The Black Mausoleum mof-4

by Stephen Deas

  The mouth of the canal was about the size of a dragon’s head. The rest wouldn’t fit. It would have to smash its way in. He had time. Time to get away.

  Jex had been up there. Relk, Marran, Kasern. All dead. A snap of fate’s fingers and gone, just like that.

  A storm of warm air tore at his clothes. The dragon was too far away to hurt him. Yet. He tried to think about where each foot was going, in between the chaos of broken stones and dragon eggs. Just that. Nothing else.

  Then he saw the second one. Down in the cisterns. A huge wriggling shape, a shadow in the distant haze, weaving between the columns. Saw a flicker of it, hundreds of yards away, coming towards him before the fire from the first dragon stopped, plunging them all back into darkness. Jasaan and Vish? He had no idea where they were, whether they were alive.

  He kept moving. The alchemists said that dragons talked in your head sometimes, but he’d never had that. Kill, eat, burn, that’s all a dragon was.

  The ground shook again, now with the crash of tumbling stone. That was the dragon worming its way towards him, given up on not smashing down the columns that held the cisterns together. A mad grin swept across his face. Maybe they’d all end up buried alive. Entombed together. A fitting end for an Adamantine Man.

  His foot caught on something. Hurled forward, he curled up before he even hit the ground, rolled and let his armour take the impact. First thing he did when he was back on his feet was check the pouches of dragon poison wrapped around him. Instinct, that was. There wasn’t much else you could do about a dragon except be eaten, and there wasn’t much point in that unless you were going to take the monster with you. All burn together, him from the outside, the dragon from within. What else was the point?

  Thing was to get to an edge, a wall, somewhere that would give shelter when the roof came down. Then hunker down and pray.

  Shudders rippled through the ground. More tumbling stones and the cisterns lit up with fire again. He didn’t look back, took what he could get and sprinted. There was no running from dragons, but that didn’t stop a man wanting to try, not when there was one right behind you.

  A deeper rumble shook the earth. The dragon behind him roared. The stones answered. A huge hand of air plucked Skjorl off his feet and threw him across the floor, bouncing between dragon eggs. He thumped into a step and cracked his head hard enough to make the world waver, even through his helmet. He blinked hard. Everything went dark again. The fire had stopped. The air was ripe with dust, rich with the smell of falling masonry and the rumble of tumbling stone.

  He sniffed. Fresh air from outside too. Sand. The smell of sand and salt.

  He smiled, but that wasn’t enough so he laughed, and even then he needed more. ‘You stupid dragon,’ he roared. ‘You actually did it. Vishmir’s cock!’ He stood up, filled with being alive. Filled with what felt like victory. Took a few steps back towards where the dragon had been before he stopped himself. Still couldn’t see a thing.

  There was the other one. Somewhere.

  Ought to slip off. Tiptoe between the eggs and hope another one didn’t hatch. Ought to. Really, really ought to. That’s what a man with an ounce of sense would do.

  ‘Vish? Skjorl?’

  Jasaan? He tried to make out where the call had come from. He counted to ten and when there wasn’t a raging dragon coming after him he reached for his firebox. Mad. What am I doing? But by the time he’d asked himself that, the firebox was lit. Didn’t help much. All he could see was a thick mist of dust.

  ‘Skjorl?’ Jasaan’s voice was laced with pain.

  ‘Jasaan?’ Took a couple of steps. Stopped. Somewhere out there was still a dragon. Maybe more than one. Maybe the hatchlings too.

  ‘Jasaan?’ A second voice.

  ‘Vish?’

  ‘Yep. Still alive. Skjorl?’

  ‘Still got all my bits.’ Friendly voices in the dark gave him strength. ‘Can you see anything?’

  ‘I can see you.’

  ‘The roof caved in.’ Jasaan’s voice was strained but he wasn’t gasping.

  ‘And the dragon?’

  ‘It’s not moving.’

  ‘You can see it?’ He couldn’t make out any other light.

  There was a pause. ‘It’s close. And I’m hurt.’

