There was a small crowd waiting on the platform as they banked in for a landing.
Seeing them there, a cluster of tiny specks in the middle of the immense open space, brought home to Thomas just how huge the palace really was. The petals that cupped the landing field hid the rest of the city from view so there was no visual way of telling they weren't on the ground, but there was something in the air, something cold and sharp, that suggested immense altitude, and indeed they were as high as the peaks of some mountains. There should be snow and ice up here, Thomas thought as the steeds flapped their wings to stall themselves and lower themselves the last few feet. Tak must have spun some magic to take the edge off the chill.
The steeds settled gently to the ground and the three riders dismounted, Thomas and Lirenna staring around in astonishment. The demi shae awed that such a wonder could exist, and her husband basking in the memories that filled his head. Memories of occasions when Tak had come and gone from this place, to visit the other Gem Lords or explore the outer reaches of his Realm. He knew that as soon as they'd passed within the palace the steeds would fly off to their stables in the tower's lower bulge, entering through the great oval openings that ringed its upper half where they would be looked after by a staff of grooms and servants.
There were hundreds of steeds down there, almost all of them kept in Eversleep. Only being woken up when they were needed. Such large numbers of steeds were maintained for those rare occasions when the Gem Lords went to war. Not against other Gem Lords, that was inconceivable, but against those inhabitants of their own Realms who'd done something to arouse their anger. A Gem Lord might take a liking to a particular community, for instance, and take up arms to defend them against other communities who threatened them. Being almost gods, they could, of course, simply blast them out of existence with a few well chosen spells, but where was the fun in that? When the centuries dragged past without end, you had to take your entertainment where you could find it, and their enemies might be spared, might even become their new favourites, if they put up a particularly spirited defence.
Their reception committee walked forward, and Thomas recognised Jasper and Garnet, grinning at him like idiots. The others were people he'd never seen before, but Tak's memories filled in their names.
"Topaz," he said to a man dressed in blue. "You're Topaz, aren't you?"
"Welcome to Dono," said Topaz, smiling as he held out a hand.
Thomas took it and introduced him to his wife.
"We've been waiting for this moment for centuries," the gem rak added. "This is a great moment for us."
"Indeed," agreed the dark skinned woman standing beside him, and Thomas was astonished to see that she was actually trembling with emotion. "You are our salvation, Thomas Gown, or so we hope."
"You must be Lady Jet," said Thomas as he took her hand. "A full Gem Lord with her companion. Coal?" The dark skinned man standing behind her inclined his head, acknowledging his identity. "It's an honour to be greeted by such important, powerful people. And would you be Jade?"
The green eyed woman hanging a small distance back came forward to take her place beside the others. "Welcome back to Dono," she said, taking his hand. "We were beginning to fear that this day would never come."
"Thank you," said Thomas, "but I'm not coming back here. I've never been here before. I've come here for the first time."
"Yes, of course," the green eyed woman agreed, a look of alarm on her face as she glanced at Lord Ruby, as if fearing she'd made a stupid mistake.
They think I'm going to become Tak, Thomas realised. They think I'm going to stay here for the rest of my life, become Sapphire the Gem Lord. I must make them realise that I'm only staying as long as it takes to finish whatever it was that Tak started. I'll help them, whatever it takes, but then I'm going home.
"Where's Lord Emerald?" he asked. "And what about the others? Lan, Enna Mael and Alustra? Evidently some of you think this occasion is more important than others."
"We don't know where Talpha-Ja is," replied Barl. "After your sixth predecessor turned out to be unsuitable, he despaired that we would ever succeed and disappeared to the furthest reaches of his realm. We haven't been able to find him. Even Jade has no idea where he is, and so we haven't been able to tell him about you. As for the others, Lord Opal and Ladies Pearl and Diamond, we haven't told them about you and it's very important they don't find out."
"They are opposed to what we're doing here," added Lady Jet, or Sheena as Tak had always thought of her. "They don't want our efforts to save the world to succeed. They want to die."
"Want to die?" cried Lirenna in horror. "They would throw the gift of life back in the faces of the Gods?"
"To them, life is no longer a gift but a curse," said Barl. "Three thousand years is a long time, even for us, and we can't end our lives when we grow weary of them. In our madness we made our soul gems indestructible." He looked down at his own gem, still glowing on his wrist, and the other gem raks did the same. An involuntary movement they performed before becoming aware of it.
"But when the realms collapse everything in them will be destroyed, no matter how indestructible it is," added Barl. "They see that as their escape. The only way they can end the eternal misery that their lives have become."
"But Tak died, didn't he?" pointed out the demi shae.
