by Ben Galley
‘How do you know?’
‘While you have been distracted playing the new ruler of the Arka, I have been watching. Such grand souls deserve attention, especially when they have spilled the blood of my daemons.’
‘Let me guess: you wish to destroy them?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Gremorin. The hissing and growling of his daemons came to an abrupt end when he added, ‘But we are too few.’
‘You sound… scared, Gremorin.’
In a breath of fire and smoke, Gremorin seized the fenrir by its lower fangs and dragged it close, jerking the god forwards.
‘I have fought more battles than you have seen decades pass. I walked the ash of this world before you were a speck in your god-mother’s eye. I have prowled the darkness and spent an age in the void above, and now that I have tasted flesh and fire again, I refuse to diminish. To scrape existence as a mortal when I was born to rule these miserable creatures. To drink the soul of the sun while gods weep beneath my claws.’
‘And yet, you still need the help of a god to do it, Orion’s Shadow,’ Loki said with that infernal smoke.
‘Give us what you promised!’
‘And so I shall.’
The hesitation further enraged Gremorin, until lightning crackled over Loki’s head, and interrupted his snarl. The wind took on a metallic taste. Magick swirled Fiercer.
Loki began to speak as the daemons stared at the sky.
‘As I am sure you are painfully aware, there was once an idea. A prophecy, if you will, of a mortal so attuned to magick, such a conduit of power, that they could reverse the gods’ curse that ended the war those thousands of years ago. With their bare hands, they could break apart the darkness of the void, undo the spell that trapped us all as stars, and bring daemon and god crashing back to the dirt in fire and chaos. You’ll of course remember the first attempt: the girl they called Samara. She brought you back, but it was not enough. Her failure stranded your kind between sky and soil. Until now.’
While the prospect of that prophecy was enticing, the abomination necessary was quite the opposite. He, like the rest of his daemons, had felt the wave of magick pass through them not nights ago. He listened to them muttering in harsh tongues behind him.
‘What have you done, Loki?’
‘What needed to be done!’
Loki spread his arms wide as if he was a master of a circus. Behind him, the mist swirled as another fenrir appeared. This creature was unremarkable; it was the creature on its back that held every scrap of Gremorin’s attention. The helbeast at its side whined piteously. He heard sizzling water and snarls as his daemons recoiled.
An abomination, it was, wrapped in ripped cloth and woollen blanket. The flesh that was bare to the elements was pale and tortured with blood and bruises, swollen with ripcords of muscle, and marred with script carved in needle and ink. The prince’s burning eyes crept from one rune to the next, watching them sporadically flash with white light. The wind carried furnace-heat and the overwhelming stink of magick to the daemon’s nostrils.
It was only when the creature raised its head and stared out from beneath its hood that Gremorin recognised the creature at last.
It was Malvus. Stretched and bloated, transformed, but those red eyes still carried the sharp daggers of a mortal mind set on immortality. Cruel eyes, now burning wide with a fiendish pleasure. Gremorin saw the shine of daemonblood in that avid stare, and the stolen ichor of his kind disgusted him.
Marsh-water showered the fenrir as Malvus dismounted to wade through the bogs. He paid Loki no heed, as if he were nothing more than a herald for his master. Instead, he was transfixed by the prince.
Gremorin stood his ground, letting Malvus approach until he stood within arm’s reach. He was unarmed, but Gremorin could still feel the magick prickling his hide. Daemons were not privy to wielding Evernia’s. It was why they had forged the elves, and why mages like the Forever King posed such threat.
When Malvus spoke, his voice rasped like iron blades crossing. The runes spread across his face in no discernible pattern cracked and bled as he moved his lips.
‘We meet again, Prince.’
‘What has the little god done to you?’
‘The magick of daemonblood combined with the power of Books. One in particular. Farden’s.’
Gremorin snarled instinctively at the name. He hadn’t realised he had taken a step back until Malvus laughed.
‘How curious it is to be feared by a daemon. I spent my time on the Blazing Throne looking up to you, and now…’
Malvus stretched, coming up to Gremorin’s chin. ‘Even your own daemons can see it, can they not? Look how they quiver, how they look at you and question whether you could beat me. What kind of prince are you now before me?’
