Dead Stars - Part Two (The Emaneska Series) (5 page)

Korrin looked down at Halophen’s exposed neck, a mottled mosaic of bruises and blood. His father had been wrong. There was pride in ridding the world of filth like this. There was honour in the spilt blood of warlords and murderers. And what had he once said to his father?
He was good at this.

‘Last words, King?’ sighed Lop.

Halophen grinned at the sand. ‘Your time will come, Knights. Soon. Very soon.’

‘So be it.’ Gaspid cleared some dust from his throat. ‘Korrin? As you please.’

Halophen chuckled to the very last swing of the blade. Not a single Knight would have admitted it, but it was unnerving, to say the least.

“I’m of the opinion that the phrase ‘hopelessly lost’ was invented, and remains privately reserved, for those who dare to wander the lofty crags of the Össfen Mountains…”

Words from ‘Mountain-Climbing - A Fool’s Hobby’ by the explorer Aspold the One-Legged

M
ist clung to the scree-slope like gnats to a bog. It held the mountain close, seeping into every crack and crevice. It was cold high in the crags, cold as graveyards in winter. The wind cut like a blade through the gaps in their cloaks. The footing, slivers of shale from the grinding of mountains, was tricky and treacherous. It covered the steep incline like a frozen avalanche of rock. Only the tired jabbing of a boot seemed to stir it to action, and when it did, it slipped like a sudden river, building as it flowed. It paid to dig feet in deep.

Samara was exhausted, more exhausted than she had ever been. The ground tugged at her weak muscles, but she fought it, as stubborn as she ever was. At least she was conscious now. Lilith could stop moaning about carrying her. Only her shoulders, ripped and torn from her spell, slowed her down.

Samara negotiated a steep section, hopping weakly from a protuberant boulder to a flatter section of shale. For a moment it sagged beneath her, its edges crumbling away, and then remained steady. She smirked and took a moment to look around her. She even dared to look down. It was a long fall and a lonely death that spread out below her, faint in the mists. Samara threw the fall a contemptuous look. This mountain should be so lucky as to play host to her grave.

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.