Free The Splintered Gods by Stephen Deas Page A

pulled Liang into some shelter where at least they were out of the wind and he could hear himself think, snatched the cup out of Liang’s hands and drank. ‘Yes, yes.’ And he half-listened as she told him how breathlessness and nausea and splitting heads had blighted everyone until the alchemist started making his potions. Everyone except the rider-slave Zafir of course, who laughed at them all for being so pathetic. When Liang was done, Tsen looked about him. His eyrie, still his eyrie, kept aloft by hostile uncaring sorcery from another age.
    ‘We’re not safe here,’ he said. He looked up at the glasships. ‘Sooner or later they will fail.’
    ‘I have more, loitering over the desert, out of the way and out of sight. Belli and I talked it through while you were gone.’
    Belli? Tsen chuckled and shook his head. What, were they lovers now? ‘You trust that slave far too much.’ He spoke with a twinkle in his words this time. So what if they were? ‘Borrowed time, Liang. We’re all on borrowed time. We must make the most of it.’
    ‘One glasship is enough to keep us aloft, T’Varr, and we have six. See how they all pull at slight angles to one another – that was the hard part to get right. If any one fails then it will fall clear of the outer rim of the eyrie. There will be plenty of time to summon another. We’ve been here for days and I haven’t lost one yet.’
    ‘It will be quite a sight if you do.’ Tsen shook his head. ‘But I wonder if we should release them. All of them. Let this eyrie and its monsters sink into the storm-dark and be gone. Evacuate everyone. Leave me behind. Wipe it all out. Mai’Choiro can stay in his cell. We’ll go down together, he and I.’ He took a deepbreath and turned to look at the dragon at last, the terror that had destroyed Dhar Thosis. Its wounds were already healing. The eyrie wall where it sat was marked by dried blood. Was there anything magical about dragon blood? There ought to be, he thought, but neither the alchemist nor Chay-Liang had run around clearing it up and cackling gleefully to themselves as they did, so he supposed there wasn’t.
    He frowned and touched his temple. His head wasn’t hurting any more and Chay-Liang was smiling at him. He rubbed his fingers into his skin, trying to chase away the last ghosts of the pain, then he turned and stared out to the west to where, if you flew for long enough, the Konsidar rose out of the sands.
    ‘Ravens flew from Dhar Thosis to Vespinarr on the day the city fell,’ he said. ‘Shonda knows what has happened. They would have reached him before I reached Senxian’s palace. He’ll be looking for us. As big as the desert is, it won’t take him long to find us. It’s a race now – Shonda or the Elemental Men.’ Tsen shook his head. ‘I left in too much haste. I should have sent a raven to Khalishtor at once. Another mistake.’
    He paused and then put a hand to Chay-Liang’s shoulder. ‘He’ll come with the best and most deadly of what his money can buy for him, Liang. He won’t wait for the Crown of the Sea Lords to decide what’s to be done. He’ll seize everything we have in the name of his “friend” Senxian and offer the new lord of Dhar Thosis some marvellous reparation. He’s probably prepared a suitable puppet already, skulking somewhere in the shadows. Probably even made that deal before Dhar Thosis burned. He’ll take everything that was ours and destroy every threat to his ambition. Quai’Shu will be allowed to live because he’s a broken old man who can’t string two sentences together any more, but only so they can try him and hang him for the look of it when it suits them. The rest of us?’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘He’ll kill every last one of us if he has even the slightest reason. You, me, Kalaiya, all of us. The only ones he won’t kill will be the ones who deserve it most.’
    His eyes drifted to the far side of the wall, to the dragon staring down into