She was cold, cold as ice, and yet she still slept — now there was a way that dust would kill you. He doubled the blanket over her and left her to sleep. The cloud in his head made up his mind. A pity, but she couldn’t be a part of his life now, really couldn’t, not like this. Best if he was gone.
He was almost at the bottom of the mountain when the dragon flew past, skimming low down the slope. It landed a few hundred yards further down the path and turned to face him. When it started to walk back towards him, he almost pissed himself. There were two riders on its back, not one.
‘Stay where you are.’ There wasn’t any threat in the command and there didn’t need to be. The dragon was enough.
And then he saw. It was Sashi on the dragon’s back with the rider.
Shit.
His knife started to come out of its sheath. And then what? What was he going to do with it? Take on an armoured dragon-knight and a dragon?
Damned if he was going down without a fight, though.
No no no. They can’t know. They can’t. This is something else. A mistake.
Something about the rider spoke of dust. Maybe his eyes weren’t quite right, or maybe there was a whiff of it in the air. Sashi was smiling at him. She’d sold him. What else would put her on the back of a dragon? And so they did know, and he should have killed her, and life was so terribly, desperately unfair.
He threw the knife at her and ran. Behind him the ground shook as the dragon chased him. He managed about a dozen steps before its enormous claws scooped him up. He screamed, beyond terror, shat himself, pissed himself, and by the time they reached the eyrie and it threw him onto the ground he was broken. He crawled in the dirt, whimpering. When he tried to get up, someone kicked him back down. And the dragon, it was always there, looming over him. Sashi was forgotten. He never knew whether his knife had hit her or not.
Gold Cloak came out. Siff clawed at his boots, begging and pleading. Gold Cloak kicked him in the face. They picked him up, dragged him away and shackled him to a wall somewhere dark that smelled of rot and death. And left.
Later, someone else came, not a rider but an outsider like him. The outsider beat him to within an inch of his life and didn’t say a word. He left too.
Siff set to shouting. ‘What do you want? I’ve done nothing!’ Wasn’t that what all condemned men said?
No one answered. Long after he’d shouted himself hoarse, two men brought a brazier and a brand. They took their time heating it up and made sure he saw what was coming. One of them ripped his shirt. The other one burned him with the mark of a slave. The pain was as though he’d been ripped apart and the pieces doused in salt.
They threw water over the wound and left. A few hours later, when the pain had become almost bearable, yet another man came. This one pulled out his fingernails, one by one. Like the others, he didn’t say a word. He left Siff with his own screams for company.
A day passed. Maybe another. Time lost its beat. The next men were riders, three of them. They stank of dust and they had questions in their eyes.
‘We know everything,’ they said, but people who knew everything didn’t come with questions in their eyes.
‘King Valmeyan is moving his throne to the City of Dragons,’ said one. ‘So, shit-eater, you can stay here, hanging on that wall until we go, and then we’ll take you in a slave cage to the markets in Furymouth along with all the other shit-eaters you betrayed. Or else you tell us where your dust is. Then when we’re in Furymouth, you can sell it for us.’
He looked them over. That was something he’d always been good at, judging other men. Even chained to a wall, he could look them in the eye and see into their hearts. They were dragon-riders, bastards, heartless, born and taught to believe they were above all other men. He could see their thoughts as clearly as if they were written across their faces. They’d take his dust and then they’d kill him.
‘No,’ he said.
This didn’t seem to bother them, which seemed strange until the other men came back, the ones who’d beaten him and branded him and torn out his fingernails. They set to work and eventually, between his screams, Siff told them everything.
Afterwards he supposed they’d kill him. When they didn’t, he sat alone in the dark, fed and watered now and then but never enough, never hearing another voice, day after day after day. Eventually the pain started to fade. By then he was used to it, like an old friend. As it left him, he found he missed it.
The riders never came back. Other men came instead. They took him down and dragged him out to the landing field and dumped him in a slave cage. After a while they brought others. Dregs. The bottom of the barrel. Some of them came shouting and screaming, as if that might make a difference.
The eyrie was almost empty and the air was strange. Something terrible was coming, you could feel it, but right there and then no one cared about that, least of all Siff. They packed the cage full until it creaked at its seams and then a dragon swooped down and tore them into the air.
28
Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum
She watched the Adamantine Man lean forward.
‘How?’ He didn’t bother trying to hide his disdain. ‘You followed the Silver King? How?’ The outsider coughed. Then sneered.
‘You doggies always have a master to serve, don’t you? Maybe that’s why you think we all ought to be that way.’ He waved a weak hand in Skjorl’s face. ‘I happened by the Aardish Caves. You’ve heard of them haven’t you, doggy? Vishmir’s tomb, and they say the Silver King’s body was taken there too. I found a door to where he went.’
‘ How, shit-eater?’
The outsider held up one finger. ‘Sit on this, doggy.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I’m tired. I’m hungry. Get me food, doggy, or enjoy my silence.’
‘Your silence will be the sweeter,’ growled Skjorl, and the two of them settled back each onto their own end of the raft with Kataros between them. They lapsed into silence. The outsider fell asleep again. The Adamantine Man dozed. She kept herself awake — easy magic that — and watched them both from a half-trance. The lapping water lulled her, drew her mind away. Hours passed, many of them, turning into a day and then another while the three of them sat on their raft, drifting down the tunnel, doing their best to ignore one another, relieving themselves when they thought none of the others was looking and slowly getting even more hungry than they’d been before they left. Siff slipped further away, already weak from weeks of starving in his cell. There wasn’t anything she could do for him, not any more. When she asked the Adamantine Man how much longer the journey would be, he simply shrugged.
She wasn’t sure whether they were on the third day or the fourth since she’d escaped when the Adamantine Man suddenly moved. She watched him through lidded eyes. He was staring at her.
‘I know you’re not asleep, alchemist,’ he said after a moment. ‘Listen!’
She listened, but all she could hear was the sound of the water in the tunnel. ‘What?’
‘There’s a change. The water sounds different. We’re moving more slowly and the tunnel is growing wider. And look ahead.’
It took a moment for her to grasp what was different. Ahead, in the distance, the tunnel was dark, pitch dark. There was no more glow from the walls. She sat straighter.
‘What does it mean, alchemist?’
‘I don’t know. Do you?’
‘No.’
The darkness drew closer. As they entered it, Skjorl got up and climbed out of the raft. He struggled with it to
