The Iron Ghost

by Jen Williams

  When eventually the bones were clean of flesh, she took them from the cauldron and lay them on a blue cloth she’d found to wrap them in. She looked at them: innocuous white sticks, she told herself, or the bones of a chicken carcass. Nothing more.

  However, when she folded up the cloth and put them in her pocket, she briefly had the impression of holding someone’s hand, and the wave of nausea that moved through her was so powerful that she staggered and had to lean on the sink for some time. Her mouth filled with saliva and her eyes watered, but she did not vomit.

  The urge to get them out of her pocket was enormous. She had to concentrate on not running to the Tower of Waking, instead forcing herself to walk sedately, her chin up, as befitted the heir to the Mistress Crafter. The bones in her pocket were not as heavy as the knife had been, but she felt them there all the same.

  On her way into the tower she met Tamlyn just coming out. The older woman looked distracted, her thick padded jacket half undone. She looked at Nuava for some moments, as if she couldn’t quite remember who she was.

  ‘I’ve done it,’ she said, trying to sound full of flinty resolve and wincing inwardly as her voice came out in a wheezy squeak. ‘Shall I take them up to her?’

  ‘What?’ Tamlyn scowled.

  ‘The bones, I – I’ve brought them, as you asked.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, of course. Take them up.’ Tamlyn looked past her. They stood at the foot of the great staircase and the front doors looked out onto an afternoon that was growing darker by the minute. ‘There has been no news,’ she said. ‘They should have been there by now, and they should be on their way back, but our furthest patrols have reported nothing so far.’

  Nuava blinked rapidly, realising that her aunt was talking about the mercenaries who had left to retrieve the Heart-Stone. It was difficult to think about anything else while the bones were in her pocket.

  ‘They could have been delayed on the Crippler,’ she said, not really caring either way. She thought of the paring knife, sliding smoothly through flesh as grey as slate, as grey as werken-rock, and she felt her stomach clench uncomfortably. ‘If the weather has been bad, they could be late by days.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tamlyn. She narrowed her eyes at her niece. ‘Or they could have been caught by the Narhl and killed, and we are still without our Heart-Stone. Go on, then, get up to the room. It is best not to keep the Prophet waiting.’

  Nuava opened her mouth, suddenly close to asking so many questions. Why would the Prophet want the finger bones of a Narhl warrior? Who was she, anyway? Why were they listening to her advice? But Tamlyn swept past her, and the moment was gone. Nuava watched her walk to the door, and then sprinted up the steps, across the hall, and up the many spiral staircases that led to the Prophet’s suite. When she stood outside the door she stopped, leaning against the raw rock wall. Her head was spinning.

  My werkens, she told herself, will be magnificent. They will be greater than anything Tamlyn has created, and I will be Mistress Crafter.

  A soft voice called from within. ‘Don’t stand out there, wheezing at the door, Nuava, dear. It’s most unseemly.’

  Nuava entered the chamber. As ever, it was much too warm; a sweat broke out on her back immediately, and she wished she’d thought to leave her furs indoors. The Prophet was on the huge four-poster bed, hidden by the thick canopy of gauze curtains. Nuava had never seen her face.

  ‘I’ve brought what you wanted,’ she said, forcing her voice to be calm. Soon she would be free of the bones, and she could forget all about it. ‘The bones. I have them here for you.’

  ‘Oh good! Come over here, child.’

  Nuava did as she was told, blanching slightly at ‘child’.

  A slim white hand slipped through the curtains, small and unblemished. The fingernails were slightly over-long.

  ‘Put them in my hand, dear.’

  Suddenly, the nausea was back. It was that voice, paired with that small, slim hand. It made no sense at all, and the wrongness of everything the Prophet was hit her. Bors was right, of course he was.

  ‘Are you quite well, child?’ Nuava could see the shadowed form of the Prophet beyond the curtain, and although the face was nothing more than a dark shape, she could hear the smile in the voice.

  ‘Yes, of course. Here.’ She shoved her hand in her pocket and placed the bundle of fabric on the Prophet’s hand. It didn’t move.

