by Stephen Deas
Bellepheros tried not to look at anything except the floor. The space around him was huge and filled with light. The ceiling was far above, if there was a ceiling at all, and the walls were all the same gold-tinged glass. If you peered you could see the clouds and the harbour and the city outside, all of it adding to the sense of nakedness around him. ‘Alchemists are used to tunnels and caves,’ he muttered. ‘Not great spaces like this.’ It was the emptiness that oppressed him, more than the size. There was no one else here except a few slaves standing patient and still in their alcoves and the soldiers who’d come with Chay-Liang. A place like the Speaker’s Hall in the Adamantine Palace, where many could gather when the occasion arose yet rarely used. It had no sense of life. For all its perfect beauty, it felt cold and dead.
‘I thought you rode great beasts through the skies where you come from.’
‘If you mean the dragons then you’re thinking of dragon-riders. Alchemists rarely. Sometimes we sit on their backs, but it’s a rider who commands them and we have saddles and harnesses that hold us fast. We certainly do not float in the air with no apparent means of support.’ He shuddered. The last few minutes were a horror he’d probably never forget.
The enchantress laughed. ‘I’ll have your rooms changed then if it’s a cave you want. I’ll send new clothes to you. Silk?’
‘Yes, yes!’ The more they walked across the marble, the further the far wall seemed to be. He felt himself shrinking.
‘Colours?’
‘Any!’ Anything to get away from this unbearable empty openness!
‘Colours matter a great deal here, Bellepheros. You’ll be the keeper of our lord’s dragons. What colour are dragons?’
It made him laugh. What colour are dragons? He kept forgetting, amid his misery, how little the Taiytakei knew of his home. ‘All manner of colours. They don’t care.’
‘Then I will choose.’ She sighed as they reached the far wall at last, then stopped beside it and took the black wand from her belt and tapped it to the glass. A clear slab descended from above, jutting from the gold-tinged wall. Bellepheros forced himself to look up. High above his head hung a great golden egg, suspended by chains from the glass discs in the sky. There was no telling how big the egg might be but the discs beyond filled his sight. There was empty sky between them and the open top of this tower. A tiny black hole beckoned from the bottom of the egg. That was where they were going, was it? His head started to spin. He looked away. Took a deep breath. His heart was pounding again and they hadn’t even started.
The enchantress put a hand on his arm. ‘Close your eyes.’
‘Yes. And I’d like to sit down too.’
Tuuran sat beside him, legs dangling over the edge. The Adamantine Man was staring at everything like an apprentice on his first visit to the caves under the Purple Spur, or like Speaker Hyram when Bellepheros had taken him there and finally shown him the truth about dragons. Or perhaps, more apt, like a virgin in his first brothel.
‘Does height not trouble you?’ Bellepheros asked him bitterly.
‘Height? I’m a sail-slave.’ Tuuran chuckled. ‘A sail-slave who’s afraid of heights doesn’t last very long. If the floor was pitching and heaving beneath us, the wind howling and the rain flaying the skin off my face, I’d feel quite at home. Height? No. But glorious as these sights may be, Lord Alchemist, I don’t like not seeing what holds me from falling. It reeks of witchery.’
Witchery? What did that even mean? But then the glass began to rise and Bellepheros stayed very still, face screwed up tight and tense as a drumskin. He cried out in fear when they emerged from the top of the tower and the sudden wind snatched at him and blew him sideways; and then, when Tuuran held him tight, wept at his own frailty, shaking helplessly. When the wind died and the glass stopped, he stayed very still, curled up tight, arms wrapped around his head. He dimly heard the Taiytakei soldiers move away but mercifully they left him alone. He sat still until the shaking stopped. It felt like a long time. Then he let out a great sigh and warily opened his eyes. He gasped and almost sobbed with relief. The glass had lifted them into a hall panelled in bronze and wood, with the sky decently pushed aside by the pleasant familiarity of walls and a floor and a roof over his head. He took a few deep breaths, carefully ignoring the bright hole in the floor though which they’d arrived. The illusion helped. Unfortunately his mind knew all too well that an illusion was what it was. It kept reminding him. Kept him thinking about the huge emptiness that lay not far through every wall and floor. Kept him quivering inside, sapping his strength and poisoning every thought.
