Some two years before the Black Mausoleum
He almost missed it. The Yamuna Falls tumbled through a notch in a slope of rocky outcrops and tumbled stones that was almost a cliff. He didn’t see the path that zigzagged up beside it at first, overgrown and half forgotten, and when he did, he almost didn’t bother climbing it. Curiosity was what drove him in the end, that and what looked like rectangular cave mouths further up the slope, although when he reached them, they turned out to be slabs of jet-black stone that had slid down from above and landed askew.
The cliffs rose up high above the upper reaches of the river, but the path didn’t climb to the top; instead it crept round a perilous corner to follow the notch carved by the river. For a moment Siff looked straight down the falls from above, through the haze and spray into the pool below; this was where he’d fallen, the water that had saved his life.
Not thinking about the dragons. Not.
Beyond the overlook above the falls, the path became a ledge gouged from a sheer rock wall about the height of ten men above the level of the Yamuna. It went on for a hundred yards or so, and then the cliffs above softened and the path led him out onto a steep and unsteady slope of stones and boulders all piled so precariously on top of one another it seemed that even a single hard kick in the right place might bring the whole hillside crashing down onto the flattened open space below. There had been walls here, he thought, stone buttresses built to hold the slope, but they’d fallen, bringing a little landslide behind them. An immense flat-topped overhanging boulder jutted out where the path wound away from the river. If that went, Siff reckoned the whole hillside might come down.
The damage was fresh. He could see the gouges in the earth below where dragon claws had ripped and torn at the stones all around the clearing. And that was when he realised what this was — what it had once been, at least. An eyrie. Tiny, as eyries went, and it had been smashed flat and burned to cinders, but an eyrie nonetheless.
He picked his way down the slope — the path had gone along with the walls that had held it up — and wandered through the ruins. He’d lived in an eyrie once, although saying in one was a bit like saying that a kennelled dog lived in his master’s house. He’d been in one of the leaky ramshackle huts that clustered around its fringe, with the shepherds and the smiths and the carters and the leather workers and the saddle makers and the boot polishers and all the other people who didn’t really matter, the ones who weren’t dragon-lords or riders or alchemists or Scales. No one ever looked at the little people, and that was perfect for a man who smuggled in a sack full of Souldust now and then and came back out each time with a sack full of silver.
One thing he knew about eyries — they always had tunnels, places to shelter in case of attack by other riders. They were kept stocked with food and water and potions, with beds and blankets and everything a dragon-lord would need to stay comfortable for a day or two while his minions slaughtered some other lord’s minions until one side or the other discovered that they’d won. He blinked a few times, trying to believe his luck. The destruction was obviously recent, but there was no one here now. His ancestors had outdone themselves. The place was abandoned.
He took a moment to catch his breath and look around. The top of the high stone bluff behind him was covered in the ruins he’d seen from the beach below the waterfall. Near the bottom, half hidden by the recent rock slide, there was a cave; around the edges of the clearing were the shattered remains of buildings. That’s where the tunnel entrances were most likely to be, if they weren’t all buried under rubble. On the other side of the eyrie were more rocks, more huge boulders all tumbled on top of each other. When he looked more closely, he saw they’d been disturbed too. A stone the size of a village hall had toppled over and cracked, and behind where the stone had been was an opening too regular to be a cave, even if it was more round than square. But what gave it away most of all was the soft light that spilled out of it as twilight started to fall. It wasn’t the flickering of firelight, but the steady quiet light of an alchemist’s lamp. The sort of lamp that gave off no smoke. The sort of lamp that a dragon-lord would use to light his shelter.
The sun was setting. The skies were darkening. He was hungry, cold, thirsty, somehow still alive and he meant to stay that way. He crept inside, his stolen knife out in front of him, and then he paused. It was all too good to be true.
‘Hello!’ Silly to be calling out if there was no one here, but what if there was?
