The ground hurtled back at them. Diamond Eye spread his wings. A monstrous hand crushed Zafir into his back, pressing so hard she thought she must snap into pieces. The world went grey and narrowed to a single spot of brightness and then she must have passed out for a few seconds, for the next thing she knew they were hurtling straight at the eyrie, sideways on, faster than she'd ever flown before, and the perfect helm was such a weight that she thought her neck might snap rather then keep her head pressed down into Diamond Eye's scales.
Straight at the eyrie wall. At the last second Diamond Eye dropped his nose and rolled. He shot beneath it. Purple light filled the air and a bright flash of violet. Zafir had a moment to see the lightning and then Diamond Eye twisted and stretched out his wings and flipped onto his back between the castle and the sand. He shot upside down between them with the sand howling past a few spans beneath Zafir's head and a part of her wanted to scream at the pain as her muscles wrenched her down against the wind, to cry out in alarm, for a dragon had never flown on its back for her before and she couldn't remember the last time she'd had so little control; and at the same time she was whooping with joy at the madness, the power, the freedom, the unfettered joy. Out from under the castle Diamond Eye rolled again. ‘Up, up!’ she cried, and so he climbed and they spiralled high once more until he found what she was looking for. A dozen miles away, deep in the sands on the edge of a black tar lake, far out of her own meagre sight. A tented town of nomads, of dark-skinned Taiytakei, of their horses and their Linxia, and the hunger was like a sharp spike through her belly and she wanted to feed, to hunt, to burn! NOW!
‘No!’ She brought Diamond Eye back down, his resentment squirming through her like a knot of angry snakes, and flew him across the sands in front of the eyrie instead. She let loose his fire there, down in the open where the watchers from the eyrie would clearly see. The dragon ravaged the dunes, burned and burned and burned them in an endless stream of fire until the sand became glass and she could smell the smouldering of her furs amid the heat around her. As they passed the eyrie again, Diamond Eye lashed the empty wall with his tail, slashing out a great chunk of the white stone that even the enchantress couldn't mark. See! See what I cando! See what we can do! Find us with your cannon if you can, Baros Tsen!
She let Diamond Eye have his way now and flew to the nomads and their tents. She let the dragon burn them black and eat his fill from the savaged remains and she couldn't have said which one of them it satisfied more. They were Taiytakei, and she was a slave.
And when they were both done, when they'd gorged themselves and were finally sated and bloated with the exhilaration, when Diamond Eye came to rest and paced the ground, she climbed down and threw away Bellepheros's stupid furs and his stupid mittens and felt the sand under her feet, the first true earth since she'd flown to war above her beloved Silver City. She felt the wind on her skin and the eyrie was small and distant, a dozen miles away across the sand.
Free.
Behind her the air popped. She wondered, briefly, if the Elemental Man had come to kill her for what they'd done, and found that she simply didn't care. She'd laugh in his face as she died, and then Diamond Eye would eat him.
‘It would be best for you to return,’ he said. ‘They are becoming anxious.’
Zafir laughed. When she climbed up into the harness, the Elemental Man came up and sat behind her. Diamond Eye launched himself into the air once more, fat and slow and languorous this time. ‘Are you impressed?’ she called as they rose into the sky, but he didn't answer and when she looked round the Elemental Man was gone again.
A little frisky she would answer later, when Bellepheros asked how Diamond Eye had flown. The glorious truth was something that would for ever be hers alone. No dragon had ever flown like that for her before. Nor for anyone.
53
Bellepheros watched the dragon fly away, squinting into the brightness of the desert sky and the glare of the sands. He watched the faces of the soldiers and of Baros Tsen and of the Taiytakei from the silver gondola, the kwen from this other place of Vespinarr. If he believed Li, the whole day was staged for this man. The Taiytakei kept their awe well hidden, but now and then a twitch gave each of them away. A touch of amazement at the speed of the dragon's ascent — even Bellepheros was surprised by that. A twinge of fear as it flew so high that it vanished from sight and they stood with their heads tipped back, faces screwed up against the sun and vast blue sky — always the chance that Tsen had somehow misjudged, that Zafir would choose to flee, that the dragon would escape even from an Elemental Man. Staring up alongside them, hands doing their best to shield his eyes from the sun, a part of Bellepheros hoped that Zafir did exactly that. Another part of him hoped she didn't, but with Zafir he simply couldn't be sure. Quietly, in the inner thoughts he never shared with anyone, it beggared belief that anyone had thought she'd make a good speaker.
For a minute or two he really thought she'd gone, rocketed off across the desert never to return, but then she came back and boiled the sand into glowing glass, and not even the Taiytakei could hide their shock at that; and when the dragon lashed the wall with its tail and sliced a chunk away and the whole castle shook beneath their feet and pieces of stone as big as a man's head fizzed right across the dragon yard and soldiers and slaves and Scales ran screaming, the Taiytakei watching from the wall cried out too, a sharp dagger of fear through them all, their masks for a moment broken. In their part of the yard the hatchlings shrieked and flapped their wings and strained at their chains at the frightened Scales around them.
Bellepheros hurried off the wall to restore some calm. She should have come back right then, he thought. Swerved in the air and crashed into the wall right in front of them before they assembled their faces again. She could have seen them as they truly were; but instead Zafir flew Diamond Eye away and for a long time there was nothing save a pall of smoke on the horizon. Even after he'd settled his Scales and the hatchlings, she still hadn't returned, and by then the Taiytakei had begun to lose interest.
Later he watched as the Elemental Man came and went. The killer had something wrong with him and it was never more obvious than today. By then most of the Taiytakei had gone and weren't there to notice, but the Watcher was almost dead on his feet. He was struggling to shift, exhausted every time he did it, gasping for breath and wet with sweat. Even under the desert sun Bellepheros had never once seen the Elemental Man sweat until the dragons had come.
When Zafir returned, the Taiytakei came back up to the walls to watch the dragon land. The dragon came slowly, with long leisurely beats of its wings. It pitched up and landed gently, towering over the white stone wall, the sun behind it so that when it reared up and stretched its wings it cast the whole of the yard into shadow. The air filled with a sweeping satisfaction. It oozed from the dragon like honey, a cloud of feeling spreading out across the eyrie to touch them all. Bellepheros had been around dragons for long enough to know it for what it was and brush it aside but its force unsettled him. Diamond Eye had an energy, a hunger, a need. Dragons always did, all of them, even back in the dragon realms, but not like this. Here all those things were somehow magnified. It wasn't only Diamond Eye either — the hatchlings were the same. He had no idea why this world should be different but it was, and it left him with a deep and lingering unease that he could never quite shake. Dragons took the thoughts and emotions of their riders and mingled them with their own, even Zafir knew that, but they sensed other things too. Was it the eyrie? They could feel things that were beyond the senses of any rider or alchemist. Old things. Deep things. For all the discipline of the Order of the Scales, their potions, their lore, there was so much they didn't know. So much lost when the Silver King was struck down.