by Stephen Deas
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw his cage. It had someone in it. The alchemist.
The thing inside was rising out of its slumber again. He tried to scream, but all he saw was a hundred eyes light up in wonder.
56
Jasaan
Twelve days before the Black Mausoleum
They slept another night out in the open by the river. At dawn they pushed their little raft out into the water, paddled it into the current, closed their eyes and prayed. To their ancestors, perhaps, for the riders, but Jasaan only saw the Great Flame. The first dragon, as large as a mountain, the creature that had given birth to the monsters of the realms. It was strange, he thought, to revere such a beast and yet dedicate yourself to slaying its progeny. They were contradictions, from the moment they were made, all of them. They were the Adamantine Guard. They slew dragons because dragons were monsters and yet, when Jasaan looked at the men he’d known, they were little more than monsters themselves.
On the river they dozed for most of the day, letting the current do the work, taking it in turns to use the crude paddles Jasaan had made to keep them in the middle of the flow and steer them around the island boulders and fallen trees that littered the water.
‘Look.’ The other rider was shaking him. Parris. Jasaan had accepted the inevitable and asked his name. Wouldn’t make any difference now. They were bound together on this quest whether he liked it or not. ‘Look!’
Jasaan sat up. Through the trees on the right bank of the river he could see open sky beyond. Open sky and another expanse of water, another river, as big or bigger than the one they were on. Jasaan steered the raft towards the bank. As the rivers came together, the current grew stronger. Whirlpools tossed and turned them, spinning them about, and it took all three of them with all their strength before they finally nudged into the bank a half-mile further downstream. Nezak knelt, gasping, in the mud beside the river. He pointed to an outcrop of stone that rose out of the bank where the rivers merged. It was a bare brown rock, fifty feet high, with the water running right underneath. The trees of the forest towered over it. Dwarfed it.
‘We were following the Yamuna. We’d come from the Moonlight Garden, heading for Furymouth. I remember that rock.’
Jasaan shrugged. ‘Then this is the Yamuna.’ It didn’t seem too likely that a man on the back of a dragon would see an insignificant thing like that, but he wasn’t about to argue. Let it be the Yamuna. Why not?
He looked up. Habit didn’t care that he was in the Raksheh. He’d probably still be glancing at the sky even after he was dead. But he looked up and he saw a speck, high and in the distance, moving below the cloud. He checked to see how much potion he had left. He had an idea that Kataros herself might have made it for him, before they’d left. Now he was down to a week, maybe a little more. Hellas had carried some too but they’d lost that. He pointed at the speck trailing across the sky.
‘Somewhere there’s a snapper that dragon can’t find.’ For some reason that made him laugh so hard he couldn’t stop. Was that even how it worked? Did dragons sniff snappers out with their extra senses or did they do it the same way any other hunter did? He had no idea. Still couldn’t stop laughing though. He took a swig and then gave the potion flask to Nezak. ‘I don’t know if we’ve got enough of this to get to the caves because I have no idea how far away they are. We haven’t got enough to get back. You take this. If we find the alchemist, you take her as far as you can. Don’t worry about us. Just don’t murder her this time.’
Nezak gave him a queer look, as though Jasaan was losing his mind. Maybe he was. Maybe he’d been losing it for a long time. ‘If we find the alchemist, perhaps she will make us some more,’ the rider said. ‘And we’ll all go together. To be blunt, Guardsman, if anyone should be left behind, it’s us.’
Riders didn’t say things like that. That wasn’t the way it was. Adamantine Men served, that was all. They served and they died so others didn’t have to. Nice of Nezak to pretend things were different, though. Jasaan forced a smile.
They walked. Paddling their little raft into the teeth of the Yamuna’s current wasn’t going to work and Jasaan was happy to be on his feet. Walking was something he was used to. The riders would slow him down but that was fine too – it gave him time to hunt and forage and pathfind for them.
