Twenty days before the Black Mausoleum
Siff watched the Adamantine Man fall. He couldn’t look anywhere else, thinking, I did that? Except surely he hadn’t. He couldn’t have. The idiot had an axe across his back, the haft of it poking up behind his head. All Siff had done was put one and one together, given him little headache and maybe lowered the bastard’s guard for a moment, long enough for someone to kill him.
Outsiders? He peered at the three remaining soldiers, wondering if the Adamantine Man was right. They spoke strangely, not quite like men from the mountains and yet with a familiar lilt. There was only one reason Siff knew for an outsider from the mountains to be down here on the plains — because some dragon-lord was taking him to Furymouth to sell in the slave markets. He sank to the ground and bowed his head, hiding his face. On the whole he didn’t give a fig who did what to whom, as long as they didn’t do it to him.
Two of them jumped on the Adamantine Man and tied him up. They relaxed after that. Siff was more a threat to himself than anyone else and they obviously thought much the same of the alchemist. They were wrong, but that was soldiers for you and Siff wasn’t about to correct them. Maybe these would be better than the last ones he’d met or maybe not, but they couldn’t be worse; and even if they were, what was he going to do? Blown about like a leaf in a storm, that’s what he was. Story of his crappy little life, from the day his stupid whore had sold him out. He still knew what he knew, though. A secret good enough to save his life twice already.
The soldiers marched them off across the muddy fields. He could barely walk, staggering and stumbling as they pushed and shoved him on, but he didn’t dare fall. They wouldn’t carry him, not like the alchemist’s doggy. They’d leave him.
They stopped in the shadow of a black shape that blotted out half the sky, at the edge of a place where the fields glowed with a soft purple light. He didn’t understand what could do that, but by then he was too lost in his own misery to think. They waited there and let him sit down, and he must have dozed off because the next thing he knew he was being hauled into a wooden cage that jerked and tugged itself up into the air, and, Ooh gods! Ooh ancestors! There was only one place he could be, the worst place. He twisted and pulled, but it was too late.
‘No!’ He pushed and punched. ‘No!’
Someone had his arms and forced him down, face against mud-streaked boards, boot on the back of his neck. Still he struggled. He’d been in a place like this before. In a cage, carried in the talons of a dragon, on his way to Furymouth to be sold as a slave.