The lantern hung from a rope. A good thick one. He jumped, swift and sudden. Seized it. Pulled sharply. The soldier at the edge of the pit holding the other end cried out, teetered, toppled over the edge and landed hard. Stupid. The lantern smashed and its rope fell in loops and then hung taut, tied to the winch and crane they used to lower people down. The Crowntaker gripped the knife between his teeth. He had the soldier's sword out of its scabbard in a flash. Hurled it up out of the pit and over the edge. Scampered up the wall, clinging to the rope, climbing like a monkey. All those years at sea. A skag. Never forgotten. At the top he picked out the other soldiers. They'd seen him. Were coming. Shouting. Didn't matter. He took it all in. One glance. Where they were. What they carried. What they wore. Bared his teeth. They were too slow. Too late to stop him. .
Burn me! Please burn me!
The first queensguard reached him. He danced past the thrust of a sword. His legs felt awkward, not his, not used to such sudden hard motion. He took the knife from between his teeth. Slammed its blade under the soldier's chin. Felt a twinge from his arm. Switched hands and almost fumbled the knife, but not quite. Snatched up the sword from the ground. Almost lost his balance but still caught the next queensguard. Barged through him, tumbling him shrieking into the pit and almost fell back in himself. Stupid body didn't do what it was supposed to. Arms and legs too long. Centre of balance in the wrong place. He looked up. Three queensguard still standing. He stopped. Opened his arms to them, soaked in blood, beckoning them forward. ‘Run if you want to live.’ Grinned wide at the new sound of his own voice. Savage like a wild animal.
O Earth Goddess! Lords of Xibaiya! Help me! Help me now! Your acolyte pleads for your aid! Make it stop!
The soldiers backed away. The knife in his hand dripped blood over his naked feet. He smiled at them one after the other. That was enough. They broke and ran, screaming alarms to anyone who might be left to listen. The Bloody Judge of Tethis let them go. Walked the other way and slipped through a half-hidden crack in the cave around the pit. Down a steep narrow slope, squeezing between the walls, inch by inch in a darkness that was absolute. He moved with purpose. Knew exactly where he was going because he'd been here before, a long time ago, with someone who'd once been a thief-taker, but now the others were all dead and there was no one left who knew this way but him. Crept carefully forward, looking for the pool that hid the sump and the secret path in and out. Found it. .
The cold touch of water on Skyrie's feet jogged a memory. Something colossal but too fleeting to grasp. He chased it as the icy water rose around him, as it swallowed him, but the harder he reached, the more it slipped through his fingers, and then the water was falling away.
Out the other side of the sump. Gasping for air. Clawing his way into another cave. Familiar. Knife-rays of sunlight shining in from a narrow entrance. He'd come in the dark before. Dark was better. He crouched and waited. His arm hurt, and his knees, and all his muscles ached, twisted into unfamiliar action. Four warlocks. Three queensguard. As easy as snapping twigs. It helped in remembering. The Bloody Judge, that's who I am. The Crowntaker. Had to hang on to that. Had to hold it tight. So he did, right on until the sun set and night fell. Then out. Into the gorge. Then what? Didn't know. Didn't dare think. Find who took his body, that's what. Take it back. Kill him. Something. Didn't know. All that hiding and waiting had left him with a thirst, though. Start with that. Afterwards a reckoning. A terrible one. Where and when and who, that was the question. Made him angry. Uncertainty and doubt? Didn't have a place for those now. Didn't dare. I am the Bloody Judge. He slipped down the slope of the gorge. Dark as shit. Moon hadn't risen yet. Crept to the edge of the river and knelt down to drink. A face reflected back at him. A face that belonged to someone else and all he could do was stare as the horror surged through him. .
Water? He remembered the water. Me! It belongs to me! Mine! My face! Skyrie! Staring at himself, for a moment Skyrie threw off the horror. He screamed, and this time, finally, he had a voice.
9
The Watcher stood atop the Palace of Leaves among the seventeen slowly turning discs of gold-tinged glass from which it hung, each thicker than a standing man and a hundred paces from edge to edge. Their motions were hypnotic. They drew novice eyes inside them and held them fast and sometimes didn't let go for days. The core of each was more deeply tinged with gold, separate and still, held apart by bearings and a heavy frame of Scythian steel. More steel hung from the cores, chains laced with silver and gold carrying the weight of the jewelled pods and orbs of the upper palace. For most who came here, this was the marvel of the City of Stone. And it was magnificent, every part laced with power drawn up from the earth by the black monoliths below, a monument to the enchanters’ arts. But to the Watcher, the real glories of Xican were the earth and the sea and the sky, things that would remain long after the palace had fallen and shattered. There was a boundless joy to standing at such a height, with the clouds close enough to part them with his fingers, with Xican a warren of black and grey spires spread beneath his feet, a thousand termite mounds jammed together and transformed by some divine hand into a grand scale. The Grey Isle was made like this from end to end, this orderless tumble of stone on stone, yet across all the worlds he'd seen it was the place he loved the most, where air and earth and water mingled, their boundaries intertwined as closely as could be like lovers wrapped around one another, limbs tangled. It was a colourless landscape of deep blues and slate-greys, but he loved the stone, the wind, the rolling salty sea, the raw kaleidoscope of shapes and angles and changes that nature had made. A rare smile forced its way onto his face. Up here, alone, he belonged to no one. The freedom was joyous and the knowledge was exhilarating, the knowledge that he was all of this and more.
As easily as another man might blink, the Watcher became a wind that blew across the Grey Isle's great teeth. For no other reason than the sheer delight of it, he became the water as he reached the other side, a wave top skipping and surfing across the reach of sea between the Grey Isle and the coast of Takei'Tarr, the heartland of the Taiytakei. At the Hangpoor delta he leaped into foam and then to the air, hanging among the clouds, drinking the sight of the Hundred Rivers glittering in the morning sun, a giant tree laid out in silver across the plains. And Zinzarra too, City of a Thousand Bridges with her air harbour in the sky, higher and larger than even the Palace of Leaves, where the Zinzarrans stored the jade they took from the mountains of the Konsidar. They boasted of it, the greatest device the enchanters had ever made, but to the Watcher the beauty here was in the delta, in the water and the weaving maze of quicksilver threads, always shifting and changing.
He turned his course westward to the fringes of the Konsidar itself. On top of the peaks he stopped a while to stare. Becoming one with the world was no effort once you knew the trick of it. Air or stone or water, or any element at all save for unruly metal, it was simply another nature, as easy and natural as breathing. He took it to be a gift too, a window to wonders that other men wouldn't ever see, and so he stopped now and then to stare at the landscapes of the world the way men from other lands might stop for a moment to pray and to give thanks to their blasphemous gods.