by Stephen Deas
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.’
31
Harsh as a Desert Heart
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.
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 h
ad 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.