by Jen Williams
‘This way, my lord.’
Frith shook his head as if to clear it, and followed Joah down into the depths of the Citadel. A deep chill settled over his flesh, and inevitably he was reminded of his first visit here – the way the corridors and steps had seemed to go on for ever, the strange sense that something was watching them in the dark. And the soreness of his shattered leg, like shards of glass working their way into his flesh. At least, he reflected, he no longer suffered from the effects of Fane’s torture. He pushed that thought away, and Joah abruptly stepped to one side and put the boxes he was carrying down on the ground.
‘This is the entrance to the prison chamber, Lord Frith. Once the Citadel is complete and the gods are caught, it is my intention that we make the journey down here much more arduous, but for now it is a relatively short walk.’
The young mage produced a ball of pale blue light from the ends of his fingers, and the chamber blossomed into life. Frith’s breath caught in his throat.
The chamber was like being inside the belly of some strange creature. It was rounded and carved directly out of the dark red rock native to Creos. There were ridges in the walls, adding to the impression that they were surrounded by the bones of a living thing, and the surface was carved all over with mages’ words – thousands upon thousands of them. Here and there were thick leather-bound volumes, no doubt also filled with more mage words, and these were joined together with a thick black iron chain that travelled the circumference of the room. There were tall clay jars too, as big as men, and these caused a shiver of recognition down Frith’s spine – he remembered the room where Sebastian had been stabbed by Gallo, and knew that the tops of the jars would be covered with a thick blue wax. The floor of the chamber was rent by a long crack that stretched from one end to the other, about three feet across at its widest point. Joah’s light didn’t even begin to touch the darkness lurking beneath them.
‘So many words …’ breathed Frith.
‘Yes, a great web of spells,’ agreed Joah. ‘We have been working on it for some years.’ He gestured to the walls with their confusion of interlocking mage words. ‘In recent years I had a breakthrough in the application of using one word on top of another, and from there it was possible to construct what we needed.’ He pointed to the entrance of the chamber. ‘In our original plan, the gods would be led down here, where all the artefacts would finally be stored – but once in here the spells act like a sort of funnel. They would push the gods away from the walls and ceiling, and into the prison chamber.’ He pointed to the long slash of darkness in the floor. ‘Down there is where they would be held for ever. We then planned to build on top of it, floors and floors containing more spells, to keep them there.’
They both stood in silence for a moment. Frith found that part of him wanted to go to the rent in the floor and look down into it. He scowled.
‘Then as they will no longer willingly come to this room, it is our job to build a device that will pluck them from the skies over Krete and force them down here. Help me spread out what we have gathered so far, and I will get to work. Do you have what you need to make our targets?’
‘I do.’ With his hair hanging to either side of his face, Joah’s face was hidden in shadow. All at once it was too easy to remember the monster he had become at the end of his life – the strange, stretched shape of his skull, the long fingers of sharpened bone. Frith looked away, busying himself with laying out the artefacts he had chosen. It was already there in his mind, a shape waiting to become real. There were demon sigils on that shape, and he recoiled from the thought of using them again, but there was nothing else for it – the knowledge of the demon Bezcavar was built into the very fabric of the Rivener, and it was impossible to extract it.
‘Can I ask you a question?’
Frith looked up to see Joah staring at him.
‘If you are quick.’
‘You do not seem to like me very much. May I ask why that is?’
Frith turned back to the artefacts. ‘I am not the easiest person to get on with. Ask anyone.’
‘Yet you seem very friendly with the mercenaries.’
Frith looked up in surprise at the tone in Joah’s voice. The young mage had his arms crossed over his chest and suddenly looked very much like a petulant teenager. For a moment Frith wasn’t sure he could trust himself not to laugh.
‘Wydrin is … Wydrin is the woman I love.’
‘She is unbound,’ said Joah, slightly too quickly. ‘There is nothing magical about her at all.’
‘You are very wrong there.’
