Pale Kings (Emaneska Series)

by Ben Galley

  Durnus watched her as she walked, her back rod-straight and her regal head held high, her eyes looking straight ahead and glistening with confidence. As she warily negotiated each slippery cobble, a single slender hand pressed instinctively to her stomach. Her black fur dress did nothing to hide the bulge beneath.

  Durnus lowered his eyes to the ground as their party passed. He took a deep breath and held it until they were almost at the Arkathedral gates. All of a sudden, an angry shout rang out from the frustrated crowd, and more discontented grumbling followed it. Vice and Bane turned around to glower at the people, while Cheska was quickly ushered indoors. The soldiers tightened their ranks, but it did not deter the crowd one bit. Next to Eyrum, a woman hefted a putrid cabbage and looked for a chance to hurl it. She looked very angry indeed. By her side, a skinny man tossed a chunk of rock from palm to palm. Another shout, then another, and then inch by inch the crowd began to shuffle forward.

  ‘We’re starving!’ came the cry.

  ‘This food isn’t fit to eat!’

  ‘Yeah! We demand better!’

  ‘Give us Åddren!’

  Durnus glowered at Vice. His pale eyes bored a hole in the Arkmage’s forehead. Eyrum put a hand on his shoulder and gently tugged him away. The vampyre growled deep in his throat, and Eyrum tugged once more. ‘It’s time to go,’ he said, eyeing the woman with the cabbage. More spoilt fruit had appeared in the hands of the crowd. ‘Durnus!’ hissed Eyrum, and as if snapping out of a trance the vampyre blinked, shook his head, and nodded. The Siren jabbed the air with his thumb. ‘Let’s get out of here before it’s too late,’ he said. Durnus nodded. It was time to disappear into the streets. Keeping a careful eye on the menacing crowd and the archers above them, the two men made their way back the way they had come. As they left, the fortress gates slammed with a dull boom, and the crowd were left to contend with the soldiers. Rotten fruit and shouting began to fill the air.

  They walked in silence, listening to the commotion behind them receding with every step they took. Durnus looked up at the sky. It had started out as a clear day, but it was going to be a rainy night if the tumbling clouds had anything to do with it. There was only one thing on his mind, and it kept going around and around his head like an incessant moth. The vampyre sighed, and wondered why Farden had neglected to mention the child.

  Vice was in a foul mood. He drummed his fingers on the marble table and took another swig of the dark Skölgard wine. Despite its rancid taste, it was making him forget about his headache, and so he kept drinking. The Arkmage wiped his hand across the misty window pane and stared at the lights of the city below. He scowled darkly. Krauslung was a festering hole, and he was fed up of waiting for it to die. Patience, he told himself, as his fingertips instilled their frustrated rhythm into the stone tabletop.

  Thanks to the crackling log fire, the air in his rooms was hot and clammy. No candles bore their light, and the only illumination was the flickering amber glow of the fire in the marble hearth. Vice had ensconced himself in a quiet corner to watch its embers, to ruminate, drink, and wait. It had been several hours since he had sent the message and now both the wine and his patience were fast running out.

  Just as he was considering hunting down the servant and strangling him to death, there came a timid knock at the door. Vice swept from his ponderous corner with relish and stormed to the door. With an impatient grunt he wrenched it open, almost ripping it from its hinges and startling a young servant in the process. The servant was no more than a young boy, and against his chest he clutched a large square object wrapped in purple cloth. He bowed as quickly as his bones would allow him, and held the package above his bowed head. ‘Your Mage,’ he muttered, trying to keep the fear from making his voice wobble. ‘Here it is,’ he said.

  Vice snatched it from his grasp and the servant shuffled backwards, careful to keep his eyes on the floor. ‘I asked for this two hours ago, boy!’ Vice hissed.

  ‘I, I… We’re sorry, sire…’ he stuttered, grappling for an explanation that would suitably spare him the Arkmage’s wrath. Fortunately for him, Vice was too preoccupied with the object in the purple cloth. ‘Get out of my sight,’ snapped the Arkmage.

