by Ben Galley
As light burned beneath his makeshift cloak, fire began to sputter around Malvus’ fingers. Sparks grew into flames. Those flames began coursing up his skin. At first, Loki saw fear in his eyes. He flinched at the heat, and then as soon as it proved harmless to him, Malvus grinned. Magick unfurled from him in fiery arcs. Loki stood still, arms crossed, even when the fire lashed the snow a foot from him.
‘Soon, you’ll be able to bring the very sky crashing to earth. Once the daemons see your power, even Gremorin will bend a knee to you. Farden will be a worm under your boot.’
Malvus’ foot thumped in the thawed mud, spraying not just grimy water but a shockwave that shook the pines and mountainside for a mile around them. Loki held his smile secure as Malvus whirled on him.
‘East?’ Malvus boomed.
‘East.’
Malvus spent a moment surveying the forest’s edge before marching towards a fenrir. The giant wolf skipped away from his touch for a moment before coming to sniff his bleeding hand. Loki heard the sound, but it took him a moment to realise what it was. It was Malvus chuckling.
Seizing its mane, Malvus jumped upon the fenrir and hunkered against its back as the creature clawed at the snow. The magick eking from the monstrosity seemed to dizzy the giant wolf for a moment.
‘East it is, god!’ he bellowed, before bounding into the dark.
Loki hung back while the other creatures raced after him. The night fell silent before he tasted a scent in the wind blowing past his shoulders. A cold he had not felt since his form had fallen from the stars.
‘What have you done, child?’ breathed the goddess of magick.
Loki turned on Evernia. She stood so close he could have grasped her throat. The goddess was full of form for a shadow of her true being. Mist drifted from her gossamer robe of silver. Her stern face was masked by hair of woven light, drifting independently of the night’s breeze.
‘You’ve found me at last. It only took you a decade or two,’ Loki greeted her. ‘I had expected you to come admonish me much sooner.’
‘Even in the stars, in Haven, we felt the winds of magick change. I came here to see for myself. Instead, I see you, as Farden warned me, betraying not only your god-kin but the world itself.’
Loki smiled. He had rehearsed this conversation for many years. Yet now Evernia stood before him, he felt no need to laud it over her. He felt a pity for his kin instead. He laughed.
‘Kin? You call me kin and yet I am nothing like you.’
‘We made you from our own blood. My blood!’
‘And so I should owe my all to you? I realised long ago that you call yourselves gods, and yet you are nothing but half-remembered lights in the night sky. We were the first sparks of this world! You created the humans to fight for and worship you. You gave them magick, and yet they turned their back on you. You sacrificed all to save them, and now the mortals use your name as curses. And somehow, you are still happy to subsist on their whispers and prayers, when all along you miss the true beauty of your creation. Their souls, Evernia.’
‘You speak like a daemon.’
‘Do I? Because I recognise the potential of the soul? There is untold power within your grasp, yet you refuse it. You could escape the dark void of Haven in a day, rule as you meant to rule, and yet you don’t. That is what I’ve done: what you cannot. And let me tell you, Evernia, you are missing out.’ He smirked. ‘I have tasted that power.’
She stepped back, harrowed. ‘Then you not only speak as a daemon, but act like them. You have betrayed your very nature.’
Loki flexed his fingers, spinning dust and frost around them. ‘If you ask me, the daemons and elves had the right idea all along to enslave the mortals. They are not warriors, worshippers, not children, but cattle. Their souls are our right. Our spoils.’
‘What have you done, Loki?’ Evernia asked him again, her pearl brow furrowed in disbelief.
‘I’ve done nothing different than what you did millennia ago when you gave the gift of magick’s song to the mortals. Didn’t you realise it was never yours to wield, Evernia? Not yours alone to give? You treated magick like a tool. Like wind in your sails, or a beast to harvest, and you gave it to mere cattle. That mistake of arrogance will cost you and Haven more than you ever expected.’
Evernia stared into the forest after the noise of crashing branches and the whining of creatures. Loki circled her.
