The Iron Ghost (12 page)

And then, eventually, silence.

Siano opened the door. Inside, the room was as opulent as she expected: a great fresco painted directly onto smoothly plastered walls, golden candlesticks dripping from every surface, pewter plates polished to a brilliant shine, and in the centre of the table a great stuffed bird surrounded by fruit.

It was spoiled somewhat by the guests themselves. Siano stepped carefully over the man who’d almost made it to the door – portly, bearded, the father of the family – and worked her way down the table, admiring her handiwork. A woman of middle-age sat slumped at the head of the table, her yellow silk dress smeared with thick gobbets of vomit and her mouth wide open, revealing a fat purple tongue. The tiny capillaries in her eyes had burst and in her last moments she’d smeared blood across her face.

Next to her was a young man, perhaps no older than Siano herself. He had fallen face down into what looked like a bowl of stew, although Siano was no longer sure where the stew had ended and the vomit began. The young woman next to him, who had probably been very beautiful before the poison did its work, had scratched bloody lines into her own throat as she suffocated.

Twenty diners, all wiped out before the dessert course. Not all of them were members of the family she’d been instructed to kill; she’d checked the guest list in the footman’s papers and there were seven men and women here who were merely friends and associates. But it hardly mattered. The client had said nothing about avoiding the deaths of innocents, and somehow Siano doubted that the severed head would mind. She drew the slim knife from her belt, preparing to draw blood from the corpses, when she stopped. There was one chair empty. The plates that sat before it were clean and untouched.

‘What is this?

Unnerved, Siano counted them again, checking numbers against the list she had memorised. There should be twenty guests: seven who didn’t matter, and thirteen family members. Except one was missing.

She put the knife away and went to the offending chair. There were pillows on it, two fat pillows, as though the person who normally sat there was too short to reach the table. The plates were smaller too, and there was a thick round cup instead of a tankard.

‘The youngest child, then,’ she murmured, reaching out to touch her fingers to the clean plate. ‘A child who has not come down for dinner. Sent to bed early for some misdemeanour, or perhaps he is ill.’

She glanced down the table, her gaze passing over faces bloated and smeared with blood and vomit. The poison she had used was odourless, tasteless, and absolutely lethal. It also cost a small fortune, as it was made from the powdered bones of a tiny lizard that lived in a small patch of jungle in Onwai, but her client was hardly going to quibble over her expenses. And it had been too tempting; a family dinner, all of her victims gathered in one place. So simple to slip into the kitchens, so easy to find the correct dishes. She’d used more than one vial just to be sure – she didn’t want to miss someone, for example, just because they didn’t fancy fish soup that evening. And then once the food had been delivered, a razor-sharp knife in the shadows of the corridor waited for those servants still left alive.

Perhaps someone had taken the child some food up to its room – a parent, or, more likely, a kindly servant – and perhaps the child was already dead, purple-faced and twisted around the bed covers. But she would have to check.

Siano left the dining room at a pace, still moving silently out of habit, even though she was reasonably certain everyone in the house was dead. Everyone save for this one child, the last link in the family chain.

She moved up the staircase, feeling the cold solidity of the wooden banister through the fine silk of her gloves. Once she was on the upper landing, she stopped, holding her breath with her mouth slightly open, allowing herself to hear the full silence of the house. A creak down the corridor, wooden floorboards settling, the distant susurrus of the wind through the trees outside, birds singing somewhere. And there: the slight huffing snort of a child at rest, or perhaps just waking up. It was coming from up ahead, from one of the rooms on the right-hand side of the corridor.

Siano moved into the shadows but the child was already up and moving; she heard its heavy footfalls stomping across the room and then it appeared, hair mussed from sleep. Siano stood as still as possible, unable to tell yet if the child – a boy with a swirl of blond hair like corn silk and an overly doughy face – had seen her.

The child stood for a moment in the hallway, rubbing small fists across his eyes, before he glanced up and looked straight at Siano. The assassin didn’t move. She felt suddenly very aware of what she must look like to this child; a tall slim stranger, dressed in black, gloves on her hands and her hair swept back from her head with a thin black cord.

