They set off. As the Adamantine Man led her through the tunnels, Kataros tried to catch Siff’s eye, but he was far away, lost in his own misery. Ahead of them, here and there, she thought she saw movement, shapes running away, footsteps echoing across the smooth stone.
‘Ferals.’
‘Men,’ she muttered, but the Adamantine Man didn’t answer. Whoever they were, they were gone before she saw much more than shadows.
‘They’ll be up in the ruins, most of them,’ grunted Skjorl. ‘Dusk and dawn. That’s the time to go feral hunting.’
‘You hunt them?’
He shrugged. ‘Not me. Sometimes the riders do.’
She wondered if the same was true in the Purple Spur. The Adamantine Men there crept out at night to forage for food. She’d never thought to ask what food it was they found.
The tunnel ran straight as an archer’s arrow and smooth as one too. They hadn’t been made so much as created, simply brought into existence exactly the way the Silver King had wanted them. A half-god who could tame dragons and raze mountains on a whim, what did he want with tunnels? She couldn’t begin to guess their purpose, but then who was she to fathom the mind of a semi-divine?
The tunnel split into three, each spiralling off in languid arcs so that it was possible to walk almost straight and yet pick any one of them as they curved up and down and away. The Adamantine Man chose one without hesitation. She didn’t know whether that was because he knew where he was going or simply because that was the way he was.
‘Stay close. If I start to run, you run with me.’
She heard a distant hiss of water. When the tunnel split again, the Adamantine Man took the path that sloped downwards, curved back on itself and then merged with another, one with water running through it. When he waded in, it came up to his knees. It was flowing fast. He stood for a time, not moving, then came out again.
‘To get to Farakkan, we follow this water,’ he said. ‘Riders go there sometimes. They have rafts. On a raft it takes two or three days.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Getting back takes longer. Got to walk up the Fury to Purkan. There’s another tunnel there. Can’t get back this way against all that water. We leave, we probably can’t come back.’
‘We don’t need to get back,’ she snapped. ‘Just there.’
‘That so?’ He shrugged. ‘And after the Raksheh? If you find whatever it is that’s there? What then?’
‘That’s no concern of yours.’ Which was another way of saying she hadn’t thought about it. In truth, she had almost no idea what she was going to find. Siff had been raving, but even if everything he’d said had been true, the chances of getting there seemed so small that she’d never looked to what happened after.
The Adamantine Man spat in the water. ‘We could float or we could swim, but this one can’t.’ He shook Siff up a bit and made him grunt. ‘Got to steal one of them rafts. Got to walk against the flow for a bit to do that and it’ll be riders we face, not ferals. Could get messy.’
‘Then find another way.’
He shook his head. ‘Can’t, because there isn’t one. We raft or we walk. I don’t know how long that will take. Too long for him unless we find food.’ He looked down at Siff, picked him up and went back into the water. ‘It’s not far. You can stay with him while I deal with it. You’ll be safe enough. Ferals avoid the place and if there’s any riders, they have to get past me first.’
She followed him in up to her knees. The current tugged at her, fast enough to take her down and wash her away if she slipped. The Adamantine Man didn’t seem troubled. With each laboured step, the hiss of rushing water grew louder, until it became an echoing roar. Under the Purple Spur she’d seen where the Silver River emptied itself into some bottomless chasm. She’d seen it from the inside, from the other side of the chasm in a cave like a cathedral, and the sound had been the same. Was there a river in the Silver City? She didn’t remember one. There were canals, the city had been famous for them, but a river?
Skjorl stopped and moved carefully to the edge of the water, up the curve of the tunnel. He propped Siff against the side and beckoned to her.
‘Getting light up there soon,’ he said. ‘Ferals forage at dawn and sleep in the day. Riders are still in their beds. Good time for us to be thieving.’ He pointed. ‘Look closely. Do you see?’
‘See what?’ Up ahead there was a subtle change to the light.
‘Where the tunnel opens out. We’re right underneath where we started. Stay here with him. Make sure the water doesn’t take him.’ He shrugged. ‘If he tries to escape, he’ll not get far on his own, but you’ll be lucky to get him back before he drowns.’
Kataros cupped Siff’s face in her hands. She lifted back his eyelids. He was conscious, if only just. ‘Are you all right?’
‘He’s half-dead, alchemist. If he hasn’t told you everything you need, I’d get it out of him quick. Then we can dump him when we get to Farakkan. We’ll move faster.’
The outsider rolled his head. ‘Fuck… you… rider…’
The Adamantine Man laughed. ‘See. It can talk. So make it!’
Kataros took a deep breath. ‘It’s not something he can tell me. Or you. We have to take him to the Raksheh with us. It’s something he has to show us.’
She’d expected an argument and that she’d have to force the Adamantine Man to her will again, but he only shrugged like he always did. ‘If you say so. If you’re not going to use your magic to make him talk, perhaps you could use it to make him walk. Although since we’re all going to be eaten by dragons as soon as we try to get up the Yamuna, don’t strain yourself.’
‘Give him some water.’
He laughed at her. ‘Give it to him yourself, alchemist. It’s right there. With a bit of luck the riders haven’t poisoned it today.’
21
Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum
Wouldn’t take all that much luck though — as far as Skjorl knew, for all their talk, the riders in the fortress had only actually done it once. Months ago, when he’d still been somewhere on Yinazhin’s Way, talking to his axe and cursing at the moon. Dropped in poison by the barrel-load to try and kill the ferals. Hadn’t worked.
A hundred yards from where he’d left the alchemist, the tunnel ended in a vast cavern. Not that he could see much of it in the gloom now, but the light here waxed and waned like the light in the rest of the fortress and he’d been here at other times, when the city had been in daylight. Water plunging from the centre of the roof, hundreds of feet up, crashing to the stone floor and making everything damp with a cold mist. It came all the way from the very top of the fortress, from the endless fountains of the Reflecting Garden where water would lie still but not lie flat, or at least that’s the way it had been before dragons had smashed it to rubble. Hadn’t killed the fountain though. Another mystery of the Silver King for the alchemist to ponder; as far as Skjorl was concerned, it made clean water spill down through the levels of the fortress and kept them all alive, and that was as much as mattered.
All that water came down, and then it flowed out into the canals of the Silver City; and then it came back again and finally ended up here, draining away down the tunnel to Farakkan, the last and lowest of the paths to the Fury. By the time it got this far, it wasn’t so clean. The place stank.
He climbed around the side of the cave. All the tunnels under the Silver City led here in the end. There were always riders too, because this was the way in and the way out of the fortress. The Undergates. The only way in and way out as far as Skjorl knew, unless you happened to have a pair of Prince Lai’s wings or perhaps a handy dragon.
The rafts, if you could call them that, weren’t much more than a few lumps of wood poorly strung together sitting on the floor of the cave close to the water. Riders were far across the other side by the gates. If they saw