  The boy needed no further encouragement. Shoes scuffing on the marble flagstones, he bowed again and scuttled backwards into the shadows like a reticent crab. Vice slammed the door as hard as he could and walked back to his gloomy corner by the window. The quiet of the room was shattered with sound: the boom of the slamming door; the metal chair squealing piercingly as it was dragged across the marble floor; the chiming of the wine-smeared bottles as they were briskly shoved aside; the thud of the heavy package as it was dropped on the table. A cloud of dust puffed out from between the folds in the purple cloth as it hit the marble tabletop.

  Vice leant on the back of the chair and examined the object with his eyes. Reaching for his wine, he took a long swig that almost emptied the glass, and then sat down. Layer by layer, like a pebble-aster unfurling in the spring sun, he peeled back the purple cloth, tossing each fold aside, until finally he revealed a huge, gnarled tome. It was a giant and dusty thing. Overlapping canary-yellow scales formed its cover. They might have been shiny one, perhaps they might have even glimmered like sand, but the long years had stolen their colour and their glitter, and now they resembled the yellowing leaves of blank paper that burst from the book’s seams, feathery and cracked. Vice lifted the cover with a finger and listened to the dusty spine of the book creak. He didn’t care if it broke.

  There was an uninvited shadow lingering in the Arkmage’s mind, like an itch he couldn’t scratch. It was as though he had forgotten what he had forgotten, and what he had forgotten should have never been forgotten in the first place. The feeling had been bothering him for weeks, ever since a tired old hawk had delivered a letter to the palace in Gordheim; a folded scrap of parchment that smelled of alcohol, bilge, and cheap tobacco. He knew exactly who it had come from, and that had only increased his fears, for the source was trustworthy.

  Vice reached under the lapel of his coat and fished out the letter from a hidden pocket. A handful of words had been scrawled and smudged across its face, a handful of spidery words that had made his heart writhe. He flicked the greasy parchment with his finger as he read the message for the tenth time. It read:

  Ruin is alive. Gold blood and tears. The stones never lie.

  L.

  Vice stared out of the window at the city lights and at the ice-clad peak of Ursufel in the distance, and tried to ignore the sense of foreboding and dread that had seeped back into his chest. Something about Krauslung seemed disjointed, as if the air had been pinched and wrung and creased in all the wrong places. He had felt it the moment he had stepped into the accursed city. Worry, it was called, and it was something Vice wasn’t used to, and he hated it. He never made mistakes, yet here was the shadow of one staring him right in the face, and grinning cheekily. Vice wondered if moving back to Krauslung had been a mistake. No, he reminded himself, he needed to be here.

  The Arkmage looked down at the blank tearbook in front of him. The Old Dragon’s tearbook had been empty ever since Vice had stolen it from Nelska. Separated from its dragon, it was close to useless, nothing but a decorative doorstop or an oversized paperweight. Fuel for the fire. The only aspect of it that gave the Arkmage a scrap of sneering satisfaction was the fact that its absence from Nelska kept the Sirens in the dark and weakened the Old Dragon. Vice idly thumbed through the yellowed pages and wondered if what he was looking for was actually in there, whether she was right. There was only one way to find out.

  The answer to the riddle had been found earlier that evening, surprisingly at the bottom of a wine glass, which is usually not the best place to find answers. Swirling the clotted dregs of the rancid wine around his glass, Vice had been given the idea. He had rubbed the purple sediment between finger and thumb, and it had dawned on him. Blood. Golden blood.

  Vice stood up and strode to the fireplace. The fi
re was on its deathbed and the room had grown darker. The tall Arkmage grabbed a thick pine log from the stack to his left and threw it onto the grate. Sparks popped and pranced and the flames quickly began to lick at the resinous wood, hungry and greedy. Vice stood with his hands on his hips and stared at the long sword that hung on the wall above the fireplace. Reaching up, he unhooked it from the wall and held it in his hands, watching the ruby pommelstone glow and burn in the firelight. Sixteen years was a long time for anything, but for a sword it was a lifetime. The last time it had been drawn was Ragjarak, sixteen years ago, and the last flesh it had pierced had been the Old Dragon’s. With luck the beast’s blood was still on the sword. Vice was counting on it.

