by Stephen Deas
His consciousness slipped away now and then. He kept his teeth clenched, trying to stay awake as long as he could, waiting for the ones around him to fade and then wriggling behind them so that they took more of the cold and he took a share of their warmth. At some point they flew though a blanket of cloud. They were going down, from the bitter high mountain skies through the grey shroud over the Raksheh into the warmer air above the trees. The cloud was a special cold, but afterwards, once they were beneath it, the wind wasn’t quite as biting any more and instead of snowcapped mountains, the land he could see was a deep, dark green, pinched and wrinkled like an old man’s skin. The Raksheh. For a second or two he laughed to himself — it was certainly a quicker way to get where he’d been going than all that tedious trekking north to Hanzen’s Camp and then finding a boat down the Fury.
The Raksheh rain started. A hail of knives that battered even the strongest of them into silence. Siff closed his eyes. There was a valley down there, distant, down among the green hills, shrouded in mist. He saw it now and then, as the cage swung that way. The Yamuna. That was the river that went through the Raksheh. He thought about Sashi, and how he hoped he’d stuck her with that knife he’d thrown. He didn’t have the words for how he hated her for selling him out. Gold would have rained out of the sky for him in Furymouth. Now it was gone, all gone, because of her, and he was going to die and meet his ancestors.
Ancestors. Barely remembered faces, burned by dragons years ago. Strange how he could remember his mother’s face more clearly now that ever before. His mother’s face and his father’s voice.
The cage swung suddenly sideways, tipped and tumbled them on top of each other. He gasped and looked about, couldn’t feel anything except the press of bodies on him. The ground was racing up, getting closer much too fast. He tried to wriggle free but the crush held him like glue. Rocks and stones and trees were flying up to smash him and he couldn’t move. He screwed up his face and screamed.
The cage lurched again. The weight on top of him was suddenly crushing. His ribs creaked. He felt all his breath pressed out of him in one long gasp. Wood groaned and popped.
And snapped, and the cage fell into pieces and he was falling.
Bodies flailed around him. Four dragons swirled down from above. He saw a rider ripped from his saddle and cheered to himself. Good to die with a last happy memory. Then something hit him in the back, tearing his skin, sending him spinning. He tipped over and saw water, a waterfall. The spray doused him, shocked him; he bounced off the falling torrent and then the water took him and wrapped its arms and its thunder around him and sucked him into darkness, and that should have been the end of that.
When he opened his eyes again, he was on a muddy grassy riverbank. He coughed, spluttered, vomited up a gout of water then rolled over, clutching himself. His insides were frozen stiff, but the air on his skin was strangely warm.
There was a dragon looking down at him. A dusky grey one. He screamed. As screams went, it was feeble and pathetic, but he gave it the best he could muster. It ended with more coughing and spluttering and sicking up water into the grass.
Death. In the real world he was still somewhere in the water, drowning. This? Having a dragon meet you in the afterlife made a sort of sense.
The dragon stared at him as though he was a fish that had somehow flipped itself out of a pond and was now flapping helplessly on the shore. There were other dragons too. Four of them all together. One was the dragon that had been carrying the cage. The other three seemed somehow different. They had a purpose to them. They were precise and methodical, picking bodies off the ground and piling them up together.
It slowly dawned on him that none of them had riders.
Are you poisonous?
He had no idea what that thought was doing in his head. It wasn’t his, not that he could make into any sense at least, but since it was in his head, he supposed it must have been. Poisonous? Was he poisonous? What did that mean?
Do you have dragon poison inside you?
Dragon poison? When had he ever heard of such a thing?
What of the others?
Others? What others? He slapped himself around the head. The dragon was still staring at him. Then it picked him up.
I am a dragon, said the voice inside his head, and you are nothing. You are not dead. You are food.
He fainted.
When he opened his eyes again, he was back on the ground, still on the riverbank. The dragons had gone. He blinked and looked around and then blinked some more. Still gone.
Must have imagined it then. He took a deep breath. What had happened, he decided, was that the waterfall had broken his fall. He’d been washed up on the bank of the river, half-drowned, and the rest had been a hallucination. Or maybe he was still up in the air, freezing slowly to death in the wind, and for some reason he’d gone mad.
Hallucination didn’t explain the neat pile of bodies that his imaginary dragons had made. Being mad, well, if he was mad then none of this was real anyway so he might as well get up and have a look at them.
Maybe I did that while I was delirious?
Probably not, since he was still tied up, trussed the way he’d been when Gold Cloak had shoved him in the cage. If anything, being soaked in freezing rain and water had made the ropes tighter. He could barely stand. If he was mad and none of this was real, he might at least have had the decency to have untied himself. So perhaps not mad either.
The pile of bodies reminded him uncomfortably of the charred corpses back at the village, the one he’d betrayed. He blinked and stared at the river for a while. The air was cold now, not warm like it had been when he’d seen the dragon. The waterfall was a few hundred yards away. At least he was out of the wind.
He was cold.
What could make a dragon crash?
