The Splintered Gods (33 page)

37

The Gates of Xibaiya

Berren crept forward in the darkness. He wasn’t sure where he was any more. The dragon was a dull memory. It had been out there, picking at him, pulling at the strings of his soul. Digging and digging deep. He remembered a flash of purity as it touched the edge of something that didn’t want to be touched, and after that the world became strange. He could remember sending the dragon away without knowing how. Keeping himself safe. He remembered Tuuran, talking to the big man, starting to tell him what the dragon had done. He remembered walking away and leaving the big man behind with no idea why he’d done that. He could have let them all go. He could have done anything then. That was the most frightening part of it all. He could have done
anything
. He could have picked up the world and thrown it into the sun or shattered the moon and made it fall in fragments across the sea for each one to grow into a strange new island of silver stone.

The moon. He kept seeing the moon, the sullen hostile moon.

In the end he hadn’t done anything at all.

Afterwards he walked and walked and walked without much idea of where he was going or why but with an absolute certainty of where he needed to be. The sun rose and he went on. He should have burned. He should have been crawling on his hands and knees but he wasn’t. He didn’t remember being hungry or thirsty though he’d had neither food nor water and never stopped to look for either. He didn’t remember exactly when he’d started down into the crack in the earth. Maybe it had been night again by then and he hadn’t noticed. He had a vague idea of a lot of steps and a bridge and a whole lot of tunnels made out of white stone that lit his way with a soft moonlight glow, and great bronze doors held closed by four-armed guardians. He wasn’t tired, though he hadn’t ever stopped to rest. There had been people too, he thought, up
near the top, with white-painted faces, but they’d kept away and left him alone and he’d gone on by.

He passed gateways, old, old places. He didn’t pay them much attention. It was as though he’d seen them before and knew what they were and understood that the words written over them were meant for him and him alone in a strange language that he couldn’t understand and yet did. They were guiding him.

And now this. The largest cavern he’d ever seen. The distant walls were smooth and rounded in all directions. A single span of white stone reached from his feet out into the void, and walking on it was like walking towards the centre of some giant bubble. When he reached that centre, the span splayed out into a circular platform ringed with archways, and the walls were so far away that he couldn’t even guess now how big the cavern was. Everywhere was a faraway unchanging pale glow, and within it distance lost its meaning. In the middle of the floor beneath him was a pitch-black hole. He couldn’t tell how wide or deep it was, but he knew it wasn’t just any hole. This was a hole in the world. Through it lay Xibaiya. The land of the dead.

He paced around the arches. The echo of the Black Moon had brought him here. The man with the ruined face and the one milky eye had put it into the warlock Skyrie. Now it was in him and it was looking for something.

Where are you?

The question came with the sense of a task not finished. The archways were empty, but only until he touched them and the Black Moon reached through his fingers and shivered them into life.

The first shimmered onto a sea of liquid silver. He felt a wistful pang of regret tinged with disappointment and murderous anger. The silver sea called to the Black Moon, begging him home, and for a moment he felt the pulse inside him waver, but then another sense came, a slowly growing awareness of his presence, huge and resentful. He let the arch go and the gateway shimmered and vanished. The regret lasted a little longer. He’d done something once. Something monumentally vast. What was it?

Get out of me. Get out!
Berren screamed at the echo inside him with all the potency of an ant screaming at a tree.

The next arch shimmered like the first when he touched it. It opened onto a small round chamber, dark with no exits. There was a mosaic on the floor, almost lost to age. Three skeletons lay over it, long-dead men clad in bronze-mesh armour. There was a book . . . No. There had once been a book but now it was gone.

Where are you?

Get out! Get out, get out!
But the Black Moon didn’t even know he was there, and Berren understood now how it had been for Skyrie when the two of them fought. Drowning. Powerless. Screaming silently in his own skin.

