by Stephen Deas
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
Contents
Map
The Silver City
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Farakkan
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
The Raksheh
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
The Aardish Caves
54
55
56
57
The Moonlight Garden
The Black Mausoleum
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
Epilogue
The Silver City
1
Kataros
Twenty-three days before the Black Mausoleum
He wasn’t stupid. Kataros had seen the way he looked at her, right from the start. Her jailer. She was a woman in a prison cell, frail and fragile, and he was the man charged with keeping her, a brute, massive and scarred with one crippled hand. In stories that went one of two ways. Either he’d fall in love with her, or he’d try to rape her and she’d get the better of him. Either way, in stories, fate always found a way to save the frail and fragile woman.
Actually no. In the childish stories she remembered the frail and fragile woman never saved herself. In those stories she stayed exactly where she was until some gallant rider on the back of a dragon tore open the door to her cell with his bare hands and whisked her away to a happy-ever-after. But in this story that wasn’t going to happen, which left her back where she started. He was interested. He didn’t take much trouble to hide it either. He wasn’t ugly, at least not on the outside, despite the scars. He was an Adamantine Man, though, and so her story wasn’t going to end in love.
There weren’t many cells down here. As far as Kataros could tell, there hadn’t been any at all until recently. Whatever this place was it had served some other purpose, something more benign, probably until the Adamantine Palace had burned. There were patterns on the floor, tiles, half buried now under a layer of filth. Ornate murals and faux arches decorated the walls. They were all over the place those arches, in almost every room she’d seen as they dragged her here. At the far end, towards the door that was the only way out, hangings lined the walls, intricate pictures of Vishmir and the first Valmeyan duelling in the skies; of the body of the Silver King, carried towards his tomb by men in masks and veils; of Narammed holding the Adamantine Spear, bowing down so he looked almost as though he was worshipping it – she could understand that, knowing now what it did.
Yes, it had been a genteel room once, quiet and out of the way and meant for reflection until someone had slammed in a few crude rows of iron bars and called it a prison.
There was no privacy. The prisoner in the cell next to hers had stared the first time she’d had to squat in a corner. The Adamantine Man, at least, had looked away.
She steeled herself to wait until the gentle sunshine glow of the walls and of the ceiling faded to starlit night. Not that waiting was difficult. She hadn’t been fed since she’d arrived and so hadn’t eaten for most of a week, and a few more hours would make no difference. The man in the cell next to her had been here longer. He’d been little more than a skeleton when she’d arrived. These days he hardly ever moved. He was dying, slowly but surely.
There weren’t any others, just the two of them and three more empty cells. Their floors were like hers, covered in filth crusted dry with time, yet the air in the prison smelled fresh and cool. That was the magic of the Pinnacles at work, the magic of the Silver King who’d come from nowhere and tamed the dragons, who’d built the world that every last one of them had come to know and then been torn down by jealous men.
Kataros spared a glance for the other man. His name was Siff, but she thought of him as something else. The Adamantine Man called him Rat, and she could see that too. He’d talked a lot when they’d first thrown her in the cell beside him; mostly he’d talked about all the things he’d like her to do for him, or the things he’d like to do to her if only he had the chance. That had been before starvation had turned its final bend and the lechery and the leering had given way to ranting and raving. Once, as the madness took him, he’d let slip his name.
He’d told her a lot of other things too, as he slipped away, more than enough to make her wish she’d heard them when he was lucid. He’d come out of the Raksheh. He’d crossed the whole Realm of the Harvest Queen and yet the dragons hadn’t eaten him. You had to admire anyone who could do that yet here he was at death’s door, starving. A week or a day or somewhere in between, was all he had left.
She let him go and turned her eyes back to the Adamantine Man. He was watching her. There was no pretence about it – today he was simply staring. Something had changed, had it? Most likely the man who called himself King of the Pinnacles had decided there would be no reprieve. Hyrkallan, that was his name. She’d heard of him before she’d come here, but she hadn’t understood his hate for her kind until it was too late. There would be no change to his law, no clemency for any who called themselves alchemist, no matter what they might bring. And what did she bring? A hope that was no hope at all. An impossible idea. Another mouth for a starving court to feed.
She looked at the Adamantine Man as he stared at her. She bit her tongue until she tasted blood. ‘Hey.’
He didn’t move.
‘Hey!’ Half the Adamantine Men she’d ever met thought that the War of the Two Speakers had made them into gods. The other half were mad, as if there was much difference. Some managed to keep some seed of civilisation inside them, but most of the ones she’d seen were violent drunkards, brutes, rapists who thought they had a right to anything and everything. We are swords. We sate ourselves in flesh as the need comes upon us and then we move on, that was their creed and they were proud of it. Sometimes they killed dragons like they were supposed to, but usually when they tried that they just died.
