The Ember Blade

by Chris Wooding

  ‘Heard about Salt Fork,’ said Fluke. ‘Any of you in that?’

  Keel didn’t reply.

  ‘Iron Hand executed a lot of people afterwards.’

  ‘Gutless turncoats should’ve stood and fought, then,’ Keel said bitterly. It sounded like something Garric would have said.

  Fluke grunted, somehow conveying his silent judgement as clearly as if he’d accused his brother aloud. He was a master of leaving things unsaid. At least Mariella yelled at him so he could yell back. Fluke’s method was slow poison.

  ‘You ought to be careful,’ Fluke advised. ‘Word’s already out that Laine’s back so you can be sure Jadrell’s already heard. Everyone knows you two come as a pair, and there’s rumours about what you get up to out there. Some say you went to join the Greycloaks. Well, those who don’t say the other thing, anyway.’

  Keel didn’t rise to the implication. He knew well what the other thing was. Typical Bitterbracker thinking, when two men couldn’t share a close friendship without raising eyebrows. He loathed this town, the mean-mindedness of its people, the walls they built around themselves. He pitied his brother, and he suspected Fluke knew it. It was one of the many reasons they didn’t get on.

  ‘Rumour’s not worth a shark’s piss in this place,’ said Keel. ‘I’m just one of a hundred whalers who left town one day and is back for a visit. Jadrell’s hardly going to hunt me down ’less he gets the say-so from his Krodan masters, and whatever I did or didn’t do out there, my name’s not on any of it.’

  ‘I suppose it matters naught, in the end,’ said Fluke. ‘You’ll be gone again before long.’

  ‘Who said I’m going anywhere?’

  Fluke smirked humourlessly.

  Keel watched the rider coming closer. He was dressed Krodan-style, but it was no soldier’s outfit, nor the uniform of an official. Keel’s hand hung a little closer to the sword at his hip just in case. It was only a matter of time before they stopped Ossians carrying weapons outside the town boundaries as well as within, and if a few more locals got killed by bears and wolves and bandits, then so be it. But that wasn’t the law yet.

  ‘You know him?’ he asked Fluke.

  ‘My neighbour Endrik. He took over the farm from Starren.’

  ‘What happened to Starren?’

  ‘Turned out he didn’t legally own the land. Some mistake in the paperwork half a century back.’

  ‘And Lord Jadrell righted that injustice?’

  ‘Course he did. Been righting all manner of injustices lately.’

  ‘Hail to the Emperor,’ said Endrik as he neared, arm across his chest in salute. He was a robust and vigorous-looking man whose fine features were not best served by an unnaturally rectangular moustache and a rigid military haircut.

  ‘Hail to the Emperor,’ Fluke replied. Keel saluted after a suitably defiant interval.

  ‘Who is your companion?’ Endrik asked Fluke.

  ‘My brother Keel. Keel, this is Endrik.’

  Keel nodded with the sullen chill of a Bitterbracker.

  ‘Now I see the resemblance,’ said Endrik. ‘Family is so import­ant. The very foundation of the Empire, as Tomas says in the Acts. Your brother is staying with you, I take it?’

  ‘He has lodgings elsewhere. I’m just showing him my farm.’

  Endrik’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Excellent, excellent,’ he said. Then, when it became clear he’d get no more conversation from them, he straightened in his saddle. ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you.’ He shook the reins and his horse walked on.

  Keel waited till he was out of earshot. ‘Friend of yours?’

  ‘One of Jadrell’s informers. The farm was his reward for it. If Jadrell didn’t know where you were before, he will now.’

  ‘You could have told him I was someone else. He didn’t know my face.’

  Fluke snorted. ‘And when he learns I lied? I’m not keen to attract any more suspicion than you’ve already brought me. I’d find my farm next on Jadrell’s list of injustices.’

  He set off again and Keel walked with him. Presently, they rounded a hedgerow and saw a farm down the hill, a scattering of outbuildings surrounding a low stone house, with a handful of animals out to pasture nearby. Fluke came to a halt and they gazed upon the deep green land of their birth, the swooping slopes, the dramatic, cloud-wracked skies. Keel saw only mud, thorns and gloom.

