mountains for ever. He whispered the mantra to the faces from his childhood. He hadn’t been there when the dragons had come to his home so he hadn’t actually seen his people burn. He remembered the afterwards, though. The swathe of burned and blackened land, the stink of smoke, of burned wood and flesh. More than anything, he remembered the smell.
He took a deep pull from the pipe and then another, dissolving the screams and the faces and the smell into a pleasant numbness. He supposed he ought to move but his legs didn’t agree, so he had some strong words with them until grudgingly they lifted him to his feet. His feet, it seemed, were none too pleased to be disturbed either. They grumbled all the way to the ladder, all the way down, and kept it up while he wandered aimlessly in circles. He’d forgotten something, but it took an age to realise what it was.
Sashi. Oh yes. Her. He was still holding her pipe, long extinct. She’ll want it back.
‘Get down here!’ he shouted. His head felt like it was about to sever itself from the rest of him and go flying off into the air. He looked at the pipe. Ancestors! What did you put in it? ‘Oi, woman! Get your spindly legs down here! We’ve got dragon-riders to taunt. I know it’s fun to make them wait, but I’ll be righteously pissed off if they leave us here.’ He staggered into one of the legs of the tower. When he looked up, a face was leering down at him.
‘Did you like my pipe? This time?’
‘Yes.’ He frowned. ‘No. I mean…’ He wasn’t sure what he meant. Yes he liked it, but he didn’t like not being able to think in a straight line. ‘What is it?’
She grinned. ‘I put a pinch of dust in it.’
He jumped up, trying to grab her, which didn’t work since she was twenty feet up in the air. When he came down again, his legs buckled and he ended up on his backside. For some reason this was immensely funny. Somewhere a part of him knew he ought to be furious, but for now that was a lone voice in a very loud and happy crowd.
‘Where did you get it?’ Tears of laughter streamed down his cheeks. She was coming down the ladder now, very, very slowly. Sometimes it looked like she was going back up again. She still hadn’t bothered to dress herself. Her breasts hung invitingly out of her shift. Siff couldn’t take his eyes off them.
‘One of the riders.’
She didn’t get to say much more. As she reached the bottom of the ladder, Siff staggered over and grabbed hold of her, pulling her down onto the ground. He took her there in the dirt without much idea of what he was doing, only that he had no choice, that he absolutely had to have her no matter what. And that she didn’t much seem to mind.
When he was done, he rolled away and lay beside her. His head felt clearer now. ‘ These riders take dust?’ Not that that was much of a revelation, although he’d thought that the ones coming here were the righteous- scourge-descending-from-the-sky-to-burn-out-the-wickedness sort. Apparently not.
‘Of course they do, they all do. I could see it in his eyes that he had some. Those big, wide faraway eyes. Just like yours.’ She was suddenly sitting up, looming over him, peering into his face. Siff lurched to his feet. Something about this was very very bad, but his head was too fuzzy to think properly.
‘Wait! You took dust from a rider?’ She leered at him.
‘And how did you pay him?’ Stupid question. There was only one possible answer.
She purred and ran a hand over herself. ‘How do you think?’
‘You’re not that good.’ He stood up and took Sashi’s hand in his. ‘Come on. Dress yourself. We need to find those riders or all of this is a waste of time. They won’t wait for us.’ The haze in his head was getting in the way. Stopping him from understanding something that was shouting out to be heard. Sashi could bed riders for their pennies all she liked, but when she wanted dust, she came to him. That was the way it was supposed to be… He cursed the muddle in his head and then lost hold of what it was he was supposed to be thinking. Riders. Dust. Yes, that. Something.
‘Do we?’ She wrapped himself around him. ‘We could wait a little longer, if you like. I’m not sure I’m done with you.’ Go on, wheedled the dust. You can wait. Look at her. Stay. You’ll want her again soon enough
He pushed her away, then pulled her back again, twirled her as though they were about to dance and then tossed her over his shoulder. ‘Time for that later.’
If his little voices had anything important to say, he was sure they would keep on at him. He’d said the same to his conscience once, but that had walked out on him years ago.
24
Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum
Superstition came easy to men who fought monsters and stared at death every day. Outside his own company no Adamantine Man would admit it, but there it was. Every axe had its name. There might not be any such things as ghosts, but there were spirits right enough. Other people had their ancestors to watch over them, but the Adamantine Men were severed from their families, and so they had the memories of all those who’d gone before, right back to the nameless Night Watchman who’d stood beside Narammed and made him the first speaker. Every soldier who’d ever walked the walls of the Adamantine Palace secretly thought he’d know the dragon that would kill him as soon as he saw it. Some were certain they would die by the flames of a green or a red or a gold. For Skjorl, it had been having someone called Vishmir in his company. A Vish made him invincible. The dragon that killed the last Vishmir would be the one to burn him. He’d quietly believed that for as long as he could remember.
And then the last Vish he knew had been crushed by a rock in Bloodsalt, and here he was, still alive. Somewhere up on Yinazhin’s Way, weeks after Jasaan had gone, he’d realised. He’d watched, then, as his superstition crumbled to dust, taking half the things he believed in with it. He thought of the names he’d given to his axe and his shield and would have thrown them away if he could have found new ones to replace them. Ancestors, spirits, ghosts, they were all nonsense. There were dragons. There were alchemists and their potions. There were blood-mages. That was all.
So there he was, all his superstitions broken in pieces and stuffed in sacks to be slowly thrown away, and now he stared at the outsider with the silver eyes, paralysed because here, in front of him, was surely a ghost made flesh. The outsider reached out his hand and Skjorl was transfixed. Tendrils of silver light like moonlight curled from the man’s fingertips. They grew as long as his thumb, writhing and coiling like little snakes, as though feeling for something that wasn’t there.
And then they abruptly vanished as the outsider’s eyes went back to normal. He slumped, and if Skjorl had had a knife on him, he might just have used it. His sword was too long to draw while he was sitting down and he was too paralysed to get up.
‘What in Vishmir’s name was that?’
‘Something the Silver King left behind,’ whispered the alchemist.
Skjorl shivered. Some thing?
The outsider opened his eyes again and looked at Skjorl. Hard to tell what colour they were in the gloom, but not silver and not glowing any more. Human then. Probably. ‘It’s a key,’ he said.
‘A key to what?’
‘Why to a door — what else? The door to where the Silver King went.’
No, couldn’t be. Skjorl shook his head. Had to be some trick. Not some shit-eater from the mountains.
The outsider shrugged. ‘Believe what you want. Doesn’t matter really, does it, what you think. What matters is what she thinks.’ He nodded towards the alchemist. ‘Lucky for me she’s the one of you who can think, eh? So you just be a good little doggy and do as you’re told.’
Skjorl was on his feet. Never mind what sort of creature was inside this shit-eater, he could still wring its neck.
‘No!’ The alchemist’s command caught him mid-lunge. ‘You don’t touch him either. Not one finger, or you’ll feel the pain as if it had been me.’
