The light of the setting sun streamed through the wall behind them. To Zafir it seemed as though everything was lit by distant flames. The disc rose high and then slid deftly sideways and stopped at a stone balcony overlooking the hall below. There was a circle of them up here and more above as the inner vault of the tower narrowed. From each balcony an entrance led to a cluster of glass-walled rooms. Zafir saw blurred shadows moving in some of them. People. Others had hangings blocking out the light, hiding whatever was inside. There was no other way up or down except by disc. No stairs.
Two of the black-cloaks led her onto the balcony and the glass disc drifted away, across the void to another. She watched as it stopped again and the other black-cloaks helped the alchemist to his feet and walked him away. When she turned back, Myst and Onyx were standing in front of her. They fell to their knees and pressed their heads to the floor. The black-cloaks didn't like that. One of them grabbed Myst by the hair and pulled her to her feet again. ‘She's a slave like you. Get up!’ They gave Zafir a shove as if to emphasise her servitude.
Her two broken birds took her to a room off the balcony. The soldiers didn't follow but she could see them still out there, slightly blurred through the gold-tinged glass, standing stiffly straight and staring back at her. She looked for a hanging or a curtain or something she could pull across the wall to hide from their gaze but there wasn't anything. The room was bare except for a silk rug that covered the floor, a chest of clothes, a bath full of warm milky water and a scattering of pots and bottles littered around it. Beneath the rug, she saw, the floor was the same glass as the walls.
Myst and Onyx fussed over her. They cut her hair short like their own and wrapped her in plain white silks. She didn't try to stop them even when they washed her and covered her in their sickly perfume. Instead she closed her eyes and imagined herself in the Adamantine Palace, imagined that these were her own maids dressing her to appear as the speaker of the nine realms once more. When they were done, they took her out to the balcony and waited until another glass disc rose to take them down to the cavernous heart of the tower once more. At the bottom, Bellepheros was already there. He had a hatchling beside him, fresh from its egg but still a monster. It squatted still and quiet, its eyes following every movement around it with a venomous hunger and a yearning hate. All the Taiytakei who passed by, who'd never seen such a creature, couldn't help but stop transfixed and tremble and then scurry away. Watching them made her smile. Made her sure in her heart that she was right about them, how they'd crumble when she squeezed. It gave her strength.
There were slaves beside the dragon, three of them. Scales with their hollow empty eyes. A part of her yearned to go to the dragon and touch it, to meet its eyes and stare into them and let it know that she was there, that one day, when it grew, she would be its mistress and its rider, but she kept away. The hatchling was too young and small to be properly clean and the slaves surely had the Hatchling Disease. It didn't show — the first patches of rough white skin on their knuckles wouldn't be visible for weeks — but they were Scales and so they had it, whether it showed or not. She sidled up to the alchemist instead, although he probably had it too. Most alchemists did.
‘Remember who we are,’ he whispered when they were close enough not to be overheard. ‘Remember, Holiness. They need us both.’
She didn't reply. Bellepheros knew the secrets that would keep these stolen dragons in check but what use did they have for her? For a moment a quiver of doubt crept out. She took it in her hand and clenched her fist around it and put it back into the box where she kept all her others. I am a dragon-queen. They cannot touch me.
Shrin Chrias Kwen came strutting up, wrapped in his most brilliant feathers and surrounded by more black-cloaks, and she wondered briefly how easy it would be to get close enough to stab him in the neck and watch him bleed. But today she didn't have a knife and so she pretended not to see him, flicking lidded glances through her lashes now and then.
Another floating glass sled drifted across the floor, much bigger than the first. The black-cloaks poked and prodded her and Bellepheros and the Scales and the hatchling onto it. She sat at the edge beside Bellepheros, as far away from the hatchling and its disease as she could be, smiling at the black-cloaks who refused to stand anywhere close until Shrin Chrias Kwen planted himself in front of the hatchling's face with his lightning wand ready in his hand. That made her smile even more — the thought of the kwen's skin slowly turning hard as stone until he suffocated because he couldn't breathe. Delicious. .
The sled rose, wafting through the space inside the tower to its centre and then rising towards its peak and another large open glass-walled space where the lords of this palace doubtless held their courts amid their gold-drenched glory. Zafir stared down past her dangling feet. Sitting over a void was strange, a very different thing from sitting on the back of a dragon. She dredged out another memory: standing on a cliff overlooking the top of the Diamond Cascade, watching as it washed over the edge of the Purple Spur and fell into mist above the City of Dragons. A few days before they'd made her speaker, with Sirion, old Hyram's cousin, beside her.
‘Am I beautiful?’
‘Of course.’ He tried to step away, but as he did she caught his hand and pressed it against her breast.
‘Am I desirable?’
‘I am not to be had, harlot.’ He'd pulled away but for an instant he'd hesitated. He'd felt her heart beating strong and fast. He'd been her enemy then, the most dangerous of them all, or so she'd thought, but for a moment she'd still seen the hunger in his eyes. A knife of last resort but always a weapon when she needed it, and she saw that hunger now in Shrin Chrias Kwen, even with her hair cut short and wrapped in these white silks, drab amid the colours of the Taiytakei. Not desire but a cruel lust to break her, fierce and brutal, to hurt her and crush her spirit utterly. A smile twitched at the corner of her lip. It made him weak.
Yet in T'Varr Baros Tsen, where she needed it most, there wasn't even a flicker.
High up, the sled stopped its ascent and drifted to the glass wall that faced the silver sphere at the heart of the Crown. Shrin Chrias Kwen touched a black rod to the gold-glass wall and it flowed away before him, opening into a portal leading onto a bridge of near-invisible glass. The black-cloaks pushed her onto it, wind howling in from the sea and the setting sun. The height made her head spin and her heart race. She strode out, head back, arms stretched wide to embrace the wind. This was more like it.