Dead Stars - Part One (The Emaneska Series) (19 page)

“Today a council member asked me an intriguing question. Are the Written getting more powerful? I had to say yes.

If Modren and Tyrfing’s observations are accurate, the Written, like the rest of Emaneska, are experiencing a surge of magick like never before. I must say it is an exciting time, if not one that is a little worrying. Even I can feel it in my bones, my blood. I can feel it humming in the air on certain nights. Spell books are coming alive by themselves, whispering to scholars. The magick markets and caravans and trade ships bring stranger and stranger things every week. Quickdoors spontaneously open. Ordinary soldiers are using magick like the mages. Written are suddenly wielding spells that would challenge the skills of Tyrfing or I. It seems that the Written are only now reaching their full potential. How painful it is then that we are losing so many of them to the murderer in the wilds.

Emaneska’s magick has truly been set aflame. The question is why? I dearly hope it is not something to do with Farden’s murderous spawn. The search for her continues.”

Taken from Arkmage Durnus’ diary, Firstdew 904

H
ide!
Screamed the voice inside his head.

The hand of fear ran its razor around his heart once again. His breath came in ragged slurps. Knees ached. Feet blistered. Owls and other night things screeched and laughed at him. Spirals of mist rose from the spiny loam, early wreaths to a grave not yet dug.

Hide where?!
Vossum shouted at his own useless thoughts. He blinked. More blood. The cut must have been deep indeed. Vossum quickly clamped a hand over his forehead and rushed on. Trees groped at him and scratched his neck and bare arms with their long fingers. Pine cones splintered under his pounding boots.

Hide!

Vossum peered through blood and darkness for a place, any place that could offer him sanctuary. The night was thick, the forest too, and the trees were thin and arrow-straight. No gnarled fallen trunk for him. No void in the earth to curl up in. The ground was flat and its only foliage needles and cones. He crouched, tempting the mists to swallow him, but they were still too thin and timid.

And then he saw it.

A fist of rock half-sunk in the earth, surrounded by trees. Narrowly missing a tree trunk, he veered violently towards it, grazing his shoulder in the process. He barely felt it. The mage hurtled on towards the rock, his sanctuary, his hiding spot. Breathless prayers fell from his lips and wafted into the cold night air.

Skin met dirt as he skidded and crumpled into a foetal position underneath a jutting lip in the rock. Vossum held his lips tight and forced himself to breathe through his nose, slowly, gently, as quiet as he could. His lungs were on fire. Darkness clutched him close.

Who was she?

What
was she?

Somewhere in the screeching darkness a twig snapped, and Vossum held his breath tight in his throat. Behind closed lips, he slowly began to weave together another spell with his tongue. Something with light and noise, a distraction maybe, something to give himself time to escape.
Curse his lack of meld magick
, he thought, fingers probing the stone around him, trying to dig into it, become it.

Another twig split in twain, closer too. A foot scuffed a pile of leaves while the trees whispered above, as if telling the hunter where her prey hid. Vossum peered into the shadows, lit only by the curious, bony fingers of a half-moon delving into the pine woods. Tonight the sky was picked clean of stars. Ambitious fog graced the sky like ghostly entrails. Sunken clouds and spiny trees obscured all but the aloof, phantom moon. Vossum glanced up, moving his head slightly to see if he could catch a glimpse of her. He couldn’t, and it made him shiver.

Something was watching him, in the misty folds of night.

Two pinpricks of sheer darkness, even blacker than the night around them, hovered by a tree a painfully short distance away. They tugged and pulled at the night around them, as if sucking it in and feeding off it. Grey smoke leaked from their corners.

Vossum’s breath caught in his throat. He stared at them, desperately trying to decide if they were human or beast, or both, or whether his mind had finally snapped. When they inched closer, accompanied by the sound of crunching pine cones, he felt his veins fill with ice. By the hands of the gods, they were eyes! Black, terrible eyes, swallowing what paltry light the moon offered.