‘So how far is it to these caves?’ He had to ask, even though he knew he wasn’t going to like the answer. The Raksheh was said to be a thousand miles from one end to the other. The caves were supposed to be somewhere in the middle and Jasaan was quite sure that he was somewhere near the edge.
‘From here? A hundred miles. Two maybe.’ Nezak shrugged as if it was all much the same. Maybe on the back of a dragon it was.
‘Long walk then.’ Mentally, Jasaan went through what every Adamantine Man went through when they were away from a safe haven, the litany they had drilled into them every day. Water. Food. Warmth. Shelter. Dragons. They had potion for the dragons, at least for a while. A whole river full of water and never mind that it rained here more than it didn’t. The trees gave shelter from the wind and most of the rain. Leaf mould, fallen branches, yes, he could build shelters and fires and forest blankets if he needed to. As for food, well, if the trek along the Sapphire valley to Bloodsalt had taught him anything, it was how to fish. So that’s what they’d be eating then. Fish and not much else.
There were other things, of course. Things he hadn’t thought of. Parris came down with a fever. He kept going but it got steadily worse. His appetite went. He stopped talking and spent his time either shivering or sleeping, but he kept going. They should have left him, every Adamantine Man would have said the same, but Jasaan slowed his pace a little, did what he could to keep Parris going. Something bit Nezak’s hand and his fingers swelled up like sausages. Jasaan wondered if he might lose them, but there wasn’t anything to be done. He had his own problems by then. His bad ankle was aching all the time, and something must have crawled under his armour one day and feasted on the good one. The first he knew about it was a growing pain. When he looked, there must have been two dozen bites, each one an ugly black blotch, swollen and sore. Wasn’t long before he was limping on both feet. At least that evened things up. Queer, though – the one thing that never slowed them down and never went bad was Nezak’s arrow wound, which was probably the worst injury of the lot.
Every day the forest was the same and the river too. Jasaan had lost count of how long they’d been out there when they saw the boat. Was almost ready to give up. Didn’t know how far they’d come by then – it might not have been a hundred miles yet, but it surely felt like it. The middle of nowhere. No one ever came here and he could see why. Parris was a wreck, hardly able to focus any more, putting one foot in front of the other was the limit of what he could do. At least Nezak’s fingers seemed to be getting better. Maybe Nezak was charmed.
And out here, in this ancestor-forsaken wilderness where no one lived for a hundred miles, there was a boat. Not one, he realised, as he stared, but two, then three, then five. He hadn’t heard them coming over the ever-present rush of the water. They were close to the bank, paddling steadily forward where the current was weakest.
He stopped and he stared. Outsiders. Dozens of them. And there she was, in the middle boat. They had her. The alchemist. Kataros. Alive.
And the bugger was that he didn’t even have a bow and the two riders were half a mile behind him, following the trail he was marking out, and there was nothing he could do.
57
Kataros
Twelve days before the Black Mausoleum
She had them in the palm of her hand. She hadn’t even used blood-magic to do it, she’d simply told them the truth. She’d told them who she was and why she was here, what she was looking for and how it might change their world, and then she asked them for their help. No more hiding, if what Siff said was true, and if it wasn’t, then she’d show them how to hide from dragons with more than the great trees over
their heads – she’d show them how to hide with alchemy too. But if she was right then they were going to have the relics of the Silver King himself, the Isul Aieha, and those relics would be theirs, and they would never need to hide again, not from anyone or anything. Afterwards, when she’d finished promising them the earth, she felt proud of herself. She’d done what a true alchemist would do. What did it matter who took the Silver King’s power? In the great long scheme of things it was a battle of one species against another. Why carry the means to tame monsters back to the Pinnacles or the Purple Spur just because someone called themselves speaker? Yes, in the long great scheme of things survival was all that mattered, not whose name carried each victory.
They took her up to a sleep-space hollowed from the trunk of one of the great forest trees, hidden from both the ground and the sky. It was high, far higher than it needed to be for mere snappers.
