Hexult

by Perry Aylen

  “Is she alright?”

  “We don’t know. We don’t know what’s happened to her.”

  Aulf gestured with his head at the cabin door. ‘Come inside and we’ll tell you everything that’s happened.’

  ‘The situation on Spinnyridge is very complicated,’ Aulf explained, as they sat down in the cabin of the Aurora. ‘Not only are Orking Do and Thorland fighting over it, but the miners who live there are demanding independence.’ He told Jacob of their arrival in the battle-scarred harbour and of their meeting with Friedrich Cooper.

  ‘It took some persuading,’ Aulf went on, ‘but in the end, he agreed to supply us with the copper we needed in exchange for money and wizard strikers, and some of our food supplies off the Aurora. The strike has left them very short of extras, though they weren’t keen to admit that. Most of the food that does arrive from Orking Do never gets beyond the garrison soldiers.

  ‘We arranged to collect the copper that evening from the mine and headed back to the Aurora. As we got nearer the harbour, we saw a gang of soldiers milling around on the road. I think they were waiting for us. They wanted to know if Elya was the dark wizard of the prophecy. We tried to steer clear of them, but they were determined to cause trouble. Elya was scared – well, we all were! There were a lot of them and they were all armed, and very unpleasant. We did our best to ignore them and keep walking, and finally made it through the harbour entrance. Fortunately, they all stayed on the other side of the gate, so we got back to the Aurora in peace.

  ‘Elya was upset by the incident and we were all worried that it might happen again. So we talked it over and agreed that I should go to the mines on my own to get the copper, and Ingar would stay on the boat with Elya. So, that’s what we did.’

  Aulf stopped and looked at Ingar. She took up the tale.

  ‘Aulf hadn’t been gone very long when Elya and I heard loud voices outside, getting closer. We went out of the cabin to see what was going on, and there were soldiers coming along the pontoon towards the boat. They had torches in their hands, and they were jeering and shouting. They told us that they didn’t want a dark witch anywhere near their islands, and that we had to leave straight away or they would burn our boat with us inside it!’

  Jacob looked horrified. ‘Didn’t the commander stop them?’

  Ingar shrugged. ‘There was no sign of him. He seemed to have conveniently disappeared. Elya and I didn’t know what to do. I explained to the soldiers that we just needed enough time to pick up the copper and then we would be gone, but they weren’t interested. In the end, I said we would go after Aulf and bring him straight back so we could leave right away. They said I could go, but Elya had to stay on board the Aurora because she would bring bad luck on the island. Poor Elya! We were both really scared. I didn’t want to leave her, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  ‘I was terrified the men might not wait, so I made Elya promise that she would watch the dockside, and if she saw them coming back, she would put on her skates, slip over the side of the boat and make for the outcrop of rock at the edge of the harbour. Then Aulf and I would know where to find her. After that I went after Aulf as fast as I could.

  ‘He was about halfway along the road to the mine when I caught up with him. We sprinted straight back to the harbour.’ Ingar and shook her head. ‘Honestly, Jacob, we ran as fast as we could. We were just too late!’

  Jacob felt panic tighten in his middle. ‘Where was she?’

  Ingar kept shaking her head. Jacob turned to Aulf. He was looking grey.

  ‘When we got back to the harbour,’ Aulf told him, ‘only the commander and a few soldiers were there, waiting by the Aurora. We thought at first everything was fine and that Elya was still in the cabin, but the commander told us they’d seen her skating away.

  ‘We asked why she’d left and he just shrugged and said he didn’t know. But he did! He was being deliberately evasive. He said they’d seen her go out of the harbour, and he’d sent some of his men after her in day boats.’

  Ingar glanced up, her eyes flashing. ‘We knew if she’d cut and run, it was for good reason.’

  Aulf nodded his agreement. ‘The trouble was, we didn’t want to waste time arguing. We needed to go after Elya.

  ‘We hurried out of the harbour with no idea where to look. Ingar said about the rocky point, so we went there, but there was no sign of her.

