by Stephen Deas
Like this, but not the same.
He ran through the rest anyway. The Purple Spur. Bloodsalt. Vish. Killing a dragon. Jasaan. The moors. The Pinnacles. The alchemist. All of it. All nicely in a row like it was supposed to be, one thing after the next.
His head still thundered but his eyes would focus now. He looked in his pouch. Dreamleaf and plenty of it, in the last water he had, and then he waited for the numbness it would bring. In Scarsdale they’d taken his axe. That was before she’d had a name. The alchemist hadn’t done that. Kataros. Must have been her, because the shit-eater would have cut his throat and been done with it. Yes, the alchemist.
The sunlight was gone. Outside was dark. Night, maybe, or it could have been the shadow of a dragon sitting over the cellar for all he knew, waiting patiently for him to come out.
Dreamleaf was starting to take him. Dragons outside? He’d dealt with dragons before. One thing at a time.
He couldn’t make Dragon-blooded bite the door. The angle was wrong, the roof too high, the door and the ladder too tucked into the corner of the cellar.
In Scarsdale he’d been angry. Smashed his fists on the door, ran at it, battered himself almost senseless trying to get out. Scarsdale had taught him patience, and so he set about the alchemists’ cellar, taking his time, no rush, searching every corner and edge. There were the lamps. He’d seen Kataros use them, seen the way they worked. Started with those and then he could see: a wooden table and a set of little shelves with tiny compartments. The alchemist had taken most of whatever had been in there. A pile of smashed glass where the ground was still damp, rich with the smell of wine. A bench. Three old chairs. The bones in the far corner, more empty bottles, a few rags.
The skeleton had a knife in one hand. Resting between its fingers, the edge stained a dark brown.
In Scarsdale they’d left him with a knife. They’d put him behind a heavy wooden door, but they’d left him with a knife, the one tucked in his boot. It had probably taken the best part of three days to pick and whittle the edge of that door until he’d made a gap large enough to shift the bolt on the other side. He’d never quite understood why they’d shut him up in Scarsdale. They shut his men up too, although at least they gave the others food and water. Him they’d left to die, like the alchemist had done. But he’d escaped and they’d got what they deserved.
He climbed the ladder, drilled through the pain and the floating feeling of the Dreamleaf, and set to work.
53
Blackscar
Four days before the Black Mausoleum
The dragon soared high above the Raksheh. Others of its kind came and went. Some came to ask it about the half-made sky-home. Others went to see it for themselves. It had moved.
They are returning, Black Scar of Sorrow Upon the Earth.
The seals are broken.
The Black Moon and then the end.
It mused on those things and shared them with any who would listen.
A thing that speaks of the stars. And something other.
The sky-home had become a thing of interest. Dragons would come from across the realms to see it. Curiosity would bring them. A sorcerer who carried a touch of the broken god. Magic of glass and gold that made lightning. Amusing diversions. The dragon had felt other things there too.
They are here! The makers. The silver ones. The time would come for a reckoning and it would be soon, but the dragon would not be there, not on the sky-home.
It flew in lazy circles, a thousand miles, spiralling towards the Aardish Caves. It could feel the presence there. Something was waiting.
It would not wait alone.
Little ones were moving. Swarming along the river. It felt their thoughts, now and then, as it peered with its seventh sense through the blanket of branches and leaves. They thought they were safe.
They were wrong.
The Aardish Caves
It is said that when Vishmir visited the Moonlight Garden, he observed that a dark reflection of the garden structures could be clearly seen in the waters of the Yamuna, and in a moment of divine clarity he understood that this was the Black Mausoleum of the Silver King. He became obsessed with the caves and spent many days participating in their exploration during the early years after his victory.
