by Ben Galley
‘He says they – you to be precise – bring disease.’ The guide held up his hands for peace and the man moved on. ‘We Chanark are not part of their alliance and our borders do not touch the mountains. It is no war of ours, but not all think that. To go west will take you into Khandri territory. Pale faces are not welcome there, and your Chanark mark of welcome will not carry you far beyond our borders. You will have to barter passage, or run very fast,’ the guide smiled before seamlessly switching to answer another visitor’s question. The guide had drawn a small crowd of listeners. ‘Why yes, several individuals have tried to swim in it, much to their regret…’
Mithrid and the others peeled away from the group, just in time for a woman to come bustling up to them. She seemed out of breath. Her vomit-green hat was askew. She babbled at them in another language before translating. ‘You…’ she gasped at Mithrid and the others. ‘You can’t just walk up to the edge and look without paying.’
Farden was uninterested in speaking with the woman. He walked on by, trudging down the slope while she buzzed around them like a fly. Only Warbringer seemed insulted.
‘You not own this. You not build this. Why should we pay you for it?’
The woman stammered for an answer. ‘Because… because…’
Warbringer was not done with her lesson. She spun Voidaran in her fist, making it cry out and driving the woman to back away. ‘You can’t ask for coin to look at sky, or walk upon the mountain. These were here before you and still exist long after you are gone.’
The minotaur’s challenge did not go unnoticed or unheard by the queuing lines of people and pilgrims nearby. One man agreed with a wholehearted, ‘Yeah!’ and promptly broke the ribbon lines with his hands. The queues crumbled in moments, resulting in an uncontrollable surge to the edge of the Thundershores.
‘Er… I think we better make ourselves scarce,’ said Mithrid, as the conflict began to grow physical between the green-hats and those that wanted their coin back. Like the others, she stared in bewilderment. Crowds were strange and fickle beasts.
‘They will learn,’ grumbled Warbringer. ‘Land not something to be owned.’
Feeling like being roasted alive was the order of the sweltering day. Mithrid had never known heat like it. A raw, incessant scorch that beat down as though she stood in a circle of bonfires. The dust and fine sand rose up to choke her. Every time she clenched her teeth, grit popped between her teeth. The black armour was smothering, becoming too hot to touch. Even when they carried their metal in sacks over their shoulders, walking was a drudgery. The shifting sand burned through their boots. Mithrid sweated in silence like the others. Only Aspala seemed free of such complaints, sniffing the hot air and striding ahead without a care, as if this was her home.
The country transformed from sand and scrubland to rolling hills. Skeletal trees that sprouted thorns as long as Mithrid’s finger ran along the roads. They blossomed with oily black fruit as sour as salt, but they did offer one kindness, and that was their sage leaves cast a shade that they desperately welcomed. Skulls like they had seen in the marshes, big as wagons, sat encrusted with dry moss.
By midday, they strolled through a countryside covered in farms. Golden wheat grew in wild fields. The rest tilled vines in shallow craters dug from the barren soil.
Caravans and long trains of the humped beasts of burden crisscrossed their paths. Their flags were of Chanark and countries unknown. They received no bother except stares for the girl, mage, and vampyre. It was their pale faces the foreigners seemed suspicious of, though Durnus had gone grey rather than pale. Durnus asked each one of Utiru. Some laughed as they kept riding. Some cursed them for wasting their time and told them to go home.
One such passerby Mithrid would never forget. As they passed through a cheery village of marble-white buildings that shone blindingly in the sun, they found a disturbance in the road ahead. Carts and beasts were being herded to the road’s gutters, giving way to a man who rode directly in the centre of the thoroughfare. His steed was a lumbering coelo, with its horn dressed in gold bands, beads, and silk sashes. Atop the ornate saddle, sat the man of spotted furs and gold chains connecting his nose, ears, and lip. He spun a wooden stick in his hands. Arms and chest also swaddled in gold, he was a bandit’s wet dream, and yet due to what stomped behind him, Mithrid imagined he saw little trouble.
