Free The Splintered Gods by Stephen Deas

off his feet. It was only when he reached the cage that he realised he was being ridiculous. To send a raven, Baros Tsen T’Varr sat at his desk in his nice quiet study, very much out of the wind, with the pretty quill pen that Kalaiya had given him and his perfect white paper shipped from Zinzarra. He wrote his words in glorious peace and quiet and then summoned a slave to take it to a scribe. And, thank you very much, went nowhere near these horror-touched birds at all.
    The jade raven eyed him from its cage with interest. The gale and its swinging perch didn’t seem to bother it. Tsen turned away. As he did, the wind caught his robe and almost lifted it over his head, making him look even more of an idiot. He looked across the rim of the eyrie at the violet storm below. I should just jump, I really should. Save us all the bother . . . But instead he struggled back down to the yard and aimed for the tunnels that would take him out of this hellish wind. State he was in, he’d probably pick the wrong entrance without thinking and end up among the Scales or something like that.
    Chay-Liang caught up with him before he could get away. ‘Tsen—’
    ‘Send a jade raven,’ he mumbled. She could do it. Saved him from thinking. ‘Send a jade raven to the Elemental Men in Khalishtor. Tell them what we did. All of it. Do it now.’
    ‘Tsen . . .’
    He stopped for a moment and looked at her. ‘Dear gods in whom we don’t believe, Liang, is it always like this up here?’
    ‘So far, yes.’ She was grinning now as though she liked it, and for a moment, through all the pain in his head, Tsen hated her. ‘Tsen—’
    ‘Later.’ He pushed past. She was mad, that was it. Happened to enchanters, didn’t it? They cracked and all sensible thought oozed out of their edges . . . He forgave her though, five minutes later when he found she’d had his bath prepared when she’d seen him coming; and the next few hours were a blur of warmth and pain and Xizic resin and Kalaiya and relief that no one was here to hang him yet, all a little marred by a lethargic dread of what was yet to come. Chay-Liang brought him something from the alchemist to help him sleep; he drank it without even thinking, and when he woke up again, his head was clearer and only throbbed like a badly sheeted sail. He called her back and they walked the walls together, battered by the relentless gale as the eyrie drifted in its lazy orbit around the Godspike.
    ‘Couldn’t we go lower?’ he shouted at her over the wind. Liang had six glasships dragging the eyrie through the sky. As far as Tsen could see, she’d moved the eyrie higher and higher until they were as far from the storm-dark as her gasping lungs could stand.
    ‘We could,’ she yelled back. ‘But you get used to it. Give it a few days.’
    ‘I may not have a few days! And if I do, I would prefer them not to hurt so much.’ Was it possible to sound plaintive and shout at the same time? He rather thought he’d managed it.
    She offered him some reeking drink or other. When he asked her what it was, she shrugged and shouted over the gale, ‘Bellepheros makes it. It helps with the thinness of the air.’ He waved her away then watched as she shrugged and drank a mouthful and offered it again. Bellepheros. The alchemist from the dragon-lands.
    ‘You trust that slave too much.’ Far too much, for what they had between the two of them was nothing like the way it should be between mistress and slave.
    ‘What?’
    He leaned into her and shouted back, ‘I said you trust your slave too much!’
    She looked at him then. Not a word, not a flicker of her eyes, not the shadow of a smirk, but he knew she was laughing at him. After a second or two he had to laugh as well. Kalaiya knew his soul. That was simply the way fate had turned. Maybe it was the same for Liang and her alchemist. At any rate, he was the last person in the world to lecture anyone when it came to overly liking their slaves.
    He