Stephen Deas - The Black Mausoleum

Vultures then.

Took another two nights of walking to find what the vultures had been eyeing from up in the sky. Hard to be sure, on account of there not being too much left, but there couldn’t be much doubt in the end. Erak, who’d had his arm bitten off by a snapper. Snappers had died, been eaten, been buried under rocks to keep them out of sight, but something had found them and something had found Erak too. Hauled his fish-pecked corpse up out of the water and scattered its shreds all about.

‘Dragon.’

Jasaan shrugged. Skjorl didn’t think much about it either. Dragon had dug him up out of the water, or else maybe a snapper — so what? They walked on past the bones, and it was only later, when they were settling in to rest up for the day, that Skjorl had got to wondering; and that was when he remembered the vultures.

‘Dragon dug him out of the water two days ago,’ he said.

Jasaan shook his head, but only until Skjorl told him about what he’d seen. Neither of them had much to say, but thinking on it set Skjorl on edge. Dragon had been here just a couple of days ago, down on the ground, rooting and nosing about. Had to ask yourself why a dragon would be doing that.

They saw it again that evening, flying back towards Bloodsalt. Low over the valley, head sweeping from side to side. Searching.

‘It’s still looking for us,’ said Jasaan. Skjorl frowned. Couldn’t be right, because that wasn’t what dragons did, but if he took a moment to forget about all that and just looked, he’d have to say the same.

It took another week and, seeing the dragon come prowling right past where they were hiding before, there couldn’t be any doubt. Dragon on the ground, sniffing its way up the Sapphire valley, lifting boulders and peering into caves? Skjorl had never heard of anything like that, but maybe that was because no one had found a pair of dragons with so many eggs and then done what he’d done. He gave himself a day to see if he could think of some way how two Adamantine Men might make a trap for it and kill it. Wasn’t surprised when he got nowhere with that, and so on the next night they changed their course and struck away from the valley, up towards the moors, still close enough to Bloodsalt that the slopes were gentle and not yet the boulder-strewn cliffs they’d start to be fifty miles further up the valley.

If you had to look back, Skjorl thought later, that was where their real falling-out had begun. Not that either said a word — too busy with pushing themselves onward — but once they got up on the moors even Skjorl could see it had been a mistake, and there was the look in Jasaan’s eye like he knew that too. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the moors. Maybe that was just when they’d both given up pretending any more. Jasaan, who’d never quite got over what happened in Scarsdale, and Skjorl, who simply couldn’t stop thinking that it should have been Jasaan who’d died in the cisterns under Bloodsalt and Vish who should have been alive and walking back to the Purple Spur.

Three dragons in three days up on the moors and they both knew they should have stuck to taking their chances in the Sapphire valley. Didn’t use to be dragons up on the Oordish Moors. No eyries. Hadn’t ever been that many snappers either, so Skjorl had reckoned on it being a safe enough place. Now he knew better. No food in the desert, but plenty of it up around Yinazhin’s Way. Plenty of dragons too now, all busy eating it.

‘Every dragon that eyried in Bloodsalt must have come up here,’ said Jasaan. ‘Back in Hyram’s time that used to be more than two hundred.’ They were hiding in a hollow, surrounded by rocks and long grass. They weren’t the only things hiding there. Jasaan had already been spat at by a snake.

‘Except the one in the Sapphire valley hunting for us.’

‘The one.’

‘ Hunting for us.’

‘We should go back.’ And Skjorl knew he was right and they should, but there was some little demon in him that couldn’t quite ever let Jasaan be right and him be wrong. Maybe because if it happened once then maybe Jasaan was right about some other things too.

‘You do that then.’

‘We’re stronger together.’

‘Your foot’s good enough. We can both stand alone if we have to.’

Made sense to go back into the valley. There was water. Walk at night, hide in the day and they’d be fine, dragon or no dragon. They’d be back in Samir’s Crossing in a month. Trouble was, Skjorl was sick of it. Sick of everything. Sick of running and hiding. Sick of never seeing the sun, of sleeping every day in a cave, sick of dragons, sick of being too hot or too cold or too wet, and sick of not being able to do the slightest thing about any of it. But most of all he was sick of Jasaan. Spineless, moaning Jasaan. And that, at last, was something he could change.

‘Adamantine Men fight together. We stand together. That’s what we do.’

Skjorl nodded. ‘Right up until we’re a little bit hurt and instead of standing together we cry like babies and plead for help and let our comrades get killed when we should have been fighting, eh?’

‘What?’

‘You.’

‘What are you talking about.’

‘Vish. Vish died because of you. Because you were too scared to do what you should have done.’ He saw Jasaan’s eyes burn then, but there was no going back. ‘I should have left you in the cistern. I should have left you by the banks of the Sapphire. That’s what I should have done, and you should have told me to do it.’

‘I couldn’t walk, Skjorl!’ Yes, there was anger there all right and plenty of it. ‘Were there enemies I stopped you from killing?’

‘You should have stayed up fighting. You should have clawed your way up the rubble down there and stabbed that dragon in the eye yourself. That’s what a real Adamantine Man would have done. But you didn’t, and so Vish did it instead, and now he’s dead and that’s on you.’

There might have been blows. It said everything about Jasaan, everything that Skjorl was sick of, that there weren’t. ‘You, of all people, have nothing to tell me about murder,’ he hissed. ‘You’re a filthy animal. You’re sick.’

That was Scarsdale coming out, which was enough to make Skjorl’s hand on his sword stay where it was. And so neither of them drew their steel, and for a second or two they stared and let each know the true depths of how much they despised the other; and then Jasaan spat at Skjorl’s feet and turned and walked away and that was the end of that.

There might have been some guilt. Might even have been some regret. Might have been that Skjorl wondered at his own words in the days after they went their separate ways. A man who’d been a part of his company for more than a year. Whatever they’d fought, they’d fought together, him and Vish and Jex and the rest of the dead. They’d survived Sand together, they’d survived the Blackwind Dales. They’d fought snappers and feral men. They’d reached the Silver River together and never mind what had happened at Scarsdale in between. They’d lived on musty water and mushrooms and the flesh of dead men in the caves under the Purple Spur. They’d forayed and foraged in the City of Dragons, hiding in cellars in the day and only coming out at night.

Might have stopped to wonder if maybe Jasaan had grown sick of all the same things he had, just a little sooner. Might have. But walking across the desolation of Yinazhin’s Way alone took a hardness, and it was easier to let the hate burn instead of asking whether it was wrong. Guilt? An Adamantine Man had no use for that. So he walked on alone. Should have left Jasaan to die. Should have let the dragon have him. Could have been back in the Purple Spur by now. Thoughts like that kept him alive when dragons burned the hills around him, when he cowered in caves or among stones or sometimes simply huddled out in the open, praying to gods that didn’t exist while lightning rattled the skies, when he dreamed of warm soft bread and warm soft women and cursed Jasaan for taking them away from him.