In the seventh year of Vishmir’s reign exploration of the caves ceased following an unexplained disaster that claimed the lives of most of those working at the site. Those nearby on the bluffs overlooking the caves reported that the ground shook and even the dragons resting nearby seemed disturbed. Upon hearing the news, Vishmir visited at once; on his return, he immediately issued a decree that the caves were a forbidden place under the guardianship of the King of Furymouth. In the later years of his reign, despite his own edict, Vishmir returned once more in great secrecy to build a mausoleum of his own. Even now the exact location of Vishmir’s tomb remains a mystery.
The Aardish Caves are remote and hard to reach without a dragon. The caves remain under the watchful eye of King Tyan of Furymouth. Despite Vishmir’s fascination, no evidence has ever been found to indicate there has ever been any connection between the Aardish Caves and the Silver King.
Bellepheros’ Journal of the Realms, 2nd year of Speaker Hyram
54
Jasaan
Fourteen days before the Black Mausoleum
You could say one thing for the Raksheh – it was easy enough going. The ground under Jasaan’s feet was soft and damp. The air was dim and still and smelled of mould; during the day the forest under the canopy was as dark as a moonlit night and during the night it was as black as a cave. Now and then a small forest of giant fungus or a place where the canopy above was broken and a furious rush of green had taken over the forest floor would force him to change his course. One time he came to the corpse of a fallen tree, a giant half buried in the earth. The wood was still as hard as stone. He paced out its length as he walked around it and lost track somewhere over a hundred. The quiet started to get to him. Now and then he heard the leaf litter rustle as something moved or else a burst of shrieking or hooting from the canopy above; mostly the forest was simply silent.
He found the river two days later and the dragon-knights a day after that. Nezak and the other one, alive and camped out on the banks of a river that he thought at first was the Yamuna but turned out was something else entirely. Such a stroke of luck amazed him, until he realised they were simply doing the same as he was – strike south for the nearest river and then stick to it like glue. Difference was that he’d followed the river upstream and the riders had simply sat where they were, wondering what to do.
‘You’re going the wrong way,’ said Nezak. ‘There are three rivers in the Raksheh. They merge together before they leave the forest. You need to go downstream until this one meets the Yamuna. Then turn west again.’
You, Jasaan noted. Not we. He didn’t ask though. What the riders did was their own business; for now they were all hungry and thirsty and bedraggled. Jasaan made a fire and they sat together for a night and never mind who might see them. Riders were so out of place down here on the ground. He’d seen it with Hellas and the others and he saw it now. They didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to look after themselves, didn’t know what to eat. All that fine armour and steel and they were worse than useless.
They were here, though. That counted for something, right? Had to. They’d hadn’t just given up and gone running back to the plains.
‘I should have stayed and fought the snappers,’ said Jasaan after he’d borrowed their bow and shot some supper – he had no idea what it was and the riders had been raised in a desert. ‘I saw your friend go down.’ Your friend – now he wished he had known the other rider’s name after all. ‘He put up a good struggle but he wasn’t ever going to win. I should have done something. I didn’t have a bow. My axe was stuck in the face of the first one, but I should have done something.’ He didn’t know what, just knew that Skjorl wouldn’t even have thought about it. Skjorl would h
ave tried to take the snapper down with his bare hands, probably, and he might even have managed it. That or he’d have died trying. A proper Adamantine Man.
The two riders looked at him. Their eyes were scared. They’d run too, no doubt about it.
Nezak sniffed. ‘We used to hunt snappers from the backs of our dragons. I didn’t realise they grew so big.’
‘Giants,’ muttered the other rider, while Jasaan shook his head because if anything, the three snappers they’d met had been small ones. Maybe everything on the ground looked bigger after you’d grown used to seeing the world from the back of a dragon.
Jasaan found a tree on the edge of the river that wasn’t one of the giants and took his axe to it. There were creepers hanging from the branches of almost everything here by the water. Stuff he’d never seen before, but it looked like rope so it would just have to do. By the end of the next day he’d made them a raft. Nezak drew a map in the mud by the water, a memory of the one time he’d flown over the Raksheh escorting Speaker Hyrkallan and his queen on some secret errand to Furymouth. Mountains to the west, the Fury gorge to the north, the plains to the east and the sea to the south. Then three rivers. The only one with a name was the one that came out onto the plains, the Yamuna.