Vossum felt naked. He wilted into the loam as the ghastly black eyes marched forward. A shape emerged behind them, with a waterfall of black hair and a pale face as hard as the steel in its hand. He lashed out wildly, but the girl was too quick. His spell sprang half-formed from his mouth, and as light and magick sputtered, Vossum saw the blade plunge into his stomach. He crumpled to the ground again, moaning a brief prayer as a slender hand wrenched his head backwards by the roots of his hair, and a blade slipped into his throat.

The girl stood upright and wiped the wet blade on her leather sleeve. She closed her pitch-black eyes, squeezing them as tightly as she could. When she opened them again, the hungry darkness in them had died, and the trails of grey smoke had evaporated. She didn’t need her eyes now; she cast a spell that burnt away the shadows with a bright white light.

The girl stretched, making her back click in several places, and then knelt to the needle-strewn ground so she could begin to cut the man’s sweat-drenched leather jerkin from his back. The seasoned blade took a few moments to bite through the tough leather, but with a swift yank it came free, and was tossed aside. The strange girl paused then, hand hovering, knife wavering, as she stared at the dead man’s back. He wore a thin yellow shirt under his thick jerkin, again soaked with fear and sweat. But something was missing.

Knife forgotten, the girl seized the shirt and ripped it off his still-warm skin. No light, no runes, no Book, nothing. She grabbed the man’s nearest arm to examine it again. There it was: a tattoo in the shape of a long, skeletal key. This man was a fake.

Fuming, the girl got to her feet again and stared down at the corpse. She spat on it, and then kicked it in its lying face; once, twice, three times, pounding it viciously with the toe of her thick boot. She stopped only when she heard the sick crunch of a skull cracking. Sheathing her knife, the girl marched north into the misty darkness lurking between the pine trees, eyes black and smoking once again.

The frail half-moon looked on, confused.

A crimson stone landed in the dust, rosy with the dawn glow. Then a black stone, chipped and scarred with age and use, landed next to it, rolling in a circle before it waddled to a stop. The last stone was a milk-white, like an eyeball that had misplaced its pupil. It fell between the other two and shoved them both aside with a sharp crack.

Lilith frowned, and took a sip of the brackish tea she was clutching between her cold knees. She looked up from her befuddled stones and stared at the day. The mist still clung fervently to the daylight, like a ghost clutching at the unravelling threads of life. The sun had just woken from its slumbers and was sitting nonchalantly on the hazy horizon. It would be a hot day, as far as Emaneska was concerned. Sleepy insects were already beginning to buzz. In the distance, somewhere in the stubborn fog, near to the outskirts of the foreign little town, cows lowed.

Lilith shuffled around to look at her seerstones from a different direction, but that only deepened her frown. She muttered something and pushed the stones away with the back of her hand. The fire beside her had burnt out in the early hours. It was now a ring of charcoal and smoking twigs. The green-wood spit that hung over it sported the carcass of a huge water rat. It was mostly bones and emptiness now, something for the crows to pick at. She could hear them in the edges of the pine forest, a little way to the south. Bored, Lilith sipped her tea and waited.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to wait long. Barely half an hour later, Samara trudged out of the fog and crouched by the dead fire. She didn’t speak. She simply dug two fingers into the cold innards of the water rat and prized out some meat that had been missed. She stuffed the greasy strands into her mouth and chewed silently. Her face was a frown.

Lilith looked at her hands, her pockets, and all around her. There was barely a speck of blood on her hands. ‘Where is it then?’

Samara ignored the question. She stared at the weak, yellow morning sun and frowned some more.

In the years that had passed, Samara had grown into a wiry, lithe little figure. A frame of bones and skin on tall legs. Those foolish enough to judge her by her skinny form, those who had even tried to take advantage of it, had quickly found themselves the new owner of a broken something, or worse. For her age and size, Samara was unnaturally strong and painfully quick. Not that she was anywhere close to
natural
. Her whole being seemed to vibrate on a different level from those around her, even Lilith. That was the magick at play.