She thought them to be trolls at first. They were nine-foot tall at least, and their skin and bones were made of driftwood and splinters. Four of the beings altogether, walking in a line, their faces impassive whorls of wood studded with two glowing eyes and no mouths. Walking upon two legs, they moved with an awkward, lurching gait that was not exactly swift. In their hands were large wooden boxes wrapped in sheets. Warbringer could have been squeezed into one quite uncomfortably.
‘Move aside!’ barked their master, levelling his stick at the mage and the others.
For a moment, Farden looked as if he were about to teach the man a lesson in manners, but he relented silently and joined the others at the side of the sand road to stare. Children around their feet cheered. All but one of the golems moved its head to look at the crowds. His green eyes seemed dejected to Mithrid.
‘Golems,’ Durnus whispered. ‘Creatures of rock or wood, made by magick. Like a troll but forged as one would a sword.’
‘Which book did you read this in, Durnus?’ Aspala asked.
‘Farden, Inwick, and I fought one in Albion.’
Farden nodded. ‘Built by a boy… a man named Timeon. Made it in my likeness, too.’
‘Ouch. Must have been difficult to look at.’
While Warbringer guffawed and clapped the mage on his unarmoured back, Farden did not look amused. It was the third time Mithrid had failed to stoke some reaction from him. Now she had her proof he still harboured some resentment towards her.
Mithrid tutted and looked instead at the last golem to pass. There were sweeping and circular runes carved into its joints.
The spectacle had passed on, and so had they. Headlong, towards the growing band of jagged black that dominated the western skyline.
The closer they drew to the Diamond Mountains, they saw the faces of their fellow travellers change. Their first encounter with the northern interlopers the guide had mentioned was a band of them camped on a ridge beside the road. To Mithrid’s eyes, they were oddly recognisable. Their armour was of steel plate, less ornate than Scalussen metal, angular and ridged to be almost like the carapace of beetles. Beyond that, from their square jaws and sunburnt skin, they could have passed for Albion or Arka with ease.
The strangers got up from their campfire to swig from wineskins and watch Mithrid and the others pass. They seemed equally confused as to where each other belonged.
‘Lundish?’ asked one of them as they passed. Mithrid had no idea what that meant. Like the others, all she offered in return was polite nods and smiles. They parted in silence and saw no more of them. They were not the last, however. Another group passed them not long after that, rattling south in wagons drawn by the scaled lizard beasts they had seen in the north. They snarled at the minotaur as if they could smell the blood on her horns from when she had gored one of her kin.
‘Watch out, Khandri soldiers are about,’ said one, sneering from the tent of his wagon, breathing pipe-smoke.
By afternoon, they had reached dusty foothills that crept from the mountains like broad buttress roots. The thorny forests spread up their slopes. From the hill Mithrid stared out from, she could see white scars of roads and towns spread across the undulating countryside. To the north, smoke arose from one of them. Not the campfire or chimney kind, but the burning things to the ground kind. Mithrid knew enough of war to recognise it immediately, and she wondered if it had been the guide’s town.
At her side, Aspala sighed woefully, as if the sight had ruined the country for her. ‘That must be the war they talked of,’ she said.
If Mithrid peered, she could make out camps of bright yellow tents le
eching over the mountainsides. Storm clouds gathered above them to the north. A wind was blowing towards it. The sight of the foul skies put a shiver through her spine.
Without discussion, Farden took a knee and shortly thereafter, collapsed into the dirt.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Durnus, taking off his black spectacles to better see the mage.
Despite the flush of his sun-scorched nose and cheeks, Farden looked increasingly dreadful. Somehow, the years rushing back to him at once took their toll in more severe ways. That’s how it seemed to Mithrid’s keen eyes. She watched him change daily. Fractions at a time, but it was getting faster. Time ate at him, just as the concern ate at her.
‘Waiting for night,’ said Farden.
‘Why?’