  ‘That doesn’t feel like bones, Nuava.’

  ‘They’re in there,’ she said. ‘They’re in the cloth.’

  ‘I asked you to put the bones in my hand, Nuava.’

  Nuava took the bundle back and opened it. Trying not to notice how smooth they were, how slightly warm from her own body heat, she gathered the bones and quickly passed them to the Prophet’s hand. The small, tapered fingers closed around them and passed back through the curtain. The Prophet made a small noise of delight.

  ‘Oh, very good. Yes, very good.’

  Nuava bowed rapidly, already backing away towards the door. She wanted to wash her hands again.

  ‘Wait one moment!’

  Nuava stopped, holding her breath.

  ‘Tamlyn tells me that you are quite the little scholar.’ There was laughter in the voice now. ‘That you study all hours. That you wish to be a crafter of the Edeian, as she is.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nuava. From beyond the curtain came the soft clatter of bones being moved against each other. ‘I want to make my own werkens one day.’

  ‘It is a rare thing, to be able to craft the Edeian,’ said the Prophet in a conversational tone. ‘I have known a few who could, and they were . . . special. Tell me, Nuava, what do you know of Joah Demonsworn?’

  ‘I know he was a great mage that lived and died not far from here. I visited his tomb just recently, with the mercenaries.’

  The Prophet chuckled. ‘Yes, I’m sure they enjoyed that. But that is what everyone knows, Nuava Nox. What do you know from your extensive studies?’

  Nuava coughed. The smoke from the braziers was making her chest tight. ‘He made a pact with a demon, and through that made his greatest and his most terrible works. He crafted the Edeian, as well as wielding the powers of a mage. But one day he asked to see the true form of the demon, for he had grown fond of it. When he saw its real face, he went insane.’

  The shape of the Prophet was very still now, and the clacking of the bones had stopped. Nuava swallowed hard, wondering if she should keep talking. ‘It was terrifying, they said, and ugly beyond anything mortal. They said that if he were a normal man, he would have been struck blind as well. They said—’

  ‘That is quite enough, Nuava.’ All the good humour had vanished from the Prophet’s voice. ‘You can leave now.’

  Nuava, her nerve finally broken, turned and ran out into the corridor.

  19

  Glaciers rose high above them, impossibly blue and shining with bright mirrored light. They were travelling through a narrow canyon, the sides sliced sheer by the passage of ancient mountains. The ground underfoot was made of brittle sheets of snow. Every now and then Sebastian would glance up to see one of the wyverns flying overhead, their long bodies wriggling like eels in a stream. Looking at them, he felt a strange sense of wonder, a tightness in his chest; their skins were a pale shimmering blue, touched here and there with white fur, and their long snouts were narrow and lined with small, peg-like teeth. Their short wings stretched out to either side of their bodies, as taut as sails, and he realised that these creatures felt alive to him in a way he didn’t quite understand. He thought of Ephemeral and her snakes. Was this blood calling to blood, as she claimed?

  Once or twice he’d seen a black bird too, flying high above them. Gwiddion was following along at a distance, it seemed, and that thought cheered him a little.

  ‘Where are you taking us?’ asked Wydrin. According to the prince her werken was waiting for them at their destination, so she walked by the sturdy little ponies that carried their kit. Dallen walked with her, an ic
e-spear at his side.

  ‘It’s a place between our territories,’ said Prince Dallen. He gestured ahead, where the ground in front of them sloped gradually upwards again. ‘Once we are out of this canyon we will be close.’

  ‘If it is between your territories, then who does the land belong to?’ asked Frith. With him they were still openly cautious; his hands were firmly bound once more, and he had been forced to ride one of the ponies, much to his obvious discomfort.

  ‘It is neither Skald nor Narhl,’ said Prince Dallen. ‘The place where I am taking you is just on the edge of our home, a thin strip of land that lies between us and the very outer reaches of where the Skalds dare to travel. It is neutral territory, and therefore the best place that I know of for peace talks.’

