by Ben Galley
The Siren danced forward, light on his feet, and jabbed at Tyrfing’s face. But again the mage shifted to the side and watched the fist fly past. The Siren jabbed again and again at his face and his body, but every time his fist connected with nothing but air and embarrassment. The Siren’s face flushed with anger. Tyrfing resisted the urge to flash his opponent a smile. He moved forward to trap the mage against the circle of people, but Tyrfing slid out of reach once more, as slippery as smoke, and caused even more cheers and shouts. Farden and Lerel clapped and hollered along with the rest of the crowd.
By this point, the Siren’s face was covered in sweat and frustration. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the rider reaching for the little bell, and in pure desperation he lunged at Tyrfing fist-first. It was an almighty swing, and had it connected with the mage it would have surely knocked him off his feet, but it didn’t, and it never would.
Like an elusive ghost, Tyrfing slid nimbly backwards and seized the moment he had been waiting for. As the Siren’s last punch flew past his face, he slugged the unfortunate man just below his ear with a blow a hammer would have been proud of. There was a thud and a crack and Siren’s eyes rolled up into his skull. Amidst the yells he sank to the floor like a sack of meat, utterly, entirely, and thoroughly unconscious. The crowd cheered for the unknown mage, and gold fell like rain.
Tyrfing simply laughed, and went to reclaim his boots as the unconscious man was dragged away. Durnus and Farden both clapped him heartily on the back. ‘Well done,’ said the vampyre. ‘Classic ploy.’ But the mage just modestly shrugged aside the compliments and politely thanked the rider who came to give him his pouch of winnings.
‘I’ll give this to Ilios,’ Tyrfing said, shaking the bag of coins.
Eyrum didn’t look entirely happy, but even so he shook Tyrfing’s hand and admitted, reluctantly so, that he was impressed. ‘Right,’ he said, quaffing the rest of his ale as though he were a drowning sailor. ‘Time to show you how it’s really done!’ And with that Eyrum marched into the middle of the ring and began unbuttoning his shirt, looking around for the next unfortunate contender. Suffice it to say, upon seeing the size of the big one-eyed Siren they were not as forthcoming as they had been with Tyrfing, but after a while Eyrum found himself some contenders, and spent the next few hours battering as much coin out of them as he could.
The others ate, drank, and laughed their way into the early hours of the morning, until the ale made the great hall spin and they couldn’t dance any more. Even when they left, the party was only just beginning to reach its peak. The crowds had become a whirling storm of limbs, music, and ale, and it promised not to stop until sunrise. That was the Siren way.
Farden left Durnus and Tyrfing at their door and bid them a good night, or to be more accurate in their case, a good morning. The vampyre was the only remotely sober one left. He barely managed to manoeuvre Tyrfing through the door before the older mage collapsed into a heap. Farden laughed and left them to it, taking Lerel with him. She held on to the mage as if her balance depended on it, and more than once along the hallway she proved that it did. Farden’s legs were tired from dancing. His head swam in a murky bowl of ale-soaked soup. Every time he closed his eyes, he felt the corridor twisting and turning. Balance evaded him. Tiredness pulled at him from all angles. He decided he needed sleep.
Farden had intended to walk Lerel to her room, but thanks to several wrong turns, they came across his own door instead. Lerel leant up against the wall, smiling, and took her shoes off so she could walk barefoot. The feel of the cold granite against her feet was soothing. Farden fiddled awkwardly with the doorknob. It dodged his fingers. ‘Locked out?’ said Lerel, with her eyes closed. The mage jiggled the door until it came loose and then pushed the door inwards. It was dark inside his room. He chuckled drunkenly. ‘There we go,’ he said. ‘Gods, I need sleep.’ The mage rubbed his eyes and tried to blink the dizziness away. His limbs felt heavy, but something kept him standing in the corridor.
‘So do I,’ Lerel replied. She stretched out her arms and yawned, her bracelets jangling, and then shook her head. Farden squinted at her.
‘Will you be okay, walking to your room on your own?’ he asked.