No, that was a thing not to think about. The thing to think about was that he was alive, barely, and he wasn’t in a slave cage any more and there wasn’t a dragon carrying him to the pens in Furymouth and he wasn’t about to be sold or murdered in his sleep. The thing to think about was that he was going to starve to death right here, wherever here was, if he didn’t die of cold first. Or of all the bits that hurt, which was almost everything.
Shelter.
His ribs and his back hurt, almost as though something had coiled around him, crushing him, pulling him out of the water without much regard to whether anything got broken in the process. Another thing not to think about. He staggered to the pile of bodies instead. It was messy. They largely looked like what you’d expect if you took a few dozen men and then scattered them from the sky across a landscape of giant rocks and boulders. Among them he saw a flash of gold. He had to kick bodies — bits of bodies as well — out of the way since his hands were tied, but there he was, Gold Cloak. Or half of him, anyway. He had his head and his shoulders and his nice cloak and his ribs and then his snapped spine sticking out through a mess of guts and bloody scraps of flesh.
For the first time in a good few days Siff smiled. He kicked about in the pile some more. Eventually he found a dragon-rider’s leg. You could tell it came from a rider because of the boot. It was a nice boot, but nowhere near as precious as the knife kept tucked inside it. Riders always kept a knife in each boot. No one had ever told him why, but that’s the way it was. Getting the knife out took a while. Jamming it in between a couple of rocks took longer, fraying the ropes that bound him longer still, but he did it, and then he was free.
Free and cold and hungry. But free!
He shouted it out to the stones around him, not caring if there were any other dragon-riders here now, stretched and rubbed his hands. He was cold and he was hungry, but he was an outsider born to the mountain forests and cold and hunger had been his friends for as long as he could remember. He had a knife and among the rocks and boulders around the waterfall he could see what looked like caves. Up above was some sort of ruin. If he could ignore, for a moment, the great gouges that dragon claws had taken out
of the earth and even out of the stones, he might think he could survive here.
First things first. He went through the pile of bodies and found himself a decent pair of boots, threw off his wet clothes and took what he could to wrap around himself. Gold Cloak’s cloak finished it off. After that he started looking for anything else he could find. There was a rider halfway up a tree by the top of the falls. His head was crushed to a smear and one of his arms was missing, but the armour he wore was mostly intact. Siff didn’t like to think about how he’d ended up in a tree. An idle fling from a dragon’s tail, perhaps?
No. Don’t think about it.
He didn’t find any blankets, nor any weapons except for another knife from the same rider as gave up his armour. By then the sun was getting low. He was still cold. The hunger in his belly was a tight knot, clenched in on itself, but he could come back to that. Dead people made good eating in a pinch. What he needed first was some shelter. Maybe, if he could start one, a fire.
That was when he found the eyrie.
36
Skjorl
Nineteen days before the Black Mausoleum
The tremor woke him up. Hadn’t been asleep for long, so no point smashing down the door yet. He’d had a good look at that as he’d been shoved inside. The door was strong enough, but the frame had been wedged poorly and in haste into whatever stone this place was made of. A good charge or two would bring it down.
The alchemist was crouched over Siff. The shit-eater was still breathing. Wasn’t moving much more than that. Skjorl rolled over and let himself fall back to sleep.
When he woke up again, the room looked exactly the same. Same light. Shit-eater lying sprawled across the floor. Alchemist sitting beside him. He couldn’t tell how long they’d been there. Hours. Could have been the middle of the night; could have been the next morning for all he knew.
‘Alchemist!’
Her head jerked up. She’d been sleeping. ‘What?’
‘What’s your plan?’
‘I don’t know.’
He unfolded himself and walked to the door. Peered through the cracks. Two men on guard outside. They looked bored and sleepy. ‘We could leave. If you want.’
‘No.’
Hardly a surprise. He sat down again.
‘Someone has mastered dragons. Whoever that is, I need to talk to them. It doesn’t matter who they serve. Whether it’s Speaker Lystra or Speaker Hyrkallan or some other speaker I’ve never heard of, they’ve mastered dragons again.’ She turned to face him. Her eyes were wide. ‘Do you know what that means?’
‘It means hope, alchemist. I know that.’
‘Yes.’
‘I saw Taiytakei as they brought us here. I saw soldiers who are of these realms and others who are not. Among the Adamantine Men it’s said that the Taiytakei brought the disaster upon us.’ He looked at her. She nodded. ‘Yet would you help them?’
‘I saw one Taiytakei. One.’ She growled at him, which made him smile. He stretched out and lay back down again. The last few days had been long ones. Adamantine Men learned to catch their rest when they could.
Some time later the door opened. Someone threw in a loaf of bread and a skin of water and slammed it shut again. The bread was hard as stone and tasted of mould but it was bread. Skjorl couldn’t remember the last time he’d tasted bread. No one had made it since the Adamantine Palace burned. He savoured every mouthful, mould or no mould.
The shit-eater was still unconscious. The alchemist was somewhere else, lost in thought. Skjorl stared at her for a while, thinking about what he’d do if she hadn’t done her blood-magic to his head.
