The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (31 page)

The next gap was a long one, or maybe there had been several with not much in between. He’d stayed with them a while, these men and their tribe. He didn’t remember much, only . . .
memories that he couldn’t quite piece together, or maybe they were dreams. It was a hard life in the woods. They’d had nothing to look forward to. Work, eat, breed, die, that was all
that most outsiders had ever had, dragons-kings or no dragon-kings. For a while, he remembered, it had been pleasant. Then later they’d been afraid of him, and then later still in awe. He
could have made them do anything, and yet he had no . . .
use
for them any more, and so he’d left one day without really knowing why, without
remembering
why. He’d had
dreams, though. He remembered those more than he remembered the men of the forest. They’d come more and more while he lived among them, dreams of men in silver, of dragons, of power beyond
imagining, beyond what he could even begin to comprehend.

At some point there had been soldiers. Not many, a dozen, perhaps. He’d found a new place to hide and there they were, already there. He’d had no chance, and yet the next thing he
knew four of them were dead. He had no idea how he’d killed them, but there was no doubting that he’d been the one who’d done it. With his bare hands, by the looks of it, because
there hadn’t been any blood. The rest had taken him back with them to the Pinnacles. They’d been terrified of him every step of the way, and he could have drunk that terror like the
finest wine if he hadn’t been strung up just like he was now. And then in the Pinnacles the dreams and the gaps had finally stopped and he was Siff again, the person he’d grown up
knowing, and nothing strange at all had happened. Shame about being thrown into a cell to slowly starve to death.

Then the alchemist had come and now it was all starting again and it was all he could do not to scream.

‘Hey, doggy!’ He had no idea what had happened. One moment he’d been talking to the alchemist, wondering whether she was an ally or an enemy and wondering what she meant to do
with her doggy once they reached the forest. The next thing he knew, here he was, hog-tied by the river. If he’d been able to reach, he’d have felt his head. His face burned. He’d
taken a good crack from something. Pity he had no idea what.

‘Hey, doggy!’

The Adamantine Man ignored him. He was sitting by the river with a bottle of what must have been the wine from the alchemists’ cellar. When he stood up, he was obviously drunk.

‘Hey shit-eater,’ he said, ‘you thirsty?’ He pulled down his trousers and aimed carefully at Siff’s face. Siff turned away – there wasn’t much else he
could do – and felt the warm wetness of the Adamantine Man’s piss spatter his skin, soaking his hair and the clothes on his back.

‘Going to kill you for that, doggy,’ he snarled.

The Adamantine Man spat at him. ‘Nothing changed there then, eh, shit-eater? I heard what you said to her.’

Siff grunted.
Pity I didn’t.

‘Saw what you had in mind for her, too.’

‘Seen what
you
have in mind for her, doggy.’

‘Touch her and I’ll cut your hand off, shit-eater.’

‘Really. I thought you might like to sit and watch. Closest you’re going to get.’

The Adamantine Man walked away and left him there. Maybe this was it. Maybe they were going to leave him for the next dragon to pass by.
Ancestors! What did I say to the witch?

Later, the air brought the smell of smoke and cooking fish. The Adamantine Man had finally found the courage to make a fire. The smell got stronger and stronger and then, after a bit, it went
away again. The sky started to lighten. Dawn was coming.

‘Doggy! Oi! Doggy!’ Dragon’s blood – they weren’t really going to leave him out here, were they? They couldn’t! If a dragon came down, it might find them too.
‘Alchemist!’

He’d about shouted himself hoarse when the Adamantine Man finally came back. He didn’t say a word, just dragged him back up the hill and tipped him down into the alchemists’
cellar. The idiot was almost too drunk to stand.

‘Hungry, shit-eater?’ he asked. And then he carefully placed a little pile of fish guts right in front of Siff’s face. ‘Eat, then. Heh.’ He reeled away.

‘You’re drunk.’ The alchemist shook her head in disgust. ‘Is that how it is to be an Adamantine Man?’

‘Oh we used to drink all right.’ He laughed. ‘Now and then. Drink until we fell over in our own piss. All that’s long gone. We were the Adamantine Men. Greatest soldiers
. . .’ He staggered towards the alchemist. ‘There’s nothing like us. We’re the biggest. Best. Hardest.’ He reached out a hand. The alchemist didn’t move.

