Stephen Deas - The Black Mausoleum

Hunger and a dragon overhead were old friends to Skjorl, but the riders didn’t like this dragon one bit. Got to them quick it did. He wondered how they meant to cross the open land from where they were to the Pinnacles, what with no alchemists and no potions to hide them, but they laughed and slapped him on the shoulder and told him he shouldn’t worry. A warren of tunnels reached out from the Fortress of Watchfulness, they said, right out across the realms, all of them ending on the banks of the Fury, from Gliding Dragon Gorge in the north to Farakkan in the south, to Purkan and Arys Crossing and Valleyford in between. Tunnels. That was how they were going home.

And so they did. Took five days. Strange and sorcerous things, those tunnels, wondrous at first, not hewn by the hands of man but by something else. Then, later, just dull. Boring and monotonous and the same, hour after hour after hour, straight as a scorpion bolt and dark and empty as a murderer’s heart until they reached what the riders said were the catacombs of the Silver City itself, back from the blood-mage days when burying the dead had been no sin. They took him up into the Fortress of Watchfulness and the slowly dying fellowship of men that lived there, this Speaker Hyrkallan and his queen, and they set him to work doing nothing much at all. More wonders. The Silver City was old, he knew that, but the three stone warrens that overlooked it were older still. The Pinnacles. Hollowed out by hands long forgotten, tunnelled and quarried by men as a shelter from the terror of the dragons when they came, shaped and transformed by the will of the Silver King. Three mile-high monoliths that had been the centre of the realms from the day the dragons had been broken. They were old and they were heartless.

He found a few others of his kind, a handful of Adamantine Men who’d been sent out, as he’d been sent to Outwatch, with axes and hammers and dragon poison for the great cull that was supposed to save the realms and had failed. He couldn’t believe what they told him at first, but over the weeks and the months he slowly saw it with his own eyes. The knights and riders of the Pinnacles were doing nothing. They had their tunnels that reached halfway across the realms and food enough for most of a lifetime. They had water, an endless inexplicable stream of it flooding through the fortress from the fountain on its peak conjured by the Silver King. But they had no hope. They were already lost.

After that he spent as little time there as possible. Lived as much as he could with the hunting parties, out in the Silver City tunnels. Doing something. Killing ferals mostly, but at least doing something.

Eventually, after a few months, another party of Adamantine Men had arrived out of nowhere. He kept away. Didn’t want them to see what he’d become. And it was just a few days after that, when he found himself guarding some traitor alchemist they’d brought with them, that everything went to shit again.

Five months before the Black Mausoleum

The dragon searched the river. Other dragons came and went, other thoughts, other distractions, but it never forgot. Here and there, when it stopped to look with care, it found traces of the little ones’ passing. Dead flesh, empty of life yet tainted with poison. It pulled them out of their hiding places and scattered them for the vultures and the crows. When it had searched every cave and turned over every rock and still found nothing that lived, it stopped and searched for its reborn mate.

The mountains, others told it, the younger ones who knew. There are most eggs in the mountains.

The dragon flew to the mountains to search and found nothing that interested it. It met a young one freshly hatched. One whose path had crossed with Bright Lands Under Starlight among the dwellings of the dead. His mate was gone, away to new flesh in a place far across the sea that had no end, beyond the storms that even a dragon could not cross except through the realm of the dead.

The hatchling spoke of other things too. It spoke of the hole in the underworld, yawning open, growing, of dragon souls swallowed and consumed, gone and destroyed for ever. The dragon considered these things and then let them fall aside. It had no use for them. It flew to the places where the little ones still cowered deep in their caves and under their stones and it searched. It stood on their battlements and reached into their thoughts while they slept beneath. In the smashed-flat wreckage of what had once been a proud place it found little ones hiding in the dirt, and among them it found a trace, a taste, a sniff of a memory, the flash of a face.

It burned them to ash and moved on until it came to the great fortress where the little ones had hidden away once before, centuries ago before their Silver King had come. To the place of the three mountains. It hunted through the thoughts and minds of the humans who cowered there, until it found the one it was looking for. And then it did something rare among its kind. It waited.

Twenty-three days before the Black Mausoleum

Being told that a lot of things came with a blood-bond was one thing; finding out what they actually felt like was something very different. Finding out what they felt like while running through the dark ruin of the Silver City with a shoulderful of pain and feral men on the loose was something else again.

She knew where the Adamantine Man was. She could feel him, always there in a certain corner of her head.

That right there was one of those other things. He was always there, whether she liked it or not, no matter whether she wanted him or couldn’t stand the thought of him. She couldn’t see through his eyes or read his thoughts or send him her own unless she set her mind to it, but she could feel him. The ebbs and surges of his thoughts were like gentle hands placed against the back of her head whose fingers couldn’t be still. She felt his thrill as he broke another feral, the moment of killing like a pinprick inside her skull. Then tension. Anticipation. Satisfaction. For a short time after that, calm. He had Siff with him now, the outsider, a constant annoyance and burden, slowing him down.

Bring him to me, she told him, but he’d hardly gone any way at all before there were more of them. Anger and rage, they came first, and underneath them a vicious joy, a raw and gleeful abandonment, a surrender of anything and everything except the next motion. They were alien and uncomfortable thoughts to an alchemist, taught always to think and consider, never to act swiftly or rashly, never in haste, never on impulse. The Adamantine Man was more like a dragon in a rage, swept up and lost in the moment. It was the blindness that came with that fury that had almost saved the realms in their last days. Almost.

She ran now and never mind how much it hurt. She felt the distance between them vanishing, yet she had no idea what that meant, whether a certain sense of him implied he was still a mile away through the starlit ruins or whether she’d find him round the next corner. She readied herself for either; as it was, she heard him before she saw him, his battle roars and the shrieks and jabberings of the feral men. She slowed as she reached them. Now that she was close, she didn’t know what to do. The Adamantine Man had Siff on the ground, lying almost between his feet, weaving his axe in arcs too quick to follow, daring anyone to come close.

‘Come on then! You wait much longer it’ll be dawn. Or would you rather wait for a dance with a dragon? It’s all the same to me, little men. This is my axe! Dragon-blooded! She’s killed dragons before and she’ll kill them again!’

The Adamantine Man had his back to a wall so the feral men couldn’t get behind him. They’d spread out in a semicircle, eight of them. She glanced at the sky. Dawn was hours away and she doubted he could keep his axe swinging for that long, so she had to do something or else they’d all die, and the only weapon she had was her own blood. Try to blood-bind some of them? Easily said, but she had to get her blood inside one first.