by Stephen Deas
They saw it again that evening, flying back towards Bloodsalt. Low over the valley, head sweeping from side to side. Searching.
‘It’s still looking for us,’ said Jasaan. Skjorl frowned. Couldn’t be right, because that wasn’t what dragons did, but if he took a moment to forget about all that and just looked, he’d have to say the same.
It took another week and, seeing the dragon come prowling right past where they were hiding before, there couldn’t be any doubt. Dragon on the ground, sniffing its way up the Sapphire valley, lifting boulders and peering into caves? Skjorl had never heard of anything like that, but maybe that was because no one had found a pair of dragons with so many eggs and then done what he’d done. He gave himself a day to see if he could think of some way how two Adamantine Men might make a trap for it and kill it. Wasn’t surprised when he got nowhere with that, and so on the next night they changed their course and struck away from the valley, up towards the moors, still close enough to Bloodsalt that the slopes were gentle and not yet the boulder-strewn cliffs they’d start to be fifty miles further up the valley.
If you had to look back, Skjorl thought later, that was where their real falling-out had begun. Not that either said a word – too busy with pushing themselves onward – but once they got up on the moors even Skjorl could see it had been a mistake, and there was the look in Jasaan’s eye like he knew that too. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the moors. Maybe that was just when they’d both given up pretending any more. Jasaan, who’d never quite got over what happened in Scarsdale, and Skjorl, who simply couldn’t stop thinking that it should have been Jasaan who’d died in the cisterns under Bloodsalt and Vish who should have been alive and walking back to the Purple Spur.
Three dragons in three days up on the moors and they both knew they should have stuck to taking their chances in the Sapphire valley. Didn’t use to be dragons up on the Oordish Moors. No eyries. Hadn’t ever been that many snappers either, so Skjorl had reckoned on it being a safe enough place. Now he knew better. No food in the desert, but plenty of it up around Yinazhin’s Way. Plenty of dragons too now, all busy eating it.
‘Every dragon that eyried in Bloodsalt must have come up here,’ said Jasaan. ‘Back in Hyram’s time that used to be more than two hundred.’ They were hiding in a hollow, surrounded by rocks and long grass. They weren’t the only things hiding there. Jasaan had already been spat at by a snake.
‘Except the one in the Sapphire valley hunting for us.’
‘The one.’
‘Hunting for us.’
‘We should go back.’ And Skjorl knew he was right and they should, but there was some little demon in him that couldn’t quite ever let Jasaan be right and him be wrong. Maybe because if it happened once then maybe Jasaan was right about some other things too.
‘You do that then.’
‘We’re stronger together.’
‘Your foot’s good enough. We can both stand alone if we have to.’
Made sense to go back into the valley. There was water. Walk at night, hide in the day and they’d be fine, dragon or no dragon. They’d be back in Samir’s Crossing in a month. Trouble was, Skjorl was sick of it. Sick of everything. Sick of running and hiding. Sick of never seeing the sun, of sleeping every day in a cave, sick of dragons, sick of being too hot or too cold or too wet, and sick of not being able to do the slightest thing about any of it. But most of all he was sick of Jasaan. Spineless, moaning Jasaan. And that, at last, was something he could change.
‘Adamantine Men fight together. We stand together. That’s what we do.’
Skjorl nodded. ‘Right up until we’re a little bit hurt and instead of standing together we cry like babies and plead for help and let our comrades get killed when we should have been fighting, eh?’
‘What?’
‘You.’
‘What are you talking about.’
‘Vish. Vish died because of you. Because you were too scared to do what you should have done.’ He saw Jasaan’s eyes burn then, but there was no going back. ‘I should have left you in the cistern. I should have left you by the banks of the Sapphire. That’s what I should have done, and you should have told me to do it.’
‘I couldn’t walk, Skjorl!’ Yes, there was anger there all right and plenty of it. ‘Were there enemies I stopped you from killing?’
