‘If you die then the dragons will wake and we will all burn and anything I would do is as nothing. Is that not so, Master Alchemist?’
‘Yes, Holiness.’ But he didn't move and his head was still bowed and that simply wasn't good enough. She lifted his chin so he had nowhere to look but right at her.
‘I do not want to lose you, alchemist, but that is what will happen if you leave me no choice. Do you understand me?’
‘Holiness!’ There. Some shock on his face at last. About time he understood this was no silly game she was playing, nor him either, him and his eyrie which he'd so obligingly built for the men who'd made him into a slave. She let him go and bared her teeth at him.
‘I will if I have to, Bellepheros. I will be a slave for a time if that's what I must do to survive but I will not stay one. Not for any of you. I'll die a statue if I must but I will die free. The disease will not kill me so quickly that I won't see the land of ash this world will become.’ She meant it. She always had, had never pretended anything else, but the alchemist had never quite believed. His eyes said that now he did. She had him then. She saw it inside him. He was still hers, even though he knew what that must mean, even if he hated it. The kwen is my Tyan, withered and dying, and Tsen will be my Hyram, who will see what is to come and will do anything, anything at all, to find another way. And then once again we'll see who is slave to whom. ‘Jehal did murder my mother, you know. It was him, with his own hand, and you alchemists with your truth-smoke never found him out. And in time we went to war, he and I, but not over that.’ She left him there, among his hatchlings.
The Taiytakei came for her that night. Black-cloaks. You'll be ready at dawn. You will fly your dragon and you will burn Bom Tark. Orders given to her as though she was some lowly rider to be sent on errands by her eyrie master. As though she was a slave.
Bom Tark. The name had come now and then, always with a roll of the eyes or a hiss of disdain. A place full of slaves that no one would mourn when she and Diamond Eye burned it to ash. Shrin Chrias Kwen was on his way there, taking the bulk of Tsen's fleet, or so the Taiytakei would have her believe. She didn't know why. To watch? To take away those who were worth saving? To see if she'd be tempted into burning him to ash too? But she wouldn't. Not that she hadn't thought about it but she wouldn't, not yet. Perhaps Tsen would be pleased and surprised at that, or perhaps disappointed. She couldn't tell.
But really? A city full of helpless slaves? She couldn't quite believe in it. There was something else to this. There had to be. A demonstration of power, that's what they wanted although they never came out and said so. Of what a dragon could truly do and with as little consequence as could be managed. A city of helpless slaves? What did that prove beyond what they'd already seen? It was, after all, a dragon.
She rose long before dawn, as eager as a girl in her first flushes. She let Myst and Onyx wash her and oil her and then sent them away and dressed herself in her dragon armour alone. It was, she would quietly admit to no one but herself, the finest armour that any rider had ever worn and she was grateful for that. Still a slave; but on Diamond Eye's back and dressed as the dragon-queen she would forget for a while. And maybe she would turn on them after all and smash their glasships out of the skies, and burn their ships and crush them and grind their embers until the Elemental Man found a way to get close enough to kill her. Which he quickly would, but it would be worth it.
The black-cloaks walked her across the dragon yard, but not to Diamond Eye. Instead they guided her to the golden egg of one of the glasships towing the eyrie. They led her inside and then they left and the ramp closed behind her and she was alone with Baros Tsen and another man, another kwen by the look of him but not one of Tsen's. He stood behind Tsen, strangely close.
‘I've seen you before,’ she said.
The kwen ignored her, but she had and now she remembered who he was. The kwen from the city in the mountains. And something about Tsen was different today. He had a gleam in his eye, a nastiness to his smile that she hadn't seen before.
‘What have you done to Shrin Chrias Kwen?’ he asked her.
66
A Taiytakei in glass and gold ran through the sword-slaves’ dormitory on the deck below. ‘Up up up!’ he screamed. ‘Everyone up on deck!’ The first glimmers of dawn lit the sky. Tuuran had his armour on in a flash, the best of what they'd been able to salvage from the slave galley after the Fire Witch had burned their masters: decent brightly coloured brigandine coat, steel greaves, vambraces and pouldrons. Not a perfect set by any means, not like the dragon-scale he'd once worn as an Adamantine Man and certainly not like the layers of sunsteel mail that Crazy Mad spoke of with wistful sighs. Plenty of gaps and joints for a canny blade or a lucky arrow, but it was what he had and it would have to do. He pulled a Taiytakei helm over his head. Now that was a fine piece, a plain open-faced steel helm but with a visor made of gold-tinged glass. Crazy had laughed when he'd brought it out of one of the slave galley cabins, right up until Tuuran had taken the helm and slammed it with a spiked club — one of the ashgars that the Taiytakei soldiers were so fond of. Instead of shattering into a thousand shards, the glass hadn't even cracked. That had shut him up.
‘Better than steel,’ Tuuran had said. They'd found three and kept them quietly to themselves. One each and one sold in Deephaven, that and a lightning wand, the last treasures from the men who'd made slaves of them for all those years. Crazy Mad had found some wizard — that was what he said he was, at least — and come away with a pocket full of gold. Lately Tuuran had come to wondering whether Crazy Mad could have come away with a great deal more, but that was wasted now. The helm was gone. A world away.
He lowered the gold-glass over his eyes, marvelling as he did every time at the clarity of it, how much he could still see with a visor over his face. Far away the rising sun lurked below the horizon, lighting up the distant burning clouds. It took Tuuran a moment to realise that the flames across the sea were no illusion of the dawn. Among the armada of ships headed to the shore, many were on fire. The ones at the front. He sniffed the air. He could smell the smoke. Why? There were more ships than he remembered from the day before. A lot more.
The wind. In a flash he understood. The wind was taking the burning ships straight at the land. They were fireships. That war he'd been longing for? Here it was at long last. A thing to make him smile like a man's first sight of the sun after years below decks.
Inside Baros Tsen's golden gondola Zafir's face froze. She squirmed. The other kwen was watching her fiercely, an odd look on him. ‘Made him look a fool,’ she said.
‘He hates you with a passion.’ Tsen smiled. He'd smiled a lot when she'd first come here, she remembered that, but it had become a rare thing these days. ‘One day I would like to know why, but it's no matter for now. You need to know that where we were once rivals, our interests have aligned one more. Perhaps only for a while, but you are my slave, and Shrin Chrias Kwen is my ally, and you will respect him for that.’
Zafir snorted. ‘I will consider it.’
Tsen got up from his throne and stood in front of her. When she was barefoot they were eye to eye. In her armoured boots she looked down on him but it didn't seem to trouble him. He ran a hand over the gold-glass scales, nodding his head, muttering approval, then stepped back and looked at her and cocked his head. ‘Think of this task as repayment for the gift I have given you.’ Suddenly, unexpectedly, he beamed at her and clapped his hands. ‘So, slave! What do you know of Bom Tark? Have my lesser kwens told you what you will see? How you should reach it?’