Pale Kings (Emaneska Series)

by Ben Galley

  It did not take the spell long to take effect. Around the ninth word, Jergan flinched and doubled up as though his stomach had suddenly been torn in half. He fell to his knees and winced, clawing at the floor with his long fingernails. Durnus kept going, hands trembling now with both magick and fear. Jergan’s limbs began to shake. He put his hands to his head and cried out. Thick grey and black hairs sprouted from his chest and shoulders and soon his bones and joints began to crack and break as they changed shape. His skin convulsed like a pale sack of snakes. Durnus threw the book to the floor and carried on, reciting the words from memory, unable to tear his eyes away from the lycan breaking out of Jergan’s skin.

  Jergan cried out once more, and the cry became a tortured, blood-curdling howl. Claws and teeth burst from his muddy fingers and blackened gums. Durnus took a step back and grit his teeth. It was too late to run now. ‘Duty calls,’ he told himself.

  All too quickly it was over, and all too quickly he was staring at death in the eyes of a nine foot tall wolf, panting steam and grinning with a mouth full of fangs. Red eyes replaced violet ones, and they looked Durnus up and down like a piece of meat.

  In a flash, the lycan pounced. It took all of Durnus’s mettle to stand and take the blow, and with a cry he was thrown through the wall and out into the rain. Durnus pushed himself upright, ignoring the broken ribs, and bared his own fangs at the creature walking towards him. It swung a mighty fist and the vampyre ducked it. The second one caught and stunned him. He hit back, catching the hulking monstrosity in the stomach, but the lycan shrugged it off like a wasp sting and kicked out. Claws rent the old vampyre’s shirt. Lightning flashed. Thunder rolled. Anger suddenly replaced fear and Durnus found himself yelling in the lycan’s snarling face.

  ‘Stop wasting my time and bite me!’ he bellowed, and then in a blur his wish was granted, as the beast sank its jaws into the soft flesh of his shoulder. Durnus cried out in unspeakable pain, pulling at the matted hair on the lycan’s neck. His feet left the grass as Jergan arched his back. Muddy claws dug into his sides, piercing flesh and scraping ribs. Unable to take any more Durnus battered the lycan’s face with his fists until it finally let go. The vampyre was dropped on the wet grass and he coughed blood as the wind was driven from his punctured lungs. Rain pelted him in the face. He opened his eyes to find the lycan bending over him, hot breath escaping from its fang-filled jaws like steam from the jagged grills of some godless forge. Words slipped past those dagger-like fangs. ‘I don’t know… how long, I can stop him, for…’ said the voice. Durnus’s eyelids felt heavy. The grass beneath him was stained red with blood. ‘Quickly!’ barked Jergan. ‘Do what you promised me!’

  With every fibre of his body crying out for him to stop and give up, Durnus got to his feet, whispering the last lines of the spell. The effort wracked him from within, as if every hissed syllable clawed at his heart with iron rakes. His breath was laboured. Blood flowed down his right arm like a crimson river. He could feel the lycan’s poison burning his veins, he could feel the pain and magick creeping up into his skull, but worst of all, he could see the lycan raising its claws for the final strike. The killing blow.

  But it never came.

  Durnus swung his fist as hard and as fast as he could muster. His fingers glowed white-hot with magick and light, and as he struck the beast thunder and lightning shook the sky again. Jergan’s face crumpled under the hammer-like blow. The beast fell without a sound, spine severed and skull split in two, red eyes quenched and dead.

  Durnus collapsed to his knees, exhausted. Like a rotting fruit, the lycan’s corpse began to shrivel up, steaming and hissing, and in a matter of moments the creature had disappeared, leaving the malnourished body of Jergan behind, naked, dead, and finally content. Durnus reached out and closed the man’s violet eyes, ignoring his broken and misshapen face. He had got what he wanted in the end. They both had.

  Utterly drained, Durnus sprawled on the grass. Shaking, he stared up at the sky and blinked as the rain drummed on his chest and his forehead, drenching his ripped clothes. Durnus shivered. It is done, he told himself, and then, not knowing whether he was going to wake up again, he slowly let his eyes droop and then finally close. Durnus gave himself up to the thick folds of bleak unconsciousness, letting the lycan’s poison creep through his tired flesh and letting the tempestuous storm wash away the blood.

