Some two years before the Black Mausoleum
The dragon took its time leaving the valley; when it did, it flew slowly and carefully as though it understood how fragile a burden it carried. It wound its way up over a narrow pass. A bitter wind tore through the cage, snapping and biting at the slaves pressed against the front. There were struggles. Men killed each other, fighting not to be in the teeth of that wind. Perhaps on another day they might have shared, taken it in turns to be burned with cold and then huddled among the others until they were warm again. But this was not that other day, and so it fell to fighting and the strongest forced the weakest to the front, where the weakest duly died and became nothing more than a shield for the rest. Siff kept out of it. Stayed at the back. There were old men in the cage, frail servants from the eyrie, not the usual outsider youths that the dragon-riders took. The old were the ones to be sacrificed, not him. Truth be told, he probably didn’t have any more strength to him than they did, but he had the look, the eyes of someone who’d killed and would kill again. And he would too. He’d have fought to the death not to be pressed into the jagged nails of that wind. He didn’t shout, didn’t bother to speak since no one could hear a thing over the roar of the rushing air, just looked. That was enough.
The fighting stopped in time. The ones left alive sat pressed together, huddled, holding on to each other, trying to keep warm. The ones at the front were dead by now so they didn’t complain. The ones at the sides clenched their fists and their teeth and shivered, slowly falling into themselves as the cold took hold. Even at the back Siff couldn’t feel his feet any more. Not feeling his hands would have been a blessing, but no, his fingers burned with a pain even worse than when the eyrie torturers had pulled his nails out. Did fingernails grow back? He didn’t know. Did it matter? Up in the howling wind it hardly seemed important. What mattered was that they hurt.
His consciousness slipped away now and then. He kept his teeth clenched, trying to stay awake as long as he could, waiting for the ones around him to fade and then wriggling behind them so that they took more of the cold and he took a share of their warmth. At some point they flew though a blanket of cloud. They were going down, from the bitter high mountain skies through the grey shroud over the Raksheh into the warmer air above the trees. The cloud was a special cold, but afterwards, once they were beneath it, the wind wasn’t quite as biting any more and instead of snowcapped mountains, the land he could see was a deep, dark green, pinched and wrinkled like an old man’s skin. The Raksheh. For a second or two he laughed to himself — it was certainly a quicker way to get where he’d been going than all that tedious trekking north to Hanzen’s Camp and then finding a boat down the Fury.
The Raksheh rain started. A hail of knives that battered even the strongest of them into silence. Siff closed his eyes. There was a valley down there, distant, down among the green hills, shrouded in mist. He saw it now and then, as the cage swung that way. The Yamuna. That was the river that went through the Raksheh. He thought about Sashi, and how he hoped he’d stuck her with that knife he’d thrown. He didn’t have the words for how he hated her for selling him out. Gold would have rained out of the sky for him in Furymouth. Now it was gone, all gone, because of her, and he was going to die and meet his ancestors.
Ancestors. Barely remembered faces, burned by dragons years ago. Strange how he could remember his mother’s face more clearly now that ever before. His mother’s face and his father’s voice.
The cage swung suddenly sideways, tipped and tumbled them on top of each other. He gasped and looked about, couldn’t feel anything except the press of bodies on him. The ground was racing up, getting closer much too fast. He tried to wriggle free but the crush held him like glue. Rocks and stones and trees were flying up to smash him and he couldn’t move. He screwed up his face and screamed.
The cage lurched again. The weight on top of him was suddenly crushing. His ribs creaked. He felt all his breath pressed out of him in one long gasp. Wood groaned and popped.
And snapped, and the cage fell into pieces and he was falling.
Bodies flailed around him. Four dragons swirled down from above. He saw a rider ripped from his saddle and cheered to himself. Good to die with a last happy memory. Then something hit him in the back, tearing his skin, sending him spinning. He tipped over and saw water, a waterfall. The spray doused him, shocked him; he bounced off the falling torrent and then the water took him and wrapped its arms and its thunder around him and sucked him into darkness, and that should have been the end of that.
When he opened his eyes again, he was on a muddy grassy riverbank. He coughed, spluttered, vomited up a gout of water then rolled over, clutching himself. His insides were frozen stiff, but the air on his skin was strangely warm.
There was a dragon looking down at him. A dusky grey one. He screamed. As screams went, it was feeble and pathetic, but he gave it the best he could muster. It ended with more coughing and spluttering and sicking up water into the grass.
Death. In the real world he was still somewhere in the water, drowning. This? Having a dragon meet you in the afterlife made a sort of sense.
