by Stephen Deas
She passed the second test. This time the ones that failed were set free, released into the wide world to be teachers or traders or whatever took their fancy, although they would always and for ever belong to the Order of the Scales to be called upon when there was a need.
They sent her to the mountains to finish her apprenticeship. She went on the back of a dragon – her first time – into the Worldspine to serve the King of the Crags, not that she’d ever see her new master. Five more years working in an eyrie would make her a true alchemist, but things in the mountains took a sour turn. There were men. In particular, one handsome dragon-rider. She lost her purpose and made foolish mistakes. Secrets that should have been kept were spoken to unworthy ears. They scolded her and they chastised her, and when that wasn’t enough they whipped her, and when that still didn’t tame her, they threw their hands in the air and took her titles and her lessons and her teachers all away and called her a Scales. They would have taken her mind too, dulling it with the same potions she had once brewed herself, and that would have been that, but instead the white dragon had come and burned her world to the ground, and then, in the aftermath, Kemir.
He was going to take her to the sea. She remembered that much. They got as far as Arys Crossing. It wasn’t far from the Silver City at all, not on the back of a dragon. But there he’d died. And there Jeiros, the grand master of her order, had found her, clinging on to the Adamantine Spear, the one thing in the world that could kill dragons. He’d taken her back to the Adamantine Palace, but only in time to watch it all burn. After that the caves under the Purple Spur became her home, hers and everyone else’s who hadn’t died in flames. And after that …
‘Here.’ The Adamantine Man stopped and took in a deep breath and slowly let it out again. She blinked. They were back where she’d started, at the esplanade around the Golden Temple.
‘Why are we here.’
‘The ferals don’t come here. They think it’s haunted. Evil spirits or some such.’
‘Is it?’
He let out a scornful snort. ‘No. Our ancestors watch over us, but there’s no such thing as ghosts.’
‘I have seen many things that I couldn’t explain.’ More than most.
‘While I’ve seen very few.’ He moved quickly across the esplanade, pausing again only when he was back in the deep shadows of the temple walls. She followed as best she could.
‘There’s no ghosts,’ he said again. ‘But there’s plenty more ferals. Some aren’t so easily scared.’
Ferals. She hated the word. He meant the survivors, the ones who’d lived through the firestorms. The ones who’d chosen to stay in the ruins of their homes in the aftermath rather than hide in the caves under the Spur or in the mountains or in the three great fortresses of the Pinnacles. A foolish choice perhaps, but they were still people. They’d been farmers once, and craftsmen and traders and maybe even a few priests and almost-alchemists. ‘We took an oath to protect them,’ she said.
The Adamantine Man slid along the wall, keeping his back pressed to the stone and the rest of him in the deep shadows. When he reached the temple gates, hanging limp and bent, he stopped and spat. ‘I took an oath to protect the speaker. No one else.’
‘You failed then.’
‘Yes.’ The admission didn’t seem to trouble him. ‘I was in Outwatch when the dragons came. The white one was there. The first.’ He peered around the corner into the black depths of the temple and made a show of sniffing the air. ‘Sometimes they come in here anyway, ghosts or no ghosts. They burn things. Offerings to the dragons or something.’
‘To the Great Flame.’
‘Pah!’ He tossed Siff over his shoulders again and jogged on. The inside of the temple wasn’t as dark as Kataros had expected. The shattered edges of the dome hung over their heads, the stars glimmering beyond. The walls were tall, like towers in the dark of the night, but the space was vast and great chunks of what had once been the roof were gone. The Adamantine Man walked to the centre, to where the altar to the sun still stood. ‘Many say the words. Few understand the meaning.’
‘Explain yourself!’
‘The Flame burned strong in the Guard. Your kind prefer to snuff it out. Do you have a god, alchemist? Do any of you?’
‘Kataros. My name is Kataros.’ She said it without thinking, then wondered why she’d bothered. She needed to be rid of him and the sooner the better. Finding him crouched over her with a knife in his hand had shown her that. She wouldn’t dare to sleep now, wouldn’t dare even close her eyes until he was gone.
He stopped. ‘The spear-carrier?’
