He chose his course with care across the mountains, skirting the domain of the Righteous Ones who dwelt in the majestic Konsidar. Though they dwelt below rather than among the mountains and would not have noticed an Elemental Man crossing high overhead, they had been more unruly of late, emerging from their holes and rattling their sabres like angry ants whose nest someone had disturbed. Best not to give any reason to add to their ire, whatever had caused it.
He turned south as the peaks and crags fell away into the desert of the Empty Sands, the wasteland that filled half the continent from the Konsidar to the Godspike and beyond. Dunes as tall as an enchanter's tower rippled beneath him, then the flats, a hundred miles of gravel, of milky-white powdered glass and hard dark lakes of clay. In the stories of the desert tribes there had been water here once, vanished now after the old cataclysm of the Splintering, pouring into the lost depths of the Konsidar and stolen away by the Righteous Ones. Or so their stories said.
Dunes rose again, reddish-orange now instead of yellow and pale. He crossed a fresh slick of black ooze streaking the sands, with a scatter of white specks at its edge that were the tents of the desert men there to collect it, scraping it into barrels to sell to the enchanters in Cashax or Vespinarr. That they'd been there long enough to build a village of tents reminded the Watcher of how long it was since he'd last come this way. Further still he passed over a faint line across the desert, invisible from the ground. Just as there had been lakes out here once, so too had there been paths that criss-crossed the wasteland. Roads. There had been cities even, but now they were ruins and the only things that lived in them were spiders and scorpions, rats and snakes and desert hawks. The desert men came here on occasion too but never lingered, not without good reason.
Amid this emptiness Baros Tsen's castle beckoned him, a huge lump of stone floating above the sand on a dazzle of purple lightning. The Watcher felt it before he saw it, the slightest thickening of the air so that being one with the wind was no longer effortless. No one knew the castle's origin. It had been in the desert for as long as anyone could remember, hanging in the sky, empty and forgotten. It was stone rather than glass, and though it floated like an enchanter's glasship, it was vastly greater than anything any enchanter had ever made, a wide bowl-shaped slab larger even than the Palace of Leaves in its entirety. Its underside was torn and jagged, as though it had been ripped out of the earth by giant hands. Purple lightning flickered and flashed through the shadows of its belly to the dunes below like a tiny fragment of the storm-dark snipped away and captured in glass. The upper side was dull and flat, a shallow-sloped white stone wall around a huge and perfectly circular space. It had no black monolith to feed it, to draw power from the earth, and yet it sustained itself. How? No one knew.
Six glasships hovered over the castle today. They were dwarfed by it yet they captured the Watcher's eye, brilliant things, concentric spinning discs of glass twisted at different angles, tinged and rimmed with lightning-thrower gold which shone and caught the sun. They were like brightly coloured cleaner fish flitting to and fro over a kraken's back, tethered to it by chains of Scythian steel.
The Watcher slowed. The thickening of the air grew worse. He felt the castle's resistance to him, a tiny force trying to knock him back to the form and shape of his birth. The Picker had said it was like this in the dragon lands only a thousand times worse, remorseless and relentless and everywhere.
He swept over its surface. A hundred men and women lived here now, slaves and Taiytakei alike, but most worked underground and he saw only two slaves aloft. They were slowly clearing sand and litter and desert plants from the edges of the castle outside the white stone walls, sweat gleaming off their backs as they scraped away to the ancient rock beneath. One was tall, a black-skinned desert man from a tribe like the one he'd seen camped by the ooze slick in the sands. His native people were probably less than a few hundred miles from here, out in the desert. The other was short and olive-skinned, from Aria or from the Dominion, either of which meant thousands of miles and a crossing of the storm-dark, but both men had been bought and sold at the skin markets of Cashax or Xican. They were slaves now, nothing else. The Watcher drifted past them, a hint of a breeze in the still and baking air.
The paler of the two clutched his leg and cried out and then stared at his hand. ‘Kelm's Teeth!’ Kelm's Teeth. From Aria then, that one. The Watcher had heard a great deal of Aria in the last years. The Ice Witch. The sea lords were talking of another Abraxi or a Crimson Sunburst, or something even worse, if such a thing was possible. There were whispers that the Ice Witch had found a way of her own to cross the storm-dark. Whispers that the cherished secrets of the Scythians and their steel and of the enchanters and their glass were finding their way to her empire. Whispers though. As yet nothing more.
‘It jumped! Ow! Bugger, but that hurts!’ The short one had a small ball of spikes stuck in the back of his leg. The desert man was peering over at him. The Watcher paused for a moment and did what he did best. Watched.
‘They don't jump.’ The desert man knelt beside the other slave, plucking with delicate care at the spikes. Patience. Always the key and always the greatest weapon of the Elemental Men. They struck when they were ready, and struck true. They'd done so many times before and would do so again. Aria and this Ice Witch would be no different.
‘Bugger you, dark-skin. I saw it.’
The desert man shook his head. ‘Be still.’
‘I tell you. .’
Patience and careful observation. The Watcher appeared beside them. ‘They do not jump,’ he said. ‘Yet this one did. Had you the eyes to see, you would have deduced my presence.’ The two slaves froze. They stared at him, dumbstruck. ‘Where is Baros Tsen T'Varr?’
The desert man fell to his knees and bowed his head. He pointed across the wall and beyond. ‘Inside, Demon Lord of Earth and Sky.’ The Watcher bowed and with a flicker of effort became the wind again, sweeping into the labyrinthine bowels of the castle, swirling ghost-like through the rune-carved tunnels of glowing white stone that ran within. The air here was at its thickest so close to the old enchanted stone. The Picker said he'd grown used to the fierce animosity of the dragon lands. It was hard, but with practice you built a tolerance to it. But then the Picker had always been a little strange, a little different. He was the only Elemental Man ever taken from another world. The Watcher knew now that he wouldn't see the Picker again. The moon sorcerers’ visions had told him so.
It would have been easier to search through the stone than through the air but the white walls of the castle were yet another mystery. Stone, yes, but as impervious to his gift as metal. Still, he found Baros Tsen T'Varr in the first place he looked, supervising some change to the bathhouse at the castle's heart. The Watcher shimmered out of the air far enough away to show his respect, and bowed. ‘T'Varr. Hands of the Sea Lord.’
‘LaLa!’ The t'varr liked his little names for those around him. Tsen was like that, had a childish streak to him and a way of making men see him as less than he was. He slouched. He was fat and he always looked either bored or half-asleep — often both — but he had sharp eyes behind the facade and his vices were surprising and few. The Watcher wondered sometimes how many people he really fooled. ‘Quai'Shu has returned then, has he? Planning a visit? He must be. We've had the emerald cages installed for weeks now and jade ravens carry news well enough for the rest of us. Just not quite as quickly, eh?’
The Watcher shook his head. ‘Our sea lord plans to return at once to the Western Realm, T'Varr, to oversee the further stages of his design. Enchantress Chay-Liang will join you here shortly.’