There was little talk among the prisoners after that. They were left under guard outside the mine while other matters were attended to. Hours dragged by. Clouds slid in from the west and Aren was left with nothing to do but dwell on Cade’s condition. When they were finally collected by a double-strength escort for the trip back to the camp, Aren couldn’t get to his feet fast enough.
The infirmary was a simple, flimsy wooden building standing near the south gate. The road from the gate to the yard was cluttered with carts, busy with villagers from across the bridge and prisoners who hadn’t been in the mine. Men hurried from the laundry with bundles of sheets to use as bandages, under the watchful eyes of the archers on the stockade walkway. The camp was in a state of emergency, and in the confusion nobody saw Aren make his way to the infirmary and thump on the door.
It was opened almost immediately by a plump-cheeked Ossian girl with her hair bundled up under a cloth cap and bloody handprints smeared on her smock.
‘I need to see my friend,’ Aren said.
‘We’re too busy for visitors.’ She began to close the door, but Aren grabbed it.
‘Please,’ he begged. ‘I just need to know if he’s well. He’s about our age, thickset, dark blond hair … He was unconscious, with a head wound. His name is Cade of Shoal Point.’
She looked him over uncertainly. ‘And you are?’
‘Aren,’ he said. ‘Of Shoal Point.’
Understanding dawned in her eyes. She looked over her shoulder, into the infirmary, then back at Aren. ‘Can you make yourself useful?’
‘Yes!’ he said, relief making him eager. ‘I’ll help any way I can.’
She sighed, as if exasperated by her own kindness. ‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘We could do with another pair of hands.’
The infirmary was laid out much like a longhouse, but twice as wide. Rows of bunks were filled with groaning casualties, and the air was pungent with blood and the sharp stink of poultices and medicines. Villagers and prisoners alike hurried between the beds, carrying buckets and bandages, pausing here and there to offer the touch of a hand or a word of comfort. As Aren entered, he passed a small room where a lanky, balding apothecary was taking down a phial from shelves that were almost empty.
‘You know anything about the healing arts? Not shy of blood, are you?’
‘I learned how to clean and staunch a wound as part of my sword training,’ Aren said. ‘And we studied a little from Harvik’s Anatomy.’ Not that he remembered any of it.
She gave him a look that was both surprised and impressed. ‘Maybe we can use you. We’re short-handed and short-stocked. Only me and the doctor know how to set a bone or stitch, and I’m only an apprentice yet.’
She indicated a short elderly man with spectacles and a long white beard, dressed in a frayed jacket and trousers that were too short for him. He was leaning over a patient and muttering to himself. Doctor Baden was feared – as all doctors were feared by Ossians, who had little grasp of Krodan methods of healing – but those he’d treated said he was gentle and wise.
‘You’re studying Krodan physic?’ asked Aren, surprised and impressed in his turn.
‘Aye. Beats the herbcraft the old mothers teach.’
‘But you’re … er …’
‘A woman? Well spotted. The doctor doesn’t hold with the Krodan idea that women are only good for staying at home and raising children. I’ll never go to the Glass University, and I’ll never hold a title, but at least when the doctor’s gone there’ll be someone in Suller’s Bluff who can do more than crush up a few foul-smelling roots, pray to the Aspects and call it a remedy. Speaking of which, there’s a druid about. Did you know?’
Aren, distracted by searching for Cade among the bunks, was taken off-guard by the question. ‘Uh, no. Between the imprisonment and the relentless toil, we don’t get much news,’ he said absently.
She laughed loudly, making him jump. It seemed jarringly out of place amid all this suffering, and yet it was pleasing to hear, a welcome antidote to the sounds of pain.
‘You should keep your ear to the ground,’ she advised, an amused gleam in her eye. ‘All kinds of thrilling things you might miss.’
Aren couldn’t help a faint smile. He liked her. She moved quickly and talked quickly and her face was lively and mobile. It had been a long time since Aren encountered anyone with vigour to spare.
