Dragon Queen (34 page)

He climbed to the top and looked out across the desert in awe.
The white stone walls sloped down – more gently on the outside than they did within – to a wide rim of dark bedrock, and then . . . nothing. To his eyes, it seemed the place was built on the top of a solitary mountain. A mesa, perhaps, like the ones on the edge of the Purple Spur where it slid into the western edge of Gliding Dragon Gorge not so far away from the Adamantine Palace itself.

The only mesa for a hundred miles though, by the looks of it, and, Flame but it was tall! To the north and east and west a sea of sand stretched out as far as his eyes could reach, great dunes washing away to the horizon, almost white and painfully bright.
White. Why is desert stone always white?
To the south the ground became flatter and dirtier, more patchy and broken. Some sort of salt marsh if he'd heard right. A brilliant line of gleaming silver ran through the middle of it, dozens of miles to the west. A river catching the sun, and a big one. When he looked hard there might have been another too, off in the far distance. Along the rim of the mesa coils of rope as thick as his arm lay below the shallow slope of the walls, with open empty crates scattered around and planks of wood in piles and pulleys and a jib built out over the side. Cranes, most of them only half built, but that meant that beyond the edge was a sheer cliff. He almost went over to have a look, to peer over and drink in the drop but thought better of it.

There were other things built along the rim too. Dull iron wheels as big as a cart lay set flat into the ground, some of them with bright steel plates mounted on them. He'd seen things like these along the walls of the Adamantine Palace, places for mounting a scorpion so that it could easily turn, although these were far larger. A few held up great glass discs, twice as tall as a man, mounted sideways and held by silvery pylons with a series of concentric glass globes nested through the middle and, right at their heart, what looked for all the world like a harness for a man to sit in. The outermost rims were covered in what looked like solid gold. Gold, always gold with the Taiytakei. He'd seen it everywhere since they'd taken him off his ship but they didn't use it for money, not like everywhere else. No, they used silver, which he'd seen in a lot of places, and jade, which he'd seen in far fewer, but never gold. Too precious for that? He wasn't sure.

His eyes drifted out to the desert. Antros, who would have been
the last speaker if he hadn't died, had come from the desert, from Sand. Speaker Hyram had come from Bloodsalt. All in all, Tuuran had spent a lot of years in the Deserts of Sand and Stone and Salt before the mistress of the Pinnacles had sold him into slavery. He felt their tug.
Home. I want to go home
. He hadn't forgotten the huge tearing in his heart as they'd crossed the storm-dark; it had dulled in the last weeks but now he felt it as sharp as it had ever been. The alchemist, the Palace of Leaves, the three knives someone had stuck in him, Yena. He saw them for what they were now. Blindfolds. Dreamleaf, but he'd never
quite
fallen asleep, never
quite
closed his eyes. He opened his shirt. He had nothing to show for those knives now except three little scars. They were almost gone, as though they were wounds from years ago. It was a shame the alchemist had nothing for the scars on the inside.

Out in the distance to the west a glint in the sky caught his eye, a little golden star under a bigger white one. As it came closer he knew it must be the alchemist and the white witch in their sky-ship. He hadn't seen much of the alchemist in the last week but he'd seen enough to know the witch had done her work. She'd cast her spell and enchanted him like she enchanted her flying machines. She'd seduced him and Tuuran would never get him back. And her slave Yena, in her own way, was the same. Even if it wasn't her fault and she didn't mean it, that was what she was trying to do.

‘Hey, slave! Get back to work!’