  Skjorl frowned at that. Adamantine Men were never hurt. They kept going or they fell over and crawled off to die, and if that was what they were going to do, they did it on their own without bothering anyone about it. The creed of the Guard had no room for the sick or the injured, no time or space for helping the wounded. You stopped to help someone when there was a dragon about, you both wound up dead. That simple. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Over here.’

  ‘What about the dragon. It moving?’

  ‘I think it’s stuck.’

  What Skjorl should be doing, he decided, was leaving. What Jasaan ought to be doing, unless he had two broken legs and two broken arms, was crawling over to wherever that dragon was and tipping poison down its throat.

  No. His company. So that was what he ought to be doing.

  Crap.

  ‘Vish! You keep going. See if you can find another way out of here.’

  ‘Bollocks! You do that. I got me a dragon to slay.’

  ‘Where’s the other one?’

  ‘Can’t see.’

  ‘You keep away from that tunnel.’

  ‘You think I’m an idiot, boss?’

  Skjorl growled. He started to move as quickly as he could through the haze of dust and the litter of rubble. Off towards Jasaan. By the time he got there, he could see the pile of fallen stone where the dragon had to be.

  The floor shuddered again. The other dragon, the one that had burned Jex and Kasern and the others. It was somewhere behind the cave-in now. Or could be a third. No way to tell.

  Jasaan was standing up, leaning against the broken stub of one of the pillars. He had one foot held off the ground. Ankle. Skjorl could see that straight away. Couldn’t walk. Could hop though.

  ‘You’re alive then.’

  Jasaan nodded.

  ‘That way.’ Skjorl pointed back the way he’d come. ‘Look for a way out.’ Maybe there wasn’t one, but it was that or climb past the collapsed roof, over the top of one dragon and straight into the path of another.

  ‘Don’t know why you’re standing around gossiping. Got nothing better to do?’ Vish trotted past them both.

  ‘I can’t, Skjorl.’ There was that pain in Jasaan’s voice again. ‘I can hardly move.’

  ‘You just wait here then.’ Skjorl took a moment and then followed Vish. Through the settling dust he could see the edges of the collapse. It was huge. Some building or other had sat on top of the cisterns and the whole thing had come down. Great slabs of cracked brickwork, of tiled floor covered in mosaics. Stone pillars and old scorched beams that still smelled of ash.

  Another rumble, a reminder that there was a second dragon around here somewhere.

  ‘Hey! Dragon! Are you already dead under there?’ Vish had his axe out, his own faithful mistress.

  ‘Still plenty of eggs to end if it is.’ Skjorl stared at the rubble. Looked up. He could feel a breeze. There was a way out here if they wanted it.

  ‘Ah. There you are. Tyan’s fury — if only I had a spear!’

  The dragon was buried from the neck down. It’s eyes were very slightly open, but it didn’t move. Skjorl’s first thought was that it was dead, but then he saw it blink.

  ‘Spear through the eye,’ muttered Vish as Skjorl stood beside him. ‘That would do it. Right in deep.’

  The head shifted slightly. Turned a fraction towards them. Despite himself, Skjorl froze for an instant. He had a dragon, right in front of him. A woken adult dragon. He took another moment to savour not being dead.

  ‘Poison. We have to poison it.’ There was always leaving it alone. Letting it starve until it burned from the inside. But no, couldn’t do that. Couldn’t leave a monster alive if he could leave it dead. Alway
s the chance that some other dragon would dig it free.

  The dragon’s lips curled back, letting them see its teeth. Vish weighed his axe. As he climbed close, it tried to snap at him, but it couldn’t turn its head far enough to reach, not with the stones crushing its neck. It sent a weak blast of fire at Skjorl, forcing him to shelter behind a shattered column, but then Vish was round behind it, and when it tried to reach him, Skjorl dashed up the rubble, and then they were both where it couldn’t touch them, halfway up and round the back of its head. It shuddered and closed its eyes and lay still.

  From the far side of the collapse, stone smashed against stone. Skjorl set to work on one side, Vish on the other. Killing the dragon with their axes was hard, like chopping at stone, but the monster never made a sound. Its eyes opened towards the end, looking at them as they finally hacked their way through its scales to the sinew and bone beneath, and then slowly closed again. Skjorl stopped, panting from the effort. Vish kept chopping away until Skjorl raised a hand.