‘This… this is madness! To mix daemonblood and magick as this in a mortal vessel is heresy! You meddle with powers even you do not know, Loki!’
‘Speaks the daemon who helped create the elves. Who longed to be free of the sky for millennia. This is what you wanted, was it not?’ demanded Loki, grinning still. ‘Malvus grows in strength every day. It will not be long until he is capable of bringing down the heavens. Every daemon the gods trapped will be free, and my kin will look down and despair as we crush their precious world. They will bow to us and whimper for their lives before we set Haven ablaze.’
‘All by my hand,’ Malvus snapped at the end of the god’s words.
‘By his hand,’ Loki recited with little feeling. ‘Reinforcements, are what I am offering, Gremorin. You will have all the reinforcements you need to crush Scalussen and Emaneska just as I promised.’
‘You will leave the mage and the girl to us,’ Malvus ordered. Gremorin rankled at taking such commands from a mortal, even one such as Malvus. Fire curled from his jaws.
The abomination closed the distance between them. Black teeth and raw gums spread in a grin. ‘Do you hear me, daemon?’ he asked. ‘Will you obey me?’
Much to the prince’s hatred, Malvus’ trap closed upon Gremorin. To fulfil the daemons’ destiny, he had little choice but to accept, but in doing so he would kneel to a mortal. He could already hear his daemons muttering in discontent. His rule would be in question. Already it was clutched a thread between his black claws.
‘Speak, Gremorin!’ Malvus hissed.
Gremorin’s shoulders blazed with fire as he sought to intimidate this upstart. He refused to be treated as a whip-slave by such a creature. Malvus did not wither. Instead, he lashed out with a fist and broke the daemon’s sword in two with his bare knuckles. Its shattered blade fell to the marsh, quenched in the foul waters.
White fire scorched the air across Malvus’ skin. Green light shone in rings around his hands. The prince roared against the pressure of magick. Malvus did not strike, but forced the daemon to his knees with his spells. The other daemons followed suit after their supposed prince.
The final insult came as Malvus stood over Gremorin. With his clawed hands, he seized the prince’s crown of fire above his head and broke its spell into pieces.
‘Your daemons are mine to command,’ whispered Malvus, as they watched the other daemons kneel in kind.
Gremorin focused on the bubbling water seeping around his lower half and fought with every burning fibre to keep still. Never before had he stared death so closely in the eye. All balanced upon his next words. He spoke them not to the transformed emperor, but to the god upon the fenrir. The god with a paler face than usual, and a slight crack in his smirk. Gremorin’s only solace was knowing that the god knew regret in that moment. Regret for what he had created. His only hope, that Loki might reap the ruin of his meddling before this was all over.
‘As you wish, Malvus. As you wish,’ growled the prince of daemons.
Malvus withdrew, smiling his wicked smile. As Gremorin watched him sniff the air, he tried to imagine the elation in his twisted, mortal mind.
‘We move east,’ he ordered. ‘The mage is close.’
; CHAPTER 22
THE SECOND TASK
Broken are the pacts between gods and humanity. They are jealous beasts, consumed with their so-called sacrifice for our souls. If we had to burn in the fires of Hel to fuel their return they would not hesitate to light the wick.
FROM WRITINGS OF JEKOL THE HERETIC
‘Sabas! Sabas!’
Mithrid pinched her nose and prayed for patience.
‘Yes… Sabas,’ she repeated. ‘But what is it? Can you eat it?’
The diminutive little shrew of a man babbled some more of his incomprehensible language. Mithrid shook her head again and mimed the horns. She hoped it would mean cow, perhaps sheep. She would even have taken goat.
The man laughed and nodded profusely. ‘Sabas! Er…’ The man put his hands on his head and stuck out his tongue. When that failed he barked.
‘Dog?’ guessed Mithrid.
Durnus shook his head. ‘Dog? Dear me.’
‘No,’ Mithrid blurted. ‘No, we don’t want dog. What is that?’ She pointed to another one of the carcasses that hung around the man’s stall. Flies buzzed around half of them. A bucket of dead grasshoppers stared at her. Mithrid wished there was a fishmonger in the village. That, she was used to. In fact, she wished for anything but a butcher. This seemed the only stall that sold something remotely edible.
