by Ben Galley
‘Understood,’ nodded Eyrum, and said no more. He left the dragons to it and trudged to the nearest spur of rock. From there he could look down on the entire army. They littered the snowy slopes in their thousands. In the charcoal darkness it looked as though the frozen ground itself slithered and convulsed. A thousand campfires filled the valley, and in between their flames silhouettes of beasts and men moved, occasionally catching the light on their sharp blades and burnished shields. Whispers and shouts and chants and prayers floated up to the Siren’s ears with the bitter winds, and together they sang a nervous song. Eyrum held his axe at his side, relishing the cold of the blade under his rough hands. His armour creaked as the wind played with it. To the south he could see the faint orange glow of Krauslung. He could remember feeling the pressure of those streets and their people, like the bubbling pressure of a hot spring waiting to explode. And now, as it had turned out, he was going to be in the thick of it when it did. Eyrum gripped his axe tighter, feeling eager to use it. It is going to be a long day, and a tough one at that, he said to himself, and went back to rejoin his dragons.
No more than half an hour later, the valleys between the slumbering mountains came alive with roars and cries, shouts and bellows. Secrecy was thrown aside and stamped out like the campfires, and the sound of clanging swords and trumpets and drums reverberated until the peaks and rocks shook under their icy blankets. Fountains of fire sprang from the mouths of the dragons and the orange flames danced on the snow. Armour shimmered in the white-hot light. Riders leapt aboard their steel-wrapped dragons and raised their fists and swords in the air, joining the cries of the others. There was no time or need for speeches. Farfallen wordlessly got to his claws, and with deep and powerful strokes of his golden wings, rose high into the air. He was followed by dragon after dragon until the sky was full to bursting. Below them, the rocks shook under the countless pounding of marching feet.
Like it or not, it was time for war, and war alone.
To the south, a darting shadow flitted across the foamy seas of the bay of Rós. Dawn had yet to break and the dragons were still donning their armour, but this dark figure had no time to lose, and was not about to wait for them.
It skimmed the waves with its curved claws and slipped unnoticed through the stubborn darkness until it was hovering near the western walls of Krauslung’s harbour. The sea frothed beneath it. Waves rolled like rugs of grey-green stone and old copper. The bells of the ships had been silenced with cloth. Only the seagulls dared to make a noise. They gathered on the rooftops and cackled like the witches of a fairytale. They could feel the tension in the air, the nervous electricity. It would be a day Emaneska would never forget.
Slowly but surely, and with the quietest of wingbeats, the shadow crept across the rocky sloping cliff face of Ursufel, and managed to slip unnoticed between the buildings of a remote, narrow street. The shadow landed without a sound.
Farden swiftly jumped from the gryphon’s back and crouched on the dirty cobblestones. Fortunately, the street was quiet, dark, and empty. Slowly, and with a metallic, slithering sound, Farden withdrew his sword from its scabbard and stood up. There was a stale smell of sickness and death on the cold wind. Farden wrinkled his nose and turned to Ilios. The gryphon could smell it too. ‘You stay here until either I return or Farfallen attacks, okay?’
Ilios nodded and whistled softly. He squeezed into a gap between two broken buildings, and there he crouched down and folded his wings. Only his eyes could be seen, glinting softly in the darkness. Farden took a deep breath. His heart was pounding against his ribs. He lifted a hand to brush his dishevelled hair from his face and found it shaking. There was no time to waste, and so he jogged into the dark streets, hugging their walls.
It didn’t take long to discover what Krauslung had descended into. Dead bodies hid in doorways and alcoves. Some looked as though they were sleeping, while others looked disconcertingly twisted. Seagulls had picked at them. Farden, unable to stop but unable to ignore them, tried his best to avoid them and jogged on. Every body he stepped over only made him angrier.
He soon encountered his first patrol, then the second patrol, then the third, then the fourth. The closer the mage got to the Arkathedral the more frequent and larger the patrols became. Farden hid in dark doorways and held his breath until they passed by, spears tapping and armour clanking. Farden kept off the main routes, tiptoeing through the back alleys and avoiding torchlight like the plague. He wasn’t about to risk raising the alarm before the Sirens attacked, and therefore he had to be sneaky and beyond careful.
