by Stephen Deas
They forced her down to her knees and pressed her head hard into the floor. Beside her, the light hadn’t gone from Brightstar’s eyes. ‘Like this!’ snapped the black-cloak whose sword still dripped. As they pulled her up and dragged her away, her foot slipped in Brightstar’s red blood, still warm. She almost fell and a trail of sticky red footprints followed her, quickly fading. Her head buzzed with what the Heart of the Sea Lord had done while his soldiers’ hands held her arms hard enough to bruise. The urge crackled inside her to pull away and fight them, to kick them, steal their swords and stab them, but she pushed it away and walked between them straight and erect. She would not lose her control. She would not let them have that victory. A dragon-rider knew her passions. She revelled in them, embraced them and rode them like the hurricanes they were, but a dragon-rider was always, always, their mistress. If they couldn’t ride their own, how could they ride the fury of a dragon?
The soldiers pushed and pulled her through the narrow companionways of the ship, up a tight flight of steps to the open air. Above the wooden masts and spars vast discs of glass and orbs of gold and silver hung in the sky, looming down and threatening to crush her. They were everywhere, spinning slowly and streaming bright shapes of sunlight across the deck in ever-shifting patterns. Others drifted languidly further out among the ships of the fleet and the smooth sculpted islands that surrounded them. They made her feel small.
No. She bit her tongue and made it bleed. Awe, rage, love, fear, they were all her children, not her masters. No, she would not gawk like some ignorant savage. She was the dragon-queen and nothing the Taiytakei could put in front of her could compare with the monsters that had been a part of her life from the very moment she’d been born. She let the cold breeze cutting through her silks fill her head, made herself look straight ahead and nowhere else, dismissed the bright sun-dazzled thing above her that was as large as a war-dragon with its wings outstretched. When they stood her in front of a gondola carved from solid gold, almost resting on the deck right in front of her, at first she refused to see that too.
But no, that wouldn’t do either, and so she lifted her eyes and went to war. The gondola floated a few feet above the deck and seemed to move up and down but that was the ship rocking in the gentle swell. The egg hung motionless. It was the size of a small hall, large enough for perhaps a dozen men to stand upright before they felt pressed together. On the outside it was smooth-skinned, made of polished gold that shone brilliant in the sun, featureless except for windows of perfect clear glass in a single ring around its belly. At the tapered end of the egg in front of her a ramp hung open, yet more gold, ending in a few steps that hung by silver chains. The steps were clear. Glass. It all hung from chains of gleaming silver. Above her the gold-glass disc spun slowly, casting its fractured light over everything.
Zafir looked and took it in, every bit of it, and then held it up against her dragons, her Onyx and her Mistral and all the others, and made it small.
The soldiers pushed her forward. The ramp was laid with a deep red carpet. Under her bare feet it was thick and soft and warm. It caressed her skin. Like a pool of warm fresh blood. Like Brightstar’s blood. The thought startled her. And then she was inside the egg and the black-cloaks had hold of her again and there was a man staring at her, fat and black-skinned with a jovial sort of face but also a sharpness to him. She forced herself to look at that face and nothing else: not at his brilliant blue silk robe with its streaming patterns of emerald and silver and crimson and gold, not at the cascading braids of his hair which spread across the floor around his throne of yet more gold still, with its arms carved in the shape of ships and its back sculpted to look like a sail, not at the white and silver and crimson feathered cloak that wrapped him nor the carved symbols that lined the golden walls, nor through the too-perfect glass of the windows nor the tiny door behind him that led to the front of the egg, hanging ajar. No, she looked at him. She met his eye and stood erect and let her mouth fall imperceptibly open. She cocked her head and imagined how it would be if he’d been her treacherous lover Jehal.
Not a flicker.
‘I am Baros Tsen,’ he said. And they talked, and as they did, she made sure to draw his gaze with her hands to her breasts, to her hips, to all the parts of her that every man she’d ever met stared at with their blunt hungry eyes. Yet not a flicker. It was strange. Confusing. Unexpectedly disarming.
