The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (23 page)

‘Wait for what?’

‘Wait for them to go. Wait for the middle of the night. Wait for them to be asleep. Best time.’

‘Wait for what?’ she snapped again. ‘Best time for
what
?’

‘Escape.’

‘You want to escape?’

‘You don’t?’

‘Back at the falls, you couldn’t wait to get here.’

The Adamantine Man shrugged. He turned away and stretched out at the far end of the room, flat on the floor. Within minutes he was snoring. Kataros envied him that, to be able to sleep whenever
the chance came, to be able to stay awake for as long as was needed. That was how they learned to be, she knew that, but still . . .

She uncapped the drinking horn and gingerly dropped the fireweed inside, still careful not to touch the leaves. The soldiers had taken Skjorl’s sword and axe but they hadn’t found
her little knife. She pricked her finger, let three drops fall into the horn and let her mind go with the blood to touch it, change it. She felt the fireweed for what it was, reached inside to the
essence at its core and let it flow out into the water, let a tiny charge of her own life mingle too.

When it was done she sat still for a moment, waiting for the dizziness to go away while she caught her breath. Then she lifted Siff’s head and tipped a few drops from the horn into his
mouth. He moaned as she touched him and hardly moved at first. Then his eyes snapped open, so wide they seemed to bulge. Kataros shuffled smartly away.

‘Holy burning ancestors!’ He sat bolt upright, hands clamped to his mouth, looking wildly from side to side. His eyes locked on to her. He pointed. ‘You! What have you . . .
Poison!’ He lunged at her, forgetting that he was still sitting down, and fell flat on his face. Kataros jumped on top of him, pinning him. The first surge of strength and panic was fading
already.

‘Shhh,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘Shh. I know it burns. It’s alchemy, healing fire. It will help you with the fever and help you find your strength again. Give it a
moment.’ She let go. Siff stayed where he was for a few seconds. When he moved again, his eyes were back to normal.

‘Ancestors, woman! That’s got some kick to it! More?’ He reached out for the horn.

‘A little. Too much would make you sick in a different way.’

He took a sip, handed it back and then clutched his mouth again. ‘Flame!’

‘Yes. It burns. I know.’

For the first time since they’d reached the castle, Siff looked around him. He frowned. ‘I remember this place.’

‘What? You’ve been here before?’ She blinked at him.

‘How did we get here?’ He shook his head.

‘Where?’

‘Ancestors! How did we get here so quickly? I don’t remember anything.’

She reached for him, but he waved her away and stood up, walked to the door and pushed at it. ‘This doesn’t belong here. I don’t remember
this
at all.’ He
shuddered.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I remember you. And him.’ He pointed at Skjorl. ‘There were soldiers. I remember clocking him on the back of his head with his own axe and they jumped on him. Best thing I saw
for weeks. And there was a castle on a cliff we were going to and a big cave full of mud and purple lights and then they stuffed us in a cage. A slave cage.’ He shuddered again. ‘But
why are we
here
again? How did you know where it was?’

‘Where
what
was?’ He was making no sense.

‘The door.’ His eyes turned suddenly silver and tiny snakes of moonlight began to curl from his finger. ‘The door. The way in. I
know
this place.’ His mouth fell
open. ‘No. Not . . . not right. This isn’t . . . I used to be . . . It’s not finished! Why isn’t it finished? It used to be finished!’ The light-snakes from his
fingers weren’t coiling aimlessly any more; they were reaching, straining forward. They plunged into the wall, and Siff’s hands followed them in as though the stone was nothing but
mist.

His mouth gaped now. He moaned, long and low. His eyes rolled back. His knees sagged and he fell back into her arms. His eyes were closed and the light from his fingers was gone; but Kataros
couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t felt the tremor that shook the walls and the floor, or the flicker in the glowing light as he fell.

