by P D Ceanneir
Havoc and those around him leant closer to the captain as he spoke, interest in the story evidently showed on their faces.
‘So where would she wake up?’ asked the prince.
‘Always at the Gateway of Life,’ said Carbaum. ‘That was when she named herself Nicbetha; in her language it meant Daughter of Life.’
‘But how could she have a language when she was found so young?’ asked Thane Garnet, the light from the fire shining in his wide brown eyes.
‘She spoke in another tongue from the moment she was found and she had memories of her own people. Whenever anyone asked her about them though she would frown and not speak about it.’
‘It was about that time she started showing signs of her power. She was able to see the future, move objects at will and read people’s minds,’ said Mannheim.
‘She was a Rawn then?’ asked Velnour.
‘No, quite the contrary. While the Rawn controls the elements from out-with the body, the Nicbetha seemed to control them from within her mind. She could see your thoughts without touching you, and move heavy objects without the Wind Element; she told my ancestors that it was a spiritual ability. The old shamans of the eastern foothills that fringe the Mubean Flats have a name for it – “Witch”.’
Carbaum sighed, ‘then she grew older and started healing the sick,’ he said, ‘and everyone thought she was a goddess come to bring us to the Hall of Whispers. Even Jannol was besotted with her and they became lovers, betrothed as he was to another. Controversy spread about them, which nearly undermined his power when he became the new Sernac, so he spurned her, which broke her heart. She found solace in the arms of another, a man called Erith, who was a cousin to Jannol and a rival.
‘Jannol became enraged at the lovers and had Erith assassinated. The Nicbetha was so distraught she fled the town and it was said found a way to step safely onto the shores of Mortkraxnoss.’
‘How did she do that?’ asked Lord Ness.
‘Well she didn’t arrive in the casket all those years ago empty handed, she brought with her an amulet made of the strangest material. Only she could wear it, because it would become white hot when anyone else touched it.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Powyss, ‘was it this Talisman of Mortkraxnoss, yes?’
‘Correct. She was gone for many years and when she returned to Ternquin she was older and far lovelier that anyone could imagine, she told my people that she learnt many great and terrifying secrets while on the Isle of the Dead and touched the Gredligg Orrinn itself. Jannol wanted her back, but she refused his advances. Therefore, if he could not have her then he could have her secrets. Therefore, he used his army to take the talisman forcibly from her. They succeeded, but incurred her wrath, because she did something too terrible to behold.’
‘What did she do?’ inquired Havoc.
‘She raised the dead,’ said Carbaum. ‘All the graves in our cemeteries and ancient burial mounds were opened up from the inside. The rotting corpses of all our long dead families descended upon the town and killed many, who then became re-animated as well and walked with them. The Nicbetha never got back the talisman, because Jannol was the only one who knew where it was hidden and he died as he was overwhelmed by the multitude of the dead. Ironically, it was the corpse of Erith who plunged a dagger into his heart.
‘When Jannol died, the Nicbetha released her hold on the dead and allowed them their peace. She then disappeared, it was later we found out that she had made a palace for herself in the mountains. It was about that same time we discovered the secret hiding place of the talisman, in the heart of the Ternquin Tree.’
‘Then the Ri arrived,’ said Mannheim with a little too much venom in his voice. ‘He knew the whereabouts of the talisman and ventured off to find the Ice Palace on his own. The next thing we knew he sent the Ice Drake to steal it from us.’
‘Gonliss Ri must have had good reason to call a dragon and take the talisman,’ said Lord Ness. ‘Summoning dragons is a lost art and has been forbidden since the days of the Dragor-rix. I cannot believe he would flaunt his abilities like this. It is not our way. Why would he interfere?’
‘He has been bewitched by the beauty of the Nicbetha.’
‘Surely she must be very old by now?’ asked Havoc.
‘One hundred and fifty years old, give or take a decade or two,’ said Carbaum.
‘A mature dame then,’ said Furran, which got a laugh.