The enchantress was looking at him, eyes agleam with curiosity. ‘More to your liking?’ He nodded. She clapped her hands. Slaves, docile men and women with downcast eyes, emerged from their alcoves. Chay-Liang beckoned to them and then to him. ‘See to our guest.’ She smiled and patted him on the arm. ‘They’ll look after you. Anything you want, just ask.’ And he felt too ill and too scared to remind her that all he wanted was to go home; and just now he wasn’t even sure that he wanted that, because that would mean more floating through the terror of the empty open air on flimsy sheets of glass.
The enchantress and the Taiytakei soldiers led, and when the slaves beckoned him and Tuuran to follow, he did. They took him away to rooms that were spacious and comfortable and took their leave with a few vague words that he didn’t really hear. Inside, rugs lay across the floor in patterns of rich reds and pale blues, the knots thick and deep under his feet and almost as soft as fur. Tapestries hung from every wall, mostly desert scenes in orange and gold. One was nothing more than a vast expanse of empty sand with a single mighty tower that rose into a swirling maelstrom of black cloud. It caught his eye because in the cloud tiny slivers of silver and purple gave the impression of lightning.
The bed was made of solid gold with a mattress of the softest down and silk sheets that slid over his skin like liquid. A dragon-king could have guested here and not been disappointed. After his old squitty stone cells in the Palace of Alchemy he wasn’t sure what to do with rooms like these, but apparently that didn’t matter because he had a half-dozen slaves to show him. They prepared a bath, and while he soaked in the water and tried not to think about the open sky just outside, they brought a small pile of books for his table. A History of the Mar-Li Seafaring Republic and a collection of journals and diaries. When he was clean they dressed him in a plain white silk tunic, so light it left him feeling naked. They laid out bronze trays of food, simple bread, a dozen different fruits from tiny bright purple berries to something that was a brilliant yellow and as big as his head, and a plate piled with strips of pink salted fish with ten tiny pots for dipping in, each with a different pungent flavour. Bellepheros gingerly tried a bit of most things and then settled for largely just eating the bread.
Tuuran watched with envy. ‘Is this how it is in the Palace of Alchemy?’ he asked.
‘We put on our own clothes and the food is distinctly inferior.’ Bellepheros frowned and then laughed at his own foolishness. Here he was, a slave, yet treated far better than he’d ever been in Prince Jehal’s eyrie at Clifftop when he’d been searching for a murderer, or even in the Veid Palace afterwards when he’d had to admit to not finding one. And that sort of thought was no good. He had no place even thinking it.
Tuuran still watched him closely, lips pursed. He didn’t say anything, though, not until Bellepheros was done and had sent the slaves away. They would have stayed and done more if he hadn’t. Anything you want, just ask. The Adamantine Man watched them go. He wrinkled his nose and sniffed. ‘You’ll get comfortable here, Lord Grand Alchemist. Careful with that.’
Bellepheros shook his head, trying to throw the other thoughts aside. ‘In the Palace of Alchemy we’re masters of our own destiny. Here I am not. They can never hide t
hat.’ Although saying the words made him think about how true that really was, because the truth was that they weren’t and never had been. They were servants to the speaker, to the nine realms and their kings and queens, but far more than that, wherever they went, they were slaves to the dragons.
‘You will,’ said Tuuran again. ‘I would.’ His voice was quiet. Subdued. Bellepheros swept his arm across the room, at the food, the bath, the bed, the clothes, trying to dispel the sudden awkwardness.
‘Help yourself. Enjoy it while it’s here.’
Tuuran glanced at the door. With a wistful sigh he sat down and picked at the food but he didn’t seem to be hungry. Which wasn’t like the Tuuran Bellepheros had come to know on the voyage, but perhaps that was down to the strangeness of their surroundings. ‘Better than ship rations, that’s for sure. It won’t last.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because I’ve been a slave to the Taiytakei for years and it never does.’
