The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (36 page)

‘And then?’ Someone had to ask.

The riders laughed at him, both of them. ‘There’s no alchemist,’ said the other one. ‘She’s dead by now. Look at this place. Everything bites and stings and wants
to eat you.’

‘She has Skjorl.’ Skjorl who’d crossed the moors on his own. Skjorl who’d killed a dragon. Skjorl the cold killer, and Jasaan had to wonder what an alchemist could do to
make a man like that serve anyone but himself. Or maybe it was a different Skjorl, but Jasaan couldn’t quite make himself believe that was right.

‘She’s an alchemist,’ said Nezak. ‘They know the paths to places like this.’

And that might even be true. For some reason, Jasaan hoped it was.

Twelve days before the Black Mausoleum

The first thing he noticed when he woke up was that he wasn’t hidden under a fallen tree any more. There wasn’t a comfortable bed of dead leaves keeping him warm.
He was lying on bare earth. It was cold and it was damp and it was dark. Late afternoon under the canopy of the Raksheh.

The next thing he noticed was that he was in a cage. He didn’t get any further than that.

‘No! No!
No!
’ He jumped up. His head was fuzzy but he hardly noticed; instead, he hurled himself at the bars, battering at them, tearing with his hands until his fingers
started to bleed. ‘No!’ He wasn’t going anywhere in a cage. Not that, not in a cage up in the air, waiting for it to shatter, waiting to fall, helpless, out of the sky. Never
again. Death first . . .

He stopped. His heart was beating fit to burst. He was breathing as though he’d just run up a mountain.

Not a cage for dragon-slaves. That time was gone.

He took deep breaths. Slow, steady, trying to calm his heart. There were no dragon-riders any more. Their time was past. Their eyries were gone, and their slave-cages too. No one was going to
lift him up into the air to freeze and gasp and fall and die.

He looked about. If not an eyrie, then where was he?

With a start he realised he knew this place. The cage was sitting on the forest floor surrounded by giant trees, only here, he knew, the trees were full of holes. This was where the outsiders
had lived, the ones he’d found on his first trek out of the forest, the ones who gouged holes into trees for places to sleep and to store their food, higher than any snapper could reach.

On the forest floor around him shadows moved slowly about. Men and women, shaping pieces of wood and making more ropes. He didn’t smell any cooking. They did that somewhere else, far away
from where they slept. He remembered that. Hunters vanished into the woods in twos and threes, sometimes for more than a week, coming back with whatever meat they’d managed to find, but
always stopping to cook it a half day away. You never knew how close a snapper pack might be.

‘Hey!’ he called. ‘Hey!’

Faces turned and quickly looked away. He didn’t know them. He didn’t remember much of the time he’d spent here, but it had been months. He stretched and rubbed his hands and
wrists. The ropes were gone. Now he had a cage instead. Was that any better?

The twilight turned slowly into night. When it was black as pitch, he felt more than heard the air move beside his cage and a voice hissed at him: ‘The only reason you’re not already
dead is that woman.’

Siff spun around. In the darkness he couldn’t see a thing. Whoever was talking was standing next to him, and Siff couldn’t see him, that’s how dark the Raksheh was when the sun
went down. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

‘You don’t remember?’ Whoever it was, they hissed and spat like a viper. No friend then.

‘No.’ There, and that was the truth too.

‘I already hated you. Now I despise you. You and your woman, you’re just more hungry mouths to me. I don’t know what possessed you to come back here after what you
did.’

‘What possessed me?’ Siff burst out laughing at his own pathetic life. It would be nice, he thought, to know
why
when they fed him to the snappers. Dimly, he remembered that
was what these outsiders did. ‘She’s got something. She won’t tell you, but she has. She’s got a secret.’

‘You’re the one with the secret. The rest, they were so under your spell they don’t even remember, but I do. You’re a demon and now you’re going to die.’

Siff felt the cage tremble. Whoever was talking to him was within touching distance.
Ancestors, if what I did was so bad why don’t I remember?
‘Listen! Wait! Hey! The woman,
she’s an alchemist! She’s a witch! She’s the demon, not me!’

