by Stephen Deas
They hobbled on, pitifully slow and sweating fit to drown. Skjorl saw a lizard the size of his hand once, basking on a stone. Nothing else moved. When they stopped to rest and drink, he emptied his water skin without even noticing.
‘Keep on like this and we’ll die from the heat, never mind any dragons,’ muttered Jasaan.
Skjorl nodded. ‘We’ll stay here then.’ Probably they were far enough from where they’d killed the dragon. He looked about and picked a house still in one piece, made out of baked mud or some such and washed in white. One room, low roof. A few old blankets rolled up in a corner. Not much else. Whoever had lived here, they were long gone. Dead somewhere. Burned by dragons or maybe eaten. Or killed by the desert heat somewhere between the city and the place a hundred miles away where the dragons had blocked up the Sapphire. They’d found plenty enough old bones along the river’s course. Skeletons. Skulls. Whole families sometimes. People died. Skjorl knew that better than most, but when you took a step and heard a crack and looked down to find you’d just snapped the sun-bleached bones of a child . . . Well, made you stop and think for a moment it did.
‘Jasaan . . .’
But he was already asleep.
9
Kataros
Twenty-three days before the Black Mausoleum
Prince Lai’s wings. She’d heard of them but she’d never met someone who’d seen a pair. The legendary prince had made them during the War of Thorns when the first Valmeyan had him trapped in the Pinnacles. The story went that he’d launched himself off the top of the Fortress of Watchfulness in the middle of the night and flown all the way to Furymouth, hundreds of miles to the south, to warn his brother Vishmir. After the war he made more, and across the realms there were said to be maybe a dozen pairs. If that was true then most of them were right here.
The Adamantine Man dragged a pair to the edge of the cave, first one wing and then another. Each was enormous, three or four times the size of a man, a fraction of a true dragon’s wing but huge nonetheless. He bolted them together. ‘Sit in the harness,’ he told her. ‘Left arm down to turn left. Right arm down to turn right. Both arms down when you’re about to land. Come on.’
She stared at him. ‘Come on?’
‘Yes.’ He pointed to the wings and then moved towards her, as if to help her buckle herself in. She hissed and recoiled.
‘You don’t touch me!’ She reached into him through the blood-bond but he was still held tight. He meant her no harm, not now.
He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. You go first. I’ll come after. I’ll be heavier, so I’ll pass you. Try and go where I go.’
She stared at him a while longer, then at the wings. Yes, she’d heard of Prince Lai’s wings, like every alchemist who studied the history of the War of Thorns back at the Palace of Alchemy. She’d seen pictures. It had never occurred to her that they were actually real, that they were anything more than a nice story.
‘Can we really fly all the way to Furymouth?’ The Raksheh was closer.
The Adamantine Man laughed. ‘That old story? These aren’t going to get you much further than the Silver City down there, and even if they could take us further, there’s no shelter on the plains. Sun comes up, dragons start to move. Then you die. You want to get to the Raksheh, we go the long way. Up the Yamuna. Not so many dragons up there.’
Kataros took another long look at the wings, taut dragon skin stretched over old dragon bones. When dragons died, they burned from the inside. They didn’t leave much behind, just their scales and wings. The scales became armour for dragon-riders and for the Adamantine Men. Wing bones were used for all sorts of things – bows, mostly, but potions too. The skin from the wings was the most prized thing of all, softer and more flexible than the scales and still impervious to flames. Princes and lords lined their armour with it. Prince Lai had made his wings after the war, sitting in the Adamantine Palace with Vishmir the Magnificent, the first and only Emperor of the Nine Realms. After the War of Thorns there had been more dead dragons around than usual, so maybe that was why he’d done it.
The Adamantine Man cleared his throat behind her. ‘Longer it takes before we’re down, the less time we have before sunrise. When that happens we need to be somewhere safe. There’s nests in the Silver City.’
She looked at the moon. The night was young. ‘There are still people down there in the city. Will they help us?’