‘You should have stayed up fighting. You should have clawed your way up the rubble down there and stabbed that dragon in the eye yourself. That’s what a real Adamantine Man would have done. But you didn’t, and so Vish did it instead, and now he’s dead and that’s on you.’
There might have been blows. It said everything about Jasaan, everything that Skjorl was sick of, that there weren’t. ‘You, of all people, have nothing to tell me about murder,’ he hissed. ‘You’re a filthy animal. You’re sick.’
That was Scarsdale coming out, which was enough to make Skjorl’s hand on his sword stay where it was. And so neither of them drew their steel, and for a second or two they stared and let each know the true depths of how much they despised the other; and then Jasaan spat at Skjorl’s feet and turned and walked away and that was the end of that.
There might have been some guilt. Might even have been some regret. Might have been that Skjorl wondered at his own words in the days after they went their separate ways. A man who’d been a part of his company for more than a year. Whatever they’d fought, they’d fought together, him and Vish and Jex and the rest of the dead. They’d survived Sand together, they’d survived the Blackwind Dales. They’d fought snappers and feral men. They’d reached the Silver River together and never mind what had happened at Scarsdale in between. They’d lived on musty water and mushrooms and the flesh of dead men in the caves under the Purple Spur. They’d forayed and foraged in the City of Dragons, hiding in cellars in the day and only coming out at night.
Might have stopped to wonder if maybe Jasaan had grown sick of all the same things he had, just a little sooner. Might have. But walking across the desolation of Yinazhin’s Way alone took a hardness, and it was easier to let the hate burn instead of asking whether it was wrong. Guilt? An Adamantine Man had no use for that. So he walked on alone. Should have left Jasaan to die. Should have let the dragon have him. Could have been back in the Purple Spur by now. Thoughts like that kept him alive when dragons burned the hills around him, when he cowered in caves or among stones or sometimes simply huddled out in the open, praying to gods that didn’t exist while lightning rattled the skies, when he dreamed of warm soft bread and warm soft women and cursed Jasaan for taking them away from him.
Yinazhin’s Way. He’d seen a map once which showed it all around the edge of the moors in a great arc from Bloodsalt to Bazim Crag. Someone had told him that you could see Samir’s Crossing and the Sapphire valley from the path. Without anything else to go by, he went on, walking the road at night, sheltered away from it in the days. When the road touched the edge of the cliffs and he looked out over the Hungry Mountain Plain and saw in the distance the glitter of a river and the black smudge of charred earth that had once been a town, he began to climb down. The cliffs weren’t even cliffs here, easier than he’d expected, more a steep scrabbling scree of loose stones and boulders. Plenty of shelter from dragons.
He had to stop a mile or so away from the edge of what had once been Samir’s Crossing. Stop and take a moment to get himself together. Adamantine Men took what life brought, whatever that was. They took their pleasures as it suited them when pleasures were there to be had. They didn’t shirk their load or complain or falter when they were set to work. If the weight of their burden crushed them, then so be it, they got crushed, but they kept going to the end, staggering onwards, never putting it down. Adamantine Men didn’t weep at the thought that there would finally be rest at the end of the night, and water and perhaps a few strips of dried meat and stale bread and most of all the company of their fellow men after so long alone in the wilderness. So since Adamantine Men did none of those things,
Skjorl took a few moments to be something else where no one would know, and only when he’d done with that did he walk on. Samir’s Crossing was ash, but there were cellars there, places where others kept watch on the movements of the dragons near the Spur. From Samir’s Crossing there were tunnels to the Spur itself and what passed for home.
He wrinkled his eyes, trying to see if he could see the Spur in the distance, but it was dark. He didn’t remember seeing it in the day. Couldn’t remember when the Spur had faded out of sight after they’d left it all those months ago. After Samir’s Crossing and before the Sapphire valley turned north and butted against the cliffs of the moors. Somewhen in between. Which meant this wasn’t right, and he wasn’t coming up on Samir’s Crossing after all.
Tried not to think about it. Told himself, as he walked among unfamiliar ruined streets, that he must have come in from a different direction. Maybe from the north or the south. Told himself all that and more, right up until he reached the far edge of whatever town this was and saw the river, immeasurably too big to be the Sapphire, and then the telling stopped.