‘I’m sure I will,’ she said, leaning her shoulder against his door-frame, as if she had already found a place to sleep. Her eyes closed halfway and she smiled, humming snatches of a song she had already half forgotten. Farden couldn’t help but stare at her, as wavering and dizzy as his eyes made her, standing there bathed in the half-light of the corridor. ‘Good,’ he said, because there was nothing else he could think of to use to fill the silence. His leaden legs kicked themselves into life and managed to take a step forward. His body followed.
As Farden took a step towards his room, he felt Lerel touch his hand and he paused. He turned to see why and as he did, she quickly reached up and ran her hand along the back of his neck, pulling herself up to kiss his mouth. Farden closed his eyes and heard his blood pounding in his head as her lips pushed against his, her cat-like tongue sneaking inside his mouth. Farden pulled her closer, trying hard not to lose his balance. Her heady perfume and the taste of wine made his hands pull at her dress. Her arms snaked around his neck. He could feel her biting his lip. In the end, Farden’s arms acted on behalf of his brain, and lifting her up, he carried her into the darkness of his room, and slammed the door behind them with a bang. All was quiet again in the corridor, all except for the sound of someone running away.
It had taken most of the night and a large portion of the early morning for Elessi to build up the courage to go find Farden. She had promised herself that she would tell him that night, before he left for Albion or not at all, and her chance was slowly fading away with every greedy minute that slipped past. Snowy sunrise was approaching fast, and the mage would be busy and gone again before she knew it.
The maid had dressed in her best clothes and had gone to the great hall to find him, but the mage wasn’t anywhere to be seen. She had asked Brightshow, and Eyrum, but neither had seen him or the others. Elessi wrung her hands in desperation. There was only one thing left to do, and that was to go to his room.
And so she had, walking quickly, her mind going over everything she would say and over again, until it was stuck fast in her head and hovering on her tongue. Twice she took the wrong turn and once she came to a dead end. Her hands were becoming sore from where she kept rubbing them.
At long last she spied the mage’s room at the end of a corridor, and to her delight she saw Farden standing outside his door, fiddling with the latch. Elessi doubled her pace, eager to catch him before he went to bed. Just as she was about to call out his name, she noticed he was not alone. Someone was standing next to him. It was Lerel, the cat-girl, and she was putting her arms around the mage.
Elessi’s mage.
Wide-eyed with disbelief and unable to look away, the maid skidded to a halt and hid in a nearby doorway to watch them kiss. Elessi put a hand over her mouth as to her horror they went into his room and slammed the door behind them. Elessi turned around and slumped against the wall. A single tear rolled down her cheek. With a sob she turned and ran, her head now full of smashed and broken hope which, as always, is the worst kind of all. Perhaps it is better to have had no hope at all, than to have had hope and seen it dashed on the rocks.
All was quiet again in the corridor, all except for the sound of someone running away.
Chapter 13
“Everyone knows to burn their dead, for the dead are ambitious creatures. The gods made us burn our dead, and rightly so, for from the ash we came and to the ash we will surely return. Those who are unfortunate enough to fall foul of the wilds, well, then that is that, but those who bury their dead in barrows and graves deserve to be haunted. Burying the dead makes for ghosts. Fire makes for peace of mind. That, and a golden coin.”
Excerpt from the ‘Rites and Rituals’ manual, found at a shrines to the lesser-worshipped goddess Hekart
Dee
p in the sewers of Krauslung, where the rats huddled together for warmth, it was a cold, cold night, and the air seemed brittle between the fingers and on the tongue. Icicles hung from the grates and gutters and refused to melt. Even in the dark sewers, under the streets and away from the bitter north wind, where the tunnels were bathed in candlelight and secrecy, the stones and walls were slick with ice and frozen grime. Deep in those tunnels, away from the watchful eyes of the guards, gathered together around a small barrel filled with logs and tar, four men tried desperately to set get a spark from a box of flint and tinder.
‘Will you bloody get on with it, Haruld!’ said one.
‘I’m trying!’ hissed the one called Haruld.
‘By the tits of Evernia it’s cold,’ cursed the first, a skinny man wearing patchwork clothes.
‘We’ll all freeze to death in a minute, if you don’t get that fire lit,’ said a third.
‘Shut up and go back to your rat meat, Tobur,’ said Haruld.
