The Watcher shifted closer. Some called the Visonda the Home of a Thousand T'Varrs. Hundreds upon hundreds of slaves came and went every day but few passed the second gates.
A series of easy staircases rose behind it, carved into the slope amid a speckle of brightly draped pavilions ranging up the gentle ascent to the summit of the mountain's root. The bulk of the old palace rose there, looming down over its satellites below, a quadrangular mass capped with gilt canopies. Few slaves came this far, but again the grey dead showed his brands and was permitted to enter. The Watcher shifted through the walls. He followed to the airy Tower of Messages which speared the air at the very peak of the palace. No slave branded and marked should have reached this far, for the upper levels of the Tower of Messages held the precious jade ravens, fabulously rare even in a city as rich as this, each one worth a dozen ships and a thousand sword-slaves. The ravens carried the words of Sea Lord Shonda of Vespinarr to his friends and allies, or his t'varrs and kwens and hsians, and rarely anyone else.
The grey dead presented himself and was ushered through into the jade-panelled scribing room. He took a gold quill and wrote a brief note on a sheet of paper and handed it to one of the bird scribes.
‘Dhar Thosis. At once.’
The scribe looked the grey dead up and down, decided he was merely a slave and allowed himself to appear offended at such an imperious tone, but the grey dead had already turned and left. The Watcher lingered. He followed the scribe now, wafting in the air, waiting in the inking room as the grey dead's message was written again, this time with diamond-tipped gold-glass scratching letters so small that an ordinary eye could barely read them onto a tiny silver ring. When it was done, the scribe took the ring and carried it up the steps that led to the cages of the jade ravens themselves, to their keepers and to the open roof where slaves were chained to posts to feed the messenger birds when they came home. Before he left he threw the grey dead's paper into a jade bowl to be burned at dusk with all the other messages sent that day.
Alone, the Watcher became flesh. He took the grey dead's words and sank into the floor. Dhar Thosis. An interesting dilemma. It would take a jade raven five days to cross the desert while he could do it himself in one.
He shifted through the walls, up to the orange-tiled roof of the Tower of Messages, and squatted there. Away from prying eyes, with the chitter-chatter caws of the jade ravens just beneath his feet, he read the grey dead's words:
He is not here. I am unmasked.
After the words came four symbols. He had no idea what they meant, but he'd seen them before. On the Azahl Pillar.
Who is not in Vespinarr? And to whom was this message sent? He needed to know both answers. He pondered. A jade raven to Dhar Thosis would go straight to the Palace of Roses, and there fate smiled on him. Xican was in debt to Vespinarr, Dhar Thosis to the mountain city's great desert rival, Cashax, and so for now the two indefatigable engines of the sea lords played out their endless duel with the Grey Isle and the Kraitu's Bones as their pawns. Quai'Shu’s spies filled the Palace of Roses as Lord Senxian's surely festered like maggots in the Palace of Leaves. If one of the grey dead had made his home in the Kraitu's Bones, he wouldn't stay hidden for long.
So, to the who of he is not here.
The Watcher became the stone of the Visonda's walls and descended to its gates, waiting for the grey dead to emerge but the slave never did. Over the days that followed the Watcher searched the city with meticulous care but the grey dead had slipped away, had somehow eluded him. When he rested in front of the Azahl Pillar, he saw that the symbols there whose meanings were lost were indeed the same as the ones the grey dead had drawn. Exact copies. A sign of the city from which his message came, was that it? Or did it mean something more?
The Watcher returned to Xican and carried out his duties. He ran errands and carried messages, paltry things far beneath an Elemental Man. Amid them the hunt resumed. A sorcerer, no matter his powers, no matter who he was, did not throw off an Elemental Man for long. The brands on the grey dead had come from Shevana-Daro. The Watcher went there and began his search anew. Patience was an Elemental Man's friend, and months later patience rewarded him with a boat stolen away to the forbidden island of Vul Storna, where the ruins of an ancient tower of white stone rose from the rocky heart of the island, visible from the sea, its top sheared in two. The Taiytakei who looked out across the water from their comfortable lives on the shore joked that the island was cursed, but those who plied their trades on the waves knew better. Not cursed. Forbidden, as the Konsidar was forbidden, on pain of death.
The Watcher became the air and blew close. This was where the last priests of the old ways had fled when the cleansing purity of the Elemental Men came down from Mount Solence. Vul Storna had been their refuge, a final hiding place, and they'd lived and worked for years amid the deep ruins and in the great labyrinth of tunnels and caves beneath. They'd come to preserve the lore and the teachings of the gods they served, the stories and memories that the Elemental Men sought to destroy, and not everything they'd left behind had been found and made safe. Yet even without them the island would have been shunned. The ruined tower was an older thing than the priests, as old as anything. It had an aura to it. A resistance that reached out and touched him like Baros Tsen T'Varr’s great floating castle. A thing that belonged to the same time, flowed out from the same white enchanted stone.
He found the grey dead again among those tunnels, searching walls filled with archways that opened onto nothing but more blank white stone. Whispers said that if a man knew the true secrets of what the priests had written, he might open these arches to other worlds, another way to reach across the storm-dark. But whispers were whispers, nothing more.
He became flesh and bone. ‘And have you found it, sorcerer? What you were looking for in Vespinarr?’
The grey dead jumped. Black shadows flew from his sleeves, hurled at the Watcher to choke his soul out of his body. The Watcher shifted. The stone walls here were like the castle with its glowing whiteness. They held him out, but the myriad of statues that littered the labyrinth were more ordinary things. Beside the grey dead, the stone features of some ancient lord became the Watcher's face and the shadows whirled around in impotent frenzy. The Watcher waited patiently for them consume themselves and wilt and die.
‘For six years they hid themselves here, sorcerer. When we found them we put an end to them, but in that time they wrote what they wrote. The Rava. More than a hundred copies of their blasphemies and abomination, written in their shaking fearful hands and smuggled away. Doubtless more made since. We track them down as we find them. We destroy them as we destroy all who read them, all who touch them and all who seek them. The Rava is forbidden knowledge, sorcerer. Is that what brought you here? We will not permit the world to end again.’
The grey dead drew his shadows back into his sleeves. ‘I know your voice. Under the temple of Vespinarr. I thought it strange for a different kind of killer to come, stranger still that my shadows failed to devour him. You I have expected.’