  Chapter 19

  “The gods work in mysterious ways…”

  An old proverb

  It was a black and dreary morning that Emaneska awoke to, a morning still thick with rain and granite-shade clouds. Thunder and lightning had, for the moment, retreated into the far reaches of the sky, but they would be back, and soon too. The world felt soaked to the bone. Chill winds swept across the skin of the land, bringing whispers of snow. Another bleak day.

  Ilios was also soaked to the bone. He had spent two nights and a day in the rain, patrolling the Arkabbey grounds, keeping watch and an eye on the unconscious Farden.

  The gryphon now sat at the entrance to the Arkabbey, stoically ignoring the cold, his yellow eyes half-closed and watchful, beak and teeth clamped together, ears flat to his feathery skull, breathing slowly, waiting. Dawn had been smothered by the storm, and the difference between dark night and gloomy day was now barely noticeable. The winter sun had been kidnapped by clouds.

  It was almost late afternoon, verging on evening, when she finally arrived.

  Something was making its way through the forest. Ilios stood and peered into the rainy haze. His keen hunter’s eyes spotted out a figure, no more than a shadow, carefully and precisely picking its way through the bushes and over tree roots without a single sound. Ilios sniffed the wind, and relaxed. She was late, but she was here.

  Ilios waited for the figure, a tall slender woman with a serene and ageless face, to emerge from the forest before going to meet her. She was wearing nothing but a long grey dress, the bottom of which was torn and muddy, and her feet were bare. She looked tired. The gryphon bowed his head to the ground and lifted a talon for her to touch. Her fingers were colder than ice. Ilios almost shivered at the feel of them.

  ‘Ilios,’ she breathed, shaking his claw. ‘It has been an age.’

  The gryphon nodded and whistled in reply. The woman looked up to the bell tower of the Arkabbey and nodded. ‘In there?’ she asked. Ilios nodded once again. ‘The vampyre has gone?’ she asked, face falling almost imperceptibly. ‘Then I hope,’ she said, ‘that we can salvage something from my belated arrival.’ She walked towards the Arkabbey. She did not hurry, and even though she winced with every drop of rain that touched her skin as if they wounded her, she walked slowly and calmly across the wind-blown lawn. Her weight barely bent the wild blades of grass beneath her feet. Ilios followed.

  The woman walked into the Arkabbey and waited for the gryphon to squeeze through the narrow door-frame. There was a circle of cold charcoal and dead embers in the middle of the floor where a fire had burnt out sometime ago. A pack of supplies lay propped up against the wall. Ilios and the woman moved on.

  Before going upstairs to find Farden, the strange woman went into the hall and looked around. Noticing the grimy effigy of the goddess, she went up to it, and stared into its marble eyes for a moment. She smiled a small smile, no more than a slight tightening of her cold lips, and touched the base of the statue with her finger. The grime and dust and mould instantly faded away and the goddess was left shining and polished once again. The woman sighed and walked away. Ilios was waiting for her by the stairs. He whistled and she shook her head. ‘We wish it were that easy,’ she replied.

  Together they climbed the stairs and made their way to the vampyre’s room high in the belltower. The old Arkabbey was full of creaking, and dripping, and the moaning of the wind outside. Here and there on the stairs dead bodies lay, and Ilios pushed each one aside so the woman did not have to step over them. Unlike his talons and claws, her bare feet made no noise on the stone steps. To anyone but the gryphon it mi
ght have seemed odd, and slightly unsettling. There was an air about this woman that was mysterious, ancient, cold, and yet preoccupied, as though half her mind was somewhere else.

  When they reached the room, the gryphon tore the broken door from its twisted hinges and dragged it aside with his beak so he could fit through. They found Farden lying behind a chair near to the fireplace. The room was cold, and the mage was paler than a ghost. He looked dead, and had it not been for the faint sound of his whispered breathing, and the even fainter haze of breath that escaped from his lips, that might have been true. But they knew better. Ilios could hear his heart beating in his chest, throbbing slowly and doggedly like a drunken drum. The gryphon warbled a concerned tune, sat down close to the mage’s body, and waited.

