by Stephen Deas
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?
Joy. Fear, as much as a dragon could feel such a thing. Amazement. Wonder. Alarm. All those things it felt in the thoughts of its kin. Then, one by one, they found their true natures and all turned to fury.
Come! it cried, and the other dragons were eager.
Dragons do not serve men.
38
Kataros
Nineteen days before the Black Mausoleum
They opened the door, threw Skjorl inside and took her instead. The Adamantine Man looked wrong. His face was distant and she couldn’t tell whether he’d seen something truly wonderful or whether he’d simply been broken.
‘What did you do to him?’
The soldiers pulled her down the passage a short way and shoved her into another room. A chair sat in the middle, waiting for her. Dressed in finery with her back to the doorway was a woman, a man standing next to her looking every bit as fine, as though they were a king and queen. Their clothes were like those of the Taiytakei, but their skin was too pale. What caught her eye, though, was the knife that the man held. It was a strange thing: the blade shone like polished silver and patterns seemed to swirl inside it. The shape was odd too, more like a cleaver than a knife, while the golden hilt was carved into a pattern of stars that, it seemed to her, made an eye. An eye that watched her as she was tied down to the chair.
‘Where is it?’ asked the man. He spoke slowly and carefully, but it was hard to make out what he was saying because of the way he twisted his words in his mouth. The accent was a strange one. Unfamiliar.
‘Where is what?’ Blood. If she dug her fingernails into her palms, maybe she could make herself bleed and then she’d have a weapon. ‘Who are you?’
‘The Silver King’s Tomb,’ said the woman. From her accent, she might have been raised in the Adamantine Palace itself. ‘That’s what you’re looking for. Where is it?’
Kataros thought about the answer to that for one long second. She could lie. She could pretend she didn’t know, but why? Whoever these people were, they had a power that harnessed dragons, and that was all that mattered. She was an alchemist, and alchemists served the realms, not this lord or that. Alchemists kept the monsters in check, that was their all and their everything.
The truth then. The essence of what Siff had told her, even though it had one great flaw running down its centre that meant it could not be quite as it seemed. ‘I believe it to be in the Aardish Caves, underneath the Moonlight Garden, where Vishmir always thought it was,’ she said. ‘Forgive me, Highness, Holiness, Lord, Lady, but, with the most humble respect please, who are you?’
The woman rounded on her. ‘Who am I? Who am I? I am your speaker! Do you not know me?’
Kataros had never seen either of the speakers they had now, not the one under the Purple Spur who had sent her away, nor the false one under the Pinnacles. This one was tall, but that didn’t help. With a start, she realised the woman had Hatchling Disease, the early marks of it, just like her own . . .
‘Lady Lystra?’ She saw from the way the woman’s eyes lit up with fury that she was wrong. The other one then. Jasmyn, was it? Jaslyn? Kataros bowed her head. ‘Forgive me, Your Holiness.’
‘Forgive . . .’ The woman’s voice was hard and cold as ice. So was this Jaslyn then? Hyrkallan’s queen, the mad one who thought dragons should be free? And was this Hyrkallan himself, standing beside her with his knife? The self-proclaimed speaker who’d murdered alchemists in the days before the Adamantine Palace had burned? The man who’d sentenced her to die and handed her off to a rapist while she waited? She clenched her fists. Who else could they be? Though the alchemist inside her couldn’t understand how they were here, or why Hyrkallan’s words sounded so strange. And wasn’t he older? This one was young.
They whispered together. The woman who called herself speaker was describing the Moonlight Garden. Kataros could remember the passage in Bellepheros’ Realms almost word for word. Up on top of the stony bluffs that overlook the Yamuna River and the Aardish Caves, deep within the wilderness of the Raksheh Forest and on the edge of the mountain foothills of the Worldspine, bounded on three sides by black marble walls, with the river-facing side left open, the Garden is nothing but a ruin . . . The journal went into the history, the old story of how the Silver King had foreseen his demise and planned ‘a mausoleum, to be built in black marble across the great river from the endless caves’, how the Moonlight Garden had been discovered by Speaker Voranin’s riders searching for the Tomb of the Silver King, how Vishmir had continued that search for nigh on twenty years and had built a mausoleum for his own ashes in the same place and in great secrecy. How parts of its design were similar to the Pinnacles and Outwatch. It was one of the larger entries in his journal, full of detail, as though he’d considered it to be important.
There was also an eyrie there. That had been little more than a footnote.
‘We don’t need this one,’ said the woman sharply. ‘Get the third one in here. And get Bellepheros. Is Tuuran back yet?’
Bellepheros? Again? Before Kataros could speak, the fortress shuddered. A tiny tremor rippled through the walls. They all felt it. Kataros kept her head bowed but her mind raced. You didn’t look at a speaker, not unless they told you too, not even one who was only a pretender. But as soon as the tremor subsided, she couldn’t hold her tongue, not after that.
‘Bellepheros? He’s here?’
‘Bring the other one,’ snapped the woman. ‘Now.’
‘What about her?’ asked the man.
‘Get rid of her. And the first one. As you wish.’
