The Iron Ghost

by Jen Williams

  They came to the Crippler on the evening of the third day. The path was every bit as hair-raising as Tamlyn had hinted; it curved around the sheer western side of the mountain in erratic fashion, sometimes so narrow that they had to walk single file, leaning heavily against the solid rock to their right, and sometimes so full of rocks and snow that Frith was convinced that they had lost track of it completely. Dizzying drops loomed off to one side, so that more than once he considered calling Gwiddion to his griffin form so that he could fly off ahead, but his pride kept him from doing so. Here it looked likely that they might lose the werken – in several places the path did not look solid enough to support its weight – but it came steadily on, and Frith had to admit he was glad not to be carrying a heavy pack when he needed all his concentration just to stay on the path.

  Eventually, the chilly afterthought that passed as daylight in these lands gave way to a dark, freezing night and they agreed to stop and rest. The Crippler had widened enough in this section for them to be able to make a small camp and Frith set about making a fire for the night; a pile of dry sticks from Wydrin’s pack, and the word for Fire inked onto a bandage in his fist. Within seconds he had a merry blaze going and Wydrin and Sebastian drew close to it, holding out their hands for warmth.

  ‘We are not far now,’ he said, trying to find a comfortable place to sit amongst the rocks and snow. The werken stood behind them as if it were a guard dog, or a statue of one. ‘When the sun comes up we should be able to see the Frozen Steps.’ Gwiddion fluttered down from the shadowy spaces above their heads and perched on top of the werken’s head. The werken did not move.

  ‘We’ll have a better idea of how we’re getting in there then,’ said Wydrin. She was busily unpacking a small bag; salted meat wrapped in greasy paper, hard black bread, a small cask of beer. She took a knife from her belt and began slicing the meat. ‘And how we’re getting the bloody thing back out. Still, at least we’ve got Mendrick here to carry it for us.’ She slapped the werken companionably on one big stone paw.

  ‘You’ve named it Mendrick?’ asked Sebastian. He took the cask from Wydrin and began filling their tin cups. ‘I thought the Skald were set against naming their beasts of burden.’

  ‘It’s after a man I met in the Horns. He was part of a travelling magic show.’ She waved a hand at Frith. ‘None of your blowing things up or freezing your companions to death or any of that. This was more card tricks and silk scarves. He used to juggle with radishes.’ She looked wistful for a moment. ‘That’s the thing with stage magicians, good with their hands.’

  Frith coughed and took a sip of beer. Beyond the path and their small circle of fire the night loomed, star-lit and streaked with ragged clouds. He thought of their final journey with Y’Ruen, the dragon nipping at their heels as they danced just out of reach. How the sky had opened up and revealed a darkness beyond that made this pitch-black night look like an early morning sunrise. The thought was not a reassuring one.

  Sebastian took first watch and Frith turned over to sleep, pulling his hood down over his face as far as it would go. When he woke again, it was for the final watch, and he sat and waited for the sun to come up. Cold yellow light seeped in from the east, turning the snows and ice briefly golden and too bright to look at. The sky crept from silvery-violet to pale, pitiless blue, while on the horizon darker clouds lurked, promising heavy snows later. Frith turned his hand to the embers that were left of their fire and it burst back into life.

  Wydrin sat up, rubbing a gloved hand over her face.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I am pleased we haven’t fallen off the cliff while we slept.’

  ‘I have passed more comfortable nights.’

  She stood up, stretching her arms over her head until the bones in her shoulders popped before reaching over to gently kick Sebastian in the rear end.

