The Splintered Gods (48 page)

‘Where’s the witch?’ she asked, but the dragons had no answer. She’d find out for herself then. She went looking for Tuuran.

54

Stowaway

Tuuran bowed as his speaker came to him. When she held out her hand, he touched his lips to the ring on her middle finger, the Speaker’s Ring of the Adamantine Palace. As he did, she touched the back of his head. It felt odd. Off, and his hair was greasy and stiff with dirt and sand. ‘In this realm there are no others,’ she told him. ‘I have you alone. You are the first of what will become a new ten thousand. I name you Night Watchman.’

She released him and he fell to his knees and pressed his head to the ground in front of her feet. ‘I cannot, Holiness. I cannot take this honour. I am not worthy.’

‘Worthy or not, this is what you have become. There is a price.’

‘Holiness?’

‘I know the creed of your kind. You are the swords. You sate yourselves in flesh and move on. You will not sate yourselves in the flesh of any slave from this eyrie. There are women here who were bred and taught for no purpose but to moan beneath fat uncaring men. They are not whores to be had as the fancy takes you. There are no slaves any more, and I will make a cage for any who act otherwise. You will see to this.’

Tuuran slowly got back to his feet. Erect, he towered over her, a full foot taller. A strange play of emotion flickered though him. Hope and passion and . . . was that adoration? No, not that. Pride. An Adamantine Man’s pride in his speaker and in himself.

‘Take what joy you can, Night Watchman.’ Zafir’s words sounded bleak and cold. ‘It won’t last long. Joy never does. Now find the witch Chay-Liang. The night-skins will come back for us soon enough.’ She walked off and Tuuran watched her go, wondering how to become what she’d asked. Crazy Mad did it by stabbing people with his warlock’s knife and disintegrating anything that annoyed him. This had its merits, he supposed, chief
being that it scared the living shit out of everyone who saw it. Her Holiness got things done by burning people with her dragon if they didn’t do what she said, the old-fashioned dragon-rider way of doing things, tried and tested. His old oar-master had been very fond of his whip. All struck him as the same thing: obey or be hurt. Which was fine until some pissed-off slave whacked you on the head in the middle of the night and tipped you into the sea.

Well, he didn’t have a dragon and he couldn’t disintegrate people who looked at him wrong, and he didn’t fancy an unexpected night-time plunge off the edge of the eyrie, so none of those. He watched the slaves and the soldiers. They did what they were told because Crazy had quietly gone round and stabbed them with his crazy knife before he’d freed the dragon and not left them with a choice, but that was just making slaves in a different way and her Holiness had said not to do it.

He collared a couple of Crazy’s tame soldiers and told them to find the enchantress Chay-Liang. ‘Tell her what’s happened. Tell her she won’t be hurt as long as she behaves. Tell her Tuuran said so.’ He didn’t have much doubt she’d remember him.

He watched the men go and sighed. Letting the hatchlings rampage was all very well and they’d done a fine job of shredding the last Taiytakei soldiers who’d wanted to fight, but it seemed more like luck than anything that they hadn’t slaughtered absolutely everybody; and now that her Holiness was done burning everything that moved and Crazy was done disintegrating everything that didn’t, the eyrie needed slaves to make it work, to cook and fetch and carry and shovel shit and build things and wash things and herd things and all sorts, and generally those slaves needed to be alive.

Generally. Of course, Crazy had once managed to find a place where that wasn’t so, and there were whispers of others too, but best not to think about that.

Since everything in the dragon yard seemed to be getting on well enough, Tuuran climbed to the wall and looked out over the distant desert and the maelstrom of the storm-dark. The wind in his face made him think of being at sea. He missed that. He’d had enough of the desert, thanks. Never enough to drink and when there was water it was tepid and stale, and sand in everything except when it was ants or scorpions. No, he’d definitely had enough of the desert.
He glanced at the two of them, Crazy and then the dragon-queen: a starving shackled wretch he’d saved from the bilges and a princess he’d found pinned against a wall by a drunkard. Gave him a strange feeling. Odd, like they were his children, and that was just daft, wasn’t it?

There was a sliver of etched glass in his boot. The Watcher had given it to him, a pass to passage among the Taiytakei to take him anywhere he asked. He pulled it out and was about to throw it away, as far and hard as he could, then stopped. Zafir wanted to go home. But as far as Tuuran knew, Crazy couldn’t cross the storm-dark. He tucked it away again and set his mind to getting the eyrie in order.
You never know, eh?

