The Iron Ghost

by Jen Williams

  The centre of the village was the same square of mud and stalls, although someone had taken the time to install wooden planters at the edges, full of the wildflowers that could be found in the valleys all around Ynnsmouth – pink Glasswort and red pasque flower, buttercups and creeping thistle. He wondered if that was his mother’s touch, but told himself that he was simply looking for signs of her.

  It was busy in the square. He kept his hood up so that his face was cast into shadow, and he hadn’t shaved for some weeks in preparation so that his beard was thick and dark. He was careful not to make eye contact with anyone, giving the men and women that passed only the barest of glances. It had been years, of course, and he knew from his own mirror that he was no longer the fresh-faced knight who had been exiled from these lands, but he had grown up here. Anyone he cared to bump into might have played with him as a child, or sold him apples, or even looked after him while his mother was ill.

  Why come here? When so much was at stake? It was not a question he could answer. He made a quick circuit of the stalls, picking up the supplies they needed, keeping all conversations short. To his surprise, he recognised no one, or at least not well enough to name them, and soon enough he stood back at the edge of the market with a heavier pack and an emptier purse.

  ‘Time to go, then,’ he said quietly. ‘Just turn around and leave this place once more.’

  Except he couldn’t quite do that. Instead, he walked down a certain street, his head bowed as though he were weary or deep in thought. Here, the wooden and thatch dwellings slumped next to each other, the smell of wood fires and peat thick in his nostrils. A group of children ran past him, several of them clutching wooden swords, and then they were gone. On the corner between two houses, three teenage girls stood. Two of them wore the scarlet hoods of the lake-singers, and one of them lifted her face to look at him as he came up the road. Sebastian hurriedly turned away.

  The road seemed shorter now. Sooner than he’d expected he found himself standing outside a house built of stone rather than wood, a pair of short stone knights flanking the doorway. One of them, he noticed, had fallen and broken through the middle. No one had repaired it.

  He looked at the windows, his heart beating so heavily in his chest that it was difficult to breathe. He half expected to see her there, her pale face framed in the bright daylight – where else would she be? This was where he pictured her, when he thought of her at all. But there was only a dark space, and no smoke came from the chimney.

  ‘She could be dead,’ he murmured to himself. ‘I would never know.’

  He stood for some time, staring at the wooden door, uncomfortably aware of how suspicious he must look but, even so, unable to move. If he knocked on the door, would she answer? Would she even speak to him? Or would her mouth turn down at the corners, as it had done on the last day he saw her, her eyes filling with pain before she summoned the guards?

  Looking back to the broken stone knight, he felt a small knot of anger in his chest. His father would not have approved of that. Stonework was to be cared for, repaired and cherished. He had been so proud when he’d made those; full of the quiet, faintly disappointed happiness of a man who had expected his son to follow him into the family business, only for him to take another, greater path. Not for the first time Sebastian felt a surge of gratitude that his father hadn’t been alive to see how it had all ended.

  Abruptly, he turned away from the stone house and walked up the street. There was a small ramshackle tavern there called The Running Fox. On a whim he stepped through the open door, peering around the gloomy interior – a single drink, a toast to his father perhaps, and then he would leave. A handful of men and women sat at tables nursing tankards of ale, and the bar at the back was empty but clean. Conversation was lively, and he caught snatches of it as he stepped up to the bar.

  ‘She left him in the end, did you hear that? Just took the girl and left. My sister knows the lake-singer mistress there, and that’s what she said.’

  Sebastian turned slightly. There were two women sitting at the nearest table, one round and matronly, her hair pulled back with a kerchief, the other thin and wiry, and clad in riding leathers. The slimmer woman took a mouthful from her pint and gave the other woman a significant look.

  ‘Well, I think that’s terrible,’ said the other woman. ‘With him losing his boy, and then she takes the girl away as well. That’s just heartless. Does she not believe him?’

  The wiry woman shrugged. ‘There was a time when Rollo was known for his drinking, wasn’t there? He’d pulled himself together lately, but I think she was just waiting for him to slip back. Maybe she thinks his head is addled.’

