The Splintered Gods (21 page)

The rider-slave gave the very slightest tilt of her head. ‘Take. This. Off.’

‘No.’

‘No?’ The rider-slave smiled and lightly shook her head. ‘Then I will do nothing for you, nor for any other.’

Red Lin Feyn nodded. ‘That is your choice to make. You know there is no good end for you here. We can finish this between us here and now if you wish.’

‘I am a dragon-queen.’

‘I know what you were before you were taken. You have your pride. I acknowledge that matters to you. Hence we do this here, in private.’

The killer vanished and appeared behind Zafir’s chair. Lin Feyn placed two fingers in front of her mouth and gently blew over them. The rider-slave’s eyes went suddenly wide and her jaw dropped. She gasped and both hands flew to the collar as she choked.

‘My killers tell me that when Mai’Choiro Kwen tried to hang
you, your dragon plucked you from the gallows.’ Lin Feyn lowered her fingers. The rider-slave shuddered and gulped a lungful of air. Her eyes were murderous. Red Lin Feyn clasped her hands together and bowed in apology. ‘I do not yet mean you harm, dragon-queen. I will send men with you when you fly, but you have already killed one Elemental Man, haven’t you? So if you do not return, my collar will kill you as the whim takes me. You will both be far away and your dragon will not save you from me. I hope you understand.’

The rider-slave spat. ‘Take this off me or kill me here and now.’

Lin Feyn opened the glasship’s ramp. They were up in the air again now, only a few hundreds of yards from the eyrie but they might as well have been miles. A howling wind blew in between them, whipping at Lin Feyn’s dress and at the rider-slave’s tunic. Lin Feyn went to stand at the ramp and looked down to where the vortex of the storm-dark twisted its slow spiral about the Godspike a mile beneath her. The slave Zafir could get up and push her out. If the killer wasn’t quick enough to stop her she’d fall and the storm-dark would eat her. Or she’d ride it as her Father of Fathers had done.

‘I am daughter of daughters to Feyn Charin himself, first navigator!’ she cried over the wind. ‘Feyn Charin, who entered the storm-dark of the desert and returned, the only man who ever did. He taught a handful of apprentices how to cross the lesser curtains out to sea, and from that one piece of knowledge everything that we are was built. He never returned to this, dragon-queen. The Elemental Men forced him back to the desert in the end but he would not go into the storm-dark. He refused them. By then he was a good part mad, closeted away in the Dralamut, filled with obsessions – the forbidden Rava and the half-gods and sorcerers who once strode the world before they shattered it. But I’ve read his words, dragon-queen, and it all came from what he saw in there; and now here it is, laid before us! I have his blood. I’ve crossed every curtain line of the storm-dark to every realm the sea lords know. I am but halfway through my life but one day I will come here and follow him. I know this as surely as I know the sun will rise each morning.’ She reached out her hand towards Zafir. ‘So jump, dragon-queen, if that’s what you want,’ she cried. ‘Push me, if you think you can. Let
us go together if death is what you so greedily desire, and see how true my Father of Fathers’ blood runs! Shall we?’

She waited. Counted out a minute then counted out another, then turned and looked back. The dragon-queen was now sitting straight in her chair, staring right through her. All full of a great deal of murder and wondering what Lin Feyn truly was. Lin Feyn closed the ramp, stepped calmly back to her seat and sat down.

I thought not
. But she kept that to herself.

‘Take. This. Off.’

‘I will not.’ Lin Feyn shook her head. ‘But if it is because a collar is the sign of a slave, I will change it.’ She rose again and came behind Zafir, placing delicate fingers on her neck. As she touched it, the gold-glass began to flow. ‘There is a story,’ she whispered as she worked, ‘that in the times before the Splintering, each of the old gods put a piece of their essence into an object and gave it to their most holy priests. Over time the objects changed hands but they never changed what they were. The sun put his fire and strength and power into a coat of burning mail. The earth put her immutable will into an Adamantine Spear. The moon filled a circlet with thought and transformation and seduction, but, fickle lord of night as he was, he couldn’t bring himself to bestow his favour on just one and so split it in two and set them loose on the world together. The lady of the stars, not to be outdone, placed power over spirits in a pair of knives whose golden hafts were carved with a thousand eyes.’ The glass oozed up over the rider-slave’s neck and around her chin, across her face. ‘We Taiytakei are forbidden these stories. To us they are fables. Yet an Adamantine Spear? You held one once. A suit of burning mail? The immortal Sun King of the Dominion wears such a coat. Golden circlets of moonlight? The Ice Witch of Aria claims them as her own.’

