The Watcher shook his head. ‘Serve your purpose to me and I'll have you sent back to your home. You'll be free.’ A smile flickered at the corner of the Elemental Man's mouth. ‘I let the second Regrettable Man go, didn't I?’
‘Except his arm!’ Tuuran looked the Elemental Man up and down and shrugged. ‘All right. I agree. What do I do when I get to the ship? You want him brought back here somehow or do I just watch?’
The Elemental Man shook his head and walked in silence for a while, on through the streets and up the lower slopes of the Silver Mountain to an obelisk that stood in the middle of a great square in front of some great palace set at the foot of the mountain's roots. ‘The Azahl Pillar,’ he said as they drew near. ‘Emperor Vespin brought it here from somewhere in the Konsidar. No one knows quite where. The inscriptions here are the oldest across the whole of Takei'Tarr. They were cut before the Splintering. They are the same as the ones on this slave, are they not?’
Tuuran rubbed his nose and squinted at the carvings in the white stone. ‘Not exactly, but. .’ He pointed at a few of the sigils. ‘I remember that one. And that one.’ He let out a long slow breath.
‘But?’
He closed his eyes, trying to remember, trying to be sure. ‘They're the same as the ones I saw back in the Pinnacles. Sigil for sigil. I think. Or maybe not exactly the same, I can't remember, but if not, then very nearly.’ He grinned. ‘Send me back and I'll find out for you.’
The Elemental Man ignored him. ‘The Regrettable Man who came to Baros Tsen T'Varr’s eyrie bore similar marks, though the one in Zinzarra did not. And they are like. . others I have seen.’ They walked again, back through the city to the river and to a busy quay and barges packed full of slaves. The Watcher handed Tuuran a sliver of glass etched with words and symbols. ‘With this you may call for aid from those who serve the sea lord of Xican. Show it when you reach Tayuna. Tell the harbour masters the name of the ship you wish to find. They will see to it.’ He walked briskly down the steps to the riverfront and waved Tuuran aboard a waiting barge. Tuuran scowled over the frothing water. ‘Watch the sail-slave with his marks. Watch for the grey dead men. Watch but do not intervene. I will find you when I can. If you do this for me then freedom is yours when it's done.’
‘Watch him? For how long? How do I find you?’ But the Watcher had already turned away and was quickly gone, lost in the riverside crowd. The barge master cast off his rope and ran to the front, yelling and shouting at the slaves there equipped with big thick poles. Tuuran made to stand up but the barge was moving now, getting faster, lurching and starting to spin in the surging river. ‘Grey dead men?’ he shouted back. ‘Who are they? When what's done?’ But he got no answer and was left to wonder whether he was alone now or whether the Elemental Man was still there, a part of the wind and the river; and then after that, as they bounced through the Yalun Zarang rapids and he was drenched in freezing spray, he was too busy clinging to the sides of the barge to wonder much of anything at all.
It took a week to reach the sea from Vespinarr, a week full of wild dashes down a river feisty with mountain snow-melt and of dangling in rickety cages lowered beside curtain-cascades of water, the Yalun Zarang cataracts. They crossed the river behind one of these on a ground-flat path of rock ten feet wide beneath a colossal black overhang with the river roaring down beside them, loud as the white witch's lightning and quivering the ground with its force. In Tayuna Tuuran found his way to the docks and showed his sliver of glass and said the name of the vessel he was looking for and was put on a ship that took him to another, and then to yet another; and whenever he showed the Watcher's glass the Taiytakei took him without question and set him to work, just another sail-slave, making his way around half the coast of Takei'Tarr and then a week across the open ocean to the horizon stain of the storm-dark. He counted through the stillness as they crossed it. Five hundred heartbeats before the ship lurched and shook and they were through to the other side and back amid the howling winds and the hurling waves and the churning violet-streaked sky.
