by Stephen Deas
Even so, he kept them to the lowest ground, took what shelter he could behind the long streaks of broken wood and debris left behind by each annual flood of the Fury. Lines of stunted narrow trees marked what had once been fields, all overgrown now, filled with long grass and fast-growing thorn bushes. He picked his path carefully, watching the moon and the stars, always staying to the shadows where he could. They moved slowly but methodically towards the castle.
It was the alchemist who found the soldiers. Walked a dozen yards into the dark, took a piss that a deaf man could have heard a mile away and came back with a knife held to her throat and four men behind her. Four that Skjorl could see, at least.
The man with the knife said something. Skjorl blinked. The words made no sense, but his meaning was clear enough. This was the part where he and the shit-eater were supposed to surrender their swords so that the alchemist didn’t get her pretty throat cut.
Skjorl thought about that for a bit. The shit-eater didn’t have a sword to surrender. And as for his own, they’d prise Dragon-blooded out of his cold dead hands if they got her at all.
‘Given the choice of her or my steel, I’ll keep the steel, thanks,’ he said. ‘But I’ll let you see it.’ Too close for axe work, too dark, so he drew out his sword, let the moonlight glint off its edge. ‘There.’
The alchemist opened her mouth. The hand around her neck tightened and she closed it again. Skjorl waited for the fingers
inside his head but they didn’t come. He grinned.
‘No orders, alchemist? Sure?’
The man with the knife said something else but Skjorl couldn’t make head or tail of it. ‘He says he’ll slit her throat,’ said another. The accent was thick, but Skjorl recognised it this time. An outsider from deep in the mountains.
‘Tell him I’ll thank him. Why don’t you tell me what a shit-eater like you is doing so far from home, or shall we just get on with it? Four of you is it, or are there more out there? Because four’s fine with me.’
‘You’re a rider.’ Lot of hatred in those words and no effort to hide it. The shit-eater doing the talking took a step forward. He drew out his own sword. It was long and curved, not a weapon Skjorl had seen before. ‘You got no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this.’
He came at Skjorl in fast easy steps, quicker and with more skill than a shit-eater had any right to. Two quick thrusts, a slash, a feint and a killing cut to the head. Skjorl blocked it all easily. Turned the longer sword, stepped inside the man’s guard and ran him through. He looked down as the soldier grunted and fell. He’d expected armour. Wrinkled his nose and tried not to sound disappointed. ‘Not bad for a shit-eater. Not good enough for an Adamantine Man though.’
The man looked up at him. Black blood dribbled out of his mouth. ‘If that’s what you are, you should serve your mistress,’ he choked.
His eyes rolled and he fell back. Skjorl looked at the rest of them. ‘Next?’ he twirled his sword.
The one holding the alchemist dug the knife into her skin. A thin thread of blood oozed across the blade.
‘Told you that’s not going to—’ He didn’t get any further because something hit him around the back of the head. Not the alchemist from the inside, but something from the outside. He staggered and spun round, and there was the shit-eater, his shit-eater, the one he’d been carrying all night. The one he’d dropped into the mud and forgotten about as soon as the soldiers had appeared. Siff.
Hit him with the haft of his own axe.
His sword flew back to strike. Pure reflex. Spears of pain crashed into his head, pinging off the inside of his skull like arrows off a stone parapet. He caught the alchemist looking at him, not scared at all about the knife against her throat.
No!
He dropped to his knees. Let the sword go and clutched his head.
Could have finished the strike. Could have . . . if I wanted . . .
Too much. Too much to bear. His eyes closed. He tipped forward.
33
Siff
Twenty days before the Black Mausoleum
Siff watched the Adamantine Man fall. He couldn’t look anywhere else, thinking, I did that? Except surely he hadn’t. He couldn’t have. The idiot had an axe across his back, the haft of it poking up behind his head. All Siff had done was put one and one together, given him little headache and maybe lowered the bastard’s guard for a moment, long enough for someone to kill him.
