Twenty-three days before the Black Mausoleum
‘What have you done to me?’ He asked the same question over and over as he led her out of her tiny makeshift prison and into a maze of stairs and passages that bewildered her. She almost told him to shut up, but the blood-bound could be tricky. Too many different orders and he might freeze in confusion. The alchemist who’d bound her had only ever used the bond once, when he’d first made it. You will be unswervingly loyal to my desires. That was it and then nothing more, not in a year and a half of service. Most of the time she forgot it was even there. He’d been a kind enough man who’d never asked for much, whose greatest desire had been for her to grow into the power that he was offering her. She hadn’t needed any help with that.
He’d shown her, after he’d bound her, how it was done, but he’d never told her what to do with it. He’d encouraged her, now and then, to bind others, but she never did, even though she knew that most alchemists had several blood-bound serving them. They did it for their protection they said, for the greater good, and in the squalor and hunger under the Purple Spur Kataros quite understood, yet every time she heard them, she remembered that they’d bound their Scales too, not long ago, and so they would have bound her if the Adamantine Palace hadn’t burned and more than half the alchemists of the realms been slaughtered.
‘You’re going to help me,’ she told him after she’d lost count of how many times he’d asked. ‘You’re going to help me save the realms.’
‘How are we going to do that?’
She didn’t answer, and the truth was that she didn’t exactly know. All she knew was what the near-corpse that the Adamantine Man was carrying had told her two nights before.
‘It’s going to get dark,’ he said a while later. The halls and vaults of the Pinnacles glowed from above like a softly starlit night, a legacy of the Silver King, who’d brought order to the broken world and who’d first subdued the monsters. Half monster himself, half living god, adept with magics that no one before or since could even understand, almost everything here bore his mark. The Pinnacles had been his home for more than a hundred years, until the blood-mages had found a way to kill him.
The Adamantine Man took her into later tunnels, ones carved by men. The twilight faded and the darkness grew. When she could barely see him any more, he stopped. ‘There are lamps by your feet. Get yourself one. You can get one for me too.’
In an alcove beside her she felt the familiar shapes, the cold glass tubes of alchemical lamps. She hadn’t expected that, not here in the Pinnacles, where to be an alchemist, it had turned out, was to be an avatar of evil. ‘There are-’
‘Your lot made them. Yes.’
‘Don’t you-’
‘Believe that everything touched by an alchemist is cursed?’ The Adamantine Man snorted. ‘I was in Outwatch when the terror started. Then Sand. Evenspire, or what was left of it. Scarsdale. Got to the Purple Spur eventually. Spent more time there than I have here. I know what your kind are. You failed, that’s all. You’re no better and no worse than any of the rest of us. Not that that’s saying very much.’
Kataros picked up a lamp. She turned it upside down, shook it and waited until the glow started. Then she handed it to the Adamantine Man and got another. ‘Won’t someone see the lights?’
‘No one comes here these days.’ He settled Siff over his shoulders and started on down the tunnel. The walls were different now. The light showed that they were rough, hacked out with picks and shovels and never finished. Utterly unlike the exquisite carved archways, the murals and the mosaics she’d seen elsewhere.
‘Why?’
He stopped. ‘This leads to the lowest girdle of the scorpion caverns. Used to be hundreds of them here. They’re all ruined now. The poison ran out and then the bolts. Not much point sticking yourself somewhere you can be burned by a dragon when you haven’t got anything you can shoot back.’
The tunnel went on, rough and uneven until it stopped at a fissure that ran up and down. Kataros couldn’t see how far it went either way, for the alchemical lamps produced little light. She crouched, searching for a pebble to drop, but the ground was smooth and there weren’t any. The Adamantine Man shifted Rat into a more comfortable position across his shoulders and started to climb. There were rungs bolted into the rock.
‘Why are we going up, not down?’
‘There’s tunnels down below. Guarded and watched well. There’s barricades and bolted doors and the speaker’s riders down there, watching out against the ferals. No way out without a fight — not for one like you. This way’s better. Gets us to the surface. No one goes out this way and you can’t get back up again, so there’s no one watching.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘You run into anyone up the top here, wave your arms at them and make ghost noises, that’ll probably work. Hyrkallan’s lot, they’re like little girls. The ones who’ve been here even longer are no better. All spooked. Most likely they really do believe that you lot made all this happen like he says. Demons. So make like one. Easier than having a fight. If they come back with any soldiers, we’ll be gone by then.’
She didn’t know what to say to that, so she climbed after him in silence, up the slit in the rock, its sides worn smooth by water from another time. In places it was so narrow that Siff scraped against the far wall; from side to side, it spread out further than her lamp could reach.
‘What is this place?’ She couldn’t help but wonder that. She’d been wondering that from the moment she’d come inside the Pinnacles and seen what it was really like. Even in chains she’d stared, lost in awe.
‘There’s shafts up and down like this all over,’ he said. ‘It’s like one of them cheeses we used to get from up on the moors.’
He reached an opening and levered himself out. Kataros felt his tension as he crouched, ready to drop Siff in an instant, but there was only darkness and silence to greet them.
‘Right. Quick now.’ He started to run, lumbering off. She followed, keeping close behind. Her heart beat faster, excitement and expectation bubbling together as if she was brewing some potion. Almost out. Almost out.
He turned a corner and light — a patch of slightly lighter darkness anyway — loomed ahead. The scorpion caves. Vishmir and the first Valmeyan had fought here in the War of Thorns. Afterwards, Prince Lai had built the scorpions. They were supposed to defend the Silver City, but it seemed to Kataros that they did the opposite. History said that when the scorpions fired, the Silver City burned. If you looked hard now, she supposed you might see it burning still.
She saw stars.
Almost out!
The Adamantine Man slowed as they reached the lip of the cave. He stopped a good ten feet short, lowered Siff to the floor and peered around him, looking for something. Kataros stared out of the sheer side of the Fortress of Watchfulness, down over the Silver City, which wasn’t still burning after all. They were high. She had no chance of climbing down, not from all the way up here.
‘How far up are we?’
‘Don’t know. A few hundred feet over the plains.’
‘And we fly like a bird?’ She’d supposed there might be a rope, or some sort of lift or crane, but there was nothing. ‘You bastard,’ she hissed, and reached through the blood-bond, ready to claw his mind apart. ‘What do we do? Flap our arms and pretend they’re wings?’
The Adamantine Man stopped. His hands fell limp. He looked almost surprised. ‘Yes,’ he said.
She almost killed him there and then, almost let the blood inside his brain boil and rupture every vessel. She could have stood there and watched him bleed from his eyes and his nose and his mouth, from his fingers and his toes and every place in between, and she wouldn’t have been sorry. But however hard she peered through the blood-bond, she saw no deceit. They were going to fly. He truly believed that.
‘How?’
He went back to peering around the cave. After a minute or two he stopped. ‘With these.’
It took a moment for Kataros to understand what she was seeing, simply because the lamps didn’t make enough light.
She was seeing wings. Dragon wings. Lashed together and with a harness between them.