Dead Stars - Part Two (The Emaneska Series)

by Ben Galley

  ‘You didn’t bring much, did you?’

  ‘What was there to bring?’

  ‘A candle would have been good,’ sighed Loki.

  Farden rolled his eyes. A candle would have been good; he would have had something to carve. He contemplated drawing Loki in a noose. That was a little too close to home. ‘Don’t you have one in those magick pockets of yours?’ he asked.

  Loki clicked his fingers. ‘Actually, I do,’ he said, almost cheerily. It took him a moment of rummaging before he produced a fat tallow candle. He tossed it to Tyrfing, who had it lit in seconds. The faint, flickering yellow glow it threw out wasn’t much, but it was enough to bring a little lift in mood to the hollow. And a little heat, too. Farden shuffled closer and practically put his boots in the little flame. He was about to ask if Loki had another, when a deep orange glow suddenly bathed their hollow. It was the Grimsayer. It was glowing brighter than it ever had before. It must have been the northern magick. Tyrfing asked it the way, and the lights went to work, throwing shapes on the rock above and around them.

  ‘One more day,’ Tyrfing announced, as he watched the route replay itself. ‘One more day and we’ll be there.’

  Farden watched the lights and had to agree. He had to. He didn’t want to believe anything else. He rubbed his hands together, trying to dispel the ache in the gap of his missing finger. He found Loki staring at it. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘How did you lose that?’

  ‘In a tavern brawl. Somebody was asking too many questions, so I cut it off myself and rammed it down his throat.’

  ‘Sounds clever.’

  ‘He thought he was.’

  ‘Honestly, how did it happen?’

  Farden sighed. ‘Vice,’ he said, ‘Vice took it clean off in our last battle. When Durnus, Tyrfing, and I killed him.’

  Loki nodded thoughtfully. ‘It is a bit of a shame, don’t you think?’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘How none of you managed to get what you wanted? How in the end you all had to share a piece of the victory, rather than having complete revenge?’ Loki shook his head, as if it were truly sad news. Farden bit his tongue.

  ‘I got what I wanted,’ grunted Tyrfing. ‘We all had a personal reason to see him dead. We each got what we wanted. Vice dead. That was it. Doesn’t matter how.’

  ‘Of course,’ Loki smiled. He drummed his fingers together for a moment. ‘But now it’s a completely different story altogether, isn’t it?’

  Farden glowered. ‘How’d you figure that?’

  ‘This time, you each have your own daemon to fight, if you will pardon the pun. You with Samara, Ruin, sorry, Durnus, with his father, should he come down from the sky. Towerdawn has Saker. And of course you, Tyrfing, have that cough of yours,’ Loki said, ticking off the names on his fingers. ‘We all have our own separate battles to pitch and win.’

  Tyrfing leant forward. ‘I don’t see you fighting any battle,’ he croaked, deep in his throat.

  Loki didn’t seem fazed by the sharp look in the Arkmage’s eye. ‘Oh, I am. I’m right there with you,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry.’

  Farden slapped the rock with his gauntlet, making Ilios jump in his sleep. ‘Enough of this shit-talk, Loki, or I’ll strangle you with the very cords you’re trying to tug at. Go to sleep. Or whatever it is you god-shadows do. Just be quiet,’ he ordered. Loki shrugged and just stared at the candle flame.

  Another fit of coughing took Tyrfing, and Farden winced as he heard his uncle retch. His throat sounded as raw as a butcher’s larder, like he was swallowing hot razors. He drew a circle in the snow and stabbed it with his metal finger until his uncle managed to catch his breath. Farden looked up. ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  Tyrfing, eyes glistening with tears of strain, nodded, and even managed a smile. ‘Fine,’ he lied. Farden couldn’t help but notice the tiny fleck of blood smeared across his uncle’s lip. Tyrfing felt the stare, and wiped his mouth. Neither said anything. Farden went back to his drawings, Tyrfing leant against his gryphon, and Loki just smiled smugly to himself.

  The world travelled through the bowels of night and came up for air in the morning. The sun made a cursory effort, barely summoning enough height to paint the sky a brighter shade of black.

  Morning found Farden in a state of urgency. There were two burning issues on his mind that morning, as he rocked back and forth and muttered to himself. One was the cold. His toes had lost all feeling. His fingers were tingling. His lips were two strips of dead rubber. The cold had even seized his stubble, giving him a white beard of ice. It was unbearable.

