The Ember Blade

by Chris Wooding

  They reached the wharf where the others waited and made their way through the chilly, quiet chambers of Skavengard, grey in the flat light of early morning. This time, they all travelled together, and Aren was glad of it. He understood now why Cade had been spooked. There was an eerie feel to the silence, as if the castle itself was holding its breath.

  Soon Cade began to talk, rabbiting on about nothing in particular to hide his nerves. While he spoke, his gaze flitted about, watching for shadows. At first, nobody wanted to engage him, as if loth to disturb the silence further; but he carried on regardless, and soon they relaxed. When Cade started doing caricatures of the people of Shoal Point, some of them even began to chuckle. He mimicked grouchy old Nab, the innkeeper of the Cross Keys; fat Rollo, the baker’s lad, who believed himself a stud bull but was more of a prize hog; crazy Mairie and her obsession with whelks. Aren began to feel homesick listening to it.

  Before long, Cade was cracking jokes, with himself as the butt more often than not. As they laughed, any ill feeling for the trouble he’d caused yesterday was forgotten; by all but Garric, anyway, who remained grim.

  Aren knew what Cade was up to. He always had the enviable skill of making people like him; everyone loved a clown. Now he was ingratiating himself with the group, and Aren wasn’t sure he liked that. Cade told him last night how he’d overheard Garric and Keel talking about the Ember Blade, and he’d been shiny-eyed with admiration as he did so, caught up in the romance of their quest. He clearly wanted to join them, though he’d stopped short of saying it outright. It was as if he’d forgotten the bruise on his cheek, or the plain and obvious hate that Garric bore for Aren.

  Aren didn’t know why Garric had an obligation to see him safe. But he was his father’s enemy and plainly no friend to Aren. If Cade thought they were staying with these people a minute longer than they had to, he was mistaken. He was sure Garric felt the same.

  Don’t get close to them, Cade, he thought. It’ll only hurt the worse when we leave them behind.

  ‘So how’d you escape the camp, Cade?’ asked Keel.

  ‘Mostly it was Grub’s doing,’ Grub said modestly.

  Cade gave him a sidelong look. ‘Well, before I tell you how we escaped, you’d better understand what we were escaping from. I ain’t soon going to forget that first day, when they threw open the doors of the prison cart and we saw what it was lay before us …’

  And so, as they walked, Cade told the story of their imprison­ment. He made them laugh with his imitations of Overseer Krent and Captain Hassan, and they laughed harder when he imitated Grub. Grub laughed, too, but it was the cold-eyed laugh of someone pretending to be a good sport. Then Cade took them to darker places: his despair, how he’d turned to ragweed for solace, and the events that led to the explosion in the mine.

  ‘Fire, blowing through the air?’ Keel asked.

  ‘Aye. Like thunder and lightning, and a force such as you’ve never felt, like being swatted by Meshuk herself. I was lifted up, and I knew nothing else, until—’

  ‘What made the thunder and lightning?’ Garric said. It was the first he’d spoken in a long time.

  ‘Elarite oil,’ said Aren sullenly. He didn’t even want to speak to Garric after what he’d done to Cade, but he couldn’t resist the chance to show he knew more than that bitter old bastard. ‘Elarite rocks bleed oil which pools in the hollows of the mountain. The oil breathes out an invisible miasma called fire-fume. When it touches flame, it ignites the oil and—’

  ‘Boom!’ Cade shouted.

  Garric gave Aren a cold stare and looked away, losing interest again.

  ‘Amazing!’ Osman exclaimed. ‘I’d heard rumours of a weapon that turns the air to fire, some terrible device cooked up by Xulan chimericists. I hadn’t thought it possible, but now I’m not so sure. And to think you faced such peril and survived!’

  ‘I almost didn’t. It’s only thanks to Aren that I got out alive at all.’

  Now Cade told the story of how Aren had saved him by carrying him out of the mine, and how he’d planned their escape and inspired them all to freedom. He told them of Aren’s encounters with Eifann, and Grub was finally enlightened as to how he found himself carrying a sack full of dead crows. Grub made a sign of protection and complained bitterly about being left in the dark. Then Cade recounted their confrontation with Rapha the Carthanian pirate and how Aren had faced him down.