  The woman stood over Farden’s body and let her dark eyes roam over him. She had watched this man for many years, and had even met him once before. But this body on the floor was not the mage she had once known, this was a different man altogether. He looked tired, as though the weight of the world was pinning him to the floor. He looked as helpless as a lost child. Even in his deep sleep, his face was etched with lines of worry and despair. His chin and cheeks were thick with dark stubble and his skin drawn. His black hair was longer than it had been, moist with cold sweat. There was dried blood under his nose. The woman shook her head. She felt a tinge of pity for him; his struggles were far from over yet. If only he knew, she thought.

  Ilios whistled, and she turned to look at him. ‘He has a chance,’ she said. ‘A slim one, but a chance indeed.’ The woman knelt and brushed his hair from his face. ‘We can only hope he is strong enough and that he listens to us.’ She looked up then, as though she were listening to something far, far away. ‘I doubt Thron will find success with the woman. We have no other choice now, we gods have played our last card. Its name is Farden.’

  The gryphon whistled again. She shook her head. ‘We can hope, yes, but even you cannot see for certain whether she will succeed, or if the vampyre will survive. Vice is of no consequence to us now, only the child, the One, and that, as the Old Dragon wisely saw, is Farden’s task.’ The woman closed her eyes and put her fingers across the mage’s face. She pressed hard, so hard that her nails dug into his skin, and took a deep breath. The mage coughed, and spluttered, and shook from head to toe. When the woman let go Farden’s eyes snapped open and he stared wildly about the room. He whispered a name. ‘Durnus,’ he said.

  ‘Durnus has gone,’ said the woman, in a calm and placid tone.

  Farden coughed, looking between this strange woman and Ilios. His hands were shaking. ‘Where?’ he asked.

  The woman got to her feet and took a step backwards. She folded her hands behind her back. ‘To do what he needs to do. Now it is time for you to do the same.’

  Farden put a hand to his head and winced. His head felt like an anvil. His thoughts were all muddled up into one big mess. The mage shakily pushed himself up from the floor and into a sitting position. Farden rubbed his eyes and looked at the gryphon, trying to gauge whether he was dreaming or not. Ilios whistled at him and clacked his beak. He turned his attention to the tall woman standing over him, the woman with strange glassy eyes and pale shimmering skin. Her feet were bare and her grey dress was ripped at the hem. Long, black hair reached down to her hips. It had been combed as straight as an arrow. She didn’t look real to him, and whenever he looked to the side she seemed to quiver and shake in his peripheral vision. Farden rubbed his eyes again. ‘Who are you, and what do you want with me?’ he asked, groggily.

  The woman cocked her head to the side like a bird. ‘Do you not recognise me, mage? After all these years?’

  Farden squinted at her. She seemed oddly familiar, but no, he had to admit, he did not. ‘I have no idea.’ His answer seemed to annoy her, as if he was wasting her time.

  ‘Then the vampyre must have hit you harder than we thought,’ she said. ‘You met me once, exactly nine months ago now. That is to say, you met a shade of me.’

  ‘A shade?’

  ‘Mmm,’ nodded the woman. ‘I gave you a daemonstone, for the price of two silver coins.’

  Farden shrugged and groaned.

  ‘You have known me ever since you were a child in your mother’s arms.’

  As she spoke, and as he stared into her deep and unfathomable eyes it slowly began to dawn on the mage. Cheska’s present, the brass-coloured gemstone, the strange thin woman behind the stall, and the way the rock had glowed that night in the Bearded Goat. Farden stared into her impassive eyes and frowned. It was like an itch he couldn’t reach. This woman was painfully familiar; he felt as if he had seen her face a thousand times before, in the street perhaps, or in Nelska. No, closer than that, he had seen her in his dreams, clothed in fog and obscurity and wearing that same look, holding her head in the same pensive manner, and not only in his dreams but on plinths and paintings, surrounded by candles and holding golden scales, demanding balance, and magick, and worship…

  Farden instantly recoiled, filled with a sudden and intense feeling that might have been something like fear. ‘No…’ he said, unsure of what else to say.

  Evernia slowly nodded. ‘I am a goddess, Farden, your goddess.’

  ‘You can’t be,’ he said, remembering his uncle’s story. ‘You are, were, in the sky, with the rest of you.’

