Ghostfire

by Christopher Golden

  “Well?” he said, trying to keep his voice down. He looked from the project manager to the doctor. “How is he?”

  Verlis and Caiaphas joined him, and the five of them came together there in the narrow space between huts.

  “Grandmaster Maddox is stable,” Doctor Gryffud grumbled. The medical mage was short and round and he ambled when he walked. At the moment he rested his hands across his voluminous belly. “He’s had a small heart attack—”

  “No,” Timothy whispered.

  Verlis laid a heavy talon across his back to comfort him.

  “He’s going to be all right, Tim,” Walter Telford said, nodding in assurance. “Leander’s weak. Very weak, actually. And no matter what the doc says, truth is, he’s only guessing about the heart attack.”

  “What?” Caiaphas snapped. Usually so calm and collected, at the moment he was most impatient. “You’re a healer. How can you not know—”

  “I stand by my diagnosis,” the doctor said, glaring at Walter grumpily. “Nevertheless, Walter is correct. The Grandmaster is very weak; he still has chest pain. I’ve done what healing spells I can, but … well, frankly, I’m somewhat mystified. Grandmaster Maddox needs to be examined by Parliamentary physicians with access to greater magic than I have at my disposal here.”

  Timothy let the words sink in. He nodded slowly, glancing around the small circle of men he trusted.

  “All right,” he said, looking from Walter to Caiaphas and then back again. “We’ll take him back. Today. Back to Arcanum.”

  Verlis had to fly.

  It had been difficult enough for him to be around the mages when Timothy and Leander were there, but now that they had gone—his only friends in the ruins of Tora’nah—he felt surrounded by suspicion and animosity. Walter Telford was a kind, open-minded man, but the crew who worked for him had already proven themselves angry and unpleasant.

  It was not only the feeling of being alone among enemies that made Verlis take to the skies. There was something else lurking at the back of his mind, something he could not quite explain. It was not knowledge or memory, but a general feeling of unease. The Wurm believed that some were gifted with prophecy, allowing certain of their kind to have glimpses of the future, sometimes in dreams and sometimes in visions. Verlis had never known anyone who claimed to have the sight to be accurate. Most of them were just overly dramatic, desiring of attention, or charlatans.

  But still, he had this feeling. Nothing specific, really, save for the certainty that events were coming together that would propel the world into disaster.

  Disaster, perhaps that’s too strong a word, he thought, spreading his wings and soaring above Tora’nah, the blue sky soothing him, the view of the forest unfolding below, filling his heart with its beauty. The air buffeted him, and Verlis slipped among the winds, beating his wings powerfully as he soared higher and then began to swoop down toward the tops of the trees, enjoying the rush of it, the feeling of flight. He had needed this. The freedom of flying was glorious.

  Yet he could not be entirely free. Not here. Not when he could see the miners using the much larger version of Timothy’s Burrower to bore enormous holes in the hillside, then carting enormous loads of metal ore from the ground. Not when the barrier that separated Tora’nah from Draconae shimmered and from time to time he thought he caught the sound of ancient chanting drifting through from the other side. DragonSong. The hymns of his ancestors. He could not relax completely with his wife and all of his clan back in Arcanum, always under suspicion even as they attempted to fit into the mages’ world. He could not relax when Leander was ill and Timothy had departed an hour earlier to escort him back to the city.

  But it helped to fly.

  Verlis opened his jaws and let loose a stream of liquid fire that burned the air. When he closed his snout, dark smoke billowed from his nostrils. The edges of his mouth turned up in what passed for a smile among his kind.

  Fire always made him feel better.

  He beat his wings several times and then banked to the right, riding air currents in a long arc that brought him back above the mining operation. Several of the mages paused to point up at him but he ignored their rudeness. There was a task he had set for himself today and despite the trouble with Leander and the departure of Timothy, the Wurm intended to fulfill it.

