The Ember Blade

by Chris Wooding

  Aren knew little about Grub, but he knew something of Skarls. They came from Skara Thun, to the north-east of Embria, a hostile white wilderness of giant sabre-toothed beasts and blood-drinking witches. Their tribes had existed in a state of permanent conflict over their limited natural resources until one visionary leader, Tharl Iqqba, began the tradition of the Scattering. From that day on, the firstborn of each family were cast from their tribes when they reached adulthood and sent across the seas to other lands. While the rest defended and cared for their homeland, the firstborns won glory for themselves and their people, so that one day they might return heroes. Feats of arms, mercantile brilliance, labyrinthine cons, acts of soaring romance: the object was to make a story of themselves and have it scribed on their skins, that the Bone God might read it when they died. In the process they’d win renown for their people and, ideally, return with great gifts and wealth for their tribe. The greatest among them were honoured with towering sarcophagi, their legends inscribed on the sides, and placed among their ancestors in snowbound necropolises that sprawled across the frozen plains.

  Aren knew he had a shallow understanding at best, but it was all he had, and any advantage was better than none.

  Milling knots of prisoners, relieved to be released from convocation, clogged the routes out of the yard. Aren dodged through them, keeping Grub in sight. He had compact, thick legs and a lumbering gait, but he moved fast for all that, and Aren struggled to keep up. Once, he thought he’d lost him, but then the back of that bald head bobbed into view again, half-covered in those black, crawling tattoos that chronicled the deeds of his life.

  As they made their way further from the yard, the crowd thinned and soon the way between them was clear. Grub appeared to be heading for the graveyard, but Aren wouldn’t let him get there. It was time to make his move.

  The Skarl was walking with his head down, apparently deep in thought. Aren quickened his step to catch up. As expected, Grub turned behind a longhouse in the direction of the cliffs. Aren rounded the same corner and found to his surprise that he had vanished.

  He halted, staring at the empty space between the longhouses, a simple muddy path walled on either side with flaking planks. There was no cover here, nowhere to hide, nowhere to go. The apparent impossibility of Grub’s disappearance blanked Aren’s mind, and he stood there gaping.

  Then he heard the scrape of a boot from above, and looked up just in time to see Grub dropping down on him from the longhouse roof.

  He reacted fast enough that the Skarl’s first blow didn’t land true. Instead he was smacked across the shoulder, shoved hard by his attacker’s weight so that he slammed palms-first against the side of the longhouse opposite. Before he could turn, an arm wrapped around his throat from behind. He struggled, but the Skarl was stronger and it was like pushing against an oak. Panic sparked as his throat was crushed in the crook of Grub’s arm.

  ‘Think Grub doesn’t know what Mudslug is up to?’ Grub snarled in his ear. ‘Think Grub doesn’t see Mudslug follow him? Mudslug looking for Grub’s stash, yes? Very brave or very stupid. Grub thinks he knows which.’

  ‘No …’ Aren gasped, his eyes bulging. ‘Talk … came to … talk …’

  ‘Grub believes you. That sound very likely to Grub.’

  Aren fought unconsciousness, his head going light for lack of blood. He was hit by the chilling realisation that Grub might not let up. He could die right now, and he was helpless to prevent it.

  ‘Stop …’ He could only grab snatches of air. ‘Want to … trade …’

  ‘Trade? You trade with Grub? Grub takes!’

  Then the arm was gone from his throat, and Grub turned him round and shoved him back against the longhouse wall. Aren sagged, dizzy with relief, hauling in air as Grub patted him down and rifled his pockets.

  ‘What Mudslug got? It better be good, or Grub break something Mudslug not want broken.’

  Aren laboured to get the words out. ‘Not … in my pockets. Going to give you … new tattoo.’

  Grub stopped searching, his eyes narrow within the ugly black crescent that crossed his face. ‘Mudslug better make sense quick,’ he warned.

  Aren put a hand to his aching throat. ‘Your tattoos,’ he said. ‘Each one tells a tale of your mighty deeds.’

