Tuuran let out a ferocious fart. Here we go again. Crazy Mad with his stories. All these things he can't possibly have done. ‘They raised me to fight dragons. Fight and die. Simpler really. Dragon comes, dragon burns. None of the rest of all that stuff you were on about. Get eaten, that's all an Adamantine Man needs to do. And what about this Skyrie of yours? What's his story? How did he get to be a slave to the sword?’
Crazy Mad hardly seemed to hear. ‘Skyrie? He's mostly gone now.’ He was lost. Off again. ‘I had a son once. By a bondswoman, which was just another fancy way of saying a slave. She belonged to the queen of Tethis. I stole her and I stole my son. It took three years of my life to do it and I gave no thought to anything else. I went to war. I killed men and I stripped the dead. It was the only thing that mattered and not one second of one day went by when I didn't think of her and of the son I had waiting for me. The other soldiers drank and bought women while I counted my silver until I had enough to buy her. And then in the end when I finally took her and she saw what I'd become. . well, she didn't see it right away and there were some good times. The best times. .’ Crazy Mad looked away. Tuuran stared, wine forgotten. The mad bugger looked all but ready to burst into tears. But then Crazy took a deep breath and pulled himself together and emptied his own cup and now he just looked lost again. ‘It didn't last. She saw who I was, saw the blood on my hands and wanted nothing to do with me any more. So I let her go and I never saw her again, nor my son, because I knew she was right, and nothing good could come to anyone who lived their life around me. I gave her everything I had and I sent her away and I went back to war but I kept my eyes and ears open. Was going to look after them the best I could. See they didn't want for much. Send them money, that sort of thing. And I did too, for bit. And then the pox came and that was that. Gone. My boy. The one I swore wouldn't grow up like me. I want my life back,’ hissed Crazy Mad. ‘The one they took from me in Tethis. The first one they took from me when I did what they wanted and they threw me in the pit for it. Never mind the rest.’
‘You can never go back, Crazy.’ Tuuran belched. ‘Besides, doesn't sound like it'd be much use to you now.’
‘The warlocks who came to our galley. You remember them?’
The last pennies were gone now, the last cup of wine in front of Tuuran and they were flat broke with nothing to their names except what they carried on their backs and at their hips. And Crazy Mad was so full of shit. Too young to have done all the things he claimed — as long as Tuuran didn't look at that memory he had, carefully locked away, of Crazy Mad with his eyes like burning liquid silver. Maybe not too young to have fathered a child. He'd looked forlorn enough about that. Maybe that bit was true. Maybe. And maybe he just didn't care, because what did it matter? Tethis? He had no idea where that even was except that it was near the Dominion and across the storm-dark and so might as well have been on the moon. He started eyeing the loose pennies on the tables around them. He wanted more wine. ‘Yes, yes. How could I forget throwing you into the sea? One of my fondest memories. Is this going to take long?’
‘Where are they?’
‘Bugger me if I have the first-’
In a flash Crazy Mad was across the table, a fist clenched around Tuuran's collar. ‘Tell me! Tell me what you know about them!’
Tuuran looked at the hand at his neck. With delicate care he wrapped his fingers around Crazy's wrist and squeezed, harder and harder, until he let go. ‘I could crush your bones, sword-slave.’ Then he laughed. The men on the next table were looking carefully away, very pointedly not seeing anything. While they weren't looking, Tuuran reached out and helped himself to some of the money on their table. Not all of it, just a couple of pennies for another cup. He waved for a refill. ‘They weren't Taiytakei, even you could see that much. And that really is about as much as I know. They didn't stay for long. They were looking for you; they were sure you were there and they were mighty upset when they didn't find you. When they left I don't know what they were thinking but they were certainly wondering who it was I threw into the sea. They peered into the water a lot until everyone decided you'd drowned; or maybe they thought you couldn't have been who they were looking for.’ Tuuran rubbed his nose. ‘Mind, something was off with them. I'd keep my guard about me if I were you, if you see them again.’
Crazy Mad bared his teeth and hissed, ‘If I see them again, I'll rip them to bloody shreds! You told me, after you came back from your flying castle over the desert, that you'd found out who all the Taiytakei lords were and what their cities were called and the flags and insignia and all that.’
‘That's true. Although fat lot of use it is to a slave.’
‘You saw the ship that brought the warlocks and took them away again, Tuuran. Where did it come from?’
Tuuran picked up his pennies and stood up, swaying slightly. ‘I like you, Berren Skyrie Bloody Judge Crowntaker Crazy Mad, whoever you are. But I was a slave and no one tells slaves where things are to be found. You want your grey dead men, you'll have to ask one of them.’ He waved and bellowed something across the tavern floor and sat down again. ‘The night-skins. Our masters. Black on the outside but they bleed like the rest of us. Go ask one of them. You know where to find some? Deephaven, I'd say.’ He smiled and sighed as a tavern boy filled up his cup. ‘The flags said the ship came from one of their cities. Dhar Thosis. For what it's worth, I happen to know that. But don't ask me where it is because I haven't the first idea.’
59
An emerald glasship hung beside Baros Tsen's eyrie, carefully out of the way of the long snouts of the black-powder cannons. There wasn't much it could do about the dragon though. Tsen supposed Vey Rin simply trusted him, which was comforting in a way: at the very least it proved that Rin couldn't read his thoughts.
They stood side by side on the battlements watching the dragon fly. The rider took it into the air every day now. It was a little miracle, he thought, that she hadn't turned on the eyrie and destroyed them all. She was a terrible slave, utterly the worst sort, wild and with a dark vein of self-destruction inside that fed her and made her impossible to control or even to contain. Slaves like that were almost always put down, yet so far Tsen hadn't done that and she hadn't burned them all either. Perhaps he had that same vein hidden in him somewhere. Maybe that was why he didn't just go back to his orchards and make wine and build bathhouses for people like Rin. It seemed that he and this unruly slave somehow got along, in their strange way.
Tsen glanced at Rin and for a moment struggled to remember what exactly it was that had brought them together all those years ago in Cashax. Half his memories of those days were lost in a haze of wine and Xizic and Devilsmoke dens. Tsen had been the leader of the pack back then. Maybe a dozen of them at times — rich, young, soulless and cynical, Taiytakei destined for power and greatness, all of them. He struggled to even remember most of the names now. They'd done whatever they could to make each day wilder than the last. Things that were best forgotten sometimes but Tsen remembered them clearly. For a while he'd been the worst of them all. And then things had happened and people had died, badly, and the others had drifted away and suddenly he and Rin were the only ones left, and Rin had dragged him out into the desert to go hunting desert men with a slaving gang who'd been only too happy to have a couple of rich boys with their sleds slumming it out in the sands. His heart hadn't been in it any more by then. In fact most of the time out among the dunes he wasn't sure whether he even had a heart at all.