Authors: Stephen Deas
Back the way she'd come, back towards the distant eyrie, the setting sun in the clear sky turned the desert and its mesas into islands in a lake of fire. The Elemental Man watched her drink for a while. ‘Did Baros Tsen tell you to do this?’ he asked.
Zafir paused. Delicious water trickled down the skin of her throat. ‘I'm
his
slave, killer, not yours. Ask
him
.’
The Watcher shook his head. ‘I do not need to.’
‘Then why ask me?’ She finished off the water and rummaged in her knapsack for something to eat. ‘Are there Elemental Women as well as Elemental Men?’
‘There are not. We are eunuchs.’
Which perhaps explained a lot. ‘How disappointing for you.’
‘It is a small loss compared to the powers we learn. One that is barely noticed.’
‘But how can you know if you don't know what you're missing?’
The Watcher snorted and Zafir couldn't tell whether he was laughing or merely disgusted by the thought. ‘The temptation of our nature is strong enough. More would be ill advised. If such things are of so much interest to you, the Righteous Men who live in the depthless caverns beneath the Konsidar are able to change their shape at will. They are not as we are but they are born of a similar seed. They are masters of flesh and bone and they can adjust themselves with considerable fluidity when the need arises.
Or the desire. Very few know this truth that I have shared with you, even among the Taiytakei. Enjoy it a while, while you can.’
Zafir let out a scornful laugh. ‘Shall I suppose that you've shared this with me to spare yourself my further interest, imagining somehow that you had it?’ She shook her head. ‘But you did not. So have no fear of me, elemental eunuch.’ The knapsack offered her dry flatbread, hard enough to make axeheads, and salted meat. Linxia meat probably. Both made her grateful she still had all her teeth, and annoyed that she'd left the rest of the water on the dragon's back. ‘Will you be a gentleman for me, Watcher? Vanish yourself to the back of my dragon and retrieve another skin of water for me?’
‘I will not.’
Something in his voice was off. Not only disdain and disgust but something else. ‘Because I am a slave?’ But it wasn't that. He was afraid of the dragon. She climbed up herself, took her time over it, found another skin of water and took a third to be sure and tossed them both down to the earth. Stripped to her underclothes, the air still felt warm but it was cooling. The sun was setting and the stars were beginning to show and the desert air was cold at nights. Not that she'd notice, sleeping beside the living furnace that was Diamond Eye. ‘Why are you here then, Elemental Man, if not to stare at my strange pale body and let your eyes wander over it, not sure whether it attracts or repels you – yes, I've seen enough of that. It's very hard not to notice these things and it tires me to the bone. But not from you, which makes your company a touch more welcome than otherwise. Nor from Baros Tsen, for that matter – is he a eunuch too?’
The Watcher snorted. ‘You are not like Taiytakei women. Or men for that matter. You are tasteless and repellent.’
Zafir laughed. ‘How refreshingly honest of you!’ Diamond Eye shifted and growled. ‘But that's not what your kwen thinks, nor half his soldiers, or does it merely make them hate themselves all the more? That they cannot control their lust for such a degenerate slave as I?’ She reined in the flash of anger and with it her tongue. ‘Tsen's tastes lie elsewhere, then? Forgive a slave for wanting to please her master.’
The Watcher shook his head. ‘I have never been to your land. I
am glad of that if all of your kind are like you. Baros Tsen T'Varr sips his apple wine and sings songs to himself and is happy and that is all. If there were a vice then I would know. You cannot hide from an Elemental Man.’
The last words had a bitterness to them. He didn't say anything more. Then he rose abruptly, snapped a stick from an almost-dead thorn tree and began to draw in the dirt.
‘Mai'Choiro Kwen told you where to fly. I saw and I heard his words. The city you will find is not Bom Tark. It is Dhar Thosis, seat of Senxian of the thirteen sea lords, and he is likely present.’ He drew a line in the dirt and then three islands and told her their names – Vul Tara, Dul Matha and the Eye of the Sea Goddess – just as Mai'Choiro Kwen had done. He told her, word for word, what the kwen had said so she could have no doubt that he'd been there too. He told her in a voice that was ruthless and fatally cold, a voice that said, quietly and without mercy or remorse, that she would die here on this stone on this night in the desert. When he was done, he looked her in the eye. ‘Sea Lord Shonda of Vespinarr is the most powerful man in the world. If he cannot hide his secrets, how will you hide yours? I know what you are doing, slave.’
