47
Twenty-two days before the Black Mausoleum
They flew by moonlight, out across the plains west of the Pinnacles with one set of wings each, gliding ever lower. There was a moment of terror, of sheer panic as he was sure he was going to die, because that’s what happened if you jumped off a mile-high cliff. The wings took him, though, and then Jasaan watched the landscape drift beneath him in shades of moonlit grey. From up high you could still see the lines in the land where the roads used to be, even though they were overgrown and sometimes hard to spot on the ground. Clusters of dark stains marked where villages and farms had stood, ash blots in the flat expanse of rolling grassland.
The wings carried them for miles and Jasaan had no idea how far or for how long. It seemed for ever at first, and then suddenly a field was rushing up and he was struggling to put his feet down in front of him as the wings pitched back and dumped him down. He sat there, dazed for a moment and amazed too. He’d flown. Adamantine Men didn’t fly. Rarely, perhaps, they would ride on the back of a dragon on some urgent errand for the Night Watchman. Quiet Vish had flown with the old speaker to Bloodsalt once, and a dragon had taken Jasaan to Sand just before the Adamantine Palace had burned; but today he hadn’t been carried, he’d flown.
He took a moment while his head stopped spinning and then he unbuckled himself and looked about for the others. He saw one, a hundred feet up in the air, sailing past him. He ran to the nearest rise and looked about from there, for the ruin of a tower, a black silhouette in the moonlight, the place where they were supposed to meet. Once he saw it, he went back to his wings and set about gathering them together. It was like dragging two dead comrades behind him lashed to their shields. When he reached the tower, the others were waiting for him.
‘You came down too fast,’ snapped Hellas. Hellas was leading the riders and probably thought he was in charge of Jasaan too. Jasaan shrugged. There wasn’t much he could do about that. ‘We’re late now. We have another fifteen miles to cover before dawn to reach our shelter. You lead!’
The moon was still high and they had eight, maybe nine hours of darkness left. Fifteen miles? Easy, and it was probably no bad thing to be at the front — better to have the eyes of an Adamantine Man scouting the way for danger than some rider bred in an eyrie who only ever saw the land from far above on the back of a dragon. The rest of them toiled in his wake, slow and labouring. He pulled ahead, stopped to scout, waited for them to catch up and did the same again. The moon reached its zenith and began to crawl its way back towards the horizon.
He counted the miles. Every one of them brought another ruin, another collection of homes trampled, burned and shattered into shards. Sometimes a few pieces of wood scattered over the road was all there was left, or else a milestone with the name of a place carved into it. Elsewhere, grass and sapling trees grew among the walls of smashed houses, thorn bushes around the remains of tumbled halls.
When he’d covered about twelve miles, he looked for the broad tree that marked where to leave the road. He waited for the riders and then ran on ahead again, to a stream and on to the corpse of yet another village, just like all the others. Rain and wind and grass had overgrown the scorched black earth and made it green again. Here and there the broken old bones of houses poked through the undergrowth, their jagged tips still charred black. Like the others, the village was empty.
Something snapped with a loud crack under his feet. A small branch, perhaps, except there were no trees. When he crouched down, he saw it was a bone. As he crept among the grass and the ruins, he found more: ribs, vertebrae, all sorts, scattered evenly about. People.
The riders were breathing hard when they finally caught up. Worn out. One night of walking and they were already tired, and how far was it to the Raksheh? He kept his thoughts to himself as Hellas took them along an overgrown path to an old well hidden among the bushes. Jasaan stretched. People had been here not all that long ago, and they came regularly enough to make a path. The riders, he supposed.
‘You have men out here a lot then,’ he said.
Hellas shook his head. ‘Not your concern.’ He pulled back the branches around the well. There was a ladder running down inside. A metal one. Its rungs shone in the waning moonlight.
‘There’s people been here in the last few days,’ Jasaan murmured. ‘No way to tell how many. Yours?’