Outsiders? He peered at the three remaining soldiers, wondering if the Adamantine Man was right. They spoke strangely, not quite like men from the mountains and yet with a familiar lilt. There was only one reason Siff knew for an outsider from the mountains to be down here on the plains – because some dragon-lord was taking him to Furymouth to sell in the slave markets. He sank to the ground and bowed his head, hiding his face. On the whole he didn’t give a fig who did what to whom, as long as they didn’t do it to him.
Two of them jumped on the Adamantine Man and tied him up. They relaxed after that. Siff was more a threat to himself than anyone else and they obviously thought much the same of the alchemist. They were wrong, but that was soldiers for you and Siff wasn’t about to correct them. Maybe these would be better than the last ones he’d met or maybe not, but they couldn’t be worse; and even if they were, what was he going to do? Blown about like a leaf in a storm, that’s what he was. Story of his crappy little life, from the day his stupid whore had sold him out. He still knew what he knew, though. A secret good enough to save his life twice already.
The soldiers marched them off across the muddy fields. He could barely walk, staggering and stumbling as they pushed and shoved him on, but he didn’t dare fall. They wouldn’t carry him, not like the alchemist’s doggy. They’d leave him.
They stopped in the shadow of a black shape that blotted out half the sky, at the edge of a place where the fields glowed with a soft purple light. He didn’t understand what could do that, but by then he was too lost in his own misery to think. They waited there and let him sit down, and he must have dozed off because the next thing he knew he was being hauled into a wooden cage that jerked and tugged itself up into the air, and, Ooh gods! Ooh ancestors! There was only one place he could be, the worst place. He twisted and pulled, but it was too late.
‘No!’ He pushed and punched. ‘No!’
Someone had his arms and forced him down, face against mud-streaked boards, boot on the back of his neck. Still he struggled. He’d been in a place like this before. In a cage, carried in the talons of a dragon, on his way to Furymouth to be sold as a slave.
34
Kataros
Twenty days before the Black Mausoleum
The castle was flying. Or floating at least. It sat in the air atop a flat slice of purple-veined rock as thick as a dragon was long, while the bottom of the uneven stone and the muddy plains of the Fury were separated by the same again in air. From up close she could feel its size. It was vast, big enough to fill half the sky. Light flickered and flashed like lightning between the castle stone and the ground, lightning with a taint of purple that let her see just how tall the castle stood. It was at least as big as the Adamantine Palace had been, perhaps larger, maybe even as large as the Palace of Paths. She wondered whether Skjorl would know. Mostly she wondered where it had risen from the earth and who could have made such a thing and how.
The soldiers pushed them all to the edge of the castle’s shadow, waited until a wooden cage came down on a rope from the night sky, and then bundled the three of them inside. The Adamantine Man was quiet and passive; Siff started to wail and moan and tried to break away, weak as he was. Even after a few cuffs round the head, even when he could barely stand any more, he was still quivering and trying to crawl. When the cage started to rise, he let out thin hooting screams until someone shut him up with a boot in the face. Kataros didn’t think he even knew where he was.
‘Who are you?’ she asked the soldiers. ‘Who do you serve? What is this? How do you master your
dragons? Do you have Scales? Are there alchemists here?’ She was fairly sure the soldiers understood her, at least in part. Their faces gave that away. They jabbered to one another and then back at her with accents so harsh that she barely caught a word. Shut up was the gist of it. But they did answer one question, whether they meant to or not. When she asked about alchemists, one of them said, ‘Bellepheros.’
She fell silent after that. Bellepheros, grand master of the Order of the Scales at the time of Speaker Hyram. Master of all the alchemists, lord of the Palace of Alchemy. She’d met him once, when she’d proved herself good enough to become an apprentice alchemist instead of going away to become a Scales. She’d seen him too, now and then in the palace, at the end of a corridor or through a door. She’d read his book, his Journal of the Realms, written from the travels he’d made shortly before he became grand master. Most of what she knew of the world had come from there.
