The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) (44 page)

Crush! You!

It was up on tiptoe, wings stretched out wide again for balance. Teetering towards him, lost to the need to smash him. It withdrew a fraction and then it lunged.

Skjorl jumped away. Its head hit the boulder where he’d been standing, a yard short. He gave it a long cold stare. It looked . . . It looked almost comical.

‘The trouble with your kind,’ he said, as he lifted his axe high over his head, ‘is that you are so
stupid
.’

It flapped its wings furiously, trying to draw away from the slope. It pushed its head against the boulder to lever itself off. Dragons had good necks. Strong. Full of muscle. It drove itself
away from Skjorl’s axe.

But Skjorl wasn’t bringing the axe down, had never planned to. He jumped away. Sideways. Off the boulder.

The dragon finished heaving itself back, pushing its weight into the slope as it wrenched itself away. Into the boulder Skjorl had been standing on. And as it did, the boulder tipped and began
to slide, and with it came half the hillside, backed up behind it, enough loose rock and stone to build a castle. Skjorl ran, but the tumbling stones swept his feet away as easily as a child
plucking a blade of grass. At the last he jumped, as high in the air as he could, trying to get away from the worst. No use. The stones under his feet were rolling over each other and he might as
well have tried to walk on water. A rock flew at him, pitched from higher up, as big as he was. It caught him a glancing blow, spun him around and knocked him down. No chance to get up again. All
he could do was curl up, wrap his arms around his ruined face and trust to his armour and his ancestors to protect him as stones rained over him.

Something hit him in the hip, hard. Another blow to the head. The next was on his ankle, smashed. Then another round the head, and then, for a time, merciful darkness.

Light. That was all he could see when he opened the one eye that still worked. Light. There wasn’t any pain any more. Numb. Everything. Couldn’t feel his hands, couldn’t feel
his legs, couldn’t feel anything.

Couldn’t move.

He blinked. He could still do that.

The light slowly separated into shades. Bright sky. Dark earth. Stones everywhere. Littered across the end of the field. And a dragon, darker still.

Lying on the ground ahead of him. Head turned. Looking at him.

Pain. He felt it now, but not his. Pain and a fading futile fury.

One broken wing. One broken leg. Half buried in the fallen rubble, neck crushed by the stone that had been holding up the mountain.

The dragon. Lying beside him, a little way away.

It stared at him.

I will come back. You will not.
And then the light slowly went out of its eyes. Skjorl tried to laugh. His lungs shook. Not much else.

He stopped breathing. Took a moment to notice. It was as though he’d simply forgotten how.

Vish, you better have kept a woman and good bottle of something strong ready and waiting for me.

He winked at the dead dragon. ‘Got you both.’

I’m coming, Vish.

The shades merged together again. The light faded.

Was gone.

As soon as the dragon took to the air, Jasaan ran. Head-down sprint, straight across the open towards the place he’d seen the alchemist. The outsider had been dragging
her somewhere and he’d had a purpose about him. Neither of the Adamantine Men had seen where he was taking her but it had to be more than just the nearest piece of cover.

He reached the other side of the landing field and glanced up. The dragon had already turned. It was almost straight above him now but hadn’t seen him. Or if it had, it had other things on
its mind. He saw where the alchemist must be. A hole in the ground, a cave, maybe the sheared end of an old tunnel down among the shattered stones at the edge of the field.

Instinct made him dive to the ground and cower as the dragon roared back towards the slope where Skjorl had gone. Small stones rattled across the ground, whipped up by the wind of the
dragon’s wings, and then it was past.

The cave. He jumped up. But he had to look back, for a moment at least. He saw the dragon’s fire blossom and burst, scattering across the rocks.

‘Goodbye, Skjorl,’ he muttered.

No time to stay and watch what the dragon did next. Dragons weren’t stupid. It knew they’d been two when it had found them, and he wasn’t about to do anything to remind it.