  The second was the powerful urge to piss.

  The problem was simple. In a land where the breath froze in front of his face, what would it do to a man relieving himself? He had avoided the problem so far. It had been a smidgeon warmer the last time. Now he was afraid of freezing himself to the ground, or worse, freezing something else.

  Farden got to his feet and strolled back and forth in what little space he had to manoeuvre. His boots kept sticking to the frost on the stone of their little ledge. Farden peeked over its edge at the black void below. What a ridiculous situation this is, he snapped at himself, for a place to be so cold that a man is afraid to piss! He did a little dance, making it worse. The cold now had a rival for unbearableness. He felt like he was going to pop.

  ‘Oh for gods’ sake. Come on, Farden,’ he muttered, shuffling to the edge. ‘Fortune favours the brave and all that.’ Farden gasped as he felt the cold of his gauntlets in a place where no man should ever feel such a thing. For a moment, he thought the metal had become stuck, but it was just the numbness of his hand, sluggish to move. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  And that was it. Farden threw caution to the wind, so to speak. He stood there, swaying, face torn between a mix of pleasure at the release, and of pain at the icy morning wind blowing around his nethers. Thankfully, it only took a minute.

  When he was finished, Farden sat down right there on the edge, sighing and watching his breath turn to cloud. Some stars were still out and about in the lightening sky. Once again he found himself trying to guess their shapes, trying to figure out if they were friend or foe, and whether he would meet any soon enough.

  It was then that a flicker in the sky caught his attention. A colour splashed against the black and grey of the morning, high in the cloudless rafters of the sky. Blues, swirling with deep greens. Disappearing there, dancing here, flowing like a ghostly river. The Wake.

  Farden watched it for a time. It looked like what he imagined magick to look like, were it tangible. It was heading north, by the looks of it. Perhaps it was magick after all, he thought. He was in the midst of pondering this deep thought of thoughts when the Wake began to do something he had never seen before. Parts of it seemed to crystallise in the unreachable sky, and drift slowly to earth. Little grains of sand, blue, green, and white, fell like snowflakes to the ice below. They took an age to fall, and when they did, they lingered on the wastes, refusing to fade. Farden squinted. None had fallen near to their mountain, only on the undulating band of ice between the Tausenbar and the Spine. Farden watched them as they slowly began to drift north and slightly east, towards an outcrop of black rock that was separate from the two mountain ranges, standing alone like a lost cousin.

  Farden got to his feet as if it would somehow aid his eyesight. The grains drifted so slowly in fact that it hardly seemed like they were moving at all. Farden suddenly remembered the spyglass he had taken from the ship, and whirled around to fish it out of his pack. He tugged the thing free and held it gingerly to his eye, careful of its cold metal rim. He swung it to the ice fields and scanned back and forth. Nothing. He looked up to get his bearings and a frown creased his brow. The grains had faded away. Farden was about to hurl the spyglass into thin air when a tiny glint of colour caught his eye, far to the northeast, by the lonely rocks. Farden lifted the spyglass and tweaked every lever and cog his fingers could find until the contraption focused. Even
then it struggled with the distance and Farden had to rest it on his knee to keep it still. But there it was, trapped in his eyepiece. A single grain of light.

  The mage watched it as it travelled across the ice. It was bigger than he had first suspected, more a lump than a grain, and a strange shape too. It fluttered like a half-snuffed candle. He could have sworn the thing had legs. It seemed to step across the ice rather than drift across it, plodding slowly and deliberately, as if it were in no rush, but knew it had a place to be. Like a condemned convict trudging towards his morning noose.

  Farden squinted again, cursing his eyes. The thing had arms too. He could see them now. Hanging limply by its side. Did it have a head? Maybe. He couldn’t tell. He looked again. The light it gave seemed to trail behind it, like the rags of a scarecrow in the wind. Farden snorted. What would a speck of light need with rags, or clothes, or hair?

  Farden leant forward, almost forgetting for a moment that he had perched on the edge of the mountain. He watched, fascinated, as the light reached the base of a short cliff, where, if the shadows didn’t deceive him, he spied a hollow filled with five tall stones. Farden got to his feet, nearly falling to his doom in the process.

  Five stones. Five monoliths.