Bellepheros, who’d disappeared somewhere near Furymouth at much the same time as the first wild dragon had awoken. His escort had been found with their throats cut from side to side, blood everywhere, but the master alchemist had vanished, and a year later the Adamantine Palace had burned and everything else with it. Everyone assumed he was dead, that he’d been murdered because he’d found something that some dragon-lord was trying to keep secret, his body taken so no one could be quite sure. The master alchemists had all started to learn a lot more blood-magic after that, more still after the Adamantine Palace fell.
The cage stopped, swung round under a long boom and then dropped gently to the ground. Not the ground she’d come from, but a new ground, hard bare stone floating a hundred feet and more above the Fury plains. The edge was only a step away. The soldiers took her up a set of stairs set into an angled wall, a half-and-half slope of plain white stone that a man could climb easily if he wanted. Then down the other side, where the slope was sharper, the steps deep and narrow. They had to carry Siff now. They were losing him. She tapped the fireweed in her pocket. Fireweed and water and she could bring him back, at least for a little.
Inside the walls was a huge circular space. A lot of wooden huts had been built around its edges, slapdash constructions, bizarre and out of place beside the immaculate precision of the fortress itself. She looked at the wall and the steps behind her. There were no cracks in the stonework. No joins, no mortar. Kataros peered for a moment, trying to see if she was right. Outwatch and Hejel’s Bridge were the same, weren’t they? Miraculous things, forged from raw stone as one creation; and the tunnels too, the tunnels that had brought them from the Silver City, all smooth and seamless. Did they share the same creator?
A soldier shoved her forward, past a cluster of huts and a scattering of old fire pits, all dark now. Other soldiers moved about, armour gleaming in the moonlight. Snores rumbled from half-open doorways. She saw someone with his face painted black so that his gleaming eyes seemed to float alone in the darkness. No. Not painted. As he walked past and stared at them with amused curiosity, she saw he was wearing a cloak made of feathers. The night killed their colour, but the shape was unmistakable. Black skin and feathers meant one thing – he was Taiytakei. And what, in the name of Vishmir, was a Taiytakei doing here?
The soldiers led her to a set of steps that vanished down into the base of the far wall, then through a heavy iron door and into a passage. The walls were smooth and so was the floor: the passageway was almost round, and filled with a familiar soft glow. Brighter here than it had been in the tunnels from the Silver City, bright as cloudless twilight, but whoever had made those tunnels had surely made this as well. They were the same.
The soldiers shoved them all together into a round room made of the same stone as the passageway. Someone had wedged some wooden beams into place across the entrance and made a crude door with a bar across the outside.
‘Water,’ she said, as the soldiers withdrew. She made a gesture, hoping they’d understand her meaning, if not the word. The last one out hesitated, then tossed her a half-full drinking horn. Half full was enough.
The door closed. She heard the bar drop on the other side.
‘We’ll wait!’ Skjorl looked up at her with narrow eyes from the floor. ‘But not for long.’
‘Wait for what?’
‘Wait for them to go. Wait for the middle of the night. Wait for them to be asleep. Best time.’
‘Wait for what?’ she snapped again. ‘Best time for what?’
‘Escape.’
‘You want to escape?’
‘You don’t?’
‘Back at the falls, you couldn’t wait to get here.’
The Adamantine Man shrugged. He turned away and stretched out at the far end of the room, flat on the floor. Within minutes he was snoring. Kataros envied him that, to be able to sleep whenever the chance came, to be able to stay awake for as long as was needed. That was how they learned to be, she knew that, but still . . .
She uncapped the drinking horn and gingerly dropped the fireweed inside, still careful not to touch the leaves. The soldiers had taken Skjorl’s sword and axe but they hadn’t found her little knife. She pricked her finger, let three drops fall into the horn and let her mind go with the blood to touch it, change it. She felt the fireweed for what it was, reached inside to the essence at its core and let it flow out into the water, let a tiny charge of her own life mingle too.
When it was done she sat still for a moment, waiting for the dizziness to go away while she caught her breath. Then she lifted Siff’s head and tipped a few drops from the horn into his mouth. He moaned as she touched him and hardly moved at first. Then his eyes snapped open, so wide they seemed to bulge. Kataros shuffled smartly away.