Kataros couldn’t make out much of what the man said this time, but she caught the name again. Bellepheros. It hadn’t been a mistake and she hadn’t misheard.
‘No! I said get rid of her! Both of them.’
Kataros dug her nails into her palm harder now, trying not to show the pain. Hands took her arms and held her down while others untied the ropes. They had her out of the chair and halfway out of the room when a soldier skidded round the corner and almost fell into her.
‘Dragons!’ he shouted.
The room fell into pandemonium. The speaker – Jaslyn? – hissed, ‘You’re the Bloody Judge. You deal with them.’ Fingernails in her palm. Digging. Bellepheros? Here? Alive? How could that be? The soldiers hauled her back to her cell and threw her inside. When they went to grab Siff, she spat on her hand and jumped on the nearest and clamped her hand over his mouth, forcing her blood and saliva over his lips. He threw her off.
‘What a waste.’ He drew a short sword. Two of them had Siff now, dragging him out while the others went for Skjorl. Four armed men against one Adamantine. She closed her eyes, whispered a prayer to the Great Flame and forced herself into her blood, looking for any tie to the soldier who was about to kill her.
Nothing.
There was a strangled shout behind her and it didn’t sound like Skjorl. She jumped back as the soldier lunged at her and looked. Skjorl had grabbed one of the others and used one soldier’s sword, still in the man’s hand, to ki
ll another, then used the same man as a shield, letting his own comrades run him through. The four soldiers had become two. They ran at him together, swords cutting, one high, one low. The Adamantine Man jumped sideways and back, dodging both swings. For a moment he was open to the soldier in front of Kataros, who drew back his sword. She threw herself at him, catching his sword as well, deflecting it just enough. The edge sliced along her arm, sharp and deep.
The Adamantine Man dropped to the floor, swept the legs out from under the man nearest him and bounded back to his feet. A foot came down. Hard. Bone cracked. The man screamed.
The soldier who’d cut her drew his sword back to run her through and finish her. She swept her hand across the wound and hurled a fistful of her blood at him. Behind her she heard a grunt and then a long slow gurgle. The soldier in front reeled away. He dropped his sword and clutched his face, screaming and screaming. Behind her, steel crunched into flesh and bone, and she knew without having to look that it was the Adamantine Man who held that steel.
The screaming stopped when Skjorl stepped past her and sliced the last soldier’s head off. Half the man’s face had dissolved away.
‘Sorted out whether this lot are going to help us or not, have we?’ He picked up one sword after another, appraised each one. Then he leered at her. ‘Could have let those soldiers kill you, you know.’
‘So why didn’t you?’ Ancestors but her arm was hurting. Blood-magic was all very well and so was being able to burn a man’s face to the bone, but it would be nicer if she didn’t have to get cut open first. The room was wobbling. She cast her mind into herself, forcing the blood to close the wound. It all took too much energy. She’d need to sleep soon and for a long time.
Skjorl let his eyes roam over her. ‘Like the man said. Would have been a waste.’
‘Oh, suck Vishmir’s legion! Do you never think of anything else?’ If she hadn’t been so weak, she just might have reached through the blood-bond and crushed the Adamantine Man where he stood.
For a moment he was quiet. Then he laughed, softly, like he was thinking of something else at the same time. ‘You swear like a guardsman.’ The chuckling slowly stopped. ‘I saw you take that blade for me.’ She didn’t answer. She was too busy trying not to collapse while she healed her arm. ‘Swear by someone else next time though.’ He sounded awkward, almost gentle, even if she knew perfectly well that he didn’t have a jot of gentleness in him.
The wound was closed now and her strength was exhausted. She shut her eyes as the room started to swirl. If she was honest, she still needed him to help them escape.
The Adamantine Man watched her, shifting from one foot to another, twitching. Then he shook his head. He picked up Siff, threw the outsider over his shoulder and walked out through the open door.
39
Siff
Some two years before the Black Mausoleum
He almost missed it. The Yamuna Falls tumbled through a notch in a slope of rocky outcrops and tumbled stones that was almost a cliff. He didn’t see the path that zigzagged up beside it at first, overgrown and half forgotten, and when he did, he almost didn’t bother climbing it. Curiosity was what drove him in the end, that and what looked like rectangular cave mouths further up the slope, although when he reached them, they turned out to be slabs of jet-black stone that had slid down from above and landed askew.
The cliffs rose up high above the upper reaches of the river, but the path didn’t climb to the top; instead it crept round a perilous corner to follow the notch carved by the river. For a moment Siff looked straight down the falls from above, through the haze and spray into the pool below; this was where he’d fallen, the water that had saved his life.
Not thinking about the dragons. Not.
Beyond the overlook above the falls, the path became a ledge gouged from a sheer rock wall about the height of ten men above the level of the Yamuna. It went on for a hundred yards or so, and then the cliffs above softened and the path led him out onto a steep and unsteady slope of stones and boulders all piled so precariously on top of one another it seemed that even a single hard kick in the right place might bring the whole hillside crashing down onto the flattened open space below. There had been walls here, he thought, stone buttresses built to hold the slope, but they’d fallen, bringing a little landslide behind them. An immense flat-topped overhanging boulder jutted out where the path wound away from the river. If that went, Siff reckoned the whole hillside might come down.