  Frith snorted derisively; the young lord was very sceptical about Prince Dallen’s apparently earnest talk of peace, but Sebastian was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. When they met up with the rest of Prince Dallen’s squad, still moving furtively under the cover of night, they had been shocked to find the Heart-Stone waiting for them there, also smuggled out of the settlement without King Aristees’ knowledge. Sebastian had caught sight of its eerie, green light, painting the surrounding snows with a colour like seawater, before someone had hastily thrown a blanket over it.

  When Sebastian had asked him about it, the prince had actually grinned ruefully, looking mildly embarrassed.

  ‘You were entirely right, Sir Sebastian. The stone is, technically, stolen property. It should not be ours, no more than it should be the Skalds’. If I take it to a neutral place, then perhaps we can begin to sort things out.’

  Sebastian surprised himself by laughing bitterly. ‘Your father was ready to cut our heads off for the sake of that stone. You yourself told me that the Skalds are defiling a sacred spirit. Now you talk of diplomacy?’

  ‘We are not savages, Sir Sebastian, whatever the Skalds would have you believe,’ said Prince Dallen. And then in a lower tone of voice, ‘my father’s throne room is no place for the Heart-Stone either.’

  Sebastian had asked him what his father would think of his plan, and Prince Dallen had looked uneasily over his shoulder, as if expecting an army to sweep down on them at any moment.

  ‘If we don’t move quickly, we may find out,’ was all he’d said.

  Now Sebastian glanced over at the prince, who was chatting easily to Wydrin, remembering that look of rueful cheer. He wants to change things, he thought, and somehow we’ve given him an opportunity to try.

  ‘So this place we’re going to,’ Wydrin was saying now. ‘Why isn’t it part of your territory? Why have neither of you claimed it?’

  ‘That’s because it’s haunted,’ said Dallen mildly. ‘A cursed place.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Wydrin dryly. ‘I haven’t been to a cursed place for ages.’

  ‘This land is full of magic, Wydrin Threefellows,’ continued Dallen. ‘And certain places are more sensitive to it. No one knows why this particular piece of land is haunted, but everyone feels it who ventures there. Even the stone-headed Skalds. Now it is inhabited only by animals, who live even closer to the Edeian than we do.’

  Eventually they came out of the canyon, as Dallen had promised, and were faced with another lonely snowscape. Here and there were soft peaks, like sand dunes, with the black teeth of rocks poking through. Sebastian was surprised to see movement in this place; a herd of distant animals, their shaggy white hides standing out in stark contrast against the black mountains that circled them. He paused, trying to make out what they were. There was something about their shapes that looked wrong to him.

  Dallen saw him looking, and smiled.

  ‘A colony of arachnos,’ he said. ‘There are many such gatherings in the wilder parts of Narhl territory.’

  ‘What are they?’ asked Sebastian. He noticed that the prince wore a tuft of white wyvern fur on a cord around his throat, next to a tooth that looked like it had belonged to a bear once. There was a lot he was noticing about the prince. ‘Are they dangerous?’

  For a time Dallen kept looking at the distant beasts, until Sebastian thought he wasn’t going to answer.

  ‘They are not dangerous, no, not unless provoked. We are heading towards them, Sir Sebastian, so you’ll get a closer look soon enough.’

  Dallen was right. Another hour of walking, the wyverns flying above them like unlikely standards, and the strange herd of animals swerved across their path. They were enormous, twice as tall as a man, with broad furry bodies supported by four long, tapering legs. Their fur was white and grey, and their heads, which nestled close to their powerful shoulders, were dotted with four glassy red eyes. Underneath these apparently lidless organs was a pair of black mandibles, half hidden in the long fur. The overall effect was that of a giant, white-furred spider with four legs, and they moved with slow grace over the brittle snow. The herd that moved past them had around thirty members, the biggest twice as tall as Sebastian, with the smallest the size of a large cow.

  Next to Sebastian, Wydrin shook her head. ‘Please tell me those things eat grass.’

  ‘They do eat flesh, but instances of them attacking humans are very rare,’ said Prince Dallen. He had ordered the group to a standstill while the arachnos passed. ‘And accidental, mostly. You see, they can form the ice like we do, and use it to build traps under the snow. A thin layer of ice over a deep hole. Unfortunate men and women have been lost this way, but an actual attack from an arachnos? I have never heard of it happening. They are peaceful animals.’