She carried on talking as she dodged between the bunks, leading him further in. ‘I’ve lived in Suller’s Bluff since I was a cribling, but I’ve never seen a druid. Thought they’d all died out, to be honest. But now Red Mabel says she’s seen the signs in the forest, and Brak Steeltooth swears he laid eyes on one, though he’s half-blind these days, so it’s just as likely it was a bear. Still’ – she scratched under her cap – ‘there’s something out there. The animals have been acting spooked ever since the season turned, and you hear cries off the peaks at night that don’t come from any wolf or beast I know.’
‘I see them!’ A shriek lifted above the moans and the pleas of dying men calling for their mothers. ‘I see them!’
‘There’s your friend now,’ she said, ‘making his racket.’ A moment later, Aren saw him, lying on a low bunk in the corner of the room. His head was bandaged and he was awake, but his eyes were wide and he was staring at something no one else could see.
‘They stalk the shifting lands around me!’ he shouted, and thrust out a finger to point at nothing. ‘Skin thin as tissue, eyes dead as stone!’ His voice dropped to a conspirator’s whisper. ‘They can’t see me. Not unless I show myself. But I never will!’
Aren hurried to him, alarmed. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ he asked as he knelt down by Cade’s side.
‘We don’t know. He took a bad knock but he’s not carrying a fever, and there’s no other injury we can find. Best we can guess is that his wits have been addled by the blow to the head.’
‘Will it pass?’ Aren asked, distraught.
‘Maybe,’ she said, with optimism. Then her face fell a little and she said: ‘Maybe not.’
‘Kel!’ A young Krodan boy came hurrying up. ‘The doctor needs you. Amputation.’
Kel became brusque and businesslike. ‘Keep him quiet as best you can. Talk to him, let him hear the voice of someone he knows. It might bring him back to sense.’
‘Doctor Baden says to see the apothecary on the way,’ the boy told her in Krodan as they hustled off.
‘Draccen tears?’
‘Yes.’
Aren was left gazing helplessly at Cade as he rolled his eyes and raved.
‘I’ve walked the streets of Carradis, jewel of the Second Empire, where the blood of the Sorcerer Kings flows in the gutters,’ Cade said. ‘I’ve seen the undercities of the urds where my ancestors were enslaved, and walked in the shadow of Ashgrak’s mountain where his body smoulders still! But this is no place for the living; only ghosts tread these lands!’
Aren seized his friend’s hand, clasped it in both of his. The sight of Cade in such a state frightened him. It would be too much to bear if Aren had rescued him from death, only to condemn him to madness.
Talk to him, Kel had said. And say what? His mind was a blank.
‘Cade!’ he said. ‘Cade, do you hear me? Do you know where you are?’
‘The Shadowlands! Where castles melt like wax and oceans turn to steam.’
‘No, no! You’re in the infirmary, Cade. And I’m right here.’
‘I feel them, stirring in their prison!’ He sat up suddenly, clasped Aren’s forearm and stared hard into his eyes, features slack with fear. ‘The Outsiders!’ he shrieked. Then he flung himself down on his yellowed pillow and began to mumble gibberish.
‘You’re dreaming,’ Aren said, his voice weak and pleading.
And yet he wondered if that were true. Was it not said that the mad were shade-touched, that their souls had strayed across the Divide into the Shadowlands where the spirits dwelled? Once, he’d have dismissed such thoughts as legends
and superstitions, fragments of a fallen empire. Ossian fancies that didn’t belong in the new order of things. But he wasn’t so sure of himself any more.
He clasped Cade’s hand harder, willing him back from the brink. There was a time when life hadn’t been a bleak, grinding procession of days, when they’d run free with the sun on their faces and the breath of the sea in their ears. Aren wanted to be back there now, more than anything, and it was that yearning which finally loosened his tongue.
‘You’re not in the Shadowlands,’ he said. ‘You’re not in the infirmary, either. I’ll tell you where you are. Remember the shipwreck, Cade? That old elaru galleon on the beach at Shoal Point? That’s where we are. Both of us. And I’m hiding, I’m hiding from Darra and Ged and Ham. You remember that day? I bet you do. That was the day we met …’
The ship’s name was Wave Dancer, or so old Mattoc the Learned told the town before he died, and it was said he could read the tongue of the elaru. It was also said that it had been on the beach since the days of Kala the Dawnwarden, who kept watch from the tower on the cliffs, and that it was a remnant of the invasion force she helped repel. That was less probable, for even elaru galleons would rot and break after so many centuries. More likely it had been driven onto the coast by a storm, but that didn’t make for such an exciting tale, so most of the townsfolk preferred the other explanation.