With a flash, the tar caught fire and slowly but surely, struggling against the brittle cold, the fire began to burn and crackle. Smoke started to clog the air. It was a welcome relief after the smell of sewage. ‘Thank the gods,’ breathed a fourth, his voice echoing around the tunnel. The men huddled as close to the flaming barrel as they could without burning themselves and rubbed their hands together, shivering.
‘It’s getting worse,’ said the first man.
Haruld, the second man, a young man with beady eyes and a running nose, half-nodded half-shivered. ‘If it isn’t the cold it’s the damned sickness, and if isn’t either of those then it’ll be the guards, or those bastard turncoat Written.’
‘One of them dragged my neighbour out of his house the other day an’ near set him on fire he did,’ said the fourth man, a dour-eyed man with a down-turned expression, the face of a man who has seen a hard life, and wasn’t expecting it to get better anytime soon.
‘What for, Olger?’
‘Who can know? They’ve gone power-mad now Lord Vice is in charge,’ interrupted the third man.
Maybe it was the cold, maybe it was the name, but all four men shivered in their boots.
‘Something needs to be done.’
‘That it does, friends,’ nodded Haruld.
‘And what are we supposed t’ do?’ asked Olger, shaking his head dolefully. ‘There ain’t nothing we can do ‘gainst the guards and the mages now the Skölgard are ‘ere in force.’
‘Every day more of those Skölgard come through the gates. They just take what they want.’
‘They took my house,’ said Tobur, a bald, ageing man with terrible posture who looked as though he had once been fat. Jowls of papery skin hung from his jaw. He had a pained look of disillusionment on his folded face. His once-fine clothes were now a tapestry of patchwork repairs. ‘I worked my whole life for that house. I raised my children in it. Built my wife the kitchen she deserved with my bare hands I did, even made that little stool she used to sit and knit on as well. Made a home for them all I did, and a damn fine one at that.’
‘That you did,’ said Olger, patting his comrade’s back awkwardly.
‘And now I hear there’s a vampyre loose, right here in the city, of all things!’
The men shivered again, and shook their heads. ‘At least it’s only attacking the Skölgard. Serves them right. Bastards.’
The first man, the ageing, skinny man with patchwork clothes, ground his teeth together. He had a regal-looking face and a fair complexion. ‘May Vice catch the sickness and die, I say. And die slowly. By the golden scales, we should have stopped him before he brought in the Skölgard.’
‘And what would you and the other members have done, eh? Old Council Fessen? Stood on the Manesmark road with your hand held high? Yelled stop at that king and his soldiers? They would have cut you to ribbons, man. The magick council is long gone now, and we’re better for it. I bet Vice had you lot under a fish barrel from the start,’ muttered Tobur. Fessen stayed quiet.
There was a moment where Haruld shook his head. ‘They killed Burgan, you know, in cold blood. Saw it myself yesterday. Just for taking an extra water skin for his wife.’
‘He was a good man.’
‘A damn shame it is.’
‘Shame,’ repeated the others with a sad sigh.
‘Burgan’s wife made a good pie as well. Now she can’t make nothin’.’
Dour Olger clenched his fist and tapped the edge of the barrel with his knuckles. ‘I can’t put up with this any more, we need to get out o’ the city, some way or another,’ he said, his voice a growl. ‘We need to get out, before they pull the noose tight.’ He pulled a face and yanked an invisible rope above his head.
Somewhere in the darkness, a rat squeaked in surprise, and there came a rustling noise from behind them. The four men turned as one, kitchen knives drawn and at the ready, and peered into the gloomy tunnel. Something sighed.
‘Running solves nothing,’ said a voice, a calm voice that was not unused to speaking wisely, cold like the north wind, commanding, a voice that had listened to the whispers of a thousand seasons, and had kept all the secrets for herself.
‘Who’s there? Show yourself!’ Haruld challenged, waving his blunt kitchen knife at the empty tunnel. His request was swiftly granted, as out from the cold and smoky darkness walked a tall, thin woman holding a hawk on her arm. She seemed oblivious to the hawk’s talons gripping her bare arm, and to the cold, wearing nothing but a long grey dress that seemed to shimmer in the firelight like her skin. Instead of walking, she seemed to drift across the stones. The bottom of her dress was muddy and torn as though she had walked a hundred miles to be there. No matter how hard the men stared, her form seemed to waver and shimmer, like a mirage, only seeming solid for brief moments and snatches of time, wreathed in tar-smoke and floating cinders.
