The Splintered Gods (27 page)

31

A Half-Remembered Place

For the second time Baros Tsen T’Varr opened his eyes and wondered where he was. This time he quickly screwed them shut again. The wind had stopped. The air was still and the sky was as bright as the sun. The sled under his back was hard and uncomfortable. He shifted, trying to stretch himself out, and realised he could move and that the rope was gone. He rolled onto his back, sat up and tried that eye-opening thing again. It didn’t much help. Everywhere he looked, all he saw were rolling waves of dazzling sand. He was out in the open in the middle of the desert in the middle of the morning with no shelter and, as far as he could tell, no water.

‘Come on. Get up.’ Sivan was poking him.

His first thought was to push Sivan off the sled and fly away. ‘If we’re going to debate the terms of your surrender, could we at least do it somewhere comfortable? Frankly I’d prefer a pleasant orchard, perhaps over a qaffeh and some Bolo, but I’d honestly settle for any place with some shade. Could you perhaps . . . ?’

The shifter ignored him, jumped off the sled and walked away across the sand. For a minute or so Tsen watched him go but Sivan didn’t look back. With a groan, Tsen got up. His feet hurt. He frowned and scratched his head, trying to remember how to make sleds work. They were enchanter toys. They did what an enchanter wanted because the enchanter wanted it and that was about the extent of what he knew; that and that they were probably a lot less use than they appeared in a place like this. He dimly remembered hearing that the small ones couldn’t fly all that far before they ran out of whatever it was that made them work.

He jumped up and down a bit. The sled wobbled. It was floating over the sand, not resting on it. Still working then, although a fat lot of good that did him. Enchanter constructs worked when
he wanted them to work because he carried a black rod. The enchanters made those rods for everyone and each rod was different, a personal thing. They were like keys, unique, and what locks they opened depended on who you were. And he didn’t have his black rod any more. Of course he didn’t. Sivan had taken it. Then again he hadn’t seen Sivan use a rod either. Did that make him an enchanter then?

Well, you could always ask him.
Sivan was almost at the top of the nearest dune. Tsen watched as he disappeared over the top.

Or perhaps not.

Tsen stood there for a bit, thinking
Go
and
Up
as hard as he could and then thinking what a fool he’d look to anyone watching and then what a fool he was for thinking something so stupid.
Yes. Probably a whole host of invisible dune people pointing and laughing at you.
Although if there were then at least they might know where to find some water. He was parched. Sand had crept into his ill-fitting too-tight black silks too. It itched.

He sat down again. He was sweating and there was no shade. The sled was made of glass and no use. He got up again and very deliberately scanned the horizon in case somehow he’d missed something, but there wasn’t anything to see except the rolling dunes and one set of footprints leading up the nearest rise.
See? Now if there
were
invisible dune people, then that’s how you’d know. They’d leave tracks.

The only tracks were Sivan’s. Tsen closed his eyes and took a deep breath and sighed. He really didn’t want to climb the dune,
really
didn’t, but the only other choice seemed to be to stay where he was and see what happened first: whether he roasted to death or died a parched husk. He sighed again, dropped off the sled and started to follow the footprints. He was probably being stupid. Sivan hadn’t gone to all that trouble just to drop him into the storm-dark so he presumably wasn’t going to leave him to die in the desert either;
presumably
he was off getting some shelter and water and other useful things and so
presumably
he was coming back. Presumably. Unless the shifter meant him to follow and just hadn’t bothered to say so.

Thoughts of rescue bubbled up, of escape and flight, all of them utterly stupid. He had absolutely no idea where he was except that
he was somewhere in the Empty Sands, and what he
did
know was that the Empty Sands had earned their name. They ran almost the entire width of Takei’Tarr, from Cashax in the north to the Lair of Samim and in places right to the sea in the south. From east to west they were a bit smaller – a mere handful of hundreds of miles from the Godspike in the east westward as far as the escarpment of the Tzwayg, which, if he could be bothered to imagine such things mattered just now, might be considered the start of the foothills of the Konsidar. Since the Tzwayg and the eastern Konsidar were every bit as dry and dead as the sand sea, he reckoned the distinction was irrelevant. Good to know he remembered his geography though. All those years trying not to learn anything. Must have had a good tutor back in Cashax. Maybe if he wasn’t dead a year from now then he could go back and thank him. Tell him how knowing the exact extent of the Empty Sands had really raised his spirits when he was stuck in the middle of them . . .

