The Black Mausoleum mof-4

by Stephen Deas

  ‘You followed the Silver King?’ Skjorl shook his head.

  ‘Better. I met him.’

  Beyond belief. Skjorl rolled his eyes and stared at Kataros. ‘Are you so desperate as to believe such a story.’ Hard to explain the eyes and the silver light, but that was just some spirit, wasn’t it? One of those ghosts he didn’t believe in. Or blood-magic. Maybe the outsider was a blood-mage! Or perhaps there was some potion…

  Kataros was looking at him. Smiling a little, although there was nothing friendly in her face. A little relish at his discomfort, that was all.

  ‘Could you lie to me?’ she asked.

  Skjorl sat in silence after that, brow furrowed. Inside his head he emptied out those sacks and slowly and carefully put everything back together again, back out where it used to belong. Took a while, but it was all still there. A part of him wasn’t too sorry about that either. Dragon-blooded was a good name. Said something. Had a truth to it. Would have been a shame to lose it.

  25

  Siff

  Some two years before the Black Mausoleum

  The path down the side of the valley was steep and stony and hard to follow. When they reached the bottom, Siff’s head still felt as though it wasn’t quite a part of the rest of him. The first he knew that they were close was the taint in the air, the old familiar smell of smoke and charcoal and burned skin. Memories stabbed at him, dulled a little by the dust but still sharp enough to bite. This is the last one, he promised them. Then I’m out of these mountains. No more dragons, no more burning. Silk sheets and soft women for me.

  They took their time coming down, and the riders had finished their work when they arrived. Flames flickered among the skeletons of what had once been huts and shacks. The village was gone. In another day there would only be a black scar on the landscape. That and the inevitable pile of charred corpses where the riders had butchered anyone too old or too young or too crippled to be sold as a slave. Scavenger food. Siff tried not to let his eyes find that, but Sashi found it for him.

  ‘Look.’

  He didn’t want to but he couldn’t stop his eyes turning. The riders had put the body pile close to the trail. Men and women who were dead because of him, even if they were shits, even if they raped and tortured their own sons and daughters, even if he wasn’t supposed to care one whit about what happened to them. At least it was a small pile this time.

  ‘Looks like they took a lot of slaves then,’ he said. Unless the dragons were hungry and had simply eaten everyone. There was always that.

  ‘Pity.’

  She meant it too. A lifetime chained to the oars of a Taiytakei slave ship for the men, being playthings for the women and the boys, and that wasn’t punishment enough? Siff shook his head. Although in a way she was right. If they’d killed everyone, that would have been better. If they’d taken slaves, they’d be held in pens back at the eyrie. He’d need to keep away from those. People might recognise him.

  Sashi hissed, ‘I wanted them all to burn.’

  ‘Some of them did and the rest are slaves. Let that be enough.’ He stared at the blackened bodies and shuddered. He’d keep away until the dragons made their next flight to the slave auctions in Furymouth. That would be best. He ought to hate himself but he didn’t. He didn’t feel much of anything at all these days.

  Most of the riders were gone. Only a pair remained, their dragons resting by the far edge of the settlement. The riders had stripped off most of their armour. They looked bored — no, not bored. They’d taken dust. Ancestors! That was why Sashi was keeping close to him, keeping small and insignificant behind his back.

  Half the riders at the eyrie took dust, which he got here, where it was made. These were supposed to be the other half, the self-righteous pricks who burned outsiders because some of them made dust and dust destroyed people. Yet here they were, the same self-righteous pricks, fuzzy-faced and dark-eyed from exactly what they’d come here to wipe out. Hypocrites, the lot of them. He’d yet to meet a dragon-rider worth the spit out of an honest man’s mouth.

  Might say the same for myself.

  He fingered his knives and wondered how easy it would be to gut them and steal their dragons. How much would he get for a pair of monsters? More than he’d ever get for trading dust, that was for sure. Yes, and then a thank you from some eyrie master in the shape of a knife in the back. Only riders sat on the backs of dragons.

