by Ben Galley
Mithrid called back to the others. ‘Is that normal?’
Farden, hating sunlight that morning, was glad she stood and pointed west. Halfway to the horizon a narrow and dark storm front had gathered. A spear of black and roiling cloud spreading deep shadow across the plains. Rain obscured all beneath it. Lightning crackled through its vapours.
Farden and the others stood beside Mithrid and stared.
‘Evorsk said this is a land of harsh weather,’ Durnus advised, trying to stuff his books into his satchel.
Farden wasn’t convinced. ‘I’ve never seen a storm like that. Have any of you?’
Mithrid reached for the distant clouds. ‘I think I can feel… magick.’
‘Gods, do I wish I had another mage with me,’ said Farden. ‘Durnus, what can you sense?’
Durnus scrunched his face in concentration and copied Mithrid. ‘I feel a cold wind amongst the threads of magick. The girl’s right. There’s magick in that storm.’ He flashed the mage a look above his spectacles. His pale eyes were wide behind the black lenses.
‘And it’s coming this way,’ Aspala whispered.
‘Whatever it is, I don’t like the look of it. Get down there and find us a ship. Sharpish, Durnus.’
Fleetstar stayed upon the cliff with Farden. Together, they watched the oncoming storm. It was likely to catch them shortly. She puffed smoke from her nostrils.
‘You fear it’s Loki, don’t you?’
Farden couldn’t tear his eyes from the clouds. The front was rising upwards as if clashing with another air, rearing up like the horn of an anvil. He could hear its thunder now, rolling across the plain. ‘I don’t fear Loki… and what have I said about reading my mind?’
‘I can feel your worry like the heat of a fireplace, mage. You needn’t worry about me, you should know. I am seeing more of the world than I ever thought existed. I don’t want to stop.’
‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’ Farden asked. ‘All this time, I believed you were unpredictable. You’re an explorer.’
‘Towerdawn made a mistake when he told me of the dragons of old. The First Dragon. When we roamed the skies between oceans.’
Farden smiled, patting the Mad Dragon’s scales around her jaw as riders often did. At first, Fleetstar flinched away from the gesture. She allowed him for a moment before sniffing at his armour.
‘No magick in you still,’ she rumbled.
‘You can tell?’ Farden didn’t know why he was surprised.
‘I never felt you so distracted. More than you ever felt in Scalussen. Are you sick?’
‘Sick in the way all living things are, perhaps.’
Fleetstar tasted the air with her forked tongue. ‘I’ll be following. Try not to die in the meantime.’
The mage shook his head. ‘You stay away from that storm, dragon!’ he yelled after her.
Without reply, the dragon slunk into the rocky tors lining the cliff, where the grasses grew so tall they could even hide her bulk.
Farden’s legs burned by the time he’d reached the pebble beach. Durnus had been busy swapping urgent words with three locals. The locals, as it turned out, seemed as dull-eyed as the fish lying in troughs and barrels. They chewed stalks of cliff grass like cows, preferring to mutter between themselves at great length before answering the vampyre’s questions.
‘There’s a ship that’ll maybe take you south,’ they were explaining. ‘Might have space for you. Tell you which one for a silver leaf or two.’
Farden couldn’t see the glare behind Durnus’ black spectacles, but he could imagine it just fine. He plucked one leaf from his cloak pocket and offered it. Each of them snatched at his hand. The grubbiest between them won it.
‘Hurry it up, gentlemen. There is a storm brewing on the plains.’
‘Yeah, yeah. That cog with yellow flags and some ugly bitch on its bow,’ grumbled the grimy man.
The other two louts explained to Durnus behind their hands. ‘It’s his old wife, so it is.’
‘She left him for another boat’s captain.’
‘So he carved the figurehead to look like her, see. ’Nother silver for the story?’
Durnus flicked another leaf into the air and left the three scrabbling.
‘Yellow flags would be that one,’ Farden snapped as he herded the others down the piers.
Aside from the bitterness of the locals, and the bad blood between him and his ex-wife, his label of ugly wasn’t undeserved. The carpenter had given her a bosom that was practically inhuman, and a grotesque smile that ran from ear to ear. Her nose was bulbous. One eye was higher than the other.
