A simple piece of glasswork long since drained of any enchantment. Early work, but her work nevertheless. Maybe Kalaiya remembered and had sent it deliberately, a little message along with Baros Tsen’s apple wine. In her spare moments Liang felt for her. Everything she was had been founded on Tsen, and now he was gone and she was nothing, just a bed-slave like any other, wrinkled at the edges and unlikely to find any great favour. She’d fallen from the top of a mountain into a deep dark hole and all in a matter of days. There were probably plenty of slaves who’d spent years envying her and tittered at her fall, but she deserved better than that. They’d had a strange thing, Kalaiya and Tsen. She’d actually liked him.

  I’ll buy her, Liang decided. She has half a lifetime left. Let her live it in peace.

  She poured herself a glass. Maybe they could take Kalaiya with them. She wasn’t sure what use the slave might be but she probably knew more of Tsen’s secrets than anyone except Tsen himself, and Tsen probably had more secrets than there were grains of sand in the desert. If there were hidden caches of treasure, secret alliances, debts unpaid, favours, then Kalaiya might know them. Things like that were currency for a man like Tsen, things you couldn’t put your finger on, ethereal and traceless.