Dead Stars - Part Two (The Emaneska Series) (50 page)

‘Why should I help you, traitor?’ she challenged.

‘Because I have delivered your father,’ shrugged Loki. An old woman, face creased in wrinkles and limp hand clutched to her side, emerged from the shadows behind her. She looked fearful. Loki saw her biting her lip.

Samara spat in the snow. ‘You need to get your facts right, god. My father is dead.’

Loki smiled up at the daemons. ‘Oh, did you not tell her?’

‘Tell me what?’

Hokus waved a claw. ‘The god is babbling, Samara, confused. What is it that you have brought us?’

‘Why, I’ve delivered the whole group to you. The Written, Arkmage Tyrfing, my brother Heimdall, and Farden, of course. Minus only Ruin. No doubt why you’ve brought such,
hungry
, companions,’ Loki looked around at the fidgeting edges of the glade.

‘And what do you get out of this bargain?’ demanded Samara.

Loki’s smile faded all too quickly, replaced with something hard, like flint. ‘Is there anything else? I was born a shadow. This earth gave me a thirst I didn’t think possible. It’s time this shadow felt flesh.’

‘Farden? Where are you going?’ Tyrfing coughed as he poked his head out of the tent. He had heard voices. Eager voices.

‘Stay inside, uncle, where it’s warm. We’re investigating this forest.’

Tyrfing made as if to follow but began to cough instead.

‘Stay inside, uncle,’ Farden repeated. He strode to the edges of the camp. Others had gathered there. A Written. One of the sailors. A handful of snowmads. They were whispering to themselves, craning ears to the fog, scratching heads.

‘What’s all this?’ Farden asked, making several of them jump.

‘Voices sir, on the breeze.’

‘What breeze?’ Eyrum asked.

Farden turned around very slowly.

Loki was still talking. ‘I can give you a power you haven’t felt in millennia.’

‘And what is that?’ Hokus sneered, as if the god couldn’t even give them a limp handshake.

Samara wrinkled her nose. ‘What could you possibly give us?’

‘Souls,’ said Loki, as simply

Valefor cackled, the ravens with him. ‘We take them as we please. Like we always have. Along with the prayer.’

Loki sighed. ‘By sword and claw, one by one. Am I right?’

‘It worked well before.’

‘I have something more dependable in mind.’

Samara looked to the daemons and then back to the god. ‘Like what? What’s this bastard talking about?’

It was Loki’s turn to jab someone in the chest. He put his finger in the shallow of Samara’s shoulder and kept it there. ‘Just you worry about bringing my body down, when I ask for it. Understand?’ Loki was lucky Samara didn’t gut him right there and then. She would have managed it, judging by the venom in her eyes, if she wasn’t so stunned by his boldness. Loki even had the audacity to wink. He pointed back through the silent trees, spying the lights and glow of the camp. ‘Have fun.’

Crunch, crunch, crunch,
went the ice under Farden’s quickening boots. Eyrum pounded along behind him, a growing entourage of mages and snowmads behind them. Something was in the trees. Farden was sure of it now. His borrowed sword glinted in the starlight. A sudden wind whipped across the ice, bringing the creaking of wood and the chattering of branches to his ears. The chattering of teeth and fangs. ‘Stay close,’ he ordered. ‘And be ready!’

‘For what?’ Eyrum whispered.

‘Nothing, I hope.’

‘Calm yourself, girl!’ Lilith whined from the gloom of the pines.

‘Farden will die tonight!’ Samara screeched. She was beyond listening. The wind whipped up the ice and needles into a frenzy around her as she stood arms stretched to the shadows. They whined and scratched the ground for her as the magick surged. The daemons looked undecided, but still they grew, swelling up to nudge the branches with their glowing shoulders. The pine copse shivered and howled around them.

Loki stood calmly amongst it all, watching the flashes of eyes and teeth as they flew from the shadow. He heard the tips of the pines crack as dragon’s wings clipped them. He watched them all as they followed Samara out onto the ice, one by one. Her skin was already crackling with lightning, like a beacon in the night. Sparks of fury hissed.

Only Valefor stayed long enough to say anything. He spoke through his veil of burning smoke. ‘We have a deal, god,’ he said, before leaving. ‘But you had best deliver.’

‘Oh,’ Loki smirked. ‘I will.’

“Carry with ye a silver mirror at all times! For the lycan is a terrifying foe, much more so that its vampyre cousin. Only a pure silver surface may deflect its terrible visage, and break the transformation! Ignore the tales of silver blades; only a mirror may save ye, verily, and a fleet foot. Travel only on a moonless night, as the milky glow of our heavenly sister doth hold sway over our lycan foe, and causes him to turn so! Unlike a vampyre, it is a creature caught betwixt its curse, half man, half beast, and never quite either. Its poison is held both in its fangs and its claws, and its roar can be heard for twenty leagues! Death is most preferable to the lycan curse. Should ye meet one bereft of a silver mirror, pray ye to the gods for a swift end!”

