The Iron Ghost

by Jen Williams

  ‘No, no,’ she murmured, urging her werken on. ‘Not yet, he can’t be back yet.’

  She pelted down the path, moving faster than anyone else would dare to on the thickly iced surface. Men and women who had been manning the guard stations hurriedly drew back to let her past.

  ‘Bring all werkens to this wall,’ she bellowed as she passed them. ‘Ready all catapults! We are under attack.’

  The wall under her werken’s feet juddered and for a few moments they skidded perilously close to the edge. Tamlyn, utterly certain of her own ability to control the werken, leaned over the side and looked down. What she saw there threatened to unseat her, and she found herself thinking of the stifling heat in the Prophet’s room, and how it had always smelled of madness.

  There was a monster at their gates.

  It looked like the largest werken she’d ever seen, but it was alien in aspect, twisted and beetle-like, and parts of it were made of darkly shining black metal. There was a cluster of violet eyes on the thing’s deeply notched head, and it was using irregular serrated claws to tears chunks out of Skaldshollow’s outer wall.

  ‘Get a team out the southern gate,’ she called to the soldiers who had followed her up the wide stairs. ‘Surround it. We have to stop it before it pulls the entire wall down.’

  The men and women scattered to carry out her orders, while small fires burst into life all along the wall as her soldiers brought up barrels from the guard houses. They were tipped over the side, splattering the monster beneath the wall with boiling oil and flame, but it carried on scraping its jagged claws against the stone; as Tamlyn watched, huge chunks of masonry fell away, and the surface under her feet trembled alarmingly. The fire, so effective in their clashes with the Narhl, had no effect on it at all.

  The werkens clustered at the side of the wall were pushing great blocks of stone towards the edge. Enormous rocks the size of carts plummeted and smashed to pieces against the creature’s stony hide. It paused briefly at this, before surging up the wall, thorned legs scrabbling for purchase.

  Tamlyn cried out, horrified at the sight of those violet eyes lunging closer, and her team of war-werkens edged back. Glancing at them, she shook her head angrily.

  ‘No retreat,’ she called to them. ‘You must hold it off for as long as possible. I will be back.’

  Barely having to think about it, she turned her werken and sped back down the steps, scattering the men and women who had come in defence of the wall. She saw Barlow at the bottom, sitting atop a bear-shaped werken; the woman looked mildly stunned.

  ‘Barlow!’ she shouted. ‘Get back to the hidden pit and get our project ready.’

  Barlow was shaking her head before Tamlyn had finished speaking. Her furry hat was askew.

  ‘Mistress Nox, there is no way it could be ready in time, I—’ There was screaming coming from beyond the wall now – the team who had gone out the gate, no doubt. ‘Most of the specifications are still only half complete, and we haven’t even—’

  ‘We have the basic structure, yes?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Then get it ready, Barlow.’

  Without waiting for an answer Tamlyn urged her werken on, flying down streets that were suddenly deserted – she caught sight of frightened faces staring from windows, and the occasional man and woman passed her, most still strapping on their armour. At one point she glanced back over her shoulder and was rewarded with a sight she suspected would be etched in her memory for the rest of her life, however long that might be: the monstrous insectile werken had breached the top of the wall, its misshapen head tossing back and forth as her soldiers rained down fire and rock. One of its grasping, clawed legs reached out, curled around a werken rider and held the soldier up as though examining him. After a moment, a wide aperture opened up in the thing’s head, pulsing with violet light, and it dropped the soldier inside. What happened to him after that, she couldn’t say.

  Tamlyn turned her eyes from it, pushing her own werken fast enough for the frightened faces peering from windows to become blurs. Finally, arriving at the Tower of Waking she half jumped, half fell from her saddle and ran, heart beating frantically in her throat.

  ‘The last piece,’ she muttered through numb lips. The room was dark, with every available werken already roused to the fight, but there was still a small oil lamp burning above the chest. Cursing her trembling fingers, Tamlyn took the key from around her neck and opened the lid; pale green light bathed her face, making it look sickly and old. ‘The last piece, and our last chance.’

