The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (6 page)

Vish!

He snuffed the firebox and dived sideways. Kept rolling until something stopped him. He felt the air tear as another stone hurtled past him in the dark, heard it bounce and smash. He knew what
came next. Had enough time to curl up tight, cover his hands and his face, put his back to the rubble and let his shield take the worst as the fire came. The air roared. The wind almost toppled
him. He put a hand out to balance himself and felt the heat burn at his palm where there was no dragonscale, only soft leather.

It was coming from the smashed-in hole in the cistern roof.

The next stone caught his outstretched hand. He felt the shock more than the pain. Screamed as he saw the boulder fly off amid the flames.

The fire wasn’t stopping. It was getting him, slowly, finding its way through his armour. He jumped back to his feet and ran, let the dragon’s flames light his way, weaving from side
to side. Another rock whizzed past him, missed his head by a yard. The fire was weak by the time it reached him now. Weak enough that the few gaps and cracks between the dragonscale he wore would
hold. The joints in his armour might be black and brittle by the end, but he’d be alive.

The next boulder didn’t reach him. It hit the ground and bounded past, shattering a cluster of eggs. Lifeless hatchling bodies flopped out across the cistern floor. When the fire stopped,
Skjorl eased his way sideways, getting as far as he could from where the dragon had last seen him.

‘Jasaan?’ he had no idea where Jasaan was.

Vish was dead. Should have been the other way round. Jasaan deserved a touch of dragon’s fire. But Vish deserved his glory too. There’d be songs. Vish the dragon-killer. He eased his
way through the darkness. Wondered for a bit if maybe Vish wasn’t dead after all, but he’d seen the stone hit, seen Vish’s head snap back and then forward, seen his body fly
through the air and slide across the ground and then lie still.

Had to look though. Had to be sure. Didn’t he?

Stupid. He took a deep breath. Adamantine Men didn’t stop for their wounded. Didn’t matter who they were, that was the way of it. Going back got you killed.

‘Skjorl?’ Jasaan, closer than he’d thought.

‘Jasaan?’

‘The other dragon. I can see it. It can’t get through the rubble.’

Now he stopped to listen, he could hear it tearing at the stones. ‘Can you swing an axe on your knees, Jasaan? If you can, you’re still useful. You can kill eggs. If you can’t,
you might as well be dead.’ Harsh, but Vish and Jex had been his friends. Couldn’t say that about Jasaan, not after Scarsdale.

There was a pause. When Jasaan answered, it was with a sullen edge. ‘Yes, Skjorl. I can still do that.’

‘Then you do it. I’m getting Vish’s poison.’

There. A good enough excuse.

Twenty-three days before the Black Mausoleum

‘What have you done to me?’ He asked the same question over and over as he led her out of her tiny makeshift prison and into a maze of stairs and passages that
bewildered her. She almost told him to shut up, but the blood-bound could be tricky. Too many different orders and he might freeze in confusion. The alchemist who’d bound her had only ever
used the bond once, when he’d first made it.
You will be unswervingly loyal to my desires
. That was it and then nothing more, not in a year and a half of service. Most of the time she
forgot it was even there. He’d been a kind enough man who’d never asked for much, whose greatest desire had been for her to grow into the power that he was offering her. She
hadn’t needed any help with
that
.

He’d shown her, after he’d bound her, how it was done, but he’d never told her what to do with it. He’d encouraged her, now and then, to bind others, but she never did,
even though she knew that most alchemists had several blood-bound serving them. They did it for their protection they said, for the greater good, and in the squalor and hunger under the Purple Spur
Kataros quite understood, yet every time she heard them, she remembered that they’d bound their Scales too, not long ago, and so they would have bound her if the Adamantine Palace
hadn’t burned and more than half the alchemists of the realms been slaughtered.

‘You’re going to help me,’ she told him after she’d lost count of how many times he’d asked. ‘You’re going to help me save the realms.’

‘How are we going to do that?’

She didn’t answer, and the truth was that she didn’t exactly know. All she knew was what the near-corpse that the Adamantine Man was carrying had told her two nights before.