"Not exactly," replied the Gem Lord. "His soul was destroyed in a quasi magic explosion, but the essence of him remained. His memories and, hopefully, his skills. His genius. That is what we placed inside your body, where it merged with your own soul." He said this to Thomas.
"Without asking me what I thought about it!" protested the wizard angrily. "I was terrified when the memories started coming! I thought I was going mad!"
"We're sorry, but we had no choice," said Jade, hanging her head in shame.
"You could have asked me! I might have volunteered!"
"And you might not have," pointed out Lord Ruby. "We didn't dare take that chance."
"Why are we talking out here?" asked Topaz, alarmed by the turn the conversation was taking. "Let's go inside. The day's growing late, you'll want to rest and refresh yourselves. We can talk more tomorrow."
"Excellent idea," agreed Barl, and he guided the others towards the small building standing at the edge of the landing platform. The building that contained the steps down to the palace below. "We have a feast prepared, to show how pleased and relieved we are to finally have you here."
His words reminded Thomas that he hadn't eaten since breakfast and that his stomach was rumbling loudly. Barl gestured for him to lead the way, and the gem raks fell in behind, the wizard using Tak's memories to lead him down the wide, cavernous staircase and through the maze of passages and corridors waiting below.
☆☆☆
The dining chamber was astounding. It was the size of a ballroom, and one whole wall and part of the floor was one giant window giving them a panoramic view out across the city. None of the other towers rose high enough to obstruct their view, so they were able to see landscape features shrinking with greater and greater distance until they were grey with haze, and at the very limit of vision was a thin ribbon of blue. The world ocean, at least a thousand miles away. If the air were perfectly clear, Thomas thought as he and Lirenna stared in wonder, we'd be able to see neighbouring continents, and if there was a direction in which the view wasn't obscured by land masses you'd be able to see all the way to the edge of this artificial world. Fifty thousand miles away!
He turned to see how Lirenna was taking it, but she was wearing her slightly vacant expression again, her shayen brain not quite able to comprehend the immensity of what she was seeing. Instead, she was looking down at the city below. The fliers were still visible, swooping and diving around the other towers, but only the rarest, fittest individual could fly high enough to reach the palace. Occasionally, Thomas remembered, a group of energetic youngsters would compete against one another to make the attempt, and Tak had rewarded those who succeeded by inviting them in for a celebratory dinner. Occasionally, though, someone would overreach themselves and pass out through over exertion, and his companions would have to catch him as he plunged back to earth.
There were occasional deaths, but what was life without challenges to overcome? It had frequently been commented upon that it was only the ever present danger of death that gave life meaning. What makes the lives of the Gem Lords worth living, then? he wondered. If they were killed, by accident or carelessness, their souls would be sucked back to their soul gems and they'd be wearing a healthy new body within minutes. But, of course, they had Derro, the red sun, which was going to blow up and kill them all unless they could stop it. Maybe the terrible threat it posed was a blessing in disguise. Maybe it was this that had prevented Barl and Sheena from suffering the same insane despair as Lan, Alustra and Enna Mael who, he now realised, had begun showing symptoms of mental instability even before Tak's 'death'.
The nearest sun was setting, the hundred mile wide globe of magical fire now only a few times its own diameter above the ground, and in reply to Lirenna's question he explained that they travelled in an arc across the sky, rising up through a hole in a circular island and sinking into another, where they passed into the world below. There, they travelled above the inverted landscape before rising back up through the hole in the first island, so that it was day down there while it was night up here. At midnight, he told her, the light of the sun would shine up through the lake surrounding the city, which had no bottom, illuminating the city from below. In the far distance, they could see other suns at various points in their orbits, looking like stars hanging close to the horizon, and Thomas explained that there were places equidistant from two suns, where one was up while the other was down, so that it was never truly night and the passage of days was determined by what direction the light was coming from.
"These islands with holes in, that the suns go through..." said Lirenna.
"The Sungates," said Thomas while the gem raks listened, delighted by how fast his memories were returning. "They're spaced in pairs, about ten thousand miles apart. Up through one, down through the other."
"Yes, the Sungates," said the demi shae. "With the sun so close every day, they must get pretty hot."
"They're uninhabitable," agreed Thomas. "Scorched black by the heat. The rock of their interior surfaces has fused to black glass, but if you get to within a few miles of them the spectacle of the sun rising through them is indescribable! There are people out there who worship them as gods, who make human sacrifices to them."
Lirenna stared in horror. "Can't they stop them?" she asked.
"The Gem Lords can stop those they know about, but there are so many land masses, the realms are so huge, that trying to police all of it is out of the question." And the gem raks usually don't even try, he added to himself. What did they care if the people of some distant island cut peoples' hearts out? If it helped them to think that their worship gave them some control over the motion of the suns, then where was the harm of it?
