The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (28 page)

She sucked on the corner of the shirt and passed it to the Adamantine Man. ‘As soon as the sun sets, we find some shelter where I can make more and do it properly. Enough to take us to the
Raksheh.’

Skjorl sucked on the shirt too. His lip curled. ‘Oh, I remember that taste.’ He waved the shirt at her. ‘That enough?’

‘To get the three of us to the Raksheh? More than enough.’ She took the shirt to Siff. Forced the corner into his mouth.

‘It’ll be dry by night.’

‘Then you’d better find me some water.’

Skjorl climbed down into the ditch with her, carefully not too close. ‘Back where we came from then. The tunnel to the Pinnacles. All the water you want and safe for as long as you need.
We could tip the raft down the falls and ride the Ghostwater to the Yamuna. It’s only a few hours away.’ He pulled Siff up out of the ditch and slung him over a shoulder. ‘Best we
stay under this . . . thing. Until dark. Castle will keep us hidden from dragons. Dragons will keep the castle soldiers safe in their beds. Works out nicely for us both ways.’ He offered her
his hand. This time she very nearly took it, almost without thinking. It didn’t seem to bother him that she didn’t.

He turned and started to walk. ‘If your potions fail, alchemist, we’ll be dead out here in days. If they do what they should, I’ll get you to the Raksheh. No promises after,
but I’ll get you that far. Night Watchman’s oath.’

Which, she knew, meant he’d do it or he’d die in the trying.

Nineteen days before the Black Mausoleum

Dragon battled dragon in the skies, a thing that Blackscar remembered from its first lifetime and then never since. The old ghosts in the half-made sky-home were silent. Hidden
once more. Even the little one, the sorcerer who carried a touch of the broken god.

Strangeness upon strangeness. As it dived upon the eyrie and set its innards alight, a part of Blackscar tried not to give itself up to the battle, to the fury and the joy of it. Too many things
to consider.

It failed. Thunder and lightning rose up to greet it, battering its skin. Fire swept in a wave before it. Little ones screamed and burned. It felt their fear, delicious like honey. It felt the
little one it was looking for. Running. Fleeing. It turned and came at the sky-home again. There. Standing by the edge, rising out of the haze of smoke and mist and steam.

You are mine.

The little one saw it coming. Knew its end. Nowhere to hide. Fire swept towards it, yet at that moment another dragon fell from the sky, teeth and claws and tail, ripping and tearing. Small.
Barely more than a hatchling. A year old, half grown at best, but it came nonetheless and the dragon knew it must turn to meet it or be taken crashing to the ground, and either way, the little one
was granted a miracle and would not burn, not now.

But soon.

It met the other dragon, tooth and claw. Victory was certain, yet the other came with a furious zeal. A certainty of purpose. A righteousness, even, the sort that belonged in the head of little
ones and their foolishness, not within a dragon. Not within a creature that had seen such zeal almost shatter creation.

But there nevertheless.

They skimmed the edge of the sky-home, cracking its shell with their wind and their tails. It saw the little one fall, but the creature’s thoughts did not fade and flicker and so the
dragon knew that it lived on. They crashed into the castle together and hurled themselves back into the sky. Blackscar threw the other dragon aside. Gently. Or gentle as a dragon could be. Wings
intact and no bones crushed beyond repair. It turned for its little one once more, but now there were more dragons. Lightning struck it, sent it plunging spiralling through the sky. When its wings
were its own again, the dragon turned its thoughts to the sorceries of glass and gold that spat thunder. The little one could wait.

Lightning met him, a storm of it. The little ones; and then their half-grown dragon servants fell from the sky and tore their own kind to the ground with teeth that struck to kill.

Dragon servants.
Its rage could melt mountains. Fill seas and burn skies. Yet it withdrew. Some did not. Could not. One by one they fell.

Defeated.

The thought was enough to pierce any fury. It had never, in any lifetime, been left to savour the word.

A surge of something ancient burst from the sky-home. It echoed across the plains and faded and died. The dragon felt it. Saw it. Saw something cut loose. Saw one of its own kind it had known
for fifty lifetimes lying crippled and broken in the folds of the sky-home’s womb and then die at the touch of an old goddess who always took something away.

The other dragons murmured among themselves. One by one they left, but the dragon called Blackscar lingered. One last thing. The little one was still there and so the dragon watched and waited,
carefully and from a distance, touching the edges of the little one’s thoughts as it climbed back down from the sky-home to the ground. Watched as a magic made of dragon blood blinked its
mind away and the little one it had hunted for so long vanished, finally, from its sight.

Such a thing might drive another to rage, it mused, but for once the dragon was unmoved.

After all, it knew by now exactly there this little one meant to go.

An expanse of largely unbroken forest that occupies the south-west corner of the realms, the Raksheh stretches over several hundred miles from Drotan’s Top and the
Gliding Dragon Gorge in the north to the Sea of Storms in the south. Its east–west borders are less sharply defined: in the west the forest merges with the valleys of the Worldspine, while in
the east the wooded areas peter out more gradually into the plains of the Silver City. Several large rivers flow through the forest, ultimately draining into the Yamuna and emerging close to the
town of Farakkan. Numerous large round lakes dot the more mountainous western fringe of the forest; from the air these are similar to the Mirror Lakes of the Purple Spur. Various deep gorges and
several spectacular waterfalls have been reported by dragon-riders who have ventured to cross the forest. The best known of these are those around the Aardish Caves.

The forest is largely uninhabited, although rumoured to give shelter to numerous settlements of outsiders and other feral tribes. Bandits and outlaws also frequent the fringes of the forest,
particularly in the north.

