So he made his eyrie, built to his own design, potions brewed to order. Quai'Shu never came to it, T'Varr Tsen was rarely there, the Watcher merely watched, and beneath their different coloured robes and their different coloured skins, he found that Chay-Liang was as much an alchemist as he was. He ran his eyrie as he saw fit and did as he wished. At his fingers he had knowledge and sorceries and devices he had never dreamed could exist. For a man who had once been master of the Order of the Scales, it was close to perfect. Without the dragons themselves, he could almost forget that he was no longer free.
But he never did forget. Never quite lost sight of the promise he'd made to Tuuran, that one day he'd take them both home. Just kept putting off the thought, as Chay-Liang danced yet another miracle before him and seduced him with ideas for just another few days. Again and again and again. And maybe he would have forgotten, but he always remembered the look of betrayal in Tuuran's eyes when the Adamantine Man finally left him and returned to the sea. You'll get comfortable here, he'd said, and it was true and he had. And when he was done, when it was all made and finished and he still hadn't made his stand and gone home after all, Bellepheros looked at what he'd built, at the perfect waiting machine, and held his head in his hands, for he knew he had done a terrible thing.
Skyrie
7
A long time ago and a good many years before the Adamantine Palace would burn, the Watcher stood at the top of Mount Solence in the centre of a circle. The sky above was a clear and brilliant blue. The sun glinted off the top of the perpetual cloud that shrouded the slopes below the summit. The circle around his feet was perhaps a hundred feet across and made of solid silver. Every inch of it was carved with the story of the world, from its creation from nothing by the four first gods until the moment the Watcher had taken his place there. Eight columns pierced the silver around him, each one of them ten paces tall, one for each element. Stone and metal, air and water, fire and ice, light and darkness, each element of each pair opposed to the other. The Watcher stood between them in the centre, quiet and serene, wholly certain of himself. He felt seven of the eight pillars as though they were his brothers. The ever-burning flame on top of the bronze pillar of fire, the tiny whirlwind around the white glass pillar of air, the carved diamond and obsidian in the pillars of ice and stone. He had mastered all of them bar the impenetrable one, the impossible metal that no Elemental Man had ever tamed. He had the power of turning himself into any one of them and moving within its flow. He had a name, given by the Celestial Septtych, the Elemental Masters. Names were nothing but masks, yet it made him proud nonetheless.
Above the sea of cloud gnarled fruit trees dotted the gentle slopes of the mountaintop, filling it with the delicate colours and scents of their bright pink blossoms. A lone figure approached, walking slowly along the winding path and the steps, leaning heavily on a staff after the long climb to the summit.
Quai'Shu. A sea lord.
The Watcher didn't move. The path up the mountain was easy enough and he was a patient man. Learning to fuse with the elements took time. For the most part an Elemental Man worked alone but today he stood beside another: the Picker. The Picker would be a killer and they'd both known that for many years. Elemental Men were cut from clean cloth, forged to kill the emperors, sorcerers, warlords and kings of other worlds. Such people often had magics and protections to be teased away before a sure blow could be struck, things generally best done with a slow and deliberate care, in need of eyes as well as knives. If the Picker was the knife, the Watcher would be his eyes. So the Septtych had told them it would be, and so he waited as this Quai'Shu hauled himself closer.
‘He has come to buy you,’ murmured the columns.
No one bought an Elemental Man. They paid for a service. Sometimes a service that would take years or even decades but it was always, eventually, discharged. To buy an Elemental Man, to own one, flesh and blood forever until death, that was unthinkable. The price would be beyond imagination.
‘Yes,’ sighed the air. ‘Both of you.’
A whispering breeze brought him the sound of distant leaves fluttering against one another and a fresh waft of scent from peach groves not far away. He smelled Quai'Shu too. He remembered that clearly, long afterwards. Oils and scents and sweat, smells of riches and hard work. He waited, still as stone, until the old man reached the circle and looked him up and down. Then he bowed and the Picker bowed too. The first of many to their new master. ‘I am yours to command,’ they said as one.
‘Yes.’ Quai'Shu leaned against the twisted rusted iron that was the elemental column of metal and took a moment to catch his breath. ‘You are. And you'd better not fail me like the last one.’
Those first words were enough to make the Watcher blink. Elemental Men didn't fail. Lesser mages, a Windbinder perhaps, or a Stoneshaper. But a true Elemental Man? Fail? No.
‘Yes. Failed. So you are both mine and I ask that you do better.’
Another movement in the air brought up the smell of the blossoms from further down the slope where they had bloomed a few days earlier. The trees at the very top of the mountain were always the last. The Watcher took a deep breath, tasting the air. He could ride that breeze if he wanted to. Turn himself into the wind and fly wherever it would carry him. Or he could sink into the stone, or become light and colours, or nothing but empty shadow in the dark. Anything but metal. And so no, an Elemental Man did not fail, not ever.
‘The Diamond Isles.’ The Picker spoke softly, so quietly that only the Watcher would hear. His voice had a keenness. The sorcerers of the Diamond Isles were a myth. No one had seen them for a thousand years. They'd died out long ago, but that was one way an Elemental man might fail, if the task was impossible because the victim simply didn't exist; although only a fool would try and wave such trickery at the Septtych.
And yet it was true, and to the Diamond Isles they went. A year passed from that day on the silver circle at the peak of Mount Solence and the Watcher stood on a gleaming beach, with the ship that had carried him there rocking at anchor out to sea. A boat sliced through the calm waters in long powerful strokes. Bright sun in a clear blue sky glinted off the rippling waves and sweat glistened on the tanned skins of the slaves at the oars. Another boat lay already beached on a small curve of gleaming white sand squeezed between two jagged fingers of black rock. Away from the sea the sand was quickly overwhelmed by a jungle of vivid green ferns and trees laced with bright red bloodflowers high up in their branches, thick and impenetrable, fighting and tumbling on top of each other for the precious sunlight. Distant shrieks and hoots echoed within. Now and then the Watcher saw flashes of brilliant yellow and blue and silver. Birds flitting among the branches.
He looked past the jungle up to the sapling mountains whose sheer sides rose from the verdant heart of the island. Three mountains, not great or grand or even particularly tall, but steep and sheer and sharp and each one topped by a tower. The towers seemed small from this distance but their glitter was dazzling. They were carved of solid diamond, or so it was said. The Picker, at least in part, had been right.
In the year that his life had belonged to Quai'Shu, the Watcher had come to learn his master's ways. Quai'Shu was a Taiytakei sea lord in every sense, measured yet bold. He'd sailed many worlds and there were few he hadn't seen with his own eyes. He'd taken slaves from the Small Kingdoms and from the coast of faraway Aria. Three times he'd taken a flotilla of ships to the Dominion of the Sun King and back. He'd plundered the ruins of Qeled. He'd seen men die and ships sink, beheld shapeshifters, monsters and ghosts. He'd watched other sea lords rise from nothing and fall into calamity, their fleets and families with them, and yet others rise in their place. Much that the Watcher had learned from the Septtych, Quai'Shu had seen for himself. Such experience deserved respect.