  ‘Mighty deeds!’ Grub roared in agreement. He jabbed a finger at a line of hieroglyphs running along his collarbone. ‘This one say how Grub climb down cliffs with his men to surprise camp full of Boskan smugglers. Then when their ship turn up, Grub surprise them, too! Get plenty rich!’

  ‘You’ve done great things,’ said Aren. ‘You’ll be a hero when you return to your people, I bet. And you’ll make fine reading for the Bone God when your time comes.’

  Aren saw something flicker across Grub’s face, a fleeting expression that might have been uncertainty or fear. Whatever it was, it was gone as quickly as it came, and as Grub’s features darkened to a scowl, Aren sensed he’d made a mistake. He plunged on before the Skarl could hit him.

  ‘What I mean to say is … are you finished?’

  ‘Uh? Finished?’

  ‘Well, your whole right arm isn’t filled in yet. Half your face, too. Seems like there’s still space for great deeds, but I can’t see much opportunity for heroism here. So is that it? Are you done?’

  ‘Grub is not done!’ Grub snapped. ‘Grub not dying in here! Grub will make such a story that the Bone God marvels at his deeds!’

  ‘You want to do something your bards will sing of?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Aren leaned forward. ‘Then this is my trade. Help me, and I’ll cut you in on my escape.’

  Grub stared at him long and hard, suspicion and threat in his gaze. Then he took a step back and dusted Aren’s shoulder with the back of his hand.

  ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Now Grub is listening.’

  21

  The autumn fogs came often in the high passes of the Ostenbergs. The next time they did, Aren was waiting.

  It was an hour past curfew. The light had left the sky and the camp was muffled and stilled. Gauzy murk stirred in the spaces between the darkened longhouses and most of the prisoners were abed, snoring and sighing in their bunks. But for Aren, there’d be no rest tonight.

  He sat on the edge of Cade’s empty bunk while he laced his boots, his breath steaming. Four days had passed since the explosion in the mine, four days of healing, resting and planning. His bruises were mostly faded now, the swelling in his face gone down. He felt stronger than he had for a long while, both in body and mind.

  Cade was getting better, too, not that you would know it by the way he screamed down the infirmary several times a day. His madness had mysteriously passed, but in its place he suffered inexplicable and agonising pains throughout his body. Doctor Baden was at a loss as to the cause. The only thing that helped was a spoonful of draccen tears to sedate him and ease his pain. Kel fretted about giving him too much – draccen tears were a powerful drug, and lethal in excessive doses – but nothing else worked.

  She need not have worried. As soon as she left his bedside, Cade spat the draccen tears into Aren’s water flask. It was already half-full; a little more and they could put their plan into action.

  Aren had been assisting with the wounded when he could, both out of a genuine desire to help and to keep in touch with his friend. In the quiet moments, they had the opportunity to talk. Outwardly, he was the Cade of old, quick to joke and to mock himself, friendly and easy in his manner. But Aren sensed he was in fragile spirits under the mask. All his hopes depended on Aren, and thoughts of escape were his only refuge from despair. Aren felt the weight of that responsibility, but knowing that Cade trusted him gave him courage.

  He moved between the bunks, feeling his way to the door. His fellow prisoners were blue shadows against the shuttered windows, made anonymous by the dark. Some raised their heads as he passed, but none spoke to him or tried to stop him. He’d be far from the first to steal out after curfew on som
e secret errand.

  The longhouses were not locked. Instead of bolts and padlocks, Captain Hassan had a simple rule: anyone caught outside after curfew without a pass would be fed to the skulldogs the following morning. No excuses, no exceptions. For most, it was an effective incentive to stay inside.

  Aren had heard tales of prisoners forging passes, but if they existed they were beyond his influence to obtain. He’d just have to be careful.

  The fog wasn’t as thick as it had been last time, but it was full dark and he could barely see anything. He slipped through the chilly murk with nervous speed, pressing close to the longhouses, heading for the graveyard. Tonight, he meant to have a reckoning with a spirit.

  Not a spirit. The dead are the dead, and they don’t come back. It was just a boy.

  A boy who’d survived, alone, for two years or more within the walls of the prisoners’ compound. It felt easier to believe Rags was a shade, but Aren refused to accept that. His faith in an ordered world had been shaken, but he wouldn’t embrace the folk wisdom of his ancestors in its place.

