Nineteen days before the Black Mausoleum
He could understand a battle. Tunnels that glowed with their own light, bronze statues that didn’t go green with age and came to life when you touched them, castles that floated above the ground, shit-eaters with silvery snakes in their fingers, none of that made any sense. Alchemist business, not his. But a battle, that was something else. A dragon fight, that was everything he’d been made for, and he’d been here before, in Outwatch, in Sand, in Bloodsalt and Samir’s Crossing. All of them filled with screams, the earth quaking as the dragons destroyed everything in reach, stones falling from tunnel roofs, dust choking the air. Here the shouting was more distant and so far the ground wasn’t shaking. A matter of time, that was all.
He stooped through the door that the dead soldiers had left open. The shit-eater was unconscious again, eyes rolling behind half-closed lids, muttering and moaning to himself. Skjorl might have asked the alchemist what she’d done to him, but he was easier to get along with like this. That and he simply didn’t care. Outside the door there was his sword and there was his axe. Dragon-blooded. Simply propped against the wall. Holding it made him whole again.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Out,’ he said. Down the passage back the way they’d come. Back towards the outside.
‘Shouldn’t we go the other way? Aren’t we safer underground?’
‘No.’ Everyone thought that. ‘At Outwatch the dragons sent their little ones down the holes.’ Hatchlings. A few days old was enough. They’d rip a bear to pieces, probably a snapper too, never mind a man. All skittering claws and curling limbs and wings and teeth and tails like whips. ‘Scrawny, with the hunger of a wolverine. Then there was the fire. In a tunnel there’s no place to run, no place to hide. You just die.’
The door to the outside was open. Grey clouds muted the daylight. It was raining, and most of the castle was hidden in mist. Warm mist. Steam. Mostly mist was good. Mist was a place to hide. He glanced up at the sky. Where the mist broke he could see dragons. Looked like dozens of them.
Three men burst out of the fog, running like their tails were on fire, yelling their heads off. If they realised who Skjorl and Kataros were, they didn’t let it bother them. Skjorl pulled the alchemist out of the way, sideways along the wall. Fast.
‘We didn’t-’
Didn’t hear the rest of what the alchemist said. Didn’t need to. We didn’t come this way. No. But the shriek from the mist, so loud it staggered him, was all the explanation she was going to get. Over his shoulder he saw a shape, a head and a neck, long and vast, nothing more than a darkness in the haze. The mouth opened and the cloud lit up. Fire poured in torrents. The head turned towards them.
The air flashed and shook. A thunderclap shook the castle. ‘Run, woman!’ He looked for a shield, anything.
The sky darkened. Another shape plunged through the mist over Skjorl’s head. A second dragon. He cringed. Couldn’t help it, dropped the shit-eater and covered his head. Pointless, but the second dragon wasn’t interested in him. It smashed into the first one and the two of them rolled away across the sky.
‘Ancestors!’ He couldn’t help himself. Never seen anything like it. A dragon attacking another dragon?
‘Come on!’ The alchemist. Couldn’t see her through the mist but following the wall took him to her quickly enough.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked, but she had no better idea than he did.
Steps up the wall. He could see them. Not the steps they’d used coming in, but still steps.
‘Stay!’ He dropped the shit-eater at the alchemist’s feet and ran up. The smoke and fog were beneath him now and he could see the dragons in the sky again. A score of them at a quick count. The air smelled of smoke. Most of the castle yard was filled with it, smoke or steam or more likely a mix of both. A dragon swooped down towards him from the other side of the castle. It levelled out. Its mouth opened and a torrent of flames poured over the far side of the castle yard, scouring it, blasting smoke and steam aside. It turned away. Over on the far wall something glowed brightly, some strange towering device of glass and gold.
He ran down the other side of the wall, over to the abrupt edge of the eyrie. The stone beneath him shook. Another thunderclap split the air. The sky behind him flashed. No sign of any cage like the one that brought them here. There was a dragon though. Coming towards him. Right at him. He looked at the cliff in front of him and the slope of the wall behind. There was nowhere to go. There was something oddly familiar about the beast. About the beat of its wings.
The dragon from Bloodsalt.
Another thunderclap. Lightning dazzled the air. For a moment he couldn’t think. Took a quick step forward, out to the edge. Stared at the dragon and the winding silver coils of the Fury sprawled across the plains below. But no, there really was nowhere to go.
He closed his eyes. Hung his head and waited for the fire to come. Damn you, dragon! Damn you! Not that an Adamantine Man was supposed to care, but for the first time he could remember, he wasn’t ready. Not now.
