Dead Stars - Part Two (The Emaneska Series) (57 page)

I’m sorry
, he told it.
I tried.

Farden awoke by a river, a blue ribbon of a river lined with smooth, patchwork pebbles. Blue, grey, black, orange, they all quivered as the clear, cold water flowed over them. Farden listened to it burble. It sounded like words. A thousand different words with voices all swirled and mashed together. Farden listened to the voices, and smiled. So many of them, all of them telling their tale.

Soon enough he became aware of another sound: the gentle crackle of soft feet sliding carefully across pebbles. Farden sat up, feeling dizzy, and found himself in a huge cave, lit by bright lights he could not see. He heard the sound again and turned to see a faint outline of a crooked old man trudging across the pebbles, parallel to the calm river. It was not deep, and yet he seemed reticent to cross it, even at the shallowest points where the pebbles of its bed broke the surface.

Farden got to his feet, stumbled, and then tried again. His legs were foreign to him, as though he had borrowed another’s for a time. He looked down and found red and gold steel staring back at him. Clean, polished, flecked with droplets of ice-water. They were marvellous things. He wondered whose they were.

Farden opened his mouth to call to the old man but his throat was too cold to work. He felt like a lead weight, striding across the pebbles, but step by step he did it. The man was hobbling so slowly that he caught him in no time.

‘Old man,’ he rasped, when he was near. ‘Old man.’

The man was staring straight ahead, eyes beady and eager over a lip of a bedraggled old scarf. He was barely visible in the bright light of the cave. A mere shadow at most, but Farden could still see the sores on his brow, his cheeks, and his bare arms. He wore thick gloves and walked carefully, as if he were going to fall at any minute, as though a lifetime had been spent doing exactly that. A leper, if Farden didn’t know better.

He looked old and beaten and Farden couldn’t help but stare. He had seen this man before. ‘Where are you going, old man?’ he asked, through a throat that wasn’t his. More bright metal caught his eye, and he looked down to see that his hands were wrapped in it. He clenched his fists, and the very end finger on his left hand remained upright. Farden moved to touch it, but before he could he heard the old man speaking.

‘One step away from the grave. One step away from the grave,’ he was mumbling.

‘Come again?’ Farden asked, but the man didn’t answer. He hobbled on, and Farden was left frowning, searching for a memory that had never been, in a mind like a dark void. Farden followed. It was the right thing to do, though he knew not why.

The river by their side was running deeper now. The cave grew narrower. The lights became brighter. More shadows joined them, crowding between the cave wall and the shingled riverbank. Soon enough they were shuffling along in a group. Farden, and a bunch of shadows. He was glad to be one of them.

Tyrfing sat up with a start. Loki was standing over him, holding out a hand. The mage pushed it aside, struggled to his feet on his own, and then promptly fell over.

‘The cold, I imagine,’ Loki said, going to look at the river. It was deep and cold, its bank made of smooth pebbles.

‘Where is my nephew?’ Tyrfing hissed, from his position, sprawled in the pebbles. His throat was on fire.

Loki looked around, as if only just noticing that it was just the two of them. ‘He isn’t here,’ he said.

‘That’s rather obvious,’ snapped Tyrfing, as he tried his feet once more. They seemed sound enough this time. He walked in a wide circle, craning his neck to stare at the lofty roof of a long, giant cave, at the multicoloured pebbles, and at Loki dipping his fingers in the river. ‘Well, where is he? More to the point, where are we?’

‘I don’t know, I just woke up. Same as you,’ Loki said. Tyrfing wasn’t quite sure whether to believe him. Farden’s suspicions were rubbing off on him. ‘But I would hazard an educated guess at Hel. The tunnels that birthed the daemons, when the first sparks…’

‘Yes, yes, I know the stories. So we made it.’

‘Look,’ Loki pointed. Tyrfing looked.

Two shadows were making their way across the stones, heading away from them and upriver. They seemed nervous and careful, picking their way across the smooth stones with precision, as only the elderly would. Another quickly joined them, seemingly from nowhere, only this one was smaller, a child, probably no more than ten by her size. Her only clothes seemed to be a sack, stained black with coal or oil or blood. She traipsed behind the older shadows, matching them step for step.

Loki was after them like a shot. Tyrfing tried his best to keep up, wobbling from side to side on his numb legs. ‘Where have you got to now, Farden?’ he muttered to himself.

‘What is this place?’ Farden asked a shadow beside the old man. He was tall, rugged. A farmer by the looks of his clothes. He too was staring straight ahead, as though his eyes were glued in place. His lips moved though, and he spoke in a faint voice, stolen by an invisible wind.

‘To the
Naglfar
.’

