Yena held up her branded arms in front of his face. ‘I'm a slave, Tuuran. Always a slave. My mistress is kind as mistresses go and wealthy and powerful and. .’ She smiled and kissed him. ‘She allows us some freedom, after all.’
The horn sounded, calling the slaves back to the sky, but as they quickly started to dress, he couldn't resist the urge to come up behind her and press her against him and run his hands over her until she turned and they made love again.
They ran afterwards, laughing, but they were still late enough to earn them both a shock of lightning. Tuuran took it with a smile — he'd had plenty enough of them at sea — but he didn't smile when they turned the wand on Yena, when she screamed and begged and afterwards cried. In the gondola as they flew away he found her lying on the planks overhead and whispered to her over and over, letting her feel his outrage in all the things he'd do for her when the chance came, until slowly he understood that that wasn't what she wanted to hear. Sorry. That was all she wanted. That he was sorry and that it wouldn't happen again, even if she'd hardly pushed him away. That was the word she wanted, and so he said it, bewildered by her need for it. And afterwards as they all slept and snored and tossed and turned and drifted through the sky, he wondered why he didn't run. He knew the answer perfectly well — he'd made an oath to the alchemist after all — but what was that worth? What was the point of it?
They crossed the mountains. All the other slaves peered hard out of the windows as they drifted over the magnificence of Vespinarr, full of excited whispers and jabbing fingers and cries of pointless joy: There! That's the Jokun river! Look! The Kabulingnor! Is that all one palace for one lord of the sea? It's as big as a city all on its own! And there! That's the Visonda! And the Harub!
On and on. Yena was much the same. She seemed to have forgotten about the day before, squealing her own excitement among the women above. When they stopped that evening, though, she walked with him and held his hand and they talked but they never strayed far from the gondola. When he tried to lead her away, she shook her head.
‘Are there any old slaves?’ he asked her. He certainly hadn't seen any at sea.
‘Plenty,’ she answered, but with doubt in her eyes. And then he let it be because where was he going with that thought anyway? Were there any old Adamantine Men? No, there weren't. And what could he offer her? Adamantine Men were swords. They sated themselves in flesh and moved on. It was simply what they were, whatever hankerings he might feel now and then, and so he said nothing and just turned and held her and kissed her long and hard, even if everyone else was watching, and then listened as she told him wild stories of the fabulous wealth of Vespinarr.
When they got back to the gondola the windows had been painted black and for almost a full day there were no more stops at all. The gondola grew hot and stifling until even its metal skin was warm to the touch. When it shuddered and swayed and came to a stop and the ramp opened again, Tuuran stumbled out of the stale air that stank of sweat and piss straight into a wall of heat. He squinted and blinked in the brilliant sun. The other slaves staggered and groaned around him, half-blind but glad to get out of the cabin and the darkness. Wherever they were, the sky shone like fire and the ground glared up at him, bright like dragon eyes in the dark. He staggered, humbled for a moment by the light. Taiytakei soldiers prodded and pushed them, herding them together, shouting orders that most of the slaves were too dazed to understand, but they didn't seem too urgent and so he just blundered aimlessly where he was prodded until his eyes got used to the sun; and when at last they did, he stopped and took a good look at where he was.
A big circle of seamless flat white stone inside a squat round wall of the same stuff. Empty except for the squinting slaves and the gondola and a handful of Taiytakei soldiers who seemed more amused than annoyed. There were five short towers spaced evenly around the wall and archways below each of them which led underground, and steps up to what were probably battlements, but as to what lay past the walls. . He craned his neck but they were too high and all he could see was the sky.
Except. .
He looked further up. More than a dozen gold-glass discs floated high above them, great long chains dangling down to the ground outside the walls. Flying ships of glass and gold like the one that had brought him here. He stared. He'd seen two, maybe three now and then flying with them from the Grey Isle, and others in the distance sometimes when they'd passed one of the Taiytakei cities. But never so many!
Yena touched his arm. ‘They're just glasships.’
‘Where are we?’
‘The desert.’ She sniffed. ‘I remember the air.’
Tuuran rubbed his eyes. ‘I remember it too, except ours is a different desert in a different world. Hot and dry and tastes a little of sand.’
‘And salt.’
He snorted. ‘Salt? Yes, we have a whole desert of salt where I come from. I went there once with our new speaker. It was his home, you see. Let's hope this desert isn't as boring as that one was.’ The endless flat salt plains around Bloodsalt were the most desolate place he'd ever been and the dragon lands had had no shortage of desolate places to choose from. He hawked and spat on the shining white stone. ‘The only reason anyone ever went there was for the lumps of gold that littered the place. Just lying on the ground, they were. Oh, that and it was the only place a bunch of runaway blood-mages and their tame dragons could find where no one would bother them, but that was once upon a time. Long, long ago.’ It would have been nice to have learned that when he'd been there with Speaker Hyram, all fresh from taking his Adamantine Throne. But no, he'd learned it from the alchemist a few weeks back when they'd been stuck on the ship together.
He looked around in case the alchemist was already there, didn't see him, then stared up at the slow revolutions of the glasships again. They were mesmerising. Now he'd seen them, they kept pulling his eye.
Yena poked him. ‘You're such a savage!’
Other times he might have grinned and told her how much she seemed to like that he was a savage. But not today. Wherever they were going, they'd arrived. He felt it, and he didn't know what that was going to mean but his gut said nothing good. ‘In my world we fly on the backs of dragons.’ He caught himself. ‘No, dragon-riders fly on the backs of dragons. Slaves fly in wooden cages that the dragons carry in their claws. Now and then they fall apart. Usually in the air. Or they get dropped. Not too careful, dragons.’ He laughed bitterly. Cut to the bare bones, it wasn't much different from how he'd come here then, except the cage had been nicer and less likely to fall apart in mid-air as old Valmeyan's slave-pens had been prone to do. And no Outsider taken from the mountains and hauled off in one of those hellish cages would have thought twice if the chance came to run away, and yet he'd had them every day for two weeks and here he was.
He cocked his head. ‘Do they breathe fire?’ he asked.
‘No.’ She poked him again. ‘Ours breathe lightning, savage.’ Savage. The palace slaves all saw him like that. Yena hid it better than the others, made a joke of it, but that wasn't saying much. An overpowering sense of not-belonging pummelled him when he wasn't with her, or at least talking to her through the wooden divide on the long days they'd spent stranded in the air. It strangled him and now it came again. He pulled away from her hand and looked for the alchemist but the second gondola still hadn't arrived.
‘Hoi! Slaves! Come on, come on! Get this unpacked! Quick now!’