The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (37 page)

‘From here? A hundred miles. Two maybe.’ Nezak shrugged as if it was all much the same. Maybe on the back of a dragon it was.

‘Long walk then.’ Mentally, Jasaan went through what every Adamantine Man went through when they were away from a safe haven, the litany they had drilled into them every day.
Water. Food. Warmth. Shelter. Dragons.
They had potion for the dragons, at least for a while. A whole river full of water and never mind that it rained here more than it didn’t. The
trees gave shelter from the wind and most of the rain. Leaf mould, fallen branches, yes, he could build shelters and fires and forest blankets if he needed to. As for food, well, if the trek along
the Sapphire valley to Bloodsalt had taught him anything, it was how to fish. So that’s what they’d be eating then. Fish and not much else.

There were other things, of course. Things he hadn’t thought of. Parris came down with a fever. He kept going but it got steadily worse. His appetite went. He stopped talking and spent his
time either shivering or sleeping, but he kept going. They should have left him, every Adamantine Man would have said the same, but Jasaan slowed his pace a little, did what he could to keep Parris
going. Something bit Nezak’s hand and his fingers swelled up like sausages. Jasaan wondered if he might lose them, but there wasn’t anything to be done. He had his own problems by then.
His bad ankle was aching all the time, and something must have crawled under his armour one day and feasted on the good one. The first he knew about it was a growing pain. When he looked, there
must have been two dozen bites, each one an ugly black blotch, swollen and sore. Wasn’t long before he was limping on both feet. At least that evened things up. Queer, though – the one
thing that never slowed them down and never went bad was Nezak’s arrow wound, which was probably the worst injury of the lot.

Every day the forest was the same and the river too. Jasaan had lost count of how long they’d been out there when they saw the boat. Was almost ready to give up. Didn’t know how far
they’d come by then – it might not have been a hundred miles yet, but it surely felt like it. The middle of nowhere. No one ever came here and he could see why. Parris was a wreck,
hardly able to focus any more, putting one foot in front of the other was the limit of what he could do. At least Nezak’s fingers seemed to be getting better. Maybe Nezak was charmed.

And out here, in this ancestor-forsaken wilderness where no one lived for a hundred miles, there was a boat. Not one, he realised, as he stared, but two, then three, then five. He hadn’t
heard them coming over the ever-present rush of the water. They were close to the bank, paddling steadily forward where the current was weakest.

He stopped and he stared. Outsiders. Dozens of them. And there she was, in the middle boat. They had her. The alchemist. Kataros. Alive.

And the bugger was that he didn’t even have a bow and the two riders were half a mile behind him, following the trail he was marking out, and there was nothing he could do.

Twelve days before the Black Mausoleum

She had them in the palm of her hand. She hadn’t even used blood-magic to do it, she’d simply told them the truth. She’d told them who she was and why she was
here, what she was looking for and how it might change their world, and then she asked them for their help. No more hiding, if what Siff said was true, and if it wasn’t, then she’d show
them how to hide from dragons with more than the great trees over their heads – she’d show them how to hide with alchemy too. But if she was right then they were going to have the
relics of the Silver King himself, the Isul Aieha, and those relics would be theirs, and they would never need to hide again, not from anyone or anything. Afterwards, when she’d finished
promising them the earth, she felt proud of herself. She’d done what a true alchemist would do. What did it matter who took the Silver King’s power? In the great long scheme of things
it was a battle of one species against another. Why carry the means to tame monsters back to the Pinnacles or the Purple Spur just because someone called themselves speaker? Yes, in the long great
scheme of things survival was all that mattered, not whose name carried each victory.

They took her up to a sleep-space hollowed from the trunk of one of the great forest trees, hidden from both the ground and the sky. It was high, far higher than it needed to be for mere
snappers.

‘Sometimes dragons come into the forest on the ground,’ said the man whose space she was sharing. He had a wife and three children, all born long before the Adamantine Palace had
burned, and the space inside the tree was little more than a cell.
A nest
, she thought.
Like a woodpecker.