‘No, Siff.’ The cage trembled again. He heard the soft creak of wood against wood.

‘Ho! Wait!’ Siff scrambled away from the noise, clutching at the bars. ‘Who
are
you?’

‘You don’t remember me?’

‘No!’

‘Liar! But you remember what you did.’

‘No! I don’t remember anything. Listen. I found something. Up the river. There’s caves up there. Days and days of walking, but there’s a place where the dragon-riders
used to go and there’s caves and I found something. You listening to me? Treasure!’

‘Yes. We heard all that the last time. Do you remember how many of us died looking for it?’

A handful of something like sand flew into Siff’s face. Whatever it was, it stung his eyes. He squealed.

‘Salt burns, does it, demon?’ Another handful scattered over him out of the darkness and then another.

‘Ancestors! I am
not
a demon! I swear on my grandfathers.’

‘Salt takes your power, demon. Now I have some iron to take your soul.’

‘
Listen
, damn you! I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know who you are! I was ill! You’re right, I was possessed, but not any more. The
demon came from up in the caves. That’s why I went away. The alchemist took the demon out. Now she’s come to do something about the caves. I don’t know what – ask
her
– but I’m not a demon any more! I’m not, I’m not!’ He was sobbing now.

‘Lies.’ The cage door was open now. ‘You’d say anything to save your skin. You said you’d come back. Don’t you remember? Something you needed, and when you
had it you’d come back. And I swore that when you did, I’d kill you.’

‘You can’t!’ he screamed. ‘I’m the only one who can show her where to go! That alchemist, she’s going to use it to be mistress of the dragons again, not that
she’ll say that to you or anything. Nor anyone else probably, but that’s what she’s after.’ He was making it up as he went along now, spinning stories the old way, mixing
truth and wild imagination so fast that even
he
wasn’t sure which was which any more. ‘It’s me that knows where, though. She knows it’s in the caves but those caves
go on for ever. You want to find it, any of you, you got to keep me alive!’

‘Seven men, demon. Two of them brothers, all of them friends.’ Siff could see the man now, finally, standing inside the cage with him. He could see an outline, the hint of a shape,
nothing more. He couldn’t see the knife, but he had no doubt it was there. He had tears in his eyes now. He was going to die because of something he couldn’t even remember.

He felt a stirring inside him, the feeling that came just before those gaps in his memory. He clutched his head. ‘She’ll make it back like it was, every bit of it. Exactly like it
was and the likes of you and me, we’ll be no better than we were. I don’t want to spend my life scraping in the dirt to live, waiting for something to come and eat me or some
one
to come and cart me off in a slave cage.’ The thing inside was waking up. ‘You kill me, you do it quickly,’ he wailed, ‘and when you’re done, you go out and you make
sure you don’t touch a drop to drink that she could have got a hand to. She’s a witch as well as an alchemist. I’ve seen her make her potions. I’ve seen her force a man to
her will with them. My own eyes, I swear. And don’t cut her. I’ve seen her throw blood in a man’s face and then watched it burn him to the bone. She knows blood-magic and
she’ll use it if she has to. Don’t cut her. Don’t let her bleed. Get that knife off her if you can.’

‘You talk of blood, demon? Seven men, and I saw what you did to them. You murdered them, one after the other. You bled them out on that stone slab. Brothers. Friends.’ A hand gripped
his shoulder, tense and strong. ‘Die, demon.’

No

The man’s face lit up with a moonlight glow and Siff saw him for an instant, still a stranger, knife gleaming in his hand, but he saw a look in the man’s eye too, a sort of wonder
and a sort of terror all at once . . .

And then he was sitting outside and it was light again and the whole night had passed and he had no idea what had happened and the outsiders were gathered around him and he knew they were
getting ready to take him up the river because that was what he wanted and what he’d told them to do. The thing inside was restless. He could feel it. It wanted to be back at the caves and so
that was where it was going, all of them together whether they liked it or not. It terrified him.
I need to get out before he comes. Need to.
Maybe the alchemist would know what it was. It
scared her too. Scared everyone who saw it. Everyone except the Adamantine Man, who just wanted to kill him.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw his cage. It had someone in it. The alchemist.