Samara’s obsidian hair was now braided in places, knotted in others. Her eyes, those dangerous little orbs, could never decide on which colour was their favourite. Like her moods, they were unpredictable and ever-changing, morphing from a piercing ice-blue to a deep sapling-green with a flick of her eyelashes. Those young eyes hid an animal behind them; stained glass windows through which a brave person could glimpse a monster drenched in magick, and when coupled with her seemingly-innocent tongue they could weave lies alongside the best of them, just like Lilith had shown her. And Lilith had shown her very well.

Lilith crossed her legs and entwined her fingers. She narrowed her eyes at her young charge. ‘I’m talking to you, girl. Where is his Book?’

Samara rolled her eyes. ‘He was a fake, Lilith. His key tattoos were cheap imitations.’

Lilith scowled. She had been wrong again. ‘Well, didn’t you follow him beforehand? Didn’t you watch him?’

‘Of course I did,’ asserted Samara, growing angry. ‘You’re the one who showed me him.’

‘Well it’s your responsibility to make sure of it! You obviously didn’t look close enough.’

‘I don’t see why it matters. Another mage is dead. So what if he wasn’t a Written?’

Lilith held up her hand for silence. Samara reluctantly bit her tongue. The seer rubbed her eyes with her good hand and sighed. Samara watched her mentor closely. The more she looked, the more she could see the years eating away at her, like a mould slowly seeping into her skin. Her cheeks and brows were beginning to sag. Grey was beginning to infiltrate her once-dark hair. Her left arm was wilting again. Samara knew what this meant. ‘Where next then?’ she asked.

Lilith cracked open an eye to stare at the three seerstones that were still lying in the dirt. It was a while before she answered. ‘I don’t know,’ she hissed, pained.

‘You’re losing it.’

‘I ‘aven’t lost
anything
!’ Lilith snapped, whirling around to face Samara. The young girl didn’t flinch. It had been a month since they had killed their last Written. Last night’s had been a fake and the other two hadn’t even existed. ‘The questions are…
difficult
. Ambiguous. Just as your magick clouds your future, the world’s magick clouds my stones. They’re confused,’ she muttered. Samara rolled her eyes. Either Lilith’s seerstones were failing, or she was. Samara offered an explanation to calm the seer down. Not that she cared, but she couldn’t stand her when she was in one of her foul moods. It wasted her time.

‘Then maybe we’ve killed them all,’ she shrugged.

Lilith’s mouth curled. ‘Don’t be foolish, girl. I don’t recall killin’ an Arkmage, or that bastard Farden. Do you? Please inform me if I missed those wondrous occasions.’

Samara stood up. Lilith might have flinched then, but she hid it well by shuffling closer to her seerstones. She looked away from the girl and prodded the red stone by her sandal. ‘Where are you goin’?’

‘Why don’t you ask your stones?’

‘Don’t give me that lip, girl,’ Lilith warned. Samara was becoming more and more recalcitrant with every week that passed. The seer couldn’t tell if it was boredom, or sheer petulance, or maybe her father’s streak rearing its ugly head. Whatever it was, Lilith didn’t like it. She wouldn’t have ever voiced it aloud, but she also feared it. ‘Where you off to?’

A reluctant answer floated out of the mist. ‘For a walk.’

Lilith cupped her hand around her mouth and shouted after it. ‘Well, be quick about it. I want t’ move on before the day is wasted!’ There was no reply. Lilith put her chin on her hand and took a deep breath.

Samara followed a thin trail of scuffs and hoof-prints through the brown dust. A collage of tracks wove in and out of her feet. Some were the cloven horn shapes of cows. Others sported the faint pinpricks of claws. Foxes probably. Samara tilted her head, and the soft clucking of chickens and geese reached her ears. Her stomach rumbled at the noise, but she swiftly slapped it into silence.

Through the misty haze and low cloud, the early sun could be stared at without squinting. Still lingering just above the horizon, it was a humble yellow ball, yet to bring any heat to the earth or pain to the eyes. Samara could simply watch it, daring it to do its worst.