Authors: Stephen Deas
She looked into him. He believed every word. He was almost weeping and the pain and sadness shook her somewhere deep. Damn him, but
she
almost believed it too. Didn't want to but there it was. A man they'd taken from his home to be their slave. He should be angry – he had every right to be – waving his fist and snarling at her and telling her that he'd never help them, not for anything. She'd been ready for
that
but not for this. Not for sorrow and . . . pity! He
pitied
them. ‘Sit,’ she said quietly, trying to rein in her disquiet. ‘We will not end so easily.’
His voice cracked. ‘Yes, you will. You're making your own doom.’
She took another map and unravelled it in front of him. Perhaps to show him who her people were, to convince him that he was wrong and that even Quai'Shu’s dragons were nothing for the Taiytakei to fear. Perhaps for herself, to fight the conviction he carried in his words. But in part too as something that would interest him, this strange old man from far away, and take his mind from all the terrible things that couldn't be helped, not even if both of them set their minds against them. She showed him her map of the many worlds with Takei'Tarr at its heart and the five lines of the storm-dark that every Taiytakei knew. She told him of the realms that lay beyond. His own with its dragons. The vast Dominion with its Sun King and its stagnant theocracy and its terrible battle-priests who called down the fire of the sun itself and the Small Kingdoms on its fringes. Aria, with its sorcerers and its gold. The great wilderness of the Southern Realm which had no name of its own because all the people who lived there were savages, yet whose ruins spoke of a civilisation as old and vast as any other. She told him tales of the lost land of Qeled, of the mysteries and horrors that surrounded that ancient kingdom and spoke of far greater things to be found within, of the Scythian masters of steel who still lived on their island and remembered a time when half-gods clad in silver had walked the earth . . .
A sharp breath stopped her. The alchemist's eyes glazed for a moment.
Half-gods clad in silver
.
Does that mean something to you?
‘Is there something the matter?’
Yes. Yes, it does!
The alchemist shook his head and tried to pretend otherwise. ‘No. Please do go on. This is fascinating. Well . . .’ He shrugged. ‘It passes the time, at least.’
She poured him a little wine.
We'll come back to your silver men after a glass or two, eh?
‘Feyn Charin and those who followed him say there should be eight lines of the storm-dark to be found. Five are known well. A sixth, it is said, was once found by the men of Vespinarr but led nowhere that mattered, and they never wrote down where they found it and never sought it again.’ She laughed. ‘Which, if you ever meet a lord of Vespinarr, you will know at once is one lie upon another, and if it's true that they found it then they certainly didn't lose it again. I've heard theories of a seventh line that comes and goes as it pleases. Feyn Charin himself claimed to have crossed it and found a realm unlike any other, a sea of liquid silver and nothing else. We call it the moon line and no one has found it since, or if they have then they haven't returned. Perhaps Feyn Charin's story is just that. He
was
a strange one, and if he did find the seventh line then he found it late in his life from his bed in the Dralamut.’ She put a hand to her heart. ‘Now there is a place we
shall
go, you and I. One of these days, when our work is done and our eyrie built. The Dralamut and Feyn Charin's library. The greatest ever assembled.’ She watched him. He was sipping at his wine like an old woman and she wanted him tipsy so they could get back to the Scythians and the silver half-gods that had made him start so.
‘Some say there should be an eighth line,’ she said. ‘Eight elements, eight lines, but that we'll never find the eighth because it's the line belonging to the element of metal and the Elemental Men have lost the art of that.’ She snorted. ‘Maybe it'll be a Scythian, then. But others say that seven is the right number. Eight elements, eight realms,
seven
lines between them.’ She raised her glass to the alchemist. ‘A toast! To arguments about numbers. To the system of the world.’
The alchemist raised his glass but didn't drink. ‘And where would your eighth line go, Chay-Liang?’
‘To the land of the dead, Master Alchemist. To Xibaiya.’
He looked at her hard. ‘Then you should ask a dragon,’ he said, and drained his glass.