She told him about the world outside, how everything had changed. He shook his head.

‘For us the only change is that your kind stopped coming into the forest.’

‘My kind?’

‘Alchemists.’

‘You didn’t notice the dragons?’ She couldn’t believe it. How could something like that make no difference?

He thought for a bit. ‘No. Dragons with riders or dragons without, they’re all the same to us. They come and they burn and they take what they want. We used to meet your kind
sometimes, on the bank of the river. The one you call the Yamuna. We traded for things made of metal. Knives and arrowheads. We gave them what we harvested from the forest.’

A younger Kataros, the one fresh from the Palace of Alchemy, wouldn’t have looked past how simple a folk they were, but that was before she’d sailed halfway down the Fury with an
outsider who turned out to be the only man she’d ever met who saw her as she was, as a person, not a simple collection of useful talents that could be employed to further some end of their
own. They were simple and straightforward people, which made it all the more of a surprise to wake up on her second morning there with the same man sitting on her back, pinning her arms while his
sons held her legs and his wife forced a gag into her mouth. She struggled and bit her tongue and tried to spit blood at them, but they knew, somehow they knew, and they would not let her blood
touch them. They were five and she was one, and by the time they’d finished trussing her up, she was helpless. Their faces looked angry.

What did I do?
But now she couldn’t ask.

When they were done they left her alone, propped against a wall, unable to move. She supposed they thought that gagged and tied they’d left her powerless too. She could have wept. Why? Why
did they have to do this? Why was there never an easy way?

She let the blood in her mouth seep into the wad of cloth stuffed in there and dissolve it slowly away. When it was gone, she spat bloody saliva onto the ropes around her, but before she could
set her mind to work on them, she heard a voice.

‘Oh ho.’

She looked up, still trussed hand and foot. There was a face staring at her from the outside. Siff, except his eyes were pure gleaming silver.

‘What did you tell them?’ She peered closer. ‘What
are
you?’

Siff shook his head. ‘I told them not to leave you alone, for a start. A few minutes with no one watching and you’re almost loose again already. This won’t do, but later, when
we have time, you must show me how.’ He pulled himself up into the sleep-space and squatted beside her, toying with a knife. ‘What did
you
tell them?’

‘The truth.’

Siff laughed out loud. ‘The truth where you take the secrets of the Silver King back to your precious speaker and make everything exactly as it used to be? Back to the days when men on
dragons came and took them away to be slaves?’

‘I told them it would be theirs.’

‘Ah. So you lied then.’

She twisted her head, trying to look him in the eye. He kept his distance. Afraid she’d spit at him, perhaps.

‘You’re the outsider here, alchemist. You’ll do what riders always do and it’ll be people like me and these who suffer, just like
we
always did.’

‘You don’t even know for sure that anything is there.’

‘No.
You
don’t know.
I
saw it. I saw a gate. Besides, look at me. How can you doubt it?’ His voice began to wander, back into a memory full of wonder and
amazement. ‘I saw a way to their world. And it was so beautiful.’ He snapped back to the present.

‘Do you want to see it or not?’

‘Yes.’ She looked down. Yes. If even a sliver of what he’d told her was true then yes, yes, she wanted to see it, more than anything in the world. The treasures of the Silver
King. ‘Of course I do.’

‘Well then, you listen hard, alchemist. They do what I tell them, not you. They know I’m the one who can lead them there, and I don’t need you now. So we’re going to go
to the Aardish Caves, just like you wanted, only you’re going to be trussed up like this all the way so you don’t go using your blood-magic on people. I’m going to be sitting with
you all the way, and if you even squirm wrong, I’ll just throw you in the river to drown, simple as that. Because I do – not –
need
you. I hope you understand. And now
I’m going to show you something.’

