by Ben Galley
‘And if they don’t return?’ Modren asked, biting his lip. Durnus’ smile tightened even further.
‘Then you better pray for our souls, as well as your wife’s, Modren, because it will be down to us. Now, muster your Written, Undermage,’ Durnus commanded.
Modren got to his feet; leaden, but willing. ‘Yes, Arkmage.’
‘Good man,’ Durnus nodded, as he listened to Modren’s boots thump on the ice and stride away. ‘Eyrum,’ he said, ‘find me somebody who can speak snowmad. It appears we have got an army to march north, and from what I remember of the ice fields, we’ll need their help.’
Samara held the sword over the cliff, grit her teeth, and gripped it until her blood turned into flame. It melted the blade clean in half. She watched the molten scraps dribble from her hand and tumble into oblivion. ‘We had them,’ she spat. The wind whipped her hair into her eyes, but she stubbornly ignored it. ‘We had them,’ she repeated. ‘We had him!’
‘Calm yourself, girl,’ hissed Valefor.
Hokus clacked his fangs together. ‘Or it shan’t just be the sword dribbling over that cliff.’
Samara whirled on the daemons, sitting slumped and impatient on the boulder behind her. ‘Just you try it!’ she cried, her anger drowning all need for respect.
Hokus made to get up, but Samara flicked her hands open and light exploded in each. ‘Don’t pretend I’m expendable, cousin. We both know I’m not.’
Hokus smiled a sickly little smile, and sat back down. Valefor spoke for him. ‘They,’ he said, waving his arms over the cliff and at the black smear of people far below on the ice, ‘are not important. They are vermin to be squashed at a later date. A few mages won’t stand in your way, not now the magick grows as fierce as it does.’
‘And Ruin?’
Valefor and Hokus traded glances. ‘He will answer to his father soon enough.’
‘And Farden?’
More glances. ‘They say blood is thicker than water. He’s yours,’ Valefor said. ‘Kill him for us.’
Samara kicked a pebble into mid-air and watched it plummet. ‘Well, I was going to last night, but he escaped, didn’t he? Right under our noses.’ Thump. Another pebble felt the wrath of her boot. ‘Where’s he gone to, anyway?’
Hokus looked north, as if he might just catch a glimpse of a heavily-laden gryphon. No such luck. The ice and the distant mottled mountains were empty, motionless save for the spurs of ice and mist flying like pennants from their peaks. Just the little slug of people below for company, creeping along across the ice, the dragons circling them. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. It took a lot to worry a daemon, but this one was. So too was Valefor.
‘Probably trying to head us off. Fools.’
There was a click of heels from behind them. It was Saker. He hadn’t bothered to clean his sword after the night before. It dangled from his belt, free of its scabbard, a rusting streak of crimson along its tip. ‘A storm is coming,’ he announced.
‘Damn right it is,’ Samara snapped.
‘No, my lady. A storm drifts southwards from the Tausenbar peaks. It will be with us within the hour. If we leave now, we can rise above it.’
Samara looked at the sky, as if ready to challenge it to a duel. With an exasperated huff, she reached up to tie back her thick hair, and nodded. ‘Then let’s go,’ she said. As she passed Hokus and Valefor, she leant close to them, so close their sulphur almost made her gag. ‘Next time I see him, he’s mine, right? All mine? No distractions?’
‘All yours,’ Hokus nodded.
Samara stalked off. ‘I look forward to it,’ she muttered. ‘Look forward to showing him the colour of his insides.’
Valefor sniggered fitfully. ‘Sounds delicious,’ he said.
The daemons waited until the dragons were in the sky before they faded into the blustery air, two clouds of jet-black smoke on the wind. Their voices joined the wind in its whining. ‘We will see him again, won’t we?’ asked Valefor.
‘I fear we will,’ replied Hokus.
‘In that case, brother, I hope she makes good on her word.’
‘If she doesn’t, we may have a problem.’
1561 years ago
His Lips Were Dead.
The cold had kidnapped them, just like the sky had kidnapped the sun. He hadn’t seen it in a week. He was beginning to fear for its safety.