‘You have an extraordinary talent, Lord Frith,’ continued Joah, almost tripping over his words, ‘a type of magic never seen before, and you waste your time with the unbound, on a woman who would likely never bear you mage children. You have a duty to your people, to focus—’
Frith stood, feeling anger crackle through him like electricity. His fists bunched at his sides, he rounded on Joah. ‘You dare to speak to me of family? Of duty?’ There was no time for this, but there was equally no stepping back from this sudden quickening of rage. ‘You know nothing of what I have suffered in the name of such things. And you ask me why I don’t seem to like you much?’ He laughed suddenly. ‘Because you see the unbound as empty, hollow, when in truth any one of them is worth a thousand of you.’ He bit off the rest of his words. ‘Now, I suggest you get to work, or you will see your precious mages destroyed by the gods.’
Joah had taken a step backwards at the force of Frith’s anger, and now he nodded once, a blank sort of acceptance on his face. He moved back to the bag of tools and materials he’d brought with him, and Frith turned away, wondering how he had ever, even briefly, felt sorry for the mage.
87
Oster pressed his fingers against the silver cuff in his hand. It had shattered into pieces when he’d broken free from Y’Gria’s makeshift prison, but he had kept hold of this piece. It was a reminder of what she had done.
The palace was a wreck now, a sprawling mess of stone and earth across the hard desert dirt, but they lingered there. Y’Gria stalked through her ruined gardens with her green hair a dirty tangle down her back. He was angry with her still, but he also felt a rage coming off her like a fever, and instinctively he stayed out of her way. His human friends had tainted her expected glory at Raistinia, and worse than that, destroyed the place she inhabited. Initially, she had brushed it off – she was a god, she could build something new within seconds, it wouldn’t even be an effort – but he had seen her running her hands over the broken stones, the uprooted trees looking raw and exposed under the relentless sun. Instead of building a new palace, she had summoned her siblings, and now they were here. Or at least, mostly here.
Res’ni padded across the exposed black dirt, her bare feet like the bellies of fish, while her twin Res’na sat on the rubble that had once been a towering archway. They both watched Y’Gria warily, as if she were a wounded animal that might bite them if they got too close. And, much to Oster’s surprise, there was an envoy from Y’Ruen: one of her so-called daughters. She stood aside from the others, scaled arms at her sides, her leathery bat wings folded against her back. There was a sense of great stillness from her, and her yellow eyes were vacant.
‘So you are willing to listen to me now, are you?’ said Y’Gria. Her mouth was stretched into what Oster supposed some people might generously label a smile. ‘You have seen what I wrought upon Raistinia and suddenly you respond to my summons.’
‘It’s a nice mess you made, I’ll give you that,’ said Res’ni. She bent and picked up a fistful of dirt, squeezing it between her fingers. ‘Although it looks like you made an even bigger mess of your palace.’
Before Y’Gria could respond Res’na spoke smoothly over them both. ‘The people of Raistinia are already rebuilding. They move to re-establish their order. I question whether what you have done will make any difference in the long run.’
‘Then I question your understanding of humans, brot
her!’ cried Y’Gria. ‘Raistinia was where they raised their families, where they spawned their little mage creatures. I halved their population at a stroke, and they will all feel it. Humans greatly prize their spawn, and this will have weakened them. Tell them, Oster.’
Oster stared at her until she looked away.
‘Oh pay no attention to him, he’s sulking because his human pet abandoned him. Y’Ruen, what say you?’
The dragon’s daughter shivered, and then opened her fang-filled mouth. A voice that was not her own issued from her throat – it was fire and ashes and the end of all things.
‘It was a good fire you made, little sister,’ said Y’Ruen. ‘Not as fine as my own, of course.’
Oster found himself staring at the dragon’s daughter. He had yet to lay eyes on Y’Ruen, but he could almost feel the shape of her through her voice, a lethal silver shadow.
