The Iron Ghost (35 page)

‘To kill you?’

‘Yes. In the end the ruling mages of the time considered what I was doing to be too dangerous. Too risky. They sent envoys to me, men and women with silver tongues, desperate to talk me away from the path, but they just didn’t understand, Aaron. Not like you do.’

Frith pressed his lips together.
Why
does he believe that I am on his side?

‘The envoys didn’t succeed, and, well, Bezcavar took exception to their attitude.’ Joah leaned back in the chair, looking at a point over Frith’s left shoulder. ‘It was all quite messy. And so eventually they sent Xinian and her remarkable sword.’ He seemed to come back to himself then, and he gestured at his own chest. ‘She succeeded in taking me from the path, but not permanently, as it turns out.’

‘What was so remarkable about her sword?’ asked Frith, but Joah was already shaking his head.

‘All ancient history, Aaron, but I hope I have sated your curiosity at least. Now, to the bird-headed man I saw in your memories. What of him?’

‘Ah, yes.’ Frith cleared his throat, his mind racing. ‘I have been thinking on this, since you expressed an interest, and I believe I may have figured out where the memory came from. It would have been one of my earliest, in fact, when my mother was still alive. She took me and my brother Tristan, who was a babe in arms at the time, to a travelling market run by the Cheoria.’ Frith paused, trying to think of details that would make his story more plausible. ‘My brother Leon was already at that age where he felt that such things – particularly things that involved being escorted by our mother – were beneath him.’

‘Ah, yes, your brothers,’ said Joah in a musing tone. Again he wasn’t quite looking at Frith; instead he was looking down at his own hands. ‘And you lost both of them. How sad.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Frith. ‘It was. At the travelling market there were a group of mummers, performing several plays. One of them was a series of skits on the earliest days of Ede, and one of the actors wore the most outlandish headdress.’ Frith forced a laugh. ‘When I was a child, I remember it scared me quite badly, so that I demanded to leave the play, much to my mother’s exasperation. I had nightmares about it for months after, would you believe? It is strange the things that affect us as small children.’ When Joah didn’t answer immediately, Frith continued falteringly, ‘There were lots of strange masks of course – wolves too, for the twin gods, and another of a woman’s face with long green hair streaming from the back of it – but it was the bird mask that scared me. I can only imagine that’s why—’

Joah leapt from his chair, reaching for Frith’s throat. Giving a startled yelp, Frith threw himself backwards, almost toppling to the floor, but Joah caught him, one strong hand at his neck and the other pushing a tiny knife into the bony part of his shoulder.

‘Remember,’ muttered Joah directly into his ear, his breath hot and feverish, ‘concentrate on the pain.’

Frith threw a punch at Joah’s midriff, only for it to be deflected with a wave of force that took all the feeling from his fingers. In response, he felt the Edenier rising in his chest once more, fuelled by pain and fury and ready to spill out in any means possible, but then there came a fiercely hot pain in the centre of his forehead; Joah was forcing a ‘crossing’ on him again, and he felt the rogue mage’s mind slip into his own like a heated blade. He screamed, unable to stop himself – the intrusion of it, the terrible sense of tearing – and then he was lost in a tumult of images, although these ones were all too familiar.

His brother Tristan playing with a toy horse on the rug of the great hall, their father a distant blur on his chair; falling beaten and half naked onto the ice-covered stones of the courtyard and glancing up to see their bodies hanging, black and purple, from the battlements; holding a folded piece of torn cloak to the wound in Sebastian’s chest, feeling his life’s blood slipping through his fingers; the waters of the Mages’ Lake, glittering with a thousand points of light; Wydrin’s face, creased into her usual smirk, a length of linen curled between her clever fingers; an island of black rock and steaming pools –

At this image Frith tried to draw back, knowing that these memories would contain information that Joah should not see, but the rogue mage was relentless, pushing aside his resistance as though it were made of wet paper.

Jolnir hobbling towards him out of the mist, enormous bird mask nodding alarmingly; sleeping in a conical hut made of grass, lying and listening to the lonely sound of the wind and feeling lost; sending fireballs into a nest of flying lizards and watching as they fell, blackened and crispy; Jolnir removing the headdress and revealing his own terrible face, the face of an old god; O’rin the trickster god taking his powers with one touch, and letting him fall to the ground, senseless . . .