‘You don’t desire me at all, do you?’ She couldn’t help herself.
‘Not at all.’ He waved her away; and when she went it was with a lightness to her step that she couldn’t explain until the black-cloaked soldiers waiting outside seized her. Their eyes roamed freely, stealing devouring looks that perhaps they imagined she didn’t see. She smiled at them. When she was a queen again, those were the eyes she would have gouged out first. They shoved and pulled her back down to her cabin. Brightstar’s body was gone but her blood still stained the wooden floor. Myst and Onyx cowered and kowtowed as the black-cloaks chained her wrist once more and left, locking the door behind them. None of them spoke. Zafir put a hand on each of them and made a silent promise. It will not happen again.
Silent Onyx offered her a piece of Xizic. The taste was strong and made her gag at first but she chewed at it anyway, torn between disgust and curiosity while her slaves undressed her and bathed her and dressed her again, and as she did the world seemed to take on a new edge of colour. Sounds became crisper and a delicious warmth spread inside her. She almost forgot where she was. As they brushed her hair and oiled her skin she closed her eyes and couldn’t help but see Jehal. The silks they put her in were tantalising against her skin. Jehal at his best with his fingers and his lips. With the olisbos he’d brought to her that last time they’d been alone. She could have lost herself in those thoughts but before they could grow into something more, the door of her cabin burst open once more and the black-cloaks were back, pulling her to the floor. They took the silver chain from her wrist and bound her with another, one that tied her hand to her ankle so she could barely walk, and when they were done they hauled her up and pushed and shoved her back to the deck. The golden egg was gone, a bronze one in its place; and this time she stopped and looked up at the glass disc in the sky, almost as long as the ship, and tried to make sense of it. It spun slowly around a lattice of silvery metal and more glass. Inside was another glass disc, spinning faster, perpendicular to the first, and then another and another and another, and then inside that a sphere and another disc, the last one turning so fast that its spokes were a blur. It reminded her of an object that her alchemist Vioros had once had, all concentric metal rings at strange angles to one another. An orrery, was that what he’d called it? Except his had been the size of a dinner plate while this dwarfed even a dragon.
But it doesn’t breathe fire and it’s made of glass. She tried to imagine what would happen if a dragon came upon something like this. It helped with the breathless wonder that threatened to overwhelm her. ‘What is this thing?’
The soldiers hanging on her arms forced her forward. One of them said something like ‘Glasship,’ although through his accent she couldn’t be sure. Then he said something else, guttural, and they both laughed. She didn’t understand the words but she caught the meaning clearly enough: ignorant savage. She looked at the two of them, one and then the other so she could be sure to remember their faces. First their eyes and then their tongues, and then they would see how truly amusing a dragon-queen could be.
‘I saw them fly,’ she said with a smile. ‘They are slow and clumsy.’
The soldiers spat their disgust at her feet and pushed her inside the egg, all bare metal and empty except for the men already waiting there and a single polished handrail of dark wood running around the interior below the line of the windows. The floor felt warm. She might have moved to the windows to look outside, to see how this flying thing felt beside the sensation of sitting on the back of a
dragon with a hurricane howling through her hair, but her eyes wouldn’t let go of one of the men already inside the egg. He was a slave like her, the only one in the ship who wasn’t Taiytakei, and he was old but it still took a second for the rest of her to realise how she knew him.
‘Alchemist?’
Grand Master Bellepheros. Older and thinner than she remembered, but it was him. He stepped away from the others and bowed. ‘Your Highness.’
‘I was crowned a queen, Bellepheros, to follow my mother, and then Hyram named me speaker. I’ve held the Adamantine Spear and it drank my blood.’ She shivered at the memory then held out her hand so he could see the Speaker’s Ring still on her finger. Through everything, no one had thought to take that away. He stared goggle-eyed in disbelief, and then his eyes glistened and his jaw dropped. He fell to his knees in front of her and pressed his face to the floor the way her slave maids had done before Shrin Chrias Kwen, and a bubble of joy burst inside her.
