He shook his head. The kings and queens he remembered had been the same as these sea lords. Mad, all of them, and if Baros Tsen were forced to choose between Zafir and Li, Bellepheros was quite sure the t'varr would choose his slave and let his enchantress go. Zafir, who rode dragons. He could always buy another Liang.
‘You can come in now,’ she called.
And by the oaths I once took I should choose the same, but I'm not so sure that I would. The greater good of the realms seemed as insubstantial as a vapour now. He shook himself and walked into the workshop. ‘They treat you as they treat me,’ he said as his eyes darted around, looking for what was new or different since the last time. ‘Doesn't it trouble you that you build their world yet receive so little of its glory?’
Li looked at him and smiled and shook her head, and maybe there was a trace of something sad in her eyes. ‘Oh, we enchantresses talk sometimes among ourselves of what they'd do without us.’ It was an old conversation, he saw that straight away. ‘Back in the Hingwal Taktse. We all think it at some time or another. We could stop making their glasships and the black needles that give them their power. We could take away the glass and the gold. They'd manage perfectly well without us for a while. The consensus when I was there was three years before enough things broke down to trouble them, five and they'd be on their knees. That's a long time, Belli. Plenty of time to destroy us or enslave us or persuade us. But what's far more likely is that we'd all grow so bored with nothing to do that we'd give in and give them back what they wanted. Just for our own pleasure of building it.’ She smiled. ‘There's no running from an Elemental Man, Belli, and we all take far too much pleasure in what we do to stop. We're like you. When all is said and done we love our creations, and that's enough for us to be happy with what we have.’
‘Like me?’ He couldn't argue with that. ‘Ah, what we could do, you and I, with the knowledge we each have. Imagine if we could take it away and share it all with no secrets between us! Give us a year and we could turn both our worlds on their heads but we'll never get the chance. Baros Tsen T'Varr will keep us apart because he doesn't understand what we might do if we truly worked together; and if ever he did, he'd still keep us apart for fear of it.’ He laughed. He'd had that thought for months too, but until now that was all it had been: a thought.
Li stared deep inside him, eyes a-sparkle and a smile flickering around her lips, and he saw she knew it too. ‘But Belli, why would I want to turn my world on its head? Or yours, for that matter? For the most part I like it. It's comfortable. I get to do what gives me pleasure. What should I change?’
‘Your people's hunger for slaves.’ The words jumped out as though afraid he'd bite them back if they gave him any time to think about them. Probably would have too. The two of them stared at each other, struck silent for a moment. ‘Could you not build a dragon of your own?’ he asked her. ‘One of glass and gold?’
‘I built two. Little ones. Gold with jewelled eyes and little dim minds of their own.’ She led him across her workshop. It was far larger than his own study but so crowded with bits and pieces she was working on that it always felt cramped. He'd come to know it well. Sometimes when she was moulding glass he came in just to watch. Of everything he'd seen, the Taiytakei glass still struck him the most. So clear, like water, and he'd watched her do it a dozen times and he still didn't understand how she made it like that.
Different sand she always said when he asked why her glass was so perfect while everything he remembered from the realms had been dull and warped. Different sand and hotter fire. Did you see what your dragon does to the desert sand? Your glass makers should take their work to your eyries. Then you'd have much better glass. And he'd thought about that afterwards and saw that maybe she was right, and that he'd never have thought of that on his own. Not a chance.
‘Do you like it?’ The armour was strewn across the benches in pieces. Bellepheros tried to imagine how it would look when it was put together, all overlapping plates of silver and gold and enchanted glass. ‘I started with your dragon-scale,’ she said. ‘I put a very thin soft leather underneath it. I don't think you have one quite like it where you're from.’ She tossed him a strip of brown cloth. ‘Here. Feel.’
‘Rabbit skin?’ It was soft enough and light enough but there was no fur. Almost no fur.
‘Ratusk. They're bigger. But it serves the same purpose. The strength lies in the dragon-scale.’ She pouted at him. ‘You never told me how hard it is to work that!’
‘I certainly did!’ They'd been arguing about that ever since she'd started.
‘You told me it was hard; you didn't tell me it was next to impossible! So the dragon-scale holds it together. There's padding on the inside where you said it should be. I would have fitted it to her in person but she is. . hard to borrow.’
‘Hard to borrow?’ Bellepheros snorted. ‘When she's not riding the dragon she sits around all day doing nothing! You mean you don't like her.’
Li's nose twitched. ‘No, I don't, and I won't have her here. She's broken and she's dangerous and she troubles me; and what troubles me more, Belli, is that you don't see it.’
‘Li, do you think I'm so blind? But she's my queen, my speaker. I have a duty to her. I swore an oath.’
‘She is a slave now, Belli.’
‘And so am I.’ And for that he closed his eyes to Zafir's madness. Deliberately, wilfully, and he knew it, and it made him angry, angry with himself for being an old fool. ‘In my world she would have been my mistress. She was a sea lord and more.’
‘I think she seeks to supplant our kwen.’ Li laughed aloud, but Bellepheros didn't.
‘I've been asked to prepare the dragon for war. Does our lord mean to burn somewhere? Because if he does then I think you might ponder long and hard before you reserve all of your disdain for our dragon-queen.’
‘O Belli!’ She frowned and poked him. ‘Yes, they're speaking among themselves of a war with Senxian, even if they don't admit it to the rest of us, but it won't come to that. Senxian is a sea lord and the Elemental Men will not allow it. The consequences would be fatal and far-reaching and Tsen knows it and he's not stupid. And I promise you, Tsen T'Varr is not a man to burn cities either, not really. He's too. . well, content, I suppose. It's all posturing and noise and flapping of wings, nothing more. They'll not fly your dragon to burn anything that matters. Tsen simply wouldn't do that.’ Which wasn't what Bellepheros had been hearing in what little time he had with Zafir these days, nor what his own eyes were seeing around him, but then he and Zafir were merely slaves and sometimes wars truly were phoney ones, fought without swords and blood and dragons but with merely the idea of them. Sometimes.
‘I hope you're right. The dragon is made and bred and ready for such things and her Holiness is quite beyond my influence or control. I don't think Tsen or any of the rest of you quite understand what you'd unleash.’ Li gave him an odd look, as if trying to peer inside his head. A dark anger came over Bellepheros and he snapped at her, ‘Come and learn our ways instead of taking us as slaves and then you'd know!’