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 towards 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.