‘Gods,’ Aspala winced as they stood alongside her on the pier. ‘Poor woman.’
The name of the ship above read The Seventh Sister.
‘Are we sure about this, Farden?’
The mage set his jaw. In the narrow window of sky above them, the blue was starting to succumb to the storm’s grey claws. ‘I feel we don’t have the luxury of choice.’
Tar and old fish blood had dried in stains down its sides. The sails were patched so much it was doubtful any of the original material remained. A crew of individuals, six-strong and missing all sorts of ears and toes, leaned on the bulwark and stared down at the strangers. They seemed so at one with the rats that ran about the pier and anchor lines that one sailor even had one sitting on his shoulder, nibbling his pearl earring.
‘Foul creatures,’ Warbringer said as she stamped her hoof.
Even in his unsettled mind, Farden couldn’t help but remember Whiskers. ‘Lot smarter than you think,’ he corrected her.
She was not impressed. ‘But they taste like mud.’
Farden shoved Durnus ahead, being the least hungover of the bunch. ‘Fine morning to you! Is this fine ship taking passengers?’
‘Depends where those passengers want to go. Where they want to go depends how much they’ve got to spend,’ said the man with a pet rat. It was only then that Farden noticed the rat’s matching pearl earring. ‘Rest assured. She don’t look much, but she’s faster than most.’
‘South, past Hartlunder, maybe?’
A portly man spoke up as he moved the rat-man aside. ‘There’s a lot of south to Hartlunder. How far south?’
‘To the roaring waters we’ve heard of,’ Durnus bluffed.
The guess paid off.
‘Chanark?’ The sailor whistled a low note. ‘For all of you?’
‘All of us,’ Farden grunted. ‘Yes or no? We’re short of time.’
‘You’ll have to share a cabin.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘We can take you as far south as the Bay of Souls. Kedi Ada, maybe. Barges will take you the rest of the way to where you want to go.’
‘How much?’
‘Fifty gol—’
The fat sailor nudged the rat-man into silence. ‘Seventy-five gold.’
Durnus made a good show of sighing, even rummaging in his satchel. Farden knew he had close to two hundred gold and as many silver in that winner’s purse of his.
Farden would have laughed out loud had his face not been craned to the clouds.
‘Sixty,’ Durnus countered.
‘Sixty-five.’
‘Pay him what he wants, Durnus. Sixty-five, no questions asked, and we want to leave now.’
‘Now?’ one of them began to complain: a young runt with hair a copper shade. ‘Tide’s not right. Never mind the shit wind today.’
‘I have a feeling that’ll change.’
‘What do you know, land-scrubber?’
Farden needn’t have argued. The rotund sailor, perhaps the captain, had already decided. ‘Deal!’ he cried. He spat in the ocean to seal it.
Almost all the sailors nudged each other as if they had just won the Scarlet Tourney. There was a mutual round of smug smiles as they stepped aboard the frankly dilapidated ship, each thinking they had conned the other, and only one party being right.
‘Hoist the sail then, lads!’ yelled the
captain as he busied himself counting his Golikan leaves.
Farden rushed to the stern. The cabin could wait. No sooner had he gripped the railing before thunder shook the air. Gloom-ridden cloud now filled the sky. Heavy rain began to fall. A smell of sulphur and metal found its way into Farden’s mouth.
‘Don’t like this, King,’ Warbringer growled. ‘Remind me of storms that came to Efjar when Arka mages stood in force. All that magick. I can taste it.’
Farden shot her a look.
The Sister wallowed beneath them. Two of the crew poked the piers with oars. They had noticed the storm now, too. Instead of it concerning them, it seemed to bewitch them. The sails flapped uselessly without the wind. The sailors were quite happy to let momentum or perhaps strong intentions take the Sister out to sea.
It looked as though night had fallen above the cove. Cloud even began to creep down the limestone. The rain pelted now. Hailstones thwacked the deck. Children in the ramshackle village began to cry. It was then Farden felt the hairs on the backs of his arms rise. His nape prickled. An iron weight in his chest almost choked him.
