Tsen pouted. ‘Well, you certainly didn't come all the way here just to tell me that! What news do you really bring?’
‘Our sea lord has acquired the alchemist. He is in Xican. Enchantress Chay-Liang will bring him to you when she comes.’
A broad smile spread across the t'varr’s face, so wide it ran halfway up his cheeks. ‘And dragon eggs, LaLa? Any sign of those?’
‘Our sea lord advises less than a year, T'Varr.’
‘Delicious.’ The t'varr clapped his hands. ‘Then we shall be busy soon. I'm sure this alchemist will be most demanding. But good. Good.’
‘Sea Lord Quai'Shu also commands that his castle be taken to the northern edge of the Lair of Samim. The alchemist will offer further advice when he arrives.’
The Watcher left him to it. The glasships with their chains would move the castle, inch it to the edge of the great salt marsh where the Samim, the mother of snakes and scorpions and all things poisonous, was said to live.
He went that way himself too, but for entirely other reasons.
10
Beside the river of Tethis he forgot his thirst. He was Skyrie, but the Crowntaker was inside him. Panting, sweating, he stripped off his clothes and stood in the water and looked at himself naked in the moonlight. He didn't know how long he had before his skin wouldn't be his own again. He touched himself, looking for the marks that came with ten years of soldiering. Not his marks, but those of the Bloody Judge. But all he found was the huge scar on his left thigh, old and puckered and familiar and comforting, the size of his splayed hand. At least his skin was still his own.
He waded to the bank and fell to his knees at the edge of the water and started to sob. The thing was still there, writhing and screaming in impotent agony and rage, and he wanted it gone, but he didn't know how. Oh gods, he'd killed four of his brothers! Friends! He howled at the sky, ‘It wasn't me! It wasn't me! It was him! Oh Xibaiya! Someone help me!’
He was young, a boy coming into the first flushes of manhood. He was hiding. Cowering in the crude hut that was his home. Outside, open and in the daylight, something terrible was happening. Women were screaming. Men roared and howled and he heard horses. They came every year, the riders, had done ever since he was small. Came and took what they wanted and left; and whenever they came, he and his brothers and sisters hid away. He was shaking. Trembling. The Bloody Judge's men. Hadn't known then, but Vallas had told him later who had done it.
The sobs turned to howls. He buried his face in his hands.
A giant burst in and pulled him from his hiding place. Immense and as tall and as broad as the doorway. Long dreadlocked hair hung to his waist and a short spiked axe hung on a loop of leather from one wrist. The giant picked him up and flung him against a wall. The axe swung and Skyrie lost all will to move and simply slumped. He looked down. He was sitting in a lake of his own blood. His leg had been cut open, so deep that it was more off than on.
And then later the water.
He got back to his feet, the river dripping off his legs. He was cold, the water icy, the night air chill and he was naked. He looked at the scar again in the moonlight, long and hard. The skin looked as though it had melted and then frozen again, twisted out of shape. In the moonlight it was speckled with pale and silvery streaks, thousands of little marks left in the skin as it had healed.
That's no axe scar, warlock. In his head the Crowntaker was right behind him. He squealed and turned and ran a few steps and then stopped, helpless, and wailed, because how did you run from something that was inside you? The Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge. There. Watching and looking and waiting.
It looks like a burn, warlock. But it came from an axe. The one the giant had swung at him. He tried to scream: I was there! It was me! I felt it! But though his mouth opened, no sound came out. He was losing control. The Judge was taking him back.
The Crowntaker had seen those silver streaks before. There were patterns in them, staggering and intricate and they looked like writing of a sort. The sigils that warlocks used, perhaps. Or maybe the sunburst marks of the sun priests. The thought came with a trail of wistful regret strung out like gossamer behind it, lingering.
He looked at his hands. The fingers were long and slender. The callouses that came from years of gauntlets and swords weren't there. They were soft.
He put the grey robes back over his head.
The warlock was screaming. Endless screaming, battering against the prison of his own mind, howling to be let out, but that would never happen, not again. Flickering memories flashed by, not his own, dancing past, revealing a little of their skin and dashing away. Then a great slew of them came like rocks tumbling from the face of a cliff to reveal new strata beneath, pristine and clean. Memories of the death-mage sticking that paper to his breastplate, fierce and hot, striking the last stroke of the last sigil in his own blood and casting his incantation as he died. Everything that came after.
I am the Bloody Judge. For a moment he faltered, bewildered by the enormity of what they'd done to him, frozen by it. He looked at the hands that weren't his. Stared at them as they shook. How could they be real? Then forced the horror away because what use was it? The sigils were gone, the spell cast. What was done was done. There would be time later for fear and anguish and dread — now was for bloody vengeance. Vallas Kuy, the master warlock. He needed to find Vallas and his golden knife that cut pieces out of the souls of men.
He remembered his thirst again, knelt and touched his lips to the water, taking care not to look at his own reflection. The river was clean here, the smells of the docks mere whispers on the breeze. Afterwards he danced from stone to boulder across the hiss of the water and slipped in and out of the alleys that nestled among the houses of the rich on the other side. He found a wall that was low enough to climb. Jumped onto the edge of a storehouse roof, crept to the top and then along the ridge of it, skills the warlock Skyrie had never had, old skills the Bloody Judge had learned long ago as a thief in far-off Deephaven. He slipped through the town unseen, running down the Galsmouth Road towards the battlefield where he belonged.
11
Long ago the Elemental Men had come down from Mount Solence. They'd fallen on the squabbling coast of Takei'Tarr and cut away the old sorceries and religions in a swathe of blood and fire. It had been a necessary thing, an act of mercy to save this piece of the now-broken world from another cataclysm. Some places had taken to the new order well. The old Mar-Li Republics had acquiesced almost at once and so became the model for the society that now grew under elemental eyes. Others had not. Yet it struck the Watcher that two cities in particular had resisted most furiously. They were the cities furthest from the first Elemental Men, with the most time to prepare and who should have seen the inevitability of history sweeping inexorably towards them but whose pride was matchless. Cashax in the far north of the desert with her inexhaustible supply of slaves; and worse, Vespinarr, deep in the southern mountains on the edge of the Konsidar with her silver and her bottomless wealth. They had fought the hardest and so had been cut the deepest. Vespinarr had given birth to the sorceress Abraxi, Cashax to the indescribable abomination of the Crimson Sunburst. Both had been crushed in the end, conquered and ruled and their histories rewritten by the Elemental Masters, and yet now they quietly ruled the world despite their pasts. Every conflict among the Taiytakei, if you looked hard enough, was underpinned by their rivalry.