  ‘Up you get, Seb, we’ve got sacred stones to steal, and the fewer nights spent on my back in this mountain the better.’ She turned back to Frith, and then stopped, her eyes caught by something on the horizon. ‘Speaking of which –’

  Frith looked where she pointed. From this vantage point, with the early morning light seeping across the land like honey, the Narhl territories were a wild and jagged confusion; white snow and deep purple shadows, grey rock tearing at the sky like serrated daggers, layered with the deep lethal blue of glacial ice. The mountain of Skaldshollow was small and timid in comparison to these ancient giants. Nothing moved on that landscape, save for the occasional swirl of mist, and Frith found himself thinking that Sebastian’s religion, where the mountains were feared and pandered to, was suddenly not so difficult to understand. Below the path they clung to was a snow-clogged valley, and at the far end of that was a great looming structure of what looked like broken glass. No, it’s ice, he corrected himself. The Narhl have built the outer wall of their fortress from ice. It was shaped roughly like a series of arrow heads, the tops glittering with points that looked sharp and deadly. As he watched, the sun caught it and sent a shimmering parade of golden lights across the valley floor.

  ‘Have you ever seen such a place?’ His voice was instinctively hushed. There were shapes moving on the top of the wall, men and women with spears. A long sinuous shape alighted briefly there, a blue-skinned creature with a long, narrow head. These would be the wyverns that Nuava’s books had warned them about. After a second or so the wyvern leapt off the wall and up into the sky, wriggling like an eel. It was most disconcerting. Gwiddion alighted next to him and cawed once, as if he, too, were alarmed by these dragon-like animals.

  ‘That doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy to get into,’ said Sebastian, his voice still groggy from sleep. Frith had to agree. Beyond the ice wall it was just about possible to make out the hazy shapes of what looked like buildings, and in the distance four white towers stood shining above everything else; somewhere in there, assuming they could get through the wall, they would have to locate the Heart-Stone.

  ‘If Tamlyn Nox and her army of werkens could not break it . . .’ Frith flexed his fingers. He had already prepared a number of silk strips with spells that he hoped would be appropriate. ‘And even if we manage, somehow, to breach the Frozen Steps, how are we to get to the Heart-Stone with a hostile population between us and it?’

  ‘You have forgotten, princeling, that we are the Black Feather Three,’ said Wydrin, stepping over the fire to join him at the edge of the path. She passed him a flask of sour-smelling wine. ‘We defeated a dragon. We can do anything.’

  Frith smiled a little despite himself. Her hood had fallen back and in the sunlight her hair was an impossible colour. Like the heart of a fire, he thought, and then pushed the thought aside.

  ‘I take it you have a plan, then? Something that can get us over that wall and to Tamlyn’s stone and out again?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said, patting the dagger at her hip. ‘It involves sneaking about, the cover of night, and good old-fashioned beating people up. And we’re going through the wall, not over it.’

  13

  Siano stood outside the doors to the great dining room, listening. It was early evening, and normally the busiest time in the household, but all the servants were absent. She’d given them the night off, so to speak.

  From inside the dining room came the soft familiar sounds of people eating dinner; murmured conversations between bites, the clink of cutlery – always the right cutlery for the right course, obviously – and the gentle glug of wines being poured. Gradually, the sounds changed, and now Siano leaned her head against the grain of the wood, drinking it in. Conversations became stilted, the words that were spoken shrill and confused. The clatter of cutlery became more violent as people threw down knives and forks, or dropped their spoons onto the stone floor. There was, gloriously, the unmistakable sound of someone vomiting violently, followed by the screech of chairs being pushed back from the table. Siano heard a muffled shout, someone calling for servants that were never coming, and there was even the bri
ef stumble of someone attempting to make it to the door. After a moment there was a thump as whoever it was hit the floor like a sack of rocks.

  And then, eventually, silence.

  Siano opened the door. Inside, the room was as opulent as she expected: a great fresco painted directly onto smoothly plastered walls, golden candlesticks dripping from every surface, pewter plates polished to a brilliant shine, and in the centre of the table a great stuffed bird surrounded by fruit.

