Flame but his face hurt! Cursed Fire Witch or whatever she was. And he still kept wanting to touch it and still kept having to stop himself. Burns. You had to keep them clean — every Adamantine Man knew that — and so you didn't touch them, didn't wrap them, just let the air do its work and maybe a little cold clear water for relief now and then. Damn but he'd have killed to get his hands on a decent alchemist now, or at least a bit of Dreamleaf.
It slowly dawned on them all that they were free. They broke into the hold and hauled out the Taiytakei food and the little barrels of wine and spirits and drank themselves stupid. Tuuran drank until he couldn't stand up any more. It took the edge off the pain. He passed out as the sun set, same as half the rest of them. He thought maybe he saw Crazy Mad's eyes burn silver again right as the sun turned the sea into a lake of orange fire, but afterwards he couldn't be sure and he'd been drunk enough to see faeries and dragons dancing on the moon too. In the morning, face still burning, head pounding, guts churning, he tried cleaning up the messes that the Fire Witch had left behind. Not that he particularly minded them, but it was something to do. Didn't get far though. The Taiytakei slavers — what was left of them — were little more than ash and charcoal burned into the galley's wooden hull. He tried to scrape them off but they were welded in as though wood and flesh had melted and then set again, merged together.
He went off to puke into the sea in case that would make him feel any better. It didn't, but then Crazy Mad showed up with a pot of something he'd looted from the galley captain's trunk, and when he smeared it on the side of Tuuran's face where his ear used to be his skin went numb and the pain just wafted away. Crazy had found some Xizic too, and after a while chewing on that, the world was suddenly a whole lot better and Tuuran took to doing what he did best: strutting the deck and yelling at people, and it never once struck him as strange how easy it was to send the oar-slaves back to their oars and the sail-slaves back to their sails. How easily he became their captain and Crazy Mad his mate.
‘Aria,’ he muttered to Crazy once the galley was moving again. ‘You reckon that was that Ice Witch the night-skins keep whispering about?’
Crazy Mad looked all deep for a moment and smiled one of those smiles of his, the one where it looked like he knew all the dirty little secrets of the gods and was wondering what to do with them. ‘No. Not her.’ Then the smile hit his eyes and the chill was gone as he laughed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, not exactly ice, was it?’
Tuuran scuffed at some charred remains on the deck beside him. ‘Seen dragons do that to a man once. Just burned and burned him until there was nothing left but a handful of charcoal.’ He stood up and looked out at the sea and the sky and the land. ‘I don't know where we are, Crazy. Not the first idea. Even if I did, I wouldn't have a clue how that would help me work out which way to go.’
‘I want to go to Tethis. I want the man who took my life.’
Tuuran shook his head and wrinkled his nose. ‘It's the Judge in there today, is it? Well, Judge, I never heard of Tethis save what you've told me and most of that I don't believe. But even if I did, there's no going back home for either of us, not yet. A galley can't cross the ocean and none of us can navigate the storm-dark and your Tethis lies on the edges of the Dominion, does it not? We're in the wrong world for either of us. Shall we say Deephaven? To be blunt, in this world I don't even know the name of anywhere else.’
Crazy Mad spat. ‘Deephaven then.’
‘At least I know it exists beyond your say-so, eh?’ He grinned. ‘And it sounds a good enough place for a shipload of sailors to make their home. I've heard there are Taiytakei anchored there often enough too. Traders, not slavers. Maybe you could persuade them with that sharp-edged charm of yours to take you home. Maybe I could too!’ He laughed.
Crazy Mad shrugged and turned away. ‘Bad memories. Bad things happened in Deephaven. Someone died. But that was a long time ago. There's others who might know it better by now.’ Crazy didn't like Deephaven today by the look of things. And on his bad days Crazy Mad could be, well, crazy. And mad.
Tuuran gestured vaguely at the sea. ‘Look, I don't care where we go. You know another place? Choose it.’
‘No, you're right — there always used to be Taiytakei ships in Deephaven. I remember them. Sharp-edged charm or not, they can take us both home. If we can think of something they want bad enough to do it.’
Tuuran snorted. ‘Or they can make us slaves again.’ But Crazy Mad didn't say anything more and Tuuran still had the glass shard given to him by the Watcher, the one that would make the Taiytakei give him aid, and so maybe they could get home, one way or another. He jabbed a finger at the coast. ‘Pick a direction. Left or right?’
Turned out neither of them had any idea where Deephaven was, and so they sailed with the wind because at least they'd cover more ground that way, and it was only later that day that Tuuran heard the oar-slaves talking among themselves about the Fire Witch who'd freed them and stopped to listen, and of course as soon as he did, the oar-slaves all stopped talking and made a point of some vigorous rowing and he had to remind them that they weren't wearing chains any more, that they weren't slaves and that he wasn't some Taiytakei with a whip; and when he'd done yelling that at them, he set them to rowing again. Much later, as the galley drifted through the night and they sat around their braziers on the deck, doing what they'd always done and telling each other stories, he found those oarsmen again and told them to tell everyone else what they'd heard.
‘Everyone knows the Fire Witch. She came to Deephaven after the day the knives fell from the sky. That was the day the silver sorcerers came and raised the dead to walk and lifted an army from the earth. The Ice Queen drove them all away. And then the Fire Witch came.’ Which was about the most ridiculous story Tuuran had ever heard until he thought about the tales he might tell of dragons and a stolen alchemist and an ancient flying castle drifting over a desert.
‘They say the Fire Witch burned the risen dead and put them to rest.’ Several of the oar-slaves made a little sign, a strange gesture of reverence and protection and fear mixed together. They'd been on the galley when she'd freed them. ‘She cleansed the city and let the living come back. It's hers now. She rules it for the Ice Queen.’ Again they made the same gesture. ‘The risen dead are everywhere. They covered the streets to keep the sun at bay. Half the city is theirs.’ The slaves from Aria made another sign, the sign of the sun this time, a ward against evil.
Tuuran scratched his chin, not much liking the sound of any story with so many witches in it. ‘Maybe we shouldn't go that way after all.’ Not that he thought much of stories in which wizards who could really only be the Silver Kings themselves suddenly showed up and raised armies of the dead, seeing as how the Silver Kings had been gone for a thousand years and probably then some. But none of them knew anything better and he couldn't quite shake that memory of Crazy Mad and the way his eyes had flared after the grey dead men had come with their golden knife. And the Ice Witch was real enough, or so the Taiytakei had said before they'd burned. He looked around at the faces lit up by the glowing coals of the braziers, all equal men for the first time since they'd been ripped from their homes. Home. That was what they all wanted, but home was scattered across four worlds and a dozen different kingdoms and Deephaven was the only place where they might find ships to take them across the storm-dark.
They argued some more. No one much cared for a city of the dead ruled over by a witch who could burn men to ash with a blink, that much was obvious. Even Crazy Mad didn't like it. Deephaven might have been where he'd been born on the days he called himself Berren but he'd severed his ties with that past long ago. In his moments alone Tuuran quietly reckoned that Crazy had severed his ties with rather too many things. But in the end, since none of them knew which way it was to Deephaven anyway, they stuck with the wind and kept the coast on their port side and hoped for the best. The other slaves prayed, but not Tuuran and Crazy Mad. Tuuran's only god was the fire that burned everything at the end of the world and Crazy didn't have any gods at all any more.