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  Tuuran watched with envy. ‘Is this how it is in the Palace of Alchemy?’ he asked.

  ‘We put on our own clothes and the food is distinctly inferior.’ Bellepheros frowned and then laughed at his own foolishness. Here he was, a slave, yet treated far better than he'd ever been in Prince Jehal's eyrie at Clifftop when he'd been searching for a murderer, or even in the Veid Palace afterwards when he'd had to admit to not finding one. And that sort of thought was no good. He had no place even thinking it.

  Tuuran still watched him closely, lips pursed. He didn't say anything, though, not until Bellepheros was done and had sent the slaves away. They would have stayed and done more if he hadn't. Anything you want, just ask. The Adamantine Man watched them go. He wrinkled his nose and sniffed. ‘You'll get comfortable here, Lord Grand Alchemist. Careful with that.’

  Bellepheros shook his head, trying to throw the other thoughts aside. ‘In the Palace of Alchemy we're masters of our own destiny. Here I am not. They can never hide that.’ Although saying the words made him think about how true that really was, because the truth was that they weren't and never had been. They were servants to the speaker, to the nine realms and their kings and queens, but far more than that, wherever they went, they were slaves to the dragons.

  ‘You will,’ said Tuuran again. ‘I would.’ His voice was quiet. Subdued. Bellepheros swept his arm across the room, at the food, the bath, the bed, the clothes, trying to dispel the sudden awkwardness.

  ‘Help yourself. Enjoy it while it's here.’

  Tuuran glanced at the door. With a wistful sigh he sat down and picked at the food but he didn't seem to be hungry. Which wasn't like the Tuuran Bellepheros had come to know on the voyage, but perhaps that was down to the strangeness of their surroundings. ‘Better than ship rations, that's for sure. It won't last.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because I've been a slave to the Taiytakei for years and it never does.’

  Bellepheros read a little from the journals, trying to make sense of them, but his head kept lolling and he soon gave up. He slept soundly, finally untroubled by any thoughts of how far above the ground they were. The bed was a soft embrace, warm and gentle. Tuuran slept on the floor, curled up in a pile of blankets. If he snored, Bellepheros didn't notice.

  The slaves were waiting for him again when he woke. They fed and dressed him, this time in feather robes patterned in silken flames that made him cringe and beg for something else, and when it turned out there was nothing else, made him wish he'd answered the enchantress when she'd asked. He was quite sure this was her way of getting back at him for not paying proper attention. Her little joke.

  When he was ready they ushered him to the door. Two Taiytakei knights in their glass and gold armour waited outside. They led him through a short maze of passages to a door of solid gold carved with entwined bolts of lightning. At the touch of their black rods it opened. They gently ushered him inside but didn't follow. The door closed behind him. He was in a room with no windows, lit by glowing glass spheres that reminded him of his own alchemical lamps. It wasn't a big room — pleasingly small in fact — but it was made entirely of gold. Every inch was carved with fractal patterns that twisted and writhed and moved under his eyes whenever he tried to make out what they were. Three Taiytakei faced him across a table that was a single mirror-polished slab of lapis-blue. The old man with the white hair that Bellepheros had seen on the ship sat in the middle, quietly calm and sure of everything around him. Chay-Liang, the enchantress, stood to one side, stiff and ill at ease. On the other side a slender man in black stood as still as a statue. His skin and his clothes were both so dark that Bellepheros couldn't see where one started and the other ended. He could have been a living shadow, but the edging to his robe gave him away. Strands of red, blue and white, entwined together. The Picker had worn those robes.

  ‘You're an Elemental Man,’ Bellepheros said.

  The black-robe didn't answer. ‘The Watcher's going to keep you safe from the enemies of our city,’ Chay-Liang said. ‘And believe me, slave, we have quite enough.’

  The old Taiytakei stared at Bellepheros. ‘Keeper of the Dragons, I am Quai'Shu, sea lord of Xican and your absolute master. I said you would build me an eyrie.’

  Bellepheros didn't look away. He didn't bow this time either. ‘And I said you would wish that I hadn't.’

  ‘You will do this. You will be given whatever you require. I will send you to my t'varr, Baros Tsen. You may ask him for whatever you need. He is a perfect t'varr: there is nothing he cannot find, nothing he cannot arrange. Whatever you wish for, he will provide. If you need artefacts of glass, Chay-Liang will make them. They will do whatever you require. The Watcher will be your guardian. Where should such a thing be built?’