A Taiytakei soldier was on the battlements with him. One of those with the glass and gold-plated armour and the glowing wands. Not that Tuuran had any work to be doing but slaves didn't argue and so he raised his hands, bowed and retreated back down the steps into the yard and moved boxes and crates from one place to another as though he knew what he was doing. Someone pointed to an archway and he followed the line of their finger, nodding dumbly. A few steep steps descended inside and then curved sharply to follow the line of the wall, spiralling deeper underground. The passageway walls were the same white stone as outside, glassy smooth and curved with only a slight flattening at the floor, as though they'd been made by some sort of burrowing worm. There were no murals, no hangings, no decoration, nothing, but they had a light to them like an alchemist's lantern, a glow that
crept out from the very stone itself. The eyrie slaves moved back and forth with blank faces but the palace slaves stared in wonder and chatted excitedly. One stopped and scratched the stone with a knife. He caught Tuuran looking at him and hurried away but when Tuuran went to look for himself he couldn't find a mark. Nothing. Yet strange as these passages with their light seemed to the other slaves, yet again Tuuran had seen them before, in the Pinnacles this time. In Queen Aliphera's Fortress of Watchfulness, what little of it he and the new speaker had been allowed to see. They were almost his last memories of the realms he called home. The last ones he cared to dwell on at least.

A short way down the passage he began to pass a series of little rooms, all the same with egg-shaped holes for entrances that you had to step over but not a single door. He'd seen these in the Pinnacles too. And deeper in, as the passage curved back towards the centre of the eyrie and grew wider the rooms grew bigger, some of them larger than the gondola that had carried him here but always curved and in strange shapes. Not circles but never anything angular and no two the same as though water had come through here once and taken its time to carve its signature in each and every room, one that could never be repeated.

The rooms grew larger the deeper he went and the passage grew taller and there were archways here and there, carved into the walls, and swathes of runes and symbols. Not that the arches went anywhere. Just the shape of them, opening onto nothing more than the same white stone as everything else. He'd seen those in the Pinnacles too. Place was riddled with them.

He carried the alchemist's things to the room Bellepheros had been given. Not that the alchemist had any possessions of his own but the witch had arranged for a whole gamut of things to be delivered to him anyway. Clothes and pots and pans, glass beakers in all shapes and sizes. Tiny cages. And books, dozens and dozens of books. Tuuran didn't know what to do with anything else but he knew what alchemists did with books. He put most of them on the shelves and scattered the rest around the room, on tables, on seats, on the bed. He left a few of them opened at some random page in the middle; and when Bellepheros finally arrived, he clapped his hands as he saw and smiled; and Tuuran smiled back, even
though the alchemist's smile was ghastly. It was Yena's smile, the smile of a man who'd made some sort of peace with himself and accepted his slavery, who'd bowed to its inevitability and embraced it for what he could get. The Taiytakei had no dragons yet but the witch had shown him her glittering spires and golden glass. She'd told him tales of conjured jewels, of marvellous creatures and the wonders of worlds. She'd seen exactly where his weakness lay and she'd struck at it with the swiftness and the deadly precision of a desert cobra and with a poison to put any snake to shame.

‘Going home any time soon?’ Tuuran asked him but Bellepheros barely heard. He grunted. Across the passage was another space, one meant to be his laboratory. Someone shrewd must have known he was coming because it was already stocked with shelves and shelves of herbs and roots and powders and liquids, none of which meant anything to Tuuran and most of which were apparently a mystery to the alchemist as well. Watching him was like watching a child in a room full of new toys, moving from one thing to the next, picking it up, opening bottles, sniffing, putting them down, moving on. He even made excited squealing noises. But Tuuran wasn't going to let it lie, not this time.

‘No. You're not going anywhere.’

‘Sorry?’

‘She's got you. That witch. She's got you good. She's put a spell on you and made you her slave.’

The alchemist paused. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean you're going to build them their eyrie and you're going to give them their dragons and you're not even going to try to stop them.’

Bellepheros had a bottle of silver liquid in his hand which he seemed to find strangely fascinating. After a moment of thought he put it down. ‘I cannot stop them from bringing dragons.’ His smile faded. ‘Tuuran, I've begged and pleaded with all who give me their ears to sway them from this course but they don't listen, of course they don't. And if dragons come then yes, I
will
keep them as best I can because the consequences of anything else are unbearable.’ He picked up a piece of golden glass and tossed it into the air. It fell, but slowly like a feather. ‘Look, though! Look at this! Look at what they can do! Imagine how our world could change!’

Tuuran tried and found he couldn't. Floating glass? What use did he have for floating glass?

‘I've set my mind on a course, Tuuran. Liang agrees. One day alchemists will come here to work as they would in any other eyrie, and the Taiytakei will come to us in return. If they
must
have dragons, if they simply cannot be dissuaded, we'll look after them and they will teach us to build these things. It will be a brave new world for all of us.’

