The Splintered Gods Read Online Free PDF

Slaves hurried back and forth, carrying supplies. Apple wine. An enchanted bowl of never-melting ice that Liang had made for him years ago. Barrels of water for the tanks on the gondola’s roof. Hard bread and biscuits, fruit, cheese, silken sheets and blankets and everything he’d need. He stood in the middle of them, doing nothing useful and simply getting in the way while they bustled around him as though he wasn’t there. The junior t’varr overseer stiffened when he saw Tsen but then decidedto ignore him too. Tsen felt his resentment, his disapproval. You’re running away from what you’ve done. And, yes he was, but he was running towards it too.
    Kalaiya, of course, didn’t come out until the gondola was ready to fly. She made him wait, which was her subtle way of telling him she was cross with him. When she came out to the dragon yard, she was dressed in the plain white tunic of a slave, in case anyone had forgotten. Tsen took her hand and led her inside. The ramp closed behind them. He tried to think of something to say, but as the glasship above rose into the sky and lifted the gondola away, he couldn’t shake off that vision of her, years from now, a penniless beggar eking out the barest sketch of a life on what charity she could find. All that they were, all that they could have been, all gone to waste because of his own stupid hubris.

3
    Hiding in Waiting
    Tuuran called him Crazy Mad. The big man had called him that since the day Berren had first told him the story of how the warlocks had stolen his life, how they’d sucked him out of his body and trapped him in another one, and how he’d escaped and gone looking for the man who wore his face. How he had pieces of other souls trapped inside him – Skyrie the warlock and something else, something dark and huge and powerful. All I want is to find out who I am. All I want is to have my life back. He clung to those other names, the person he used to be. Berren the Bloody Judge. Berren the Crowntaker. Inside, that’s who he was and who he meant to be again one day, but first they had to get off this stupid island and away from this stupid war and all these murderous Taiytakei.
    He found the remains of a wooden tower on the cliffs away from both the bridge and the palace, a half-tumbled-down ruin long before the dragon had come. An old lookout point perhaps, watching over the sea before Sea Lord Senxian had raised his golden towers. He and Tuuran hid inside, covering themselves in mouldy sacking and bits and pieces of rotting timber, waiting out the day. Now and then, when Tuuran fell asleep and started to snore, Berren poked him. He’d seen what the Taiytakei on top of the Dul Matha were doing, clearing it, killing anyone who wasn’t one of them. As twilight fell, he slipped out into the gloom and watched them leave. A pair of glass sleds ten times bigger than the one he and Tuuran had stolen ferried them to the few ships that had survived the onslaught. Before they left, the soldiers threw something from the shattered stump of one of the three towers to dangle by a rope. Berren heard a small cheer drift down from the ruins. A body, but he had no idea whose it was, nor any reason to care.
    When they were gone, he woke Tuuran and they pulled their stolen sled to the cliff by the bridge. Berren tied a rope around itwhile Tuuran put a rock on top. They pushed it out over the abyss between the two islands to see what happened.
    ‘Well that’s a bit of a relief.’ Tuuran grinned when it didn’t plummet into the sea. ‘Would have been a bit of a bugger otherwise.’
    They pulled it back, took off the rock off and sat on the sled. Tuuran pushed off as hard as he could against the cliffs and they crossed the divide between Dul Matha and the Eye of the Sea Goddess, drifting over the waves far below. Tuuran sat still, looking up at the moon and the stars bright overhead, glancing now and then at the far cliff coming towards them as though it was a perfectly