The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (32 page)

The rider with the arrow in him bellowed something about victory and honour and hurled himself at the first one to come near him, waving his sword like a madman. The other riders just stood
there, gawping as though they’d never been in a close fight before.

Oh ancestors, no!
They hadn’t. They’d fought on the backs of their dragons and they’d fought in a practice ring, and that was it. Jasaan rolled to his feet and shoved
his short sword into the nearest convenient feral.

‘Hyrkallan!’ cried another rider. Two ferals jumped on him, pulling him down. A third piled in. Jasaan saw a stick rise and fall. Another rider ran to help. Too late, probably. The
rider with the arrow in him hacked the hand off someone. There was a scream.

A feral ran right in front of him. Jasaan ran him through and then looked for Hellas, but by then the ferals had already had enough. They turned and ran and vanished into the night like
ghosts.

Three riders left standing. When he looked, Jasaan found the one who’d been pulled to the ground. They’d got his helm off and caved in the side of his skull with a stick. Dead was
dead, so Jasaan ignored him and went to see the rider who’d been shot instead. Out in the open like this was no place to be carrying wounded. An Adamantine Man understood that the injured
were best left to fend for themselves or else given a quick and merciful death. Riders, Jasaan supposed, probably saw things differently.

He found the rider sitting with his back to a smashed wooden wall. He was breathing hard and pasty-faced, but he wasn’t coughing blood. The arrow, when Jasaan carefully cut its shaft and
pulled off the rider’s armour to look, had gone in about as far as one finger joint. Either the feral who’d fired it had been feeble or he had some self-made bow with all the punch of a
night girl’s tongue. The dragon-scale armour had done the rest.

‘You know what we call a wound like that,’ Jasaan said. ‘A dream-lover’s kiss. Leaves a nice red mark and that’s all there is to it.’ He pulled the arrow out.
The rider screwed up his face but at least he didn’t shriek. There were no barbs. It was just a crude thing. Wasn’t even quite straight. ‘You have anything to dress
this?’

The rider nodded and pointed to a pouch at his belt. Jasaan had a look. Mud. A roll of ripped cloth. Rubbish, but that was what you got for killing all your alchemists. Jasaan reached into his
own. He didn’t know what any of the powders he carried were, only what to do with them. Alchemists handed them out, packaged up into pouches.

‘Got a name, rider?’ he asked. There, now he’d gone and made some trouble for himself. Now he’d probably do something stupid like make a friend just in time to watch him
die.

‘Nezak.’ The rider winced.

‘You lived in the north before all this, didn’t you?’ Jasaan unwrapped a tiny paper bundle and carefully took a pinch of the dark powder inside. In daylight you could see it
wasn’t quite black. In moonlight . . . well, under the moon, everything looked grey.

‘Sand,’ said Nezak.

‘You know how I can tell? It’s the skin. Different colour, you see. You’re a long way from home. Lie down.’

The rider lay back. Blood ran out of the hole in his ribs in a slow but steady pulse.

‘I was in Sand when the dragons came.’ Nezak probably didn’t want to hear about that, but it would keep his mind off what Jasaan was doing to the hole where the arrow had been.
‘They flew in circles around the city, pouring their fire over everything until even the stones of the monastery cracked in the heat and they still didn’t stop. Places like Sand and
Bloodsalt, out in the open, there’s nowhere to run. People hid as best they could. They hid in their cellars where they thought the fire wouldn’t reach them, but the dragons made the
city burn for days. The ones who went underground died anyway. Cooked. After that the dragons smashed it flat. I was in the caves under the monastery. Those and the tunnels under the eyrie were the
only places deep enough.’

There. That had rider Nezak’s attention. Nothing like telling a man that his whole family was dead to focus his mind. While he had it, he pushed the pinch of dark powder into Nezak’s
wound. The rider yelped.

‘The powder will stop the wound from going bad.’

‘Vishmir’s cock! It burns!’

‘Yes, it does.’ Jasaan smeared on some of Nezak’s mud. ‘This will help it heal. We killed every dragon in Sand before they came. We poisoned them and smashed their eggs
with our axes and our hammers. There wasn’t a single monster left in the eyrie by the time the rogues reached us. We did what we could.’ They’d killed a good few riders too to get
to those dragons and those eggs, but there didn’t seem much need to be mentioning that.