He looked as though he believed it and Tuuran had to turn away and screw up his face to hold back the anger. ‘No, Lord Master Alchemist. The Taiytakei will come to our land and take whatever pleases them. That's what they do. I've sailed on their slave ships for years;
you
have been here for a mere handful of weeks. You cannot change their ways with a simple snap of your fingers.’

The alchemist met his eye. ‘Tuuran, for this I think I can. It's too precious to them.’ He looked earnest and eager and hopeful, for a moment far younger than his years. ‘I hope they fail, Tuuran, I truly do. But if they don't, if they raise their own dragons, then it must be this way. Anything else will be the end of them.’

‘Then
I
hope it is, Lord Grand Master. I hope it
is
the end of them. I hope you fail.’ He might have spat at the alchemist's feet but he was an Adamantine Man and this was the grand master of the Order of the Scales and he couldn't see them –
wouldn't
see them – as two ordinary slaves, no different from any other. So he held the bitterness inside him, held the alchemist's gaze long enough to be sure the old man saw the betrayal he felt, then turned and left.

It was another day before he realised that the eyrie wasn't built on top of a sheer-sided mountain at all. That was when the glasships hanging overhead slowly began to move and the chains fastened to the rim outside the walls grew taut and hummed, when all the slaves from the palace stopped what they were doing and ran in amazement to the walls to shout and stare as the eyrie itself began to drift across the desert, free of any tether to the earth.

32

Regrettable

Chay-Liang stood on the rim of the eyrie with the alchemist, and try as she might to stay calm, she could feel her temper wriggling between her fingers like an eel, trying to get away from her. For the fourth time the eyrie had moved because Bellepheros wasn't content with where it sat. They were further east than she'd ever feared, much further than Baros Tsen T'Varr was happy with and ridiculously distant from where Sea Lord Quai'Shu had asked them to go. Too close to Vespinarr for comfort. She could even see the hazy distant peaks of the Konsidar on the far horizon.

‘So will
here
do? It had better. Tsen will send someone to push
both
of us over the edge if there's much more of this!’ Belli had his slave bodyguard with him, the one he'd brought all the way from Xican. The man was a monster, a simmering hulking brute steaming with resentment and he didn't like her one little bit. He glowered at her and she had to smile, though she turned away where neither of them would see.
Anyone who pushed Belli over the edge would follow quickly enough
. The thought of the two of them plummeting to their deaths made her smile even more, though that made no sense. She pointed at the shapes roaming across the sandy grasslands below. Thousands of them. ‘Your dragons can eat those.’

‘What are they?’

Liang shrugged and looked at the other slave who seemed to tag around after them all the time. Yena, who braided her hair each morning. The alchemist wanted his guard after the trouble in Zinzarra and the guard wanted his woman and so there they were. It was ridiculous.

‘Linxia.’ Yena bowed. ‘Desert horses.’

Bellepheros scratched his nose. ‘Are they migratory?’

Liang looked at the slave again. Yena covered her face in her hands and fell to her knees. ‘I do not understand, mistress.’

The slaves that Shrin Chrias Kwen had sent with her were perfect palace slaves, not what she wanted at all. A good slave had
some
sense of their own value. Tsen at least understood that. She would get them changed. Some of them, anyway. Apparently not this one. ‘Migratory,’ she snapped, saying the word loudly and clearly.

‘Do they move from place to place as the seasons change or do they always live here?’ asked the alchemist. Damn him but he was better with the slaves than she was and not just because he was one of them. He had a streak of the teacher to him. A patience she'd never possessed.

Yena glanced from Liang to Bellepheros and back again. She had no idea how to treat the alchemist. Nor did anyone else. Since he was unbranded, strictly speaking he was an oar-slave, lowest of the low. Liang treated him as an equal because to her mind that's what he was, slave or not. His bodyguard, although a higher-ranked slave, treated him as though he was a superior. And at the top of them all, Tsen treated everyone as though they were the same and just slightly beneath him. Poor girl didn't know where to start.