The dull thuds of the lightning cannon had stopped. A handful of slaves ran past Liang’s workshop, and then the eyrie fell into uncertain silence. After a while, when no one came, she limped to the door and looked up and down the passage.

Empty. She thought about heading up to the eyrie to find out what was going on and then imagined another hatchling lurking and went back for a second lightning wand instead. And maybe a sled. And maybe she could take several gold-glass spheres and make a shield around the sled, and then she wouldn’t have to walk any more. And rockets. She could put the bombs on the ends of rockets. They wouldn’t go very far but it would be better than throwing them. And she could sit inside the shield and stick wands out the front and rockets on the side and make a sort of sled for fighting dragons.

When she was done making her armoured sled, it crossed her mind that two lightning wands were all very well, but ten would be better; and it took a while, making all that, and she was still working when she heard new voices outside and another pair of soldiers came to her door. Not the soldiers she’d seen before, but at least they didn’t look like they were running for their lives this time. Even if they were both Vespinese. She’d given up hating the Vespinese – it was just too much effort.

‘Enchantress!’

‘Did the Elemental Men kill it? What’s happened to the dragon? Is it dead?’

The soldiers looked confused as if they didn’t understand what she meant. ‘Lady, you have to come to the dragon yard now. Night Watchman Tuuran gives his assurance you’ll be safe.’ The soldier sounded calm, almost asleep, as though he’d been chewing Xizic since dawn. No sign of the terror and the panic she’d seen in the others.

‘Tuuran?’ Liang shook her head, puzzled. ‘Where are the Elemental Men?’

‘Gone, lady.’ The soldier offered a hand. ‘Some were killed, others fled.’ Calm as anything, as though it hardly mattered. Liang had to lean on a bench. This was too much. Her voice broke to a whisper.

‘The dragon?’

‘The dragon serves the Black Moon. As do we all.’ They came towards her, arms reaching to take hold of her. As soon as they touched her, she reached her mind into the gold-glass armour they wore and froze it solid. She wrenched herself free. One of them toppled over. The other simply stood, stiff as a stone, an expression of bewilderment on his face. Liang shook her head.

‘Now there’s a lesson for you,’ she muttered, wincing at the pain in her leg. ‘I
could
make that armour of yours squeeze until your ribs burst, but why not tell me without all that messiness, eh? What in the name of Xibaiya and the unholy Rava are you talking about?’

They told her that a silver sorcerer of the moon had come, one of the half-gods to whom the smiths of Scythia quietly prayed when they thought that no one was looking. Belli’s half-god, who might once, if you believed in the rumoured words of the forbidden Rava, have ruled everything and everywhere. It couldn’t be true but that was what the soldiers believed. The worst was how it didn’t seem to bother them.

When they were done, Liang dragged the two of them in their frozen armour into the far corner of her workshop and hobbled away to hide.

Tuuran headed into the tunnels with a few of the soldiers Crazy had stabbed with his knife. He found slaves barricaded in their dormitories to keep the dragons out and told them he’d keep them safe; and they came out because some of them remembered him
and what a pain in the arse he’d been. The night-skins he found now and then generally threw lightning at him, but there were a few who remembered him from back when he’d been the alchemist’s bodyguard, who did at least say hello before they tried to kill him. He herded the survivors up to the dragon yard and Crazy Mad quietly stabbed Taiytakei and slave alike and handed them back over to Tuuran, heart, mind and soul; and it was like his old galley – Crazy and her Holiness the galley masters, and him with a band of frightened slaves left to make sure that stuff got done.

‘That’s your dragon-queen, is it, big man?’ asked Crazy. Tuuran nodded. ‘This eyrie. It’s hers now. Make it work.’

Out over the storm the glasships were coming. Her Holiness was shouting something, pitting her lungs against the wind. Tuuran listened for a bit, thinking she didn’t sound much like a speaker of the nine realms and that old Vishmir the Magnificent or Narammed the Great would have given a much finer battle speech. He climbed the walls and looked around the rim at the cannon.
Right then.

