The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (45 page)

Jasaan? From the Spur?

Silver flowed from the sea beyond the gate and shattered the Adamantine Man’s sword. Slivers of steel flew like arrows among the arches.

‘No!’ She tried again. ‘Don’t! Leave him be!’ This was
her
battle, by the Flame! And if Siff went right through the gate, who was to say what might come
back. ‘Jasaan! Don’t!’

Jasaan landed a kick and Siff tumbled through. She didn’t dare reach through her blood to try and touch him again, not now. Whatever was inside him that had thrown her away before, it was
growing fully awake. She just about found enough strength to sit up. At least now she could see properly. See the silver sea wrapping itself around the outsider, clothing him. She could see him for
what he was. The Isul Aieha. The Silver King.

‘Jasaan!’ The Adamantine Man was standing before the gate, panting, still holding the stump of his sword. One by one around them the arches flickered and failed, their mirrors
falling black and dead and then fading into nothing until each was just an arch again with no sign of any magic to it, all except the one beyond which Siff stood.

Kataros called her blood, what was left of it, called it back to her to feed her own strength. Siff was covered in silver now. It had grown into an armour around him, hard plates in layers and
layers, exquisite and complex, and he held two swords, short and curved, one in each hand. There were pictures, in the Palace of Alchemy, of this man. Drawn five hundred years ago. Exactly the
same.

‘Isul Aieha,’ she said softly.

No answer.

‘They killed you. They took your body to the mountains. To some distant cave. Yet you are here.’

He pointed one of his swords. History crashed into her. She was him, the Silver King. She saw herself call the dragons to her. Saw herself tame them with a single word. She ruled over men but
they were nothing to her. A distraction. She was looking, looking for something, always. Something about the spear she carried and a great and terrible thing that had been done. For a long time,
looking but never finding, and all the while a despair was building inside her and a loneliness, until she could bear it no more. She saw herself come to this place and conjure these arches, and as
she did it she saw a glimpse of her future, of the end that awaited her, and so she left a seed behind, surely a needless precaution – when she chose to leave and return to her home and her
kin there was nothing that mere men could do to stop her – but one taken nonetheless. And then they turned on her and somehow they won. She saw men, blood-mages, the ancestors of the
alchemists, tear her apart and take her body to the mountains, to some distant cave and hold her caught at the edge of life and death. They drank her in tiny drops, not the blood of her veins, but
the silver god-blood, and in doing so they each took a morsel of her power. They kept her that way, trapped, for decades and centuries, and all the time her seed was waiting. Waiting for a host and
a way to go home.

She would not forget. She would not forgive but nor would there be vengeance. Home called her. Her people. Peace.

The Silver King lowered his sword and turned away.

‘No!’ Kataros struggled to her feet. She had almost to claw her way up the Adamantine Man to get up. ‘Don’t! Don’t leave us! We need . . .’

The silver sea became a silver mirror. Faded to black and died.

‘You.’ She began to sob. Her own blood was still all over the arch. She reached through it, trying to open the way again, but there was nothing. Dead stone, that was all it was now.
It wanted more than a mere alchemist.

He didn’t know what to do with her at first. Blood everywhere, one alchemist weeping and sobbing for the man who’d tried to kill her – as best he could tell.
She didn’t want him, didn’t want to go, that much was obvious. For a while he left her to it, left her to do whatever it was that alchemists did, and went and had a bit of a look
around, but there wasn’t much else to see. More tunnels. He wasn’t sure he fancied those.

She would need water. Water and red meat, that was what you gave people who’d lost a lot of blood, not that he was any sort of expert. There was water in the river, that was easy enough.
And as for red meat, there were plenty of dead men out there. He’d eaten the flesh of his own before. Maybe he’d not mention to the alchemist exactly where it came from. He frowned,
trying to remember. Was there something about alchemists not eating the dead?

The trouble with going outside was the dragon. With a bit of luck it had done for whatever outsiders had survived – if it hadn’t eaten them, they’d surely have had the sense to
run away – but it was still a dragon and chances were it was still out there.

He loitered near the mouth of the tunnel, listening, waiting for dark. There weren’t any sounds of people, no screams, no dragon cries. When he followed the stars out of hiding, he saw
why. He saw what had happened. What Skjorl had done. Another dragon. On his own this time with just his bare hands and an axe. Smug bastard.

From where he stood there was no way to tell whether the dragon was completely dead, and there was no way he was going close enough to find out. He skirted around it. Got water and then walked
the long way around the Midnight Garden to the beach below the waterfall and helped himself to some choice cuts of the dead there. He found Nezak there, dead. He took a moment to go over his body,
and Parris too, but the outsiders had got to both of them first and there was nothing left to take.

When he went back inside the alchemist seemed herself again. She was weak and pale, but she was the Kataros he remembered from the Purple Spur. The spear-carrier. He offered her water.

‘I came to find you,’ he told her. ‘I’m supposed to bring you back to the Pinnacles. All the riders who came with me are dead now. There’s just you and me.’
He shrugged. ‘What do we do?’

She shivered. Her face was still stained with tears. ‘We go to the Spur. I will gather my order and we will come here again and we will make these gateways open. That’s all
that’s left to us.’

‘Through the Raksheh? There are snappers.’

‘We’ll use the river.’

‘There’s the worm.’

‘I will soothe it.’

‘We’ll get hungry.’

‘I’ll show you what you can eat. There may be more outsiders though.’

‘I’ll get a new string for my a bow. There’ll be dragons once we get outside the forest.’

‘I’ll make potion to hide us.’

‘It’ll take a long time to get to the Spur.’

‘We’ll be quick. There was a dragon outside. Has it gone?’

Jasaan shook his head. He couldn’t help half a smile. ‘Skjorl brought the hill down on it.’ Had to rub it in, didn’t he?

‘Skjorl?’ She seemed surprised, if only for a moment. ‘He did that?’

‘He’s dead now.’ Jasaan searched the alchemist’s face. She didn’t seem much bothered. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I’m weak. That’s all.’

He nodded and waited to be told what to do. While he was waiting, the alchemist curled up and went to sleep. After a bit, Jasaan did the same.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to my agent, John Jarrold, and to my editor at Gollancz, Simon Spanton, whose faith that ‘Yes, I know how this will all end’ as yet seems to know no
bounds. They go yet again to my wife Michaela, widowed on many evenings by fire-breathing monsters. They go to Hugh Davis, who has copy-edited most if not all of these dragon stories and always for
the better.

One or two of you managed to creep some names into this. Well done. A nod to DM Rich and the crazy dwarf and his missus too.

Thank you for reading this. As always, if you liked this story, please tell others who might like it too.

Also by Stephen Deas from Gollancz:

The Adamantine Palace

The King of the Crags

The Order of the Scales

The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice

The Warlock’s Shadow

The King’s Assassin

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Stephen Deas 2012
Map copyright © Dave Senior 2009
All rights reserved

The right of Stephen Deas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2012 by Gollancz.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 10051 0

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