The Iron Ghost

by Jen Williams

  ‘Are you well, Aaron? I can hear you calling out in your sleep.’

  Frith swore under his breath, glancing towards the door, but when he looked back to the woman she was gone; the collection of shadows was just that again, empty and dark.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he answered, flexing his injured hand. ‘Better than ever, obviously.’

  35

  ‘Well, this is ominous.’

  They stood at the entrance to the cave, which, to Wydrin, looked more like a jagged hole in the ground. She could see the rock-strewn path within sloping steeply down into the darkness. At the very lip of the cave were five small, furry bodies – two lean rabbits, and three mangy foxes with pale, yellowed fur. Their blood had long since dried to a brown stain on the rocks.

  ‘Are they offerings?’ said Sebastian. ‘Is this a holy place?’

  ‘Perhaps they’re offerings to whatever lives in this cave,’ said Wydrin, pulling a face. ‘Maybe if you leave it dinner it doesn’t come out looking for you.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Sebastian. ‘Are you sure about this, Wydrin?’

  Wydrin sighed. Mendrick was already speaking in her head, that cold, dispassionate voice like a handful of pebbles down her back.

  This is the place, he said. This is where I can reach the nexus.

  ‘I don’t like the look of it much either, Seb, but old stony face here is insisting. Nuava, you will stay up here with Prince Dallen while Sebastian and I—’

  ‘I want to go with you,’ cut in the girl. She crossed her arms over her chest, not looking directly at the Narhl prince. ‘I want to see it. This nexus. It could be the key to – it could teach me so much about the Edeian, and how to craft it.’

  Dallen looked up sharply at that, but said nothing.

  ‘We can’t leave the prince on his own,’ said Sebastian. ‘He is wounded and we don’t know how long this could take.’

  ‘I will be fine on my own,’ said Dallen, in a slightly affronted tone. ‘I am more at home in this place than any of you.’

  ‘I want to go,’ said Nuava again. For the first time in days her face was creased with something other than grief, and she was standing a little straighter. ‘I have lost many things, but I am still a crafter in training. I wish to see this nexus, if it exists.’

  Wydrin could see from the flinty look in the girl’s eye that she was not convinced that Wydrin could hear Mendrick’s voice at all; perhaps she thought it was an elaborate joke at her expense. Taking a deep breath, Wydrin lifted and dropped her arms dramatically.

  ‘Fine. If Nuava fancies falling about in the dark with me and a giant pile of moving rocks, then let’s do it. Sebastian, you can stay up here and make sure the prince doesn’t get too bored.’ Catching the look on his face, she waved a hand at him. ‘I’d really rather there were someone up here watching our backs. I don’t want anything hungrier than me following us down here. We’ll be in and out before you know it, I swear on my claws.’

  Sebastian watched them disappear into the tunnel with a feeling of dread thick in his throat. Wydrin had given Nuava the small light-globe originally gifted to them by Crowleo, back at the Secret Keeper’s house, and she had drawn her dagger ready. When she’d seen his worried look, she’d tipped him a wink.

  ‘I’m just exploring some mysterious tunnels. What’s the worst that could happen?’

  Mendrick followed in after them, the strange wolf shape that was so much a part of the landscape moving smoothly and with barely any noise. After a few moments they were lost to sight.

  ‘Hurry up,’ Sebastian murmured. ‘Do what you need to do and get out of there.’

  He and Dallen settled in to wait at the cave entrance. The tunnel Mendrick had led them to sat at the bottom of a shallow bowl in the rock, and they were surrounded by snow and ice, all weathered into strange shifting shapes by the wind. They had left the frozen lakes with the armoured fish and the monoliths behind, although Sebastian still felt that they were travelling through a cursed land, deemed as wicked by an ancient people. And underneath that was another feeling: a cold joy in the lack of humanity here, and a connection to this place that he couldn’t begin to understand. He wondered what Ephemeral would make of that.

  The prince removed a long, glass bottle with square sides from his pack and took a sip. The liquid inside looked thick and brownish-yellow.

  ‘I would offer you some,’ he said apologetically, catching Sebastian’s look, ‘but this is a drink we call Old Father. It’s made from whale fat and goat’s milk, and left in vats for months. When we have traded with warmlings in the past, none of you would touch it.’

