Dead Stars - Part One (The Emaneska Series)

by Ben Galley

  Durnus stood up and folded his hands calmly behind his back. Somehow, he stared directly at the councillor, something which Malvus found incredibly disturbing. ‘None required, Council Barkhart. Seeing as you are so charitable with your hard-earned coin, perhaps I can rely on you to help fund a new barracks for our prospective mages? As you are so very concerned with the advancement of our fine country?’

  Malvus narrowed his eyes. He was now stuck in a political corner, and a public one at that. He could do nothing but bow once again. ‘I will gladly discuss those arrangements with you in private, Arkmage Durnus,’ he muttered.

  ‘I am sure you will.’

  Tyrfing also stood up. He quickly descended from his throne. ‘Until tomorrow then, councillors,’ he shouted. The magick council, some two-hundred strong, began to filter out through the gilded doors at the entrance of the hall. Like a lumbering, many-legged beast, it talked to itself and chattered animatedly. Malvus and his little band of loyal followers held the rear. They were deep in hushed conversation. They huddled close as they walked away, like the poisonous spur on the tail of the council beast.

  Tyrfing, Modren, and Durnus remained behind. A few councillors came to bow and shake hands, some formal and polite, others overly eager to express their shared views. The Arkmages patiently heard each of them out and then thanked them graciously. They needed all the supporters they could get. It took half an hour for the great hall to empty.

  As soon as they were alone, Modren slumped back into the Underthrone. ‘Today was particularly trying.’

  ‘And you only had to suffer through a tiny slice of it,’ sniffed Tyrfing. He seemed so distracted at the moment. Modren knew better than to ask why. Durnus didn’t have to. Tyrfing coughed then, another one of his choking, rasping coughs that seemed to take him by surprise. He covered his mouth with the hem of his mage’s robe and then ran a hand across his mouth.

  ‘Where were you anyway?’ he asked, hoarsely.

  Modren rolled his eyes. ‘We had trouble before dawn, down in the docks.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘A group of those Thron nutcases…’

  ‘The Thunderites,’ offered Durnus.

  ‘Those are the ones. Campaigning about their beloved god on the western boardwalk. Not very clever to start denouncing all other gods, especially the god of the sea, in that area. A group of Njord-following ship-boys took offence to their preaching. Took a couple of broken bottles to their necks.’

  ‘Gods’ sakes.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  There was a pause as each man took a moment to collect their battered thoughts after the assault that had been the magick council meeting. Tyrfing ran a charcoal-smudged hand through his hair. Like a drawn-out siege, his mop of black hair was slowly giving way to a silvery grey hue that betrayed his age. His blue eyes, now glued to the floor, were surrounded by deep, dark rings of tiredness, signature of a week of late nights. Still, all things considered, Tyrfing had just crept into his seventies, and although the lines were now showing in his dark, sun-leathered skin, he looked good for his age. And as far as any Written was concerned, he was a marvel. Most mages never lived past their fifties, thanks to a combination of the madness and certain occupational hazards. Fifty-five had been the previous record.

  Modren broke the silence with another issue. ‘The Written are starting to ask questions.’

  ‘Which ones?’ asked Durnus. His face, as always, had the appearance of a crinkled old map, bleached by the winter sun. His immortality had locked his age in time. Cruel irony perhaps, that he hadn’t been restored to a younger man, but those who are immortal hardly have cause for complaint.

  Modren held his hands up. ‘All of them.’

  ‘Then bring them in. I think it is time they knew.’

  Tyrfing looked up from this staring spot on the marble floor. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Very.’

  Modren got to his feet and headed for the door. ‘Right you are then!’

  As the mage departed, Durnus put his hand on Tyrfing’s shoulder and let it linger. ‘Let us venture up to the Nest. That will cheer you up.’

  Tyrfing knuckled his eyes again. ‘I don’t need cheering up. I just want the magick council to leave us alone, Farden back, and his bitch of a daughter to just kill herself and save us all the trouble.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  Tyrfing was about to answer when he abruptly began to cough. He clamped his hand over his mouth as he hawked and barked, deep in his throat. Tears squeezed from his pinched eyes. When he’d recovered, he took a breath and wiped his hand on the hem of his robe. Crimson smeared across the white cloth. Tyrfing quickly clenched a fist. Sometimes, he was glad Durnus was blind. ‘I think that’s it,’ he replied, folding the hem over to hide the blood.