The shrew-man beamed a smile that lacked about half its teeth. ‘Coelo! Coelo!’
Durnus held up one finger. ‘That word I recognise. Yes.’
Instead of grabbing the coelo meat as expected, the man rummaged in a barrel. He untwined a chain of black sausages and hooked them around his arm.
‘Not what we asked for, but I will take it.’
‘Better than nothing.’
The man looked incredibly pleased with a silver Golikan leaf, and with their strange business concluded, Mithrid and Durnus began their walk back to the copse.
A fort of trees sat upon the vista of rolling fields, half an hour’s walk from the ramshackle village. They’d had their fill of trees after Vensk, but it was wiser to keep hidden. After all, the entire queendom of Golikar was apparently out for their blood.
Mithrid dumped the ring of sausages onto a pile of leaves. ‘Sausages. We’ve been assured they’re coelo. Could be cat for all we know.’
‘I’ll take anything at this point,’ Aspala whispered. She hoisted herself up onto her knees, her face a mask of pain. They had bound her wounds with a poultice of mosses and oily plants Durnus had recognised. She was far from death, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t hurt.
Warbringer snatched six of the links and stuffed them into her jaws. Nobody complained, least of all her. She had been silent since they had flown from Dathazh.
‘Where are we then, Farden?’ Durnus asked of the mage.
Farden was still bent over the vampyre’s books, just as they had left him. The inkweld lay open and blank by his side. The crystal key of Sigrimur’s breath sat atop it. A dappled pattern of morning sun fell on the tome he was examining: one of the maps Durnus had brought. The mage still looked like shit warmed up. His black eye and other bruises had only darkened. He moved even stiffer than before.
‘By my calculations,’ Farden began. ‘That’s what you always say, right?’
The vampyre grumbled as he stoked their campfire. ‘I have been known to say it on occasion.’
‘A day and a night of flying puts us just past the borders of Golikar, and somewhere near what’s called the Wounds. Looks like that means the jagged coastline.’
‘At least we know what Vernia’s glow is. Evernia’s stars, to be precise. Our goddess’ constellation rises directly east. We should follow that.’
‘Not our goddess,’ Farden muttered. ‘As for a giant, that must be a mountain, but there’s no such mountain on this map.’
Mithrid could see where he was pointing. A featureless headland above a lump of land that some sailor had marked Hartlunder. No markings of mountains.
‘Not that map. Perhaps we need an older one.’ Durnus found a folded piece of parchment. It looked to have been ripped from a book long ago. ‘A crude sketch, but the oldest map I could find. There is a rough marking there, directly east from Eaglehold. It looks like a mountain upside down. As for the dragon teeth, I have no clue. I am merely glad to see something other than those giant pines. Feels good to be in another land entirely and moving on.’
The others nodded in silence. The forests of Vensk had rolled on for what seemed like leagues, from dusk to first sunlight. Huge ravens had risen from their needle peaks to flap alongside the dragon and speak in their croaking voices. Fleetstar had almost seemed to understand them. Even now, the forests of Golikar were a dark band like a cliff to the west.
Farden reached for the inkweld, stopped, and then clenched his gauntlet. He still hadn’t removed any of his armour. It lacked the polish Mithrid had seen in Scalussen, but it looked much better than before. And yet, for some reason, Farden seemed distracted. So distracted, in fact, he ignored the sausages beginning to sizzle in the flames, got to his feet, and left them to their cooking.
‘Where are you going?’ Mithrid asked him.
Farden did not turn. ‘To think. You look after that key, Durnus. Keep it safe.’
The vampyre stared after him, nodding slowly. ‘Leave him be, Mithrid. Farden likes to be alone after battle sometimes.’
‘You let him be himself too much. I want answers,’ Mithrid said, hoping that made the sense it made in her head. She stood and followed the mage to the edge of the scattered birch trees. She did not sneak, but tread quietly. Small scarlet birds trilled above her.
Farden sat upon a half-buried boulder that overlooked the grassland. He said nothing as she sat down in the grass next to him. For a time she said nothing, just quietly observed the cold and wet seeping from the ground into her trews. That’s what she got for taking her armour off.