  Sebastian smiled. ‘I’m not surprised. Thank you anyway, but Wydrin has left me with half her rum supply, which is a surprisingly large amount of rum.’ He pulled a flask from his own belt. ‘Although if I drink too much, I’ll be for it.’

  ‘Here, look at that.’ Dallen pointed up to the low clouds just in time for Sebastian to catch a tremor of movement up there. ‘Keep watching, they will come down again in a moment.’

  Frowning slightly, Sebastian narrowed his eyes, wondering what he was looking out for, when three long eel-like shapes slipped down out of the clouds, wriggling frantically. Their shining blue skins looked like banners the colour of a summer’s sky, and Sebastian could just make out the twisted white forms of their horns. The three wyverns slipped along together, like porpoises in the sea, before vanishing back up into the cloud. Sebastian smiled; their shapes pleased him in a way he could not name.

  ‘Wild wyverns,’ said Dallen. There was both pride and sadness in his voice. ‘There are nests not far from here. Every few generations we come to the nesting grounds and collect a few eggs for ourselves, and then we hatch them in the war-towers.’ A look of pain moved across his face. ‘It does the wyverns good to have new blood in the squadrons every now and then. Rillion’s mother was from a new egg. She loved to fly higher than the others, and my father always said it was because she was closer to her wild cousins.’

  ‘Has anyone from outside – has anyone who wasn’t a Narhl ever ridden one?’ Sebastian asked, not quite sure why he needed to know.

  Dallen looked at him in surprise. ‘Never. The wyverns dislike warmlings even more than my father does, as difficult as that may be to believe.’

  ‘You are close to them,’ said Sebastian after a few moments. He was thinking of the nest of snakes under the thorn bushes, and how Ephemeral had stilled them with a look. ‘There is a connection between you?’

  Dallen nodded. ‘I felt the death of each wyvern as keenly as I felt the death of Olborn, of Krestin, of all of them. To lose all of them at once . . . such grief will never leave me.’

  They lapsed into silence, and the sky grew gradually darker. Light flurries of snow began to fall and Sebastian pulled up his hood.

  He thought of Wydrin and Nuava, somewhere beneath the ground now, looking for this mysterious nexus. She’ll be fine, he told himself. Wydrin had faced down a dragon, not to mention half the tavern owners in Crosshaven. She could take care of herself.

  ‘Tell me about your order,’ said the prince into the silence. ‘Your order of Ynnsmouth knights.’

  Sebastian shrugged. ‘There is not much to tell. I thought it was where I belonged, but I was wrong. I paid for that mistake, and, in the end, so did they.’

  ‘I like to hear about these things, you see,’ said Dallen softly. The snow was dusting the top of his head, and as Sebastian watched, a few errant flakes landed in his beard and on his eyebrows. They did not melt. ‘I’ve only ever known this place, all my life. My soldiers used to laugh at me for it, but I collected all sorts of items from outside the Frozen Steps. Maps, books, even cooking utensils, scavenged from travellers coming through these northern lands. Anything I could get that reminded me that there was a world outside this cold place.’

  Sebastian nodded. He could feel his own beard growing rigid with ice, but he felt strangely comfortable even so. Soon he would have to move away from t
he prince and build a fire, but just for the moment it felt good to sit here looking out across the broken rocks with this strange man at his side.

  ‘We were a celibate order,’ he said, ignoring the heat suddenly suffusing his cheeks. ‘And I fell in love with a man in my company, a man who looked up to me as a leader. It did not end well.’

  Dallen nodded carefully, not quite looking at him. ‘The Order of the Ynnsmouth Knights . . . they did not tolerate . . . such things?’

  ‘No. There are places that do,’ said Sebastian, turning towards the prince. Suddenly it seemed quite important to say this. ‘Out in the world beyond the Frozen Steps, and beyond Skaldshollow. Where Wydrin comes from, for example, a place called Crosshaven, such things hardly merit a raised eyebrow. There are better places, out in the world. But Ynnsmouth was not one of them. I was exiled, cast out from my order and banished from the land of my birth.’