His feet felt like hooves. Stumps of dead flesh to be stumbled over and wobbled on. The snow had frozen into the gaps in his armour. He was slowly being frozen solid.
Weeks, he had tottered about on the ice. No food. His only water was what snow and ice he could cram into his mouth and melt between his chattering teeth. His armour could no longer keep him warm. He was kept alive only by its stubborn, persistent magick.
Korrin rolled onto his side and looked back the way he had come. He could see his trail of awkward footprints leading back east. No dark shapes this time. No torches. Maybe he’d lost them.
No. He squinted again. It couldn’t be. There, hidden in the distant snowy haze, a score of black figures stood in a line. They were moving slowly, probing every snowdrift with their spears.
Korrin thumped the snow with his fist, immediately regretting it as the numbness made his bones shudder painfully. He’d had enough of running now.
Korrin struggled to his feet and began to walk again. Pain shot through his legs with every step. He set his jaw and moved through it.
‘Is it time?’ he asked himself. Anybody will start talking to themselves after being alone for so long, so abandoned and lost. It is the mind’s way of staying sane. Korrin bit his lip. He had never imagined it would come to this, but options were something he’d left at the lip of the volcano, to burn with the rest of them.
Korrin held his breath as the emotion caught in his throat. He sobbed once and then swallowed it.
With resolute hands, he grabbed his gauntlets and tugged them free. They dangled by his side for the briefest of moments before he tossed them aside, one to the left and one to the right, as far as his tired arms could manage. He grit his teeth as he heard them land in the snow. Please let that distract them.
It took another week to find the stones. Rising high out of the ice, on a shelf of rock above the ice fields, he found them. At first he thought they might shelter him from the icy winds, but as he staggered up to them, wheezing like a blacksmith’s bellows, he saw they were bare and cold, spaced in a ring like a crown. The wind howled between them, cold breath sighing through granite teeth.
They were tall, that was for sure. Taller than one of his father’s huts. Korrin slumped to his knees and gazed up at them. He felt the cold on his legs and forearms. Without the greaves and vambraces, the cold had gone deeper into his body. Slowly but surely he was freezing.
He collapsed there for a time. It was all he could do to put his face into the snow and let it numb him. His mind was rambling, capering through fields of the absurd, of guilt, and of sorrow. He let it ramble as he allowed himself to sag into the snow.
‘This one’s alives, brothers,’ hissed a sickening voice, like silk being dragged over a fistful of nails.
‘Alives indeeds. We’ve not hads visitors in so longs.’
Korrin tried to get up, but something heavy was pressing him down. He could smell it: old leather and rotting meat. He could feel its claw clicking against his helmet. Korrin pawed for his sword before remembering he’d lost it three days ago.
More voices now, horrid, slithering voices. Korrin guessed at five of them. ‘Whats shall be done with its?’
‘Meats, brother. We’s shall eats it.’
‘Like hell you will,’ hissed Korrin.
‘Ah, its speaks of Hels, brothers!’
‘But our Hels, we wonders. Or anothers?’
Tap tap tap went the claw on his helmet. From what he could glimpse, these creatures were as big as dogs, made of black wings and fur. He spied a beak full of teeth, but he couldn’t be sure. ‘Have you comes to dies here, humans?’
it asked him.
Korrin shook his head. ‘I wanted to live.’
‘Comes to the wrongs place for thats, meats.’
‘To escape.’
‘Likes the others?’
Korrin flinched. ‘What others?’
Something breathed very closely to his ear. Its breath stank. ‘More meats follows you. In the snows. Lookings for somethings.’
‘Me.’
‘You came heres to hides then?’ asked the first creature. Tap tap tap.
‘I don’t know why I came here,’ Korrin sighed. ‘Everything’s over. The others are dead…’
There was a silence as the creatures looked at each other, swapping furtive glances and ideas. The claw stroked the back of his helmet, almost as soft as a lover would. ‘We’s can hides you, ifs you wishes?’
‘Where?’
‘Wheres nobodys will ever looks.’
Korrin tasted the snow in his mouth. It tasted bitter. He was willing to try anything now. Even if it meant trusting these creatures. ‘Hide me, then.’
‘We’s needs a trades, firsts.’
