The Iron Ghost

by Jen Williams

  ‘No,’ he said, and he threw the spoon down onto the table. ‘It’s not my favourite and you don’t know anything!’

  Siano sighed and slipped a dagger from within her jacket.

  ‘Very well. But you would have enjoyed the cake more.’

  14

  Frith crouched in the snow. He could feel it soaking into his cloak and through his trousers, icy cold, and soon, he supposed, he would be thoroughly wet and miserable. The night was cloudy, with very little light from the stars and the moon, and that in itself was an enormous stroke of luck, because there was no way this godsforsaken plan had a chance of succeeding otherwise.

  Next to him Wydrin shifted, peering over the pile of rocks that was in fact Mendrick, half covered in snow so that the faint glow of the Edeian wouldn’t give them away. Around fifty feet away the jagged ice wall of the Frozen Steps rose in front of them, grey and ghostly in the dark, and there were two guards that he could see: one standing in front of the wall, a slim shape holding a long spear, and another on top of the wall, only visible as a patch of lighter darkness against the sky. They both had strange lamps next to them, glowing with a bluish light. There were more guards further down, at regular intervals, but as Wydrin had pointed out, they only needed one section of the wall to themselves.

  She crouched down next to him, her face a mosaic of grey shadows. ‘Are you ready?’ she whispered. ‘This is as good a time as any.’

  Frith glanced up at the sky, wondering where Sebastian was. ‘Are you sure we’re close enough?’ The constant wind picked up a little, and Frith paused, making sure it wasn’t travelling in a direction that would reveal their presence to the guards. When he was happy it wasn’t, he spoke again. ‘You will have to move quickly over this ground.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I am known for being fast and quiet. Just make sure he doesn’t get the word out.’

  Frith nodded and shifted round so that he had a clear view over Mendrick’s shoulders. The word for Stillness was already painted on the bandage around his hand and the Edenier was churning within his chest. All he needed to do was reach for the word, see it clearly in his mind’s eye, and then focus. The ancient mage magic surged into life, focussed through the words painted on the silk.

  The guard by the wall, who had been shifting restlessly from foot to foot, suddenly stood rigidly to attention. Frith tightened his concentration down, focussing the bulk of the spell on the man’s head. If he sounds the alarm, this will all be over very quickly. Wydrin was already up and moving, scurrying across the snowy ground silently. She had drawn her dagger.

  ‘Hold still,’ murmured Frith. It occurred to him, slightly too late, that such a focussed use of this spell might actually stop the man from breathing. He can hold his breath, he told himself. For a while at least.

  Wydrin was next to the guard now. She reached up and removed the man’s helmet before neatly smacking him around the back of his head with the pommel of her dagger and kicking snow over the small lamp. She waited a moment, and then waved to Frith. He let go of the word in his mind and the guard slumped, sliding down the wall into the snow. They now had this section of the wall to themselves.

  He came out from behind the rocks and moved as quickly as he could over to where Wydrin stood. ‘Is he out?’

  ‘Cold.’ Wydrin nudged the guard with her foot. ‘Have you seen his face? I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  Frith peered down. It was difficult to make out in what little light there was, but the man’s head was narrow and sharply angled, his skin mottled with different colours. He looked grey to Frith’s eyes, but then everything did in these shadows. He shook his head; it was hardly important.

  ‘Here comes part two of the plan,’ said Wydrin, pointing upwards.

  Out of the cloudy night sky Sebastian and Gwiddion fell like a stone, sweeping towards the top of the wall impossibly fast. There was a muffled ‘Oof!’ from somewhere above them and suddenly that part of the Frozen Steps was empty too.

  ‘Quickly now,’ Wydrin whispered. ‘We won’t have long before someone notices they’re gone.’

  Frith turned to the wall behind them. Up close it was solid and grey, a chunk of rock-hard ice that had clearly been there for hundreds of years. He summoned the word for Fire and focussed it down to a tiny dot between his palms; a fireball, as satisfying as that would no doubt be, would also be spotted much too quickly. Instead, he sank the fiercely burning point of heat into the ice and immediately part of the wall fell away in a cloud of steam.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Wydrin, her voice hushed. ‘Careful with that, princeling. We don’t want to bring the whole thing down on our heads.’