  Aren was uncertain they should be sharing their story so openly with people he didn’t trust; but Cade did such a good job of it, and he cast Aren in such flattering light that Aren didn’t want to stop him. By the end, they were all looking at Aren with admiration, and Cade’s face was flushed with the triumph of a tale well told.

  ‘And here I thought we were just in the company of two unfortunate boys fallen foul of Krodan injustice!’ Osman laughed. ‘But that’s a story worthy of a bard’s song. Dead crows filled with draccen tears! Ingenious! And you’re quite a surprise, too, friend Grub. Though I’ll watch my valuables closely from now on, such as they are.’

  ‘Grub not a thief. He just good at finding things. Besides,’ said Grub, with a winningly hideous smile, ‘Grub not steal from his friends.’

  ‘Now, where’d I leave that shovel of mine?’ Keel pondered aloud, and Garric cackled nastily.

  ‘Hoy!’ said Aren. ‘Weren’t you listening? We’d never have made it out at all if not for him. He deserves more than mockery.’

  Grub gave him a look of bare surprise, shocked to find Aren defending him. He wasn’t used to being defended by anyone, Aren guessed. But although Aren disliked him, he wouldn’t see him ganged up on by the others. It offended his sense of fairness.

  Keel raised his hands and grinned. ‘Just a joke, eh?’

  They walked through the first half of the morning. Their pace was kept slow by Vika – her leg was improving but she still limped – and by Aren, who tired quickly and had to be carried on Grub’s back for stretches. The place was as mournful and still as Cade had described it, but there were no ghosts that Aren could see, and though it was indeed a maze, it wasn’t so hard to navigate. They were helped by Vika, who spotted marks here and there that they’d have otherwise missed: druidsign left by Polla.

  By mid-morning they reached a bridge of milky stone which spanned the gap to the central island. Windows along its length, carved to resemble open fans, gave them a view of the water below, a narrow channel sandwiched between the cliffs.

  The sun was bright and warm, and they rested in its light with their breath steaming the air and their spirits high. Ruck stood up with her paws on a sill, tongue lolling as she surveyed the world from her vantage point.

  ‘What did I say?’ Garric called triumphantly to Keel, who was handing out hardapples. ‘We’ll be out of here by nightfall, if we make haste.’

  ‘Then perhaps we should do so,’ said Vika, and they all knew what she was thinking. They were soon on the move again.

  After that, it wasn’t so easy.

  The main island of Skavengard was a different experience. The ways became winding where before they’d been straightforward. Vika lost track of Polla’s druidsign and couldn’t locate it again. They found themselves forced from their path again and again, and were reduced to wandering helplessly through rubble-strewn halls and up long, echoing staircases. Sometimes they were diverted into gloomy corridors that ran into the heart of the island rock, sometimes illuminated by crafty lightwells, and sometimes not at all. Then they had to proceed using lanterns and the castle took on a newly sinister air in their flickering glow. They were always relieved to emerge from the dark, but whenever they did, they found it was later than they thought and they were heading in the wrong direction.

  ‘See?’ said Cade. ‘It ain’t that simple finding your way about in here!’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Vika suspiciously. ‘And yet it was very simple until now.’

  ‘What’s your meaning?’ Keel asked her.

  ‘Merely thinking aloud,’ she said
, but she was grim and wary after that, and even Cade lapsed into silence.

  Despite its frustrations and the persistent sense of unease, there was much that Aren marvelled at in Skavengard. There were halls built on a scale that seemed unachievable today. They found walkways wide as streets, rows of strange statues standing between broken columns, soaring aqueducts fashioned with spidery grace. They climbed a double spiral staircase, the two halves winding round each other like snakes, a column of light at its centre. For all the orderly magnificence of the Krodan temple at Shoal Point, and the paintings he’d seen of the Emperor’s palace at Falconsreach, none of it matched up to this. He felt an absurd sense of ownership at that thought. This was the work of his ancestors. What did the Krodans have to compare?

