The Iron Ghost

by Jen Williams

  Frith groaned, his stomach roiling. It’s the Rivener, he thought, I can barely be in the same room as it. He glanced up to the aperture that housed the Heart-Stone, and saw that it was now a ghoulish grey, and almost black on one corner.

  ‘Oh do stop making a fuss, Aaron, I just needed to retrieve the information you were hiding from me.’ Joah bent down and lifted Frith up with one arm. ‘And I shan’t pretend to understand why you would do that, but it hardly matters. Do you see what we can do now? Do you see?’

  Frith pushed away from the rogue mage, supporting himself with one of the stone tables.

  ‘What?’ he spat, no longer able to keep up his pretence of manners. ‘What is it I’m supposed to see?’

  ‘A god! A source of pure Edenier, of pure spirit.’ Joah grinned. ‘We shall eat his flesh, Aaron, and be mighty.’

  39

  The tunnel was narrow and low-ceilinged, so that Wydrin and Nuava had to crouch awkwardly as they made their way down deeper into the earth. There had been an unhappy few minutes where Nuava had guarded the entrance to the tunnel while Mendrick and Wydrin shoved some larger stones and boulders in front of it, but the centipedes seemed to have forgotten about them already, and Wydrin only saw a few segmented bodies rushing past in their haste to service their queen. Nuava had been shaking when she’d reached her, hands and vest covered in sticky translucent fluid and blood, but now she was holding the light-globe steadily and her face was set into a stern frown. The kid is learning.

  ‘I really hope there’s another way out of here, Mendrick,’ Wydrin said aloud, ‘as I don’t particularly fancy our chances with what’s left of Mummy Centipede if we have to go back through her dining room.’

  There are other ways, replied Mendrick in her head. Once we have found the nexus, all shall be clear to me.

  Nuava glanced up at her warily. ‘Did it . . . did it reply?’

  ‘He did,’ said Wydrin. ‘We’ll be back under the blessed sky soon enough, thank the Graces.’

  ‘It really speaks, then? In your mind?’ Nuava was gazing at the werken with a mixture of disbelief and religious awe.

  Wydrin nodded. ‘He’s not the best conversationalist, to be honest. He’s a bit dry. As you’d expect, for a big chunk of living rock. I don’t imagine he knows many jokes.’

  ‘All these years,’ said Nuava, ‘and we never had the smallest clue that such a thing was even possible.’

  ‘Really?’ said Wydrin, looking at her side-on. ‘They can walk around, and obey your commands. Someone at some point must have considered the possibility.’

  They made their way in silence for a few moments more. The sound of thousands of centipedes writhing together had faded the further down they travelled, and now there was only the sound of their own footsteps and the distant drip of ice melting somewhere. Is this how it sounds in Mendrick’s head? A great waiting silence, for ever.

  ‘Someone probably did,’ Nuava eventually admitted, biting her lower lip. ‘Long before I trained to be a crafter, one of my ancestors must have looked into it. Perhaps they didn’t look very hard.’ Nuava brushed angrily at her furs, dislodging some imagined piece of dirt. ‘No doubt it was easier to carry on with what we were doing than to stop.’

  ‘Do you think your aunt knew?’

  Nuava’s shoulders stiffened. ‘She knew about the Prophet, and her plan to resurrect Joah Demonsworn. After that, I’m not sure anything could surprise me.’

  ‘What will you do?’ asked Wydrin quietly. ‘Once all this is over?’

  ‘I honestly do not know. All of this is very difficult for me to take in. My whole life, I have been taught to treat the werkens like objects. Beasts of burden that did not require feeding, or care. Just things that existed to do our will.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘It is not so easy to brush all that away on the word of a sell-sword and the prince of our enemy.’

  Wydrin raised her eyebrows at that, but before she could answer, Mendrick spoke in her head again.

  The nexus is in the chamber ahead. I can feel it.

  The tunnel widened out, allowing them to stand and move more easily. The ground under their feet changed abruptly from rough stone to a surface that was almost as smooth as glass. Nuava lowered the light-globe, and it showed them a black glossy surface, almost mirror-like. In the centre of the chamber the smooth surface was broken by what looked like a gathering of roots stretching from the ceiling to the floor, but made of bright green crystal.