‘It’s going to get dark,’ he said a while later. The halls and vaults of the Pinnacles glowed from above like a softly starlit night, a legacy of the Silver King, who’d
brought order to the broken world and who’d first subdued the monsters. Half monster himself, half living god, adept with magics that no one before or since could even understand, almost
everything here bore his mark. The Pinnacles had been his home for more than a hundred years, until the blood-mages had found a way to kill him.

The Adamantine Man took her into later tunnels, ones carved by men. The twilight faded and the darkness grew. When she could barely see him any more, he stopped. ‘There are lamps by your
feet. Get yourself one. You can get one for me too.’

In an alcove beside her she felt the familiar shapes, the cold glass tubes of alchemical lamps. She hadn’t expected that, not here in the Pinnacles, where to be an alchemist, it had turned
out, was to be an avatar of evil. ‘There are—’

‘Your lot made them. Yes.’

‘Don’t you—’

‘Believe that everything touched by an alchemist is cursed?’ The Adamantine Man snorted. ‘I was in Outwatch when the terror started. Then Sand. Evenspire, or what was left of
it. Scarsdale. Got to the Purple Spur eventually. Spent more time there than I have here. I know what your kind are. You failed, that’s all. You’re no better and no worse than any of
the rest of us. Not that that’s saying very much.’

Kataros picked up a lamp. She turned it upside down, shook it and waited until the glow started. Then she handed it to the Adamantine Man and got another. ‘Won’t someone see the
lights?’

‘No one comes here these days.’ He settled Siff over his shoulders and started on down the tunnel. The walls were different now. The light showed that they were rough, hacked out
with picks and shovels and never finished. Utterly unlike the exquisite carved archways, the murals and the mosaics she’d seen elsewhere.

‘Why?’

He stopped. ‘This leads to the lowest girdle of the scorpion caverns. Used to be hundreds of them here. They’re all ruined now. The poison ran out and then the bolts. Not much point
sticking yourself somewhere you can be burned by a dragon when you haven’t got anything you can shoot back.’

The tunnel went on, rough and uneven until it stopped at a fissure that ran up and down. Kataros couldn’t see how far it went either way, for the alchemical lamps produced little light.
She crouched, searching for a pebble to drop, but the ground was smooth and there weren’t any. The Adamantine Man shifted Rat into a more comfortable position across his shoulders and started
to climb. There were rungs bolted into the rock.

‘Why are we going up, not down?’

‘There’s tunnels down below. Guarded and watched well. There’s barricades and bolted doors and the speaker’s riders down there, watching out against the ferals. No way
out without a fight – not for one like you. This way’s better. Gets us to the surface. No one goes out this way and you can’t get back up again, so there’s no one
watching.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘You run into anyone up the top here, wave your arms at them and make ghost noises, that’ll probably work. Hyrkallan’s lot, they’re
like little girls. The ones who’ve been here even longer are no better. All spooked. Most likely they really do believe that you lot made all this happen like he says. Demons. So make like
one. Easier than having a fight. If they come back with any soldiers, we’ll be gone by then.’

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she climbed after him in silence, up the slit in the rock, its sides worn smooth by water from another time. In places it was so narrow that Siff
scraped against the far wall; from side to side, it spread out further than her lamp could reach.

‘What is this place?’ She couldn’t help but wonder that. She’d been wondering that from the moment she’d come inside the Pinnacles and seen what it was really like.
Even in chains she’d stared, lost in awe.

‘There’s shafts up and down like this all over,’ he said. ‘It’s like one of them cheeses we used to get from up on the moors.’

He reached an opening and levered himself out. Kataros felt his tension as he crouched, ready to drop Siff in an instant, but there was only darkness and silence to greet them.

‘Right. Quick now.’ He started to run, lumbering off. She followed, keeping close behind. Her heart beat faster, excitement and expectation bubbling together as if she was brewing
some potion.
Almost out. Almost out.

He turned a corner and light – a patch of slightly lighter darkness anyway – loomed ahead. The scorpion caves. Vishmir and the first Valmeyan had fought here in the War of Thorns.
Afterwards, Prince Lai had built the scorpions. They were supposed to defend the Silver City, but it seemed to Kataros that they did the opposite. History said that when the scorpions fired, the
Silver City burned. If you looked hard now, she supposed you might see it burning still.