‘I’ve done what you always feared. Daemonblood and magick entwined. Farden’s daughter almost managed to bring down the sky, but now I will succeed. I will bring this world to the wrack and ruin the daemons could never accomplish, and when every mortal scream cries my name, when the flames rise so high that you are choking on them in Haven, then you will see how pathetic you have become, and you will kneel before me, the god of gods.’
‘You are no god,’ whispered Evernia, already fading to dust.
Loki lashed out at her with his own magick. Petty, perhaps, but her frown had not given him the satisfaction he had expected. Pure power lashed the frost and torched the earth, but Evernia was gone.
Loki stood alone in the silent night once more, and snarled.
Between the stars above, where the wind had no breath and time had no meaning, narrowed gazes fell upon the glowing world below. There, in the faint parapets and castles of Haven, faint as gossamer, gods watched on in their multitudes with their wings folded and hands clasped. All of them wondering what it was they had felt wash through the endless void. What that taste of magick had meant. The word went unspoken, but it hovered on every godly tongue. Every lip.
Doom.
CHAPTER 13
THE LADY OF WHISPERS
Barons, satraps, merchants, peasants. All cheer for the fighters of the Scarlet Tourney. All are made equal by their adoration of death.
FROM THE INSCRIPTION ON THE TOWER OF THE VISCERA
In the dream, Mithrid stood upon a mountainside black as coal. The endless slope trembled beneath her. Pumice and boulders tumbled past her. Beneath her lay an endless void. Ahead, a peak that never came to a point. She alone climbed while everything else fell.
Ahead, Mithrid saw a doorway cut by fire into the rock. Smoke billowed from it. Song, too. Deep and earth-shaking. She couldn’t begin to understand its words, spoken by no human mouth, in a language spoken before the world formed.
Her feet moved inexorably. Mithrid watched them shuffle through the ash and saw skulls amongst the rubble of the mountainside. A child-sized scalp glared eyeless from the dust. Her armoured boot crushed it before she could avert her step.
Thunder drew her eyes up to where tongues of flame now billowed from the doorway. The eye of a furnace burned beyond that black rock. She had seen that eye before. Its heat sought to envelop her. Mithrid felt the skin of her cheeks and arms sizzling. She cried out. Whether she had no voice or it was stolen by the roar of the mountain, she did not know. And still she approached the fire.
Mithrid reached for the fire, even as it burned the flesh from her fingers. Her shadow was a black shield before the fire. She reeled as the mountain paused its onslaught to take breath. She stood, shield ready and axe in her skeleton hands. She felt the heat raw on the bare bones of her cheek.
The volcano’s inferno swallowed her, but even as she was scattered as dust, Mithrid found herself standing before a ladder. The kind that had hung from the walkways of Troughwake like tails. She heard a sea breaking in the thick darkness behind her. In her hand lay a small, frosted cake in the shape of a beetle. Before her eyes, it burst into flame. Formless, devoid of breath or time, she stared down at the flame until she became aware of a presence in the gloom opposite her.
Mithrid’s gaze crept, inch by inch, until she saw the grinning visage: A face wreathed in fire and wild hair. A face covered in white shining runes. Mithrid recoiled in terror. Once again, fire consumed her. She was nothing but ash on the breeze. Forgotten. Trodden upon. Tilled with soil generation after generation. Stars spun around her in an endless dark.<
br />
Mithrid awoke with a yelp she would later regret the pitch and volume of. The first thing she saw was the head of a giant moose with a golden apple clutched in its mouth. She pressed herself into the velvet couch in fright. Her eyes desperately searched the gloom. A skull with a huge horn loomed above her. Beside it was a painting with a puppet emerging from it. That, strangely, was the thing that reassured her. She had fallen asleep staring at the grotesque object, wondering what kind of person would buy, let alone make, such a thing.
Mithrid exhaled. She was in the house of the Lady of Whispers.
A gruff bark made her flinch. Beside her, upon another couch, Farden flew upright. In the dim candlelight, Mithrid saw the sweat on his brow. It also took him a moment or two to recognise his surroundings. His eyes locked onto Mithrid.
‘Nightmare?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. You?’
Farden’s brow furrowed. He stared at the moose for a while before speaking. ‘What did you see?’
‘Fire. Irminsul, I think.’
‘Hmm.’ The mage shook his head. ‘I saw a face covered—’
‘In runes?’