  ‘We sailed out onto the ice and did several wide sweeps in the hope of spotting her or the soldiers’ boats, but we still couldn’t find her. In the end, not knowing what else to do, we went back to the point and waited. We could only hope she’d find her way there. We hadn’t been there very long when the soldiers’ boats came hurtling back – three of them – at full speed, like they had a pack of wolves at their heels. We hoped Elya might be with them, so we followed them back into the harbour.

  ‘They didn’t have Elya.’ Aulf’s voice was uncharacteristically bitter. ‘They had run almost head on into a clutch of raiders. That’s why they’d turned tail and fled back.’

  Jacob turned a shade of deathly grey.

  ‘We did everything we could think of,’ Ingar said, her voice unsteady. ‘Really, we did! Aulf managed to get one of the soldiers to own up about what had really happened. He told us they had gone back to the Aurora after I left and told her they were going to burn the boat. They threw stones at her, that’s why she ran away. And then they chased her.’

  Jacob stared around the little cabin in a daze, imagining his sister’s lonely terror as she listened to the angry voices outside, hearing the stones crack on the wood of the door. His eyes fixed blankly on a large wrapped bundle on the cabin floor. One corner was exposed from the wrapping and it gleamed with a fiery lustre. Vaguely Jacob registered that it was copper. He stared at it, feeling suddenly sick.

  ‘So where is she now?’ His voice came out sounding small and dry.

  Aulf rubbed his hands across his tired face. ‘We don’t know. We spent a whole day trying to find her. Then we decided you would want to know what’d happened, so we came back here. All we can tell you is what the soldiers told us, that the last they saw of her, she was speeding across the ice on her skates, right into the path of the raiders.’

  Chapter 39

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Svanah, her light brown eyes dancing with excitement. Ever since they had started building this tower on Zanzo, Svanah had woken each day with eager anticipation. She never missed an opportunity to race across the ice on the sled to see how it was progressing.

  ‘It’s going well.’ Jacob ran his eye up and down the stonework, now almost at full height. ‘Another few days and it should be complete.’ He knew how desperate Svanah was to send a message from this tower. She had been journeying regularly to Orking Do to learn wizard’s code from Nadiya. Even her parents and her younger brother had enlisted in Nadiya’s training school. For Svanah’s family, the building of the Zanzo tower meant the chance to stay on Barley, their beloved island, with their precious dogs. And ferrying builders and building materials to and from Zanzo had brought them much needed income.

  It was almost two months since Elya had disappeared. To begin with, Aulf had taken the Aurora out every day onto the ice between Spinnyridge and Thorland, in the hope of finding some clue to her disappearance, but they found nothing. Raider attacks were a constant threat on any stretch of open ice, but the expanse between Spinnyridge and Thorland was particularly lawless. Taking the Aurora out there daily was risky, but Aulf, stricken with guilt and grief at his failure to protect Elya, was deaf to warnings of danger.

  Yet all their searching turned up nothing, no clue as to what had become of Elya.

  To begin with, Jacob stubbornly refused to accept that his sister was gone, but as the days passed, gradually his hope began to fade. Even though he tried to carry on normally, and keep his mind occupied, the knowledge that she was gone was like a wound inside him. It would strike him at unexpected moments, like a sudden blow to the stomach.
/>   The tower on Orking Do was all but finished, and the Zanzo tower was fast approaching completion. Supervising the building had helped keep Jacob’s mind from his grief, but getting this far had not been straightforward. Before they could even start building on Zanzo, a careful plan had to be drawn up, detailing the logistics of transporting a building crew and all the equipment and supplies they would require, by dog sled, across the ice and between the arms of the Vajra. Never had it occurred to Jacob that most builders would be unwilling to work so close to the Vajra. Only his reputation as a powerful wizard - based mostly on the unprecedented success of the wizard strikers - had persuaded this team of builders to come here. Jacob was uncomfortably aware that the men all firmly believed it was his magic that protected them from the dangers of the crevasse; doubly ironic, he thought, when he couldn’t even bring himself to look over the edge of the sheer cliff on which the new tower was built, let alone gaze down into the heart of the Vajra. The mere thought of that yawning chasm made his legs feel unsteady and his stomach knot with fear.