She met his eye. ‘Then stop me.’
The Elemental Man drew a blade from his belt. Or rather, he drew the hilt of a blade with an edge too thin for Zafir to see. ‘Quai'Shu took loans that Tsen cannot repay. The other sea lords circle like sharks to devour his fleet.’ He stood up. ‘Stop you? That is what Baros Tsen T'Varr has asked of me. I wondered, with the truth before you, if it would make a difference. But, like the monster you fly, you are what you are. I hope you die slowly and badly, slave. I do not wish you well and I will not give you a quick and easy death.’ He turned his back on her. ‘When you are gone, Tsen will have to let his alchemist poison your monster. It is better for all this way.’
‘I am a slave, killer,’ she said. ‘Let me go. Let us all go. Back to my palace. Back as it was. I would be content with that.’
‘No,’ he said softly without looking back. ‘No, I do not believe you would.’
He vanished. Zafir dived for Diamond Eye, to be as close as she could to the dragon. Too slow, always too slow when the enemy
was an Elemental Man, and yet she saw him coming through the air, a haze of wind that rushed and then slowed and faded into being a man again, a rictus face of furious strain. Zafir crouched under Diamond Eye's bulk, hissing at him, ‘Come on! Kill me then! That's all there ever is, isn't there?’
He was breathing hard. She could feel Diamond Eye restless above her, peering down between his feet, trying to see. The Elemental Man screwed up his face and shimmered, half faded and then slipped back to solid flesh again. Zafir snarled. She reached for a knife she didn't have, and that was that. He was going to kill her. The old way.
He stepped towards her. Cautious, although surely he could see she was helpless. She stood to meet him. Quivering not with fear but with despair. She had to blink hard to keep the tears from her eyes.
No pity for pretty little Zafir
. She touched a hand to her breast. ‘My heart is here, killer. What's left of it. Strike true.’
‘Think of it as a mercy,’ he said, and maybe he was right. Maybe that's what it was, but she'd never know because he only took one more step before the tip of Diamond Eye's tail flew like a spear out of the gloom behind him. It impaled him like the bolt of a scorpion and threw him through the air to land broken at her feet. And at the very last, as he lay dying, he didn't even move. Just screwed up his face as if he were trying to shift to another form and couldn't. Zafir stepped back. Diamond Eye lifted up one massive foot, stamped the Elemental Man flat and stared at her. She started to laugh. She was right underneath him and so his head was upside down. He looked faintly ridiculous.
‘No.’ She closed her eyes. ‘No mercy for Zafir. Never that.’ She looked up at the dragon. ‘But you? You don't even know what that is, do you? Mercy?’ She looked down again as Diamond Eye lifted his foot. ‘And he was probably right. Have I ever been content? I don't think I have.’
For a long time afterwards she stared at the smear that was all that was left of the Elemental Man. She drank and ate and looked and wondered. Later she picked up his knife with its invisible blade and gingerly slipped its scabbard out from the mess that was the rest of him. When she was done, she curled up tight beside Diamond Eye. ‘You stopped him, didn't you? You made his magic
not work. I don't understand. Did he think you wouldn't keep me safe?’ She nestled closer to the dragon's uncaring warmth. ‘Watch over me, Diamond Eye. He's right. We are what we are.’
She fell asleep, and her dreams were as they always were when she slept beside a dragon. Furious and filled with fire.
Tuuran charged as another barrage of rockets fizzed out of the city from not far behind the docks. He hit the enemy hard. If the waiting soldiers had had bows he'd have been dead and so would most of the rest of them. But they didn't and so he crashed into them axe first like a wild boar into a band of novice hunters, tossing them this way and that. As Crazy Mad and the rest came on behind him, more rockets shrieked in from the sea. They exploded, fire scouring the far end of the docks in a chorus of screams. From the corner of his eye he saw a man run and dive into the water, on fire from head to toe, but that was only a moment, a flash of something else between the arcs of death he flung before him. The soldiers in his way were sword-slaves, armoured in a hodgepodge of whatever had come to hand, some in nothing but leathers, others in mismatched pieces of steel. His axe battered them aside, cutting limbs and spraying blood through the air.
This
was what an Adamantine Man was made for.
This
was what it meant! He howled as his eyes searched for the men he most wanted to kill, Taiytakei in their glass and gold.