Red Lin Feyn stepped away. The gold-glass was a circle around the rider-slave’s brow now.

‘Fables. Stories. To me they are simply that, but perhaps you might think otherwise. I cannot and would not give you your spear, but you may have a crown, queen of dragons, if that suits you better. If you try to take it off, or if you displease me, it will still burst your skull.’ She glanced at the ramp, closed now. ‘If you ever prefer the other way, no one will stop you.’

25

A Holy Trust

In a perfect world, Bellepheros thought, he might have moved some of his laboratory outside to the hatchery and done his alchemy while watching over the eggs, but the wind put paid to any notion of that – five minutes in that and only the Great Flame could know what potions he’d end up with! But still it was sometimes an irritation having to go all the way back to his laboratory when he needed a potion in the hatchery, and so he’d taken to keeping a few things closer to hand at the top of the tunnels where the Scales lived. He slipped away there now. The eyrie was crowded with the Vespinese and now the Elemental Men, but the spiral where the Scales lived remained almost empty. The consequences of the Hatchling Disease were there for everyone to see and, for those who’d been here and remembered, Tsen had been ruthless in keeping the plague suppressed. No one wanted to be anywhere near Bellepheros’s dragon-slaves, and that was fine: the eyrie had five separate spirals of tunnels and rooms and the Scales had one entirely to themselves. It gave them far more space than they needed, and what was an alchemist to make in dozens of empty rooms where he might work in the sure knowledge he’d not be disturbed? Mischief, clearly!

He had a sled hidden in one of them, stolen from the Vespinese on the night of their attack. The Scales had found several when they’d been clearing the rubble from the ruined hatchery, and one of them hadn’t ever quite made it back in the chaos of the Elemental Men. In fact he had two sleds, but Perth Oran T’Varr knew about the second one and Bellepheros made sure to keep it out in the open where everyone could see it.

The Scales weren’t the only the reason the Taiytakei avoided this part of the eyrie. It stank of death. There were bodies here. Tsen had started it, feeding the slaves who caught the Hatchling
Disease to Diamond Eye, and somehow it had never quite stopped. Bellepheros hated seeing dragons eating the bodies of the dead even though in most eyries in the dragon-realms men had considered it an honour to feed their dead to the dragons. The Taiytakei saw things differently, but Perth Oran T’Varr was of a practical disposition – he was a t’varr after all – and considered any slaves who had died in the crossfire of the fighting nothing more than useful meat. So, what with one thing and another, Bellepheros had ended up with a larder of dead men. He’d had the Scales gut them so they didn’t rot and explode, and Li had months ago placed some sort of enchantment on a couple of the rooms to keep them cold, but the smell had gradually come anyway. It lingered.

Bellepheros went to them now, his larder of the dead, because it was the one place he was sure to be left alone. He shivered and blew on his fingers. The corpses hung from hooks through their wrists, a gaping flap of skin and pasty flesh across their abdomens where their stomachs and intestines had been removed and emptied and replaced again as knotted sacs full of the potions he made to dull the hatchlings. It was a grisly gruesome little room and he hated that it even existed, but after the escaped hatchling had burned his laboratory and destroyed almost all his potions, he’d been glad of his little larder. If nothing else, the rogue dragon had taught him to keep his most precious things scattered in different places.

He pushed through the hanging bodies. Another corpse lay across the floor behind them, one that hadn’t been gutted yet, the slave who’d poisoned Li and had tried to kill her Holiness. He stared at the man a while, as he did every time he came here, then turned away. Everyone knew the corpses hanging here had potions for the dragons inside them, but nowadays he kept other things here too. He took what he’d come for out of the open belly of a slave who’d once been one of Tsen’s cooks. He’d been a good cook and had liked his food so there was plenty of space inside him. He’d become Bellepheros’s favourite place to hide things.

The thought made him shudder. He had a favourite corpse now?

He put a knotted half-dried bladder in his shoulder bag and hurried out, through the hatchery and across the dragon yard to the spiral of tunnels where he and Li had their studies and their
workshop and laboratory. Now was a fine time for what he had in mind. Perth Oran T’Varr had already gone below, doubtless off to shout at the lesser t’varrs who served him, who could shout in turn at their kwens, who would then bawl at their men to go and do something about feeding the hatchlings. Li was still sleeping off the poison. The killers would be busy. Her Holiness . . . He looked up. The gondola had lifted and drifted, out past the rim.