  ‘This is most interesting,’ said Prince Dallen. His voice had taken on a carefully speculative note. ‘My father, and indeed most Narhl, would not look kindly on such things. It may have,’ he took a deep breath, ‘it may have made life difficult for me, over the last few years.’

  For a little while they sat in silence. The snow grew heavier, sending swirls of white flakes dancing around the broken rocks and shadows, making them look like they were almost moving themselves; a great waltz of ghosts and stone.

  It didn’t take long for it to become clear that this was a cave unlike any Wydrin had been in before. The tunnel walls were curiously rounded, as though something had bored its way through the earth, and the deeper they went the smoother it became. After a time, they started to see small patches of odd creatures that Wydrin could only guess were some sort of cross between a fungus and a living animal; she paused by one with her dagger out, and gestured to Nuava to bring the light closer.

  ‘Here, look at this.’

  It looked rather like a swollen bunch of grapes, except that each small sac was pale and translucent, and gathered in the very centre were a number of tiny appendages, like rubbery fingers. When Wydrin placed the point of her dagger on one of the swollen sacs, the entire thing seemed to thrum with anger and the ends of the small appendages lit up with a pearly green light. There were hundreds of the things, on the floor and the walls and the ceiling, some growing in patches as large as a man.

  Nuava peered at it closely. ‘I’ve never seen such a thing,’ she said. Without seeming to think about it, her hand drifted towards the notebook on her belt. ‘But that light. It looks to be Edeian-generated. Perhaps the creatures here, living in such close proximity to the rock, are affected by it. I should very much like to make some drawings, take a few notes.’

  Wydrin snorted. ‘We don’t have time for that I’m afraid, Nuava. While we’re in here messing about with weird plants our murderous mage could be up to anything.’

  Nuava stepped away a little unsteadily. ‘Let’s keep moving, then.’

  They walked on down the tunnel, the familiar heavy tread of Mendrick coming on behind them. He was silent in Wydrin’s head, but she could feel him there clearly. It was strange, she realised, to know that someone was there with you but to have no idea of their mood. There were no expressions on his stony face to interpret, and his voice was a disembodied echo inside her own mind.

  As they moved deeper under the ground, the bulbous plants grew thicker, so that they brushed against them continually and, consequently, the tunnel was soon lit with enough green light for them to barely need the light-globe.

  Do you know what these things are?

  For a moment there was no reply from Mendrick, only the echoing silence. They are lights for someone, he said eventually. And now lights for you.

  That’s not exactly helpful, she replied. Are we going the right way?

  Yes, he replied, although we have a way to go yet.

  They walked on, Wydrin still with Frostling in her fist. They started to pass other tunnels, ones that bisected their own and passed on into the dark. All of them were smooth and round. Wydrin glanced at Nuava. The girl was looking at their surroundings with wide eyes, as though she could somehow drink in the knowledge by seeing everything at once.

  ‘For what it’s worth, I am sorry about your brother.’

  Nuava looked up, her eyes filled with pain again, and inwardly Wydrin winced.

  ‘I mean, he was very kind to me. I’m sure that doesn’t help at all, but he seemed like the sort who was always helping people when he could, and those are the best sort of people. Rare people, often.’

  Nuava sniffed and nodded. ‘I – I can’t believe he’s gone,’ she said. ‘We argued a lot, because we both wanted to craft the Edeian, but I was the only one naturally inclined that way. He would study Tamlyn’s designs for hours, and it never really helped.’ She paused, then shook her head. ‘That’s a lie actually. About the arguing, I mean. I would argue, and he would just listen, patiently, and then try to make me understand. It was infuriating.’

  Wydrin smiled, thinking of Sebastian. ‘I know the sort.’ The girl was walking with her head down now, looking at her boots. ‘Some people will tell you it gets better,’ she said, ‘but that’s not really true, and I won’t tell you that. There’s a piece missing from you now, and you never get it back, but you do learn how to exist alongside that missing piece. It gets easier to navigate, over time. It’s terrible, really, that you can learn to live with such a thing, but you do. People are horribly resilient in that way.’

  Nuava sniffed again, and quickly wiped a gloved hand across her face. Wydrin pretended not to see.

  ‘You’ve lost someone, then?’

