‘I brought. .’ Quai'Shu’s voice was, for the first and only time the Watcher would hear, hesitant. ‘I brought an offering.’
The Watcher fell to his knees and bowed.
This? Now the voices spoke in his head one at a time, alternating one after the other.
What knowledge of this. .
. . do you think we do not possess?
They were laughing at him. He could feel their amusement at this little creature who had the audacity to disturb them. To think he was important. Quai'Shu’s voice didn't falter, though. ‘I will take the master alchemist from the dragon lands. I can bring you the secrets of dragons. .’
We know. .
. . everything there is to know. .
. . about dragons.
The Watcher kept his head bowed. Quai'Shu, the great sea lord of Xican. A man whose voice rang across the whole might of Takei'Tarr when he spoke in the Crown of the Sea Lords in Khalishtor; a man who had negotiated trades in every world the Taiytakei could reach for forty years, twenty as the captain of his house and some with men who'd begun by trying to kill him. That was what sea captains did. It was his life. Yet here and now he was at last lost for words.
He was the offering and he wasn't good enough. He would find a way to repay his master for his failure.
Our answer. .
. . is yes.
Your offering. .
. . is nothing.
You will give us. .
. . something other.
Even in front of three half-gods, some instincts ran too deep. The Watcher heard the familiar sly lilt to his master's voice. ‘Something other? What is it you desire?’
You will not understand. They didn't smile but there was a mocking laughter in their words, and then they were gone.
Months passed and turned to years. Quai'Shu grew old and frail before his time until he could barely walk. Much of his fleet passed on to his sons and daughters as he let them pitch themselves against one another while he watched, waiting to see if one would show themself more able than the others, but his dreams of dragons were not forgotten. His steps were assured, careful and precise, the piece-by-piece building of a machine that had come fully formed into his head that day on the beach of the Diamond Isles. The Watcher learned that there had indeed been another Elemental Man, the one that failed. He learned why. It was a strange thing, but in this land of dragons certain things that an Elemental Man took for granted simply didn't work.
‘Deserts are suitable.’
His mind snapped back to the here and the now. To Quai'Shu beside him and the alchemist of the dragon realms before him. It had begun. The Picker had completed the first of his tasks. Now there was an eyrie to be built, a flying castle fortress to be found and many things besides, and soon the dragons would come, all as Quai'Shu had been promised.
Yet Quai'Shu had not been alone on that island, and the half-gods had not shown him everything. By the time the dragons came, the Picker would be dead and Quai'Shu would be mad. The moon sorcerers had shown the Watcher these things, and when he asked why they had shown them to him and to him alone, the half-gods had laughed in mockery. Fate was fate and could not change. They'd shown him other things too and it would do no good to try and change any of it. Except for one thing that remained hanging in the balance.
The grey dead. .
. . are coming. .
. . with the golden knife.
They are making. .
. . the greatest of us. .
. . whole again.
They are calling. .
. . the Black Moon. .
. . to rise once more.
Do. .
. . what you do. .
. . and watch.
8
Skyrie. On a battlefield outside Tethis, four years before the Adamantine Palace would burn, the name slipped inside Berren's head. It came with an explosion of light. When he opened his eyes again he was staring at the bright sky. Faces were looking down on him. Old friends. Faces he knew but he could feel himself falling away from them. And he could feel something coming the other way. Something from a dark place. It had a name.
Skyrie. .
He caught a glimpse of other faces peering down at him too. Different faces. Dim shadows shrouded in grey.
Berren! Crowntaker! Where are you wounded? The words of his soldiering friends, of Tallis One-Eye, grew distant. Hold the advance! Get him out of here! Gaunt, lead the wall!
He barely heard. He was sinking. Falling fast while another streamed the other way. He reached out at the thing that passed him in the void and tore at it, sunk in his fingers and his teeth and his toes. He tore a piece away but it didn't stop the falling.
Skyrie. That was who he was. That was his name. He saw the Crown-taker coming, falling, screaming, flailing, clawing. They tasted one another as they passed through Xibaiya, through the path ripped by the warlock's sigil, and then Skyrie saw the light. He saw the Bloody Judge fall away. Saw faces and the sun. Reached for them as the warlock's rip began to close. He'd seen a tear like this before, he was sure of it. In a place full of water but he couldn't remember where. He reached for the light, for the sun, full of urgency and victory, but now something was dragging him back. ‘Get me up!’ A voice that was his but wasn't. ‘Get that off me! Now! Before it's too. . It's doing. .’ He scrabbled to fight his way on into the light and the noise of the battlefield but the rip was almost gone.
Something seemed to push past him through the tear, clambering over him, squeezing him back. The faces and the sky dimmed and began to change and now Skyrie was falling too, away into somewhere else where the sky was black and the air was filled with smoke and the smell of earth and the faces that looked down on him were shrouded in cowls and he wasn't on the battlefield any more, he was back where he'd been all along, in the pit under Tethis castle. He knew its dingy light and its rotten smell. He was lying flat on a table at the bottom of a hole in the floor of a cave deep underground.
He slumped. Closed his eyes. They'd failed. He took a deep breath and let it out and then another. His heart was thumping as though he'd been the one in the middle of a battle, not the Crowntaker. He groaned. Four of his brothers in grey held him, peering at him. Warlocks, and he was one of them. Skyrie the marsh farmer, who'd come to Tethis with a hole in his soul and a vengeful heart, who'd taken the grey robes of the Dark Queen's priests to wreak havoc and woe on the Bloody Judge who'd destroyed his home. He'd come here willingly, made his choices, and now they'd failed. He groaned, desolate, and tried to sit up.
‘Skyrie?’ The other warlocks still held him down. They were shaking, full of fear. In case it had worked and the body they held had the Crowntaker inside it now. Which gave them every reason to be afraid.
Skyrie fell limp. ‘It didn't work.’ He was too weak to move. Too ruined by despair. Their last gambit and he was still here and the Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge of Tethis, was still out there, still who he'd ever been. Vallas's sigils had failed. But they'd been so close! For a moment he'd even seen through the Bloody Judge's eyes before the rip had closed and something had torn him back.
‘Should we call Vallas?’ The warlock who held his left leg. Brother Scortas.