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Synopsis

Two years have passed since the events of The Order of the Scales. Across the realms, dragons are still hatching. Hatching, and hatching free.

Skorl is an Ember, a soldier trained from birth to fight dragons. He is a living weapon, one-shot only, saturated with enough dragon-poison to bring down a monster all on his own. Misanthrope, violent and a drunk, to fulfil his purpose and slay a dragon, means to be eaten. Now Skorl has a choice: he can hang for his crimes, or he can go with the last of the Adamantine Men, fighting against an enemy he was born to face.

Rat is an Outsider. He's on the run and he's stumbled onto something that's going to make him rich beyond all his dreams. It's just a shame that the end of the world has started without him.

Kataros is an alchemist, one of the order responsible for keeping the dragons in check. One of the order that has just failed, and disastrously so.

Two men, one woman. One chance to save the world from a storm of dragons...

Excerpt

The Black Mausoleum - Chapter One: Kataros

He wasn't stupid. Kataros had seen the way he looked at her, right from the start. Her jailer. She was a woman in a prison cell, frail and fragile, and he was the man charged with keeping her, a brute, massive and scarred with one crippled hand. In stories that went one of two ways. Either he'd fall in love with her, or he'd try to rape her and she'd get the better of him. Either way, in stories, fate always found a way to save the frail and fragile woman.

Actually no. In the childish stories she remembered the frail and fragile woman never saved herself. In those stories she stayed exactly where she was until some gallant rider on the back of a dragon tore open the door to her cell with his bare hands and whisked her away to a happy-ever-after. But in this story that wasn't going to happen, which left her back where she started. He was interested. He didn't take much trouble to hide it either. He wasn't ugly, at least not on the outside, despite the scars. He was an Adamantine Man, though, and so her story wasn't going to end in love.

There weren't many cells down here. As far as Kataros could tell, there hadn't been any at all until recently. Whatever this place was it had served some other purpose, something more benign, probably until the Adamantine Palace had burned. There were patterns on the floor, tiles, half buried now under a layer of filth. Ornate murals and faux arches decorated the walls. They were all over the place those arches, in almost every room she'd seen as they dragged her here. At the far end, towards the door that was the only way out, hangings lined the walls, intricate pictures of Vishmir and the first Valmeyan duelling in the skies; of the body of the Silver King, carried towards his tomb by men in masks and veils; of Narammed holding the Adamantine Spear, bowing down so he looked almost as though he was almost worshipping it - she could understand that, knowing now what it did.

Yes, it had been a genteel room once, quiet and out of the way and meant for reflection until someone had slammed in a few crude rows of iron bars and called it a prison. There was no privacy. The prisoner in the cell next to hers had stared the first time she'd had to squat in a corner. The Adamantine Man, at least, had looked away.

She steeled herself to wait until the gentle sunshine glow of the walls and of the ceiling faded to starlit night. Not that waiting was difficult. She hadn't been fed since she'd arrived and so hadn't eaten for most of a week, and a few more hours would make no difference. The man in the cell next to her had been here longer. He'd been little more than a skeleton when she'd arrived. These days he hardly ever moved. He was dying, slowly but surely.

There weren't any others, just the two of them and three more empty cells. Their floors were like hers, covered in filth crusted dry with time, yet the air in the prison smelled fresh and cool. That was the magic of the Pinnacles at work, the magic of the Silver King who'd come from nowhere and tamed the dragons, who'd built the world that every last one of them had come to know and then been torn down by jealous men.

Kataros spared a glance for the other man. His name was Siff, but she thought of him as something else. The Adamantine Man called him Rat, and she could see that too. He'd talked a lot when they'd first thrown her in the cell beside him; mostly he'd talked about all the things he'd like her to do for him, or the things he'd like to do to her if only he had the chance. That had been before starvation had turned its final bend and the lechery and the leering had given way to ranting and raving. Once, as the madness took him, he'd let slip his name.

He'd told her a lot of other things too, as he slipped away, more than enough to make her wish she'd heard them when he was lucid. He'd come out of the Raksheh. He'd crossed the whole Realm of the Harvest Queen and yet the dragons hadn't eaten him. You had to admire anyone who could do that, yet here he was at death's door, starving. A week or a day or somewhere in between, was all he had left.

She let him go and turned her eyes back to the Adamantine Man. He was watching her. There was no pretence about it - today he was simply staring. Something had changed, had it? Most likely the man who called himself King of the Pinnacles had decided there would be no reprieve. Hyrkallan, that was his name. She'd heard of him before she'd come here, but she hadn't understood his hate for her kind until it was too late. There would be no change to his law, no clemency for any who called themselves alchemist, no matter what they might bring. And what did she bring? A hope that was no hope at all. An impossible idea. Another mouth for a starving court to feed.

She looked at the Adamantine Man as he stared at her. She bit her tongue until she tasted blood. 'Hey.'

He didn't move.

'Hey!' Half the Adamantine Men she'd ever met thought that the War of the Two Speakers had made them into gods. The other half were mad, as if there was much difference. Some managed to keep some seed of civilisation inside them, but most of the ones she'd seen were violent drunkards, brutes, rapists who thought they had a right to anything and everything. We are swords. We sate ourselves in flesh as the need comes upon us and then we move on, that was their creed and they were proud of it. Sometimes they killed dragons like they were supposed to, but usually when they tried that they just died.

This one still didn't answer. His eyes didn't flicker. He was making it hard for her, harder than it already was. The blood in her mouth sharpened her mind. She could see the knowledge in his eye. They both knew what was coming.

'Hey.' She made her voice softer this time. He moved a little now, tilted his chin slightly and looked at her some more, silent as the still air. She forced herself to get up and walk towards him until she was almost against the bars. If he'd wanted to, he could have reached through and touched her.

For a long time they looked at each other.

'I'm hungry,' she said. Each day he brought them water. Water, water, always water, the one thing the Pinnacles never lacked. He never brought food. He never ate in front of them either, but she could smell it on his breath. Food. The answer was in his eyes. Everyone is hungry.

Copyright © 2012 by Stephen Deas

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