Authors: Stephen Deas
The alchemist put his other hand on hers and turned to look her in the eye. His face was hard but with hope. ‘Could it really be
like that? Really? We both know it will not be
our
choice to make. Either of us, for either world.’
‘But would you not rather come as friends and allies than as slaves?’ The smile that flickered at the edges of his lips as he thought about it was beautiful. His eyes gleamed. ‘We
will
make it so, Belli. You and I. We have just begun.’
He chuckled. ‘You
will
need more alchemists if you ever get your dragons.’ He turned away from her, smiling now, and looked out of the window at the Silver Mountain of Vespinarr, Mazanda's Peak and the huge sprawl of the Kabulingnor Palace that was its crown. ‘I don't know, Liang. But what you say does have much to recommend it, it really does. Even to a dragon-king. Whoever is speaker might agree to it, given the right encouragement. Or if they came here and saw it all for themselves. I tremble to imagine what your people could offer instead of slave ships!’
She squeezed his hand. ‘And a sea lord too, Belli. Let this be a great exploration between us. When the dragons come and we've shown T'Varr Baros that his eyrie works as it should, we'll tell him that he must have more alchemists than just one. We
will
make it so, you and I, and you will go back to your land filled with books and scrolls and the knowledge that I've given you. And I'll come with you and I'll bring my glasship and you'll show me all the places of wonder in your lands as I have shown you mine.’
‘You won't bring a glasship,’ he said. ‘I won't let you.’ Nor would she, for such grand and complex pieces of her art didn't take well to crossing the storm-dark and almost inevitably failed.
‘It was a fancy, Belli, that's all. Don't spoil it.’
The smile had spread right across his face. His hand squeezed hers back. ‘Liang, if you ever let me go and come to my world, I won't take you like this. Staring out at the earth below from behind glass as it drifts slowly by, that's not how my land wishes to be seen. I'll find a rider to take us and you'll come with me on the back of a dragon.’
She put an arm around him. ‘Build the eyrie, Belli. Make it work. Bring our worlds together.’
He shook his head even as his smile remained. ‘Perhaps I will, Liang. It's a pretty picture you paint for me and I will admit it has a possibility to it, and I believe you mean every word of it. But a
picture it remains, a sketch of an idea made as much to placate me as anything else, and nothing changes the truth that the choice is not ours to make, neither yours nor mine, and wanting does not make things real. Dragons don't belong here, Liang. Dragons are monsters. They are terrible, terrible things, and no good will come of this, whatever dreams we build. They might destroy you before you even know what's happening.’
She gripped him tight, fearful to let him lose sight of the future she'd shown him. Fearful to lose it herself. ‘I know it will be long and hard. But see the world always as you want it to be, Belli, not how you fear it may end. Walk towards that world with every step of your life and your progress may surprise you.’
He turned to her and raised an eyebrow. ‘One of your desert philosophers?’
‘No.’ She let him go. ‘Just me.’
The glasships landed twice each day to let everyone stretch their legs for an hour. Tuuran saw the alchemist now and then, walking beside the white witch. Sometimes he watched them – usually they talked a little while and then went their separate ways and sat or walked alone – but most of the time he was with Yena. They ran together through trees and hid in shady glades and, when she let him, they stripped each other naked away from the eyes of the other slaves and he devoured her skin like a starving man. All those sterile years at sea with the choice between abstinence or another sail-slave, that and the alchemist's blood, had left him with an insatiable appetite for the girl. He couldn't get enough of her, and he made sure it was good too. All those years from long ago in the brothels around the City of Dragons had taught him how to make things last and he stayed inside her until she squealed and moaned and shuddered against him, until her fingers clawed his skin.
‘Don't you ever think about running away?’ he asked her afterwards as they lay together, already knowing they'd be late back to the gondolas.
‘Where would I go?’ She rolled him onto his back and straddled him and ran a finger over the ugly great scab on his chest and kissed it for luck. To make it heal clean, she said – and it
had
healed, and far faster than any wound ever should just as the alchemist had said. Every time Tuuran looked at himself, the scars left him queasy. Blood-magic. The worst magic of all.