‘You can’t touch me, Skjorl. Go to sleep.’

The Adamantine Man shook himself. He grabbed the alchemist by her shoulders. The look of shock on her face was precious.

‘Should have listened to me,’ sang Siff.
Whatever I said.

The Adamantine Man’s brow furrowed as though he was thinking hard. He clawed at the back of his head, then pushed the alchemist up against a wall. His other hand went to her face. He
grinned. ‘My spear is huge, its shaft is hard, its point is savage and battle-scarr’d. Best lovers in the realms, the Guard. You look good.’ He started to fumble at her. The
alchemist pushed him away.

‘Get off! Get off me!’

Skjorl was drunk enough to almost lose his balance. He staggered. ‘You’ll not find better.’ He glanced down at Siff and laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you want
that
one?’

‘You may not touch me!’

‘I’ll make you moan, woman. You haven’t had it if you haven’t had it from an Adamantine Man.’ He stumbled towards her again. The alchemist dodged out of the way,
picked up an empty bottle and smashed it over his head. Siff almost burst out laughing. The Adamantine Man swayed, but he didn’t go down.

The alchemist kicked Skjorl between the legs, hard enough that Siff couldn’t help but wince, even as he watched with glee. Skjorl doubled up, clutching himself, gasping while the alchemist
stood over him, screaming in his ear. ‘You don’t touch me! Never! You never, ever touch me, you hear? You think after what you tried to do to me that I’d feel anything but
loathing for you? You pig! You thuggish witless pig!’

Skjorl growled. The pain on his face was delicious. Siff reckoned that anyone ordinary would be on the floor, rolling in agony, but the Adamantine Man was beginning to straighten up.

The alchemist brought a second bottle down on his head. This time the Adamantine Man fell as though it had been an axe. Siff grinned.

‘And you!’ She rounded on Siff. ‘You’re no better! Filth, both of you.’ She went off into the furthest corner she could find and curled up on the floor. Up above,
the first rays of daylight were creeping in past the trapdoor.

‘Maybe so, alchemist, but this filth is the one you need. You don’t need that one. Not once we get to the Raksheh.’

‘You don’t even know what you are!’ she spat back at Siff. ‘What are you?’

‘A man trying to stay alive in a world that doesn’t like him much,’ he said. He didn’t get an answer to that.

The Adamantine Man started to snore, as if going out of his way to prove that he really wasn’t dead. He was going to be in the king of all foul moods when he woke up. Siff sighed. He
listened carefully to the alchemist’s breathing through the racket the Adamantine Man was making, waiting until she was asleep. Then he started at the ropes holding him fast. Most days, if
he’d ever managed to free himself, he’d have had Skjorl to deal with – the oversized bastard slept with one eye open and woke up if Siff as much as moved. Not today though. Today
he probably wouldn’t even wake up if a dragon landed on him.

An hour later he gave up. As it turned out, the Adamantine Man knew what he was doing with a rope even when he was roaring drunk. Pity. Siff closed his eyes and let himself drift off. Sooner or
later the big man would slip up. Besides, he had a surprise waiting for him in the Raksheh. They all did.

Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum

They flew by moonlight, out across the plains west of the Pinnacles with one set of wings each, gliding ever lower. There was a moment of terror, of sheer panic as he was sure
he was going to die, because that’s what happened if you jumped off a mile-high cliff. The wings took him, though, and then Jasaan watched the landscape drift beneath him in shades of moonlit
grey. From up high you could still see the lines in the land where the roads used to be, even though they were overgrown and sometimes hard to spot on the ground. Clusters of dark stains marked
where villages and farms had stood, ash blots in the flat expanse of rolling grassland.

The wings carried them for miles and Jasaan had no idea how far or for how long. It seemed for ever at first, and then suddenly a field was rushing up and he was struggling to put his feet down
in front of him as the wings pitched back and dumped him down. He sat there, dazed for a moment and amazed too. He’d
flown
. Adamantine Men didn’t fly. Rarely, perhaps, they would
ride on the back of a dragon on some urgent errand for the Night Watchman. Quiet Vish had flown with the old speaker to Bloodsalt once, and a dragon had taken Jasaan to Sand just before the
Adamantine Palace had burned; but today he hadn’t been carried, he’d
flown
.

