Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum
On the outside her own shaking stopped when the golem had faded from sight. On the inside… on the inside she was lost. There had been books back when she’d been in the Palace of Alchemy. The Silver King had made golems, statues of stone or bronze or even iron, animated and given life. No one had seen a golem since the Silver King had fallen. Like Prince Lai’s wings, they were pretty stories. Myths read in the comfort of a warm study.
There had been other things in those books.
The Adamantine Man abruptly reached forward. He had his hands on her shoulders before she could blink, his fingers pressing into her skin, hard and hurting. There was a madness in his eyes she’d never seen before, a wildness that scared her even more than the golems had done.
‘What. Was. That?’ He could have snapped her neck, easily.
‘You’re hurting me!’ The words came out strangled, but they flew through the blood-bond just as well and hit him like a hammer. He let go and reeled away with a snarl.
‘Alchemist!’ He bared his teeth at her like an animal, like a rabid dog.
Remembering what he was, she welded her thoughts like an iron shield. ‘Sit down!’ The blood-bond was wide open now. He had no choice but to obey. ‘You will never, ever touch me again, Skjorl. Never. If you do, you will feel a pain that will sink you to your knees. You will wail and tear at yourself in agony. A touch, you shit-eater, that’s all.’ It wasn’t enough though. He needed to feel it — she wanted him to feel it — and so she reached out a hand towards him. ‘Let me show you.’ She seized his hand and pressed it against the side of her face. He jerked and tried to pull away, but she had him from within as well and he couldn’t let go. He threw his head back and screwed up his face and whined. She held him a while longer. When his eyes started to bulge she let him go.
‘There.’
Siff was watching them. He was trying to make out he was unconscious, but his eyes were very slightly open and moving under their lids, flicking from her to the Adamantine Man and back again. The tunnel walls drifted past, always the same, smooth and unmarked.
‘I opened the doors,’ growled Skjorl after a bit. ‘Well I tried.’ He looked at her. ‘So why were you sent from the Purple Spur, spear-carrier. What did you do wrong?’
She didn’t want to tell him, especially after what she’d just done, but a promise was a promise and alchemists kept their word, so she took a deep breath and made it as blunt as she could.
‘There were a little over thirty of us,’ she said. ‘Three of us were alchemists. The rest were Adamantine Men. We went in three separate groups, an alchemist in each. We were looking for help because we’re slowly starving to death under the Spur. We can poison dragons but they simply come back. We can kill them with the Adamantine Spear but they still come back. Men like you may go and smash eggs and slaughter hatchlings, but for what? We’ve taken to searching for eggs to bring to the caves, hoping we might do what we’d done before, but there are so many eggs in so many places that we can’t begin to collect them all; and even the ones we get, the dragons simply refuse the food we offer them when they hatch. They know now. They know what we do and they know how to beat us. They know we cannot win and so they starve themselves and they die and then they come back. We thought we might find something at the Pinnacles. The place is filled with things left behind by the Silver King, things that have never been touched since the time of the blood-mages, things we have never understood. We remembered them from our books, before the dragons burned them all. In the past the kings and queens of the Silver City barred us from their three palaces and no alchemist has been inside the lower chambers for centuries. We hoped… We thought perhaps we might finally be allowed to see, to discover something the Isul Aieha — the Silver King — left behind. Something to defeat the dragons.’ She sighed. ‘Grand Master Jeiros knew how futile our expedition would be, but he let us go nonetheless, chose three junior alchemists he could easily afford to lose and waved us farewell. In his eyes you could see how certain he was that he’d never see us again. For our part, we thought the dragons would eat us long before we arrived. Yet we went, not because Speaker Lystra ordered it, but because there was nothing else for us to do. Nothing, do you understand? The dragons have all but destroyed us. You’ve seen for yourself. You went to Bloodsalt? There was an Adamantine Man with me who went there too. He told me it was dead. Lifeless. Nothing but sand and ash and water too poisonous to drink. That’s what the realms will become, all of them. So we did as we were asked. I don’t know what happened to the other alchemists. We travelled apart and I never saw them again.’ She looked at the Adamantine Man. ‘They reached the fortress too, I think, but then Hyrkallan killed them.’ She shook her head. Looked away, not wanting any response, not now. ‘We crossed the Fury and climbed the gorge and skirted the Raksheh, sheltering under its leaves. There were dragons there, hunting. Always. When we had to, we crossed the Harvest Realm in three long hard nights. Everything that used to be fields and towns and villages, just a wasteland of ash and embers and scorched stone. There’s no one alive there now. I think once I saw a mouse.’ She shook her head.
