The Splintered Gods (16 page)

18

Warlocks and Other Things Best Forgotten

At night the dragon Silence watched. Through the day it flew along the coast for hundreds of miles. It found the edge of the desert where it blurred into smudges of green that grew and then sprawled into a thick jungle of emerald trees laced through with silver ribbons of water. It found clouds and lush hills that drew the rain out of them before they could reach the desert beyond. All these things but no cities of the little ones.

It hunted and returned, perched on a rock in the night and listened to the thoughts and memories of the little one who carried the splinter of the Black Moon. It poked a little and prodded, but only with the lightest touch. Before the sun rose it flew away, out to sea until it found another curtain of the storm-dark, stretched out, endless to the eye. It dived beneath the water, down until it reached the bottom, and in the depths there purple lightning flashed, dim and distant and full of sullen purpose, lighting the black water. There were no fish, no crawling things on many legs scuttling in the darkness, no glow-eyed jelly creatures. Life knew better than to be close to the Nothing. The dragon Silence rose again and burst into the air, long and sharp and hard in glittering spray, and returned to seek the little ones once more. It drew out their thoughts and divined their destination – the Queverra – and when the dragon sought to see this place in their memories, it saw a scar across the earth, the bottomless chasm it had crossed some days before.

It found the Crowntaker once more. It dug into his thoughts, peeling the layers of his life like an onion.

‘Did I ever tell you about Utthen of Merizikat?’ Berren walked with his hands tied to a pole. Five other slaves had their hands tied to the same pole in front of him and three more followed behind. Tuuran was on another pole beside him. Their feet were tied too,
with ropes loose enough for walking but too short to run.

‘I’m not listening to you.’ Tuuran made a big show of looking somewhere else.

‘Utthen of Merizikat! Name not mean anything?’ They walked like that, night after night over hard-baked earth, dry and dusty. Tufts of hostile spiny grass and stunted thorn bushes ambushed them in the twilight now and then, tearing at legs and feet.

‘I think I am hearing some noises. Might it be a large dangerous animal? I hope so – then it might
eat
someone.’

‘Merizikat. In the Dominion. They have some catacombs there. They hang people under the ground. The worst sorts. They take them from all across the provinces. Thousands of miles some of them come. They hang them underground and then leave their bodies in the catacombs so their souls can never reach the sun.’ They walked in the mornings as the sun rose and the heat of the day began to build, rested and hid in what shade they could find from midday until late in the afternoon, then walked again until long after dark and then slept, the same every day.

‘Or is that noise the wind? Come to think of it, it
does
sound like a lot of hot air.’

‘Utthen of Merizikat. Pretended to be a necromancer. Came from somewhere in the far south. Claimed he’d murdered more than a hundred souls. Entire villages. So they locked him up and took him a thousand miles to be hanged in Merizikat. But it turned out he wasn’t a necromancer at all. He just had business there and was too tight to pay for passage.’ Berren’s legs ached. He was hungry and tired and thirsty but most of all he was numb inside, as though all the colour had drained out of him and every memory was a washed-out grey. Fasha stayed, a slowly dimming pain, the memory of her face blurring, the sharpness of remembered feeling leaching out every day.

‘Did they hang him anyway?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Bit of a crap story then.’

Tuuran went back to ignoring him. The slavers made their next midday camp in the lee of a great cliff. They propped up shelters and walked among their captives, giving each a meagre cup of water and a wedge of dry stale bread. Berren dozed, woken again
when it was time to go by sharp shouts and prodding feet. The slaves pulled wearily at each other, all having to get up at once along the pole that bound them together, tripping over the ropes around their feet. Some were close to the end of their endurance. Berren had no idea what would happen when the first one fell. It wouldn’t be him. That was all that mattered.

They trudged on, the slavers exhorting them to a faster pace with threats and now and then the crack of a whip. They followed the base of a cliff, the sun behind them now as they headed ever eastward. The world around Berren narrowed to the heat on his back, the pain across his shoulders from the wooden pole, the aches in his legs and his feet and the cracked-dry earth in front of him where each next step would fall. The reluctant sun sank to the horizon, darkness fell and a full moon rose. They passed the cliff and headed into open ground and a breeze swept across from the north. A light puff of wind but delicious nevertheless.

