They carried boxes out of the gondola and piled them against the white walls, the palace slaves grumbling and groaning under their breath about such menial labour while Tuuran just got on with it. As soon as they were done, the gondola lifted away into the air. Other slaves — Tuuran supposed they were the ones who already lived here — poured out of the archways under the walls, filling the air with urgent questions: ‘What belongs to the enchantress? Which are her personal effects? Are these for the laboratory? Where's the alchemist?’
Tuuran moved away. He had what he had, what he carried in his own bag, and that was that. No one paid him any attention and no one shouted and drew out a golden wand as he crossed to the wall. He ambled over to one of the steep flights of steps cut into it and began to climb. The steps, the wall, everything was made of the same white stone, seamless as if carved from a single solid lump of something, polished smooth and all curves and arcs and not a single hard edge or corner in sight. Odd, but what made him stop and run his finger over the stone was that he'd seen this before, back in the dragon realms. The eyrie of Outwatch, far off in the north in the middle of the Desert of Sand. Maybe this white stone grew in deserts then? Certainly nowhere else, for all across the realms he'd never seen anything made as Outwatch had been made, all rounded and smooth without a sharp line anywhere inside or out. Yet here he was in another world and this stone was the same.
He climbed to the top and looked out across the desert in awe. The white stone walls sloped down — more gently on the outside than they did within — to a wide rim of dark bedrock, and then. . nothing. To his eyes, it seemed the place was built on the top of a solitary mountain. A mesa, perhaps, like the ones on the edge of the Purple Spur where it slid into the western edge of Gliding Dragon Gorge not so far away from the Adamantine Palace itself.
The only mesa for a hundred miles though, by the looks of it, and, Flame but it was tall! To the north and east and west a sea of sand stretched out as far as his eyes could reach, great dunes washing away to the horizon, almost white and painfully bright. White. Why is desert stone always white? To the south the ground became flatter and dirtier, more patchy and broken. Some sort of salt marsh if he'd heard right. A brilliant line of gleaming silver ran through the middle of it, dozens of miles to the west. A river catching the sun, and a big one. When he looked hard there might have been another too, off in the far distance. Along the rim of the mesa coils of rope as thick as his arm lay below the shallow slope of the walls, with open empty crates scattered around and planks of wood in piles and pulleys and a jib built out over the side. Cranes, most of them only half built, but that meant that beyond the edge was a sheer cliff. He almost went over to have a look, to peer over and drink in the drop but thought better of it.
There were other things built along the rim too. Dull iron wheels as big as a cart lay set flat into the ground, some of them with bright steel plates mounted on them. He'd seen things like these along the walls of the Adamantine Palace, places for mounting a scorpion so that it could easily turn, although these were far larger. A few held up great glass discs, twice as tall as a man, mounted sideways and held by silvery pylons with a series of concentric glass globes nested through the middle and, right at their heart, what looked for all the world like a harness for a man to sit in. The outermost rims were covered in what looked like solid gold. Gold, always gold with the Taiytakei. He'd seen it everywhere since they'd taken him off his ship but they didn't use it for money, not like everywhere else. No, they used silver, which he'd seen in a lot of places, and jade, which he'd seen in far fewer, but never gold. Too precious for that? He wasn't sure.
His eyes drifted out to the desert. Antros, who would have been the last speaker if he hadn't died, had come from the desert, from Sand. Speaker Hyram had come from Bloodsalt. All in all, Tuuran had spent a lot of years in the Deserts of Sand and Stone and Salt before the mistress of the Pinnacles had sold him into slavery. He felt their tug. Home. I want to go home. He hadn't forgotten the huge tearing in his heart as they'd crossed the storm-dark; it had dulled in the last weeks but now he felt it as sharp as it had ever been. The alchemist, the Palace of Leaves, the three knives someone had stuck in him, Yena. He saw them for what they were now. Blindfolds. Dreamleaf, but he'd never quite fallen asleep, never quite closed his eyes. He opened his shirt. He had nothing to show for those knives now except three little scars. They were almost gone, as though they were wounds from years ago. It was a shame the alchemist had nothing for the scars on the inside.
