As soon as the dragon took to the air, Jasaan ran. Head-down sprint, straight across the open towards the place he’d seen the alchemist. The outsider had been dragging her somewhere and he’d had a purpose about him. Neither of the Adamantine Men had seen where he was taking her but it had to be more than just the nearest piece of cover.
He reached the other side of the landing field and glanced up. The dragon had already turned. It was almost straight above him now but hadn’t seen him. Or if it had, it had other things on its mind. He saw where the alchemist must be. A hole in the ground, a cave, maybe the sheared end of an old tunnel down among the shattered stones at the edge of the field.
Instinct made him dive to the ground and cower as the dragon roared back towards the slope where Skjorl had gone. Small stones rattled across the ground, whipped up by the wind of the dragon’s wings, and then it was past.
The cave. He jumped up. But he had to look back, for a moment at least. He saw the dragon’s fire blossom and burst, scattering across the rocks.
‘Goodbye, Skjorl,’ he muttered.
No time to stay and watch what the dragon did next. Dragons weren’t stupid. It knew they’d been two when it had found them, and he wasn’t about to do anything to remind it.
He ran for the cave, for the tunnel, the whatever it was. No time to think about Skjorl. The world was a better place for being rid of him, but of course he had to go out like that. Had to make himself the hero. If Jasaan ever got the alchemist back to the Pinnacles or the Purple Spur or wherever it was that she wanted to go, if ever anyone asked him to tell their tale, then he’d tell it as it was, and every Adamantine Man would raise a cup to the dragon-killer, the one who’d given his life so that others might live and fight, and never mind the rest. Rapist. Murderer. Drunk. None of that mattered if you died well. They’d all raise their cups and they’d call him a hero, and if Jasaan quietly didn’t raise his, well then most likely the rest of them would quietly not notice.
He ran down the tunnel. The place had been built by alchemists, that was obvious. Their eerie cold white light came from the walls, from the roof and floor. It reminded him of the Pinnacles rather than the curved caverns of the Spur, scoured by water. No, this was the work of…
He didn’t know. Magic? It was supposed to be the Silver King’s tomb, after all.
The tunnel took him into a vault, smooth curved walls coming together far above him. In the middle, a ring of white stone arches with gleaming mirrors between them lit up the walls.
‘Alchemist! Kataros!’ He couldn’t see inside the circle but she he had to be there, didn’t she?
He drew his sword. Being cautious hadn’t ever done him any harm, not yet, even if Skjorl had despised him for it. Best to have a care. Best to have a think about the sort of things a man might find in a place like this.
What did tombs have in them apart from bodies? Try again. What sort of person got his body stuffed into a tomb? Dragon-riders were fed to their dragons when they died. Adamantine Men too. Across the realms a man was burned and his ashes scattered either in the nearest river, if you were lucky enough to live near one, or cast into the desert winds if you came from the north. Some folk who lived along the Fury sent their dead off in boats. That was all before the Adamantine Palace had burned. Now mostly people just got burned or eaten, whether they were dead or whether they weren’t. But buried under the ground? That was wrong. That trapped a man, kept him from joining his ancestors.
As he thought, Jasaan continued walking towards the circle. So what would you find in the tomb of an ancient half-god sorcerer? He had no idea. Nothing good, probably. No one would choose to rest in a place like this, not under the ground. So what, then? You put a sorcerer in the ground because you could, and then you wrapped him up in blood-magic to keep him there and make sure he couldn’t come back. You did that because you were scared witless that if you did anything else, whatever it was you were trying to bury might claw its way out and rip your head off. You did that because what you were burying was a terrible, terrible thing.
He stopped. Skjorl was at his shoulder. His ghost, anyway. For the love of Vishmir, shut up, stop thinking, start moving and be what you are!
He reached the arches. Between them a silver surface shimmered, blocking his way into the centre circle. They were too high to climb and nothing in the world would have made him touch them. He began to walk around instead. He could hear noises now from inside. A faint sobbing. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. When he looked down, he saw dark drops on the floor. He knelt and peered at them. Licked his finger, rubbed it against them, tasted it.
