by Ben Galley
Lilith frowned, and took a sip of the brackish tea she was clutching between her cold knees. She looked up from her befuddled stones and stared at the day. The mist still clung fervently to the daylight, like a ghost clutching at the unravelling threads of life. The sun had just woken from its slumbers and was sitting nonchalantly on the hazy horizon. It would be a hot day, as far as Emaneska was concerned. Sleepy insects were already beginning to buzz. In the distance, somewhere in the stubborn fog, near to the outskirts of the foreign little town, cows lowed.
Lilith shuffled around to look at her seerstones from a different direction, but that only deepened her frown. She muttered something and pushed the stones away with the back of her hand. The fire beside her had burnt out in the early hours. It was now a ring of charcoal and smoking twigs. The green-wood spit that hung over it sported the carcass of a huge water rat. It was mostly bones and emptiness now, something for the crows to pick at. She could hear them in the edges of the pine forest, a little way to the south. Bored, Lilith sipped her tea and waited.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to wait long. Barely half an hour later, Samara trudged out of the fog and crouched by the dead fire. She didn’t speak. She simply dug two fingers into the cold innards of the water rat and prized out some meat that had been missed. She stuffed the greasy strands into her mouth and chewed silently. Her face was a frown.
Lilith looked at her hands, her pockets, and all around her. There was barely a speck of blood on her hands. ‘Where is it then?’
Samara ignored the question. She stared at the weak, yellow morning sun and frowned some more.
In the years that had passed, Samara had grown into a wiry, lithe little figure. A frame of bones and skin on tall legs. Those foolish enough to judge her by her skinny form, those who had even tried to take advantage of it, had quickly found themselves the new owner of a broken something, or worse. For her age and size, Samara was unnaturally strong and painfully quick. Not that she was anywhere close to natural. Her whole being seemed to vibrate on a different level from those around her, even Lilith. That was the magick at play.
Samara’s obsidian hair was now braided in places, knotted in others. Her eyes, those dangerous little orbs, could never decide on which colour was their favourite. Like her moods, they were unpredictable and ever-changing, morphing from a piercing ice-blue to a deep sapling-green with a flick of her eyelashes. Those young eyes hid an animal behind them; stained glass windows through which a brave person could glimpse a monster drenched in magick, and when coupled with her seemingly-innocent tongue they could weave lies alongside the best of them, just like Lilith had shown her. And Lilith had shown her very well.
Lilith crossed her legs and entwined her fingers. She narrowed her eyes at her young charge. ‘I’m talking to you, girl. Where is his Book?’
Samara rolled her eyes. ‘He was a fake, Lilith. His key tattoos were cheap imitations.’
Lilith scowled. She had been wrong again. ‘Well, didn’t you follow him beforehand? Didn’t you watch him?’
‘Of course I did,’ asserted Samara, growing angry. ‘You’re the one who showed me him.’
‘Well it’s your responsibility to make sure of it! You obviously didn’t look close enough.’
‘I don’t see why it matters. Another mage is dead. So what if he wasn’t a Written?’
Lilith held up her hand for silence. Samara reluctantly bit her tongue. The seer rubbed her eyes with her good hand and sighed. Samara watched her mentor closely. The more she looked, the more she could see the years eating away at her, like a mould slowly seeping into her skin. Her cheeks and brows were beginning to sag. Grey was beginning to infiltrate her once-dark hair. Her left arm was wilting again. Samara knew what this meant. ‘Where next then?’ she asked.
Lilith cracked open an eye to stare at the three seerstones that were still lying in the dirt. It was a while before she answered. ‘I don’t know,’ she hissed, pained.
‘You’re losing it.’
‘I ‘aven’t lost anything!’ Lilith snapped, whirling around to face Samara. The young girl didn’t flinch. It had been a month since they had killed their last Written. Last night’s had been a fake and the other two hadn’t even existed. ‘The questions are… difficult. Ambiguous. Just as your magick clouds your future, the world’s magick clouds my stones. They’re confused,’ she muttered. Samara rolled her eyes. Either Lilith’s seerstones were failing, or she was. Samara offered an explanation to calm the seer down. Not that she cared, but she couldn’t stand her when she was in one of her foul moods. It wasted her time.
