Pale Kings (Emaneska Series)

by Ben Galley

  And then it was gone, as quickly as it had started. The semicircle of Dukes sat wide-eyed and frozen like confused statues. Guards and servants swayed like reeds, slack-jawed. The glassy-eyed bard hovered on the edge of his stool and wobbled precariously. Ilios folded his wings by his side and clacked his beak together once again. Satisfied with his work he turned, bowed his head to the three men, still with fingers plugging ears, and left.

  Durnus was the first to take his fingers out of his ears, and he crept forward warily, as if the Dukes would wake from their strange daze at any moment. ‘It worked,’ he whispered to the others.

  ‘How do we know? They just look frozen,’ Farden hissed back.

  As if to answer the mage’s question, Wodehallow suddenly blinked and shivered, looking about like a newborn. His mouth hung open like a trap door. Saliva dribbled from the corner of his wine-stained lip. Durnus folded his arms behind his back and smiled his most winning smile at the Duke. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘Our arrangement? Ten chests of gold for your armies?’

  Wodehallow looked at the strange pale man, as though he were trying to call a dream, and slowly raised a hand. ‘It is a deal,’ came his slow, droning words.

  Durnus shook the Duke’s hand with two of his, holding on tightly. ‘We have your word? You will join the attack two days from now? At dawn on the third?’

  ‘Of course,’ he mumbled. ‘We will help you. Two days, dawn, attack Krauslung.’

  ‘Excellent,’ grinned Durnus, accidentally flashing a fang or two. Wodehallow squinted woozily at the pale man standing in front of him. He could have sworn he just saw something strange in the man’s mouth. The vampyre continued before Ilios’s magick had a chance to wear off. ‘Tomorrow indeed, as you said, your lordship. With all the men you can muster. We will send dragons and open your quickdoors. Fortunately for your ships, the winds blow west this time of year. You have two days.’

  ‘Two days,’ repeated the Duke. Nearby Kiltyrin mouthed the same words.

  Durnus nodded. ‘Two days,’ he said, shaking the man’s hand vigourously. More than satisfied, the vampyre turned and left, leaving Wodehallow to stare dumbly at his hand and wonder where his favourite gold ring had gone.

  Not wishing to ruin their success, the three men left hastily, stifling grins and bewildered smiles. They left the dazed Dukes to scratch their heads and rub their chins. When the swarm of courtesans returned they found their lords limp and confused and foggy-eyed, and yet when asked what the strangers had wanted, every single one of them grinned, utterly convinced they had made just made a hefty profit of ten chests of gold. The Bartering had been lucrative indeed.

  Durnus, Farden, and Lakkin swiftly made good their escape. They walked down the dark corridor with long, fast paces. Stepping over the broken door and the unconscious guard lying beneath, it they emerged into the open air. Ilios was nowhere to be seen. They stared upwards, but could see nothing. The sky was a scaly patchwork. Here and there the pale sun had broken through, and had managed to burn away some of the wispy marsh mist. The warmth on their skin felt odd after the cold morning and the cool keep. The air was filled with the smells of baking clay and burning wood. They could hear the clatter of the rowdy market.

  ‘What just happened?’ asked Lakkin, as they strode down the hill.

  ‘That, I believe, they call a Slumbersong,’ replied Durnus, hoisting his scarf around his face to keep the sunlight at bay. His skin around his exposed eyes was already starting to blister.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked the mage, frowning. He rolled up his sleeves and watched his scarlet and gold vambraces glint in the winter sunlight. His gauntlets were stowed away safely in his pack.

  Durnus shrugged. ‘Something I read in a book long ago. I wasn’t sure if Ilios could do it or not, or whether it had just been a fairytale, but as it turns out it’s very true indeed.’

  ‘Slumbersong,’ repeated Farden. ‘Well it worked. Looks like we were lucky today.’ He rubbed the dragonscale pendant around his neck, saying his thanks to whoever might have been listening to his thoughts. ‘Especially for you, Lakkin.’

  ‘The Dukes are the ones who are lucky; lucky not to have one of my arrows in each of their throats. Fortunately for them we had a gryphon with us,’ grunted the Siren. Farden couldn’t help but smirk.

  ‘Now there’s just Leath left,’ said Durnus, in a low voice.

  ‘Leath?’ asked the mage, making a confused face. ‘Is it worth the trouble?’

