Embar Dea reached the sea palace toward dawn, when a light as faint and pure as the pearl that she still clutched in her claw was rising over the eastern horizon. Embar Dea looked out across a cold stretch of ocean, dappled with shards and fragments of ice, to where a glittering phosphorescence tracked across the sea. A rush of excitement filled her: she knew what that glitter meant, magical and beckoning—the path of dragons. And just as she saw this, they began to sing, their voices lifting up through the water and bursting into the light, as cold and eerie as the ocean itself. It was a long time since Embar Dea had given voice so boldly, but she did so now, raising her head from the water and sending air fluting through each of the bearded tentacles that surrounded her face.
When Embar Dea began to sing, the rest of the dragons stopped, as if startled, but only for a moment. Then their voices, too, began again, joining in with her song and responding in harmony to it. Embar Dea knew this meant that she had been accepted, and even though there was little possibility that she might not have been, she was still relieved. She was old, and it was long years since she had last spoken with any of her kind, apart from the now-dead in Sulai-Ba. She did not know if things had changed, for territories between dragons were subject to constant subtle shifts, and it was almost certain that the allegiances she knew were no longer in place. Dragons were benign, looking at matters over a great span of years, but dragons played games.
No games this time, it seemed. As the song from beneath the waves went on, a spire rose from the sea. It was a pinnacle of ice, a fretted turret, rising higher and higher into the wan sunlight and bringing the rest of the palace with it. Embar Dea saw huge halls and caverns, green sea ice like precious stone, marbled with silver, encrusted with barnacles and pearls, and at this, she clasped the pearl that she held even more tightly. A staircase of black ice, water gushing and rushing over its sides, surged up out of the sea in front of her and Embar Dea climbed, feeling the ice burning-freezing under her claws before her body temperature adjusted and it became like walking on sun-warmed stone.
Up the steps and into the great central hall of the sea palace. And there were dragons waiting, all nine of the remaining sea dragons of the world of Earth: wild dragons covered in limpets and weed; a dragon from the warm southern seas whose skin was chased with a thousand different colors, gold and scarlet and sea-green, gliding across it in the silent speech of its kind; dragons from the far north who looked like ice themselves, glassy and remote and chill.
Embar Dea moved between the ranks of dragons, all the way up the long hall, with its pillars and columns and lacy balconies. And as she walked, someone came to meet her.
He was black and shining, silver glistening and gleaming about his armored head. Perhaps a hundred feet from nose to tail, bristling with spines, his wedge-shaped, great-eyed head swinging from side to side. Between his horns, a pearl showed him to be of Imperial lineage.
"You are the last," he said. He spoke like the music of dragons. "You are the one from the temple, from the lost place."
"I am Embar Dea," she said, for he had spoken first, as befit his status. But she was full of questions. She knew this dragon: Prince Rish, but if he was here and speaking for the assembly, then where was the Dragon Lord?
"Our King is gone," the Prince said, as if he had heard her thought, as perhaps he had. And all the dragons raised their voices in a terrible song of mourning. Embar Dea bowed her head and felt suddenly, dreadfully old.
"I have something to give to you," she said, feeling that she wanted to give up what had become a great burden. She held out the pearl from the Veil of Day, and explained how she had come by it.
The dragons mourned again, voices raised in icy keening. "This is the pearl of the old King," the Dragon Prince said. "This is the pearl that went missing from Cloud Kingdom, and thus stole his life away. And now we have it back, but it is too late, the old King is dead and the new King gone."
Embar Dea knew that she was not at fault, but she could not help feeling somehow to blame. "If I had been earlier—" she started to say.
"It would have made no difference. This is many years in the making. We have this now, it is returned to us and we thank you, because I believe it is a sign that we will prevail."
"Please," Embar Dea said. "What has been happening? All I know are signs of danger and loss, but I don't know why."
"No more do we," said the mottled, shifting southern dragon, in a voice that suggested that speech did not come easily to her, a voice like rusting metal. "Signs and portents, of danger and woe, but we don't know where it comes from."
"We must go to Cloud Kingdom," the Dragon Prince said, and Embar Dea's heart lifted at this, for she had not seen Cloud Kingdom since she was a child, born there like all dragons before being sent to the many worlds. "And now you have come," Prince Rish added. "We are able to leave."