Authors: Stephen Deas
The dragon was doing it. The Watcher blinked deep in the night under the desert stars, closer and closer to the monster's side to be sure, but it
was
the dragon, its very presence. The closer he came, the harder it was, and that was the simple truth of it. In the dragon realms a windwalker had been killed by a man with a crossbow not long before Quai'Shu stole the dragons. Beneath his scorn the Watcher had been shaken by that. A man who could become the wind should never fall to a mere crossbow. The Picker used to swear the hardness of shifting his form in the dragon-realm came from the dragons themselves; now the Watcher knew he was right.
He flew with the air to Khalishtor, where Nimpo Jima Hsian was supposed to be taking their sea lord's place at the Great Sea Council, as a hsian often did, but of course he wasn't there and had passed on the duty to his own t'varr. Another thing a hsian often did.
From one place to the next, then, one man and then another, holding the bladeless knife at their throats and asking where Quai'Shu’s hsian might be found. A tedium made bearable by the relief of shifting effortlessly from place to place within the City of Gold and Glass. It didn't take long to find the answer. The hsian was in Dhar Thosis. The Watcher tried to see the reason behind such a defection, for there could be little doubt that was what it was. The lord of Vespinarr had already known and told the Hands of the Sea Lord where to look, in his own subtle way.
Before he left for the long crossing of the desert, he stood at the edge of the sea and faced the city where no one ruled, shadowed by the mountain of the Septtych of the Elemental Masters. He bowed to both and stepped back over the edge of the harbour wall and fell in among the waves, and as he touched them he became the water. Currents. Temperatures. All too subtle for a man to see but
the Watcher felt them. They were his guide, his map and compass. They took him a little way up the coast to the old Tomb of Ten Tazei where he walked past the shrine and into the cave and passed effortlessly through the wall of stones that barred its end and on to Ten Tazei's path to Xibaiya and the land of the dead. Secrets lay here. Old ones best forgotten, and the Elemental Men were their guardians.
‘These dragons make me weak.’
The sand and the stone took his words and ate them with silence. The Watcher closed his eyes and tasted the air, filled with salt and the sea. The distant hiss of waves on the sand kissed his ear. The cave was still. Time could stop in a place like this. He'd come here sometimes with the Picker. Now he came here alone, but it was still their place to speak together. He felt the Picker's memories most closely here.
The men here have their navigators and their enchanters. In Aria they have sorcerers of the old ways once more. Pale nothings beside the silver half-gods of the moon but they are learning at last. The priests of the Dominion call power from the old gods themselves. But in the realms of the dragons? Nothing. Alchemy. A dance with potions and a dabble with blood. There's nothing there for the likes of us to hunt
.
Blood. The alchemist got his power from his own blood. The last refuge for a sorcerer's power. The most potent place.
Why? Why did the dragon realms alone have no true sorcerers? The answer had been staring at him. There were no sorcerers in the dragon realms because the dragons had devoured the nameless boundless flow of life from which all mages drew, even the Elemental Men.
‘How?’
No answer.
‘Can they not be destroyed?’
The cave and the endless tunnel downward mocked him with their stillness.
Zafir walked back out across the dragon yard, smiling at Diamond Eye and at the sun, Myst and Onyx trailing in her wake. She felt drunk. Tipsy with joy. Her skin tingled, hot in the desert heat. Her head still buzzed from the sheer ecstasy of the dragon. Maybe once, maybe the first time she'd ridden on a monster's back with her mother in front of her to guide the beast, maybe then she'd felt this before. Or the first time she'd taken old Azure into the sky alone with no one to sit beside her and watch over her and tell her what to do, just weeks before Hyram had taken the throne she stole from him ten years later. The sheer unadulterated freedom. Azure, slow and small and old. He'd burned to ash from the inside not many years later but she remembered him as well as she remembered any of them. Pale blue scales that flashed in the sun, and if he was old and slow then he hadn't seemed that way when she'd ridden him up above the three mountaintops of the Pinnacles, higher and higher until everything below was specks and streaks and had lost its colour, where the air was so thin she could barely breathe; and then they'd dived, three miles straight down, and her head had roared and swum and she'd known that nothing,
nothing
in the world, could possibly be like this, and for all the horror that awaited her, whatever they did to her when she came back to earth, none of that would matter any more, and the pain and rage and the fear of even being alive, they all became small things, a suffering that no longer had substance. They'd flown for hours, far longer than they were supposed to, and she'd been punished for that, but it had been worth it. She sometimes thought it was the greatest lesson her mother and her many lovers had taught her. They'd surely never meant to, they'd certainly very quickly regretted it, but she'd never, ever, forgotten. That sometimes there came a point where punishment didn't matter any more.