‘What?’
‘You. You brought back the Speaker’s Spear? The Dragonslayer. Or am I wrong?’
‘I …’ Yes. They called her that, sometimes. The spear-carrier. ‘I had it for a time. For a few hours, that’s all. It was the grand master who carried it back to the palace.’
‘You were there, then. At the end. For the final battle.’ He sounded in raptures at the thought of it.
‘I was deep underground. I only heard.’
‘I wish I could have seen it. Outwatch was a slaughter. Sand the same. There weren’t enough of us to make any difference. We smashed their eggs and took our axes to the unborn hatchlings inside. Killed a few of the very young, the ones still placid or in their chains. The bigger ones your sort did for. Poisoned.’ He shook his head. ‘I’d have given a lot to see the legions in their glory with their scorpions, pitched into the battle we were all told we would fight.’
‘They were slaughtered. Hardly a man left standing.’
‘I know.’
‘Almost every last one of them fought on until the end. Long past when all hope was lost. It seemed foolish to me.’
He growled. ‘It’s what we do, alchemist Kataros.’
A litter of old offerings lay spread across the altar, but the Adamantine Man swept them away before Kataros could see what they were. He crouched down and brushed at the dust and dirt on the floor with his hands.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘To the likes of you I’m just soldier or guard. Among those who stand beside me, I am Skjorl.’
She reached through the blood-bond. ‘My blood is bound to yours, Skjorl. You are tied to my will. You will never harm me. You will do whatever you must to keep me from hurt.’
He didn’t move, just kept scraping at the floor. ‘Do you know, alchemist, how much it hurts when you do that?’
‘Less than anything you would have done to me, I think.’
‘I would have given you a quick and painless death, more painless than the one that was waiting for you, and an hour or two of pleasure to remember me by when you reached your ancestors, if you’d have let me. Both still yours for the taking if you want them.’ He looked up, leered at her and patted his crotch.
‘You …’ She shuddered.
‘If you ever let me go, alchemist, I will do everything to you that I would have done before, only this time I will make sure it hurts.’
There was no anger in his voice, no hate, no venom, but he meant every word. He looked up at her a second time, heard her silence and laughed at it. ‘Alchemist, you’ve taken my freedom. What I will do to you is kinder.’ He took a step sideways and clawed at the floor for a moment. ‘You did the same to the dragons. It’s your way, is it? Whatever stands before you, you enslave it?’
He might have touched a nerve, if it hadn’t been for what he’d been about to do when she’d put her blood into him. ‘You were set on raping and then killing me. You see that as a better fate?’
‘I do.’
‘You’re so wrong.’ How did men come to even think such things? There were no words for the depth of it.
He laughed at her as his fingers wrapped around a metal ring set into the stone in front of him and he started to pull. ‘Ask one of these ferals which they’d prefer, death or slavery. Ask them why they’re here and not in your nice comfy little fortress.’
‘T
hey are men! They are not animals!’
‘They were men, alchemist. Now they’re ferals.’ The stone began to move, grinding across the floor. ‘Can you make some light?’
She showed him her empty hands. ‘With what?’
‘If you can’t, then we descend in the dark. Do you see a shaft?’
Kataros peered into the hole. It was black as pitch. ‘I can’t see anything.’
He sighed and pulled the stone further out, inching it across the floor. Another ring was fastened into the back of it. A rope was tied to the ring and vanished into the hole. Skjorl crawled across and gave the rope a tug.
‘There are other paths in and out of the fortresses from the city. Plenty of them, so I’m told. We close this behind us so the ferals can’t follow.’
‘Men!’ she shouted back at him. ‘They are not ferals!’ And then he was on top of her, hand clamped across her mouth, blood-bound slave or not, hissing in her ear.
‘Quiet!’ She heard a chuckle in his throat. ‘Quiet, alchemist. Lest you get hurt when the ferals hear you and fall upon us in their hordes.’ He let her go and bared his teeth, then dragged Siff to the edge of the hidden shaft under the altar and began to climb down rungs set into the stone with the outsider over his shoulders. When all three of them were inside, he swung on the rope until the altar stone was back in place and the darkness became absolute. She heard him below her, one foot after the other, climbing down the shaft faster than she could bring herself to, even though he had Siff on his back and she had nothing.
