Stephen Deas: The Black Mausoleum

His fingers tightened around the haft of his axe, closer to him and cared for with more tenderness than any lover. He squinted. Two adults. The same two adults he’d seen every day for more than a week now as he and what was left of his company of men eased their way along the Sapphire valley towards the lake and the ruins of the old city. Two adults and perhaps a score of hatchlings. More dragons than any of them had seen in the year since the Adamantine Palace burned.

The Adamantine Men had done their duty when the dragons first awoke. To eyrie after eyrie the word had come before the dragons did. Quietly and without fuss, the alchemists had slipped poison into the potions they fed to adults and hatchlings alike. Quietly and without fuss, the dragons had burned from the inside and died; and while they were burning, the Adamantine Men had taken their hammers and their axes. They’d marched into the hatcheries and the egg rooms and they’d done what needed to be done. In some places there had been fighting between the Adamantine Men and soldiers loyal to an eyrie master or the dragon-king or — queen who owned him. Always fights that the Adamantine Men won. Across the realms eggs had been smashed, dragons poisoned.

Except here. Here and Outwatch. Had Bloodsalt had any warning? They’d had seconds at Outwatch. Seconds, and that had still very nearly been enough.

‘Any kills, boss?’ whispered a voice in the thorns beside him. ‘I don’t see any kills.’

‘No.’ Skjorl shook his head. There was nothing to eat near Bloodsalt for anything larger than a sand lizard, much less a dragon. The adults probably flew up into the Oordish Moors to feed, hundreds of miles away, but they always came back. The hatchlings? He didn’t know if they’d go so far. He was hoping not, otherwise they were all wasting their time.

‘Bollocks.’ The thorns rustled angrily. Skjorl stayed silent. No kills meant nothing to poison. Until there was something to poison, they’d stay where they were, hiding in the dust and the salt, drinking brackish water, eating their own boots and being bitten to death by sandflies. He could live with that if it meant taking down a dragon. Skjorl had his own cask of dragon poison, more than enough for a full-grown adult. He had his axe too, in case they got as far as the eggs. Yes, he could wait right enough.

They’d had a hatchling in a cave at Outwatch. A rogue the mad queen had made. The old greybeard who ran the eyrie had let slip what it was and that had been good enough for Skjorl, good enough to kit up in dragon-scale armour, dismantle a scorpion and carry it down to the caves. The dragon had strained at its chains and spat fire at them, but those chains had held. They’d carried the scorpion in pieces to the far end of its cave, to the hole in the cliff face where the sunlight and the air poured in. They’d carefully built it back together while the hatchling had watched them like a hawk. Somehow the first shot had missed. Then Skjorl had looked outside and he’d seen the white horror gliding through the sky towards them. Riderless. Coming home. The greybeard eyrie master had seized the scorpion for himself then. Skjorl hadn’t waited. He’d run, shoving his men out in front of him, last one out slamming the door as he went. Didn’t pause to see what became of the eyrie master. Death walked beside every Adamantine Man. When it came it came quick and you went one of two ways, crispy or crunchy. They’d run and run, all through the tunnels under Outwatch as the citadel came smashing down. They’d taken their hammers and their axes. Eggs smashed. Hatchlings murdered, the little ones butchered, the bigger ones fed poison. He’d taken servants, slaves and Scales, and battered them and strapped skins of poison to them, then thrown them to the howling monsters to be devoured. They’d have been dead anyway if he hadn’t. And amid the screaming and the blood and the fire that came after, an unexpected smile had stretched across his face. The dragons had awoken. The end of the world had begun. It was what he’d been made for.

The same smile was still there. Crispy. The greybeard eyrie master had gone the crispy way. For ordinary men there was a third way too, the starving-to-death-under-the-ground way; that was something that would never happen to him, but he didn’t mind a bit of waiting, not if there was a reason for it. In Outwatch he’d waited them out and they’d left. Left him and his company, what remained of them, stranded in the middle of the desert, a hundred miles from anywhere, surrounded by ash and ruin. It had been a lot like this.

The sun slipped below the horizon and darkness wrapped the salt plains. Skjorl eased himself out from under his thorn bush and crept back down the hill and into the tumble of rocks where the other Adamantine Men were waiting, still and quiet. There were seven of them left, a poor shadow of the fifty-odd who had left the Purple Spur three months ago. There was Jex, who’d been with him in Outwatch and ever since. Vish too. Jasaan he’d picked up on his way south, in what was left of Sand after the dragons had finished with it. Kasern, Relk and Marran, they’d come later when he’d trekked his way from Sand all through the dead Blackwind Dales as far as the Silver River and finally found what passed for the remains of civilisation, hiding out in the caves and chasms that reached from one side of the Spur to the other. Jex and Vish, they were his squad. They’d spent the best part of a year together, struggling every day not to be dead. The rest were all Adamantine Men, and three months creeping beside the waters of the Sapphire had told him everything he needed to know. They were alive while everyone else wasn’t. They were survivors then. The best.

‘Stay alive?’ Vish tossed over a skin half full of water from the river. It tasted warm and foul. Everything out here was too hot. Skjorl drank, though. The taste was something he’d come to know. The bitterness and nausea and blood-iron tang of the powders the alchemists had given them. Mix with water and drink at least once a day so the dragons don’t find you. Skjorl had no idea what that meant or how it worked, but it was true that dragons usually had a way of knowing where you were, no matter how well you hid. They’d found that out the hard way crossing the Blackwind Dales.

He tossed the skin to Jex. It was also true that on their trip up the Sapphire valley the dragons had seemed not to notice them. Maybe they’d been lucky, although seven left from more than half a hundred was an odd kind of luck. But he took his potion, however bad it tasted, and he’d keep taking it. Given how many of them were left, there wasn’t much chance they’d be running out any time soon.

‘Waiting, is it?’

Skjorl nodded. Waiting. Three months it had taken them to get this far. Soon enough they’d be done and then maybe they’d spend three months getting back home again, and if that’s how it was, that’s how it was.

Jex tipped the skin and poured water into his mouth. He tossed it back towards Vish but Kasern snatched it out of the air. He picked up another one and held them out in one hand, dangling them next to each other. ‘What’s that then?’

Relk shook his head and turned away. Jex and Vish were laughing.

‘Tits,’ Marran spat. ‘That’s what that is. I could murder for a good pair of tits.’

‘That’s not just any tits.’ Jex rubbed his crotch and nudged Skjorl. ‘That woman from Scarsdale, she had tits like that, eh? Old and saggy and wrinkled and yet oddly firm.’ He chuckled to himself.

‘More like two giant balls in a giant ball sack, they were.’ Vish wrinkled his nose.

‘Didn’t see you minding at the time.’

‘Didn’t see anyone minding at the time,’ grunted Skjorl. Four months it had been when they’d reached Scarsdale. Four months from Outwatch. Past Sand, black and smashed to bits. Past Evenspire, which just wasn’t there any more except the Palace of Paths, so big and so massive that even dragons couldn’t knock it flat. Four months and mostly all they’d seen were blackened corpses. Everything in the Blackwind Dales was dead even before the dragons. And then they’d got to Scarsdale. Twelve people they’d found there, hiding in the copper mines, creeping out at night for water from the Dragon River, eating fish and freshwater crabs and whatever roots and leaves they could find.