He walked softly along the tunnel. He’d been wrong about the light. He’d seen alchemist’s lamps before, once or twice, often enough to know what they looked like, cold and harsh and white. The light here was softer. It came from everywhere, from the walls and the roof and even the floor of the passage, as though the alchemists had mixed their concoctions into the stone itself. Now that was something Siff had never seen, never even heard of. There were probably lots of things that he’d never heard of that alchemists could do.
He tried not to think about the dragon by the waterfall staring down at him. The more time passed, the more he could believe it had been a vision, a hallucination, a touch of madness and not real at all.
The passage ran straight, sloping down under the ground, then opened up into a vast round chamber so large he could barely see the other side, even in the moonlight glow of the walls. The chamber floor also sloped. It was like the whole place, whatever it was, had been tipped slightly askew.
A ring of archways stood in the centre. It wasn’t what he’d expected to find, all this pointless decoration, and a man couldn’t eat archways. He ignored them and made his way around the edge of the chamber, looking for other ways out.
‘Hello?’ He tried again. Food, that was what he was after. The river would give him all the water he needed, but a good stash of food would set him on his way. With his hands swollen and next to useless, without a bow, that might be the difference between life and death. There were the dead men outside, if he had to, but dragon-rider food sounded infinitely better.
Did they have snappers in the Raksheh? He had no idea. They had wolves, he’d heard, but wolves he could handle. Wolves would leave a man alone unless they were desperate. Snappers were another matter. All those bodies would draw snappers like flies.
There were other passages, all like the one that had led him here. There were a lot of little round rooms, some larger halls, a few staircases, shafts, and every single one of them was utterly empty. There weren’t even any spiders or beetles and there certainly wasn’t anything to eat. The whole place was turning into a big waste of time. All he ever saw were archways, everywhere he went, carved into the walls with nothing on the other side except plain white stone, glowing softly back at him. Whoever had built this certainly liked them.
He hadn’t explored much more than a fraction of the place before he gave up. Outside, when he looked, it was dark now. There were other places to search, once it was light again, but stumbling around in the dark seemed foolish. Another night without food wouldn’t kill him, not yet. He went back to the first chamber he’d found, the one with the archways in a circle in the centre. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a dragon-lord’s shelter. No one had been down here for a very long time — how long he wasn’t sure, but years, decades probably. He was tired now, dead tired. He could go looking for food in the morning.
The archways drew him in. The light seemed brighter there, the air felt warmer. He lay down between them. If there were no animals then nothing would come and eat him while he slept. That was good. He hadn’t found any other ways out. You had to wonder, he thought, as he drifted to sleep, why a place like this was hidden away. Protecting something? Wasn’t there something in the Raksheh? Something about caves and an old ruin and a tomb. Vishmir? He hadn’t found Vishmir’s tomb, had he?
That was worth some thinking. Vishmir’s tomb? Never mind all that dust he’d lost, Vishmir had ruled the world. There’d be treasure, wouldn’t there? His eyes closed.
In the middle of the night he thought he woke up to find a tiny silver snake curled up on his chest. Its head was lifted, staring at him. He tried to move, but nothing worked. The snake stared and stared, and then instead of biting him, it slid up his chest and up his neck and pushed its head between his lips and forced its way into his mouth. He tried to scream but nothing happened. Afterwards he knew it was a dream, because the next thing he remembered was standing on a sea of liquid silver, looking up at a moon far larger than the moon he knew. He saw himself with his back to a range of mountains, while ahead of him the sky was dark with thousands of onrushing dragons. Beside him a man clad in silver raised a spear. He struck the earth with it and the ground split open into a chasm a mile wide and impossibly deep, and from it rose a sheet of fire, a wall so high it tore the clouds to pieces and turned even dragons away.
The dreams grew stranger still, but when Siff woke up, the memory of them faded, and only the snake and the silver sea and the fire remained, those and the feelings that came with them, deep and alien.