‘The ferals?’ The Adamantine Man laughed. ‘Don’t think they come up to the surface much, even at night. But still, got to get their food from somewhere. Help us though?’ He shook his head and patted the axe slung over his back. ‘Ferals find us, it’ll be time for my lady to get to work. We get to the city, you stay close. We go down. Underground. Find a place to hide from the dragons, that’s the first thing. Then we look for the tunnels. There’s ways as far as the Fury. After that?’ He shrugged.
Kataros stared at the wings. If she got ripped to pieces by feral men or eaten by dragons, that wasn’t any worse than being raped and strangled in a dingy cell. And at least she’d be trying to do something. She took a deep breath and started to strap herself into the harness. It was simple enough, similar to a dragon harness, the sort of thing a rider would have designed. All buckled in, she tried to drag the wings towards the mouth of the cave, but they were so heavy she could barely move them.
‘Let me help.’ He lifted them up, resting them across his shoulders. Kataros walked towards the edge and then stopped. The sky was clear and she could see the shapes of the Silver City hundreds of feet below her. And she was going to jump? Madness! She shrank away and stepped back straight into the solid bulk of the Adamantine Man behind her. ‘Get away from me!’
‘Sorry about this.’
The next thing she felt was his hand in her back, hurling her forward. She screamed as her feet struggled to push against him, reached through the blood-bond, found him there, grasped the first part of him that came to hand and twisted and tore. The pushing stopped and he let go. Her feet teetered on the brink of the cave.
The wings collapsed on top of her, forcing her down and pitching her forward. She grabbed at them, but they were much too big and much too heavy and she was already too close to the edge. They toppled forward and tipped out into the void, and Kataros went with them.
10
Skjorl
Eight months before the Black Mausoleum
They waited for the evening and for the heat to fade. If the dragons were still in Bloodsalt, Skjorl didn’t bother to look. Best chance of staying alive was to stay out of sight. He searched around the house for anything useful, but under the dirt and dust were only the blankets, an old table and a couple of stools. After that he had a good look at his hand. Took some Dreamleaf to take the edge off the pain and did his best to splint it up. Wasn’t ever going to work right again, that was for sure, but maybe he’d still be able to wield his axe one day, that was what mattered.
Dragon-blooded. He picked up his axe and held her. He could call her Dragon-blooded, after the stains on her steel. Better than Dragonslayer.
After that he had a look at Jasaan. Hard to tell whether the ankle was broken or badly sprained, but it was swollen up like a severed head. He put a splint on that as well. Stools turned out useful for something after all.
When it was properly dark again they crept out, back towards the water of the Sapphire. They found the covered canal and Skjorl stared at it. The parts in the city had been smashed to bits, trampled into a mess of jumbled bricks. So much for Jex and the rest, not that he’d had any hope they were still alive. Maybe they’d managed to get themselves eaten. Maybe the other dragon was burning too, but Skjorl wasn’t about to count on it. Never count on anything with dragons. Crafty bastards they were.
Outside the city, pieces of the canal were still intact. They hid inside one for the last hour of darkness and the whole of the day. Blasted place was like an oven in the sun, baking them in their own juices until they had nothing left to sweat. Skjorl lay towar
ds one end, head poking outside but in the shade, catching what whisper of a breeze he could. In the distance he thought he saw the dragon, high up in the sky and away to the south, heading towards the Sapphire valley. When he blinked it was gone; afterwards, he wasn’t sure whether he’d seen it or dreamed it. Didn’t matter much. A sign was a sign. It was looking for them.
‘We’re too slow and there’s not enough shelter,’ Skjorl said when the sun set and they were ready to move again.
Jasaan shrugged. ‘We don’t get any water, we won’t last another day.’ He levered himself back to his feet and propped his axe under his shoulder as a crutch. ‘If it’s my time then I suppose I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.’
‘If we have to fight it, we will. We’ll come back out here and look for it after we’re done in the Spur.’ He tried to smile, and Jasaan grinned back. An Adamantine Man faced a dragon without fear. Even if there were only the two of them and they were both crippled and stood no chance whatsoever of victory, they’d still fight.
‘Whatever you say,’ said Jasaan after a pause that was much too long.
