Ghostfire

by Christopher Golden

  “This is … for me?” Verlis asked.

  Charna crossed her arms and gave him a solemn look. “It’s the very first thing we forged, from the first batch of Malleum the miners brought up. The very first thing. We wanted to make sure you knew that you’re not alone either. We stand together.”

  Then the woman held out a hand. Verlis did not know, at first, what the purpose of this gesture was. It took him a moment to realize she meant to shake on it, the way the mages did. He reached out his massive hand and took her tiny one in it, talons curling around her wrist.

  “You have my thanks,” he said.

  Then Verlis glanced around at all of those gathered there: friendly faces, grinning with pride in the work that they had done. He looked at Telford, who came over and clapped him on the back.

  “Try it on!” called one of the smiths, a young man, powerfully built, with a long beard.

  Verlis took the helmet from them, turned it over in his hands, taking a second merely to appreciate its beauty, and then he fit the metal helm over his head. The metal was still warm from having been inside the Forge building, so near the fires. The helmet sat up high enough from the top of his skull that his horns were not in the way. It was snug around his eyes and nostrils, so that he could see and breathe perfectly.

  “It is wonderful,” he said.

  Some of the smiths actually cheered. Charna and Walter congratulated them all on a job well done. They started talking excitedly among themselves, and then Charna began to herd them back into the Forge, getting them back to the important work they were doing. Some of them wished Verlis luck and waved. He raised a hand and waved back, the gesture unfamiliar and odd.

  Walter strode over to the massive door of the Forge with Charna and they were talking together, leaving him for a moment to himself.

  Verlis blinked in confusion.

  There was a strange hum inside the helmet. The metal itself seemed to be vibrating slightly, setting up a kind of harmonic tone, a ringing in his head. He started toward the building and it diminished some.

  Then he took several steps back, away from the Forge, and it increased.

  Verlis frowned. He swung around, peering out from within the warm metal. He moved several steps in one direction, then another, and another, testing a theory. In moments he had found that if he moved toward the village, the hum would increase its intensity.

  Leaving Walter behind, he unfolded his wings and sprang into the air, flying toward the village.

  But it wasn’t the village that was causing the hum.

  It was Alhazred’s Divide.

  Verlis hung in the sky, hovering as best he could several hundred feet above the village, wings beating the air. He stared at the crackling barrier of magic that stretched up to the heavens and to either side as far as he could see. Milky colors swirled in the fabric of that magic.

  The wall that separated two worlds.

  The barricade that even now he knew Raptus’s sorcerers were attempting to tear down from the other side.

  The hum in his helmet increased again, now a kind of trilling noise added to it. Verlis snorted fire. He had not moved closer, but the hum had grown.

  Verlis caught a scent on the breeze. A familiar smell. The scent of Draconae. He could almost feel that other world, and the presence of so many Wurm warriors, bent on the destruction of Terra and its mages. With that hum in his head and the way he sensed Draconae, so nearby, Verlis trembled with the sudden, alarming certainty that the barrier between worlds was growing thinner.

  Walter Telford and his miners and smiths would need to hurry.

  Even then, they might soon run out of time.

  SkyHaven ought to have been in chaos. Cassandra knew that. With the Grandmaster having attacked his primary aide and then having rushed to the Xerxis to attempt to murder the Voice of Parliament … the floating fortress should have been just as frantic as the wild beating of her heart. And yet it was not.

  She stood on a balcony at the front of the fortress, from which she could see the western wall and the spires of Arcanum beyond, as well as the courtyard below. Combat mages ran in quartets across the lawns toward stone stairs that would take them up the inner wall to the battlements, where they could watch for Leander Maddox’s return. They were trained to fight in groups, to use coordinated magical attacks. The Order of Alhazred combat mages were simultaneously among the most peaceable and the most capable in all the world.

  “Mistress Cassandra!”

  With a final glance at the sky above the mainland, searching for the sign of anyone approaching, Cassandra turned and left the balcony, stepping through wide-open doors onto a mezzanine that ran along the inner wall of the main entry hall of SkyHaven, high above the stone floor.