‘Then maybe we’ve killed them all,’ she shrugged.
Lilith’s mouth curled. ‘Don’t be foolish, girl. I don’t recall killin’ an Arkmage, or that bastard Farden. Do you? Please inform me if I missed those wondrous occasions.’
Samara stood up. Lilith might have flinched then, but she hid it well by shuffling closer to her seerstones. She looked away from the girl and prodded the red stone by her sandal. ‘Where are you goin’?’
‘Why don’t you ask your stones?’
‘Don’t give me that lip, girl,’ Lilith warned. Samara was becoming more and more recalcitrant with every week that passed. The seer couldn’t tell if it was boredom, or sheer petulance, or maybe her father’s streak rearing its ugly head. Whatever it was, Lilith didn’t like it. She wouldn’t have ever voiced it aloud, but she also feared it. ‘Where you off to?’
A reluctant answer floated out of the mist. ‘For a walk.’
Lilith cupped her hand around her mouth and shouted after it. ‘Well, be quick about it. I want t’ move on before the day is wasted!’ There was no reply. Lilith put her chin on her hand and took a deep breath.
Samara followed a thin trail of scuffs and hoof-prints through the brown dust. A collage of tracks wove in and out of her feet. Some were the cloven horn shapes of cows. Others sported the faint pinpricks of claws. Foxes probably. Samara tilted her head, and the soft clucking of chickens and geese reached her ears. Her stomach rumbled at the noise, but she swiftly slapped it into silence.
Through the misty haze and low cloud, the early sun could be stared at without squinting. Still lingering just above the horizon, it was a humble yellow ball, yet to bring any heat to the earth or pain to the eyes. Samara could simply watch it, daring it to do its worst.
The air was deathly still. Not a single breeze nor zephyr disturbed the morning air. It would have been stifling, had it been any warmer.
Samara wandered on towards the animal sounds of the farm and the town hiding in the mist, somewhere up ahead. While she walked, she scanned the dusty, grassless ground, looking for something in particular. Whatever it was, it wasn’t to be found.
Samara soon came across a dry-stone wall that had seen better and more attentive times. Slumped and spilled in places, the wall was clogged with moss and mouse-droppings. Behind it lay a dust field dotted with tough grass and the odd woven basket of pale hay. Large shadows lumbered about in the fog. They mooed and dug at the dust with their hoofs. Samara dug her toe into the wall and swiftly vaulted it, landing with a light thud.
The cows quickly sensed the presence of something in their field, something very strange indeed. As a thin shape emerged from the mist, striding nonchalantly towards them, the patchwork beasts began to low fearfully. She oozed danger, and they could smell it. Luckily for them, cows were not what she was after. The girl paid them nothing but a sideways glance as they bowed their heads and quickly cantered to another corner of the field.
The chickens, on the other hand, were not so lucky.
Samara followed the sound of the muted clucking and burbling to a tumbledown hen-house that stood by a wooden gate. She crouched beside it and scraped a handful of dirt from the ground. A few sleepy hens stood on the little ramp that sloped from their raised door down to the earth. A few feathers sat like a rune at the foot of it. A smattering of blood lay in the dirt, an accidental blotch of scarlet ink, the signature of a fox
. But chickens were not known for their lengthy memories. They had already forgotten their lost comrade and the red-haired predator, and were now staring at the unfamiliar girl crouching by their house with a mixture of curious intrigue and hunger.
Samara held out her hand, cupped as though full of grain, and offered it to the stupid birds. The docile creatures were used to humans handing them food, and quickly came down the ramp to investigate. It was the last mistake they ever made. In a flash, Samara seized two of them by their necks and spun them around in a circle until their necks snapped with a loud squawk. She was back at the drystone wall before their feathers had fallen to the dust.
Crouching behind the wall, Samara found a length of twine in her pocket and used it to tie the two chickens together. She slung them over her shoulder and followed the wall to its crumbled corner. Pausing there, she flicked a feather from her leather sleeve and looked around. There was a dirt road a few yards away that no doubt led into the town. Samara looked right, towards the town, and then left, where the road sloped gently up a small hill, and where a dark shape hovered high in the mist. She gazed at it, trying to make it out, but it was just a shapeless blotch in the morning haze. Curiosity piqued, Samara went to investigate.