‘Holiness,’ he murmured, and for that she would have made him a king, right there and then, if she could.
‘Rise, alchemist.’
The Taiytakei soldiers stared at them both in open amazement. Bellepheros struggled up, his old knees giving him trouble. As he rose, he stumbled and grabbed her arm. Zafir froze, flitting from crowning him to hanging him in a cage for the crows in an instant, but as he finished pulling himself up, his cheek brushed her ear. ‘Do not bow to them, Holiness,’ he breathed so quietly that no other would hear. ‘They need us both.’
She smiled and took his hands in hers. Not a king! For that I will crown you an emperor! ‘It’s good to see you again, Grand Master. We thought you dead.’ Bellepheros. Grand master alchemist. She’d barely known him. The last time she’d seen him had been in Furymouth at Jehal’s wedding, spitting derision at him while her insides turned in knots, desperately afraid that he might peel back the riddle of her mother’s death and unravel what she and Jehal had done. Before that she could barely remember him existing. Afterwards … After he’d gone she’d wished him back, but only because of spiteful vicious-minded Jeiros who’d taken his place. Yet here he was. An ally!
‘The Taiytakei took me. As you see, Holiness.’
The smile stayed while she tried to look inside him to see what else was there. ‘They took a great deal more,’ she began, but then saw from his darting eyes that she should be wary. She looked past him at the other men. More black-cloaks in their gold-glass armour and one more who wore a plain sable robe woven with simple coloured strands along its hem from his collar to his feet.
The floor trembled as the glasship rose into the air. She almost stumbled.
‘Perhaps you would care to share the view, Holiness?’ Bellepheros gestured to the nearest window and grabbed for the rail beneath it. ‘It is an interesting experience. Very different from dragon flight.’
‘Slow,’ she said. She moved beside him to watch as the ship fell away. The movement of the gondola was imperceptible at first; as it rose higher it began to sway a little, much like the ships down below rocking back and forth in the sea. Six more glass discs hung over the Taiytakei fleet. The closest, she saw, was being loaded with dragon eggs.
‘Indeed. But comfortable,’ said Bellepheros. ‘How many do they have?’
It took her a moment to understand that he meant the eggs and not the glasships. ‘Hundreds, I think. A good few hatched at sea. I don’t know what became of them.’
‘The Taiytakei have them. I beg to ask, Holiness, how could they have taken our speaker?’
Zafir smiled and put a hand on his, wondering what news he’d had of the dragon realms since he’d been taken. None? But she couldn’t be sure. ‘A long tale for another time, Grand Master. They took me when I tried to stop them stealing these eggs.’ A tiny little truth. He could have that much. ‘How many of these flying things do they have?’
‘I don’t know, Holiness. Many, but I’m rarely permitted to leave my eyrie.’
‘You have an eyrie?’
He nodded. ‘The Taiytakei have made one.’
She turned from the window and looked at him. There was something in his words that caught in his throat. Shame, was it? And she saw it in his face too. ‘You helped them.’ She couldn’t keep the hardness out of her voice. He nodded. ‘Are you not a slave then, alchemist?’
‘I am, Holiness.’
‘Yet you helped them? After what they’ve done?’
Bellepheros bowed his head. ‘My duty is to keep the dragons in check, Holiness. Always and only that. I tried to dissuade the sea lord who took me. I failed.’ He looked up again, now with a note of defiance. ‘And it was right that I did. If I hadn’t helped them to be ready when these dragons came …’ He shook his head. ‘I have done my duty, Holiness, as I always have.’
‘They could all burn, Master Alchemist, and I wouldn’t shed a tear.’ She leaned close, ready to whisper in his ear, Let their dragons awake. Let them reap what they have sown. Let them burn, all of them. But he was an alchemist. ‘When we are alone, let me tell you what they have done to our home. See if you might reconsider where your duty truly lies.’