‘There are no riders on the plains,’ grumbled Hellas. ‘There are no people at all. The plains are dead. The dragons killed everyone.’
‘No.’ Jasaan understood the bones now, why they’d found so many here and hardly any anywhere else. They hadn’t been left by dragons, they’d been scattered later by men. Warning others away maybe. ‘Look at the ladder,’ he whispered. ‘See how it shines.’ Six men with swords and dragon-scale could hold their own against a lot of ferals if they knew what they were doing, but not if the ferals had bows. ‘Worn clean. This is a home for-’
The first arrow hissed through the foot of space between him and Hellas, close enough that Jasaan felt a brush of air on his wrist. He was moving before any of the others even blinked, shoving Hellas out of the way and pushing him to the ground. Another arrow zipped straight into a second rider. Jasaan didn’t know his name, didn’t know any of them except Hellas. None of them had thought to tell him and it hadn’t occurred to him to ask. It was easier not to care about men who didn’t have names.
The rider with the arrow sticking out of his side just stood there, looking surprised. Jasaan tumbled into the deepest piece of undergrowth he could find and lay flat, waiting for the arrows to turn into a hail; instead, he heard a chorus of shouts. Figures rose from among the bushes nearby. Ten, maybe a dozen, armed with sticks and dressed in rags.
The rider with the arrow in him bellowed something about victory and honour and hurled himself at the first one to come near him, waving his sword like a madman. The other riders just stood there, gawping as though they’d never been in a close fight before.
Oh ancestors, no! They hadn’t. They’d fought on the backs of their dragons and they’d fought in a practice ring, and that was it. Jasaan rolled to his feet and shoved his short sword into the nearest convenient feral.
‘Hyrkallan!’ cried another rider. Two ferals jumped on him, pulling him down. A third piled in. Jasaan saw a stick rise and fall. Another rider ran to help. Too late, probably. The rider with the arrow in him hacked the hand off someone. There was a scream.
A feral ran right in front of him. Jasaan ran him through and then looked for Hellas, but by then the ferals had already had enough. They turned and ran and vanished into the night like ghosts.
Three riders left standing. When he looked, Jasaan found the one who’d been pulled to the ground. They’d got his helm off and caved in the side of his skull with a stick. Dead was dead, so Jasaan ignored him and went to see the rider who’d been shot instead. Out in the open like this was no place to be carrying wounded. An Adamantine Man understood that the injured were best left to fend for themselves or else given a quick and merciful death. Riders, Jasaan supposed, probably saw things differently.
He found the rider sitting with his back to a smashed wooden wall. He was breathing hard and pasty-faced, but he wasn’t coughing blood. The arrow, when Jasaan carefully cut its shaft and pulled off the rider’s armour to look, had gone in about as far as one finger joint. Either the feral who’d fired it had been feeble or he had some self-made bow with all the punch of a night girl’s tongue. The dragon-scale armour had done the rest.
‘You know what we call a wound like that,’ Jasaan said. ‘A dream-lover’s kiss. Leaves a nice red mark and that’s all there is to it.’ He pulled the arrow out. The rider screwed up his face but at least he didn’t shriek. There were no barbs. It was just a crude thing. Wasn’t even quite straight. ‘You have anything to dress this?’
The rider nodded and pointed to a pouch at his belt. Jasaan had a look. Mud. A roll of ripped cloth. Rubbish, but that was what you got for killing all your alchemists. Jasaan reached into his own. He didn’t know what any of the powders he carried were, only what to do with them. Alchemists handed them out, packaged up into pouches.
‘Got a name, rider?’ he asked. There, now he’d gone and made some trouble for himself. Now he’d probably do something stupid like make a friend just in time to watch him die.
‘Nezak.’ The rider winced.
‘You lived in the north before all this, didn’t you?’ Jasaan unwrapped a tiny paper bundle and carefully took a pinch of the dark powder inside. In daylight you could see it wasn’t quite black. In moonlight… well, under the moon, everything looked grey.
‘Sand,’ said Nezak.
