Read Online The Splintered Gods by Stephen Deas - Free Book Online Page A

the Godspike which pierced its heart. The cloud seemed to swell as the miles fell away, a great vortex of shadows racked by violet lightning, twisting in dark spirals, a solitary isolated fragment of the storm-dark curtain that cut the many worlds into pieces, trapped here in the heart of the desert by a ring of white stone spires each a mile high. As the glasship came closer, Tsen’s heart beat faster. Chay-Liang hadn’t said a word about him leaving her to bring the eyrie here, leaving her to do it alone, hadn’t even frowned though she’d surely seen right through him. No one flew their glasship over the top of the storm-dark if they didn’t have to because sometimes the magic simply failed up there. It happened over the Queverra too and, so he’d heard, in parts of the Konsidar. A glasship that failed over the storm-dark fell like a stone until the maelstrom swallowed and un-made it. It unmade everything it touched. The lines out to sea did the same unless a navigator wove their protective weave and used the rifts to travel to other worlds – from that one masterful secret the Taiytakei had become what they were – but the storm-dark over the Godspike was different. Feyn Charin, first and greatest of the navigators, had entered it and returned. No one else ever had.
    Tsen shuddered. Maybe the magic that made his eyrie fly would work better. No one understood that either, after all.
    The clouds grew, spreading across the sky as the gondola came closer, high overhead like a dark hand reaching down to devour him. He saw the ring of spires around the edge of the cloud, caging it, their tips touching it; and, deep inside, the white stone spire of the Godspike itself, piercing it, gleaming in the desert sun, a pillar of light rising through the churning black cloud up into the sky beyond, towards the stars until it vanished into the deep and blinding blue. The spires held the storm-dark at bay, the navigators said. Truth was, Tsen reckoned, no one had ever had a clue except maybe Feyn Charin himself – and in the end Charin hadgone every bit as mad as Quai’Shu, drooling in his rooms in the Dralamut and mumbling about dragons.
    The air thinned as the glasship rose. Tsen felt it as the roiling black mass spread slowly around them, filling the sky. The storm-dark seemed like a hole in the world and there were some who said that’s exactly what it was. He saw the flashes of lightning as the gondola rose higher, deep inside the darkness, bright and violent. Travellers between worlds saw that same lightning as they crossed, either side of the heart of the darkness where everything, even time perhaps, stopped and there was simply nothing.
    The glasship rose past the edge of it. For a full minute the storm-dark blotted out the sun, and from one side of the gondola he was dazzled by brilliant afternoon sunlight while from the other all he saw was black. His knuckles were tight, the rest of him as tense as a lanyard. Kalaiya was shaking. He put his arm around her. Shameful, but he was glad of her fear. It gave him something to do and helped him to hide his own.
    ‘We won’t. Fall.’ He gasped out the words between shallow breaths. ‘It almost. Never. Happens.’ He was starting to feel how thin the air was up here.
    A strange thing happened as they climbed above the rim of the maelstrom. From underneath it was simply a black void in the sky; now, from above, with the sinking sun lighting its clouds, it became a sea of colours stretched out before him, swirls of purple and violet streaked with white and wisps of orange fire like frozen flames, flickering with inner lightning. The sight of it filled him, showing him how small he was, how tiny and irrelevant. He ran from one window to the next to the next around the gondola as the storm spread slowly out beneath them, unable to take his eyes from it except to run on and then stare again. His head pounded. And yes, he was still afraid, but not of being consumed by the