  ‘Believe it or not, our favourite Duke controls one of the largest areas of farmland in Albion. Farmland needs farmers and farmhands, and you can rest assured that there are a lot of them. Not many of the other Dukes know it, but if Leath wanted to, he could raise an army of peasants that could rival the rest of the Dukes’ forces put together,’ explained Durnus. Farden made a confused face. All those years spent living in the shadow of the scraggy town of Leath, and he had never realised the Duke’s real power.

  ‘And how would we go about convincing him?’ asked Lakkin.

  ‘Who knows,’ replied Durnus, glumly.

  Farden patted his friend on the shoulder. ‘Luckily for us, I have a plan, and I think you might like it,’ said the mage, much to the vampyre’s concern. He frowned, but Farden said no more. The three men walked on.

  They battled their way through the crammed marketplace once more and reached the gates as quickly as they could manage. The queues for the city had already tripled in size. They squeezed through the archway and as they left Farden winked at the big guard who had challenged them earlier and smiled. ‘I’ll see you in a day or so,’ said the mage, leaving the man even more bewildered and confused than he usually was.

  Now that the morning fog had all but lifted, it took them an hour to get out of sight of the city walls. The going was once again slow through the marshes, and it took them almost another hour to reach the spot where Brightshow and Ilios waited for them. The two sat awkwardly on their haunches, their claws precariously perching on wobbly boulders covered in slime. Brightshow looked relieved to see them. Ilios warbled at the sight of his new shiny trinket; a gift from Durnus in the form a heavy gold ring studded with a fat ruby, recently pilfered from the finger of a Duke. The men, the dragon, and the gryphon had a brief lunch, and then quickly set off north again, winging their way north through the cold Albion air.

  The patchwork sunshine did not last long. A storm was gathering at the eastern edges of the sky, dark brooding clouds that towered like the iron faces of cliffs, heavy with ice and rain and fuelled by biting winds, lashed and whipped like the slaves of a dark factory. Shadowy fog, curtain-thick and cold as ghost-breath, came as their herald. Heavy banks of mist and gloom slid furtively across the Bern and Jörmunn Seas, creeping across waves already tipped white with angry foam and salty spray. Ships ran for the shelter.

  Mile by mile the storm crept forward, confidently baring its bitter teeth and readying itself to pounce, clawing at the shores and calmer skies. Mountains hid under its shadow. The sun, shackled by cloud, cowered in the west. It was not long before it vanished below the sea, drowned in dusk and storm-front.

  All across Emaneska, animals began to dig hiding places, or burrow between tree roots, or cluster together in caves. Even the tree and earth and stone giants, even the rock trolls, solitary in their secret groves and mountain passes, gathered their roots and rocks about them to anxiously watch the clouds fill the winter skies above. They could feel the electricity, the stifling thickness of the very air around them pressing down on their senses, and it filled them with trepidation. On some unknown level the people of Emaneska felt it too, even if they were not sure what it was. They shuffled hurriedly along their streets and paths, eyeing the gathering storm clouds above them, whispering strange prayers and mumbling to themselves. They went home and locked their windows and doors tight.

  Lightning flashed forebodingly across the ceiling of the sky. Thunder rolled and boomed in its wake, and the rain waited for its chance to strike.

&
nbsp; Chapter 17

  “Like most other magickal creatures, such as lycans, or wild wyrms and vampyres, faeries feed off and sniff out magick. Winged pests from the far eastern reaches of Emaneska, they have been explicitly banned on the magick market, especially in the lands of the Arka. Hence the calamity of the Neffra Incident, which makes me shudder even as I recall it.

  “In the year 879 a group of dark sorcerers decided to send a message to the Arka in the form of a sick joke. They decided to con a merchant by the name of Neffra, a gloriously gullible charm pedlar from the east. They sold him the idiotic idea of capturing two score of these vicious little faeries and selling them as pets to the mages and nobility of Emaneska. What they had forgotten to tell Neffra, already up to his knees in their atrocious prank, was that faeries have the innate ability to shimmer, or in other words, turn invisible at a whim.

  “And so, after months of hunting these beasts this most ambitious of merchants arrived in the Port of Rós and opened his stall. Of course, upon gathering a crowd, he opened his box of faeries and found it utterly empty. Or so he thought.

