The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) by Stephen Deas Page A

anyone who
stood in his path, they either ran away or they were dead, man, dragon, snapper, anything. Wherever this was, he knew the river, knew the only river it could be. The Fury; and walking the Fury
would
take him home. Into the Gliding Dragon Gorge. Plag’s Bay. Watersgate. He gripped his sword tighter and ground his teeth. Another week, maybe just a little more. That was all.
After so long, what did that matter?
    Made him want to scream, that’s what it mattered.
    When he heard a shout, a half-strangled cry of fear with death swift on its heels, he went towards it without even thinking, moth-like to a flame, knuckles white. Started to run. The sound gave
a shape to his anger, sharpened and made of steel.
    Three men out in the open. Soldiers. Armed and armoured, but with long swords in their hands not the short stabbing things of the Adamantine Men, and two of them were down and there were a dozen
man-things, scrawny raggedy feral scrap-eaters, snapping at them.
    He swung Dragon-blooded off his back. Ran faster. Axes were for snappers and for dragons, but they were for this rage too, a murderous thing that would brook no lesser weapon.
    The ferals saw him coming. Heard his bellow and his charge. The first one skittered out of the way, but the axe caught the next, hardly blinking as it cut through the man’s shoulder and
chest and shattered his ribs right to his sternum. He spun away, already dead, and then Dragon-blooded was coming back and straight into another, and then down, splitting the head of a third from
his crown to his spine; and then Skjorl was among the soldiers and they were his, rallying to him, and together they charged and screamed and surged and slew, until the feral men scattered and fled
into their shadows, and he stood, victorious, axe raised above his head, screaming words he would never remember.
    An accented voice pulled at his arm, urging him away. Then something hit him on the head so hard he thought the sky had fallen on him.
    And then, for a time, nothing.
    When the world swam back into view he was in a boat being rowed across the Fury. ‘They throw rocks,’ said someone. ‘Stones. Sometimes they have arrows, but
not often.’
    They were dragon-riders from the north, soldiers from Outwatch and Sand stranded with their King Hyrkallan and their Queen Jaslyn for more than a year since the dragons had awoken, stuck in the
Pinnacles after the battle of the two speakers and the great cull that came after. Trapped there by the grand master alchemist – everyone under the Spur knew the story. No love between the
riders at the Pinnacles and the alchemists of the Spur, none at all, and Adamantine Men had no time for either. Could have hidden it maybe, but that wasn’t Skjorl’s way. So he told them
what he was and then watched their faces to see if there would be blood.
    ‘Adamantine Men betrayed us like the alchemists.’ Under the Purple Spur the alchemists had declared another speaker. Queen Jaslyn’s sister Lystra. Turned out this lot had
declared one too, Hyrkallan, Queen Jaslyn’s king. Ought to have had a fight about that, right there and then, but what was the use? He saw the stone head of Speaker Hyram again, lying on its
side in the ruins of Bloodsalt. One speaker hiding impotent in a cave was hardly any different from another, and titles were petty things when placed before the tide of dragons. Not that that
stopped fools from thinking different. Stupid, and Skjorl found he wanted no part of it.
    ‘My lady Dragon-blooded is for killing dragons,’ was all he said, nodding at his axe. ‘In whose name she flies, that doesn’t really matter.’
    They wrapped a cloth across his eyes and took him down into the secret tunnels that Pantatyr and his blood-mages had built after they slew the Silver King. He was in Valleyford, they said, two
hundred miles and maybe more from Samir’s Crossing where he was supposed to be. And it was alchemists they truly hated among the