‘Durnus…’
The vampyre heard the tone in the mage’s voice.
‘Get us out of here now.’
Twisting his hands in a complicated yet surreptitious pattern, the vampyre hissed in annoyance. ‘I have not done this in some time…’
‘Now, Durnus!’
Durnus at last found the right spell. The wind magick buffeted them before the vampyre gave it direction. The sailors cried out as the Sister lurched with a billowing sail towards the gap in the cliffs.
‘You land-scrubbers was right: storm ahoy!’ the captain brayed from behind them. ‘Get those lines sharpened up, damn it!’
The archway of stone swallowed them within short moments and spat them into a darkened day. The storm clouds spun overheard, whipping the waves into spray in its shadow. Farden and the others craned their necks to stare up at the clifftops as they escaped into the Bitter Sea.
‘By Bezarish’s arsehole, what is that?’ Aspala yelled over the waves.
Farden was already staring at it.
A whirlwind of dust and darkness raged above the cliffs. The storm was powerless but to spiral about it. White and purple lightning burned streaks across the dark. The roar became constant. As they watched, the whirlwind approached the very edge of the cliff and then appeared to hesitate. A solid form could be seen within its vortex, unmoving. Barely a silhouette framed by the angry flashes of light. In stutters, the shadow raised its thick arms. With an ear-splitting thunder, a web of lightning spread across the dark clouds.
Farden crouched instinctively as a fork of crackling light struck the sea beside the Seventh Sister. Barely had he blinked its shine from his eyes than another pierced the waves on the opposite side. The heat was searing. Sparks crackled across the boat’s iron fixings, charring wood or shocking the sailors into fits.
Durnus strained so hard to free them, the Seventh Sister’s bow actually began to rear from the water. It punished the spitting rollers like a flat-bottom scow. Mithrid held her head, eyes clenched as if the magick around her was becoming too much to bear. Aspala and Warbringer had seized the bulwark and were refusing to let go.
Only Farden stood defiant. He stood with fists clenched, staring directly into the eye of the unnatural storm, enduring every punishing crash of the lightning bolts though the next could have blown the Sister to cinders. Even once the wind had saved them from the storm’s reach, and the others had righted themselves, he remained staring.
‘Farden,’ Mithrid breathed. ‘What was that?’
‘If my worst fears are true… an old enemy,’ said Farden. ‘The face from our nightmares in Dathazh.’
CHAPTER 24
A GOD’S RANSOM
Some words are a poison better swallowed.
OLD PARAIAN PROVERB
The escape from the Falcon’s Spur had been a nightmare. There was no better description; simply a painful, drudged sail through battering seas and winds that tried their hardest to drown every ship in the Rogue’s Armada one by one. The gods of Njord and Hurricane had been called out to and cursed in equal measure for days straight.
Three ships had fallen to the ocean’s tirade. The Windfang had gone belly up in a rogue wave as those nosed past the island’s shelter. Forever’s Blade, an older ship still with a leviathan fang embedded in its hull, had lost its captain to a fallen spar. Turned on its side before the crew could claim the wheel, she was washed into a cliff and stowed in.
It was the Siren warship that cost the most to Elessi’s heart.
Nerilan had ordered a dozen of the precious dragon eggs to be stowed aboard Jaws of Nelska. The ship had survived more than its share of northern storms, but it was the ferocious rocks of Paraian coasts that finally sunk her, with almost all hands lost. Only a score had been saved, and three eggs dragged from the angry ocean.
Now that the storm had abated, hundreds had been reported missing or outright dead. And every one of their names piled on Elessi’s shoulders.
The hastily scribbled list trembled in her hands. The night winds were hot, even on the empty bow of the Autumn’s Vanguard, but Elessi still shivered. It was not cold. It was a landscape of emotion, stretching from exhaustion to anger all the way to grief and back.
Gritting teeth to keep them from chattering, Elessi looked up at the diamond stars. More and more, each night she stood on deck, the less she recognised the sky. It seemed the heavens stretched and changed like the land beneath her. At first, she had come to watch them for solace. Not least because she and Modren had spent nights in the same way, but because they were as an anchor to her. As long as the sky stayed above and the old gods looked down, she had comfort. Elessi could still recognise not only the world, but herself.