Not Samir’s Crossing.
He found himself quivering. Trembling. There was a feeling he didn’t know. It might have been despair, but since Adamantine Men didn’t know such things, he grasped each and every memory
he could reach and crushed them to see if they would bleed, and when he found ones that did, he poured them over this feeling, on and on until he hammered it into something that he understood.
Rage.
He let out a roar, but that wasn’t enough, not even the start of enough. He pulled his sword out and started walking along the banks of the river, swearing blind that anything, anyone who stood in his path, they either ran away or they were dead, man, dragon, snapper, anything. Wherever this was, he knew the river, knew the only river it could be. The Fury; and walking the Fury would take him home. Into the Gliding Dragon Gorge. Plag’s Bay. Watersgate. He gripped his sword tighter and ground his teeth. Another week, maybe just a little more. That was all. After so long, what did that matter?
Made him want to scream, that’s what it mattered.
When he heard a shout, a half-strangled cry of fear with death swift on its heels, he went towards it without even thinking, moth-like to a flame, knuckles white. Started to run. The sound gave a shape to his anger, sharpened and made of steel.
Three men out in the open. Soldiers. Armed and armoured, but with long swords in their hands not the short stabbing things of the Adamantine Men, and two of them were down and there were a dozen man-things, scrawny raggedy feral scrap-eaters, snapping at them.
He swung Dragon-blooded off his back. Ran faster. Axes were for snappers and for dragons, but they were for this rage too, a murderous thing that would brook no lesser weapon.
The ferals saw him coming. Heard his bellow and his charge. The first one skittered out of the way, but the axe caught the next, hardly blinking as it cut through the man’s shoulder and chest and shattered his ribs right to his sternum. He spun away, already dead, and then Dragon-blooded was coming back and straight into another, and then down, splitting the head of a third from his crown to his spine; and then Skjorl was among the soldiers and they were his, rallying to him, and together they charged and screamed and surged and slew, until the feral men scattered and fled into their shadows, and he stood, victorious, axe raised above his head, screaming words he would never remember.
An accented voice pulled at his arm, urging him away. Then something hit him on the head so hard he thought the sky had fallen on him.
And then, for a time, nothing.
When the world swam back into view he was in a boat being rowed across the Fury. ‘They throw rocks,’ said someone. ‘Stones. Sometimes they have arrows, but not often.’
They were dragon-riders from the north, soldiers from Outwatch and Sand stranded with their King Hyrkallan and their Queen Jaslyn for more than a year since the dragons had awoken, stuck in the Pinnacles after the battle of the two speakers and the great cull that came after. Trapped there by the grand master alchemist – everyone under the Spur knew the story. No love between the riders at the Pinnacles and the alchemists of the Spur, none at all, and Adamantine Men had no time for either. Could have hidden it maybe, but that wasn’t Skjorl’s way. So he told them what he was and then watched their faces to see if there would be blood.
‘Adamantine Men betrayed us like the alchemists.’ Under the Purple Spur the alchemists had declared another speaker. Queen Jaslyn’s sister Lystra. Turned out this lot had declared one too, Hyrkallan, Queen Jaslyn’s king. Ought to have had a fight about that, right there and then, but what was the use? He saw the stone head of Speaker Hyram again, lying on its side in the ruins of Bloodsalt. One speaker hiding impotent in a cave was hardly any different from another, and titles were petty things when placed before the tide of dragons. Not that that stopped fools from thinking different. Stupid, and Skjorl found he wanted no part of it.
‘My lady Dragon-blooded is for killing dragons,’ was all he said, nodding at his axe. ‘In whose name she flies, that doesn’t really matter.’