The next arch was a great throne room, grand beyond imagining. A king in a coat that burned like the sun. Then a room full of more archways exactly like the ones in front of him but at the top of some high tower. Then a gloomy cave at the bottom of a spiralling staircase and a spear, its pointed haft buried six inches into the floor, walls lit by alchemical lamps whose cold white light glittered on the spear’s silver skin. Then a place of shimmering rainbows and a woman, achingly beautiful, with a golden circlet on her brow. They meant nothing, any of them.

In the next he saw himself. Berren the Bloody Judge. Berren the Crowntaker. His own face, his real face, the flesh and skin that had once been his, taken from him years ago in Tethis. He saw himself staring at a knife, the other knife with a golden haft carved into a thousand eyes and a pale swirling blade. The Bloody Judge looked right back at him, and for a moment the Black Moon wavered, its substance turned to smoke. Berren lunged. ‘Help me!’ he shrieked. ‘
Help me!’

The gate snapped closed. The Black Moon inside him shivered and roared, coalesced hard as black iron, too much to bear as it grasped at a memory that should have been within easy reach and yet simply wasn’t there. Brilliant silver light flared across the cavern, and all the arches shimmered and flared and opened for a moment and then closed.
I built this! I made this!
Silver light soared around him.
I. Made. This.

The last arch shimmered into the black abyss, into the all-devouring void that was Xibaiya, land of the dead. The Black Moon took his legs and stepped through. Berren screamed and . . .

. . .
ceased to be. Souls passed him by. Millions upon millions of
glittering shards of the sun, flitting through him, dancing briefly on their way home. Now and then the memories of a dragon, lurking, searching to be reborn. Fragments of the earth which fled at his approach, knowing what he was. And he remembered. He was the singer of songs to the earth. Creator and maker of terror and monsters, of Zaklat and the Kraitu and a hundred others, defier and destroyer of gods, unraveller of terrible secrets. He was the Black Moon, who turned his enemies to dragons and split the earth asunder and rose to wipe out the sun, trapped in useless flesh as futile rage and boundless despair crushed through him like a deep ocean storm and . . .

. . . sat up.

Blinked and took deep gasping breaths, trying to remember who he was.

Berren. Berren the Crowntaker. Berren the Bloody Judge.

Relief shuddered through him. A dream then.

A dream? But that didn’t . . . But best not to think about it. That’s what Tuuran would say. He was who he was.

He got to his feet, unsteady as an old man. He wasn’t in the cavern of white stone with archways any more, if he ever had been. He was lying on his back as though he’d been asleep, and that on its own made wherever this was a damn sight better. He was himself, not driven by some hungry thing he didn’t understand that some warlock had stuck inside his head.

Berren. Berren the Crowntaker. Berren the Bloody Judge.

He lay still, breathing hard until his heart finally slowed. Stupid dream. He sniffed the air. It smelled of Xizic, which made him feel slightly sick, but at least the smell was familiar. Taiytakei, slaves, everyone chewed the stuff here.

The night was black. There were no stars, no slivers of moonlight. He was in some sort of shelter. He could feel that by the stillness of the air. He was tired. Weak. His skin, already dark from years at sea, was sore, burned by the sun and sand and wind.

He sat up and felt around him. He wasn’t in a hut or a shelter after all, but some sort of cave. There was a jug of water beside him and a cloth. He drained the water, greedy for it, then got to his feet and felt his way about. When he moved too quickly, his head started to swim. Slow and careful then. A cave and he was at the back of it. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled
around until a faint flickering of firelight lit the damp stone wall around a corner. The light led him to where the cave opened onto a dark expanse of black sand beneath inky-dark cliffs. The sky above was every bit as black as the sand. The middle of the night then, with clouds blotting out the stars. Three men sat around the tiny fire whose flames had led him. It lit up their faces. He froze, startled – they looked like ghosts and it was a moment before he realised they were simply painted. Three naked men with their skin painted white.