The dragon stared at him as though he was a fish that had somehow flipped itself out of a pond and was now flapping helplessly on the shore. There were other dragons too. Four of them all together. One was the dragon that had been carrying the cage. The other three seemed somehow different. They had a purpose to them. They were precise and methodical, picking bodies off the ground and piling them up together.
It slowly dawned on him that none of them had riders.
Are you poisonous?
He had no idea what that thought was doing in his head. It wasn’t his, not that he could make into any sense at least, but since it was in his head, he supposed it must have been. Poisonous? Was he poisonous? What did that mean?
Do you have dragon poison inside you?
Dragon poison? When had he ever heard of such a thing?
What of the others?
Others? What others? He slapped himself around the head. The dragon was still staring at him. Then it picked him up.
I am a dragon, said the voice inside his head, and you are nothing. You are not dead. You are food.
He fainted.
When he opened his eyes again, he was back on the ground, still on the riverbank. The dragons had gone. He blinked and looked around and then blinked some more. Still gone.
Must have imagined it then. He took a deep breath. What had happened, he decided, was that the waterfall had broken his fall. He’d been washed up on the bank of the river, half-drowned, and the rest had been a hallucination. Or maybe he was still up in the air, freezing slowly to death in the wind, and for some reason he’d gone mad.
Hallucination didn’t explain the neat pile of bodies that his imaginary dragons had made. Being mad, well, if he was mad then none of this was real anyway so he might as well get up and have a look at them.
Maybe I did that while I was delirious?
Probably not, since he was still tied up, trussed the way he’d been when Gold Cloak had shoved him in the cage. If anything, being soaked in freezing rain and water had made the ropes tighter. He could barely stand. If he was mad and none of this was real, he might at least have had the decency to have untied himself. So perhaps not mad either.
The pile of bodies reminded him uncomfortably of the charred corpses back at the village, the one he’d betrayed. He blinked and stared at the river for a while. The air was cold now, not warm like it had been when he’d seen the dragon. The waterfall was a few hundred yards away. At least he was out of the wind.
He was cold.
What could make a dragon crash?
No, that was a thing not to think about. The thing to think about was that he was alive, barely, and he wasn’t in a slave cage any more and there wasn’t a dragon carrying him to the pens in Furymouth and he wasn’t about to be sold or murdered in his sleep. The thing to think about was that he was going to starve to death right here, wherever here was, if he didn’t die of cold first. Or of all the bits that hurt, which was almost everything.
Shelter.
His ribs and his back hurt, almost as though something had coiled around him, crushing him, pulling him out of the water without much regard to whether anything got broken in the process. Another thing not to think about. He staggered to the pile of bodies instead. It was messy. They largely looked like what you’d expect if you took a few dozen men and then scattered them from the sky across a landscape of giant rocks and boulders. Among them he saw a flash of gold. He had to kick bodies — bits of bodies as well — out of the way since his hands were tied, but there he was, Gold Cloak. Or half of him, anyway. He had his head and his shoulders and his nice cloak and his ribs and then his snapped spine sticking out through a mess of guts and bloody scraps of flesh.
For the first time in a good few days Siff smiled. He kicked about in the pile some more. Eventually he found a dragon-rider’s leg. You could tell it came from a rider because of the boot. It was a nice boot, but nowhere near as precious as the knife kept tucked inside it. Riders always kept a knife in each boot. No one had ever told him why, but that’s the way it was. Getting the knife out took a while. Jamming it in between a couple of rocks took longer, fraying the ropes that bound him longer still, but he did it, and then he was free.
Free and cold and hungry. But free!
He shouted it out to the stones around him, not caring if there were any other dragon-riders here now, stretched and rubbed his hands. He was cold and he was hungry, but he was an outsider born to the mountain forests and cold and hunger had been his friends for as long as he could remember. He had a knife and among the rocks and boulders around the waterfall he could see what looked like caves. Up above was some sort of ruin. If he could ignore, for a moment, the great gouges that dragon claws had taken out of the earth and even out of the stones, he might think he could survive here.
First things first. He went through the pile of bodies and found himself a decent pair of boots, threw off his wet clothes and took what he could to wrap around himself. Gold Cloak’s cloak finished it off. After that he started looking for anything else he could find. There was a rider halfway up a tree by the top of the falls. His head was crushed to a smear and one of his arms was missing, but the armour he wore was mostly intact. Siff didn’t like to think about how he’d ended up in a tree. An idle fling from a dragon’s tail, perhaps?
No. Don’t think about it.
He didn’t find any blankets, nor any weapons except for another knife from the same rider as gave up his armour. By then the sun was getting low. He was still cold. The hunger in his belly was a tight knot, clenched in on itself, but he could come back to that. Dead people made good eating in a pinch. What he needed first was some shelter. Maybe, if he could start one, a fire.
That was when he found the eyrie.