‘To cross the border with a better chance,’ he replied, pointing to what looked like a watchtower Mithrid hadn’t spotted yet. It sat upon the edge of a narrow river running a zigzag path south between the sandy foothills. ‘And because I think I’ve figured the next part of the riddle. The scarred sister. Tyrfing once told me a story about the wars of gods and daemons before humans were created. You’ll know the edda, no doubt. The gods made the sun to burn the daemons from the day, and when the daemons claimed the night, the gods created the moon. The daemons tortured it, leaving it scarred to this day. And so, the scarred sister’s light.’ Farden pointed to the half-moon already lurking between the peaks. ‘Moonlight.’
Mithrid picked at dry lips. ‘I wondered what you were chuntering about beneath your breath all day.’
‘And if you asked me, that looks quite like a canyon.’
Aspala was right. Between the mountains, to the south of where they aimed, was a dark gap in the foothills. It forked deep into the mountainside, as if an unfathomable axehead had slammed into the ground aeons ago. Hardly a settlement dared to go near it.
Ducking behind the crook of the hill, they gathered some of the brushwood and built a fire to cook some of the supplies they’d retrieved from the Seventh Sister and kept from Mogacha. The sailors hadn’t stocked much, but the captain had apparently had a great love of cured fish and cheese. It was a rich meal for their empty stomachs, but a little wine and the dry seaweed cakes helped it down.
Silence reigned in the last hours of the day as it had for most of their journey. There was plenty to say about their mysterious enemy as well as what lay beyond the third task. About Loki’s knife, too, which burned a hole in Mithrid’s mind. Yet nobody spoke. The mage had turned over to sleep. He snored fitfully. The knife hung on his belt. One arm was crooked over his sack of dead armour.
Durnus was studying the bone key again. In the light of the fire, and through its intricate carving, illuminated runes washed over his face. Warbringer had shut her eyes but looked to be praying to her strange minotaur god. Voidaran was clutched in her big paws. Aspala stood watch on the hilltop, painted a silhouette by the faint purple light of a sunken sun.
Without asking the vampyre, Mithrid reached for his satchel and brought forth the inkweld. The ink was desperately low, but she took a drip and wrote Hereni’s name across the green pages. Durnus watched her with a raised eyebrow, but said nothing.
‘I need to know they’re still alive,’ Mithrid whispered anyway. ‘It’s been days since we managed to speak to them.’
‘We have checked the Grimsayer. They’re alive.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘They have likely done what Farden said and found safe harbour and are biding their time, staying safe while we complete this quest.’
Mithrid wrote the mage’s name five times before she gave up.
‘Are we worried about those storm clouds gathering in the north. They’ve only come closer.’
‘Worried, yes. Not fidgeting with what I could call excitement.’
‘Not excitement. I have been next to useless on this journey until the second task. I don’t care what the goddess said. Maybe this is the part I play in all of this.’
‘Do not be so concerned with the idea of fate, Mithrid. Fate can be a scapegoat of responsibility for lives lived poorly, or evilly. And in those whose hearts are purer, delusions of grandeur, or worse, madness trying to figure what one’s path is. Life is the journey. Fate, if there is such a force, is the destination. To focus on the latter erases the former. As a scholar, I prefer to believe in coincidence, in happenstance, and in consequence. Even chaos can be beautifully prescient. Each breath can become a storm, in time.’
‘I disagree,’ said Aspala, crunching back down the slope. ‘Fate is a goddess of Paraia. All of us have destinies that she decides for us. For some, it is dying on the battlefield; others, the gutter. Others still become kings or killers.’
Durnus mused, rubbing the stubble that was sprouting across his chin. ‘What kind of world is that where we have no choice?’
Grit shifted as Farden rolled over and sat up to look at the moon, now bright over the silver mountains. ‘Leave the philosophy for another day. We have work to do.’
Perhaps it was the wine, but Mithrid blurted. ‘Are you ever going to talk to me?’
The mage regarded her with sleepy but narrowed eyes.
‘Why should I when you lied to us, Mithrid? Lied to me, to be precise.’
Mithrid clenched her fists. She’d rehearsed her lines. ‘I didn’t lie. I just didn’t say anything about it.’
