by Stephen Deas
‘It remains none of your concern.’ She shook her head. Skjorl spat into the water. There was nothing to see this far from the Silver City. The ferals didn’t come so deep, and whatever did come this far was quickly washed away. There was only the sloshing of the water, the faint glow of the walls and the smell of rot. He didn’t even know for sure that any of the riders really had ever come down this far. They used the rafts as far as the edge of the Silver City, but further? He’d heard talk, but never with any names. Farakkan. Easy to reach, but hard to get back with all that water flowing in your face.
Dragon blood. How, by all those who’d gone before him, was he supposed to get dragon blood?
The alchemist was tending to the outsider. Soaking a piece of cloth in the water and then squeezing dribbles into his mouth. He was so weak he could barely move.
‘I wouldn’t drink anything she offers you, shit-eater.’ Skjorl laughed. ‘She’ll make you her slave.’ Too late for that, of course.
She looked at him, a glance of pure hate. ‘I only do that to people who try to rape me.’
He laughed. ‘You’d have come round, alchemist.’
‘I wouldn’t touch you if you were the last man alive.’ Fingers scraped the back of his head on the inside. A warning of what she could do to him.
An hour passed and then another. He watched the alchemist for when she would fall asleep, but her eyes stayed wide and alert. More blood-magic perhaps, or maybe some old-fashioned fear. Eventually he gave up and let himself doze.
He woke up to find the alchemist shaking his arm. His hand was on his sword before his eyes had finished opening. She was pointing. Ferals, that was his first thought, but that wasn’t it. She was pointing because one side of the tunnel had opened out. Already, she was guiding them to the edge of the water.
Not a natural cavern. The walls were straight and threw off the same dim light as the tunnel. They weren’t smooth though. He frowned. Peered at them. Archways. The walls were decorated with arches. Like the walls inside the Fortress of Watchfulness. Odd.
‘This is …’ He frowned. ‘Where are we, alchemist?’ Trouble with dozing and floating in the dark in a place like this. Could be they’d a gone a mile or two, could be they’d gone a hundred. Could be the Silver City was barely out of sight behind them, or maybe Farakkan was just a few minutes ahead.
The alchemist ignored him. ‘What is it?’ Which told him what he needed to know – she knew as much as he did: nothing. He shook his head as the boat ground against the stone floor of the tunnel and bumped to a stop.
‘Whatever this is, it isn’t Farakkan. We should go on.’ Adamantine Men never felt fear. Never. So the feeling in the pit of his stomach had to be something else. Concern? An understanding that something was out of place, perhaps? An awareness of possible danger. Call it all of those things. He shook himself. Old stone walls, nothing else. The Pinnacles had been carved out before the Silver King had ever come to them, and if this had been made by the same hands then they were dead a thousand years and the only thing he might find alive here were ferals who’d been swept away from the Silver City; and ferals were things he could kill. He got out of the boat. There. In the middle of the far wall, a pair of doors gleamed softly in the light. Bronze, perhaps, though untouched by age. Should have been greened and dull.
The alchemist followed him out of the boat. Her fingers dug into his arm. ‘What is this place?’
He shrugged. ‘You keep asking, but I still haven’t the first idea. Never heard of it.’ He pointed at the doors. ‘You want to find out, go ahead.’
‘No. You go.’
‘I am … uneasy about this place.’ Now there was a thing. Couldn’t shake that feeling of something being wrong.
Fingers in his head again. ‘Go and open those doors and find out what lies beyond. Then I’ll tell you why I was sent from the Purple Spur.’
The hair on his arms prickled. ‘I’ll do as you ask, but I feel danger here. Take that as a warning.’ Danger from what? Ghosts? But there were no such things as ghosts. No such things as spirits. There were dragons and there was blood-magic and there were knives in the back in the dark. Those were dangers. Dark shadows? Old stones? He walked to the doors. Slowly and carefully though, legs and arms loose and ready to run, sword drawn. The doors were huge, bigger than they’d seemed from the water. Not familiar either, not like the wood and iron gates inside the Pinnacles; these were made of bronze, and into each was carved the figure of a man, ten feet tall and with four arms instead of two, each hand with a long curved sword. Their faces were hidden behind blank helms with no eyes. There were no handles that he could see, nothing to pull.