In the middle of the yard she paused, looked up to the sky, closed her eyes and soaked in the sun and the warmth and the dragon's wild hunger. In the years after that day with Azure she'd flown more and more. She'd become a rider, a dragon-princess. The joy had faded, too familiar perhaps, but she never quite forgot, and every time she climbed onto a dragon's back she closed her eyes and thought of that day and of what had come after. She'd looked for it everywhere. With dragons at first. With men, when she'd come to understand what they could do for her. She'd found it for fleeting moments with Jehal, who would die a thousand deaths if she ever found him again. She'd come close over Evenspire in the wild mad fury of that fight; lost herself here and there for little moments until the battle had turned sour. Afterwards, when she was sure she was alone, she'd wept, wept as the little girl who'd found the door to heaven and lost it again.
And here, of all places, she'd found it once more.
Joy
.
‘Mistress is pleased.’ Myst had found her voice these days.
‘Mistress is,’ murmured Zafir, still with her eyes closed. She held out her arms and stretched.
‘They're looking at you.’ Myst meant the Taiytakei. Zafir opened her eyes and saw that they were, all of them. Watching her, some of them openly, some of them furtively from the towers. Tsen T'Varr and Chrias Kwen and the lord from the mountain city and a dozen others in clothes and feathers that would put rainbows and peacocks to shame were gathered together up on the wall. They were well away from Diamond Eye, but the dragon loomed over everything. And Diamond Eye was looking at her, and so now the Taiytakei were looking at her too. She wondered what it was that drew them in – the power? The hunger?
But today they want me. All of them. One way or another they want me for what I have. Even Tsen
.
Taiytakei black-cloaks followed as she walked to the castle walls and mounted the steps. She lounged against the stone parapets, dressed in white silk and barefoot. The desert sun beat down and made her skin hot. Her face tingled. She stretched her arms and arched her back, soaking in the heat while Myst and Onyx stood beside her, heads bowed, still as statues. With her long tunic loose around her shoulders and her waist, her arms
and ankles bare, the desert was bearable. The soldiers around her with their metal plates stitched into cloth, in their glass and gold and their long florid cloaks, she didn't know how they could bear it. They must be sweating rivers. She looked at them, wondering, and they looked back, desire and envy and disgust mixed together in their gleaming faces while their hands gripped their ashgars and their lightning wands. They couldn't help themselves.
They think I'm a whore
. She laughed at them and smiled and shook her head. They wouldn't be the first, and whatever they thought it didn't matter. Taiytakei women kept themselves covered from chin to ankle. So what? She wasn't Taiytakei and none of them would ever have her unless she chose it. Another rule of steel forged on Azure's back that day. Never again a slave to any lusts but her own.
The Taiytakei gathered on the wall began to disperse. Tsen paused. He saw her flaunting herself in his path and turned and went a different way.
What's wrong with you? What are you afraid of?
But it wasn't Tsen she wanted anyway, and the arcane rules they lived by said that none of the others could follow in his wake save the lord who was his guest. Shrin Chrias Kwen –
he
was the one she wanted. She set her eyes on him and ignored the others.
Later. This one first
.
Chrias Kwen met her gaze as he approached, and with a venom that made her heart beat a little faster. She let the dragon hunger wash over her, let him feel it burn his skin. As he passed, she kept her eyes on his and brushed a hand across her neck as if to wipe the sweat away. ‘Do murder some more slaves, Kwen, if it troubles you that I'm still here.’
