got to strip, gut and fillet him. Skjorl was the one who had to walk for hours to the edge of the salt flats, fill up his pack with salt and walk back again. He wrinkled his nose. Relk had started to smell even worse than he had when he was alive. Desert heat was good for that.
‘This going to work?’
Jasaan shrugged. ‘It’s what they do here.’
Eventually they were done. Skjorl tried not to look. White bone gleamed from dead red flesh. Hard to say why, but it was better this way, better that it wasn’t Vish. Relk, he was an Adamantine Man, as good as any, but that’s all he was. Vish and Jex, they’d started to be something else. Maybe even Jasaan too, even with that Scarsdale crap between them. Was a long way from Sand down to the Silver River valley. Long enough and hard enough that you learned things about your company that you didn’t learn other ways.
‘Ought to bury him,’ said Jasaan. ‘Hide what’s left from the dragons.’ He was taking the meat he’d sliced off Relk and smothering it in salt, trying to make it keep. ‘They see this, they’ll know we were here.’
‘Can’t do that.’ That’s not what you did with the dead. Burned them, maybe. Fed them to a dragon. Weighed them down and threw them in a river, hung them up for the crows even, but you didn’t bury them, never that. Even the people who died starving under the Purple Spur got carried up and out of the caves, and never mind that the people doing the carrying were starving too.
‘I know. Just saying it would be best.’
‘The river.’ Jasaan nodded.
‘Weigh him down and sink him. Dragons won’t see. Water will hide the smell.’
‘Won’t hide the mess we made.’
Wasn’t much to be done about that. They’d lost most of the night by now anyway. Jasaan hobbled back to their hole. Skjorl took the meat and followed him. Most likely they’d starve and never mind Jasaan and his clever plans. Or the dragons would find them. Or they’d get some sickness from eating the flesh of their own kind and die in agony in a pool of their own fluids. Could be any of those things would happen and Skjorl wouldn’t have called himself much surprised.
They did get hungry right enough. And they saw dragons now and then, and they had the runs and had cramps, but they didn’t die. They eked Relk out as best they could, tongues curling at the saltiness of him. And by the time they ran out of bits of him to eat, Jasaan could walk again.
11
Twenty-three days before the Black Mausoleum
She screamed. The world spun around her. Stone rushed towards her face and then a huge hand reached down from the sky and plucked her up and she was flying, the wind in her face, tugging her hair.
Prince Lai’s wings.
She forced herself not to panic, forced her mind to be still. The ground seemed a lot closer than it had from the cave. She tried not to look at it, but that was wrong — she had to look at it, didn’t she? The Silver City was a jumble of shapes, of outlines, all reduced to a dim grey in the moonlight. The city had burned before the dragons had broken free. They hadn’t smashed it like they’d smashed the City of Dragons. There were long streets and wide, open squares. There were canals, yes! The city had had canals since the time of the blood-mages. Long straight lines of water. One of those would do.
Ancestors! The ground was coming closer. Slowly, but it was. Underneath, it went past her so fast! Left hand down to turn left. Right hand down to turn right.
She tugged, very gently, with her right hand. Nothing happened. She tugged harder and then pulled with all her strength. The wings tipped her sideways. She started to fall, fast. When she let go, heart thumping so hard it seemed ready to burst out of her, the wings straightened and levelled and she was gliding again. She shivered. The ground was nearer now. She was lower. Never mind the canals. Ground, any ground, would have to do.
Buildings and streets rushed beneath her, mercilessly fast, dead empty houses, roads covered in weeds and patches of grass. There were trees, here and there, starting to sprout. They’d called this the Harvest Realm once. Now the fields and the meadows that had made the Silver City so rich were eating it.
The heart of the city reached up for her. The Golden Temple surrounded by its gardens, its esplanade, its lake and more of the old canals. Kataros could see the temple’s dome, half staved in by some idle dragon. A livid green by day, but in the moonlight it was as grey as everything else. Next to it an open space. She could land there. Nervously, she pulled on the left wing, trying to guide herself towards the temple. Gently but firmly; and slowly the wings turned her, this time without plunging her towards the ground.
A shape passed through the air beneath her. For a moment her heart almost stopped, because even though it was night, it still could only be a dragon, gliding straight towards the temple; but then she understood: it was the Adamantine Man. Just like he’d said, he was flying faster than her, much faster and he was already lower down. She saw him fly on ahead towards the temple, but he came down short of it, into one of the canals. She saw his wings flare as he reached the ground, saw a splash of water and then he was lost as she flew over him.
The ruins fell away. For a moment she was over a wide square leading towards the gardens, then the temple walls reached out like hands. She tried to turn, but not enough. At the last she pulled down hard on both wings, the way the Adamantine Man had told her.
One wing hit a wall. She pitched forward. Something cracked and then she was falling, but slowly, strangely slowly. There was another crack, this time louder as the wing twisted and snapped. The ground flew at her face; she tumbled and then the world hit her on the back of the head and the broken pieces of Prince Lai’s wings crashed on top of her.
12
Eight months before the Black Mausoleum
The little ones had given it a name. In its disdain for them, the dragon had forgotten. It had lived a thousand years and more, almost a hundred lifetimes. It had seen the world change beyond all recognition, but in the first of its lifetimes it had had another name. Black Scar of Sorrow Upon the Earth. Blackscar.
It had had a rider in those days. A true rider, a worthy one, a man made of silver. The god-men of the moon, whom the little ones called the Silver Kings. It had gone to war with them. It had known then, as it knew now, that the Silver Kings had made it, and made it for that one purpose. It had raged and stormed and slaughtered, burned little ones and consumed them, and in its turn had been burned by the sorceries of the lesser gods.
The Silver Kings had made it well. Death was not the end. Death was the little death, the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. It had been reborn. It had watched the world shatter, and then the last of the Silver Kings were scattered and gone, hidden or lost in the new and broken world. It had looked for them. They had all looked at first, all the dragons, left alone, forgotten and abandoned.
The dragon called Blackscar had looked for longer than most. A lifetime passed and then another, and by then few of them cared any more. The world was a new one. The lesser gods had been made quiet. The Silver Kings were gone. There were other creatures but they were ephemeral things. The dragons ate them and the world became theirs.
Between its lives, in its passing through the realm of the dead, it saw that something had changed since its first rebirth. A hole had been made, a tear, a rent from the shattering of the world, patched whole again by a web of something that tasted of the moon and of the earth and of something else, of some wrongness. Other dragons saw it too. For a while they had wondered together what it was. But the web held fast. The dragons avoided it. In time they lost interest.
