Authors: Stephen Deas
‘To take . . . away . . . the worst?’ he gasped.
‘Spiderwort is a poison, my friend. It kills through sheer agony.’
‘I . . . can believe you.’
‘Ach, you're an Adamantine Man. You're supposed to be immune to pain.’
‘Apparently not . . . as immune . . . as I would like.’
Bellepheros held up his hand and rummaged for something. ‘Has anyone got a knife?’ Tuuran was still clutching one. He managed to lift his hand enough to show Bellepheros, who took it. Last
Tuuran had looked, he'd still had at least one other stuck in him somewhere too.
‘Belli!’ The Witch gave a little gasp of alarm.
‘O Chay-Liang! If I was going to kill anyone then I could have poisoned either of us in a hundred different ways by now.’ The alchemist tested the edge and then delicately sliced open the flesh on the heel of his hand. ‘This will hurt too, I'm afraid.’ He wiped a few drops of his blood onto a finger and then pressed it into the wound on Tuuran's chest. He did the same with the other cuts. And yes, it hurt, but not like the leaves had.
‘Blood-magic,’ hissed Tuuran. ‘We do not . . . suffer a blood-mage . . . to live!’
‘Well if this is blood-magic then you'll have to kill an awful lot of alchemists,’ snapped Bellepheros. ‘A blood-mage uses the blood of others. Usually without their consent. An alchemist uses his own. That's the difference and the
whole
difference. When I start murdering virgins on altars to meddle with forces best left to slumber,
then
you can put on your armour and take up your sword and spout your righteous claptrap. When I'm saving your life, you can be quiet!’
Tuuran started to laugh. ‘I think I like you, alchemist.’
‘You'd better! Now shut up and lie still while I stitch these closed. They'll heal in a few days, far faster than you might otherwise expect. You have my blood to thank for that. You'll feel enervated for a time. I advise a great deal of fresh air and exercise.’
‘He's going to spend the next two weeks in a space about the size of this one with a dozen other slaves,’ said the witch caustically.
‘Then if they are slaves for whom you have a fondness, I suggest you find a particularly enthusiastic partner to accompany him. He'll need
some
way to release the energy I've just put into him. The usual outlet for Adamantine Men, from what I've seen of them, is either whoring or breaking heads. Give him the former or the latter will surely follow.’ Bellepheros held up a threaded needle so Tuuran could see. ‘Do you prefer men or women?’
‘Bellepheros!’ The witch's outrage made Tuuran laugh again. ‘You cannot possibly expect me to do such a thing! It would be . . .
beyond
inappropriate hardly begins to encompass it!’
‘I will find a way to . . . OW!’ Tuuran gasped again as the needle bit his skin.
Manage. I will find a way to manage
.
They kept him in their gondola that night. He felt the glasship rise and listened, in and out of a fitful sleep, to the alchemist and the witch talking of this and that, of his realm and of hers and of dragons. Mostly of dragons, for they were why the alchemist was here; and dragons, he found, were not as unknown among the Taiytakei as he'd supposed. They had no living ones of course but they had legends. The symbol of the city of Vespinarr was three dragons twined together with a lion. Dragons were said to live deep under the mountains of the Konsidar with the mysterious people that the witch called the Righteous Ones, a race apart. Dragons had once roosted on a place called the Dul Matha where they had warred with the stone titans of the sea, both of them spawned by the monstrous Kraitu and the great sea serpent the Red Banatch. There had been dragons long ago in the City of Stone, even, before men had ever ventured there. They'd been turned to obsidian and flint in the Splintering but pieces of them could still be found here and there, fused into the mountainsides. All stories, of course, none of them real.
He learned of the alchemist's dragons too, the flesh and blood dragons of his home that years ago he'd seen criss-cross the sky every single day. He learned a great deal more than he would have wished, and when he finally woke to find the sun risen once more, a fleeting wonder hung around him and the alchemist was no longer the man Tuuran had thought but something just a shade or two darker.
