Tuuran
26
Many months before the dragon-queen came across the sea, Tuuran arrived with the alchemist Bellepheros in the Taiytakei port of Xican. He nearly died and so became the alchemist's sworn sword. The Taiytakei merely saw it as the giving of a slave and the alchemist wouldn't have understood, but, as they were winched from their ship, Tuuran spoke an oath quietly and softly in his head. The alchemist Bellepheros had saved his life and so now that life would be his shield; and as they stood beside one another at the top of the cliffs and stared for the first time at the City of Stone and the Palace of Leaves, he wondered for a moment what Crazy Mad, his strange friend for the last three years, would have made of what he saw. Because Crazy was complicated and Tuuran was simple, and it was all just far too big to fit inside his head.
Sometimes, when Tuuran had been younger and was still being forged as an Adamantine Man, he'd lain awake at nights, wondering what it must have been like for the first men to be freed of the tyranny of dragons. Living in their caves and their tunnels, dark and cold and hungry until the man of living silver came with the Earthspear and the world was suddenly changed. How it had felt to walk outside into the warm balmy breeze and the bright sun and feel it on your skin for the first time without the creeping dread and the urge to look up, always to look up. How it was to run in grassy fields and doze beside rivers and sleep for the first time safe and sound under the stars. Most of all he wondered how it must have been to have such a creature as the Silver King appear, a half-god who could snap his fingers and rearrange the world to his liking. What was it like to be around such a presence, to see miracles occur before your eyes? He tried to imagine these things but he always failed. He was a soldier, after all, strong and fast and obedient, not prone to dreaming but wise enough to understand that some things were simply beyond his reasoning. Some ideas were simply too grand.
Looking up at the Palace of Leaves, Tuuran knew he had his answer. This. This was how it had felt. Beside him the alchemist gaped in slack-jawed awe. A maze of shapes hung in the air dangling from pale golden clouds. They shone and gleamed and dazzled. From the stone peaks beneath, a forest of bright towers rose to meet them. Brilliant strands of sunlight stretched among the shapes, between the towers, to the ground and up to the shimmering clouds like the web of some great spider. When Tuuran squinted he could clearly see a ship suspended among the orbs and towers, masts and sails and all, and he could only think that this must be one of the sky-ships of the Taiytakei of which he'd heard. He stared, open-mouthed, while inside where no one would see he laughed at the wonder of it and wept too at how big a thing this was to see. Perhaps like seeing a dragon for the first time, with no previous understanding that such creatures even existed; but where a dragon was a terrible thing of fear and dread, the palace of Xican was god-touched with beauty.
The white witch with the glass lenses fiddled at her belt. The movement drew his eye whether he liked it or not. Slaves learned fast about belts and wands. The gold ones with the inner light, they were the ones you watched for. Discipline wands, the galley slave masters called them, although he'd heard them called other things too. The oar masters and the sail masters used them all the time, casually sending little shocks flying across the decks of their ships to remind the slaves who was in charge. For idleness, mostly; sometimes because they felt like it; but now and then it was for something more and then the cracks of lightning they spat out became the slap of a dragon's tail, the crush of a dragon's claw, pain overwhelming. He'd seen white-skinned men turned black and flaking, their extremities crumbling to ash as though burned by dragon fire. A sail-slave grew a sixth sense for when a wand was pulled from a belt and so Tuuran saw what the enchantress did, even though he never quite stopped looking at the sky-palace either, even though a good part of him felt touched by the presence of a divinity whose name he'd never been told.
‘A perk of being what I am,’ said the witch and stepped onto the glass disc she'd made. Tuuran still couldn't take his eyes from the palace. Only one power had ever created such things as these. The Silver King, but the Silver King was gone. Witchcraft and alchemy and blood-magic? He couldn't believe any of those could even begin to craft such marvels.
The Taiytakei shoved him onto the glass disc. As it began to move, the alchemist stumbled. Tuuran caught him. The ground fell away and the palace soared closer. Beneath him the hatchling mountains of the City of Stone seemed even steeper and sharper than they had from the summit of the cliff. Tuuran drank it all in. This! This must be how it felt to fly on the back of a dragon, and suddenly he was filled joy and envy. Joy because an Adamantine Man rarely sat on the back of one of their monsters; and envy because now he understood why the dragon-riders strutted like gods.
He sat down and kept his eyes firmly on the palace. The alchemist looked as though he was going to be sick. Don't look down. You learned when they made you climb the cliffs of the Purple Spur, and yes there was a thing that passed for a path that wound its way up past the Zar Oratorium, but when you were a half a mile up on a ledge that was a handspan wide, then you learned.
The white witch said something. Tuuran didn't hear — his eyes were locked on the palace. He eased the alchemist down to sit beside him, gripping him tight.
‘I have you,’ he murmured, never looking aside. ‘Witchcraft and blood-magic, but we are stronger, Lord Alchemist. We are stronger! Cling to that!’
For a moment he did take his eyes off the palace and its orbs and risked a glance, because even when they knew they shouldn't look, every Adamantine Man still did. The sight made him dizzy. They were high over the stones of the city, floating between them, the sea hundreds of feet beneath, an invisible nothing all that was holding him. He gasped and stared and started to laugh with amazement, and then the dizziness took him so hard that he could barely even sit without falling sideways. He squeezed his eyes shut and turned back to the golden towers where the white witch and her flying disc were headed and watched them come closer. The dizziness ebbed.
A wind picked up and grew stronger as they climbed. The alchemist's fingers dug into his arm, deeper and tighter. As they drew close to the towers he saw they weren't truly gold but gold-tinged glass, huge flat slabs of it as though the tower had been moulded from a single colossal piece. Like the white stone tower of Outwatch they were flawlessly smooth, except Outwatch was all curves and arcs without a single sharp corner, while the gold-glass towers were edges and angles all over. They were heading for the upper reaches of one, one of many, already in the golden half-shadow of the great glass discs overhead. Most of what he'd taken for a giant web he could see were chains running from the sky to the ground, or to the pendulous gold and silver eggs and orbs that hung beneath the discs, or else they were half-seen bridges that ran high between the towers. The sky-ship was below now, its masts and furled-up sails nestled between the towers away to one side, festooned with chains as though it would break free given even a glimpse of freedom. Among all this, kaleidoscope patterns of light and shadow moved slowly through one another as the sunlight met the serene revolutions of the gold-glass structures above.
The witch's disc glided at last to a stop beside the skin of the tower. Tuuran reached to touch it and found it silky. The witch took the black rod from her belt again. She tapped the tower wall and the glass flowed like liquid, rippling back to leave a hole the shape of an egg. The witch put away her rod, looked at the alchemist and then at Tuuran. Bellepheros was swaying where he sat, eyes still tightly shut.