He moved to sit in front of her. Very slowly he took his knife to her cheek and made a shallow cut. She felt the blood roll down her skin. Then he cut his own palm and put the knife away and
stroked a drop of his blood onto his finger. Right in front of her, carefully and deliberately, he pressed her blood into his own and mixed them together.

‘That’s how you do it, isn’t it? That’s how you made your doggy do what he was told?’ His gaze never left her face.

She stared at his hand. It had to be a trick but she couldn’t see how it worked. Without even thinking, she was already reaching into the blood, feeling for him, looking for the bridge
that would give him to her. As she’d done to Skjorl, just like he said.

There. There it was. There
he
was.

But he wasn’t alone. There was something else. Something immeasurably larger than either of them, and as she tried to touch him, it seemed to wake up and sense her. It turned as though
struggling from a deep sleep to bring her into focus.

She backed away. Broke the bridge, but she wasn’t quick enough. A knife followed, stabbed into her head, a pain that exploded from her very centre outwards. She screamed.

As fast as it had come, it was gone. Siff was staring at her. His silver eyes blazed and the moonlight snakes were wriggling their way from his fingers.

‘What are you?’ she gasped. ‘Are you him? Are you the Isul Aieha?’

The silver light faded. Siff blinked as his eyes became his own again.

‘See, alchemist. I don’t know what it is I found in there, but it’s bigger than you. It wants to go back. And it doesn’t want you in here.’

‘Doesn’t it scare you?’ she asked him.

He hesitated. For a moment she saw the answer in his face. Yes. He was petrified, but the thing, whatever it was, had such a hold on him now that the old Siff was already as good as lost. He
smiled at her. ‘Why should I be scared, alchemist? You’re the one who ought to be afraid.’

‘I am,’ she said.

He was by her side every moment after that. As the outsiders gathered what they would need, he sat with her to watch. He was the one who brought her food and her water. When she fell asleep, he
was sitting beside her; when she woke up, he hadn’t moved. If he slept himself, she never saw it, and no one else came near her. She tried talking but he rarely answered. Mostly he seemed to
be lost in thought, far far away, but he never missed a movement. All she had to do was lift her hand and he’d be looking at her. His eyes were silver all the time now.

The outsiders brought spears, nets and bows, blankets, ropes – so much that she wondered if they had anything left. Perhaps fifty of them walked with her and Siff through the trees to the
river. A few were little more than children, but most were adults, half men, half women. Kataros wondered whether there was anything significant in that, or whether it was simply the hand of
chance. The trouble with being an alchemist, as her grand master had once said, was that you couldn’t help wondering about things, even things that didn’t matter a jot. They worshipped
Siff and they were terrified of him too. They did whatever he said, half in awe, half from fear, and she had no idea why. Was it the silver eyes? No, there was more to it than that. They
knew
him. There was history here, but neither Siff nor anyone else would tell her what it was.

There were boats at the river, five of them, sections from branches fallen from of one of the great trees. They’d been sliced in two, hollowed out and sharpened at either end. She might
have called them canoes but they were nothing like the little dugouts she’d seen on the upper reaches of the Fury; no, these were huge, wide enough for three to sit abreast. The outsiders
divided themselves evenly between the boats. Eight of them in each with paddles, working against the current of the river, while two sat, one at the front, one at the back, with spears and nets.
Now and then they swapped places. Whenever they stopped to eat, they dozed, all carefully as far from Kataros as they could be. All the while Siff sat beside her.

And so it went, day after day. The forest never seemed to change. They passed rapids, where the outsiders carried their boats over their heads along the bank. Fallen trees blocked their way
upriver, boulders, even sandbanks. In other places the waters were wide and deep, so broad that Kataros wondered if they’d reached a lake. She’d never heard of any lakes in the Raksheh,
but that didn’t mean much. The great forest was a mystery beyond the fringes where the alchemists gathered its riches.

‘Don’t you worry about the worms?’ she asked Siff one day. No point in asking the other outsiders. They flinched every time she even looked at them. Whatever Siff had said, he
was their master now and they revered him every bit as much as they feared her.