  The two riders finally noticed him. Siff let his knives be. He was, at heart, a man who preferred not to take risks if he didn’t have to.

  ‘Enjoying the harvest?’ He forced a grin.

  ‘There’s nothing! Nothing here!’ The first rider rested a hand on his sword as he strode closer. Siff shrugged.

  ‘I expect that’s because you let your dragons burn everything.’ Behind their riders, the two dragons glared. Dragons terrified the shit out of Siff, terrified the shit out of everyone with any sense, he liked to think. They’d squash you with a careless step, squash you flat. Damn things always looked angry too. Angry and hungry with their baleful eyes the size of dinner plates and teeth like a forest of swords. He shuddered. Did their riders ever get used to how big they were? ‘Took a good enough haul of slaves though, eh?’ He glanced back towards the pile of bodies. ‘Or did you feed them all to your dragons?’

  The rider’s hand clenched the pommel of his sword so tight that Siff could see his knuckles turn white. He didn’t draw it though. ‘There’s no dust, you fool.’

  Of course there’s not. That’s because they hide it out in the forest and only I know where. He frowned and peered at the rider. Dilated pupils and the man was swaying slightly, as though drunk. ‘By the looks of you, you must have found some. ’ He could have stabbed himself. That wasn’t supposed to come out. You didn’t provoke a dragon-rider. Just didn’t, not if you wanted to keep your skin.

  The rider looked flustered. For a moment the devil in Siff took over his mouth. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.’ Shut up!

  The rider growled. He pulled his sword half out of its scabbard. Siff jumped away and whipped out a knife. The dragons eyed him with interest. You could feel their attention. You could feel them waking up, sensing the possibility of blood, and feel their remorseless hunger. But then the rider frowned and stared and seemed to lose his thread, caught in the flip-flop of emotion that came with too much dust. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He slid his sword back where it belonged.

  Siff smiled and put his knife away too. ‘Then let’s forget all about it,’ he said. And thank Vishmir for that. ‘Got a purse for me?’

  The rider shook his head. ‘Not here, sell-sword. You come back with us.’

  ‘What?’ It took a moment to realise that he meant it, that they wanted him up on the back of a dragon, and there was no way in the nine realms he was doing that. ‘Why?’

  The rider spat at his feet. ‘Because I tell you to, sell-sword.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ He tried not to look around for places to run to. If they were going to kill him right here, not a thing in the world would stop them; and the trouble was, the more Siff put himself in their boots, the more he could see how they’d do exactly that.

  ‘Then you and your purse can both crawl off and rot under the earth. We’ll keep our whore though.’ The rider turned away. Behind him, the other one had almost finished putting his armour back on.

  ‘Wait!’ Wait? Damn fool.

  ‘What?’ The rider didn’t turn around. He was already doing up the straps on his dragon-scale.

  ‘I come back with you and then I get paid, right?’

  The rider shrugged. ‘I don’t know and I don’t care. Maybe my eyrie master wants to stick a spike up your arse and hang you in a cage.’

  You couldn’t help but look at the dragons. Siff shook his head. They were just too big even this far away, out of reach of their fire-breath. But to get closer, close enough to touch… No. No, he wasn’t doing that. It made him want to scream.

 
The dead men he’d betrayed were laughing at him. ‘I’ll walk,’ he spat. ‘You lot owe me.’ He started to back away and put a hand on Sashi’s arm. ‘Come on, lover. Leave these gentlemen to their pleasure.’ It would take him a week or more to get back to the eyrie on foot. With a bit of luck the slaves would be gone by then and that was a thing to be happy about. Maybe it hadn’t worked out too bad after all.

  ‘You’re not taking her.’ The rider looked past Siff and leered at Sashi. ‘No. She can ride with me. She knows what I like.’

  I bet she does. ‘Best let her stay with me, rider. Otherwise she might just bite it off.’

  ‘No.’ Sashi pushed past him and looked the rider up and down. ‘I’ll go with him. It’s fine.’

  ‘It’s bloody not fine.’

  She half-smiled, half-leered at him. ‘I’ll wait. You won’t be long, right?’

