The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (11 page)

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.

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.

The hatchling spoke of other things too. It spoke of the hole in the underworld, yawning open, growing, of dragon souls swallowed and consumed, gone and destroyed for ever. The dragon considered
these things and then let them fall aside. It had no use for them. It flew to the places where the little ones still cowered deep in their caves and under their stones and it searched. It stood on
their battlements and reached into their thoughts while they slept beneath. In the smashed-flat wreckage of what had once been a proud place it found little ones hiding in the dirt, and among them
it found a trace, a taste, a sniff of a memory, the flash of a face.

It burned them to ash and moved on until it came to the great fortress where the little ones had hidden away once before, centuries ago before their Silver King had come. To the place of the
three mountains. It hunted through the thoughts and minds of the humans who cowered there, until it found the one it was looking for. And then it did something rare among its kind. It waited.

Twenty-three days before the Black Mausoleum

Being told that a lot of things came with a blood-bond was one thing; finding out what they actually felt like was something very different. Finding out what they felt like
while running through the dark ruin of the Silver City with a shoulderful of pain and feral men on the loose was something else again.

She knew where the Adamantine Man was. She could feel him, always there in a certain corner of her head.

That right there was one of those
other
things. He
was
always there, whether she liked it or not, no matter whether she wanted him or couldn’t stand the thought of him. She
couldn’t see through his eyes or read his thoughts or send him her own unless she set her mind to it, but she could feel him. The ebbs and surges of his thoughts were like gentle hands placed
against the back of her head whose fingers couldn’t be still. She felt his thrill as he broke another feral, the moment of killing like a pinprick inside her skull. Then tension.
Anticipation. Satisfaction. For a short time after that, calm. He had Siff with him now, the outsider, a constant annoyance and burden, slowing him down.

Bring him to me
, she told him, but he’d hardly gone any way at all before there were more of them. Anger and rage, they came first, and underneath them a vicious joy, a raw and
gleeful abandonment, a surrender of anything and everything except the next motion. They were alien and uncomfortable thoughts to an alchemist, taught always to think and consider, never to act
swiftly or rashly, never in haste, never on impulse. The Adamantine Man was more like a dragon in a rage, swept up and lost in the moment. It was the blindness that came with that fury that had
almost saved the realms in their last days. Almost.

She ran now and never mind how much it hurt. She felt the distance between them vanishing, yet she had no idea what that meant, whether a certain sense of him implied he was still a mile away
through the starlit ruins or whether she’d find him round the next corner. She readied herself for either; as it was, she heard him before she saw him, his battle roars and the shrieks and
jabberings of the feral men. She slowed as she reached them. Now that she was close, she didn’t know what to do. The Adamantine Man had Siff on the ground, lying almost between his feet,
weaving his axe in arcs too quick to follow, daring anyone to come close.

‘Come on then! You wait much longer it’ll be dawn. Or would you rather wait for a dance with a dragon? It’s all the same to me, little men. This is my axe! Dragon-blooded!
She’s killed dragons before and she’ll kill them again!’

The Adamantine Man had his back to a wall so the feral men couldn’t get behind him. They’d spread out in a semicircle, eight of them. She glanced at the sky. Dawn was hours away and
she doubted he could keep his axe swinging for that long, so she had to do something or else they’d all die, and the only weapon she had was her own blood. Try to blood-bind some of them?
Easily said, but she had to get her blood inside one first.

The Adamantine Man then – he’d have to drive them away. Or lure them. She hadn’t given much thought to what she was going to do with him once she was out of her prison. Get rid
of him. Use him to escape and then send him away, or perhaps watch him fall on his own sword – that would have done nicely. One day it still might, but now the alchemist in her warned
caution. Siff couldn’t move, it reminded her, not on his own, and she certainly wasn’t going to be the one to carry him. It whispered of how useful he still might be.
Why throw away
a tool like that?
it asked.
He’s no threat to you now.
She remembered his hand at her throat, squeezing while the other crippled one pawed at her.
But now he’s yours and
you are his mistress. You can end him whenever you like. Why do it now?