The dragon came back. By the end of the day they'd found four more slaves with the first signs of the disease. This time Tsen had them thrown quietly over the side in the middle of the night. Liang wasn't sleeping anyway any more so she came up to watch. She listened to the screams as they went over the edge one after the other. Afterwards she went to Belli to wake him up because she'd realised she knew the answer. When she reached his room though he was already up, pacing back and forth.
‘It was her, wasn't it? She's got the disease too, hasn't she? Just like you have it. She's how those two soldiers got it. Not some Scales.’
Belli shrugged and nodded and didn't know for sure, but yes, he certainly thought so, and he told her what the kwen's men had done and how Zafir had taken away all his cures and how he'd quietly been making more.
Over the next few days the alchemist tirelessly inspected slave after slave while Liang looked for the first inevitable victims among the Taiytakei. Slave or Taiytakei, the alchemist gave them potions and promised them long and happy lives if only they would drink it daily. Tsen was more ruthless. He waited a few days until the epidemic seemed to have stopped, and then the Taiytakei who had it all vanished one night. Liang never knew what he'd done to them. Thrown them off the edge, she supposed. At least they weren't fed to the dragon. She asked about the two soldiers but found they'd gone over the side too, a few days back with their throats cut open. Liang had wondered, until she heard that, whether the story Bellepheros had told her was the truth or whether the rider-slave had made it up, but when she cornered Chrias Kwen himself and he spat at her and demanded to know how she dared to ask such questions, she saw shame under the mask of outrage, or was it even fear? And so the slave Zafir hadn't been lying; and though it was another reason to be rid of her, it was hard to despise her quite so much after that. After that, Liang wasn't sure what she was supposed to feel about anything any more.
At last a cluster of glasships drifted in across the endless blue sky. The desert was starting to change now, growing a little more life to it. In the distance Liang could see a ragged line of hills. She had no idea where she was. Somewhere to the north and to the west, she supposed. Not far from the Godspike, though too distant to see it even from the height of the eyrie. She wondered idly whether the dragon and its rider had ventured that far, whether they'd found it and stopped and stared in wonder at something that would make even them seem small.
Chrias Kwen and most of the other Taiytakei with colourful robes and ornate feathered cloaks and long braided hair left the next day, carried away with the glasships. The eyrie stopped, hovering above the naked stone of the earth. Belli stood beside her as the glasships floated away. He rubbed his chin where one of the Taiytakei soldiers had hit him.
‘They shouldn't have been allowed to go.’ Saying that once too often to Tsen was what had earned him his bruise.
‘A t'varr does not command a kwen,’ Liang said, and they stood in silence a while until the glasships were specks in the distance. She looked at Belli when she thought he wasn't looking back. Watched his face as it gradually changed from strain and fatigue to something else. As that little frown she'd come to love crept over his eyes, the one that said he was thinking. They were slowly breaking him. She'd seen that in the last few weeks. The dragons and then the rider and then everything Tsen wanted, all of that had been more than enough; and now the disease. They were grinding their only alchemist away, piece by piece, and yet he still had a spark in him. She smiled and would have hugged him if hugging a slave hadn't been wholly disgraceful, and then she thought of the moment when the Regrettable Man had ripped open his throat and she'd been sure for a few seconds that he was dead. How that had felt. It seemed so long ago now. ‘Come to me, Belli. When you need help.’ She took his hand and squeezed. No one would see that. ‘There's only so much either of us can do, but we will do it.’
He turned to her, and there was that spark still bright in his eyes and the frown, deep enough to have made its way into a question at last. ‘Your glasships in Khalishtor drew power from black stone towers,’ he said. ‘You said they need to after every journey. How do they draw their power here?’
‘From the eyrie. They draw it from the stone on which we stand.’
‘And from where does the eyrie draw its power? What keeps it up?’
Liang shrugged. ‘We have no idea. Not the least shred of one.’
‘So this might simply fall out of the sky at any moment?’ He laughed. ‘That might be a blessing.’
Liang laughed with him. ‘It hasn't fallen for the last hundred years so why would it fall now? A glasship will fly for a few days before it fails. Baros Tsen's eyrie is something else. Something older and greater than us.’
They stood together. Dragons could fly without rest for. . Bellepheros said he didn't know and Zafir had said the same. Longer than any rider could last, certainly. They might get hungry and they might get angry and they would grow hotter and hotter from the effort until they caught alight and burned from the inside, but they never actually tired.
‘The Silver Kings,’ Belli said quietly, as much to himself as to her. ‘We have their relics too, here and there.’ He straightened himself. ‘Is it coming, then? This war you said would never be allowed to happen? That's where they're going, isn't it? And the dragon will fly to fight beside them.’
Liang didn't answer that. She didn't need to. It was hard keeping secrets in a place like the eyrie where everyone lived on top of everyone else and all of them in the shadow of Zafir and the terrible dragon to whom slave and master alike were nothing but food. ‘Something is coming,’ she said eventually. ‘I don't know what. I still can't believe Tsen would allow it.’
Belli shook his head. ‘Ach! We had our speakers and you see how they become.’
He left her then to make the last preparations for the dragon to fly. To listen to Zafir chide and mock and berate him. To suffer it in silence and bow and call her Holiness, as he always did.
‘You could be rid of her,’ said Liang softly in his ear as the last day came close. ‘She takes your potions every day. I've seen her. So does the dragon. You could be rid of both of them. It would be so easy.’ Bringing the dragon and its rider into their world had been a mistake. She saw it now. It was clear as glass if you stepped back and looked, and Belli had been telling them exactly the same from the very first day. But Quai'Shu was mad, Jima Hsian hadn't come to the eyrie for weeks, the kwen was a kwen and even Tsen, who was a better man, even he wouldn't believe the danger until the damage was irrevocably done.
Belli looked at her and smiled a sad old smile and there just might have been tears in his eyes. ‘I am a preserver of life, Li, not a taker. When a man puts aside what's good in him to serve a cause, often it seems to me that he later forgets where he put it.’
‘Then I will do it. Show me how.’
Belli shook his head. ‘You're an enchantress, Li. You don't need me to show you anything. Kill this war, Li, but with words, not blood. Otherwise that's how we become as they are; and you're so much better than that.’
She could have kissed him.
64
‘Oh, for the love of the Flame!’ Tuuran grabbed hold of Crazy Mad and shook him, almost slapping him, banging his head against the hard sailcloth of his hammock. ‘How's a man supposed to get some sleep? Pity me, slave, Berren, Crowntaker, whoever you are! Mercy! I beg you!’