This one still didn’t answer. His eyes didn’t flicker. He was making it hard for her, harder than it already was. The blood in her mouth sharpened her mind. She could see the knowledge in his eye. They both knew what was coming.
‘Hey.’ She made her voice softer this time. He moved a little now, tilted his chin slightly and looked at her some more, silent as the still air. She forced herself to get up and walk towards him until she was almost against the bars. If he’d wanted to, he could have reached through and touched her.
For a long time they looked at each other.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said. Each day he brought them water. Water, water, always water, the one thing the Pinnacles never lac
ked. He never brought food. He never ate in front of them either, but she could smell it on his breath. Food. The answer was in his eyes. Everyone is hungry.
‘Are you going to ask me to be gentle?’ he asked.
2
Skjorl
Eight months before the Black Mausoleum
Bloodsalt. There used to be a city here. Skjorl had never seen it in its glory and never would because it had been gone for more than a year. Burned. Flattened. Crushed. The alchemists said it had been the first city to fall when the dragons had broken loose, the first place they’d gone after shattering the tower at Outwatch. The first and now the furthest from the few companies of Adamantine Men who still survived. Skjorl watched the sun set behind it. There was nothing left, nothing but ash and sand and salt and ruin. The dragons had dammed the river. Changed its course. Whatever they hadn’t burned, whoever had stayed hidden, had been left to parch in the relentless sun. The more foolish probably tried to drink from the lake; they would have been the ones to die first, for the waters of Bloodsalt had earned their name. As for the rest, the last survivors? Skjorl had walked past their bones, scattered along the Sapphire valley.
Now he lay on the top of a low hill, squeezed between two rocks and hidden beneath a thorn bush, itself old and dead and dried. The river had found its way through the dragon dam in time, but not until everyone here was long dead. Nonetheless he kept absolutely still. There were still things alive at Bloodsalt. There were dragons.
His fingers tightened around the haft of his axe, closer to him and cared for with more tenderness than any lover. He squinted. Two adults. The same two adults he’d seen every day for more than a week now as he and what was left of his company of men eased their way along the Sapphire valley towards the lake and the ruins of the old city. Two adults and perhaps a score of hatchlings. More dragons than any of them had seen in the year since the Adamantine Palace burned.
The Adamantine Men had done their duty when the dragons first awoke. To eyrie after eyrie the word had come before the dragons did. Quietly and without fuss, the alchemists had slipped poison into the potions they fed to adults and hatchlings alike. Quietly and without fuss, the dragons had burned from the inside and died; and while they were burning, the Adamantine Men had taken their hammers and their axes. They’d marched into the hatcheries and the egg rooms and they’d done what needed to be done. In some places there had been fighting between the Adamantine Men and soldiers loyal to an eyrie master or the dragon-king or -queen who owned him. Always fights that the Adamantine Men won. Across the realms eggs had been smashed, dragons poisoned.
Except here. Here and Outwatch. Had Bloodsalt had any warning? They’d had seconds at Outwatch. Seconds, and that had still very nearly been enough.
‘Any kills, boss?’ whispered a voice in the thorns beside him. ‘I don’t see any kills.’
‘No.’ Skjorl shook his head. There was nothing to eat near Bloodsalt for anything larger than a sand lizard, much less a dragon. The adults probably flew up into the Oordish Moors to feed, hundreds of miles away, but they always came back. The hatchlings? He didn’t know if they’d go so far. He was hoping not, otherwise they were all wasting their time.
‘Bollocks.’ The thorns rustled angrily. Skjorl stayed silent. No kills meant nothing to poison. Until there was something to poison, they’d stay where they were, hiding in the dust and the salt, drinking brackish water, eating their own boots and being bitten to death by sandflies. He could live with that if it meant taking down a dragon. Skjorl had his own cask of dragon poison, more than enough for a full-grown adult. He had his axe too, in case they got as far as the eggs. Yes, he could wait right enough.
They’d had a hatchling in a cave at Outwatch. A rogue the mad queen had made. The old greybeard who ran the eyrie had let slip what it was and that had been good enough for Skjorl, good enough to kit up in dragonscale armour, dismantle a scorpion and carry it down to the caves. The dragon had strained at its chains and spat fire at them, but those chains had held. They’d carried the scorpion in pieces to the far end of its cave, to the hole in the cliff face where the sunlight and the air poured in. They’d carefully built it back together while the hatchling had watched them like a hawk. Somehow the first shot had missed. Then Skjorl had looked outside and he’d seen the white horror gliding through the sky towards them. Riderless. Coming home. The greybeard eyrie master had seized the scorpion for himself then. Skjorl hadn’t waited. He’d run, shoving his men out in front of him, last one out slamming the door as he went. Didn’t pause to see what became of the eyrie master. Death walked beside every Adamantine Man. When it came it came quick and you went one of two ways, crispy or crunchy. They’d run and run, all through the tunnels under Outwatch as the citadel came smashing down. They’d taken their hammers and their axes. Eggs smashed. Hatchlings murdered, the little ones butchered, the bigger ones fed poison. He’d taken servants, slaves and Scales, and battered them and strapped skins of poison to them, then thrown them to the howling monsters to be devoured. They’d have been dead anyway if he hadn’t. And amid the screaming and the blood and the fire that came after, an unexpected smile had stretched across his face. The dragons had awoken. The end of the world had begun. It was what he’d been made for.