‘If nobody has said yet, thank you for what you did in the Viscera. I didn’t expect you to summon Fleetstar. I thought you’d forsaken Aspala and Warbringer. Thought you’d lost sight of what was important, though you got Tartavor in the arm rather than the heart.’
‘I feel that isn’t the last we’ve seen of him or Golikar.’
‘You missing the Lady of Whispers?’ she joked to break the stale silence.
‘There are more important things to worry about than Irien,’ Farden said. Mithrid thought she heard a tinge of regret.
‘At least your armour is fixed?’
Farden bowed his head and nodded.
Mithrid knew the mage better than that. ‘It’s not, is it?’
‘Superficially, maybe,’ grunted the mage. He sounded dejected. ‘The smith did a fine job, but there’s more to this armour than simple craftsmanship and tempered steel. It still feels broken. Still feels… dead.’
‘What does that mean?’
Farden took a shuddering breath. There was a concentration in it, as if he was fighting to keep his temper at bay. ‘It means I’m dying, Mithrid. The Written will finally die out, and with me, no less. My armour’s magick stops its wearer from ageing. Ever since I first found these vambraces more than forty years ago, I’ve worn this metal. It’s a second skin to me, and it has kept me thirty winters old and away from time’s claws. Yet, like my magick, it’s fallen silent since Scalussen. Dead. Deceased. And ever since the battle, I feel as though the last four decades are breathing down my neck. I feel myself growing weaker by the day. Older by the hour. And if I feel weak, what does that mean for Scalussen? For us?’ Farden’s voice had become a whisper. ‘For decades the responsibility has rested on my shoulders more than anyone’s. Nobody can do what I can… could do. I believed my own legend: that I was unbeatable, even in the face of Malvus’ hordes. I was so confident, I took on a volcano. I’m paying the price for that arrogance now, and so be it. But I won’t let Scalussen, or Emaneska, or even this strange land pay for my mistake. I can’t,’ Farden kicked at the dirt, taking a moment. ‘I would norm
ally entrust these kinds of things to Durnus, but he has his own problems to worry about right now. I’m sorry for piling them on you.’
The word sounded foreign coming from the mage. As foreign as the shrew-faced butcher. Mithrid stared at the Scalussen scales before her. ‘Don’t apologise, Farden,’ she said. ‘What can we do?’
‘Nothing I know of,’ said Farden. ‘But we are in lands I’ve never heard of, so all I can do is hope in Durnus’ gamble. The spear is the only thing that matters now. Not me. Keeping Scalussen alive is all that matters. Hopefully Elessi is doing that. I haven’t managed to raise them on the inkweld for a few days now.’
‘Maybe the storm that hit Vensk went south and west,’ she offered.
‘Maybe.’
Mithrid had never seen the mage so resigned. In the short time she had known him, he pissed in the face of fate and circumstance, as she had aspired to do. Yet here he was, giving in. This was not the mage she recognised, and it shook her confidence.
‘I want to train,’ Mithrid said. The question had bothered her since Vensk, and she voiced it aloud. ‘I keep wondering, what if the High Cathak had kidnapped me instead of Aspala? I doubt I would have made it two fights, and that scares me. I have all this power, and I survived Scalussen, but when there’s no magick to fight I feel useless. I hate that feeling. If I am to be what I want to be, I need to be better.’
Farden was looking at her sidelong. ‘Why?’
‘So I don’t die? Just one example off the top of my head.’
‘That’s not all though, is it?’ Farden winked his black eye. ‘You’ve got ambition in you, girl. Irminsul hasn’t scared you as it should have. Any other soldier or mage would be grey behind the eyes by now after what we’ve done. Broken. You’re not.’
Mithrid’s words snapped at the heels of Farden’s. ‘Because I’m different. Because I’m convinced I’m made for more. I told you: Irminsul can’t have been my only destiny, and now fate’s done with me. I refuse to be a sidekick. I want to be… not you, but I want to matter like you do,’ she replied, opening her hands and letting faint smoke blow in the breeze. ‘I can’t believe my part in this is over. You said yourself that something brought me to you. I have to matter. I have to play a part in all of this.’