Stephen Deas - The Black Mausoleum

The mouth of the canal was about the size of a dragon’s head. The rest wouldn’t fit. It would have to smash its way in. He had time. Time to get away.

Jex had been up there. Relk, Marran, Kasern. All dead. A snap of fate’s fingers and gone, just like that.

A storm of warm air tore at his clothes. The dragon was too far away to hurt him. Yet. He tried to think about where each foot was going, in between the chaos of broken stones and dragon eggs. Just that. Nothing else.

Then he saw the second one. Down in the cisterns. A huge wriggling shape, a shadow in the distant haze, weaving between the columns. Saw a flicker of it, hundreds of yards away, coming towards him before the fire from the first dragon stopped, plunging them all back into darkness. Jasaan and Vish? He had no idea where they were, whether they were alive.

He kept moving. The alchemists said that dragons talked in your head sometimes, but he’d never had that. Kill, eat, burn, that’s all a dragon was.

The ground shook again, now with the crash of tumbling stone. That was the dragon worming its way towards him, given up on not smashing down the columns that held the cisterns together. A mad grin swept across his face. Maybe they’d all end up buried alive. Entombed together. A fitting end for an Adamantine Man.

His foot caught on something. Hurled forward, he curled up before he even hit the ground, rolled and let his armour take the impact. First thing he did when he was back on his feet was check the pouches of dragon poison wrapped around him. Instinct, that was. There wasn’t much else you could do about a dragon except be eaten, and there wasn’t much point in that unless you were going to take the monster with you. All burn together, him from the outside, the dragon from within. What else was the point?

Thing was to get to an edge, a wall, somewhere that would give shelter when the roof came down. Then hunker down and pray.

Shudders rippled through the ground. More tumbling stones and the cisterns lit up with fire again. He didn’t look back, took what he could get and sprinted. There was no running from dragons, but that didn’t stop a man wanting to try, not when there was one right behind you.

A deeper rumble shook the earth. The dragon behind him roared. The stones answered. A huge hand of air plucked Skjorl off his feet and threw him across the floor, bouncing between dragon eggs. He thumped into a step and cracked his head hard enough to make the world waver, even through his helmet. He blinked hard. Everything went dark again. The fire had stopped. The air was ripe with dust, rich with the smell of falling masonry and the rumble of tumbling stone.

He sniffed. Fresh air from outside too. Sand. The smell of sand and salt.

He smiled, but that wasn’t enough so he laughed, and even then he needed more. ‘You stupid dragon,’ he roared. ‘You actually did it. Vishmir’s cock!’ He stood up, filled with being alive. Filled with what felt like victory. Took a few steps back towards where the dragon had been before he stopped himself. Still couldn’t see a thing.

There was the other one. Somewhere.

Ought to slip off. Tiptoe between the eggs and hope another one didn’t hatch. Ought to. Really, really ought to. That’s what a man with an ounce of sense would do.

‘Vish? Skjorl?’

Jasaan? He tried to make out where the call had come from. He counted to ten and when there wasn’t a raging dragon coming after him he reached for his firebox. Mad. What am I doing? But by the time he’d asked himself that, the firebox was lit. Didn’t help much. All he could see was a thick mist of dust.

‘Skjorl?’ Jasaan’s voice was laced with pain.

‘Jasaan?’ Took a couple of steps. Stopped. Somewhere out there was still a dragon. Maybe more than one. Maybe the hatchlings too.

‘Jasaan?’ A second voice.

‘Vish?’

‘Yep. Still alive. Skjorl?’

‘Still got all my bits.’ Friendly voices in the dark gave him strength. ‘Can you see anything?’

‘I can see you.’

‘The roof caved in.’ Jasaan’s voice was strained but he wasn’t gasping.

‘And the dragon?’

‘It’s not moving.’

‘You can see it?’ He couldn’t make out any other light.

There was a pause. ‘It’s close. And I’m hurt.’

Skjorl frowned at that. Adamantine Men were never hurt. They kept going or they fell over and crawled off to die, and if that was what they were going to do, they did it on their own without bothering anyone about it. The creed of the Guard had no room for the sick or the injured, no time or space for helping the wounded. You stopped to help someone when there was a dragon about, you both wound up dead. That simple. ‘Where are you?’

‘Over here.’

‘What about the dragon. It moving?’

‘I think it’s stuck.’

What Skjorl should be doing, he decided, was leaving. What Jasaan ought to be doing, unless he had two broken legs and two broken arms, was crawling over to wherever that dragon was and tipping poison down its throat.

No. His company. So that was what he ought to be doing.

Crap.

‘Vish! You keep going. See if you can find another way out of here.’

‘Bollocks! You do that. I got me a dragon to slay.’

‘Where’s the other one?’

‘Can’t see.’

‘You keep away from that tunnel.’

‘You think I’m an idiot, boss?’

Skjorl growled. He started to move as quickly as he could through the haze of dust and the litter of rubble. Off towards Jasaan. By the time he got there, he could see the pile of fallen stone where the dragon had to be.

The floor shuddered again. The other dragon, the one that had burned Jex and Kasern and the others. It was somewhere behind the cave-in now. Or could be a third. No way to tell.

Jasaan was standing up, leaning against the broken stub of one of the pillars. He had one foot held off the ground. Ankle. Skjorl could see that straight away. Couldn’t walk. Could hop though.

‘You’re alive then.’

Jasaan nodded.

‘That way.’ Skjorl pointed back the way he’d come. ‘Look for a way out.’ Maybe there wasn’t one, but it was that or climb past the collapsed roof, over the top of one dragon and straight into the path of another.

‘Don’t know why you’re standing around gossiping. Got nothing better to do?’ Vish trotted past them both.

‘I can’t, Skjorl.’ There was that pain in Jasaan’s voice again. ‘I can hardly move.’

‘You just wait here then.’ Skjorl took a moment and then followed Vish. Through the settling dust he could see the edges of the collapse. It was huge. Some building or other had sat on top of the cisterns and the whole thing had come down. Great slabs of cracked brickwork, of tiled floor covered in mosaics. Stone pillars and old scorched beams that still smelled of ash.

Another rumble, a reminder that there was a second dragon around here somewhere.

‘Hey! Dragon! Are you already dead under there?’ Vish had his axe out, his own faithful mistress.

‘Still plenty of eggs to end if it is.’ Skjorl stared at the rubble. Looked up. He could feel a breeze. There was a way out here if they wanted it.

‘Ah. There you are. Tyan’s fury — if only I had a spear!’

The dragon was buried from the neck down. It’s eyes were very slightly open, but it didn’t move. Skjorl’s first thought was that it was dead, but then he saw it blink.

‘Spear through the eye,’ muttered Vish as Skjorl stood beside him. ‘That would do it. Right in deep.’

The head shifted slightly. Turned a fraction towards them. Despite himself, Skjorl froze for an instant. He had a dragon, right in front of him. A woken adult dragon. He took another moment to savour not being dead.