The glasships stopped at a deserted place where the mountains touched the sea, the northern margin of the forbidden Konsidar. The alchemist and the witch turned him out so they could be alone with their knowledge and their learning and their discovery of one another and Tuuran watched them return to their gondola with a sense of something gone dreadfully awry. She was seducing him. He'd seen that with his own eyes and heard it with his own ears. Seducing him with knowledge and secrets, and he was seducing her, in his turn, though he probably didn't even know it, but they were in her land, not his, and so she'd get what she wanted and the alchemist, in the end, would get nothing.
Back among the other slaves again he found the alchemist's prediction to be painfully right. His wounds hardly troubled him;
instead he was spurred by a constant restless energy that urged him to stifle the drawls and whispers of the pompous palace slaves around him with their own ripped-out tongues.
Manage. I will find a way to manage
. He'd rather have faced a dragon when it came to it but he'd given his word and so, whenever the glasships put down, he ran and climbed among the broken stones like a restless ape until his muscles burned. Until he found a slave whose eyes followed him; and when she whispered in his ear he knew her, for it was the whisper from above as they'd left the Palace of Leaves. Her name was Yena, and she became his lover.
Chay-Liang had the glasship golem stop for an hour so they could all stretch their legs by the Shevana-Daro aqueduct. She couldn't take Bellepheros to every place she would have wanted but she could make sure their route passed the more spectacular creations birthed in Hingwal Taktse. The aqueduct carried fresh water from lakes at the edges of the Konsidar down to the city by the sea fifty miles away.
‘The view is good,’ said Bellepheros but he obviously wasn't much impressed. He spent more time watching the slave who'd saved his life clambering among the pillars of stone beside the lakes, showing off to some slave woman who'd taken a shine to him. He was capering as though caught again in the years between boy and man and Chay-Liang found it strangely irritating to watch him. ‘It's the blood,’ Bellepheros said when he caught her following his eye. ‘Give it another day or two and it'll wear off.’
‘My slave is probably ruined.’
Bellepheros shrugged. ‘That depends on her cycle.’
Liang squirmed at that. And yes, it was ridiculous to be squeamish about a little blood once a month but that wasn't the point. Such things were a woman's domain and men had no place talking about them. No proper Taiytakei would dream of it.
‘Give her to me,’ he said suddenly.
‘What? Don't be silly – she braids my hair! You have no use for her at all.’
‘Anything I want, you said. You can still borrow her from time to time.’
‘Absolutely not!’
He didn't press her. The next time they stopped, she took him down to the Tomb of Ten Tazei in its overgrown cove north of Khalishtor. Standing in the rain, sheltering under the boughs of
the massive trees that grew there, she told him the story of the great explorer who'd charted the northern coast of Takei'Tarr, who'd turned Dhar Thosis from a village into a famous city with his stories of the Kraitu and the Dul Matha and his shrine to the Goddess of Fickle Fortune.
‘People come here for luck.’ There was a shrine beside the sea, four white marble pillars holding up a bronze pagoda roof, built on the spot where Tazei was said to have landed for the last time and still, they said, with his footprints preserved in the sand. Chay-Liang ignored it and led Bellepheros to the cave where Ten Tazei's remains had been left. It ended in a wall of loose stones almost covered by strips of white paper on which those who came to the tomb left their prayers. ‘The sailors who buried him here walled him up,’ she said. ‘They say that Tazei's ghost dug a hole all the way to Xibaiya back there.’
Bellepheros chuckled. ‘We have our own mythical tomb, if only anyone could find it. Flame knows where
that
might lead.’ He'd already told her about his Silver King now, come from nothing and vanished to nowhere but who'd tamed the first dragons in his passing, all hundreds of years in the past; now he told her of the tomb the sorcerer had supposedly prepared before his end, his Black Mausoleum, how it was said to be filled with treasures beyond understanding and how the greatest of their dragon-kings had once searched in vain for twenty years to find it.
‘That sounds more like Darkstone.’ She laughed. ‘Our Scythian friends have tales of a treasure trove of devices left by their half-gods too.’ The same half-gods clad in silver? Surely, although the half-gods of the Scythians had gone with the splintering of the world. ‘They say Darkstone is filled with terrible weapons.’
Bellepheros didn't seem to hear. He had that look on his face that she'd come to know, the look when something she'd said had snagged on a thought of his own and started to bloom. ‘If he was such a hero, why did you bury him? Is that what you do?