‘Sometimes dragons come into the forest on the ground,’ said the man whose space she was sharing. He had a wife and three children, all born long before the Adamantine Palace had burned, and the space inside the tree was little more than a cell. A nest, she thought. Like a woodpecker.
She told him about the world outside, how everything had changed. He shook his head.
‘For us the only change is that your kind stopped coming into the forest.’
‘My kind?’
‘Alchemists.’
‘You didn’t notice the dragons?’ She couldn’t believe it. How could something like that make no difference?
He thought for a bit. ‘No. Dragons with riders or dragons without, they’re all the same to us. They come and they burn and they take what they want. We used to meet your kind sometimes, on the bank of the river. The one you call the Yamuna. We traded for things made of metal. Knives and arrowheads. We gave them what we harvested from the forest.’
A younger Kataros, the one fresh from the Palace of Alchemy, wouldn’t have looked past how simple a folk they were, but that was before she’d sailed halfway down the Fury with an outsider who turned out to be the only man she’d ever met who saw her as she was, as a person, not a simple collection of useful talents that could be employed to further some end of their own. They were simple and straightforward people, which made it all the more of a surprise to wake up on her second morning there with the same man sitting on her back, pinning her arms while his sons held her legs and his wife forced a gag into her mouth. She struggled and bit her tongue and tried to spit blood at them, but they knew, somehow they knew, and they would not let her blood touch them. They were five and she was one, and by the time they’d finished trussing her up, she was helpless. Their faces looked angry.
What did I do? But now she couldn’t ask.
When they were done they left her alone, propped against a wall, unable to move. She supposed they thought that gagged and tied they’d left her powerless too. She could have wept. Why? Why did they have to do this? Why was there never an easy way?
She let the blood in her mouth seep into the wad of cloth stuffed in there and dissolve it slowly away. When it was gone, she spat bloody saliva onto the ropes around her, but before she could set her mind to work on them, she heard a voice.
‘Oh ho.’
She looked up, still trussed hand and foot. There was a face staring at her from the outside. Siff, except his eyes were pure gleaming silver.
‘What did you tell them?’ She peered closer. ‘What are you?’
Siff shook his head. ‘I told them not to leave you alone, for a start. A few minutes with no one watching and you’re almost loose again already. This won’t do, but later, when we have time, you must show me how.’ He pulled himself up into the sleep-space and squatted beside her, toying with a knife. ‘What did you tell them?’
‘The truth.’
Siff laughed out loud. ‘The truth where you take the secrets of the Silver King back to your precious speaker and make everything exactly as it used to be? Back to the days when men on dragons came and took them away to be slaves?’
‘I told them it would be theirs.’
‘Ah. So you lied then.’
She twisted her head, trying to look him in the eye. He kept his distance. Afraid she’d spit at him, perhaps.
‘You’re the outsider here, alchemist. You’ll do what riders always do and it’ll be people like me and these who suffer, just like we always did.’
‘You don’t even know for sure that anything is there.’
‘No. You don’t know. I saw it. I saw a gate. Besides, look at me. How can you doubt it?’ His voice began to wander, back into a memory full of wonder and amazement. ‘I saw a way to their world. And it was so beautiful.’ He snapped back to the present.
‘Do you want to see it or not?’
‘Yes.’ She looked down. Yes. If even a sliver of what he’d told her was true then yes, yes, she wanted to see it, more than anything in the world. The treasures of the Silver King. ‘Of course I do.’
‘Well then, you listen hard, alchemist. They do what I tell them, not you. They know I’m the one who can lead them there, and I don’t need you now. So we’re going to go to the Aardish Caves, just like you wanted, only you’re going to be trussed up like this all the way so you don’t go using your blood-magic on people. I’m going to be sitting with you all the way, and if you even squirm wrong, I’ll just throw you in the river to drown, simple as that. Because I do – not – need you. I hope you understand. And now I’m going to show you something.’