One by one, Elessi began to read the names to the silent stars, hoping it would do the lost souls some scant good without pyres.
She had one last name to read to the list when she felt the scrape of wood and the presence behind her. Elessi had expected Lerel or Hereni to join her. She feared the company of any of the others. Even Eyrum, for she saw the results of her decision in his injuries.
When Elessi turned, she saw a familiar yet loathsome face in the shadows.
‘Guards!’ she yelled without thought.
Loki held up a fist before the shout had left her mouth. A gust of wind buffeted her against the railing, somehow stealing her words.
The god smiled broadly. ‘I have come to talk, General Elessi. Nothing more,’ he said, coming forwards to show her empty hands. His skin took on a pearlescent quality in the patterned moonlight bathing the decks.
The shock of his appearance still wracked her. Though he was their foulest of enemies, he was still a god. Elessi had never met one in the flesh. Something in her mortal mind urged her to prostrate herself. ‘You snivelling wretch. The last time we spoke, you brought three leviathans down on us.’
Loki nodded. ‘And you have survived them! Somewhat, at least. Killed two, or so my eyes tell me.’
The shock was fading. Elessi remembered the dagger in her belt and decided she didn’t need guards. ‘And it’s cost us far too much,’ she said, drawing her blade and stepping at him.
Loki looked disappointed. Hurt, even. ‘I come here in peace.’
‘I fucking don’t.’
Before she could get within arm’s reach, the god folded into nothing with a crackle of light.
The voice came from behind her moments later, further down the bulwark. ‘Your anger is completely understandable, but as I said, I am here to offer a truce. No tricks. I should like to speak terms.’
Elessi shook her head. ‘Your words are weapons enough.’
‘Give me a moment of your time,’ Loki hissed to her, ‘and it may just save Farden’s life.’
Elessi cursed. ‘You’d best speak quickly and simply, god. Before I stab you myself.’
‘My my. You’ve found some spirit sin
ce Scalussen, I see. I am almost impressed.’
She held the knife at the level of his throat.
‘You and your armada can’t survive these seas.’ Loki looked around at the dilapidated state of the deck. ‘That’s plain enough from your. struggle.’
‘Which is because of you. You summoned those monsters.’
Elessi saw Loki’s patience wither for an intriguing and satisfying moment.
‘Save yourselves,’ he snapped. Carve a space from Paraia for yourselves here in this fine land, and I will be gracious enough and allow you to live,’ He sounded proud to Elessi. If for no other reason, she could immediately understand why Farden loathed this creature.
‘You seem to be really likin’ this job of ruling,’ she tutted, remembering Towerdawn’s words on greed, and how even gods weren’t immune.
Loki flashed a wolfish smile. ‘I am a god, am I not? The only one upon the land in flesh and blood. That’s why I have the power to promise you safe haven. No rest until freedom, was your battle cry. And look, here is freedom,’ Loki spread his hand across the black seas, etched with moonlight. ‘Here you can rest. The world is bigger than you know, Elessi. Forge your new Krauslung or Scalussen, or whatever you wish to call it, here in these warm lands. I bet you are bored of ice, no? Save your people from a worse fate on these harsh seas. In return, I will call back the remaining leviathan and, as promised, ensure Farden’s safe return to you. You will have your king back. Your leader. More or less whole, but alive.’
‘How generous of you. How can you promise that?’
‘I have the ear of both the daemons and Krauslung. I can guarantee it. I may have set a certain interested party on his tail.’
‘What do you mean, interested party?’
‘Interested in removing Farden’s head from his body, that is.’
‘Gremorin,’ Elessi guessed. The name still bored a hole in her mind most nights.
But Loki chuckled. ‘My, no. Although the prince sends his regards, even Gremorin withers in its presence. And your dear mage Farden? Well, I’m afraid even he would not survive such an encounter either. But if you give up your journey, stay out of my way, I can intervene on Farden’s behalf.’
