The Watcher snorted. ‘You are not like Taiytakei women. Or men for that matter. You are tasteless and repellent.’
Zafir laughed. ‘How refreshingly honest of you!’ Diamond Eye shifted and growled. ‘But that's not what your kwen thinks, nor half his soldiers, or does it merely make them hate themselves all the more? That they cannot control their lust for such a degenerate slave as I?’ She reined in the flash of anger and with it her tongue. ‘Tsen's tastes lie elsewhere, then? Forgive a slave for wanting to please her master.’
The Watcher shook his head. ‘I have never been to your land. I am glad of that if all of your kind are like you. Baros Tsen T'Varr sips his apple wine and sings songs to himself and is happy and that is all. If there were a vice then I would know. You cannot hide from an Elemental Man.’
The last words had a bitterness to them. He didn't say anything more. Then he rose abruptly, snapped a stick from an almost-dead thorn tree and began to draw in the dirt.
‘Mai'Choiro Kwen told you where to fly. I saw and I heard his words. The city you will find is not Bom Tark. It is Dhar Thosis, seat of Senxian of the thirteen sea lords, and he is likely present.’ He drew a line in the dirt and then three islands and told her their names — Vul Tara, Dul Matha and the Eye of the Sea Goddess — just as Mai'Choiro Kwen had done. He told her, word for word, what the kwen had said so she could have no doubt that he'd been there too. He told her in a voice that was ruthless and fatally cold, a voice that said, quietly and without mercy or remorse, that she would die here on this stone on this night in the desert. When he was done, he looked her in the eye. ‘Sea Lord Shonda of Vespinarr is the most powerful man in the world. If he cannot hide his secrets, how will you hide yours? I know what you are doing, slave.’
She met his eye. ‘Then stop me.’
The Elemental Man drew a blade from his belt. Or rather, he drew the hilt of a blade with an edge too thin for Zafir to see. ‘Quai'Shu took loans that Tsen cannot repay. The other sea lords circle like sharks to devour his fleet.’ He stood up. ‘Stop you? That is what Baros Tsen T'Varr has asked of me. I wondered, with the truth before you, if it would make a difference. But, like the monster you fly, you are what you are. I hope you die slowly and badly, slave. I do not wish you well and I will not give you a quick and easy death.’ He turned his back on her. ‘When you are gone, Tsen will have to let his alchemist poison your monster. It is better for all this way.’
‘I am a slave, killer,’ she said. ‘Let me go. Let us all go. Back to my palace. Back as it was. I would be content with that.’
‘No,’ he said softly without looking back. ‘No, I do not believe you would.’
He vanished. Zafir dived for Diamond Eye, to be as close as she could to the dragon. Too slow, always too slow when the enemy was an Elemental Man, and yet she saw him coming through the air, a haze of wind that rushed and then slowed and faded into being a man again, a rictus face of furious strain. Zafir crouched under Diamond Eye's bulk, hissing at him, ‘Come on! Kill me then! That's all there ever is, isn't there?’
He was breathing hard. She could feel Diamond Eye restless above her, peering down between his feet, trying to see. The Elemental Man screwed up his face and shimmered, half faded and then slipped back to solid flesh again. Zafir snarled. She reached for a knife she didn't have, and that was that. He was going to kill her. The old way.
He stepped towards her. Cautious, although surely he could see she was helpless. She stood to meet him. Quivering not with fear but with despair. She had to blink hard to keep the tears from her eyes. No pity for pretty little Zafir. She touched a hand to her breast. ‘My heart is here, killer. What's left of it. Strike true.’
‘Think of it as a mercy,’ he said, and maybe he was right. Maybe that's what it was, but she'd never know because he only took one more step before the tip of Diamond Eye's tail flew like a spear out of the gloom behind him. It impaled him like the bolt of a scorpion and threw him through the air to land broken at her feet. And at the very last, as he lay dying, he didn't even move. Just screwed up his face as if he were trying to shift to another form and couldn't. Zafir stepped back. Diamond Eye lifted up one massive foot, stamped the Elemental Man flat and stared at her. She started to laugh. She was right underneath him and so his head was upside down. He looked faintly ridiculous.
‘No.’ She closed her eyes. ‘No mercy for Zafir. Never that.’ She looked up at the dragon. ‘But you? You don't even know what that is, do you? Mercy?’ She looked down again as Diamond Eye lifted his foot. ‘And he was probably right. Have I ever been content? I don't think I have.’
For a long time afterwards she stared at the smear that was all that was left of the Elemental Man. She drank and ate and looked and wondered. Later she picked up his knife with its invisible blade and gingerly slipped its scabbard out from the mess that was the rest of him. When she was done, she curled up tight beside Diamond Eye. ‘You stopped him, didn't you? You made his magic not work. I don't understand. Did he think you wouldn't keep me safe?’ She nestled closer to the dragon's uncaring warmth. ‘Watch over me, Diamond Eye. He's right. We are what we are.’
She fell asleep, and her dreams were as they always were when she slept beside a dragon. Furious and filled with fire.
70
Tuuran charged as another barrage of rockets fizzed out of the city from not far behind the docks. He hit the enemy hard. If the waiting soldiers had had bows he'd have been dead and so would most of the rest of them. But they didn't and so he crashed into them axe first like a wild boar into a band of novice hunters, tossing them this way and that. As Crazy Mad and the rest came on behind him, more rockets shrieked in from the sea. They exploded, fire scouring the far end of the docks in a chorus of screams. From the corner of his eye he saw a man run and dive into the water, on fire from head to toe, but that was only a moment, a flash of something else between the arcs of death he flung before him. The soldiers in his way were sword-slaves, armoured in a hodgepodge of whatever had come to hand, some in nothing but leathers, others in mismatched pieces of steel. His axe battered them aside, cutting limbs and spraying blood through the air. This was what an Adamantine Man was made for. This was what it meant! He howled as his eyes searched for the men he most wanted to kill, Taiytakei in their glass and gold.
More rockets hissed and shrieked back and forth from city to sea. The sword-slaves turned and fled from his axe but the golems were another matter, hulking brutes of black rubbery skin, terrible enough almost to quell the battle madness but Tuuran was having none of it. ‘Are you dragons?’ he screamed at them. Behind the screams and the clash of swords and the dull thumps of bursting fireballs and the roar of flames and the distant booms and thunderclaps, a deep rhythmic pulsing was building, louder and louder. ‘Are you? Because that's what I was made to kill.’ He ducked under a clumsy swipe and split a golem in half with his axe, ripping open its belly. It fell apart and lost its shape like an overripe fruit and now Crazy Mad and the sword-slaves who'd followed him surged forward again. He felled another. .
A rocket howled out of the air and struck one of the golems, spitting it. It stood there for a moment, reeling, and then exploded. Tuuran stumbled back, blinded by the flash, only the gold-glass helm saving his eyes from the flames. All around him men staggered and screamed and clutched their faces. There was a terrible smell of burning tar. When he blinked the brightness away, another of the golems was standing right in front of him. It had a wooden beam in its hands. It swung. He ducked easily underneath and inside its reach. They were large, too large to be men, but they were slow and had no notion of how to fight. He hacked at the golem, slashing it open. Black goo oozed from the wound. A substitute for slaves and cranes, that's what they were. Enchanted creatures for loading and unloading ships in the harbour and little use for anything else. Beside him Crazy Mad stabbed and cut.