Stephen Deas - The Black Mausoleum

Mad. He was mad.

The dragon swooped across the field. Jasaan dived for the steepest part of the slope he could find and a large rock that stuck out of it. He took cover as best he could and peered out. There was nothing else to do. The dragon had either seen him or it hadn’t.

It skimmed the ground, wings out wide, a roar of wind, mouth open and filled with fire. It snapped up one outsider and ate him in a single gulp, and its wings powered it up again. Jasaan saw the alchemist and the other outsider thrown across the ground by the wind of its passing. Mouth still wide and full of fire, its eyes were staring straight at him.

No. Not at him. At Skjorl! Great Flame! Was this truly the dragon from Bloodsalt? The one that had killed Quiet Vish? Had it really followed Skjorl all the way here, looking for its revenge? That wasn’t right! That wasn’t what dragons did!

He cringed behind his rock and curled up tight, hiding his face and hands. Fire washed the slopes clean, burning everything that would burn, on and on, a roar wrapped around his head, smothering, drowning him. Its heat crept in through the cracks in his dragon-scale, around his arms, scorching the skin of his face and burning away his hair. And then at last it was gone, and the ground didn’t thunder and quiver. It hadn’t tried to land, not yet. Just as well — a dragon landing amid the scree would have brought the whole lot down. It would have killed them all. Buried alive or crushed, take your pick.

He looked up, searching for the monster, but he couldn’t see it. It must have flown through the gap in the cliffs, over the river and out the other side of the falls. It would be back though. He turned to the field. To the outsider and the alchemist.

They were apart. A chance! He drew the bow off his back. Dragon bone didn’t burn. He reached for an arrow…

The bow had no string any more. Two charred pieces dangled, one at either end, and that was it. He swore in frustration, and now the outsider was by the alchemist again, trying to drag her to her feet. ‘Stay still, you idiot!’ he shouted, but his words were lost in the roar of the falls.

‘Come on!’ That was Skjorl, breaking from cover, skittering down the slope, running, sliding. ‘Get her before that bastard comes back.’

Fat chance, but he couldn’t stay where he was either. Even if the dragon couldn’t land on the slope, it could burn him out if it tried hard enough. Or throw boulders — it had already shown that it knew that trick — or it could smash at him with its tail or kill him with its claws and jaws. No, couldn’t stay where he was.

Down below, the alchemist and the outsider were struggling with each other.

‘Come on come on!’ screamed Skjorl. ‘Move, you cripple!’

Jasaan looked behind him. Still no dragon, but it was only a matter of time. It would come between the cliffs and across the river any moment now. Fast. They’d barely have a chance to see it, never mind do anything about it. Down at the bottom of the slope they’d be in the open.

‘No, Skjorl! We don’t have time!’ He was right. This wasn’t him being scared, even though he was. Not cowardice this time. Just… being right.

Skjorl’s run faltered as he sensed it too. His head snapped from side to side. He pointed. ‘Cave.’

Made sense. That was what they’d come here for, wasn’t it? The endless Aardish Caves, which peppered the bluffs here like a honeycomb, so deep and numerous that Vishmir had managed to hide his tomb in one and no one had ever found it. And so had the Silver King, if what the riders had said was right. The frustration was a knife though.

Over his shoulder there was the dragon again, screaming over the river in a turn so vicious it made the air shudder enough to crack trees. Fire lit up the cave, fierce orange, the hot air swirling past him, scorching his hair a second time, stinging his skin, and then a wind picked him up and threw him further in. Dragon-scale armour was at its best when fire came from behind. Adamantine Men weren’t stupid.

The ground shook. A slab of stone sheared from the cave wall ahead, shaken loose by the shock of the dragon landing. Jasaan stumbled and skidded to his knees, knocked over by the tremor. As the light of the fire died, he picked himself up again. Skjorl had stopped exactly deep enough inside for the dragon’s fire not to reach him.

‘Where’s your shield?’ he asked.

‘Back with some snappers. Where’s yours?’ snapped Jasaan.

‘Back in the Pinnacles. Never had a chance to get it. Ankle troubling you again, I see.’

‘How’s your hand?’

The dragon was out there, blocking the daylight. Jasaan could hear it tearing at the stone at the mouth of the cave as if it could dig them out. The ground shook as it roared and stamped in fury.

Skjorl’s voice, when he spoke, was right by Jasaan’s ear. ‘So, friend, old wounds aside, are you strong from toe to crown.’ The ritual of greeting and parting and luck among Guardsmen, but barbed with bile. They both knew what Skjorl thought of him.

Jasaan felt himself tense. ‘Yes, I am. And you?’

Skjorl growled. ‘Insatiable.’

‘So we are strong. Why are you here?’

‘I came for the alchemist. And you? You and your riders. Are there any of them left?’

‘Did the one on the beach fall?’

‘Was still standing when I left.’

‘He was the last.’

Light flickered as the dragon backed away to lash at the entrance with its tail. A torrent of stone fell around the mouth of the cave. Skjorl grasped Jasaan on either side of his head. ‘ Did you come for the alchemist, Jasaan?’

‘Yes.’

‘And when the outsider and the dragon are done for, what will you do with her?’

‘I will take her home, Skjorl.’ He forced himself out of Skjorl’s grip and turned to face him. ‘Why? What would you do with her?’

He stared at the arches, at the liquid mirrors within them, at the silver sea beyond the gate made of moonlight.

Home.

Not his home. Home for whatever was inside him. A seed planted when he’d come this way by chance. A seed growing all the time. He wondered, for a moment, why he’d ever left, why he hadn’t stayed here and gone through the gate, and then he remembered. He was looking for something, something that had been missing and now had been found.

He reached for the arch. Its surface felt like he was dipping his fingers into a bowl of warm water. The scene inside rippled.

‘There,’ he said again, voice soft with wonder. ‘That’s where your Silver King went. He didn’t die. He went home.’

‘No.’

‘Yes, alchemist.’

‘No, Siff. That’s not what happened. Siff, listen to me. I’m an alchemist, and there are things known to us. Histories. Perhaps the Silver King built a mausoleum for himself here before he died just as Vishmir did. Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps he built many. But he did not come here to die.’

‘Look!’ Siff waved his hands at the silver mirrors all around them. The snakes from his fingers slithered through the air, touching one after another and, as they did, each mirror changed. In one he was looking at a lake of fire. Another gave him the clouds, broken, looking down on them from above, high over a huge forest. The third opened on to a small dark chamber, round with no exits, but with a mosaic on the floor, half lost to age and three skeletons lying upon it, each clad in bronze mesh armour. Deep underground by the feel of it, although he wasn’t sure how he knew. The next showed him a room full of more archways exactly like these, high up at the top of some tower; then a man with a strange gold-handled knife on his hip riding a horse; then another man, riding on the back of a dragon, high above the clouds; then another, a man with one eye and a face half-ruined by the pox. The next opened on to a place of shimmering rainbows and a woman, achingly beautiful with a circlet of gold around her brow.