  “The faeries immediately set upon anything and everything magickal, from spell books to potions, to women wearing charms to mages on patrol. I can tell you that there is nothing more panic-inducing than being attacked by a swarm of invisible teeth, and my word, do those jaws work quickly.

  “It took a week to find them all, and we lost a great number of mages, and noble ladies for that matter, in the process. Neffra was clapped in irons and immediately gave up his sorcerer friends. To this day the magick market remains a tightly controlled affair.

  “In the end, the joke completely backfired. Arkmages Åddren and Helyard deployed the Written to hunt down every last dark magick user, and hunt them down they did…”

  ‘Tales from the Streets of Power’ by Hargrum Olfsson

  As the clouds began to fill the narrow Krauslung sky, as night began to fall, something began to happen on the streets.

  After the previous night, the citizens of the city were subdued, beaten, and frightened. A few house fires still burnt here and there, adding smoke and soot to the gathering darkness. Nobody had bothered to put them out. Arka and Skölgard soldiers stalked the streets in groups of ten or twenty, on the look out for any any hint of rebellion, and for the elusive vampyre everyone was talking about.

  The sewers had been scoured, every loft, attic, and crawl-space had been torn apart. Those who had put up a fight lay naked and dead in gutters or hanging out of windows, milky-eyed and stiff.

  Unfortunately for the beleaguered people of Krauslung, Vice wasn’t quite finished with them yet.

  The Arkmage stood on highest parapet of the city gatehouse, watching with beaming satisfaction as long lines of people were forcefully ushered through the gates like wide-eyed livestock. Nothing slammed the echelons of society together like oppression and occupation. Farmers and rich merchants shuffled along side by side, knocking elbows, while proud-looking women and peasants picked each other out of the mud. Vice sniggered. Their lines stretched into the distance, all the way to the valley’s edge to the tall hill of Manesmark and the charred corpse of the Spire. From atop the gates they looked like an endless column of ants.

  Vice turned to the bulky woman standing next to him. General Agfrey watched the procession below with cold emotionless eyes, like those of basking lizard. Below them a man stepped out of line, and was whipped back into place. The snap of the whip echoed against the formidable granite walls. Agfrey didn’t flinch at the sound. This city had done nothing for her conscience.

  ‘And you are sure this is all?’ Vice asked her. His voice was low and hoarse. It sounded as though he had not slept. Agfrey nodded. ‘All we could find, your Mage. We searched every village and town within fifty miles and brought them all here, just as you ordered,’ she answered.

  ‘Like lambs to the slaughter. Meat to be sold and bartered,’ muttered Vice. He turned around and walked to the other side of the parapet to watch the people being pushed towards the city and down to the Port of Rós, where a dozen grey ships waited to be filled.

  ‘I want the people held at the docks until nightfall,’ ordered Vice. ‘Then load them onto the ships under the cover of darkness. Give them food, and water, and keep them calm for now, I don’t want an uprising on my hands. Not now.’

  ‘Yes, your Mage,’ replied Agfrey, suddenly confused. ‘But if…’

  Vice rubbed his tired eyes. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I thought, I mean, I was under the impression that the ships were for us? The soldiers? To attack the dragon-riders?’

  The Arkmage shook his head and smiled without any trace of humour. There was a sick malice in that smile. ‘And that is exactly what the dragons will think, when they attack the city the day after tomorrow.’

  It took a while for the realisation to dawn on the slow woman, and when it finally did she looked at Vice, then at the people below, and then another smile began to creep across her lips. ‘Very good, your Mage,’ she said, eyes alight.

  ‘Lambs to the slaughter, General,’ repeated Vice. He grabbed Agfrey by her thick steel breastplate and pulled her closer. ‘Keep them calm, and keep it secret.’

  Agfrey nodded, her head wobbling as if it were on springs. ‘I will do sire. Very secret.’

  ‘And what of Modren? Why hasn’t he reported in?’ Vice asked.

  Agfrey sneered at the mention of the mage. ‘According to his Written and my soldiers he has disappeared. Nobody has seen a whisker of him.’

  ‘I suspected as much,’ said Vice, letting her go. ‘When he does rear his head, then you may do with him as you please. Treat him like the traitor he’s become. Make an example.’