Another panicky excerpt from ‘Death and all her Beasts’ by Master Wird

T
o say the arrival of the dragons was well timed was nothing short of an understatement.

At the precise moment that the face of the copse burst into several thousand burning fragments of wood and resinous needle, splinters of ice and slush, the southern sky was turned orange by the belching fires of the arriving dragons.

Towerdawn was the first, skidding to a halt on the ice just long enough for Modren and Durnus to jump, or rather fall, from his side. There was no pretence of grace. The two mages’ legs had turned limp during the ride. They slid from the Old Dragon’s scaly hide and crumpled into two matching heaps in the snow. One of his captains was next, delicately rolling so that the still form of Elessi could be carried off by some waiting snowmads.

‘Farden!’ roared Towerdawn, sighting the mage standing against the blaze of the copse, the shadows suddenly alive with creatures from memory and nightmare. ‘A delivery for you!’

Farden’s reply was a flash of his sword. He had no time for reunions.

Where the mage was standing, it was all rather confusing. The silent ghost of a pine copse had suddenly exploded into life. A sinister army was pouring from its blazing trees. Giant wolves, shadows he couldn’t even begin to name, swarthy ice trolls, ravens, something slithering, something crystalline glittering in the orange light, Lost Clan dragons, two daemons towering over it all, and in the centre, a slim, glowing figure, hair flying in her own storm winds.
Samara
. It was an ambush the likes of which he couldn’t have dreamt up if he had tried, and she had orchestrated it all.

‘Icewights!’ yelled a nearby snowmad, pointing a shaking finger. Farden followed it, and found two glittering creatures at the end. They looked vaguely human in the light of the fire, but made of glass, razor-sharp and translucent. They slid across the ice as if it were part of them, far outpacing the rest of the chaotic mass galloping behind them. They raised their glassy claws and hissed as they came near. Farden was so stupefied by their appearance that he almost forgot to swing his sword…

…Almost.

The steel carved through the face of the icewight like a boulder through a pane of glass. The creature shattered. Farden grit his teeth and shielded his face as shards flew. Cold, sharp shards. The creature crumpled to the ice. The mage looked up to find the other in a very similar position, frantically clawing at the axe-blade that was embedded in its groin. Eyrum twisted, and the creature shattered like the first. Farden poked at the shards with his boots. They were swiftly melting, but still the snowmads behind them were cowering on their knees. Eyrum just shrugged. ‘Easy as that,’ he said, and turned to face the rest.

Farden felt the blast of wind as the dragons flew overhead. He heard, no,
felt
, the crunch and roar as they collided in mid-air with their Lost Clan foes. Several plummeted to the ice, ripping and tearing and trumpeting as they fell.

‘Farden!’ yelled a voice far behind him. Farden was about to turn when something resembling a boulder with arms and legs burst out of the fiery shadows. He stumbled back, sword glancing uselessly off a stone rib, curved like a tusk.
Who on earth was trying to strike up a conversation at this moment in time?!
he bellowed inwardly. It turned out to be his uncle, racing across the ice towards him. He slid to a stop just long enough to send a fireball ploughing into the boulder troll’s stomach, and then he ran on. Farden ducked as the orb of flame sent the creature flying. He could smell burning hair.

When he stood up, a raven was flapping in his face, trying to peck at his eyes. A quick slash with the sword sent it flying across the ice in two separate directions. ‘Next!’ he yelled to the roaring, screeching paint-splash of orange and black that the night had suddenly become. It was madness. Pure, unexpected madness. Fire, ice, creatures, and his daughter in the midst of it all. He couldn’t help but think at that moment that it could all still be traced back to him.

‘Farden!’ Tyrfing was still trying to catch up with him. He would have to try harder. Farden spun and slashed as the strange creatures kept coming, sometimes one at a time, others in packs of two, or three. He put his sword through the face of a white snarling fox, and then dashed another icewight to the ground. Something grabbed him from behind, something slithering and tentacled choking him around the neck. There was a dull
thwack
as Eyrum’s axe bit into its spongy skull, and the thing went limp. Farden looked down to find out what it was and still drew a blank.

‘What are these things?’ he yelled.

Eyrum spun the axe like a toy. ‘The scum and dredges of the old creatures, drawn by your daughter and her daemons,’ he growled. A constellation of brown blood drops decorated his face.

‘Speaking of,’ Farden hissed, looked to his daughter, a few hundred yards ahead, wreaking havoc, flanked by the two daemons from Krauslung. He clenched his red-gold fists together and marched towards her. ‘Enough is enough.’