‘I’m thinking we should go up on the moors. Yinazhin’s Way. I been along it once. There’s a part you can see the Sapphire gleaming like a needle, the Hungry Mountain Plain to the south and the Plains of Ancestors to the north with Samir’s Crossing in between. We get up to the moors, there’s shelter and water and food. Dragon should have forgotten about us by then.’
‘Be busy looking for wherever his mate hatched out.’
‘Maybe.’ Now there was a thing Skjorl still couldn’t get fixed right in his head. He’d spent most of his life thinking dragons were big dumb animals. Immense and deadly, but animals. Now it turned out they could read your thoughts if you didn’t take a potion to stop them, and when they died, they just came back again, hatched straight out of another egg somewhere. And they remembered. No, couldn’t get that sort of thing fixed in his head at all.
They followed the sunken canal back as far as the river, crossed it, wallowed in the cool water and drank their fill and then headed on. Plenty of shelter at least. Dry riverbeds. Clusters of rocks. Crevices in the dirt. Nothing alive though. No trees, no grass, no nothing. Maybe there were snakes and rats and creatures like that, but all Skjorl saw were the same sodding great sandflies that had been trying to eat him alive for the last three weeks.
They stopped as the sun rose and took shelter in the middle of a cluster of giant boulders. Felt like they’d walked for miles and miles, but when Skjorl looked back, there was Bloodsalt, a dull scar smeared across the shining sands and the glittering lake. The river wasn’t much more than a mile away. He looked in his pack. Food for three or four days before he started to starve himself, but that wasn’t going to be the problem. In this heat they’d die of thirst long before he had to worry about that. The edge of the desert and the slopes up to the moors were fifty miles away. Took Jasaan a bit longer to work it out, but he got there in the end.
‘This isn’t going to work,’ he said as the afternoon wore on.
‘No.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘On my own I could get there.’
‘You’re going to leave me to die then?’
‘Don’t have much choice. Better than both of us.’ This time Jasaan could bloody well accept it.
Jasaan shrugged. ‘I got a different idea. We don’t move at all. We sit it out right here. We find a cave and we stay in it. We wait until you can hold an axe properly. Until I can run and climb again. Then we bolt for the Spur, fast as we can. We got water. The river.’
‘And what do we eat, Jasaan? Even if I could, there’s nothing to hunt here.’
Jasaan sniffed. He looked away, back across to the river to Bloodsalt. ‘Dead meat, that’s what.’
Skjorl laughed. ‘Dragons? Hatchlings? They burn, remember. There’s nothing left but ash, Jasaan. You can’t eat ash!’ He was losing it.
‘I wasn’t thinking of dragons.’ Jasaan was looking at him. Hard and steady. Waiting for him to see it. Took a while too, because no one else would even have thought of such a thing.
‘You mean mean Vish, don’t you?’
Jasaan didn’t say anything. But yes, that’s exactly what he meant.
‘You want to eat Vish?’
Jasaan’s eyes didn’t leave Skjorl’s face but now they showed iron. ‘It’s not like we don’t both know there’s good eating on a man, eh?’
Scarsdale. That’s what he was thinking. When they’d left and what they’d taken with them to keep their bellies full as far as the Silver River. Desperate times, men did desperate things. Eat another Adamantine Man, though? Cold, that was. But the other choice he’d given Jasaan was a cold one too. Skjorl turned away. Had to think.
‘Can’t be doing that, Jasaan,’ he said at last. ‘Can’t be eating Vish.’
Jasaan didn’t say anything. Just looked at him. Adamantine Men didn’t have friends. Trouble was, that cut both ways now.
‘Vishmir’s cock!’ Skjorl’s fists clenched themselves.
‘He’s dead, Skjorl. Gone. You know that.’ Jasaan spoke softly. ‘Best chance of one of us getting back to the Spur is we do what I said.’
Hard to say if that was true. Hard to take even if it was. Should have been Jasaan down in the cisterns, climbing up towards the trapped dragon and hacking its head off. Then Vish would have been here and with both his legs working and they’d be laughing now and running all through the night, up to the start of Yinazhin’s Way and onward, as far and fast as they could.
