‘You might want to help him,’ she said and walked calmly through. Tuuran gawped at the hole in the wall and at the cavernous hall beyond, a white marble floor the full width of the tower between the gold-glass walls. He picked himself up slowly and carefully and gently lifted the alchemist to his feet.
‘Eyes still closed, Lord Grand Master,’ he whispered, ‘but we're here.’ Wherever here was. A little like a great lord's grand hall in the realms. Like the Speaker's Hall except vastly brighter and made of gold and hundreds of feet above the ground. His eyes were watering. Tears of awe, was it? Yet he couldn't stop himself.
‘We are arrived, Lord Alchemist. The ground is stone again.’ He let the alchemist go. Through the walls he could see the sky, the muted distant shapes of clouds and of the sea, of the City of Stone below like thousands upon thousands of giant dragon-tooth towers pressed together, rising out of the dark waters. The walls of this hall rose up fifty feet more. Beyond them, past more gold-tinged glass, the shapes of the upper palace hung large and close.
Bellepheros fell to his knees and puked. Slaves came running at once to clean up the mess but Tuuran barely noticed. As the white witch began to walk, his feet followed but his eyes stayed where they were, looking up. Entranced. A hundred spans above his head hung a golden sphere, a small black hole pointing directly down. At the far end of the gold-glass hall the witch tapped her black wand against the wall and another piece of floating glass grew at her feet, forming out of the wall itself. Tuuran flinched back and looked at it askance but the witch stood on it and the other Taiytakei guided the alchemist to sit beside her, and so he had little choice but to join him, legs dangling over the edge, torn between the glorious vista around them, the hypnotism of the distant hole above and the gnawing sense that the glass beneath him was somehow alive and would notice him and either buck him off or eat him at any moment.
When the glass kept on rising and didn't eat him, he looked back down to the hall from which they'd come. The handful of slaves who stood there waiting patiently to serve looked small and lost in its enormity.
‘Does height not trouble you?’ gasped the alchemist. His eyes were screwed tightly shut. The spell of the place faltered for a moment, broken by ordinary words.
‘Height? I'm a sail-slave!’ Tuuran chuckled. ‘A sail-slave who's afraid of heights doesn't last very long. If the floor was pitching and heaving beneath us, the wind howling and the rain flaying the skin off my face, I'd feel quite at home. Height? No.’ No, it wasn't the height that made the squirming knot in his belly, even through the rapturous wonder. ‘But glorious as these sights may be, Lord Alchemist, I don't like not seeing what holds me from falling. It reeks of witchery.’ Even so, witchery or not, its magic still held him — perhaps that more than anything was what made him afraid — that he was bewitched and made so infinitely insignificant. The moment he fell silent he felt himself shrinking again, the colossal tower wrapping itself around him, making him smaller and smaller and smaller.
They passed into empty space and a wind that whipped at sleeves and cuffs and robes. The alchemist yelped and clung with fingers like claws. He had his eyes closed again while Tuuran couldn't even bring himself to blink. ‘Is this how it is to ride a dragon?’ He held the alchemist tight but what he wanted was to let go. To leap and fly with the wind howling in his face. The world beneath him was shrinking. Suddenly he didn't feel small any more but huge, gripped by a strange need to stand and hold out his arms and somehow embrace the sheer size of everything around him.
He put his hands in front of his eyes, since he couldn't make them close, until the sensation went away and a gloom wrapped him in its shadows and they were out of the sky and up into the lowest belly of the sky-palace itself, surrounded by dark carved wooden walls and bronze plaques and more shining bronze on the floor and other mundane and familiar things. A dragon-king's palace might look like this, perhaps. He'd never seen the inside of one to know, but he'd seen the houses of the rich in the City of Dragons and he'd lived inside the walls of the Adamantine Palace. His eyes flicked everywhere, taking it all in.
There were slaves already waiting for them, branded on both arms with the lightning bolt sigil of the City of Stone. Trusted sword-slaves but these were passive docile things, spiritless palace creatures, invisible servants with scarcely a flicker of life in them. The slaves followed the white witch and the Taiytakei soldiers like broken ghosts in their white tunics, heads bowed, up a single flight of stairs made of bronze and wood and lit by oil lamps, all reeking of the smell Tuuran knew well from the ships he'd sailed: Xizic, the ubiquitous drug of the Taiytakei. Sailors chewed lumps of it when they could get it. Men and women alike bathed in its oil, those who could afford it. Now it seemed they scented their lamp oil with it too.
‘The sea lord will see you in the morning.’ The white witch with her glass lenses stopped beside a wood and bronze door and opened it. A simple handle, no black rod this time and no lock either. ‘These slaves will tend to you. You must be at your best for the sea lord, if you wish to get the most from him.’ She winked as though she and the alchemist were part of some conspiracy together but the alchemist didn't seem to notice; Tuuran wasn't sure he'd even heard.
The palace slaves went inside and Tuuran would have followed but the white witch laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment and whispered in his ear, ‘Watch him, sail-slave. Guard him. We'll not keep him here for long but when others know of his arrival he will be in danger. I cannot arm you but I will send no slave that you could not easily overpower. You will taste his food. If he dies then it will fall hard on us all. And for those who are slaves, you know what that must mean.’
Tuuran nodded and bowed as she backed away. Slaves knew better than to question what they were told but it struck him as a very strange thing to say, and strange in an uncomfortable sort of way, as if she didn't trust her own men walking right beside her as much as she did a slave she'd barely met. He followed Bellepheros into his room where the palace slaves were already undressing him. Their demeanour changed the moment the witch had gone. Eyes that said they were better than Tuuran, with their two brands to his one. Tutting and muttering, talking about him as if he wasn't there, appalled by the state and the stink of him. He'd seen slaves like this before. The worst of the worst. Sniffing and servile and fawning to their masters, haughty and arrogant among their own. They were looking at him like that now.
He waited while they poured bucket after bucket of water into a bronze bath, then, while the alchemist was bathing and wouldn't see, he picked up the palace slave who was doing the worst of the talking and punched him on the nose. Not much of a punch but the look on the man's face was priceless.
‘You. . you! I will have you destroyed for this, sail-slave.’ The man kept his voice low, glancing nervously towards Bellepheros in his bath. Then he spat at Tuuran's feet. Still afraid though, and that was what mattered. Tuuran punched him again, harder this time, enough to daze him.
‘Do your worst,’ he sneered. ‘You'll find I barely notice.’ He looked from one slave to the next to the next, seeing their faces crumble from disdain to fear. His eyes lingered on the women. Flickers of interest here and there maybe? Or maybe not, maybe that was his imagination and being surrounded by sail-slaves and sailors for too long. Sail-slaves had little enough chance for any pleasure. Now there was a thought. Better than the slack-jawed awe that still threatened to sweep him away.