  ‘Mariella says you’d have me work with you,’ Keel said.

  ‘The offer’s there,’ said Fluke. ‘Don’t reckon you’ll ever accept it, though.’

  Keel dug at the turf with the toe of his boot. ‘She really wants me to stay this time.’

  ‘She wants that every time. Hasn’t stopped you before.’

  ‘Things are different now. There’s Tad.’

  Fluke grunted.

  ‘He’s my son,’ Keel said, as if by speaking the words aloud he was explaining something to himself.

  ‘He is,’ Fluke agreed. ‘So what are you going to do about that?’

  Keel wished he had an answer, but every path forward seemed impossible. He couldn’t stay and he couldn’t go. He had to help Tad somehow, and he couldn’t do that while scratching a living in Wracken Bay. Yet if he left to seek a solution, he’d lose Mariella. Hard as it was to be with her, it would be harder without. He needed to know he was loved, even if it came from afar. She was his anchor to the world while he went roaming. Without her, the black pit inside would surely consume him.

  ‘Do you reckon she meant it? About leaving me?’ He resented having to ask, but his brother knew her better than he did these days.

  ‘She meant it,’ said Fluke. ‘Whether she could do it, that’s another question.’

  They stood there for a time, contemplating the farm below.

  ‘Didn’t you ever want to get away from this town?’ Keel asked.

  ‘No,’ said Fluke. ‘I have all I need right here.’

  ‘Da always dreamed we’d stay on the boat, working together, after he died.’ He waved a hand at the scene below. ‘He’d have hated all this.’

  ‘The old bastard hated a lot of things. I hated the sea, but that didn’t count for naught with him; I had to be a whaler all the same. Now my farm feeds your family.’

  ‘I know it,’ said Keel, then forced himself to add, ‘I’m grateful.’

  ‘Don’t be. I don’t do it for you.’

  Fluke showed no sign of moving. Keel realised he was building up to something.

  ‘Say your piece, Fluke. You brought me out here for a reason, and I reckon it wasn’t to admire your farm.’

  ‘Right you are,’ said Fluke, casting him a sour glance from beneath his dark fringe. He sniffed. ‘I reckon you ought to go.’

  Keel raised his eyebrows. He’d been expecting the usual lecture on responsibility.

  ‘Go and don’t come back,’ Fluke said. ‘Ever.’

  Keel gave a bitter laugh of surprise. ‘If you want to tell me how you feel, I’ll settle for a brotherly embrace,’ he said sarcastically.

  Fluke ignored that, as he did all humour. ‘You’re killing her, Keel.’

  Keel sobered at that. The tone of his voice, the way he said it, it didn’t sound like an exaggeration.

  ‘Every time you go, you leave her waiting,’ Fluke went on. ‘That’s her life. She gets through the day, and she waits. For you.’ His voice went dark with anger. ‘Then back you come, for a day, a week. Just long enough that she thinks you might stay this time. But you don’t. You never will. And each time you break her bloody heart a bit worse than before.’

  ‘She knew my nature when she married me,’ said Keel. Angry resentment swelled beneath his words. ‘She’s the fool if she thought she could change me.’

  ‘She’s the fool,’ Fluke agreed. ‘And she’s paid for it, and paid again. She thought a child might keep you by her side, and that was foolishness, too.’ He balled up a fist, rubbed the side of his neck with his knuckles, the way he did when he was tense. ‘You need to let her go, Ke
el. She’s trapped, and she always will be while she’s hoping you’ll come back. Tell her you’re not, and don’t.’

  Keel had to fight down the urge to strike him. ‘You’ve got a lot to say about my family these days, brother. Any advice about my dying son?’ Speaking the words almost pushed him over the edge into tears.

  ‘Tad’s in the hands of the Aspects now,’ said Fluke, rolling on with his argument, his opinions slow and heavy as stone. ‘Best your druidess friend can do is stave off the inevitable. You’ll never get the money to cure him, and you know it.’

  ‘And what will you do when I’m gone?’ Keel sneered. ‘You’ll look after them in my stead, then?’

  ‘In your stead? I’ve been looking after them for four years already, excepting a few donations when the mood strikes you. Can’t see that changing anytime soon.’