‘Holy burning ancestors!’ He sat bolt upright, hands clamped to his mouth, looking wildly from side to side. His eyes locked on to her. He pointed. ‘You! What have you . . . Poison!’ He lunged at her, forgetting that he was still sitting down, and fell flat on his face. Kataros jumped on top of him, pinning him. The first surge of strength and panic was fading already.
‘Shhh,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘Shh. I know it burns. It’s alchemy, healing fire. It will help you with the fever and help you find your strength again. Give it a moment.’ She let go. Siff stayed where he was for a few seconds. When he moved again, his eyes were back to normal.
‘Ancestors, woman! That’s got some kick to it! More?’ He reached out for the horn.
‘A little. Too much would make you sick in a different way.’
He took a sip, handed it back and then clutched his mouth again. ‘Flame!’
‘Yes. It burns. I know.’
For the first time since they’d reached the castle, Siff looked around him. He frowned. ‘I remember this place.’
‘What? You’ve been here before?’ She blinked at him.
‘How did we get here?’ He shook his head.
‘Where?’
‘Ancestors! How did we get here so quickly? I don’t remember anything.’
She reached for him, but he waved her away and stood up, walked to the door and pushed at it. ‘This doesn’t belong here. I don’t remember this at all.’ He shuddered.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I remember you. And him.’ He pointed at Skjorl. ‘There were soldiers. I remember clocking him on the back of his head with his own axe and they jumped on him. Best thing I saw for weeks. And there was a castle on a cliff we were going to and a big cave full of mud and purple lights and then they stuffed us in a cage. A slave cage.’ He shuddered again. ‘But why are we here again? How did you know where it was?’
‘Where what was?’ He was making no sense.
‘The door.’ His eyes turned suddenly silver and tiny snakes of moonlight began to curl from his finger. ‘The door. The way in. I know this place.’ His mouth fell open. ‘No. Not . . . not right. This isn’t . . . I used to be . . . It’s not finished! Why isn’t it finished? It used to be finished!’ The light-snakes from his fingers weren’t coiling aimle
ssly any more; they were reaching, straining forward. They plunged into the wall, and Siff’s hands followed them in as though the stone was nothing but mist.
His mouth gaped now. He moaned, long and low. His eyes rolled back. His knees sagged and he fell back into her arms. His eyes were closed and the light from his fingers was gone; but Kataros couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t felt the tremor that shook the walls and the floor, or the flicker in the glowing light as he fell.
Maybe Skjorl was right to be incredulous. The story Siff had told her, back in their prison in the Pinnacles, had been full of holes and mysteries. Some because the outsider was lying to her; some because he was hiding things; some because he didn’t understand most of what he’d seen and neither did she. But she knew which parts of his story were lies and which he believed, and that had been more than enough. Then he’d shown her this, and it was no magic she’d seen before, not blood-magic, not alchemy but something else. Something not seen since the days of the Silver King.
35
Siff
Some two years before the Black Mausoleum
The dragon took its time leaving the valley; when it did, it flew slowly and carefully as though it understood how fragile a burden it carried. It wound its way up over a narrow pass. A bitter wind tore through the cage, snapping and biting at the slaves pressed against the front. There were struggles. Men killed each other, fighting not to be in the teeth of that wind. Perhaps on another day they might have shared, taken it in turns to be burned with cold and then huddled among the others until they were warm again. But this was not that other day, and so it fell to fighting and the strongest forced the weakest to the front, where the weakest duly died and became nothing more than a shield for the rest. Siff kept out of it. Stayed at the back. There were old men in the cage, frail servants from the eyrie, not the usual outsider youths that the dragon-riders took. The old were the ones to be sacrificed, not him. Truth be told, he probably didn’t have any more strength to him than they did, but he had the look, the eyes of someone who’d killed and would kill again. And he would too. He’d have fought to the death not to be pressed into the jagged nails of that wind. He didn’t shout, didn’t bother to speak since no one could hear a thing over the roar of the rushing air, just looked. That was enough.