It took a moment for its features and edges to loom into clarity, but once it did, Samara stood underneath it, and let her eyes rove over its greasy hinges, its rusty bolts and locks, its spikes and its bars.
It was a gibbet, suspended high over the road by a sturdy pole and a moss-covered beam choked by iron chain. It looked as though it had seen ten thousand dawns in its time; its iron cage was half-rusted away and tired, while the wood it hung from was grey with age. Cracks ran up and down the pole like thin veins of coal in a granite face.
There was a skeleton inside the gibbet, a crow-picked and weather-bitten frame of bones. It was easy to see the man had been dead for a decade. Whatever flesh its cracked armour had once protected was now long gone. Even the maggots had moved on. The armour itself, bent and buckled, a memory of polished steel now washed moon-grey by rain and time, was that of an old Skölgard soldier. Samara recognised its style. Even though the empire had fallen, some men and women still clung to their old life, in the way that the lost do. Here, in the remnants of old Skölgard lands, now dubbed the Crumbled Empire, some still wore their old armour and their memories on their chests. Depending on which way the empire had crumbled, some towns and lands didn’t mind the relics, while others despised them. This man, now staring hollow-eyed at the sleepy sun, had obviously stumbled across the wrong town.
Samara reached up to rock the gibbet. Its chains and bars squealed like a strangled cat. The dawn was creeping into day, and a blunt glow was beginning to caress the wooden beams. Something glinted at the girl’s feet and she looked down to find a muddy puddle. It held the reflection of the gibbet in it, making it wobble and waver slightly. Samara smiled. Tossing her dead chickens to one side, she quickly knelt down in the dirt.
She put her finger in the puddle and swirled it around curiously, watching the mud dance underneath the rippled surface. The water was cold, despite the dawn sun. Samara put her elbows on her knees and waited for the water to calm again, for the reflection to grow still and mirror-like once more, and when it had, something rather disturbing happened.
The girl watched intently, not a sign of fear or surprise on her face as the reflection of the gibbet began to move. There was a squeak of rusty chains as something twitched above her. Bones clicked. The skeleton reached up to push its jawbone back into place and then wriggled it about, testing, trying. Had it a tongue, it would have licked its jagged line of broken teeth to wet them. With a rattle and a whine of metal, the skeleton looked down, and slowly sank to its knees. It stared, still empty-eyed and very much dead, through the gaps in its cage at the young girl in the puddle’s reflection. Samara leant forward to greet it.
‘Where are you?’ said the dead thing, in a breathy voice that slithered over its weathered bones and climbed the bars of the gibbet, dripping, seeping.
‘North, near the border of what used to be Vorhaug,’ replied Samara, calm as could be.
The skeleton waved its bony hand. Its teeth chattered as it tested and prodded its jaw again. ‘What of the seer? She prays to us no longer,’ it hissed.
Samara frowned. ‘She’s… distracted.’
‘By what, indeed?’
‘By her problems.’
The skeleton squinted. Its eye-sockets cracked and splintered. ‘The stones again?’ it said. The tone of its voice was growing angry.
Samara nodded. ‘She says her questions are too… am… ambiguous. The stones are confused, she says.’
The skeleton grumbled to itself. ‘How many have you shown your knife to now?’
‘Twenty-four Written. A dozen other mages.’
‘And how many remain?’
Samara shrugged.
The skeleton reached down and jabbed its finger at the girl. ‘Dare to shrug at me? Give me numbers, girl!’
Samara bowed her head. ‘A score, perhaps thirty. Three that we know of for sure. The Undermage and captain of the Written, the Arkmage, and of course, him.’
The skeleton sniffed. The bones around its dead nostrils shivered. ‘Powerful as we are growing, we still cannot see Farden, just as the seer cannot. Something hides his magick. But something tells me he will be unwilling to stand in your way. Do not worry about him.’
‘I wasn’t, though Lilith says I should fear the Arkmages, especially my father’s brother, Ruin.’
‘You have the blood of both, and therefore are stronger than both, child. Ignore the seer. We continue with the plan.’
‘And once you fall…?’
The skeleton waved its hand. ‘You will not be alone.’
The girl nodded to the puddle.
‘How do you feel?’
