by Stephen Deas
‘They believe in nothing. Godless creatures. But either way, men don’t slay dragons with steel.’
‘Is it steel? I don’t know what it is. But I think the Taiytakei greatly desire to own it.’ He was talking to himself, he realised. Voicing his secret thoughts.
‘It’s just a spear.’ Tuuran shrugged and stood up and drew out the cabin key from under his shirt. He opened the door. ‘There’s going to be a storm soon. We’ll come on it after nightfall. The storm-dark. It’s no natural thing but the Taiytakei must cross it to reach their home. They’ll shutter and bar your window, my Lord Alchemist. You’ll think it’ll be the end of us. Everyone does, the first time they cross, but don’t fear it. Like the wrath of the Great Flame and the Silver King and the old gods themselves all rolled together, but it ends and by some miracle the ship remains whole.’
The sun set not long after Tuuran left him. The sky darkened and the clouds grew thick and ugly. The ship lurched and heaved while the waves rose and wore white caps of foam. The wind snapped and snarled, the decks creaked and groaned and the stars winked out one by one as the storm clouds devoured them. Outside someone closed the shutters on his window, and when Bellepheros tried to open them again he found they were barred. He lay on his bed, breathing hard. His stomach clenched into a knot. The air smelled strange. Unnatural. He’d tasted air like this once before, deep in the bowels of the Pinnacles amid the creations of the Silver King. The pitching of the ship grew worse. Abruptly he threw up into the bucket beside his bed, retching until there was nothing left, then groaned and lay back and closed his eyes; and so he almost didn’t notice when the cabin door opened again and Tuuran slipped back in. The Adamantine Man sat beside him and the first Bellepheros knew of it was a cup of something hot and bitter pressed into his hand.
‘For the sickness,’ Tuuran said. Bellepheros forced himself up. As he did, a sudden sway of the ship banged the cabin wall against him.
‘Great Flame!’ He sniffed the cup and groaned again and then laughed despite himself. ‘I could tell you everything that went into this just from the smell. I know better remedies but it will do.’
He drank. Tuuran pushed at the shutters but they didn’t give. ‘They keep us slaves away from the storm-dark, locked up in the hold. Every crossing.’ He bared his teeth, a carnivore’s grin. ‘I told them you might die of fright if you didn’t have someone to hold your hand so they let me come up to look after you, but I know you don’t need me, Master Lord Alchemist. I did this for me, not for you. I want to see it. I’ve heard more stories about it than I’ve heard of Vishmir and Narammed put together. I want to see if they’re true.’
Bellepheros resisted the temptation to lie down again and try to fall asleep. Tuuran’s potion was working, at least a little, although with his travel chest he could have made something far better. ‘They want me to make an eyrie for them,’ he mumbled.
‘Yes, I know. It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ Tuuran pushed at the window again. ‘I’ve crossed the storm-dark a dozen times. I might never find a way home again, but I’ll see the damn thing before I die.’ When the window didn’t give, he punched it, then lay on the bed and kicked it, blow after blow until something cracked and then on until the shutters flew open.
The sky flashed purple.
Bellepheros forgot the snakes writhing in his belly. The night was black as pitch, the stars and moon all gone and swallowed up by the tide of darkness. The sea glistened, a faint blue-green phosphorescence lighting up the churning waves. The wind howled and swirled and then another bolt of purple light split the sea and the sky, jagged and blinding bright, lighting up the waves like the midday sun.
‘Lightning,’ hissed Tuuran. ‘The lightning. So that much is true.’
Another flash and then another and the wind sucked them deeper into the storm. Even the sea seemed to rush towards it, the waves crashing and climbing over one another, pushing them on. The gale caught the broken shutters and smashed them against the hull, over and over. It screamed and whistled through the ropes and the rigging somewhere above. Banshee wails ripped the air, rising and fading. The ship rolled and heaved and pitched and the purple lightning flashed and flamed and danced through the sky. The storm drew Bellepheros in, wrapped him up and held him like a dragon’s stare until the ship bucked mightily, tipping him and Tuuran onto the floor together. The Adamantine Man was laughing. ‘Imagine this deep in the hold, Master Alchemist, among the rats and the bilge water! Imagine it! Men falling over, tumbling into each other in the pitch black! Can you see why they piss themselves? Death stares at you there but I didn’t fear it, not once, not ever, for I am Adamantine, made to face dragons!’
