The Black Mausoleum (Memory of Flames 4) by Stephen Deas Read Free Book Online Page A

deserved a touch of dragon’s fire. But Vish deserved his glory too. There’d be songs. Vish the dragon-killer. He eased his
way through the darkness. Wondered for a bit if maybe Vish wasn’t dead after all, but he’d seen the stone hit, seen Vish’s head snap back and then forward, seen his body fly
through the air and slide across the ground and then lie still.
    Had to look though. Had to be sure. Didn’t he?
    Stupid. He took a deep breath. Adamantine Men didn’t stop for their wounded. Didn’t matter who they were, that was the way of it. Going back got you killed.
    ‘Skjorl?’ Jasaan, closer than he’d thought.
    ‘Jasaan?’
    ‘The other dragon. I can see it. It can’t get through the rubble.’
    Now he stopped to listen, he could hear it tearing at the stones. ‘Can you swing an axe on your knees, Jasaan? If you can, you’re still useful. You can kill eggs. If you can’t,
you might as well be dead.’ Harsh, but Vish and Jex had been his friends. Couldn’t say that about Jasaan, not after Scarsdale.
    There was a pause. When Jasaan answered, it was with a sullen edge. ‘Yes, Skjorl. I can still do that.’
    ‘Then you do it. I’m getting Vish’s poison.’
    There. A good enough excuse.

 
     
     
     
7
Kataros
     
     
     
     
    Twenty-three days before the Black Mausoleum
    ‘What have you done to me?’ He asked the same question over and over as he led her out of her tiny makeshift prison and into a maze of stairs and passages that
bewildered her. She almost told him to shut up, but the blood-bound could be tricky. Too many different orders and he might freeze in confusion. The alchemist who’d bound her had only ever
used the bond once, when he’d first made it.
You will be unswervingly loyal to my desires
. That was it and then nothing more, not in a year and a half of service. Most of the time she
forgot it was even there. He’d been a kind enough man who’d never asked for much, whose greatest desire had been for her to grow into the power that he was offering her. She
hadn’t needed any help with
that
.
    He’d shown her, after he’d bound her, how it was done, but he’d never told her what to do with it. He’d encouraged her, now and then, to bind others, but she never did,
even though she knew that most alchemists had several blood-bound serving them. They did it for their protection they said, for the greater good, and in the squalor and hunger under the Purple Spur
Kataros quite understood, yet every time she heard them, she remembered that they’d bound their Scales too, not long ago, and so they would have bound her if the Adamantine Palace
hadn’t burned and more than half the alchemists of the realms been slaughtered.
    ‘You’re going to help me,’ she told him after she’d lost count of how many times he’d asked. ‘You’re going to help me save the realms.’
    ‘How are we going to do that?’
    She didn’t answer, and the truth was that she didn’t exactly know. All she knew was what the near-corpse that the Adamantine Man was carrying had told her two nights before.
    ‘It’s going to get dark,’ he said a while later. The halls and vaults of the Pinnacles glowed from above like a softly starlit night, a legacy of the Silver King, who’d
brought order to the broken world and who’d first subdued the monsters. Half monster himself, half living god, adept with magics that no one before or since could even understand, almost
everything here bore his mark. The Pinnacles had been his home for more than a hundred years, until the blood-mages had found a way to kill him.
    The Adamantine Man took her into later tunnels, ones carved by men. The twilight faded and the darkness grew. When she could barely see him any more, he stopped. ‘There are lamps by your
feet. Get yourself one. You can get one for me too.’
    In an alcove beside her she felt the familiar shapes, the cold glass tubes of alchemical lamps. She hadn’t expected that, not here in the