Twelve days before the Black Mausoleum
The first thing he noticed when he woke up was that he wasn’t hidden under a fallen tree any more. There wasn’t a comfortable bed of dead leaves keeping him warm. He was lying on bare earth. It was cold and it was damp and it was dark. Late afternoon under the canopy of the Raksheh.
The next thing he noticed was that he was in a cage. He didn’t get any further than that.
‘No! No! No! ’ He jumped up. His head was fuzzy but he hardly noticed; instead, he hurled himself at the bars, battering at them, tearing with his hands until his fingers started to bleed. ‘No!’ He wasn’t going anywhere in a cage. Not that, not in a cage up in the air, waiting for it to shatter, waiting to fall, helpless, out of the sky. Never again. Death first…
He stopped. His heart was beating fit to burst. He was breathing as though he’d just run up a mountain.
Not a cage for dragon-slaves. That time was gone.
He took deep breaths. Slow, steady, trying to calm his heart. There were no dragon-riders any more. Their time was past. Their eyries were gone, and their slave-cages too. No one was going to lift him up into the air to freeze and gasp and fall and die.
He looked about. If not an eyrie, then where was he?
With a start he realised he knew this place. The cage was sitting on the forest floor surrounded by giant trees, only here, he knew, the trees were full of holes. This was where the outsiders had lived, the ones he’d found on his first trek out of the forest, the ones who gouged holes into trees for places to sleep and to store their food, higher than any snapper could reach.
On the forest floor around him shadows moved slowly about. Men and women, shaping pieces of wood and making more ropes. He didn’t smell any cooking. They did that somewhere else, far away from where they slept. He remembered that. Hunters vanished into the woods in twos and threes, sometimes for more than a week, coming back with whatever meat they’d managed to find, but always stopping to cook it a half day away. You never knew how close a snapper pack might be.
‘Hey!’ he called. ‘Hey!’
Faces turned and quickly looked away. He didn’t know them. He didn’t remember much of the time he’d spent here, but it had been months. He stretched and rubbed his hands and wrists. The ropes were gone. Now he had a cage instead. Was that any better?
The twilight turned slowly into night. When it was black as pitch, he felt more than heard the air move beside his cage and a voice hissed at him: ‘The only reason you’re not already dead is that woman.’
Siff spun around. In the darkness he couldn’t see a thing. Whoever was talking was standing next to him, and Siff couldn’t see him, that’s how dark the Raksheh was when the sun went down. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
‘You don’t remember?’ Whoever it was, they hissed and spat like a viper. No friend then.
‘No.’ There, and that was the truth too.
‘I already hated you. Now I despise you. You and your woman, you’re just more hungry mouths to me. I don’t know what possessed you to come back here after what you did.’
‘What possessed me?’ Siff burst out laughing at his own pathetic life. It would be nice, he thought, to know why when they fed him to the snappers. Dimly, he remembered that was what these outsiders did. ‘She’s got something. She won’t tell you, but she has. She’s got a secret.’
‘You’re the one with the secret. The rest, they were so under your spell they don’t even remember, but I do. You’re a demon and now you’re going to die.’
Siff felt the cage tremble. Whoever was talking to him was within touching distance. Ancestors, if what I did was so bad why don’t I remember? ‘Listen! Wait! Hey! The woman, she’s an alchemist! She’s a witch! She’s the demon, not me!’
‘No, Siff.’ The cage trembled again. He heard the soft creak of wood against wood.
‘Ho! Wait!’ Siff scrambled away from the noise, clutching at the bars. ‘Who are you?’
‘You don’t remember me?’
‘No!’
‘Liar! But you remember what you did.’
‘No! I don’t remember anything. Listen. I found something. Up the river. There’s caves up there. Days and days of walking, but there’s a place where the dragon-riders used to go and there’s caves and I found something. You listening to me? Treasure!’
‘Yes. We heard all that the last time. Do you remember how many of us died looking for it?’
A handful of something like sand flew into Siff’s face. Whatever it was, it stung his eyes. He squealed.
‘Salt burns, does it, demon?’ Another handful scattered over him out of the darkness and then another.
‘Ancestors! I am not a demon! I swear on my grandfathers.’
‘Salt takes your power, demon. Now I have some iron to take your soul.’
‘ Listen, damn you! I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know who you are! I was ill! You’re right, I was possessed, but not any more. The demon came from up in the caves. That’s why I went away. The alchemist took the demon out. Now she’s come to do something about the caves. I don’t know what — ask her — but I’m not a demon any more! I’m not, I’m not!’ He was sobbing now.
‘Lies.’ The cage door was open now. ‘You’d say anything to save your skin. You said you’d come back. Don’t you remember? Something you needed, and when you had it you’d come back. And I swore that when you did, I’d kill you.’
‘You can’t!’ he screamed. ‘I’m the only one who can show her where to go! That alchemist, she’s going to use it to be mistress of the dragons again, not that she’ll say that to you or anything. Nor anyone else probably, but that’s what she’s after.’ He was making it up as he went along now, spinning stories the old way, mixing truth and wild imagination so fast that even he wasn’t sure which was which any more. ‘It’s me that knows where, though. She knows it’s in the caves but those caves go on for ever. You want to find it, any of you, you got to keep me alive!’
‘Seven men, demon. Two of them brothers, all of them friends.’ Siff could see the man now, finally, standing inside the cage with him. He could see an outline, the hint of a shape, nothing more. He couldn’t see the knife, but he had no doubt it was there. He had tears in his eyes now. He was going to die because of something he couldn’t even remember.
He felt a stirring inside him, the feeling that came just before those gaps in his memory. He clutched his head. ‘She’ll make it back like it was, every bit of it. Exactly like it was and the likes of you and me, we’ll be no better than we were. I don’t want to spend my life scraping in the dirt to live, waiting for something to come and eat me or some one to come and cart me off in a slave cage.’ The thing inside was waking up. ‘You kill me, you do it quickly,’ he wailed, ‘and when you’re done, you go out and you make sure you don’t touch a drop to drink that she could have got a hand to. She’s a witch as well as an alchemist. I’ve seen her make her potions. I’ve seen her force a man to her will with them. My own eyes, I swear. And don’t cut her. I’ve seen her throw blood in a man’s face and then watched it burn him to the bone. She knows blood-magic and she’ll use it if she has to. Don’t cut her. Don’t let her bleed. Get that knife off her if you can.’
‘You talk of blood, demon? Seven men, and I saw what you did to them. You murdered them, one after the other. You bled them out on that stone slab. Brothers. Friends.’ A hand gripped his shoulder, tense and strong. ‘Die, demon.’
No
The man’s face lit up with a moonlight glow and Siff saw him for an instant, still a stranger, knife gleaming in his hand, but he saw a look in the man’s eye too, a sort of wonder and a sort of terror all at once…
And then he was sitting outside and it was light again and the whole night had passed and he had no idea what had happened and the outsiders were gathered around him and he knew they were getting ready to take him up the river because that was what he wanted and what he’d told them to do. The thing inside was restless. He could feel it. It wanted to be back at the caves and so that was where it was going, all of them together whether they liked it or not. It terrified him. I need to get out before he comes. Need to. Maybe the alchemist would know what it was. It scared her too. Scared everyone who saw it. Everyone except the Adamantine Man, who just wanted to kill him.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw his cage. It had someone in it. The alchemist.
The thing inside was rising out of its slumber again. He tried to scream, but all he saw was a hundred eyes light up in wonder.