‘Downstream,’ said Nezak. ‘We haven’t crossed a river since we came into the forest, so we go downstream. When this river comes together with another, that’ll be the Yamuna and we’ll know where we are.’
‘And then?’ Someone had to ask.
The riders laughed at him, both of them. ‘There’s no alchemist,’ said the other one. ‘She’s dead by now. Look at this place. Everything bites and stings and wants to eat you.’
‘She has Skjorl.’ Skjorl who’d crossed the moors on his own. Skjorl who’d killed a dragon. Skjorl the cold killer, and Jasaan had to wonder what an alchemist could do to make a man like that serve anyone but himself. Or maybe it was a different Skjorl, but Jasaan couldn’t quite make himself believe that was right.
‘She’s an alchemist,’ said Nezak. ‘They know the paths to places like this.’
And that might even be true. For some reason, Jasaan hoped it was.
55
Siff
Twelve days before the Black Mausoleum
The first thing he noticed when he woke up was that he wasn’t hidden under a fallen tree any more. There wasn’t a comfortable bed of dead leaves keeping him warm. He was lying on bare earth. It was cold and it was damp and it was dark. Late afternoon under the canopy of the Raksheh.
The next thing he noticed was that he was in a cage. He didn’t get any further than that.
‘No! No! No!’ He jumped up. His head was fuzzy but he hardly noticed; instead, he hurled himself at the bars, battering at them, tearing with his hands until his fingers started to bleed. ‘No!’ He wasn’t going anywhere in a cage. Not that, not in a cage up in the air, waiting for it to shatter, waiting to fall, helpless, out of the sky. Never again. Death first . . .
He stopped. His heart was beating fit to burst. He was breathing as though he’d just run up a mountain.
Not a cage for dragon-slaves. That time was gone.
He took deep breaths. Slow, steady, trying to calm his heart. There were no dragon-riders any more. Their time was past. Their eyries were gone, and their slave-cages too. No one was going to lift him up into the air to freeze and gasp and fall and die.
He looked about. If not an eyrie, then where was he?
With a start he realised he knew this place. The cage was sitting on the forest floor surrounded by giant trees, only here, he knew, the trees were full of holes. This was where the outsiders had lived, the ones he’d found on his first trek out of the forest, the ones who gouged holes into trees for places to sleep and to store their food, higher than any snapper could reach.
On the forest floor around him shadows moved slowly about. Men and women, shaping pieces of wood and making more ropes. He didn’t smell any cooking. They did that somewhere else, far away from where they slept. He remembered that. Hunters vanished into the woods in twos and threes, sometimes for more than a week, coming back with whatever meat they’d managed to find, but always stopping to cook it a half day away. You never knew how close a snapper pack might be.
‘Hey!’ he called. ‘Hey!’
Faces turned and quickly looked away. He didn’t know them. He didn’t remember much of the time he’d spent here, but it had been months. He stretched and rubbed his hands and wrists. The ropes were gone. Now he had a cage instead. Was that any better?
The twilight turned slowly into night. When it was black as pitch, he felt more than heard the air move beside his cage and a voice hissed at him: ‘The only reason you’re not already dead is that woman.’
Siff spun around. In the darkness he couldn’t see a thing. Whoever was talking was standing next to him, and Siff couldn’t see him, that’s how dark the Raksheh was when the sun went down. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
‘You don’t remember?’ Whoever it was, they hissed and spat like a viper. No friend then.
‘No.’ There, and that was the truth too.
‘I already hated you. Now I despise you. You and your woman, you’re just more hungry mouths to me. I don’t know what possessed you to come back here after what you did.’
‘What possessed me?’ Siff burst out laughing at his own pathetic life. It would be nice, he thought, to know why when they fed him to the snappers. Dimly, he remembered that was what these outsiders did. ‘She’s got something. She won’t tell you, but she has. She’s got a secret.’