They looked up. Saw him and then glanced at each other and beckoned, and when he joined them, they knelt and pressed their heads against the sand, prostrating themselves before him. Berren frowned.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Got any food?’

They backed away and scuttled into the darkness and returned a few moments later with bowls of nuts and dried berries and leaves.

‘Meat. Got any meat?’

They shook their heads.

Berren looked up. Everything was obsidian-dark and that wasn’t right. There weren’t any stars, not one, and the last thing he knew he’d been in a desert and there hadn’t been a cloud for a hundred miles. So there should have been stars.

‘Where am I?’

The white-painted men backed away. They were scared of him. Somehow he wasn’t what they’d expected.

‘How did I get here?’

Two of the men kept shuffling away; the third hesitated, then beckoned Berren to follow and returned to pick a burning brand from the fire. He led the way to the cliffs, into a different cave and through a wide rough tunnel. After a few minutes it opened into a vast space, bigger even than the white stone cave from his dream. He was at the bottom of a colossal scar in the desert. The Queverra. He remembered now. Right at the bottom of the damp cold depths while five miles above him a long slit of daylight filtered feebly down. Berren closed his eyes. A camp at the edge of the abyss. And he remembered, yes, walking down all those steps, part of what he’d thought had been a dream. He pointed to the sky.

‘I came from up there?’ He took a deep breath and squatted
on his haunches. The sun must have cooked his head to make him think that coming down here was a good idea. Then again he hadn’t been thinking right since that night when he’d seen a dragon and something had happened to the slavers’ pole he’d been tied to and he’d escaped. It was all a bit hazy. Muddled.

The white-faced man was shaking his head. He pointed to the light too. ‘Not from the light. All others come from the light. But not you.’ He pointed a sure finger a different way, along the canyon bottom to where it narrowed and funnelled into yet another cave mouth, this one guarded by two pale stone sentinels covered in strange runes. ‘There. You come from there.’

Berren walked to the pillars. He ran his fingers over the stone, which was smooth and perfect, the runes carved crisply, not worn and pitted by wind and water. He moved to go on between them into the cave and then turned and took the brand and poked it ahead of him. The cave devoured the firelight. He couldn’t see a thing right in front of him, and yet in the distance he saw a dim light. A tunnel, straight and true, of softly glowing white stone that vanished off into for ever.

Something more than a cave.

‘There,’ said the man. ‘You come from Xibaiya. From the dead.’

Berren leaned hard on the pillar beside him. His head started to spin. He took a deep breath and looked inside himself.

The Black Moon looked back.

38

The Konsidar

Chay-Liang woke to find she wasn’t dead after all but lying in Red Lin Feyn’s gondola. She recognised the smell. The air carried a tinge of ozone and sulphur from Visonda Square but underneath it lay the soft perfume of the Arbiter’s silks, of old Xizic and the odd mustiness that came from the half-empty chests under the bed. Liang could feel the vibrations of the glasship coming down the silver chains into the gondola walls and could hear the wind outside through an open window. They were moving quickly.

She opened her eyes. She was lying on her front with her head almost hanging off the bed. Her clothes were piled in a tidy heap on the floor next to the box Belli had given her. The box was open and one of the vials was missing. She groaned and tried to roll onto her back and a searing pain shot through her shoulders. The knife, she’d forgotten the knife. She’d been stabbed and poisoned and yet here she was. The last thing she remembered was the man standing over her. Her head ached and her mind was foggy but her thoughts were clear when she forced them to be.

She was naked underneath the silk sheets apart from a bandage wrapped around her chest and back. It went under her arms and over her shoulders and there was so much of it and it was so tightly wrapped that it felt like a second skin whenever she took a deep breath. She liked that, the sense of it squeezing her chest. She carefully eased herself to sit on the edge of the bed. A dull ache throbbed through her belly, echoes of cramps and retching but nothing worse than she’d had every month since she turned twelve. When she wiggled her toes they wiggled just fine. So did her fingers, and everything was in focus. She hurt deep inside, a little bit of everywhere, but it was the hurt of a body put through a trauma that it had fought and survived and now it wanted to let her know about it.

