Thirteen days before the Black Mausoleum
She sat beside the Adamantine Man. He was snoring. Drooling. She had a knife in one hand, the fingers of the other on the pulse of his neck. It would be so easy. A little cut in the right place, he’d bleed out and never wake up. She sat there and thought it through. Thought about how he deserved it and how she’d feel after it was done. Would it change anything?
‘You don’t need him any more,’ whispered a little voice that might have been Siff, except when she turned to look the outsider was sound asleep so it must have been her own little voice.
He wasn’t ever going to change. Not that it mattered now. He’d served her need for him. The question was whether she left him alive or left him dead. She reached into her blood and looked for the ties that bound him to her. They were still there, still strong. It must have been the wine then. He’d been scratching at his head while she’d been trying to make him stop. Was that it? Had he been too drunk to notice the screaming in his head commanding him to leave her alone? No one had ever told her that that was how it worked, but then alchemists never got drunk. Most of them. Except for her.
After a while she got up, took the last bottles of wine and smashed them. She shook Siff.
‘Get up.’
He rolled over, so tightly tied he could barely move. His eyes were alert. He hadn’t been asleep after all.
‘Get up,’ she said again.
‘You’ll have to untie me. I can’t move. Good with knots, your doggy.’
She looked at what Skjorl had done, but she couldn’t see where to start. In the end she simply cut the outsider free, everything except his hands, which stayed tied behind his back.
‘I can’t exactly walk like this,’ he complained.
She poured a little water into an old glass flask. Then cut herself and dripped a drop of blood into it. She made sure Siff could see everything. ‘Drink?’
‘And make me like your doggy? No thanks.’
‘You were no better than him last night.’
He looked away. ‘Wasn’t I? Thing is, I don’t remember.’
‘You were… You weren’t you.’ She turned away too. Thing was, she wouldn’t have untied him anyway, and he already had her blood inside him.
‘It happens sometimes.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know why. I don’t want to hurt you. You got me out of there.’
He was lying. She was a means to an end, that was all. She could see that in the way his eyes gleamed, in the little smile that played at the corner of his lips when he glanced at the Adamantine Man, still snoring on the floor. A means to an end. That cut both ways though.
‘Don’t honey-tongue me, Siff.’ She climbed the steps and pushed open the trapdoor. The last greys of dusk filled the cellar.
Siff spat on Skjorl with careful precision. ‘You just going to leave him?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know he won’t let you. He’ll come after us when he wakes up. You know that. He’ll cover the ground faster too. He knows where we’re going. He will find us. You can’t just leave him.’
‘Yes, I can. You can come with me now or we can wait until he wakes up. You choose.’
‘I saw what he was like.’
‘I saw what you were like.’
Siff ran his tongue over his teeth. ‘You’re an alchemist. Suppose that means you haven’t ever killed someone. I could do it for you, if you want. Doesn’t bother me.’
‘Yes. I’m an alchemist and I deal in blood every day. I know exactly where to cut a man, Siff. If I wanted to kill him, I’d do it myself.’ She dealt in her own blood, never the blood of another. That was a line an alchemist never crossed, the line between alchemy and blood-magic. She’d given herself the chance to bleed out the Adamantine Man already and found she hadn’t the will to do it. Letting Siff do it for her now seemed weak.
‘If you say so.’ Siff shrugged and Kataros shook her head. The outsider was trouble enough on his own. Neither of them understood what he had inside him and neither of them could control it, but even without that she had to believe he’d turn on her the first chance he got to escape. Skjorl had been her shield.
She gave the Adamantine Man a last glance as she stood at the top of the steps. ‘Are you coming then?’
Siff struggled his way up the ladder. ‘This would be a lot easier with hands.’
