Stephen Deas - The Black Mausoleum

‘Somewhere there’s a snapper that dragon can’t find.’ For some reason that made him laugh so hard he couldn’t stop. Was that even how it worked? Did dragons sniff snappers out with their extra senses or did they do it the same way any other hunter did? He had no idea. Still couldn’t stop laughing though. He took a swig and then gave the potion flask to Nezak. ‘I don’t know if we’ve got enough of this to get to the caves because I have no idea how far away they are. We haven’t got enough to get back. You take this. If we find the alchemist, you take her as far as you can. Don’t worry about us. Just don’t murder her this time.’

Nezak gave him a queer look, as though Jasaan was losing his mind. Maybe he was. Maybe he’d been losing it for a long time. ‘If we find the alchemist, perhaps she will make us some more,’ the rider said. ‘And we’ll all go together. To be blunt, Guardsman, if anyone should be left behind, it’s us.’

Riders didn’t say things like that. That wasn’t the way it was. Adamantine Men served, that was all. They served and they died so others didn’t have to. Nice of Nezak to pretend things were different, though. Jasaan forced a smile.

They walked. Paddling their little raft into the teeth of the Yamuna’s current wasn’t going to work and Jasaan was happy to be on his feet. Walking was something he was used to. The riders would slow him down but that was fine too — it gave him time to hunt and forage and pathfind for them.

‘So how far is it to these caves?’ He had to ask, even though he knew he wasn’t going to like the answer. The Raksheh was said to be a thousand miles from one end to the other. The caves were supposed to be somewhere in the middle and Jasaan was quite sure that he was somewhere near the edge.

‘From here? A hundred miles. Two maybe.’ Nezak shrugged as if it was all much the same. Maybe on the back of a dragon it was.

‘Long walk then.’ Mentally, Jasaan went through what every Adamantine Man went through when they were away from a safe haven, the litany they had drilled into them every day. Water. Food. Warmth. Shelter. Dragons. They had potion for the dragons, at least for a while. A whole river full of water and never mind that it rained here more than it didn’t. The trees gave shelter from the wind and most of the rain. Leaf mould, fallen branches, yes, he could build shelters and fires and forest blankets if he needed to. As for food, well, if the trek along the Sapphire valley to Bloodsalt had taught him anything, it was how to fish. So that’s what they’d be eating then. Fish and not much else.

There were other things, of course. Things he hadn’t thought of. Parris came down with a fever. He kept going but it got steadily worse. His appetite went. He stopped talking and spent his time either shivering or sleeping, but he kept going. They should have left him, every Adamantine Man would have said the same, but Jasaan slowed his pace a little, did what he could to keep Parris going. Something bit Nezak’s hand and his fingers swelled up like sausages. Jasaan wondered if he might lose them, but there wasn’t anything to be done. He had his own problems by then. His bad ankle was aching all the time, and something must have crawled under his armour one day and feasted on the good one. The first he knew about it was a growing pain. When he looked, there must have been two dozen bites, each one an ugly black blotch, swollen and sore. Wasn’t long before he was limping on both feet. At least that evened things up. Queer, though — the one thing that never slowed them down and never went bad was Nezak’s arrow wound, which was probably the worst injury of the lot.

Every day the forest was the same and the river too. Jasaan had lost count of how long they’d been out there when they saw the boat. Was almost ready to give up. Didn’t know how far they’d come by then — it might not have been a hundred miles yet, but it surely felt like it. The middle of nowhere. No one ever came here and he could see why. Parris was a wreck, hardly able to focus any more, putting one foot in front of the other was the limit of what he could do. At least Nezak’s fingers seemed to be getting better. Maybe Nezak was charmed.

And out here, in this ancestor-forsaken wilderness where no one lived for a hundred miles, there was a boat. Not one, he realised, as he stared, but two, then three, then five. He hadn’t heard them coming over the ever-present rush of the water. They were close to the bank, paddling steadily forward where the current was weakest.

He stopped and he stared. Outsiders. Dozens of them. And there she was, in the middle boat. They had her. The alchemist. Kataros. Alive.

And the bugger was that he didn’t even have a bow and the two riders were half a mile behind him, following the trail he was marking out, and there was nothing he could do.

Twelve days before the Black Mausoleum

She had them in the palm of her hand. She hadn’t even used blood-magic to do it, she’d simply told them the truth. She’d told them who she was and why she was here, what she was looking for and how it might change their world, and then she asked them for their help. No more hiding, if what Siff said was true, and if it wasn’t, then she’d show them how to hide from dragons with more than the great trees over their heads — she’d show them how to hide with alchemy too. But if she was right then they were going to have the relics of the Silver King himself, the Isul Aieha, and those relics would be theirs, and they would never need to hide again, not from anyone or anything. Afterwards, when she’d finished promising them the earth, she felt proud of herself. She’d done what a true alchemist would do. What did it matter who took the Silver King’s power? In the great long scheme of things it was a battle of one species against another. Why carry the means to tame monsters back to the Pinnacles or the Purple Spur just because someone called themselves speaker? Yes, in the long great scheme of things survival was all that mattered, not whose name carried each victory.

They took her up to a sleep-space hollowed from the trunk of one of the great forest trees, hidden from both the ground and the sky. It was high, far higher than it needed to be for mere snappers.

‘Sometimes dragons come into the forest on the ground,’ said the man whose space she was sharing. He had a wife and three children, all born long before the Adamantine Palace had burned, and the space inside the tree was little more than a cell. A nest, she thought. Like a woodpecker.

She told him about the world outside, how everything had changed. He shook his head.

‘For us the only change is that your kind stopped coming into the forest.’

‘My kind?’

‘Alchemists.’

‘You didn’t notice the dragons?’ She couldn’t believe it. How could something like that make no difference?

He thought for a bit. ‘No. Dragons with riders or dragons without, they’re all the same to us. They come and they burn and they take what they want. We used to meet your kind sometimes, on the bank of the river. The one you call the Yamuna. We traded for things made of metal. Knives and arrowheads. We gave them what we harvested from the forest.’

A younger Kataros, the one fresh from the Palace of Alchemy, wouldn’t have looked past how simple a folk they were, but that was before she’d sailed halfway down the Fury with an outsider who turned out to be the only man she’d ever met who saw her as she was, as a person, not a simple collection of useful talents that could be employed to further some end of their own. They were simple and straightforward people, which made it all the more of a surprise to wake up on her second morning there with the same man sitting on her back, pinning her arms while his sons held her legs and his wife forced a gag into her mouth. She struggled and bit her tongue and tried to spit blood at them, but they knew, somehow they knew, and they would not let her blood touch them. They were five and she was one, and by the time they’d finished trussing her up, she was helpless. Their faces looked angry.