  Wydrin nodded shortly. The tunnel ahead of them branched off into two separate entrances, and after a moment she heard Mendrick in her head again. To the left, he said, so she led them on. The glass globe cast its sunny light over walls thick with the strange, vibrating creatures, and somewhere she could hear water running.

  ‘My father –’ she began as they made their way through the left-hand side passage. This way was narrower, and she and Nuava had to walk much closer, their arms brushing together periodically. ‘He was a merchant, and sometimes a pirate. He went looking for something impossible over the horizon, and never came back.’

  ‘He could still be alive, then,’ said Nuava hesitantly. Wydrin heard the hope in her voice, the irrational hope that the dead could somehow be returned to them, and felt a sliver of pain in her own heart. No, she thought bitterly, it doesn’t work that way. We must live for the living. ‘He could just be lost, or stranded somewhere. I’ve read about that, in stories. Men and women in shipwrecks, getting washed up on deserted islands.’

  ‘It’s a nice thought,’ said Wydrin, desperately trying to hide the sour note in her voice. ‘But it’s been years now. My father was no fool – at least, he wasn’t a fool in that sense – and he would have found a way to get a message to us by now. My mother and my half-brother have both looked for him, up and down a hundred coastlines.’ She sighed, suddenly annoyed that she was thinking about this at all. ‘If he ever did turn up at my door again, I’d probably knock him straight back into the sea for making us worry so much.’

  Nuava half laughed, a tiny, nervous noise that echoed strangely off the walls.

  ‘The last time I saw him, he’d won a cargo boat full of oranges off some idiot in a card game.’ Wydrin smiled at the memory. ‘He was trying to figure out what he was going to do with them all, but I said to him—’

  The ground beneath their feet trembled, causing Nuava to stagger to one side. Wydrin drew Glassheart in her free hand and looked around, but there was nothing to be seen.

  ‘What was that?’

  Nuava shook her head. They had reached another of the intersections, and she stood where the tunnels met, looking back the way they’d come.

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps the rocks are shifting?’

  Something lurched out of the dark from her right, knocking her forward and then gathering her up in o
ne movement. Wydrin had time to see a huge, segmented creature that half-filled the tunnel that passed through theirs, its body covered in shiny brown blisters like earthenware plates, before it had snatched up Nuava with a set of writhing mandibles, and then she was faced with its backside, disappearing off down the tunnel. The thing had scurrying, insectile legs, hundreds of them, and it was moving alarmingly fast.

  Nuava screamed, once, and then already she was out of sight.

  ‘Ye gods and little fishes!’ Wydrin sheathed her dagger and scrambled up onto Mendrick’s back. ‘Follow that centipede!’

  Mendrick pounded down the tunnel, sending up showers of stone and grit. The strange plants shimmered and shone, lighting their way down the passage. Ahead of them, Wydrin could just make out the barbed read-end of the monster that had stolen Nuava; the creature was twisting and turning, seemingly at random, and for long moments they would lose sight of it altogether, before Mendrick would put on an extra burst of speed.

  ‘The lights,’ she gasped as she clung to the leather strap around the werken’s neck. ‘You said they were someone’s lights. You could have mentioned that that someone was a giant carnivorous centipede!’

  It is not carnivorous, said Mendrick. Not as such.

  ‘Not as such?’

  They tore around another corner, and now they were very close. Wydrin could see that the long, horn-like barbs on the centipede’s rear end were flexing at them aggressively, and there was some sort of dark fluid oozing from the pointed ends.

  ‘Of course it would be poisonous,’ she muttered. ‘Bastard thing that ugly would have to be.’

  From ahead they heard Nuava shouting again, and Wydrin leaned forward over Mendrick’s neck.

  ‘Go for it, Mendrick,’ she urged. ‘I know you can catch this thing.’

  Mendrick leapt forward, attempting to land on the creature’s rear end and crush it, but the centipede vanished from view, and then suddenly they were falling, catapulting down into the black. Wydrin heard Nuava screaming, and then realised she was screaming too. There was a confusion of lights – the light-globe, somehow still with Nuava, the weird shimmering lights of the wall fungus, and the twin green lamps of Mendrick’s eyes – and in it Wydrin caught sight of what looked like a whirlpool directly beneath them.