Bellepheros read a little from the journals, trying to make sense of them, but his head kept lolling and he soon gave up. He slept soundly, finally untroubled by any thoughts of how far above the ground they were. The bed was a soft embrace, warm and gentle. Tuuran slept on the floor, curled up in a pile of blankets. If he snored, Bellepheros didn’t notice.
The slaves were waiting for him again when he woke. They fed and dressed him, this time in feather robes patterned in silken flames that made him cringe and beg for something else, and when it turned out there was nothing else, made him wish he’d answered the enchantress when she’d asked. He was quite sure this was her way of getting back at him for not paying proper attention. Her little joke.
When he was ready they ushered him to the door. Two Taiytakei knights in their glass and gold armour waited outside. They led him through a short maze of passages to a door of solid gold carved with entwined bolts of lightning. At the touch of their black rods it opened. They gently ushered him inside but didn’t follow. The door closed behind him. He was in a room with no windows, lit by glowing glass spheres that reminded him of his own alchemical lamps. It wasn’t a big room – pleasingly small in fact – but it was made entirely of gold. Every inch was carved with fractal patterns that twisted and writhed and moved under his eyes whenever he tried to make out what they were. Three Taiytakei faced him across a table that was a single mirror-polished slab of lapis-blue. The old man with the white hair that Bellepheros had seen on the ship sat in the middle, quietly calm and sure of everything around him. Chay-Liang, the enchantress, stood to one side, stiff and ill at ease. On the other side a slender man in black stood as still as a statue. His skin and his clothes were both so dark that Bellepheros couldn’t see where one started and the other ended. He could have been a living shadow, but the edging to his robe gave him away. Strands of red, blue and white, entwined together. The Picker had worn those robes.
‘You’re an Elemental Man,’ Bellepheros said.
The black-robe didn’t answer. ‘The Watcher’s going to keep you safe from the enemies of our city,’ Chay-Liang said. ‘And believe me, slave, we have quite enough.’
The old Taiytakei stared at Bellepheros. ‘Keeper of the Dragons, I am Quai’Shu, sea lord of Xican and your absolute master. I said you would build me an eyrie.’
Bellepheros didn’t look away. He didn’t bow this time either. ‘And I said you would wish that I hadn’t.’
‘You will do this. You will be given whatever you require. I will send you to my t’varr, Baros Tsen. You may ask him for whatever you need. He is a perfect t’varr: there is nothing he cannot find, nothing he cannot arrange. Whatever you wish for, he will provide. If you need artefacts of glass, Chay-Liang will make them. They will do whatever you require. The Watcher will be your guardian. Where should such a thing be built?’
‘In the realms that are my home,’ said Bellepheros with quiet calm, ‘where there are many other alchemists to ensure your dragons remain tame.’
The sea lord’s face didn’t flicker. ‘There are ways to bring a man to heel, Keeper of the Dragons, without breaking him. Where?’
‘Far away from any cities. Far away from people. As far away as you can.’
‘Why?’
Why? You have to ask why? Bellepheros gaped. ‘Because they are dragons, Sea Lord Quai’Shu of Xican! Because they are fifty paces from tip to tip of wing and from nose to tip of tail. Because of what will happen if any one of them breaks free of the potions you will ask me to make – if I make them at all. Because I am your one and only alchemist and you will not have another, and if anything happens to me then your cities will burn. Because they are a plague to ruin worlds. But I see you for what you are – you’re like a dragon-king, believing yourself master of everything around you. You will never believe such a catastrophe could happen, for surely your mere existence prevents it. I hope you may think otherwise when you meet a full-grown dragon eye to eye, but I cannot show you how that feels here in this room. So for now let us say because of the disease that newly hatched dragons bring with them. It will run like fire through your people should it ever escape.’