  A small group of acolytes stood awaiting instructions. One of Leander’s aides, a handsome mage with skin the color of rust, seemed to be in charge of them. But both the aide and the mages had turned at the sound of that voice. It belonged to Carlyle, and all of those gathered in the main hall seemed surprised by his arrival. The man’s face was flushed red and there was a quickly fading bruise on his forehead that seemed to change colors even as he strode across the hall to stand below the mezzanine, looking up at her.

  “Carlyle!” Cassandra said happily. She did not like the man very much, but found that she was very pleased to see him up and around. “I’m glad to see you looking well, but shouldn’t you be resting?”

  The stout, oh-so-proper man crossed his arms and arched an eyebrow. “After what happened earlier, do you honestly think I could rest?” he asked. Then, hearing the edge in his own voice, he stood a bit taller. “My apologies, Grandmaster. You’ll understand if I feel somewhat under stress. Forgive my tone.”

  Cassandra pushed her hair away from her face and smiled. “There is nothing to forgive. I see word of my tyranny has already reached you, however.”

  What happened next was a first in her experience. Carlyle actually laughed. “Indeed. And I applaud you, Mistress. You never did suffer fools, and now you’ve even less reason to do so.”

  The man had once been indispensable to her grandfather, and later to Leander, but she had never had the feeling he felt any fondness for her at all. Apparently, though, upon regaining consciousness Carlyle had swiftly learned of her asserting herself as Grandmaster and of her treatment of the acolyte who had questioned her. Why else would he call her Grandmaster?

  “Well, if you insist on being on your feet, sir, are you prepared to assume your duties as head of household once more?”

  “I am at your service, Grandmaster,” Carlyle replied, executing a short bow.

  “Excellent.”

  Cassandra strode along the mezzanine and came to a curving staircase that led down to the floor of the vast chamber. She bunched her robe in her hands and raised the hem several inches to avoid tripping, then started quickly downward. All along, her ears were attuned to listen to any sound from outside the fortress, any signal that trouble was afoot. But all seemed quiet for the moment.

  “You,” she said, nodding to the bronze-skinned aide who had herded the acolytes into the room and who had stood in silence with them, awaiting instructions. “Uriah, is it not?”

  “It is, Grandmaster,” replied the mage, inclining his head.

  Carlyle came to meet her at the bottom of the steps. The large bruise on his forehead had faded almost completely; only a small yellowed area remained to show where he had been struck. The Order’s healers had done their work quite well, as always.

  “Well, then, Uriah,” Cassandra said, “take this group down to the aerie. Search for Ivar there. Most other areas of the fortress have already been assigned search parties, so presuming you find no sign of Ivar there, you’ll have quite a task ahead of you. I’ll want someone to examine the open window in the base of SkyHaven, in the center of the Aerie, and then the underside of the island, as well as the waters below, for any sign that he might have left the fortress through that passage, either of his own
accord or through sinister means.”

  Uriah signaled to the acolytes to follow. As one, they touched their foreheads in a gesture of respect and hurried from the hall through an arched doorway in the northeastern corner.

  “You seem to be taking to your new role with little difficulty,” Carlyle said.

  Cassandra sighed heavily and shook her head. “It’s an illusion, I’m afraid. Now that we no longer have an audience, I can confess that much. I hope you’re well enough for me to lean on you a bit.”

  “How may I help?”

  “Supervise the search for Ivar, please. I want to go out to the wall to speak with the captain of the—”

  They were interrupted by the most welcome sound Cassandra had ever heard, the heavy flapping of wings and the cawing of a rook. Her eyes went wide, and she spun to look up at the mezzanine where she had been standing only moments earlier. The black bird darted in through the open balcony doors and circled the entire chamber.

  “Caw! Caw! Cassandra, there you are! We need a sky carriage!” Edgar called, his voice shrill. The rook’s wings fluttered, and he came to rest atop a bust of Alhazred that sat upon a small table near the bottom of the stairs she had just descended.