Blood. A spray of blood. Two things did that. You cut a man in the neck or in some other places and the blood would spray on its own. Or you sliced deep into a man’s flesh and then it was your own blade that did the spraying. Either way, whoever the blood came from usually wound up dead. But was it the alchemist or was it the outsider?
Couldn’t see the alchemist swinging a sword. Or cutting a throat for that matter.
Flame!
Unless the outsider had brought her here and they’d found something waiting for them. He wasn’t sure that was much better.
The sobbing was still there. He thought he heard a whisper. It’s beautiful.
She was lost. When a mage reached through their blood to touch another mind, there was always a danger. To touch the mind of another mage, that was the fear, one who was stronger than you. She’d done that with her teacher and he’d shown her how to defend herself, how to run away, break the link, hide within yourself, throw up walls and barriers that even the strongest mage could never break. She’d touched his mind and felt his strength; she’d done as he had shown her and in the end seen how she could save herself. She’d seen him attack her with everything he had and not even strain her mastery of herself.
The silver sea consumed her as though she was nothing. Even if she’d had the time to try and hide herself, it would have washed her walls away like a tidal wave against a sandcastle. She had no idea what it was. Something immense. Vast. Something that would always be beyond her understanding, no matter how much she learned. In a blink it looked at her, took her in, absorbed her. She felt its size and its age and its utter indifference. Her own insignificance. And then she realised that yes, she did know what it was. She knew exactly.
The Silver King. It had to be. Whatever old crippled Jeiros had said, there was nothing else this could be.
‘It’s beautiful,’ whispered Siff.
It was waiting there. Waiting for what, though?
Help us! she thought as loudly as she could, simply hoping to be noticed. We need you again!
She saw Siff start. He turned slowly to look at her.
‘You?’ He shook himself. She understood. Trying to shake away the presence all around them both. Trying to bring himself back to the simple world of stone and flesh.
‘Siff,’ she breathed. ‘Look at it.’
His face twisted into a snarl. ‘You! You want to steal it.’ His hands clenched. He held out the knife towards her. ‘No no no, witch, this is mine, not yours. Mine!’
‘And all the blood around your feet is mine,’ she whispered. She had no strength in her arms any more, nor her voice. She’d lost too much blood to him, but that gave her another strength. ‘I am sorry, Siff.’
On the ground around him her blood started to flow — rising, soaking into one of his boots, climbing higher, past his ankle, up his leg. It touched his flesh and burned and he screamed. He bared his teeth and his eyes flared with silver. ‘I have told you before, blood-witch, you cannot do that!’
Jasaan walked cautiously around the outside of the arches. The sobbing stopped. Voices. He froze.
‘You?’ A man. The outsider?
‘Siff. Look at it.’ A woman’s voice full of wonder, not fear. Full of… full of awe. Kataros. The alchemist. Alive.
So whose was the blood?
Then the first voice came again, suffused with anger and envy and murder — ‘Mine, not yours!’ — and Jasaan moved again, faster now, around the arches, looking for a way in until he saw the single one that was open, that wasn’t filled with liquid silver.
In the centre, lying on a slab of stone in a pool of blood, deathly pale, lay the alchemist. Her breath came fast and shallow. Across from her, halfway through one of the far arches, the outsider stood with knife raised. His eyes shone with silver. His lips were drawn back and his teeth were bared. Blood was everywhere.
Jasaan blinked. The blood around the outsider’s feet… it was moving!
Sorcery. A woman lying on a stone slab, a man standing over her with a knife raised. That was all he needed. All any Adamantine Man would need. He knew exactly what to do. He raised his sword. The battle cry came of its own accord. He was already in the air, half the ground covered between them, before the outsider even saw he was there.
The alchemist gasped something, so faint he didn’t hear. The outsider turned and raised his hands. While the blood on the floor flowed up one of his legs, silver flowed up the other, fast as lightning, drawn from the silver lake. Up his leg and up his side, across his shoulder, down his arm and just as Jasaan’s sword should have cut him in two, he had a sword of his own, silver, blocking Jasaan’s blade, and half of him was cased in armour.