‘Vishmir’s cock,’ he said again, quietly this time. ‘Where we stayed right before we crossed the river – you reckon you can get there in one night?’ An overhang. Not quite a cave, but with a tumble of rocks in front of it. The sort of place a few men could stay hidden from anything short of something poking its nose right inside.
Jasaan nodded.
‘You’ll be on your own.’ Skjorl took a deep breath. ‘Two days – one to get in, one to get back, if I get back at all. Might be there’s another egg hatched. Might be one of the young ones has gone down there. Might be Vish has gone already. Eaten. Might be you’ll never see me again. Might be I’ll run.’
‘Then I’ll be no worse off than I am right now. Besides, you are what you are, Skjorl, and you wouldn’t do that. You might kill me, but you wouldn’t lie to me.’
For some reason that made Skjorl laugh. ‘That’s us, isn’t it?’
‘From birth until death.’
‘Blood and honour and fire.’ Skjorl took a deep breath. The sun was edging the horizon now, setting the sands and salts of the desert rippling red. Together they watched it go down. ‘I’m taking the water,’ Skjorl said.
It took him a night longer than he’d thought – one to get in, two to get back. Wasn’t any easier carrying a dead Adamantine Man than a crippled one. Vish wasn’t there, no sign of him, which meant a dragon had got him. But when he looked hard, it wasn’t so difficult to find what had happened to the others. Wasn’t any getting to Jex or Marran, and Kasern was half buried. Relk, though, he must have been alive. Crawled out from under where he’d been burned and then crushed with both legs broken. He’d probably still been alive the night Skjorl and Jasaan had left.
Wasn’t now. Sun had done him, most likely. No one had eaten him though, that was what mattered. No one ate Skjorl either, and when he got back, Jasaan was waiting for him, sitting on the rocks, keeping watch. Soon as the sun set again, they took the body a little way up the river. With his two good hands, Jasaan was the one who got to strip, gut and fillet him. Skjorl was the one who had to walk for hours to the edge of the salt flats, fill up his pack with salt and walk back again. He wrinkled his nose. Relk had started to smell even worse than he had when he was alive. Desert heat was good for that.
‘This going to work?’
Jasaan shrugged. ‘It’s what they do here.’
Eventually they were done. Skjorl tried not to look. White bone gleamed from
dead red flesh. Hard to say why, but it was better this way, better that it wasn’t Vish. Relk, he was an Adamantine Man, as good as any, but that’s all he was. Vish and Jex, they’d started to be something else. Maybe even Jasaan too, even with that Scarsdale crap between them. Was a long way from Sand down to the Silver River valley. Long enough and hard enough that you learned things about your company that you didn’t learn other ways.
‘Ought to bury him,’ said Jasaan. ‘Hide what’s left from the dragons.’ He was taking the meat he’d sliced off Relk and smothering it in salt, trying to make it keep. ‘They see this, they’ll know we were here.’
‘Can’t do that.’ That’s not what you did with the dead. Burned them, maybe. Fed them to a dragon. Weighed them down and threw them in a river, hung them up for the crows even, but you didn’t bury them, never that. Even the people who died starving under the Purple Spur got carried up and out of the caves, and never mind that the people doing the carrying were starving too.
‘I know. Just saying it would be best.’
‘The river.’ Jasaan nodded.
‘Weigh him down and sink him. Dragons won’t see. Water will hide the smell.’
‘Won’t hide the mess we made.’
Wasn’t much to be done about that. They’d lost most of the night by now anyway. Jasaan hobbled back to their hole. Skjorl took the meat and followed him. Most likely they’d starve and never mind Jasaan and his clever plans. Or the dragons would find them. Or they’d get some sickness from eating the flesh of their own kind and die in agony in a pool of their own fluids. Could be any of those things would happen and Skjorl wouldn’t have called himself much surprised.
They did get hungry right enough. And they saw dragons now and then, and they had the runs and had cramps, but they didn’t die. They eked Relk out as best they could, tongues curling at the saltiness of him. And by the time they ran out of bits of him to eat, Jasaan could walk again.