‘Naglwhat?’ Farden cupped a hand around his ear, feeling the cold of his metal hand. Strange, to be so dead and yet still feel so cold. He hoped it wouldn’t last long.

‘The deadship.’

‘The crossing.’

‘The boatman.’

‘The other side,’ came the whispers from all around him. The shadows jostled him as they walked. Their pace had quickened. Even the crooked old leper by his side was hobbling along as fast as he could. Farden followed suit.

At a bend in the river, the cave opened out into a huge vault, its roof so high that mist hung to the distant ceiling. He could barely make out its edges. Creamy stalactites punctured its thick tendrils, looking for all the world like upside down mountains. The river here was thick and wide and running fast. The shadows, the dead, gathered at its banks in their hundreds and thousands. Mist hung at the edges of the crowds too. There could have been millions there, buried in the haze. Farden gawped. All of them jostled for space. Never before had whispers been so deafening.

‘I’ve been here before,’ he said aloud. The crowd of shadows behind him laughed without smiling, or barely even moving their lips at all. One, a pale man with a face half-crushed and broken, shook his head.

‘You don’t get to see this place and leave, friend.’

‘What is it then?’ Farden asked. Something was itching in the back of his mind. Vacantly, he reached up to scratch his head, and then paused halfway.

‘Where the dead come,’ growled another, a huge minotaur with a twisted horn. Its lips had barely moved.

‘The ship!’ a thousand voices whispered around him. And there it was.

‘Where are they all going?’ Tyrfing asked.

‘I thought you knew the stories?’ Loki sneered. For some reason he was walking very closely to the shadows, arms outstretched as if he were readying himself to hug one of them. Whether it was a trick of these ghostly lights, Tyrfing couldn’t tell, but the god seemed to be glowing. Tyrfing squinted at him, and then huffed.
Trick of the light for sure
, he told himself.

‘Forgive me,’ grunted the Arkmage, ‘I’m not that familiar with Hel.’

‘That you aren’t. These are the dead. They are making their way to the other side.’

Tyrfing looked around at the ever-growing crowds. His eyes ached trying to fathom their numbers. He was trying his hardest not to touch them. ‘There are thousands of them. More.’

‘Tens of thousands. Such are the dead.’

‘And they all pass through here?’

‘All by one ship.’

‘Ship?’

Loki nodded. ‘That’s right.’

Tyrfing put the toe of his boot in the river. Even through the thick leather he could feel its deadly cold. ‘A ship, in this?’

‘Just you wait,’ Loki said, distracted again by another crowd of shadows moving closer to the river. Closer, but not too close. The god pressed himself close to them. Tyrfing rubbed his eyes. Loki was shivering now, wriggling even, like heat rising from a flame, or a hand passing behind mottled glass.

‘Curse this strange place,’ he coughed. It was playing tricks with his eyes.

As it turned out, he did not have to wait long. Soon enough they came to where the long cave opened out into a cavern that would have swallowed the Arkathedral in one mouthful. Mist, cloud maybe, lingered at the top of it, wrapping the sharp stalactites like wool around teeth. Grey lichen clung to the rough, grey walls, climbing up into oblivion. The river grew wide here. Wide and deep. It hissed against the pebbles, adding to the susurrus of whispering and gentle crunching of the countless, endless, dead feet.

Tyrfing stared at them all, wide-eyed and disbelieving. He had never seen so many living people in one place, never mind the dead. They jostled for space as they pressed forward to the river, reticent to touch its waters, and yet eager to cross it.

It was then that the ship came. It materialised out of the dark fog on the far, far side of the monochrome cavern. Even from there, Tyrfing could see that it was a ship like no other. It was tall and imposing, sharp-sided like a knife on its side. Its dimensions were uneven and irregular, and its masts were crooked, bereft of sails.

Closer and closer it crept, unaffected by the rushing of the river, seemingly travelling at its own unhurried pace. Obviously, the dead could wait. Tyrfing pressed forward to see more of it. The shadows around him were cold. He swore he could feel frigid breath on the back of his neck. He pulled his collar up and stifled some more coughing. Loki was ahead of him somewhere, a solid pillar of life amongst a sea of ghosts. Well, almost. He was the closest thing Tyrfing had.
Where in Hel is Farden?
he wondered.

The ship pulled lazily alongside the shore, several hundred yards up the riverbank. Something ungodly and horrible was shrieking and screeching amidst the crowd, but what it was, Tyrfing couldn’t see. Before he could ask Loki, the crowd surged like ocean swell, carrying them towards the ship. Loki seemed to melt into the shadows. Tyrfing pushed and shoved and fought his way along. He didn’t like this one bit.

‘Farden!’ he began to call, as loud as his raw throat would let him.