Bellepheros stared out of the window, although there was nothing at all to see. ‘I don't understand. Where is the storm? How can this be?’
Tuuran gripped his arm, tight, fingers digging in to Bellepheros's skin until they hurt. ‘It can't be, Lord Alchemist. That is the point. It is the space between worlds. A place that cannot exist and yet does.’ But Bellepheros barely heard. The Taiytakei came from across the sea. Everyone knew that. From another land, distant and unreachable. Everyone knew that too. From another world? Yes, he'd heard it said, but not meant, not literally.
There was no motion. Not even the slightest rocking of the ship. They weren't even in the sea any more. And outside the silence was perfect, the darkness complete.
On a whim he picked up his lamp and threw it out of the window, then peered out to look. It fell away, a bright speck of light, down and down and down for ever, like a little falling fading star until it was too dim to see.
Impossible. A void between worlds.
The ship lurched, violent and without warning, smacking Bellepheros's head against the frame of the window. Light and noise and howling wind slammed back like a punch in the face. He reeled as the churning sea and the maelstrom of night-black cloud returned. The ship shuddered sideways. Tuuran fell and Bellepheros tipped and rolled back to the floor on top of him. A brilliant flash of violent purple lit up the cabin. He caught sight of Tuuran's eyes. They were mad, filled with hunger and desire, and with belief.
I cannot. He couldn't say the words. There was no alchemy for this, but Tuuran still stared and Bellepheros couldn't speak, and so they sat pressed together and watched as the lightning flashed and the storm raged until it fell slowly away and the clouds became grey and broken and the sky finally emerged between them, blue and bright, and at the last the sun. In the distance ahead of them, as Bellepheros pressed his head to the wall to peer forward through the broken porthole, a new line smeared the horizon. Land. Tuuran picked himself off the floor. ‘That is Xican, Lord Master Alchemist. The City of Stone. That's where they are taking you.’
‘And you?’ He couldn't think of anything else to say.
The Adamantine Man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Back to the sea. To sail on it.’ He nodded to the broken shutters. ‘Or else they'll throw me into it to drown for showing you what they fear the most. No matter. I'll survive or I'll die.’
Bellepheros pressed his head against the wall again and looked out of the window, back the way they'd come this time, and there it was, an endless line of storm clouds that seemed to go on for ever, receding into the distance. The storm-dark. And he knew that what he'd seen in its midst would haunt his dreams.
‘A last thing, Master Alchemist.’ Tuuran chuckled. ‘Look at the sun, bright and high in the sky. How long ago did you watch night fall?’
Bellepheros blinked. The sun had barely set when they'd entered the storm. He felt drained and exhausted and deadly tired, but now his heart ran cold. His mouth fell open but he couldn't find any words. It should be dark. It should be the middle of the night. There should have been stars and the moon. How? How was it possible?
Tuuran's grin ran right across his face. ‘Yes, Lord Master Alchemist. And it's always this way when we cross. They don't understand. No one does.’ The mad wonder in his eyes made Bellepheros want to hide for there was nothing wondrous in this, only a dreadful wrongness. ‘And when night comes, Master Alchemist, look at the stars. Oh, you'll see a few that are familiar. But only a few. We are in a different world. It is theirs, not ours, and there are others beyond both.’ He laughed and wagged a finger. ‘Still think you'll take us home now, do you?’
5
Tuuran left him long before the land resolved into more than a distant blur. He slipped out and locked the door behind him and Bellepheros heard it click. The alchemist lay back on his little bed and shivered. When he closed his eyes he saw the storm and the purple lightning and the Nothing that lay in the middle of it. When he opened them he saw the same, images and ghost memories flitting across the sea.
Alchemists were cold people. He'd come to see that many years ago. It was the dragons that did it. Dragon-riders learned to ride their emotions, to guide them and turn them. They were passionate and fearless because that was what riding dragons demanded of them. Alchemists didn't ride dragons, they worked with them. They kept them dull and stupid. Sometimes they quietly poisoned them. There was no place for any bond with a dragon for an alchemist, none at all, and yet they had to be fearless every bit as much as a rider did. So alchemists put their emotions away and learned to be cold, to stand back and aside from everything but their duty. A rider, he knew, would have fought the Elemental Man back on the road, tooth and nail. A rider would have fought in the Paratheus. A rider would have fought in the docks, on the boat, every day. An alchemist sat by and watched, waiting for the moment when action would be certain of success.
He'd had lovers when he'd been younger. Alchemists weren't supposed to but a lot of them did. Back when they'd been in their first flush of adulthood, fresh full of secret potions, before the awe of the dragon secrets they were learning had lost their chill. He remembered being afraid of dragons once too. In a way it had never gone, but he'd turned it into something else. A sort of shrugging acceptance that one day he might die. Out of nowhere, something he'd never see coming. He was careful and cautious and measured in everything he did — an alchemist didn't live long otherwise — but with dragons accidents happened. He'd lost count of the number of friends who'd gone to some distant eyrie and never come back. Accidents, nearly all of them. It was what came from dealing with monsters. It was part of what they were.
He picked up his splinter and stabbed it carefully into his thumb. Squeezed out a drop of blood and smeared it onto the wall. He reached into it and found he could. The touch was still erratic but another few days and he'd be himself again. Satisfied, he lay back and closed his eyes. Trying to collect his thoughts and formulate a plan. Something. Some way to persuade the Taiytakei that what they'd chosen to do was wrong, more than wrong, was folly. Calmly and rationally. Make them realise they should take him back, but he couldn't see it. The storm-dark kept filling his head. The darkness in its heart. The Nothing, as Tuuran had called it. He couldn't remember when something had frightened him so much, not even when the Elemental Man had been choking him to death in the quiet autumn sun. A part of him knew that one day a dragon would carelessly flick its tail without thinking and shatter half the bones in his body. Kill him without reason or warning, just the way the life of an alchemist was, a thing to be accepted. You moved on or you never survived, never slept at nights and never learned to be not afraid. That part had kept him safe all the way from the carriage, kept him from losing his mind, kept his thoughts clear and reasoned, but the storm-dark confounded everything. He couldn't think.
Tuuran's potion was wearing off. He was starting to feel sick again. He let out a long sigh, sat up and pressed his head against the wall, looking out the broken window. Fresh air blew over his face. That helped.
They were closer to the shore now, sailing in at good speed. The land outside — Xican, was it? — began as a few jagged stones, pale grey spires scattered among the waves, each one rising higher than the last as the ship raced between them. A shadow crossed the sun as something passed overhead, but whatever it was, Bellepheros couldn't see it, and the window was too small for him to lean out and look up. The sharp grey cliffs brought back memories. Every dragon-rider had a first time. Perhaps the kings and queens and great lords and ladies of the dragon realms sat on the backs of their monsters from such a young age that they didn't remember but Bellepheros had been more than twenty years old and about to become a true alchemist. The ceremony for most alchemists was held in the caves under the Purple Spur but he and two others had been chosen for something special. He hadn't understood why, only that he would ride on the back of a dragon at last, and every moment of that flight remained etched into his memory, though not as deep as what he'd seen and heard after they'd landed. When he closed his eyes, he could see the mountains of the Worldspine, huge towering things that glowered at one another but kept their distance across deep wide valleys. Then they'd flown deeper and further north where the valleys vanished and the mountains were piled up next to one another, squashed together as though some giant god had scattered mile-high shards of rock over the ground, jumbled and haphazard and without thought. The spaces between them were gorges, gulches, ravines. From above it had been impossible to imagine how anyone could live in such a sterile vertical place, but they did.