The Iron Ghost (16 page)

‘Yes, good, very good.’ The voice came through even clearer this time, almost as though she could hear it in her head. ‘This was very fine indeed. He was afraid of you at the end, did you know that? I can still taste it in the room. A very fine type of suffering.’

‘I did it well,’ said Siano. ‘He was afraid, but he was also proud.’

The voice chuckled. ‘I’m sure that was of
great
comfort to him as he bled all over his own bedcovers.’

Siano shifted. The room stank of blood now, a thick mineral smell like copper pennies. Surely someone else in the House of Patience would smell it soon, and she would have to be gone before then.

‘What is our next move, my lord?’

‘Oh, you must come and find me next, Siano. Come and find me in Skaldshollow. We’re going to have such fun.’

Nuava walked down the corridor hurriedly, one hand on her pocket. Tamlyn had given her the knife, muttering something about it being the right tool for the job, but she hadn’t met Nuava’s eyes, and had turned away when she asked more questions. Now the knife was a weight in her pocket, and it was heavier than she’d been expecting, in more ways than one.

‘He is already dead,’ she told herself again. She kept her eyes forward, concentrating on getting this task done without delay. ‘It won’t matter to him either way.’

Nuava nodded to the guard on the door. ‘I am here on the Prophet’s business.’

His eyes widened slightly at that.
And he doesn’t even know about the knife
, she thought.

Inside the cell the body of the Narhl prisoner slumped on a narrow straw bed, a lifeless sack.
A sack of bones
, she thought grimly. Her brother was standing over him, scratching words onto a length of parchment. He looked up and saw her, his brow creasing in immediate worry.

‘Nuava? What are you doing here?’ He shifted slightly so that he blocked her view of the body, although she’d already seen the various burn marks streaked like sooty trails across the man’s grey and white flesh. ‘This isn’t something you want to see.’

She lifted her chin, holding her face still and composed.

‘Tamlyn sent me. I have a task to perform for her.’ She stepped neatly around him, peering down at the body. ‘Did he die from – what we did to him?’

Bors sighed and put the parchment on a small blood-stained table.

‘No. I think it was the heat, in the end. I keep telling them, it’s too warm down here, with all the lamps.’ He looked away from her, his lips pursed. ‘The Narhl can’t cope with it, not when they’re already injured.’

Nuava bent down and pressed her fingers to the man’s arm. This one had been a lone rider, scouting around the edges of Skaldshollow on the back of a wyvern. One of the war-werkens had been lucky with a shot from a catapult, and they’d brought him back to the Hollow before he’d regained consciousness. His skin was smooth, and still quite warm. She blinked. Of course, a healthy Narhl would be cold, she told herself.

‘What are you doing down here, Nuava?’ Bors came over to her. ‘I need to make an inventory, a report to the werken council. Everything Tamlyn needs to know will be in that.’

Nuava straightened up. ‘Tamlyn wishes me to remove his fingers. His finger bones. I’m to bring them, cleaned, to the Prophet.’

There was a moment’s silence. She didn’t quite dare look at her brother’s face.

‘You’re doing
what
?’

She cleared her throat. ‘You heard me, Bors. Just leave me alone, all right? I can do this.’

‘What could the Prophet possibly need those for?’

‘It is all part of the training.’ She reached into her pocket and drew out the knife. ‘What does it matter, anyway? It’s just his fingers, and he’s dead now.’

Bors laid a hand on her arm. He looked bewildered. ‘How can this be part of the training, Nuava? How can this have anything to do with crafting the Edeian?’

‘And you know about that, do you?’ she snapped, shaking his hand off. ‘You are not her pupil, as much as you would like to be.’ He frowned at that, and looked down at his feet for a moment; a classic sign that her brother was struggling to control his temper. ‘Bors, these are the ways of the Edeian. They are not for everyone, and it is not my place to question our aunt.
She
is Mistress Crafter.’

‘You know this is wrong.’ He made her meet his eyes. His broad face was tense, his eyes pleading. ‘No one hates the Narhl more than I. They’ve terrorised us, taken the Heart-Stone, killed our people. Our mother and father, Nuava. But desecrating their corpses? We call them savages, worse than animals, but what are we if we carve their bodies into pieces? Nuava, the Prophet –’ he lowered his voice, glancing uneasily at the door – ‘I’m not sure we should be following everything she says. We don’t even know where she came from.’

