She opened her eyes. The roaring that had been the sound of her drowning was still there. The waterfall. She was bobbing up and down, but not in the water any more. She was hanging over some man’s shoulder. Looking down from among the rocks beneath the Moonlight Garden. ‘You two! Hold here. Stop him. Or at least slow him down.’ Siff. ‘You! Bring her! Follow me! Run, damn you!’
Siff and the man carrying her climbed higher, over the top of the waterfall, then started picking their way along a ledge overlooking the river. She lurched up and down. Her hands and her feet were still tied. She had no strength, no energy, and struggling seemed futile when all she could do was cough now and then and bring up another mouthful of river water, yet a strange excitement had her. They were here. She couldn’t see it, even when she turned her head and tried to look up, but the Moonlight Garden was somewhere above her. No one had ever understood what the Moonlight Garden was. Not the first idea.
Stupid thing to think, really, but it gave her a focus. Stopped her being too sick and helpless and terrified.
At the end of the ledge they were among rocks again, picking their way down a steep slope. She felt the man who was carrying her slip. He was cursing with almost every other step until they reached the bottom and were beside the river again, out in the open on a flat overgrown field. The cave mouths drew her eye.
‘They’re getting closer!’ The man was breathing hard. She was slowing him. And then everything fell into shadow and he screamed. She hit the ground like a sack of turnips, winded and too weak and bruised to move, and that might have been what saved her. A huge shape blotted out the sun and snatched the man who’d been carrying her into the sky; and then the sun was back, and with it a wind like a hurricane that picked her up and threw her across the ground as though she was a leaf.
Dragon. She couldn’t bring herself to move. Stay still. Don’t struggle and above all don’t run. Dragons can’t resist it if you run, and no one who runs ever gets away. Ever.
Could it feel her thoughts? She wasn’t sure. She’d taken her last dose of potion back before the outsider settlement. Two weeks, give or take a couple of days. Yes, it could probably feel her then, and dragons hated alchemists with a fury. She sighed and closed her eyes and waited to die.
‘Get up!’ Hands were shaking her. Siff. ‘Get! Up!’ He was cutting the ropes around her feet, wrapping another one around her hands. ‘Get up, alchemist! We’re nearly there.’ He hauled her up, pulling her by her wrists. The dragon was in the air past the waterfall. Turning.
For a moment she caught a glimpse of movement in the rocks up the slope behind her. There was a man, his head and shoulders popping up. He had a bow. Was aiming at…
Her?
Skjorl?
No. Couldn’t be.
‘Come on!’ Siff pulled her hard enough to tear the skin of her wrists. She cried out. The man with the bow was out in the open now, running down the slope towards them, little streams of stones clattering in rivers around him as he came. And yes, it was Skjorl. He had his axe. She’d know him anywhere. Great Flame, did she laugh or did she cry? And he had someone else with him too. Another Adamantine Man.
‘Run, you stupid witch!’ Siff screamed and pulled at her. ‘Not from them! From the dragon!’
The dragon was coming back. You learned, when you worked with them for as long as she had, to read their flight. It was going for the Adamantine Men. She dropped back to the ground, squealing at the pain in her wrists, but she wasn’t going to run. ‘No! Stay still!’ It would burn them if they ran.
The Adamantine Men knew it too. They were fifty yards away, right at the bottom of the slope at the start of the open empty space that had once been a landing field. They were seconds away from her but now they veered away, diving for cover as the dragon swooped down on them, strafing them with fire. The earth shook, the very air quivered in shock, and then a wall of heat and wind and the stink of scorched earth picked her up and roared and rolled her across the grass.
The dragon turned again and landed where the Adamantine Men had been, hard enough that Kataros was almost thrown up into the air. The rocks on the slope to the path and the Moonlight Garden shuddered and shifted. A boulder the size of a horse tumbled down, bouncing past the dragon and into the river amid a hail of smaller stones.
Halfway up the slope a massive chunk of rock shifted very slightly. It was as big as a barn. Kataros held her breath, waiting for it to slide and bring the whole slope down on all of them, but it only shifted the once and then held still.
The dragon’s tail slashed the air, the tip hissing like a whip past her head, so close she could almost touch it. It had to feel her, didn’t it? Don’t think! Don’t think! But it had its mind elsewhere. The dragon took two quick steps away and lunged towards wherever the Adamantine Men had gone. A hot wind rushed over the ground as it tried to burn them out.
