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…
Jasaan? From the Spur?
Silver flowed from the sea beyond the gate and shattered the Adamantine Man’s sword. Slivers of steel flew like arrows among the arches.
‘No!’ She tried again. ‘Don’t! Leave him be!’ This was her battle, by the Flame! And if Siff went right through the gate, who was to say what might come back. ‘Jasaan! Don’t!’
Jasaan landed a kick and Siff tumbled through. She didn’t dare reach through her blood to try and touch him again, not now. Whatever was inside him that had thrown her away before, it was growing fully awake. She just about found enough strength to sit up. At least now she could see properly. See the silver sea wrapping itself around the outsider, clothing him. She could see him for what he was. The Isul Aieha. The Silver King.
‘Jasaan!’ The Adamantine Man was standing before the gate, panting, still holding the stump of his sword. One by one around them the arches flickered and failed, their mirrors falling black and dead and then fading into nothing until each was just an arch again with no sign of any magic to it, all except the one beyond which Siff stood.
Kataros called her blood, what was left of it, called it back to her to feed her own strength. Siff was covered in silver now. It had grown into an armour around him, hard plates in layers and layers, exquisite and complex, and he held two swords, short and curved, one in each hand. There were pictures, in the Palace of Alchemy, of this man. Drawn five hundred years ago. Exactly the same.
‘Isul Aieha,’ she said softly.
No answer.
‘They killed you. They took your body to the mountains. To some distant cave. Yet you are here.’
He pointed one of his swords. History crashed into her. She was him, the Silver King. She saw herself call the dragons to her. Saw herself tame them with a single word. She ruled over men but they were nothing to her. A distraction. She was looking, looking for something, always. Something about the spear she carried and a great and terrible thing that had been done. For a long time, looking but never finding, and all the while a despair was building inside her and a loneliness, until she could bear it no more. She saw herself come to this place and conjure these arches, and as she did it she saw a glimpse of her future, of the end that awaited her, and so she left a seed behind, surely a needless precaution — when she chose to leave and return to her home and her kin there was nothing that mere men could do to stop her — but one taken nonetheless. And then they turned on her and somehow they won. She saw men, blood-mages, the ancestors of the alchemists, tear her apart and take her body to the mountains, to some distant cave and hold her caught at the edge of life and death. They drank her in tiny drops, not the blood of her veins, but the silver god-blood, and in doing so they each took a morsel of her power. They kept her that way, trapped, for decades and centuries, and all the time her seed was waiting. Waiting for a host and a way to go home.
She would not forget. She would not forgive but nor would there be vengeance. Home called her. Her people. Peace.
The Silver King lowered his sword and turned away.
‘No!’ Kataros struggled to her feet. She had almost to claw her way up the Adamantine Man to get up. ‘Don’t! Don’t leave us! We need..’
The silver sea became a silver mirror. Faded to black and died.
‘You.’ She began to sob. Her own blood was still all over the arch. She reached through it, trying to open the way again, but there was nothing. Dead stone, that was all it was now. It wanted more than a mere alchemist.
Epilogue
He didn’t know what to do with her at first. Blood everywhere, one alchemist weeping and sobbing for the man who’d tried to kill her — as best he could tell. She didn’t want him, didn’t want to go, that much was obvious. For a while he left her to it, left her to do whatever it was that alchemists did, and went and had a bit of a look around, but there wasn’t much else to see. More tunnels. He wasn’t sure he fancied those.
She would need water. Water and red meat, that was what you gave people who’d lost a lot of blood, not that he was any sort of expert. There was water in the river, that was easy enough. And as for red meat, there were plenty of dead men out there. He’d eaten the flesh of his own before. Maybe he’d not mention to the alchemist exactly where it came from. He frowned, trying to remember. Was there something about alchemists not eating the dead?
The trouble with going outside was the dragon. With a bit of luck it had done for whatever outsiders had survived — if it hadn’t eaten them, they’d surely have had the sense to run away — but it was still a dragon and chances were it was still out there.
He loitered near the mouth of the tunnel, listening, waiting for dark. There weren’t any sounds of people, no screams, no dragon cries. When he followed the stars out of hiding, he saw why. He saw what had happened. What Skjorl had done. Another dragon. On his own this time with just his bare hands and an axe. Smug bastard.
From where he stood there was no way to tell whether the dragon was completely dead, and there was no way he was going close enough to find out. He skirted around it. Got water and then walked the long way around the Midnight Garden to the beach below the waterfall and helped himself to some choice cuts of the dead there. He found Nezak there, dead. He took a moment to go over his body, and Parris too, but the outsiders had got to both of them first and there was nothing left to take.
When he went back inside the alchemist seemed herself again. She was weak and pale, but she was the Kataros he remembered from the Purple Spur. The spear-carrier. He offered her water.
‘I came to find you,’ he told her. ‘I’m supposed to bring you back to the Pinnacles. All the riders who came with me are dead now. There’s just you and me.’ He shrugged. ‘What do we do?’
She shivered. Her face was still stained with tears. ‘We go to the Spur. I will gather my order and we will come here again and we will make these gateways open. That’s all that’s left to us.’
‘Through the Raksheh? There are snappers.’
‘We’ll use the river.’
‘There’s the worm.’
‘I will soothe it.’
‘We’ll get hungry.’
‘I’ll show you what you can eat. There may be more outsiders though.’
‘I’ll get a new string for my a bow. There’ll be dragons once we get outside the forest.’
‘I’ll make potion to hide us.’
‘It’ll take a long time to get to the Spur.’
‘We’ll be quick. There was a dragon outside. Has it gone?’