She picked up her clothes and saw the blood. The stains were huge. Dry now, but they ran from between her shoulders down past her waist, and drips and trails ran as far as the hem around her feet. They were ruined, robe and shift both, but she had others. She tried to stand, but that hurt too much so she shuffled along the edge of the bed to her travel trunk instead. Painstakingly, she dressed herself, then looked at the steps down to the body of the gondola. They were steep and she had no idea how to get down them. Shuffling on her backside maybe but there was a good chance she’d fall, which was hardly the sort of thing one did before the Arbiter of the Dralamut.

Assuming the Arbiter was there. Assuming she’d survived.

The air shuddered. An Elemental Man appeared sitting on the bed beside her. The same one who’d been with them in the square.

‘Your sort just can’t use the stairs, can you?’ She pointed. ‘They’re right there.’ It was easy to be angry with him because she hurt and because the Elemental Man was meant to protect them and he hadn’t, and . . . ‘The Arbiter?’

The killer smoothed his robes. ‘Our lady is shaken and bruised but not physically harmed. Mostly she is angry. As Arbiter, however, she is hurt badly. An attempt on her life. The audacity to strike at her and, by inference, at the very order of things.’ The killer took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The strain on his face was clear and for once he seemed less like a mystical sorcerous assassin and more a common man close to the end of his tether. He nodded to the steps. ‘It’s laziness, Chay-Liang, that’s all. It’s easier for us to shift our substance and fly and shift back again than it is to climb a few steps. Does that surprise you? I suppose it must but it’s true. Here and in Aria and the Dominion too. Everywhere except the dragon-realms. Dragons make it hard. I suppose she told you that while you were speaking in secret?’ When Liang shook her head the Elemental Man rolled his eyes and looked away. ‘The Arbiter has chosen you to be her companion, Chay-Liang. She chooses to trust you over the Elemental Men who have served the Dralamut for five hundred years. So be it. We’re not your enemy. We serve in good faith. May I ask you to undress? I would inspect your wound. I have no doubt you would do a better job yourself, but its position, I fear, is awkward for you.’

Who have served the Dralamut
… Words chosen with thought or carelessly let out? The Elemental Men were supposed to serve the Elemental Masters who existed at the top of Mount Solence and whom no one else had ever seen, like priests who served a god whose every miracle was in fact the work of men. Liang had always quietly thought of the killers as serving an idea, or perhaps an ideal, and even if she shared it, she’d never much liked the notion. It was hard to argue with an idea, and ideals were notoriously intransigent. In a very metaphysical sort of way killing ideals was the purpose of the Elemental Men. It was ironic to imagine that they also served one.

Who have served the Dralamut
. Perhaps she’d had it all wrong. She moaned softly. It was hard slipping her robe and shift back up her body. ‘Someone has been through the potions my alchemist slave gave me. Was that you?’

The killer bowed. ‘When it was clear the danger to our lady was past, I found you and brought you here. For the rest I was banished outside. The wound was not fatal but the blade carried a poison, and we do not learn the arts of healing on the peak of Mount Solence. Many other things, but not that. Our lady Arbiter tended you while I hunted those responsible.’

‘Did you find them?’ She had the robe and shift over her head now and felt conscious of her nakedness. The killers were eunuchs, she knew that much, but it had been a very long time since anyone had seen her disrobe. She flinched as his fingers brushed her skin and loosened the bandages. ‘It was you I saw at the end.’ The feet in front of her face. She’d thought they belonged to the man who’d stabbed her, come to finish her, but it must have been the Elemental Man instead. ‘Did you find him? The one who left his knife in me.’

The killer shook his head as he unwound the cloth from her chest. ‘My first concern was the safety of the Arbiter. Others will come once news of this reaches them. It cannot be ignored.’ He poked at the wound in her back. He was gentle but she squealed anyway.