The damage was fresh. He could see the gouges in the earth below where dragon claws had ripped and torn at the stones all around the clearing. And that was when he realised what this was – what it had once been, at least. An eyrie. Tiny, as eyries went, and it had been smashed flat and burned to cinders, but an eyrie nonetheless.
He picked his way down the slope – the path had gone along with the walls that had held it up – and wandered through the ruins. He’d lived in an eyrie once, although saying inone was a bit like saying that a kennelled dog lived in his master’s house. He’d been in one of the leaky ramshackle huts that clustered around its fringe, with the shepherds and the smiths and the carters and the leather workers and the saddle makers and the boot polishers and all the other people who didn’t really matter, the ones who weren’t dragon-lords or riders or alchemists or Scales. No one ever looked at the little people, and that was perfect for a man who smuggled in a sack full of Souldust now and then and came back out each time with a sack full of silver.
One thing he knew about eyries – they always had tunnels, places to shelter in case of attack by other riders. They were kept stocked with food and water and potions, with beds and blankets and everything a dragon-lord would need to stay comfortable for a day or two while his minions slaughtered some other lord’s minions until one side or the other discovered that they’d won. He blinked a few times, trying to believe his luck. The destruction was obviously recent, but there was no one here now. His ancestors had outdone themselves. The place was abandoned.
He took a moment to catch his breath and look around. The top of the high stone bluff behind him was covered in the ruins he’d seen from the beach below the waterfall. Near the bottom, half hidden by the recent rock slide, there was a cave; around the edges of the clearing were the shattered remains of buildings. That’s where the tunnel entrances were most likely to be, if they weren’t all buried under rubble. On the other side of the eyrie were more rocks, more huge boulders all tumbled on top of each other. When he looked more closely, he saw they’d been disturbed too. A stone the size of a village hall had toppled over and cracked, and behind where the stone had been was an opening too regular to be a cave, even if it was more round than square. But what gave it away most of all was the soft light that spilled out of it as twilight started to fall. It wasn’t the flickering of firelight, but the steady quiet light of an alchemist’s lamp. The sort of lamp that gave off no smoke. The sort of lamp that a dragon-lord would use to light his shelter.
The sun was setting. The skies were darkening. He was hungry, cold, thirsty, somehow still alive and he meant to stay that way. He crept inside, his stolen knife out in front of him, and then he paused. It was all too good to be true.
‘Hello!’ Silly to be calling out if there was no one here, but what if there was?
He walked softly along the tunnel. He’d been wrong about the light. He’d seen alchemist’s lamps before, once or twice, often enough to know what they looked like, cold and harsh and white. The light here was softer. It came from everywhere, from the walls and the roof and even the floor of the passage, as though the alchemists had mixed their concoctions into the stone itself. Now that was something Siff had never seen, never even heard of. There were probably lots of things that he’d never heard of that alchemists could do.
He tried not to think about the dragon by the waterfall staring down at him. The more time passed, the more he could believe it had been a vision, a hallucination, a touch of madness and not real at all.
&nbs
p; The passage ran straight, sloping down under the ground, then opened up into a vast round chamber so large he could barely see the other side, even in the moonlight glow of the walls. The chamber floor also sloped. It was like the whole place, whatever it was, had been tipped slightly askew.
A ring of archways stood in the centre. It wasn’t what he’d expected to find, all this pointless decoration, and a man couldn’t eat archways. He ignored them and made his way around the edge of the chamber, looking for other ways out.
‘Hello?’ He tried again. Food, that was what he was after. The river would give him all the water he needed, but a good stash of food would set him on his way. With his hands swollen and next to useless, without a bow, that might be the difference between life and death. There were the dead men outside, if he had to, but dragon-rider food sounded infinitely better.
Did they have snappers in the Raksheh? He had no idea. They had wolves, he’d heard, but wolves he could handle. Wolves would leave a man alone unless they were desperate. Snappers were another matter. All those bodies would draw snappers like flies.
There were other passages, all like the one that had led him here. There were a lot of little round rooms, some larger halls, a few staircases, shafts, and every single one of them was utterly empty. There weren’t even any spiders or beetles and there certainly wasn’t anything to eat. The whole place was turning into a big waste of time. All he ever saw were archways, everywhere he went, carved into the walls with nothing on the other side except plain white stone, glowing softly back at him. Whoever had built this certainly liked them.
He hadn’t explored much more than a fraction of the place before he gave up. Outside, when he looked, it was dark now. There were other places to search, once it was light again, but stumbling around in the dark seemed foolish. Another night without food wouldn’t kill him, not yet. He went back to the first chamber he’d found, the one with the archways in a circle in the centre. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a dragon-lord’s shelter. No one had been down here for a very long time – how long he wasn’t sure, but years, decades probably. He was tired now, dead tired. He could go looking for food in the morning.