And then burst out laughing. She took his cup and threw it away. ‘Alchemist! I am not some squealing virgin back from her first dragon. This hunger?’ She clasped a hand to her breast. ‘Do you think I don't know it for what it is?’ She leaned over him, her face close to his, and he sank back into his chair. ‘I am a dragon-queen, alchemist, and I am mistress of both of us, and this. . thing that you think you see? I am still its mistress even if I revel in riding it.’ She bared her teeth. ‘It is strong, though.’
Like a dragon. Bellepheros swallowed hard. ‘The Taiytakei will listen to you,’ he said, ‘for a time. You have their minds. They have seen the possibilities and they will want to know more. Everything. Give them what it pleases you to give, Holiness. Tease them.’ He could feel the heat of her as she stared down at him, burning through her shifting silks. ‘Tsen had the Vespinarr man beside him to watch you but there were others. Many others. I couldn't see them where they stood so I cannot speak for the faces they wore, but for any who saw you fly today, their world has changed.’
‘Shrin Chrias Kwen? Did he see?’ Her face lit up. He watched her hunger turn murderous. Prey.
‘I do not know, Holiness.’
‘No matter. I can't imagine he missed it.’ She licked her lips and ran a finger along the skin of her neck, over the scar from the hatchling on Quai'Shu’s ship. Then held out the dragon helm Li had made. ‘A fine gift, Master Alchemist. You must tell me one day how I may reward you. Make the rest as you made this and I will be pleased.’
He bowed. ‘Holiness.’
Zafir tossed her head, turned for the door and then paused. ‘Bellepheros, the potions you make for your Scales, the ones to keep the Hatchling Disease at bay, have you told your mistress Chay-Liang the secrets of their preparation?’
‘Some but not all. I have been careful, Holiness. Besides, only those with the Silver King in their blood can make such potions.’ He bit his lip.
‘Keep that secret safe, Master Alchemist. Keep it very safe.’ Half a smile twitched at the corner of her mouth. Perhaps he imagined it but there seemed a terrible purpose to her eyes. He bowed as she walked away.
‘Holiness. .’
She didn't turn back. ‘Bellepheros?’
Did you do it? Were you the one? Did you throw your mother from her dragon's back? What did I see back there in Furymouth between you and Jehal? How did you come to be speaker when it should have been Shezira? What happened in the realms after I was gone? Subtle clues for the subtle mind here and there. And the not so subtle, for here was a dragon-queen, the speaker of the nine realms no less, taken as a slave; but the dragons had taken all his time and all his thoughts until now. What did you do, Speaker of the Nine Realms? What did you do?
The words froze in his mouth, unsaid. They were here now and surrounded by enemies and so perhaps it shouldn't matter any more. He bowed his head. ‘I serve you, Holiness. You above all.’
Zafir laughed, a little singing sound. ‘Well that's as you should, Master Alchemist, and very good to hear.’ And she was gone, and all he could do was wonder, Am I doing the right thing? I whose duty is to enslave monsters?
54
The dragon was doing it. The Watcher blinked deep in the night under the desert stars, closer and closer to the monster's side to be sure, but it was the dragon, its very presence. The closer he came, the harder it was, and that was the simple truth of it. In the dragon realms a windwalker had been killed by a man with a crossbow not long before Quai'Shu stole the dragons. Beneath his scorn the Watcher had been shaken by that. A man who could become the wind should never fall to a mere crossbow. The Picker used to swear the hardness of shifting his form in the dragon-realm came from the dragons themselves; now the Watcher knew he was right.
He flew with the air to Khalishtor, where Nimpo Jima Hsian was supposed to be taking their sea lord's place at the Great Sea Council, as a hsian often did, but of course he wasn't there and had passed on the duty to his own t'varr. Another thing a hsian often did.
From one place to the next, then, one man and then another, holding the bladeless knife at their throats and asking where Quai'Shu’s hsian might be found. A tedium made bearable by the relief of shifting effortlessly from place to place within the City of Gold and Glass. It didn't take long to find the answer. The hsian was in Dhar Thosis. The Watcher tried to see the reason behind such a defection, for there could be little doubt that was what it was. The lord of Vespinarr had already known and told the Hands of the Sea Lord where to look, in his own subtle way.
Before he left for the long crossing of the desert, he stood at the edge of the sea and faced the city where no one ruled, shadowed by the mountain of the Septtych of the Elemental Masters. He bowed to both and stepped back over the edge of the harbour wall and fell in among the waves, and as he touched them he became the water. Currents. Temperatures. All too subtle for a man to see but the Watcher felt them. They were his guide, his map and compass. They took him a little way up the coast to the old Tomb of Ten Tazei where he walked past the shrine and into the cave and passed effortlessly through the wall of stones that barred its end and on to Ten Tazei's path to Xibaiya and the land of the dead. Secrets lay here. Old ones best forgotten, and the Elemental Men were their guardians.
‘These dragons make me weak.’
The sand and the stone took his words and ate them with silence. The Watcher closed his eyes and tasted the air, filled with salt and the sea. The distant hiss of waves on the sand kissed his ear. The cave was still. Time could stop in a place like this. He'd come here sometimes with the Picker. Now he came here alone, but it was still their place to speak together. He felt the Picker's memories most closely here.
The men here have their navigators and their enchanters. In Aria they have sorcerers of the old ways once more. Pale nothings beside the silver half-gods of the moon but they are learning at last. The priests of the Dominion call power from the old gods themselves. But in the realms of the dragons? Nothing. Alchemy. A dance with potions and a dabble with blood. There's nothing there for the likes of us to hunt.
Blood. The alchemist got his power from his own blood. The last refuge for a sorcerer's power. The most potent place.
Why? Why did the dragon realms alone have no true sorcerers? The answer had been staring at him. There were no sorcerers in the dragon realms because the dragons had devoured the nameless boundless flow of life from which all mages drew, even the Elemental Men.
‘How?’
No answer.
‘Can they not be destroyed?’
The cave and the endless tunnel downward mocked him with their stillness.
55
Zafir walked back out across the dragon yard, smiling at Diamond Eye and at the sun, Myst and Onyx trailing in her wake. She felt drunk. Tipsy with joy. Her skin tingled, hot in the desert heat. Her head still buzzed from the sheer ecstasy of the dragon. Maybe once, maybe the first time she'd ridden on a monster's back with her mother in front of her to guide the beast, maybe then she'd felt this before. Or the first time she'd taken old Azure into the sky alone with no one to sit beside her and watch over her and tell her what to do, just weeks before Hyram had taken the throne she stole from him ten years later. The sheer unadulterated freedom. Azure, slow and small and old. He'd burned to ash from the inside not many years later but she remembered him as well as she remembered any of them. Pale blue scales that flashed in the sun, and if he was old and slow then he hadn't seemed that way when she'd ridden him up above the three mountaintops of the Pinnacles, higher and higher until everything below was specks and streaks and had lost its colour, where the air was so thin she could barely breathe; and then they'd dived, three miles straight down, and her head had roared and swum and she'd known that nothing, nothing in the world, could possibly be like this, and for all the horror that awaited her, whatever they did to her when she came back to earth, none of that would matter any more, and the pain and rage and the fear of even being alive, they all became small things, a suffering that no longer had substance. They'd flown for hours, far longer than they were supposed to, and she'd been punished for that, but it had been worth it. She sometimes thought it was the greatest lesson her mother and her many lovers had taught her. They'd surely never meant to, they'd certainly very quickly regretted it, but she'd never, ever, forgotten. That sometimes there came a point where punishment didn't matter any more.