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

find what had happened to the others. Wasn’t any getting to Jex
or Marran, and Kasern was half buried. Relk, though, he must have been alive. Crawled out from under where he’d been burned and then crushed with both legs broken. He’d probably still
been alive the night Skjorl and Jasaan had left.
    Wasn’t now. Sun had done him, most likely. No one had eaten him though, that was what mattered. No one ate Skjorl either, and when he got back, Jasaan was waiting for him, sitting on the
rocks, keeping watch. Soon as the sun set again, they took the body a little way up the river. With his two good hands, Jasaan was the one who got to strip, gut and fillet him. Skjorl was the one
who had to walk for hours to the edge of the salt flats, fill up his pack with salt and walk back again. He wrinkled his nose. Relk had started to smell even worse than he had when he was alive.
Desert heat was good for that.
    ‘This going to work?’
    Jasaan shrugged. ‘It’s what they do here.’
    Eventually they were done. Skjorl tried not to look. White bone gleamed from dead red flesh. Hard to say why, but it was better this way, better that it wasn’t Vish. Relk, he was an
Adamantine Man, as good as any, but that’s all he was. Vish and Jex, they’d started to be something else. Maybe even Jasaan too, even with that Scarsdale crap between them. Was a long
way from Sand down to the Silver River valley. Long enough and hard enough that you learned things about your company that you didn’t learn other ways.
    ‘Ought to bury him,’ said Jasaan. ‘Hide what’s left from the dragons.’ He was taking the meat he’d sliced off Relk and smothering it in salt, trying to make
it keep. ‘They see this, they’ll know we were here.’
    ‘Can’t do that.’ That’s not what you did with the dead. Burned them, maybe. Fed them to a dragon. Weighed them down and threw them in a river, hung them up for the crows
even, but you didn’t bury them, never that. Even the people who died starving under the Purple Spur got carried up and out of the caves, and never mind that the people doing the carrying were
starving too.
    ‘I know. Just saying it would be best.’
    ‘The river.’ Jasaan nodded.
    ‘Weigh him down and sink him. Dragons won’t see. Water will hide the smell.’
    ‘Won’t hide the mess we made.’
    Wasn’t much to be done about that. They’d lost most of the night by now anyway. Jasaan hobbled back to their hole. Skjorl took the meat and followed him. Most likely they’d
starve and never mind Jasaan and his clever plans. Or the dragons would find them. Or they’d get some sickness from eating the flesh of their own kind and die in agony in a pool of their own
fluids. Could be any of those things would happen and Skjorl wouldn’t have called himself much surprised.
    They did get hungry right enough. And they saw dragons now and then, and they had the runs and had cramps, but they didn’t die. They eked Relk out as best they could, tongues curling at
the saltiness of him. And by the time they ran out of bits of him to eat, Jasaan could walk again.

 
     
     
     
11
Kataros
     
     
     
     
    Twenty-three days before the Black Mausoleum
    She screamed. The world spun around her. Stone rushed towards her face and then a huge hand reached down from the sky and plucked her up and she was flying, the wind in her
face, tugging her hair.
    Prince Lai’s wings.
    She forced herself not to panic, forced her mind to be still. The ground seemed a lot closer than it had from the cave. She tried not to look at it, but that was wrong – she
had
to
look at it, didn’t she? The Silver City was a jumble of shapes, of outlines, all reduced to a dim grey in the moonlight. The city had burned before the dragons had broken free. They
hadn’t smashed it like they’d smashed the City of Dragons. There were long streets and wide, open squares. There were canals, yes! The city had had canals since the time of the
blood-mages. Long