Bellepheros struggled to his knees and clutched at the bed. The ship pitched forward, swinging his legs out from under him. Tuuran rolled and slammed into the door, then hauled himself to his feet. He was grinning like a madman, swept up by the violence around them while the lightning outside cracked again and again, bright and a vivid violet like nothing Bellepheros had ever seen. ‘This is not natural!’
‘No.’ Tuuran shook his head gleefully. ‘Even the Taiytakei don’t understand it, though they’ll never admit it, not to the likes of us.’ The ship groaned. A loud crack reverberated through the hull. ‘But the best, the best is yet to come. We’re close to the middle now. They say—’
Tuuran didn’t finish. Or perhaps he did and Bellepheros simply didn’t hear. The heaving and rolling of the ship abruptly stopped. The clouds vanished, the lightning and the sea too, and now outside there was nothing at all, and through that nothing the ship drifted silent and still. All that sound and fury, suddenly gone. Tuuran’s eyes gleamed. ‘Always in whispers, in the dark, they talked about it,’ he said. ‘But none of us had ever seen it.’ He pointed at the emptiness outside. ‘That, my Lord Alchemist! Make that your mistress! A thing deeper than dragons and they don’t understand it. I couldn’t begin. But you!’ His gaze bored into Bellepheros. ‘You, Lord Master Alchemist, you who have tamed dragons, you can make it ours! I’ve risked my life for you to see this. Remember that. Tame the storm-dark and one day take us home!’
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 stor
m 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
The Enchantress
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.
The Nothing of the storm-dark crept back into his head. He sighed and opened his eyes and looked again at the new world around him. As the ship moved on, it slowed. The stones grew taller and wider and more numerous, scattered around the sea, rising from the waves like the petrified fingers of ancient giants. They were flecked with green and some were marked with holes. Caves or windows but too regular to be wholly natural. As the ship turned he saw more, a coastline of grey saw-toothed cliffs jumbled one upon the other. Black spots covered them like boils of the pox. Buildings jutted out of their sides, wooden platforms and gantries like scars running from side to side and up and down, more still perched on their tops. Closer in he could make out the shapes of men scurrying back and forth along the ones closest to the sea, up ladders and across rope bridges, dangling from the faces of cliffs that rose far higher than any mast, while between the dizzying spires other ships, made small by the to
wers of stone around them, wallowed in the waves, rolling languidly from side to side. But none of that was what held his eye. As he pressed his face to the wall to see, he saw a palace of bright and shining gold rising over the heaviest thicket of cliffs. It hung in the air, glittering orbs of sparkling silver dangling beneath great discs of glass like golden clouds; while from below more spires of glass and gold rose up behind the cliffs to meet them. Tuuran had spoken of them, seen far off in the distance, but not like this. Here was a creation that dwarfed even the marvels left by the Silver King. A golden palace in the sky. For a moment even the storm-dark was forgotten.
The ship edged closer. The cliffs climbed higher and their bulk gobbled up the palace and the sky both, until all Bellepheros could see was a wall of pale stone and the wooden scaffolds that hung from it. Windows and doors littered the cliff faces, some of them shuttered or closed, but most no more than simple openings into the rock. They were careful things, precise circles and arches. Closer still and the men at work on the scaffolds threw ropes to the ship, hauling it slowly in. A few were black-skinned Taiytakei; most were paler, but they all wore rags like the serfs of Furymouth. As the ship came so close that he could almost reach out from his window and touch them, he saw that some of the men were like Tuuran, with lightning bolts branded on their arms. The ones who wore the brand gave orders to the ones who didn’t; and then the ship was so close that the scaffolds were above him and he could see nothing at all except for a wall of dark wet stone mottled with seaweed.
The Taiytakei, when they came to take him, glanced at the broken window. They didn’t say anything but Bellepheros saw the sourness on their faces and in the set of their mouths. They took his arms and pushed him, firmly but not harshly, along a passage and up a narrow flight of steps out into the daylight. After the gloom of his cabin the brightness of the sun was overwhelming. He blinked and squinted and screwed up his face. Sailors swarmed around him, dirty white tunics over sun-browned skins. Soldiers in golden armour stood guard. They gleamed and sparkled in the sun so brightly that it took Bellepheros a moment – even after his eyes adjusted to the light – to realise their armour was made of glass tinged with gold and woven with wire. He shielded his eyes against the sun and looked for the floating palace up between the masts but the sky was too bright and blue. There was … something up above the ship, something round and glittering and golden and huge, as big as the ship itself, but it shone so brightly in the streaming sun that he couldn’t look at it for long. He screwed up his eyes and blinked again, looking back at the deck.