  They rested and ate lunch beneath a vast orrery in an enormous domed chamber, brightly lit where the sun shone through a ragged hole in the roof. Above them hung representations of three planets and their satellites. Calva, the giant; their own planet Thea with its two moons Lyssa and Tantera; striped Valta beyond them. A fourth planet, Elve, lay dented on the floor among slabs of broken stone, its supporting arm twisted and bent by falling rubble. Aren had heard of orreries like this in foreign lands, but never of one so large. Once, the whole thing would have turned, moving the planets around the sun. Aren wished he could have seen it.

  ‘Why are there only four?’ Cade wondered at his side.

  ‘They didn’t discover the other two till long after the Second Empire fell,’ Aren said absently. ‘Not till after they’d built the observatory at the Glass University.’

  ‘They thought there were only four planets?’ Cade scoffed. ‘Can’t have been that smart, then.’

  ‘Skarls say there seventh planet, out there in the big dark,’ Grub put in.

  ‘Aye, well, you would, wouldn’t you?’ said Cade dryly.

  ‘You have something on your mind, Vika,’ Garric said as he sat against the orrery and chewed his meagre lunch. ‘Will you speak?’

  ‘I fear this place,’ she said at last. ‘I fear it is trying to keep us here.’

  ‘Walls are walls,’ Osman said. ‘They cannot move to block us.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ said Vika. ‘And yet we cannot find our way past them.’

  ‘Is there aught you can do?’ Garric asked.

  ‘I dare not, unless the need is dire. Our flight from the dread­knights has taxed me sorely. But we will not leave this place before night comes. I know that now.’

  ‘Let it come, then, and we will see what comes with it,’ said Garric. ‘I will not fear a rumour.’

  Vika said nothing to that.

  They moved onwards, and it seemed that the way straightened before them and they made good speed for a time. Vika’s leg was improving by the hour, and she flexed her left hand often and was pleased and relieved by its responsiveness. Aren, too, was feeling stronger; after lunch, he walked on his own again. The rest of the day passed so swiftly that evening’s arrival was a surprise. It became clear they wouldn’t even reach the third island tonight, let alone find the way out. The insidious sense of unease grew steadily more intense, and Cade’s tale of shadow figures didn’t sound so fanciful then.

  Presently they found themselves at the bottom of a set of ancient steps, standing before wrought-metal doors, their surfaces crawling with tangled symbols. Guardian demons writhed across them, reaching from the doors with palms out: Halt! The pillars to either side were wrapped in carvings of feathered, snake-headed men holding spears towards them to keep them at bay.

  ‘Reckon someone doesn’t like visitors,’ Cade remarked.

  ‘Aye, well, it’s in our way,’ said Garric. He reached for the door, but Vika laid a hand on his arm to stay him.

  ‘Wait. There is sorcery here.’ Ruck growled low in her throat, hackles raised. ‘Let me.’

  She approached the door, looked it over and then touched it lightly with her fingertips. When nothing happened, she passed her staff to Keel and laid both hands upon it, and finally her cheek. She closed her eyes as if listening for a heartbeat.

  ‘I do not have the strength right now to divine its nature,’ she said, ‘but I do not think it will harm us. Like the power laid upon the gate, it is meant to guard against something else.’

  She pushed the door firmly. It was unlocked and swung open without a sound.

  Aren sensed the change in atmosphere as soon as they crossed the threshold. It was as if they’d walked through an invisible curtain. The corridors of Skavengard ached with emptiness, and the cold air felt thin and brittle like new frost; but here, the air was thick and oppressive. Aren felt unwelcome, and the shadows were murky and oily. The others felt it, too. Ruck flattened her ears and whined, and even Garric hunched his shoulders and lowered his head as he entered.

  The chamber had nine sides; one for each Aspect, Aren presumed. High overhead, the walls gathered into a conical spire studded with small oval windows. Aren reckoned it to be an occult sanctum of some kind, or an alchemist’s laboratory, or some combination of the two. His eyes were drawn first to the circle on the floor, a ring of silver wards and signs set into the flagstones. They pulled his gaze with a force that was hard to resist, but soon he felt a headache building and he had to look away.

  The rest of the room was cluttered with bizarre apparatus. Some were familiar from his studies, like the broken alembic and crucible lying among a heap of copper distiller’s pipes. Others were harder to guess at. There was a rectangular screen criss-crossed with web-like filaments that glittered in the gloom. Next to it was a crumpled suit of rotted hemp attached to an iron helmet fashioned in the shape of a screaming harpy, her long fingers meshed together to cover the wearer’s eyes.

