Except the next time he woke, the sun had set and it was dark outside and he was alone, and when he tried the cellar door, it wouldn’t move.
49
Sixteen days before the Black Mausoleum
He walked ahead, alone. It suited him. He didn’t have to talk, didn’t have to learn the riders’ names, didn’t have to hear where they were from. Most of the riders in the Pinnacles came from the deserts, from Sand and from Bloodsalt, and Jasaan had seen both after the dragons had done with them. They must have known their families were gone, but no one could imagine what Bloodsalt had been like. No one had come away, not one single survivor, to say how the dragons had destroyed that city, but Jasaan still saw the skeletons when he closed his eyes, their dry bones just lying in the streets and inside the houses and littered along the Sapphire valley.
He found a hollow for them to shelter in through the second day. He shared the potions that he’d brought with him from the Purple Spur, the ones that stopped the dragons from feeling their thoughts. He covered the riders with brushwood and then listened to them trying to stay silent and still as the long hours of daylight passed overhead. Now and then dragons flew out from the Raksheh. They didn’t pause, didn’t look down.
‘There must have been a dozen or more, all told,’ he said to Nezak as he changed the dressing on the rider’s wound. Nezak was carrying his injury well for now. Jasaan wondered what Hellas would do if the wound went bad.
‘Heading for the Pinnacles.’
‘Further south, I’d say. Can’t be sure.’
Roads became tracks, so overgrown now that even Jasaan had trouble finding them. The land became wilder. Burned-out villages gave way to burned-out farms. The hills grew bigger and steeper and the copses on their crowns spread out into woods. Good land for hiding. Better than the plains. They’d start seeing feral folk again soon, he thought.
The rain began one night, thick clouds hiding the moon and the stars and making the world so dark that they only covered another few miles before dawn. It rained on for most of the day, slowly soaking them, and when Jasaan roused Hellas and his riders in the evening they were sluggish and bad-tempered. Three days, that’s all they’d been out. He tried to remember what it had been like on the way back from Bloodsalt, hunted by a dragon but never allowed to stray too far from the lifeline of the Sapphire. Harder than this, that was for sure. His ankle was already hurting again, aching like it always did since Bloodsalt, whenever he walked on it for days at a time.
‘We get a roof over our heads after tonight,’ Hellas told him. ‘If you can find it. There’s a place the dragons didn’t burn. It’s hidden inside the Raksheh.’
‘How far is it?’
‘We’ll be there before dawn.’ Hellas made it sound as though he knew this country well, as though he’d been here many times. Jasaan knew better. What Hellas had was a poor copy of some alchemist’s map and a handful of rumours. All passed on to Jasaan and expected to be enough.
The rain didn’t stop. Clouds veiled the moon and the stars. In the last few hours of the night, as they entered the Raksheh proper, Jasaan gave up scouting ahead. It was so dark now that he could barely see his hand in front of his face and each step was an adventure. Hellas was wrong. They never found his shelter; instead, they sat out the last few hours of the night huddled on the fringe of the Raksheh, under monstrous trees as wide as houses that already towered far overhead, waiting for the light.
‘There’ll be dragons come dawn. Then what?’
Jasaan shrugged. ‘Then either they’ll see us or they won’t.’ Under the canopy of leaves they should be safe enough, shouldn’t they? He didn’t know. He’d never travelled a land like this, fresh and wet and full of life. Everywhere he’d seen of the realms until now had been desert. ‘Haven’t seen any sign they roost near here.’ Among these trees, at night, there was no point in trying to make any progress. They might as well have worn blindfolds.
He led them deeper into the forest, and the further they went, the darker it became. There wasn’t much undergrowth any more, which was a blessing, but now every direction looked the same. Sometimes Jasaan had to stop and just stare at the trees. He’d never seen trees anything like these before. Little things that grew around the City of Dragons, yes, and the stunted desert trees of Sand, the same ones that grew among the Blackwind Dales and on the banks of the Sapphire and the Silver River, but nothing like these. Looking up at them from below reminded him of looking up at the old Tower of Air, the last speaker’s favourite tower before the dragons had brought it down, but the trees were taller. A man could build a palace here, he thought, and it would still be lost amid the size of everything.
He must have had a sixth sense because he was already signalling the riders to stop before he heard the first snarl. A dozen yards away a snapper was staring at them. Jasaan froze. Cursed thing must have been just standing there, still as a statue in the gloaming, watching them come closer. Snappers. They didn’t have wings, they didn’t breathe fire, they were cunning but not clever, but they were still the size of a small horse with jaws that could rip a man’s arm off in a single bite. One on one, a snapper almost always won. An Adamantine Man, even Skjorl, even the old Night Watchman himself in his full dragon-scale armour, was no match for a hungry adult. What you did with snappers was you ran. You climbed up something and then you hoped that it wasn’t all that hungry. Snappers weren’t like dragons. Snappers would wait for you for days. Weeks.
The trunks of the trees around them were as wide as barns and as smooth as glass. So much for climbing.
Shit!
The other thing you did was shoot them. The bows and the axes that every Adamantine Man carried were about the only things that would hurt them. If you were lucky, really lucky, you could take one down. The riders had bows. He had an axe. And it wasn’t one against one.
‘Arrows,’ he said quietly. ‘Not swords. You need arrows.’ He stayed as still as he could while he let his axe slip from his back and into his hands. ‘Get them ready.’
The snapper was looking at him. Its head was half turned away, watching him with one beady eye. Very, very slowly, it picked up one leg and moved it a foot sideways, watching all the time. Turning a little towards him.
‘Stay still,’ Jasaan hissed. ‘It’ll come for me as long as you just stay still. When I run and it chases, you shoot it. You aim for the head and for the neck.’ Damn things were bulky enough that an arrow anywhere else didn’t do much more than annoy it. Like shooting a scorpion into a dragon.
He gritted his teeth. If he’d had Adamantine Men behind him this would have been easy. He’d trust them. He’d turn and he’d run. The snapper would chase him. He’d race right through the archers and they’d shoot it dead. He’d done it once, when the Night Watchman had managed to trap a few snappers for some sport. Instead, what he had were four riders, four dragon-knights who’d never faced anything more dangerous than an irate servant unless they were on the backs of their dragons.
‘Ready!’ he roared, as much a challenge to the snapper as anything else. The lizard turned to face him properly now. It took another step towards him, not as slow this time, and opened its mouth to show off its teeth. Jasaan bellowed out another challenge right back. Then he turned and ran. He felt the snapper launch itself after him, felt the ground shake as though it was a hatchling dragon. He counted his steps. One, two, three, four, five and the snapper would be at full speed. Six, seven; he ran past the first rider, Hellas, saw him draw back his bow and let fly. Eight; past the next two. Nine; saw Nezak off to one side. Ten; the monster was behind him now, right there. He started swinging his axe. Eleven; let the swing go on, jumped into the air, twisting round, bending every ounce of strength.
Twelve.
It was right there, jaws open wide, a couple of yards away and closing fast. Three arrows were sticking out of its neck and shoulders. Blood trickled from each. As far as Jasaan could see, it had hardly noticed. He turned the flight of his axe a fraction. There wasn’t much else he could do.
