On the morning of the fourth day the clouds thinned and faded away. They flew over dry brown land wrinkled and scarred by rivers, crossed a line of hills and drifted towards a scorched and yellow desert. The glasship sank. Tsen went to stand by one of the windows at the front above the little door leading to the place where the pilot golem was. In the warmth Zafir shivered when he showed her. The closest a Taiytakei could come to being a dragon-rider and they replaced their pilots with automata. Then he beckoned her to stand beside him and pointed. To share his window they had to stand close, so close that now and then they touched.
Sitting on the desert ahead was a huge rock. ‘My eyrie,’ he said.
No. Not sitting on the desert but floating over it, and on its back was a round fortress of thick sloping walls and low squat towers and. . other things whose nature she couldn't make out from so far away. It reminded her a little of Evenspire with its sloping walls meant to stand up to dragons. She saw it and laughed. It floats in the air so has no tunnels deep under the ground and so there's nowhere to hide when the dragons come. ‘Whoever is master of that eyrie had better make victory a habit,’ she murmured.
Maybe Tsen misunderstood her. He pulled away, faced her, reached out a hand and touched her brow with two warm fingers. ‘Yes,’ he said. He went back to his chair but Zafir stayed, watching until the floating eyrie was beneath them and she couldn't see it any more. She'd seen the one thing that mattered by now. The golden war-dragon perched on one wall. A monster. Her monster. Her heart skipped a beat. She knew him at once. Diamond Eye, for the deathly pale blue of his eyes like glacier ice.
The glasship slid slower and lower through the air and finally came to a halt on the sloping wall. Through the windows Zafir took in Tsen's eyrie. The space was huge, bigger than any walled circus she'd ever seen, bigger than the Speaker's Yard in the Adamantine Palace. Bigger even than the spaces inside the vast walls of Evenspire and yet almost empty. A few huts in the middle, a lot of crude tents around them, lines of sails strung up on ropes, partitioning the yard like low walls, flapping in the wind. In one area she saw hatchlings chained to the stone. She tried to count them. A dozen perhaps, give or take.
The back of the gondola split apart and the ramp of gold and glass lowered. Tsen made a little gesture and Zafir stepped outside, but the t'varr made no move to follow her. On top of the walls were squat towers, little more than a few stone pillars with a roof on top; along and below the walls were dozens of long blunt-ended tubes made of thick iron. Each was mounted on a mesh of metal wheels built to turn quickly. They were nothing like the scorpions defending the Adamantine Palace: the tubes pointed up rather than out and there was no dragon-scale shield to protect the firer. Strange.
At last she let herself look at the dragon, like a treat saved for the end, and all else was forgotten. Diamond Eye. A war-dragon from her own eyrie, massive, mature but still in his prime. A real monster, almost eighty strides across the wing and thirty tall when he lifted his head, scales of gold and gleaming crimson but also silver and greens and blues across his belly, a tail that could bring down castle walls with a single swipe and the strength and the power to lift a Taiytakei ship clean out of the water and crush it to firewood. That was a dragon, and this was what it meant to be a dragon-queen.
A tightness crossed her face. A flash of sadness, quickly twisted to an anger she couldn't hide. Her dragon, ridden by riders she'd trusted with her life, and the Great Flame knew there'd been few enough of those by the end. Dead now and gone for ever. She stared at Diamond Eye and the sadness flared again. They'd served her to the end. Even in their dying, they'd served. No other riders left but her and so Shrin Chrias Kwen was denied his hanging and she was alive and here and given, once more, a dragon to fly. And we will, my beautiful deathbringer. We will. We'll show this world what we can be, both of us. The anger shifted to a fierce glee. The hunger she'd felt before Evenspire. There will be a reckoning. One day we will burn them all. And as she thought it, the dragon lifted its head and turned towards her, and she could almost feel it noticing her and seeing her for the first time and knowing who she truly was. As it should be. For I sat astride you many times, my deathbringer. I felt your wings beat at my command and you heard my thoughts and my will. You're mine and we will be one again.
As if he heard her, Diamond Eye spread his wings and lifted his head and snorted a column of fire into the sky. The soldiers around her flinched and she laughed. You know nothing. You all call me slave but you know nothing.
Tsen came out of the egg at last, the Elemental Man beside him, and she smiled some more and nodded to herself. He'd been there all the time then, as the alchemist had warned he might be. Loitering, so there had been a guard, and Tsen hadn't been quite as much at her mercy as he'd wanted her to think. He'd tricked and lured her and lulled her and she had the vague sense that a game had been played between them these last few days, one she didn't quite understand and had comprehensively lost. But the dragon filled her head now. Tsen could wait.
He looked serene, untroubled as he stared at the monster on the walls. ‘Well, yes,’ he said after a bit to the Elemental Man beside him. ‘You said it was big but I suppose it's one of those things you need to see for yourself to really understand what big actually means. My, my. What a difference it would have made had we brought this one to Khalishtor.’ He looked at Zafir. ‘And you will fly this creature for me.’ And she wasn't sure whether it was a question or simply a statement of what would be.
Parts of a harness still hung around Diamond Eye's back. ‘Yes,’ she breathed and had to fight back the urge to go to the dragon right now, to look for the mounting ladder and climb straight up onto its back, even in this useless slave-silk tunic they made her wear. Seeing the dragon now, the longing was a physical pain. ‘And so will you,’ she said.
Tsen laughed and his belly shook under his peacock robes. ‘No, slave, I will not.’
‘Oh, you will.’ She smiled at him. ‘How could you resist?’
He was still laughing. ‘It will be very easy.’ He walked away along the top of the walls and then down steep steps into the dragon yard. Zafir watched him go until he vanished through a hole in the base of the walls. She was for a moment alone. For the first time in days.
The dragon. Still looking at her. Calling her. Come, rider, for I yearn to soar and do you not feel the same? And she did, but the thoughts must have been her own because dragons didn't talk, not when they were dulled, and if the alchemist's potions had somehow failed wouldn't the eyrie be a smoking ruin?
But still. . Yes, Diamond Eye. We'll fly soon. A promise to herself. She started along the wall and down the steps, looking for Bellepheros and his potions.
43
Shrin Chrias Kwen sent the fleet on its way home from Khalishtor, gathering as many soldiers as he could before it left. They were poor troops — slaves mostly, ill trained with little armour and old weapons that would break as likely as damage anything else — but they were the best he could get in a few days. In Xican he might find more.
Once the fleet's orders had been given, he took his own glasship and followed, taking the direct route over the land. He crossed the gleaming aqueduct of Shevana-Daro which ran like an arrow of light from the city to the edge of the mountains. Then over the sea past the Zinzarran island of Bal Ithara with its sheep and its rain and its bloody-minded farmers who eked what living they could from a land that hated them, and from there on to the Grey Isle and the City of Stone. Home.