  ‘Yes sire,’ replied Agfrey, with a greedy smile. Her mind began to conjure up all sorts of punishments and tortures. ‘It will be my pleasure to teach him a lesson.’

  ‘Good,’ nodded Vice. Satisfied, he walked away, and left the general to watch the endless procession of Arka enter the city for the last time. The smile stayed on her lips for quite a while.

  Agfrey and Vice weren’t the only ones watching the procession of innocents. In the depths of Krauslung, somewhere near to the docks, a boarded-up house sat quiet and unassuming on a corner. Behind one of its splintered windows, a pair of squinting eyes stared through a tiny crack in a thick black curtain. Behind it crouched a man, a dour-eyed man wearing borrowed clothes and stolen boots, and behind him stood an ageing fellow with a fair face. ‘Where’s Haruld?’ he asked. ‘Is he out there?’

  The dour-eyed man shook his head as much as he dared. There were crowds of soldiers outside the house, and endless lines of glum-looking people. ‘I can’t see ‘im,’ he breathed.

  Trying to catch a glimpse for himself, the ageing man ducked and hovered behind the other man’s head, peering at the bright slit of light in the curtain. ‘What are they doing out there, Olger?’

  Olger, the dour one, shrugged. ‘I have no idea. It looks like they’re sending everyone to the docks.’

  ‘Why?’

  Olger didn’t answer. He narrowed his eyes and leant a little closer to the dusty window. A cobweb crackled as he shifted the curtain a little to the side. It looked as though the people were being herded towards the big grey ships in the harbour, over on the east side of the port. Surely it couldn’t be, he thought to himself, thoughts trailing away like chimney smoke on a windy night. Olger leant backwards and took a deep breath.

  Suddenly a movement caught his eye. Someone was coming. ‘Get down!’ he hissed, and the skinny man dove for cover under a dirty blanket. Olger hunkered down with his back to the wall beneath the windowsill and waited. He held his breath.

  The Arka soldier prodded the boards that covered half of the window, testing them. He pulled the fraying black curtain aside and peered into the dusty gloom. There was nothing there but a pile of dirty blankets and a broken chair. The soldier flicked a piece of glass off the windowsill and heard it chime on the stone floor. The ho
use smelled damp, filthy, and moth-bitten. As he held the back of his hand to his nose he yanked the curtain shut, cursed, and left.

  Beneath the windowsill, Olger breathed out slowly. His heart was racing. He wasn’t used to all this sneaking around and hiding. The other man, Fessen, peeked out from under his sooty blanket. ‘Gone?’

  ‘Gone,’ nodded Olger. He shuffled around and with the tip of his finger, very carefully and very slowly pulled the torn edge of the curtain back. ‘There’s so many of ‘em,’ he said, looking at the endless line of people and watchful soldiers.

  ‘Gods curse that Arkmage,’ whispered Fessen. ‘Just when you think it can’t get any worse, he pulls something else from under his evil sleeve.’

  ‘Whatever it is, we can’t help them. We’ll just have to tell the others to stay low and wait for these Sirens to make their move. We haven’t got a chance against them on our own.’

  A moment passed. ‘Where’s Haruld?’ asked Fessen.

  Olger sighed, ignoring the question. Haruld had already been missing for most of the night, and as more hours scraped uncomfortably by no word of him had come. In all honest likelihood, his friend was probably face down in a gutter by now, Olger conceded grimly. In the silence, there was a soft scratching noise behind them, like the tap-tapping claws of a scampering rat. He turned around to look. Nothing. The dark room was empty and the door behind them was locked. They were safe for now.

  That was until a cold blade slid under his chin and gently pressed upwards. Olger froze. Fessen whimpered under the blanket, hoping the mage hadn’t seen him. Olger carefully turned his head to look at the blade’s owner, very aware of the razor-sharp edge of the thin sword tickling his skin.

  The mage stood as still as a statue. He was a Written by the look of his armour and the tattoos on his wrist. Despite the dusty gloom, Olger could see he had short blonde hair, and a face full of stress and tiredness. There was a yellow cloak hanging from his shoulders. Olger swallowed, carefully, and gradually held up a pair of grubby, empty hands. The sword crept forward an inch, warning him to be careful. ‘If you’re going t’ kill me, then kill me, and stop wastin’ whatever time I ‘ave left,’ Olger hissed, momentarily shocking himself with the brazenness of his own words.