The Splintered Gods Read Online Free PDF Page B

normal thing to float a thousand feet above rocks and the sea on something your eyes saw right though if you could bring yourself to look. Berren tried not to think about it. He had no idea how the sled worked; it just did. Let that be enough. On the far side fires still burned in the ruins of what had once been rich palaces. He felt a restlessness stir inside him, roused by his fear and by the flames. He pushed it away but it persisted. The dragon had awoken something. Memories. Ideas. Desires.
    The Eye of the Sea Goddess had been an island of palaces once, of shimmering glass-and-gold towers, but the dragon had smashed most of them in a fit of . . . what? Rage? Among the few that still stood were the dancing lights of swinging lanterns, and as they came closer, Berren saw they were gangs of soldiers, searching the ruins for survivors. When the soldiers found one, they dragged him out and killed him.
    Tuuran left the sled by the bridge. Smashed pieces of glass lay scattered underfoot, sharp and dangerous, or else ground to a gravel that crunched with shocking loudness at every step. The silver light of the half-moon cast eerie shadows among the splinters and shards. A single road meandered down the island from the cliffs and the Dul Matha towards a causeway and another bridge to the mainland, but it was busy with soldiers camped out for the night. Elsewhere, the slope was steep and treacherous, rocks sticking out between thick tangles of grass and thorny vines or else hidden beneath them, hungry to snatch a foot and twist an ankle. Tuuran bulled through it, cutting a path to the seaward cliffs away from the debris and the hunting parties of Taiytakei until they found agully overgrown with thorn bushes, the sort of place you couldn’t see until you as good as walked straight into it.
    ‘This’ll do.’ He pushed his way under the overhanging thorns and settled down, waiting for the dawn. He was snoring again in minutes. Berren tossed and turned and shifted. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the dragon of Dhar Thosis again, the red and gold scaled monster as he and Tuuran had stood before it in the freshly ruined palace. Its eyes had been all over him. It knew him, and memories that weren’t his had bubbled and boiled in his head, memories of another time and place when there hadn’t been one dragon but a thousand, and all of them were his.
    The warlock Saffran Kuy had cut him with a golden knife once, long ago, and he’d seen a flash of his future. Yesterday he’d killed Saffran’s brother Vallas and taken that knife. In the dying warlock’s memories he’d seen the man with the ruined face and the one blind milky eye. Among the memories in his head that weren’t his own, he saw himself dying on the edge of a swamp with the night split open like swollen flesh and leaking black shadows, the stars winking out one by one. He saw the same man standing over him.
    ‘Are you death?’ he tried to ask, but the words never came out.
    ‘I carry the Black Moon.’ The eye bored into him.
    That man. The man with the ruined face and the milky eye. He had the answers. He’d made all this happen, and now Berren had something in his head that didn’t belong. Something sleeping and crippled, but he felt it when it stirred. A splinter of some unbounded power.
    ‘I need to find him,’ he whispered to the stars. ‘I need to know what he did to me.’ Before it was too late.
    After a while he left Tuuran to his snores and slipped through the night, crept back among the ruins to where the Taiytakei were camped, loud, bright with fire and easy to avoid. He slipped around them, watching and waiting for a lone sentry to settle just a little too far from the rest. Old familiar skills and they came back to him with ease. He’d been a thief once, an orphan from Shipwrights’ in Deephaven, a boy pickpocket, a cutpurse and a burglar. He smiled to himself. It was all so long ago and he’d been so many things since then, but he still