Dead Stars - Part Two (The Emaneska Series)

by Ben Galley

  ‘Curse this strange place,’ he coughed. It was playing tricks with his eyes.

  As it turned out, he did not have to wait long. Soon enough they came to where the long cave opened out into a cavern that would have swallowed the Arkathedral in one mouthful. Mist, cloud maybe, lingered at the top of it, wrapping the sharp stalactites like wool around teeth. Grey lichen clung to the rough, grey walls, climbing up into oblivion. The river grew wide here. Wide and deep. It hissed against the pebbles, adding to the susurrus of whispering and gentle crunching of the countless, endless, dead feet.

  Tyrfing stared at them all, wide-eyed and disbelieving. He had never seen so many living people in one place, never mind the dead. They jostled for space as they pressed forward to the river, reticent to touch its waters, and yet eager to cross it.

  It was then that the ship came. It materialised out of the dark fog on the far, far side of the monochrome cavern. Even from there, Tyrfing could see that it was a ship like no other. It was tall and imposing, sharp-sided like a knife on its side. Its dimensions were uneven and irregular, and its masts were crooked, bereft of sails.

  Closer and closer it crept, unaffected by the rushing of the river, seemingly travelling at its own unhurried pace. Obviously, the dead could wait. Tyrfing pressed forward to see more of it. The shadows around him were cold. He swore he could feel frigid breath on the back of his neck. He pulled his collar up and stifled some more coughing. Loki was ahead of him somewhere, a solid pillar of life amongst a sea of ghosts. Well, almost. He was the closest thing Tyrfing had. Where in Hel is Farden? he wondered.

  The ship pulled lazily alongside the shore, several hundred yards up the riverbank. Something ungodly and horrible was shrieking and screeching amidst the crowd, but what it was, Tyrfing couldn’t see. Before he could ask Loki, the crowd surged like ocean swell, carrying them towards the ship. Loki seemed to melt into the shadows. Tyrfing pushed and shoved and fought his way along. He didn’t like this one bit.

  ‘Farden!’ he began to call, as loud as his raw throat would let him.

  Every step they took towards the strange ship, the more of it Tyrfing could make out. He grimaced as he peered at its rough, uneven sides. Stone? No, he told himself. Not possible. Metal? No, too flaky, too rugged, pockmarked. No smith could have made this. The crowd of shadows swelled, and suddenly he was at the riverbank, standing with his feet in the water. Tyrfing squinted at the ship, now barely fifty yards ahead.

  Nails.

  Of the finger and toe sort. Millions of nails stuck together with tar and resin and glue and things Tyrfing didn’t even want to consider. Dead nails. He felt bile rising in his throat. By the gods, the entire thing… he inwardly gasped. He didn’t dare look at the figurehead too closely. Out of the corner of his vision he saw it moving. Heard it screaming.

  ‘Farden!’ he cried again. He delved back into the dead and pushed them left and right, jumping up and down to glimpse anything that resembled something solid, something alive. ‘Farden! Can you hear me?!’

  There. He saw him, rushing headlong where the crowd was at its thickest. The roar of whispers was deafening now. Tyrfing barged his way through the pressing crowd, so cold even though they were so close and pressing in on him. His breath came in great steaming gasps. ‘Farden!’ he cried.

  ‘I have seen this before,’ Farden muttered again. If his feet were moving he didn’t feel it. The crowd bore him up and carried him along, icy and clammy, just like him. Farden felt his eyelids grow heavy, his head loll. He could have sworn he had something to do, but it all seemed so distant, so forgotten now. So bothersome.

  The ship came close to the shore and Farden heard the scrape of the yellow keel on the shingle. The dead pressed forward again as gangplanks were lowered to the stones. Farden looked at them dazedly. They looked like they were made from crushed shell, sand maybe.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ said a voice in his ear, like cold worms slithering around in his hair. Farden didn’t mind.

  ‘Lucky?’ he asked. ‘How so?’

  ‘Most wait an age for the ship,’ sighed another. Farden didn’t see their faces.

  ‘The Naglfar will take us all in the end.’

  Farden flinched involuntarily as a shriek ripped through the rustling and whistling. ‘All aboard!’ came the cry, a foul cry from a foul beak, rasping and thick with centuries of mucus. Farden could see something moving at the head of the ship. He blinked. A vague memory tugged at him. He held himself back against the crowd for a moment.