  ‘Up! Get up!’ Farden started pounding his gauntlet on his greaves, making a clanging sound. Ilios was up in seconds, claws at the ready. Tyrfing, his leaning spot suddenly transformed into an alert gryphon, floundered on the ground. Loki opened his eyes as if he had been awake the whole time. Both of them got to their feet and came to stand by Farden. He pointed at the tiny light in the distance, barely noticeable. They glimpsed it just before it faded into the ice. ‘Gentlemen and gryphon, I think we’ve found ourselves a ghostgate,’ Farden announced.

  ‘What, there?’ Tyrfing gestured for the spyglass. He winced at the cold of its metal.

  ‘There indeed. Right where the Grimsayer said it would be. Barely a morning’s flight,’ Farden almost sounded excited.

  ‘What was that light?’ Loki asked, interested.

  Farden shrugged. ‘Well, I assume it was a ghost for the gate.’

  ‘A soul, then,’ Loki said, biting his lip.

  ‘Whatever it is, it’s where we’re headed,’ Farden paused as a shiver ran through his body. ‘It’s time to go,’ he said.

  Pitted like pox-scars, the grey faces of the stones were a strange contrast to the black of the yawning hollow of the cliff behind them. They sat in a circle, an awkward, granite crown poking from the snow. Five identical stones, each of them massive and towering, no fewer than fifteen feet tall at a sound guess. Their points were sharp. Their sides were sheer, ashen and sparkling in the morning glow. The runes and shapes that had once tattooed their surfaces were now eroded smooth and faint, whipped illegible by the wind and ice.

  ‘Is this it?’ Farden prodded the ground between the stones with his boot, making the snow creak. ‘There’s nothing here.’ Nobody answered. Loki was silent and distracted. He stood a short distance away, facing south, his hands hanging limply by his sides. Ilios was off hunting. Tyrfing was also silent. He was busy scraping the ice away from one of the stones, trying to get at the runes beneath. He shrugged.

  ‘Great. What’s a gate that isn’t a gate? A waste of time, that’s what,’ Farden muttered.

  ‘So the light faded here, did it?’ Tyrfing asked, casting around for something, anything. He had a cloth clamped over his mouth.

  ‘Right here,’ Farden stamped on the snow again. He took out his sword and prodded at the roots of the stones. Nothing budged. ‘Nowhere.’

  Loki turned around, his face catching the morning light and making his skin glow. Had Farden been in the mood to notice things, he might have noticed how strange it made him look. How solid it made him. ‘Perhaps you have to be dead, to pass through the gate,’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘By all means, god,’ Farden snapped, ‘be my guest.’

  ‘That would be impossible.’

  ‘Well, isn’t that a sha…’

  ‘Farden,’ Tyrfing coughed, waving his hand. Farden raised his sword. He had heard it too. A scraping. A puff of snow falling down the cliff above them, trickling from one crag to the next, like a miniature avalanche. The two mages crept forward until they were under the lip of the cliff, backs to the rock. Loki stayed where he was, oblivious, or distracted, or both.

  The mages watched the shadow of the cliff, a jagged black line in the snow just beyond the furthest ghostgate stone. Farden pointed as a little shape popped up, and then disappeared. More snow trickled down. Another shape appeared, then another, and another, too small to be human, but too big to be a bird, or a rabbit. They could hear the scraping and tinkling of needle-claws on the rock above. Tyrfing and Farden pressed themselves against the cliff as something black and leathery flopped onto the snow in front of them.

  It was a beastly little thing, that was for sure. All spindly limbs and feathers. Not quite a bat, but not quite a crow, and stuck somewhere in between. It was about the size of a cat, and had the tail of one too. Its beady little eyes hadn’t seen them yet. They were fixed on Loki.

  Another three of the little creatures came down to join the first. They crept forward, sniffing at the air, chattering softly, hungrily. Farden stepped forward, and calmly dug the point of his sword into the ice with a metallic ping. The creatures flinched. ‘Stay where you are,’ he warned, hoping they would understand. Surprisingly, they did. The creatures slowly turned to face him, baring clusters of jagged teeth, rammed into beaks several sizes too small for their faces. One of them shrieked at him, a horrible noise like a strangled bugle, but otherwise stayed put.

  ‘Strangers,’ it said in a hissing, bubbling voice, not unlike a pot coming to the boil, ‘comes to stares at the gates.’

  ‘We do,’ Farden said. ‘And what, pray, are you?’

