The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (35 page)

So the ones that ran, he killed them. They were doing to die anyway and it made the others safer. When they got to Southwatch, he was proud of the ones he’d saved but they still hated
him.

Southwatch had food and shelter for months, but he’d let his Adamantine Men stay for three days, no more. When they left, they left with as much as they could carry, as many weapons as
they could use, whatever tools took their fancy. Too much, screamed the men and women of Sand that he left behind. There were hundreds of them against a score of his Guard, but they didn’t
dare to try and stop him. A few begged to come with him. Fine, he told them, if you can keep up. There were maybe half a dozen who left with them for Evenspire. After the second day he never saw
any of them again. He’d done his duty. He’d led the survivors of Sand to a safe place and now he was going home. To do his duty again, whatever it was.

Evenspire, when they got there, was deserted. The city had burned. The Palace of Paths still stood, its walls so massive that even dragons couldn’t knock them down. They stayed for two
days, trying to find a way into the tunnels that were surely beneath it, to reach the survivors who must be there. Hadn’t worked out, and so it had been a choice: follow the Evenspire Road
out into the desert again, or else the Dragon River south through the Blackwind Dales to Scarsdale. Evenspire Road was hundreds of miles across the Plains of Ancestors, with no water until the
Sapphire and Samir’s Crossing. Death to men on foot, Adamantine ones or any other. Wasn’t much of a choice.

They took the river then, and so it was they got to Scarsdale, starving. A dot on a map, that was all, the last place they might scavenge some food before they crossed the line of hills to the
valley of the Silver River and the Great Cliff. What they found were ramshackle ruins, burned and smashed, littered all along the river and up the hills with no sense of order or purpose. Place had
been stripped clean. Too clean for it to be dragons. Someone had got there first.

Finding the mines, though, that had been an accident. He’d thought it was a cave. Good piece of shelter for the day, but they took a look about first – man had to be sure he
wasn’t sharing with snappers or something like that after all – and that’s where they’d found the shafts. By the end of that day they’d found the rest, a few dozen
people living down in the mines with enough food to last them a year.

The Adamantine Men had feasted. Two solid days of it. Got drunk on wine, on the barrels of it hidden there. The people had been none too pleased, but when you’d been out in the open,
hiding from dragons in the day and marching across a parched landscape by night, you took what you could get. He’d been doing that for months. Yes, a man took what he could get.

Liouma. That had been her name. The one he’d taken. Nice tits. Big. Big arse too. Ripe. He knew he was going to have her from the moment he saw her. And then the next day, afterwards,
he’d woken up and it had been like this. Hungover, thundering head, locked up behind a wooden door without knowing why.

Like this, but not the same.

He ran through the rest anyway. The Purple Spur. Bloodsalt. Vish. Killing a dragon. Jasaan. The moors. The Pinnacles. The alchemist. All of it. All nicely in a row like it was supposed to be,
one thing after the next.

His head still thundered but his eyes would focus now. He looked in his pouch. Dreamleaf and plenty of it, in the last water he had, and then he waited for the numbness it would bring. In
Scarsdale they’d taken his axe. That was before she’d had a name. The alchemist hadn’t done that. Kataros. Must have been her, because the shit-eater would have cut his throat and
been done with it. Yes, the alchemist.

The sunlight was gone. Outside was dark. Night, maybe, or it could have been the shadow of a dragon sitting over the cellar for all he knew, waiting patiently for him to come out.

Dreamleaf was starting to take him. Dragons outside? He’d dealt with dragons before. One thing at a time.

He couldn’t make Dragon-blooded bite the door. The angle was wrong, the roof too high, the door and the ladder too tucked into the corner of the cellar.

In Scarsdale he’d been angry. Smashed his fists on the door, ran at it, battered himself almost senseless trying to get out. Scarsdale had taught him patience, and so he set about the
alchemists’ cellar, taking his time, no rush, searching every corner and edge. There were the lamps. He’d seen Kataros use them, seen the way they worked. Started with those and then he
could see: a wooden table and a set of little shelves with tiny compartments. The alchemist had taken most of whatever had been in there. A pile of smashed glass where the ground was still damp,
rich with the smell of wine. A bench. Three old chairs. The bones in the far corner, more empty bottles, a few rags.

The skeleton had a knife in one hand. Resting between its fingers, the edge stained a dark brown.

In Scarsdale they’d left him with a knife. They’d put him behind a heavy wooden door, but they’d left him with a knife, the one tucked in his boot. It had probably taken the
best part of three days to pick and whittle the edge of that door until he’d made a gap large enough to shift the bolt on the other side. He’d never quite understood why they’d
shut him up in Scarsdale. They shut his men up too, although at least they gave the others food and water. Him they’d left to die, like the alchemist had done. But he’d escaped and
they’d got what they deserved.

He climbed the ladder, drilled through the pain and the floating feeling of the Dreamleaf, and set to work.

Four days before the Black Mausoleum

The dragon soared high above the Raksheh. Others of its kind came and went. Some came to ask it about the half-made sky-home. Others went to see it for themselves. It had
moved.

They are returning, Black Scar of Sorrow Upon the Earth.

The seals are broken.

The Black Moon and then the end.

It mused on those things and shared them with any who would listen.

A thing that speaks of the stars. And something other.

The sky-home had become a thing of interest. Dragons would come from across the realms to see it. Curiosity would bring them. A sorcerer who carried a touch of the broken god. Magic of glass and
gold that made lightning. Amusing diversions. The dragon had felt other things there too.