  ‘Let’s move quickly, then.’ He pressed forward, melting a hole in the ice big enough for them to walk through. It was easy really, just a question of focussing the word down to this tiny point – all of the power of the fire spell, but almost all of it converted to heat rather than flames and light. He remembered doing the same to Fane’s helm, and he smiled in the dark.

  ‘What are you grinning at?’ asked Wydrin. She was standing close to him in the newly forged tunnel, her sword already drawn, and although she stood ready to fight, she was smiling too. All at once it was too easy to remember why he enjoyed doing this.

  ‘Keep close to me and watch our backs,’ was all he said. ‘I’m not sure how far we have to go.’

  Leaving his squadron to their dice game, Prince Dallen, first and only son of King Aristees of the Frozen Steps, made his way to the very top of the war tower. It had been a long day of patrols and exercises, and he felt curiously heavy; a side effect of spending all day in the sky. Now the men and women of his unit were opening their first bottles of grut, and already he could hear the bone rattle of the dice in their cups. He half smiled to himself; they would regret that, come the morning – as the king’s son, he was expected to lead the dawn patrols, regardless of how busy a day they’d had – but he didn’t have the heart to order them to their bunks. Instead he found his habitual seat by the window, and looked out across the Frozen Steps, the pack they’d found that day held loosely in his hands.

  It was a quiet night, the winds having died down, the skies thick with cloud. Cold-lights shone across his home, blue and white like stars, and everything was still. And familiar. Dallen shifted in his chair. How was it possible to love a place so much, and yet to feel like you’d be glad to see the back of it at the same time?

  Wanting to distract himself from these long thoughts, he opened the pack. They’d found it on their eastern patrol, next to the frozen body of some luckless traveller. From the condition of the corpse the man had simply lost his way and succumbed to the cold, before being partially eaten by a host of Arichok. At least, Dallen hoped that the man had died first.

  Fiddling with the drawstrings, he emptied the contents out onto the wide stone sill. A greasy paper package full of salted meat, a leather roll of dried tobacco – this he held up to his nose, fascinated by the scratchy, spicy scent – a set of tin plates, dented and crusted with the tinker’s last meal, a thick tangle of silver charm bracelets, all turning slightly green; and, joyously, three maps curled into tight rolls and sealed with waxed bands. One was of the Frozen Steps and the surrounding territories, unsurprisingly, but the other two were of lands Dallen had never seen, and had heard of only in tales; Onwai, the vast country to the far east, and Pathania, a place of plagues and gold.

  For some time he sat with the maps spread across his knees, following the unfamiliar shapes with his finger, murmuring the names of places he would likely never see. The man who had been travelling through the Frozen Steps had written notes here and there on the maps, the ink smeared in places. Dallen read them out loud to himself.

  ‘Do not go back to The Star Pocked Axe, Annie will not forget tonight in a hurry. The old Steaming Baths have closed, now run by a right rum sort. The bridge over the Falling Fate river has space underneath to sleep, take blankets, do not remove shoes.’

 
Dallen looked at it a moment longer, trying to imagine these distant places, with their wide streets and warm houses. There must be so many people, so many voices.

  He looked out the window again, trying to find some solace in the beauty of the Frozen Steps. In the tower next to him, he told himself, his wyvern and the wyverns of his squad were resting, their noble faces curled against their scaled hides. No other people in the world, as far as he knew, flew on the backs of wyverns – it was a gift that belonged only to his people. In the morning, he would lead the squadron, and there was no one faster in the sky than he, and no better captain – despite what his father might have to say. There was glory here, and pride, in the Frozen Steps.

  Yes, he thought to himself, they’re certainly frozen. Frozen and unchanging.

  He half turned from the window, deciding that he would take a drink with his squad after all, when the wall caught his eye again. It took him a few seconds to notice what was different, but when he did, he felt a trickle of unease move down his back: one of the cold-lights on top of the wall had gone out.

  ‘They’ve probably dropped it,’ he told himself. ‘Kicked it off when they weren’t looking.’