Ah well. Her Holiness and a sorceress. Let them sort it out between them. Kept them both out of his way. After what he’d seen, he couldn’t wait any more.

The iron door to his study was closed. The Elemental Men had insisted on putting a guard outside but the iron door was why he’d kept Li here in the first place. That and it was easier than trying to move her. She was in his bed and he was camped in his laboratory.

‘Anyone come by?’ The guard shook his head. Bellepheros bent and inspected a corner of the door where he’d wedged a piece of leaf against the frame. ‘Then you might as well come in.’ They’d
said
they were putting a guard on Li, but he hadn’t had a single moment to work in peace since she’d been poisoned. Eyes, always eyes watching him. He had a bad feeling that it was about to get a lot, lot worse, and for a moment, inside the sanctuary of his study, everything he’d just seen suddenly hit him all at once. He stood in the middle of the room, then bent double, gasping for breath. He felt sick. The woman was a sorceress! When he’d tried to speak through the web of silence she’d wrought, he’d felt his blood curdle in his veins.

No, he couldn’t be sick. He just needed to do this now. Quickly.

The guard was frowning. ‘You all right?’

‘The Arbiter has come.’ That shut him up. Bellepheros shook himself.
No time for trembling now, old man. Later . . .
Li was on the bed where he’d left her, wrapped in all the blankets he could find. He put a hand on her brow. As far as the watching guard could tell, that was all he ever did, check on her and force a little water into her now and then – he and the guard both took a good swig of it before they fed any to Li – but what he’d forced into Li when he’d found her dying on his floor hadn’t been a potion but his blood, pure and strong, and there were consequences to doing a thing like that. The first and most important consequence was that
Li wasn’t dead, but there were others. He closed his eyes, reached into his own blood and through it across the bridge he’d made to Chay-Liang. Blood-magic. The terrible temptation every alchemist had to face. He had a hold on her now whether he wanted it or not. He could, if he chose, compel her to his will. He could read her feelings and perhaps even her thoughts. He could make her a slave far more than she’d ever made one of him. Not that he wanted to. Not that the thought didn’t appal him. But he could.

The poison in her veins was a villainous one and Li was still fighting off its last claws. Another few hours, maybe another day. He straightened. ‘Not long now. If she wakes and I’m not here then you must send someone to find me. Do it straight away. She’ll be thirsty. Give her water.’

The Taiytakei smiled. He looked relieved – happy even – but then Bellepheros thought he caught a hint of something else. Something anxious and then a glance at the water jug.

‘I’ll make sure it’s pure,’ Bellepheros said. Not that he had any reason to suspect this particular Taiytakei of anything, but still . . . He forced a smile. ‘I have a couple of chores to see to. Actually, no, I can give her something else that might help. Would you mind getting me the decanter of wine from the desk in my laboratory?’ He took the bladder from the dead cook out of his bag and poked a tiny hole into it with a scalpel, then squeezed the goo inside into a small clay bowl. It stank, the most noxious smell imaginable. The Taiytakei, who’d come to peer over his shoulder, recoiled.

‘Unholy Xibaiya, alchemist! What
is
that?’

Telling him it was the rotting liquefied brain matter of someone who’d once cooked food for them both didn’t seem politic. ‘It has a particular name but basically it’s fermented dragon shit,’ he lied, then glanced back and grinned. The soldier had retreated to the door. ‘You get used to the smell.’

‘You do?’

Not really.
Bellepheros coughed and made a face. ‘Well . . .’ Out of sight he pricked the heel of his hand with the scalpel and dripped three drops of his own blood into the bowl. ‘Could you get the wine?’ When the Taiytakei didn’t move, Bellepheros let his shoulders slump and gave a little sigh. ‘Right.’ Yes, yes, the whole tiresome matter of never having a moment alone with Li. Not that
he wanted one, but having someone watch everything he did in his own study, he could have done without
that
. He sprinkled a little powdered obsidian into the bowl, dripped in three drops of moonshade and a half a dozen of clove oil. The clove oil didn’t actually do anything useful, but he liked the smell of it a whole lot better and it went some way to mask the stink of rotting brain. ‘I’ll take this to the laboratory and then it can go to the hatchery in a bit. It can stink out there instead of in here.’ He forced a smile for the watching guard and stirred the pot until everything was mixed together nicely. ‘Right. Wine.’ He walked out with his pot. The soldier didn’t see the scalpel he took with him, hidden up his sleeve.

