against a score of his Guard, but they didn’t dare to try and stop him. A few begged to come with him. Fine, he told them, if you can keep up. There were maybe half a dozen who left with them for Evenspire. After the second day he never saw any of them again. He’d done his duty. He’d led the survivors of Sand to a safe place and now he was going home. To do his duty again, whatever it was.
Evenspire, when they got there, was deserted. The city had burned. The Palace of Paths still stood, its walls so massive that even dragons couldn’t knock them down. They stayed for two days, trying to find a way into the tunnels that were surely beneath it, to reach the survivors who must be there. Hadn’t worked out, and so it had been a choice: follow the Evenspire Road out into the desert again, or else the Dragon River south through the Blackwind Dales to Scarsdale. Evenspire Road was hundreds of miles across the Plains of Ancestors, with no water until the Sapphire and Samir’s Crossing. Death to men on foot, Adamantine ones or any other. Wasn’t much of a choice.
They took the river then, and so it was they got to Scarsdale, starving. A dot on a map, that was all, the last place they might scavenge some food before they crossed the line of hills to the valley of the Silver River and the Great Cliff. What they found were ramshackle ruins, burned and smashed, littered all along the river and up the hills with no sense of order or purpose. Place had been stripped clean. Too clean for it to be dragons. Someone had got there first.
Finding the mines, though, that had been an accident. He’d thought it was a cave. Good piece of shelter for the day, but they took a look about first — man had to be sure he wasn’t sharing with snappers or something like that after all — and that’s where they’d found the shafts. By the end of that day they’d found the rest, a few dozen people living down in the mines with enough food to last them a year.
The Adamantine Men had feasted. Two solid days of it. Got drunk on wine, on the barrels of it hidden there. The people had been none too pleased, but when you’d been out in the open, hiding from dragons in the day and marching across a parched landscape by night, you took what you could get. He’d been doing that for months. Yes, a man took what he could get.
Liouma. That had been her name. The one he’d taken. Nice tits. Big. Big arse too. Ripe. He knew he was going to have her from the moment he saw her. And then the next day, afterwards, he’d woken up and it had been like this. Hungover, thundering head, locked up behind a wooden door without knowing why.
Like this, but not the same.
He ran through the rest anyway. The Purple Spur. Bloodsalt. Vish. Killing a dragon. Jasaan. The moors. The Pinnacles. The alchemist. All of it. All nicely in a row like it was supposed to be, one thing after the next.
His head still thundered but his eyes would focus now. He looked in his pouch. Dreamleaf and plenty of it, in the last water he had, and then he waited for the numbness it would bring. In Scarsdale they’d taken his axe. That was before she’d had a name. The alchemist hadn’t done that. Kataros. Must have been her, because the shit-eater would have cut his throat and been done with it. Yes, the alchemist.
The sunlight was gone. Outside was dark. Night, maybe, or it could have been the shadow of a dragon sitting over the cellar for all he knew, waiting patiently for him to come out.
Dreamleaf was starting to take him. Dragons outside? He’d dealt with dragons before. One thing at a time.
He couldn’t make Dragon-blooded bite the door. The angle was wrong, the roof too high, the door and the ladder too tucked into the corner of the cellar.
In Scarsdale he’d been angry. Smashed his fists on the door, ran at it, battered himself almost senseless trying to get out. Scarsdale had taught him patience, and so he set about the alchemists’ cellar, taking his time, no rush, searching every corner and edge. There were the lamps. He’d seen Kataros use them, seen the way they worked. Started with those and then he could see: a wooden table and a set of little shelves with tiny compartments. The alchemist had taken most of whatever had been in there. A pile of smashed glass where the ground was still damp, rich with the smell of wine. A bench. Three old chairs. The bones in the far corner, more empty bottles, a few rags.
The skeleton had a knife in one hand. Resting between its fingers, the edge stained a dark brown.
In Scarsdale they’d left him with a knife. They’d put him behind a heavy wooden door, but they’d left him with a knife, the one tucked in his boot. It had probably taken the best part of three days to pick and whittle the edge of that door until he’d made a gap large enough to shift the bolt on the other side. He’d never quite understood why they’d shut him up in Scarsdale. They shut his men up too, although at least they gave the others food and water. Him they’d left to die, like the alchemist had done. But he’d escaped and they’d got what they deserved.
He climbed the ladder, drilled through the pain and the floating feeling of the Dreamleaf, and set to work.
53
Four days before the Black Mausoleum
The dragon soared high above the Raksheh. Others of its kind came and went. Some came to ask it about the half-made sky-home. Others went to see it for themselves. It had moved.
They are returning, Black Scar of Sorrow Upon the Earth.
The seals are broken.
The Black Moon and then the end.
It mused on those things and shared them with any who would listen.
A thing that speaks of the stars. And something other.
The sky-home had become a thing of interest. Dragons would come from across the realms to see it. Curiosity would bring them. A sorcerer who carried a touch of the broken god. Magic of glass and gold that made lightning. Amusing diversions. The dragon had felt other things there too.
They are here! The makers. The silver ones. The time would come for a reckoning and it would be soon, but the dragon would not be there, not on the sky-home.
It flew in lazy circles, a thousand miles, spiralling towards the Aardish Caves. It could feel the presence there. Something was waiting.
It would not wait alone.
Little ones were moving. Swarming along the river. It felt their thoughts, now and then, as it peered with its seventh sense through the blanket of branches and leaves. They thought they were safe.
They were wrong.
It is said that when Vishmir visited the Moonlight Garden, he observed that a dark reflection of the garden structures could be clearly seen in the waters of the Yamuna, and in a moment of divine clarity he understood that this was the Black Mausoleum of the Silver King. He became obsessed with the caves and spent many days participating in their exploration during the early years after his victory.
In the seventh year of Vishmir’s reign exploration of the caves ceased following an unexplained disaster that claimed the lives of most of those working at the site. Those nearby on the bluffs overlooking the caves reported that the ground shook and even the dragons resting nearby seemed disturbed. Upon hearing the news, Vishmir visited at once; on his return, he immediately issued a decree that the caves were a forbidden place under the guardianship of the King of Furymouth. In the later years of his reign, despite his own edict, Vishmir returned once more in great secrecy to build a mausoleum of his own. Even now the exact location of Vishmir’s tomb remains a mystery.
The Aardish Caves are remote and hard to reach without a dragon. The caves remain under the watchful eye of King Tyan of Furymouth. Despite Vishmir’s fascination, no evidence has ever been found to indicate there has ever been any connection between the Aardish Caves and the Silver King.
Bellepheros’ Journal of the Realms, 2nd year of Speaker Hyram