‘She will not die,’ said Mannheim, ‘for she has already foretold her own end, and that is the strangest enigma of all.’
‘What enigma?’ Havoc asked.
‘She said that the Son of Death himself will take her life.’
Havoc’s mouth dropped open in stunned surprise. Both Lord Ness and Powyss turned to look at him with the same expression.
‘One should never ignore prophecy,’ said Ness Ri.
…“She said the Son of Death would take her life…take her life…her life…life.” Mannheim’s voice followed him into sleep and into another strange dream. The Archward’s voice echoed and dissipated as he stood on the beach. The Blacksword looked around him. In the distance, the remnants of a storm still flashing sheet lightening inside black clouds, but above his head, the clouds were broken and shifting away with the strong breeze. He could still feel the storms elemental energy as it tingled on his pale skin.
She was there, standing on rocks with the tide retreating behind her. She stood barefoot, wearing that blue gossamer dress that floated around her against the breeze. Her blonde hair danced around her like a halo of gold.
The Blacksword felt a short snap of anger at her summoning him into a dream once again, yet he allowed it to continue, knowing that he could end it with a force of will if he wished.
‘Why have you brought me here?’ he asked her.
The Nicbetha said nothing. She pointed to a group of spikey rocks below her. The Blacksword was there in an instant as the dream shifted. He looked behind the rocks to see a large wooden casket banded in steel, similar to a sailor’s sea chest, but the wood was smooth with very little ingrained rings and it glittered in the damp sunlight.
‘Ternquin Wood,’ said the Nicbetha, ‘strong light and waterproof.’
The Blacksword reached for the clasp, unlatched it and pushed open the lid. The hinges did not squeak.
Inside was a ball of light. He lifted up his hand to cover his eyes, but the light soon faded to reveal a small female baby sound asleep. She was naked with just a large five-pointed star clutched in her podgy hands and the silver chain around her neck. The star points had etched Skrol symbols and a large sapphire set into its centre.
‘You witness my re-birth, one of many,’ said the Nicbetha informally.
‘I don’t understand. Why are you showing me this?’
The child in the casket opened her eyes to reveal the brightest azure that regarded him with playful humour. She spoke in the Nicbetha’s voice.
‘In time you will…Son of Death.’
The dream shifted again.
He stood in a shattered landscape of smashed houses and splintered trees. All around him the horizon was taken up by a high wall of black clouds; a hurricane. He stood with the older Nicbetha inside the storm’s eye.
‘Where are we?’ he asked.
‘We are in the aftermath of a great battle between my people. The first and the last. Those that lost went into exile.
‘The Elemental War?’
She shook her head, ‘No, this was a different conflict.’
‘What was the battle about?’
‘Evolution.’
The Blacksword regarded her with a frown. The girl’s face etched in sadness, but her jaw was set in grim determination.
‘Many of us wished to aid the My’thos in their Great Plan, few of us resisted the need to change. Those that sided with the Old Gods were triumphant.’ She lifted her arm and pointed in front of her. ‘See, the plan unfolds.’
Suddenly, the smashed landscape fille
d with people; at least, that is how the Blacksword perceived them. They looked transparent, insubstantial forms floating in a circle causing a miniature tornado to form around them. Inside the tornado a blue light emitted as the vortex spun faster and shot through the spinning spirits with rods of bright light, this caused the revenants to scatter into the dark clouds in the distance.
The Talisman of Mortkraxnoss hung in the air. The blue stone in it’s centre pulsed and the silver of the star glinted as it slowly spun on its axis.
The Nicbetha walked forward, plucked it from the air, and then placed it around her neck.
‘The stone in the centre is not a sapphire,’ informed the Nicbetha, ‘but Glammerstone. There are few powers in the world that could manipulate God Metal so. Pyromantic Energy is one; the power of the human spirits is another.’
The Blacksword found himself reaching out for the talisman and the Nicbetha stepped backwards with a chuckle.
‘Not yet, Son of Death.’
‘You keep calling me that, why?’