Maybe Skjorl was right to be incredulous. The story Siff had told her, back in their prison in the Pinnacles, had been full of holes and mysteries. Some because the outsider was lying to her;
some because he was hiding things; some because he didn’t understand most of what he’d seen and neither did she. But she knew which parts of his story were lies and which he believed,
and that had been more than enough. Then he’d shown her this, and it was no magic she’d seen before, not blood-magic, not alchemy but something else. Something not seen since the days
of the Silver King.

Some two years before the Black Mausoleum

The dragon took its time leaving the valley; when it did, it flew slowly and carefully as though it understood how fragile a burden it carried. It wound its way up over a
narrow pass. A bitter wind tore through the cage, snapping and biting at the slaves pressed against the front. There were struggles. Men killed each other, fighting not to be in the teeth of that
wind. Perhaps on another day they might have shared, taken it in turns to be burned with cold and then huddled among the others until they were warm again. But this was not that other day, and so
it fell to fighting and the strongest forced the weakest to the front, where the weakest duly died and became nothing more than a shield for the rest. Siff kept out of it. Stayed at the back. There
were old men in the cage, frail servants from the eyrie, not the usual outsider youths that the dragon-riders took. The old were the ones to be sacrificed, not him. Truth be told, he probably
didn’t have any more strength to him than they did, but he had the look, the eyes of someone who’d killed and would kill again. And he would too. He’d have fought to the death not
to be pressed into the jagged nails of that wind. He didn’t shout, didn’t bother to speak since no one could hear a thing over the roar of the rushing air, just looked. That was
enough.

The fighting stopped in time. The ones left alive sat pressed together, huddled, holding on to each other, trying to keep warm. The ones at the front were dead by now so they didn’t
complain. The ones at the sides clenched their fists and their teeth and shivered, slowly falling into themselves as the cold took hold. Even at the back Siff couldn’t feel his feet any more.
Not feeling his hands would have been a blessing, but no, his fingers burned with a pain even worse than when the eyrie torturers had pulled his nails out. Did fingernails grow back? He
didn’t know. Did it matter? Up in the howling wind it hardly seemed important. What mattered was that they hurt.

His consciousness slipped away now and then. He kept his teeth clenched, trying to stay awake as long as he could, waiting for the ones around him to fade and then wriggling behind them so that
they took more of the cold and he took a share of their warmth. At some point they flew though a blanket of cloud. They were going down, from the bitter high mountain skies through the grey shroud
over the Raksheh into the warmer air above the trees. The cloud was a special cold, but afterwards, once they were beneath it, the wind wasn’t quite as biting any more and instead of
snowcapped mountains, the land he could see was a deep, dark green, pinched and wrinkled like an old man’s skin. The Raksheh. For a second or two he laughed to himself – it was
certainly a quicker way to get where he’d been going than all that tedious trekking north to Hanzen’s Camp and then finding a boat down the Fury.

The Raksheh rain started. A hail of knives that battered even the strongest of them into silence. Siff closed his eyes. There was a valley down there, distant, down among the green hills,
shrouded in mist. He saw it now and then, as the cage swung that way. The Yamuna. That was the river that went through the Raksheh. He thought about Sashi, and how he hoped he’d stuck her
with that knife he’d thrown. He didn’t have the words for how he hated her for selling him out. Gold would have rained out of the sky for him in Furymouth. Now it was gone, all gone,
because of her, and he was going to die and meet his ancestors.

Ancestors. Barely remembered faces, burned by dragons years ago. Strange how he could remember his mother’s face more clearly now that ever before. His mother’s face and his
father’s voice.

The cage swung suddenly sideways, tipped and tumbled them on top of each other. He gasped and looked about, couldn’t feel anything except the press of bodies on him. The ground was racing
up, getting closer much too fast. He tried to wriggle free but the crush held him like glue. Rocks and stones and trees were flying up to smash him and he couldn’t move. He screwed up his
face and screamed.

The cage lurched again. The weight on top of him was suddenly crushing. His ribs creaked. He felt all his breath pressed out of him in one long gasp. Wood groaned and popped.

And snapped, and the cage fell into pieces and he was falling.