  As he watched, a part of the night sky seemed to come to life; a black shape moving impossibly fast darting across the clouds. He saw it rise sharply and then drop down, briefly outlined against the ghostly grey of the ice wall. Whatever it was, it was huge, and it had wings.

  Prince Dallen ran, grabbing the small pile of tin plates as he did so, already hollering for his squad. When he reached their barracks room, he threw the tin plates right into the middle of their dice game, scattering dice and cups.

  ‘Move,’ he told their surprised faces. ‘We’re under attack.’

  Leaving them, knowing that the grut would slow them down and his own head was as clear as spring water, he turned sharply and ran down the branching corridor that led up to the wyvern aviary. The bridge was open to the night air and the cold hit him, awaking the ice in his veins. He looked over to the wall as he ran – the missing light was an ominous patch of darkness now – and there it was again, the alien creature in their airspace.

  He stumbled into the aviary, having only a few seconds to get his bearings. Half the animals had been put in their stables, the wyvern-keepers clearly thinking they had all night now the main patrol was back. Nile, the head keeper, was so surprised to see his prince that he dropped the tack he was cleaning.

  ‘A-a night ride, your highness?’

  ‘Is Rillion still up?’

  ‘Y-yes, you know how she won’t rest until the whole team are down. Should I . . .?’

  ‘We’re under attack. Get them all ready. The rest of the company are coming.’

  Dallen grabbed a discarded harness from a corner and hurriedly strapped it across his chest, before filling the long pouch on the back with a clutch of ice-spears. He moved from there to her enclosure, and her long head came out to meet him, narrow nostrils flaring.

  ‘Did you smell me coming, Rillion?’ He rubbed her nose fondly. ‘How do you feel about some night-time flying?’

  Rillion was the largest of their team of wyverns, and therefore their leader. She was twelve feet long from nose to tail, and the pale blue of an early morning sky. Her sleek body rippled with muscles as Dallen adjusted the saddle, and she tore crystal claws across the flagstones, already impatient to be off.

  ‘Hold on, girl, we’re nearly there.’ He climbed into the saddle, and pulled the last straps home. Behind him he could hear the other members of his squad stumbling into the aviary, shouting at Nile and generally causing chaos. ‘And, hup!’

  Rillion crouched, coiling like a spring, and then they were in the air, flying upwards into the night sky. Her short, bat-like wings extended with a sound like a whip being cracked, and her powerful tail, rigid with fins, propelled them forward. Dallen shifted in his saddle, crouching over her neck and watching the sky. There it was.

  ‘You see it, don’t you girl? Go!’

  They shot upwards, turning so rapidly that Dallen’s field of vision was suddenly filled with the ground rather than the sky, and then they righted, and the creature was right in front of them.

  ‘What is that?’

  It looked like a huge black bird, except that it had four legs and a thickly muscled body. There was a man riding on the back of it, and, for a brief second, Dallen caught sight of his face – handsome, clean shaven, and apparently just as surprised as Dallen. The creature gave a harsh cry, almost like that of a mountain eagle, and then it was speeding away, its enormous wings kicking up a formidable backwind. Dallen pressed his knees to Rillion’s sides and they shot off in pursuit.

  The bird and its rider led them a merry dance, soaring up towards the clouds and then plummeting down, corkscrewing through turns and moving unnaturally fast the whole time. He kept getting glimpses of the rider, his broad shoulders hunched, clinging on to his mount for dear life. He’s not Narhl, thought Dallen, his heart beating rapidly in his chest, and he’s not a Skald either. What is going on?

  There were distant ululating screams, indicating that the rest of his squad were out of the aviary and in the air, but Dallen only had eyes for his prey now. The creature made a mistake, turned right when it should have turned left, and suddenly he was close enough. Dallen snatched a spear from his back and threw it, but the rider and his mount dropped like a stone, and his spear sailed harmlessly past.

  Swearing under his breath Dallen tugged hard on the reins and sent Rillion into a swirling dive, her enormous tail rippling, her wings folded to her side, and they caught up with them again. Taking the chance that his wyvern would be heavier than the strange giant bird, he drove Rillion directly into the creature. There was a moment of friction, a flurry of black feathers, and the interloper slipped away again, but not before Dallen noticed something else: the rider, despite being attacked from above, had been looking down at the ground. And he looked worried.