Oh just shut up.

Halfway up the dune and he was already gasping. Bloody sand. He’d spent a good deal of his youth in Cashax, roaring around the desert on the back of a sled, wadi racing and generally making an arse of himself. He’d learned a lot about sleds and how fast they could go and how to corner them and skim them across the face of a dune. He tried to remember whether he’d accidentally learned anything useful about surviving out here. If he had, it was largely to try very hard not to have to.

Well, that’s useful then.

Yes. Almost as useful as illeistic sarcasm.

Actually, that wasn’t strictly . . .

Looking for features in the sand wasn’t going to help because there weren’t any. He probably knew the desert as well as anyone who didn’t actually live there, and the sum of what he knew was that it was mostly made up of great big sand dunes with other bits scattered around like careless sprinkles on a hurriedly decorated cake: flats of gravel and of a milky-white power like crushed glass and a few stretches of hard red clay that the desert men claimed had once been lakes in the long-ago before the half-gods broke the world. He clearly wasn’t in any of those, and even if he climbed a dune to find one staring him in the face, he hadn’t the first idea
how that was supposed to help him because they all looked the same.
Oh, look, a large flat expanse of red clay. Must be a dried-up lake bed. Pat yourself on the back for being clever for a moment before you go back to dying of thirst.
Something like that.

From the air he’d sometimes seen what looked like lines in the sand, or maybe under it. The shadows of old roads, said the desert men, but from the ground they were invisible. Nothing much lived here. Spiders. Scorpions. Snakes now and then. Skimming the dunes around Cashax, he’d once come across a nest of tiny silver ants with ridiculously long legs. If he was lucky maybe he might see a desert hawk. Magnificent birds, but that wouldn’t be much consolation when he was stretched out dead. Maybe he’d be eaten by one. There were probably better ways to go.

What? Like dying quietly of old age in your bath fifty years from now with Kalaiya by your side and the taste of apple wine on your lips? Already forget that your dragon burned a city, did you? Forgot that everyone wants you hanged?

He deserved this. He deserved to die out here for what he’d done.

I tried to stop it!
He waited a bit to see if his conscience was having that, but no, apparently not.
You were trying to be clever and you messed it up, but hey, you tried to stop it. Well done. Clap clap clap. THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE BURNED!

He spent another few minutes arguing with himself about just how much everything either was or wasn’t his fault, which kept him going until he reached the top of the dune. Sivan was waiting a few yards down the leeward side, just out of sight.

‘You could have stayed with the sled, you know,’ said the shifter.

‘Now you tell me.’ Tsen looked around for any sort of weapon but there was only sand and the sea of dunes. Sivan picked himself up.

‘What do you know that makes them want you so badly, T’Varr?’

Despite being lost in the desert, despite his fallen eyrie and the fleet of Vespinese ships that had taken it from him, despite Kalaiya left behind – or perhaps because of all those things – Baros Tsen T’Varr laughed. ‘I know a great many things. I have made it my business to see that while Lord Shonda aimed his lightning at me,
I had lightning enough to aim back. You don’t imagine I’m going to tell you, do you?’

‘Didn’t see this though, eh?’ The young man laughed.

‘Why are we here, out in the middle of the desert? Where are you taking me?’

‘Somewhere safe and out of the way.’ Sivan set off again. At least sliding down the lee side of the dune was easier than climbing. How long since he’d gone walking in the dunes? He’d done it as a boy and a couple of times in his younger years with Vey Rin – rich young men riding their sleds, dressed up in their glass-and-gold armour, scouting for the slavers that struck out into the desert now and then from Cashax. Older now, wiser and knowing a little more of the world and its consequences, he found himself ashamed of almost everything he’d done during those years in Cashax, but most of all of the time he’d scouted for the slavers. He’d been so painfully ignorant.

He slid down the sand, almost falling. He caught himself. Sivan was already ahead again, starting up the next slope.

‘Is there an end to this?’ Tsen called after him. ‘Or are we just walking for the sake of it?’