  With a slow movement, he drew the sword from its scabbard and held his eye close to the silver blade. The Arkmage smirked with satisfaction. He went to the table and picked up the almost-empty wine glass. He sipped it a bit more, swirled it around, sipped again, and repeated until there was the tiniest amount of dark wine left in the glass. Vice put it back on the table with a clink and then, holding the blade above the wine glass, he drew his finger and thumb along the edge of the blade. His nails scraped against the old metal with a whine and carved a little path through the faint patches of what looked like yellow rust. Vice kept going, scraping the dried blood into the wine glass, until he was sure he had enough. Stripped of its usefulness, Vice tossed the sword on the floor and pushed it under the table with his boot. He then picked up his glass and carefully stirred the dregs of the liquid around with the end of his finger, mixing it with the ochre blood. Vice’s eyes seemed to glow in the firelight, and for a moment they seemed to turn a paler shade, almost white, a trick of the flames perhaps.

  Vice kept swirling the mixture until he was happy, and then, spreading his fingers over the blank pages of the tearbook, he angled the wine glass over one corner, eying it like a hungry hawk. The dark liquid lethargically crept up the glass like a glacier. It hesitated at the lip of the glass, taunting him. With a wiggle of his hand he made it spill, and a trickle of liquid fell onto the page beneath. A purple flower of wine blossomed across the dry, thirsty paper, soaking and seeping.

  For a long moment nothing happened. Vice waited with bated breath, and then suddenly it did. Something stirred underneath the wine stain. Spidery lines and shapes began to appear and grow, slowly at first, then faster, until the page was full to bursting with strange-looking script and odd, scrawling hieroglyphs. The foreign glyphs raced across the blank pages faster than Vice could turn them and he quickly gave up trying. A rustle of phantom scribbling rifled through the book.

  With a satisfied, and slightly conceited, grin, the Arkmage flipped the pages to the start of the book where the script was faded and ancient beyond comprehension. Because of their nature, tearbooks read backwards, with their dragon’s oldest memories at the front. And with a dragon as old as Farfallen, they were very old indeed. Vice stared at the dragonscript greedily, tracing letters he hadn’t read in incalculable years. It was to be a long night ahead, he decided, and he would need more of the wine to curb his headache. Dark suspicion slithered like worms inside of him.

  Eyrum tore into his loaf of bread with ravenous hunger. Crumbs cascaded down the front of his red tunic and showered his half of the dinner table. He quaffed some more of his watery ale and then stabbed some of the fish with a fork that, in his big hands, looked as though some mischievous wizard had cast a shrinking spell on it. The one-eyed Siren made a few satisfied grunting sounds as he shovelled the roast fish into his already full mouth. All things considered, Eyrum seemed very happy. He felt as if he hadn’t eaten in days.

  Durnus on the other hand, had barely touched his plate of food. His fish and boiled potatoes waited patiently to be eaten, on the verge of being cold. The vampyre stared off into space, consumed in deep thought like he had been for most of the evening.

  ‘Aren’t you going to eat anything?’ asked Eyrum between mouthfuls. ‘The landlord’ll get suspicious if only one of us eats.’

  Durnus flinched as if the sudden question had shocked him. ‘What?’ he replied, his pale blue eyes wide and confused. Eyrum gestured towards his untouched plate and Durnus made a face and shook his head. ‘Oh, no. I am not in the, hmm, the right mood,’ he mumbled, and then returned to his thoughtful gazing.

  Eyrum chewed, eyeing the old vampyre. Durnus was confusing at times. But then again, thought the Siren, he had never spent much time in the company of tame vampyres before. Maybe they were all as quiet and as pensive as this one. Eyrum pointed at the untouched plate with his fist of bread. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked.

  Durnus turned around again and looked at the Siren. ‘Help yourself,’ he said. With a single bony finger he pushed the plate towards Eyrum and the big man grabbed it eagerly. He tucked into the fish with gusto, this time not even bothering to use his fork. Durnus pursed his lips as he watched bits of scale and bone fall onto the wooden table. Eyrum must have been starving.

  The vampyre sipped at his beaker of water and let his tongue run circles around one of his fangs as he thought. Food was the last thing on his mind. His mind was full of bothersome questions and he couldn’t help but turn them over and over in his head like a seagull flips stones, hoping for soft crabs and a quick fix.