‘Death is a constant state, so too is Life. We two are cause and effect, offspring to order and chaos. We are what the My’thos wished us to be.’
‘We play a part in the grand scheme of things?’ said the Blacksword who was beginning to understand.
‘A part in the Great Plan? Yes, we very much do.’
She turned and walked away from him. The dream was disappearing.
‘Wait. Where are you going?’ he found he was unable to follow her.
‘We will be together soon,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘but in order for that to happen, you have to kill me.’
Chapter Ten
The Ice Palace
T
ia stroked Mirryn’s chest feathers as the kite roosted on a makeshift perch in the corner of Tyban’s bunkroom. Chichi, the Lemur, dozed quietly in his cage; the gentle sway of the Cybeleion’s movement through the sky lulled him into a safe slumber. Tia was amazed he could sleep with the cacophony of noise that filled the first officer’s bunk. Every square foot of the surrounding walls had shelves filled with small wooden cages. Inside the cages things chirped, squawked, or chattered in despair at their manmade prisons. Tyban’s love for all manner of strange animals that he had collected on their travels was turning his room into an exotic Sonoran zoo.
Beyond the noise of the animals was a constant scratching sound of quill on parchment as Tyban catalogued his collection.
‘Sometimes I think you are in the wrong job, Tyban,’ said Tia.
‘Well I can’t help finding these animals fascinating,’ said Tyban without looking up. ‘Is it our turn for the deck watch already?’
‘Uh, huh,’ Tia nodded.
Tyban sighed and finished off his writing with a flourish. He wiped his inky hand on a rag and stood up from his desk.
‘Captain Danyil may be a tad overcautious when he doubles the watches. Are you sure the prince was correct about those Vallkyte Sky Ships?’
Tia turned to him as she opened his bunk door. ‘He has never been wrong, so far.’ They had sailed to the south then east in the early evening, skirting the coast and hugging the mountains, wary of the Ice Drake if he should appear again, but there was no sign of the creature. “Sent to lick its wounds,” said the ship’s doctor, Zabel, without much enthusiasm.
Once on deck, they acknowledged their arrival and handover of deck-watch to the previous watch who waved a goodbye as they went below decks to shelter from the snow that was now falling heavily all over the land and the air as they sailed through its thick clustering flakes.
‘Thought my days of deck walking in bad weather were over,’ said Tyban as he pulled his furs closer around him.
‘It could be worse, I suppose,’ said Tia.
‘How could this be worse?’
‘You could be halfway up a frozen mountain with the prince,’ she said with a sigh, still annoyed at the prince’s refusal for her to go along with his group.
‘Good point. Remind me never to be selfish again.’
The next day’s trek was harder than the first. They made slow progress around the mountain. With the ice and snow all around, it was easy for them to lose their footing. By the time the sun was at it’s peak, blurry behind the snow-heavy clouds, they exited the woods and were out in the open wind-blasted slope for the final push.
Despite the narrowness of the path and the sheer vertical mass of the mountain on their left, Havoc had the men march in column. Being out in the open made him feel exposed to the eyes of the Ice Drake and he wanted them easily prepared to defend themselves in case of attack.
As the long trudge along the ever-rising hill continued, they came across another obstacle that made their hearts sink. A vertical wall of ice, stretching up into the low flurry of snow, blocked their path. Quickly, and without any argument from the others, Furran claimed he was the better climber and volunteered to scale the ice. Gunach, the master of the crow’s-nest, was not to be out done in this endeavour, and so stepped up beside Furran. Both man and dwarf equipped themselves with pick axes, ropes and specially made spiked crampon boots that Carbaum gave them.
The two took a while to find their footing yet progressed steadily as they found their pace. Daylight was waning fast by the time the group lost sight of them beyond the snow flurries fifty feet up the ice wall. Little Kith took to shouting up to Furran in a deep booming voice, which to Havoc made him sound overly concerned for his friend even though he was only checking if they were making further progress. After a time, there was no reply to Kith’s calls.