  ‘In the realms that are my home,’ said Bellepheros with quiet calm, ‘where there are many other alchemists to ensure your dragons remain tame.’

  The sea lord's face didn't flicker. ‘There are ways to bring a man to heel, Keeper of the Dragons, without breaking him. Where?’

  ‘Far away from any cities. Far away from people. As far away as you can.’

  ‘Why?’

  Why? You have to ask why? Bellepheros gaped. ‘Because they are dragons, Sea Lord Quai'Shu of Xican! Because they are fifty paces from tip to tip of wing and from nose to tip of tail. Because of what will happen if any one of them breaks free of the potions you will ask me to make — if I make them at all. Because I am your one and only alchemist and you will not have another, and if anything happens to me then your cities will burn. Because they are a plague to ruin worlds. But I see you for what you are — you're like a dragon-king, believing yourself master of everything around you. You will never believe such a catastrophe could happen, for surely your mere existence prevents it. I hope you may think otherwise when you meet a full-grown dragon eye to eye, but I cannot show you how that feels here in this room. So for now let us say because of the disease that newly hatched dragons bring with them. It will run like fire through your people should it ever escape.’

  Quai'Shu barely even blinked. It was as if not a single word had reached him. ‘Far away from others. The desert, then.’

  ‘Deserts are suitable. The heat makes the dragons a little sluggish.’ Outwatch was the biggest eyrie in the dragon realms and that was in a desert. ‘An eyrie should be hard to reach and hard to enter, because whatever you may believe, every eyrie contains the greatest weapon you will ever know.’ He leaned a little forward and spoke through clenched teeth. ‘People may try to steal it.’

  The sea lord nodded and sent him away and it was the last time that Bellepheros would see Sea Lord Quai'Shu as the Taiytakei knew him, as the captain of a city and a fleet of ships, as a conqueror of worlds. Bellepheros had said the desert, and so that was where the Taiytakei took him and gave him a castle that floated in the air. He made peace with himself then. Accepted his slavery and bowed to its inevitability, for now at least. The Taiytakei had no dragons yet, that was true, but what they did have beggared his mind. He felt a fool beside Chay-Liang, lowly and ignorant among her glittering spires and golden automata, among the conjured jewels and marvellous creatures and the wonders of a dozen worlds. He told her, slowly and carefully and with patience, exactly what they would need to build a dragon eyrie that would work and exactly what they would need to keep a dragon tame. Food. A great deal of it, and so she moved the castle that floated in the air to the desert's edge where great herds of hump-backed horses roamed among dry and sandy grasslands. After that, men and women to tend the dragons. Scales. People who, with a little of his help, would fall in love with the monsters, who would give their lives as they became slowly riddled with the Hatchling Disease and died of it, turned into human statues. So Baros Tsen, the sly fat t'varr, brought him slaves, and Bellepheros brewed the potions that would dull their minds and ready them to fall in love with their monsters.

  There were other ways, he said. Better ways, but they took longer and nee
ded children to be raised as Scales from before they could talk, knowing nothing else. At that, Tsen T'Varr brought him children — babies — but Bellepheros sent them away, for they would need teachers first and other things. Men and women to cook and clean, to build and polish and make and repair. They brought him all the slaves he asked for, everything he desired, and he set them to work.

  To make his potions he would need dragon blood. Somehow they brought it to him. Above all, he told them, they would need more alchemists.

  Then make them, they said. And that was the one thing he couldn't do. He could teach a slave to make a potion. He could teach Chay-Liang to make almost anything. By the end there was almost not a single one of his secrets that he hadn't shared with her. But alchemy lived in the blood, and there was only one place in the world where a true alchemist could be made, an alchemist who could dull a dragon, and the secret of that place was the one secret he kept, for it was deep within the dragon realms, far off in the darkest caves of the Worldspine, and without that secret there was only one person in their world who could make the potions they wanted and that person was him, and without more alchemists they would all be hostages together when they finally found a dragon. They would see the horror that a dragon could bring and he would show this Quai'Shu why his desire was such terrible folly.

  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

  The Elemental Man

  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 ye
llow 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.