Out in the distance to the west a glint in the sky caught his eye, a little golden star under a bigger white one. As it came closer he knew it must be the alchemist and the white witch in their sky-ship. He hadn't seen much of the alchemist in the last week but he'd seen enough to know the witch had done her work. She'd cast her spell and enchanted him like she enchanted her flying machines. She'd seduced him and Tuuran would never get him back. And her slave Yena, in her own way, was the same. Even if it wasn't her fault and she didn't mean it, that was what she was trying to do.
‘Hey, slave! Get back to work!’
A Taiytakei soldier was on the battlements with him. One of those with the glass and gold-plated armour and the glowing wands. Not that Tuuran had any work to be doing but slaves didn't argue and so he raised his hands, bowed and retreated back down the steps into the yard and moved boxes and crates from one place to another as though he knew what he was doing. Someone pointed to an archway and he followed the line of their finger, nodding dumbly. A few steep steps descended inside and then curved sharply to follow the line of the wall, spiralling deeper underground. The passageway walls were the same white stone as outside, glassy smooth and curved with only a slight flattening at the floor, as though they'd been made by some sort of burrowing worm. There were no murals, no hangings, no decoration, nothing, but they had a light to them like an alchemist's lantern, a glow that crept out from the very stone itself. The eyrie slaves moved back and forth with blank faces but the palace slaves stared in wonder and chatted excitedly. One stopped and scratched the stone with a knife. He caught Tuuran looking at him and hurried away but when Tuuran went to look for himself he couldn't find a mark. Nothing. Yet strange as these passages with their light seemed to the other slaves, yet again Tuuran had seen them before, in the Pinnacles this time. In Queen Aliphera's Fortress of Watchfulness, what little of it he and the new speaker had been allowed to see. They were almost his last memories of the realms he called home. The last ones he cared to dwell on at least.
A short way down the passage he began to pass a series of little rooms, all the same with egg-shaped holes for entrances that you had to step over but not a single door. He'd seen these in the Pinnacles too. And deeper in, as the passage curved back towards the centre of the eyrie and grew wider the rooms grew bigger, some of them larger than the gondola that had carried him here but always curved and in strange shapes. Not circles but never anything angular and no two the same as though water had come through here once and taken its time to carve its signature in each and every room, one that could never be repeated.
The rooms grew larger the deeper he went and the passage grew taller and there were archways here and there, carved into the walls, and swathes of runes and symbols. Not that the arches went anywhere. Just the shape of them, opening onto nothing more than the same white stone as everything else. He'd seen those in the Pinnacles too. Place was riddled with them.
He carried the alchemist's things to the room Bellepheros had been given. Not that the alchemist had any possessions of his own but the witch had arranged for a whole gamut of things to be delivered to him anyway. Clothes and pots and pans, glass beakers in all shapes and sizes. Tiny cages. And books, dozens and dozens of books. Tuuran didn't know what to do with anything else but he knew what alchemists did with books. He put most of them on the shelves and scattered the rest around the room, on tables, on seats, on the bed. He left a few of them opened at some random page in the middle; and when Bellepheros finally arrived, he clapped his hands as he saw and smiled; and Tuuran smiled back, even though the alchemist's smile was ghastly. It was Yena's smile, the smile of a man who'd made some sort of peace with himself and accepted his slavery, who'd bowed to its inevitability and embraced it for what he could get. The Taiytakei had no dragons yet but the witch had shown him her glittering spires and golden glass. She'd told him tales of conjured jewels, of marvellous creatures and the wonders of worlds. She'd seen exactly where his weakness lay and she'd struck at it with the swiftness and the deadly precision of a desert cobra and with a poison to put any snake to shame.