  Siff backed away from the riders and their monsters. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the looks that went between the rider and Sashi. That was where she’d got her dust then. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Betrayed mostly, but with a bit of pity for her too. They’d burn her, more likely than not, once they were bored with her. That’s what happened when you played with dragons. ‘Suit yourself then.’

  He turned away, an itch between his shoulders until he’d walked the first mile or two and saw the dragons up in the air at last, flying home. Empty cages hung beneath them, a few wooden bars lashed together with crude ropes. That was how the dragon-knights carried their slaves. Sometimes the cages fell apart in mid-air, but what did that matter? They were only slaves, right? Plenty more out there. Bastards.

  He stood still, watching them go, higher and higher off to the south until the sky swallowed them, and then, only then, did he give a deep sigh and turn round, heading back for all those hidden stashes of dust.

  He was shaking.

  26

  Blackscar

  Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum

  The dragon understood time well enough, but the concept had little meaning. It hatched, it ate, it grew, it flew. Some day a strange feeling would come from inside. A heat that would not be denied. It would come like a flood, wave after wave, each one deeper and stronger than the last. Not with any pain, but with a tiredness. The dragon would lie down and fade and its essence would vanish away to the realm of the dead, a spirit seeking passage. Sometimes it awoke there alone. Sometimes others would come and go, others it knew. Sometimes it passed a shoal of the human dead, vanishing towards whatever end awaited them. Occasionally it found other things, trapped and best left well alone. Always, though, it felt the call. New flesh, begging for life; and always it answered, sought out the cries and devoured one and awoke, a hatchling reborn, cracking its hungry way from the egg. This was how a dragon marked the passage of time, not in seasons or suns, but in lifetimes.

  Around the three spires of stone where the Isul Aieha had once lived it made its home. The little one it sought was always there. Never hidden, but walled within the stone where even a dragon could not reach. It hunted. It made sport of the prey in the ruins below. It roosted as the whim took it among the smashed palaces of the mountaintops, or else far away, but it always came back and the little one was always still there, a thorn in the dragon’s thoughts. It could not have said how long it waited, how many days passed as it came and went, feeding, hunting, soaring, sometimes alone, sometimes with others of its kind. It could not have said because it did not care. Mere days were such ephemeral things.

  Then one morning the little one was gone. The dragon raked its senses through the mountains. All the others it had come to know, they were still there, but the one it wanted, that one was gone; and so the hunt began.

  27

  Siff

  Some two years before the Black Mausoleum

  The sensible thing, he knew, was to disappear. The Worldspine was big enough and they’d hardly come looking for him. Running after him with their bag of silver to pay him what he was due. Not likely. Yes, walking away was the sensible thing. Trouble was, everything he had was hidden around that eyrie, the place where dragons were groomed and grown and fed and trained. And they really owed him a lot of silver for today’s work. If they were going to kill him, he decided, they would have done it already; if they weren’t, then yes, he’d like to be paid. He’d take his blood money and be gone, and after that he’d be happy if he never saw these mountains again.

  The valleys around the edge of the Worldspine all looked the same to Siff. He’d lived his whole life in them, but unless you were a dragon-rider, all you got to see were the trees around you, the branches overhead and whatever annoying pile of rocks, cave, fissure, gulley, stream, waterfall or pack of hungry snappers was getting in your way to to slow you down this time. There were paths sometimes, if you knew where to look for them, old ways made of heavy stones laid down by people long forgotten. Sometimes there were even rope bridges. The trouble with paths was the chance of running into someone else, and the fact that the average someone else almost always turned out to be a murderous footpad to anyone travelling alone. Bridges, as far as he could tell, were official meeting places for murderous footpads. Siff avoided the lot. He made his own way through the forest and the valleys to the dragon-riders’ eyrie. It took him a week and a half. He dragged it out. The longer the better, the more chance all the slaves would be gone by the time he got there.