Another dragon screamed. A wall of hot air slammed him back, knocking him down. But it didn’t burn, wasn’t fire. The monster from Bloodsalt passed over his head, blotting out the sky, except it wasn’t one dragon now but two, wrapped around each other, claws and tails twisted together, teeth snapping. The wind of their wings picked him up as they passed, threw him like a doll back up the slope of the wall. Their tails clipped the top of it, shattering the stone. Boulders as big as his head hurled through the air and rained down around him. A length of chain dangled between the dragons, links as big and thick as his arm. It slashed behind them, curling and writhing in the wind like a snake. Slicing and shattering whatever it touched.
Then they were past, tipping down towards the ground, smashing into the midst of the castle, gouging a trail of destruction and then bouncing up again, splitting apart. The one from Bloodsalt turned and climbed. The other one vanished down towards the plains, wings outstretched.
The dragon from Bloodsalt. Skjorl watched it turn. There wasn’t any doubt. At least now he knew what colour it was. Gold. A real prize. He spat. Some consolation.
He picked himself up. Ran back up the wall before the dragon could return and raced down the steps. Grabbed the alchemist and kept running, taking what shelter he could. Not that it would help much if the dragon was still after him.
The dragon that had killed Vish. It filled his blood. Stay here with me, dragon, and I’ll find a way to crash this fortress on your head!
He was ready for the fire, but it never came. They ran through a choking wall of smoke, a cloud of scalding steam, more smoke, mist, but no fire. And then they were at the steps, the ones that would take them back to the cage and down to the ground.
And then?
He ran up, the shit-eater still over his back, light as a feather. The cage and its crane were there, what was left of them. Smashed to splinters. The rope was there too. Huge and heavy, its coils sprawled around its shattered pulleys. Scorched but not burned through.
And then?
The question wouldn’t let go. What happens when you get to the bottom? When the dragon from Bloodsalt is still looking for you and you have nowhere to hide? Because there was no doubt. It remembered. Its eyes had never left him.
Amid the ruin of the crane he found the end of the cage rope, still spliced into a loop around a cracked beam of wood. Dragged it to the edge of the rock and pushed it over and dodged out of the way as the rope’s weight dragged it down, heavy loops of it flipping and squirming like eels in a jar.
Another thunderbolt, another flash of lightning and a dragon fell out of the sky, its wings broken, screaming until it smashed into the castle yard. The wall trembled. The alchemist staggered. She reached out, steadied herself on his arm to stop herself falling, then jumped away as though she’d been stung.
‘I have to stay here,’ he told her.
She looked at him as though he was mad. ‘No.’
‘There’s a dragon here I’ve seen before.’ The one that had crashed into the castle? No, that had been a darker colour with flashes of metallic green. ‘It knows me.’
She laughed.
Skjorl shrugged. He pointed down the wall. ‘You can climb down.’ He didn’t know whether the rope reached the ground or not. Hadn’t thought to check.
‘And him?’ She pointed to Siff.
‘You wake him up and make him climb too.’ She wasn’t going to carry him, that was for sure, and there wasn’t anything he could use to make a harness, no other rope to lower him down.
‘Look at him!’ The alchemist screamed in his face. And there they were, the fingers inside his skull again. ‘You get him down. I don’t care how, but you do that.’
‘A dragon here is hunting me,’ he said again, in case that would help her understand. ‘It’ll find me. Won’t take it long. It wants to kill me. If you’re with me, it’ll kill you too. I can throw your shit-eater over the edge if you like.’ The thought made him smile. ‘See if he bounces. Would amount to much the same.’ The castle shook. Another crash of thunder loud enough to make him cringe; another flash as light filled the air.
‘Get. Him. Down!’
His body jerked with the force of the command. He shrugged. Without a choice any more, he picked up the shit-eater and arranged him carefully over his shoulders. Arms and one leg wrapped in front of him so that both his hands were free. Then carefully down the slope of the wall back to the wreckage of the crane. He peered over the edge.
Stupid.
The fortress was moving, slowly, dragging the end of the rope through the fields below, vanishing under the castle’s bulk. He lay down and swung his legs over the edge. It was higher than it had been before, or maybe it just seemed that way. Two hundred feet or more to the ground now.
Stupid stupid stupid. Dangle from a rope in the middle of the air in the middle of a dragon fight? And one of them hunting me? Stupid beyond belief.
He took hold of the rope and slid over the edge. With luck the shit-eater would fall off. If that happened, well then good riddance to him. Once over the side, he clung on to the rope with both hands and walked down the purple-veined slab of stone under the castle until he was dangling over empty air and the shit-eater was still wrapped around his shoulders. He squeezed his legs around the rope and let himself slide the rest of the way to the ground as fast as he dared. As fast as he could without shredding himself. They landed hard, sprawling and tumbling apart, rolling in the mud. Easy. Easier than he’d thought.