  ‘Enough. It’s dead. Let’s go.’

  Vish grinned back at him like a madman. ‘We killed a dragon, Skjorl! We killed a dragon! With our axes! We killed a dragon and we’re walking away.’

  ‘And we’ve got eggs to finish. And there’s still the other one.’ The ground shook. ‘Can’t expect those stones to stop it for ever.’ The Night Watchman had killed more then ten on the night the Adamantine Palace had burned, but he’d had the Speaker’s Spear and the dragons still got him in the end. He and Vish, they’d killed an adult and they’d done it with steel and their bare hands. Not much chance they’d get back to the Purple Spur to brag about it, but Vish deserved his smile. They both did.

  A stone the size of a child hit Vish square in the back with the force of a charging horse, arcing down from the top of the collapse. Vish sailed through the air like a thrown-away doll, arms and legs limp and loose. He landed like a sack of turnips. Skjorl stared in disbelief. Then jumped away and looked behind him. Just a pale white haze of dust and sand in the air lit up by his firebox. Beyond that: darkness. He could hear, though. Stones moving.

  Vish!

  He snuffed the firebox and dived sideways. Kept rolling until something stopped him. He felt the air tear as another stone hurtled past him in the dark, heard it bounce and smash. He knew what came next. Had enough time to curl up tight, cover his hands and his face, put his back to the rubble and let his shield take the worst as the fire came. The air roared. The wind almost toppled him. He put a hand out to balance himself and felt the heat burn at his palm where there was no dragonscale, only soft leather.

  It was coming from the smashed-in hole in the cistern roof.

  The next stone caught his outstretched hand. He felt the shock more than the pain. Screamed as he saw the boulder fly off amid the flames.

  The fire wasn’t stopping. It was getting him, slowly, finding its way through his armour. He jumped back to his feet and ran, let the dragon’s flames light his way, weaving from side to side. Another rock whizzed past him, missed his head by a yard. The fire was weak by the time it reached him now. Weak enough that the few gaps and cracks between the dragonscale he wore would hold. The joints in his armour might be black and brittle by the end, but he’d be alive.

  The next boulder didn’t reach him. It hit the ground and bounded past, shattering a cluster of eggs. Lifeless hatchling bodies flopped out across the cistern floor. When the fire stopped, Skjorl eased his way sideways, getting as far as he could from where the dragon had last seen him.

  ‘Jasaan?’ he had no idea where Jasaan was.

  Vish was dead. Should have been the other way round. Jasaan deserved a touch of dragon’s fire. But Vish deserved his glory too. There’d be songs. Vish the dragon-killer. He eased his way through the darkness. Wondered for a bit if maybe Vish wasn’t dead after all, but he’d seen the stone hit, seen Vish’s head snap back and then forward, seen his body fly through the air and slide across the ground and then lie still.

  Had to look though. Had to be sure. Didn’t he?

  Stupid. He took a deep breath. Adamantine Men didn’t stop for their wounded. Didn’t matter who they were, that was the way of it. Going back got you killed.

  ‘Skjorl?’ Jasaan, closer than he’d thought.

  ‘Jasaan?’

  ‘The other dragon. I can see it. It can’t get through the rubble.’

  Now he stopped to listen, he could hear it tearing at the stones. ‘Can you swing an axe on your knees, Jasaan? If you can, you’re still useful. You can kill eggs. If you can’t, you might as well be dead.’ Harsh, but Vish and Jex had been his friends. Couldn’t say that about Jasaan, not after Scarsdale.

  There was a pause. When Jasaan answered, it was with a sullen edge. ‘Yes, Skjorl. I can still do that.’

  ‘Then you do it. I’m getting Vish’s poison.’

  There. A good enough excuse.

  7

  Kataros

  Twenty-three days before the Black Mausoleum

  ‘What have you done to me?’ He asked the same question over and over as he led her out of her tiny makeshift prison and into a maze of stairs and passages that bewildered her. She almost told him to shut up, but the blood-bound could be tricky. Too many different orders and he might freeze in confusion. The alchemist who’d bound her had only ever used the bond once, when he’d first made it. You will be unswervingly loyal to my desires. That was it and then nothing more, not in a year and a half of service. Most of the time she forgot it was even there. He’d been a kind enough man who’d never asked for much, whose greatest desire had been for her to grow into the power that he was offering her. She hadn’t needed any help with that.