  He was still scared, regardless.

  The shifting fog made his eyes unreliable, showing him movement where there was none. He calmed his breathing and listened instead. There was little to hear in the eerie quiet but the song of the blood in his ears.

  A creak of leather broke the silence.

  Aren peered around the corner of a longhouse, his heart thumping hard. The noise came again, closer, and then closer still. It was unmistakably moving towards him. He tried to fix the direction but the fog thwarted him. Suddenly there was a brightening of the murk and a shadow moved. A guard walked out from around the corner, carrying a lantern, and in fright Aren flattened himself against the wall and went still. The guard passed by within a few feet of him, oblivious to his presence in the fog, and Aren, to his amazement, remained unseen.

  He didn’t move until the creak of the guard’s leather armour had faded into silence. Only then did he dare to detach himself from the safety of his hiding place and go on. He tried not to think of Deggan as he went, but he couldn’t help recalling his screams as the skulldogs went at him, the way his flesh fell apart beneath the dogs’ red claws and teeth.

  They won’t take me alive, he promised himself. I’ll throw myself on their swords first. But the gap between intention and action was always wider than he thought, and he wondered if he’d be brave enough for that.

  He reached the strip of open ground between the longhouses and the graveyard and struck out across it. This time, as the walls on all sides disappeared into nothingness, there was no sense of clutching dread, and he climbed over the graveyard fence with a small sense of satisfaction.

  Once among the graves, he felt more confident. The guards didn’t patrol the graveyard; it was easy to turn an ankle on the broken earth or fall into a hole in the fog, and even the relentlessly sensible Krodans were not immune to fear of the supernatural on a night like this.

  He crept towards the cliffs at the back of the camp. Lifeless trees, twisted as in torment, were feathered with roosting crows. Cairns of piled stones and leaning planks commemorated the dead. He picked his way between humps of earth, listening hard, but nothing moved among the graves, and no spirits rose to attack him.

  He stopped deep in the heart of the graveyard, judging this spot as good as any, and sat down, leaning his back against a tall cairn.

  Well, he thought. Here I am.

  Cade had told him a story once, about the bloodmare, a horse-spirit with fanged teeth and bladed hooves that could bewitch travellers with its prancing. The enchanted travellers would climb on the bloodmare’s back, and it would take them on a wild ride through the forest, which would end when it bucked them off a cliff or plunged them into a river to drown. Then the unlucky traveller would be eaten. It was pure Ossian folklore, though Cade had dressed it up as Krodan, for Aren’s sake.

  In the story, a clever hunter learned that a bloodmare might be lured and pacified by the song of a virgin girl. He set his daughter to the task and hid nearby, hoping to slay the beast when it arrived. The bloodmare came as expected, but, unbeknownst to the hunter, his daughter wasn’t quite as virginal as she’d claimed to be, and the tale didn’t end well for either of them.

  There were no such thing as bloodmares, Aren told himself, but Sards were real, and their love of music was well known. He remembered the unsettling tune Rags had been singing when they first met. Now it was his turn.

  He took a breath, let it out. He was trembling, and only partly from the cold. Then, in a small, thin voice, he began to sing.

  His nannies and tutors had taught him Krodan songs and hymns in praise of the Primus, but they wouldn’t do here. The song that came to his lips instead was an Ossian one, sung in the gliding tongue of his homeland.

  It was known as ‘The Mourner’s Elegy’, a song of loss, a celebration of a life together and a chronicle of quiet intimacies shared. To the unknowing, the grieving singer might have been a farmer or a merchant or a lord, or anyone who’d ever loved another to the limit of their ability. But there were hints to the truth in the verses. The dead woman was Jessa Wolf’s-Heart, the greatest leader and hero Ossia ever had, and the man singing was Morgen, her lover and companion. ‘The Mourner’s Elegy’ was a personal portrait of a woman otherwise known only as a legend.

  It had been long since Aren had sung anything at all, for he wasn’t fond of the sound of his voice, and there had been little to sing about of late. It had been longer still since he sang in Ossian, and the first verses came out frail with fear. He risked being overheard by a guard, if one came near enough, and he still had doubts about trying to lure Rags this way. He couldn’t quite forget the sight of the shaggy-haired Sard boy eating raw crow.

