The soldiers pushed and pulled her through the narrow companionways of the ship, up a tight flight of steps to the open air. Above the wooden masts and spars vast discs of glass and orbs of gold and silver hung in the sky, looming down and threatening to crush her. They were everywhere, spinning slowly and streaming bright shapes of sunlight across the deck in ever-shifting patterns. Others drifted languidly further out among the ships of the fleet and the smooth sculpted islands that surrounded them. They made her feel small.
No. She bit her tongue and made it bleed. Awe, rage, love, fear, they were all her children, not her masters. No, she would not gawk like some ignorant savage. She was the dragon-queen and nothing the Taiytakei could put in front of her could compare with the monsters that had been a part of her life from the very moment she'd been born. She let the cold breeze cutting through her silks fill her head, made herself look straight ahead and nowhere else, dismissed the bright sun-dazzled thing above her that was as large as a war-dragon with its wings outstretched. When they stood her in front of a gondola carved from solid gold, almost resting on the deck right in front of her, at first she refused to see that too.
But no, that wouldn't do either, and so she lifted her eyes and went to war. The gondola floated a few feet above the deck and seemed to move up and down but that was the ship rocking in the gentle swell. The egg hung motionless. It was the size of a small hall, large enough for perhaps a dozen men to stand upright before they felt pressed together. On the outside it was smooth-skinned, made of polished gold that shone brilliant in the sun, featureless except for windows of perfect clear glass in a single ring around its belly. At the tapered end of the egg in front of her a ramp hung open, yet more gold, ending in a few steps that hung by silver chains. The steps were clear. Glass. It all hung from chains of gleaming silver. Above her the gold-glass disc spun slowly, casting its fractured light over everything.
Zafir looked and took it in, every bit of it, and then held it up against her dragons, her Onyx and her Mistral and all the others, and made it small.
The soldiers pushed her forward. The ramp was laid with a deep red carpet. Under her bare feet it was thick and soft and warm. It caressed her skin. Like a pool of warm fresh blood. Like Brightstar's blood. The thought startled her. And then she was inside the egg and the black-cloaks had hold of her again and there was a man staring at her, fat and black-skinned with a jovial sort of face but also a sharpness to him. She forced herself to look at that face and nothing else: not at his brilliant blue silk robe with its streaming patterns of emerald and silver and crimson and gold, not at the cascading braids of his hair which spread across the floor around his throne of yet more gold still, with its arms carved in the shape of ships and its back sculpted to look like a sail, not at the white and silver and crimson feathered cloak that wrapped him nor the carved symbols that lined the golden walls, nor through the too-perfect glass of the windows nor the tiny door behind him that led to the front of the egg, hanging ajar. No, she looked at him. She met his eye and stood erect and let her mouth fall imperceptibly open. She cocked her head and imagined how it would be if he'd been her treacherous lover Jehal.
Not a flicker.
‘I am Baros Tsen,’ he said. And they talked, and as they did, she made sure to draw his gaze with her hands to her breasts, to her hips, to all the parts of her that every man she'd ever met stared at with their blunt hungry eyes. Yet not a flicker. It was strange. Confusing. Unexpectedly disarming.
‘You don't desire me at all, do you?’ She couldn't help herself.
‘Not at all.’ He waved her away; and when she went it was with a lightness to her step that she couldn't explain until the black-cloaked soldiers waiting outside seized her. Their eyes roamed freely, stealing devouring looks that perhaps they imagined she didn't see. She smiled at them. When she was a queen again, those were the eyes she would have gouged out first. They shoved and pulled her back down to her cabin. Brightstar's body was gone but her blood still stained the wooden floor. Myst and Onyx cowered and kowtowed as the black-cloaks chained her wrist once more and left, locking the door behind them. None of them spoke. Zafir put a hand on each of them and made a silent promise. It will not happen again.
Silent Onyx offered her a piece of Xizic. The taste was strong and made her gag at first but she chewed at it anyway, torn between disgust and curiosity while her slaves undressed her and bathed her and dressed her again, and as she did the world seemed to take on a new edge of colour. Sounds became crisper and a delicious warmth spread inside her. She almost forgot where she was. As they brushed her hair and oiled her skin she closed her eyes and couldn't help but see Jehal. The silks they put her in were tantalising against her skin. Jehal at his best with his fingers and his lips. With the olisbos he'd brought to her that last time they'd been alone. She could have lost herself in those thoughts but before they could grow into something more, the door of her cabin burst open once more and the black-cloaks were back, pulling her to the floor. They took the silver chain from her wrist and bound her with another, one that tied her hand to her ankle so she could barely walk, and when they were done they hauled her up and pushed and shoved her back to the deck. The golden egg was gone, a bronze one in its place; and this time she stopped and looked up at the glass disc in the sky, almost as long as the ship, and tried to make sense of it. It spun slowly around a lattice of silvery metal and more glass. Inside was another glass disc, spinning faster, perpendicular to the first, and then another and another and another, and then inside that a sphere and another disc, the last one turning so fast that its spokes were a blur. It reminded her of an object that her alchemist Vioros had once had, all concentric metal rings at strange angles to one another. An orrery, was that what he'd called it? Except his had been the size of a dinner plate while this dwarfed even a dragon.
But it doesn't breathe fire and it's made of glass. She tried to imagine what would happen if a dragon came upon something like this. It helped with the breathless wonder that threatened to overwhelm her. ‘What is this thing?’
The soldiers hanging on her arms forced her forward. One of them said something like ‘Glasship,’ although through his accent she couldn't be sure. Then he said something else, guttural, and they both laughed. She didn't understand the words but she caught the meaning clearly enough: ignorant savage. She looked at the two of them, one and then the other so she could be sure to remember their faces. First their eyes and then their tongues, and then they would see how truly amusing a dragon-queen could be.
‘I saw them fly,’ she said with a smile. ‘They are slow and clumsy.’
The soldiers spat their disgust at her feet and pushed her inside the egg, all bare metal and empty except for the men already waiting there and a single polished handrail of dark wood running around the interior below the line of the windows. The floor felt warm. She might have moved to the windows to look outside, to see how this flying thing felt beside the sensation of sitting on the back of a dragon with a hurricane howling through her hair, but her eyes wouldn't let go of one of the men already inside the egg. He was a slave like her, the only one in the ship who wasn't Taiytakei, and he was old but it still took a second for the rest of her to realise how she knew him.