Farden’s gaze came rushing back to her. The sound of shuffling shoes approached, along with the light of a candle. The artefacts covering the walls threw grotesque and daemonic shadows.
Durnus appeared. ‘Did you two feel that?’ he asked.
‘We both dreamed the same thing.’ Farden nodded. ‘A face covered in runes. You?’
‘A wind is all I can describe it as. Blowing through my soul and my veins. A wind from the west.’
‘Whatever it is, why do I feel Loki is at fault?’
Mithrid pushed herself from her couch. ‘Because you’re probably right.’
‘We cannot worry about that now. We must focus on Sigrimur and finding his breath.’
Farden pointed to Durnus. ‘Where are the others?’
‘Warbringer is standing watch over the Lady of Whispers. She is warier than you. The minotaur drinking horns on a table might have been something to do with it. Or she doesn’t trust carpets. Aspala and I were swapping tales and knowledge by a fire with wine, spending an evening how it should be spent. How do you feel, Farden?’
The mage sighed as he knuckled his face. Mithrid stared once more at the gap of Farden’s missing finger. ‘Like I only slept for two hours.’
‘If you ask me, you still look like shit,’ Mithrid said, trying a smile although she couldn’t help but notice a streak of silver in his hair she swore hadn’t been there before. To her surprise, she actually coaxed a weary but matching smile from Farden.
‘You should talk,’ replied Farden. His eyes crept above hers. Mithrid put up a hand and found her unruly hair had rebelled once again. It was stuck up like a cliff-face. She shrugged. ‘Still look better than you.’
Farden snorted as he arose. He had slept in his armour, with his helmet clutched on his chest.
‘Do you trust this Lady of Whispers, Durnus?’
‘She has given me no reason not to.’
‘Those are the ones you have to worry about,’ Farden sighed. ‘What have you told her?’
‘Nothing, yet. I have merely expressed an interest in relics of Sigrimur. You still think me a fool, old friend? I was not born yesterday. I know the value of secrets. I was once an arkmage, you know. After being your superior for many years.’
Farden tutted. With a series of grunts and curses, Farden removed his armour piece by piece. Even though it was clearly broken in some way, Mithrid still marvelled at the way its scales slid over each other, as if they had a life of their own. The tunic beneath was verging on threadbare where the armour had worn. The mage smelled road-weary. Mithrid was about to mention a bath until she took off her own armour. She caught a whiff of herself and winced.
‘I wonder if the Lady of Whispers has a bucket and soap. Or a bath.’
Durnus’ nose was firmly wrinkled. ‘I hope so.’
Mithrid had never known such cleanliness. Even in Scalussen, when she had at last washed the salt and blood and dust of Troughwake and the Revenge from her body, she swore bathing had not felt this good.
The Lady of Whispers was clearly rich. Mithrid had never seen such a house for one person. She had seen a guard or two, but the only servants in the house were children half her age. Some even younger. They looked as filthy as peasants. A small girl with pigtails showed Mithrid and Farden to the baths. Otherwise, it seemed Irien was largely alone with her collections.
The things even spread to the bathing room. The glazed tiles of the wall were festooned with more trinkets and paintings. A range of varnished serpents sat rearing on plaques. Mithrid stared daggers at the strange things while she doused herself in bucket after bucket of warm water. The soaps tingled her nose with their fragrances, deftly treading the edge of being unpleasant. When Mithrid emerged from the steam, she found a robe-like dress and trews waiting for her. She had seen similar fashion on Dathazh’s streets. It felt vaguely like putting on a disguise. It remind her of the time Bogran, Remina, and the others of the crew had dressed in dry seaweed all day to avoid the old ones of Troughwake.
The thought stalled Mithrid’s hand an inch from the door handle. She shook her head, swallowed the emotion as always, and marched from the bath.
Farden was in the corridor. The beard had been cut from his chin and cheeks in uneven patches. He was trying to adjust his shirt, which for some reason came with laces and vacuous cuffs. ‘Why in Hel there are laces on this thing, I don’t know.’
He quickly gave up on chasing the folds of fabric and ripped the sleeves clean from the body. Arms bare but torso covered, he threw the sleeves down the nearest stairwell. Mithrid sputtered with laughter.