  55

  Inside the Rivener, Joah Demonsworn stared out through the new glass windows at the carnage going on around him. His arms were burning with spells, and his head swam with words – so many held in balance at once, changing and shifting and being brought together. It was dizzying, but the Rivener moved to his command, exactly as he had envisioned; the Edeian, the Edenier, the demon’s artifices, and the Heart-Stone itself were working together in feverish unison. Distantly he was aware that the burns on his face were infected, but even that maddening itch was pushed aside by the complexities of the Rivener.

  ‘Many people have told me I am mad,’ he said to the empty room. Beyond the windows he could see the stone houses of the Skald, the people fleeing down the cobbled streets. Absently he instructed the Rivener to snatch up one of these struggling figures. ‘Aaron was certainly not the first. He knows nothing of being a mage.’

  There was a thud from behind him and he turned to see the woman he had plucked from the street land inside the glass chamber. He saw her roll over and look at him, her eyes wide and her nose bloody, and then the violet light surged in brilliance. The woman tried to climb to her feet, but the Rivener was already doing its work. Rather than standing up and throwing herself against the glass, as he had no doubt she intended, the woman slumped back down to her knees, her eyes becoming unfocussed. Above her there was a swirl of something almost invisible as the raw Edenier was siphoned away.

  ‘It all works so well,’ murmured Joah, his eyes still fixed on the woman. She was staring back at him with an expression of faint puzzlement. After a moment the floor below her dropped away and she fell down through the inner workings of the Rivener, to be dropped somewhere beneath it. If she was lucky, the fall would kill her.

  Outside, the people of Skaldshollow were flinging fire and pitch, a flurry of stone and ice. None of it could harm the Rivener, although Joah kept himself aware of it, as he was aware of everything. It would not do to have to stop and make repairs before he had subdued this place. The Tower of Waking was in his field of vision now, thrusting up like a great flinty arrow head.

  ‘The centre of Skaldshollow,’ he said to himself. Inside, his mind repeated a mantra of mages’ words: Hold, Lift, Force, Crush. ‘From there I shall start. Even if Aaron—’

  Something through the windows caught his eye. The Rivener was passing a series of taller buildings now, their roofs parallel with its wide abdomen, and a small figure stood atop one, waving its arms as though it wanted the Rivener to consume it. It took Joah some moments to recognise it – the demon girl’s hair was short, and she was dressed in rags. The child Bezcavar had chosen to inhabit looked scrawnier than when he’d last seen her. With a start he realised it had been some time since he’d even thought about the fate of the demon.

  He made the Rivener pause. The war-werkens hadn’t stopped their barrage of missiles, and he heard them clanging and crashing against the Rivener’s outer hide like giant hailstones. With slightly more care than he’d shown the people of Skaldshollow, he swept up the small form of Ip and delivered her to a narrow hidden door in the side of the Rivener’s broad head, which he opened from his side.

  Ip stood there, a slim and scruffy slip of a child, her brutally cut hair sticking up at all angles.

  ‘Joah,’ she said, and the voice was Bezcavar’s, ‘how good of you to drop in.’ The girl’s face twisted as the demon struggled to contain its emotions. ‘You have a lo
t of explaining to do.’

  He ushered her over the threshold and shut the door behind her. The complicated processes and spells that kept the Rivener moving were all suspended in his head, a hellishly complex web of cause and effect.

  ‘I am quite busy at the moment.’

  ‘Busy?’ Ip surveyed the crowded central chamber of the Rivener, with its glowing violet heart. ‘This is it, then, is it? This is what you’ve forsaken me for?’

  Joah shook his head irritably. ‘I have forsaken no one. Many things have come to my attention, and I had to deal with them.’ He paused. ‘You told me there were no mages left living on Ede. You lied.’

  Ip snorted. ‘Him? A poor excuse for a mage. A footnote in a long and glorious history, perhaps, but nothing in comparison to you. Speaking of which, I sent you to that place to kill Sebastian and his companions, did I not? When I last saw them they were all very much alive. Would you care to tell me why?’