‘Can we run now?’ Siff’s eyes were wild. This time she let him pull her away. The dragon was tearing at the hillside, digging after the Adamantine Men at the foot of the high stone bluffs below the Moonlight Garden. It roared. Frustration. Kataros ran faster. Blood. A drop of blood was all she needed. Whatever Siff had inside him, it stopped her from mastering his will, but she could still burn him and there were other things too. If she could find anything that was alive, she could make it hers. Snakes, spiders, scorpions. Snappers even. Let the forest give her a weapon, any weapon…
Siff pulled her in among more tumbled boulders, behind an enormous rock towards an opening in the ground, too regular to be a cave. Her steps faltered. Even in the sunlight she could see how it glowed. It was a tunnel, like the passages, of all places, within the flying castle!
‘Move!’ Siff hauled at the ropes around her wrists. Kataros winced. Yet the alchemist in her wanted to see now, had to, no matter what happened afterwards.
‘It’s like the castle,’ she said. ‘It’s the same. Look at it. You didn’t know, did you?’ There. That made him stop. In the castle he hadn’t been himself.
‘Is it? I don’t remember.’
‘What’s inside, Siff?’
‘Come and see.’
The earth trembled. Siff dragged her deeper. The light here was soft and soothing and came from everywhere, just like in the castle over Farakkan. ‘What’s inside you, Siff? What did you find?’
He yanked harder, angry. ‘When I found this place, I thought it must have been made by alchemists. But you didn’t make this, did you? Someone else made it. I didn’t know that until your riders brought me to the Pinnacles and I saw that too. You didn’t make that either.’
‘That was the Silver King’s palace.’
‘Yes.’ The passage went on and on, dead straight, sloping down into the earth. ‘And so was this.’
‘The Black Mausoleum.’ She whispered it to herself, a test to see whether she really believed. Although what else could it be?
But no, alchemists knew better. The alchemists, the grand master and a handful of others, they knew what had happened to the Silver King. They kept that secret to themselves, but they’d happily tell you there was no Black Mausoleum, no tomb. Treasure, yes, there might be that, and secrets and powers and, yes, even a way to master dragons. But no half-god.
Siff dragged her on. Down and down into the earth, dead straight until the walls and the ceiling fell back and opened up into a dome-shaped chamber, tilted slightly into the earth, far too perfect to have been made by men and so large she could barely see the other side. The walls were smooth as glass like the passages in the flying castle, like parts of the Pinnacles, like the tunnels that had taken her from the Silver City to the edge of the Yamuna. Siff was right. The Silver King had made this.
A ring of arches stood under the centre of the dome. They were ornately carved from the same white stone and they reminded her of the Pinnacles too. There had been arches there just like these but set into the walls. As her eyes grew used to the gloom, she could see little changes in the light in places around the edge of the chamber. Other passages.
‘What is this, Siff?’
He ignored her and pulled her towards the arches.
‘Where do those tunnels go? Do you know?’
Again no answer. In the middle of the circle of arches sat a flat slab, perfectly round and perfectly white. Siff pulled her towards it, right into the middle. ‘Here. See, alchemist!’
He left her standing there and held out his hands. His eyes changed, filling with glowing silver. The tiny snakes of moonlight curled from his ruined fingertips out towards the arches. They reached further and further, strained and pulled at him. As the first one touched the nearest arch, a silver mirror flowed from the edges to fill the space. One archway after another, until his snakes had touched them all and he had made a circle of mirrors all around him; the moonlight snakes shrank back to Siff’s fingers, but the mirrors stayed.
‘Look!’ he said, full of awe and wonder, and Kataros could only feel the same. ‘Look!’
He stepped in front of one mirror and reached towards it; the snakes from his fingers leapt forward again and the silver rippled as they dived into it, and then it shimmered and changed. Instead of a mirror Kataros saw a gateway to another place. A place filled with liquid silver, an endless rippling ocean of it with a giant moon above.
‘Look!’ he cried again. ‘Look, alchemist. That is where your Silver King has gone. There! Don’t you want to follow him? Don’t you want to see what’s beyond? Tell me, alchemist. Tell me you want to see!’
Kataros stared. She’d never seen anything like it.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I want to see.’