Quai’Shu barely even blinked. It was as if not a single word had reached him. ‘Far away from others. The desert, then.’
‘Deserts are suitable. The heat makes the dragons a little sluggish.’ Outwatch was the biggest eyrie in the dragon realms and that was in a desert. ‘An eyrie should be hard to reach and hard to enter, because whatever you may believe, every eyrie contains the greatest weapon you will ever know.’ He leaned a little forward and spoke through clenched teeth. ‘People may try to steal it.’
The sea lord nodded and sent him away and it was the last time that Bellepheros would see Sea Lord Quai’Shu as the Taiytakei knew him, as the captain of a city and a fleet of ships, as a conqueror of worlds. Bellepheros had said the desert, and so that was where the Taiytakei took him and gave him a castle that floated in the air. He made peace with himself then. Accepted his slavery and bowed to its inevitability, for now at least. The Taiytakei had no dragons yet, that was true, but what they did have beggared his mind. He felt a fool beside Chay-Liang, lowly and ignorant among her glittering spires and golden automata, among the conjured jewels and marvellous creatures and the wonders of a dozen worlds. He told her, slowly and carefully and with patience, exactly what they would need to build a dragon eyrie that would work and exactly what they would need to keep a dragon tame. Food. A great deal of it, and so she moved the castle that floated in the air to the desert’s edge where great herds of hump-backed horses roamed among dry and sandy grasslands. After that, men and women to tend the dragons. Scales. People who, with a little of his help, would fall in love with the monsters, who would give their lives as they became slowly riddled with the Hatchling Disease and died of it, turned into human statues. So Baros Tsen, the sly fat t’varr, brought him slaves, and Bellepheros brewed the potions that would dull their minds and ready them to fall in love with their monsters.
There were other ways, he said. Better ways, but they took longer and needed children to be raised as Scales from before they could talk, knowing nothing else. At that, Tsen T’Varr brought him children – babies – but Bellepheros sent them away, for they would need teachers first and other things. Men and women to cook and clean, to build and polish and make and repair. They brought him all the slaves he asked for, everything he desired, and he set them to work.
To make his potions he would need dragon blood. Somehow they brought it to him. Above all, he told them, they would need more alchemists.
Then make them, they said. And that was the one thing he couldn’t do. He could teach a slave to make a potion. He could teach Chay-Liang to make almost anything. By the end there was almost not a single one of his secrets that he hadn’t shared with h
er. But alchemy lived in the blood, and there was only one place in the world where a true alchemist could be made, an alchemist who could dull a dragon, and the secret of that place was the one secret he kept, for it was deep within the dragon realms, far off in the darkest caves of the Worldspine, and without that secret there was only one person in their world who could make the potions they wanted and that person was him, and without more alchemists they would all be hostages together when they finally found a dragon. They would see the horror that a dragon could bring and he would show this Quai’Shu why his desire was such terrible folly.
So he made his eyrie, built to his own design, potions brewed to order. Quai’Shu never came to it, T’Varr Tsen was rarely there, the Watcher merely watched, and beneath their different coloured robes and their different coloured skins, he found that Chay-Liang was as much an alchemist as he was. He ran his eyrie as he saw fit and did as he wished. At his fingers he had knowledge and sorceries and devices he had never dreamed could exist. For a man who had once been master of the Order of the Scales, it was close to perfect. Without the dragons themselves, he could almost forget that he was no longer free.
But he never did forget. Never quite lost sight of the promise he’d made to Tuuran, that one day he’d take them both home. Just kept putting off the thought, as Chay-Liang danced yet another miracle before him and seduced him with ideas for just another few days. Again and again and again. And maybe he would have forgotten, but he always remembered the look of betrayal in Tuuran’s eyes when the Adamantine Man finally left him and returned to the sea. You’ll get comfortable here, he’d said, and it was true and he had. And when he was done, when it was all made and finished and he still hadn’t made his stand and gone home after all, Bellepheros looked at what he’d built, at the perfect waiting machine, and held his head in his hands, for he knew he had done a terrible thing.