‘With the dragons and the rider-slave and Shonda and his enchanters to deal with? How many of you are there, killer?’ His fingers were hot and everything between her shoulders was swollen and hurt.

‘Enough, enchantress, always enough. I would go and tell them myself but I fear to leave our lady’s side. Where she goes I must be her voice.’ Whatever he’d done he seemed satisfied. He began to wind the bandage back around her.

‘The Konsidar?’

‘Indeed.’ The Elemental Man tied the end of the bandage. He shuffled back and gave her a baleful look. ‘Our lady does not say why. I will not ask if she has told you, but the Konsidar is another realm where our rules and our laws no longer apply. Be wary there, enchantress.’ He stood up. ‘The wound is closing well. If I didn’t know better then I’d say it was many days old. Whatever your alchemist slave puts in his potions, you might consider selling its secrets. You would have good custom.’

‘I was content where I was, you know.’

The Elemental Man walked to the steps. Halfway down he turned and smiled at her. ‘You see, we
can
do it if we remember to try. I will tell our lady you are risen from the dead.’

When he was gone, Liang eased herself back into her clothes. It took for ever, an endless series of slow tiny movements and then a gasping jab of pain and a pause for breath and begin again.
Whatever your alchemist slave puts into his potions
. His blood, that’s what, and where his blood went so did a little part of him. She didn’t know what Belli had meant by that but his face had said it wasn’t a good thing, as if he’d put some sort of curse on her even though it had saved her life from poison twice now – a curse that struck her as peculiarly benign, as curses went. With careful gentle steps, she eased her way down the stairs. The killer stood in a far corner now, still and out of the way. Most of the gondola was taken up by the smashed-up remains of one of the golems, lying on its back. The two arms on its right side had been shattered by the iron ball of a black-powder cannon. Its head and back were peppered with chips and cracks and three of its golden eyes were missing. Lin Feyn was bent over it, moulding glass between her bare hands. She didn’t look up as Liang came down. ‘Can you work?’

Liang didn’t reply at first. The Arbiter was a navigator from the Dralamut, and every navigator had been an enchanter first and they had to excel to be called. But around Lin Feyn, Liang forgot these things and only saw the Arbiter, dressed in all her finery.
Now and then she’d seen the woman underneath, who seemed to find her own privileged life vaguely disagreeable. But as an enchantress, moulding glass . . . ?

‘Well?’

‘Yes!’ Liang moved as quickly as she could and stood awkwardly, trying to find a position that was comfortable.

‘You’re injured. You may sit in the presence of your Arbiter. Or kneel.’ Lin Feyn suddenly laughed. She was dressed in a tan smock streaked with stains and scorched in places; her braided hair was tied back in a messy bundle to keep it out of the way and she looked like any other enchantress hard at work. She glanced at the Elemental Man. ‘Or sit or lie down or do handstands or roll around the floor. I think we can all forget, for a while, that I am what I am. Even you, killer. I am Red Lin Feyn today. I am a very fine enchantress but this golem is beyond me.’ She sat back and looked at Liang. ‘When was the last time you went back to Hingwal Taktse? Do you know how these things are supposed to work? I made my own little golems when I was an apprentice and I imagine you did too, but they were stupid things, nothing like this.’

A smile spread across Liang’s face and she cracked her knuckles. ‘I was never the best enchantress in Hingwal Taktse, not by a long way, and it’s been a decade since I was there. But I have spent years indentured to the lord of Xican, and there are more golems in Xican than in the rest of the Fourteen Cities put together. I know my golems.’ She crouched beside the glass-and-gold body and pressed her hands to it, looking for the shape and form of its inner structure.

‘The spark is still there,’ said Lin Feyn. ‘We’re not wasting our time.’

