Dead Stars - Part Two (The Emaneska Series)

by Ben Galley

  Lilith was not feeling so confident. As her younger companion dragged herself over yet another lip of rock and disappeared from view, Lilith braced herself against the shale with her good hand and gave her poor lungs a moment to rest. The cold was getting to her. It burned in her chest. Her withered hand shivered uncontrollably. Curse this mountain, and curse the brat for choosing this direction, she hissed to herself. They should have listened to her stones. East, Lilith had said, not north. East to the forests, to wait and to train. Lilith mumbled her tirade under her breath; her lungs hadn’t the breath to spare for words.

  Samara must have felt her anger. ‘Come on!’ she hollered down the slope, still lost to view. Lilith grudgingly pushed herself upright and began to climb again. Not because she had been told to, but because it was either that or sleep in the scree, waking up to who knows where, who knows what, if she woke up at all. Broken skull and twisted limbs, most likely. Night was gathering once again.

  Lilith used her weak arm to hold her steady while she dragged her skirts up to her knees. She managed to get a foot onto a solid rock, and pushed herself awkwardly up to follow in Samara’s rattling wake to flatter, sturdier ground. Curse this ageing body of hers. What a decrepit husk.

  It took her half an hour to reach the jagged crest of the slope. It too was draped in monochrome curtains of mist. There was nothing but grey around them. Nothing dared to grow in such a place. The air was too thin for animals. Even birds stayed below, where the food was.

  Lilith wilted onto a boulder and caught her breath. The summit was like a grey blanket hung between two sharp poles. They sat in the dip of it, a ridge with barely a yard of flat land on either side of it before the world dropped away into a misty, slate abyss. Samara was bent double at one edge, wiping the sweat from her hair. A smear of brown blood ran across her cheek, between her nose and her ear. Despite the strain on her body, she looked pleased with herself, as though she had just conquered the whole of the Össfens, not one simple crag.

  ‘What are you smiling about, girl?’ spat Lilith, digging a pebble from her stolen shoe. They had escaped in their borrowed clothes. There had been no time to change. No time except to run. They had barely made it to the mountain crags east of Manesmark without an arrow in their backs, It was a miracle they hadn’t been hunted down already. Nothing made a distraction like a trio of daemons falling from the sky.

  The aforementioned smile quickly faded. ‘I’m not smiling,’ replied Samara.

  Lilith scowled. ‘Good, because you’ve got no reason to. You failed. An’ miserably too.’

  ‘What are you blabbering on about, old woman?’

  Lilith’s rock-bitten fingernail jabbed the misty air. ‘You! You failed, like I said you would. You weren’t ready.’

  ‘Shut up! I didn’t fail, I…’ Samara faltered, along with her confidence. ‘It was too hard. I didn’t have enough of a grip… Oh, you wouldn’t understand!’ snapped the young girl. It was in moments like this that she looked her true age; a petulant child still yet to teeter on the cusp of adulthood. Moments like this made Lilith more confident.

  The old seer got to her tired feet. ‘You weren’t ready and we should have waited. Now you’ve ruined your perfect chance to hit ‘em all at once. We’re lucky to have escaped with our lives!’

  Samara thumbed the crusted streak of blood on her cheek. A fresh trickle had started to worm its way out of her nose. ‘I had orders…’ she mumbled.

  ‘I’m the one who gives you orders around here, you little runt! I’m the one who tells you what to do, as I always ‘ave! Who ‘ave you been talking to? Hmm? Who put ideas in your head before you were ready?’

  ‘We did,’ boomed a voice that rattled the shale. Lilith fell to the scree in fright.

  ‘They did,’ smirked Samara, slowly bowing to one knee.

  As the mists coalesced into charcoal muscle and flinty bone, the night seemed to fall like a landslide. Veins of shadow knitted together like the plaited wicker of a basket, wrapping around them and their little ridge of shale. Teeth emerged from the mists, in two glowing mouths. Eyes ignited. Claws and toenails found the earth, thudding and scraping as the daemons took their steps forward out of the dark haze. They shrank as they moved, going from twenty feet tall to ten in less than a step. Suddenly there they stood: two daemons, arms crossed, fiery faces blank, waiting for a response.

  Lilith was reticent to give one. Samara bowed her head. ‘Cousins,’ she said.

