He learned of the alchemist's dragons too, the flesh and blood dragons of his home that years ago he'd seen criss-cross the sky every single day. He learned a great deal more than he would have wished, and when he finally woke to find the sun risen once more, a fleeting wonder hung around him and the alchemist was no longer the man Tuuran had thought but something just a shade or two darker.
The glasships stopped at a deserted place where the mountains touched the sea, the northern margin of the forbidden Konsidar. The alchemist and the witch turned him out so they could be alone with their knowledge and their learning and their discovery of one another and Tuuran watched them return to their gondola with a sense of something gone dreadfully awry. She was seducing him. He'd seen that with his own eyes and heard it with his own ears. Seducing him with knowledge and secrets, and he was seducing her, in his turn, though he probably didn't even know it, but they were in her land, not his, and so she'd get what she wanted and the alchemist, in the end, would get nothing.
Back among the other slaves again he found the alchemist's prediction to be painfully right. His wounds hardly troubled him; instead he was spurred by a constant restless energy that urged him to stifle the drawls and whispers of the pompous palace slaves around him with their own ripped-out tongues. Manage. I will find a way to manage. He'd rather have faced a dragon when it came to it but he'd given his word and so, whenever the glasships put down, he ran and climbed among the broken stones like a restless ape until his muscles burned. Until he found a slave whose eyes followed him; and when she whispered in his ear he knew her, for it was the whisper from above as they'd left the Palace of Leaves. Her name was Yena, and she became his lover.
30
Chay-Liang had the glasship golem stop for an hour so they could all stretch their legs by the Shevana-Daro aqueduct. She couldn't take Bellepheros to every place she would have wanted but she could make sure their route passed the more spectacular creations birthed in Hingwal Taktse. The aqueduct carried fresh water from lakes at the edges of the Konsidar down to the city by the sea fifty miles away.
‘The view is good,’ said Bellepheros but he obviously wasn't much impressed. He spent more time watching the slave who'd saved his life clambering among the pillars of stone beside the lakes, showing off to some slave woman who'd taken a shine to him. He was capering as though caught again in the years between boy and man and Chay-Liang found it strangely irritating to watch him. ‘It's the blood,’ Bellepheros said when he caught her following his eye. ‘Give it another day or two and it'll wear off.’
‘My slave is probably ruined.’
Bellepheros shrugged. ‘That depends on her cycle.’
Liang squirmed at that. And yes, it was ridiculous to be squeamish about a little blood once a month but that wasn't the point. Such things were a woman's domain and men had no place talking about them. No proper Taiytakei would dream of it.
‘Give her to me,’ he said suddenly.
‘What? Don't be silly — she braids my hair! You have no use for her at all.’
‘Anything I want, you said. You can still borrow her from time to time.’
‘Absolutely not!’
He didn't press her. The next time they stopped, she took him down to the Tomb of Ten Tazei in its overgrown cove north of Khalishtor. Standing in the rain, sheltering under the boughs of the massive trees that grew there, she told him the story of the great explorer who'd charted the northern coast of Takei'Tarr, who'd turned Dhar Thosis from a village into a famous city with his stories of the Kraitu and the Dul Matha and his shrine to the Goddess of Fickle Fortune.
‘People come here for luck.’ There was a shrine beside the sea, four white marble pillars holding up a bronze pagoda roof, built on the spot where Tazei was said to have landed for the last time and still, they said, with his footprints preserved in the sand. Chay-Liang ignored it and led Bellepheros to the cave where Ten Tazei's remains had been left. It ended in a wall of loose stones almost covered by strips of white paper on which those who came to the tomb left their prayers. ‘The sailors who buried him here walled him up,’ she said. ‘They say that Tazei's ghost dug a hole all the way to Xibaiya back there.’
Bellepheros chuckled. ‘We have our own mythical tomb, if only anyone could find it. Flame knows where that might lead.’ He'd already told her about his Silver King now, come from nothing and vanished to nowhere but who'd tamed the first dragons in his passing, all hundreds of years in the past; now he told her of the tomb the sorcerer had supposedly prepared before his end, his Black Mausoleum, how it was said to be filled with treasures beyond understanding and how the greatest of their dragon-kings had once searched in vain for twenty years to find it.
‘That sounds more like Darkstone.’ She laughed. ‘Our Scythian friends have tales of a treasure trove of devices left by their half-gods too.’ The same half-gods clad in silver? Surely, although the half-gods of the Scythians had gone with the splintering of the world. ‘They say Darkstone is filled with terrible weapons.’
Bellepheros didn't seem to hear. He had that look on his face that she'd come to know, the look when something she'd said had snagged on a thought of his own and started to bloom. ‘If he was such a hero, why did you bury him? Is that what you do? Bury your dead?’ His face wrinkled in distaste. Liang laughed.
‘Bury them? Condemn them to Xibaiya? No!’ No need to hide her own horror at that; but he was still looking at her, waiting patiently for an answer and she realised that she didn't know. Why did Ten Tazei's crew bury him and not burn him? ‘He asked for it, I think.’ She frowned. ‘There are books about Tazei. He left a journal and so did some of his crew; and several of the navigators wrote about him later. One of those might answer you.’
They passed Khalishtor at night. There wasn't much to see in the rain except a forest of pinprick lights from the ships anchored out at sea. Mount Solence was shrouded in cloud as it ever was. Looking at it she wondered if the alchemist's Silver King had come to his world at the same time as the Elemental Men had come to hers. The times seemed almost right and seemed to fit, yet she'd found that the further she looked back into history the more time seemed to bend and warp in peculiar ways. A question to ponder quietly in the back of her mind then, like the one about Ten Tazei, or to pass back to her friends still in Hingwal Taktse. There were so many questions now that she'd taken to writing them all down.
She took them to the ground for an hour or two in the morning and again in the evening each day, in part to show him some aspect of her world, in part to ease the growing cramps and aches that came with so much sitting around and doing nothing, and in part to clear her head and give herself space to think and give both of them some time alone. She hadn't understood, until this journey, how much she cherished her own space and privacy, and Belli seemed the same. Often when they stopped she would take him to a place to sit and stare at the mountains or at the sea. She'd tell him a little of the history for a while and then leave him and walk alone. They spent an afternoon sitting overlooking the eyrie of the Dralamut, where the navigators who crossed the storm-dark learned their craft. She told him about the Crimson Sunburst of Cashax and her army of golems, how the Sunburst and the Elemental Men had fought, of her acolytes who'd become the first enchanters, and of one in particular, Feyn Charin, who would later be the first to cross the storm-dark. The Elemental Men had gifted him the Dralamut as a reward, to become a school where he would teach others.