Here the onslaught stopped. Frith had a brief impression, as Joah withdrew his mind, of the woman Xinian the Battleborn, and then it was gone. Back in his chair in the Forge, he slumped awkwardly half to the floor, gasping for breath. Joah was standing over him, his face pale and his eyes wild.

‘The lost god?’ He was shouting, but Frith suspected he had no idea of the volume of his voice. ‘O’rin the trickster god lives?’

Frith pressed his hand to his forehead, once more attempting not to be sick. Darkness was crowding in at the edge of his vision.

‘What did you do to me?’ he murmured. ‘What have you done?’

‘Don’t you understand, Aaron? Don’t you know what this means? One of the old gods lives! I had always assumed that that particular source of power was forever lost to me, but here it is, and you have brought it to me.’

Frith groaned, his stomach roiling.
It’s the Rivener
, he thought,
I can barely be in the same room as it.
He glanced up to the aperture that housed the Heart-Stone, and saw that it was now a ghoulish grey, and almost black on one corner.

‘Oh do stop making a fuss, Aaron, I just needed to retrieve the information you were hiding from me.’ Joah bent down and lifted Frith up with one arm. ‘And I shan’t pretend to understand why you would do that, but it hardly matters. Do you see what we can do now? Do you see?’

Frith pushed away from the rogue mage, supporting himself with one of the stone tables.

‘What?’ he spat, no longer able to keep up his pretence of manners. ‘What is it I’m supposed to see?’

‘A god! A source of pure Edenier, of pure spirit.’ Joah grinned. ‘We shall eat his flesh, Aaron, and be mighty.’

The tunnel was narrow and low-ceilinged, so that Wydrin and Nuava had to crouch awkwardly as they made their way down deeper into the earth. There had been an unhappy few minutes where Nuava had guarded the entrance to the tunnel while Mendrick and Wydrin shoved some larger stones and boulders in front of it, but the centipedes seemed to have forgotten about them already, and Wydrin only saw a few segmented bodies rushing past in their haste to service their queen. Nuava had been shaking when she’d reached her, hands and vest covered in sticky translucent fluid and blood, but now she was holding the light-globe steadily and her face was set into a stern frown.
The kid is learning
.

‘I really hope there’s another way out of here, Mendrick,’ Wydrin said aloud, ‘as I don’t particularly fancy our chances with what’s left of Mummy Centipede if we have to go back through her dining room.’

There are other ways
, replied Mendrick in her head.
Once we have found the nexus, all shall be clear to me.

Nuava glanced up at her warily. ‘Did it . . . did it reply?’

‘He did,’ said Wydrin. ‘We’ll be back under the blessed sky soon enough, thank the Graces.’

‘It really speaks, then? In your mind?’ Nuava was gazing at the werken with a mixture of disbelief and religious awe.

Wydrin nodded. ‘He’s not the best conversationalist, to be honest. He’s a bit dry. As you’d expect, for a big chunk of living rock. I don’t imagine he knows many jokes.’

‘All these years,’ said Nuava, ‘and we never had the smallest clue that such a thing was even possible.’

‘Really?’ said Wydrin, looking at her side-on. ‘They can walk around, and obey your commands. Someone at some point must have considered the possibility.’

They made their way in silence for a few moments more. The sound of thousands of centipedes writhing together had faded the further down they travelled, and now there was only the sound of their own footsteps and the distant drip of ice melting somewhere.
Is this how it sounds in Mendrick’s head? A great waiting silence, for ever.

‘Someone probably did,’ Nuava eventually admitted, biting her lower lip. ‘Long before I trained to be a crafter, one of my ancestors must have looked into it. Perhaps they didn’t look very hard.’ Nuava brushed angrily at her furs, dislodging some imagined piece of dirt. ‘No doubt it was easier to carry on with what we were doing than to stop.’

‘Do you think your aunt knew?’

Nuava’s shoulders stiffened. ‘She knew about the Prophet, and her plan to resurrect Joah Demonsworn. After that, I’m not sure anything could surprise me.’

‘What will you do?’ asked Wydrin quietly. ‘Once all this is over?’