  It was spoiled somewhat by the guests themselves. Siano stepped carefully over the man who’d almost made it to the door – portly, bearded, the father of the family – and worked her way down the table, admiring her handiwork. A woman of middle-age sat slumped at the head of the table, her yellow silk dress smeared with thick gobbets of vomit and her mouth wide open, revealing a fat purple tongue. The tiny capillaries in her eyes had burst and in her last moments she’d smeared blood across her face.

  Next to her was a young man, perhaps no older than Siano herself. He had fallen face down into what looked like a bowl of stew, although Siano was no longer sure where the stew had ended and the vomit began. The young woman next to him, who had probably been very beautiful before the poison did its work, had scratched bloody lines into her own throat as she suffocated.

  Twenty diners, all wiped out before the dessert course. Not all of them were members of the family she’d been instructed to kill; she’d checked the guest list in the footman’s papers and there were seven men and women here who were merely friends and associates. But it hardly mattered. The client had said nothing about avoiding the deaths of innocents, and somehow Siano doubted that the severed head would mind. She drew the slim knife from her belt, preparing to draw blood from the corpses, when she stopped. There was one chair empty. The plates that sat before it were clean and untouched.

  ‘What is this?

  Unnerved, Siano counted them again, checking numbers against the list she had memorised. There should be twenty guests: seven who didn’t matter, and thirteen family members. Except one was missing.

  She put the knife away and went to the offending chair. There were pillows on it, two fat pillows, as though the person who normally sat there was too short to reach the table. The plates were smaller too, and there was a thick round cup instead of a tankard.

  ‘The youngest child, then,’ she murmured, reaching out to touch her fingers to the clean plate. ‘A child who has not come down for dinner. Sent to bed early for some misdemeanour, or perhaps he is ill.’

  She glanced down the table, her gaze passing over faces bloated and smeared with blood and vomit. The poison she had used was odourless, tasteless, and absolutely lethal. It also cost a small fortune, as it was made from the powdered bones of a tiny lizard that lived in a small patch of jungle in Onwai, but her client was hardly going to quibble over her expenses. And it had been too tempting; a family dinner, all of her victims gathered in one place. So simple to slip into the kitchens, so easy to find the correct dishes. She’d used more than one vial just to be sure – she didn’t want to miss someone, for example, just because they didn’t fancy fish soup that evening. And then once the food had been delivered, a razor-sharp knife in the shadows of the corridor waited for those servants still left alive.

  Perhaps someone had taken the child some food up to its room – a parent, or, more likely, a kindly servant – and perhaps the child was already dead, purple-faced and twisted around the bed covers. But she would have to check.

  Siano left the dining room at a pace, still moving silently out of habit, even though she was reasonably certain everyone in the house was dead. Everyone save for this one child, the last link in the family chain.

  She moved up the staircase, feeling the cold solidity of the wooden banister through the fine silk of her gloves. Once she was on the upper landing, she stopped, holding her breath with her mouth slightly open, allowing herself to hear the full silence of the house. A creak down the corridor, wooden floorboards settling, the distant susurrus of the wind through the trees outside, birds singing somewhere. And there: the slight huffing snort of a child at rest, or perhaps just waking up. It was coming from up ahead, from one of the rooms on the right-hand side of the corridor.

  Siano moved into the shadows but the child was already up and moving; she heard its heavy footfalls stomping across the room and then it appeared, hair mussed from sleep. Siano stood as still as possible, unable to tell yet if the child – a boy with a swirl of blond hair like corn silk and an overly doughy face – had seen her.

  The child stood for a moment in the hallway, rubbing small fists across his eyes, before he glanced up and looked straight at Siano. The assassin didn’t move. She felt suddenly very aware of what she must look like to this child; a tall slim stranger, dressed in black, gloves on her hands and her hair swept back from her head with a thin black cord.

  The boy blinked at her sleepily. ‘I’m hungry now,’ he said. ‘I know Mama said no food, but I’m hungry now. Are they done with dinner downstairs? I don’t want to eat with them.’