He didn't say this, but of course Lirenna was reading his mind and was now looking very scared. Thomas wanted to reassure her, to tell her that she wasn't going to lose him, but he didn't feel able to say it in front of the others. I'll wait until we're alone, he thought. I'll tell her then.
In the meantime he just reached across and took her hand, giving it a squeeze. She looked across at him and he smiled back, trying to tell her what he wanted to say without words. That it was still Thomas standing beside her. Still her husband. The man who loved her. The man who would always love her. The Gem Lords wanted him to become Lord Sapphire, he knew. They weren't interested in Thomas Gown. To them, Thomas Gown was nothing more than a vessel into which Lord Sapphire would be reborn. If Thomas disappeared in the process, they wouldn't care.
Thomas Gown isn't going anywhere, he thought, and he tried to put it into the smile he was giving Lirenna. She smiled weakly back at him, looking reassured, and Thomas relaxed. I'll tell you properly later, he promised himself. When there aren't all these people all around.
Barl showed the two wizards to the places that had been prepared for them, at the heads of the long table. They wanted Thomas to have Barl and Sheena beside him, so they could talk to him easily, he assumed, while Lirenna's place was at the other end of the table. flanked by Jasper and Garnet. Thomas guessed that their task for the evening was to keep her occupied in conversation while the Gem Lords worked on him, but Thomas wasn't having any of it.
"Would it be okay if we sat side by side?" he asked. "This is all a bit overwhelming and we'd both feel better with the other close by."
"Well..." began Lord Ruby.
"We'll sit here. Is that okay," He guided Lirenna to a seat halfway along the table, then sat beside her. Lirenna beamed with relief, while the gem raks milled uncertainly, glancing at Lord Ruby to see what they should do.
"Of course," said Barl, resigning himself to the inevitable. "Whatever makes you feel at ease." He then sat beside Thomas, while Jasper sat beside Lirenna. The ends of the table were taken by Coal and Jade. The two least important people sitting furthest from Thomas, he saw with amusement.
They were served by blue eyed men and women dressed in uniforms of the same colour, the characteristic livery of Lord Sapphire's household. The meal they served was Ilandian in preparation and content. One of Thomas's favourite childhood meals, but with some elements from Tak's time, recognised by Thomas as an attempt to lull the human part of him with pleasant childhood memories while evoking the spirit of the ancient Lord of Domandropolis. He smiled as he spooned the soup starter into his mouth, confident that he was fully in control of his own mind and that all these new memories would not change the basic core of who he was.
The food was excellent, and so was the wine, not that he was an expert. The soup was followed by pork carved from a whole roast pig placed in the centre of the table, and Barl reminded Thomas of a boar hunt he and Tak had taken part in, shortly after the death of Khalkedon. Thomas hadn't previously had any memory of the incident, but as the Gem Lord described it the memories came flowing back and he smiled, remembering the long chase through tangled woodlands. The horse bucking under him as they'd struggled through the undergrowth, and the moment of triumph when he'd speared the squealing creature with his lance. Almost as good as a good breek hunt! Tak had also enjoyed hunting pyrodons, he remembered. A fierce creature he'd created himself for the purpose. He gasped at the memory. How could he have forgotten the pyrodons? They'd taken up almost as much of his time as the gem steeds themselves!
The sweet was seedless grapes with a crunchy sugar coating, piled in two communal bowls, one at either end of the table, and as Thomas reached for one his hand bumped against Sheena's, the soft pad of the heel of her hand soft and cool as it rubbed pleasantly against the back of his fingers. That was deliberate! he realised, popping the grape into his mouth without giving any sign of what he suspected. She's trying to remind me of the physical relationship we once had.
Now that he took the time to notice, he saw that she was wearing a body identical to the one she'd been born in. Lithe, muscular and athletic. About thirty years old, the same physical age as she'd been when they'd first met. She wore the same mischievous grin she'd had then. Her hair was styled the same way, and she even had the same fragrance of horses and sweat about her, although barely noticeable. Just sufficient to register on the subconscious and evoke Tak's memories of that long ago day.
They'd made love on the eve of that first battle, he remembered, and Tak had enjoyed it more than any other experience of his life, but Tak had never had a shayen lover and the gem rak could read in his face that her attempt was doomed to failure.
He turned his head to look at Lirenna and was delighted to see her grinning triumphantly at Lady Jet. Her sharp eyes had followed the whole incident and were now glowing with new hope. That's right, he thought as their eyes met, and he gripped her hand again to confirm it. I will never stop loving you. I will never leave you for these people. Never.