  His heart soared as he came into view of the highest ridge of the hills at Tora’nah. There were stone ruins spread all across the hills, tumbled down structures that had been constructed by the Wurm in the years before the mages banished them to Draconae. But on that highest ridge were far more ancient ruins, even more sacred than the graves he had driven the miners away from. There were caves in the steep, rocky hillside here, many of them covered over by what appeared to be landslides or blocked by enormous stone slabs that seemed to have broken off of the ridge. But none of those caves had been blocked by nature or by accident.

  They were the earliest tombs of the Dragons of Old. Kings and Queens and heroes. Sacred ground. The cairns that had been created as stone markers for the graves of Dragons had seemed only rock and earth to the miners, who cremated their dead rather than buried them. But here … this cliffside and the caves within were monuments to history, the resting place of the greatest of his ancestors, and Verlis could not imagine how the miners could not see the grim dignity of the place.

  He alighted beside the first cave on a rocky outcropping. This tomb had a huge slab of stone in front of it, but time had long since eroded the marking that had been engraved in the slab in the language of the Dragons of Old. There were only traces of those symbols now.

  Verlis surveyed the entire ridge. There must have been dozens of such markers. He meant to restore each one. No matter how long it took him, he would carve those symbols anew, marking those ancient tombs, so that when his clan finally made their way to Tora’nah—when the treat of Raptus was over—they would find the sacred land properly cared for.

  First, however, there was one other chore.

  Beside the slab that covered the tomb was a spire of stone, and atop the spire, a bowl made from Malleum. The metal bowl was empty, but long ago a flame had burned in front of each tomb to mark the graves of the Dragons of Old.

  These memorials would blaze anew.

  Verlis curled his wings around his body and lowered his head. He spoke long strings of words in the ancient tongue of his people. He bowed to the spire and bowl, scraped his talons across the air itself, and then he opened his jaws. A narrow stream of golden fire rose from his belly and churned in his chest, at last erupting from his maw to ignite a fire in the bowl atop that spire.

  A torch of remembrance.

  No one would ever forget this place again.

  Caiaphas was capable of navigating the sky carriage at great speed. Several times Timothy had been made breathless by the swiftness of the vehicle and the skill with which its driver guided it. Leander Maddox might have been the owner of the carriage, but Caiaphas was its master.

  This was why Timothy remained mostly silent as they journeyed back toward Arcanum from Tora’nah. It would take well into the afternoon hours to make the trip, but if there was a way to shorten the duration, Caiaphas would find it. The navigation mage was kind-hearted and very loyal to his employer, and though they had not discussed it, Timothy knew he would do everything he could to get Leander to the healing mages in Arcanum as quickly as possible.

  All Timothy could do to help him was to not become a distraction. So the boy sat on the plush seat inside the carriage and watched with concern as Leander slept fitfully, spread out upon the bench seat across from him. His eyes moved rapidly beneath his eyelids. Whatever dreams Leander was having, they were not pleasant.

  The man did not look well at all. The blood that had run like tears from his eyes had been cleaned off of his face, and there had been no further sign of injury. But Leander was pale, and though it was cool enough outside—and in the sky carriage—beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. There was a yel
lowed cast to his skin that disturbed Timothy deeply. It was as though he had been tainted, even poisoned. If he sought deep within his heart, Timothy would have had to admit that other than the sweat upon him and the way he shivered, Leander looked almost like a corpse.

  “No,” he whispered, there in the sky carriage, alone save for the unconscious mage. From atop his high seat Caiaphas could not hear him speaking so low.

  He’s not going to die. He can’t.

  Timothy swallowed hard and his throat hurt. He hugged himself and slid further down in his seat, staring at Leander. He gnawed on his lower lip and when his eyes burned, threatening to shed tears, he bit down harder, the pain clearing his head.

  Yet he could not rid himself of the emotion, of the specter of his father’s death that now haunted him. Over and over again he had asked himself what he would do in this strange and unfriendly world without Leander.

  He had yet to come up with an answer.