The door opened again. There were more soldiers this time. Eight, maybe nine. Skjorl didn’t get the chance to count them before they piled into him, ignoring the others, pinned him down and tied his hands. Then they dragged him out. They didn’t take him far, just to another cell along the same passage, hardly a dozen yards from where they’d started and empty but for a heavy chair. Took most of them to tie him to it, but they did. When they were done, one of them stood in front of him and cracked his knuckles.
‘You’re a spy.’
He had an accent, this one. Not a strong one, but an accent nonetheless. One Skjorl could place. Another outsider. Skjorl grinned at him. ‘You’re a shit-eater.’
The man punched him in the face and broke his nose. ‘Your speaker sent you. You’re a spy.’
Skjorl said nothing. Said nothing when the man punched him again. Said nothing when they held back his head and poured water over his face until he was sure he was going to drown. Said nothing when they told him what else they were going to do, what bones they’d break, what pieces they’d cut off him and how they’d burn and scar him. The men of the speaker’s guard took worse from the brothers of their own legion, after all, before they were finally given their dragon-scale and their axe and sword. A last test. No one ever said so, but the ones who failed never saw another full year, dragon-scale or no.
Skjorl’s test had lasted three days. The shit-eater here grew bored after a couple of hours. When he stopped Skjorl laughed at him. He spat out a tooth.
‘I am an Adamantine Man, shit-eater,’ he said, as if that was enough.
They left him for a while. He didn’t bother struggling or trying to break free. Concentrated instead on recovering his strength. When they came back, they picked him up, chair and everything, and turned him round so he couldn’t see the door.
‘I know about you,’ said a new voice. Heavy accent again, but the words were careful, shaped with thought and spoken slowly so they could be heard. ‘Adamantine Men. They raise you from the cradle to fight dragons.’
Skjorl said nothing. He was what he was. An Adamantine Man never broke.
‘I’ve led soldiers in three worlds now. I would take your kind over any other. You have my profound respect. I’m sorry for the beating. Pointless, I realise, and if my captain had been here, it wouldn’t have happened. He’d have known better, because he’s one of you. I’m also sorry that I have to take this from you in such a way, but time is pressing.’
Skjorl waited for the blow. He didn’t flinch, didn’t tense his muscles, just waited for whatever would come.
What came was a tickle in his head, that was all. Like the alchemist’s fingers but infinitely lighter and defter. The faintest sense of something taken away, cut with an expert scalpel. For a moment Skjorl thought he saw the flicker of a knife with a golden hilt reflected in the polished armour of the soldiers around him.
‘Now,’ said the voice again. ‘Tell me why you are here. Tell me everything.’
Skjorl told him everything. Afterwards, when they took him back to his cell, he sat down and wondered why he’d done that, because it wasn’t like they’d ripped it from him, piece by piece, fighting for every word. More like he’d decided it was right to tell what he knew, and just didn’t know why, that was all. He watched, strangely detached, as the same soldiers dragged the alchemist away and closed the door behind her. He listened to her shout, heard the scrape of wood on stone. That would be the chair. Voices. The man who had asked him questions, then the alchemist, then another one, a woman, one he’d heard once before, a long time ago only now he couldn’t place her. She sounded sharp and angry. There was something about a garden. Something about moonlight.
His brow furrowed. He was sure he ought to care about these things.
A tiny tremor ran through the walls. The shit-eater was still on the floor, unconscious or asleep or pretending, one or the other. Down the hall the voices stopped. When they started again they were fast and urgent, words buried once more under strange accents. He caught one clear enough though. Over and over, shouted like an alarm.
‘Dragons!’
37
Blackscar
Nineteen days before the Black Mausoleum
Finding others took time. Not long, but time nonetheless. A sun passed and then another. The open ground around the great river had little to offer. Everythi
ng that once roamed here had been eaten. Burned. Chased away, even after the dragons who had come were bloated. No food for the little ones. Let their animals roam far away. Let them starve in their holes if they cannot be burned.
There were always dragons to be found near the old towers, though. The place the little ones called the Pinnacles but the dragons knew by a far older name, a place where the silver-skinned makers had once lived and worked and wrought their sorceries. Sorceries like the one that had come to visit the plains of the great river.
It found three dragons, all young and small, all hatched since the Awakening. It shared what it had seen. Four would not be enough, not when three were small.
What brings it back?
Little ones, teeming with them.
Not afraid?
What is this Black Moon?
We have seen the hole in the realm of the dead. You have not, Black Scar of Sorrow Upon the Earth.
They flew towards the setting sun, to the dark forests where even a dragon could not pass, and then to the hills and the mountains of the great Worldspine beyond. High among the glaciers and the snow, it found more of its kind, young and old.
A scent powerful and old.
Something of the silver ones and something even greater.
What can be greater?
The Earthspear.
The Earthspear is buried under mountains.
No. A thing that speaks of the stars. And something other.
The little ones will burn.
Their sorceries will be devoured.
Chains?
Pulled through the sky?
Made into a toy?