‘The Yamuna will lead us to the Raksheh.’ They’d be under the trees by dawn and the canopy of the Raksheh would hide them from the dragons. They could walk by day and sleep at night again. They’d follow the river to the Aardish Caves, however far that was, and then Siff would show her what he’d found. Maybe they’d fight each other for it or maybe they wouldn’t, but they had to get there, that was the first thing.
She looked about. Once Siff was out of the cellar, she closed the trapdoor and piled stones from the ruins on top of it. There were plenty of them.
‘I’d help if I had hands,’ said Siff. Kataros ignored him. She piled as many stones as she thought would hold the Adamantine Man inside the cellar, and then piled on as many again until the door was nearly buried.
‘Would have been kinder to kill him with that knife,’ said Siff when she was done.
‘I don’t mean to kill him. Only to slow him. I don’t think you’re right about him following us, but just in case.’ She pushed past him. ‘We’ll go as fast as we can, if you don’t mind.’
Siff followed her. ‘I’d walk quicker with hands,’ he said.
‘There are a lot if things you could do better with hands. Most of them won’t help us.’
‘When I need a piss, are you going to hold it for me?’
He was close behind her, so when she suddenly stopped and turned, he almost walked right into her. She had her knife pressed to his throat while he was still blinking in surprise. For a moment she almost did it. Alchemists are considered in all things. An alchemist acts with thought, always, never on impulse. Which had been her downfall, had been a flaw in her large enough that they’d never have made her what she was if the Adamantine Palace hadn’t burned, if Hyrkallan hadn’t killed half the order at the Pinnacles, if she hadn’t been the one to dive down into the waters of the Fury and pick the Adamantine Spear out of a dead dragon’s mouth, if any of those things hadn’t been so.
And suddenly, out of nowhere, she was having to bite back tears for the one other outsider she’d known, for Kemir.
‘Don’t,’ she hissed. ‘Just don’t.’ She put the knife away slowly, then turned and started to walk again. ‘When you need a piss, you can work it out for yourself or you can piss in your breeches.’
‘That’s not very nice.’
‘No.’
There wasn’t much to be said after that. They walked in silence under the clouds. A drizzle started, a cold cloying dampness that stuck to Kataros and wrapped her up as though trying to steal all her warmth. No matter. She had potions now, powders and herbs and blood and water, everything she needed. She fed a drop or two to Siff. He was slow, slower than Skjorl had been, even when he’d had the outsider on his back.
‘You want him to catch us?’ she asked as the trees either side of the Yamuna grew thicker and taller.
‘I’d walk quicker with hands,’ was all he said.
For once, as the sun came up, Kataros was awake. The two of them sat, carefully apart, either side of a tiny fire. The trees were huge, their trunks as wide as a man with his arms outstretched. They reached up towards the sun and the clouds, sheer pillars of wood a hundred feet or more from the ground to the first branches, and this was only the fringe of the forest. High overhead the leaves were so thick that they all but blotted out the light. Daytime in the Raksheh was a perpetual twilight.
‘I haven’t seen fire for months.’ Kataros watched Siff’s eyes follow the smoke as it rose. The warmth was delicious.
‘Smoke calls dragons,’ he said.
‘In the deep caves it’s choking death.’
On the ground around them almost nothing grew. The earth was covered with a thick layer of dead leaves, moisture from the rain seeping through the canopy above. Here and there, in the few places where the sun broke through, bushes and saplings grew together, fighting for the light. In the darker damper places mushrooms grew instead, some of them as tall as a man. Some of them, she knew, were poisonous. Others were edible. The Raksheh was a place for alchemists. Alchemists and outsiders.
‘There’s going to be people here, most likely,’ said Siff after a bit. ‘Maybe they could help us.’
Company. She yearned for that, but what would a tribe of outsiders do if they found themselves an alchemist? Nothing good. ‘If there are people here, we will hide from them.’