He came back without his stinking pot and carrying a silver tray which he set down on the desk. He poured a little wine onto a piece of clean cloth, took the cloth to Li’s bed, about to squeeze a little into her mouth, and then stopped and looked at the Taiytakei soldier. The soldier looked back. There were two glasses on the tray. ‘A little wine will help her recovery –’ Bellepheros grinned ‘– but perhaps we should do as we do with her water?’ He poured a little into each cup and let the soldier choose which one to drink. They raised their glasses to each other. The soldier grinned too as he knocked it back.

‘This from old Tsen T’Varr’s stock, is it?’

Bellepheros shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t drink much, to be honest. The lady Chay-Liang found it . . .’

There were several things he might have said or done next but he didn’t do any of them because the iron door was still open and now two women in white tunics were standing there, looking nervously inside. Bellepheros sighed. Zafir’s slaves. ‘What does she want now?’

‘Master alchemist.’ Myst and Onyx both bowed as though they didn’t know what to make of him. He was a slave too, so no better than they were, but then so was their mistress, who almost seemed to run the eyrie sometimes, and Bellepheros was the one person – now that Tsen was gone – that she treated with anything other than contempt. ‘Master alchemist, can you come please? Our mistress asks.’

‘Tell her to come here,’ he snapped. ‘I’m in the middle of something.’

They bobbed and bowed and shuffled their feet and didn’t go away. ‘Lord alchemist, our mistress will not come. But she . . . asks kindly for you to attend her. And we beg you, both of us. Please.’

Bellepheros looked at them hard. Zafir sent them now and then with petty errands and asked him odd little questions and sometimes demanded his presence. So far he’d obliged her. This time . . . this time he was half-minded to refuse and send them away, but something about them was off. They were worried. They were also the only two people in the eyrie who’d do anything except breathe a great sigh of relief when the Elemental Men finally hanged Zafir, but for the time being he had good reasons to want that day to be a little way away. ‘I don’t suppose she wants to start hunting the hatchling that burned my laboratory, does she?’

‘We are to tell you that she will consider it.’

Bellepheros glanced at Li, at the soldier and at the wine. He took a deep breath. The air stank of cloves and something rotten, but all that could wait a little. ‘Very well.’ He shrugged an apology at the soldier. ‘I won’t be long. Keep her safe and let no one enter until I get back.’

The soldier followed him out and closed the door and resumed his post. Bellepheros didn’t bother with the leaf this time –
this
time he was quite sure that the soldier would keep Li safe. He followed Myst and Onyx out into the wind and up to the wall where Diamond Eye perched, staring at the Godspike. Zafir lay on the dragon’s back, basking in the sun. As Bellepheros approached, she beckoned him to climb and join her. Bellepheros rolled his eyes. Yes, he understood why she wanted him up there, because the Elemental Men couldn’t come so close to a dragon without turning back into flesh and bone and so Diamond Eye’s back was the safest place for them to talk without being overheard. But really? The ladder flapped and swung in the wind. Heights and open space both made him sick with anxiety, and he was an old man and his knees hated climbing anything at all, even gentle steps. Besides, it wasn’t right for an alchemist to sit on the back of a dragon. They did it when they had to but it wasn’t how the world was supposed to work. Dragons and alchemists, oil and water.

‘Holiness . . .’ She probably couldn’t even hear him from up there over the wind, and even if she could it wouldn’t make any
difference. He took a deep breath and steeled himself. She’d left space for him to sit in front of her as always, but this time, as soon as he was up, she reached around him and pulled him tight up against her and locked her arms around his waist.

‘Holiness . . .?’

‘Didn’t you ever want to fly, alchemist?’

She was already buckled into her harness. He saw it coming a moment before it happened, let out a pained little gasp and closed his eyes with a volley of silent oaths, and then Diamond Eye flared his wings and jumped and he was tipping sideways and the only things stopping him from falling were Zafir’s arms wrapped around him. The huge vast emptiness suddenly all around him made him want to scream. He screwed his eyes tight shut and prayed he wouldn’t be sick. Couldn’t look. Couldn’t. And there was nothing to stop him falling except those arms which could let go at any moment . . .

Zafir pulled him straight again. He knew they hadn’t banked, knew that Diamond Eye was simply gliding straight over the maelstrom of the storm-dark far below them, but his tongue had swollen so much it seemed to fill his mouth, his heart was
thump-thump-thump
against his ribs as if trying to break free, and much of his insides desperately wanted to escape by whatever way they could. Mustering all the will he could find, he righted himself and risked a look, then quickly closed his eyes again. ‘Holiness?’ He couldn’t manage any more than that.