Stephen Deas - The Black Mausoleum

Yinazhin’s Way. He’d seen a map once which showed it all around the edge of the moors in a great arc from Bloodsalt to Bazim Crag. Someone had told him that you could see Samir’s Crossing and the Sapphire valley from the path. Without anything else to go by, he went on, walking the road at night, sheltered away from it in the days. When the road touched the edge of the cliffs and he looked out over the Hungry Mountain Plain and saw in the distance the glitter of a river and the black smudge of charred earth that had once been a town, he began to climb down. The cliffs weren’t even cliffs here, easier than he’d expected, more a steep scrabbling scree of loose stones and boulders. Plenty of shelter from dragons.

He had to stop a mile or so away from the edge of what had once been Samir’s Crossing. Stop and take a moment to get himself together. Adamantine Men took what life brought, whatever that was. They took their pleasures as it suited them when pleasures were there to be had. They didn’t shirk their load or complain or falter when they were set to work. If the weight of their burden crushed them, then so be it, they got crushed, but they kept going to the end, staggering onwards, never putting it down. Adamantine Men didn’t weep at the thought that there would finally be rest at the end of the night, and water and perhaps a few strips of dried meat and stale bread and most of all the company of their fellow men after so long alone in the wilderness. So since Adamantine Men did none of those things, Skjorl took a few moments to be something else where no one would know, and only when he’d done with that did he walk on. Samir’s Crossing was ash, but there were cellars there, places where others kept watch on the movements of the dragons near the Spur. From Samir’s Crossing there were tunnels to the Spur itself and what passed for home.

He wrinkled his eyes, trying to see if he could see the Spur in the distance, but it was dark. He didn’t remember seeing it in the day. Couldn’t remember when the Spur had faded out of sight after they’d left it all those months ago. After Samir’s Crossing and before the Sapphire valley turned north and butted against the cliffs of the moors. Somewhen in between. Which meant this wasn’t right, and he wasn’t coming up on Samir’s Crossing after all.

Tried not to think about it. Told himself, as he walked among unfamiliar ruined streets, that he must have come in from a different direction. Maybe from the north or the south. Told himself all that and more, right up until he reached the far edge of whatever town this was and saw the river, immeasurably too big to be the Sapphire, and then the telling stopped.

Not Samir’s Crossing.

He found himself quivering. Trembling. There was a feeling he didn’t know. It might have been despair, but since Adamantine Men didn’t know such things, he grasped each and every memory he could reach and crushed them to see if they would bleed, and when he found ones that did, he poured them over this feeling, on and on until he hammered it into something that he understood.

Rage.

He let out a roar, but that wasn’t enough, not even the start of enough. He pulled his sword out and started walking along the banks of the river, swearing blind that anything, anyone who stood in his path, they either ran away or they were dead, man, dragon, snapper, anything. Wherever this was, he knew the river, knew the only river it could be. The Fury; and walking the Fury would take him home. Into the Gliding Dragon Gorge. Plag’s Bay. Watersgate. He gripped his sword tighter and ground his teeth. Another week, maybe just a little more. That was all. After so long, what did that matter?

Made him want to scream, that’s what it mattered.

When he heard a shout, a half-strangled cry of fear with death swift on its heels, he went towards it without even thinking, moth-like to a flame, knuckles white. Started to run. The sound gave a shape to his anger, sharpened and made of steel.

Three men out in the open. Soldiers. Armed and armoured, but with long swords in their hands not the short stabbing things of the Adamantine Men, and two of them were down and there were a dozen man-things, scrawny raggedy feral scrap-eaters, snapping at them.

He swung Dragon-blooded off his back. Ran faster. Axes were for snappers and for dragons, but they were for this rage too, a murderous thing that would brook no lesser weapon.

The ferals saw him coming. Heard his bellow and his charge. The first one skittered out of the way, but the axe caught the next, hardly blinking as it cut through the man’s shoulder and chest and shattered his ribs right to his sternum. He spun away, already dead, and then Dragon-blooded was coming back and straight into another, and then down, splitting the head of a third from his crown to his spine; and then Skjorl was among the soldiers and they were his, rallying to him, and together they charged and screamed and surged and slew, until the feral men scattered and fled into their shadows, and he stood, victorious, axe raised above his head, screaming words he would never remember.

An accented voice pulled at his arm, urging him away. Then something hit him on the head so hard he thought the sky had fallen on him.

And then, for a time, nothing.

When the world swam back into view he was in a boat being rowed across the Fury. ‘They throw rocks,’ said someone. ‘Stones. Sometimes they have arrows, but not often.’

They were dragon-riders from the north, soldiers from Outwatch and Sand stranded with their King Hyrkallan and their Queen Jaslyn for more than a year since the dragons had awoken, stuck in the Pinnacles after the battle of the two speakers and the great cull that came after. Trapped there by the grand master alchemist — everyone under the Spur knew the story. No love between the riders at the Pinnacles and the alchemists of the Spur, none at all, and Adamantine Men had no time for either. Could have hidden it maybe, but that wasn’t Skjorl’s way. So he told them what he was and then watched their faces to see if there would be blood.

‘Adamantine Men betrayed us like the alchemists.’ Under the Purple Spur the alchemists had declared another speaker. Queen Jaslyn’s sister Lystra. Turned out this lot had declared one too, Hyrkallan, Queen Jaslyn’s king. Ought to have had a fight about that, right there and then, but what was the use? He saw the stone head of Speaker Hyram again, lying on its side in the ruins of Bloodsalt. One speaker hiding impotent in a cave was hardly any different from another, and titles were petty things when placed before the tide of dragons. Not that that stopped fools from thinking different. Stupid, and Skjorl found he wanted no part of it.

‘My lady Dragon-blooded is for killing dragons,’ was all he said, nodding at his axe. ‘In whose name she flies, that doesn’t really matter.’

They wrapped a cloth across his eyes and took him down into the secret tunnels that Pantatyr and his blood-mages had built after they slew the Silver King. He was in Valleyford, they said, two hundred miles and maybe more from Samir’s Crossing where he was supposed to be. And it was alchemists they truly hated among the Pinnacles, not Adamantine Men, and so he could live — even though he’d be another mouth to feed — as long as he didn’t mind putting his axe to some use; and Skjorl didn’t mind that one little bit. For a month they stayed, hiding in the day, fighting ferals at night, searching for food and anything that might be salvaged, meticulously recording the movements of any dragons that passed overhead. Might have stayed longer if one dragon hadn’t got scent of them and set itself to digging them out of the ground. Skjorl hadn’t thought it possible, but it sat over their heads and each day they heard it tearing with its claws at the earth. He saw it in the air one day. Saw its silhouette and the shape and beat of its wings and knew it was the dragon from Bloodsalt. Odd that.