Maybe I did that while I was delirious?
Probably not, since he was still tied up, trussed the way he’d been when Gold Cloak had shoved him in the cage. If anything, being soaked in freezing rain and water had made the ropes tighter. He could barely stand. If he was mad and none of this was real, he might at least have had the decency to have untied himself. So perhaps not mad either.
The pile of bodies reminded him uncomfortably of the charred corpses back at the village, the one he’d betrayed. He blinked and stared at the river for a while. The air was cold now, not warm like it had been when he’d seen the dragon. The waterfall was a few hundred yards away. At least he was out of the wind.
He was cold.
What could make a dragon crash?
No, that was a thing not to think about. The thing to think about was that he was alive, barely, and he wasn’t in a slave cage any more and there wasn’t a dragon carrying him to the pens in Furymouth and he wasn’t about to be sold or murdered in his sleep. The thing to think about was that he was going to starve to death right here, wherever here was, if he didn’t die of cold first. Or of all the bits that hurt, which was almost everything.
Shelter.
His ribs and his back hurt, almost as though something had coiled around him, crushing him, pulling him out of the water without much regard to whether anything got broken in the process. Another thing not to think about. He staggered to the pile of bodies instead. It was messy. They largely looked like what you’d expect if you took a few dozen men and then scattered them from the sky across a landscape of giant rocks and boulders. Among them he saw a flash of gold. He had to kick bodies — bits of bodies as well — out of the way since his hands were tied, but there he was, Gold Cloak. Or half of him, anyway. He had his head and his shoulders and his nice cloak and his ribs and then his snapped spine sticking out through a mess of guts and bloody scraps of flesh.
For the first time in a good few days Siff smiled. He kicked about in the pile some more. Eventually he found a dragon-rider’s leg. You could tell it came from a rider because of the boot. It was a nice boot, but nowhere near as precious as the knife kept tucked inside it. Riders always kept a knife in each boot. No one had ever told him why, but that’s the way it was. Getting the knife out took a while. Jamming it in between a couple of rocks took longer, fraying the ropes that bound him longer still, but he did it, and then he was free.
Free and cold and hungry. But free!
He shouted it out to the stones around him, not caring if there were any other dragon-riders here now, stretched and rubbed his hands. He was cold and he was hungry, but he was an outsider born to the mountain forests and cold and hunger had been his friends for as long as he could remember. He had a knife and among the rocks and boulders around the waterfall he could see what looked like caves. Up above was some sort of ruin. If he could ignore, for a moment, the great gouges that dragon claws had taken out of the earth and even out of the stones, he might think he could survive here.
First things first. He went through the pile of bodies and found himself a decent pair of boots, threw off his wet clothes and took what he could to wrap around himself. Gold Cloak’s cloak finished it off. After that he started looking for anything else he could find. There was a rider halfway up a tree by the top of the falls. His head was crushed to a smear and one of his arms was missing, but the armour he wore was mostly intact. Siff didn’t like to think about how he’d ended up in a tree. An idle fling from a dragon’s tail, perhaps?
No. Don’t think about it.
He didn’t find any blankets, nor any weapons except for another knife from the same rider as gave up his armour. By then the sun was getting low. He was still cold. The hunger in his belly was a tight knot, clenched in on itself, but he could come back to that. Dead people made good eating in a pinch. What he needed first was some shelter. Maybe, if he could start one, a fire.
That was when he found the eyrie.
36
Nineteen days before the Black Mausoleum
The tremor woke him up. Hadn’t been asleep for long, so no point smashing down the door yet. He’d had a good look at that as he’d been shoved inside. The door was strong enough, but the frame had been wedged poorly and in haste into whatever stone this place was made of. A good charge or two would bring it down.
The alchemist was crouched over Siff. The shit-eater was still breathing. Wasn’t moving much more than that. Skjorl rolled over and let himself fall back to sleep.
When he woke up again, the room looked exactly the same. Same light. Shit-eater lying sprawled across the floor. Alchemist sitting beside him. He couldn’t tell how long they’d been there. Hours. Could have been the middle of the night; could have been the next morning for all he knew.
‘Alchemist!’
Her head jerked up. She’d been sleeping. ‘What?’
‘What’s your plan?’
‘I don’t know.’
He unfolded himself and walked to the door. Peered through the cracks. Two men on guard outside. They looked bored and sleepy. ‘We could leave. If you want.’
‘No.’
Hardly a surprise. He sat down again.
‘Someone has mastered dragons. Whoever that is, I need to talk to them. It doesn’t matter who they serve. Whether it’s Speaker Lystra or Speaker Hyrkallan or some other speaker I’ve never heard of, they’ve mastered dragons again.’ She turned to face him. Her eyes were wide. ‘Do you know what that means?’
‘It means hope, alchemist. I know that.’
‘Yes.’
‘I saw Taiytakei as they brought us here. I saw soldiers who are of these realms and others who are not. Among the Adamantine Men it’s said that the Taiytakei brought the disaster upon us.’ He looked at her. She nodded. ‘Yet would you help them?’
‘I saw one Taiytakei. One.’ She growled at him, which made him smile. He stretched out and lay back down again. The last few days had been long ones. Adamantine Men learned to catch their rest when they could.
Some time later the door opened. Someone threw in a loaf of bread and a skin of water and slammed it shut again. The bread was hard as stone and tasted of mould but it was bread. Skjorl couldn’t remember the last time he’d tasted bread. No one had made it since the Adamantine Palace burned. He savoured every mouthful, mould or no mould.
The shit-eater was still unconscious. The alchemist was somewhere else, lost in thought. Skjorl stared at her for a while, thinking about what he’d do if she hadn’t done her blood-magic to his head.
The door opened again. There were more soldiers this time. Eight, maybe nine. Skjorl didn’t get the chance to count them before they piled into him, ignoring the others, pinned him down and tied his hands. Then they dragged him out. They didn’t take him far, just to another cell along the same passage, hardly a dozen yards from where they’d started and empty but for a heavy chair. Took most of them to tie him to it, but they did. When they were done, one of them stood in front of him and cracked his knuckles.
‘You’re a spy.’
He had an accent, this one. Not a strong one, but an accent nonetheless. One Skjorl could place. Another outsider. Skjorl grinned at him. ‘You’re a shit-eater.’
The man punched him in the face and broke his nose. ‘Your speaker sent you. You’re a spy.’
Skjorl said nothing. Said nothing when the man punched him again. Said nothing when they held back his head and poured water over his face until he was sure he was going to drown. Said nothing when they told him what else they were going to do, what bones they’d break, what pieces they’d cut off him and how they’d burn and scar him. The men of the speaker’s guard took worse from the brothers of their own legion, after all, before they were finally given their dragon-scale and their axe and sword. A last test. No one ever said so, but the ones who