The thing inside was rising out of its slumber again. He tried to scream, but all he saw was a hundred eyes light up in wonder.

Twelve days before the Black Mausoleum

They slept another night out in the open by the river. At dawn they pushed their little raft out into the water, paddled it into the current, closed their eyes and prayed. To
their ancestors, perhaps, for the riders, but Jasaan only saw the Great Flame. The first dragon, as large as a mountain, the creature that had given birth to the monsters of the realms. It was
strange, he thought, to revere such a beast and yet dedicate yourself to slaying its progeny. They were contradictions, from the moment they were made, all of them. They were the Adamantine Guard.
They slew dragons because dragons were monsters and yet, when Jasaan looked at the men he’d known, they were little more than monsters themselves.

On the river they dozed for most of the day, letting the current do the work, taking it in turns to use the crude paddles Jasaan had made to keep them in the middle of the flow and steer them
around the island boulders and fallen trees that littered the water.

‘Look.’ The other rider was shaking him. Parris. Jasaan had accepted the inevitable and asked his name. Wouldn’t make any difference now. They were bound together on this quest
whether he liked it or not. ‘Look!’

Jasaan sat up. Through the trees on the right bank of the river he could see open sky beyond. Open sky and another expanse of water, another river, as big or bigger than the one they were on.
Jasaan steered the raft towards the bank. As the rivers came together, the current grew stronger. Whirlpools tossed and turned them, spinning them about, and it took all three of them with all
their strength before they finally nudged into the bank a half-mile further downstream. Nezak knelt, gasping, in the mud beside the river. He pointed to an outcrop of stone that rose out of the
bank where the rivers merged. It was a bare brown rock, fifty feet high, with the water running right underneath. The trees of the forest towered over it. Dwarfed it.

‘We were following the Yamuna. We’d come from the Moonlight Garden, heading for Furymouth. I remember that rock.’

Jasaan shrugged. ‘Then this is the Yamuna.’ It didn’t seem too likely that a man on the back of a dragon would see an insignificant thing like that, but he wasn’t about
to argue. Let it be the Yamuna. Why not?

He looked up. Habit didn’t care that he was in the Raksheh. He’d probably still be glancing at the sky even after he was dead. But he looked up and he saw a speck, high and in the
distance, moving below the cloud. He checked to see how much potion he had left. He had an idea that Kataros herself might have made it for him, before they’d left. Now he was down to a week,
maybe a little more. Hellas had carried some too but they’d lost that. He pointed at the speck trailing across the sky.

‘Somewhere there’s a snapper that dragon can’t find.’ For some reason that made him laugh so hard he couldn’t stop. Was that even how it worked? Did dragons sniff
snappers out with their extra senses or did they do it the same way any other hunter did? He had no idea. Still couldn’t stop laughing though. He took a swig and then gave the potion flask to
Nezak. ‘I don’t know if we’ve got enough of this to get to the caves because I have no idea how far away they are. We haven’t got enough to get back. You take this. If we
find the alchemist, you take her as far as you can. Don’t worry about us. Just don’t murder her this time.’

Nezak gave him a queer look, as though Jasaan was losing his mind. Maybe he was. Maybe he’d been losing it for a long time. ‘If we find the alchemist, perhaps she will make us some
more,’ the rider said. ‘And we’ll all go together. To be blunt, Guardsman, if anyone should be left behind, it’s us.’

Riders didn’t say things like that. That wasn’t the way it was. Adamantine Men served, that was all. They served and they died so others didn’t have to. Nice of Nezak to
pretend things were different, though. Jasaan forced a smile.

They walked. Paddling their little raft into the teeth of the Yamuna’s current wasn’t going to work and Jasaan was happy to be on his feet. Walking was something he was used to. The
riders would slow him down but that was fine too – it gave him time to hunt and forage and pathfind for them.

‘So how far is it to these caves?’ He had to ask, even though he knew he wasn’t going to like the answer. The Raksheh was said to be a thousand miles from one end to the other.
The caves were supposed to be somewhere in the middle and Jasaan was quite sure that
he
was somewhere near the edge.