  ‘But the bite marks,’ insisted the other woman. At the bar, Sebastian stood up a little straighter and turned his face away from them. ‘My cousin’s Junie saw the body, and she said the throat was all torn out.’

  ‘Could have been a meadow wolf.’ The woman wearing leathers didn’t look like she actually believed that. ‘Perhaps he was scared and left the boy to his fate, and now he’s making up stories of these dragon women to make himself look better.’

  ‘A meadow wolf down here, on the lakes?’ The woman with the kerchief pulled a face. ‘Methinks you’ve been at the drink yourself, Gertha. Besides which, the girl saw them too.’

  ‘She could be lying for her da. She could be scared out of her wits. If there were a troop of green dragon women in Ynnsmouth, do you not think we’d have seen them?’

  ‘What happened in Relios was real,’ said the other woman, her voice low now. ‘The battle at Baneswatch was real. My Willem was there, and he saw them.’ She paused, and Sebastian saw her mutter a prayer to Isu. ‘Thank the god-peak he got out of there when he did. You mark my words, Gertha, there are monsters walking Ede these days, and we are living in dark times.’

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Sebastian started, nearly dropping his pack. The tavern keeper was leaning over the bar next to him, thick dark brows lowered over a gaze that already looked suspicious.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘A drink? That’s what people normally comes in here for. If you’ve come in here merely to rest yourself against my bar, well, then I’m afraid I may have to charge you rent.’

  ‘No, thank you. I thought I did – I thought I was meeting someone here, but I’ve come to the wrong place.’

  The tavern keeper opened his mouth to say something else, but Sebastian was already heading for the door.

  He did see her in the end, just as he was leaving the boundary of the village.

  A tall figure swathed in a long grey cloak left one of the smoking huts and passed him on the right-hand side. She wore a cloth over the lower half of her face – tending the fish in the smoking huts was difficult on the lungs, she had always told him that – but he knew it was her from the way that she walked, from the slight stoop of a woman who had always been taller than her friends. Her black hair was mostly grey now, white in places, and she did not even glance at him as they passed, so close that Sebastian could have reached out and touched her arm.

  A few seconds was all he had in the end, to take note of the new lines around her blue eyes, to drink in the sight of her. A few seconds and he was past her and beyond the stone markers. He walked on, feeling as though he might never breathe again. So foolish, he told himself, his heart racing in his chest. If anyone would know me on sight, it would be her. Isu must truly be looking out for me today.

  He stopped and turned back, not quite able to resist, and saw her standing there looking back at him. A solemn figure in grey, a basket of smoked fish on one arm, her face covered. He knew then that she had seen him, that she had known him even in that brief second; that there was no way she could not.

  After a moment or two, she turned away and walked further into the village, and although he watched her until she was out of sight, she never looked back at her son.

  38

  Frith awoke in the middle of the night to a series of p
ainful cramps in his stomach. He just about managed to roll out of the bunk – eliciting an angry squawk from Gwiddion – before the bile surged up the back of his throat and he vomited awkwardly onto the metal floor. When it was over he knelt for a moment in the dark, feeling the room spin around him, and he imagined he was being carried in the belly of a great, terrible machine. Laughing weakly, he wiped his mouth on one of the filthy blankets and climbed shakily to his feet. Throwing up had not relieved his nausea. If anything, he felt even worse.

  ‘If you think that’s just the bad food, little man, you are a fool.’

  Frith looked up sharply. The woman was there again, standing at the back of the narrow room. She was little more than a shape in the darkness now, but he knew she was there.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The woman said nothing. Frith shook his head in frustration.

  ‘Damn you,’ he spat. ‘If you’re not going to help me, you could at least let me be ill in peace.’

  The woman sighed, a small noise of amusement. Frith clenched his fists.

  ‘I am Xinian the Battleborn,’ she said eventually. ‘My presence here is . . . limited. The world fades in and out. It is difficult to describe.’