  With a deep sigh he forced himself to sit up straight and he gazed out the window. Yarrith Forest spread out ahead of them, but it took him a moment to realize he saw something other than trees. They were quite high above the green forest now, and far ahead something flashed in the sunshine. Far off in the distance there was a building … and then he realized there were several. Perhaps even more. He had only a glimpse of the distant structures before the sky carriage dropped much closer to the trees below and his view was eclipsed, but he thought the tops of those buildings were terraced, like pyramids but built in steps.

  “Caiaphas?” Timothy called.

  The sky carriage slowed just slightly. “Yes, lad?” the navigation mage replied.

  Timothy was about to ask about the terraced buildings he had seen, but a shiver ran through him and he felt sure something moved at the edges of his vision. He frowned, glancing down at Leander.

  The ailing mage had opened his eyes. He was still sweating and the yellow hue of his skin had deepened, so he looked even worse, but Leander was staring right at Timothy. His eyes were alert.

  The boy smiled hopefully. “Leander?”

  He’d barely gotten the word out when the mage shot from the seat, silent and swift. His size and weight, shifting so suddenly, tilted the sky carriage a bit. Caiaphas called in to them, wondering what had upset the vehicle. But Timothy barely heard the words and certainly could not respond.

  Hate was etched upon Leander Maddox’s face.

  The burly mage reached out and grabbed Timothy by the throat with one enormous hand, and twisted his fist up in the fabric of the boy’s tunic with the other.

  “What is it?” Timothy cried. “What’s wrong with you?”

  But his frightened queries were ignored. Leander hauled him across the carriage with powerful hands. A cruel grin spread across the mage’s face, and in that moment Timothy saw that he had stopped sweating. Then the mage thrust Timothy’s head at the window of the sky carriage and Timothy flinched … though he knew there would be no impact. Instead of striking the spell-glass, his head passed right through. The glass winked out of existence and the wind whipped into the sky carriage, screaming past his ears.

  “Leander!” Timothy screamed. “Stop!”

  Twisting around, he tried to beat at the mage’s hands as Leander forced him out the window. Timothy had one glimpse of Caiaphas as the navigation mage turned around on his high seat at the front of the sky carriage, eyes wide with horror.

  And then Timothy was falling.

  Screaming.

  He plummeted toward the trees, arms flailing, terror hammering in his chest. As he dropped, spinning in the air, he saw the sky carriage one last time. The door had been thrown open and Leander was climbing out, dragging himself up onto the roof, reaching for Caiaphas with hands ablaze with crackling, dark-light magic.

  Timothy’s free fall ended when he struck the uppermost branches of a tree. Several small branches snapped beneath him, knocking the breath out of him. When he collided with a much thicker limb, Timothy grunted in pain as something cracked in his chest.

  He tumbled only a few more feet before he at last struck the ground. Pain shot through his body and he could barely breathe. Black spots swam before his eyes, and Timothy Cade slipped down into darkness.

  Chapter Five

  Timothy was aware of the birds before anything else. His mind was cloaked in darkness, his awareness simply shut down. It was only the singing of the birds that he noticed, somewhere beyond him. One bird in particular had a bleating, insistent call that he found aggravating. It made him frown, though the other bird-song soothed him.

  A cool breeze washed over him and he heard it rustling the branches above him.

  It was sort of nice.

  His eyes opened to slits. He saw the trees above and the deepening blue sky beyond. The sunlight was rich and golden, and long afternoon shadows surrounded him.

  Trees. Broken branches. And the sky.

  Only then did he remember what had happened. An image of Leander, eyes lit with madness and cruelty, swam into his mind and Timothy felt grief and fear welling in his chest. What had happened? What had become of Leander?

  Then he moved, just a small shifting of his weight, and pain shot up from his right side so sharply that it pricked tears from his eyes. Timothy groaned, taking in a deep, shuddering breath that burned in his chest. He lay still, one hand pressed against his side where the pain throbbed in his ribs. After a few moments, though, it subsided to a dull ache and he felt that he could breathe more easily. Even so it took another minute before he could muster the courage to try to move again.

