‘I can hold your hand if you want.’ Crazy Mad laughed and pushed on.
‘Another word out of you, slave, and you can hold my axe with your skull! I'm a sail-slave. I was climbing ropes and masts when you were still hiding up your mother's skirts!’ Looking up. Looking straight ahead. Anywhere, really, as long as it wasn't down. Looking at the dragon, except the dragon had vanished again in among the towers and walls of the palace, and he saw it only in flashes and glimpses.
‘Run, you lazy slave!’ yelled Crazy Mad from the other end. ‘I thought you Adamantine Men weren't afraid of anything!’
He walked faster. Still couldn't look down. Ropes, ladders, masts, rigging, any of those, even in a howling wind and a thrashing storm, they were home. Easy. Even with the alchemist, flying on the glass disc up to the Palace of Leaves. But this? Standing on what looked like nothing at all over an abyss of stone and water. .
Halfway across the bridge a part of the roof had been staved in, nothing left but smashed iron bones. Chunks of glass lay scattered about. Somehow that made it easier. And then more bodies. The dragon. It had burned these so hard that the gold in their armour was smeared where it had melted. At the far side Crazy Mad was on his haunches, crouched beside something. An arm poked out from between pieces of broken stone, a strip of skin as pale as a ghost. Tuuran thought it must be covered in dust but then he saw the tattoos. Sharp shapes writhing through each other across the skin. The tattoos of the grey dead men. Crazy Mad looked up at him and Tuuran had to turn away. ‘You're doing the eyes again.’
‘They're here!’ The hunger in Crazy's voice was a frightful thing, like the insatiable hunger of a dragon. He pulled at the stones, tearing them away from the body underneath. When they got the corpse out, Crazy Mad turned him over. The bodies lying in the open were black and charred for the most part, brittle as charcoal where their armour hadn't shielded them, but the stones must have covered the warlock from the worst of the fire. His belly and face were pale. The tattoos on his arms ran up to his neck. The fragments of robe hanging in tatters around him were grey. No question as to what he was.
‘Is that him?’ Tuuran made himself look. ‘The one you're after?’
‘No.’ Crazy Mad sat there staring. He looked strangely content. ‘But now I know they're here.’
Zafir made Diamond Eye fly between the outer towers and leave them be. Forced him straight for the inner ones, the tallest, and there she let him loose on the first one they passed, tooth and claw and tail, splintering great chunks of gold and glass from its side. Pieces fell into the open yard below among the milling Taiytakei and their slaves and exploded in a hail of deadly spears and knives. Screams echoed beneath her and joy surged inside — from Diamond Eye but also her own.
Clusters of black-powder cannon. She saw them now, around the outer ring, close to each of the three black needles of the enchanters’ monoliths. More lightning too perhaps, although she spotted none of the rings of brilliant light she'd seen around the cannon on the fortress by the sea. She turned Diamond Eye towards them. They were moving, trying to bear on her, but they were uselessly slow, like the cannon that Tsen had shown her on the eyrie. Weapons to fire on glasships, clumsy and worthless against a dragon. Diamond Eye flew to the first and tore the cannon to pieces with his claws, hurling the metal tubes at the black monolith beside them, cracking it. Zafir laughed madly.
‘Burn them!’ she screamed into the wind and urged Diamond Eye on to the next. ‘Burn them!’ There was no lightning here. Lightning didn't work against glasships, and what else could fly so high? ‘Burn them!’ They reached the next cluster of cannon. Fire raged out of the dragon all along the walls, up and over the metal and the stone, and then the wall blew apart beneath them and a mighty hand lifted them up, dragon and all. It tossed them into the air and she felt Diamond Eye convulse with pain, peppered by stones and shards of glass like scorpion bolts. Pain and then more rage and he banked and rolled and dived at the offending ground. Another explosion, smaller than the first. The dragon skimmed the wreckage, smashing the skeleton of iron beneath the glass and pouring flames into the gaping wound. Fire bloomed inside another piece of wall and burst through it like a fist through paper. More glass flew. The Taiytakei were little figures, running and screaming, frantic like ants. Anything to get away. The flying glass tore them to pieces before her eyes. It ripped them open and tore their limbs and sliced off their heads.
A piece hit her in the face, right between the eyes like a stone from a sling.
Tuuran and Crazy Mad passed the first gatehouse, which reeked with the stink of hot stone and burned flesh. There were bodies, dozens of them. Taiytakei soldiers dead at their posts, their armour melted on them by the dragon's fire. Tuuran glanced at them and smiled. Dead slavers! A thing to make hearts sing. People were running the other way now, eyes mad with terror, fleeing from the palace of their unassailable sea lord. Slaves. A few were pale-skinned folk from the dragon lands or perhaps the little kingdoms and the northern edge of the Dominion. Mostly they were darker, Crazy Mad colour from the heart of the Dominion or the southern coast of Aria. There were Taiytakei too, slaves holding their hands high as they fled so that anyone who cared could see the brands they carried. Tuuran ignored them. Slaves were slaves and he had no grief with them, whatever skin they wore.
The second gatehouse was empty. The road beyond was gouged, stone slabs ripped out of the ground in great long slashes. The dragon. Bloody limbs, spiked clubs, shields, batons: all lay strewn about amid streaks of sticky blood. More and more slaves ran past. A few here and there stooped to pick up discarded weapons. At the third a gang of sail-slaves had armed themselves from the fallen Taiytakei. They held up their hands to show their brands and Tuuran held up his own and they nodded to one another. They had a Taiytakei and they were killing him, slowly and with a great deal of relish. If it wasn't for Crazy Mad Tuuran might have stopped to join them.
An explosion shook the ground. Up around the edge of the palace a fireball bloomed and rose into the air. He saw the dragon, saw it lurch and then turn and vanish behind the higher walls. He could smell smoke again, drifting in on the breeze. The stream of slaves fleeing the palace became thicker. There were fights, short and sharp and vicious. Slaves of all colours beating down Taiytakei soldiers, swallowing them with their weight of numbers, tearing off their armour and pulling away their helms and battering them bloody. Lightning spat left and right. It was madness. Chaos. Whether the Taiytakei were attackers or those defending the palace, Tuuran had no idea. The slaves didn't much care.
And there, running straight at him with panic on his face, was one of the men he'd seen on the ship. The tall grey dead man, Crazy Mad's Vallas Kuy, and Crazy had seen him too. The warlock was slow, old and feeble among the young muscle of the escaping slaves. His skin was as pale as the moon and his grey robes fluttered around his feet. Crazy Mad moved into his path; he took off his helm with slow and deliberate care, but the grey dead man was too busy running to look at faces. Vallas the warlock skittered sideways, eyes fixed on the road and his only escape from the dragon, and then at the very last his gaze flicked to Crazy Mad's face and flicked away again. And then flicked back.
Crazy Mad caught hold of him, eyes gleaming. Tuuran stopped to watch.