Bury
your dead?’ His face wrinkled in distaste. Liang laughed.
‘Bury them? Condemn them to Xibaiya? No!’ No need to hide her own horror at that; but he was still looking at her, waiting patiently for an answer and she realised that she didn't know. Why
did
Ten Tazei's crew bury him and not burn him? ‘He asked for
it, I think.’ She frowned. ‘There are books about Tazei. He left a journal and so did some of his crew; and several of the navigators wrote about him later. One of those might answer you.’
They passed Khalishtor at night. There wasn't much to see in the rain except a forest of pinprick lights from the ships anchored out at sea. Mount Solence was shrouded in cloud as it ever was. Looking at it she wondered if the alchemist's Silver King had come to his world at the same time as the Elemental Men had come to hers. The times seemed almost right and seemed to fit, yet she'd found that the further she looked back into history the more time seemed to bend and warp in peculiar ways. A question to ponder quietly in the back of her mind then, like the one about Ten Tazei, or to pass back to her friends still in Hingwal Taktse. There were so many questions now that she'd taken to writing them all down.
She took them to the ground for an hour or two in the morning and again in the evening each day, in part to show him some aspect of her world, in part to ease the growing cramps and aches that came with so much sitting around and doing nothing, and in part to clear her head and give herself space to think and give both of them some time alone. She hadn't understood, until this journey, how much she cherished her own space and privacy, and Belli seemed the same. Often when they stopped she would take him to a place to sit and stare at the mountains or at the sea. She'd tell him a little of the history for a while and then leave him and walk alone. They spent an afternoon sitting overlooking the eyrie of the Dralamut, where the navigators who crossed the storm-dark learned their craft. She told him about the Crimson Sunburst of Cashax and her army of golems, how the Sunburst and the Elemental Men had fought, of her acolytes who'd become the first enchanters, and of one in particular, Feyn Charin, who would later be the first to cross the storm-dark. The Elemental Men had gifted him the Dralamut as a reward, to become a school where he would teach others.
‘The greatest library in the world,’ she said wistfully.
Soldiers huffed and puffed up from the valley to see whose glasships had come and asked them kindly to leave. She obliged them, but as they left she couldn't help circling the Dralamut one last time. ‘They have copies of the
Rava
,’ she said. ‘More than one. An
original, I've heard. And astronomical instruments and notebooks that belonged to the Crimson Sunburst herself. Those sort of things would get you killed anywhere else. The Elemental Men can be very . . . rigid. I suppose that's the word. But within the Dralamut they turn a blind eye.’
Bellepheros let out a weary sigh. ‘We have our own great library in Sand but I'm sure it's not as exciting as yours.’ Something had irritated him today and so she let him be. He had his moods. They came and went but she knew what they were: sickness for his old home. For his old comforts and his old friends and there was absolutely nothing she could do to help him. It was strange how she felt sorry for him now. When they'd left she'd been set on making him want to stay. Now she found herself wishing for another way. Something that could give all of them what they wanted but she couldn't think for the life of her what that might be.
They passed over the mountain city of Vespinarr. Vespinarr held more marvels than half the rest of the world together, yet as they came close he barely even looked out of the window. ‘Your world is full of miracles,’ he told her when she asked him why. ‘And you've tried very hard, Liang, to make me see them for what they are, and I do feel privileged to have seen them at all. You've made my home seem small and tawdry by comparison and you've been nothing but kind and, had it come another way, I think I would be exhilarated. But it
was
my home and I should dearly like to see it again.’
‘I know, Belli.’ She took his hand and sat beside him. ‘And that's one thing I can't do for you, however much I might wish it. Quai'Shu will not let you go. But I
have
seen your sadness and I
have
given some thought to it. Perhaps, when the eyrie is built and the dragons are come, perhaps then there will be a way. Perhaps we might have more of your alchemists here. You could send them to us to look after our dragons and in return we'll teach them some of our ways and send them back, richer and wiser. It might take years to make a dream like that become real and I know that patience is a hard thing to ask of any slave, but you, I think, can understand better than any other I've met.’