  Outside the barrage of missiles had increased, and one piece of rock landed a lucky shot, cracking one of the Rivener’s great glass eyes. Frustrated, Joah reached out with the Rivener’s limbs and smashed everything moving immediately around them.

  ‘Bezcavar, this is not the time. I have important work to do, and I don’t have the time for your petty revenges.’

  ‘Petty revenge?’ The voice went from withering sarcasm to thundering rage in a moment. Such a voice should not have been able to issue from a child’s throat, and in spite of himself Joah took a step backwards. ‘Need I remind you of what I have given you, Joah Demonsworn? The powers bestowed, the secrets shared?’

  ‘You have taught me much, of course.’ The girl’s eyes had turned blood red from lid to lid, and her pale face was turned up to his, brow deeply furrowed. If not for her eyes, she would have looked like a child having a tantrum. He continued hurriedly. ‘But you must understand, I have great works to perform.’

  ‘I must understand?’ The voice was softer now, and Joah recognised the danger inherent in that. ‘Perhaps I need to remind you of our bond, so that you may understand.’

  Ip reached up and took hold of his hand, her fingers cold, and with horror he felt his mind being peeled open.

  ‘Do you remember the day, Joah, that I showed you my true face?’

  ‘No, please, no.’ The strength went from his legs and he bent suddenly at the knees, falling painfully to the metal lattice floor. ‘Please, not that.’

  ‘I took the memory from you because we have known each other a long time. As partners, as lovers. I knew that you could not live with such a memory, so I plucked it from your strange and glorious head.’

  Her hand gripped his hard enough for him to feel the bite of her sharp fingernails. Inside his head he could feel himself slipping towards that great pit of darkness, the one he spent so much time ignoring, but he could not stop himself. He would be pulled in, and he would be lost in that memory.

  ‘Do you remember yet, my love?’ Bezcavar hissed, almost tenderly. ‘Can you remember my face?’

  He remembered a beautiful day full of sunlight, in the middle of a field of golden wheat. Bezcavar’s human form then had been a woman of cold beauty, with hair the same colour as the gently rustling crops around them. That day they had found a small, isolated village, a collection of ramshackle buildings full of the hardworking poor, and they had killed them as they wished to – casually, without fear of retribution. Afterwards, they’d come to this field to rest, lounging amongst the stalks and the warm smell of the earth. The demon had been wearing the odd, spiky armour its host had favoured, and with a lurch Joah remembered how his heart had filled at the sight of her. He remembered brushing a strand of golden hair from her cheek and smiling fondly.

  ‘You are an extraordinary creature,’ he had said. There had been two spots of dried blood, one at the corner of her mouth, one on her full lower lip. ‘I must know everything there is to know about you.’

  The demon had smiled at him, raising one perfect eyebrow. She had slid her hand over his chest, pushing him back slightly. There had been blood on her hands too, dried in dark half-moon shapes under her fingernails.

  ‘Everything, my sweet Joah? You could not wish to know everything. Your little human mind, as remarkable and strange as yours is, simply could not take it.’

  Joah had snorted. ‘Have I not proven myself more than mortal? Greater than any mage?’

  ‘Greater than any mage, yes, but is that truly so great?’ She was grinning at him, and he’d felt a stab of annoyance.

  ‘We have done so much, and yet still you treat me like a child.’ He had remembered the children in the village, running so fast that they couldn’t even scream. ‘Why must you continue to act like I am still the novice, scrabbling after every little scrap of knowledge you might throw my way?’

  The pressure on his chest had increased, and the demon had turned her head slightly. It was an oddly predatory gesture, like a raven peering at the last juicy eyeball on a field of corpses.

  ‘You believe yourself my equal, is that it?’

  Joah had shaken his head, too late realising the dangers of this path. ‘I only wish to know you. To know everything about you.’

  The demon had leaned down as if to kiss him. ‘Then know me,’ she’d said, and her face changed.

