here were long gone, eaten by dragons or fled. Snappers didn’t come down onto the plains — they’d always known better than to live out in the open. And dragons didn’t fly at night. Usually.
Even so, he kept them to the lowest ground, took what shelter he could behind the long streaks of broken wood and debris left behind by each annual flood of the Fury. Lines of stunted narrow trees marked what had once been fields, all overgrown now, filled with long grass and fast-growing thorn bushes. He picked his path carefully, watching the moon and the stars, always staying to the shadows where he could. They moved slowly but methodically towards the castle.
It was the alchemist who found the soldiers. Walked a dozen yards into the dark, took a piss that a deaf man could have heard a mile away and came back with a knife held to her throat and four men behind her. Four that Skjorl could see, at least.
The man with the knife said something. Skjorl blinked. The words made no sense, but his meaning was clear enough. This was the part where he and the shit-eater were supposed to surrender their swords so that the alchemist didn’t get her pretty throat cut.
Skjorl thought about that for a bit. The shit-eater didn’t have a sword to surrender. And as for his own, they’d prise Dragon-blooded out of his cold dead hands if they got her at all.
‘Given the choice of her or my steel, I’ll keep the steel, thanks,’ he said. ‘But I’ll let you see it.’ Too close for axe work, too dark, so he drew out his sword, let the moonlight glint off its edge. ‘There.’
The alchemist opened her mouth. The hand around her neck tightened and she closed it again. Skjorl waited for the fingers inside his head but they didn’t come. He grinned.
‘No orders, alchemist? Sure?’
The man with the knife said something else but Skjorl couldn’t make head or tail of it. ‘He says he’ll slit her throat,’ said another. The accent was thick, but Skjorl recognised it this time. An outsider from deep in the mountains.
‘Tell him I’ll thank him. Why don’t you tell me what a shit-eater like you is doing so far from home, or shall we just get on with it? Four of you is it, or are there more out there? Because four’s fine with me.’
‘You’re a rider.’ Lot of hatred in those words and no effort to hide it. The shit-eater doing the talking took a step forward. He drew out his own sword. It was long and curved, not a weapon Skjorl had seen before. ‘You got no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this.’
He came at Skjorl in fast easy steps, quicker and with more skill than a shit-eater had any right to. Two quick thrusts, a slash, a feint and a killing cut to the head. Skjorl blocked it all easily. Turned the longer sword, stepped inside the man’s guard and ran him through. He looked down as the soldier grunted and fell. He’d expected armour. Wrinkled his nose and tried not to sound disappointed. ‘Not bad for a shit-eater. Not good enough for an Adamantine Man though.’
The man looked up at him. Black blood dribbled out of his mouth. ‘If that’s what you are, you should serve your mistress,’ he choked.
His eyes rolled and he fell back. Skjorl looked at the rest of them. ‘Next?’ he twirled his sword.
The one holding the alchemist dug the knife into her skin. A thin thread of blood oozed across the blade.
‘Told you that’s not going to-’ He didn’t get any further because something hit him around the back of the head. Not the alchemist from the inside, but something from the outside. He staggered and spun round, and there was the shit-eater, his shit-eater, the one he’d been carrying all night. The one he’d dropped into the mud and forgotten about as soon as the soldiers had appeared. Siff.
Hit him with the haft of his own axe.
His sword flew back to strike. Pure reflex. Spears of pain crashed into his head, pinging off the inside of his skull like arrows off a stone parapet. He caught the alchemist looking at him, not scared at all about the knife against her throat.
No!
He dropped to his knees. Let the sword go and clutched his head.
Could have finished the strike. Could have… if I wanted…
Too much. Too much to bear. His eyes closed. He tipped forward.
33
Twenty days before the Black Mausoleum
Siff watched the Adamantine Man fall. He couldn’t look anywhere else, thinking, I did that? Except surely he hadn’t. He couldn’t have. The idiot had an axe across his back, the haft of it poking up behind his head. All Siff had done was put one and one together, given him little headache and maybe lowered the bastard’s guard for a moment, long enough for someone to kill him.
Outsiders? He peered at the three remaining soldiers, wondering if the Adamantine Man was right. They spoke strangely, not quite like men from the mountains and yet with a familiar lilt. There was only one reason Siff knew for an outsider from the mountains to be down here on the plains — because some dragon-lord was taking him to Furymouth to sell in the slave markets. He sank to the ground and bowed his head, hiding his face. On the whole he didn’t give a fig who did what to whom, as long as they didn’t do it to him.
Two of them jumped on the Adamantine Man and tied him up. They relaxed after that. Siff was more a threat to himself than anyone else and they obviously thought much the same of the alchemist. They were wrong, but that was soldiers for you and Siff wasn’t about to correct them. Maybe these would be better than the last ones he’d met or maybe not, but they couldn’t be worse; and even if they were, what was he going to do? Blown about like a leaf in a storm, that’s what he was. Story of his crappy little life, from the day his stupid whore had sold him out. He still knew what he knew, though. A secret good enough to save his life twice already.
The soldiers marched them off across the muddy fields. He could barely walk, staggering and stumbling as they pushed and shoved him on, but he didn’t dare fall. They wouldn’t carry him, not like the alchemist’s doggy. They’d leave him.
They stopped in the shadow of a black shape that blotted out half the sky, at the edge of a place where the fields glowed with a soft purple light. He didn’t understand what could do that, but by then he was too lost in his own misery to think. They waited there and let him sit down, and he must have dozed off because the next thing he knew he was being hauled into a wooden cage that jerked and tugged itself up into the air, and, Ooh gods! Ooh ancestors! There was only one place he could be, the worst place. He twisted and pulled, but it was too late.
‘No!’ He pushed and punched. ‘No!’
Someone had his arms and forced him down, face against mud-streaked boards, boot on the back of his neck. Still he struggled. He’d been in a place like this before. In a cage, carried in the talons of a dragon, on his way to Furymouth to be sold as a slave.
34
Twenty days before the Black Mausoleum
The castle was flying. Or floating at least. It sat in the air atop a flat slice of purple-veined rock as thick as a dragon was long, while the bottom of the uneven stone and the muddy plains of the Fury were separated by the same again in air. From up close she could feel its size. It was vast, big enough to fill half the sky. Light flickered and flashed like lightning between the castle stone and the ground, lightning with a taint of purple that let her see just how tall the castle stood. It was at least as big as the Adamantine Palace had been, perhaps larger, maybe even as large as the Palace of Paths. She wondered whether Skjorl would know. Mostly she wondered where it had risen from the earth and who could have made such a thing and how.