  He’d shown her, after he’d bound her, how it was done, but he’d never told her what to do with it. He’d encouraged her, now and then, to bind others, but she never did, even though she knew that most alchemists had several blood-bound serving them. They did it for their protection they said, for the greater good, and in the squalor and hunger under the Purple Spur Kataros quite understood, yet every time she heard them, she remembered that they’d bound their Scales too, not long ago, and so they would have bound her if the Adamantine Palace hadn’t burned and more than half the alchemists of the realms been slaughtered.

  ‘You’re going to help me,’ she told him after she’d lost count of how many times he’d asked. ‘You’re going to help me save the realms.’

  ‘How are we going to do that?’

  She didn’t answer, and the truth was that she didn’t exactly know. All she knew was what the near-corpse that the Adamantine Man was carrying had told her two nights before.

  ‘It’s going to get dark,’ he said a while later. The halls and vaults of the Pinnacles glowed from above like a softly starlit night, a legacy of the Silver King, who’d brought order to the broken world and who’d first subdued the monsters. Half monster himself, half living god, adept with magics that no one before or since could even understand, almost everything here bore his mark. The Pinnacles had been his home for more than a hundred years, until the blood-mages had found a way to kill him.

  The Adamantine Man took her into later tunnels, ones carved by men. The twilight faded and the darkness grew. When she could barely see him any more, he stopped. ‘There are lamps by your feet. Get yourself one. You can get one for me too.’

  In an alcove beside her she felt the familiar shapes, the cold glass tubes of alchemical lamps. She hadn’t expected that, not here in the Pinnacles, where to be an alchemist, it had turned out, was to be an avatar of evil. ‘There are-’

  ‘Your lot made them. Yes.’

  ‘Don’t you-’

  ‘Believe that everything touched by an alchemist is cursed?’ The Adamantine Man snorted. ‘I was in Outwatch when the terror started. Then Sand. Evenspire, or what was left of it. Scarsdale. Got to the Purple Spur eventually. Spent more time there than I have here. I know what your kind are. You failed, that’s all. You’re no better and no worse than any of th
e rest of us. Not that that’s saying very much.’

  Kataros picked up a lamp. She turned it upside down, shook it and waited until the glow started. Then she handed it to the Adamantine Man and got another. ‘Won’t someone see the lights?’

  ‘No one comes here these days.’ He settled Siff over his shoulders and started on down the tunnel. The walls were different now. The light showed that they were rough, hacked out with picks and shovels and never finished. Utterly unlike the exquisite carved archways, the murals and the mosaics she’d seen elsewhere.

  ‘Why?’

  He stopped. ‘This leads to the lowest girdle of the scorpion caverns. Used to be hundreds of them here. They’re all ruined now. The poison ran out and then the bolts. Not much point sticking yourself somewhere you can be burned by a dragon when you haven’t got anything you can shoot back.’

  The tunnel went on, rough and uneven until it stopped at a fissure that ran up and down. Kataros couldn’t see how far it went either way, for the alchemical lamps produced little light. She crouched, searching for a pebble to drop, but the ground was smooth and there weren’t any. The Adamantine Man shifted Rat into a more comfortable position across his shoulders and started to climb. There were rungs bolted into the rock.

  ‘Why are we going up, not down?’

  ‘There’s tunnels down below. Guarded and watched well. There’s barricades and bolted doors and the speaker’s riders down there, watching out against the ferals. No way out without a fight — not for one like you. This way’s better. Gets us to the surface. No one goes out this way and you can’t get back up again, so there’s no one watching.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘You run into anyone up the top here, wave your arms at them and make ghost noises, that’ll probably work. Hyrkallan’s lot, they’re like little girls. The ones who’ve been here even longer are no better. All spooked. Most likely they really do believe that you lot made all this happen like he says. Demons. So make like one. Easier than having a fight. If they come back with any soldiers, we’ll be gone by then.’