He stopped and looked the bronze up and down. Gave the door a good hard push. Nothing. Couldn’t say he felt too bad about that. Whatever was behind those doors had been there for a long time. Belonged to whoever had made the Pinnacles, and no one at all knew who that was. Someone bigger and older even than the Silver King.
‘No way in.’ He took a step back.
The doors creaked. The groan of bending metal shook the cave, so loud that Skjorl staggered back another step. The doors opening? No. That wasn’t right. One of the bronze figures was falling forward. Out of its door!
No, that wasn’t it either. The bronze was moving right enough, but it wasn’t falling. Grinding tearing shrieking sounds of metal shook the air, rang in his ears. For an instant Skjorl stood and stared. He’d faced dragons without fear, without a moment of pause, and dragons were the most terrible things in the realms. Or that’s what he’d thought; but then as far as he knew, no one had ever come face to face with a ten-foot-tall statue of bronze with four arms all holding swords. Not one that moved and was tearing itself out of a door.
An instant passed, that was all. Then he sheathed his sword and pulled Dragon-blooded off his back in one movement, leapt sideways and forward and brought the axe round with all his strength, sweeping low as the bronze man finished pulling himself free. He ducked under the sweep of a scimitar and the axe struck home, smashing into a knee joint and snapping it clean in two. Skjorl recoiled away as the bronze giant staggered onto its knees. Didn’t fall though, and now its scimitars were weaving arcs faster than any human swordsman. Skjorl backed away.
‘You still want me to go inside there, alchemist?’ he roared. The grinding metal noises were rising again. The other door was starting to shift.
No answer. A grin forced its way onto Skjorl’s lips. He wasn’t sure whether he had a choice, whether he could turn and run even if he wanted to. Didn’t matter. Didn’t want to. Ought to, but didn’t want to.
The second bronze giant was ripping itself free. The first one was between them. Stopping him from getting close enough to cripple it while it was still vulnerable.
‘If I were you, alchemist, I’d be pissing in my pants!’ Had to shout over the roar of tearing metal. ‘I’d run. Run, girl, run away!’ He was going to die and he’d never be remembered, but he’d know, for a fleeting instant, that it had been glorious.
He didn’t feel the first tug on his belt. Only noticed it when the alchemist pulled hard enough to unbalance him.
The second bronze man was almost free.
‘Come! Come!’
Skjorl wasn’t sure he wanted to. The torrent of noise inside his head was a river, rushing him to battle. The alchemist’s fingers in there were distant things, hardly heard.
Come! Come! Come to us!
Not the alchemist. Another voice. On top of hers.
‘Move!’ She was pulling him. Dragging him, and then his head was his own again and he turned, ran like any sensible man would, pushing her in front of him, barging her back onto the raft, thrusting it out into the water, into the current and hurling himself after her.
A few feet short of them, the second bronze giant reached the edge of the water. It stopped. Skjorl stood on the raft, legs wide apart, axe held out in front of him, but the giant stayed where it was. It seemed to watch, motionless, as the raft floated a
way down the tunnel. Skjorl thought he saw it move again as it faded out of sight. Turn, back towards the door from where it had come. He stayed where he was, poised to fight until long after the last glimmer of light from that place had winked away.
He was shaking.
The cold. Must have been the cold.
22
Kataros
Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum
On the outside her own shaking stopped when the golem had faded from sight. On the inside … on the inside she was lost. There had been books back when she’d been in the Palace of Alchemy. The Silver King had made golems, statues of stone or bronze or even iron, animated and given life. No one had seen a golem since the Silver King had fallen. Like Prince Lai’s wings, they were pretty stories. Myths read in the comfort of a warm study.
There had been other things in those books.
