turned away. Behind him, the other one had almost finished putting his armour back on.
‘Wait!’ Wait? Damn fool.
‘What?’ The rider didn’t turn around. He was already doing up the straps on his dragon-scale.
‘I come back with you and then I get paid, right?’
The rider shrugged. ‘I don’t know and I don’t care. Maybe my eyrie master wants to stick a spike up your arse and hang you in a cage.’
You couldn’t help but look at the dragons. Siff shook his head. They were just too big even this far away, out of reach of their fire-breath. But to get closer, close enough to touch… No. No, he wasn’t doing that. It made him want to scream.
The dead men he’d betrayed were laughing at him. ‘I’ll walk,’ he spat. ‘You lot owe me.’ He started to back away and put a hand on Sashi’s arm. ‘Come on, lover. Leave these gentlemen to their pleasure.’ It would take him a week or more to get back to the eyrie on foot. With a bit of luck the slaves would be gone by then and that was a thing to be happy about. Maybe it hadn’t worked out too bad after all.
‘You’re not taking her.’ The rider looked past Siff and leered at Sashi. ‘No. She can ride with me. She knows what I like.’
I bet she does. ‘Best let her stay with me, rider. Otherwise she might just bite it off.’
‘No.’ Sashi pushed past him and looked the rider up and down. ‘I’ll go with him. It’s fine.’
‘It’s bloody not fine.’
She half-smiled, half-leered at him. ‘I’ll wait. You won’t be long, right?’
Siff backed away from the riders and their monsters. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the looks that went between the rider and Sashi. That was where she’d got her dust then. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Betrayed mostly, but with a bit of pity for her too. They’d burn her, more likely than not, once they were bored with her. That’s what happened when you played with dragons. ‘Suit yourself then.’
He turned away, an itch between his shoulders until he’d walked the first mile or two and saw the dragons up in the air at last, flying home. Empty cages hung beneath them, a few wooden bars lashed together with crude ropes. That was how the dragon-knights carried their slaves. Sometimes the cages fell apart in mid-air, but what did that matter? They were only slaves, right? Plenty more out there. Bastards.
He stood still, watching them go, higher and higher off to the south until the sky swallowed them, and then, only then, did he give a deep sigh and turn round, heading back for all those hidden stashes of dust.
He was shaking.
26
Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum
The dragon understood time well enough, but the concept had little meaning. It hatched, it ate, it grew, it flew. Some day a strange feeling would come from inside. A heat that would not be denied. It would come like a flood, wave after wave, each one deeper and stronger than the last. Not with any pain, but with a tiredness. The dragon would lie down and fade and its essence would vanish away to the realm of the dead, a spirit seeking passage. Sometimes it awoke there alone. Sometimes others would come and go, others it knew. Sometimes it passed a shoal of the human dead, vanishing towards whatever end awaited them. Occasionally it found other things, trapped and best left well alone. Always, though, it felt the call. New flesh, begging for life; and always it answered, sought out the cries and devoured one and awoke, a hatchling reborn, cracking its hungry way from the egg. This was how a dragon marked the passage of time, not in seasons or suns, but in lifetimes.
Around the three spires of stone where the Isul Aieha had once lived it made its home. The little one it sought was always there. Never hidden, but walled within the stone where even a dragon could not reach. It hunted. It made sport of the prey in the ruins below. It roosted as the whim took it among the smashed palaces of the mountaintops, or else far away, but it always came back and the little one was always still there, a thorn in the dragon’s thoughts. It could not have said how long it waited, how many days passed as it came and went, feeding, hunting, soaring, sometimes alone, sometimes with others of its kind. It could not have said because it did not care. Mere days were such ephemeral things.
Then one morning the little one was gone. The dragon raked its senses through the mountains. All the others it had come to know, they were still there, but the one it wanted, that one was gone; and so the hunt began.
27
Some two years before the Black Mausoleum
The sensible thing, he knew, was to disappear. The Worldspine was big enough and they’d hardly come looking for him. Running after him with their bag of silver to pay him what he was due. Not likely. Yes, walking away was the sensible thing. Trouble was, everything he had was hidden around that eyrie, the place where dragons were groomed and grown and fed and trained. And they really owed him a lot of silver for today’s work. If they were going to kill him, he decided, they would have done it already; if they weren’t, then yes, he’d like to be paid. He’d take his blood money and be gone, and after that he’d be happy if he never saw these mountains again.
The valleys around the edge of the Worldspine all looked the same to Siff. He’d lived his whole life in them, but unless you were a dragon-rider, all you got to see were the trees around you, the branches overhead and whatever annoying pile of rocks, cave, fissure, gulley, stream, waterfall or pack of hungry snappers was getting in your way to to slow you down this time. There were paths sometimes, if you knew where to look for them, old ways made of heavy stones laid down by people long forgotten. Sometimes there were even rope bridges. The trouble with paths was the chance of running into someone else, and the fact that the average someone else almost always turned out to be a murderous footpad to anyone travelling alone. Bridges, as far as he could tell, were official meeting places for murderous footpads. Siff avoided the lot. He made his own way through the forest and the valleys to the dragon-riders’ eyrie. It took him a week and a half. He dragged it out. The longer the better, the more chance all the slaves would be gone by the time he got there.
He knew he was getting close when there started being more to the world than trees and rocks and streams and then more trees and rocks. The forest around the eyrie peak had been stripped away, its rugged slopes covered in grass and dotted with huts and herds of alpaca. Further up the valley, the huts grew closer together. There were people here, not the outsiders who lived in the forests, but the tame dragon folk who lived in the shadows of the eyries. The sort who would tell you that the dragons protected them, even as the monsters and their riders took everything they had and left them no better off than the forest folk. He passed pens filled with animals. The huts gradually gathered together into what passed for a town, but he skirted around all that and headed for the path that went up the mountain, another old stone thing, uneven, weathered, steps worn by all the feet that had gone up and down. Odd that, since almost no one used it now, barely even remembered it was there. If you wanted something up the mountain, you simply carried it in the talons of a dragon. Even Siff had to agree that was much more straightforward and far less effort than climbing the path on foot. It was there, though, like the paths through the valleys, old and forgotten by all but the outsiders. Made in a fairy-tale time that had never really happened when there had been no dragons, and the people of the mountains had lived and prospered and raised towns and cities and these paths had been their roads. Rubbish, all of it, but pretty stories nonetheless. Maybe if you could believe there had once been a time before dragons then you could believe in a faraway day when they’d finally be gone.
As he approached the top of the path, three of the monsters soared through the valley below him. They arced upwards and landed somewhere among the crags and bluffs above. They were carrying cages. He saw one cage clip the ground and shatter, spilling slaves all over the mountainside. He could smell the eyrie now. A smell you always
