The Splintered Gods by Stephen Deas

It’s Senxian’s mausoleum and it gives me the shivers.’
    He’d feared they’d meet a gold-glass wall, the sort that needed a enchanter’s black rod to open, that he’d have to go back to the gondola and get the silver globe Chay-Liang had made for him forcutting through; but this high up in the tower Senxian had seen no need to keep people out. A mere iron door barred the way – iron so no Elemental Man could pass through – which swung open at Tsen’s touch. Beyond was the Tying Room, where the jade ravens were fed while the scribes’ messages were tied to their feet. More pieces of green glass covered the floor. Bits of what had once been people. There must have been three or four before the ravens touched them, turned them this way and shattered them. No one had cleared away the remains. The scribes had left in a hurry. More cages hung open in the corners of the room, large and silver – cages for men this time – and the litter of green chunks was thickest around them.
    Kalaiya squealed; when Tsen looked round she was holding most of someone’s face in her hands – everything from the eyebrows down to the chin, where a large chip was missing. If you’d known the man in life, you’d know him now, clear as anything. Tsen gently lifted it away. The pieces the ravens left looked like jade-coloured glass but to the touch felt more like a resin, like Xizic, with a little give beneath the fingers if you squeezed hard, not the cold unyielding sharpness of brittle stone.
    He led Kalaiya away. She was shaking. ‘They were slaves,’ he said as if that somehow made it better, and then remembered that she was a slave too. He forgot that more than he should. ‘Criminals,’ he added quickly, guessing how Senxian would have chosen them. ‘Murderers. Rapists. The worst sort.’ They’d have been the sick and the old, though, the ones Senxian couldn’t put to useful labour. ‘They were going to die anyway.’ That at least was probably true.
    A screen of metal chains passed for the next door, another device to stop Elemental Men from entering. Tsen pushed through into a hall. They eventually found what he wanted – the Writing Room – up some narrow stairs. He clucked his tongue in frustration when he saw the bronze mesh basket where the scribes threw the letters after they transcribed them. It was blackened and full of charred pieces. He crouched beside the basket, fingering the few corners of paper that survived, looking for anything that might still be legible. Fragments of words, that was all. The rest crumbled into ash, staining his fingertips grey.
    ‘Tsen?’
    He shook his head. A waste of time. ‘It was a fine idea, my love.’
    ‘Tsen! Look!’ She was standing over one of the scribing desks. There were pieces of paper in her hand. She thrust them at him. ‘Look!’
    Vespinarr. Shonda.
    Senxian’s glasships lie in broken pieces. The Vul Tara burns. Nothing remains. The creature has shattered two of the towers of the palace. I am in the third. Somehow we are spared. Everyone is fled. All is ruin . . .
    He read on then walked back through the Tying Room and onto the balcony again, into the roar of the wind, seeing the scene as it might have been. Perhaps whoever wrote the message had been standing here, fighting to hold his paper and pen. The writing was scratchy and erratic, hard to read, scribed in haste and panic, but what sort of man would stand here at all with a furious dragon tearing the towers around him? He tried to see it: across the sea a pall of smoke over the city as he watched the dragon burn everything in its path. It came to the palace itself. They thought they were safe inside their mighty towers of glass and gold but the dragon had smashed their walls and shattered their ramparts. It had ripped lightning cannon and the black-powder guns alike from their mountings and tossed them over the cliffs into the sea. It had gouged holes in stone and glass and filled the palace with fire.