‘Don’t think you can. Maybe if you move fast and far enough. Get further up the river. I don’t know how many months ago it was I came down from the caves, but there weren’t any people living by the river until I got close to the edge of the forest. It was all wild up there. Keep going for two or three days and hope for the best.’ He smiled happily. ‘If you ask me, I don’t think there’s much you can do about it. Just be thankful you left doggy behind. They’d kill him.’
‘They’ll kill me too, won’t they?’
His smile grew wider. Here it came. ‘Well now. Maybe they might. Or maybe, since they’re more my sort of people, I could talk them out of it. If I had hands.’ She tried to reach through the blood-bond and found nothing, just as it had been since the night in the old alchemists’ cellar. The thing Siff had inside him, even when it was asleep, kept her out.
Siff sniffed. ‘Not being all tied up like this might make me more amenable to help you.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘You’ll have to do better than that.’
‘We could tie your hands instead. Then they’d think you were mine.’
She laughed bitterly. ‘So after they hit you over the head with a rock, they’d feel free to help themselves to your property? No, Siff, you stay as you are.’ There was always another way. There was the alchemist’s way, the way of thought and foresight and knowledge. She got up and wandered away from the fire to where the nearest little forest of mushrooms grew. These ones barely came past her ankles. From their mustard-yellow tops they were goldcaps, which were fine enough to eat if you didn’t mind a few strange dreams. They’d make an oil to soothe the skin too. Her feet had blisters from all the walking; they could do with some soothing.
She cut some goldcaps, speared them on a few twigs and took them back to the fire. They were best fried in fish oil but these days you took what you could get. Goldcaps fried in anything at all would be a luxury back under the Purple Spur. After they’d started to crisp around the edges, she took them out from the flames and sprinkled a little white powder over them and handed one to Siff.
‘What did you put on them?’ Siff sniffed his mushroom suspiciously.
‘Salt.’
He took a bite. She almost had to smile at the way his face lit up. ‘This is good!’
‘It’ll give you dreams.’ She wondered, too late now, whether that was wise. Did the thing Siff had inside him dream?
She ate her goldcap and then went to cut some more. ‘We’ll move on a way. Until we find some shelter.’
‘My feet hurt.’
‘So do mine.’
‘Hand to get up?’
‘Do it yourself.’
Not much further upriver they found a massive branch fallen from one of the trees. There was a hollow under it filled up with dead leaves. Good enough.
‘That’ll do for some shelter.’ Siff yawned. ‘Good forest blanket there and wood to keep the rain off. Ancestors! I’m exhausted.’
Kataros nodded. This was the bit where she fell asleep and Siff tried his best to get out of his ropes, took her knife and slit her throat. Or maybe he didn’t slit her throat, maybe he simply ran away. She let him see her thinking. He yawned again.
‘There’s nowhere for you to go,’ she said, and pointed. ‘You have that bit. I’ll be somewhere else. You’ll pardon me if I watch you while you go to sleep.’
‘If you must.’ Siff chuckled to himself. She could almost read his thoughts. You think I can’t fool you, alchemist? They both knew he could hide things from her, blood-bound or not.
She watched him anyway. When he started to snore, she crept closer. ‘Salt,’ she whispered. ‘And a little more. Enjoy the dreams.’ She sighed and stretched and snuggled down under her end of the fallen log. It was damp, the leaves prickled her skin, but she was so tired she barely noticed. Sleep, for once, without the Adamantine Man to look over her, to watch her. She shivered, thinking about that. Yes, she was glad he was gone. She closed her eyes and tried not to think about all the things that might go wrong, all the things that lived in the Raksheh that were poisonous, the spiders, the centipedes, the scorpions, the little six-legged biting lizards and their larger scavenger cousins who’d have a go at anything that wasn’t quick enough to run away. The packs of man-eating snappers that were supposed to roam the place. Yes, tried not to think about any of that, and then, to her surprise, it was suddenly late in the day and she woke up with a start.
Something was prodding her. Something sharp.
She blinked.
Three outsiders were standing over her log. They had spears.