Korrin held what was left of his armour close. ‘What could I possibly offer you?’
‘Meats.’
‘Meats?’
‘Meats!’
Korrin bit the inside of his lip. He hadn’t come this far just to be eaten alive. Hadn’t trained and fought so hard just to give in and slump into the snow. Had never wanted something so much. He realised then that he hadn’t just wanted to be alive, but to have a life. A life with meaning, not a pig farmer’s life. He had carved himself a life with his armour, an existence. A purpose. How dare he let that crumble now, in his darkest moment. He wondered what his father Ust would say, if he were there now. He would have barked something fierce and bitter about doing what is necessary, no doubt. Korrin took a breath. ‘Take those that follow me then. They are looking for me,’ he muttered, weakly. ‘I brought them here for you.’
‘Presents?’
‘We’s accepts!’
‘Meats!’
There was an eager little shuffling around him. The creatures were moving towards the stones. The weight lifted from his back but Korrin stayed where he was, sprawled in their centre. There was a muttering and a scratching around him. He glanced up to see the ugly things, all black skin and patchy fur, clawing at the puckered granite and its strange runes. Korrin felt the ice sag beneath him. A shadow grew dark under the ice, a bruised, hollow blue colour. Korrin pressed his hands to it and felt it shrivel under his numb fingers. It was melting away underneath him. He tried to quell the panic.
Before the freezing water took him, Korrin looked up at the grey sky, perched on the lip of the cliff hanging above him. The cloud had fragmented in the east, and in between the broken patches, he could see it: the pale northern sun. Finally returned, safe and sound. Korrin watched it until the ice vanished beneath his knees and hands.
And he sank like a stone.
Into a place no living eye had ever seen before.
Chapter 25
“Wrapped in a threadbare blanket, the rider shivered in the cold. It was bitter, there, in the north, where the ice clawed at the south.
A great flapping sound made him stare at the sky. His dragon had returned. A golden drake was he, majestic, as any Old Dragon should be. The rider stood and stepped back, bowing as the dragon landed, claws crunching on the wet snow.
‘My lord,’ the rider whispered.
‘Rider,’ growled the dragon. The rider took a furtive step forward. Their camp was sparse. He had left the blanket in the snow.
‘It is cold,’ said his dragon. The rider nodded, trying to hide the trembling of his limbs.
‘Have you tinder?’ asked the dragon.
The rider looked up, shocked. ‘What are you suggesting?’
The Old Dragon sniffed the cold air, sombre. ‘It is time, rider. It is time you humans tasted our sacred fire.’
The rider bowed again, and folded to his knees. Hands shaking, he reached into his haversack and brought forth tinder and dry sticks, vestiges of a warmer, drier land. He laid them with reverence in the snow, and quickly stood back. No dragon had ever leant his flame before.
‘Spread your hands, and be warm, rider,’ whispered the Old Dragon, taking a deep breath. His chest swelled as took in the cold air, turning it to fire in his belly. Pursing his lips, he exhaled, and flame dribbled from his teeth, spilling on to the damp tinder beneath. Fire blossomed, and the rider felt the warmth on his hands. He smiled. The dragon had given the rider his fire.”
‘How the Dragon first gave Fire to his Rider’ - an old Siren proverb
As it turned out, Farden could have probably used that blanket.
Four days passed them by, and not by any means quickly. Time itself seemed to be affected by the cold. Traipsing past sluggishly, like a half-frozen beggar.
Farden had never been so cold in his life. Every day north they travelled, the colder it got. He spent the days hugging Ilios’ back and praying for a second skin, or even just a second cloak. The nights he spent sitting as close to his uncle as physically possible, while Tyrfing tried his hardest to keep a flame burning in his hands for as long as he could. There was nothing to burn in the icy crags of the mountains, nor down on the ice, amongst the glaciers and ever-rolling snow fields, or the crumbled skeletons of old, frozen empires. They would have had better luck trying to strike a flint under the sea. Only Farden’s iron pride kept him from asking Loki to produce a cloak or a blanket from one of his endless pockets. He would have rather frozen than ask for help from a trickster like him.