He moved to sit in front of her. Very slowly he took his knife to her cheek and made a shallow cut. She felt the blood roll down her skin. Then he cut his own palm and put the knife away and stroked a drop of his blood onto his finger. Right in front of her, carefully and deliberately, he pressed her blood into his own and mixed them together.
‘That’s how you do it, isn’t it? That’s how you made your doggy do what he was told?’ His gaze never left her face.
She stared at his hand. It had to be a trick but she couldn’t see how it worked. Without even thinking, she was already reaching into the blood, feeling for him, looking for the bridge that would give him to her. As she’d done to Skjorl, just like he said.
There. There it was. There he was.
But he wasn’t alone. There was something else. Something immeasurably larger than either of them, and as she tried to touch him, it seemed to wake up and sense her. It turned as though struggling from a deep sleep to bring her into focus.
She backed away. Broke the bridge, but she wasn’t quick enough. A knife followed, stabbed into her head, a pain that exploded from her very centre outwards. She screamed.
As fast as it had come, it was gone. Siff was staring at her. His silver eyes blazed and the moonlight snakes were wriggling their way from his fingers.
‘What are you?’ she gasped. ‘Are you him? Are you the Isul Aieha?’
The silver light faded. Siff blinked as his eyes became his own again.
‘See, alchemist. I don’t know what it is I found in there, but it’s bigger than you. It wants to go back. And it doesn’t want you in here.’
‘Doesn’t it scare you?’ she asked him.
He hesitated. For a moment she saw the answer in his face. Yes. He was petrified, but the thing, whatever it was, had such a hold on him now that the old Siff was already as good as lost. He smiled at her. ‘Why should I be scared, alchemist? You’re the one who ought to be afraid.’
‘I am,’ she said.
He was by her side every moment after that. As the outsiders gathered what they would need, he sat with her to watch. He was the one who brought her food and her water. When she fell asleep, he was sitting beside her; when she woke up, he hadn’t moved. If he slept himself, she never saw it, and no one else came near her. She tried talking but he rarely answered. Mostly he seemed to be lost in thought, far far away, but he never missed a movement. All she had to do was lift her hand and he’d be looking at her. His eyes were silver all the time now.
The outsiders brought spears, nets and bows, blankets, ropes – so much that she wondered if they had anything left. Perhaps fifty of them walked with her and Siff through the trees to the river. A few were little more than children, but most were adults, half men, half women. Kataros wondered whether there was anything significant in that, or whether it was simply the hand of chance. The trouble with being an alchemist, as her grand master had once said, was that you couldn’t help wondering about things, even things that didn’t matter a jot. They worshipped Siff and they were terrified of him too. They did whatever he said, half in awe, half from fear, and she had no idea why. Was it the silver eyes? No, there was more to it than that. They knew him. There was history here, but neither Siff nor anyone else would tell her what it was.
There were boats at the river, five of them, sections from branches fallen from of one of the great trees. They’d been sliced in two, hollowed out and sharpened at either end. She might have called them canoes but they were nothing like the little dugouts she’d seen on the upper reaches of the Fury; no, these were huge, wide enough for three to sit abreast. The outsiders divided themselves evenly between the boats. Eight of them in each with paddles, working against the current of the river, while two sat, one at the front, one at the back, with spears and nets. Now and then they swapped places. Whenever they stopped to eat, they dozed, all carefully as far from Kataros as they could be. All the while Siff sat beside her.
And so it went, day after day. The forest never seemed to change. They passed rapids, where the outsiders carried their boats over their heads along the bank. Fallen trees blocked their way upriver, boulders, even sandbanks. In other places the waters were wide and deep, so broad that Kataros wondered if they’d reached a lake. She’d never heard of any lakes in the Raksheh, but that didn’t mean much. The great forest was a mystery beyond the fringes where the alchemists gathered its riches.