The forest may be the home of many unique creatures. Earthworms as large as horses have been reported, together with six-legged lizards of various sizes ranging from the minuscule to the giant.
Several breeds of venomous snakes and poisonous frogs are known to inhabit the forest. Snappers are also a constant danger, although their numbers are less than in the more northern fringes of the
Worldspine. For those of our order, the forest offers a concentration of valuable and unique ingredients the like and diversity of which can only otherwise be found on the distant Oordish Moors.
Frogsback, for example, is harvested from the southern fringes of the Raksheh Forest.

With the exception of the rather arid northern section close to Drotan’s Top, the forest has the distinction of being one of the wettest places in the realms, surpassed only by the
southern reaches of the Worldspine itself.

Bellepheros’
Journal of the Realms
, 2nd year of Speaker Hyram

Twenty-one days before the Black Mausoleum

Bloodsalt made him a hero. Bloodsalt earned him everything and then hoisted him by his own shirt and dropped him in a cesspit.

On the moors he and Skjorl had gone their separate ways, something that had been coming ever since Scarsdale. Jasaan then tried to get on with the business of walking and eating and walking and
sleeping and walking and drinking and not being caught in the open by a dragon; and most of all not thinking about Skjorl and how small and subtle were the differences between them. As far as
Jasaan knew, Skjorl had meant to stick stubbornly to Yinazhin’s Way, so Jasaan picked his path down to the Sapphire valley. There was water, food if you knew where to look for it, not much
but enough and plenty of fish. He drank his potions and hid in the day and walked carefully at night and took each sunset as it came, quietly assuming he’d die somewhere beside the river and
get nowhere near the Purple Spur; and then, somehow, he’d reached Samir’s Crossing. It wasn’t even that difficult.

No one had ever thought Skjorl or any of his company would come back. People didn’t even come back from the moors any more and Bloodsalt was three times the distance. At Samir’s
Crossing the Adamantine Men who watched the skies and the plains to the north and south made him a hero. They welcomed him with open arms and poured praise over him like wine at a desert
wedding.

He waited a few weeks – they gave him that luxury – but Skjorl never came back. Skjorl was dead. Eventually Jasaan believed it. And all the while the stories he told of Bloodsalt
made delicate and tiny changes to themselves. Quiet Vish and Skjorl always killed the dragon, but his own part changed, maybe became a little more how it
might
have been than what actually
happened. Yes, Skjorl and Vish had wielded their axes, but it was no accident that the roof had collapsed where it did. The dragon had been lured to its doom by the cleverness of men. By
Jasaan.

Adamantine Men did what needed to be done. That was all. They didn’t make themselves into heroes, and so it wasn’t a surprise when the alchemists under the Purple Spur found him
something else to do. There was to be an attempt to reach the Pinnacles. Alchemists would be going. They would need guides. Soldiers to protect them, soldiers who understood the ways of dragons.
Most particularly, they needed soldiers who had survived out in the open, who knew how to stay alive with no vast roof of stone to shield them from the skies. They needed an inspiration, someone
the other soldiers, the alchemists even, would believe in. And Jasaan, since he was a hero, couldn’t deny them, no matter how much he never wanted to go out in the open again. Who else could
they choose? And what else could he do but go?

He got them there too, all of them. Picked his men carefully, set off in three separate bands on three separate paths and amazed even himself. His alchemists reached the Pinnacles alive. Even in
the Silver City, even as he tried to find a way into the fortress itself, he kept them safe from the feral men who lived in the tunnels and the cellars, hiding from the dragons above and only ever
coming out at night. He kept them safe and he got them inside, all the way from the Purple Spur, with messages of greetings and hope from the speaker who lived there.

That had been a week ago. The next day, after his soldiers had politely surrendered their swords, trusting to the hospitality of King Hyrkallan and his men, Hyrkallan had killed the alchemists.
Hadn’t listened to what they had to say, simply got rid of them.

No one actually
said
that, of course. Apparently what had
really
happened was that all the alchemists had gone to the very roof of the Pinnacles, to the Reflecting Garden, and been
eaten by a dragon. About the most implausible story imaginable, but by the time he’d come to understand about the false speaker Hyrkallan and his hatred for alchemists, they were dead and the
damage was done. All the men he’d lost on the way wasted. He might have made a fuss about it, but really what was the point? In the days since it had happened, he’d just felt more and
more numb.

He stood in the same place now, the Reflecting Garden, looking at the moon. It wasn’t often that anyone who lived under the Spur got to see the real sky, the real moon, the real stars,
never mind the real sun. To Jasaan open skies only meant keeping his eyes wide for dragons. He’d had enough of that. A good strong mountain over his head would do nicely.

A stream bubbled out from a pile of rubble that had once been a fountain. That was all the dragons had left of the Reflecting Garden, but the riders who’d been trapped in the Pinnacles
since before the Adamantine Palace had burned spoke of pools of water that didn’t lie flat, of paths in arcs and the Silver Onion Dome. Even Jasaan had heard about that. He looked at the
remains, the shattered stones and gravel. There was almost nothing left.

On special nights when there were no dragons roosting on the mountaintop, the false speaker Hyrkallan had his throne carried up from the tunnels below. Tonight was one of those nights, and
he’d summoned Jasaan to join him. Jasaan watched carefully, vaguely wondering whether tonight was the night that the dragon who’d eaten his alchemists would mysteriously eat him and all
his men too. Under the Purple Spur a lot of things were quietly said among the Adamantine Men about Hyrkallan and his queen. Hyrkallan should have been the speaker, they said. He could have saved
the realms from disaster, they said, but his queen was another matter: his queen was bitter and ugly, hateful and mad and had awoken dragons for fun. Queen Jaslyn wasn’t there tonight and
Jasaan hadn’t ever seen her, even when they’d first arrived. As for Hyrkallan, he was old, his beard was grey and there was white in his hair. To Jasaan he looked lost.