what? Ghosts? But there were no such things as ghosts. No such things as spirits. There were dragons and there was blood-magic and there were knives in the back in the dark. Those were dangers. Dark shadows? Old stones? He walked to the doors. Slowly and carefully though, legs and arms loose and ready to run, sword drawn. The doors were huge, bigger than they’d seemed from the water. Not familiar either, not like the wood and iron gates inside the Pinnacles; these were made of bronze, and into each was carved the figure of a man, ten feet tall and with four arms instead of two, each hand with a long curved sword. Their faces were hidden behind blank helms with no eyes. There were no handles that he could see, nothing to pull.
He stopped and looked the bronze up and down. Gave the door a good hard push. Nothing. Couldn’t say he felt too bad about that. Whatever was behind those doors had been there for a long time. Belonged to whoever had made the Pinnacles, and no one at all knew who that was. Someone bigger and older even than the Silver King.
‘No way in.’ He took a step back.
The doors creaked. The groan of bending metal shook the cave, so loud that Skjorl staggered back another step. The doors opening? No. That wasn’t right. One of the bronze figures was falling forward. Out of its door!
No, that wasn’t it either. The bronze was moving right enough, but it wasn’t falling. Grinding tearing shrieking sounds of metal shook the air, rang in his ears. For an instant Skjorl stood and stared. He’d faced dragons without fear, without a moment of pause, and dragons were the most terrible things in the realms. Or that’s what he’d thought; but then as far as he knew, no one had ever come face to face with a ten-foot-tall statue of bronze with four arms all holding swords. Not one that moved and was tearing itself out of a door.
An instant passed, that was all. Then he sheathed his sword and pulled Dragon-blooded off his back in one movement, leapt sideways and forward and brought the axe round with all his strength, sweeping low as the bronze man finished pulling himself free. He ducked under the sweep of a scimitar and the axe struck home, smashing into a knee joint and snapping it clean in two. Skjorl recoiled away as the bronze giant staggered onto its knees. Didn’t fall though, and now its scimitars were weaving arcs faster than any human swordsman. Skjorl backed away.
‘You still want me to go inside there, alchemist?’ he roared. The grinding metal noises were rising again. The other door was starting to shift.
No answer. A grin forced its way onto Skjorl’s lips. He wasn’t sure whether he had a choice, whether he could turn and run even if he wanted to. Didn’t matter. Didn’t want to. Ought to, but didn’t want to.
The second bronze giant was ripping itself free. The first one was between them. Stopping him from getting close enough to cripple it while it was still vulnerable.
‘If I were you, alchemist, I’d be pissing in my pants!’ Had to shout over the roar of tearing metal. ‘I’d run. Run, girl, run away!’ He was going to die and he’d never be remembered, but he’d know, for a fleeting instant, that it had been glorious.
He didn’t feel the first tug on his belt. Only noticed it when the alchemist pulled hard enough to unbalance him.
The second bronze man was almost free.
‘Come! Come!’
Skjorl wasn’t sure he wanted to. The torrent of noise inside his head was a river, rushing him to battle. The alchemist’s fingers in there were distant things, hardly heard.
Come! Come! Come to us!
Not the alchemist. Another voice. On top of hers.
‘Move!’ She was pulling him. Dragging him, and then his head was his own again and he turned, ran like any sensible man would, pushing her in front of him, barging her back onto the raft, thrusting it out into the water, into the current and hurling himself after her.
A few feet short of them, the second bronze giant reached the edge of the water. It stopped. Skjorl stood on the raft, legs wide apart, axe held out in front of him, but the giant stayed where it was. It seemed to watch, motionless, as the raft floated away down the tunnel. Skjorl thought he saw it move again as it faded out of sight. Turn, back towards the door from where it had come. He stayed where he was, poised to fight until long after the last glimmer of light from that place had winked away.
He was shaking.
The cold. Must have been the cold.
22
Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum
On the outside her own shaking stopped when the golem had faded from sight. On the inside… on the inside she was lost. There had been books back when she’d been in the Palace of Alchemy. The Silver King had made golems, statues of stone or bronze or even iron, animated and given life. No one had seen a golem since the Silver King had fallen. Like Prince Lai’s wings, they were pretty stories. Myths read in the comfort of a warm study.
There had been other things in those books.
The Adamantine Man abruptly reached forward. He had his hands on her shoulders before she could blink, his fingers pressing into her skin, hard and hurting. There was a madness in his eyes she’d never seen before, a wildness that scared her even more than the golems had done.
‘What. Was. That?’ He could have snapped her neck, easily.
‘You’re hurting me!’ The words came out strangled, but they flew through the blood-bond just as well and hit him like a hammer. He let go and reeled away with a snarl.
‘Alchemist!’ He bared his teeth at her like an animal, like a rabid dog.
Remembering what he was, she welded her thoughts like an iron shield. ‘Sit down!’ The blood-bond was wide open now. He had no choice but to obey. ‘You will never, ever touch me again, Skjorl. Never. If you do, you will feel a pain that will sink you to your knees. You will wail and tear at yourself in agony. A touch, you shit-eater, that’s all.’ It wasn’t enough though. He needed to feel it — she wanted him to feel it — and so she reached out a hand towards him. ‘Let me show you.’ She seized his hand and pressed it against the side of her face. He jerked and tried to pull away, but she had him from within as well and he couldn’t let go. He threw his head back and screwed up his face and whined. She held him a while longer. When his eyes started to bulge she let him go.
‘There.’
Siff was watching them. He was trying to make out he was unconscious, but his eyes were very slightly open and moving under their lids, flicking from her to the Adamantine Man and back again. The tunnel walls drifted past, always the same, smooth and unmarked.
‘I opened the doors,’ growled Skjorl after a bit. ‘Well I tried.’ He looked at her. ‘So why were you sent from the Purple Spur, spear-carrier. What did you do wrong?’
She didn’t want to tell him, especially after what she’d just done, but a promise was a promise and alchemists kept their word, so she took a deep breath and made it as blunt as she could.
‘There were a little over thirty of us,’ she said. ‘Three of us were alchemists. The rest were Adamantine Men. We went in three separate groups, an alchemist in each. We were looking for help because we’re slowly starving to death under the Spur. We can poison dragons but they simply come back. We can kill them with the Adamantine Spear but they still come back. Men like you may go and smash eggs and slaughter hatchlings, but for what? We’ve taken to searching for eggs to bring to the caves, hoping we might do what we’d done before, but there are so many eggs in so many places that we can’t begin to collect them all; and even the ones we get, the dragons simply refuse the food we offer them when they hatch. They know now. They know what we do and they know how to beat us. They know we cannot win and so they starve themselves and they die and then they come back. We thought we might find something at the Pinnacles. The place is filled with things left behind by the Silver King, things that have never been touched since the time of the blood-mages, things we have never understood. We remembered them from our books, before the dragons burned them all. In the past the kings and queens of the Silver City barred us from their three palaces and no alchemist has been inside the lower chambers for centuries. We hoped… We thought perhaps we might finally be allowed to see, to discover something the Isul Aieha — the