That ship took him to another, with colours and signs on its sails that he'd seen before. He saw land again. They sailed towards it, beside it, to a cove in the middle of nowhere along an unfamiliar wild coast and lowered their sails and waited in the calm seas and turned to face the wind, and there at last was his corsair galley, his slave ship. He knew it at once and his heart smiled as he saw it. A strange feeling swept him through. A warmth. A relief and yet an anxiousness. He was as close as a man like him got to such a thing as home — as long as he could keep from memories of his true home.
The ship and the galley both lowered their boats, captured slaves leaving, barrels of water and biscuits and arrows coming the other way. Up in the ship's rigging the archer platforms were manned by sharp-eyed Taiytakei bowmen. Food and weapons and money for slaves, that was the way the corsair galleys worked. It wasn't the first time they'd met another ship in the middle of nowhere and exchanged goods like this but it was the first time Tuuran had been on the other side.
Oar-slaves rowed him over. Tuuran scrambled with ease up the heavy net lowered over the side of the galley, climbed aboard, put his hands firmly on his hips, took a deep breath and let it slowly out again, scanning the decks and smiling a toothy smile. A few new faces but most of them were familiar and he met their surprised eyes with his grin. Tuuran is back. Old friends rejoice; enemies quiver and quail. The sail-slaves watched him. Times like this they had little to do but the air was always thick with tension. Handing over the catch from the last few months always brought home what they were: slaves taken from their own lands and turned, now making more of the same for the very people they'd once sworn to hate. A few grinned back at him — old friends — but Tuuran passed them by. There'd be time for greetings and half-forgotten scores later. Some of the Taiytakei who remembered his face stared as well. A couple even grinned, maybe pleased to have him back, while others gaped. He passed them too. He was after Crazy Mad, and there he was, walking to the far edge of the deck, his back to the sailing ship as though he wasn't interested at all, looking down into the sea. Well, he wasn't going to get away with that.
Tuuran dropped a heavy hand on Crazy Mad's shoulder and clasped him tight. ‘Hello slave. So now is your time to throw me in the water, I think.’
Crazy Mad jumped like he'd been stung. ‘Tuuran! What are you doing back here?’
‘What do you think? Back among my old friends. Missed all of our fun, missed stealing men and women from their homes to make into new slaves for our masters, of course.’ And now he'd seen how those masters lived. Hadn't given it much thought before. ‘You're not at your post, slave. Do you like rowing?’
In another world there might have been more between them — an embrace, some acknowledgement of pleasure — but this was a slaving ship and everything that might be weakness was seized and devoured and destroyed, and so Tuuran said no more and left Crazy Mad where he was and set to shouting at all the other sail-slaves who'd been secretly glad when they'd thought he wasn't coming back. The old familiar world slipped easily over him like a favoured glove, close and comforting, and it was hardly a chore to keep half an eye on Crazy Mad and what he did, especially when what he did was exactly what every sail-slave did. Sailed, drank, brawled, gambled and told stories.
The sailing ship left and that was always a happy time for the sailors: a hold full of food and no angry captives. The galley continued in the routine Tuuran knew as well as he knew his own skin. A month passed and then another. They filled the slave pens with bronze-skinned men from a shoreline of arid rugged hills that the locals called the Kala, moving slowly north towards the southernmost coast of Aria. The sailing ship came again and emptied their cages and filled their larder and they moved on, edging up the coast; and it took even the Taiytakei by surprise when a second ship hunted them down only a few weeks later. It was a sleek warship, this one, far bigger than the one that had returned Tuuran and almost as big as the vessel that had taken him to the dragon lands. The usual platforms for archers hung amid the masts and spars but there were other things there too, and more on the deck, pointing over the side. Metal tubes filled with Taiytakei black-powder rockets, each with a glass bulb on the front filled with trapped fire. The ship stood off from the galley, weapons armed, nothing friendly about its manner at all, and lowered a boat. Just the one with a single Taiytakei aboard and some oar-slaves to row it, and three men in cowled grey robes who looked far too skinny and feeble to be working ships to Tuuran's eyes; and then a different thought jolted him: Watch for the grey dead men.