Liang limped across the ice-cold morgue of what had once been Baros Tsen T’Varr’s bathhouse into the spiralling passages where the slaves lived. The tunnels were quiet and empty, the rooms deserted. She stepped around scorched bodies and pieces of men, some so mangled as to be unidentifiable. A few rooms here and there had been gutted by fire but most were simply empty. She went to where the kitchen slaves slept, found a stained white tunic and rubbed some of their cheap perfume over her skin to make herself, as best she could, seem just another slave. She returned the way she’d come and started looking for Belli. He wasn’t in his laboratory so she tried his study and found him sitting on the end of his bed, his head in his hands, rocking gently back and forth. For a moment he didn’t recognise her. Then his eyes sharpened and he jumped to his feet. ‘Li! You’re hurt!’

‘I killed a dragon,’ she said and then giggled a little shrilly at how ridiculous that sounded. And yet it was true. ‘It was only one of the little ones,’ she added sheepishly.

Belli might not even have heard for all she could tell. Just like the last time. He was on his hands and knees already, looking at
her leg. She’d wrapped a piece of cloth around it to try and stop herself spattering blood all over the floor of her workshop, and it was saturated. A trickle of red dribbled along her calf and dripped from her ankle. Belli shook his head and tutted. ‘You never look after yourself, Li.’ He tried to untie the knotted cloth and merely ended up with her blood all over his fingers. He went to get a knife.

‘Why didn’t you kill it?’ she asked.

‘Kill what?’

‘The dragon. Was it because of her?’

‘Zafir?’ He shook his head as he cut the bandage. ‘I would have argued for her life with my own, but the dragon? The Elemental Men told me it must be done and they were right. It was the slave who said I should not.’ He looked up at her and there were tears in his eyes. ‘The Silver King, Li. The Silver King! How could I not obey? He returns. Or so I thought . . .’ He looked down again and shook his head. ‘And then Zafir tried to kill him, and, Flame help me, I think she was right! Somehow she had a knife from an Elemental Man. She tried to kill the Silver King. The Silver King, Li! With a killer’s blade but it turned to ash in her hand.’ He was trembling. ‘Only this is not the Silver King I thought to serve.’ He shook his head and shuddered. ‘He set them free, Li. He woke the dragons with a snap of his fingers and set them free.’

Belli was trembling. He cut himself with the knife and smeared his own blood over the wound in Liang’s leg and Liang squealed at the sting of it. After that he bandaged her up again and then dabbed and fussed at the cut on her face until she sat him down, held his head in her lap and made him tell her exactly what had happened, over and over until she understood.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he whispered when he was done.

‘We must each pick a side,’ she answered softly.

‘I will pick whatever side has you, Li.’

‘I will fight them, Belli.’

‘I cannot defy this Silver King to his face, Li, not for anything.’ He shook his head. ‘I cannot. He is . . .’

She kissed him on the temple. ‘Then keep me safe and I will fight them for both of us.’

For a long time they sat together and she stroked his thinning hair and rocked him back and forth until he began to doze, and it
was only when she heard brisk footsteps coming towards the door that she let him go and quickly hid under the bed.

The Taiytakei Crazy stabbed with his warlock’s knife did what Tuuran told them because Crazy had said they had to, but Crazy hadn’t told them they had to pretend to like it. The slaves were a bit of this and a bit of that. Some put on armour of glass-and-gold with an eager glee, others slunk away. Tuuran let those ones go and sent them back down into the eyrie to carry on pulling out bodies and setting the place to rights. The ones who had the will to fight he set to work learning how to use the black-powder cannon. The eyrie shook every time they fired, and even over the wind the noise made him jump. From the corners of his eyes he watched the dragons. The hatchlings circled the eyrie. The big one stayed sat on the wall, still as a sentinel.

The bodies in the yard were almost gone, the dead sorted and stripped, the corpses thrown over the side. He hadn’t had much of a chance to look at them and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He’d had a lover when he’d been here before. Yena. Didn’t much like the thought of finding her again, charred and hacked into bits. They’d parted badly, but still . . . Maybe she wasn’t even here. Maybe she was dead. Maybe she was cowering in a room deep under the dragon yard, terrified of what he’d do when he found her, terrified because she’d been too afraid to run away with him.

Which reminded him . . . He called up a pair of soldiers from the yard. ‘The white witch. Where is she?’ Yena had been a slave to the enchantress, and it struck him now that he hadn’t seen her even though he’d sent men to find her. Hadn’t seen Grand Master Bellepheros for a while either.