  Then there were the instruments of death and torture. There was no mistaking those. He saw a surgeon’s table, rusted blades, hooks for rending and embalming jars to store organs in. Standing against one wall was a fearsome sarcophagus made of metal, ivory and obsidian. It had the shape of a fanged and many-eyed spider whose legs curled around to hold whomever was put within. Aren peered inside and saw long, needle-like blades in various states of retraction.

  ‘Terrible things happened here,’ Vika said gravely as she surveyed the scene. Aren didn’t doubt her.

  ‘We shouldn’t linger,’ said Garric. ‘This place is a dead end.’

  They left in haste and retraced their steps until they found another way onwards. But even after it was behind them, Aren felt befouled, as if some of the atmosphere of that place still clung to him. His admiration for the wonders of Skavengard was tainted now. He didn’t want to think what his magnificent ancestors had done in that room.

  They hadn’t travelled much further before Garric called a halt. ‘We won’t escape Skavengard tonight, and I won’t waste oil travelling in the dark. Let’s camp here. At least we’ll have the moonlight.’

  The spot he’d chosen was a long hall set over two levels connected by a wide staircase. A gallery attached to the higher level overlooked the lower, and narrow floor-to-ceiling windows ran along one side. There was a gaping hole where some of the wall had fallen in, revealing a colonnaded walkway that was open to the air, and a long-dead garden beyond it.

  ‘It will be cold without fire,’ Fen said, eyeing the windows.

  ‘If you can find anything to burn in here, be my guest,’ said Garric.

  ‘What happened to all the furniture?’ Keel wondered. ‘Didn’t they sit down in Old Ossia? Didn’t they sleep?’

  ‘Time would have turned most to dust, I imagine,’ Osman said. ‘Once, perhaps, there were tapestries and carpets.’

  ‘The boats survived,’ Aren pointed out, ‘even if most were rotted through. And there was furniture in the sanctum.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Vika. ‘The place feels … emptied. As if what was here simply vanished. Perhaps the boats survived because they were outside.’

  ‘And the sanctum?’ Aren prompted.

  Vika didn’t answer him, merely looked thoughtful.
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  They laid down their packs and huddled together to eat in the cheerless hall, drawing their coats close. The temperature dropped as the sun dipped behind the mountains. Fen muttered about rationing and made sure nobody got quite enough.

  ‘All the stories I’ve heard about heroes and quests and adventures,’ said Cade, ‘none of them made mention of how much time you spend being cold and hungry and miserable.’

  ‘And bored,’ Keel added. ‘Still, there’s worse fates. Waking every morning to the same view, the same labour, the same faces day after day. I’ll take a hard life in the wild wide world over a soft one in a hutch.’

  ‘You’re not wrong there,’ said Cade. Then he frowned. ‘Don’t you have a family, though?’

  ‘I do,’ said Keel. ‘A wife fair as the sun after a storm, and a young boy, too. I miss ’em sore when I’m away.’ He grinned. ‘Not so much when I’m at home.’

  ‘How long since you last saw them?’

  ‘When was it, Garric? Midspring?’

  ‘Gallian’s Day, I think.’

  ‘Thereabouts, anyway. Not long enough for the echoes of her parting words to fade.’ He chuckled. ‘By Joha, I love her something fierce but we can’t be around each other for long. And that damned town! Wracken Bay is the end of all hope.’ He shrugged. ‘She knew I was a wanderer when she picked me. Never could stay still for long. I send them what money I can, but noble causes don’t pay much, and dragging about after this ugly fool is a full-time occupation.’ He thumbed at Garric and gave Cade a wink.

  ‘Hearth and home and the love of a good woman sound fine to me,’ said Osman, ‘but not in a land ruled by Krodans. There’s much to be done before I’ll settle down.’

  ‘I’d just take a hearth right now,’ said Cade. ‘And maybe an ale with it.’

  The room dimmed as the last of the light bled from the sky. They heard a low rumble and a tremor ran through the hall, as if the castle itself had shivered. Dust sifted down from the ceiling.