The Black Mausoleum by Stephen Deas

Author:Stephen Deas [Deas, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Epic, General
ISBN: 0575100494
Publisher: Gollancz
Published: 2012-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

35

Siff

Some two years before the Black Mausoleum

The dragon took its time leaving the valley; when it did, it flew slowly and carefully as though it understood how fragile a burden it carried. It wound its way up over a narrow pass. A bitter wind tore through the cage, snapping and biting at the slaves pressed against the front. There were struggles. Men killed each other, fighting not to be in the teeth of that wind. Perhaps on another day they might have shared, taken it in turns to be burned with cold and then huddled among the others until they were warm again. But this was not that other day, and so it fell to fighting and the strongest forced the weakest to the front, where the weakest duly died and became nothing more than a shield for the rest. Siff kept out of it. Stayed at the back. There were old men in the cage, frail servants from the eyrie, not the usual outsider youths that the dragon-riders took. The old were the ones to be sacrificed, not him. Truth be told, he probably didn’t have any more strength to him than they did, but he had the look, the eyes of someone who’d killed and would kill again. And he would too. He’d have fought to the death not to be pressed into the jagged nails of that wind. He didn’t shout, didn’t bother to speak since no one could hear a thing over the roar of the rushing air, just looked. That was enough.

The fighting stopped in time. The ones left alive sat pressed together, huddled, holding on to each other, trying to keep warm. The ones at the front were dead by now so they didn’t complain. The ones at the sides clenched their fists and their teeth and shivered, slowly falling into themselves as the cold took hold. Even at the back Siff couldn’t feel his feet any more. Not feeling his hands would have been a blessing, but no, his fingers burned with a pain even worse than when the eyrie torturers had pulled his nails out. Did fingernails grow back? He didn’t know. Did it matter? Up in the howling wind it hardly seemed important. What mattered was that they hurt.

His consciousness slipped away now and then. He kept his teeth clenched, trying to stay awake as long as he could, waiting for the ones around him to fade and then wriggling behind them so that they took more of the cold and he took a share of their warmth. At some point they flew though a blanket of cloud. They were going down, from the bitter high mountain skies through the grey shroud over the Raksheh into the warmer air above the trees. The cloud was a special cold, but afterwards, once they were beneath it, the wind wasn’t quite as biting any more and instead of snowcapped mountains, the land he could see was a deep, dark green, pinched and wrinkled like an old man’s skin.

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