The dead of Merizikat. Stupid story, although that reminded him of even more stupid stories from the galley back when he’d been a slave. Stories of how the dead men lying in the catacombs had started getting up and walking again these last few years. And that was simply ridiculous, or so he’d thought until he’d gone back to his old home of Deephaven and found the streets he used to know had become a necropolis, crawling with the walking talking bastard dead. He shuddered at the memory. With their eyes stitched shut – what was that about?

Deephaven and the dead. Made him think of warlocks, of Saffran and Vallas and Skyrie; out of nowhere they bloomed inside his thoughts, unexpected, unwanted and unwelcome. Skyrie had stopped fighting him years ago. The warlock’s memories were dead things, passive and still, but they remained. Memories of the memories of another man, now escaped somehow from the closets in which he’d put them. He remembered walking into the Pit under the castle of Tethis, knowing what Vallas Kuy meant to do. He remembered being Berren on a field a few miles away with sigils scribed in blood pressed to his chest in the heat of battle. He remembered the horror as he was ripped out of himself and Skyrie’s horror as they merged, for that wasn’t how Vallas had meant it to be.

He’d never stopped to think much about this other man Skyrie. All that had counted back then was that they were trapped together, that only one of them could win and that it had to be him. Skyrie had been a warlock, a minion to the soap maker. Little else. It was all that mattered.

But no, there had to be more.

No. Nothing that mattered.

Remember it anyway.

A farmer then. A poor village boy from somewhere. Berren had never heard the name of the place, only knew that it was on the edge of a lake beside a swamp, surrounded by reed beds. Didn’t even know what kingdom. He’d had a sister. Men had come to his village. Soldiers on horses. Raiders who took whatever caught their eye. One year they came twice and something bad had happened and . . .

He could see the scar on his leg. Cut to the bone across his thigh, it was a savage wound. The skin had closed in time, twisted and warped and folded but healed. The leg worked well enough now.

The second time they came, they killed every man, woman and child. They burned Skyrie’s village to ash and he was the only one who lived because he’d already crawled out into the reeds to die that night. The leg had gone bad. And yet he hadn’t died after all and he’d come back in the morning and found everything gone. He’d followed the tracks of the soldiers but lost them. Then he met an old man with a half-ruined face, scarred by pox or fire and with one blind milky eye, who claimed he’d seen some soldiers come by not long ago, a villainous-looking lot, and he knew who they were too. The Bloody Judge’s men.

A lie. A lie a lie a lie!

Something about the old man. He’d travelled with Skyrie a little way. Only a few days. The soldiers were long gone by then, beyond his reach, but there were men who would help him, the old man said. Men in Tethis. He should look for the soap maker. And so he did, and told his story and learned everything there was to learn about the wickedness of the Bloody Judge, the mercenary lord who took his band of outlaws up and down the little kingdoms and answered to no one and left a trail of wailing women and fatherless children behind him. The greatest evil north of Kalda, but in
Tethis something would be done. Queen Gelisya meant to bring an end to his reign of terror.

He remembered Vallas, the soap maker. Remembered him both as Skyrie and as Berren the Bloody Judge, years before on a ship and years later, a few days ago when Berren had finally found him in Dhar Thosis and killed him.

Aria, Skyrie, where the Ice Witch keeps him in a gilded cage. He gave you a gift. One that not even she knows.
The warlock’s last words. He had no idea what they meant.

A gift?

He’d never understood.

Saffran Kuy’s last apprentice. The man with one eye.
The man with the half-ruined face.

You ask me who you are, Skyrie, but that’s not the question. The question is what?

A man with a half-ruined face. He’d seen a man like that before. The old man who’d sent him to the soap maker. But somewhere else as well.

Where?

In Skyrie’s memories. The ones that came out in his dreams. He pushed deeper.