  ‘Stand, daughter of nefalim,’ said one of the daemons, the one with many eyes.

  Samara stood, but kept her head bowed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she blurted, sounding like a child again. Even she realised it this time. Something that might have been called fear trickled down her spine. Fear of failure. Of consequences unknown. It was all well and good talking to dead rats and gibbet-cages, but now two daemons stood before her, as real as the stench and the claws they brandished. ‘I couldn’t do what you asked. It was too hard. I tried, but I couldn’t do it.’

  ‘No, but you shall, in time,’ said the other, one with bitten wings and curled horns. In the murky darkness behind him, something resembling a lion’s tail swished back and forth. He had large, wild eyes; grey, tinged with red. They were disconcertingly human in proportion. He was grinning with all his teeth, looking possessed, if that were even possible for a daemon. ‘You will!’ he laughed.

  Samara glanced at Lilith. ‘But I’ve already failed you,’ she said.

  The other daemon, the sterner one, flicked a many-eyed gaze at the old woman, who was still wallowing in the pebbles. He was taller and darker than his comrade. His skin was a mottled black, scaled like the hide of a snake. His claws were curved and curved again, wickedly sharp. He had no tail, but wings of smoke and shadow. A cluster of orange eyes squatted above a scant nose and a mouth that resembled a blast-furnace. Thin wisps of greasy white hair trailed from the back of his ridged scalp, falling across a muscled set of shoulders. ‘And who said that?’ he asked, slowly.

  Samara didn’t even hesitate to point at Lilith. The seer glowered. ‘She did.’

  ‘Ah yes! The pebble-caster. Future-spinner. Fate-seller. You have been quite busy keeping our cousin from her task.’

  Lilith scrabbled to her feet in protest. ‘I’ve done no such thing. I did everything Vice asked! And more besides.’

  The grinning daemon sniggered. ‘I don’t remember our dead cousin or his father asking for the skins of mages, do you, brother Hokus?’

  ‘I do not, Valefor.’

  Valefor snickered at that.

  ‘It matters not. I’ve seen this one’s future,’ Hokus smiled a smile at Lilith that would chill an ice bear. It certainly chilled her. It sent a rattle down her spine.

  ‘A fire, methinks,’ announced Valefor.

  Hokus shook a claw. ‘A small one, for the Watcher might see.’

  Valefor bent to it. He cupped his mottled hand and dragged some of the shale into a pile. ‘Not here, behind the mountains,’ he said. ‘I don’t sense his gaze.’

  Hokus let his forked tongue taste the air. ‘It is good to sense anything again.’

  ‘That it is, brother.’

  Lilith looked across at the pile of shale. ‘Where’s your firewood? Wet rock won’t light no fire,’ she told the daemon, her brashness nettling both Samara and their fiery visitors.

  ‘For a seer,’ sneered Hokus, ‘you know very little.’

  Valefor had finished piling up his rocks. Once he was satisfied, he stood up and spat a gelatinous globule of grey saliva onto his hand, and then let it drip onto the rocks. He then gestured to Samara. ‘If you please, cousin,’ he said, bowing.

  Samara clicked her fingers, making Valefor and Hokus swap glances for a moment, and let a ribbon of fire swirl around her wrist. She touched it to the rocks. The spit caught like whale oil, and in mere seconds the shale was alight, bubbling like lava. It hissed with an orange flame, belching a thick oily smoke and throwing out a blistering, dry heat. It
was like no fire Samara and Lilith had ever felt.

  ‘Sit,’ ordered Hokus, and the strange quartet sat down on the stones.

  Samara spoke first. She sat like a half-empty sack, bent over and withered. The exertion of the day and its summoning sat on her bruised shoulders like a heap of granite. She felt sick with fatigue. Only her acute stubbornness kept her eyes from drooping. ‘So,’ she began, tentatively. ‘I haven’t failed you? He’s not angry?’

  ‘Not yet,’ chuckled Valefor, gazing upwards. The daemon’s smile was like oil.

  Samara breathed a loud sigh of relief, letting her head droop in her hands. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You will try again, of course,’ said Hokus.

  ‘Now?’

