Stephen Deas - The Black Mausoleum

‘Poison. We have to poison it.’ There was always leaving it alone. Letting it starve until it burned from the inside. But no, couldn’t do that. Couldn’t leave a monster alive if he could leave it dead. Always the chance that some other dragon would dig it free.

The dragon’s lips curled back, letting them see its teeth. Vish weighed his axe. As he climbed close, it tried to snap at him, but it couldn’t turn its head far enough to reach, not with the stones crushing its neck. It sent a weak blast of fire at Skjorl, forcing him to shelter behind a shattered column, but then Vish was round behind it, and when it tried to reach him, Skjorl dashed up the rubble, and then they were both where it couldn’t touch them, halfway up and round the back of its head. It shuddered and closed its eyes and lay still.

From the far side of the collapse, stone smashed against stone. Skjorl set to work on one side, Vish on the other. Killing the dragon with their axes was hard, like chopping at stone, but the monster never made a sound. Its eyes opened towards the end, looking at them as they finally hacked their way through its scales to the sinew and bone beneath, and then slowly closed again. Skjorl stopped, panting from the effort. Vish kept chopping away until Skjorl raised a hand.

‘Enough. It’s dead. Let’s go.’

Vish grinned back at him like a madman. ‘We killed a dragon, Skjorl! We killed a dragon! With our axes! We killed a dragon and we’re walking away.’

‘And we’ve got eggs to finish. And there’s still the other one.’ The ground shook. ‘Can’t expect those stones to stop it for ever.’ The Night Watchman had killed more then ten on the night the Adamantine Palace had burned, but he’d had the Speaker’s Spear and the dragons still got him in the end. He and Vish, they’d killed an adult and they’d done it with steel and their bare hands. Not much chance they’d get back to the Purple Spur to brag about it, but Vish deserved his smile. They both did.

A stone the size of a child hit Vish square in the back with the force of a charging horse, arcing down from the top of the collapse. Vish sailed through the air like a thrown-away doll, arms and legs limp and loose. He landed like a sack of turnips. Skjorl stared in disbelief. Then jumped away and looked behind him. Just a pale white haze of dust and sand in the air lit up by his firebox. Beyond that: darkness. He could hear, though. Stones moving.

Vish!

He snuffed the firebox and dived sideways. Kept rolling until something stopped him. He felt the air tear as another stone hurtled past him in the dark, heard it bounce and smash. He knew what came next. Had enough time to curl up tight, cover his hands and his face, put his back to the rubble and let his shield take the worst as the fire came. The air roared. The wind almost toppled him. He put a hand out to balance himself and felt the heat burn at his palm where there was no dragonscale, only soft leather.

It was coming from the smashed-in hole in the cistern roof.

The next stone caught his outstretched hand. He felt the shock more than the pain. Screamed as he saw the boulder fly off amid the flames.

The fire wasn’t stopping. It was getting him, slowly, finding its way through his armour. He jumped back to his feet and ran, let the dragon’s flames light his way, weaving from side to side. Another rock whizzed past him, missed his head by a yard. The fire was weak by the time it reached him now. Weak enough that the few gaps and cracks between the dragonscale he wore would hold. The joints in his armour might be black and brittle by the end, but he’d be alive.

The next boulder didn’t reach him. It hit the ground and bounded past, shattering a cluster of eggs. Lifeless hatchling bodies flopped out across the cistern floor. When the fire stopped, Skjorl eased his way sideways, getting as far as he could from where the dragon had last seen him.

‘Jasaan?’ he had no idea where Jasaan was.

Vish was dead. Should have been the other way round. Jasaan deserved a touch of dragon’s fire. But Vish deserved his glory too. There’d be songs. Vish the dragon-killer. He eased his way through the darkness. Wondered for a bit if maybe Vish wasn’t dead after all, but he’d seen the stone hit, seen Vish’s head snap back and then forward, seen his body fly through the air and slide across the ground and then lie still.

Had to look though. Had to be sure. Didn’t he?

Stupid. He took a deep breath. Adamantine Men didn’t stop for their wounded. Didn’t matter who they were, that was the way of it. Going back got you killed.

‘Skjorl?’ Jasaan, closer than he’d thought.

‘Jasaan?’

‘The other dragon. I can see it. It can’t get through the rubble.’

Now he stopped to listen, he could hear it tearing at the stones. ‘Can you swing an axe on your knees, Jasaan? If you can, you’re still useful. You can kill eggs. If you can’t, you might as well be dead.’ Harsh, but Vish and Jex had been his friends. Couldn’t say that about Jasaan, not after Scarsdale.

There was a pause. When Jasaan answered, it was with a sullen edge. ‘Yes, Skjorl. I can still do that.’

‘Then you do it. I’m getting Vish’s poison.’

There. A good enough excuse.

Twenty-three days before the Black Mausoleum

‘What have you done to me?’ He asked the same question over and over as he led her out of her tiny makeshift prison and into a maze of stairs and passages that bewildered her. She almost told him to shut up, but the blood-bound could be tricky. Too many different orders and he might freeze in confusion. The alchemist who’d bound her had only ever used the bond once, when he’d first made it. You will be unswervingly loyal to my desires. That was it and then nothing more, not in a year and a half of service. Most of the time she forgot it was even there. He’d been a kind enough man who’d never asked for much, whose greatest desire had been for her to grow into the power that he was offering her. She hadn’t needed any help with that.

He’d shown her, after he’d bound her, how it was done, but he’d never told her what to do with it. He’d encouraged her, now and then, to bind others, but she never did, even though she knew that most alchemists had several blood-bound serving them. They did it for their protection they said, for the greater good, and in the squalor and hunger under the Purple Spur Kataros quite understood, yet every time she heard them, she remembered that they’d bound their Scales too, not long ago, and so they would have bound her if the Adamantine Palace hadn’t burned and more than half the alchemists of the realms been slaughtered.

‘You’re going to help me,’ she told him after she’d lost count of how many times he’d asked. ‘You’re going to help me save the realms.’

‘How are we going to do that?’

She didn’t answer, and the truth was that she didn’t exactly know. All she knew was what the near-corpse that the Adamantine Man was carrying had told her two nights before.

‘It’s going to get dark,’ he said a while later. The halls and vaults of the Pinnacles glowed from above like a softly starlit night, a legacy of the Silver King, who’d brought order to the broken world and who’d first subdued the monsters. Half monster himself, half living god, adept with magics that no one before or since could even understand, almost everything here bore his mark. The Pinnacles had been his home for more than a hundred years, until the blood-mages had found a way to kill him.

The Adamantine Man took her into later tunnels, ones carved by men. The twilight faded and the darkness grew. When she could barely see him any more, he stopped. ‘There are lamps by your feet. Get yourself one. You can get one for me too.’