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

for something after all.
    When it was properly dark again they crept out, back towards the water of the Sapphire. They found the covered canal and Skjorl stared at it. The parts in the city had been smashed to bits,
trampled into a mess of jumbled bricks. So much for Jex and the rest, not that he’d had any hope they were still alive. Maybe they’d managed to get themselves eaten. Maybe the other
dragon was burning too, but Skjorl wasn’t about to count on it. Never count on anything with dragons. Crafty bastards they were.
    Outside the city, pieces of the canal were still intact. They hid inside one for the last hour of darkness and the whole of the day. Blasted place was like an oven in the sun, baking them in
their own juices until they had nothing left to sweat. Skjorl lay towards one end, head poking outside but in the shade, catching what whisper of a breeze he could. In the distance he thought he
saw the dragon, high up in the sky and away to the south, heading towards the Sapphire valley. When he blinked it was gone; afterwards, he wasn’t sure whether he’d seen it or dreamed
it. Didn’t matter much. A sign was a sign. It was looking for them.
    ‘We’re too slow and there’s not enough shelter,’ Skjorl said when the sun set and they were ready to move again.
    Jasaan shrugged. ‘We don’t get any water, we won’t last another day.’ He levered himself back to his feet and propped his axe under his shoulder as a crutch. ‘If
it’s my time then I suppose I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.’
    ‘If we have to fight it, we will. We’ll come back out here and look for it after we’re done in the Spur.’ He tried to smile, and Jasaan grinned back. An Adamantine Man
faced a dragon without fear. Even if there were only the two of them and they were both crippled and stood no chance whatsoever of victory, they’d still fight.
    ‘Whatever you say,’ said Jasaan after a pause that was much too long.
    ‘I’m thinking we should go up on the moors. Yinazhin’s Way. I been along it once. There’s a part you can see the Sapphire gleaming like a needle, the Hungry Mountain
Plain to the south and the Plains of Ancestors to the north with Samir’s Crossing in between. We get up to the moors, there’s shelter and water and food. Dragon should have forgotten
about us by then.’
    ‘Be busy looking for wherever his mate hatched out.’
    ‘Maybe.’ Now there was a thing Skjorl still couldn’t get fixed right in his head. He’d spent most of his life thinking dragons were big dumb animals. Immense and deadly,
but animals. Now it turned out they could read your thoughts if you didn’t take a potion to stop them, and when they died, they just came back again, hatched straight out of another egg
somewhere. And they
remembered
. No, couldn’t get that sort of thing fixed in his head at all.
    They followed the sunken canal back as far as the river, crossed it, wallowed in the cool water and drank their fill and then headed on. Plenty of shelter at least. Dry riverbeds. Clusters of
rocks. Crevices in the dirt. Nothing alive though. No trees, no grass, no nothing. Maybe there were snakes and rats and creatures like that, but all Skjorl saw were the same sodding great sandflies
that had been trying to eat him alive for the last three weeks.
    They stopped as the sun rose and took shelter in the middle of a cluster of giant boulders. Felt like they’d walked for miles and miles, but when Skjorl looked back, there was Bloodsalt, a
dull scar smeared across the shining sands and the glittering lake. The river wasn’t much more than a mile away. He looked in his pack. Food for three or four days before he started to starve
himself, but that wasn’t going to be the problem. In this heat they’d die of thirst long before he had to worry about that. The edge of the desert and the slopes up to the moors were
fifty miles away. Took Jasaan a bit longer to work it out, but he got there in the end.
    ‘This