The Adamantine Man was glaring at her. ‘The dragons try to starve us out,’ he snarled. ‘Same as they always did with the Spur. Burn everything. Leave us with nothing. Wasted effort around the Silver City though.’ He laughed. ‘Before I got there, the dragons smashed the fountains on top of the Fortress of Watchfulness. Smashed them to pieces but that didn’t stop the water from coming out of them. It just spouted from the broken stones instead. Then they tried burning them, but stone doesn’t burn. They poured out their fire for days, one after the other without end, and the water through the fortress still ran cold and fresh.’
Kataros nodded, for a moment forgetting that the worst monster was right here next to her. ‘The Silver King’s magic. That’s what we came looking for. When we reached the Silver City, we were welcomed and given food and water, and we were so tired and so grateful.’
Skjorl shrugged. ‘I heard stories there was another alchemist. That they took him up to the top at night, smashed his wrists and his ankles and hung him from a wheel over the edge. Same as they did for your grand master before the Adamantine Palace fell. I heard there were soldiers as well. My sort. I don’t know what happened to them. As far as I know they were still alive. Didn’t see them.’ For a moment he looked away and she caught the whiff of some smouldering shame inside him. ‘Too busy.’
‘That’s why I came to the Pinnacles. That’s what I was looking for and that’s what you’re going to find for me in the Raksheh. A half-god’s secrets for mastering dragons.’
He laughed at her, long and hard. ‘You think they haven’t looked for those? They say the ghost of the Silver King walks along hidden passages deep under each of the three Pinnacles, but I say this: if even a part of the Silver King remained beneath the Pinnacles, we would bow to him, all of us, dragons too.’
‘There’s another place to look. A better place. His tomb.’ Skjorl laughed more. ‘Vishmir spent twenty years looking. A thousand dragons and ten times the riders. Didn’t find it though.’
‘So we are supposed to believe.’
The Adamantine Man shook his head. ‘Even if I had a choice, I might still go with you, alchemist. But you’ll find nothing, same as everyone else. We’ll die out there looking for it. If it exists at all, then it’s hidden from the likes of you.’
Kataros glanced down at the outsider. He was still pretending be be asleep. ‘But not from him.’
Skjorl stared at her.
‘He’s been there. He found it. In the Raksheh. And now he’s going to show us the way.’
Skjorl stared at her some more. Then he fell back onto the raft and roared with laughter. ‘That’s what he told you, is it? That he’d found the Silver King’s tomb? And you believed that?’ He shook his head in disbelief. Kataros leaned towards him.
‘Yes. And would you like to see why I believed him?’ She turned to Siff. ‘I know you’re listening. Show him. Show him what you showed me.’
Very slowly Siff sat up. When he opened his eyes, they gleamed in the half-light of the tunnel walls.
They were silver.
Looking down over the confluence of the Fury and the Yamuna, Farakkan is little more than a market on a little hill, but the fact that it lies above the flood plain of Bonjanland (frequently becoming an island for most of the late spring and early summer) and is visible from a long distance across the flat terrain makes it seem something more. The city is wet, filthy and muddy and is largely viewed with disdain by the courts of the surrounding realms. The people of Farakkan are used to this and seem not to care. It has no culture to speak of and offers little to interest those whose lives are not dedicated to food, fish or livestock.
Bellepheros’ Journal of the Realms, 2nd year of Speaker Hyram