The dragon lowered its head right down, as big as a cart, with eyes like glistening boulders of glacier ice and teeth like swords.
‘Rin,’ whispered Tsen in such a broken voice that he wasn't sure he'd even spoken at all. ‘It was Rin.’
The dragon's eyes shifted very slightly, and then it reached out one massive claw and picked up the t'varr from Vespinarr. For an age everyone was frozen where they were, Tsen still rigid with dread, Rin held in the dragon's claw high up in the air, eyeball to eyeball with the monster. A strange noise echoed over the eyrie, and it took a moment for Tsen to realise what it was. Rin. Screaming.
‘Put him down! Put him down!’ Dimly Tsen registered that the alchemist was shouting too, but the dragon didn't move and the alchemist was left to wave his stick in futile anger until at last the rider came out and told the dragon to leave Vey Rin T'Varr alone. Much to Tsen's surprise, Rin was still alive.
Later they had to help him to get into his gondola. He didn't say much. Tsen didn't think he'd be saying much for a long time, but at least Shonda still had his brother. He might need a new t'varr now, but no one had died and so they weren't going to war, and maybe there would be an Elemental Man coming for him or maybe not, but with a bit of luck not as long as he gave Shonda exactly what he wanted and sent the dragon to burn Dhar Thosis.
The thought made him smile and weep both at once. Shonda had something else now too, something unexpected. He had someone who understood exactly what had happened to Quai'Shu.
For what that was worth.
Goodbye, Rin, old friend.
60
He lay in bed at night, wide awake, shaking and sweating and shivering. Trembling at the memory of a dream he could barely hold but to which he clung with every finger of memory hooked into it like talons. All his people were dead. His family. But he knew who he was and he knew his purpose.
In his dream he'd been someone else. More than someone else. The hooded man with the half-ruined face and the one blind eye had been there.
He'd been begging, pleading on his knees. There was someone inside him. Another name. He scratched and scrabbled at the dream, clawing at it to drag the memory back but it wouldn't come. All he remembered was the name.
Skyrie.
Berren Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge of Tethis, sat up, fists clenched and eyes wide. He was surrounded by straw and everywhere was dark, so dark he couldn't see even a glimmer around him. He didn't know where he was. Tethis? The Pit?
The shades from his dreams lingered. There was another pit, one they remembered but that he'd never seen. In another dark place lit by a column of golden light and the broken goddess of the dead earth was there and the Black Moon, and he'd come so close. So close to. .
So close to what? It made no sense.
He stared around him. The dream was fading but in the darkness he could still see it. He saw a woman bent over a man, and the man had an arrow in him and he was going to die; and the woman was trying to save him, but that didn't matter because the woman needed to die too because she was the last lock on the gate he'd so very nearly opened, and there was something about her, something inside her that made her like him, more than one person at once, but there was another voice far away calling him and his hands wouldn't move, wouldn't make that last tiny little gesture to make him free, and the rage and the frustration and the despair were like tidal waves crashing through him one after the other.
He roared and jumped up off the floor and lunged for the door he couldn't see. ‘Leave me alone!’ Not my memories. Not my memories. It was there somewhere. He knew it. He still couldn't remember where he was but he knew this place. He fumbled for the wall.
A hand landed on his shoulder. ‘Great Flame. Again?’
He jerked. Tuuran. And with his name the memories that didn't belong shattered to glittering shards and faded like smoke in the wind and yes, he knew where he was: he was in Deephaven. The place he'd once called home. Deephaven, looking for Taiytakei and their ships to take him to Vallas Kuy.
‘Come on. Out, out!’ Tuuran was pushing him through the door into a passage every bit as dark as the room where they'd been sleeping. He thrust Berren ahead of him up a steep flight of stairs. There was light here now. Gleams and slivers of something bright at the top. A trapdoor onto a rooftop.
Deephaven. His head was clearing. He remembered now. They'd found a ship and worked their passage up the coast and he'd let himself sink away again and for a time he'd become. . the other one. Skyrie. Still in there. Lurking. Hiding. But now he was where he'd been born and Skyrie was the weak one, and he wanted this, this place with its memories.
Tuuran pushed the trapdoor up and Berren almost fell back down the steps as he reeled from the brightness outside. It was the middle of the day. He climbed up and looked, and all his strength was suddenly gone because he was here again and seeing it was like a punch to the gut. Twenty years since he'd trained with the sword-monks of Torpreah when they'd come to Deephaven for a summer. The start of a civil war, his master had said, but it had come to nothing. Twenty years and yet he could see Tasahre as though it was yesterday, dying at his feet as he knelt beside her. He blinked and shook his head, trying to tear himself away from the past and the deck of that ship, from the Emperor's Docks and the Deephaven he'd known half a lifetime ago, but he couldn't. It had gripped him from the moment they'd sailed round the Blue Cliffs and the needle-like spikes of Deephaven Point. When the ship had brought them into the bay, it had all come crashing back. He'd seen the city from the sea before, but only the once, from the ship that had taken him away all those years ago. The docks were still there, the castle-like House of Records at one end where the harbour masters lived, the great warehouses, the Old Harbour Watchtower at the other leaning like a drunkard over the Kingsway but still not fallen down. He stared at it all, fifteen years old again, the Bloody Judge and the Crowntaker both names that hadn't yet found him. Just Berren, the thief-taker's boy, the day after his life was shattered. He felt as though he'd stepped back in time, as though he'd gone back to those days to walk through them again, only this time he was walking backwards ever further into the past. He'd watched the city come closer and he'd wept, because if he was walking backwards through his life he knew exactly what happened next; and also because he knew that he wasn't, that the sensations weren't real, and that however hard he wished, he wouldn't be seeing his Tasahre again.
From a distance the city had seemed much the same. The changes were small and subtle and it took being up close to see how deep they ran. And not so much see as feel. As he stepped off the boat and onto the docks, a tension had embraced him like a poisoned shroud. He'd walked up the Avenue of Emperors, drinking it in, the rich taverns on one side and the hostels for sailors who could afford decent lodgings. The Assayers’ quarter, as he remembered it. On the other side should have been the first fringes of the Maze, and that was where the city had changed. But not just changed. Every single street and alley had vanished, simply not there any more as though all the taverns and bawdy houses and the jewellers and the goldsmiths and the Moongrass dens and the sailors’ flophouses had all shuffled up while he was gone and quietly closed them off. Further on it was suddenly familiar again. The two great curved swords still reared over the top of the Avenue, the Swords of the Sun proclaiming the virtue of truth and a terrible fate for thieves and liars. The old statues he remembered were still there: the first emperor and the last, except the statue of Ashahn the Wise had now gone and there was another in its place, a young woman. She might have been beautiful and regal once but her face had been scratched and scarred and daubed with paint.