Page 71 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

“It seems the princess has a favorite fighter. All hail Princess Renata, and her noble father, Agraias, our rightful king.”

“Hail!” they all said, or shaer! in their language.

Shaer! Shaer! they went in their just-too-low-to-be-human voices.

And as I looked up at the sky, and as Galva and I were led away to cheers with our hands up in victory, the petals of strange yellow flowers rained on us by boys and girls with baskets, the trumpetlike horns of Erydon blaring an alien song, it was clear to me that great wheels had been set turning. Though to what strange end we would be borne, I could not then guess.

22Toward the Red City

To say the events of the following day were bewildering is to pay them thin coin. I still don’t fully understand everything that happened. First and most importantly, Galva and myself had been bought by the king of the half-giants, who was vain, and going bald, and wore kind of a wig just for the top of his head, like drapes of hair. But it didn’t match the bit down by his ears. The bangs on his forehead were glorious, the fluff behind a bit shabby. It must have took some doing on the part of his valet to get this hair-drape just right under his crown, which was white gold, which looks like silver, but isn’t. The crown, though—that was a beautiful thing set full of firestone, which I learned is made from smashing together rubies and citrine to get a brilliant orange gem. No idea how they do it. They’ve got magic in Erydon, but it’s different from in the east. They’ve also got something called alchemy, which is like magic, but just involves knowing what elements to combine and whether they need heat and such. Their priests are the only ones allowed to do alchemy, and they’re all right cunts, which is the same as in Manreach. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The king bought Galva for his troop of blacksand fighters, of which he was very proud, but me he bought entirely for his daughter, Renata, who was a bitch’s bitch at the tender age of eight. Wait ’til you hear some of what she got up to.

Oh, but where to start with this?

The cloud-ship, that’s a good place.

They don’t have them in Manreach, because they don’t know how to get sathium out of mountains. Sathium’s like air, you can’t see it, you can breathe it a little, but it’s bad for you. Makes your voice funny. Anyway, they use pipes of metal to suck it up, and put it in great canvas bags, because it’s much lighter than air and rises. You know how sparks go up from a fire? It’s because hot air is lighter. Like when it’s summer and the lower floor of a rich person’s house is decent, but the top is for dying in. I thought it was because the top floor was closer to Sath’s kiss, which is to say the heat of the sun, but no! The fucking air’s lighter! Who knew? These knobs of Erydon, that’s who. Anyway, sathium is much, much lighter than even hot air, and when it escapes from its cells and caves in the ground, it wants to go nowhere but up and up. So, put that in a huge bag, which they call a balloon, and tie a wooden boat-bit under it, and it flies! Erydon has seven of these, or they did at least. I’m getting ahead of myself, but I can’t help it. It’s too much. They knew things they shouldn’t, you know? Like how to push things with steam, and using marking-plates to put writing or drawings on paper, each leaf the same. And thunderdust, that shyte’s evil, but you already met it when I told you how these karks dropped it on giants and smashed them to bits and burned them with it. That’s what thunderdust does, it smashes and burns, all the while making a great ungodsly racket. The priests have control over that, too.

Or they did, before.

All right, I’m taking a breath.

The cloud-ship.

We were still slaves, if royal ones, so we went on the second cloud-ship, called the Pride of Geryat. Geryat was their goddess of eagles and storms, sometimes shown as an eagle with lightning for a tongue, sometimes as a woman with eagle’s wings and eagle’s claws for feet. She was the sister of Thumos, the God Under the Mountain, but she had been enslaved by him, and one of those eagle-feet always had a chain on it, held by the God Under the Mountain. Thumos was a scary old bastard. If I ever knew there to be a live goddie, and I’m not saying I know that, it would have been that Kark of Threes in the Thralls, and just as much so this mean, sooty cunt who sat upside down on a great obsidian chair under the mountain called the Throne of Thumos. Anyway, Geryat, she was painted on the side of the balloon, which was red, they were all of them red but the king’s, and I’m telling you, the thing was the size of a whale. We were herded along by the priests who flew it, and what a bunch they were. All bald, all men, with great square beards under their baldy heads. They wore circlets of white gold or blackglass or bronze depending on their rank, but the high priest wore a circlet of glowing iron, hot as if it came right out of the forge, though it never burned him because I suppose he was holy, and proof against fire, or at least that fire. You couldn’t get real close to him with it, it was that fucking hot it would make your eyes sting. And neither would you want to get close to him. They called him the Praxeter, which means “the greatest father,” and I never heard anyone call him another name.