Haruld took a wary step forward. His friends waggled their knives behind him menacingly. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘I am a messenger. Or rather, he is the messenger,’ she said, looking to the proud-looking hawk perched on her arm, a beady-eyed and dangerous bird, with two feathers like that of a heron’s dangling behind its head. ‘The Siren spies cannot find you down here.’
Haruld squinted his beady eyes at her through the smoky haze and found himself a little overwhelmed. The woman shared the same beauty as an iceberg, calm, yet dangerous beneath the surface, striking and yet completely unfathomable. She was pale, very pale indeed, almost transparent at times, and she had long jet-black hair that reached all the way to the back of her hips. Like her face, her limbs and fingers were thin, as if her whole body had been stretched and drawn out on a rack. The woman’s eyes were like a lizard’s and almost seemed to move independently of each other. They were dark, serene, and inexpressive like two pools of mercury. The hawk flapped its wings and the woman plucked a tightly rolled scroll from its leg. She held it out and Haruld warily took it from her, wary of her ghost-like skin.
‘What’s it say, Haruld?’ hissed Fessen.
As the others clamoured forward to peek over his shoulder, Haruld hastily unravelled the scroll and began to read it, muttering the words to the others. As they read, the strange woman began to speak. ‘The dragon-riders are asking for a war, and a war there shall be. There is no other way. You have four days before the Sirens come, four days to wake this city and urge it to fight. Be on the lookout for strangers, and on the dawn of the fifth day watch for dragons in the sky to the north,’ she said. As she spoke, the woman seemed to drift backwards into the gloomy tunnel.
‘Who are you?’ asked Haruld, confused and more than a little bewildered.
The woman’s voice echoed around the tunnel. ‘The question is, will you help them? Will you rise up and fight, and perhaps die? Or will you hide in your sewers forever? Even an ancient oak, proud and strong as it may be, can be felled by a worm at its core. Do not forget; you have four days and four days only. And, if you encounter the mage before we do, when he arrives to
right his wrong, give him this message…’
‘What message?’ the men called after her.
‘…Daemonstone,’ said the voice.
There was nothing like a cup of hot Albion farska to keep away the cold. Modren clutched it to his chest as if it were a shield against the wind. He held it up to his lips and savoured the hot steam brushing against his lip before it was snatched away by the cold. The smell of vegetables and meat stock and spices filled his nostrils and he took a tentative slurping sip.
Swilling the boiling liquid around his mouth, the mage sighed and walked on. It was the third watch of the night, which made it Modren’s turn to wander the cobbles of Krauslung, searching for vampyres, checking up on his Written and their posts. A lesser man wouldn’t have bothered.
In the selfish interests of war, Vice had closed every Arkabbey in Emaneska and withdrawn all their mages, and in doing so had left Modren with a small contingent of Written in the city, around fifty or so, and the rest of the lesser Arka mages, of which there were a larger and more uncontrollable number. Most of his Written were scattered far and wide, either hunting Farden and his accomplices or causing trouble in the outlying villages. Like the swarms of Skölgard that had invaded the city, the Arka men were increasingly concerned with their own entertainment and the war than keeping the peace. As always, when those in a position of power are given free reign and a captive audience, screams and shouts tend to follow. Modren viewed his command as a slippery rope, swiftly sneaking out of his grasp. It was all he could do to instil a scrap of order into his men, and that was why he insisted on taking his watches.
The mage wandered down a windy street punctuated with worn steps. Every time he passed an alleyway, he caught a glimpse of the Arkathedral looming over city, set against the obsidian backdrop of the mountain, bejewelled by a smattering of glittering lights. Modren squinted in the face of the bitter wind and clenched his fist to send another heat spell through his cold bones. Carefully avoiding the patches of slick ice, he jogged down a flight of steps and lifted his cup to take another sip of his steaming stew.