The voices had stayed with him since that day on the shore of the Diamond Isles. He could never quite hear them, never quite understand what they were trying to say. He'd been a gift. Quai'Shu had given him to the sorcerers with their diamond towers. The Watcher had never forgotten that and nor had they. Become as one. He was their servant now. But servant in what? To what end?
He sat on the mountaintop in the biting cold air which cut like little knives and held his head in his hands until the voices found a calm. Passions clouded the mind and a clouded mind could not become the wind, the earth, the ice, the light, the water, the fire or the dark. Among his own kind a few whispered that the secret of the last element, of metal, was to be bursting with joy or love or hate or fury, but no Elemental Man had ever mastered metal and so whispers was all they ever were.
The voice of the moon sorcerers never stopped. The Watcher changed it in his head to make it a more soothing thing. His other master was Quai'Shu, whom the dragons had made mad. Men were plotting to kill him and the Watcher would stop them. That, at least, was a simple enough thing to see.
Become as one. He had no idea what that was supposed to mean. What become as one? Was he supposed to stop it or make it happen? They'd told him just enough to pull at the loose threads of the tapestry of something when they could simply have shown him the tapestry in its whole, the picture it made, and told him what to do. So why hadn't they done that?
He drew out his knives one by one, the blades of each so thin that light passed through them, leaving them all but invisible. Bladeless knives. Enchanter-made, sharp as broken glass and hard as diamonds. He cleaned them, cleaned away every speck of dust until he could barely see they were there, and as he did, a stillness settled over him like a weighted net. They'd given him a purpose and a mission, and in that purpose they'd given him a reason for what they'd done. And now he saw why: it was to stop him from looking for another one, purely and simply that. Dragons on Takei'Tarr. Their intervention after the crossing — leading away the hatching dragons and dumping them in Baros Tsen T'Varr’s eyrie — was almost unseemly in its blatant purpose. Tsen and the other Taiytakei were too busy with their own problems to notice but a hsian would see at once. Quai'Shu’s hsian. He could start there. The hsian was due a reminder of whom he served but perhaps he could serve just a little more. It would be. . interesting. For both of them. The Watcher would start with why he, alone among the hsians, had decided to bring dragons to Takei'Tarr because of the Midsummer Star and how, exactly, he had made that choice.
He wrapped his knives in their silks and stood up, breathing in the mountain air. Before that he had one other thing to attend to. The kwen. The kwen was in Xican, and that was as good a place as any to do what Tsen and Quai'Shu had asked. The city of the sea lord's first grandchild, wilful raven-haired Elesxian. Baros Tsen T'Varr should probably marry her. It would give both of them what they wanted but the simple fact was that Tsen wasn't ever going to marry anyone. No one would ever marry him. It would be a waste of everyone's time.
He blinked, changed to a breath of wind, and the mountaintop became still. A moment later it was a distant shape on the horizon. Another moment and it was gone and he was gusting across mountains and forests and islands and seas to Xican, to the city of stone carved out of the iron-grey and obsidian-black of the Grey Isle where nothing grew. Not a single thing lived there if it didn't live in the city; in fact most of the island wasn't even an island but more a collection of boulders, large and small, smashed together, which still rolled and shifted from day to day. The enchanters had done something to the city itself to keep the stones around it still, the ones from which it was carved. Except for the plateau at the centre, the rest of the island changed constantly. Slowly, yes, but never the same. For a long time it hadn't been much more than a staging post, a first and last place for the great Taiytakei fleets of the sea lords to stop and rest before they crossed the storm-dark to the other realms. That was how it had started.
The Watcher appeared on a pinnacle overlooking the hollowed stone spires of the city. The weather out here on the far edge of the island was always the same, always bright and sunny and clear and never a drop of rain, even when a deluge of storms hammered at the plateau only a dozen miles to the east. On the horizon, twenty miles away more or less, sat the grey veil edge of the storm-dark. When it was as close as it was today, the Watcher liked to sit and look at it because Xican was the only place in the whole of Takei'Tarr where the storm-dark now and then came close enough to the shore to be seen from land. Through that veil lay other worlds, the dragon realms, the Diamond Isles, Qeled, Aria, all the rest, and it was a veil that even an Elemental Man couldn't pierce. Not like a wall of silver or glass or gold, which became like a solid thing, hard and impenetrable; no, the veil of the storm-dark was soft like a curtain, always pushing him aside so that no matter how carefully he trod, he always found himself back where he began. It moved too. It drifted back and forth. Some days it was within sight of the Grey Isle, but on others it was far out to sea, hundreds of miles into the ocean perhaps, days of sailing. Most often it was out of sight, but there were some who said that the clouds of the storm-dark had once come closer still, that they'd touched the Grey Isle itself, and that was why it was as it was. To the Watcher the storm-dark was a marvel, a miracle and a wonder left over from the Splintering. For ships and more mundane men it was simply a place of horror and death from which nothing returned. For the Taiytakei that was a much easier thing to understand.