Skjorl took a moment then, mostly to be amazed that he wasn’t dead, that no dragon had paused from its fight to come and snatch this little morsel just hanging in the air. But none of them had, and when he looked up, the alchemist was almost on top of him. She fell off the end of the rope, staggered, slipped in the mud and fell. He took a step towards her and stopped. When she got back to her feet, she was shaking all over.
‘I thought you might fall,’ he said. He meant it as a compliment that she hadn’t.
‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ she spat at him.
The castle moved ponderously over their heads, burying them in shadow as black as night, lit up by the flicker of the purple lightning that flashed along the underside of the stone. The rope dragged through the dirt, thick as his wrist.
He tried again. ‘I can’t stay with you. I want to, but I can’t. There’s a dragon here that wants me. When it finds me, it’ll kill everyone who’s near.’
He felt her looking inside him, searching for the lie beneath his words, but there wasn’t one. Every word perfectly true.
She didn’t like it. ‘Leave me your sword,’ she snapped.
He gave her his sword, belt and scabbard and all, and tapped the back of his head. ‘Let me go.’
She looked at him as though he was mad. ‘Don’t be stupid.’ And turned her back on him, struggling with the sword and trying to lift the shit-eater up out of the mud all at the same time. Skjorl hesitated. But no, better for all of them that they part. Best to climb the rope back into the fortress. Lure the monster of Bloodsalt away.
He slung Dragon-blooded back over his shoulder. It could come after him if it wanted. Let his enemies fight each other. He could hide among them for days if he had to. Let the alchemist go. Wouldn’t last long without him and then he’d be free. Strange how he felt about that. Not gleeful at all. Sad, if anything, but it had to be this way. Best for them all.
Climbing up was a lot harder than climbing down, even without a shit-eater on his back. At least there were no dragons swooping on him. The air still shook to the occasional clap of thunder, but the battle looked to be over, the attacking dragons driven back. Would be worth learning how the men in the fortress had managed that. Maybe he could do something useful after all.
At the top, the smoke and the mist were clearing. There were still dragons, but they were high overhead or specks in the distance. He took a moment to look about, then climbed to the top of the sloping wall, careful not to be seen. Hardly any other soldiers around, none on the walls and only a very few below. Almost everything was smashed or burned, all the wooden shacks he’d seen the night before, the fire pits, everything. In the middle of the carnage was a dragon, sprawled across the ruins, the shimmering green one he’d seen fall. Both wings broken. A lot of other bones too, and it wasn’t moving. Eyes were open though. Below, closer to him than to the dragon, carefully out of reach of its fire, a couple of dozen soldiers clustered together. They wore dragon-scale; when their words drifted up to him from the bottom of the wall, he could understand them clearly. He listened, amazed, but there was no doubt. Adamantine Men, all of them. He almost called out, but then heard another voice, the man who carried the golden knife, who had somehow made him tell everything he knew, and so Skjorl hesitated, and then stayed quiet and watched instead. The man with the golden knife walked towards the dragon. He went with care, came from behind and moved with purpose. Stayed well clear of the dragon’s tail and kept a large shield — dragon-scale, Skjorl supposed — close to hand. The man reached the back of the dragon’s head.
Skjorl squinted. He couldn’t see what the man was doing. Fiddling with something. He saw the flash of a knife. Whatever he did, when the man came back, he wasn’t careful at all.
‘You can kill it now,’ he said, and disappeared into one of the passages that ran under the walls. The Adamantine Men shouldered their axes and picked up their shields. They closed on the dragon with the same care. As they reached its head they fanned out, but the dragon didn’t move. It just watched them.
The axes came out. Skjorl felt a surge of glee as they fell. His hand went behind him to rest on Dragon-blooded’s shaft. He understood, as only another Adamantine Man could understand, what a rare victory this was. No special rituals for killing a dragon. You took your chances as they came. Mostly you died trying and even if you managed to kill one, usually you died at the claws of another moments later. Like when Vish had gone, crushed. Or else burned. That was the way of being an Adamantine Man. So he watched them kill the dragon, watched its blood stain the stones and watched them leave, and felt a soaring joy. It would burn now from the inside, getting hotter and hotter for days if not weeks until its flesh and bone crumbled to ash and all that was left were scales and a few scorched bones from its wings. Scales for armour, bones for bows. No one had been able to harvest a dead dragon since the Adamantine Palace had burned. But these men would.
Amid the envy and the glee, he felt a pang of something else.
Blood, staining the stones. Dragon blood.
He grinned to himself, a huge grin, and started looking among the ruins for what he would need.