There were other tales about the Wave Dancer, too. Dark tales that crowded the mind of the eight-year-old boy racing towards it.
That boy was Aren, all limbs and angles, his arms pumping as his sandals pounded the hot sand. To his left were the cliffs, patched with hardy salt-loving shrubs, where petrels fussed about their nests. To his right was the sea, bright beneath the burning blue sky of a summer afternoon. Behind him were three boys with sticks in their hands, baying for his hide.
Ged, Ham and Darra had chased him all the way from the town and down the switchback wooden stairs from the cliffs. An hour ago they’d been playing seek-and-tap through the winding stone alleys of Shoal Point, darting like cats among the bun-sellers. It had been Aren’s idea to play and they’d followed his lead, as they usually did. But then the day had turned, and they’d turned on him, and now Aren was on the run. He’d get more than a tap if they caught him.
The galleon loomed before him. It had foundered on the rocks not far from the shore and listed to starboard with its prow tilted upwards. The impact had toppled the masts, and the stern had broken free and lay half-submerged nearby. Barnacles encrusted its hull below the tidemark; droppings splattered its decks; sea air and sun had bleached and chewed its planks and gunwales. Yet it was still elegant in its ruin, a sleek silver vessel built by strange crafts unknown to men.
Looters had long since taken anything of value from inside, but the carcass had remained largely undisturbed. Elaru whitewood defeated all but the hardest saws, harder than anyone in Shoal Point possessed, and it was thought to bring ill fortune to those who took it into their homes. Stories were told of an elaru captain who’d been pierced through the heart by a broken spar when his ship ran aground, whose shade walked the decks with a witch-iron sabre, ready to slay any humans foolish enough to find themselves aboard when night fell.
Beyond the shipwreck, the beach tapered into the sea and the cliffs reached out to cut off the sand. There was nowhere for Aren to run, nowhere to hide from the beating that was coming.
Nowhere but the galleon.
The tide was out and the rocks that had smashed the hull were exposed, a jagged ridge that humped out of the sea onto the beach like the spine of some buried leviathan. Chest heaving beneath his sweat-damp shirt, Aren climbed the ridge and scrambled out towards the decayed and brooding hulk.
‘Where are you going, Aren?’ Ged cried as they reached the feet of the rocks. ‘Come back and get what’s owed you!’
‘Watch out for the captain’s shade!’ Darra called gleefully.
‘Don’t be stupid! It’s dangerous in there!’ pleaded Ham, who was kind-hearted and quite fond of Aren, despite temporarily planning to beat him up.
Aren didn’t listen. He didn’t care what they said, as long as they didn’t follow; and they didn’t sound eager to do that. The waves pushed up against the ridge below him as he hurried on, clambering hand and foot along the sun-dried stone. When he reached the hole in the galleon’s flank, he stopped and looked back. The boys were watching him uncertainly, hoping he’d change his mind. Chasing him across a beach was one thing; braving the galleon was something else entirely.
‘You can’t hide in there! We’re not scared of any elaru!’ Ged called. But he made no move to climb the rocks.
‘Leave me alone!’ Aren yelled. With no other options left, he climbed through the gap in the hull.
Inside was a jumble of splintered planks that shifted and creaked with the movement of the sea. Below he could see salt waves lapping around the smashed lower decks, jagged edges ready to impale him if he fell. He picked his way gingerly through the mess, testing each spot before moving ahead. The boards squeaked alarmingly beneath his weight, but they didn’t give way. He climbed through a narrow doorway into a cramped chamber and leaned up against the wall, relieved to have solid wood beneath his feet.
Once he’d caught his breath, the distress of pursuit faded away to be replaced with a more subtle form of terror. A child’s fear of the monster in the dark, of dead things in dead places. But though he dreaded to go further in, he couldn’t stay where he was. The others might still decide to follow, and if Aren was to escape a thrashing, he needed to keep moving.