  Valefor shook his head. He swung an arm to one side and held it above the shale. As he wriggled his claws, the slivers of rock began to twirl and rise into the air, gently and slowly, as if they were dancing, twirling on their tips. ‘The magick here is strong now. Almost as strong as we remember, perhaps, in the first days. But it is not quite strong enough for you and your task. You did not fail us, the magick failed you. For the most part.’

  Samara let her chin dig into her palm, balancing her head. Her eyelids drooped, tiredness, relief, both tugging them down. Lilith leant forward. ‘So that’s it then?’ asked the seer. ‘The magick isn’t strong enough?’

  Hokus spoke then. ‘Centuries of planning and prophecy, and you imagine us to be foiled by something as elementary as this, seer? Your lack of faith in your masters is deplorable. I have half a mind to see you punished.’

  ‘I am rather hungry, brother…’ ventured Valefor. He let his floating slivers of shale fall one by one, to the rhythm of Lilith’s chattering teeth.

  ‘I do not imagine she would taste very good,’ mumbled Samara, flicking the old woman a look that ordered silence. Lilith shrugged, callously, almost fearlessly. She knew her fate. They weren’t it. ‘She’s all dust and daemon-blood as it is. Tough as boots,’ Samara was saying.

  ‘Mmm,’ mused the daemons, licking their lips. Lilith didn’t reply.

  ‘So what then? Do we wait?’ asked Samara.

  ‘You go to where the magick is strongest.’

  ‘And where is that?’

  ‘I think you already know the answer to that,’ Hokus replied.

  Samara rubbed her eyes. Did she? Her mind was a tangled, tired mess. The magick in her veins burned insolently as she quizzed it. Then she realised she already knew. It felt as though she had been living beside a strong river for all her life and only just realised in which direction it flowed.

  ‘North,’ she said.

  Hokus nodded. ‘All the way north,’ he said. Lilith’s face turned ashen at that.

  ‘To the Roots,’ Valefor chipped in.

  ‘The roots of what?’

  ‘Of everything.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then you will try once more. Unhindered this time,’ said Valefor, smiling again. His smile bled duplicity, for in the next breath he added. ‘And mark my words, cousin, failure will not be tolerated a second time.’

  Samara simply nodded.

  Lilith spoke up again. ‘What of Farden, and Ruin, and the others?’ she asked.

  Hokus flashed teeth. ‘The years of fretting over his precious Arka have made Ruin weak. He may have killed Alpheron on the hill, but mind is weak, human, and petty. His father has something special planned for him.’

  ‘And Farden? What about him?’

  ‘Last we saw, they have gone west in a ship.’

  A tired sneer. ‘He’s fleeing?’

  Hokus stared into the mists. ‘No, but he does not pursue you either. Not yet. The god-shadows are with him.’

  Valefor spat on the rock-fire and sent a burst of flame into the sky. ‘None of them will matter once you reach the Roots.’

  Samara instantly got to her feet, albeit a little shakily. The daemons followed suit. Lilith preferred to stay where she was. ‘Then let’s go,’ Samara said, her voice as tremulous as her legs. She was met by Valefor’s chuckling.

  ‘You cannot travel with us. That sort of magick is god-trickery. Your journey is by foot, cousin.’

  ‘You rest tonight. You will need it.’

  Samara fidgeted, as if eager to prove herself that very second, right there on that mountaintop. But the daemons were having none of it. As they began to fade back in the mists, as their bodies began to deliquesce and trickle into the darkness, their voices rattled the shale. ‘We will be watching,’ said Hokus.

  Valefor’s grin was the last to fade. ‘Sleep tight.’

  And so it was that Lilith and Samara were left staring at the gathering darkness, a fire of stones and a sticky silence between them. The girl pondered her frustration, her unsteady future, her looming task, and the fate of failure, while Lilith contemplated her own doom, knowing she had just leapt a little closer to it. The far north, she quivered. Anywhere but there.

  She remembered an old phrase she had once heard from a drunken sailor. He had crossed her palm with coin, and she had cast his stones in the pipe-smoke air of a bilge-ridden tavern. He had been sacked from his merchant ship, given a bottle of wine for his troubles, and cast into the city. Lilith had asked him the reason behind his sacking. His gruff, addled answer had been two simple words that at the time, she hadn’t understood.

  Surplus to requirements.

  All of a sudden, Lilith understood him perfectly.