Myst and Onyx flinched. The muscles in the kwen's neck tensed. He'd heard her. She laughed, a tinkling mocking laugh in case her words hadn't been enough. He walked on. The others passed her and she pointedly watched each one as they did. A few turned to look back and then quickly looked away again, embarrassed to be seen to stare at a slave, even one who was a dragon-queen. When they were all gone, Zafir turned and leaned over the parapet into the gentle touch of the breeze. She stretched out her arms and tipped back her head, closed her eyes and flew once more on the dragon's wings.
‘Mistress, why?’ Myst again. Zafir still didn't know her real name and didn't care to, either. Myst was good enough.
‘I'm thirsty.’ They followed her down into the white circle of the dragon yard and into the soft light of the tunnels beneath. Tsen had quartered her among the eyrie slaves at first to remind her of what she was, but he'd moved her before long, away from the others and put her in among the Scales. To keep her safe, he'd told her, but she saw the lie. He'd moved her to shut her defiance away.
She let Myst and Onyx wash and perfume her. They made jasmine tea and chewed Xizic together and Zafir looked at them. They'd been with her for months now, ever since the ship. They were hers, body and soul, and she'd come to take them for granted because they were slaves,
her
slaves, which made them much the same as the servants she'd once had. But now, today, there was a chance they were about to die and so she saw them afresh. Not as slaves who dutifully loved and groomed and fed her but as people who had once had hopes and hungers of their own, just as she did. She took Myst by the hand. Her skin was so dark it was like staring into the moonless night.
‘Were you born a slave?’
Myst shook her head but Onyx was the one who answered. ‘None of us were, mistress.’
‘I was born in the desert,’ said Myst.
‘We both were. The sword-slaves came out into the Empty Sands and the Desert of Thieves. They bought us from our people and took us back to the slave markets of Cashax and sold us to our first master.’
Zafir listened to them talk as they told her how they'd been taken, each of them, to some Taiytakei lord who made slaves from the desert into bed-slaves fit for a sea lord. How they'd been taught about men and how to pleasure them, how to groom themselves, how to make themselves as perfect and as desirable as possible. They talked of friends made and lost as those who failed to become someone's favourite were thrown aside. The men who were their masters, the kind ones and the cruel, and the women who taught them, who were often far crueller. Zafir half heard their stories and half listened for the crack of the iron-shod boots she knew would come on the stone outside their door, yet while she waited
an unexpected sadness crept into her. A kinship for these slaves who should have meant nothing to her – who would have meant nothing to her back in her days as a dragon-queen. Not for their slavery, but for what had come with it. And a sadness, because she ought to send them away now to make them safe but she couldn't quite bring herself to be alone, not in the face of what was coming. She could already feel her resolve weakening.
Which wouldn't do. There was no space in the world for pity, not for her, not for anyone. She'd learned that long ago. Even the idea of it, here of all places, made her furious. She jumped up and stepped away from them. Myst almost whimpered. ‘Mistress? Have we said something wrong?’ They looked at her like whipped dogs.
No, and anger wouldn't do either. That wasn't what she needed, not with what was about to happen. The dragon. She needed the dragon. She sat down beside them again and pulled them close. ‘No. You haven't.’ Sitting on the back of Diamond Eye. The feeling of him. The warmth, the speed, the hunger, the desire, the freedom and the joy. She took herself back and lived it again. ‘Tell me something else. Something precious. The memory you hold on to on dark days. Something that brings you joy.’
Onyx looked sad, but Myst's eyes were suddenly bright. ‘I remember a night in the desert,’ she said. ‘The air was cool, the sky clear like every other desert night. I am hidden, stolen away from my family and my people, not far, but out of sight and out of sound. We are on a journey across the sands. The shaman has decided it's the way we should go. There are whispers of black ooze rising from the dunes and harvesting the ooze for the city lords brings us riches and fat bellies. But we are still on our way. We have reached the old place the city men call Uban. Much is buried under the sand but some pieces still rise above it. I have never seen a city before, even an old and ruined one that is almost buried. It seems a magical place outside the world I know. I am waiting behind a stone that rises out of the sand, tall as the sky, for the boy that I want. And he comes to me and I see him, and his eyes are like stars.’