More rockets hissed and shrieked back and forth from city to sea. The sword-slaves turned and fled from his axe but the golems were another matter, hulking brutes of black rubbery skin, terrible enough almost to quell the battle madness but Tuuran was having none of it. ‘Are you dragons?’ he screamed at them. Behind the screams and the clash of swords and the dull thumps of bursting fireballs and the roar of flames and the distant booms and thunderclaps, a deep rhythmic pulsing was building, louder and louder. ‘Are you? Because that's what I was made to kill.’ He ducked under a clumsy swipe and split a golem in half with his axe, ripping open its belly. It fell apart and lost its shape like an overripe fruit and
now Crazy Mad and the sword-slaves who'd followed him surged forward again. He felled another . . .
A rocket howled out of the air and struck one of the golems, spitting it. It stood there for a moment, reeling, and then exploded. Tuuran stumbled back, blinded by the flash, only the gold-glass helm saving his eyes from the flames. All around him men staggered and screamed and clutched their faces. There was a terrible smell of burning tar. When he blinked the brightness away, another of the golems was standing right in front of him. It had a wooden beam in its hands. It swung. He ducked easily underneath and inside its reach. They were large, too large to be men, but they were slow and had no notion of how to fight. He hacked at the golem, slashing it open. Black goo oozed from the wound. A substitute for slaves and cranes, that's what they were. Enchanted creatures for loading and unloading ships in the harbour and little use for anything else. Beside him Crazy Mad stabbed and cut.
‘Get away from the shore! Get away! Into the streets! Quick!’ They'd broken through at the end of the jetty. More attackers were dashing past them. Out in the dawn smoke over the jetties other ships loomed. Wood snapped and splintered. Lightning flashed and thundered back and forth. The Taiytakei with the golden armour was urging them on and now he had others around him, more of the night-skins in their shimmering colours and their cloaks of bright feathers. They had short stabbing swords at their sides, their black rods too, but in their hands were the lightning wands, cracking and fizzing thunderbolts all around them. They carried shields, huge things of glass and gold, and spiked ashgars over their backs. Up and down the shore among the handful of ships that had rammed the jetties, smoke lay over a sea full of bobbing boats, oars straining furiously for the land. The throbbing noise was louder. Across the waves flashes and booms surrounded the island that the fleet had passed in the pre-dawn twilight as they'd lit their first fire-ships. Within the smoke the water was ablaze with misty glowing shapes, burning hulks and wreckage and pools of fire that floated and seemed to burn the very water itself. The sun had cracked the horizon far out to sea, shining straight though the carnage and the haze, throwing everything into silhouette. Tuuran could see all three of the islands now. The one they'd passed was low and
shrouded in smoke while bolts of lightning flared like the sun, one and then another and another. The middle of the three islands, the tallest, must have been a mile away across the sea and he still had to tip his head back to look at the top of it. A great column of rock, sheer sides rising out of the water. With the rising sun behind it, its top glowed with golden fire. The third sloped up from the sea to the meet the cliffs of the second. A bridge crossed the chasm between, gleaming in the dawn with a dazzling fiery gold.
The golems were falling one by one. They fought without thought, swinging their clubs at any who came within range. The stabbing swords and spears of the sword-slaves wounded their rubbery skin, but Tuuran, with his axe and quick feet, he was the one to finish them, fast enough to get in close and split them apart before their clubs could shatter him. They were slow, too slow to be much danger to a man with his eyes open and his wits sharp. ‘Next!’ He sliced the legs from one and buried the head of his axe into the side of another. ‘And again! More! Harder! Give me something that can
fight
!’
‘Move! Clear the shore!’ The ships out in the water were turning, those that weren't broken or shattered burning wrecks. ‘Get away! Get away!’ He had no idea who was shouting. He hacked at another golem's leg and it staggered. One heaved its club at him. He ducked and it struck the first golem in the face, splitting it open. The crippled golem sagged to the ground, black liquid pooling around it. Another rocket exploded on the dockside and then a whole string of them rained down, falling on the end of the jetty and on the ship he and Crazy Mad had stormed; and on their own ship too, engulfing everything in a storm of fire. Tuuran staggered away, overwhelmed by noise and light and the heat.
So much for our passage back
. The golems pressed forward. He saw a sword-slave picked up and ripped in two, another hit by a club so hard that it took his head off his shoulders, a third batted out to sea like a ball in a game of circle-running.