Old one?
The little one had trapped it and almost unravelled it so that only the barest essence remained. The dragon wondered how a little one could do such a thing but it had no answer to that. The half-god was all but gone, not enough left for it to know what was happening to it, much less talk. The dragon took the two shades in its claws and picked them patiently apart until they were separate things, each straining to be released. One for the sun, one for the moon.
Old one? It tried one last time but the half-god was too damaged to understand. Perhaps the night lord would make it whole again, perhaps not. There was a sense of recognition though. This was one of the half-gods who'd turned with old wise Seturakah for whom the dragons had first flown. One of the few who'd stayed and fought, who had turned against the old gods and failed and lost and been broken.
Were you too close when the end came? Is that what happened to you? It looked at the mangled shrivelled shade. So few, and yet you were so great and so close. It let the old one go. Be with your creator. Make your penance and your peace. Is he merciful in his victory, the night lord? The dragon had little idea what such things meant. Mercy, revenge, forgiveness, spite? Those were not dragon thoughts — for dragons there was only what was food and what was not. It had learned these other words from the little ones. They seemed to think them somehow important. The dragon couldn't see why they should matter. Mostly what it understood was the rage, the wild impatient fury that always undid them. Why are we this way? Why are we made to be so quick of thought and claw and yet so fleeting? It mused on this for a minute or two, and when it saw that there was no answer to be had to that either, its thoughts moved on. It did not understand resentment either.
It still held the little one. The little one wasn't damaged at all.
Who are you? It began to move back to the broken prison. The little one squirmed and tried to get away but the dragon held it fast. Nor did it answer; but little ones, as the dragon had often observed, could rarely control their thinking. All the dragon had to do was to listen.
You were a lord among your kind? The little one had a name, but the dragon had no interest. I have never heard of your home. If I find it I will burn it. No, I will not let you go. I mean to feed you to the Nothing to see what will happen.
The little one struggled but it had no hope of escape. The dragon reached out as close as it dared to the hole and its questing devouring tongues. It dropped the little one inside.
How? How did this come to pass? How was the old seal broken? Where did the dead goddess and her slayer go? Did they flee or has the Nothing consumed them? Not that, it thought, for the two of them had held the Nothing at bay for an age and more. No, they had gone somewhere.
A weight of understanding closed over Silence then. If they truly had gone somewhere then they could be found and they could be returned, and That Which Came Before could be locked away once more.
I do not want the burden of this knowledge.
The little one flickered as the Nothing closed around it and then it darted through a tiny space the dragon hadn't seen and flashed away, gone towards its creator, the Lord of Light and Warmth. The dragon lunged, annoyed, but it was slow and the little one had already vanished. As it went, the dragon caught a fractured fragment of a thought.
I was there. I saw it happen.
And with that a flicker of something else. Of pride and a place and a face.
The dragon snarled. If the little one had seen it then so had the old one; and if the little one was gone to the sun, so the old one was gone to the moon and the night lord. And the night lord was known to dragons.
So, Gods, I have sent these souls with their knowledge and their memories back to you. What will you do?
What gods always did. Nothing.
The Bloody Judge
58
By the time the boats from the galley came ashore, the pain ran right from the top of Tuuran's head down his neck. His face felt like it was still on fire and it wasn't going to get any better in a hurry either. Adamantine Men knew all about fire. When old Hyram had taken the Speaker's Ring, he'd put on a tournament and games for the dragon-riders who came from across the nine realms to kiss it. They'd fought mock battles, strafing legions of the Adamantine Men with dragon fire while the soldiers hid behind their dragon-scale armour and walls of dragon-scale shields. It was supposed to show how fearless the speaker's army was, how they could stand up to anything. And it had, but they'd still lost fifty men over the space of the five days and a hundred more carried their burns proudly, scars to prove who they were. Tuuran reckoned the good soldiers were the ones who'd managed to get themselves and their brothers beside them properly behind their shields, but anyone who got burned got treated well enough. Burns hurt.
He growled and waved his sword at the slaves from the galley and turned them right around. ‘That's a ship, that is,’ he bellowed at the oar-slaves and the sail-slaves as they struggled in through the surf. ‘That's a ship, and we know how to sail it and that makes it our life. What are you going to do? Run into the woods barefoot? Do you even know where you are?’ The men from the cages in the hold came from up and down the coast here but the galley slaves came from everywhere, mostly the little kingdoms like the one Crazy Mad said he was from, all around the fringes of the Dominion. They'd be lost here, as lost as he would, so he rounded them up, sail-slaves, oar-slaves, the men from the cages, and made them have a good long look at what had happened on the beach. All those dead Taiytakei, that was the sort of sight a slave ought to see now and then. The sort to remember. No one questioned that he should be the one giving the orders now.
‘Any of our slave masters left on the galley?’ he asked. The pain across his face turned everything he said into an angry snarl. But no, the Fire Witch — or whatever she was — had burned every Taiytakei to ash. So he looked at all the slaves, standing there on the beach, shitting and pissing themselves and gawping at the mangled remains of their masters, and left them to wonder for a bit while he picked up one of the lightning wands and waved it about in case he could make it work. Everyone knew the wands only worked for the dark-skins but it seemed worth a go. Turned out everyone was right, but it didn't stop them from flinching when he pointed it at them. He'd keep it, he thought, and turned and waved it at the slaves and asked them, ‘You really want to stay here? Stay. The rest of you, we go back to the galley because it just became ours.’
About half stayed, mostly the ones from homes up and down the coast. Back on the galley, once the rest of them had scrambled aboard, it turned out that not all the dark-skins were dead after all. The galley slave masters might all be burned to crispy ash and yes, the deck smelt like an eyrie from back home, but down among the oars they found a pair of Taiytakei oar-slaves cowering under the rowing benches. Tuuran had no idea what they were doing there — putting Taiytakei slaves in among the oars was just another way of killing them, everyone knew that — but there they were anyway, terrified. Tuuran dragged them out and gave the others a choice: kill the dark-skins or keep them and they voted almost to a man for keeping. It didn't surprise him. Slave or not-slave always counted more than the colour of a man's skin.