Tuuran walked with the alchemist and the white witch as far as a bronze door and there the witch stopped him. The soldiers who'd come too barred his way and so he watched the alchemist disappear. It gave him a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach watching the two of them go ahead together. He felt the floor tremble and then the soldiers lost their quiet calm and barked and poked and pushed him back another way, through another bronze door where he found himself cramped into a room not much bigger than the alchemist's, only with a dozen more slaves and piles of crates already filling it and making it feel small. It was round, with bright metal walls, bronze or gold or something in between. It might have been tall once but now it had been split by a dividing floor of crude planks and it didn't take Tuuran long to realise there were more slaves crammed into the upper part, and probably more crates too. The women on the top, the men underneath, and the planks between them were so low that around the edges Tuuran couldn't stand straight. There were hammocks strung up in stacks of three, so close that they were all practically sleeping on top of one another. They had no lights and no candles. The palace slaves already there were looking at one another aghast, sharing their horror and their outrage at being treated this way, but for Tuuran this was the world he knew, where sailors were packed like fish in a barrel if they weren't at work as a slave to oar and sail.
Around the walls were tiny round windows, right up by the improvised ceiling like the portholes of the ship that had brought him to Xican. He elbowed the other slaves aside. Some of them grumbled and some of them shouted their outrage. One or two bowed their heads and kept out of his way. He heard them talking, whispering about who he was and what he'd done in the alchemist's room the night before, punching a palace slave in the face and
making his nose bleed. Either way, through glares and shoves and by sheer size, by the time the glasship was loaded Tuuran had quietly established among the other slaves that, however many lightning bolts you had branded on your arms, you bloody well gave up your window to an Adamantine Man.
The view as they left the Palace of Leaves was breath-stealing. They rose, Tuuran and the others all craning their necks and bending their heads to peer outside, while right over their heads the women were lying on the floor, squinting through windows that for them were by their feet. They were so close through the thin wood that he could smell them, jasmine and lavender and cheap Xizic wafting through the planking. He watched the Palace of Leaves fall away beneath them, its huge gold-glass wheels spinning slowly just below the clouds, and then the rest of the City of Stone and the Grey Isle itself, smaller and smaller, looking like some behemoth porcupine dropped in a sea just a little too shallow to cover it.
‘Great Flame!’ He shook his head in awe. ‘And you live here? Do you even see it?’
The palace slaves turned their backs. They scorned him when they weren't being afraid of him, but a soft whisper came through the boards from above: ‘Magnificent, isn't it?’
‘The world I knew, it had nothing like this.’ Through the haze the bulk of the island rose to a great plateau. The same spikes of rock that jutted out of the sea to make the City of Stone grew here too, but snapped and broken and tumbled down among each other. Maybe he was wrong, maybe if he'd crossed the realms on the back of a dragon he'd have seen a dozen wonders like this. Maybe.
‘Nor mine,’ whispered the boards above. ‘Come to the other side. Come and look ahead.’ He followed the whisper and crossed the gondola, elbowing and barging his way through a sea of growls and mutters and surly resentment. ‘Do you see it?’ asked the whisper when they were together again, and he did: the other flying ship of glass, the one with the alchemist, rising ahead of them, a golden gondola hung by chains from another sun-bright wheel like those that lifted the palace. He stared at it, amazed. It made him feel small again, uncomfortable. He understood dragons well enough but not this, and he knew he never would. He shivered,
half in awe, half fearful, except it couldn't really be fear because Adamantine Men had long since left fear behind.
He turned and looked around the room. At the roundness of it, at its curved floor and metal walls. ‘We're in one of those too, aren't we?’ He bit his lip. Witchery and blood-magic again! But there was nothing to be done.
‘Of course we are.’ The voice above giggled at him.
He turned back to the window. He didn't dare let the other slaves see him looking afraid, even if he knew he wasn't. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘A slave, of course,’ said the whisper. ‘You're the new one, aren't you? The one who comes from the place they call the land of the dragons? Do they really have dragons there?’
‘Yes.’
‘And are they terrible monsters?’
She felt so close. He turned and stared at the boards and wondered if he was strong enough to rip a hole. ‘Terrible enough,’ he growled. ‘But not as terrible as I am. What's your name?’
‘I already told you.’ She was laughing at him.
He bared his teeth at the sky outside. ‘Well, slave, whoever you are, I wish you were down here where I could see you.’
‘I think for now I'm very glad that I'm not.’