  Cassandra felt her heart skip a beat, her breath catching in her throat, and she could not suppress the grin that spread across her face. “You’ve found them, Edgar? Is Tim … are they all right?”

  The bird shuddered, feathers ruffling, and flew from the small statue to the banister of the stairs. He cocked his head and looked at Carlyle, black eyes gleaming with distrust, then back at Cassandra.

  “They’re fine, babe. Trust me on that. But they’ve got dark tales to tell from this trip. Leander’s gone crazy, but there’s more than that. We’ve got a prisoner: Constable Grimshaw. He was hunting them out there, like he knew where they’d be, you understand? And he wasn’t alone. He had…” Once again, his feathers ruffled. “Well, maybe I’d better let the kid tell you.”

  Cassandra hesitated. Certainly she knew that Leander was not in his right mind, but this news about Grimshaw was dire. And what else was Edgar not saying?

  “Well, come on,” the rook cried. “They’re on horseback. Should be getting to the shore any minute now. Timothy sent me on ahead. They need transport—”

  “Enough!” Carlyle shouted.

  His voice echoed through the chamber.

  The bird cocked his head. “What’s your problem?”

  “The next time you speak to the Grandmaster with such impertinence, I’ll have you for blackbird pie,” Carlyle snapped.

  Edgar cawed and turned those gleaming eyes on Cassandra. “Grandmaster, huh? Well, looks like you’ve got a story of your own.”

  The horses should have been exhausted. Timothy himself was exhausted and his stallion had been doing all of the running. All he’d had to do was hang on, but even so, he was tired. He and Caiaphas rode side by side along an old trading road that hadn’t seen much traffic in recent years. There were trees to the east and a slowly rising hill to the west. Due north was Arcanum, and though the sky was fairly clear, they could not see even the tallest spires yet.

  They rode on, the horses’ hooves thundering on the hard-packed earth of the road.

  “Nearly there!” Caiaphas called to him.

  Timothy smiled, gritting his teeth against the wind that blew back his hair and caused his tunic to flutter at his back as he rose up off of the saddle. The Legion Nocturne were no ordinary mages. He had known this before, but riding one of their horses made him realize it all the more. Much as Lord Romulus would hate to admit it, Timothy probably had more in common with the Legion than any other mages on Terra. They lived in the wild and knew how to hunt. They relied on magic for a great deal, but not for everything, as so many mages did.

  “How’s our captive?” Caiaphas called, eyes sparking blue above his veil.

  The boy reined in his horse just a little and dropped back a few feet. A rope of blue mist trailed behind Caiaphas, back to a floating sphere of energy—the same levitation magic he used as a navigation mage. Inside that sphere lay an unconscious Constable Grimshaw. Or, at least, he appeared to be unconscious. His eyes were closed. Even in sleep, though, his features were contorted with hate, his Up curled up in spite.

  “Ha!” Timothy shouted, snapping the reins. The horse galloped faster, and soon he was beside Caiaphas again. “He’s still out.”

  “Or he’s pretending to be!” the navigation mage called, bouncing with the rhythm of the horse’s momentum.

  Timothy said nothing. Constable Grimshaw was too arrogant, too proud, to worry about being clever. If he had been conscious, Timothy was certain he would have been sneering at them and making pronouncements about their imminent doom at the hands of his master.

  The boy smiled at the thought.

  When he glanced ahead once more, he saw the tip of the Xerxis on the horizon like the brightest star in the sky. It was day, still, but the spire gleamed in the sun. With every step thereafter, more spires came into view. Arcanum had never really been home for Timothy, but he grinned with pleasure and relief, looking forward to visiting his ancestral home—his home—on August Hill again.

  Soon. First, though, he had to find out what had become of Leander, and what secrets Grimshaw was hiding.

  The road curved slightly eastward and, even as it did, the line of trees thinned out. Timothy caught the scent of the ocean on the breeze and then he could see glimpses of it through breaks in the trees. Another quarter mile and the trees stopped completely.