  Durnus watched as the Siren finished his beer in two massive gulps and then put a hand to his stomach as if to brace it from bursting. ‘Ahh,’ he sighed, with a smile. ‘Fish isn’t quite up to Nelska standards, but it’s good.’ He took a moment to pick a bone out of his teeth, and then reached for a cold boiled potato from Durnus’s plate. ‘So when are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?’ he said with a faint smile. The vampyre chuckled wryly and swirled his water around his cup. He and Eyrum had grown accustomed to each other over the past few months. They had bonded over a mutual love of silence.

  ‘When I know, then I’ll tell you,’ replied the vampyre.

  ‘That’s comforting,’ said Eyrum, and Durnus nodded. ‘Are you sure you don’t want any food? You haven’t touched a thing.’

  Durnus shook his head again and shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t quench my hunger, if you know what I mean.’

  Eyrum knew what he meant. ‘Mmm,’ he hummed. ‘The blood thing,’ he said, and left it at that. It had taken him a while to get used to being in a vampyre’s company, but now it didn’t bother him in the slightest.

  Like many others across Emaneska, Sirens viewed vampyres and lycans as cursed outcasts, no better than lepers. There were wild vampyres and so-called “tame” vampyres, depending on their bloodline, and the latter were lone beasts, never venturing into cities, and able to control their urges. Although Arka laws were kind and accommodating to such tame vampyres, as they had been to Durnus before he had moved to Albion, Skölgard laws were quite the opposite. They demanded that all such beasts be skewered on the spot. Therefore it was the risk of raising any sort of alarm that worried Eyrum. The vampyre needed to eat, but in a city where the soldiers stood on every street corner was it worth risking even the quietest of screams? The dragons needed them in the city to keep an eye on the ships and wait for Farden. And now that Vice was there it was even more important they stay. It was imperative that they kept their heads low. ‘Is there no substitute?’ Eyrum asked.

  The vampyre shook his head once more. ‘I do often wish there was,’ he replied. ‘Animal blood has no effect and normal food turns to ash in my stomach. It makes me ill. Hence…’ he gestured towards the half-eaten plate of potatoes. Eyrum nodded. The vampyre was looking even paler than usual. His skin had begun to sag around the corners of his mouth and cheeks, and Eyrum could have sworn that his fingers were shaking just a little.

  ‘How long have you, I mean, been a…?’ he asked, not meaning to be intrusive. Strangely enough, the subject had never come up. He knew what it was like when people stared or pointed at his scarred eye, or asked about his dead dragon.

  It took a few moments for Durnus to answer. ‘Far, far too long,’ he said. ‘
I’ve lost count of the decades.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  Durnus rubbed his throat, and stared at the table. ‘All I can remember is the beast that did it, a wild, vicious thing it was, as cold and as pale as the snow. I was attacked on the ice fields you see, so far north that when night falls it falls for days, not hours. I don’t think I ever saw him coming.’ The vampyre shook his head. ‘But in regards to who I was, what sort of man I had been, or what I was doing there on the fields, there are no answers to these questions, only more questions. The curse wiped the memories from my mind.’

  Eyrum nodded, because there was nothing to say to such things, and decided to change the subject. ‘So,’ said the Siren, taking another bite of a potato, ‘I’m wondering what brought Vice to Krauslung?’

  Durnus shuffled in his seat so that he was facing the Siren. He was glad to get off the subject of his vampyrism. Recently it was all he ever thought about. ‘It makes no sense does it? Gordheim was the perfect stronghold from which to carry out their campaign, so why come south?’

  Eyrum scratched his chin for a moment, noticing the stubble that had gathered there. ‘Perhaps they want to make sure the ships are completed on time, or maybe Vice wants to enforce his rule here? The city is on a knife-edge after all.’ He suddenly shivered. ‘Thron’s balls, it’s cold.’

  Durnus had gone beyond feeling cold. He shrugged. ‘I agree, but for all three of them to travel here there has to be something else, something we’re missing.’

  Eyrum shrugged. ‘Maybe it has something to do with that pregnant girl,’ he said. Durnus raised an eyebrow and wondered how much the Siren had figured out.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he mumbled. ‘Maybe it’s the old Arkmage, Åddren. If he still lives, that is. He could know something, or have something…’ Durnus’s words died on his tongue, unconvinced.