Her skin tingled. The air around them fizzed. Her thoughts became muddled. She didn't quite know where she was any more, or who, or why. .
The lightning from the third tower hit Diamond Eye squarely in the face. Zafir caught a flash of light so bright that it left her momentarily blind and a thunderclap so loud that her ears screamed. She couldn't see and she couldn't hear. Diamond Eye fell limp beneath her. The rage and the hunger and the fury all vanished at once. Suddenly she couldn't feel his presence at all.
The room. The locked room. Wrapped in darkness. Fear of the light. That was all she was. It took her with it and the world went black.
74
There wasn't much fighting left to be had by the time Tuuran and Berren reached the sea again. Hundreds of sword-slaves, thousands maybe, had come ashore from their little boats. No one had stopped them and now Tuuran and Crazy Mad passed them running the other way, heading deeper into Dhar Thosis and away from the sea and the spreading fires. No quarter — they'd all had that shouted at them until their ears were ringing. They were sword-slaves, bred to the lash at the oars of a galley but strong enough to have survived; and now here they were, let loose on the very people who'd enslaved them. They would not be kind. The roaming gangs had hungry faces and violent eyes. They looked Tuuran and Crazy Mad up and down, saw the colour of their skin and the swords and armour they wore and passed on with a nod and a growl. Closer to the shore, as the gangs thinned, houses burned, sometimes with men and women still inside and knots of sword-slaves at the doors with spears, laughing and poking them back into the flames. They passed bodies in the streets, Taiytakei torn from their beds and hurled out of their houses and ripped to pieces. Crazy Mad didn't like it but Tuuran couldn't have cared less. They deserved it for what they did, all of them.
They passed a half-dozen sword-slaves dragging a pair of screaming women into an alley. The slaves had already left one body behind them, too small to be a grown man.
‘This isn't how an army should behave,’ Crazy Mad muttered.
Tuuran laughed at him. ‘This isn't an army, madman! This is a horde. A mob. Besides, war is war. Victory is to crush your enemy so utterly they can never stand against you again. Annihilate them if you can.’
Crazy Mad scowled back at him. ‘No. Victory is to be better than what you overthrow.’
‘Ha! Then slavers or not, I think you're on the wrong side of this battle.’ For a fraction of a moment, Tuuran hesitated and remembered the girl from the Pinnacles. It had been right, what he'd done, and was this any different? But then he shook his head and walked on. It was different. The Taiytakei were his enemies, all of them.
Berren stopped. The big man was right. Not that he cared, but he was right, and the Bloody Judge would never have let it be like this, and the screaming from the alley wouldn't let him go. He stopped and turned back, letting Tuuran walk on without him. The body left on the street was a Taiytakei, a boy no more than about ten. He'd had his throat cut.
He drew his sword. The Bloody Judge in him wanted to run into the alley, rush the sword-slaves and cut them to pieces. Kill maybe three of them before the rest could gather their wits. But he held the killing fury back. The alley was so narrow they wouldn't be able to surround him. He had a sword and good armour, and for all their numbers they had neither; so he came up on them and drew his sword across the alley wall hard enough to make sparks and get their attention. It was dark, shielded from the dawn light across the water, and the air was hazy with smoke from the fires around the docks. The sword-slaves had one of the women pinned against a wall, the other forced down on her knees. The women looked small and helpless. ‘Stop!’
The nearest sword-slave faced him down. ‘Piss off.’ He peered. ‘You could almost be one of them.’
‘But I'm not, and I'm telling you to leave these women be.’
‘Or what?’
‘Or I'll kill you, that's what.’ Berren opened his arms to them. Daring them.
The sword-slave spat and drew himself up. ‘There's plenty more. Go find your own.’
The fury came so quickly it took him by surprise. He let out a roar of rage and lifted his sword, but the fury brought something with it this time, something from deep down. Something that wasn't his, that had been left behind when the warlocks had ripped him from the battlefield and consigned him to the pit under Tethis. He wasn't quite sure what happened after that but the sword-slaves were gone and the alley was empty except for the two women, screaming as though they'd been set on fire. A fine cloud swirled around them all, black ash that must have blown in from the docks. Berren took a step towards the nearer woman. She cried out and shrank down the wall, blubbering, Please please please.
‘I'll not hurt you. You should run. Run hard and run far. If anyone chases you, look for narrow places where big men in armour will be slow. Or high places where heavy men will fall or dark places where you can't be seen.’ The first rules a Shipwrights’ boy learned. He was surprised he remembered, but he was wasting his breath. The girl was lost to her fear. For some reason she seemed more afraid of him than she'd been of the sword-slaves.
‘There you are,’ grunted Tuuran from the mouth of the alley. ‘Now what?’ Berren turned. Tuuran was frowning at the two women. ‘I thought you didn't approve of this sort. .’ He stopped and stared. Then he looked at the women again. His voice became strangely calm and quiet. ‘You two, you should probably go now.’ Tuuran took a step back himself. ‘Run. Go! Shoo! Quick!’
Berren stared at the big man. He heard the two women run out of the alley and away. ‘What?’
‘You're doing that thing again.’
‘What thing?’
‘That silver eyes thing. Weren't there some of our comrades here just now?’
‘They ran away.’
Tuuran sniffed the air and took another step back. ‘Right. .’
‘Well, they didn't just vanish into thin air.’
The big man shook his head as he turned away. ‘Really? And exactly how sure are you about that?’
Berren glanced back down the alley. The two Taiytakei women were gone. The black ash was settling on the ground and on his armour. It was greasy and it smelled bad.
‘You stink of burned man.’ Tuuran strode out of the alley and whatever had happened there back towards the sea. Fast. To be away from Crazy Mad too, but Crazy ran after him.
‘Burned man? What does that mean?’
‘Means exactly what I said: you stink of burned man. Everything here stinks of burned man. You think I don't know the smell?’ He tapped his nose. ‘Land of dragons, remember?’ They turned a corner and he could see the sea again, right there in front of him. ‘So. Those men. .’ He stopped.
Shapes were rising from the waves past the breaking surf. Stone giants with craggy features were breaching the water and heading for the shore. There were still boats coming in, the last stragglers. He watched as one of the creatures from the sea picked a boat up, tossed it into the air and smashed it to pieces.
‘Now there's a thing.’ Flame! Now what? Tall as a house they were. Even Crazy Mad had stopped, frozen by the sight. The last gangs of sword-slaves were racing away from the sea, screaming and waving their arms and pointing back to the giants as if Tuuran might somehow not have seen them. And they had the right of it, he decided: running seemed like a fine idea. He turned and shot down another street, shouting over his shoulder at Crazy, ‘They had people made of stone in Xican. Where I was for a bit when they took me away. They called them golems so I suppose those things are golems too, only. . bigger. Big golems. Really, really fucking big.’ He was talking to himself and he knew it, but sometimes talking a thing out was the only way to deal with it.