  His friend chuckled. ‘You don’t want much at all then.’

  Tyrfing walked Durnus behind the thrones. There was a gap of about twenty feet between them and the back wall, and there, as part of the rebuild, the workers had placed an thick oak door with a silver handle. The design of a splayed hand had been carved into the wood and inlaid with silver. It was quite the piece of craftsmanship.

  Tyrfing pointed his friend to the door, and Durnus let his hands wander across it. His wrinkled fingers traced the cold shape of the carving. He sank his hand into it, finger for finger, palm to palm. There was a click and an echoing thud, and Durnus pushed the door open. Tyrfing led him inside.

  A set of curving stairs led them into a circular room. There were skinny windows set in the walls, stained-glass panes depicting the Battle of Krauslung. The glass was so new that the dyes looked wet, fresh, like the memories they had been drawn from. Dragons swooped over grey walls. A dozen ships sat in a crescent in the harbour waters. Fire bloomed in one pane, brave soldiers in another. An evil, dead face grimaced in the last.

  The Arkmages paced through the room and headed for another door, one that was more like a giant misshapen porthole than a door. It too was made of painted glass. The craftsmen had decorated these panes with feathers. Slate-grey fading to a translucent white, the detail was so incredible it seemed that if the latch were to be loosed, the doors might fly away into the morning sunlight and escape. Tyrfing ran his hand across them. These were new; the final touches to what the workers had come to call the Nest. Tyrfing described them for his friend, and Durnus smiled. He had the smell of the dyes and paints to enjoy, the taste of marble dust on his tongue.

  With the gentlest of pushes, the ornate doors swung open and revealed a long balcony with a spiral staircase on either side of it. Above them, the tendrils of marble trees pawed at the sky. Tyrfing and Durnus stepped out onto the balcony and ascended the left-hand set of stairs. The breeze was cold at the pinnacle of the Arkathedral, but gentle. They could hear voices, the hissing of brooms, and the soft tapping of wooden mallets above them.

  The Nest was finished.

  It had taken one long year to complete, but it was the crown to the Arkathedral’s brow. Sitting directly on top of the great hall’s marble roof, the Nest was a two-tiered tower built for one purpose and one purpose only: Ilios.

  Though the gryphon was nowhere to be seen, Tyrfing could feel his eyes on the back of his neck as they set foot on the top level of the tower. A group of dusty craftsmen bustled nearby, packing their tools into boxes and sweeping marble chips and dust into buckets.

  Tyrfing looked around, drinking in the vista. Behind them, the vertical granite walls of Hardja reached up into the sky and pierced the clear blue of the morning with her jagged peak. Directly ahead of them, far on the other side of Krauslung’s narrow valley was Hardja’s twin sister, Ursufel. She was a black arrowhead in the bright white light of the early sun. In the south, to their right, was the endless sea and a port bristling with masts and sails. Hazy smudges, flocks of gulls and rimelings, parried with each other as they fought for scraps on the boardwalks. In the far distance was a line of black specks, the faraway islands of Skap. Between t
hem and the coast, flecks of white and brown scuttled slowly across the water.

  To the north and left sat Manesmark and the jagged range that was the Össfen Mountains. In the distance, dominating all, was Emaneska’s loftiest peak, Lokki. Tyrfing momentarily pondered whether there was a reason the mountain’s name sounded so similar to the god’s. He made a mental note to ask Heimdall.

  If the Arkmage squinted, he could just about make out the cranes and the scaffolding around the new Spire on Manesmark hill. It would never be as grand or as tall as the old Spire, but it would do its job of housing all of the new mages. They needed a home. They had to have a home. If the wind blew right, Tyrfing could imagine hearing the thud of the giant granite blocks as they were lowered into place, or the hissing of the fire and water spells as the blocks were melted to join one another, perfectly sealed.