Bodies flailed around him. Four dragons swirled down from above. He saw a rider ripped from his saddle and cheered to himself. Good to die with a last happy memory. Then something hit him in the
back, tearing his skin, sending him spinning. He tipped over and saw water, a waterfall. The spray doused him, shocked him; he bounced off the falling torrent and then the water took him and
wrapped its arms and its thunder around him and sucked him into darkness, and that should have been the end of that.

When he opened his eyes again, he was on a muddy grassy riverbank. He coughed, spluttered, vomited up a gout of water then rolled over, clutching himself. His insides were frozen stiff, but the
air on his skin was strangely warm.

There was a dragon looking down at him. A dusky grey one. He screamed. As screams went, it was feeble and pathetic, but he gave it the best he could muster. It ended with more coughing and
spluttering and sicking up water into the grass.

Death. In the real world he was still somewhere in the water, drowning. This? Having a dragon meet you in the afterlife made a sort of sense.

The dragon stared at him as though he was a fish that had somehow flipped itself out of a pond and was now flapping helplessly on the shore. There were other dragons too. Four of them all
together. One was the dragon that had been carrying the cage. The other three seemed somehow different. They had a purpose to them. They were precise and methodical, picking bodies off the ground
and piling them up together.

It slowly dawned on him that none of them had riders.

Are you poisonous?

He had no idea what that thought was doing in his head. It wasn’t his, not that he could make into any sense at least, but since it was in his head, he supposed it must have been.
Poisonous? Was he poisonous? What did that mean?

Do you have dragon poison inside you?

Dragon poison? When had he ever heard of such a thing?

What of the others?

Others? What others? He slapped himself around the head. The dragon was still staring at him. Then it picked him up.

I am a dragon
, said the voice inside his head,
and you are nothing. You are not dead. You are food.

He fainted.

When he opened his eyes again, he was back on the ground, still on the riverbank. The dragons had gone. He blinked and looked around and then blinked some more. Still gone.

Must have imagined it then.
He took a deep breath. What had happened, he decided, was that the waterfall had broken his fall. He’d been washed up on the bank of the river,
half-drowned, and the rest had been a hallucination. Or maybe he was still up in the air, freezing slowly to death in the wind, and for some reason he’d gone mad.

Hallucination didn’t explain the neat pile of bodies that his imaginary dragons had made. Being mad, well, if he was mad then none of this was real anyway so he might as well get up and
have a look at them.

Maybe I did that while I was delirious?

Probably not, since he was still tied up, trussed the way he’d been when Gold Cloak had shoved him in the cage. If anything, being soaked in freezing rain and water had made the ropes
tighter. He could barely stand. If he was mad and none of this was real, he might at least have had the decency to have untied himself. So perhaps not mad either.

The pile of bodies reminded him uncomfortably of the charred corpses back at the village, the one he’d betrayed. He blinked and stared at the river for a while. The air was cold now, not
warm like it had been when he’d seen the dragon. The waterfall was a few hundred yards away. At least he was out of the wind.

He was cold.

What could make a dragon crash?

No, that was a thing not to think about. The thing to think about was that he was alive, barely, and he wasn’t in a slave cage any more and there wasn’t a dragon carrying him to the
pens in Furymouth and he wasn’t about to be sold or murdered in his sleep. The thing to think about was that he was going to starve to death right here, wherever here was, if he didn’t
die of cold first. Or of all the bits that hurt, which was almost everything.

Shelter.

His ribs and his back hurt, almost as though something had coiled around him, crushing him, pulling him out of the water without much regard to whether anything got broken in the process.
Another thing not to think about. He staggered to the pile of bodies instead. It was messy. They largely looked like what you’d expect if you took a few dozen men and then scattered them from
the sky across a landscape of giant rocks and boulders. Among them he saw a flash of gold. He had to kick bodies – bits of bodies as well – out of the way since his hands were tied, but
there he was, Gold Cloak. Or half of him, anyway. He had his head and his shoulders and his nice cloak and his ribs and then his snapped spine sticking out through a mess of guts and bloody scraps
of flesh.