  He knew he was getting close when there started being more to the world than trees and rocks and streams and then more trees and rocks. The forest around the eyrie peak had been stripped away, its rugged slopes covered in grass and dotted with huts and herds of alpaca. Further up the valley, the huts grew closer together. There were people here, not the outsiders who lived in the forests, but the tame dragon folk who lived in the shadows of the eyries. The sort who would tell you that the dragons protected them, even as the monsters and their riders took everything they had and left them no better off than the forest folk. He passed pens filled with animals. The huts gradually gathered together into what passed for a town, but he skirted around all that and headed for the path that went up the mountain, another old stone thing, uneven, weathered, steps worn by all the feet that had gone up and down. Odd that, since almost no one used it now, barely even remembered it was there. If you wanted something up the mountain, you simply carried it in the talons of a dragon. Even Siff had to agree that was much more straightforward and far less effort than climbing the path on foot. It was there, though, like the paths through the valleys, old and forgotten by all but the outsiders. Made in a fairy-tale time that had never really happened when there had been no dragons, and the people of the mountains had lived and prospered and raised towns and cities and these paths had been their roads. Rubbish, all of it, but pretty stories nonetheless. Maybe if you could believe there had once been a time before dragons then you could believe in a faraway day when they’d finally be gone.

  As he approached the top of the path, three of the monsters soared through the valley below him. They arced upwards and landed somewhere among the crags and bluffs above. They were carrying cages. He saw one cage clip the ground and shatter, spilling slaves all over the mountainside. He could smell the eyrie now. A smell you always took with you. Dragons.

  He stopped and had his lunch while the riders above rounded up all the slaves that hadn’t been maimed or killed in the crash. It happened all the time. Sickening really, if you stopped to think about it, and so on the whole he didn’t. He waited and ate and drank and dozed and smoked his pipe. When he was sure the riders were finished, he packed his bag and wound the rest of his way up to the eyrie.

  Since he wasn’t a rider, no one was remotely interested in him or anything he had to say once he got there. The first time he’d been left to wander an eyrie, he couldn’t believe that people just let him by, minding their own business when he could have been anyone. He could have been a spy, an assassin, a madman, anyone, but he’d grown used to it, and he underst
ood now. Their arrogance made them stupid — they simply couldn’t believe that anyone worth bothering with came to a mountain eyrie on foot.

  It took him an afternoon and then an evening of waiting around, while everyone else had their supper, before he finally got to talking to someone who mattered. This one was wearing a fancy gold cloak, which Siff had never seen before. Gold cloaks probably meant something so he bowed a lot. Outsiders were supposed to do that anyway, and this one had a nice fat purse.

  ‘You’re the scout,’ said Gold Cloak.

  Siff nodded. Gold Cloak held out the purse.

  ‘Then this is yours.’ He frowned. ‘My riders tell me there was no dust.’

  My riders? Siff tried to keep a straight face. He shrugged.

  ‘Maybe they moved it. Maybe they hid it. They usually do. I’m not surprised your riders didn’t find it. The slaves you took might know where to look.’

  ‘Yes. They did. We went back. Everything was gone.’

  Siff shifted uncomfortably. Hadn’t expected that. That would be because I went round and took it all myself. He shrugged again. ‘Must have missed a few of them in the woods then. Easily done. I suppose they must have taken it after your riders left. Have you asked the woman?’

  Gold Cloak frowned. He snapped his fingers and a door opened behind him. Two riders came out pushing Sashi in front of them. ‘You mean this one?’

  ‘Yes.’ Shit.

  ‘She was no use. Did she do as she was told?’

  Siff nodded. Time to be a little rude, to be what they’d expect from an outsider. Push back, just enough to earn some disdain.

  ‘Yes, she did, and that’s my woman now, remember. Part of our deal. You tell your riders that, remind them that she’s mine. They seem to think they can help themselves to her whenever they want. Well they can, if they’re that desperate, but they pay now I’m here. They pay me.’ Gold Cloak seemed to struggle with this and Siff had to work to keep his face looking angry. He’d met dragon-knights like Gold Cloak before, the ones who thought that all the riders around them were as pure as mountain snow.