Abruptly Bellepheros turned around. He began pointing to the other men in the cabin. ‘These two, as you may have already imagined, are our master’s soldiers. Our master in practical ways is Baros Tsen T’Varr. Through these men he will hear every word we say. They are his ears. This one –’ he pointed to the man in the middle, the one in drab black beside the rainbow colours of the soldiers ‘– this one is our sea lord’s very own Elemental Man. Our master is the only sea lord to own such a magician outright. Do you know, your Holiness, what an Elemental Man is?’
Zafir pursed her lips. Thank you, alchemist, for demanding that I show my ignorance. ‘I have heard many stories, Master Alchemist. It would take a shrewd mind to discern the fact from the fiction.’
‘Indeed it would, but our stories are largely true. They are killers of monsters, men who can become the wind, the water, fire or earth. I’ve come to know this one very well. I am sure you’ll come to know him too.’
Ah. A spy then.
Bellepheros turned back to the window. The fleet was receding now, the city coming closer. ‘Khalishtor, Holiness. The City of Gold and Glass. Imagine it as our City of Dragons. It is the centre of their realms yet a place where no one lord holds sway. The enchanters abide here, those who make such wonders as this glasship and other creations that will briefly amuse your eye. The navigators too, the ones who guide the sea lords’ ships across the Endless Ocean and the Sea of Storms. At the Palace of Glass the sea lords hold their court.’ Bellepheros glanced at the other men behind them. ‘Our master intends to present us and one of his dragons. He wishes to show us off.’ Zafir watched the old alchemist as he talked. He’d shown her already where his loyalties lay. Unleashing the dragons the Taiytakei had brought with them, letting them grow wild and untamed, letting them loose to do what dragons would do, in that he’d fight her tooth and claw; so for now she put the thought aside and stared out at the city as they drifted closer. It sprawled between two headlands. More ships cluttered the bay between them, closer to the land than Quai’Shu’s fleet had come. Towers of glass or diamond rose in a circle from the far headland, glittering golden in the late afternoon sun. Between the headlands the buildings were packed in close and tight. A handful of the floating glass discs hovered in the air near the sea. Everything sparkled.
‘That is where the Elemental Men are made.’ Bellepheros pointed to the single mountain that rose behind the shore among gently sloping hills, its peak decked in a cloak of cloud, and then to the glass spires on the far headland. ‘And there are the enchan
ters.’ His voice dropped. ‘There is little love between them.’ A touch to the way he said it told her this was a thing for her to remember.
Smoke rose from a far point in the city near the sea. As Zafir watched, one of the hovering discs drifted towards it. Behind the press of buildings along the shore, strips of green and stands of trees sat among wide squat buildings. The glittering was golden glass, more of it in the more open parts of the city. A spire here, a tower there. Occasional black obelisks rose among them, several beneath flying glass discs. Tethers?
‘Watch that one, Holiness.’ Bellepheros pointed to the glasship close to the pall of smoke. Zafir did as he said. As the glasship reached the smoke, the air beneath it turned into a haze and then mist. ‘Water,’ said the alchemist with admiration. ‘From the sea. They simply fill a gondola like this with it and then drop it from the sky! Their cities no longer suffer the peril of fire!’
‘Slave!’
She didn’t look up. At first she didn’t realise the Elemental Man was speaking to her until Bellepheros gently nudged her. After that, ignoring the assassin was deliberate.
‘Slave!’ he barked again.
Bellepheros turned round, knelt and bowed his head. ‘Master Watcher?’ Zafir stayed exactly where she was, staring out of the window. They’d either kill her for disobedience or they’d tolerate it, and if they were going to kill her then they might as well get on with it. Better sooner than later.
When the Elemental Man spoke again, the edge had gone from his voice. ‘Alchemist, if you have not seen the Crown of the Sea Lords, the view now approaches its best from the windows on this side.’