Stephen Deas - The Black Mausoleum

The worm rose again. It capsized a second canoe, which was paddling towards them as fast as it could. More men spilled into the river, their frantic screams silenced by the water.

No! This couldn’t be! The Yamuna worm was a myth! Something the alchemist had made up.

The water frothed again, further away this time. Another man was hurled into the air and then swallowed whole. The last three boats paddled desperately for the shore. ‘Me!’ he shouted, ‘To me!’ but they were all too terrified or too deaf, or else the screams and the roar of the nearby falls were too loud. He swam for the shore as best he could, not that he had much idea how to do it, arms grabbing at the water, legs kicking. Born and bred in the mountains with their rivers and lakes, every outsider learned how not to drown. They didn’t learn how to outrun a river monster though.

A third canoe went over, battered from behind this time, tipped sideways. Men and women fell out and clung to it, screaming. Ancestors, were they praying? To whom? He wanted to scream at them but he was too busy trying not to drown.

He caught a cry as another man tumbled through the air like a broken doll. ‘Isul!’ Then the worm breached the surface. It reared up and crashed down and the man vanished in the spray. The Silver King! They were calling to the Silver King.

He saw a man’s eyes, wild with fear, staring straight at him as the water swirled and sucked him under. ‘Isul! Isul!’ Him! They meant him! For a moment he was stunned enough to forget that he was about to die. Why? Why were they looking at him? He flapped and floundered closer to the shore, but that was no good because that was where the worm was now. He let the current take him instead, carry him away from the slaughter. Screams rang out over the water, over the rumble of the falls. ‘Isul! Isul!’

‘What?’ he screamed back at them. ‘What can I do?’

A moment later he realised that he wasn’t alone. Someone was in the water ahead of him. Lying on their back, almost drifting.

The alchemist. As soon as he saw her, he knew: she’d done this. He thrashed through the water towards her, madness and a volcanic anger driving him on. Her hands were tied. She had no escape. He caught her and grabbed her arm. ‘No, you don’t do this. You don’t do this to me!’

He flailed towards the bank, hauling her with him. She didn’t resist but it was hard work and they were far from the beach.

‘It won’t touch me as long as I have you,’ he snarled, as much to make himself believe it as anything.

‘You should… have let… me go,’ she gasped. Damn her, he was almost minded to push her head under the water and drown her for this. But he needed her. That was the trouble. The rest of them, they might have been his friends, might even have been his family if he let them, but he didn’t need them. He needed her. He was completely certain of that, even though he didn’t quite know why.

The screams of the outsiders from the village faded as the river carried him away. And then he saw something. A wave heading through the water towards them, small and fast, a dark shape beneath it. The alchemist had called the worm to her! Madness!

‘Let… me go… or I’ll kill us both.’

‘Crazy witch!’ He’d let her go, and then she’d have the worm eat him and she’d be free. No chance.

‘I’ll let you live,’ she cried. ‘On my word as… an alchemist.’

He did let go, but only so he could grab her again, this time with an arm around her throat. His head bobbed under the water; he almost let go again as he choked.

‘Stop it!’ he screamed in her ear. ‘Stop it! Stop killing them! If you don’t stop, I will kill you. We’ll all drown together, you blood-mage witch!’

She spluttered something.

‘What?’

‘Can’t!’ she managed.

‘ Liar! ’ Can’t what? Make it stop? Breathe? He didn’t care any more. His people. She’d called the worm and used it to kill his people. He shifted his arm further around her neck and squeezed as hard as he could, then forced her head beneath the water for good measure. They both went under together. She writhed and squirmed, but she was tied and there wasn’t much she could do about it. He had her fast. He couldn’t see the worm any more but the water didn’t boil. No teeth grabbed him, no sucking maw devoured him.

The alchemist went limp in his arms.

It took every ounce of strength after he’d seen the boats on the water, but they did it, Jasaan and his two riders. They walked and they walked, on through the night, no stops for rest. They were at their limit, all of them. Jasaan’s ankles were killing him; the riders could barely stand — Parris probably didn’t even know what realm he was in any more — but they they got ahead of the boats. And so Jasaan was on the rocks at the top of the waterfall, at the foot of the Moonlight Garden, when the outsiders came, and he watched the canoes round the last bend, one, two, three, four, five of them, with maybe a dozen men in each. Which meant fifty or sixty outsiders against three armoured men at the end of their tether with two bows between them. And, when he counted, exactly thirty-three arrows.

An Adamantine Man didn’t retreat just because the odds were bad, but Jasaan thought about it anyway as he watched the canoes come closer. Parris and Nezak were here because they hadn’t seen how many they had to face. They were his responsibility, weren’t they? They were riders, not Guardsmen. They didn’t have a duty to stand and die no matter what.

He wasn’t sure he did either. Question was, where else did they go? Or did they sit and watch and see what happened and then spring some sort of ambush. Even then the riders didn’t look like they were going to last. The more he looked at them, the more he was amazed that they weren’t already dead. And the trouble with that was it made him proud they’d all come this way, and that made him want them to live all the more.

The middle canoe tipped over, spilling its men into the river. Then another. From beneath one of the men thrashing in the water something massive rose, and a great spout of spray threw him high into the air. When he came down, he vanished, sucked under by a great pale shape.

‘Parris! Nezak!’

They could barely move, poor bastards. Parris lurched to the edge of the rocks and stared blankly down, eyes so distant that Jasaan thought he might walk off over the edge without noticing. Nezak, though, he was grinning, even through the pain of his hand and his side and his exhausted legs.

‘The worm of the Yamuna!’

Three of the canoes were on their sides now. Jasaan eased the bow off Parris’ back. Nezak was counting, Jasaan could see it in his eyes. How many men he’d have to face.

‘We have bows,’ offered Jasaan.

‘So do they.’

Jasaan shrugged. The people who lived on the fringes of the realms weren’t his concern. The King of the Crags used to catch them and sell them as slaves to the Taiytakei. Everyone knew that. Little people of no consequence to the speaker and the Speaker’s Guard. ‘Not ones made of dragon bone,’ he growled.

The river surged and frothed as another man was hurled into the air and then swallowed whole.

Nezak nodded. ‘And we wear dragon-scale.’ They stared as a colossal fountain of water erupted below.

The fourth canoe went over about a dozen yards from the shore. Most of its men reached the bank. The fifth canoe beached before the worm could capsize it.

‘You think our alchemist was on one of those?’

A pale shape welled up from the river and sucked another man down. From up here, with the waterfall so close, there were no screams, no cries for help, no curses, no monstrous howls. Just the endless roar of water.