  Wydrin had gone slightly paler under her hood.

  ‘As if falling into a hole in this place wouldn’t be bad enough, without a giant snow spider showing up to eat you afterwards.’

  Dallen chuckled. ‘I fear I have accidentally portrayed the arachnos in a poor light. When we get to our destination, I will be able to show you a different side.’

  They reached the unclaimed lands under a sky ragged with black clouds and moonlight. The land had been gradually sloping downwards again, until they came to a sudden drop and, beyond that short cliff, was a wide, shallow bowl filled with snow.

  ‘What are those, then?’ asked Wydrin. Dallen’s squad led them down the cliff, along a rough path carved directly into the rock, and she found her eyes turning again and again to the strange objects nestled in the snow.

  ‘This is where the arachnos lay their eggs,’ said Dallen. Frith had been turfed off the mountain pony, and was walking with his arms held awkwardly behind his back, while Sebastian brought up the rear. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’

  ‘They are that,’ agreed Wydrin. The wide expanse of powdery snow was covered in round hemispheres of ice, all clustered together like bubbles floating on the top of a puddle. They glittered in the moonlight, as though they had been sprinkled with diamonds. As they got closer, Wydrin could see that they all had a small hole where the ice met the ground – small for the arachnos, anyway; a human could walk in and out without much trouble. ‘Very beautiful. Are you really telling me you’ve brought us to where those things nest?’

  Dallen gestured with his ice-spear. ‘This nesting site is long since abandoned. They never lay their eggs in the same place twice, and certainly wouldn’t reuse their ice-warrens. Look.’ They had reached the first cluster now, and Dallen’s squad were swiftly unpacking their goods from the small mountain ponies, while the wyverns and their riders landed some distance away. ‘They lay their eggs and then cover them in a protective shell of ice. When the young arachnos hatch, they claw their way out with their mandibles.’

  ‘This is all fascinating,’ said Frith from behind them. ‘Perhaps one day I shall return and write a book about it.’ Wydrin shot him a look, amused; she could tell from his tone that he was close to losing his temper. ‘However, if I do not get to sit near a fire soon I shall be forced to set myself on fire.’

  Dallen glanced over to him. ‘Of course. I have had your belongings brought here ahead of us.’ At his word, five more
men and women appeared from within one of the arachnos’ nests, and they were carrying their packs.

  ‘You intend to give them back to us?’ asked Sebastian.

  ‘Perhaps not immediately.’ Prince Dallen smiled slightly. ‘Which I’m sure you can understand. Wydrin, your werken is also here, although I wish to talk to you about that before we go any further. I want to talk to you all about what I intend to do here.’

  ‘Sure.’ Wydrin glanced at Frith and Sebastian. Neither of them objected. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got something to drink while we have this chat? My insides feel like I’ll never be warm again.’

  ‘We have plenty of grut,’ he said, gesturing to one of his men. ‘I hesitate to recommend it, though, on my honour as a prince.’

  ‘That’ll do,’ she said. ‘I’ve had worse.’

  ‘I must demand that my hands are untied,’ said Frith as soon as he was seated. His hood had fallen back from his face and his brown skin was the warmest thing Wydrin had seen in days. She looked away. ‘I am the Lord of the Blackwood, and I refuse to suffer this indignity any longer.’

  They were sitting inside one of the ice nests, with a cold-lamp wedged in the snow between them. Inside the nest the ice was cloudy and white, with fine swirling lines traced all over the surface like giant fingerprints.

  ‘You may as well untie him,’ Wydrin said. ‘You won’t get a word of sense out of him until you do.’

  Prince Dallen nodded reluctantly before leaning over and cutting Frith’s bonds with a knife. The young lord made a great show of rubbing his wrists.

  ‘I imagine you’re wondering what I have planned, taking you away from the Frozen Steps in the middle of the night.’ He sat forward slightly, the leather armour gaping open around his neck. He seemed utterly unconcerned by the cold.