‘I thought you rode great beasts through the skies where you come from.’
‘If you mean the dragons then you're thinking of dragon-riders. Alchemists rarely. Sometimes we sit on their backs, but it's a rider who commands them and we have saddles and harnesses that hold us fast. We certainly do not float in the air with no apparent means of support.’ He shuddered. The last few minutes were a horror he'd probably never forget.
The enchantress laughed. ‘I'll have your rooms changed then if it's a cave you want. I'll send new clothes to you. Silk?’
‘Yes, yes!’ The more they walked across the marble, the further the far wall seemed to be. He felt himself shrinking.
‘Colours?’
‘Any!’ Anything to get away from this unbearable empty openness!
‘Colours matter a great deal here, Bellepheros. You'll be the keeper of our lord's dragons. What colour are dragons?’
It made him laugh. What colour are dragons? He kept forgetting, amid his misery, how little the Taiytakei knew of his home. ‘All manner of colours. They don't care.’
‘Then I will choose.’ She sighed as they reached the far wall at last, then stopped beside it and took the black wand from her belt and tapped it to the glass. A clear slab descended from above, jutting from the gold-tinged wall. Bellepheros forced himself to look up. High above his head hung a great golden egg, suspended by chains from the glass discs in the sky. There was no telling how big the egg might be but the discs beyond filled his sight. There was empty sky between them and the open top of this tower. A tiny black hole beckoned from the bottom of the egg. That was where they were going, was it? His head started to spin. He looked away. Took a deep breath. His heart was pounding again and they hadn't even started.
The enchantress put a hand on his arm. ‘Close your eyes.’
‘Yes. And I'd like to sit down too.’
Tuuran sat beside him, legs dangling over the edge. The Adamantine Man was staring at everything like an apprentice on his first visit to the caves under the Purple Spur, or like Speaker Hyram when Bellepheros had taken him there and finally shown him the truth about dragons. Or perhaps, more apt, like a virgin in his first brothel.
‘Does height not trouble you?’ Bellepheros asked him bitterly.
‘Height? I'm a sail-slave.’ Tuuran chuckled. ‘A sail-slave who's afraid of heights doesn't last very long. If the floor was pitching and heaving beneath us, the wind howling and the rain flaying the skin off my face, I'd feel quite at home. Height? No. But glorious as these sights may be, Lord Alchemist, I don't like not seeing what holds me from falling. It reeks of witchery.’
Witchery? What did that even mean? But then the glass began to rise and Bellepheros stayed very still, face screwed up tight and tense as a drumskin. He cried out in fear when they emerged from the top of the tower and the sudden wind snatched at him and blew him sideways; and then, when Tuuran held him tight, wept at his own frailty, shaking helplessly. When the wind died and the glass stopped, he stayed very still, curled up tight, arms wrapped around his head. He dimly heard the Taiytakei soldiers move away but mercifully they left him alone. He sat still until the shaking stopped. It felt like a long time. Then he let out a great sigh and warily opened his eyes. He gasped and almost sobbed with relief. The glass had lifted them into a hall panelled in bronze and wood, with the sky decently pushed aside by the pleasant familiarity of walls and a floor and a roof over his head. He took a few deep breaths, carefully ignoring the bright hole in the floor though which they'd arrived. The illusion helped. Unfortunately his mind knew all too well that an illusion was what it was. It kept reminding him. Kept him thinking about the huge emptiness that lay not far through every wall and floor. Kept him quivering inside, sapping his strength and poisoning every thought.
The enchantress was looking at him, eyes agleam with curiosity. ‘More to your liking?’ He nodded. She clapped her hands. Slaves, docile men and women with downcast eyes, emerged from their alcoves. Chay-Liang beckoned to them and then to him. ‘See to our guest.’ She smiled and patted him on the arm. ‘They'll look after you. Anything you want, just ask.’ And he felt too ill and too scared to remind her that all he wanted was to go home; and just now he wasn't even sure that he wanted that, because that would mean more floating through the terror of the empty open air on flimsy sheets of glass.
The enchantress and the Taiytakei soldiers led, and when the slaves beckoned him and Tuuran to follow, he did. They took him away to rooms that were spacious and comfortable and took their leave with a few vague words that he didn't really hear. Inside, rugs lay across the floor in patterns of rich reds and pale blues, the knots thick and deep under his feet and almost as soft as fur. Tapestries hung from every wall, mostly desert scenes in orange and gold. One was nothing more than a vast expanse of empty sand with a single mighty tower that rose into a swirling maelstrom of black cloud. It caught his eye because in the cloud tiny slivers of silver and purple gave the impression of lightning.
The bed was made of solid gold with a mattress of the softest down and silk sheets that slid over his skin like liquid. A dragon-king could have guested here and not been disappointed. After his old squitty stone cells in the Palace of Alchemy he wasn't sure what to do with rooms like these, but apparently that didn't matter because he had a half-dozen slaves to show him. They prepared a bath, and while he soaked in the water and tried not to think about the open sky just outside, they brought a small pile of books for his table. A History of the Mar-Li Seafaring Republic and a collection of journals and diaries. When he was clean they dressed him in a plain white silk tunic, so light it left him feeling naked. They laid out bronze trays of food, simple bread, a dozen different fruits from tiny bright purple berries to something that was a brilliant yellow and as big as his head, and a plate piled with strips of pink salted fish with ten tiny pots for dipping in, each with a different pungent flavour. Bellepheros gingerly tried a bit of most things and then settled for largely just eating the bread.
Tuuran watched with envy. ‘Is this how it is in the Palace of Alchemy?’ he asked.
‘We put on our own clothes and the food is distinctly inferior.’ Bellepheros frowned and then laughed at his own foolishness. Here he was, a slave, yet treated far better than he'd ever been in Prince Jehal's eyrie at Clifftop when he'd been searching for a murderer, or even in the Veid Palace afterwards when he'd had to admit to not finding one. And that sort of thought was no good. He had no place even thinking it.
Tuuran still watched him closely, lips pursed. He didn't say anything, though, not until Bellepheros was done and had sent the slaves away. They would have stayed and done more if he hadn't. Anything you want, just ask. The Adamantine Man watched them go. He wrinkled his nose and sniffed. ‘You'll get comfortable here, Lord Grand Alchemist. Careful with that.’
Bellepheros shook his head, trying to throw the other thoughts aside. ‘In the Palace of Alchemy we're masters of our own destiny. Here I am not. They can never hide that.’ Although saying the words made him think about how true that really was, because the truth was that they weren't and never had been. They were servants to the speaker, to the nine realms and their kings and queens, but far more than that, wherever they went, they were slaves to the dragons.
‘You will,’ said Tuuran again. ‘I would.’ His voice was quiet. Subdued. Bellepheros swept his arm across the room, at the food, the bath, the bed, the clothes, trying to dispel the sudden awkwardness.
‘Help yourself. Enjoy it while it's here.’
Tuuran glanced at the door. With a wistful sigh he sat down and picked at the food but he didn't seem to be hungry. Which wasn't like the Tuuran Bellepheros had come to know on the voyage, but perhaps that was down to the strangeness of their surroundings. ‘Better than ship rations, that's for sure. It won't last.’