  ‘Wait…’ he said.

  ‘Stop!’ came another cry. Farden turned his head. He could see colours flashing through the translucent grey-blue of the crowd. Their shapes bent and warped by the blank faces and shoulders of the dead, like images warped by bent glass. Pink, brown, gold, silver, these weren’t the colours of things here. Farden flailed his hands.

  A shot of fire sprang up into the air. Just high enough to get attention. It crackled and puffed into smoke above the ship. Another flew up, and murmurs rippled through the crowd. Farden blinked owlishly.

  ‘Back!’ screamed the beast at the bow.

  ‘Back,’ Farden mouthed. ‘You do not belong.’ Words plucked from a dream by a curved and bloody beak. He shrugged. ‘I tried. I tried,’ he sighed.

  ‘Farden!’ somebody was shouting a name he half recognised. He floundered amongst the crowd like a sprat in a net, hopelessly useless against the surge of the shadows. As his boots crunched against the burnt-shard husk of the gangplank, something grabbed his arm.

  ‘Farden!’ Tyrfing yelled in his nephew’s face, spittle flying like hailstones. Farden was as limp as a fish. Tyrfing shook him again as Loki tried to push back the dead.

  ‘I tried,’ Farden moaned, eyes glazed.

  Tyrfing cupped his head to keep it from lolling onto his chest. His skin was winter-cold and clammy too. ‘Damn right you tried. Tried to drown me, you did! Grabbed hold of my leg and wouldn’t let go.’ The Arkmage punctuated each of his sentences with a violent shake. Farden’s teeth chattered together with each one.

  ‘I can’t…’ mumbled the mage.

  It was then that Tyrfing slapped him. Hard and open handed. A solid, wet thwack that made a tourist out of his jaw. When it returned from the opposite side of his face, Farden was blinking, mouth agape. There was a little bit of blood on his lip. He put a hand to his rapidly crimsoning face and coughed.

  Tyrfing slapped him again for good measure.

  Farden’s eyes were rolling. ‘What the fu…’

  ‘And there he is!’ Tyrfing cried. ‘He’s back with us.’

  ‘And not a moment too soon,’ Loki pointed. There was a scraping sound as the ship pulled away from the shore, gangplanks still trailing from its uneven bulwarks. Slowly it brought its bow around, giving them a full gawp of what had been nailed to the bow.

  And what a nightmarish thing it was. Half a vulture, half a grinning man, it made the ‘Blade’s mermaid look like a kitten wrapped in velvet. This was a bad dream with a beak, with limbs like that of a skeleton. Their eyes started at its feet, emaciated bony appendages that dangled in the river’s water. Then to its knees, thin pebbles with skin stretched over them. From the hips up, its ribcage was open and filled with splinters and broken fingernails, moss, and scraps of long-dead meat. From the chest the man became a black-feathered vulture. Its wings were splayed across the bow, held in place with bent, rusty nails and bits of yellow rope. Its head was barely more than a vulture’s skull: a hooked beak and black eyes. Mad, black eyes.

  ‘Hello again,’ Farden said, crossing his arms.

  The figurehead screeched as the keel nudged the shore. The creature loomed over them. The three had to fight the urge not to step back. ‘Straddlers! You do not belong!’ it cried.

  Farden nodded. ‘I think we had a similar conversation a few weeks ago.’

  ‘You pretend to be dead! You do not belong!’

  ‘If I may…’

  ‘Straddlers! Back I say.’


  Farden had become bored of being interrupted. He stamped his foot. ‘How much?!’ he bellowed.

  The vulture snapped its beak shut. It took a while for it to open again. ‘You wish to… to bargain?’ it asked, almost a whine, and at a considerably lower volume than before.

  ‘We wish to cross. What will it cost to do so?’

  ‘Careful, Farden,’ Loki could be heard whispering. The dead still clamoured and pushed behind him, but they had quietened slightly, almost as if they were intrigued by this debacle. ‘Be very careful,’ he said. He sounded so sincere that Farden almost turned around to check Loki hadn’t been swapped for another god.

  ‘What will it cost to cross the river?’ Farden asked.

  The vulture spoke no more. The stones crunched as the great ship turned on its bow and pushed its belly up against the shore. The gangplanks slid out again, burying their noses in the stones. Farden shrugged. ‘I guess we’ll find out once we’re on board,’ he said, and he was absolutely right.