The Adamantine Man abruptly reached forward. He had his hands on her shoulders before she could blink, his fingers pressing into her skin, hard and hurting. There was a madness in his eyes she’d never seen before, a wildness that scared her even more than the golems had done.
‘What. Was. That?’ He could have snapped her neck, easily.
‘You’re hurting me!’ The words came out strangled, but they flew through the blood-bond just as well and hit him like a hammer. He let go and reeled away with a snarl.
‘Alchemist!’ He bared his teeth at her like an animal, like a rabid dog.
Remembering what he was, she welded her thoughts like an iron shield. ‘Sit down!’ The blood-bond was wide open now. He had no choice but to obey. ‘You will never, ever touch me again, Skjorl. Never. If you do, you will feel a pain that will sink you to your knees. You will wail and tear at yourself in agony. A touch, you shit-eater, that’s all.’ It wasn’t enough though. He needed to feel it – she wanted him to feel it – and so she reached out a hand towards him. ‘Let me show you.’ She seized his hand and pressed it against the side of her face. He jerked and tried to pull away, but she had him from within as well and he couldn’t let go. He threw his head back and screwed up his face and whined. She held him a while longer. When his eyes started to bulge she let him go.
‘There.’
Siff was watching them. He was trying to make out he was unconscious, but his eyes were very slightly open and moving under their lids, flicking from her to the Adamantine Man and back again. The tunnel walls drifted past, always the same, smooth and unmarked.
‘I opened the doors,’ growled Skjorl after a bit. ‘Well I tried.’ He looked at her. ‘So why were you sent from the Purple Spur, spear-carrier. What did you do wrong?’
She didn’t want to tell him, especially after what she’d just done, but a promise was a promise and alchemists kept their word, so she took a deep breath and made it as blunt as she could.
‘There were a little over thirty of us,’ she said. ‘Three of us were alchemists. The rest were Adamantine Men. We went in three separate groups, an alchemist in each. We were looking for help because we’re slowly starving to death under the Spur. We can poison dragons but they simply come back. We can kill them with the Adamantine Spear but they still come back. Men like you may go and smash eggs and slaughter hatchlings, but for what? We’ve taken to searching for eggs to bring to the caves, hoping we might do what we’d done before, but there are so many eggs in so many places that we can’t begin to collect them all; and even the ones we get, the dragons simply refuse the food we offer them when they hatch. They know now. They know what we do and they know how to beat us. They know we cannot win and so they starve themselves and they die and then they come back. We thought we might find something at the Pinnacles. The place is filled with things left behind by the Silver King, things that have never been touched since the time of the blood-mages, things we have never understood. We remembered them from our books, before the dragons burned them all. In the past the kings and queens of the Silver City barred us from their three palaces and no alchemist has been inside the lower chambers for centuries. We hoped … We thought perhaps we might finally be allowed to see, to discover something the Isul Aieha – the Silver King – left behind. Something to defeat the dragons.’ She sighed. ‘Grand Master Jeiros knew how futile our expedition would be, but he let us go nonetheless, chose three junior alchemists he could easily afford to lose and waved us farewell. In his eyes you could see how certain he was that he’d never see us again. For our part, we thought the dragons would eat us long before we arrived. Yet we went, not because Speaker Lystra ordered it, but because there was nothing else for us to do. Nothing, do you understand? The dragons have all but destroyed us. You’ve seen for yourself. You went to Bloodsalt? There was an Adamantine Man with me who went there too. He told me it was dead. Lifeless. Nothing but sand and ash and water too poisonous to drink. That’s what the realms will become, all of them. So we did as we were asked. I don’t know what happened to the other alchemists. We travelled apart and I never saw them again.’ She looked at the Adamantine Man. ‘They reached the fortress too, I think, but then Hyrkallan killed them.’ She shook her head. Looked away, not wanting any response, not now. ‘We crossed the Fury and climbed the gorge and skirted the Raksheh, sheltering under its leaves. There were dragons there, hunting. Always. When we had to, we crossed the Harvest Realm in three long hard nights. Everything that used to be fields and towns and villages, just a wasteland of ash and embers and scorched stone. There’s no one alive there now. I think once I saw a mouse.’ She shook her head.