He ran for the cave, for the tunnel, the whatever it was. No time to think about Skjorl. The world was a better place for being rid of him, but of course he had to go out like that. Had to make
himself the hero. If Jasaan ever got the alchemist back to the Pinnacles or the Purple Spur or wherever it was that she wanted to go, if ever anyone asked him to tell their tale, then he’d
tell it as it was, and every Adamantine Man would raise a cup to the dragon-killer, the one who’d given his life so that others might live and fight, and never mind the rest. Rapist.
Murderer. Drunk. None of that mattered if you died well. They’d all raise their cups and they’d call him a hero, and if Jasaan quietly didn’t raise his, well then most likely the
rest of them would quietly not notice.

He ran down the tunnel. The place had been built by alchemists, that was obvious. Their eerie cold white light came from the walls, from the roof and floor. It reminded him of the Pinnacles
rather than the curved caverns of the Spur, scoured by water. No, this was the work of . . .

He didn’t know. Magic? It was supposed to be the Silver King’s tomb, after all.

The tunnel took him into a vault, smooth curved walls coming together far above him. In the middle, a ring of white stone arches with gleaming mirrors between them lit up the walls.

‘Alchemist! Kataros!’ He couldn’t see inside the circle but she he had to be there, didn’t she?

He drew his sword. Being cautious hadn’t ever done him any harm, not yet, even if Skjorl had despised him for it. Best to have a care. Best to have a think about the sort of things a man
might find in a place like this.

What did tombs have in them apart from bodies?
Try again.
What sort of person got his body stuffed into a tomb?
Dragon-riders were fed to their dragons when they died. Adamantine
Men too. Across the realms a man was burned and his ashes scattered either in the nearest river, if you were lucky enough to live near one, or cast into the desert winds if you came from the north.
Some folk who lived along the Fury sent their dead off in boats. That was all before the Adamantine Palace had burned. Now mostly people just got burned or eaten, whether they were dead or whether
they weren’t. But buried under the ground? That was wrong. That trapped a man, kept him from joining his ancestors.

As he thought, Jasaan continued walking towards the circle.
So what would you find in the tomb of an ancient half-god sorcerer?
He had no idea. Nothing good, probably. No one would choose
to rest in a place like this, not under the ground. So what, then? You put a sorcerer in the ground because you could, and then you wrapped him up in blood-magic to keep him there and make sure he
couldn’t come back. You did that because you were scared witless that if you did anything else, whatever it was you were trying to bury might claw its way out and rip your head off. You did
that because what you were burying was a terrible, terrible thing.

He stopped. Skjorl was at his shoulder. His ghost, anyway.
For the love of Vishmir, shut up, stop thinking, start moving and be what you are!

He reached the arches. Between them a silver surface shimmered, blocking his way into the centre circle. They were too high to climb and nothing in the world would have made him touch them. He
began to walk around instead. He could hear noises now from inside. A faint sobbing. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. When he looked down, he saw dark drops on the floor. He knelt
and peered at them. Licked his finger, rubbed it against them, tasted it.

Blood. A spray of blood. Two things did that. You cut a man in the neck or in some other places and the blood would spray on its own. Or you sliced deep into a man’s flesh and then it was
your own blade that did the spraying. Either way, whoever the blood came from usually wound up dead. But was it the alchemist or was it the outsider?

Couldn’t see the alchemist swinging a sword. Or cutting a throat for that matter.

Flame!

Unless the outsider had brought her here and they’d found something waiting for them. He wasn’t sure that was much better.

The sobbing was still there. He thought he heard a whisper.
It’s beautiful.

She was lost. When a mage reached through their blood to touch another mind, there was always a danger. To touch the mind of another mage, that was the fear, one who was
stronger than you. She’d done that with her teacher and he’d shown her how to defend herself, how to run away, break the link, hide within yourself, throw up walls and barriers that
even the strongest mage could never break. She’d touched his mind and felt his strength; she’d done as he had shown her and in the end seen how she could save herself. She’d seen
him attack her with everything he had and not even strain her mastery of herself.

The silver sea consumed her as though she was nothing. Even if she’d had the time to try and hide herself, it would have washed her walls away like a tidal wave against a sandcastle. She
had no idea what it was. Something immense. Vast. Something that would always be beyond her understanding, no matter how much she learned. In a blink it looked at her, took her in, absorbed her.
She felt its size and its age and its utter indifference. Her own insignificance. And then she realised that yes, she did know what it was. She knew exactly.