‘I told you, you could stay with the sled.’ Sivan didn’t look back.

‘If you came all this way out of the goodness of your heart to save me from the wicked Lord Shonda, why didn’t you come a little sooner with news of his plans so I was ready to meet him? And why did you tie me up? To be blunt with you, I do not feel particularly
rescued
, Sivan.’ Inside he winced. Sometimes he couldn’t help himself; he just had to push a bit harder than he ought. He reached the bottom of the dune. Sivan, already halfway up the next, looked back at last.

‘You’re free to go, T’Varr. You’re not my prisoner.’ He kept on walking.

It had never occurred to Tsen, even when it was happening right under his nose, what the slavers in Cashax were really doing, how they ripped tribes apart, families. One thing to treat the barbarians of the other realms so – although the older he got, the more he questioned even that – but the desert men were black-skinned Taiytakei like him. Oh, the slavers dressed it up well, made sure their rich-boy scouts were kept safe and away from the nastier parts
of their business, but what shamed him most was that he’d never stopped to think. It wasn’t so much what he’d done, more that he’d joined in so blindly and never once thought to open his eyes.

Halfway up the next dune, he paused to catch his breath. He was sweating like a pig and Sivan was at the top. At least the shifter was waiting for him this time.

He’d gone dune climbing once, with Vey Rin, back long before anyone had imagined that Vey’s brother Shonda would somehow rise to be sea lord of the most powerful city in the world. Vey Rin was back in Vespinarr now, mind broken by the dragon he’d been stupid enough to provoke with his jade raven. He owed his life to the rider-slave. Maybe Shonda did too and so maybe Shonda would spare her for that, but Tsen doubted it. Most likely he’d never even know. Vey Rin was certainly in no state to tell him.

Dunes. One step up, slide most of a step back again, and they’d been bigger dunes than these. He remembered how they’d joke, the two of them, about how many steps they really took to climb. They’d taken their sleds out into the deep desert scouting for signs of the black ooze lakes that rose from the sand now and then and drew the desert men. They’d gone a long way and hadn’t found any and had turned back when Vey Rin spotted one of those dunes that really was as tall as a hundred men and challenged him to climb it. Tsen had given up halfway, laughing, sliding all the way to the bottom and flying to the top on his sled, but Vey Rin had kept on, walking all the way. Something had changed between them after that, as though Vey Rin was always a little disappointed in him.

He reached the top.

‘You should have come to me openly,’ he said to Sivan. ‘You pretended to be the woman I love. You tricked me and I don’t believe a word you say.’

Sivan’s smile was broad and mischievous and with a touch of malevolence. ‘Would you have come if I’d simply asked?’ He laughed. ‘As it happened, I did rescue you, T’Varr, and I really don’t mean you any harm.’

‘But you were coming for me either way.’

Sivan pointed down the lee of the dune to a pillar of white stone, round and about as tall and as wide as a man. There was a hole in the ground beside it. Tsen found the whole thing so odd that he
forgot for a moment how exhausted and thirsty he was. A pillar and a pit in the middle of the shifting dunes? How did the hole not get filled up and the pillar not vanish under the sand? Sivan was already walking, and as Tsen hurried to catch him up, he saw that the hole was more of a shaft, the pillar in the centre of it and that a set of steps spiralled down. Closer still and he saw that the steps were made of the sand itself. Clearly his tutor in Cashax hadn’t been so marvellous after all, since he had no idea what this place was or how it worked or how Sivan had found it.

‘Kalaiya,’ he called. ‘I want Kalaiya. That’s all.’

Sivan started down the steps. When Tsen reached them, he hesitated, but then again he couldn’t think of anything else to do but follow. The sun was hot, the stairs were shady, he needed water, and all that waited for him in the dunes was death. He ran his hand over the pillar as he tested the first step. The stairs looked the same as the dunes but if he closed his eyes and listened to his feet then they were as solid as iron. The white stone of the pillar was hard, flawless and perfect-polished smooth like the white stone of the eyrie and of the Godspike. It had two symbols carved into it but he had no idea what they meant. It disappeared into the shaft and the steps spiralled around it, and as the sunlight fell away, he saw that the pillar itself glowed with a soft yellow light, guiding his way.