Bloodied and broken and crawling to his death in the swamps while the stars above winked out one by one. With a man standing over him in robes the colour of moonlight, his pale face scarred ragged by disease or fire, one blind eye milky white. Fingers that traced symbols over him. Air that split open like swollen flesh. Black shadow that oozed from the gashes left behind.

There was something out of place in Skyrie’s memories. He hadn’t seen it before because he hadn’t looked or cared. But Skyrie had crawled away into a swamp to die with one leg festering and ruined beyond repair and in the morning he’d walked out again.
Walked
out . . .

The wound in his leg. There were marks within the scar, impossibly intricate, silvery lines and whorls like runes. Like the sigils of the warlocks. The man with the one eye . . .

But he’d met the old man with the one eye afterwards, not then. The one who’d told him about the soldiers, who’d sent him to Vallas . . .

Show me!

For a moment Berren stumbled.
Show me?

It fills the hole, you see.
Words Gelisya had spoken to him once. The Dark Queen before that’s what she became.
Like the Black Moon and the Dead Goddess fill the hole in the world. He showed me. You have to keep it closed. Otherwise something will come through. Not yet but one day. Before you both come back for the very last time. You have to keep it closed.
Even with her lips almost touching his ear, her whisper was so quiet he could barely hear her.
He’s making us ready. To let it in when the Ice Witch brings down the Black Moon.

And then Skyrie again, that night in the swamp where everything changed.
What will you give?
the one-eyed stranger had asked.

Anything
, he replied.

And everything?

Everything.

Anything and everything.

The hole was there. For the second time he looked inside and saw that he was not alone. He saw that something looked back.

The Black Moon.

The stranger with the half-ruined face and the milky eye had put it there. Inside Skyrie. Inside him. And he saw too that all along there had been other eyes behind his own, peering with a quiet hunger over his shoulder at every vision and every memory, pushing and nudging and guiding him towards revelation.

The Black Moon saw too.

I see you, little worm.

Destroyer! Who let you loose?

A flicker of a thought that didn’t belong to any of the pieces he carried inside him.
A child of the sun . . .

Crazy Mad muttering to himself wasn’t anything new. Tuuran had mostly stopped listening, but this time he caught the last few words because something had changed. The voice wasn’t Crazy’s any more.

‘A child of the sun.’

Crazy’s eyes burst into brilliant moonlight silver. All of a sudden Tuuran could see everything around him as though it was the middle of the day. He staggered as the other slaves on his pole
lurched and lost their step. Crazy Mad stopped dead. The ropes around him simply ceased to be and the pole over his head was gone too. The slave behind stumbled into the back of him and dissolved into a cloud of black ash. Tuuran stared aghast. No pretending it hadn’t happened, not this time.

A hundred yards off in the scrub among the loose rocks he saw a dragon. A hatchling. In the darkness it had been invisible. Now it was clear for everyone to see, except everyone was staring at Crazy Mad.

‘Dragon!’ Tuuran would have pointed but his hands were tied to the pole. A flash of lightning dazzled him, brighter still than the light pouring out of Crazy Mad’s eyes. The thunderclap made him wince. Crazy staggered. Another lightning bolt hit him and then another, thrown by the slavers with their wands, each one strong enough to kill any man it touched and probably anyone unlucky enough to be standing next to him too. They ought to have hurled Crazy Mad through the air like a leaf in the wind. After the third Crazy didn’t even flinch any more. He stood there, all that silver light pouring out of him, and simply didn’t notice.

The slaves next to Crazy suddenly found themselves free. They bolted, only they weren’t running for freedom, they were running to get away. Everyone was suddenly shouting at once. The slaves bound to Tuuran tried to run too, except the pole and the tethers around their feet made it impossible. One tripped in his haste, lost his balance and fell, and his weight on the pole was enough to bring them all down in a tangled heap of arms and legs. Another pole of slaves was shuffling away as fast as possible; yet another had fallen; the slavers were screaming their heads off and dashing this way and that like crazed geese, bawling at everyone to get down on the ground while everything threw up crazy shadows, bathed in the eerie moonlight glow from Crazy Mad’s eyes.