He took a moment while his head stopped spinning and then he unbuckled himself and looked about for the others. He saw one, a hundred feet up in the air, sailing past him. He ran to the nearest
rise and looked about from there, for the ruin of a tower, a black silhouette in the moonlight, the place where they were supposed to meet. Once he saw it, he went back to his wings and set about
gathering them together. It was like dragging two dead comrades behind him lashed to their shields. When he reached the tower, the others were waiting for him.

‘You came down too fast,’ snapped Hellas. Hellas was leading the riders and probably thought he was in charge of Jasaan too. Jasaan shrugged. There wasn’t much he could do
about that. ‘We’re late now. We have another fifteen miles to cover before dawn to reach our shelter. You lead!’

The moon was still high and they had eight, maybe nine hours of darkness left. Fifteen miles? Easy, and it was probably no bad thing to be at the front – better to have the eyes of an
Adamantine Man scouting the way for danger than some rider bred in an eyrie who only ever saw the land from far above on the back of a dragon. The rest of them toiled in his wake, slow and
labouring. He pulled ahead, stopped to scout, waited for them to catch up and did the same again. The moon reached its zenith and began to crawl its way back towards the horizon.

He counted the miles. Every one of them brought another ruin, another collection of homes trampled, burned and shattered into shards. Sometimes a few pieces of wood scattered over the road was
all there was left, or else a milestone with the name of a place carved into it. Elsewhere, grass and sapling trees grew among the walls of smashed houses, thorn bushes around the remains of
tumbled halls.

When he’d covered about twelve miles, he looked for the broad tree that marked where to leave the road. He waited for the riders and then ran on ahead again, to a stream and on to the
corpse of yet another village, just like all the others. Rain and wind and grass had overgrown the scorched black earth and made it green again. Here and there the broken old bones of houses poked
through the undergrowth, their jagged tips still charred black. Like the others, the village was empty.

Something snapped with a loud crack under his feet. A small branch, perhaps, except there were no trees. When he crouched down, he saw it was a bone. As he crept among the grass and the ruins,
he found more: ribs, vertebrae, all sorts, scattered evenly about. People.

The riders were breathing hard when they finally caught up. Worn out. One night of walking and they were already tired, and how far was it to the Raksheh? He kept his thoughts to himself as
Hellas took them along an overgrown path to an old well hidden among the bushes. Jasaan stretched. People had been here not all that long ago, and they came regularly enough to make a path. The
riders, he supposed.

‘You have men out here a lot then,’ he said.

Hellas shook his head. ‘Not your concern.’ He pulled back the branches around the well. There was a ladder running down inside. A metal one. Its rungs shone in the waning
moonlight.

‘There’s people been here in the last few days,’ Jasaan murmured. ‘No way to tell how many. Yours?’

‘There are no riders on the plains,’ grumbled Hellas. ‘There are no people at all. The plains are dead. The dragons killed everyone.’

‘No.’ Jasaan understood the bones now, why they’d found so many here and hardly any anywhere else. They hadn’t been left by dragons, they’d been scattered later by
men. Warning others away maybe. ‘Look at the ladder,’ he whispered. ‘See how it shines.’ Six men with swords and dragon-scale could hold their own against a lot of ferals if
they knew what they were doing, but not if the ferals had bows. ‘Worn clean. This is a home for—’

The first arrow hissed through the foot of space between him and Hellas, close enough that Jasaan felt a brush of air on his wrist. He was moving before any of the others even blinked, shoving
Hellas out of the way and pushing him to the ground. Another arrow zipped straight into a second rider. Jasaan didn’t know his name, didn’t know any of them except Hellas. None of them
had thought to tell him and it hadn’t occurred to him to ask. It was easier not to care about men who didn’t have names.

The rider with the arrow sticking out of his side just stood there, looking surprised. Jasaan tumbled into the deepest piece of undergrowth he could find and lay flat, waiting for the arrows to
turn into a hail; instead, he heard a chorus of shouts. Figures rose from among the bushes nearby. Ten, maybe a dozen, armed with sticks and dressed in rags.