Yena held up her branded arms in front of his face. ‘I'm a slave, Tuuran. Always a slave. My mistress is kind as mistresses go and wealthy and powerful and . . .’ She smiled and kissed him. ‘She allows us
some
freedom, after all.’
The horn sounded, calling the slaves back to the sky, but as they quickly started to dress, he couldn't resist the urge to come up
behind her and press her against him and run his hands over her until she turned and they made love again.
They ran afterwards, laughing, but they were still late enough to earn them both a shock of lightning. Tuuran took it with a smile – he'd had plenty enough of them at sea – but he didn't smile when they turned the wand on Yena, when she screamed and begged and afterwards cried. In the gondola as they flew away he found her lying on the planks overhead and whispered to her over and over, letting her feel his outrage in all the things he'd do for her when the chance came, until slowly he understood that that wasn't what she wanted to hear. Sorry. That was all she wanted. That he was sorry and that it wouldn't happen again, even if she'd hardly pushed him away. That was the word she wanted, and so he said it, bewildered by her need for it. And afterwards as they all slept and snored and tossed and turned and drifted through the sky, he wondered why
he
didn't run. He knew the answer perfectly well – he'd made an oath to the alchemist after all – but what was that worth? What was the point of it?
They crossed the mountains. All the other slaves peered hard out of the windows as they drifted over the magnificence of Vespinarr, full of excited whispers and jabbing fingers and cries of pointless joy:
There! That's the Jokun river! Look! The Kabulingnor! Is that all one palace for one lord of the sea? It's as big as a city all on its own! And there! That's the Visonda! And the Harub!
On and on. Yena was much the same. She seemed to have forgotten about the day before, squealing her own excitement among the women above. When they stopped that evening, though, she walked with him and held his hand and they talked but they never strayed far from the gondola. When he tried to lead her away, she shook her head.
‘Are there any old slaves?’ he asked her. He certainly hadn't seen any at sea.
‘Plenty,’ she answered, but with doubt in her eyes. And then he let it be because where was he going with that thought anyway? Were there any old Adamantine Men? No, there weren't. And what could he offer her? Adamantine Men were swords. They sated themselves in flesh and moved on. It was simply what they were, whatever hankerings he might feel now and then, and so he
said nothing and just turned and held her and kissed her long and hard, even if everyone else was watching, and then listened as she told him wild stories of the fabulous wealth of Vespinarr.
When they got back to the gondola the windows had been painted black and for almost a full day there were no more stops at all. The gondola grew hot and stifling until even its metal skin was warm to the touch. When it shuddered and swayed and came to a stop and the ramp opened again, Tuuran stumbled out of the stale air that stank of sweat and piss straight into a wall of heat. He squinted and blinked in the brilliant sun. The other slaves staggered and groaned around him, half-blind but glad to get out of the cabin and the darkness. Wherever they were, the sky shone like fire and the ground glared up at him, bright like dragon eyes in the dark. He staggered, humbled for a moment by the light. Taiytakei soldiers prodded and pushed them, herding them together, shouting orders that most of the slaves were too dazed to understand, but they didn't seem too urgent and so he just blundered aimlessly where he was prodded until his eyes got used to the sun; and when at last they did, he stopped and took a good look at where he was.
A big circle of seamless flat white stone inside a squat round wall of the same stuff. Empty except for the squinting slaves and the gondola and a handful of Taiytakei soldiers who seemed more amused than annoyed. There were five short towers spaced evenly around the wall and archways below each of them which led underground, and steps up to what were probably battlements, but as to what lay
past
the walls . . . He craned his neck but they were too high and all he could see was the sky.
Except . . .
He looked further up. More than a dozen gold-glass discs floated high above them, great long chains dangling down to the ground outside the walls. Flying ships of glass and gold like the one that had brought him here. He stared. He'd seen two, maybe three now and then flying with them from the Grey Isle, and others in the distance sometimes when they'd passed one of the Taiytakei cities. But never so many!