‘Wait!’ she hissed, but either he didn’t hear her or he didn’t care. At the bottom, his hand touched her arm in the dark. She squealed and flinched away.
‘Just me, alchemist. What did you fear?’ He was laughing at her.
She didn’t know how far down they were. The alchemist-trained part of her understood they’d gone neither as far nor spent as long there as it seemed in the blackness. Older instincts wondered what monsters lurked so deep beneath the earth. ‘Under the Purple Spur sometimes the dead, those who aren’t taken up into the sunlight, rise,’ she said. ‘Does that happen here?’
He laughed at her. ‘I came from under the Spur before I came here and I heard the same. People living in fear will say many things. Believe me, alchemist, the dead do not rise.’
‘Those under the Spur say otherwise.’
‘Seen it yourself?’
She looked away. ‘No.’
There was a shrug of indifference in his voice. ‘I am what I am, alchemist. I believe what my senses show me, not the tales of fearful men.’ His arm touched hers again and brushed along her side. ‘You should take my hand, alchemist, lest you trip and fall and hurt yourself in the dark.’
‘No.’ She pushed him away. ‘You don’t touch me.’
‘Suit yourself.’ He moved off. She felt the space between them, felt his absence from close to her like a load taken away that been clamped around her chest.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’
He didn’t answer that. Through the blood-bond she felt him ease his way slowly in the darkness. He still had Siff slung across his shoulders. He was strong, fearfully strong, but that was the way the Adamantine Men were made. It was simply done. They took unwanted children from across the realms, just as the alchemists did, only for a far lesser price, and then they forged them, without mercy, into fighting men who would stand against dragons. Most died before they reached manhood. Most of the rest didn’t last as long as this one had, judging by his age.
Skjorl. Did she even want to know his name? He was better as a faceless monster, cold and loathsome as the dragons he’d been raised to face.
‘If you were in the Spur after the realms fell, how did you get here?’ she asked. Following him was easy. She could sense him, where he was, always, feeling his way along the walls.
‘I walked, alchemist. And you? You were under the Spur too. Kataros the spear-carrier. You were at the palace when it fell, after all.’ She heard him chuckle. ‘Why would you come to the Pinnacles, alchemist, where only torture and death could possibly await you?’
‘I was sent.’ She felt him freeze and fall silent and so she did the same, ears stretching out into the black, grasping for sound and finding nothing. After a few seconds he began to move again. ‘There were others. Do you … Do you know what happened to them?’
‘No.’
He was lying. The blood-bond told her that at once, which must have meant the others were dead. She took a ragged breath. It wasn’t a surprise, not at all, but still there was a difference between fearing the worst and knowing it. She was alone here then, as she’d thought, and there would be no seeing her old master again, nor any of those that passed as friends who’d come here.
‘Who sent you? The speaker?’
‘That’s none of your concern, soldier, nor is the why.’ Even if the why, she suspected, had more to do with the dwindling of supplies under the Spur, the growing starvation, the simple presence of more mouths than could be fed, even among the Adamantine Men, even among the alchemists.
‘There are tunnels as far as Plag’s Bay. You could return. It would be a safer journey than going into the Raksheh. I’d take you if you asked.’
She answered that with silence. There were reasons, of course there were reasons, but sharing them would make her weaker, not stronger.
‘What did this shit-eater I’m carrying tell you?’
She let her silence answer that one too. Through the blood-bond she felt him grinning to himself.
‘Here. A door. Ready? There’s about to be blood.’ He stopped and lowered Siff to the ground. She heard the grind of metal against metal and then a line of dim light opened the darkness like the drawing of a curtain. Cold white light, alchemists’ light, flooded in as Skjorl pulled the door wide. He drew out his sword and then jumped through. There was a shout, and then the screaming started.