‘Shall I tell her you said that?’ Nuava immediately regretted the words; such a thing was an open threat, and to her own brother. But she had a task to do, and his discomfort was less painful than Tamlyn’s fury should she fail. ‘I’m sure people have asked before where the Prophet came from, and why we should listen to her. Do you know where they are now, Bors?’

For a long moment he said nothing. Nuava found herself wanting to look at the corpse again, anything to avoid the pain in her brother’s eyes.
This is my path
, she told herself.
If I must walk it alone, then that is what I will do.

‘Tamlyn is no longer in control,’ he said. ‘You know that, I know that. We are trusting our lives, and the lives of all the people of Skaldshollow to . . . to that thing that calls itself the Prophet.’

Nuava drew in a sharp breath. Instinctively, she glanced at the door to see if the guard was still there but he had gone.

‘Bors, you can’t—’

‘It hurts me to say it, but our aunt has lost her way. This –’ he gestured to the dead Narhl – ‘has nothing to do with crafting the Edeian, and everything to do with whatever sick game the Prophet is playing. You are too clever, Nuava, not to know this. Don’t be so proud that you ignore it.’

She opened her mouth, not at all certain what she was going to say, but without another word he walked past her into the corridor and was gone, leaving her alone with the dead man.

Nuava looked down at the knife. She’d been gripping it so tightly that her knuckles had turned white.

‘It is a simple enough task,’ she told herself. Her voice sounded very small to her own ears. ‘Once I have done this, Tamlyn will know I am serious about being a crafter. And it’s not like he’ll be using them again.’

She stood for a moment, taking a number of deep, steadying breaths, and then she bent to the task.

After wrapping the severed fingers in a piece of cloth, she took them to the small home she shared with Bors, and shut herself in the kitchen. Luckily, he wasn’t home, and she set about stripping the flesh with one of her own paring knives. While she did this she pictured the werken she would someday build: tall and mighty, greater than anything Tamlyn had created. Next she boiled up some water in their small black cauldron and threw the fingers in. While they tossed in the heated water she washed her hands repeatedly, wearing their small block of soap down to a nub.

When eventually the bones were clean of flesh, she took them from the cauldron and lay them on a blue cloth she’d found to wrap them in. She looked at them: innocuous white sticks, she told herself, or the bones of a chicken carcass. Nothing more.

However, when she folded up the cloth and put them in her pocket, she briefly had the impression of holding someone’s hand, and the wave of nausea that moved through her was so powerful that she staggered and had to lean on the sink for some time. Her mouth filled with saliva and her eyes watered, but she did not vomit.

The urge to get them out of her pocket was enormous. She had to concentrate on not running to the Tower of Waking, instead forcing herself to walk sedately, her chin up, as befitted the heir to the Mistress Crafter. The bones in her pocket were not as heavy as the knife had been, but she felt them there all the same.

On her way into the tower she met Tamlyn just coming out. The older woman looked distracted, her thick padded jacket half undone. She looked at Nuava for some moments, as if she couldn’t quite remember who she was.

‘I’ve done it,’ she said, trying to sound full of flinty resolve and wincing inwardly as her voice came out in a wheezy squeak. ‘Shall I take them up to her?’

‘What?’ Tamlyn scowled.

‘The bones, I – I’ve brought them, as you asked.’

‘Oh. Yes, of course. Take them up.’ Tamlyn looked past her. They stood at the foot of the great staircase and the front doors looked out onto an afternoon that was growing darker by the minute. ‘There has been no news,’ she said. ‘They should have been there by now, and they should be on their way back, but our furthest patrols have reported nothing so far.’

Nuava blinked rapidly, realising that her aunt was talking about the mercenaries who had left to retrieve the Heart-Stone. It was difficult to think about anything else while the bones were in her pocket.

‘They could have been delayed on the Crippler,’ she said, not really caring either way. She thought of the paring knife, sliding smoothly through flesh as grey as slate, as grey as werken-rock, and she felt her stomach clench uncomfortably. ‘If the weather has been bad, they could be late by days.’

‘Yes,’ said Tamlyn. She narrowed her eyes at her niece. ‘Or they could have been caught by the Narhl and killed, and we are still without our Heart-Stone. Go on, then, get up to the room. It is best not to keep the Prophet waiting.’

Nuava opened her mouth, suddenly close to asking so many questions. Why would the Prophet want the finger bones of a Narhl warrior? Who was she, anyway? Why were they listening to her advice? But Tamlyn swept past her, and the moment was gone. Nuava watched her walk to the door, and then sprinted up the steps, across the hall, and up the many spiral staircases that led to the Prophet’s suite. When she stood outside the door she stopped, leaning against the raw rock wall. Her head was spinning.