The Tausenbar Mountains were an inhospitable scrap of the world. Every inch of them seemed to scream “grave for hire” at one volume or another. They were a jagged bristle of black rock and sheer glacier, splayed east to west across the north. Young peaks, still waiting to be eroded and filed smooth by the ice-winds. Still saw-toothed and dangerous, miserly with caves or flats, barren and cold like the wastes they reared up from.
In their valleys the ice-fields wove and wandered, split into a thousand different threads by the rocks and foothills. Most ended in a sheer, black cliff or a wall of smirking, sapphire ice. Only a few led through the mountains to the other side, where the foothills stretched out into yet another wasteland of ice and snow, speckled with patches of frozen forests, rocks, cliffs, more rocks, and the occasional shard of black stone. But it was all just a preamble to the main event. A prelude. A warm-up act.
The real mountains sat in the distance.
The Spine made the Tausenbar look like a troll’s rock-garden. Those mountains were monstrous things, the smallest of them easily as tall as Emaneska’s highest peak, Lokki. Farden wondered why it still held that title, and then quickly realised why: nobody would have believed any adventurer if he had returned home telling of the Spine. Not even trusty old Wallium the Wanderer.
Ilios had taken them high above a storm on that day, to a peak so high they’d found it hard to breathe. They had seen the Spine instantly above the roof of the storm. A faint red glow pasted across the distant, jagged horizon, illuminating the peaks like the rotten, black teeth of a shark gnawing on bright crimson flesh. Plumes of ash sprouted up here and there between the monstrous summits, the remnants of the Roots. These were real mountains, like the gods would have wrought in their prime. Mountains that would have given giants a challenge of a climb. They were breathtaking in more ways than one.
Since then the sky had glowed constantly red. Even in the day the Spine turned the sky a rosy, bloody hue, like a constant sunrise. Farden hated it. He kept expecting to feel a little bit of warmth from such a glow, but the cold kept on being cold, and the wind kept on biting. More so with every wing-flap north.
Farden was just thankful for the gryphon. Ilios was not only transport, but warmth in the night as they crouched and lay against his feathery back. He had even kept their stomachs full on two of the nights. The first, he had caught a snow-fox. The third, he foun
d a leathery rabbit, long-dead but perfectly preserved in a patch of glassy ice. Tyrfing had melted it free and cooked it with his bare hands. It was leathery indeed, like nibbling a boot, but it was food at least. Ilios had crunched the bones and fur, and seemed happy enough with that.
The fourth night found them shivering on the northern side of the Tausenbar, in the lee of a rocky outcrop, tucked into its hollow. There was a faint dusting of snow on the rock, like icing on a market cake. Farden was distracting himself from how cold his extremities were by drawing pictures in it. A minotaur with a broken horn. A fish with sails. A wolf with eight legs. As he moved on to draw a book with a hat, he wondered absently if he were going insane. ‘Can you go mad from the cold?’ he asked aloud, behind chattering teeth.
‘We’ll soon find out,’ Tyrfing replied. He was warmer, though barely. He was trying to conserve his strength to fight off whatever illness was still plaguing him. His cough had returned with a vengeance. Barely a few minutes went by without him retching and spitting something on the rock. Tyrfing didn’t tell. Farden didn’t ask. It was a heavy lead lump between them. A bastion in the room.
On the other side of the hollow, Loki fished a small notebook from his coat, flipped through a few pages, and then put it back again. ‘No,’ said. ‘Apparently you cannot.’
Farden had given up wondering about the god’s pockets. They were as endless as he was annoying. If that was his only skill as a god, it made him about as useful as a feather in a sword-fight. Farden snorted to himself, and began to draw a feather with a sword-handle in the snow.
Ilios warbled something sleepily. The gryphon was curled up around the mouth of the hollow. Even with his thick feathers, he was still a desert creature. He wasn’t made for the cold. Farden could see his claws shivering. ‘Ilios wants to know how far we have to go. May I?’ Tyrfing asked hoarsely.
‘Be my guest,’ Farden said, and slid his haversack over. Tyrfing opened it up, half-expecting to find the thick tome wrestling for space with supplies. It wasn’t. It was practically alone in the sack. Tyrfing jiggled it free and heaved it onto his lap.