Samara looked up at the mist for a while. The skeleton above her creaked and sighed, impatiently waiting for her answer. She finally gave it. ‘Ready.’
‘Then you have wasted enough time stalking mages in the shadows. It is time. Don’t let the seer delay you any more.’ The skeleton sagged slightly, as whatever magick that was animating its lifeless bones began to drain away. ‘And child?’
‘Yes?’
The skeleton slumped into a heap at the bottom of the gibbet. The voice wafted into the misty air, echoing in her mind. ‘If the seer continues to prove herself useless, or stands in your way, you may remove her.’
Samara pulled a face, not quite a wince, but not quite anything else. ‘Of course,’ she replied. After a while, she got to her feet and stood in the puddle, looking up at the slumped, broken skeleton hanging above her head. One of its feet had slipped through the gaps in the bars and dangled in the air. Samara reached up and flicked it with her finger. One of the toes broke off and flew into the mist. With an amused hum, the girl grabbed the foot by its ankle and wrenched it downwards. As the skeleton’s foot came loose, the gibbet and its frame exploded into countless splinters, spraying the dirt road with molten iron and charred wood. The skeleton and its armour were vaporised in a cloud of fire and smoke. As the chaos cleared, Samara, completely untouched, walked calmly away, two smoking chickens slung over her shoulder.
When she returned to the little camp, Lilith was still sitting cross-legged in the dust. She was nudging her stones back and forth with her knuckle. At the sound of footsteps she looked up. ‘Finally,’ she hissed.
Two chickens landed on her lap in reply. Lilith lifted them up. She squinted at where their feathers were slightly charred. ‘So that’s what that bloody noise was. You want to watch yourself, girl. You’ll draw attention to us.’
‘So what?’
‘What do you mean?’ snapped Lilith, swivelling around to face the girl. ‘You know…’
Samara remained standing ‘We’ve wasted enough time hunting Written in the dark. It’s time.’
‘I decide when it’s time.’
‘No, Lilith,
you don’t. We’re leaving tonight. Krauslung’s time is up.’
Lilith slapped the dirt, making her stones wobble. ‘There are more Written left, not to mention Ruin, Modren, and Tyrfing. And Farden. And not just them either, there are other mages in that city, Written, and Siren wizards no doubt!’
‘I’m ready for them.’
‘Are you? You might be able to take down a single mage, but what about ten at a time, twenty, fifty? They’ll swarm you. They’ve grown stronger now too, you know that.’
‘As have I.’
‘There’s only one of you.’
Samara lifted her chin. ‘Well, it won’t just be me, will it?’
Lilith spat. ‘You think you’re ready for that? You’ve barely seen fifteen years pass by, and you think you’re ready? Fool of a girl! We’re going north, so pack your things.’
Samara stepped forward and grabbed the old seer by her hair. Lilith yelped and screamed, lashing out with a handful of sharp fingernails. Samara lifted her from the dust and held her in mid-air. She ignored the fingers clawing at her long hair. ‘We’re going south,’ she said. ‘It’s time I did what I’m supposed to do. You’ve had your fun.’
With a snarl, Lilith wrenched herself free and stood, fuming and fearful, beside the burnt-out fire. ‘Fine,’ she relented. ‘Fine.’
In the pocket of her tunic, Samara relaxed her grip on the little knife.
Moodily, Lilith sat back down and picked up her three stones. Samara sat opposite her and put a hand in the dead coals of the fire. They quickly came back to life, and after adding a few more scraps of wood and removing the carcass of the water rat, the spit was soon rotating over a crackling fire, sporting a freshly-plucked chicken.
Lilith had said nothing since their brief argument. She was still staring at her seerstones and silently begging them to make sense. Samara watched her as she fiddled with the spit. The girl pitied her in a way. Sometimes, in the dark depths of a wine-sodden evening, Lilith would occasionally let stories slip from her drink-stained lips. Samara would listen to the seer rant about her life and about its brief peaks and the more consistent troughs, about how she had lost her arm, about her stones and what they had whispered to her on stormy nights. A seer was never supposed to look at her own future, so she had said, but Lilith had been stupid enough to look. She had evaded that future ever since, living off wine and daemon blood, becoming twisted and bitter from both. Fate could be evaded, but not for long.