19
Skjorl
Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum
Answers would come when answers were ready. The alchemist would tell him, because in the end people like her always did. She’d yield to him in other ways too, in time. For now there was killing to be done. There were always ferals in the tunnels. No surprise to open the door and find a few of them sheltering. He was in among them before the sleeping ones even had a chance to open their eyes. Three women. Pity to waste them, but the alchemist would never have let him toy with one. Two children. He killed those first, moved on to the women as quickly as he could. Not that they had any chance of getting away but because he had to be done with them before the alchemist could tell him to stop. There was a man, sitting on watch perhaps, eyes closed and dozing. Skjorl killed him last as he tried to flee, driving his sword into the man’s chest just when the alchemist screamed at him. Leisurely, he put his boot on the dead man and pulled his sword out again.
‘What are you doing?’
He walked back to one of the women, tore off the outer layer of her rags and wiped his blade clean.
‘Answer me!’ The words came with a hammer blow to the back of his head. He screwed up his eyes against the pain of it.
‘The ways from the tunnels to the Silver City are kept secret. They saw us come through. So they had to die.’ Good chance they already knew the secret shaft was there, might even have been why they’d settled where they had, but no need for the alchemist to know that. He looked up and down the tunnel. The light here was like the light in the fortress, a glow that came from the very stones of the walls and the roof. Here it was feeble, starlight on a cloudy night, no more than that. He closed his eyes and reached with his ears, searching for running feet, but now all he could hear was the alchemist bleating.
‘You will not kill without reason!’
‘I have reason. Hyrkallan’s riders have ordered that all ferals be killed.’
‘No!’
Stupid woman needed to know when to speak and when to shut up. If any ferals had got away, their footste
ps were lost now. He growled. ‘Alchemist Kataros, listen when I tell you this. The feral folk who live under the Silver City may once have been ordinary men and women, but that was before their city burned and dragons ate all those they loved. They blame the speaker, their kings, their queens, their riders, their alchemists and even the Adamantine Men for what has fallen upon them. They will not listen to your pretty words – they’ll kill us for our food, for our clothes, for anything we carry, or if we carry nothing, they’ll kill us because we are not them. These would have come back with others. Your command was to protect you from any hurt. I have obeyed it.’
Which was more talking than he was used to. He blew out his cheeks and subsided into silence. The alchemist wouldn’t understand. She’d think she knew better. Alchemists always did until the world taught them otherwise.
‘No.’ She shook her head. She was a woman, inevitably weak. Which made the hold she had over him all the more galling.
‘Going to be hard to find shelter up the Yamuna. The alchemists under the Spur once gave us potions they said hid us from the dragons. Stopped them from knowing we were there even when they couldn’t see us. You said you know how to make that potion. Do you?’ The ferals were dead and good riddance to them. No point dwelling on what couldn’t be changed.
‘Yes, if I had what I needed. But I don’t.’ She was still staring at the bodies. Couldn’t seem to tear her eyes away from them. He wondered why. They were dead, after all. It was done. Move on.
‘And what do you need?’
She looked up at him and laughed. ‘You’re not capable of getting it.’
Skjorl smiled to himself. Said with venom but hardly likely to be true. ‘What do you need, alchemist?’
‘Dragon blood, soldier. I need dragon blood.’
‘Something so easily done?’ He laughed back at her. ‘I’d hoped for a challenge.’ Whatever she said to that, she said it under her breath and he didn’t hear. He settled to stripping the corpses on the off chance they had anything useful. ‘I’ve not travelled the Yamuna valley, but I’ve heard nothing good. Open country, wide and flat, all the way from Farakkan to the Raksheh. No shelter. It’s one thing to hide from a dragon that flies past without the first idea you’re there. Different matter to hide from one that can feel you. Got to dig deep where it can’t reach and then wait for it to get bored. Can be days. Weeks even.’ How long had the dragon from Bloodsalt stalked him and Jasaan? Had it ever even stopped? ‘And then there’s the next one and the next. Too many down there and no place to go deep. There’s the river worms too, if such things are real. If the dragons haven’t eaten them. We should go somewhere else.’ Useless, these ferals. Never have anything worth shit. No keepsakes. No food, not even a half-decent knife. Nothing but stinking rags alive with lice and the string that holds them together.
