Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum
She watched the Adamantine Man lean forward.
‘How?’ He didn’t bother trying to hide his disdain. ‘You followed the Silver King? How?’ The outsider coughed. Then sneered.
‘You doggies always have a master to serve, don’t you? Maybe that’s why you think we all ought to be that way.’ He waved a weak hand in Skjorl’s face. ‘I happened by the Aardish Caves. You’ve heard of them haven’t you, doggy? Vishmir’s tomb, and they say the Silver King’s body was taken there too. I found a door to where he went.’
‘ How, shit-eater?’
The outsider held up one finger. ‘Sit on this, doggy.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I’m tired. I’m hungry. Get me food, doggy, or enjoy my silence.’
‘Your silence will be the sweeter,’ growled Skjorl, and the two of them settled back each onto their own end of the raft with Kataros between them. They lapsed into silence. The outsider fell asleep again. The Adamantine Man dozed. She kept herself awake — easy magic that — and watched them both from a half-trance. The lapping water lulled her, drew her mind away. Hours passed, many of them, turning into a day and then another while the three of them sat on their raft, drifting down the tunnel, doing their best to ignore one another, relieving themselves when they thought none of the others was looking and slowly getting even more hungry than they’d been before they left. Siff slipped further away, already weak from weeks of starving in his cell. There wasn’t anything she could do for him, not any more. When she asked the Adamantine Man how much longer the journey would be, he simply shrugged.
She wasn’t sure whether they were on the third day or the fourth since she’d escaped when the Adamantine Man suddenly moved. She watched him through lidded eyes. He was staring at her.
‘I know you’re not asleep, alchemist,’ he said after a moment. ‘Listen!’
She listened, but all she could hear was the sound of the water in the tunnel. ‘What?’
‘There’s a change. The water sounds different. We’re moving more slowly and the tunnel is growing wider. And look ahead.’
It took a moment for her to grasp what was different. Ahead, in the distance, the tunnel was dark, pitch dark. There was no more glow from the walls. She sat straighter.
‘What does it mean, alchemist?’
‘I don’t know. Do you?’
‘No.’
The darkness drew closer. As they entered it, Skjorl got up and climbed out of the raft. He struggled with it to the edge of the water and pulled it to a halt.
‘We walk,’ he said. He looked at Siff. ‘Him too.’
‘You’ll have to carry him again.’
Skjorl gave her a scornful look. Then he turned the raft over, tipping Siff into the water, and watched as he thrashed and spluttered. ‘Can’t touch him, remember,’ he said. ‘And look. He can stand on his own. Not as dead as he’d like you to think, alchemist.’
‘Toothworms to your arse, doggy.’ Siff shook himself and started squeezing the water out of his clothes. ‘Now I’m going to catch a cold.’
‘Best walk briskly then. Keep yourself warm.’ Skjorl spat in the water. He turned the raft back the right way and let it drift ahead of him on the end of its rope. Siff was already shaking; whatever the Adamantine Man thought, he wasn’t going to last for long if they had to walk. Then Skjorl would carry him, like it or not.
Skjorl let the raft lead the way, nosing and poking through the dark. For a while Siff struggled along behind them. Kataros could hear his footsteps splashing in the edge of the water, ragged and uneven like his breaths. He was getting worse, and quickly. They couldn’t have been going for more than ten minutes before he fell.
‘Stop!’
The Adamantine Man stopped. She could tell that because his feet ceased splashing. In the dark Kataros couldn’t tell whether he turned around. She thought probably not.
‘Listen to him. He can’t go on. You have to carry him.’
‘Then you must let me touch him.’
‘No. Put him on the raft then.’
The Adamantine Man laughed. ‘What, and have the temptation to let go of the rope?’
‘But you won’t.’ It wasn’t an order, not a command sunk into his blood. Simply knowledge that, however much the Adamantine Man despised and loathed them both, he was trapped by who he was just as much as the rest of them. Siff had shown them a ray of hope. Skjorl didn’t believe it, even she didn’t really believe it, but neither of them could let it go because it was all they had.
‘Just pull in the raft.’
Siff staggered with her help towards it. They both fumbled in the dark while the Adamantine Man was no help at all, but eventually Siff was sitting on it.
‘I’m cold,’ he said, but there was only so much Kataros could do with blood alone, and only so much of it going spare.
‘And I’m hungry,’ he said later, and there wasn’t much she could do about that either.
She had no idea how far they went in the dark. It seemed that most of a day must have passed, but darkness was deceptive and she knew that it had more likely been no more than an hour. The floor of the tunnel began to change under her feet. The walls changed too, from smooth to rough like a cave. They had to feel their way around obstacles in their path — boulders, columns and spires of stone, invisible in the dark. The water changed its sound as it wove between them, and then ahead came a first glimmer of light. The walls pressed in, the roof too, the water rushed faster, and then they were at an end and daylight was ahead, slitting through vines and creepers that masked the mouth of the tunnel like bars on a cage. The sound of rushing water grew louder.