  ‘And so we are, this very moment. What you see is a shadow of myself, fallen to earth to make sure you,’ and here she pointed a long finger at him, ‘do what is demanded of you.’

  Farden shook his head. ‘You can’t be Evernia.’

  She took a step closer to him. ‘Dare you doubt my words? My very presence?’ Farden shuffled further away. Her dark eyes burnt like pools of dark fire. She towered over him as if she were a thousand feet tall, and yet at the same time she was as finite as a grain of sand, as fluid as a raindrop. Her energy pulsated like a star. Farden could feel his Book burning on his back, feel the words lighting up and flashing under his skin. The symbols on his wrists glowed brightly beneath the polished vambraces.

  ‘No,’ he said, quietly. She relaxed, shaking slightly, and Farden took a breath. ‘Where is Durnus?’ he asked again.

  ‘Durnus has gone, that is all you need to know, for now.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  Evernia sighed. ‘I am here because none of you listen. We have feared this day for a very long time indeed, and we have tried everything in our power to stop it. We sent your uncle a gryphon to make him dream, to show him the impending danger, to teach him the prophecies and the lost poems, but in the end he refused to listen. Instead he sent you futile dreams in an effort to help you escape Vice’s clutches, but you, like him, failed to listen. He sent the cat and the message to Durnus, to tell him the truth and even he failed to listen until now, when it is almost too late. And now you, Farden, you who have been told time and time again, have failed to listen, and now you plan to do nothing.’

  Farden felt naked. He felt as if his thoughts had been laid out on a hot rock, and left to wither in the desert sun, the searing gaze of this goddess. ‘Then why didn’t you come earlier?’ he asked.

  It was an odd thing to see a goddess shrug. It was an honest sort of gesture. ‘Because we couldn’t. Because like Ilios, we saw the child too late. Because we had faith in you humans, as you had in us. I suppose we hoped you could do it yourselves. In a way, part of us didn’t want to believe this day was finally here.’

  ‘Nobody did.’ The mage stood up, shakily, and crossed his arms. ‘So have the old gods got nothing better to do than to come and castigate me?’ he asked. Again Evernia pointed at him, jabbing her long fingernail in his face.

  ‘It would be in your best interests to mind your impudent tongue, mortal. Your child, your most heinous of mistakes, will rip the sky in two and bring the gods and the daemons crashing back to earth. We cannot allow this.’

  ‘So my uncle told me, and so has everybody else. You’ve come a long way to remind me of the obvio
us.’

  ‘The gravity of this situation continues to escape you.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  Frustration flew across Evernia’s face. ‘Then why do you refuse to do anything about it?’

  Farden bit his lip, but he couldn’t help it. ‘Because I can’t, that’s why! If you gods cared about any of us you’d come down here and finish the job yourselves! Instead, you’re wasting your time in a dank Arkabbey asking a tired man pointless riddles. You go and kill my child, and the woman I can’t help but love, because I know that I can’t!’ he bellowed. Evernia’s eyes flashed with fire once again. To his credit, Farden stood his ground. Here he was, shouting at a goddess.

  She fumed. ‘Do you not think, mage, that if we could, that Vice would still be walking this earth? I expected intelligence from one like you. We are prisoners, Farden, and on this earth we are but shades of ourselves, ghosts and whispers. We cannot do anything except ask, or rather, in this case, beg that this time you listen.’

  ‘Well I’ve told you already, I won’t do it.’

  The goddess’s eyes were becoming dangerous. Ilios looked on nervously. ‘What happened to the lone wolf? What happened to duty? What happened to revenge and honour? What will happen to the Sirens and your friends? Would you be so selfish as to condemn the rest of the world, all because you are so stubbornly unwilling?’

  It was Farden’s turn to jab the air with his finger. He could feel the rage bubbling inside him still. ‘I am what you made me! I can’t kill her or my baby,’ he countered. A tear hovered at the corner of his eye ‘I asked for none of this!’

  ‘You are what time and circumstance has made you, mage, and you will do it.’

  ‘Why?’ he shouted. Farden’s tattoos were glowing white hot beneath his cloak and armour. ‘Either you go ahead and make me, or you find someone else!’

  Evernia shook her head, full of pity. ‘Because you have the only weapon that can kill the child, or Vice.’