Farden soon came across a main street that curved a winding path downhill towards the port. He crouched in the shadows and looked left and right. Uphill meant the Arkathedral, and Cheska. His heart beat out a nervous tune at the thought. He closed his eyes to find her face and that terrible knife sweeping down through the air imprinted on his eyelids. Farden shuddered, and stepped out into the bright light. Hood up and brave, he jogged up the hill, hoping he could make it to the doors of the Arkathedral before being spotted and stopped.
He did not get far.
A patrol appeared ahead of him, too far away to notice him, but close enough for Farden to be caught out in the open; he stood on a part of the street without alleyways or side-streets, just long rows of bare walls and cracked windowpanes offering nothing in the way of a hiding place. Farden looked up at the tall buildings, imagining baleful eyes in the dark windows. Suddenly a thought grabbed him and he remembered his uncle’s lessons in Hjaussfen, lessons of illusion and camouflage. Farden instantly leapt to the side and found the nearest brick wall. The sound of marching boots and spears were getting louder. Farden rubbed his vambraces together and felt the magick quickly bite. He felt the cold wall with his fingertips, feeling the cold bricks, scraping the crumbly grouting under his fingernails, feeling how it was missing in some parts; he pressed his head against the brick and felt how solid it was, how cold and unassuming it was, how unobtrusive and everyday it was, all the while staring at the armoured guards that approached him…
…and walked straight past. Farden stood as still as a skeleton, and watched the score of men pass by, muttering to themselves. The mage looked down and noticed that his hand and his arm, even his vambraces, had become wall-coloured. His skin was grey and as rough as brick. He looked down and saw his chest was a pattern of brick and cement, exactly the same as the wall. As soon as Farden saw it, his concentration broke and he emerged from the wall, normal once again. Farden rubbed his fingers together. They felt dusty, and cold. Shadowsift, he recalled.
But Farden had little time to stop and stare, so he kept going, hugging the darker side of the street once again.
As he approached the white marble cliff face of the Arkathedral, as he had done hundreds of times in the past, he looked up at the spiralling turrets and parapets looming high above him. It was dark and cold, empty even, yet Farden knew it teemed with soldiers. Its myriad windows were black except for one. It shimmered in the way a star does, when it seems so close that one could pluck it from the sky in its ripeness and hold it glistening in the hand. He knew it had to be her room.
Suddenly, a splash of bright torchlight flooded the empty street. Farden dove for cover behind a broken cart and concentrated on being small and silent. There were loud voices and shouts, and woeful cries, and through the gaps in the wooden cart Farden spotted a group of people hauling a person across the cobbles. There was a large man, perhaps a woman, dressed in heavy Skölgard armour, a general or captain by the looks of her. She was flanked by a dozen soldiers bearing torches, and together they were half-dragging, half-carrying another woman. She cried out and tried to wriggle free, but the soldiers were too strong. Farden squinted. In the light of their torches, he could make out white skirts, an apron, bare feet, and brown curly hair. Farden leant forward and pressed his nose against the cart as they passed by. They were too busy with the struggling woman to notice a man hiding behind a disused cart. He peered at their ca
ptive. He could just make out her face in the light.
Farden flinched when he recognised her, so shocked in fact he almost forgot where he was, and went to stand up and call out to her. But he was better than that, and stayed firmly where he was, watching like a hungry eagle as they pulled and yanked her down the street and away from him. Had she failed, or had she succeeded and already killed Cheska and his child? There was no way of knowing, he told himself. He frantically rubbed his eyes and stared again. There was no mistaking it. She cried out again, begging to be let go, and the mage recognised her Albion accent. It was unmistakably Elessi.