The swords came together and Jasaan’s steel shattered. Shards of it flew. A sliver sliced his cheek. Pieces hit his armour and ricocheted away. The outsider screamed and reeled back. Where the silver didn’t cover him, pieces of Jasaan’s blade had cut him open.
Jasaan stared at the stump of his sword. Impossible. Swords didn’t shatter. Not like that, like glass.
The outsider swayed, off balance. The light in his eyes grew brighter. They turned on Jasaan, a terrible power lurking within them. The alchemist groaned something again. No time to get out his axe. The stump of his sword would do. He lifted it as if to plunge it into the outsider, who raised his arms to fend off the blow as the silver flowed around him again; then Jasaan kicked him instead, hard in the ribs, where a shard from the shattered blade had already embedded itself in his flesh.
The outsider threw back his head. He shrieked and fell back into the silver sea behind him. The liquid flowed over him and covered him from head to toe, but only for a moment, and then he began to rise once more.
‘No,’ she croaked. She thought the man with the sword was Skjorl at first, but this one was too short, too small. Still, when she reached through the blood to touch him, she knew at once that he’d tasted hers. For a moment that threw her. She looked for Skjorl and found nothing, yet this man…
Jasaan? From the Spur?
Silver flowed from the sea beyond the gate and shattered the Adamantine Man’s sword. Slivers of steel flew like arrows among the arches.
‘No!’ She tried again. ‘Don’t! Leave him be!’ This was her battle, by the Flame! And if Siff went right through the gate, who was to say what might come back. ‘Jasaan! Don’t!’
Jasaan landed a kick and Siff tumbled through. She didn’t dare reach through her blood to try and touch him again, not now. Whatever was inside him that had thrown her away before, it was growing fully awake. She just about found enough strength to sit up. At least now she could see properly. See the silver sea wrapping itself around the outsider, clothing him. She could see him for what he was. The Isul Aieha. The Silver King.
‘Jasaan!’ The Adamantine Man was standing before the gate, panting, still holding the stump of his sword. One by one around them the arches flickered and failed, their mirrors falling black and dead and then fading into nothing until each was just an arch again with no sign of any magic to it, all except the one beyond which Siff stood.
Kataros called her blood, what was left of it, called it back to her to feed her own strength. Siff was covered in silver now. It had grown into an armour around him, hard plates in layers and layers, exquisite and complex, and he held two swords, short and curved, one in each hand. There were pictures, in the Palace of Alchemy, of this man. Drawn five hundred years ago. Exactly the same.
‘Isul Aieha,’ she said softly.
No answer.
‘They killed you. They took your body to the mountains. To some distant cave. Yet you are here.’
He pointed one of his swords. History crashed into her. She was him, the Silver King. She saw herself call the dragons to her. Saw herself tame them with a single word. She ruled over men but they were nothing to her. A distraction. She was looking, looking for something, always. Something about the spear she carried and a great and terrible thing that had been done. For a long time, looking but never finding, and all the while a despair was building inside her and a loneliness, until she could bear it no more. She saw herself come to this place and conjure these arches, and as she did it she saw a glimpse of her future, of the end that awaited her, and so she left a seed behind, surely a needless precaution — when she chose to leave and return to her home and her kin there was nothing that mere men could do to stop her — but one taken nonetheless. And then they turned on her and somehow they won. She saw men, blood-mages, the ancestors of the alchemists, tear her apart and take her body to the mountains, to some distant cave and hold her caught at the edge of life and death. They drank her in tiny drops, not the blood of her veins, but the silver god-blood, and in doing so they each took a morsel of her power. They kept her that way, trapped, for decades and centuries, and all the time her seed was waiting. Waiting for a host and a way to go home.
She would not forget. She would not forgive but nor would there be vengeance. Home called her. Her people. Peace.
The Silver King lowered his sword and turned away.
‘No!’ Kataros struggled to her feet. She had almost to claw her way up the Adamantine Man to get up. ‘Don’t! Don’t leave us! We need..’
The silver sea became a silver mirror. Faded to black and died.
‘You.’ She began to sob. Her own blood was still all over the arch. She reached through it, trying to open the way again, but there was nothing. Dead stone, that was all it was now. It wanted more than a mere alchemist.