‘I feel it. But something has cut it off from its body.’ She let her thoughts roam the structure of the glass. ‘I’m not sure I can remould this.’

‘I should hope not! It’s a sentinel golem of the Dralamut. As with the palace towers of the sea lords, it’s meant to be impervious to your intrusions. Or mine for that matter. Not much use if one of us can simply reshape it into an exquisitely expensive glass statue just by putting a finger to it.’

Liang withdrew her hands and winced at the pain across her
back. She was already sweating at the effort of forcing her mind inside the golem’s glass. ‘We’ll have to break it open. I have raw gold-glass ready for moulding. Some, anyway. I can probably repair what’s broken, although it won’t be as well made as this. Perhaps
you
should work it, lady? It’s your golem.’

‘I’m not sure I’d do any better but I do have more glass. What’s wrong with it?’

‘I can show you, but first we have to get inside.’

Easier to say than do. At the heart of the golem the spark that gave it life and motion resided within an intricate structure of glass and gold. Moulded around that was the carapace armour of its body, inches thick. Neither Red Lin Fey nor Liang, even together, could begin to reshape the armour, which left breaking inside, and that would be no mean feat given the golem had been struck by a cannon and had survived. They looked at it for a while until Lin Feyn hit it with a hammer out of sheer frustration and then laughed at her own foolishness as it bounced and flew out of her hand. ‘We should open the ramp, throw it out and smash it to pieces on the mountains and rework it from the start,’ she said, although they both knew that would shatter both the golem’s armour and its inner heart.

In the end they landed the gondola and tipped out the golem and had the Elemental Man drop rocks on it from ever-greater heights until the armour cracked and they were able to smash and lever a chink out and reach inside with their own moulded glass. Liang rebuilt the link from the spark to the body and then withdrew and left Red Lin Feyn to repair the arm and broken armour. It looked like what it was when they finished – a hodgepodge – but it walked and talked and remembered who it was. Which was as well, since even all three of them together had no hope of dragging its weight back inside the gondola.

Lin Feyn smiled. ‘Well, Chay-Liang of Hingwal Taktse, that was certainly far more enjoyable than sitting in Mai’Choiro Kwen’s gondola in your wind-blasted eyrie listening to Sea Lord Shonda threaten and whine about not being allowed to leave.’ There was a new tear in her smock and her hair was a mess.

‘I’m afraid I never learned to master lightning beyond a simple wand.’ Liang poked at the golem’s shattered arms.

Lin Feyn shrugged. ‘Nor did I. It’s still better than nothing.’ She chuckled. ‘I could have another one sent from the Dralamut, of course. We’d wait a few days and it would come, perfect and new, but I prefer this way. We’ll have little use for a golem in the Konsidar anyway. They won’t let it beneath the surface.’

‘How did you get it into the gondola in the first place?’ Liang asked.

‘A lot of slaves and a sled.’ Her smile faded. ‘It gave my killer something to do while I had a look at your wound. Don’t thank me, though. It was your alchemist’s potions that saved you.’

Liang eased her back and realised it was hardly troubling her any more. She stared at the mountains around her. They were far from Vespinarr. Not in the Konsidar proper but at the edge of it, among the valleys where the Vespinese mined their silver. The landscape was deserted. A wide river only a few inches deep ran through a bed of sharp rocks and gravel, some tributary of the Jokun or the Yalun Zarang. The sides of the valley either side were steep and streaked with bare rock between thick verdant trees. The air was damp and cold. ‘A pleasant change after the desert, lady,’ she said,

‘I hate that desert.’ Lin Feyn’s voice was distant. ‘I hate that eyrie. I hate the Godspike and I hate the storm-dark.’ She shuddered. ‘Floating over it and it’s always there, huge and uncaring and malevolent, just waiting to swallow me whole. You were there far longer than I – didn’t you ever get the urge to jump?’ She turned and smiled at Liang. ‘The Arbiter is long gone, isn’t she? If you were her, what would you do?’