Twelve days before the Black Mausoleum
He pushed at the door with all his strength but it didn’t move. He could see from the way the daylight came through the gaps in the planks around the edges what they’d done to him. They’d trapped him. Buried him alive.
Didn’t make any sense. Why do that? You wanted to kill man, you stuck a knife in him and watched until the light went out of his eyes. That was that, the only way.
So she didn’t want him dead. Maybe they were coming back? He should sit and wait?
No. He’d done that once before. In Scarsdale. And why would they bury him? Made no sense.
Mighty Vishmir but his head hurt! Once he’d pushed at the door enough to know it was weighed down with more than he could move, he went and sat in the middle of the cellar floor to think. Or try, at least to try. His head was screaming.
He’d been drunk. Dead drunk. He remembered that. The shit-eater had been tied well enough. Couldn’t have escaped on his own. The alchemist then. Had there been an accident? He’d banged his head?
Moving meant screwing up his face against the surge of pain. Dreamleaf, more of it, that’s what he needed. Except when he looked for it, his eyes couldn’t quite seem to focus. He moved to where one of the shafts of sunlight sneaked in through a crack in the trapdoor, but the brightness was like being stabbed in the eye with a hot needle. He lay down, rolled on his side, closed his eyes and lay still, gasping. The cellar was spinning.
The shit-eater had been in the cellar when he’d been drunk. He’d been talking to the alchemist. He remembered, in pieces. She’d looked good. That was the wine.
Scarsdale.
Had he had her? In front of the shit-eater? Had she given in at last? No, he’d remember that, wouldn’t he?
He’d taken her. In front of her man. What was his name?
No, that was Scarsdale. This was somewhere else.
Memories crashed into each other, merged, went their own way again, all muddled up.
Ancestors! The alchemist. She’d done something to him. He couldn’t remember her name. Couldn’t remember either of them. Couldn’t remember much except the pain. Someone had hit him on the head. The evidence was the lump on his skull. Start with that.
Start with the beginning.
No. Scarsdale. Start with that.
Isul Aieha! Damn place wouldn’t leave him alone. He screwed up his eyes. Looked for a memory he could hang on to, one that wouldn’t slip away. Found it and clung to it as though it was his life. Sand. He remembered Sand. Everything burning. Held on to that memory and forced out the next one. Stuck them back together piece by piece, like undoing a rope full of old knots, each one as impenetrable and held fast as the next. One by one he picked and prised them apart.
Sand. They’d walked for weeks after the tunnels under the monastery. The men he’d had with him at Outwatch had been stoical about the destruction. The others, the hundreds of refugees, the survivors, the ordinary folk who happened still to be alive, they’d wept and screamed and torn their hair. Couldn’t blame them. Even the Adamantine Men had come out with tight lips and taut faces and far-away eyes. The first time most of them had seen what dragons could really do. They were seeing the death of the realms, of everything they knew, stark and irrevocable. Some faced it and took it for what it was. Others screamed and tried to imagine something else. For the most part those were the ones who died on the way.
They were slow. Some days they only covered a few miles, following the Last River towards the mountains. Simply wasn’t any other way to go, not with so many people. He split them up into little groups, graded by their speed, divided his men between them. He took the slowest. The weak, the sick, the old, the frail, the mad. They hated him. One by one they failed or fled, but he had no choice. He drove them hard. The longer they took, the more they starved, the more they starved, the slower they went. When they fell, he killed them. Same for the ones who fled — tracked them, hunted them and put them down with neither malice nor mercy, then buried them in the sand. Left them in the open, maybe a dragon would find them. Maybe it would start to wonder, or worse, it would find them still alive and tear out their memories. He’d seen that under Outwatch. Seen it with his own eyes, that murderous hatchling snatching men and staring at them, and them screaming and begging for mercy and spilling out the places where others might hide. It never saved them. The hatchling had killed everyone. It had been admirably, remorselessly thorough.
So the ones that ran, he killed them. They were doing to die anyway and it made the others safer. When they got to Southwatch, he was proud of the ones he’d saved but they still hated him.
Southwatch had food and shelter for months, but he’d let his Adamantine Men stay for three days, no more. When they left, they left with as much as they could carry, as many weapons as they could use, whatever tools took their fancy. Too much, screamed the men and women of Sand that he left behind. There were hundreds of them against a score of his Guard, but they didn’t dare to try and stop him. A few begged to come with him. Fine, he told them, if you can keep up. There were maybe half a dozen who left with them for Evenspire. After the second day he never saw any of them again. He’d done his duty. He’d led the survivors of Sand to a safe place and now he was going home. To do his duty again, whatever it was.
