The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (22 page)

It turned its head and opened its mouth. Even the wind could burn.

The lightning veered away, crackled uselessly around the dragon’s flames. The dragon’s wings began to move again. It spread them wide and caught its fall and powered away, shooting
like an arrow, faster than the wind could follow, off and gone.

Others. It would find others.

Lots of others.

Twenty days before the Black Mausoleum

There were easier ways down from the hills than following the Ghostwater and its haunted valley, but Skjorl didn’t break anything and neither did the alchemist, and after
an hour they were down on the plains towards Farakkan. Easy walking except for the mud. No cover, but then there was no one to hide from. The people who lived here were long gone, eaten by dragons
or fled. Snappers didn’t come down onto the plains – they’d always known better than to live out in the open. And dragons didn’t fly at night. Usually.

Even so, he kept them to the lowest ground, took what shelter he could behind the long streaks of broken wood and debris left behind by each annual flood of the Fury. Lines of stunted narrow
trees marked what had once been fields, all overgrown now, filled with long grass and fast-growing thorn bushes. He picked his path carefully, watching the moon and the stars, always staying to the
shadows where he could. They moved slowly but methodically towards the castle.

It was the alchemist who found the soldiers. Walked a dozen yards into the dark, took a piss that a deaf man could have heard a mile away and came back with a knife held to her throat and four
men behind her. Four that Skjorl could see, at least.

The man with the knife said something. Skjorl blinked. The words made no sense, but his meaning was clear enough. This was the part where he and the shit-eater were supposed to surrender their
swords so that the alchemist didn’t get her pretty throat cut.

Skjorl thought about that for a bit. The shit-eater didn’t have a sword to surrender. And as for his own, they’d prise Dragon-blooded out of his cold dead hands if they got her at
all.

‘Given the choice of her or my steel, I’ll keep the steel, thanks,’ he said. ‘But I’ll let you see it.’ Too close for axe work, too dark, so he drew out his
sword, let the moonlight glint off its edge. ‘There.’

The alchemist opened her mouth. The hand around her neck tightened and she closed it again. Skjorl waited for the fingers

inside his head but they didn’t come. He grinned.

‘No orders, alchemist? Sure?’

The man with the knife said something else but Skjorl couldn’t make head or tail of it. ‘He says he’ll slit her throat,’ said another. The accent was thick, but Skjorl
recognised it this time. An outsider from deep in the mountains.

‘Tell him I’ll thank him. Why don’t
you
tell
me
what a shit-eater like you is doing so far from home, or shall we just get on with it? Four of you is it, or are
there more out there? Because four’s fine with me.’

‘You’re a rider.’ Lot of hatred in those words and no effort to hide it. The shit-eater doing the talking took a step forward. He drew out his own sword. It was long and
curved, not a weapon Skjorl had seen before. ‘You got no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this.’

He came at Skjorl in fast easy steps, quicker and with more skill than a shit-eater had any right to. Two quick thrusts, a slash, a feint and a killing cut to the head. Skjorl blocked it all
easily. Turned the longer sword, stepped inside the man’s guard and ran him through. He looked down as the soldier grunted and fell. He’d expected armour. Wrinkled his nose and tried
not to sound disappointed. ‘Not bad for a shit-eater. Not good enough for an Adamantine Man though.’

The man looked up at him. Black blood dribbled out of his mouth. ‘If that’s what you are, you should serve your mistress,’ he choked.

His eyes rolled and he fell back. Skjorl looked at the rest of them. ‘Next?’ he twirled his sword.

The one holding the alchemist dug the knife into her skin. A thin thread of blood oozed across the blade.

‘Told you that’s not going to—’ He didn’t get any further because something hit him around the back of the head. Not the alchemist from the inside, but something
from the outside. He staggered and spun round, and there was the shit-eater,
his
shit-eater, the one he’d been carrying all night. The one he’d dropped into the mud and forgotten
about as soon as the soldiers had appeared. Siff.