  ‘It is just like the Heart-Stone!’ cried Nuava, automatically moving to run to it, but Wydrin laid a hand on her upper arm.

  ‘Easy now, kid,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘I don’t hold with such things myself, but I suspect this is a place that would be sacred to Mendrick, so perhaps we shouldn’t immediately go trampling all over with our big ugly boots.’

  Nuava looked briefly annoyed before nodding shortly. ‘Right. Fine.’

  Indeed, Mendrick’s green eyes were like lamps, and they seemed to grow brighter as they approached the knot of crystals.

  It is the nexus, he said, and for the first time Wydrin detected the slightest hint of an emotion in his voice: excitement. From here I will be able to see everywhere.

  ‘All right, Mendrick, you do what you’ve got to do and then let’s get moving.’

  The werken reached the nexus and lowered his stone snout until it touched the crystal. The effect was immediate; the crystal glowed with sudden blinding brilliance, and all across the glassy floor beneath them bright green fractures like fingers of lightning appeared, shooting out from the nexus to hit the far walls. As Wydrin watched, they flared again and again, a living heartbeat of the mountain.

  ‘This is like when we joined minds,’ she said to Nuava, pleased to see such a wondrous sight again. ‘All green flashing lights like getting hit really hard in the head. I was—’

  And then Mendrick was in her mind, pushing all other thoughts aside. Absently, she dropped to her knees, and Nuava’s voice was very distant.

  See this with me, said Mendrick. See where they have taken your friend.

  It was like flying through the heart of the rock; darkness and silence and the unending pressure of a thousand years. Then she saw snow, places where the heart of the mountain broke through the surface like the back of a great, black whale, before she was thrown past a series of small, bleak hills. She saw a circle of standing stones, and a place where the hill was broken. No, worse: it was diseased. Whoever had come here had poisoned the land, and was doing it with its own flesh. Instinctively, she recoiled – it was like looking down at your hand to see that it had been replaced with something dead and rotten – and she felt Mendrick’s horror inside her head too.

  He has tainted it, he said. Now the emotion in his voice was anger, and that wasn’t hard to spot at all. The human man has twisted us, broken us.

  Wydrin reached out, wanting to see more. There was an image of a place heavy with iron and drowning in a sickly violet light; it was riddled throughout the hill like the tendrils of an infection. She saw Frith curled up in a foul-looking bunk and even from the brief glance she got she could see that he was very ill; his normally warm brown skin was almost grey, and there were dark circles around his eyes. He fretted in his sleep, murmuring something over and over. There was sweat on his brow.

  Mendrick broke the connection, and Wydrin came back to herself with a gasp. Nuava was standing over her, her brown eyes full of worry.

  ‘Are you all right? You looked like you were barely breathing.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Wydrin, struggling back to her feet. ‘But I think my friend needs our help urgently.’

  40

  Frith awoke with a start to find Joah kneeling over him, one hand resting on his forehead. He’d been dreaming about his time at Whittenfarne, and the many long conversations he’d had with O’rin, the god of lies. He pulled himself back towards the wall away from Joah’s touch, all the while mindful of Gwiddion, concealed in the blankets at the foot of the bed.

&n
bsp; ‘What are you doing?’ He felt ill again, and shakier even than when he’d fallen sleep.

  ‘Just looking,’ said Joah. He didn’t seem perturbed by the way Frith was scowling at him. ‘Searching through the rest of your memories. It really is quite fascinating.’

  ‘You performed a crossing? But I felt nothing!’

  ‘It gets easier,’ said Joah dismissively. ‘The more often I do it, the wider the path. And you were very deeply asleep. I saw a woman in your memories, Aaron. A woman with red hair and a dagger at her hip. She seems to have been in your thoughts a great deal.’

  ‘A sell-sword,’ said Frith. ‘A woman I have travelled with recently. I paid her to help me retrieve the information I needed from the Citadel in Krete.’

  ‘Aaron, it is clear that she is more than that to you,’ Joah said softly, ‘and it does us no good to become attached to people such as her. She will be nothing to what we will eventually achieve. What we will eventually be. Such attachments are a distraction and I will not tolerate them.’

