purple-veined slab of stone under the castle until he was dangling over empty air and the shit-eater was still wrapped around his shoulders. He squeezed his legs around the rope and let himself slide the rest of the way to the ground as fast as he dared. As fast as he could without shredding himself. They landed hard, sprawling and tumbling apart, rolling in the mud. Easy. Easier than he’d thought.
Skjorl took a moment then, mostly to be amazed that he wasn’t dead, that no dragon had paused from its fight to come and snatch this little morsel just hanging in the air. But none of them had, and when he looked up, the alchemist was almost on top of him. She fell off the end of the rope, staggered, slipped in the mud and fell. He took a step towards her and stopped. When she got back to her feet, she was shaking all over.
‘I thought you might fall,’ he said. He meant it as a compliment that she hadn’t.
‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ she spat at him.
The castle moved ponderously over their heads, burying them in shadow as black as night, lit up by the flicker of the purple lightning that flashed along the underside of the stone. The rope dragged through the dirt, thick as his wrist.
He tried again. ‘I can’t stay with you. I want to, but I can’t. There’s a dragon here that wants me. When it finds me, it’ll kill everyone who’s near.’
He felt her looking inside him, searching for the lie beneath his words, but there wasn’t one. Every word perfectly true.
She didn’t like it. ‘Leave me your sword,’ she snapped.
He gave her his sword, belt and scabbard and all, and tapped the back of his head. ‘Let me go.’
She looked at him as though he was mad. ‘Don’t be stupid.’ And turned her back on him, struggling with the sword and trying to lift the shit-eater up out of the mud all at the same time. Skjorl hesitated. But no, better for all of them that they part. Best to climb the rope back into the fortress. Lure the monster of Bloodsalt away.
He slung Dragon-blooded back over his shoulder. It could come after him if it wanted. Let his enemies fight each other. He could hide among them for days if he had to. Let the alchemist go. Wouldn’t last long without him and then he’d be free. Strange how he felt about that. Not gleeful at all. Sad, if anything, but it had to be this way. Best for them all.
Climbing up was a lot harder than climbing down, even without a shit-eater on his back. At least there were no dragons swooping on him. The air still shook to the occasional clap of thunder, but the battle looked to be over, the attacking dragons driven back. Would be worth learning how the men in the fortress had managed that. Maybe he could do something useful after all.
At the top, the smoke and the mist were clearing. There were still dragons, but they were high overhead or specks in the distance. He took a moment to look about, then climbed to the top of the sloping wall, careful not to be seen. Hardly any other soldiers around, none on the walls and only a very few below. Almost everything was smashed or burned, all the wooden shacks he’d seen the night before, the fire pits, everything. In the middle of the carnage was a dragon, sprawled across the ruins, the shimmering green one he’d seen fall. Both wings broken. A lot of other bones too, and it wasn’t moving. Eyes were open though. Below, closer to him than to the dragon, carefully out of reach of its fire, a couple of dozen soldiers clustered together. They wore dragon-scale; when their words drifted up to him from the bottom of the wall, he could understand them clearly. He listened, amazed, but there was no doubt. Adamantine Men, all of them. He almost called out, but then heard another voice, the man who carried the golden knife, who had somehow made him tell everything he knew, and so Skjorl hesitated, and then stayed quiet and watched instead. The man with the golden knife walked towards the dragon. He went with care, came from behind and moved with purpose. Stayed well clear of the dragon’s tail and kept a large shield — dragon-scale, Skjorl supposed — close to hand. The man reached the back of the dragon’s head.
Skjorl squinted. He couldn’t see what the man was doing. Fiddling with something. He saw the flash of a knife. Whatever he did, when the man came back, he wasn’t careful at all.
‘You can kill it now,’ he said, and disappeared into one of the passages that ran under the walls. The Adamantine Men shouldered their axes and picked up their shields. They closed on the dragon with the same care. As they reached its head they fanned out, but the dragon didn’t move. It just watched them.
The axes came out. Skjorl felt a surge of glee as they fell. His hand went behind him to rest on Dragon- blooded’s shaft. He understood, as only another Adamantine Man could understand, what a rare victory this was. No special rituals for killing a dragon. You took your chances as they came. Mostly you died trying and even if you managed to kill one, usually you died at the claws of another moments later. Like when Vish had gone, crushed. Or else burned. That was the way of being an Adamantine Man. So he watched them kill the dragon, watched its blood stain the stones and watched them leave, and felt a soaring joy. It would burn now from the inside, getting hotter and hotter for days if not weeks until its flesh and bone crumbled to ash and all that was left were scales and a few scorched bones from its wings. Scales for armour, bones for bows. No one had been able to harvest a dead dragon since the Adamantine Palace had burned. But these men would.
Amid the envy and the glee, he felt a pang of something else.
Blood, staining the stones. Dragon blood.
He grinned to himself, a huge grin, and started looking among the ruins for what he would need.
42
Nineteen days before the Black Mausoleum
Letting the Adamantine Man go felt strange. A part of her was sad to be rid of him. That was the part that had learned alchemy, that knew which ingredients in what proportions would have how much of an effect and had been taught to think not of the now and the tomorrow, but of what would happen a year away, a decade, a century even. The part that knew there were more perils ahead of her than behind and had learned the value of a strong and loyal sword.
Another part, the part that had always been her, the part that thrilled to the raw immediacy of blood-magic, was sad too, but only that she wouldn’t have the pleasure of seeing him torn to pieces by whatever dragon was hunting him. She had her blood, her magic. Let that be enough.
She had no idea what to do with the sword she’d taken. The belt didn’t fit her. However she tried to wear it, it ended up slipping down around her ankles and tripping her up. Even when it didn’t fall down, the sword somehow slipped between her legs and tried to catch her that way. Then there was Siff, the outsider the Adamantine Man had carried so easily but who turned out to weigh more than she did, even as wasted as he was. She had no idea how to move him. She tried dragging him. She tried lifting him. She managed to get him over her shoulder once, but then the sword tripped her and tipped them both in the mud. Through it all he didn’t stir.
She looked for a place to hide, but the best she could find in the darkness beneath the castle was a ditch filled with long grass with a few inches of slime at the bottom. It would have to do. There wasn’t much else for it but to wait until Siff came back from wherever he was.
She knew the Adamantine Man was near again before she heard him. The blood-bond told her, which meant she’d been looking for him without even knowing it, and that was troubling all on its own. She peered up out of the ditch and there he was, haloed in purple lightning, staring at the ground and walking right towards her.
‘Why are you here?’ she yelled at him. ‘Why are you here if there’s a dragon hunting you?’
He looked up, caught in a moment of surprise. Then he grinned at her and waved something. A large rag. A shirt maybe. Dark and wet. ‘Dragon blood,’ he said.
It took a moment for what that meant to sink in.
‘Dragon blood,’ he said again. ‘You can make the potion. To hide us all from the dragons. You said you needed dragon blood.’
Dragon blood and her own. She touched the cloth and reached into the blood and yes, it was true, it really was what he said, however impossible it seemed. Dragon blood. Fresh. ‘Yes.’ For a moment she caught herself looking at him in a way she’d never looked before. Mixed in with the loathing was a touch of awe. There had to be, didn’t there, for a man who could bring you blood from a dragon?
‘Water,’ she said, and glanced up at the underbelly of the castle, still moving slowly overhead. ‘I need clean