He got up from the floor and would have gone outside, except now the archways around him were like mirrors and there was no way out of their circle, and when he looked down, he realised he must still be dreaming, because tiny snakes of moonlight were curling from his ruined fingertips. They reached and strained and pulled him forward, until they touched the nearest mirror and the mirror became a gateway to another place, also filled with silver, and he was sucked inside, back to where he’d been before, standing on a silver sea with the giant moon above. He staggered back and tripped and something happened inside his head as he fell.
He woke up with a start, gasping and shaking, but there were no silver snakes curling from his fingers and the archways were merely the same stone they’d been the night before. He got to his feet and walked away and quietly swore, Vishmir’s tomb or not, that he would never return, not to this part. At least he didn’t feel hungry any more.
Outside he soaked up the bright warm sun and sucked in air sweet with the scent of pollen and flowers, so different from the biting autumn wind of the day before. He felt strangely good. His fingernails didn’t hurt now, nor the place where they’d branded him. He was thirsty, that was all. And he knew now exactly what he was going to do. Never mind dragons and tombs, what he was going to do before anything else was sort through the pile of bodies and do a proper job of it this time. Take whatever food, clothes, swords, knives, armour and anything else that he could salvage and then get away from here as fast as he could before the smell of blood drew in the snappers. Down the river, that would do. He thought for a bit about making a raft but he didn’t have an axe to chop wood, and anyway wasn’t some sort of monster supposed to live in the Yamuna, if that’s what this river was?
Riverbanks were good for food though. Animals came for water. Things grew there, fruits and berries and such like. Maybe he could try fishing. And then he’d get out of the forest and find his way to the Silver City and to the court of the Harvest Queen. Aliphera? Or was she the one who’d fallen off her dragon? Not that it mattered — whoever it was, he’d tell them that he’d found Vishmir’s Tomb, take whatever gold they’d give him for showing them the way and leave them to it. Or maybe he’d find some band of outlaws. Yes, that would be better still, a gang of sell-swords. He could bring them here, show them the way in and see what they brought out. Take his share and be done. Just as long as he didn’t have to go back in there on his own again.
The sun was high in the sky. It felt warm, even though the year was turning to winter. The heat cheered him. Best to make the most of it. If there was one thing the Raksheh didn’t see very much, it was the sun. Most of the time, if it wasn’t raining, it was shrouded in mist and cloud. The sun gave him a sense that he might not die out here after all.
Ancestors but he felt good.
He walked back up to the smashed eyrie. It all looked much more overgrown than he remembered. When he’d first seen it, he could have sworn that the destruction had been fresh, yet now he could see he’d been wrong and it had happened some time ago. Months, at least. But then it had been late when he’d climbed past the waterfall. The sun had been low in the sky, the shadows long and deceiving and he’d still been dazed and amazed that he was even alive. Beaten and battered and not quite himself. Maybe that was it. Would explain why there was no one here.
He picked his way up the bluffs, careful not to disturb any stones, and followed the path above the river to the falls and then down the other side. The water was flowing faster today, and a lot higher too. Rains in the mountains in the night, maybe?
Eventually he reached the bottom. Where there ought to have been a pile of bodies, there was just grass. Grass and, when he looked carefully around, a few old bones, almost buried. A boot. Pieces of leather, worn and cracked, here and there. A skull. All almost lost in the thick grass.
He looked at his fingers again, looked at them properly this time. His nails were still missing but otherwise they were healed. Completely. The seeping scabs were gone.
His hair kept falling in his eyes. It was long. Hadn’t been long before.
He tore off his shirt. Not his shirt, but the shirt he’d stolen from a dead man the day before. The brand was an old scar, long healed.
He stopped then and looked more closely at the forest around him. Everything was different. Yesterday, autumn had been coming. The leaves had been starting to turn and there were berries on the bushes. Today there were no berries; instead there were flowers. The leaves on the trees were all green, and the scent in the air was of the last trace of spring blossom.
While he’d slept whole seasons had passed. And he hadn’t the first idea what had happened to him.