  For a while, neither of them spoke. Samara kicked at the rocks and fought off unconsciousness while Lilith stared at the fire. Night descended on them and their mountain, and soon they were stranded in a black void, with only the odd flames and their twisted shadows for company.

  ‘You’ve got no respect,’ muttered Samara, finally.

  ‘Now you know how it feels.’

  ‘They’ll see you dead, if you keep acting like that around them.’

  ‘I’m touched by how much you care.’

  ‘Don’t care one inch for your skin,’ Samara coughed. ‘I may need you, is all,’ she added quietly.

  ‘You forget, girl, that I am a seer. I know my journey, even if I can’t see yours. Don’t you worry. I’ll make it jus’ fine to the north. Those daemons won’t touch me,’ she whispered, stretching out on the shale, feeling her old back click and moan. She found her pack and the thick, square object hiding in it. A book crammed with bloody pages. Her insurance, she inwardly sighed. That’s what it had been designed to be, when all this was over. A little bargaining power, a little something to stave off her fate. Keep her in blood for a little longer. Fat chance of that now. Not if they were heading north. She’d brought up the child, done her work. Now she was baggage, being dragged to the place she’d avoided for years, to an ice field, to black rocks, to a dripping knife… she shuddered as the old vision flashed through her mind once again. So soon…

  Samara shrugged. That was all the sentiment she had to offer, it seemed. ‘You just watch your tongue around them. And don’t be dragging me back, either. This is a race now.’

  Samara ended her sentence by booting a flat pebble into the black void. She didn’t hear it land and Lilith didn’t reply. She had nothing to say to the little girl and her callous words. After all these years, she’d grown quite accustomed to them.

  With a frown and a curse, Samara lay down on the shale, and finally gave in to her exhaustion. The darkness of sleep quickly took her. Only one thought wandered through her mind before she slipped away.

  It was a thankless task, bringing the world to its knees.

  Chapter 3

  “You can put a sailor on dry land, but you’ll never turn his gaze from the sea.”

  Old Arka proverb

  ‘I’m not used to men throwing up at the mere sight of me, but as I know how you tend to react to ships, I’ll let you off.’

  The words floated to Farden on a murky sea of darkness, muffled and adrift. There is a fine line between dreaming and waking, and
Farden found himself straddling it. Sleep sucked him downwards, while the orange light sneaking through the slits of his half-cracked eyes bore him up. He felt like a man halfway into a warm, and not entirely unpleasant, bog.

  A hand gently pressed on his chest, and he was slowly brought back to the world of the living. Wood was the first thing he saw, staring down at him. Still wreathed in the remnants of his dreams, the sleepy-eyed mage could imagine faces in the knots and whorls of the oak beams, like the faces in the candles he used to carve. They wrinkled their faces at him.

  ‘Farden,’ said a voice, and another face came into view. This time it was a real one. Lerel stared down at him, a faint hint of concern on her features. There was also a hint of impish humour there too. ‘Did you hear what I said?’ she asked.

  ‘You look different.’ Farden squinted at her. This was not the Lerel he knew from his crumbled memories. Not her at all. Her dark hair was shorter now, cropped and cut close to her jaw-line and neck. The tips of her ears peeked through it. Rings of silver and gold hid there. He looked down at the hand resting on his scarred and sweaty chest. He looked so pale against her nut-brown skin. The Paraian tattoos on the back of her hand led a swirling path up her arm, slipping under her shirt, and blossomed across her neck, like fingers of ivy. Another reached down from behind her ear. Desert script. Newer than the rest.

  Her mahogany-brown eyes roved over his grizzled and gaunt face. He imagined the same expression being worn by a merchant assessing a rusty antique. She sniffed, her nose wrinkling for a moment. Still as feline as ever. ‘Fifteen years will do that,’ she said.

  ‘Lazy,’ he mumbled.

  Lerel smiled. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘It’s what I used to call you,’ he said. ‘In a room just like this one. On a similar voyage. When you were a cat.’ It felt as though he had lived three lives since then. A foreign time, misty, rusted.

  ‘I remember,’ Lerel reached below the bed with her other hand and produced a wooden bucket. It was empty, for now. ‘See?’ she asked, with a wry smile.

  Farden groaned. He took a deep breath, rubbed his eyes, and ran a hand through the matted mess that was his beard. ‘How long this time?’