  Below the Nest, the great hall pointed directly east. It and its adjacent rooms stretched almost to the precipice of the Arkathedral. There the thick battlements clung on for dear life as the walls fell away like a waterfall of white marble, plummeting to the cobbles a thousand feet below. Two skinny white towers teetered at the very edge. They were almost as tall as the Nest. They held the twin bells, aptly named Hardja and Ursufel, that rang every dawn and every sunset.

  It was the Nest itself that Tyrfing found he couldn’t tear his eyes away from.

  Open to the sky, it was essentially a varnished oak platform, diamond in shape. But it was what stood around and over it that robbed a man’s breath. At each point of its compass, a milk-white marble tree sprouted from the oiled oak and curled into the sky above it. Polished so that they seemed almost liquid in texture, each tree bowed to its opposite and joined together over the centre of the platform, branches forming a knot of carved marble, willows grappling over an oak river. The marble looked pure white at a distance, but up close the tiniest capillaries of grey and blue mica could be seen under their skins. In the early sun, they threw strange shadows on the oak at the Arkmages’ feet, shadows that seemed to sway with the breeze despite the stone they were carved from. It was pure mastery. Art, imitating wood.

  ‘I wish you could see this,’ whispered Tyrfing, awed, a breath from speechless.

  Durnus shrugged and smiled. ‘I wish that I could too, old friend.’ He was listening to the whispering of the nearby craftsmen. The wooden spars and tangled ropes of the cranes were slowly being ushered below. One of them, a foreman by the look of his spotless blue coat, came to bow.

  ‘All finished, your Mages. I trust you’re pleased?’ he asked.

  ‘Judging that Arkmage Tyrfing is lost for words, I would say we are, Stonemaster Ret. We finally have an Arkathedral.’

  Ret grinned, tipped his cap, and bowed again. He turned to his crew of craftsmen and builders. ‘You hear that, boys? You’ve done a fine job,’ he announced, and the dusty men smiled proudly. Ret turned back and a serious, slightly concerned look came over his face. ‘There was one thing, your Mages, that I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘The, er, beast, sir. Now that we’ve finished, will he be returning soon? The only reason I ask is that last time he nearly frightened several of the younger men into jumping from the roof.’

  Tyrfing looked up at the clear morning sky. ‘I’ll make sure he waits until you’ve finished.’

  Master Ret blew a great sigh of relief. ‘Oh, thank you, sir. And again, you’ve got me and my crew’s word that we’ll keep quiet about him,’ he said.

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ Tyrfing said. He beckoned the foreman closer as he reached inside the pocket of his robe. He withdrew a cloth purse, fat with coins. It clinked as he pushed it into Ret’s hand. ‘For you and your men,’ whispered the Arkmage. The craftsmen had already been paid, of course, but it didn’t hurt to give them a little something for the taverns. ‘Make sure it’s used appropriately.’

  Ret grinned knowingly. ‘Thank you, sirs. I’ll make sure it is.’ The man bowed one final time and quickly rejoined his dusty and weary band. There was a moment of hushed conferring, and then a chorus of cheers. They turned, swept off their caps, and then bowed to their masters.

  ‘An honour, your Mages!’

  ‘Thank you sirs!’

  ‘Much obliged!’ came the shouts.

  Ret thrashed about with his cap. ‘Alright you lot, back to work! That’s enough!’

  When they had gone back to their tidying, Durnus sighed. ‘Be careful that Malvus and his cronies do not hear of that little expense. That purse was heavier than we had discussed.’

  Tyrfing tapped his nose. ‘And luckily for us, most of it came from Ilios’ own hoard.’

  ‘Well then, all’s well,’ Durnus replied. He twitched then, and sniffed the breeze. ‘Do you feel that?’

  Tyrfing slid the sleeve of his robe up his forearm. Even though the fingers of time and age had faded some of his self-inflicted scars, the deeper ones still remained, purple and silvery twine embedded in his leathered skin. But in the middle of them all, as stark as the day the whalebone needle had first kissed him, was the key tattoo of his Book. And it was glowing ever so softly. ‘That was quick,’ he said.

  ‘Let us not keep them waiting.’