The boy blinked at her sleepily. ‘I’m hungry now,’ he said. ‘I know Mama said no food, but I’m hungry now. Are they done with dinner downstairs? I don’t want to eat with them.’

‘They are done with dinner, yes,’ answered Siano. People were so good at fooling themselves sometimes it astounded her. If you were in their house, then surely you must be allowed to be there. Anything else would be unthinkable. ‘Would you like some pudding now?’

The boy’s eyes lit up. ‘Is there lemon cake? Cook said there would be, but that was before Mama got all angry.’

Siano took the boy down to the kitchens, being careful to take him via a route that avoided the slumped forms of servants, their throats gaping and red. The boy seemed oblivious to the unnatural silence of the house, and even appeared unworried that the kitchen was entirely empty of staff. Instead he went and sat himself at the big, scarred wooden table, waiting to be served.

‘I know Mama said no dinner,’ he said again. ‘But she doesn’t really mean it. Pudding is better, anyway.’

Siano nodded. There was indeed lemon cake, a huge pan of the stuff, still softly steaming and smelling pleasantly of hot summer days. Siano cut a portion and slid it onto a plate before dousing it liberally with the poison from the last of the vials.

‘Here,’ she plonked the plate in front of the boy. ‘Your favourite, no?’

The boy peered at her. For the first time he seemed to be questioning the appearance of this strange woman in his house.

‘Can I have a spoon, then?’ he said eventually.

Siano nodded graciously. ‘Of course.’

She fetched one from a huge tureen of washed cutlery and set it next to the boy’s plate, but still the child didn’t touch his pudding. Instead he looked up at her, his brow beginning to furrow in a way that either meant stomach trouble or an oncoming tantrum. The boy opened his mouth to speak, perhaps to ask where everyone was, and Siano smoothly spoke over him.

‘You were in trouble, then? Sent to bed with no dinner?’ She forced a smile, attempting to look like the sort of shadowy stranger dressed in black that you might confide in.

The child shrugged, looking slightly more cheerful. ‘I was teasing the puppies again. Ned, the groundskeeper, one of his dogs has just had puppies, and I wanted to play with them, but Meela the kitchen girl caught me and Mama said I wasn’t to play with them like that.’ The boy took a breath and picked up his spoon, but he only pushed the cake around his plate.

‘How were you playing with them?’ Siano stood to one side. In the back of her mind she was still listening to the sounds of the big house, just in case someone unexpected should choose to visit. The boy began to mash the cake with his spoon, chopping it into honeyed lumps.

‘I was only teasing them,’ he said, tucking his chin into his chest as he spoke. Siano suspected that he probably did the same thing when talking to his mama, perhaps imagining it made him more appealing. It did not. ‘There were hot coals in the farrier’s shed, and I was only
playing
. They weren’t really hurt. They just make a lot of noise and Meela got upset.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Siano, ‘puppies make a lot of noise. When I was younger than you, my family also had dogs, lots of them, and there were always so many puppies. My parents did not notice when one or two went missing, or even three or four. I took their little ears, and sometimes their eyes. Your mistake, child, is that you were playing where other people could hear.’

The boy was looking at her with wide eyes now, the lemon cake completely forgotten. He looked, in fact, like he might never feel like eating cake again.

‘Didn’t you get in trouble?’ he asked, a slight tremor to his voice.
He is noticing
, thought Siano
, that I did not call him by his name, and he is beginning to realise I shouldn’t be here
. ‘Didn’t your mama and papa get mad?’

‘They did, yes, when they found out. And they found out about lots of things, eventually, although I believe they had been pretending not to know about it all for a long time. Parents are good at that. But then they sent me away, and what I am was put to good use.’

‘Where is my mama?’ the boy said, and now his voice was thick and close to tears. ‘I want to see my mama now.’

‘Aren’t you going to eat your cake?’ asked Siano, taking a step closer. She wasn’t concerned – there was no chance of this child outrunning her – but she was starting to get bored. ‘It’s very good. And it’s your favourite, no?’

The boy stared at her, the spoon trembling slightly in his podgy fingers.

‘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.’

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.’