Yena touched his arm. ‘They're just glasships.’
‘Where are we?’
‘The desert.’ She sniffed. ‘I remember the air.’
Tuuran rubbed his eyes. ‘I remember it too, except ours is a different desert in a different world. Hot and dry and tastes a little of sand.’
‘And salt.’
He snorted. ‘Salt? Yes, we have a whole desert of salt where I come from. I went there once with our new speaker. It was his home, you see. Let's hope this desert isn't as boring as
that
one was.’ The endless flat salt plains around Bloodsalt were the most desolate place he'd ever been and the dragon lands had had no shortage of desolate places to choose from. He hawked and spat on the shining white stone. ‘The only reason anyone ever went there was for the lumps of gold that littered the place. Just lying on the ground, they were. Oh, that and it was the only place a bunch of runaway blood-mages and their tame dragons could find where no one would bother them, but that was once upon a time. Long, long ago.’ It would have been nice to have learned that when he'd been there with Speaker Hyram, all fresh from taking his Adamantine Throne. But no, he'd learned it from the alchemist a few weeks back when they'd been stuck on the ship together.
He looked around in case the alchemist was already there, didn't see him, then stared up at the slow revolutions of the glasships again. They were mesmerising. Now he'd seen them, they kept pulling his eye.
Yena poked him. ‘You're such a savage!’
Other times he might have grinned and told her how much she seemed to like that he was a savage. But not today. Wherever they were going, they'd arrived. He felt it, and he didn't know what that was going to mean but his gut said nothing good. ‘In my world we fly on the backs of dragons.’ He caught himself. ‘No,
dragon-riders
fly on the backs of dragons.
Slaves
fly in wooden cages that the dragons carry in their claws. Now and then they fall apart. Usually in the air. Or they get dropped. Not too careful, dragons.’ He laughed bitterly. Cut to the bare bones, it wasn't much different from how he'd come
here
then, except the cage had been nicer and less likely to fall apart in mid-air as old Valmeyan's slave-pens had been prone to do. And no Outsider taken from the mountains and hauled off in one of those hellish cages would have thought
twice if the chance came to run away, and yet he'd had them every day for two weeks and here he was.
He cocked his head. ‘Do they breathe fire?’ he asked.
‘No.’ She poked him again. ‘
Ours
breathe lightning, savage.’
Savage
. The palace slaves all saw him like that. Yena hid it better than the others, made a joke of it, but that wasn't saying much. An overpowering sense of not-belonging pummelled him when he wasn't with her, or at least talking to her through the wooden divide on the long days they'd spent stranded in the air. It strangled him and now it came again. He pulled away from her hand and looked for the alchemist but the second gondola still hadn't arrived.
‘Hoi! Slaves! Come on, come on! Get this unpacked! Quick now!’
They carried boxes out of the gondola and piled them against the white walls, the palace slaves grumbling and groaning under their breath about such menial labour while Tuuran just got on with it. As soon as they were done, the gondola lifted away into the air. Other slaves – Tuuran supposed they were the ones who already lived here – poured out of the archways under the walls, filling the air with urgent questions: ‘What belongs to the enchantress? Which are her personal effects? Are these for the laboratory? Where's the alchemist?’
Tuuran moved away. He had what he had, what he carried in his own bag, and that was that. No one paid him any attention and no one shouted and drew out a golden wand as he crossed to the wall. He ambled over to one of the steep flights of steps cut into it and began to climb. The steps, the wall, everything was made of the same white stone, seamless as if carved from a single solid lump of something, polished smooth and all curves and arcs and not a single hard edge or corner in sight. Odd, but what made him stop and run his finger over the stone was that he'd seen this before, back in the dragon realms. The eyrie of Outwatch, far off in the north in the middle of the Desert of Sand. Maybe this white stone grew in deserts then? Certainly nowhere else, for all across the realms he'd never seen anything made as Outwatch had been made, all rounded and smooth without a sharp line anywhere inside or out. Yet here he was in another world and this stone was the same.