‘You’re the one with the secret. The rest, they were so under your spell they don’t even remember, but I do. You’re a demon and now you’re going to die.’
Siff felt the cage tremble. Whoever was talking to him was within touching distance. Ancestors, if what I did was so bad why don’t I remember? ‘Listen! Wait! Hey! The woman, she’s an alchemist! She’s a witch! She’s the demon, not me!’
‘No, Siff.’ The cage trembled again. He heard the soft creak of wood against wood.
‘Ho! Wait!’ Siff scrambled away from the noise, clutching at the bars. ‘Who are you?’
‘You don’t remember me?’
‘No!’
‘Liar! But you remember what you did.’
‘No! I don’t remember anything. Listen. I found something. Up the river. There’s caves up there. Days and days of walking, but there’s a place where the dragon-riders used to go and there’s caves and I found something. You listening to me? Treasure!’
‘Yes. We heard all that the last time. Do you remember how many of us died looking for it?’
A handful of something like sand flew into Siff’s face. Whatever it was, it stung his eyes. He squealed.
‘Salt burns, does it, demon?’ Another handful scattered over him out of the darkness and then another.
‘Ancestors! I am not a demon! I swear on my grandfathers.’
‘Salt takes your power, demon. Now I have some iron to take your soul.’
‘Listen, damn you! I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know who you are! I was ill! You’re right, I was possessed, but not any more. The demon came from up in the caves. That’s why I went away. The alchemist took the demon out. Now she’s come to do something about the caves. I don’t know what – ask her – but I’m not a demon any more! I’m not, I’m not!’ He was sobbing now.
‘Lies.’ The cage door was open now. ‘You’d say anything to save your skin. You said you’d come back. Don’t you remember? Something you needed, and when you had it you’d come back. And I swore that when you did, I’d kill you.’
‘You can’t!’ he screamed. ‘I’m the only one who can show her where to go! That alchemist, she’s going to use it to be mistress of the dragons again, not that she’ll say that to you or anything. Nor anyone else probably, but that’s what she’s after.’ He was making it up as he went along now, spinning stories the old way, mixing truth and wild imagin
ation so fast that even he wasn’t sure which was which any more. ‘It’s me that knows where, though. She knows it’s in the caves but those caves go on for ever. You want to find it, any of you, you got to keep me alive!’
‘Seven men, demon. Two of them brothers, all of them friends.’ Siff could see the man now, finally, standing inside the cage with him. He could see an outline, the hint of a shape, nothing more. He couldn’t see the knife, but he had no doubt it was there. He had tears in his eyes now. He was going to die because of something he couldn’t even remember.
He felt a stirring inside him, the feeling that came just before those gaps in his memory. He clutched his head. ‘She’ll make it back like it was, every bit of it. Exactly like it was and the likes of you and me, we’ll be no better than we were. I don’t want to spend my life scraping in the dirt to live, waiting for something to come and eat me or someone to come and cart me off in a slave cage.’ The thing inside was waking up. ‘You kill me, you do it quickly,’ he wailed, ‘and when you’re done, you go out and you make sure you don’t touch a drop to drink that she could have got a hand to. She’s a witch as well as an alchemist. I’ve seen her make her potions. I’ve seen her force a man to her will with them. My own eyes, I swear. And don’t cut her. I’ve seen her throw blood in a man’s face and then watched it burn him to the bone. She knows blood-magic and she’ll use it if she has to. Don’t cut her. Don’t let her bleed. Get that knife off her if you can.’
‘You talk of blood, demon? Seven men, and I saw what you did to them. You murdered them, one after the other. You bled them out on that stone slab. Brothers. Friends.’ A hand gripped his shoulder, tense and strong. ‘Die, demon.’
No
The man’s face lit up with a moonlight glow and Siff saw him for an instant, still a stranger, knife gleaming in his hand, but he saw a look in the man’s eye too, a sort of wonder and a sort of terror all at once . . .