Farden instantly found himself torn, as though he were a sheet of useless paper. He stared up at the flickering window at the top of the Arkathedral, and thought of Cheska. Farden clenched his teeth and looked back to poor Elessi being dragged downhill towards the docks. Get to Cheska, or save the chambermaid, deliberated a voice in his head. The mage stood and stepped out into the street, sword in hand. He looked again to the flickering window. The twin bells of Ursufel and Hardja were silent, no guards were running to and fro, there were no screams. Elessi would already be dead had Vice caught her. He still had time. He could save Elessi and then get to Cheska before dawn. The mage hoped desperately to the gods that he was right as he ran across the street and after the maid.
The guards led him a winding route through street and alley until finally they emerged onto the boardwalk of the harbour. There, out of the relative cover of the slim streets, the wind was once again cold and biting. In the distance, the waves roared and hurled themselves at the gap in the harbour walls. Spray and rain had made the wood underfoot treacherous. Salt filled the air. The mage had never seen the harbour so empty; only a handful of fishing boats, maybe even a stubborn carrack or two, had stayed. They were dwarfed by the huge dark ships that floated, heavy and ponderous, on the eastern side of the harbour. If Farden had looked hard enough and long enough, he might have spotted several dark shapes hovering on the storm-chased waves far out to sea, near the islands of Skap, ready to pounce when dawn came.
Despite the creaking of the remaining ships and the booming of the wind-blown waves, the port was unnaturally quiet. The bars and taverns had been either gutted and smashed or boarded up. Arka and Skölgard soldiers alike lined the piers and boardwalks. They smoked pipes and chatted to each other in low voices as they shivered at their many posts. They watched with indifferent faces as a teary-eyed maid was dragged past them. None of them noticed a mage following them, hooded and cloaked and sneaking about in the shadows, blending perfectly with the walls and wooden walkways.
Elessi had given up on screaming and begging. The woman, whom she heard the men call Agfrey, or General, had struck her hard in the mouth to keep her quiet. It had worked. Elessi now resigned herself to crying quietly, and sucking on her bleeding lip. The soles of her feet had been shredded and bloodied by the icy cobbles. Still they dragged her on.
She wasn’t given long to agonise over where they were taking her, and when she realised the tears rushed back to her eyes. Elessi was hauled to the eastern side on the harbour, where a dozen giant ships sat heavy and low in the stinking salty water. Eyes watched her approach, both from the huge flat deck of the closest ship, and from the tiny gaps in its hull where fingers and faces battled for space. The stench of fear, mingled with unmistakable reek of human effluent, choked the air. Elessi began to struggle again but to her despair the soldiers dragged her mercilessly down a flight of steps and onto the wooden pier that sat alongside the first ship. The wood underneath was sticky and wet with more than just ice.
‘Who goes there?’ challenged a voice from above, not quite a shout nor a whisper but somewhere in between.
‘It’s General Agfrey,’ barked the big woman. A man walked briskly down the gangplank and stood with his foot on one of the mooring ropes. The soldiers moved forward and the man blinked in the bright torchlight. He looked like a Written.
‘By the golden scales, put those torches down!’ he hissed, pointing to the ship behind him. ‘The caulking is still fresh! You don’t want to send the whole lot of them up now, do you?’ The soldiers shook their heads and threw their torches into the roiling waters beside them. They fizzed once and then died, and floated away.
‘Good riddance I say,’ spat the general. ‘I’ve got one more for you, anyway, courtesy of his Mage.’
The man walked forward. He sported a long ginger beard and was missing the tip of his left ear. ‘Another maid? Fair enough. I’m sure we could squeeze her in.’ The mage clicked his fingers and two more figures descended the plank. ‘Take her on board and shove her in with the rest.’ The figures nodded and tugged her onto the ship.
Agfrey waited until the maid had been taken out of sight. She nudged one of the mooring ropes with her foot. ‘I’m surprised they still float, the amount we packed onto them.’
‘Full to the brim with everyone we could find. Men, women, and children to boot,’ said the mage in a cold, emotionless voice, completely unaware of who was listening.
‘Be ready to cast off when dawn comes.’
‘Right you are.’
‘Are all your archers in place?’
‘Ready and waiting.’
‘And the ballistas?’
‘Them too.’
‘Good,’ said Agfrey. ‘The Sirens aren’t going to know what hit them.’
The mage coughed, and smiled in the darkness. ‘Or what they hit.’
