54
Fourteen days before the Black Mausoleum
You could say one thing for the Raksheh — it was easy enough going. The ground under Jasaan’s feet was soft and damp. The air was dim and still and smelled of mould; during the day the forest under the canopy was as dark as a moonlit night and during the night it was as black as a cave. Now and then a small forest of giant fungus or a place where the canopy above was broken and a furious rush of green had taken over the forest floor would force him to change his course. One time he came to the corpse of a fallen tree, a giant half buried in the earth. The wood was still as hard as stone. He paced out its length as he walked around it and lost track somewhere over a hundred. The quiet started to get to him. Now and then he heard the leaf litter rustle as something moved or else a burst of shrieking or hooting from the canopy above; mostly the forest was simply silent.
He found the river two days later and the dragon-knights a day after that. Nezak and the other one, alive and camped out on the banks of a river that he thought at first was the Yamuna but turned out was something else entirely. Such a stroke of luck amazed him, until he realised they were simply doing the same as he was — strike south for the nearest river and then stick to it like glue. Difference was that he’d followed the river upstream and the riders had simply sat where they were, wondering what to do.
‘You’re going the wrong way,’ said Nezak. ‘There are three rivers in the Raksheh. They merge together before they leave the forest. You need to go downstream until this one meets the Yamuna. Then turn west again.’
You, Jasaan noted. Not we. He didn’t ask though. What the riders did was their own business; for now they were all hungry and thirsty and bedraggled. Jasaan made a fire and they sat together for a night and never mind who might see them. Riders were so out of place down here on the ground. He’d seen it with Hellas and the others and he saw it now. They didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to look after themselves, didn’t know what to eat. All that fine armour and steel and they were worse than useless.
They were here, though. That counted for something, right? Had to. They’d hadn’t just given up and gone running back to the plains.
‘I should have stayed and fought the snappers,’ said Jasaan after he’d borrowed their bow and shot some supper — he had no idea what it was and the riders had been raised in a desert. ‘I saw your friend go down.’ Your friend — now he wished he had known the other rider’s name after all. ‘He put up a good struggle but he wasn’t ever going to win. I should have done something. I didn’t have a bow. My axe was stuck in the face of the first one, but I should have done something.’ He didn’t know what, just knew that Skjorl wouldn’t even have thought about it. Skjorl would have tried to take the snapper down with his bare hands, probably, and he might even have managed it. That or he’d have died trying. A proper Adamantine Man.
The two riders looked at him. Their eyes were scared. They’d run too, no doubt about it.
Nezak sniffed. ‘We used to hunt snappers from the backs of our dragons. I didn’t realise they grew so big.’
‘Giants,’ muttered the other rider, while Jasaan shook his head because if anything, the three snappers they’d met had been small ones. Maybe everything on the ground looked bigger after you’d grown used to seeing the world from the back of a dragon.
Jasaan found a tree on the edge of the river that wasn’t one of the giants and took his axe to it. There were creepers hanging from the branches of almost everything here by the water. Stuff he’d never seen before, but it looked like rope so it would just have to do. By the end of the next day he’d made them a raft. Nezak drew a map in the mud by the water, a memory of the one time he’d flown over the Raksheh escorting Speaker Hyrkallan and his queen on some secret errand to Furymouth. Mountains to the west, the Fury gorge to the north, the plains to the east and the sea to the south. Then three rivers. The only one with a name was the one that came out onto the plains, the Yamuna.
‘Downstream,’ said Nezak. ‘We haven’t crossed a river since we came into the forest, so we go downstream. When this river comes together with another, that’ll be the Yamuna and we’ll know where we are.’
‘And then?’ Someone had to ask.
The riders laughed at him, both of them. ‘There’s no alchemist,’ said the other one. ‘She’s dead by now. Look at this place. Everything bites and stings and wants to eat you.’
‘She has Skjorl.’ Skjorl who’d crossed the moors on his own. Skjorl who’d killed a dragon. Skjorl the cold killer, and Jasaan had to wonder what an alchemist could do to make a man like that serve anyone but himself. Or maybe it was a different Skjorl, but Jasaan couldn’t quite make himself believe that was right.
‘She’s an alchemist,’ said Nezak. ‘They know the paths to places like this.’
And that might even be true. For some reason, Jasaan hoped it was.
55
Twelve days before the Black Mausoleum
The first thing he noticed when he woke up was that he wasn’t hidden under a fallen tree any more. There wasn’t a comfortable bed of dead leaves keeping him warm. He was lying on bare earth. It was cold and it was damp and it was dark. Late afternoon under the canopy of the Raksheh.
The next thing he noticed was that he was in a cage. He didn’t get any further than that.
‘No! No! No! ’ He jumped up. His head was fuzzy but he hardly noticed; instead, he hurled himself at the bars, battering at them, tearing with his hands until his fingers started to bleed. ‘No!’ He wasn’t going anywhere in a cage. Not that, not in a cage up in the air, waiting for it to shatter, waiting to fall, helpless, out of the sky. Never again. Death first…
He stopped. His heart was beating fit to burst. He was breathing as though he’d just run up a mountain.
Not a cage for dragon-slaves. That time was gone.
He took deep breaths. Slow, steady, trying to calm his heart. There were no dragon-riders any more. Their time was past. Their eyries were gone, and their slave-cages too. No one was going to lift him up into the air to freeze and gasp and fall and die.
He looked about. If not an eyrie, then where was he?
With a start he realised he knew this place. The cage was sitting on the forest floor surrounded by giant trees, only here, he knew, the trees were full of holes. This was where the outsiders had lived, the ones he’d found on his first trek out of the forest, the ones who gouged holes into trees for places to sleep and to store their food, higher than any snapper could reach.
On the forest floor around him shadows moved slowly about. Men and women, shaping pieces of wood and making more ropes. He didn’t smell any cooking. They did that somewhere else, far away from where they slept. He remembered that. Hunters vanished into the woods in twos and threes, sometimes for more than a week, coming back with whatever meat they’d managed to find, but always stopping to cook it a half day away. You never knew how close a snapper pack might be.
‘Hey!’ he called. ‘Hey!’
Faces turned and quickly looked away. He didn’t know them. He didn’t remember much of the time he’d spent here, but it had been months. He stretched and rubbed his hands and wrists. The ropes were gone. Now he had a cage instead. Was that any better?
The twilight turned slowly into night. When it was black as pitch, he felt more than heard the air move beside his cage and a voice hissed at him: ‘The only reason you’re not already dead is that woman.’
Siff spun around. In the darkness he couldn’t see a thing. Whoever was talking was standing next to him, and Siff couldn’t see him, that’s how dark the Raksheh was when the sun went down. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