  Careful to use his left arm to prop himself up, trying not to strain his right side, he got onto his knees and rose to his feet. Fresh pain spiked into his side and he gritted his teeth, but it passed more quickly this time. Afraid his ribs might be broken and worried what damage a broken rib might do to his insides, he raised his shirt and carefully pressed his fingers over each rib bone. There was a massive, purple-black bruise larger than his hand with all fingers splayed. He winced despite how softly he prodded those bones, but after checking his chest, Timothy believed that though he might have cracked a rib or two, none of them were broken. There was no danger of him puncturing a lung or damaging other organs.

  Growing up on the Island of Patience, climbing trees and hills and scrambling over rocks, he had once broken his left arm and twice had cracked ribs. Fingers and toes were simple enough if broken; a basic splint and the bones would heal fine. He had sprained muscles and worse. Ivar had taught him a great deal about injuries and how to treat them. There were poultices, for instance, made from simple plants and berries, that would diminish swelling and cause bruises to disappear more quickly. But the bones would have to knit on their own.

  “All right,” he whispered. “I’m all right.”

  Timothy drew in a long breath. The pain in his side was sharp, but bearable. He could breathe. Though it would hurt, he could also travel. And that was vital, for he had to make his way out of these woods and somehow return to Arcanum.

  He glanced up again and it was as though he saw it all playing out before his eyes once more. The sky carriage, dipping lower toward the forest—thank the gods that Caiaphas had chosen that moment to descend or he would have died—then Leander shoving him out of the window to tumble end over end, striking the branches as he fell.

  Timothy frowned. Caiaphas. The last thing he had seen was Leander climbing on top of the sky carriage to grapple with the navigation mage. He wondered what had happened next.

  With a deep, painful breath, he surveyed the woods around him. The sun had moved through the sky, and the shadows continued to deepen. It was a simple thing to gauge direction this late in the day from the position of the sun. The sky carriage had been heading north. If Leander had done the same thing to Caiaphas as he had to Timothy, the navigation mage ought to have fallen a short distance farther north.

  His heart filled with the fear of what he might find, Timothy started north, moving in amon
g the trees. He walked as swiftly as he could without adding to his pain. The bruises would fade, the cracks would heal. At the moment, even the madness that had befallen Leander was not his first priority. No, foremost in his mind was Caiaphas.

  The forest thinned and he found the going much easier. A handful of minutes after he had begun walking, however, Timothy paused. He shook his head sadly as he stared at what lay ahead … a clearing in the trees.

  In the clearing was a sprawled figure cloaked in deep blue robes. In that great forest, Caiaphas had had the ill luck to plummet from the sky into a clearing devoid of any branches that might have broken his fall. He lay unmoving.

  “Caiaphas,” Timothy said, staring into the clearing. His heart hammered in his chest and he felt a terrible grief welling up inside of him. “Caiaphas!”

  One hand clamped upon his bruised side, he hurried over. Strands of long grass stuck to Caiaphas’s robes. Though he knew he would see only birds, Timothy could not help glancing up into the afternoon sky as though the sky carriage might still be there, as though he could imagine the fall of the navigation mage who had been his friend and Leander’s loyal servant. He bit his lip as he stopped beside the fallen mage. Timothy knelt gently beside the body, wincing at the pain in his side.

  Caiaphas lay on his chest, legs outstretched, left arm tucked at his side. The mage’s right arm had been trapped beneath him in the fall. His head was turned to one side and his veil had been pulled away to reveal rugged, dark features. He was very still.

  But not completely.

  Timothy’s heart leaped as he saw that the mage was breathing. Caiaphas uttered a soft groan of discomfort.

  “Hello?” the boy ventured. He reached out to touch the navigation mage’s shoulder. “Caiaphas?”

  With a grunt, the mage opened his blue eyes, which glowed with the deep blue of his robes. The man’s features contorted in pain, but there was a kind of tenderness in his eyes as he gazed at Timothy.