General Agfrey nodded and waved to her men. They swiftly departed and went back the way they came, minus one maid. The mage hawked and spat into the sea and went back on board his ugly ship.
Farden emerged as if from nowhere and slunk along the wooden pier like a rat. He put a hand to the moist hull of the huge ship and pressed his ear to the cold wood. Alongside the foetor of sewage and waste he could smell tar and pine resin in the wood. It felt sticky to the touch. Beside him was the tiniest of portholes, barely big enough to fit a hand through. Farden crouched down to peer through it, and was met by two fingers and a wide eye, frightened and desperate. ‘Please,’ whispered the person behind the eye. ‘Don’t kill us.’ It was all he could manage; the man quickly descended into a fit of coughing. The sickness, thought Farden, and he covered his mouth. He could hear other voices: low moans, vomiting, and crying, and the smell wafting through the little hole made him gag. The whole dark nature of Vice’s plot dawned very quickly on him, and Farden put his fist to the wood. Elessi was in there somewhere with them.
The mage crouched down and pressed himself against the hull of the ship as the sound of footsteps from above reached his ears. A soldier, face obscured by darkness, leant out over the side of the ship and peered into the pitch black darkness that hugged the hull. Even though Farden could have jumped up and touched him, the soldier was oblivious to the mage’s presence. He thudded the side of the ship with his palm. ‘Quiet down in there!’ he hissed, as if afraid of speaking too loudly. ‘I won’t tell you again, by Evernia’s tits, I’ll just come down and beat it out of you!’
The moaning from the ill-fated prisoners inside the ship momentarily faded. The mage sniffed. ‘More like it,’ he mumbled. There was the clinking sound of armour and mail as the man fished himself out of his trousers. With a tired sigh, he began to urinate over the side of the ship. Farden snarled, barely managing to dodge the stream of piss. He drew his sword with a quiet slither of steel. Holding it firmly with both hands and feeling the anger burn inside him, he lunged upwards with all of his might, driving the sword deep into the man’s exposed crotch. Before he could make any sound other than a horrified gasping, Farden twisted the blade and dragged the soldier downwards, muffling the sound of the fall with his own body. With one armoured hand clamped firmly over the man’s face, the mage twisted the sword the other way and drove it inwards and upwards as hard as he could, until the blade bit through the soldier’s spine with a crunch. The man was dead before he knew it. Slowly, hand slick with hot blood, Farden withdrew his
sword and lowered the man into the pitch-black gap between the pier and the creaking ship, leaving him to sink under the weight of his own armour. Farden spat in place where he sank. ‘Good riddance, I say,’ he whispered.
Farden wiped his bloody hands on his cloak and then began to creep towards the gangplank, not quite sure what he was intending to do. There were twelve ships in the harbour, each crammed to bursting with people. His people. The Arka, and he was the only one who knew they were there. Farden shook with anger and indecision. He crouched at the bottom of the gangplank and throttled the handle of his sword with both his hands. He looked up at the teeth of the mountain high above him, where the icy peak gnawed at the sky, and groaned.
Dawn was breaking over the mountains.
The sound of frenetic bells suddenly filled the cold valley. Farden stood up and looked to the north, where the sky was beginning to fill with winged shapes and the hills glimmered with blazing torches. The distant pounding drums joined the frenzied tolling of the bells. He was too late. Farden swore under his breath. The Sirens had arrived.
Cheska had never known such pain. Her insides were on fire. She felt as though she were slowly but surely splitting in half. To make matters worse, if that were even possible, the maids were pinning her down by her shoulders and ankles, and on Vice’s orders they had pushed a small piece of dark wood between her teeth. Their hands were cold and painful, and the strange wood tasted bitter on her dry tongue. It was supposed to numb the pain. It was a damn lie.
That other woman, that old seer of Vice’s, did nothing except watch, standing calmly at the end of the bed with her arms awkwardly crossed, with that withered arm of hers, just watching. She had a beady look about her, like a hungry crow watching a rabbit in a trap, waiting for it to wriggle itself to death. The princess scowled at the sight of her, wishing her hands were free.
