Twelve days before the Black Mausoleum
They slept another night out in the open by the river. At dawn they pushed their little raft out into the water, paddled it into the current, closed their eyes and prayed. To their ancestors, perhaps, for the riders, but Jasaan only saw the Great Flame. The first dragon, as large as a mountain, the creature that had given birth to the monsters of the realms. It was strange, he thought, to revere such a beast and yet dedicate yourself to slaying its progeny. They were contradictions, from the moment they were made, all of them. They were the Adamantine Guard. They slew dragons because dragons were monsters and yet, when Jasaan looked at the men he’d known, they were little more than monsters themselves.
On the river they dozed for most of the day, letting the current do the work, taking it in turns to use the crude paddles Jasaan had made to keep them in the middle of the flow and steer them around the island boulders and fallen trees that littered the water.
‘Look.’ The other rider was shaking him. Parris. Jasaan had accepted the inevitable and asked his name. Wouldn’t make any difference now. They were bound together on this quest whether he liked it or not. ‘Look!’
Jasaan sat up. Through the trees on the right bank of the river he could see open sky beyond. Open sky and another expanse of water, another river, as big or bigger than the one they were on. Jasaan steered the raft towards the bank. As the rivers came together, the current grew stronger. Whirlpools tossed and turned them, spinning them about, and it took all three of them with all their strength before they finally nudged into the bank a half-mile further downstream. Nezak knelt, gasping, in the mud beside the river. He pointed to an outcrop of stone that rose out of the bank where the rivers merged. It was a bare brown rock, fifty feet high, with the water running right underneath. The trees of the forest towered over it. Dwarfed it.
‘We were following the Yamuna. We’d come from the Moonlight Garden, heading for Furymouth. I remember that rock.’
Jasaan shrugged. ‘Then this is the Yamuna.’ It didn’t seem too likely that a man on the back of a dragon would see an insignificant thing like that, but he wasn’t about to argue. Let it be the Yamuna. Why not?
He looked up. Habit didn’t care that he was in the Raksheh. He’d probably still be glancing at the sky even after he was dead. But he looked up and he saw a speck, high and in the distance, moving below the cloud. He checked to see how much potion he had left. He had an idea that Kataros herself might have made it for him, before they’d left. Now he was down to a week, maybe a little more. Hellas had carried some too but they’d lost that. He pointed at the speck trailing across the sky.
‘Somewhere there’s a snapper that dragon can’t find.’ For some reason that made him laugh so hard he couldn’t stop. Was that even how it worked? Did dragons sniff snappers out with their extra senses or did they do it the same way any other hunter did? He had no idea. Still couldn’t stop laughing though. He took a swig and then gave the potion flask to Nezak. ‘I don’t know if we’ve got enough of this to get to the caves because I have no idea how far away they are. We haven’t got enough to get back. You take this. If we find the alchemist, you take her as far as you can. Don’t worry about us. Just don’t murder her this time.’
Nezak gave him a queer look, as though Jasaan was losing his mind. Maybe he was. Maybe he’d been losing it for a long time. ‘If we find the alchemist, perhaps she will make us some more,’ the rider said. ‘And we’ll all go together. To be blunt, Guardsman, if anyone should be left behind, it’s us.’
Riders didn’t say things like that. That wasn’t the way it was. Adamantine Men served, that was all. They served and they died so others didn’t have to. Nice of Nezak to pretend things were different, though. Jasaan forced a smile.
They walked. Paddling their little raft into the teeth of the Yamuna’s current wasn’t going to work and Jasaan was happy to be on his feet. Walking was something he was used to. The riders would slow him down but that was fine too — it gave him time to hunt and forage and pathfind for them.
‘So how far is it to these caves?’ He had to ask, even though he knew he wasn’t going to like the answer. The Raksheh was said to be a thousand miles from one end to the other. The caves were supposed to be somewhere in the middle and Jasaan was quite sure that he was somewhere near the edge.
‘From here? A hundred miles. Two maybe.’ Nezak shrugged as if it was all much the same. Maybe on the back of a dragon it was.
‘Long walk then.’ Mentally, Jasaan went through what every Adamantine Man went through when they were away from a safe haven, the litany they had drilled into them every day. Water. Food. Warmth. Shelter. Dragons. They had potion for the dragons, at least for a while. A whole river full of water and never mind that it rained here more than it didn’t. The trees gave shelter from the wind and most of the rain. Leaf mould, fallen branches, yes, he could build shelters and fires and forest blankets if he needed to. As for food, well, if the trek along the Sapphire valley to Bloodsalt had taught him anything, it was how to fish. So that’s what they’d be eating then. Fish and not much else.
There were other things, of course. Things he hadn’t thought of. Parris came down with a fever. He kept going but it got steadily worse. His appetite went. He stopped talking and spent his time either shivering or sleeping, but he kept going. They should have left him, every Adamantine Man would have said the same, but Jasaan slowed his pace a little, did what he could to keep Parris going. Something bit Nezak’s hand and his fingers swelled up like sausages. Jasaan wondered if he might lose them, but there wasn’t anything to be done. He had his own problems by then. His bad ankle was aching all the time, and something must have crawled under his armour one day and feasted on the good one. The first he knew about it was a growing pain. When he looked, there must have been two dozen bites, each one an ugly black blotch, swollen and sore. Wasn’t long before he was limping on both feet. At least that evened things up. Queer, though — the one thing that never slowed them down and never went bad was Nezak’s arrow wound, which was probably the worst injury of the lot.
Every day the forest was the same and the river too. Jasaan had lost count of how long they’d been out there when they saw the boat. Was almost ready to give up. Didn’t know how far they’d come by then — it might not have been a hundred miles yet, but it surely felt like it. The middle of nowhere. No one ever came here and he could see why. Parris was a wreck, hardly able to focus any more, putting one foot in front of the other was the limit of what he could do. At least Nezak’s fingers seemed to be getting better. Maybe Nezak was charmed.
And out here, in this ancestor-forsaken wilderness where no one lived for a hundred miles, there was a boat. Not one, he realised, as he stared, but two, then three, then five. He hadn’t heard them coming over the ever-present rush of the water. They were close to the bank, paddling steadily forward where the current was weakest.
He stopped and he stared. Outsiders. Dozens of them. And there she was, in the middle boat. They had her. The alchemist. Kataros. Alive.
And the bugger was that he didn’t even have a bow and the two riders were half a mile behind him, following the trail he was marking out, and there was nothing he could do.