  That was too much to bear. Keel seized him by the coat, pulled his brother around to face him, so furious he couldn’t speak. Fluke gazed at him, unafraid, possessed of that same dull determination with which he ploughed through the seasons.

  ‘You’re bad for her,’ Fluke told him. ‘Do what’s right and go.’

  The only choice then was between driving a fist into Fluke’s impassive, bovine face, or flinging him away. Keel shoved him hard before the temptation to punch overwhelmed him. Fluke staggered a few steps down the trail, righted himself and looked back at Keel, unruffled.

  ‘She doesn’t love you,’ Keel flung at him. ‘She’ll never love you, no matter how many times you pick up the pieces. She doesn’t love you, Fluke. She’s mine!’

  He saw the flicker in his brother’s eyes as his words struck home, and took vicious satisfaction in it. Where’s your sanctimony now? Where’s your superiority? Where’s your advice?

  Fluke dropped his gaze, then looked off across the hills to where the black clouds were heaping. ‘The rest of your lot are nearby?’

  ‘We made camp in the woods,’ said Keel. Their confrontation was over, as suddenly as that. They both sounded weary and deflated.

  ‘Tell them to come for dinner,’ said Fluke, jacking a thumb towards the farm. ‘They can stay in the barn.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘This is still Ossia, last I looked,’ said Fluke. Still Ossia, where strangers were offered hospitality, where a table was for sharing and generosity was the measure of a man.

  There was no bitterness about it, even after their angry words. Fluke never could hold a grudge. ‘I’ll tell them,’ Keel said.

  Fluke hooked his thumbs in his trousers and squinted at the sky. ‘Make it quick. Storm’s coming,’ he said, and walked away down the track.

  59

  Thunder snarled and a curtain of rain came out of the night. The woods, dark and quiet a moment ago, turned riotous as the secret rustle of animals was drowned out by the hiss and splatter of the storm. Leaves bowed and nodded; trails turned to muddy pools; a family of boars ran snorting for shelter.

  Vika hurried through the doorway of the derelict cottage, carry­ing a dead rabbit by the ears. Ruck had gone ahead, not minded to wait for her slower companion, and was shaking herself off in the gloom. Inside, it was dank with rot and mould, and the rain dribbled through the roof in half a dozen places, making puddles among the decayed rushes strewn across the floor. There was a crude table, a few stools, a bed with a hand-stitched mattress. A tin plate and mug lay on the floor near the table.

  A mean and meagre dwelling, then, but it was drier than outside, and Vika thanked the Aspects for that. She dropped the rabbit on the floor and raised a warning finger at Ruck as the hound came over to investigate. Then she took off her hide cloak, which had saved her from the worst of the deluge, and wrung out her hair where it had got loose from her hood.

  She poked around the cottage a little. It didn’t take long. There was a pantry, a tiny area for storage and the main room. Given the state of the place and the way it had been left, she guessed that the owner had intended to return and never did. Likely they were killed by something in the forest, a wild animal or perhaps a fatal fall. She said a prayer to the Red-Eyed Child for the previous owner and then set about smashing up furniture for the fireplace.

  She’d left the others back in Fluke’s barn. Keel’s brother hadn’t been a particularly sociable or talkative host, but he was willing to extend the hand of friendship to strangers, and to give generously of what little he had. Vika respected him for that. It heartened her to know that the old ways hadn’t been entirely forgotten under the Krodan yoke.

  Keel hadn’t dined with them, but gone back to his cottage. He had bridges to repair, and wanted to spend what time he could with his family. The ship to Morgenholme was leaving at dawn on the morrow, and he’d yet to decide if he would stay or go. The uncertainty was hard on Garric, who feared to lose his oldest friend, but he kept his silence on the matter.

  When she had a decent pile of stool legs, planks and wool in the hearth, she sprinkled it with firedust and dug through her wet cloak till she found the phial she needed. She dripped its contents onto the firedust and it began to fizz and sparkle, burning furious white, spreading outwards until the whole hearth was filled with blinding glare. Gradually it faded, white to yellow and orange, leaving fire licking and crackling the wood.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she said to Ruck. ‘Wasteful. But it’s so much easier than flint and tinder.’