  The three shoved their way to the nearest gangplank and stared at it with disgust. Farden had remembered what the ship was made of. It was not crushed shell after all, but layers and layers of finger and toenails, just as he had seen the first time. He had hoped that part had been more a dream than reality, but there was no such joy. He stepped aboard with a crunch and a shudder. He tried his best not to wonder where they had all come from, and not to look down either. His stomach did a little turn.

  Crunch. Crunch. Their boots played a sickening little rhythm on the gangplank as they climbed it to the decks above. Farden bit his lip with every step. The dead around him seemed indifferent. I suppose you do, when you’re dead, he thought.

  At the top of the gangplank they found a flat, crowded deck, and just like the rest of the ship, it too was fashioned entirely from nails. ‘Remind me to tell Nuka about this,’ Farden muttered over his shoulder. His uncle grunted. ‘If we ever get out of here.’

  The dead were packed tightly into every available scrap of space. They stood on the steps. They straddled the bulwarks. Some even hugged the spindly, sail-less masts creeping out of the deck like depressed oaks.

  They heard a cry from the bow. ‘Speak to the boatman!’ it said, and they did as they were told, slowly worming their way through the crowds to the aftcastle, where a lonely raised platform stood overlooking the deck. A dark figure stood upon it, masked by a wheel.

  Farden didn’t really know what to expect in the way of crew. There was only one, as it turned out, the boatman, hidden behind his wheel. Farden squinted, wondering what sort of creature this boatman would be. Half-skeleton maybe. Perhaps part rat. A man with a wolf’s face. After the figurehead, Farden wouldn’t have been surprised by anything. Or so he thought.

  As they reached the meagre stairs to the aftcastle, they saw him. Farden stumbled to a halt at the sight of a shock of blonde hair. ‘Turns out the boatman is a boatwoman,’ said Tyrfing, behind him, nudging his nephew forward.

  The boatman was a woman indeed. She was almost a skeleton, as it turned out, but not quite. She was a tall and skinny bag of bones, white skin stretched over a frame, showing every joint and beam and lump there was to show. From her angular skull a waterfall of thick, tangled blonde hair cascaded, an ancient stranger to scissors by the way it fell past her legs and tangled around her bare feet on the deck. It dredged up a few memories that made Farden quite uncomfortable.

  It was her face that captivated the mages. Even Loki seemed enraptured. Clutched between cheekbones, a jaw, and a forehead so sharp they could have given the Tausenbar peaks a run for their coin, was a face so vacant that Farden wondered for a moment whether she were a statue. Eyes black as tar stared into the distance. A thin scrawl of lips were drawn tight and had a faint, sad slope to them. Her nose was like the tip of a sword. She was beautiful in a way, in a forlorn and striking way. Cold and yet still warm at the same time. Forgotten and lost. A corpse of a pretty princess not long dead.

  ‘Visitors,’ she sighed, lips barely moving as they came up the stairs with slow feet and wide eyes.

  ‘Madam,’ Tyrfing bowed. By his side, Farden did the same. Only Loki stayed still, a frown on his face.

  It was then that she turned to face them, gazing at them with eyes so black it was hard to tell if she were truly looking at anything at all. Her thin lips crept into an intrigued smile. ‘Loki,’ she said, ‘what a surprise, brother.’

  The mages turned to the god by their side, looking more than a little suspicious, perhaps a little shocked. They hadn’t expected this. Loki nodded, still refusing to bow. ‘Hel,’ he curtly replied.

  ‘Am I missing something here?’ Farden asked, trying not to stare too deeply into the black eyes of this Hel woman.

  Hel laughed then, a thin scraping of a chuckle. ‘I first knew Loki when he was naught but a twinkling in the void. Before I was sent here, to ferry the dead.’

  Loki spoke up. ‘Mages, meet Hel, the dead shepherd, guardian of the realm of the same name, goddess of the road to the other side, and sister of Evernia,’ he introduced, like a bored announcer. Hel nodded, and bowed her head very slowly, as if it pained her to do so, as if her neck hadn’t moved so much in centuries.

  ‘Evernia’s sister?’ Farden asked.

  Hel raised her chin. ‘Indeed I am. Though at times even I forget it. I have spent far too many years in this place. Far too many.’ Her tone turned from proud, to resentful, to wistful all in one sentence. ‘I assume you have not ventured down here for the stimulating conversation. What is your business in my realm?’ she asked, her voice now hard and cold. ‘How do you stand here, before me, so disgustingly alive?’