‘Then you will agree? The mages are as weak as they have ever been, and we are at our strongest. If we band together now, with new blood on our side, if we work together as a family, we can finally destroy them. Brothers, sisters, come with me to Krete and let us show them their deaths. They dared to plan to trap us within their city. Do they not deserve to be wiped from the face of Ede for that alone?’
For a few moments there was silence amongst the group. Oster looked down at the silver cuff in his fingers, thinking about Sebastian. He could almost hear his voice, and he could well imagine what he would say.
‘If we come together now, we come together as equals,’ said Res’ni. ‘Mother of the garden and growing things, you are not our mother. We stand side by side in this fight, with no leader.’
There was a murmur of what sounded like laughter from the dragon’s daughter, but Y’Gria ignored it. ‘Of course,’ she said, bowing her head. ‘I ask only to fight alongside you, sister-wolf.’
‘I suppose there is a time for an ending,’ said Res’na. He stood up from his perch on the broken archway. ‘This could well be it.’
‘Then you will all join me?’ Y’Gria’s golden skin shimmered. Her eyes were bright. ‘You will come to Krete?’
‘I will be with you,’ said Y’Ruen, her voice rolling flat against the broken stones. ‘I will be with you at the end, little sister.’
At first it had been easy.
Joah worked on the far side of the cavernous room, imprinting on the diaphanous skins the combination of mage words they had agreed on – the same combination of words would be marbled throughout Frith’s version of the Rivener, so that the two would be inextricably linked. The young mage worked quietly and swiftly, all his attention now focussed on the task at hand, and Frith found it easy enough to ignore him while he sketched out his complex designs on the floor of the cavern with a piece of chalk Selsye had provided from one of her many pockets. Eventually, however, he came to a place where he could advance no further – without the Edenier within him, he could not weld the pieces into the shapes he needed, and could not etch upon them the necessary mage words. He briefly considered trying to use Selsye’s staff for the task, but although he suspected it wouldn’t be impossible, the staff was really a blunt instrument, and this required the most delicate use of the Edenier – layering word upon word, creating a web of spells. The Edeian crafting that came naturally to him now only carried him so far.
Reluctantly, he stood up and crossed to where Joah was crouched. In the light of their many lamps and torches the young mage was holding up a piece of transparent material so thin that it barely seemed to be there at all. It was pale yellow in colour, and a pair of mage words was inked delicately over the surface, like some sort of elaborate birthmark. Sensing Frith behind him, he turned round.
‘What do you think?’ He held the skin up higher. ‘I think we may be there.’
Frith peered closely at the patterns, and nodded. It was right, he could feel it – the words seemed to sing with potential magic. ‘Are you sure they will work on the gods? That they will stay in place?’
Joah shrugged. Consumed by the work, he seemed to have forgotten their earlier differences. Frith suppressed a shiver at the memory of a man whose moods went from amiable to murderous in a second. ‘I can’t say for sure, obviously,’ he said, oblivious to Frith’s discomfort. ‘Mages don’t generally get to test their spells on gods. But the material is made to bond with anything, and I think the gods themselves will be too distracted with trying to destroy this city to notice a tiny mark like this.’
‘What’s to stop them bonding to someone before we get them where they need to be?’
‘Ah, that’s the really clever bit.’ Joah turned the skin around – on the other side was a very pale shape, a word he almost recognised. ‘It says “Y’Gria”, in their language,’ said Joah, guessing his question. ‘I have tailored each skin for them, so they don’t end up in the wrong place. It will still be a very delicate process but …’ He trailed off, and then shrugged. ‘You trust the mercenary woman to do this.’ It wasn’t quite a question.
‘I trust her with my life. Then you are nearly finished?’
‘Indeed.’ He placed the skin back on top of a thin slab of Edeian-enriched rock. ‘You need me for something?’
‘I do. I have gone as far as I can on my own. I will need you to assist me.’
Frith led him back to his portion of the floor, and falteringly began to explain his elaborate sketches. Joah listened attentively, and gradually his eyes grew bright with excitement. When Frith finished and began to gather together the artefacts they would be bastardising for parts, Joah shook his head wonderingly.