Farden scoffed. ‘You’ve grown up more than that to still use such childish excuses.’
That scorched Mithrid. She felt her age under the gaze of the others watching.
Farden was not done. He spoke as he put on his armour piece by piece, punctuating his words with clangs and grunts. ‘You said nothing when I found that knife, and that in itself is a lie. You could’ve put us all in jeopardy by keeping that back. But what offends me the most is that fact the foul bastard saved your life.’
‘Farden?’ Even Durnus looked shocked.
‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ the mage said. His anger was the cold and calculated kind. Mithrid almost wished he would shout so she could vent the pressure she felt in her heart.
‘I’m happy he did and ashamed to say I wasn’t there instead. But why, Mithrid? Why is Loki so interested in keeping you alive?’
‘I’ve asked myself many times. I don’t know.’
‘And that,’ Farden growled before turning away, ‘is what worries me.’
‘Then why not just throw it away!’
‘Because you’ll get your wish soon enough, Mithrid. Your wish to prove yourself!’ he yelled over his shoulder.
It had not gone as Mithrid had hoped, but there was no talking about it now. With questions spinning in a hurricane within her, she donned her armour despite Aspala’s unneeded help and slogged down the hill after the others. The argument was dead, and she had lost. The mage was right: she had lied, but his punishment turned her guilt turned to anger. How dare he, after all he had done wrong?
Gauntlets creaking, Mithrid followed in guilty, raging silence.
The night was far too light for running outright across the landscape. Aspala and Durnus led the way, their eyes leading them down paths between the hills, sticking to scrub and goat paths. The dark was full of the yapping of foxes and owls. High above them, a shape swooped low. Fleetstar, blending perfectly with the night.
They had reached the river when shouts broke the calm. Clashes of steel made them hunker in the river’s shallows, the cool water burbling against their legs.
Farden used the distraction. He sloshed through the river with wild abandon, breaking across the banks and into Khandri territory. Though the land looked no different from before, the air was different. Taut like a glass pane creaking beneath a heavy weight.
Over the next few hours, they wandered in furtive dashes across the land. Quiet villages slept on as they passed by unseen. Hounds were the only creatures that caught their scent, yapping at the night. By the time their masters had come to see what disturbed them, Mithrid and the others had already sc
ampered on, further up the mountain slopes.
At last, they stood at the maw of Utiru’s canyon. Only there did they pause to catch their breath and stare at their surroundings.
Above them, the canyon’s gates stretched to the night sky. It was wider than it had looked in the distance. A hundred soldiers could have marched side by side. Dirty crystals spouted from the ground in clumps. Veins of them glittered in the crags of the rock. Most came to a sharp and angular point. Mithrid touched one as gently as she might a petal. Yet its cold glass cut her finger so keenly she only noticed when the blood came.
‘Damn it,’ she hissed.
‘Scarred sister’s light burns the path,’ Farden said to the silent canyon mouth.
As they stood and waited, the moon crept along its nightly path. Its light washed down the canyon walls inch by inch. When it bathed the crystal veins, some of them began to glow with a colourless light and lit a rough path that weaved its way across the canyon’s north wall.
‘In we go.’
Walking in the half-light of the moon and the crystals, they entered the canyon. The crystals only grew in number and height as their path narrowed. Soon they were forced to duck under fallen arches of the giant geodes, or step delicately through fields of their clumps. Nothing stirred amongst the crystals. Not an insect. Not a bird. The only movement came from the occasional tumbling stone from the dragon on the cliff above, keeping watch, as always.
The light led them down a branch of the canyon where they had to walk in single file. It was not long before they stood at the entrance of a cave. A black hole lined with crystal, leading downwards into the rock. A cold breeze emanated from it. Mithrid swore she heard a voice float with it. Words she had never heard before.
‘You hear that?’
‘Just the wind, Mithrid,’ said Farden, though his tone was far from certain.
‘Are we going in there?’ Warbringer cleared her throat. She scratched at the thick tufts of hair along her jaw.
‘Where else would we go?’ Farden said. ‘You’re not afraid… are you?’