‘You know, it’s good to know that I’m a peasant girl, yet I’ve still got better manners than a king,’ she said.
Farden hoisted his pack of armour over his shoulder. ‘Let’s see how this Lady of Whispers can help us.’
‘She looked intrigued by you earlier, you know,’ Mithrid smirked.
‘Did she, indeed.’ It wasn’t a question, simply a reply to avoid silence.
Mithrid walked in silence up the stairs. Yet again, they were lined with all manner of relic and bauble. If it couldn’t be stuck to the wall, it was displayed in glass cases, or on tables that intruded on the stairs or corridors.
They found the others in a grand sitting room. It was an opulent affair that was at complete odds with the stark Frostsoar, or the poorness of Troughwake. Mithrid had never seen such frivolous use of gold and silver. Columns and chairs were painted with it. Suits of opulent armour of the metals lined the walls between columns bearing tapestries and heads of beasts. There were even a few human heads in Irien’s collection, with names in strange runes hanging from them. Swords and spears too. Nothing matched. Everything demanded her attention.
The only light was a fireplace that crackled and spat. The Lady of Whispers herself sat in a chair of striped hide. The back of the chair stretched twice her height into the gloom.
Aspala and Durnus sat upon a low bench lined with more velvet. Aspala’s lids were half-closed. She clutched a goblet with two hands and stared into the fire, only smiling when Mithrid sat opposite her. The armchair was covered in the softest fur she had ever touched, decorated in the shape of stars. Its cushions were so soft, Mithrid swore the thing tried to eat her when she sat down.
‘Ah, they have awoken, bathed, and returned!’ Irien greeted them as they entered. ‘The night is young. Come and enjoy the fire. Wine, if you take it. The city will not wake before midday tomorrow. Your master Durnus has been full of questions. What can I answer for you, lady and sir? Or will you tell me of your lives instead?’
Aspala had purple lips from the wine. She held out her goblet and Mithrid took it without comment. It wasn’t a cold ale, but it was sweet enough to give Mithrid the same shiver. Within moments, she felt the sugar creep from the back of her tongue into her temples. She felt warm, and reclined in th
e chair.
Farden didn’t hold back. ‘Why do they call you the Lady of Whispers?’
Durnus nodded knowingly while Irien tittered. She plucked a cork from a flagon that rested at her side and poured a liberal slog of wine into her crystal goblet.
‘The same question Durnus asked,’ she said, staring boldly at the mage. ‘Whispers and the secrets they carry are a currency in cities as old as complicated as Dathazh and Vensk. I trade in them as a merchant might trade in jewellery or silk, and have done for more years than I will admit. It is a craft that is despised by some, and not without its dangers.’ Irien waggled her wooden fingers. ‘But I have proven myself against great odds, worked hard, and I have succeeded. People come to me to learn things that my children – my eyes and ears across the plains and Golikar – bring me. You see, a whisper’s worth is only what somebody will pay to buy or keep it. Some will pay the world to protect their secret.’
Mithrid piped up, wanting to appear involved. ‘Vensk is the city across the river?’
Irien’s gaze tore away from Farden and alighted on Mithrid. There was a constant gleam of delight in the woman’s bewitching eyes. ‘It is, indeed, young lady. The capital of the queendom of Golikar. It is where the Scarlet Tourney is held year after year, in an arena as old as the roots of the trees that form its foundations. We call it the Viscera. Countless warriors have lost their lives there over the course of centuries. Only champions emerge.’
‘You sound proud,’ said Farden.
Irien stared straight at Farden. ‘It is a tradition, Sir Farden! Of course I am proud. It brings trade, notoriety, and honour to the two cities. And it keeps peace between our fractious nations and those of the east and south. Did you know that the Rivenplains and Golikar spent decades at war? Vensk and Dathazh were in constant siege. Now, thanks to the Tourney, the idea of war has become preposterous. We’ve had almost four hundred years of peace because of it.’ The lady took a moment to raise and finish her glass. She emptied the drips onto her carpet without care. ‘I would rather have a pint of blood spilled in the Viscera than thousands die in war.’