  Tyrfing led Durnus back down the marble steps and into the tower. With every step, his tattoos grew brighter. They could feel it growing in the air too, the magick, the thick, hot touch of it, stirring and simmering as though the blood in their veins was coming to the boil. Durnus and Tyrfing let their own magick swirl and mingle with it as they walked, unfurling like wings behind them. Any normal person, unfortunate enough to be walking alongside them, might have felt the pressure of the air drop, maybe even felt their ears pop or their chest tighten, the flash of a headache maybe but they would be clueless as to why. The Arkmages, and the Written gathering in the hall, could taste it, smell it, hear it, wave their hands through it, even imagine it tumbling through the air like an unravelling rainbow, alight with fire. It was intoxicating. Dangerous. Such was how they had grown in the last ten years.

  Tyrfing pushed open the door to the great hall and drank it in. His tattoos were now glowing white-hot. Durnus let go of his arm and found his way to his throne without the tiniest moment of hesitation or the slightest hint of a stumble. It was almost as though the magick gave him another kind of sight, one that Tyrfing could only pretend to understand. He took to the steps of his own his throne. Once they were seated, they looked out over the pitifully small group that stood in perfect lines before them. The Written. The last of their kind.

  Twenty-six, counted Tyrfing. That number made his heart heavy. The Written had once numbered well over a hundred. Vice’s cruel battle had slashed their numbers by half. Nobody was more painfully aware of that than Modren and Tyrfing, for they had been responsible for a good number of Written corpses that day. Corpses of traitors, mind. Farden’s spawn had culled the rest. Twenty-four bodies had been counted so far, over the years. Their numbers had been halved again, and mercilessly too. A dying breed, and no Scribe to save them. Such was Vice’s legacy.

  But the men and women arrayed in formation in front of them didn’t look defeated, nor worried by their dwindling numbers. Every single one had their hands folded calmly behind their back, and each one wore a tiny smile on their face. Tyrfing had once worn a smile like it. As had Farden. It was a smile that smacked of confidence and power. A smirk of the elite. The Arkmage looked at each of the mages and recited their names in his head. Modren’s earlier words echoed in his head and he found himself smiling back at them. He would rather have twenty-six of those smiles, he thought, and know what caused them, than twenty-thousand men without.

  Durnus waved them forward, and one by one the Written fell out of formation and gathered at the foot of the twin thrones. How did he know? wondered Tyrfing. He looked down at them as they sauntered forward. Some of them wore gleaming suits of his newly designed armour. Some had been given Scalussen pieces. Some were still waiting patiently for theirs. Some w
ere old, with scars on their faces, while some were young, some of the last to taste the Scribe’s needle. All of them were silent and calm. Their magick screamed loudly enough for all of them.

  ‘Modren,’ Durnus called to the Undermage, who was standing at the back of the hall. Elessi was there, standing beside him. Tyrfing couldn’t help but notice the frown on her face. ‘Seal the doors!’ ordered Durnus.

  Modren nodded and gently moved Elessi aside. She went to sit on a bench by a window, arms crossed and face ashen, rubbing her head as if in pain. Modren wiped his hand across the gilded doors, first the left, and then the right, and two resounding thuds echoed through the hall.

  ‘Written!’ announced Durnus. The Written watched him expectantly. ‘It is time for you to hear why you have been training so hard,’ he began.

  One of the younger mages put her hand up. ‘Is this about the murders, your Mage?’

  Durnus nodded. His face was grave. ‘My dear, the murders are just the beginning…’

  There was a cairn at the very peak of Hardja. The little cone of jagged pebbles was a miracle of balance. It had survived a hundred storms, tasted a hundred caps of snow, felt a hundred different faces of the wind, and was now being stared at by a god. A tiny slab of rock sat at its foot. The ice and wind and rain had stolen the words that had once been carved into it, a forgotten time ago.

  Heimdall shifted his feet. His boots crunched on the snow that still stubbornly clung to the peak. An inch from his foot, the rock fell away into a sheer, ice-clad cliff, meeting the walls of the Arkathedral far below. If the god was worried by the stomach-churning drop, he didn’t show it. His boots were firmly wedged in a snowy nook. One hand firmly grasped the side of the cairn, while the other shaded his tawny eyes against the morning sun, teetering on top of the opposite peak. He was watching two figures standing on top of the Arkathedral, one being led by another, standing under a set of marble trees.