The world outside turned suddenly white as they rose into the cloud and stayed that way for the whole two days they flew, almost as if whoever was piloting wished them to see nothing. There was not much to do except get in the faces of the other men and whisper sweet nothings at the women above, though no one whispered back after that first ascent. They were all much too demure in the Taiytakei way for such things. Or, as the sail-slaves back on his galley had it, tight-legged prudes.
The gondola came down at last, long after dark in the middle of some city, into a wide stone-flagged yard surrounded by tall walls full of windows. The ramp doors opened and Taiytakei soldiers hustled the slaves quickly out. Tuuran's eyes peered at the night, looking at the women as they came down from above. The palace slaves stood and shivered and grumbled. Tuuran stretched his legs and flexed his muscles and made sure he was seen, while their gondola and its ship of glass rose once more to make space
for the alchemist and the witch to land in their place. As soon as it came down and the gondola ramp opened, the witch marched the alchemist straight out, past them all and across the yard and through grand iron-bound doors, snapping her fingers at Tuuran and a pair of soldiers to follow in her wake. She strode through a long magnificent hall draped in night-time shadow, through another great iron door and away into the city, all breathlessly fast as if the fate of the world depended on it only to stop after half a mile to stand in front of an old palace. For the purpose, as far as Tuuran could tell, of talking at it.
‘I wanted to show you at least one thing while we were here.’ The witch was out of breath and so was the alchemist. ‘It dates back to the Mar-Li Republics, to before the Elemental Men.’ Tuuran puffed his cheeks and looked about. The alchemist seemed interested but Tuuran was bored and hungry and deadly restless after two days cramped up in a cage in the sky. He paced around. ‘It used to be the home to Zinzarra's lords, but when they went they left it to rot. Yet they still guard it.’ It seemed odd to Tuuran to guard a place with its windows and doors all bricked shut, and if they
were
guarding it, they didn't seem to be doing much a job of it. He couldn't see any actual guards, for a start. And maybe the alchemist thought something similar, but he never had a chance to ask because suddenly there was another Taiytakei sauntering down the street, and he would have walked right up to them if the two soldiers hadn't blocked his path. He stopped courteously enough but his eyes stayed a little too long on Bellepheros. Tuuran's skin prickled. Old instincts put him on edge.
‘I do apologise so much for this,’ said the stranger. ‘It's so hideously embarrassing that I don't even know your name. So, ah, Alchemist from the Land of Dragons will have to do. And again, further apologies for the nature of this meeting . . .’
The soldiers advanced to force the newcomer away. He retreated without complaint, not bothered at all. Such an easy manner in front of two armed men made Tuuran wish for his sword. And he kept talking too, and at Bellepheros, not even at the witch.
‘Ordinarily we'd make arrangements for a time and place in a quiet and civilised manner and I'd give you a day or two to settle your affairs. Things being as they are, I'm afraid I must insist on
here and now. I can only beg you forgive me for such rudeness.’
The words made little sense but the way they were said had Tuuran already moving towards Bellepheros. The two Taiytakei soldiers reached for their swords but faltered and staggered as the stranger walked between them, pushing them lightly aside. One stumbled to his knees, clutching his throat. The other crashed to the ground. The witch went for the golden wand at her belt.
‘I'm so sorry about your soldiers.’ The stranger had a hand in one pocket. His eyes were firmly on the witch now, not looking at Bellepheros at all, but his words had been for the alchemist. The alchemist who was simply watching, bemused.
There was a second man somewhere.
The realisation hit Tuuran a moment before he saw the other assassin and by then he was already moving, hurling himself at the alchemist's back.
The witch levelled her wand. Quick as a snake, the first assassin whipped some silvery thing out of his pocket and held it in front of him, pointed at the witch. The second drew back his arm and threw knives, one, two, three, all at the alchemist's back but a half a second too late. Tuuran took them all, one in the arm, one the shoulder and one to the chest. Deep, each one of them. The arm and shoulder would hurt. The one in the chest, he knew, had probably killed him. The assassin now went for his sword; so did Tuuran, only he didn't have one, so he pulled the knife out of his shoulder instead. He was bleeding like a stuck pig. The assassin's sword was a long pointy thing, the sort for running people through. The two of them faced each other.