‘They’re fine,’ said Havoc to Little Kith and a few others that looked worried. ‘They’re just out of earshot.’
‘Besides, if they weren’t alright we would see them as a blur when they lost the battle against gravity,’ Powyss quipped, which did not help the situation, but lightened the mood a little.
Havoc’s mood was anything but light. The moment he woke that morning something about the story Carbaum and Mannheim told them about the Nicbetha made it all sound so familiar; not to Havoc, but to the Blacksword. There were many aspects of the tale so enchanting to the Blacksword that he became an annoying itch at the back of the prince’s head; when Havoc queried him about it, all he received with silence.
As the night fell, a cold blue light emanated over the ice wall casting everything in a strange synthetic glow. When Lord Ness asked Carbaum about its origin, the captain said, ‘it is the glow from the ice palace itself, I believe it comes from its structure.’
At that moment, there was a surprised shout from Little Kith when several ropes appeared from the darkness to hang down the cliff. In groups of fours and fives, the men climbed the icy rock, slowly at first, but as they climbed, the face of the cliff inclined a little and this made it far easier to scale. What took Furran and Gunach most of the evening to climb, the rest of them did in a minutes. Although exhilarated at completing the climb, most of them had aching arms and thighs.
A man in a snow crusted fur hood met Havoc as he reached the top. Furran grabbed his hand and hauled him the rest of the way up. As the prince lay on his back on flat soft snow gasping for breath, he heard Furran chuckle.
‘I would love to say we have some hot herbal tea brewing in our camp, but I can’t, because Gunach forgot the tinder and flints,’ he said with a smile.
‘Damn! That is a pity,’ said Havoc, ‘the one thing that was keeping me going was the herbal tea.’
‘Well false hope is better than nothing I suppose.’ Furran helped him up. ‘Gunach is up ahead, Boss. Follow the light; you are not going to believe what you see.’
Intrigued, Havoc stumbled through the snow and saw other Paladins and Falesti in front of him. Then suddenly the bank of thick snowflakes disappeared behind him as if he had walked through some sort of invisible barrier and he gasped at what he saw.
Crystalline structures of ice, like hexagonal spikes, jutted upwards from the ground at odd angles. Each formation had smaller icy protrusion
s sprouting from them like tree branches that formed into a twinkling petrified forest, there were literary thousands of them littering the flat level ground in front of him. However, there were other structures inside the forest, thick and stumpy, although slightly taller and wider than a man. As Havoc drew closer, he could see darker shapes inside.
‘It’s a graveyard,’ said Thane Garnet standing in front of a group of his infantrymen. ‘The Ice Drake has been busy.’
Havoc peered into one of the ice columns and saw a face of a long dead warrior or adventurer, his shrunken body was pale white and the face had collapsed inward as the pressure of the frozen ice had pushed against the emaciated head.
‘That is not an honourable way to die,’ said Gunach, who had come trotting back from the centre of the forest. ‘There are dwarves, three of them, up ahead that suffered the same fate. Their armour style is over fifty years old.’
‘The Ice Palace, did you see it?’ Havoc asked.
‘Yes it’s on the other side of this forest; it’s also the source of the light.’
Dark shadows cast irregular shapes of the ice trees on the snow plain as the blue light from the palace cut through the forest. Snow crunched underfoot as the soldiers followed Gunach’s back and the trees got thicker and ever larger so the group were forced to split up in order to walk through in the forest in individual routes.
On the other side of the forest, the bright blue glow of the palace revealed massive walls of ice on top of which was the palace itself. Huge columns of the ice angled inwards to form a high arch many feet in height. The size and complex structure of the palace reflected the glow through a layered ice roof, transparent as glass, which enhanced the light that to cast it all around. The strange properties of the ice palace were hypnotising.
In the end, it was much like any normal castle or fortress, complete with windows, battlements, and parapets. It even had gargoyle ice sculptures jutting out of the roof edging. The palace’s surface texture was like a ripple of clear water frozen in time.