  Joah dropped to the metal floor, screaming and screaming. There was a bright slither of pain across his cheek as the burns there were torn open, and a hot flood as blood streamed from his nose, but it was nothing to the dark haemorrhaging in his mind. He was coming away from himself, cast out, floating into an empty night sky where nothing waited for him but that, the demon’s face that waited for him in every shadow, in every mirror, in every breath, that tore away his skin and nested in his throat, that grew inside him and turned everything to worms, that . . .

  A small cool hand settled on his brow and abruptly he was back, lying awkwardly on the floor of the central room of the Rivener. The demon knelt over him in its child form, its face blank and unconcerned. Joah was sweating and shivering all over, and his mouth and beard were covered in blood.

  ‘There, there,’ said Ip, absently. ‘I think you will see things a little clearer now, yes?’

  It took him a moment to find his voice.

  ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. He sat up. ‘I . . . it is difficult for me, seeing you like this.’ Joah paused, wondering if this sudden burst of honesty would cost him his life. ‘You are not . . . as you were.’

  The girl frowned. ‘That is true enough. This vessel is not ideal, Joah, but it will change. Once we are done here we can journey back to Relios and seek out the last of my cults. There will be willing vessels there and I will be appealing to you once more. But you must listen to me. This new mage is not your friend. He is not your concern. And we have much to do.’

  Joah got to his feet shakily. From outside the patter of missiles from the Skalds and their werkens continued, while the spells in his head hung in suspension, waiting for him to push the Edenier through them again. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, peering at the bloody streak that appeared there. His nose had stopped bleeding when Bezcavar had placed Ip’s hand on his head.

  ‘Much to do,’ he agreed. ‘And what are we to do first, Prince of Wounds?’

  ‘Tamlyn Nox still lives.’ The girl walked away from him and over to the glass windows. She traced one of the cracks with her finger. ‘She has hounded me for the last two weeks, but she couldn’t find me in the end. I would like to repay her attentiveness.’

  ‘Then we shall go and find her.’

  Joah immersed himself back into the web of spells, and the Rivener lumbered forward.

  56

  ‘Barlow! Barlow, where are you?’

  There was no answer. The quarry was still hidden behind the trees. The last sliver of Heart-Stone was in a pouch resting against her chest. There would still be time. Tamlyn opened her mouth to shout again – no longer knowing why she shouted, really, just aware that she wanted to s
ee another human being – when the forest around her began to tremble. Snow pattered down from the tops of trees and birds fled into the sky in a sudden cacophony. Tamlyn turned, already knowing what she would see.

  The monstrous creature, the thing that was Joah Demonsworn returned, loomed over the tops of the trees, the clutch of violet eyes hanging in the air like alien moons.

  Tamlyn threw everything into a single command – run! The werken sped off and immediately the creature was on her. She heard the explosive crash as tree after tree was ripped from its path, saw the debris of branches and earth flying past her. Any moment now, it could reach down and take her, any moment now, unless she got to the quarry.

  In seconds she was out past the treeline and the secret pit gaped away in front of her. At first she could see no one, and then Barlow’s portly form appeared at the door in the middle of the screen. Even from that distance, Tamlyn could see the look of terror on the woman’s face.

  ‘Is it ready?’ she screamed.

  Barlow opened her mouth, and then shut it again, before disappearing behind the screen.

  ‘Damn you, Barlow!’

  The werken scrambled forward, ignoring the paths now and heading directly down the side of the quarry, sending up dust and powdered rock. A shadow passed over them, and Tamlyn kept her eyes narrowed at the screen. It would be waiting for her there – her greatest project, the final werken. There was a low crump as Joah’s monster put its weight on the area of the pit that had already been extensively mined, and then there was a roaring in Tamlyn’s ears, a confused sensation of weightlessness, and sudden bright agony as the skin on the left side of her face was abruptly torn away by the gravelled floor of the pit. The creature had struck out at her, knocking her clean off her werken to land some distance away. Blood stung her eyes as she sat up.

  ‘I . . . what . . .?’

  Her werken, the one that she had designed to be shaped like a cat and faster than any other, was a pile of broken, scattered rubble. Tamlyn herself was twenty feet away, although closer to the screen than she had been. The monster, all rock and black iron and veins of Edeian, was watching her, its strangely insectile head turned in her direction.