  Frith ran a hand through his hair, grimacing at the old sweat he could feel there. It was so difficult to think.

  ‘I know that name.’

  ‘Of course you do, mage-child, but that man’s bastardised magic is unmaking you. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel it in your blood?’

  Frith swallowed, his throat sour. The bunk room smelt of sickness and dying, and he needed suddenly to be elsewhere, ghosts or no ghosts. He stumbled out of the room, pushing the door closed firmly behind him. The central forge room was empty, the light of the corrupted Heart-Stone playing over empty tables and chairs. Glancing at it warily, Frith made for a door to the far side, where he could hear the steady tread of someone walking backwards and forwards.

  ‘Joah? Are you in there? I need to speak to you.’

  He walked into the room, and stopped. Joah was standing in the middle, while all around him objects hung in the air, suspended by magic. Frith saw open books, their pages frozen in the moment of turning, knives twirling around each other like errant dance partners, and lengths of silk, fluttering as though caught in a breeze. Joah stood amongst them, his face drawn and pensive. It seemed to take him a few moments to notice that Frith had entered the room.

  ‘Ah Aaron, I thought you were asleep.’ He blinked, and the objects settled gently back down onto the floor. The room itself was otherwise bare, save for the scrawled sigils in black paint on the walls. ‘I was just thinking some things over.’

  ‘I saw a woman,’ said Frith, no patience left to dance around the matter, ‘in your memories. Just before I woke up. She was fierce, and had brown skin and a bald head. She was missing her left hand, and in her other she carried a strange sword. I should like to know who she was.’

  Joah stood very still for a moment, before smiling tightly. ‘Shall we return to the main room, Aaron? We have much to talk about, it seems.’

  They returned to the centre of the Forge, and although being back in that violet light made his head throb painfully, Frith sat where Joah bid. The rogue mage sat down opposite him, the easy smile back on his face.

  ‘I propose an exchange of information,’ he said, reaching up to push an errant lock of hair back behind his ear. ‘I will tell you what I know of Xinian the Battleborn, and you will tell me what you can of that bird-headed man I saw in your own head. Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Frith. He looked down at his own hands and saw that they were shaking, so he balled them into fists. ‘I will agree to that.’

  ‘Good. Xinian the Battleborn was a mage from my time, Aaron, and a very powerful one at that. Back then, some mages chose to take a more martial approach to the use of the Edenier, and Xinian was a famed warrior and general. She led the Howling Battalion against the Eight Hosts of the Yellow Night, and single-handedly fought the demon Brugula to a standstill.’ Joah waved a hand dismissively, half laughing. ‘All ancient history now, of course. I’m sure you’ve never even heard of such events. She was an extraordinary fighter, combining offensive magic and a keen strategic mind. She was also the mage they sent to kill me.’

  Frith raised his eyebrows. Joah’s tone was mild, as though they were discussing what to have for dinner, but his previous outbursts were still fresh in his memory.

  ‘To kill you?’

  ‘Yes. In the end the ruling mages of the time considered what I was doing to be too dangerous. Too risky. They sent envoys to me, men and women with silver tongues, desperate to talk me away from the path, but they just didn’t understand, Aaron. Not like you do.’

  Frith pressed his lips together. Why does he believe that I am on his side?

  ‘The envoys didn’t succeed, and, well, Bezcavar took exception to their attitude.’ Joah leaned back in the chair, looking at a point over Frith’s left shoulder. ‘It was all quite messy. And so eventually they sent Xinian and her remarkable sword.’ He seemed to come back to himself then, and he gestured at his own chest. ‘She succeeded in taking me from the path, but not permanently, as it turns out.’

  ‘What was so remarkable about her sword?’ asked Frith, but Joah was already shaking his head.