They wrapped a cloth across his eyes and took him down into the secret tunnels that Pantatyr and his blood-mages had built after they slew the Silver King. He was in Valleyford, they said, two hundred miles and maybe more from Samir’s Crossing where he was supposed to be. And it was alchemists they truly hated among the Pinnacles, not Adamantine Men, and so he could live – even though he’d be another mouth to feed – as long as he didn’t mind putting his axe to some use; and Skjorl didn’t mind that one little bit. For a month they stayed, hiding in the day, fighting ferals at night, searching for food and anything that might be salvaged, meticulously recording the movements of any dragons that passed overhead. Might have stayed longer if one dragon hadn’t got scent of them and set itself to digging them out of the ground. Skjorl hadn’t thought it possible, but it sat over their heads and each day they heard it tearing with its claws at the earth. He saw it in the air one day. Saw its silhouette and the shape and beat of its wings and knew it was the dragon from Bloodsalt. Odd that.
Hunger and a dragon overhead were old friends to Skjorl, but the riders didn’t like this dragon one bit. Got to them quick it did. He wondered how they meant to cross the open land from where they were to the Pinnacles, what with no alchemists and no potions to hide them, but they laughed and slapped him on the shoulder and told him he shouldn’t worry. A warren of tunnels reached out from the Fortress of Watchfulness, they said, right out across the realms, all of them ending on the banks of the Fury, from Gliding Dragon Gorge in the north to Farakkan in the south, to Purkan and Arys Crossing and Valleyford in between. Tunnels. That was how they were going home.
And so they did. Took five days. Strange and sorcerous things, those tunnels, wondrous at first, not hewn by the hands of man but by something else. Then, later, just dull. Boring and monotonous and the same, hour after hour after hour, straight as a scorpion bolt and dark and empty as a murderer’s heart until they reached what the riders said were the catacombs of the Silver City itself, back from the blood-mage days when burying the dead had been no sin. They took him up into the Fortress of Watchfulness and the slowly dying fellowship of men that lived there, this Speaker Hyrkallan and his queen, and they set him to work doing nothing much at all. More wonders. The Silver City was old, he knew that, but the three stone warrens that overlooked it were older still. The Pinnacles. Hollowed out by hands long forgotten, tunnelled and quarried by men as a shelter from the terror of the dragons when they came, shaped and transformed by the will of the Silver King. Three mile-high monoliths that had been the centre of the realms from the day the dragons had been broken. They were old and they were heartless.
He found a few others of his kind, a handful of Adamantine Men who’d been sent out, as he’d been sent to Outwatch, with axes and hammers and dragon poison for the great cull that was supposed to save the realms and had failed. He couldn’t believe
what they told him at first, but over the weeks and the months he slowly saw it with his own eyes. The knights and riders of the Pinnacles were doing nothing. They had their tunnels that reached halfway across the realms and food enough for most of a lifetime. They had water, an endless inexplicable stream of it flooding through the fortress from the fountain on its peak conjured by the Silver King. But they had no hope. They were already lost.
After that he spent as little time there as possible. Lived as much as he could with the hunting parties, out in the Silver City tunnels. Doing something. Killing ferals mostly, but at least doing something.
Eventually, after a few months, another party of Adamantine Men had arrived out of nowhere. He kept away. Didn’t want them to see what he’d become. And it was just a few days after that, when he found himself guarding some traitor alchemist they’d brought with them, that everything went to shit again.
15
Blackscar
Five months before the Black Mausoleum
The dragon searched the river. Other dragons came and went, other thoughts, other distractions, but it never forgot. Here and there, when it stopped to look with care, it found traces of the little ones’ passing. Dead flesh, empty of life yet tainted with poison. It pulled them out of their hiding places and scattered them for the vultures and the crows. When it had searched every cave and turned over every rock and still found nothing that lived, it stopped and searched for its reborn mate.
The mountains, others told it, the younger ones who knew. There are most eggs in the mountains.
The dragon flew to the mountains to search and found nothing that interested it. It met a young one freshly hatched. One whose path had crossed with Bright Lands Under Starlight among the dwellings of the dead. His mate was gone, away to new flesh in a place far across the sea that had no end, beyond the storms that even a dragon could not cross except through the realm of the dead.