The Adamantine Man was glaring at her. ‘The dragons try to starve us out,’ he snarled. ‘Same as they always did with the Spur. Burn everything. Leave us with nothing. Wasted effort around the Silver City though.’ He laughed. ‘Before I got there, the dragons smashed the fountains on top of the Fortress of Watchfulness. Smashed them to pieces but that didn’t stop the water from coming out of them. It just spouted from the broken stones instead. Then they tried burning them, but stone doesn’t burn. They poured out their fire for days, one after the other without end, and the water through the fortress still ran cold and fresh.’
Kataros nodded, for a moment forgetting that the worst monster was right here next to her. ‘The Silver King’s magic. That’s what we came looking for. When we reached the Silver City, we were welcomed and given food and water, and we were so tired and so grateful.’
Skjorl shrugged. ‘I heard stories there was another alchemist. That they took him up to the top at night, smashed his wrists and his ankles and hung him from a wheel over the edge. Same as they did for your grand master before the Adamantine Palace fell. I heard there were soldiers as well. My sort. I don’t know what happened to them. As far as I know they were still alive. Didn’t see them.’ For a moment he looked away and she caught the whiff of some smouldering shame inside him. ‘Too busy.’
‘That’s why I came to the Pinnacles. That’s what I was looking for and that’s what you’re going to find for me in the Raksheh. A half-god’s secrets for mastering dragons.’
He laughed at her, long and hard. ‘You think they haven’t looked for those? They say the ghost of the Silver King walks along hidden passages deep under each of the three Pinnacles, but I say this: if even a part of the Silver King remained beneath the Pinnacles, we would bow to him, all of us, dragons too.’
‘There’s another place to look. A better place. His tomb.’ Skjorl laughed more. ‘Vishmir spent twenty years looking. A thousand dragons and ten times the riders. Didn’t find it though.’
‘So we are supposed to believe.’
The Adamantine Man shook his head. ‘Even if I had a choice, I might still go with you, alchemist. But you’ll find nothing, same as everyone else. We’ll die out there looking for it. If it exists at all, then it’s hidden from the likes of you.’
Kataros glanced down at the outsider. He was still pretending be be asleep. ‘But not from him.’
Skjorl stared at her.
‘He’s been there. He found it. In th
e Raksheh. And now he’s going to show us the way.’
Skjorl stared at her some more. Then he fell back onto the raft and roared with laughter. ‘That’s what he told you, is it? That he’d found the Silver King’s tomb? And you believed that?’ He shook his head in disbelief. Kataros leaned towards him.
‘Yes. And would you like to see why I believed him?’ She turned to Siff. ‘I know you’re listening. Show him. Show him what you showed me.’
Very slowly Siff sat up. When he opened his eyes, they gleamed in the half-light of the tunnel walls.
They were silver.
Farakkan
Looking down over the confluence of the Fury and the Yamuna, Farakkan is little more than a market on a little hill, but the fact that it lies above the flood plain of Bonjanland (frequently becoming an island for most of the late spring and early summer) and is visible from a long distance across the flat terrain makes it seem something more. The city is wet, filthy and muddy and is largely viewed with disdain by the courts of the surrounding realms. The people of Farakkan are used to this and seem not to care. It has no culture to speak of and offers little to interest those whose lives are not dedicated to food, fish or livestock.
Bellepheros’ Journal of the Realms, 2nd year of Speaker Hyram
23
Siff
Some two years before the Black Mausoleum
On a bright clear day the lookout could have seen for miles across the valleys, peering between the mountaintops. He could have seen the approaching dragons when they were still specks in the sky. He could have lit the warning fire that would have told the men and women living in the valley to drop whatever they were holding, snatch up their children and run deep into the forest, where the dragons wouldn’t find them. On a bright clear day like today all of those things would have happened. Except the lookout was dead.