The interior of the galleon was claustrophobic and stuffy with heat. Slices of white sunlight cut through gaps in the boards overhead, illuminating strange, sad corridors warped and scabbed with the passing of empty years. Everywhere he saw touches of elaru craft, wood made to flow like water. The cornices over the doorways were works of art; the walls were chased with carven motifs of leaf and vine. This galleon had been a thing of beauty once, before it fell to must and mould.
Rats scattered ahead of him as he trod along sloping floors. Timbers moaned as the galleon rocked with the waves sloshing in its belly. Had he gone far enough? Maybe they hadn’t followed him after all. Perhaps he should go back and check.
A long, low creak cut through the quiet: the unmistakable sound of a sneaking foot pressing on a floorboard.
Aren whirled, heart thumping hard. He was standing in the middle of a tight corridor with several doorways. Further along, a narrow stairway led to the deck.
He saw no one. But somebody was here.
An image flurried into his mind, a vision of the elaru captain cobbled together from stories and a painting he’d once seen. He was tall, pale and sharp as an icicle, with hair the colour of new snow. His features were haughty and beautiful, his mouth thin and cruel, his ears without lobes. He’d come striding from the dark, a shade striped in sunlight, the tattered tails of his fish-eaten jacket flapping behind him and a long, narrow sabre of grey witch-iron in his hand. Aren could hope for no mercy from him, for his kind had none.
Panic bubbled up in his gut as he realised what an awful miscalculation he’d made. He should never have come here, never have risked this. But Ged and the others still waited for him outside, and he was afraid of the beating he’d get if they caught him. Paralysed by indecision, he dithered in the corridor, searching for danger but doing nothing to escape it.
‘Yah!’
Aren screamed and flailed his arms in front of his face as his attacker leaped out from a doorway. So violent and surprising was his reaction that his attacker screamed as well. After a few moments, when Aren appeared not to be dead, he dared to lower his arms. Standing uncertainly before him was a pudgy boy he vaguely recognised from town. He was wearing a woollen blanket round his neck as a cape, and holding a carved wooden shortsword. Remembering himself, the boy squared his shoulders and levelled the makeshift weapon.
‘Surrender!’ he demanded.
‘Who are you
?’ Aren asked, bewildered.
‘I’m King Haften Urdsbane!’ the boy declared. He brandished his sword. ‘And this is the Ember Blade of old!’
‘Who are you really, though?’
‘Oh.’ He deflated, disappointed that Aren wasn’t playing along. ‘I’m Cade. You’re Aren, ain’t you? I’ve seen you about.’ He stuck his sword awkwardly in his belt. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m hiding.’
‘You ain’t doing the best job of it,’ Cade observed.
‘Well, I haven’t found a hiding place yet,’ Aren said testily.
‘Who are you hiding from?’
Aren shrugged, as if it was no big thing. ‘Ged, Ham and Darra. They want to beat me up.’
‘Why?’
‘I hit Ged.’
‘Why?’
Because he’d said some things about Aren’s father and the elegant, pretty women who sometimes came to dinner at the house, and who were often there at breakfast, too. Sometimes they were Krodan, sometimes Ossian. Some he only saw once; others would visit frequently. Aren thought them fascinating, especially those that spoke sweetly to him and gave him toys, but they made him feel odd as well, like something was happening that he didn’t understand. Every so often, Randill would sit him down and tell him very seriously that nobody would ever replace his mother, and not to be worried, even though Aren had been thinking nothing of the sort. Then there’d be no women for a while; but eventually a new one would appear.
He didn’t really know what Ged had been implying when he said what he said about Randill. He didn’t even really remember the words. But it had the tone of an insult, and it touched a nerve, and since he didn’t know how to respond with his tongue, he’d used his fists instead.
But Aren couldn’t explain all that to Cade; he could barely explain it to himself. All he knew was that he didn’t want to talk about his father any more, so he turned the question back on Cade. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked, making it an accusation.
The Ember Blade Page 14