She saw stars.

Almost out!

The Adamantine Man slowed as they reached the lip of the cave. He stopped a good ten feet short, lowered Siff to the floor and peered around him, looking for something. Kataros stared out of the
sheer side of the Fortress of Watchfulness, down over the Silver City, which wasn’t still burning after all. They were high. She had no chance of climbing down, not from all the way up
here.

‘How far up are we?’

‘Don’t know. A few hundred feet over the plains.’

‘And we fly like a bird?’ She’d supposed there might be a rope, or some sort of lift or crane, but there was nothing. ‘You bastard,’ she hissed, and reached through
the blood-bond, ready to claw his mind apart. ‘What do we do? Flap our arms and pretend they’re wings?’

The Adamantine Man stopped. His hands fell limp. He looked almost surprised. ‘Yes,’ he said.

She almost killed him there and then, almost let the blood inside his brain boil and rupture every vessel. She could have stood there and watched him bleed from his eyes and his nose and his
mouth, from his fingers and his toes and every place in between, and she wouldn’t have been sorry. But however hard she peered through the blood-bond, she saw no deceit. They were going to
fly. He truly believed that.

‘How?’

He went back to peering around the cave. After a minute or two he stopped. ‘With these.’

It took a moment for Kataros to understand what she was seeing, simply because the lamps didn’t make enough light.

She was seeing wings. Dragon wings. Lashed together and with a harness between them.

Eight months before the Black Mausoleum

He found Vish easy enough. No doubt about how dead he was. His neck was broken, the back of his head was smashed in and he was lying in a pool of blood that was bigger than he
was. The axe and shield on his back had been shattered. Skjorl stood for a moment. There wasn’t anything special to say. Adamantine Men weren’t long on rituals or on sentiment. When you
fought dragons, you did what needed to be done, nothing more, nothing less. You did it fast and you did it without hesitation. Most of the time you died anyway.

He took Vish’s potions, his poisons, his firebox, the alchemist herbs that stopped the dragons from finding them and left the rest. The shield and the armour were useless and he already
had an axe.

The other dragon had left, judging by the quiet, but it wouldn’t be gone for long. Looking for another way in, most likely. Back soon enough, one way or the other. He wondered if any of
the others up top had survived. Didn’t seem likely. Which left him and Jasaan. Jasaan the cripple. Jasaan and his principles. Easier to leave him behind.

He was starting to notice that his hand hurt. He took a last look at Vish. Quiet Vish.

Wouldn’t have left you behind, would I?

No. He didn’t suppose he would, and what was good for one was good for another. That was the way it was. And then there were all these eggs, which could hatch any time, and the small
matter of not being able to use his own axe properly with only one good hand. Couldn’t see how bad it was, but there was no getting around that it was bad. Bad enough it wouldn’t be all
fine again in a few days.

He’d have to give his axe a name, he thought. Call her Vish maybe, but Vish was a man’s name and his axe was more his lady, his lover. Dragon-bane? He cringed at that. She deserved
better.

‘You walk?’ he asked when got back to Jasaan. Jasaan shook his head.

‘Ankle’s done. I can hop.’

‘Not down here with no light. You can crawl, right?’

‘I can crawl.’

They shuffled along in the darkness, quiet as they could, Jasaan on his hands and knees, Skjorl inching his way beside him until they reached one of the cistern walls. Here and there they passed
more eggs. With a bit of care, Skjorl could still swing his axe with one hand to smash them. It took Jasaan to cut off the unborn hatchlings’ heads. Skjorl tried but he couldn’t find a
way to make his buggered hand work and he just made a mess. Quicker to prop Jasaan up to finish the job.

He didn’t know how long they’d been going when they finished the eggs. Long enough he wanted to sit down. Back where the roof had collapsed there was sunlight filtering down through
the hole, giving a dim light so he could finally see. The dust had mostly settled except where the two of them kicked it up again. He put his back to a stone and rummaged in his pack for something
to eat.