  Timothy pulled on the reins and the horse stopped. Caiaphas saw him dropping behind and followed suit. He seemed about to ask what the delay was about when he noticed Timothy staring out at the water.

  Caiaphas did the same.

  Timothy cantered slowly up beside him on the horse and together they gazed out across the water at SkyHaven, hanging proudly hundreds of feet above the whitecapped waves.

  The boy took a deep breath. So many terrible and wonderful things had happened in his short life, all connected to that floating fortress. But this time, he was not sure what he would find when he returned.

  “A carriage,” Caiaphas said.

  Timothy narrowed his gaze. It was so far away, he had not seen it at first. Now he spotted the sleek sky carriage gliding above the water toward the mainland.

  “Edgar found her quickly,” he said.

  Then he spurred his horse on, and he and Caiaphas rode hard for the bluff overlooking the ocean. A long cliff stood above a short, rocky coast where the ocean crashed on the shore. His heart beat in time with the horse’s hooves. As they rode, the sky carriage came nearer. Timothy glanced over his shoulder once more to make certain Grimshaw was still imprisoned, and when he looked back, the carriage was gently gliding toward the top of the bluff. The driver was clad in a veil and robes almost identical to those that Caiaphas wore.

  There were curtains across the windows.

  The carriage set down just a few moments before Timothy and Caiaphas rode onto the bluff. Twenty feet from the craft, the boy pulled the reins and drew the horse to a halt. He climbed down off of the saddle and tore his gaze from the carriage long enough to run a gentle hand along the snout of the beat.

  “Thank you,” he whispered to the horse. It nodded its heavy head as though it understood. “You’ll find your way back to Romulus, I’m sure.”

  The horse snorted in agreement.

  Timothy patted it on the side and shouted. “Ha!” The beast bolted, making a wide circle that took it daringly close to the edge of the cliff, and then it started back the way it had come. When the boy turned toward Caiaphas, he saw that the navigator had done the same. The horses trotted away together. The magical tether that sprang from Caiaphas’s hand seemed to have lengthened, but that sphere still hovered over the ground, and within it, Grimshaw did not move.

  “Welcome back.”

  His pulse quickened as he turned at the sound of that voice and saw Cassandra step
ping out of the sky carriage. In the sun, her red hair was a halo of fire and he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. Anyone so beautiful. The journey had been long and difficult and he was scraped and dirty, sore from the ride, and burdened with worry for Leander.

  In that moment, none of it mattered. Once, he would have hesitated, not knowing what to say to her. Now Timothy dragged his fingers through his hair, straightening it, and strode over to her.

  “Hello, Cassandra,” he said. A little laugh bubbled out of him, surprising him, and he shook his head. “Gods, you have no idea how good it is to see you.”

  Her green eyes widened and her pale skin flushed scarlet. Cassandra glanced away a moment and Timothy realized that this time she was the one who did not know what to say. It also occurred to him, standing there beside her on the bluff, that he had become noticeably taller since they had first met, so that he was now only a few inches shorter than she was. When they gazed at each other they were nearly eye-to-eye.

  “It’s good to see you as well,” she said. Her smile lingered for several moments, but then it disappeared, and her face was clouded with darker concerns. “I was … I was afraid I’d never see you again.”

  Cassandra reached out to take his hand. Timothy let his fingers touch hers. When Caiaphas approached, they broke that clasp, but he could still feel the warmth of her touch.

  “Excuse me, Timothy,” said the navigator. “Mistress Cassandra—”

  “Grandmaster, now, I’m afraid,” she said sadly.

  Timothy felt his heart clench. “You’re Grandmaster? Then, is Leander—?”

  “Alive,” she said quickly. “But…” Cassandra shook her head. “No, this is not the place. Let us return to SkyHaven, get Constable Grimshaw properly imprisoned, and then you shall hear it all.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Using a damp cloth and a pan of warm water, Timothy quickly washed the accumulated grime and dirt of his journey from his face and body. He wished he could have taken time to relax, to catch his breath, but that was a luxury that would be denied him until Leander was apprehended and Ivar’s whereabouts were discovered.