They are here!
The makers. The silver ones. The time would come for a reckoning and it would be soon, but the dragon would not be there, not on the sky-home.

It flew in lazy circles, a thousand miles, spiralling towards the Aardish Caves. It could feel the presence there. Something was waiting.

It would not wait alone.

Little ones were moving. Swarming along the river. It felt their thoughts, now and then, as it peered with its seventh sense through the blanket of branches and leaves. They thought they were
safe.

They were wrong.

It is said that when Vishmir visited the Moonlight Garden, he observed that a dark reflection of the garden structures could be clearly seen in the waters of the Yamuna, and in
a moment of divine clarity he understood that this was the Black Mausoleum of the Silver King. He became obsessed with the caves and spent many days participating in their exploration during the
early years after his victory.

In the seventh year of Vishmir’s reign exploration of the caves ceased following an unexplained disaster that claimed the lives of most of those working at the site. Those nearby on the
bluffs overlooking the caves reported that the ground shook and even the dragons resting nearby seemed disturbed. Upon hearing the news, Vishmir visited at once; on his return, he immediately
issued a decree that the caves were a forbidden place under the guardianship of the King of Furymouth. In the later years of his reign, despite his own edict, Vishmir returned once more in great
secrecy to build a mausoleum of his own. Even now the exact location of Vishmir’s tomb remains a mystery.

The Aardish Caves are remote and hard to reach without a dragon. The caves remain under the watchful eye of King Tyan of Furymouth. Despite Vishmir’s fascination, no evidence has ever been
found to indicate there has ever been any connection between the Aardish Caves and the Silver King.

Bellepheros’
Journal of the Realms
, 2nd year of Speaker Hyram

Fourteen days before the Black Mausoleum

You could say one thing for the Raksheh – it was easy enough going. The ground under Jasaan’s feet was soft and damp. The air was dim and still and smelled of
mould; during the day the forest under the canopy was as dark as a moonlit night and during the night it was as black as a cave. Now and then a small forest of giant fungus or a place where the
canopy above was broken and a furious rush of green had taken over the forest floor would force him to change his course. One time he came to the corpse of a fallen tree, a giant half buried in the
earth. The wood was still as hard as stone. He paced out its length as he walked around it and lost track somewhere over a hundred. The quiet started to get to him. Now and then he heard the leaf
litter rustle as something moved or else a burst of shrieking or hooting from the canopy above; mostly the forest was simply silent.

He found the river two days later and the dragon-knights a day after that. Nezak and the other one, alive and camped out on the banks of a river that he thought at first was the Yamuna but
turned out was something else entirely. Such a stroke of luck amazed him, until he realised they were simply doing the same as he was – strike south for the nearest river and then stick to it
like glue. Difference was that he’d followed the river upstream and the riders had simply sat where they were, wondering what to do.

‘You’re going the wrong way,’ said Nezak. ‘There are three rivers in the Raksheh. They merge together before they leave the forest. You need to go downstream until this
one meets the Yamuna. Then turn west again.’

You
, Jasaan noted. Not
we
. He didn’t ask though. What the riders did was their own business; for now they were all hungry and thirsty and bedraggled. Jasaan made a fire and
they sat together for a night and never mind who might see them. Riders were so out of place down here on the ground. He’d seen it with Hellas and the others and he saw it now. They
didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to look after themselves, didn’t know what to eat. All that fine armour and steel and they were worse than useless.

They were here, though. That counted for something, right? Had to. They’d hadn’t just given up and gone running back to the plains.

‘I should have stayed and fought the snappers,’ said Jasaan after he’d borrowed their bow and shot some supper – he had no idea what it was and the riders had been raised
in a desert. ‘I saw your friend go down.’
Your friend
– now he wished he
had
known the other rider’s name after all. ‘He put up a good struggle but he
wasn’t ever going to win. I should have done something. I didn’t have a bow. My axe was stuck in the face of the first one, but I should have done
something
.’ He
didn’t know what, just knew that Skjorl wouldn’t even have thought about it. Skjorl would have tried to take the snapper down with his bare hands, probably, and he might even have
managed it. That or he’d have died trying. A proper Adamantine Man.

The two riders looked at him. Their eyes were scared. They’d run too, no doubt about it.

Nezak sniffed. ‘We used to hunt snappers from the backs of our dragons. I didn’t realise they grew so big.’

‘Giants,’ muttered the other rider, while Jasaan shook his head because if anything, the three snappers they’d met had been small ones. Maybe everything on the ground looked
bigger after you’d grown used to seeing the world from the back of a dragon.

Jasaan found a tree on the edge of the river that wasn’t one of the giants and took his axe to it. There were creepers hanging from the branches of almost everything here by the water.
Stuff he’d never seen before, but it looked like rope so it would just have to do. By the end of the next day he’d made them a raft. Nezak drew a map in the mud by the water, a memory
of the one time he’d flown over the Raksheh escorting Speaker Hyrkallan and his queen on some secret errand to Furymouth. Mountains to the west, the Fury gorge to the north, the plains to the
east and the sea to the south. Then three rivers. The only one with a name was the one that came out onto the plains, the Yamuna.

‘Downstream,’ said Nezak. ‘We haven’t crossed a river since we came into the forest, so we go downstream. When this river comes together with another, that’ll be
the Yamuna and we’ll know where we are.’