  But there among the graves the song found him, and it sank into his chest and warmed him like whiskey. His voice strengthened, and he closed his eyes and abandoned himself to the music. If he was to be heard, let him be heard, by friend or foe alike. There could be no half measures. This song, this course he’d set himself on, was life and death. He wouldn’t shrink from it.

  Time slipped away from him. He didn’t know if his voice carried in the fog-shrouded night, or if he was the only one hearing it. Only when the song had finished did he come back to himself, and his voice quivered into silence.

  He opened his eyes and his heart bucked against his ribs. There, crouching in the dark, was Rags. He was half-hidden behind a plank, his green gaze piercing in the gloom.

  Aren’s mouth went dry as each watched the other, and neither moved.

  ‘No ghost you are,’ the boy said at last, in heavily accented Ossian.

  ‘Neither are you,’ said Aren, and saying it broke the spell. It was only a boy, after all, and his fear left him.

  A twig cracked somewhere in the fog. A muffled Krodan curse. The boy twisted in alarm, then turned back to Aren.

  ‘You come,’ he said urgently.

  Aren needed no second invitation. There were Krodan guards in the graveyard. They’d heard the song. He scrambled to his feet, and together they hurried into the fog.

  22

  The boy led Aren through the graves to the foot of the cliffs, where a tangle of evergreens and shaggy vines grew close against the stone. There, he pulled aside a low branch and wriggled through the narrow space. Aren followed with considerably more difficulty.

  He emerged, arms scratched and clothes torn, in a tiny hollow between the trees and the cliffs. Crammed in with the boy, he could smell the stink of him, old sweat and mould.

  ‘Safe,’ said the boy. ‘Come.’ There was a rustle of movement, and he was gone.

  His disappearance startled Aren, who could see no way out of the hollow beyond the way they’d come in. He found himself alone in a distressingly tight space, with cold rock at his back and trees pushing in on him. He began to paw about, carefully at first but then with increasing panic as claustrophobia took hold. Cade’s tales of trickster spirits came to him a
gain, and he imagined himself caged here till he starved, lured to his doom by a shade in the shape of a boy.

  Then, movement again, and the boy was back, seizing his wrist in a warm grip. ‘Come!’ he said impatiently, and tugged Aren. He felt about and found a corner, a fissure in the cliff that he’d somehow missed in this tiny space. The boy backed into the crack like a spider, still tugging at him, and Aren crushed himself down and followed. As he did so, he caught sight of something painted on the rock, a strange, twisting symbol of curves and slashes dense with meaning, stark and clear despite the darkness. After he went inside, it stayed floating before his eyes for a time, like an after-image of the sun.

  ‘Come, come,’ the boy said again. Aren felt along with his hands. Fabric brushed against his face, making him jump: a crude curtain, hanging in his way. The boy pushed it aside and guided him onwards.

  ‘Come. Careful be.’

  Can he see in here? Aren wondered. But that was ridiculous: the darkness was total. The boy simply knew the space like a blind man knew his home.

  ‘Stay,’ the boy said, and Aren did, surrounded by the void. The darkness and confinement should have frightened him, but he felt himself calming instead. He’d found the boy, and he was real. That was a victory.

  A flint sparked. The wick of a rusty lamp caught and warmed into life, filling the space with a comforting glow. They were in a small cave, barely big enough to stand in, which was cluttered with junk and bric-a-brac and scattered with clothes. Piles of mildewed blankets were heaped untidily at one end like a nest, and there were bloody black feathers everywhere. In a crevice in the rock, arranged like ornaments on a mantelpiece, were the boy’s treasures: coins, a ring, a handful of teeth, some damp cheroots. There was a pile of small round stones in a hollow off to one side: ammunition for his sling.

  Aren looked about and marvelled. To find such a place here, hidden away in the joyless world of the camp, was like slipping through a portal into some shabby wonderland. Though it was freezing and dank and resembled the lair of a scavenging beast, it was a secret place, right under the noses of the Krodans. A place they had no power over. Its very existence was a rebellion.