because tiny snakes of moonlight were curling from his ruined fingertips. They reached and strained and pulled him forward, until they touched the nearest mirror and the mirror became a gateway to another place, also filled with silver, and he was sucked inside, back to where he’d been before, standing on a silver sea with the giant moon above. He staggered back and tripped and something happened inside his head as he fell.
He woke up with a start, gasping and shaking, but there were no silver snakes curling from his fingers and the archways were merely the same stone they’d been the night before. He got to his feet and walked away and quietly swore, Vishmir’s tomb or not, that he would never return, not to this part. At least he didn’t feel hungry any more.
Outside he soaked up the bright warm sun and sucked in air sweet with the scent of pollen and flowers, so different from the biting autumn wind of the day before. He felt strangely good. His fingernails didn’t hurt now, nor the place where they’d branded him. He was thirsty, that was all. And he knew now exactly what he was going to do. Never mind dragons and tombs, what he was going to do before anything else was sort through the pile of bodies and do a proper job of it this time. Take whatever food, clothes, swords, knives, armour and anything else that he could salvage and then get away from here as fast as he could before the smell of blood drew in the snappers. Down the river, that would do. He thought for a bit about making a raft but he didn’t have an axe to chop wood, and anyway wasn’t some sort of monster supposed to live in the Yamuna, if that’s what this river was?
Riverbanks were good for food though. Animals came for water. Things grew there, fruits and berries and such like. Maybe he could try fishing. And then he’d get out of the forest and find his way to the Silver City and to the court of the Harvest Queen. Aliphera? Or was she the one who’d fallen off her dragon? Not that it mattered — whoever it was, he’d tell them that he’d found Vishmir’s Tomb, take whatever gold they’d give him for showing them the way and leave them to it. Or maybe he’d find some band of outlaws. Yes, that would be better still, a gang of sell-swords. He could bring them here, show them the way in and see what they brought out. Take his share and be done. Just as long as he didn’t have to go back in there on his own again.
The sun was high in the sky. It felt warm, even though the year was turning to winter. The heat cheered him. Best to make the most of it. If there was one thing the Raksheh didn’t see very much, it was the sun. Most of the time, if it wasn’t raining, it was shrouded in mist and cloud. The sun gave him a sense that he might not die out here after all.
Ancestors but he felt good.
He walked back up to the smashed eyrie. It all looked much more overgrown than he remembered. When he’d first seen it, he could have sworn that the destruction had been fresh, yet now he could see he’d been wrong and it had happened some time ago. Months, at least. But then it had been late when he’d climbed past the waterfall. The sun had been low in the sky, the shadows long and deceiving and he’d still been dazed and amazed that he was even alive. Beaten and battered and not quite himself. Maybe that was it. Would explain why there was no one here.
He picked his way up the bluffs, careful not to disturb any stones, and followed the path above the river to the falls and then down the other side. The water was flowing faster today, and a lot higher too. Rains in the mountains in the night, maybe?
Eventually he reached the bottom. Where there ought to have been a pile of bodies, there was just grass. Grass and, when he looked carefully around, a few old bones, almost buried. A boot. Pieces of leather, worn and cracked, here and there. A skull. All almost lost in the thick grass.
He looked at his fingers again, looked at them properly this time. His nails were still missing but otherwise they were healed. Completely. The seeping scabs were gone.
His hair kept falling in his eyes. It was long. Hadn’t been long before.
He tore off his shirt. Not his shirt, but the shirt he’d stolen from a dead man the day before. The brand was an old scar, long healed.
He stopped then and looked more closely at the forest around him. Everything was different. Yesterday, autumn had been coming. The leaves had been starting to turn and there were berries on the bushes. Today there were no berries; instead there were flowers. The leaves on the trees were all green, and the scent in the air was of the last trace of spring blossom.
While he’d slept whole seasons had passed. And he hadn’t the first idea what had happened to him.
40
Nineteen days before the Black Mausoleum
The fortress was where the dragon remembered it. There was no hesitation this time, no pause to wonder. It raked its mind through the hive-thoughts of the little ones within.
The chains first, it thought to those who flew beside it. The chains and freedom to those who were bound, freedom through tooth and claw. Then the little ones would burn, all of them, and the dragons would take that which did not belong here and send it back to the sleep whence it had come.
The dragon sifted from thought to thought and, as it did, found something it had forgotten. A mind. The one from the place in the burning desert and the lake of red salt. The one it had hunted. Here. Yet even as the dragon found that, it felt something else, something that passed like a ghost through the thoughts of another little one, like a ghost and yet like a titan passing among ants, so vast that it went almost unseen. They are here! it said, but the presence had already vanished again, and after that it hardly seemed to matter any more as the exultant fury of the fight took its place.
An age had passed since dragon had last fought dragon.
41
Nineteen days before the Black Mausoleum
He could understand a battle. Tunnels that glowed with their own light, bronze statues that didn’t go green with age and came to life when you touched them, castles that floated above the ground, shit-eaters with silvery snakes in their fingers, none of that made any sense. Alchemist business, not his. But a battle, that was something else. A dragon fight, that was everything he’d been made for, and he’d been here before, in Outwatch, in Sand, in Bloodsalt and Samir’s Crossing. All of them filled with screams, the earth quaking as the dragons destroyed everything in reach, stones falling from tunnel roofs, dust choking the air. Here the shouting was more distant and so far the ground wasn’t shaking. A matter of time, that was all.
He stooped through the door that the dead soldiers had left open. The shit-eater was unconscious again, eyes rolling behind half-closed lids, muttering and moaning to himself. Skjorl might have asked the alchemist what she’d done to him, but he was easier to get along with like this. That and he simply didn’t care. Outside the door there was his sword and there was his axe. Dragon-blooded. Simply propped against the wall. Holding it made him whole again.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Out,’ he said. Down the passage back the way they’d come. Back towards the outside.
‘Shouldn’t we go the other way? Aren’t we safer underground?’
‘No.’ Everyone thought that. ‘At Outwatch the dragons sent their little ones down the holes.’ Hatchlings. A few days old was enough. They’d rip a bear to pieces, probably a snapper too, never mind a man. All skittering claws and curling limbs and wings and teeth and tails like whips. ‘Scrawny, with the hunger of a wolverine. Then there was the fire. In a tunnel there’s no place to run, no place to hide. You just die.’
The door to the outside was open. Grey clouds muted the daylight. It was raining, and most of the castle was hidden in mist. Warm mist. Steam. Mostly mist was good. Mist was a place to hide. He glanced up at the sky.