The same smile was still there. Crispy. The greybeard eyrie master had gone the crispy way. For ordinary men there was a third way too, the starving-to-death-under-the-ground way; that was something that would never happen to him, but he didn’t mind a bit of waiting, not if there was a reason for it. In Outwatch he’d waited them out and they’d left. Left him and his company, what remained of them, stranded in the middle of the desert, a hundred miles from anywhere, surrounded by ash and ruin. It had been a lot like this.
The sun slipped below the horizon and darkness wrapped the salt plains. Skjorl eased himself out from under his thorn bush and crept back down the hill and into the tumble of rocks where the other Adamantine Men were waiting, still and quiet. There were seven of them left, a poor shadow of the fifty-odd who had left the Purple Spur three months ago. There was Jex, who’d been with him in Outwatch and ever since. Vish too. Jasaan he’d picked up on his way south, in what was left of Sand after the dragons had finished with it. Kasern, Relk and Marran, they’d come later when he’d trekked his way from Sand all through the dead Blackwind Dales as far as the Silver River and finally found what passed for the remains of civilisation, hiding out in the caves and chasms that reached from one side of the Spur to the other. Jex and Vish, they were his squad. They’d spent the best part of a year together, struggling every day not to be dead. The rest were all Adamantine Men, and three months creeping beside the waters of the Sapphire had told him everything he needed to know. They were alive while everyone else wasn’t. They were survivors then. The best.
‘Stay alive?’ Vish tossed over a skin half full of water from the river. It tasted warm and foul. Everything out here was too hot. Skjorl drank, though. The taste was something he’d come to know. The bitterness and nausea and blood-iron tang of the powders the alchemists had given them. Mix with water and drink at least once a day so the dragons don’t find you. Skjorl had no idea what that meant or how it worked, but it was true that dragons usually had a way of knowing where you were, no matter how well you hid. They’d found that out the hard way crossing the Blackwind Dales.
He tossed the skin to Jex. It was also true that on their trip up the Sapphire valley the dragons had seemed not to notice them. Maybe they’d been lucky, although seven left from more than half a hundred was an odd kind of luck. But he took his potion, however bad it tasted, and he’d keep taking it. Given how many of them were left, there wasn’t much chance they’d be running out any time soon.
‘Waiting, is it?’
Skjorl nodded. Waiting. Three months it had taken them to get this far. Soon enough they’d be done and then maybe they’d spend three months getting back home again, and if that’s how it was, that’s how it was.
Jex tip
ped the skin and poured water into his mouth. He tossed it back towards Vish but Kasern snatched it out of the air. He picked up another one and held them out in one hand, dangling them next to each other. ‘What’s that then?’
Relk shook his head and turned away. Jex and Vish were laughing.
‘Tits,’ Marran spat. ‘That’s what that is. I could murder for a good pair of tits.’
‘That’s not just any tits.’ Jex rubbed his crotch and nudged Skjorl. ‘That woman from Scarsdale, she had tits like that, eh? Old and saggy and wrinkled and yet oddly firm.’ He chuckled to himself.
‘More like two giant balls in a giant ball sack, they were.’ Vish wrinkled his nose.
‘Didn’t see you minding at the time.’
‘Didn’t see anyone minding at the time,’ grunted Skjorl. Four months it had been when they’d reached Scarsdale. Four months from Outwatch. Past Sand, black and smashed to bits. Past Evenspire, which just wasn’t there any more except the Palace of Paths, so big and so massive that even dragons couldn’t knock it flat. Four months and mostly all they’d seen were blackened corpses. Everything in the Blackwind Dales was dead even before the dragons. And then they’d got to Scarsdale. Twelve people they’d found there, hiding in the copper mines, creeping out at night for water from the Dragon River, eating fish and freshwater crabs and whatever roots and leaves they could find.
‘Shit-eaters, all of you,’ grumbled Jasaan. ‘And what about the other one? You remember her?’
This again. Skjorl tensed.
‘Sweet Vishmir but she was ripe. If she was here now …’ Vish leered.
