Crazy Mad snorted. Tuuran stared up at the mountains. He hadn't seen it before, but one of the three diamond spires was splintered and broken.
‘Some of the soldiers I fought with used to call me dark-skin,’ Crazy Mad muttered. ‘Then I'm surrounded by Taiytakei and suddenly I'm pale-skin. Be nice to be back in a place where it doesn't matter.’
‘Should have stayed in Deephaven then.’ Tuuran bared his teeth and grinned at the sea. ‘Used to have other slaves call me out for my skin, or for my nose, or for the way I talked, or just for where I was from. Didn't bother me much. Adamantine Men learn better. You live a few years in the Guard and then even being an oar-slave is like taking a bit of a rest. But then it came to me that it should bother me.’ He clenched his fists and smiled at them one after the other. ‘So then it stopped. That was easy. There was an oar-master who had it in for me until he vanished one night. I think he fell into the sea while no one was looking. Maybe because someone hit him round the head with a boathook. No one was ever sure though, because the slave who got blamed for it said it wasn't him right up to when they hanged him. Odd, that sail-slave being another one who gave me trouble too.’ He bared his teeth at Crazy Mad. ‘Funny how things work out sometimes, eh?’
‘Hilarious.’
They left the Diamond Isles behind that day, and — thank the Great Flame — Crazy Mad's dreams too; and after a week at sea more ships joined them, three at first and then the next day another six and then another three. When they sighted land there were more, day after day until they were an armada of more than a hundred. There were no slave galleys here either, only sharp-prowed ships that crossed the oceans.
‘Only one thing a fleet like this can mean.’ Tuuran cracked his knuckles. ‘Listen to it. Listen to the sailors at their talk. Listen to the tension. Listen to the whispering of the wind and the hungry knives it brings. We're going to war, my friend. About time too.’
‘They can do whatever they like as long as they take me to Dhar Thosis.’
Tuuran shook his head. ‘You and your pus-filled wound. You are who you are, Crazy Mad. Even if you find your warlock, all he can do is tell you the same.’
65
Zafir rode Diamond Eye high and far. Alone and alive and free to be the woman of her deepest heart, the one beneath the masks and the disguises and the armour and the pretence. Savage and small. In this world Diamond Eye was the most alive creature she'd ever found, even among his own kind. He flew for her as no other dragon ever had, as if they fed off each other's desires.
The glasships dragged Baros Tsen's floating eyrie ever further until there was nothing to see even from the heights at which she flew, nothing to the horizon but endless sand and burning rock; and still they dragged the eyrie further and each day her dragon flew. There was nothing in the desert for either of them. The camels and cattle that had been hoisted into the eyrie and filled the dragon yard were enough for the hatchlings and the men and women of the Taiytakei but for a full-grown dragon? No. So she went as the whim took her, looking for food, hundreds of miles sometimes, and when they found a herd of something that moved and ran they burned it to embers and feasted together, alone save for the Elemental Man lest they forget they were still slaves tethered by chains to T'Varr Tsen. Bellepheros said that the dragons interfered with the Elemental Man's power. Zafir watched carefully and saw he was right, and what a delicious truth it was to watch the assassin suffer and strain.
Each day after she landed the alchemist was waiting for her with his Scales. The air around the eyrie sang with tension. She saw it as clearly as she saw the violet lightning that sprang from the underside of the eyrie whenever she flew low and close beside it.
‘Don't fly Diamond Eye to war for them, Holiness. Tell them no. Defy them, I beg you.’
He'd cornered her today, among the hatchlings where none of the Taiytakei would come close. Perhaps the Elemental Man was secretly listening but he was desperate enough not to care. She smiled at him and let him see in her face that she didn't care either. ‘They are my enemies, Bellepheros, all of them, and I'll have not one drop of pity for any of them. They should be yours too.’ She looked him in the eye until he turned away. ‘I don't care one whit how many Taiytakei burn. The more the better.’ The only pity was that Chrias Kwen had gone. Would he understand what she'd done to him? He'd seen it in two of the men he'd had with him. It must have crossed his mind. It must have started by now, after all this time, the first little signs, but the Statue Plague was a slow and unpredictable killer. She'd hoped, when he'd come back, to see it on him, but no, and now he'd gone again but she could still imagine him somewhere far away, staring at the strange patches of hard rough skin that he couldn't understand, rubbing himself with creams and ointments and wondering why they wouldn't go away. For your arrogance. For killing one of my own slaves simply to show me that you could. A shame not to watch you die, slowly and in pain as your skin turns to stone. To show you that I could.
The alchemist shrugged his shoulders. ‘I try not to think of it, Holiness. Those who fall with a spear in their belly and a sword in their hand might be said to deserve their end. But many will die who do not. I know what you do when you fly him.’
‘He must eat,’ she hissed, ‘and they are all my enemy, every walking man in this world save you.’
‘And the slaves who are not Taiytakei? You see them here and there. Not many on the eyrie, perhaps, but in Khalishtor you saw them. Slaves taken from other lands. Slaves taken from our own, Holiness. Outsiders perhaps, taken by the King of the Crags and carried to Furymouth in his slave cages. What of them?’
‘I will free them and they'll be mine.’
Bellepheros laughed bitterly. ‘I've heard this Bom Tark is a town full of nothing else yet that's what they will have you burn!’
She smiled at that and shook her head. She'd heard the same, but all her instincts told her otherwise. ‘Perhaps I'll bring their glasships down instead and lead the slaves in this eyrie to revolt.’ They both knew she wouldn't.
‘And the Taiytakei slaves, Holiness? Will you free them and make them yours too?’
‘I will.’
‘But they are the same as the men from the desert! The ones you burned.’
So he knew about that. And she'd gone out of her way since then not to strike down the desert men she found but to fly on and look for lesser prey, even though Diamond Eye begged her to dive and burn and chase these little ones whose fear was so deliciously sharp. ‘The ones I burned that one day were not slaves, alchemist. And, slaves or not, a dragon must still eat.’ She turned away. My Vioros would have held his tongue better than you. ‘I remind you of your own words, Bellepheros. After the dragons your duty is to me, not to them. Certainly not to your enchantress.’ He bristled at that. Good.
‘Yes, Holiness.’
She turned away and out of the corner of her eye she saw him bow deeply and as he should to a speaker of the nine realms, but there was rebellion in his voice nowadays. So be it. If anything it hardened her resolve. She turned back to him and stepped in closer, close enough to feel his warmth, put two fingertips on his lips while the other hand snaked around his throat. When she spoke they were so close that her lips almost touched him. Nevertheless her words were so quiet that he had to strain to hear them.