Hit him with the haft of his own axe.

His sword flew back to strike. Pure reflex. Spears of pain crashed into his head, pinging off the inside of his skull like arrows off a stone parapet. He caught the alchemist looking at him, not
scared at all about the knife against her throat.

No!

He dropped to his knees. Let the sword go and clutched his head.

Could have finished the strike. Could have . . . if I wanted . . .

Too much. Too much to bear. His eyes closed. He tipped forward.

Twenty days before the Black Mausoleum

Siff watched the Adamantine Man fall. He couldn’t look anywhere else, thinking,
I did that?
Except surely he hadn’t. He couldn’t have. The idiot had an
axe across his back, the haft of it poking up behind his head. All Siff had done was put one and one together, given him little headache and maybe lowered the bastard’s guard for a moment,
long enough for someone to kill him.

Outsiders? He peered at the three remaining soldiers, wondering if the Adamantine Man was right. They spoke strangely, not quite like men from the mountains and yet with a familiar lilt. There
was only one reason Siff knew for an outsider from the mountains to be down here on the plains – because some dragon-lord was taking him to Furymouth to sell in the slave markets. He sank to
the ground and bowed his head, hiding his face. On the whole he didn’t give a fig who did what to whom, as long as they didn’t do it to him.

Two of them jumped on the Adamantine Man and tied him up. They relaxed after that. Siff was more a threat to himself than anyone else and they obviously thought much the same of the alchemist.
They were wrong, but that was soldiers for you and Siff wasn’t about to correct them. Maybe these would be better than the last ones he’d met or maybe not, but they couldn’t be
worse; and even if they were, what was he going to do? Blown about like a leaf in a storm, that’s what he was. Story of his crappy little life, from the day his stupid whore had sold him out.
He still knew what he knew, though. A secret good enough to save his life twice already.

The soldiers marched them off across the muddy fields. He could barely walk, staggering and stumbling as they pushed and shoved him on, but he didn’t dare fall. They wouldn’t carry
him, not like the alchemist’s doggy. They’d leave him.

They stopped in the shadow of a black shape that blotted out half the sky, at the edge of a place where the fields glowed with a soft purple light. He didn’t understand what could do that,
but by then he was too lost in his own misery to think. They waited there and let him sit down, and he must have dozed off because the next thing he knew he was being hauled into a wooden cage that
jerked and tugged itself up into the air, and,
Ooh gods! Ooh ancestors!
There was only one place he could be, the worst place. He twisted and pulled, but it was too late.

‘No!’ He pushed and punched. ‘No!’

Someone had his arms and forced him down, face against mud-streaked boards, boot on the back of his neck. Still he struggled. He’d been in a place like this before. In a cage, carried in
the talons of a dragon, on his way to Furymouth to be sold as a slave.

Twenty days before the Black Mausoleum

The castle was flying. Or floating at least. It sat in the air atop a flat slice of purple-veined rock as thick as a dragon was long, while the bottom of the uneven stone and
the muddy plains of the Fury were separated by the same again in air. From up close she could feel its size. It was vast, big enough to fill half the sky. Light flickered and flashed like lightning
between the castle stone and the ground, lightning with a taint of purple that let her see just how tall the castle stood. It was at least as big as the Adamantine Palace had been, perhaps larger,
maybe even as large as the Palace of Paths. She wondered whether Skjorl would know. Mostly she wondered where it had risen from the earth and who could have made such a thing and how.

The soldiers pushed them all to the edge of the castle’s shadow, waited until a wooden cage came down on a rope from the night sky, and then bundled the three of them inside. The
Adamantine Man was quiet and passive; Siff started to wail and moan and tried to break away, weak as he was. Even after a few cuffs round the head, even when he could barely stand any more, he was
still quivering and trying to crawl. When the cage started to rise, he let out thin hooting screams until someone shut him up with a boot in the face. Kataros didn’t think he even knew where
he was.