  Before they could start on the tower, the shelter on Zanzo needed rebuilding so the builders had somewhere warm to stay. In the meantime, in a bitter twist of fate, the hard won copper, brought at such cost from Spinnyridge and destined for the Orking Do and Zanzo towers, had vanished overnight, stolen by thieves. That particular incident had been the most trying of all as they knew there would be no easy replacement forthcoming from Spinnyridge.

  Glumly, they had sat together in the cabin of the Aurora, contemplating their dilemma. Without the copper, they had no mirrors. Without mirrors the signal towers were useless. It was a dark day for Jacob. Everything he had achieved seemed pointless, and Elya’s absence, always like a burning hole inside him, suddenly became overwhelming, threatening to drag him down in a morass of despair and self pity.

  He was so occupied with remorse and self loathing, he could think of no obvious solution. It was only Ingar’s sudden flash of inspiration that saved him.

  ‘Ma’s saucepans!’ she burst out, and both he and Aulf stared at her in blank bemusement. A slow grin lit up Ingar’s face. ‘You stay here and keep building those towers, Jacob. Aulf and I have got business with Ma, and then with Grim.’

  They were slow to catch up with her. ‘Ma’s saucepans,’ she repeated. ‘Her big preserving pans. They’re made of copper! If we can persuade her to part with them, we can take them to Grim and he’ll make them into thin sheets for our mirrors!’

  So Ma saved the day. They would need more copper later, but for now, they had three mirrors, enough to link Zanzo and Orking Do, and fit a second mirror on Zanzo in the direction of Quayven.

  Jacob had left the Quayven and Pelago towers in Gabriel’s hands. After Elya’s disappearance, the prospect of dealing again with Gabriel had made Jacob’s mouth taste sour. Although he had not been directly involved in what had happened, Jacob still found himself blaming the scheming old wizard for his sister’s persecution, and he had not been able to suppress his satisfaction when he heard that Gabriel’s tower was still beset by problems.

  ‘What’s Gabriel doing about copper?’ Jacob mused aloud one day, on board the Aurora. He knew only too well how difficult it was to obtain.

  Aulf and Ingar provided the answer to his question, returning from Grim’s with the newly converted saucepans, and several more crates of wizard strikers.

  ‘Gabriel has mirrors,’ said Aulf. ‘Five big copper sheets! In fact, I would say, wouldn’t you, Ingar, that they are exactly the same size as the sheets we collected from Spinnyridge?’

  Ingar nodded. ‘Same size, same thickness, same number.’

  They all looked at each other with pursed lips. ‘I guess,’ said Jacob, bitterly, ‘there’s no way of telling one sheet of copper from another.’

  ‘Jacob! Look! Look!’ Svanah’s squeals of excitement jerked Jacob back to the present. He spun round alarmed, wondering what had occurred. There, in the distance, faint but unmistakable, they could see flashes of light from Orking Do. A great surge of relief flowed around Jacob, instantly followed by a giant wave of triumph.

  ‘It works! It works!’ he shouted, grabbing Svanah’s arm and dancing her round in a circle.

  ‘Of course it works! Did you ever doubt it?’

  ‘I knew it should in theory, but I couldn’t be sure.’

  They were both laughing wildly. The builders had stopped what they were doing, faces turned to Orking Do, and they were cheering too, slapping each other across their backs, big grins on their faces. This was the moment they had all been working for.

  Jacob and Svanah got the message the second time around.

  ‘HELLLO ZANZO. HOP YU ARE RECIEGING THIS. NADIYA FORM ORKING DO.MSGENDS.’

  After a pause, the message was repeated twice more, each time with fewer mistakes.

  ‘We did it!’ squawked Jacob.

  Svanah hopped up and down in frustrated eagerness, longing to send her own message back.

  The laughter faded from Jacob’s voice. A shadow of regret crept like a slow cloud across his face. ‘I just wish Elya was here to see this, too.’

  Chapter 40

  Jeremiah awoke with a start. It was still dark, but frantic, furious barking outside had startled him from sleep. He clambered quickly out of bed and rushed to pull on his warm clothes. In the kitchen he paused briefly to haul on his boots. The frenzied commotion outside hadn’t lessened. Somebody, or something, was definitely on the prowl. Quickly he headed for his forge to pick up a large hammer, just in case of trouble.