  ‘Tolerate?’ Frith clenched his fists. ‘How dare you . . .’

  Joah held up a hand, and Frith felt his entire body freeze solid, as though he were suddenly stuck in amber.

  ‘And there is another woman. This woman . . . she has long dark hair, and wears silks and satin, and elaborate fancies of gold and diamonds. I see her in a great castle surrounded by tall trees. Another distraction?’

  Frith hissed through his teeth. The hold spell was so strong that it was difficult to breathe.

  ‘There was a marriage proposal. A contract to bring our lands together. Her name is Lady Clareon. Her lands are as ancient as the Friths’, and she thought it would be mutually beneficial for us to marry. Since my family were wiped out . . . It would mean security for the bloodlines, and for our lands.’ He gasped more air into his lungs. ‘I was considering it.’

  Joah nodded thoughtfully, and all at once the pressure holding Frith in place was gone.

  ‘You are concerned that if you do not enter into an agreement with this woman you will lose everything that your family once meant. That this is what your father would have wanted you to do. But there is a great conflict in your heart, and you cannot commit to either path.’

  Frith stared at him.

  ‘I can feel your mind, Aaron. I’m beginning to know how you think.’ He looked at him, his brown eyes completely sincere. ‘I know that you miss your family. I am sorry.’

  Frith looked away. ‘That is none of your concern.’

  ‘That is where you are wrong.’ Joah stood up. ‘You are my brother now, Aaron, and your concerns are my concerns. Your pains are mine, and I shall suffer them with you.’

  Frith slid his legs out of bed, ignoring the way it made his head spin.

  ‘That is gratifying, Joah, but really not necessary.’

  ‘Yes. You must put these human concerns from your mind, Aaron, because we have a lot of work to do. The Rivener must be in full working order as soon as possible.’

  Frith squeezed his eyes open and shut, trying to keep up. ‘Why, exactly?’

  ‘In order to capture O’rin, of course!’ Joah spread his arms wide. ‘Once we have him where we want him, we shall eat his flesh like the mages of old, and we shall become all powerful.’

  Frith laughed despite himself. ‘You think this god an idiot? He will come nowhere near you. O’rin, remember, hid on an island for centuries, pretending to be a mad old priest. I have never met a being so full of cunning and caution. What are you going to do? Ask him nicely to dinner?’

  Joah grinned and wagged a finger at him, as though Frith had made a particularly groan-worthy joke.

  ‘Oh yes, I am very aware of his tricks. We thought that we had captured him in the Citadel with his siblings, after all. But I have searched through your memories, Aaron. You must remember how it was that O’rin first came to you?’

  Frith frowned. ‘He didn’t come to me, I came to him. I travelled through the Nowhere Isles to Whittenfarne in search of the mages’ words.’

  ‘Think again. When you arrived on the island, after you had been abandoned by your ridiculous guide, what happened then?’

  Frith glared at Joah. He seemed to be enjoying the conversation, as though they were in a tavern sharing tankards of ale.

  ‘I walked across Whittenfarne. It was an awful place, covered in pools and mists.’ He paused, remembering. ‘I fell into one of the pools, actually. And something bit me.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And the Edenier flared up, covering me briefly in fire and boiling the pool. O’rin found me after that.’ Frith blinked, the truth finally hitting home. ‘He felt it, or sensed it somehow. The magic. That was why he suddenly appeared, and that was why he agreed to teach me. Because he knew all along what I was.’

  Joah nodded happily. ‘And so it will be again, Aaron. We will create a blast of Edenier so powerful that your old teacher will not be able to resist it, wherever on Ede he happens to be now.’

  ‘He won’t be that stupid,’ said Frith. ‘And even if that were the case, he’ll just assume it is me. Before you made your unexpected appearance, as far as anyone knew I was the only mage on Ede.’

  ‘Not with the magical explosion I’m planning, Aaron. No one man would be able to generate such levels of Edenier, and I don’t think O’rin – lying, curious, interfering god – will be able to resist.’

  Frith stood up, shaking himself brusquely. The stone has made me sick, he thought, but it has only made him more insane.

  ‘How then? Are even you capable of such a feat?’