  The first shrieked again. ‘We’s ares the watchers. Watches the ghosts comes and goes.’ The thing pointed the clawed stub of its leathery wing at patches of thin air. ‘There’s oneses. There’s anothers,’ it said, sniggering. Farden and Tyrfing looked around, wary. There was nothing except the stones and the snow.

  Something rattled behind Farden and he felt a sharp pain on his neck. Another of the little creatures had jumped onto his back, sinking its claws through his cloak. Farden clenched his teeth and grabbed the thing by the neck. The others flapped and whined. ‘Be quiet!’ Farden yelled, holding the flapping, thrashing thing at arm’s length. ‘Be quiet, or I’ll rip this one’s head off quicker than you can blink.’ There was a hissing as the things calmed, sagging into the snow. ‘That’s better,’ said the mage. ‘Now, what do you want?’

  The first raised a claw, blinking its little black eyes. ‘Hims,’ it said, pointing at Loki. The god was still oblivious to all. ‘He’s not like yous.’

  The creature in his grip squawked. ‘Never mets a gods before!’

  Farden threw the thing to the snow. It smelled like old meat and damp. ‘He’s none of your business. What are you creatures?’

  ‘We’s are the watchers!’ cried the first.

  ‘You said that, but what are you? What do you do here besides watch things?’ Farden asked.

  The beasts cackled amongst themselves. ‘We’s make sures the deads do as they’s tolds.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Go downs into the darks!’

  ‘We’s tells them their lives, if they wants to listens. Reads thems their pasts.’

  ‘Ands their futures!’

  ‘Eats their meats!’

  Tyrfing sniffed. ‘Fortune-tellers?’

  The eyes of the creatures glittered. ‘We’s cans reads you yourses, if you pleases? For a prices!’

  ‘Shrieks,’ Farden muttered to his uncle. ‘Fairytales were true after all.’ He turned around to find the four Shrieks had gotten a little closer all of a sudden. They had gathered around his boots. Farden nudged one away with the flat of sword, but it crawled right back.

  ‘Fut
ures is all yous live oneses have,’ one said.

  ‘Pasts is all the deads oneses have,’ another added.

  Farden aimed a kick at the nearest Shriek. They smelled even worse in a group. They looked hungry too. ‘Enough chatter. What do you know about the gate?’

  ‘Everythings!’

  ‘How do we get in it?’

  ‘Impossibles for the live oneses!’ cried the Shrieks, as one.

  ‘Lies,’ Farden grunted. ‘It happened before. Korrin was his name. He wore armour like this.’ Farden tapped his vambraces. The Shrieks fell silent. The breeze moaned through the stones, blowing a little snow in their faces. Tyrfing walked forward. His sword was out too. He flicked it up to hover barely an inch from the eye of the biggest Shriek.

  ‘Show us the way, or we’ll see to it that you never watch anything ever again,’ he threatened, grunting his words. Farden nodded and twirled his own blade menacingly. They had no time to waste with politeness.

  The big Shriek relented. ‘Ones cames before. Before anys of us. Before anys of our eggs, or the eggs before that.’

  ‘But you know of him?’

  The Shrieks cackled, unfolding the story one by one. ‘Storieses passed downs. Shriek to Shriek. We knows him. Korrins. Yesss.’

  ‘Asked us for helps, he dids.’

  ‘Asked us the ways in, he dids.’

  ‘Helped hims in the ends.’

  ‘Showed him the ways.’

  ‘Gave us meats!’

  Farden looked hungrily at the stones. ‘Show us, like you showed him.’

  The Shrieks fidgeted, creaking and rustling like slimy leather. A few moments passed. ‘A prices,’ one hissed. ‘There’s a prices for such knowledges.’

  ‘Yes! A prices!’ the Shrieks hopped up and down excitedly. ‘He paid!’

  ‘Whats can you offers us, in tradeses?’

  ‘Meats?’

  Farden smiled a very wild smile indeed. ‘Of course,’ he said, gently. Laying his sword across his knees, he slowly crouched down and bent a finger to the Shrieks. They shuffled forward eagerly to hear their prize. Farden looked at each and every one, still smiling all the while, before he answered. ‘How about,’ he began, ‘you show us the way through this gate here, or we tie you all up in neat bundles, make you watch as we build a little roasting fire, and cook you all on spits. Alive, of course. One by one, so the rest can watch. You can even try a bit too, if you like. We’re more than happy to share.’ The mage grinned maniacally. ‘How does that sound?’