  ‘All ancient history, Aaron, but I hope I have sated your curiosity at least. Now, to the bird-headed man I saw in your memories. What of him?’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Frith cleared his throat, his mind racing. ‘I have been thinking on this, since you expressed an interest, and I believe I may have figured out where the memory came from. It would have been one of my earliest, in fact, when my mother was still alive. She took me and my brother Tristan, who was a babe in arms at the time, to a travelling market run by the Cheoria.’ Frith paused, trying to think of details that would make his story more plausible. ‘My brother Leon was already at that age where he felt that such things – particularly things that involved being escorted by our mother – were beneath him.’

  ‘Ah, yes, your brothers,’ said Joah in a musing tone. Again he wasn’t quite looking at Frith; instead he was looking down at his own hands. ‘And you lost both of them. How sad.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Frith. ‘It was. At the travelling market there were a group of mummers, performing several plays. One of them was a series of skits on the earliest days of Ede, and one of the actors wore the most outlandish headdress.’ Frith forced a laugh. ‘When I was a child, I remember it scared me quite badly, so that I demanded to leave the play, much to my mother’s exasperation. I had nightmares about it for months after, would you believe? It is strange the things that affect us as small children.’ When Joah didn’t answer immediately, Frith continued falteringly, ‘There were lots of strange masks of course – wolves too, for the twin gods, and another of a woman’s face with long green hair streaming from the back of it – but it was the bird mask that scared me. I can only imagine that’s why—’

  Joah leapt from his chair, reaching for Frith’s throat. Giving a startled yelp, Frith threw himself backwards, almost toppling to the floor, but Joah caught him, one strong hand at his neck and the other pushing a tiny knife into the bony part of his shoulder.

  ‘Remember,’ muttered Joah directly into his ear, his breath hot and feverish, ‘concentrate on the pain.’

  Frith threw a punch at Joah’s midriff, only for it to be deflected with a wave of force that took all the feeling from his fingers. In response, he felt the Edenier rising in his chest once more, fuelled by pain and fury and ready to spill out in any means possible, but then there came a fiercely hot pain in the centre of his forehead; Joah was forcing a ‘crossing’ on him again, and he felt the rogue mage’s mind slip into his own like a heated blade. He screamed, unable to stop himself – the intrusion of it, the terrible sense of tearing – and then he was lost in a tumult of images, although these ones were all too familiar.

  His brother Tristan playing with a toy horse
on the rug of the great hall, their father a distant blur on his chair; falling beaten and half naked onto the ice-covered stones of the courtyard and glancing up to see their bodies hanging, black and purple, from the battlements; holding a folded piece of torn cloak to the wound in Sebastian’s chest, feeling his life’s blood slipping through his fingers; the waters of the Mages’ Lake, glittering with a thousand points of light; Wydrin’s face, creased into her usual smirk, a length of linen curled between her clever fingers; an island of black rock and steaming pools –

  At this image Frith tried to draw back, knowing that these memories would contain information that Joah should not see, but the rogue mage was relentless, pushing aside his resistance as though it were made of wet paper.

  Jolnir hobbling towards him out of the mist, enormous bird mask nodding alarmingly; sleeping in a conical hut made of grass, lying and listening to the lonely sound of the wind and feeling lost; sending fireballs into a nest of flying lizards and watching as they fell, blackened and crispy; Jolnir removing the headdress and revealing his own terrible face, the face of an old god; O’rin the trickster god taking his powers with one touch, and letting him fall to the ground, senseless . . .

  Here the onslaught stopped. Frith had a brief impression, as Joah withdrew his mind, of the woman Xinian the Battleborn, and then it was gone. Back in his chair in the Forge, he slumped awkwardly half to the floor, gasping for breath. Joah was standing over him, his face pale and his eyes wild.

  ‘The lost god?’ He was shouting, but Frith suspected he had no idea of the volume of his voice. ‘O’rin the trickster god lives?’

  Frith pressed his hand to his forehead, once more attempting not to be sick. Darkness was crowding in at the edge of his vision.

  ‘What did you do to me?’ he murmured. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Don’t you understand, Aaron? Don’t you know what this means? One of the old gods lives! I had always assumed that that particular source of power was forever lost to me, but here it is, and you have brought it to me.’