Stephen Deas - The Black Mausoleum

Kataros took another long look at the wings, taut dragon skin stretched over old dragon bones. When dragons died, they burned from the inside. They didn’t leave much behind, just their scales and wings. The scales became armour for dragon-riders and for the Adamantine Men. Wing bones were used for all sorts of things — bows, mostly, but potions too. The skin from the wings was the most prized thing of all, softer and more flexible than the scales and still impervious to flames. Princes and lords lined their armour with it. Prince Lai had made his wings after the war, sitting in the Adamantine Palace with Vishmir the Magnificent, the first and only Emperor of the Nine Realms. After the War of Thorns there had been more dead dragons around than usual, so maybe that was why he’d done it.

The Adamantine Man cleared his throat behind her. ‘Longer it takes before we’re down, the less time we have before sunrise. When that happens we need to be somewhere safe. There’s nests in the Silver City.’

She looked at the moon. The night was young. ‘There are still people down there in the city. Will they help us?’

‘The ferals?’ The Adamantine Man laughed. ‘Don’t think they come up to the surface much, even at night. But still, got to get their food from somewhere. Help us though?’ He shook his head and patted the axe slung over his back. ‘Ferals find us, it’ll be time for my lady to get to work. We get to the city, you stay close. We go down. Underground. Find a place to hide from the dragons, that’s the first thing. Then we look for the tunnels. There’s ways as far as the Fury. After that?’ He shrugged.

Kataros stared at the wings. If she got ripped to pieces by feral men or eaten by dragons, that wasn’t any worse than being raped and strangled in a dingy cell. And at least she’d be trying to do something. She took a deep breath and started to strap herself into the harness. It was simple enough, similar to a dragon harness, the sort of thing a rider would have designed. All buckled in, she tried to drag the wings towards the mouth of the cave, but they were so heavy she could barely move them.

‘Let me help.’ He lifted them up, resting them across his shoulders. Kataros walked towards the edge and then stopped. The sky was clear and she could see the shapes of the Silver City hundreds of feet below her. And she was going to jump? Madness! She shrank away and stepped back straight into the solid bulk of the Adamantine Man behind her. ‘Get away from me!’

‘Sorry about this.’

The next thing she felt was his hand in her back, hurling her forward. She screamed as her feet struggled to push against him, reached through the blood-bond, found him there, grasped the first part of him that came to hand and twisted and tore. The pushing stopped and he let go. Her feet teetered on the brink of the cave.

The wings collapsed on top of her, forcing her down and pitching her forward. She grabbed at them, but they were much too big and much too heavy and she was already too close to the edge. They toppled forward and tipped out into the void, and Kataros went with them.

Eight months before the Black Mausoleum

They waited for the evening and for the heat to fade. If the dragons were still in Bloodsalt, Skjorl didn’t bother to look. Best chance of staying alive was to stay out of sight. He searched around the house for anything useful, but under the dirt and dust were only the blankets, an old table and a couple of stools. After that he had a good look at his hand. Took some Dreamleaf to take the edge off the pain and did his best to splint it up. Wasn’t ever going to work right again, that was for sure, but maybe he’d still be able to wield his axe one day, that was what mattered.

Dragon-blooded. He picked up his axe and held her. He could call her Dragon-blooded, after the stains on her steel. Better than Dragonslayer.

After that he had a look at Jasaan. Hard to tell whether the ankle was broken or badly sprained, but it was swollen up like a severed head. He put a splint on that as well. Stools turned out useful for something after all.

When it was properly dark again they crept out, back towards the water of the Sapphire. They found the covered canal and Skjorl stared at it. The parts in the city had been smashed to bits, trampled into a mess of jumbled bricks. So much for Jex and the rest, not that he’d had any hope they were still alive. Maybe they’d managed to get themselves eaten. Maybe the other dragon was burning too, but Skjorl wasn’t about to count on it. Never count on anything with dragons. Crafty bastards they were.

Outside the city, pieces of the canal were still intact. They hid inside one for the last hour of darkness and the whole of the day. Blasted place was like an oven in the sun, baking them in their own juices until they had nothing left to sweat. Skjorl lay towards one end, head poking outside but in the shade, catching what whisper of a breeze he could. In the distance he thought he saw the dragon, high up in the sky and away to the south, heading towards the Sapphire valley. When he blinked it was gone; afterwards, he wasn’t sure whether he’d seen it or dreamed it. Didn’t matter much. A sign was a sign. It was looking for them.

‘We’re too slow and there’s not enough shelter,’ Skjorl said when the sun set and they were ready to move again.

Jasaan shrugged. ‘We don’t get any water, we won’t last another day.’ He levered himself back to his feet and propped his axe under his shoulder as a crutch. ‘If it’s my time then I suppose I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.’

‘If we have to fight it, we will. We’ll come back out here and look for it after we’re done in the Spur.’ He tried to smile, and Jasaan grinned back. An Adamantine Man faced a dragon without fear. Even if there were only the two of them and they were both crippled and stood no chance whatsoever of victory, they’d still fight.

‘Whatever you say,’ said Jasaan after a pause that was much too long.

‘I’m thinking we should go up on the moors. Yinazhin’s Way. I been along it once. There’s a part you can see the Sapphire gleaming like a needle, the Hungry Mountain Plain to the south and the Plains of Ancestors to the north with Samir’s Crossing in between. We get up to the moors, there’s shelter and water and food. Dragon should have forgotten about us by then.’

‘Be busy looking for wherever his mate hatched out.’

‘Maybe.’ Now there was a thing Skjorl still couldn’t get fixed right in his head. He’d spent most of his life thinking dragons were big dumb animals. Immense and deadly, but animals. Now it turned out they could read your thoughts if you didn’t take a potion to stop them, and when they died, they just came back again, hatched straight out of another egg somewhere. And they remembered. No, couldn’t get that sort of thing fixed in his head at all.

They followed the sunken canal back as far as the river, crossed it, wallowed in the cool water and drank their fill and then headed on. Plenty of shelter at least. Dry riverbeds. Clusters of rocks. Crevices in the dirt. Nothing alive though. No trees, no grass, no nothing. Maybe there were snakes and rats and creatures like that, but all Skjorl saw were the same sodding great sandflies that had been trying to eat him alive for the last three weeks.

They stopped as the sun rose and took shelter in the middle of a cluster of giant boulders. Felt like they’d walked for miles and miles, but when Skjorl looked back, there was Bloodsalt, a dull scar smeared across the shining sands and the glittering lake. The river wasn’t much more than a mile away. He looked in his pack. Food for three or four days before he started to starve himself, but that wasn’t going to be the problem. In this heat they’d die of thirst long before he had to worry about that. The edge of the desert and the slopes up to the moors were fifty miles away. Took Jasaan a bit longer to work it out, but he got there in the end.