and of the three he’d brought here, she’d been the one who seemed to understand what a dragon really was. It didn’t surprise him that she, of all of them, would survive, although last he’d heard she’d been eaten by a dragon along with the rest of them right where he stood. Apparently that had been a lie. He said nothing.
‘Your alchemist may have killed the others,’ said the rider. ‘We think she led them up here, knowing a dragon was waiting. We think she did it so she could disappear.’
Jasaan said nothing. They all knew perfectly well that his alchemists had been killed by men, not by dragons.
‘We know why and we know where she’s going. You will help us find her.’
Jasaan allowed himself to blink. Eventually they’d tell him what they really wanted him to know.
‘She’s gone to the Raksheh,’ said the rider eventually. ‘To somewhere near the Aardish Caves.’
‘Why would she do that?’ Jasaan asked when the rider didn’t say anything more.
The rider spat. ‘Alchemists make their own laws. They think they are beholden to none, not even to the speaker.’ He glanced at Hyrkallan on his throne and then turned to watch Jasaan carefully. ‘You will help me,’ he said again.
‘How?’
‘You’ve been out there.’ The rider glanced over towards the edge of the mountain. He was scared. It had taken Jasaan this long to realise it, but the rider was scared. He was scared to leave his stone shelter.
‘Yes.’ No expression in his voice. No judgement. Scared? So he should be.
‘The speaker commands that this alchemist is to be found. She is to be returned. As are those with her and anything she may have found if we do not catch her in time.’
‘Found?’ Jasaan cocked his head.
‘We had an outsider. He claimed to have entered the Aardish Caves and found the Black Mausoleum. The alchemist has taken him.’
Jasaan nodded. There was no such place. Every Adamantine Man knew that story, and that’s all it was — a story, a myth, another waste of time. ‘Vishmir himself spent his life searching for it in those caves,’ he said.
‘Indeed. Yet this alchemist you brought among us has taken him. We will start our search there.’
He had to wonder why they were even bothering about such a mad tale, but that was another question and not one for an Adamantine Man. All in all he’d be glad to be out of the Pinnacles, filled with its veiled hostility, and he’d be glad enough to find the alchemist too. Her life had been placed in his hands and all he’d managed to do was deliver her to men who wanted to kill her. He owed her for that. When he found her, he wouldn’t be bringing her back here, that was for sure. ‘I’ll get my men ready,’ he said. Eaten by a dragon on the top of a mountain? No alchemist was that stupid.
‘No,’ said the rider. They stared one another down.
‘The most likely thing,’ said Jasaan after neither of them had flinched, ‘is that they’re both dead. They’ll fall prey to dragons or feral men before they even leave the Silver City.’ He shrugged. ‘But if you want her found, then you’ll want to take with you the men who have the most knowledge of what lies out there.’ He nodded towards the darkness. ‘We braved dragons, yes, but there’s more.’ Perhaps he could play on this rider’s fears. ‘There are snappers, wolves, feral men. Disease is rife and every day is a battle merely to find food. Once we reach the Raksheh…’
The rider shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Then send us out together because we are the men you can best afford to lose!’ hissed Jasaan. Keep us together!
‘No.’ The decision, Jasaan realised, had already been made. He glanced up at the throne, at Hyrkallan the pretend speaker, staring back down at him.
The rider pointed to the wing-like things that had been brought up from below. ‘There can be eight of us, no more, because that’s how many of Prince Lai’s wings we have left. They’ll take us far enough away from the Silver City. Two of my riders will return them. You and I and four others will enter the Raksheh. I have no doubt at all that you’re right, that the alchemist is already dead and the outsider too. Nonetheless, we will look for them. We will go to the Aardish Caves and we will search for them, and if we do not find them then we will search for the Black Mausoleum ourselves. We will not return empty-handed.’
So we won’t be returning at all. That explained the rider’s fear. Jasaan looked for his own and found nothing. He’d either survive or he wouldn’t, whether there were dragons to face or not.
‘Vishmir searched for twenty years,’ he said again. ‘With a hundred dragons and a thousand men. There is no Black Mausoleum.’
The rider wasn’t listening, but the plan made Jasaan feel better about leaving his soldiers behind. They weren’t welcome here, that much had been obvious from the day they’d arrived, but they deserved better than to be thrown at the Raksheh chasing after a dream. He, on the other hand, he deserved every bit of it.
He looked at the things the rider had called Prince Lai’s wings. Yes, they looked like wings. Other than that he had no idea what they were for.
‘You will come.’
It wasn’t a question. Jasaan nodded.
‘Good.’ The rider paused and frowned. ‘The alchemist took one other with her. We do not know whether he went willingly or not. He was another Guardsman. An Adamantine Man who found his way here some months ago.’
The rider paused, waiting for a reaction, but Jasaan didn’t have one for him. Good for her, he thought to himself. Maybe she was still alive after all.
‘His name was Skjorl. Did you know him?’
Skjorl? Here? Jasaan frowned for a moment. ‘No,’ he said mildly. ‘No, I don’t know a Skjorl.’
45
Thirteen days before the Black Mausoleum
The Adamantine Man did what she needed of him: he got her to the Raksheh. He led them, slowly and methodically, following the Yamuna River but never too close to the waters themselves even though they never saw any sign of the dreaded river worms. Down here, away from the forest, perhaps the dragons really had eaten them after all.
There had been people on the Yamuna plains once. It wasn’t a place for cities, but there had been an abundance of thriving small towns and villages clinging to the riverbank. She could see what had once been huts and halls, all built on stilts for when the river flooded. Most of them had been smashed and burned now; sometimes the only sign left was a field of stumps, blackened and splintered but still stuck stubbornly in the earth.
Boats littered the fields. They were everywhere, scattered among the flotsam and jetsam of the dragons’ passing. Most were little fishing skiffs, no more than a few poles lashed together, picked up by the last floodwaters and dropped wherever they were dropped. There was nowhere to hide, no shelter. No hills, no trees, not any more, no caves, no cellars, no rocks, just flat fields full of wild grass going on and on, a slight rise here, a slight dip there. As each night began to brighten, the Adamantine Man found them a cluster of rocks, a pit in the ground or maybe simply a mound of rubble. They spent one day dozing under a pile of old boats that he’d carefully arranged around the stump of a tree. Anything to hide them from the sky while the sun was up, while Kataros and her dragon-blood potions masked their thoughts and hid the fact of their presence.
She saw dragons every day, often more than once. They usually flew on their own, but sometimes they came in twos and threes; and towards the end, as they drew closer to the forest, there were more. She counted a dozen in one day, every one of them flying away from the Raksheh. She wondered why, but had no answer. They were flying away from where she was going and that would have to be enough.
The Adamantine Man set a hard pace. Most of the time he still carried the outsider. Even then she was pressed to keep up with him. Siff would have had no chance at all. He was getting some of his strength back now, but he still mostly dozed except at dawn and dusk.