Skjorl stopped. He tied the raft to a boulder and waded on towards the way out. When he came back he was smiling.
‘I know this place,’ he said. ‘The Ghostwater. There’s a waterfall. Pool at the bottom. Lots of rubble and stone. Valley’s steep and narrow here and the path’s hard, but it doesn’t go far and then you’re on the plains.’ He shrugged. ‘If the Fury isn’t flooding we could be in Farakkan in a few hours from here. Not that there’s much point. There won’t be anything left except black mud and a few bits of charred wood.’ He looked from side to side and then spoke with forced scorn. ‘Ghostwater was supposed to be haunted. Bad spirits.’ He shrugged. ‘So now what, alchemist? What do we do now?’
Kataros walked past him, as close to the waterfall as she could get. She couldn’t see much apart from the brightness of the daylight beyond the cave mouth.
‘There could be a dragon out there,’ warned Skjorl.
‘Why don’t you go and have a look?’
‘Is that a command, alchemist?’
She shook her head. ‘We should wait for nightfall.’
‘Yes.’ The Adamantine Man walked back through the cave, through the water and away from the falls. He was measuring his paces and by the time he stopped, he was lost in the darkness again. ‘Go no closer to the light than this,’ he said. ‘If there’s a dragon out there, its fire won’t reach you here.’
Kataros ignored him. She looked at Siff sitting on the raft. He was shivering. When she touched his skin, it was cold. He needed food and he needed warmth, and they were both almost close enough to be touched, just outside the cave. Where a dragon might be. She considered sending Skjorl out to find something for Siff to eat and maybe some firewood, but then thought better of it. A fire would make smoke and smoke could be seen. Instead, she dragged the outsider off the boat and up onto the dry floor of the cave and then wrapped herself around him. Her own warmth was all there was to be had.
She must have fallen asleep too, despite herself. When she opened her eyes again, the light outside had changed. Beside her, Siff was snoring. He was still cold but at least he wasn’t shivering. The only other sound was the roar of water. She had no idea where the Adamantine Man might be now. Asleep, if he had any sense.
She got up. Squeezing around the edge of the waterfall without being swept away turned out to be easier than it looked, once she brushed the tresses of trailing grass and vine away. Halfway up the side of the cave mouth was an old path, not much more than a worn-down ledge, but it kept her away from the water and took her out onto a steep hillside, craggy rocks poking out from a cover of long spiky grass. Some of the rocks had been columns once, pieces of an ancient building that must have fallen centuries ago. She frowned at that. The history she’d learned in the Palace of Alchemy didn’t allow for such things. There were places like the Pinnacles and Outwatch and Hejel’s Bridge and the other remnants from when the Silver Kings had walked the realms as one. And then after that there was nothing, nothing that wasn’t burned until the last half-god returned to tame the monsters and the blood-mages murdered him for his troubles.
She hurried past, watching the skies. Maybe it wasn’t as old as it looked. She had more to worry about now. Coming outside was stupid but it seemed like for ever since she’d seen the sun.
A stone tripped her. She stumbled and almost fell into a patch of fireweed. After she picked herself up, she stooped to pick it, careful to touch only the stalks and not the leaves. Fireweed, water and a drop of her own blood. A potion that would help Siff to stay warm.
‘It’s safe,’ said a voice above her, not more than ten feet away. She started, slipped and nearly fell off the path and tumbled down the hillside. The Adamantine Man was sitting on a rock almost close enough to touch her and she hadn’t even known he was there. A moment of panic staggered her — she hadn’t felt him through the blood-bond either — but when she looked for it, he was still there, still at the end of her reach. She hadn’t been paying attention, that was all.
His hand snaked down, an offer to pull her up the last few feet of the crags. Then it withdrew. He gave a wry smile. ‘Can’t touch, eh?’
She skirted around him and made her own way up. Her eyes flicked to the sky.
‘Oh don’t worry about them. They’ve got something to keep them busy.’ He pointed. ‘Look. Look carefully.’
She followed the line of his finger. There were dragons — just specks in the distance in the sky, but what else could they be? They were a mile away, maybe two, circling where Farakkan should have been. There might have been as many as twenty of them. Certainly there were more than a dozen.
She frowned. Dragons circling. She’d never seen them do that before, not unless they had a rider.
On the flood plains of the Fury beneath the dragons sat a castle where no castle had ever been built, welded to a vast slab of stone that simply shouldn’t have existed.
‘Now there’s a thing,’ said the Adamantine Man. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any point asking you what it is.’
As she watched, the castle moved.