  A pre-dawn lightness hung over the island as he opened the door and stepped out into the coldness of the night, light enough for him to make out the dogs clamouring against the fence of their enclosure. He made his way towards the gate. Whatever was out there in the dark, the pack would soon track it down.

  Without warning, his legs were swept out from under him by a hefty blow from an iron bar that caught him hard behind the knees. He fell heavily, hitting the ground with a resounding thud that knocked the wind from him. Before he could gather his wits, a large boot stamped down on the wrist that held his hammer, and another struck him forcibly on the side of the head. His face hit the dirt and a weight came down on the back of his neck, pinning him there, his mouth full of grit and dust. Rough hands clamped iron shackles around his ankles. He struggled in vain as his wrists were forced into the small of his back and chained.

  His head spinning, he thought of the Horde, swiftly followed by a cold fear in his stomach for the safety of his dogs. The weight forcing his head into the hard ground lifted, and he raised his face and spat dirt from his bruised mouth, twisting his neck to see what was happening.

  His eyes had accustomed themselves to the half light now. He could make out four men, all wearing black ice masks. They hung over him, heavy iron cudgels in their hands and nasty looking knives at their belts.

  ‘We don’t want to hurt you, blacksmith,’ growled one of the men. ‘We just want information.’

  ‘Funny way of asking,’ Jeremiah spat back.

  ‘All we want to know,’ returned the masked man, ‘is how to make wizard strikers. Tell us that and there won’t be any unpleasantness.’

  ‘To make a wizard striker, you need a wizard!’

  ‘Don’t try it on!’ The man’s eyes narrowed, the only part of his face visible to Jeremiah, under his mask. ‘You know the secret. You’ve been shipping out strikers regularly, and there hasn’t been a wizard here all that time.’

  ‘You still need the magic,’ Jeremiah insisted. ‘You can’t make them without it, so no point in me telling you.’

  This time the boot thudded viciously into his ribs, and he grunted with pain.

  ‘Don’t try and be clever!’

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ Jeremiah told him.

  Another blow hit from the other side as the same masked man said, ‘You best hope we aren’t, for your own sake.’ He turned to his companions. ‘Get him inside.’

  Jeremiah
was a big man. It took three of them to hoist him to his feet, and half drag, half carry him into the forge. There he watched in silent fury as they shovelled charcoal into the furnace, pumping at the bellows until the forge glowed red, and the heat made their faces beneath the masks glisten with unaccustomed perspiration.

  When the charcoal burned a brilliant crimson, the same man who had spoken outside turned to Jeremiah. ‘Now blacksmith, we can do this the easy way, or the hard way. It’s up to you.’

  Jeremiah didn’t answer. The man took up an iron poker and set it into the heat. All eyes stared intently at the iron bar as it grew hotter, soaking up the red hot glow until it became a pulsing rod of light. The man drew it out of the fire and turned back to Jeremiah.

  ‘What’s it to be, blacksmith?’

  Jeremiah swallowed hard but still said nothing.

  ‘You tell us how to make the wizard strikers, that’s all. You don’t have to do anything. My boys here will follow all your instructions, and if the striker works, and you don’t try any tricks, we’ll untie your hands and we won’t trouble you again. On the other hand...’ He leaned closer to Jeremiah and pushed the poker against the blacksmith’s chest. The wool of Jeremiah’s jumper sizzled unpleasantly, shrivelling beneath the heat. He winced and gasped in pain as the fabric beneath disintegrated and the burning iron scorched his exposed flesh.

  The man sucked air through his teeth, in mock sympathy. ‘My, that’s hot! Did it burn you?’ He drew the poker away and put it carefully back into the glowing charcoal. ‘I think we can get it even hotter.’

  Jeremiah glared at him in helpless frustration. There was a film of sweat over his face. Although he couldn’t see his tormentor’s mouth, Jeremiah was certain there was an evil smile beneath the mask.

  ‘What’s it to be, blacksmith? Is it really a secret worth dying for?’

  * * *