  If Ruck disapproved, it wasn’t enough to stop her enjoying the flames. She slunk closer to warm herself. Vika gave her a rough pat and got to her feet.

  ‘Now then. Let’s set to it.’

  She hung her cloak to dry by the fire and pulled out some cooking implements from her sodden pack. Then she found her foraging bag and counted her gains from the night. Herbs, mushrooms, roots and flowers. Most had been readily given by the forest, but the catfoot briar had proved troublesome to find, and it had delayed her long enough for the storm to catch up. She’d hoped to be back in the barn before it broke, but she had no choice but to persevere. She needed to make Tad’s potion tonight.

  The fire held off the night and warmed the dank corners of the cottage while the storm boomed and rolled outside. Vika and Ruck dried as she worked, peeling twigs with her knife, baking leaves till they were crisp, chewing roots to pulp and spitting them out again. She collected rainwater through the leaking roof, filling two pots: one small, the other smaller. These she set to boil, and when they were bubbling, she began to throw the ingredients in. The air filled with earthy scents. Ruck, recognising the process, laid her head on her paws and watched with anticipation.

  When the basics of both concoctions were in place, she took up the dead rabbit, cut off its head and drained its blood into the smallest pot, saying a prayer of thanks as she did so. She tossed the carcass to Ruck, who fell on it eagerly, her patience rewarded at last. While the wolfhound crunched and chewed beside her, Vika drew a shallow cut on her forearm and added a few drops of her own blood to the mix. That done, she set the smallest pot aside to cool.

  Rabbit blood was weak sauce for the brew, but her own contribution would add potency. Blood was the power, blood the fuel, blood the catalyst. It was said that the blood of elder druids, steeped in the essence of the Shadowlands and distilled through a lifetime of potion-taking, could make concoctions more powerful than Vika could dream of. An elder druid might have been able to cure Tad’s condition rather than merely delaying its progress, but Vika didn’t have craft enough for that.

  There were other ways to increase the potency of a potion, of course. Ways she could outstrip even the elders, were she tempted to take them. But those were forbidden paths, and not for her.

  She drank from the bloodied pot and let the brew seep into her. Tendrils of acid heat spread from her belly to her groin, up her neck, wrapping round her skull. Her mind opened outwards, an unfurling flower of consciousness, and her senses sharpened till she could hear the tick of insects in the boles of the trees, and smell the spoor of mice and deer, wildcat and fox. Air sighed
in and out of her, drawn into her lungs and expelled back into the world, altered. She was no longer a separate thing, one and alone, but a part of her surroundings, a channel through which the flow of existence moved, out of the past and into the future.

  She closed her eyes and saw Agalie-Sings-The-Dark, her friend and mentor, sitting by the light of another fire as Vika complained of being abandoned by the gods. It had sounded churlish then, and more so now. Her last doubts had been swept away at the entrance to Skavengard, as she held the gates against the dreadknights with sacred light. What else could that have been but the Aspects working through her? Her task had been set by the gods themselves, to walk at Garric’s side and protect him from the servants of the void, for that was surely what the dreadknights were. She’d sensed its taint on them, and they’d been kept out of Skavengard by the same sorcery that kept the beast in.

  But how did it all connect? What did Garric’s plan to steal the Ember Blade have to do with the hellish future the Torments had revealed? Why were the Krodans consorting with dreadknights, and whatever dark force lay behind them?

  Time would tell. Until then, she had work to do.

  Her trance had deepened enough that she was everywhere and nowhere, hyper-aware of her surroundings and no longer aware of herself. She sensed the borders of the Shadowlands on the fringes of her consciousness and made a channel to it, in the same instinctive way as she might move her fingers or clench a muscle. She willed it, and it was so.

  She siphoned off a mote of chaos – a firefly glimmer, a spark – and sent it into the bubbling pot on the hearth before her. In that moment, the contents of the pot were no longer rainwater and herbs, but something else: a tumble of possibilities all existing at once, waiting for her to choose one. Given more power, more chaos, it could become blood, or oil, or wine; but the bigger the channel she opened to the Shadowlands, the more likely something unwelcome would find its way through. All she needed was to make a small adjustment to the essence of the concoction, turning it into something potent, imbuing it with the power to bring change of its own.