But right, he wasn’t on our cloud-ship, he was riding with the royal family, which today was just the king and his daughter. On this particular trip, I couldn’t actually see what the Praxeter looked like, just his glowing circlet on the Storm’s Plaything; it lit the mist of a cloud that swallowed both ships. It lit the bottom of the great orange balloon that topped their boat trimmed in gold. The Plaything carried some of the royal guard as well, blackglass armored nine-foot hardboys with orange silk sashes about their trim waists. Orange was the royal color here.

To board, Galva and I had climbed stone stairs up to a sort of dock at which our cloud-ship stood tied, bobbing like a boat at sea. The sun was not yet up, it being earliest morning. The priests on our vessel, both high enough in the order to wear white gold circlets on their bald heads, went first, and then four king’s guard, and six regular soldiers. Various handlers bustled about as well; a true giant lifting the heavy things up, strong kynd slaves sorting them on the boat. An older man attached our chains to benches in the rear. A monkey in a cage came next, of the sort that stole my water, and he and me eyed each other with much mutual suspicion. Now a trio of peacocks in cages came, all saying what sounded like haaaaalp, one of these birds pure white, like it was blank and some lazy painter had forgot to put the colors on. Also a badger, and some parrots, and a fancy, cheeky cat called a lynx. Galva said they had those in Ispanthia, but this one on the cloud-ship was my first. I knew me and the lynx would get along, because he didn’t like the monkey either. I later heard Tinthrax had a famous market for exotic animals. Which is exactly what I was. Galva looked at the strange business going on around us, and then flashed her eyes at me as if to say, Do you believe this?

I stuck my black tongue out at her.

With a bang and a creak, the ship started to rise, and as it climbed, I got a curious feeling in my bits. I’d been high up before, but always with something under my feet, and something else under what was under my feet, and so on and so forth all the way to the solid ground that held us all. Here, there was wood beneath me. But under that? Nothing. Just fucking nothing.

“Whuh,” I said, overcome with it.

Our cloud-ship spun a time or two, then righted itself by means of big glass bottles that belched out fire and pushed us when a priest did this or that to them, taking turns between them to correct our course. What exactly was he doing? I looked and saw he was pinching a sort of lever. It occurred to me you’d use oars on a canoe much the same way. They weren’t fast, these ships, but they moved with a sort of portly grace, like a rich, fat dam through a tavern, parting the clouds before it.

I dared a look over the side, and far below us now, there went Tinthrax, the Fruit-Tree of Slaves, from which we had just been plucked by the hand of the king. Farewell to its red walls. Farewell to the Wostrans and their false noses and false goblin friends. Farewell to Birch, and the Holter, and to the wicked ould dam Verna Zan Zan, who I had almost liked despite or because of her warning not to do so.

Erydon, the capital, would have been a ten-day camel ride from Tinthrax.

We would dock at the palace by sunset.

These pilot-priests knew their work.

I watched them, I watched everything they did.

I knew we were to go south, but the first thing we did was turn our tail to the east and head hard west.

“Why are we going west?” I asked in my tongue.

“Shut up,” one said.

The other said, “To dodge the hard north thermals on the southern Thralls. Now, I agree, shut up.”

“Huh,” I said, I thought too quietly for further rebuke.

But the first priest gave me a look that wasn’t hard to translate. It said, You’re the property of the king, and I’m not supposed to throw you over the side. But I’d like to. And if you speak that slave language at me again, I just might.