The Splintered Gods Read Online Free PDF Page A

came back.
    ‘What about the slave?’ Chay-Liang couldn’t quite keep her loathing out of her voice. I should have listened to you, eh?
    ‘Zafir? Lock her away until I return.’
    ‘I’d rather hang her and be done with it.’
    ‘But I would not.’ The enormity of what she’d done in his name kept staring him in the face, standing in his way whenever he tried to move. He couldn’t simply have her executed because he needed her presence to remind him of his own guilt. ‘Liang, she knew the truth, and of all of us she has no reason to hide it. Her fate is certain.’ And perhaps a little because, in the end, when she’d had the chance to poison him, she’d turned it down and he couldn’t understand why. ‘I’m going to take Kalaiya with me. It’s an indulgence, I know, but I don’t think I can face this alone. If they’re waiting for me when I come back, they will try to use her to punish me. She deserves better. So do you, Chay-Liang.’
    He sent her away and thought about having someone call Kalaiya to attend him, then changed his mind and walked through the eyrie to find her. On other days he passed through the ancient passageways oblivious to their age and their origin, but today, as unsettled as he was, Tsen saw them for what they truly were: relics beyond understanding, detritus left after the half-gods brought the Splintering upon the world and vanished. They were the unknown. Like the dragons, like so many things. Like the eyrie itself, a huge piece of rock, an enigma floating over the dunes of the desert, honeycombed with mystery, abandoned for hundreds of years and sitting for all that time, patiently waiting, its design unfinished and its purpose long forgotten. He tried to shake the feeling away. It was a perilous thing sometimes, to stop and take a long look at the world right there around him; that was when he realised how little of it he truly understood.
    Kalaiya, of course, had known he’d come. She was waiting for him. Tsen opened the iron door to her room and she came to himat once, with neither haste nor ceremony, and wrapped her arms around him. Succour and comfort. She gave him his strength. He buried his face in her endless hair.
    ‘Do you remember,’ he asked, ‘how things were before all this started? At the very least, I could have called my life normal, or perhaps not very interesting, or frequently mundane.’ He took a deep breath. Six months since the dragons came. There certainly hadn’t been as many people who’d wanted him to conveniently drop dead back then. Couldn’t have been more than three or four. Now it must be more like . . . well, frankly, once it comes out what the dragon-queen has done to Dhar Thosis, pretty much everyone.
    Kalaiya held him tight. ‘I remember.’ Her hair smelled of Xizic. His favourite, not hers.
    ‘It’s all over, Kalaiya. I will never be the next sea lord of Xican. There will be no Xican any more. They’ll hang me, and you know there’s no running from the Elemental Men. I’ll keep you safe as best I can. I need to go now. To see what . . .’ There was a lump in his throat, choking him. For years he’d built them a future full of promises and now they were all burned to ash. ‘I need to leave.’ She was shaking. Scared, no matter how she tried to hide it. He let her go and forced himself to look at her, to see her and remember her face. Look at her and look at what you’ve done . He could only die once, however unpleasant it was, but Kalaiya would be there to watch it and to remember, over and over. After he was gone, she’d be nothing. No one would want her. She’d be tainted by him for ever. ‘Come with me? Please?’ He couldn’t look at her any more. He turned and fled, but it didn’t help. The regret and the pain that tore at his chest came with him.
    Outside, waiting in the middle of the dragon yard, Chay-Liang already had a gondola hanging by twelve silver chains from the sedate rotation of a glasship’s disc.