  Dallen pulled up and forced himself to look away from the man and his strange mount, and below them, on the snow-covered streets of his home, he spotted two more interlopers. They were moving in the shadows, slowly and quietly, and yet they had made it so far into the Frozen Steps that they were only a short run from the Hall of Ancestors, the place where his father was keeping the sacred heart of the mountain. Dallen brought Rillion a little lower and noticed something else: there was a heavier shape in the shadows moving alongside them. A werken. They would dare to bring a werken here, of all places?

  Filled with a sudden fury that made the blood run cold in his veins, Prince Dallen yanked up on Rillion’s reins, ignoring her squawk of outrage. There was only one way to finish this quickly.

  He caught up with the other rider and his monster easily enough; he saw now that he had been trying to distract him all along, to keep him from noticing the rest of his men on the ground. Dallen held out one hand towards the man and called it to him – that which never left them, the soul of this frozen land: the cold. The ice in his veins sang, and the temperature surrounding them dropped. He saw the other rider shout in surprise as the wings of his animal were suddenly fringed with frost, and then his rising panic as the air around them became too cold for him to breathe. Too cold for a warmling to breathe, anyway, thought Dallen, smiling slightly.

  The winged creature struggled for a moment, and the rider even drew the short sword at his waist, as if a weapon could be any use against the cold. And then they both fell from the sky.

  15

  Frith had to admit, the werken certainly could move quietly. They were edging their way along the streets as quickly as they could without making any noise, keeping to the shadows thrown by the strange, ice-covered buildings. The whole place looked as though it had been flash-frozen; he could see houses built of stone, but they were all encased in thick sculptures of clear ice. Some were simple, squarish hovels, others were more elaborate, with icy waves and spikes clustered on roofs and over doors. The street they walked along was
cobbled beneath the snow.

  ‘Are you sure this is the way?’ whispered Wydrin. She was leading, her hood drawn over her head. Frith looked around uneasily but there was no one to hear her; it was the small hours of the morning now, and the Narhl streets were quiet. Even so, he still had the word for Stillness wound around his hand, and he was ready to use it should they see anyone.

  ‘Of course,’ he whispered back. He had spent many hours of their journey studying the maps given to them by Nuava. All the information they had collected indicated that the securest part of the Narhl stronghold was the Hall of Ancestors. It was also their most sacred place, according to the young scholar; considering the importance they attached to the Heart-Stone, it was very likely to be hidden there. ‘It’s just up here. Once we have the stone we’ll have to move fast. Will Sebastian be ready to cover us?’

  Wydrin glanced up. ‘Don’t worry, he—’ She stopped, and he saw her straighten up abruptly. ‘Sebastian?’

  Frith looked up to the sky just in time to see Sebastian on the back of Gwiddion, lurching off to one side as what looked like a huge blue snake collided with them. It was one of the Narhl wyvern riders – Nuava had given them notes on them, too – and now Frith could see the man on its back.

  ‘Shit!’ Wydrin pointed beyond Sebastian to a set of four white towers in the distance. More of the flying blue snakes were coming from that direction, all heading towards Sebastian on the back of the griffin. ‘We have to get out of here.’

  Before they could do anything, the wyvern already attacking Sebastian seemed to draw off. Frith saw the man on its back hold out one arm, and suddenly it grew much colder, so much colder that Frith saw the feathers on Gwiddion’s huge black wings grow white, and then the griffin was falling, with Sebastian holding on for dear life.

  Wydrin screamed wordlessly and the werken shot forward, racing for the spot where Sebastian would land.

  ‘Wydrin!’

  It was too late. The other wyverns had spotted them now and were headed straight for them. Frith ran after her, summoning the word for Stillness in his head as he did so, before flinging up his right arm, the Edenier warming his cold fingers. It was close, but he felt the spell catch hold of Sebastian and the griffin and although he could not quite keep them in the air – concentrate, concentrate – it was enough to slow them down, just enough.