Evenspire, when they got there, was deserted. The city had burned. The Palace of Paths still stood, its walls so massive that even dragons couldn’t knock them down. They stayed for two days, trying to find a way into the tunnels that were surely beneath it, to reach the survivors who must be there. Hadn’t worked out, and so it had been a choice: follow the Evenspire Road out into the desert again, or else the Dragon River south through the Blackwind Dales to Scarsdale. Evenspire Road was hundreds of miles across the Plains of Ancestors, with no water until the Sapphire and Samir’s Crossing. Death to men on foot, Adamantine ones or any other. Wasn’t much of a choice.
They took the river then, and so it was they got to Scarsdale, starving. A dot on a map, that was all, the last place they might scavenge some food before they crossed the line of hills to the valley of the Silver River and the Great Cliff. What they found were ramshackle ruins, burned and smashed, littered all along the river and up the hills with no sense of order or purpose. Place had been stripped clean. Too clean for it to be dragons. Someone had got there first.
Finding the mines, though, that had been an accident. He’d thought it was a cave. Good piece of shelter for the day, but they took a look about first — man had to be sure he wasn’t sharing with snappers or something like that after all — and that’s where they’d found the shafts. By the end of that day they’d found the rest, a few dozen people living down in the mines with enough food to last them a year.
The Adamantine Men had feasted. Two solid days of it. Got drunk on wine, on the barrels of it hidden there. The people had been none too pleased, but when you’d been out in the open, hiding from dragons in the day and marching across a parched landscape by night, you took what you could get. He’d been doing that for months. Yes, a man took what he could get.
Liouma. That had been her name. The one he’d taken. Nice tits. Big. Big arse too. Ripe. He knew he was going to have her from the moment he saw her. And then the next day, afterwards, he’d woken up and it had been like this. Hungover, thundering head, locked up behind a wooden door without knowing why.
Like this, but not the same.
He ran through the rest anyway. The Purple Spur. Bloodsalt. Vish. Killing a dragon. Jasaan. The moors. The Pinnacles. The alchemist. All of it. All nicely in a row like it was supposed to be, one thing after the next.
His head still thundered but his eyes would focus now. He looked in his pouch. Dreamleaf and plenty of it, in the last water he had, and then he waited for the numbness it would bring. In Scarsdale they’d taken his axe. That was before she’d had a name. The alchemist hadn’t done that. Kataros. Must have been her, because the shit-eater would have cut his throat and been done with it. Yes, the alchemist.
The sunlight was gone. Outside was dark. Night, maybe, or it could have been the shadow of a dragon sitting over the cellar for all he knew, waiting patiently for him to come out.
Dreamleaf was starting to take him. Dragons outside? He’d dealt with dragons before. One thing at a time.
He couldn’t make Dragon-blooded bite the door. The angle was wrong, the roof too high, the door and the ladder too tucked into the corner of the cellar.
In Scarsdale he’d been angry. Smashed his fists on the door, ran at it, battered himself almost senseless trying to get out. Scarsdale had taught him patience, and so he set about the alchemists’ cellar, taking his time, no rush, searching every corner and edge. There were the lamps. He’d seen Kataros use them, seen the way they worked. Started with those and then he could see: a wooden table and a set of little shelves with tiny compartments. The alchemist had taken most of whatever had been in there. A pile of smashed glass where the ground was still damp, rich with the smell of wine. A bench. Three old chairs. The bones in the far corner, more empty bottles, a few rags.
The skeleton had a knife in one hand. Resting between its fingers, the edge stained a dark brown.
In Scarsdale they’d left him with a knife. They’d put him behind a heavy wooden door, but they’d left him with a knife, the one tucked in his boot. It had probably taken the best part of three days to pick and whittle the edge of that door until he’d made a gap large enough to shift the bolt on the other side. He’d never quite understood why they’d shut him up in Scarsdale. They shut his men up too, although at least they gave the others food and water. Him they’d left to die, like the alchemist had done. But he’d escaped and they’d got what they deserved.
He climbed the ladder, drilled through the pain and the floating feeling of the Dreamleaf, and set to work.