‘But this is incredible,’ he breathed. He was staring at the plans with a bright hunger that Frith remembered all too well. ‘The complexity of it, the ambition. You have no Edenier of your own, and yet you have brought all this together in your mind.’ Joah looked up at him, his face filled with frank admiration. ‘You must be the greatest crafter of our age. Of any age.’
Frith found himself briefly unable to speak. How much of this was plundered from the memories future Joah had shared with him, and how much was formed of his own instincts and the shimmering half-knowledge of the time magic? The Rivener was not as it had been, that was for certain. Rather than powered by the Heart-Stone it was maintained by a grid of smaller Edeian sources – the gem from an enchanted necklace, the steel of the blades of Morrigan’s Regret – and it was infinitely more sophisticated than Joah’s original. Instead of simply tearing away the Edenier from victims that passed through its influence, this device would fling out a magical net and pluck from the air those it sought and pull them back into this chamber. He could feel how it would all fit together, web upon web of spells and influences. There was no question that it would work, not really – he could feel the rightness of it, and whereas part of him wanted to pretend that it was all Joah, he also knew that wasn’t the truth. The device was as much him as the rogue mage. Briefly, he wondered if the time magic was simply allowing him to glimpse the future of the device and from there build it backwards, but the very idea made him dizzy.
‘Lord Frith, are you quite well?’
Frith closed his eyes tightly and opened them again. ‘Yes. Do you understand everything I’ve told you?’
‘I do. It has its own beautiful logic, like a thing that was just waiting to exist.’
‘Good. Then let us get to work.’
Joah gestured, and a piece of broken armour floated gently into the air. It started to turn ruby-red, and twist into a new shape. Frith watched it carefully, already knowing where it would fit within the device. The trap would work; the only question now was whether they could make it in time.
88
The dragon-kin had grown so large that they could no longer travel close to their small group. They thundered through the forest all around them, and Ephemeral would catch glimpses of their leathery hides through the trees, still heading north to the centre of the island. However, when Ephemeral opened her mind fully to them, she felt their curiosity turning
outwards now. The memories of their lost siblings travelled with them, but the grief had already lessened, a wound that had scabbed over. Ephemeral reminded herself of the books she had read about wildlife, how an animal that produced so many eggs would expect to lose a certain percentage of them to disease or predators. Perhaps the dragon-kin carried within their blood a certain expectation of grief.
Thinking of such loss, she looked ahead to where Devinia the Red marched through the thick foliage. Since Augusta had died, the woman had barely stopped moving. She ate little and spoke less, just marched with her head held high, as if she dared the island to attack her again. Terin was also quiet, although this was more to do with the increasing temperature. She knew that he suffered again, and that he said nothing about it because there was nothing to be done. For a brief moment, Ephemeral felt a surge of despair such as she’d never known before, and her feet seemed too heavy on the path. Sebastian gone, Augusta Grint dead, Terin dying, and her sisters impossibly far away. She had been so foolish.
What is wrong?
It was Inky, her mind never far from Ephemeral’s. She closed her eyes and tried to hold her feelings away from that silvery link.
I am fine. She pushed the idea of exploration towards the dragon-kin, hoping to distract her. The island is yours now. You can hunt, protect yourselves.
There was a sense of reluctance from Inky. The others want to go, she admitted. It is time to run alone.
Then you should go, replied Ephemeral, trying to sound firm. There was a silvery flicker from the other dragon-kin minds, so she opened herself to all of them. Go, find new hunting grounds. Make your own choices.
We will protect you, as you protected us. Inky’s mind, but she felt it echoed in others.
No. Ephemeral clenched her fists, remembering the terrible noises as the Dawning Man plucked the flying dragon-kin from the air and crushed them, the flat sound of their bodies hitting the wet ground. Please, no. Not for me. Go, live your own lives. Go!