‘It wasn’t enough.’

‘No.’ Bandages now. A wad of cloth to keep the mud in place, that was all he needed. ‘Sit up while I wrap this around you. I’m sorry for your family. My family were the
Guard. Most of them are dead too.’ He looked at Nezak carefully. ‘Not everyone died. A lot of riders survived under the eyrie. I remember one who looked a lot like you. Older
though.’

‘My brother perhaps.’ Nezak grasped Jasaan’s shoulder. ‘Was his beard thicker than mine, and black? Was he still limping? What was his name?’

Jasaan shrugged. ‘I don’t remember a limp and I didn’t speak to him so I have no name to give you. The beard though, yes. Thick and black.’ It wasn’t likely, was
it, that Nezak would ever get back to Sand and discover he’d been lied to? Hope was a healer. He’d learned that from the very alchemist he was hunting. ‘The riders stayed to see
what could be done. I left with the other Adamantine Men.’ Each to their own duties. ‘I met a man in Sand,’ he said quietly as he worked. ‘An Adamantine Man. They came from
Outwatch. They walked. Across the desert. I don’t know how far that is.’

Nezak shook his head. He smiled over a grimace of pain. ‘It’s a half-day ride even on the back of a dragon. On the back of a horse, four or five. To walk?’ He shook his head.
‘The road from Outwatch to Sand is not one for walking. The heat kills. There’s no water.’

‘Still, walk is what they did. They were Adamantine Men who had fought dragons and lost. They’d smashed the eggs and they were burned in their turn. Hatchlings scoured the tunnels.
When the dragons were gone, there were a dozen of them left. They walked all the way to Sand and found us at the monastery. The dragons had learned by the time they came to us. They’d learned
to be thorough. They lingered to make sure they finished us all, but they couldn’t burn us out from the tunnels. When we came out there was nothing left. Nothing at all except these dozen men
who’d simply watched from afar for day after day, dying of thirst, waiting for the dragons to leave. There.’ Jasaan tied the bandage off. ‘Shouldn’t slow you down much.
It’ll hurt, though.’

Rider Nezak closed his eyes. ‘Sand.’ He held his head in his hands.

‘Everywhere is gone, rider. All across the realms, everything is destroyed.’ Jasaan stepped back. He’d done what he could. The rider would live. Whether he had the strength to
cross half a realm to the Aardish Caves was another matter, but Hellas could worry about that. ‘The Adamantine Man who is with the alchemist we hunt. Hellas says his name is Skjorl. It was a
Skjorl who led the survivors out of Outwatch, on foot and across the desert. After Sand, the Skjorl I knew led his company to Evenspire, to Scarsdale and all the way to the Silver River. Across
half the realms, the barren half, on foot. If it’s the same man, then he’s been up the Sapphire River to Bloodsalt and back again across the moors. He’s the perfect Adamantine
Guardsman, strong, remorseless, untiring, fearless and brutal. If this Skjorl
is
the same man then I will wager you that your alchemist is still alive.’

Thirteen days before the Black Mausoleum

Pain. Pain and hardship. You learned to live with them. Sometimes they were friends, telling you things you needed to know. More often they were adversaries, but they were old
foes and known ones. They were comfortable companions if not welcome ones.

Took him a while when he woke up to realise where he was. For a bit he thought he was back in the catacombs under Bloodsalt, that the dragon throwing rocks at him had finally hit him. He could
even see someone lying beside him. Vish. Or maybe not.

After that he thought he must be dying. Certainly felt like it.

Bits of memory landed like snowflakes. Bloodsalt, that had been a long time ago, hadn’t it? Or was the time he’d spent in the Pinnacles somehow before?

There was an alchemist. That was after.

That man on the floor there wasn’t Vish.

He saw a bottle. Wine. Yes, he remembered. There had been wine.

He let out a low groan. He’d drunk himself stupid enough times. It had never been like this. Wine must have had something in it. Where was he?

He rolled onto his front, crawled into a corner and was sick. Stale fish.
Ancestors but that was bad.

