‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because I've been a slave to the Taiytakei for years and it never does.’
Bellepheros read a little from the journals, trying to make sense of them, but his head kept lolling and he soon gave up. He slept soundly, finally untroubled by any thoughts of how far above the ground they were. The bed was a soft embrace, warm and gentle. Tuuran slept on the floor, curled up in a pile of blankets. If he snored, Bellepheros didn't notice.
The slaves were waiting for him again when he woke. They fed and dressed him, this time in feather robes patterned in silken flames that made him cringe and beg for something else, and when it turned out there was nothing else, made him wish he'd answered the enchantress when she'd asked. He was quite sure this was her way of getting back at him for not paying proper attention. Her little joke.
When he was ready they ushered him to the door. Two Taiytakei knights in their glass and gold armour waited outside. They led him through a short maze of passages to a door of solid gold carved with entwined bolts of lightning. At the touch of their black rods it opened. They gently ushered him inside but didn't follow. The door closed behind him. He was in a room with no windows, lit by glowing glass spheres that reminded him of his own alchemical lamps. It wasn't a big room — pleasingly small in fact — but it was made entirely of gold. Every inch was carved with fractal patterns that twisted and writhed and moved under his eyes whenever he tried to make out what they were. Three Taiytakei faced him across a table that was a single mirror-polished slab of lapis-blue. The old man with the white hair that Bellepheros had seen on the ship sat in the middle, quietly calm and sure of everything around him. Chay-Liang, the enchantress, stood to one side, stiff and ill at ease. On the other side a slender man in black stood as still as a statue. His skin and his clothes were both so dark that Bellepheros couldn't see where one started and the other ended. He could have been a living shadow, but the edging to his robe gave him away. Strands of red, blue and white, entwined together. The Picker had worn those robes.
‘You're an Elemental Man,’ Bellepheros said.
The black-robe didn't answer. ‘The Watcher's going to keep you safe from the enemies of our city,’ Chay-Liang said. ‘And believe me, slave, we have quite enough.’
The old Taiytakei stared at Bellepheros. ‘Keeper of the Dragons, I am Quai'Shu, sea lord of Xican and your absolute master. I said you would build me an eyrie.’
Bellepheros didn't look away. He didn't bow this time either. ‘And I said you would wish that I hadn't.’
‘You will do this. You will be given whatever you require. I will send you to my t'varr, Baros Tsen. You may ask him for whatever you need. He is a perfect t'varr: there is nothing he cannot find, nothing he cannot arrange. Whatever you wish for, he will provide. If you need artefacts of glass, Chay-Liang will make them. They will do whatever you require. The Watcher will be your guardian. Where should such a thing be built?’
‘In the realms that are my home,’ said Bellepheros with quiet calm, ‘where there are many other alchemists to ensure your dragons remain tame.’
The sea lord's face didn't flicker. ‘There are ways to bring a man to heel, Keeper of the Dragons, without breaking him. Where?’
‘Far away from any cities. Far away from people. As far away as you can.’
‘Why?’
Why? You have to ask why? Bellepheros gaped. ‘Because they are dragons, Sea Lord Quai'Shu of Xican! Because they are fifty paces from tip to tip of wing and from nose to tip of tail. Because of what will happen if any one of them breaks free of the potions you will ask me to make — if I make them at all. Because I am your one and only alchemist and you will not have another, and if anything happens to me then your cities will burn. Because they are a plague to ruin worlds. But I see you for what you are — you're like a dragon-king, believing yourself master of everything around you. You will never believe such a catastrophe could happen, for surely your mere existence prevents it. I hope you may think otherwise when you meet a full-grown dragon eye to eye, but I cannot show you how that feels here in this room. So for now let us say because of the disease that newly hatched dragons bring with them. It will run like fire through your people should it ever escape.’
Quai'Shu barely even blinked. It was as if not a single word had reached him. ‘Far away from others. The desert, then.’
‘Deserts are suitable. The heat makes the dragons a little sluggish.’ Outwatch was the biggest eyrie in the dragon realms and that was in a desert. ‘An eyrie should be hard to reach and hard to enter, because whatever you may believe, every eyrie contains the greatest weapon you will ever know.’ He leaned a little forward and spoke through clenched teeth. ‘People may try to steal it.’
The sea lord nodded and sent him away and it was the last time that Bellepheros would see Sea Lord Quai'Shu as the Taiytakei knew him, as the captain of a city and a fleet of ships, as a conqueror of worlds. Bellepheros had said the desert, and so that was where the Taiytakei took him and gave him a castle that floated in the air. He made peace with himself then. Accepted his slavery and bowed to its inevitability, for now at least. The Taiytakei had no dragons yet, that was true, but what they did have beggared his mind. He felt a fool beside Chay-Liang, lowly and ignorant among her glittering spires and golden automata, among the conjured jewels and marvellous creatures and the wonders of a dozen worlds. He told her, slowly and carefully and with patience, exactly what they would need to build a dragon eyrie that would work and exactly what they would need to keep a dragon tame. Food. A great deal of it, and so she moved the castle that floated in the air to the desert's edge where great herds of hump-backed horses roamed among dry and sandy grasslands. After that, men and women to tend the dragons. Scales. People who, with a little of his help, would fall in love with the monsters, who would give their lives as they became slowly riddled with the Hatchling Disease and died of it, turned into human statues. So Baros Tsen, the sly fat t'varr, brought him slaves, and Bellepheros brewed the potions that would dull their minds and ready them to fall in love with their monsters.
There were other ways, he said. Better ways, but they took longer and needed children to be raised as Scales from before they could talk, knowing nothing else. At that, Tsen T'Varr brought him children — babies — but Bellepheros sent them away, for they would need teachers first and other things. Men and women to cook and clean, to build and polish and make and repair. They brought him all the slaves he asked for, everything he desired, and he set them to work.
To make his potions he would need dragon blood. Somehow they brought it to him. Above all, he told them, they would need more alchemists.
Then make them, they said. And that was the one thing he couldn't do. He could teach a slave to make a potion. He could teach Chay-Liang to make almost anything. By the end there was almost not a single one of his secrets that he hadn't shared with her. But alchemy lived in the blood, and there was only one place in the world where a true alchemist could be made, an alchemist who could dull a dragon, and the secret of that place was the one secret he kept, for it was deep within the dragon realms, far off in the darkest caves of the Worldspine, and without that secret there was only one person in their world who could make the potions they wanted and that person was him, and without more alchemists they would all be hostages together when they finally found a dragon. They would see the horror that a dragon could bring and he would show this Quai'Shu why his desire was such terrible folly.