My werkens
, she told herself,
will be magnificent. They will be greater than anything Tamlyn has created, and I will be Mistress Crafter.

A soft voice called from within. ‘Don’t stand out there, wheezing at the door, Nuava, dear. It’s most unseemly.’

Nuava entered the chamber. As ever, it was much too warm; a sweat broke out on her back immediately, and she wished she’d thought to leave her furs indoors. The Prophet was on the huge four-poster bed, hidden by the thick canopy of gauze curtains. Nuava had never seen her face.

‘I’ve brought what you wanted,’ she said, forcing her voice to be calm. Soon she would be free of the bones, and she could forget all about it. ‘The bones. I have them here for you.’

‘Oh good! Come over here, child.’

Nuava did as she was told, blanching slightly at ‘child’.

A slim white hand slipped through the curtains, small and unblemished. The fingernails were slightly over-long.

‘Put them in my hand, dear.’

Suddenly, the nausea was back. It was that voice, paired with that small, slim hand. It made no sense at all, and the wrongness of everything the Prophet was hit her. Bors was right, of course he was.

‘Are you quite well, child?’ Nuava could see the shadowed form of the Prophet beyond the curtain, and although the face was nothing more than a dark shape, she could hear the smile in the voice.

‘Yes, of course. Here.’ She shoved her hand in her pocket and placed the bundle of fabric on the Prophet’s hand. It didn’t move.

‘That doesn’t feel like bones, Nuava.’

‘They’re in there,’ she said. ‘They’re in the cloth.’

‘I asked you to put the bones in my hand, Nuava.’

Nuava took the bundle back and opened it. Trying not to notice how smooth they were, how slightly warm from her own body heat, she gathered the bones and quickly passed them to the Prophet’s hand. The small, tapered fingers closed around them and passed back through the curtain. The Prophet made a small noise of delight.

‘Oh, very good. Yes, very good.’

Nuava bowed rapidly, already backing away towards the door. She wanted to wash her hands again.

‘Wait one moment!’

Nuava stopped, holding her breath.

‘Tamlyn tells me that you are quite the little scholar.’ There was laughter in the voice now. ‘That you study all hours. That you wish to be a crafter of the Edeian, as she is.’

‘Yes,’ said Nuava. From beyond the curtain came the soft clatter of bones being moved against each other. ‘I want to make my own werkens one day.’

‘It is a rare thing, to be able to craft the Edeian,’ said the Prophet in a conversational tone. ‘I have known a few who could, and they were . . . special. Tell me, Nuava, what do you know of Joah Demonsworn?’

‘I know he was a great mage that lived and died not far from here. I visited his tomb just recently, with the mercenaries.’

The Prophet chuckled. ‘Yes, I’m sure they enjoyed that. But that is what everyone knows, Nuava Nox. What do you know from your
extensive studies
?’

Nuava coughed. The smoke from the braziers was making her chest tight. ‘He made a pact with a demon, and through that made his greatest and his most terrible works. He crafted the Edeian, as well as wielding the powers of a mage. But one day he asked to see the true form of the demon, for he had grown fond of it. When he saw its real face, he went insane.’

The shape of the Prophet was very still now, and the clacking of the bones had stopped. Nuava swallowed hard, wondering if she should keep talking. ‘It was terrifying, they said, and ugly beyond anything mortal. They said that if he were a normal man, he would have been struck blind as well. They said—’

‘That is quite enough, Nuava.’ All the good humour had vanished from the Prophet’s voice. ‘You can leave now.’

Nuava, her nerve finally broken, turned and ran out into the corridor.

Glaciers rose high above them, impossibly blue and shining with bright mirrored light. They were travelling through a narrow canyon, the sides sliced sheer by the passage of ancient mountains. The ground underfoot was made of brittle sheets of snow. Every now and then Sebastian would glance up to see one of the wyverns flying overhead, their long bodies wriggling like eels in a stream. Looking at them, he felt a strange sense of wonder, a tightness in his chest; their skins were a pale shimmering blue, touched here and there with white fur, and their long snouts were narrow and lined with small, peg-like teeth. Their short wings stretched out to either side of their bodies, as taut as sails, and he realised that these creatures felt alive to him in a way he didn’t quite understand. He thought of Ephemeral and her snakes.
Was this blood calling to blood, as she claimed?