When his stomach stopped heaving, he took a few breaths then sat up. He rubbed his eyes. There were steps. Wooden slats above. Bright sunlight streaming between them. A trapdoor. A cellar then.
Yes, slowly it was coming back, where he was and why and where he was going. He was in Scarsdale and everything had burned and they were running from the dragons. Always. Running home, even if they
all knew they were never going to get there.

Carelessly he rubbed his head. Almost screamed, the pain was that blinding. Touched more softly now. There was blood crusted through his hair. A lump the size of an egg.

That explained the pain then.
Vishmir’s cock!

Fishing. He remembered fishing. Remembered coming back. Cooking. He’d been reeling by the time he was done. Then . . .

Something about an alchemist. Alchemists. That’s why they were going home.

Ancestors!
His head felt like someone had taken an axe to it. He must have fallen. Must have. Couldn’t remember . . .

He was fading again. Sleep creeping over him like blanket. He was still drunk. Probably a good thing that. Probably eased the pain. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, forced himself to look into the
little pouch he still carried with him, the one he’d had ever since he left the Adamantine Palace. All the things the alchemists made for the Adamantine Men before they went to die. Most of
them had got used up on the way to Bloodsalt, but not this.

Bloodsalt? Why was he in Bloodsalt? That wasn’t the way home? Was that where here was?

There was a dragon in Bloodsalt. It had killed Vish.

His eyes wouldn’t focus. Couldn’t see what he was doing in the half-dark anyway. He let his nose do the working, sifting through the little waxed paper packets of this and that until
he found what he was looking for. Dreamleaf, mixed with just a touch of Petrios venom. Whatever that was. Something to take the edge off the pain. Something to keep a man going. A pinch, that was
supposed to be enough.

He took two. Dropped them in a water skin. Forced himself to drink the lot. Just about managed that before his eyes closed and he slumped back to the floor. When it was sunset and they were
getting ready to move again, someone would tell him how he’d hurt his head.

Except the next time he woke, the sun had set and it was dark outside and he was alone, and when he tried the cellar door, it wouldn’t move.

Sixteen days before the Black Mausoleum

He walked ahead, alone. It suited him. He didn’t have to talk, didn’t have to learn the riders’ names, didn’t have to hear where they were from. Most of
the riders in the Pinnacles came from the deserts, from Sand and from Bloodsalt, and Jasaan had seen both after the dragons had done with them. They must have known their families were gone, but no
one could imagine what Bloodsalt had been like. No one had come away, not one single survivor, to say how the dragons had destroyed that city, but Jasaan still saw the skeletons when he closed his
eyes, their dry bones just lying in the streets and inside the houses and littered along the Sapphire valley.

He found a hollow for them to shelter in through the second day. He shared the potions that he’d brought with him from the Purple Spur, the ones that stopped the dragons from feeling their
thoughts. He covered the riders with brushwood and then listened to them trying to stay silent and still as the long hours of daylight passed overhead. Now and then dragons flew out from the
Raksheh. They didn’t pause, didn’t look down.

‘There must have been a dozen or more, all told,’ he said to Nezak as he changed the dressing on the rider’s wound. Nezak was carrying his injury well for now. Jasaan wondered
what Hellas would do if the wound went bad.

‘Heading for the Pinnacles.’

‘Further south, I’d say. Can’t be sure.’

Roads became tracks, so overgrown now that even Jasaan had trouble finding them. The land became wilder. Burned-out villages gave way to burned-out farms. The hills grew bigger and steeper and
the copses on their crowns spread out into woods. Good land for hiding. Better than the plains. They’d start seeing feral folk again soon, he thought.

The rain began one night, thick clouds hiding the moon and the stars and making the world so dark that they only covered another few miles before dawn. It rained on for most of the day, slowly
soaking them, and when Jasaan roused Hellas and his riders in the evening they were sluggish and bad-tempered. Three days, that’s all they’d been out. He tried to remember what it had
been like on the way back from Bloodsalt, hunted by a dragon but never allowed to stray too far from the lifeline of the Sapphire. Harder than this, that was for sure. His ankle was already hurting
again, aching like it always did since Bloodsalt, whenever he walked on it for days at a time.

‘We get a roof over our heads after tonight,’ Hellas told him. ‘If you can find it. There’s a place the dragons didn’t burn. It’s hidden inside the
Raksheh.’