‘I honestly do not know. All of this is very difficult for me to take in. My whole life, I have been taught to treat the werkens like objects. Beasts of burden that did not require feeding, or care. Just
things
that existed to do our will.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘It is not so easy to brush all that away on the word of a sell-sword and the prince of our enemy.’

Wydrin raised her eyebrows at that, but before she could answer, Mendrick spoke in her head again.

The nexus is in the chamber ahead
.
I can feel it.

The tunnel widened out, allowing them to stand and move more easily. The ground under their feet changed abruptly from rough stone to a surface that was almost as smooth as glass. Nuava lowered the light-globe, and it showed them a black glossy surface, almost mirror-like. In the centre of the chamber the smooth surface was broken by what looked like a gathering of roots stretching from the ceiling to the floor, but made of bright green crystal.

‘It is just like the Heart-Stone!’ cried Nuava, automatically moving to run to it, but Wydrin laid a hand on her upper arm.

‘Easy now, kid,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘I don’t hold with such things myself, but I suspect this is a place that would be sacred to Mendrick, so perhaps we shouldn’t immediately go trampling all over with our big ugly boots.’

Nuava looked briefly annoyed before nodding shortly. ‘Right. Fine.’

Indeed, Mendrick’s green eyes were like lamps, and they seemed to grow brighter as they approached the knot of crystals.

It is the nexus
, he said, and for the first time Wydrin detected the slightest hint of an emotion in his voice: excitement.
From here I will be able to see everywhere.

‘All right, Mendrick, you do what you’ve got to do and then let’s get moving.’

The werken reached the nexus and lowered his stone snout until it touched the crystal. The effect was immediate; the crystal glowed with sudden blinding brilliance, and all across the glassy floor beneath them bright green fractures like fingers of lightning appeared, shooting out from the nexus to hit the far walls. As Wydrin watched, they flared again and again, a living heartbeat of the mountain.

‘This is like when we joined minds,’ she said to Nuava, pleased to see such a wondrous sight again. ‘All green flashing lights like getting hit really hard in the head. I was—’

And then Mendrick was in her mind, pushing all other thoughts aside. Absently, she dropped to her knees, and Nuava’s voice was very distant.

See this with me
, said Mendrick.
See where they have taken your friend.

It was like flying through the heart of the rock; darkness and silence and the unending pressure of a thousand years. Then she saw snow, places where the heart of the mountain broke through the surface like the back of a great, black whale, before she was thrown past a series of small, bleak hills. She saw a circle of standing stones, and a place where the hill was broken. No, worse: it was diseased. Whoever had come here had poisoned the land, and was doing it with its own flesh. Instinctively, she recoiled – it was like looking down at your hand to see that it had been replaced with something dead and rotten – and she felt Mendrick’s horror inside her head too.

He has tainted it
, he said. Now the emotion in his voice was anger, and that wasn’t hard to spot at all.
The human man has twisted us, broken us
.

Wydrin reached out, wanting to see more. There was an image of a place heavy with iron and drowning in a sickly violet light; it was riddled throughout the hill like the tendrils of an infection. She saw Frith curled up in a foul-looking bunk and even from the brief glance she got she could see that he was very ill; his normally warm brown skin was almost grey, and there were dark circles around his eyes. He fretted in his sleep, murmuring something over and over. There was sweat on his brow.

Mendrick broke the connection, and Wydrin came back to herself with a gasp. Nuava was standing over her, her brown eyes full of worry.

‘Are you all right? You looked like you were barely breathing.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Wydrin, struggling back to her feet. ‘But I think my friend needs our help urgently.’

Frith awoke with a start to find Joah kneeling over him, one hand resting on his forehead. He’d been dreaming about his time at Whittenfarne, and the many long conversations he’d had with O’rin, the god of lies. He pulled himself back towards the wall away from Joah’s touch, all the while mindful of Gwiddion, concealed in the blankets at the foot of the bed.

‘What are you doing?’ He felt ill again, and shakier even than when he’d fallen sleep.

‘Just looking,’ said Joah. He didn’t seem perturbed by the way Frith was scowling at him. ‘Searching through the rest of your memories. It really is quite fascinating.’

‘You performed a crossing? But I felt nothing!’