The Silver King. It had to be. Whatever old crippled Jeiros had said, there was nothing else this
could
be.

‘It’s beautiful,’ whispered Siff.

It was waiting there. Waiting for what, though?

Help us!
she thought as loudly as she could, simply hoping to be noticed.
We need you again!

She saw Siff start. He turned slowly to look at her.

‘You?’ He shook himself. She understood. Trying to shake away the presence all around them both. Trying to bring himself back to the simple world of stone and flesh.

‘Siff,’ she breathed. ‘Look at it.’

His face twisted into a snarl. ‘You! You want to
steal
it.’ His hands clenched. He held out the knife towards her. ‘No no no, witch, this is mine, not yours.
Mine!’

‘And all the blood around your feet is mine,’ she whispered. She had no strength in her arms any more, nor her voice. She’d lost too much blood to him, but that gave her
another strength. ‘I am sorry, Siff.’

On the ground around him her blood started to flow – rising, soaking into one of his boots, climbing higher, past his ankle, up his leg. It touched his flesh and burned and he screamed. He
bared his teeth and his eyes flared with silver. ‘I have told you before, blood-witch, you cannot
do
that!’

Jasaan walked cautiously around the outside of the arches. The sobbing stopped. Voices. He froze.

‘You?’ A man. The outsider?

‘Siff. Look at it.’ A woman’s voice full of wonder, not fear. Full of . . . full of awe. Kataros. The alchemist. Alive.

So whose was the blood?

Then the first voice came again, suffused with anger and envy and murder – ‘Mine, not yours!’ – and Jasaan moved again, faster now, around the arches, looking for a way
in until he saw the single one that was open, that wasn’t filled with liquid silver.

In the centre, lying on a slab of stone in a pool of blood, deathly pale, lay the alchemist. Her breath came fast and shallow. Across from her, halfway through one of the far arches, the
outsider stood with knife raised. His eyes shone with silver. His lips were drawn back and his teeth were bared. Blood was everywhere.

Jasaan blinked. The blood around the outsider’s feet . . . it was
moving
!

Sorcery. A woman lying on a stone slab, a man standing over her with a knife raised. That was all he needed. All any Adamantine Man would need. He knew exactly what to do. He raised his sword.
The battle cry came of its own accord. He was already in the air, half the ground covered between them, before the outsider even saw he was there.

The alchemist gasped something, so faint he didn’t hear. The outsider turned and raised his hands. While the blood on the floor flowed up one of his legs, silver flowed up the other, fast
as lightning, drawn from the silver lake. Up his leg and up his side, across his shoulder, down his arm and just as Jasaan’s sword should have cut him in two, he had a sword of his own,
silver, blocking Jasaan’s blade, and half of him was cased in armour.

The swords came together and Jasaan’s steel shattered. Shards of it flew. A sliver sliced his cheek. Pieces hit his armour and ricocheted away. The outsider screamed and reeled back. Where
the silver didn’t cover him, pieces of Jasaan’s blade had cut him open.

Jasaan stared at the stump of his sword. Impossible. Swords didn’t shatter. Not like that, like glass.

The outsider swayed, off balance. The light in his eyes grew brighter. They turned on Jasaan, a terrible power lurking within them. The alchemist groaned something again. No time to get out his
axe. The stump of his sword would do. He lifted it as if to plunge it into the outsider, who raised his arms to fend off the blow as the silver flowed around him again; then Jasaan kicked him
instead, hard in the ribs, where a shard from the shattered blade had already embedded itself in his flesh.

The outsider threw back his head. He shrieked and fell back into the silver sea behind him. The liquid flowed over him and covered him from head to toe, but only for a moment, and then he began
to rise once more.

‘No,’ she croaked. She thought the man with the sword was Skjorl at first, but this one was too short, too small. Still, when she reached through the blood to touch
him, she knew at once that he’d tasted hers. For a moment that threw her. She looked for Skjorl and found nothing, yet this man . . .