Stephen Deas: The Black Mausoleum

He nodded and Skjorl nodded back. Dragons liked to leave their eggs somewhere like that. Out here in the desert there simply wasn’t anywhere. Or at least so Skjorl had thought.

‘Worth a look then.’ He shrugged. The hard part with dragons wasn’t finding them. Man wanted to kill a dragon, he needed to be bloody sure the dragon had no idea he was there. Slip in, poison their kill, slip away and never be seen. Smashing eggs came after, when the dragons that had laid them were dead. If you ever got that far.

On the other hand, tunnels and water could mean people. Not that anyone was still alive out here, but he supposed he ought to at least look like he’d been told.

No. Not people. Alchemists. If it was just people, well there were people everywhere. Like cockroaches. Hiding under every stone and in every cave until a dragon sniffed them out. Just hungry mouths to feed; the last thing the Purple Spur needed was more of them. No, it was alchemists he’d been sent out here to find. Bloody waste of time.

‘If there’s eggs there, we don’t touch them unless I say,’ he growled. ‘And that means we keep away from them.’ In case one hatched while they were there but he didn’t need to come out and say it, not to men like these. ‘We look in case there’s people. Then we take the adults. Eggs last.’

‘People?’ Jex laughed and shook his head. ‘There’s no people here.’ And Skjorl reckoned he was right.

First thing was crossing the water though, easier said than done. The Sapphire might have been sluggish down this close to the lake, but it was wide and too deep for a man to wade. Jex went first since he could swim. He took a rope. The rest of them stripped, floating the things that had to stay dry on their shields and hauling themselves on Jex’s rope. It took a while. Skjorl checked the moon. A third of the night gone, but that wasn’t too bad. The covered canal would be a perfect place to spend the day if they could get into it.

The entrance was in the riverbank. A channel nearly a dozen strides wide had been cut into it. Shallow, just like Jasaan had said, but the channel narrowed inside and grew deeper until they were waist-deep in warm stagnant water. The moonlight quickly faded to nothing. The darkness inside was almost absolute.

‘It’s not flowing,’ muttered Jex. ‘Must be blocked somewhere. Can’t spend the day here, not in this shit.’

Skjorl frowned. Had to agree with that. Man couldn’t be standing upright when he was supposed to be resting.

‘We could make little beds out of our shields and float on them maybe?’

‘Daft bugger.’ Skjorl scratched his head. ‘Push on for now.’ They had a place to shelter not far away if they crossed back to the other side. Less than half the night gone. Still safe to press forward.

‘Ouch.’

At the front Jasaan stopped. Skjorl couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, it was that dark. Some fifty yards behind them, the tunnel entrance was just a patch of black not quite as black as the rest.

‘What is it?’

‘Gate. Bars. Hold on.’

Skjorl stood his ground, stock still. He’d been in tunnels this dark before, plenty of times. Darkness didn’t bother him, but other things did. Things lived in tunnels and dead ends made his skin crawl.

‘Some sort of grille. Kasern, you still behind me? Give me a hand.’

Down in the mines of Scarsdale, for example. Plenty of tunnels there, and plenty of dead ends too. For once he’d been the hunter, sword in hand, already stained with blood. In Sand they’d explored the passages under the monastery. Plenty of tunnels there too. They’d found scholars and Adamantine Men and a friendly place for a day or two before they’d moved on, underneath the hell that the dragons had made above.

And before that there had been Outwatch, where they’d thought they were safe under the ground. Dragons were huge and the caves were narrow. Safe, as long as you were deep enough to escape their fire. He didn’t know what had happened after he’d fled the room and left the greybeard to his scorpion, but the old fool hadn’t killed the hatchling like he was supposed to and then someone had smashed down the door and the little bastard had come after them. Thin and wiry, all teeth and claws and flames, and whatever they’d thought about being safe, they’d found they were wrong. Alchemists knew better now. Jex and Vish knew better too. They were the ones who’d lived to talk about it, and the caves under the Purple Spur had grown a lot more big heavy doors after they’d embraced Skjorl and his men.

‘Got it.’

Metal grated on metal, the sort of sound that carried much too far inside a cave. Skjorl winced. He had to remind himself: this time the dragons were on the outside. ‘What is it?’

‘Metal gate. Keeps animals out.’

Keeps animals out? Worth remembering for the way back then. ‘Keep a hatchling out?’

‘Don’t know. Might. Might not.’

There wasn’t much for it but to press on. ‘Another hour,’ Skjorl growled. ‘We find a place we can stop for the day by then or we turn back.’ He heard Jex and Relk groan. Knew how they felt — tracking back always felt like a waste, but that was how you stayed alive when there were dragons to be stalked. Impatience, that was the killer, always was. One thing you could always do, one way you’d always win against a dragon, was wait it out. Even if it knew you were there, if you waited it out, eventually it would go away. They got bored. ‘I’ll just mention Samir’s Crossing and wait for you lot to shut up,’ he growled. Half the men they’d lost, they’d lost at Samir’s Crossing.

They sloshed on through the dark, slowly and carefully, wary of rubbish and rubble under the water. Didn’t dare light a torch even if they could, in case there were holes in the roof. One gleam, one glimmer, one flash of light in the wrong place, that would be the end of them all. For all Skjorl knew, there were hatchlings right outside.

‘Who builds a covered canal anyway?’ he muttered under his breath.

‘Means we can keep on going through the day though. Get this over with,’ murmured Vish, and Skjorl hadn’t thought of that. So set in their routine of sleeping through the day and walking at night, he never stopped to think about the why of it any more. Dragons didn’t see so well in the dark. Mostly they didn’t fly at night, so that’s when you walked. In the day they had eyes like eagles. A man wanted to stay alive, he walked at night and he hid when the sun came up. Always.

He was on the brink of turning them all around and marching back to find a place where they could do just that when Vish stopped again. The roof had fallen in. Skjorl could see the stars in the sky and his hand in front of his face again. For maybe twenty, thirty yards the tunnel was crushed into a jumble and tumble of bricks and broken stone.

‘Hold.’ He clambered up, slow and careful and silent. The moon was gone now; it was later than he’d thought. Eyes peeled, peering into the starlight. Not that he had much chance of telling the difference between a resting dragon and yet another sand-swept boulder, but still, you had to try.

Nothing. He skirted the rubble and the canal went on, roof intact once more. He could almost see it: some dragon had come here, chasing after some whim of its own, and stood on a ridge of stone that turned out not as solid as it had looked. Or maybe it had been done on purpose. Maybe the dragons that destroyed Bloodsalt had come here. Crushed the veins that fed the blood-water to the city after they’d smashed and burned it to ashes, in case their dam didn’t work. That was a thing you learned about dragons, if you watched them. Yes, they got bored, but until they did, they were nothing if not thorough.