  Joah laughed. ‘You are forgetting, Aaron. We have the Rivener! With that we have a potentially unlimited amount of Edenier at our disposal, providing we can find a large enough supply of viable subjects.’

  Frith paused. ‘Viable subjects?’

  ‘Yes. There is a small town nearby to begin with. We will need a larger population to get the sort of effect I’m looking for, so we’ll start there, and move east across—’

  ‘No!’ Frith found himself close to shouting, and Joah took a startled step backwards in response. ‘You would tear the souls from hundreds of people? It’s monstrous! You are mad, completely insane, and I will not—’

  Joah lunged for him physically this time, throwing him hard against the bunk. Frith fell awkwardly to the floor, wincing at the sound of Gwiddion’s outraged squawks.

  ‘Don’t call me that!’ howled Joah. The colour had dropped from his face, leaving him paper-white, and his brown eyes looked black. ‘Don’t you dare speak to me that way!’

  ‘You are mad,’ said Frith again, in a softer tone now. He put a hand to his mouth; there was blood on his lips where Joah had struck him. ‘Somewhere underneath it all, you must see that. It’s the demon, and the Heart-Stone. They’ve twisted you into something less than human.’ He took a deep breath. ‘These terrible things, they have changed you. But it’s possible to come back from that. You have a choice.’

  Joah stalked past him and began casting the blankets off the bed until Gwiddion was exposed. Frith scrambled to his feet, sick with the realisation that Joah had known about the bird all along.

  He saw Gwiddion’s tiny black eyes regarding him, intelligent and confused, before Joah picked the griffin up in his bird form and snapped his neck in one quick movement. The sound it made was pitifully small.

  ‘Stop distracting me, Aaron,’ said Joah. He threw the small feathered body at Frith, who caught it awkwardly in his arms. ‘We’ll never get anywhere if you keep distracting me.’

  Wydrin, Nuava and Mendrick made it back to the surface just as the sun was creeping up over the horizon, lining the snow and the black rocks with a golden glow. They came out to the south of the original cave entrance and had to circle round to find their camp. Nuava had given Frostling and the light-globe back to Wydrin with a relieved expression and now sat atop Mendrick with her hood pulled up over her head. She was exhausted, but she no longer looked quite as lost, which Wydri
n took to be an improvement.

  When the small camp came in sight they saw Sebastian first of all, on his feet and tending a battered cooking pot he’d managed to suspend over a small fire. Dallen was some distance away, lying on his back. As they approached, Sebastian waved at them.

  ‘How do you fancy some crab stew?’ he said, gesturing with a spoon at the contents of the pot. Unidentifiable lumps floated in a thick, pinkish soup. ‘Arichok stew, technically, but Dallen, that is, Prince Dallen, says it’s perfectly fine to eat the flesh, although, of course, they usually eat it cold in the Frozen Steps and the variety they hunt there is significantly smaller than the beasts that you get this far north.’ He pointed to a bloody carcass lying off to one side; segmented, furred legs pointed up to the sky. ‘I’ve tasted a bit and it’s not bad, better than endless cold meat anyway.’ He paused for breath, during which Wydrin gave him her most withering raised eyebrow. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

  ‘I’ll have some stew,’ said Nuava. Sebastian passed her a cup, but Wydrin wasn’t so easily deflected.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ she said, nodding over to where Prince Dallen was lying, pointedly ignoring them all.

  ‘Him? Just heat exhaustion. He’ll be all right in a little while.’ Sebastian pressed a cup of hot crab stew into Wydrin’s hands, an expression of calculated innocence on his face that rang about as true as a fish with legs. ‘We had a swarm of these Arichok attack all at once. Got quite frantic for a while there.’

  ‘I bet it did,’ said Wydrin, fighting not to smirk. ‘I’d like to say we had an equally diverting time but I’m afraid we just spent the night fighting giant centipedes.’

  ‘Giant . . .?’

  ‘Giant centipedes.’

  ‘Really, really ugly ones,’ added Nuava.

  ‘The good news is we found the nexus and Mendrick was able to locate Joah’s base,’ continued Wydrin. ‘Even better news than that, it’s not that far from here – no more than a day’s hike.’ She took a slurp of her crab stew, pausing to chew on a fatty lump. ‘This is pretty good, actually.’