‘You wish me to be like them. I understand. And I will not.’ Once more she held out her hand. ‘Shall we go?’
Silver-cloak snapped out some more words, too harsh and sharp and fast for Zafir to follow. Without hesitation one of the black-cloaks unsheathed his sword, narrow and pointed. A thing for finding gaps. Zafir barely managed not to flinch but the black-cloak's eyes weren't on her. He lifted his sword high and drove it down into Brightstar as she kowtowed, trembling and almost weeping with her fear. He drove it straight through her heart and she died without a sound. A stain of bright blood spread across her white silk shift and pooled on the floor. Silver-cloak never took his eyes from Zafir. ‘Show me you understand,’ he said again.
Zafir laughed in his face. Killing people she barely even knew? What was that supposed to show? That he hadn't the first idea what it was to be a dragon-queen, what it was to live around such monsters in a world where people died every day, not out of malice but out of carelessness, out of simply being in the wrong place as a dragon swished its tail or stretched its wings. Yet he'd lit something in her with what he'd done. A cold fury. ‘Do you think,’ she asked him, ‘that any part of me does more than pity you?’ Her smile was wide now. Couldn't help it. Not long ago it had been a hatchling staring down at her from the hole ripped in the roof of her cabin, a hatchling awake and with every reason to burn her and crush her and eat her. And here was a man, a nothing more, who thought to frighten her? She shrugged. ‘Kill another if you must. Lessen yourself even further.’
‘Show me you understand!’ he ordered again but his face already told her that she'd won, and oh how he hated her for that!
Zafir closed her eyes and shook her head, soft and sad. ‘I understand,’ she said, ‘that people will die. People around me. People who stand too close. So it has always been.’ She opened her eyes again and fixed him with them. ‘I understand that I am a dragon-queen, Shrin Chrias Kwen, Heart of the Sea Lord. And you are standing too close.’
The black-cloaks unlocked the bracelet from her wrist then, and silver-cloak gut-punched her so hard that, even seeing it coming, she doubled over and gasped. They forced her down, all of them far stronger than her, until her head touched the floor, and then dragged her away. She half expected silver-cloak to kill her other broken birds out of spite, simply not knowing what else to do, but he didn't. It was to his credit, she thought. Not that it would save him when the time came.
Shrin Chrias Kwen. Heart of the Sea Lord. She wondered what that meant.
24
Tsen wished he could take Kalaiya with him to Khalishtor but such things weren't done and so he left her behind in Xican and took instead a pang of regret and a small hole in his heart. Xican to Khalishtor by glasship was four days without a break, even in the smallest gondola, which crammed him into a golden egg not much bigger than the bath in his bathhouse. Other men might have taken longer, overnighting on the Bal Ithara and in Shevana-Daro, or at least breaking the journey for a night in Zinzarra. But LaLa had left him in no doubt that time was of the essence and he preferred to spend what little of it he could spare in his bath in Xican; then, too, it didn't escape him that hanging in a tiny golden sphere drifting through the air was probably the safest place he could possibly be. Encased in metal was the one place an Elemental Man couldn't reach him.
He sighed. The stupid nasty little thoughts kept bothering him. He and Kalaiya had talked for hours after LaLa had gone about what had happened, what it meant, what it might mean and last of all — because the stupid nasty little thoughts had to have their way — about who else might become Quai'Shu’s heir; and by the time she'd finished pointing out exactly how many would have their eyes on such a prize and thus might see him as a threat now, all he wanted was to curl up deep in his apple orchards and live out his days making wine. She'd talked him out of that but they'd agreed that he should stay in the glasship.
Quai'Shu’s fleet, when Tsen reached Khalishtor, had already been anchored out in the islands for a day. Shrin Chrias Kwen was there ahead of him — of course he was — trying to work his head around what in the eight worlds had happened. Jima Hsian, as far as either of them knew, was either in Vespinarr or Dhar Thosis and had no idea that the fleet had arrived back. Neither of them felt inclined to hurry the news to him. Every day, after all, was an advantage, and hsians — more than any other — hankered to be their own masters.
He wondered vaguely if LaLa could be persuaded to kill Chrias for him — how immensely helpful that would be — but the Elemental Man served Quai'Shu, not him, so he made his own arrangements and now here he was, sitting in his gold-handled chair in the cabin of his glasship with a slightly perplexed expression on his face, surrounded by all the things that made four days in a ridiculously expensive prison vaguely bearable, hoping without much hope that someone would find him some decent food and wishing he was back in Khalishtor in Quai'Shu’s tower in the Palace of Glass, gazing out over the glorious Crown of the Sea Lords and the Proclamatory with a glass of apple wine in his hand, looking forward to a nice hot bath and without a single thought wasted on who among his many ‘friends’ would be the first to try and have him murdered.
All in all not exactly the best of moods.
Behind him a tiny hatch led to where the pilot golem did whatever it was that made the glasship work. Tsen left that sort of thing to others. Experts. He knew how sails worked and he knew how money worked, and, when he put his mind to it, he knew how people worked; and that was quite enough. He'd had a good look, though, over four days of having nothing much else to do, and yes, if you tried hard, you could squeeze an assassin inside if you wanted to. Just as well no one had. But apparently assassins and all the nasty little ways they'd soon set about murdering each other would have to wait, at least for a little while. Apparently there was something more important.
And what, in the name of sea and sail, shall I do with you?
The woman in front of him was dressed like an exquisite harem slave, if you ignored the bandage around one of her hands — dressed like one, but clearly she'd never spent a day being taught how to hold herself or how to behave. She stood between two soldiers — Quai'Shu’s personal guard, by the black feathers of their cloaks — who were holding her surprisingly tightly, one gripping each arm. Shrin Chrias Kwen stood to one side puffed up like a peacock in all his formal glory, an extremely angry peacock today although he tried hard to hide it. In fact, out of all of them, the only one who looked at ease was the slave herself. The dragon-queen. The one who'd killed Zifan'Shu, driven Quai'Shu insane by some accounts and Chrias to a repressed fury that verged on incandescence; and now here she was meeting his eye as though he was the one who ought to be on his knees with his face pressed to the floor. He almost couldn't help liking her. He had a soft spot for unruly slaves, especially ones who rubbed Chrias up the wrong way. Perhaps his own inner meekness admired them for being fierce. The thought made him smile. Just ask Kalaiya.