‘Who are you?’ she asked the soldiers. ‘Who do you serve? What is this? How do you master your dragons? Do you have Scales? Are there alchemists here?’ She was fairly
sure the soldiers understood her, at least in part. Their faces gave that away. They jabbered to one another and then back at her with accents so harsh that she barely caught a word.
Shut up
was the gist of it. But they did answer one question, whether they meant to or not. When she asked about alchemists, one of them said, ‘Bellepheros.’

She fell silent after that. Bellepheros, grand master of the Order of the Scales at the time of Speaker Hyram. Master of all the alchemists, lord of the Palace of Alchemy. She’d met him
once, when she’d proved herself good enough to become an apprentice alchemist instead of going away to become a Scales. She’d seen him too, now and then in the palace, at the end of a
corridor or through a door. She’d read his book, his
Journal of the Realms
, written from the travels he’d made shortly before he became grand master. Most of what she knew of the
world had come from there.

Bellepheros, who’d disappeared somewhere near Furymouth at much the same time as the first wild dragon had awoken. His escort had been found with their throats cut from side to side, blood
everywhere, but the master alchemist had vanished, and a year later the Adamantine Palace had burned and everything else with it. Everyone assumed he was dead, that he’d been murdered because
he’d found something that some dragon-lord was trying to keep secret, his body taken so no one could be
quite
sure. The master alchemists had all started to learn a lot more
blood-magic after that, more still after the Adamantine Palace fell.

The cage stopped, swung round under a long boom and then dropped gently to the ground. Not the ground she’d come from, but a new ground, hard bare stone floating a hundred feet and more
above the Fury plains. The edge was only a step away. The soldiers took her up a set of stairs set into an angled wall, a half-and-half slope of plain white stone that a man could climb easily if
he wanted. Then down the other side, where the slope was sharper, the steps deep and narrow. They had to carry Siff now. They were losing him. She tapped the fireweed in her pocket. Fireweed and
water and she could bring him back, at least for a little.

Inside the walls was a huge circular space. A lot of wooden huts had been built around its edges, slapdash constructions, bizarre and out of place beside the immaculate precision of the fortress
itself. She looked at the wall and the steps behind her. There were no cracks in the stonework. No joins, no mortar. Kataros peered for a moment, trying to see if she was right. Outwatch and
Hejel’s Bridge were the same, weren’t they? Miraculous things, forged from raw stone as one creation; and the tunnels too, the tunnels that had brought them from the Silver City, all
smooth and seamless. Did they share the same creator?

A soldier shoved her forward, past a cluster of huts and a scattering of old fire pits, all dark now. Other soldiers moved about, armour gleaming in the moonlight. Snores rumbled from half-open
doorways. She saw someone with his face painted black so that his gleaming eyes seemed to float alone in the darkness. No. Not
painted
. As he walked past and stared at them with amused
curiosity, she saw he was wearing a cloak made of feathers. The night killed their colour, but the shape was unmistakable. Black skin and feathers meant one thing – he was Taiytakei. And
what, in the name of Vishmir, was a Taiytakei doing here?

The soldiers led her to a set of steps that vanished down into the base of the far wall, then through a heavy iron door and into a passage. The walls were smooth and so was the floor: the
passageway was almost round, and filled with a familiar soft glow. Brighter here than it had been in the tunnels from the Silver City, bright as cloudless twilight, but whoever had made those
tunnels had surely made this as well. They
were
the same.

The soldiers shoved them all together into a round room made of the same stone as the passageway. Someone had wedged some wooden beams into place across the entrance and made a crude door with a
bar across the outside.

‘Water,’ she said, as the soldiers withdrew. She made a gesture, hoping they’d understand her meaning, if not the word. The last one out hesitated, then tossed her a half-full
drinking horn. Half full was enough.

The door closed. She heard the bar drop on the other side.

‘We’ll wait!’ Skjorl looked up at her with narrow eyes from the floor. ‘But not for long.’