  ‘The Shrieks showed us the way.’

  Hel grunted something. ‘Useless creatures. A shadow of their ancestors. They would have ripped you to shreds just for daring to look at the stones.’ Hel looked disappointed. ‘Well, here you stand. What hopeless mission brings you to my realm?’

  Farden and Tyrfing looked to Loki to speak, but the god shrugged and turned away. ‘We are looking for somebody,’ Farden said.

  ‘Two to be exact,’ added Tyrfing.

  ‘Two’s right. A man and a woman.’

  ‘Then these two you look for must be dead, surely, for no mortals are foolish enough to visit Hel before their allotted time, or so I thought.’

  ‘One came here a thousand years ago. The other might just have arrived.’ Farden looked at the crowd of dead on board the ship, and then at the teeming masses on the shore, still pushing forward to board.

  ‘Names. Souls have them as well as bodies.’

  ‘Elessi and Korrin.’

  ‘Do you know of them?’

  Hel wrinkled her lip. ‘I know all the dead who cross the river. I am the only way across. They must all come aboard my ship. I have seen them all.’

  ‘So you know them?’ Farden stepped forward.

  ‘Korrin, son of Hark and Ynin, both dead. Born in the village of Jukund. Elessi, daughter of Gastinsson and Florsi, both also dead. Born in Leath, Albion.’

  Farden was close to shaking. ‘Do you know where they are?’

  Hel drummed her black nails on the crusted wheel of the ship. It too was made of nails. Dust and dirt clung to its ugly spokes. ‘She crossed a day ago, maybe less. She walks to the other side as we speak.’

  Farden took another step forward. He resisted the urge to grab the goddess. ‘So there’s still a chance?’

  Hel looked at him strangely. ‘A chance to do what, master mage? What is your business here, besides looking?’

  ‘I mean to take her back.’

  Laughter. Cold, clammy laughter. ‘How romantic.’

  ‘I am very serious.’

  ‘I am sure you are, master mage, but the dead are dead and dead they will stay, for as long as I am here.’

  Farden crossed his arms. ‘But she isn’t dead. She was daemontouched.’

  ‘As good as it then.’

  ‘But not quite.’

  ‘Once sh
e reaches the other side, she will be.’

  ‘But until that time, she is fair game, surely.’

  Hel pouted. ‘How dare you dictate to me, mortal. You have no place here. This place is reserved for the punished, those who know about death, not some mage like you.’

  A look came over Farden then. A look as cold as any Hel could have given him. ‘Punished, you say?’ he asked, almost laughing. Down by his side, his hands slowly curled to fists. ‘Let me tell you a little something about punishment, goddess. I’ve been punished since I took my first breath of cold Emaneska air. A forbidden son borne into a doomed house, snatched up and lied to for decades by a halfbreed bastard with delusions of chaos, who fucked me in more ways than I care to count. He took the love of my life and twisted her inside out, made me father a child with her before he let her die, a child that stands above us now, the bitch of some ancient prophecy. Just my luck. My only child from my only love, stolen and lied to and bred to bring the sky crashing down, daemons and all. I know what you’re thinking. How does a man cope? Like this. The man banishes himself to protect all those he cared about. He buries himself in dirty work. Killing for coin, burying himself in blood and shit and tears until he’s numb. Smoking and drinking until he’s forgotten all but the pain. Surely that’s it? No. Greed finds the man. Greed for his armour. Greed that hangs him from his own tree and runs him through. Leaves him to die. Somehow, by the skin of his teeth, he lives. He drags himself back to those he cares about, only to have one snatched away, by the daemons his very daughter summoned. A daughter who thinks her father was the very bastard who began all this. Quite a story, and you say I have no place here? I should be manning this ship, for all the death and punishment I’ve seen,’ Farden spat, breathing hard.

  There was an awkward silence. Tyrfing was staring at his nephew, his eyes bleeding every emotion they could.

  Farden calmed himself. ‘If she’s not dead, then she’s not quite yours. Am I right or not?’

  Hel picked a nail from the wheel. It was a gross, yellow toenail, bigger than any toenail should rightly be. She flicked it over the side and into the river. ‘I knew I could feel it on her. Like a stench,’ she said, and then scowled. ‘Fine. If you can find her, she is yours. Bring her to me, if you can. Though you have little hope, and even less time.’