  ‘They are done with dinner, yes,’ answered Siano. People were so good at fooling themselves sometimes it astounded her. If you were in their house, then surely you must be allowed to be there. Anything else would be unthinkable. ‘Would you like some pudding now?’

  The boy’s eyes lit up. ‘Is there lemon cake? Cook said there would be, but that was before Mama got all angry.’

  Siano took the boy down to the kitchens, being careful to take him via a route that avoided the slumped forms of servants, their throats gaping and red. The boy seemed oblivious to the unnatural silence of the house, and even appeared unworried that the kitchen was entirely empty of staff. Instead he went and sat himself at the big, scarred wooden table, waiting to be served.

  ‘I know Mama said no dinner,’ he said again. ‘But she doesn’t really mean it. Pudding is better, anyway.’

  Siano nodded. There was indeed lemon cake, a huge pan of the stuff, still softly steaming and smelling pleasantly of hot summer days. Siano cut a portion and slid it onto a plate before dousing it liberally with the poison from the last of the vials.

  ‘Here,’ she plonked the plate in front of the boy. ‘Your favourite, no?’

  The boy peered at her. For the first time he seemed to be questioning the appearance of this strange woman in his house.

  ‘Can I have a spoon, then?’ he said eventually.

  Siano nodded graciously. ‘Of course.’

  She fetched one from a huge tureen of washed cutlery and set it next to the boy’s plate, but still the child didn’t touch his pudding. Instead he looked up at her, his brow beginning to furrow in a way that either meant stomach trouble or an oncoming tantrum. The boy opened his mouth to speak, perhaps to ask where everyone was, and Siano smoothly spoke over him.

  ‘You were in trouble, then? Sent to bed with no dinner?’ She forced a smile, attempting to look like the sort of shadowy stranger dressed in black that you might confide in.

  The child shrugged, looking slightly more cheerful. ‘I was teasing the puppies again. Ned, the groundskeeper, one of his dogs has just had puppies, and I wanted to play with them, but Meela the kitchen girl caught me and Mama said I wasn’t to play with them like that.’ The boy took a breath and picked up his spoon, but he only pushed the cake around his plate.

  ‘How were you playing with them?’ Siano stood to one side. In the back of her mind she was still listening to the sounds of the big house, just in case someone unexpected should choose to visit. The boy began to mash the cake with his spoon, chopping it into honeyed lumps.

  ‘I was only teasing them,’ he said, tucking his chin into his chest as he spoke. Siano suspected that he probably did the same thing when talking to his mama, perhaps imagining it made him more appealing. It did not. ‘There were hot coals in the farrier’s shed, and I was only playing. They weren’t really hurt. They just make a lot of noise and Meela got upset.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Siano, ‘pu
ppies make a lot of noise. When I was younger than you, my family also had dogs, lots of them, and there were always so many puppies. My parents did not notice when one or two went missing, or even three or four. I took their little ears, and sometimes their eyes. Your mistake, child, is that you were playing where other people could hear.’

  The boy was looking at her with wide eyes now, the lemon cake completely forgotten. He looked, in fact, like he might never feel like eating cake again.

  ‘Didn’t you get in trouble?’ he asked, a slight tremor to his voice. He is noticing, thought Siano, that I did not call him by his name, and he is beginning to realise I shouldn’t be here. ‘Didn’t your mama and papa get mad?’

  ‘They did, yes, when they found out. And they found out about lots of things, eventually, although I believe they had been pretending not to know about it all for a long time. Parents are good at that. But then they sent me away, and what I am was put to good use.’

  ‘Where is my mama?’ the boy said, and now his voice was thick and close to tears. ‘I want to see my mama now.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to eat your cake?’ asked Siano, taking a step closer. She wasn’t concerned – there was no chance of this child outrunning her – but she was starting to get bored. ‘It’s very good. And it’s your favourite, no?’

  The boy stared at her, the spoon trembling slightly in his podgy fingers.