The Iron Ghost (49 page)

‘You believe yourself my equal, is that it?’

Joah had shaken his head, too late realising the dangers of this path. ‘I only wish to know you. To know everything about you.’

The demon had leaned down as if to kiss him. ‘Then know me,’ she’d said, and her face changed.

Joah dropped to the metal floor, screaming and screaming. There was a bright slither of pain across his cheek as the burns there were torn open, and a hot flood as blood streamed from his nose, but it was nothing to the dark haemorrhaging in his mind. He was coming away from himself, cast out, floating into an empty night sky where nothing waited for him but
that
, the demon’s face that waited for him in every shadow, in every mirror, in every breath, that tore away his skin and nested in his throat, that grew inside him and turned everything to worms, that . . .

A small cool hand settled on his brow and abruptly he was back, lying awkwardly on the floor of the central room of the Rivener. The demon knelt over him in its child form, its face blank and unconcerned. Joah was sweating and shivering all over, and his mouth and beard were covered in blood.

‘There, there,’ said Ip, absently. ‘I think you will see things a little clearer now, yes?’

It took him a moment to find his voice.

‘Yes,’ he said eventually. He sat up. ‘I . . . it is difficult for me, seeing you like this.’ Joah paused, wondering if this sudden burst of honesty would cost him his life. ‘You are not . . . as you were.’

The girl frowned. ‘That is true enough. This vessel is not ideal, Joah, but it will change. Once we are done here we can journey back to Relios and seek out the last of my cults. There will be willing vessels there and I will be appealing to you once more. But you must listen to me. This new mage is not your friend. He is not your concern. And we have much to do.’

Joah got to his feet shakily. From outside the patter of missiles from the Skalds and their werkens continued, while the spells in his head hung in suspension, waiting for him to push the Edenier through them again. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, peering at the bloody streak that appeared there. His nose had stopped bleeding when Bezcavar had placed Ip’s hand on his head.

‘Much to do,’ he agreed. ‘And what are we to do first, Prince of Wounds?’

‘Tamlyn Nox still lives.’ The girl walked away from him and over to the glass windows. She traced one of the cracks with her finger. ‘She has hounded me for the last two weeks, but she couldn’t find me in the end. I would like to repay her attentiveness.’

‘Then we shall go and find her.’

Joah immersed himself back into the web of spells, and the Rivener lumbered forward.

‘Barlow! Barlow, where are you?’

There was no answer. The quarry was still hidden behind the trees. The last sliver of Heart-Stone was in a pouch resting against her chest. There would still be time. Tamlyn opened her mouth to shout again – no longer knowing why she shouted, really, just aware that she wanted to see another human being – when the forest around her began to tremble. Snow pattered down from the tops of trees and birds fled into the sky in a sudden cacophony. Tamlyn turned, already knowing what she would see.

The monstrous creature, the thing that was Joah Demonsworn returned, loomed over the tops of the trees, the clutch of violet eyes hanging in the air like alien moons.

Tamlyn threw everything into a single command – run! The werken sped off and immediately the creature was on her. She heard the explosive crash as tree after tree was ripped from its path, saw the debris of branches and earth flying past her. Any moment now, it could reach down and take her, any moment now, unless she got to the quarry.

In seconds she was out past the treeline and the secret pit gaped away in front of her. At first she could see no one, and then Barlow’s portly form appeared at the door in the middle of the screen. Even from that distance, Tamlyn could see the look of terror on the woman’s face.

‘Is it ready?’ she screamed.

Barlow opened her mouth, and then shut it again, before disappearing behind the screen.

‘Damn you, Barlow!’

The werken scrambled forward, ignoring the paths now and heading directly down the side of the quarry, sending up dust and powdered rock. A shadow passed over them, and Tamlyn kept her eyes narrowed at the screen. It would be waiting for her there – her greatest project, the final werken. There was a low
crump
as Joah’s monster put its weight on the area of the pit that had already been extensively mined, and then there was a roaring in Tamlyn’s ears, a confused sensation of weightlessness, and sudden bright agony as the skin on the left side of her face was abruptly torn away by the gravelled floor of the pit. The creature had struck out at her, knocking her clean off her werken to land some distance away. Blood stung her eyes as she sat up.

‘I . . . what . . .?’

Her werken, the one that she had designed to be shaped like a cat and faster than any other, was a pile of broken, scattered rubble. Tamlyn herself was twenty feet away, although closer to the screen than she had been. The monster, all rock and black iron and veins of Edeian, was watching her, its strangely insectile head turned in her direction.

‘Barlow!’ Tamlyn winced. She’d broken something deep inside. She had to hope it was only a rib or two. ‘I’m coming, Barlow, and if it isn’t ready I will skin you myself!’

Keeping half an eye on the monster she dragged herself to her feet, ignoring the sharp pain in her chest and the terrible stinging agony of her face – what was left of it – and half fell, half ran the rest of the way to the screen.

‘Tamlyn?’ Barlow was at the door again, her eyes wide and her face paper-white. At the sight of Tamlyn she took an involuntary step backwards. ‘What are you . . .?’

‘Run!’

But it was too late. Darkness passed over them and Tamlyn found she could feel the weight of the thing above her, like an impossible mountain hanging in the sky. In her desperation she tried to pull the pouch from its cord and pass it to Barlow –
our last chance
– but before her fingers found it the stone claw of Joah’s monster closed around her, lifting her off her feet and into the air. She saw Barlow’s face turned up, slack with terror, and then the thing squeezed. The minor pain of her broken ribs was brushed aside in this new agony, and Tamlyn Nox screamed until she had no more air left in her lungs. There was blood in her mouth, hot and salty.

The pressure eased off slightly and she looked around as best she could. There were the thing’s eyes, and now that she was this close she could see that they were just round glass windows, lit from within with sickly purple light. She thought she could see shapes beyond the glass, but her vision was growing dark around the edges.

‘Fuck you,’ she said, before spitting a mouthful of blood onto the creature’s stone fist. ‘Fuck you and the monster you rode in on.’

The claw tightened once more around her body, crushing bone against bone, and then the monster threw her out across the tops of the trees.

‘Are you sure about this?’

Frith looked her steadily in the eye, and it took all of Wydrin’s self-control not to wince. The magical outburst at Temerayne, the journey back across the icy wastes to Skaldshollow, the last spells to locate Joah Demonsworn; they had all taken a terrible toll on the young lord, and now he looked close to death, his skin thin and bruised, his hands trembling. But his eyes, still the colour of storm clouds, were unwavering.

‘I can do this,’ he said, and she tried not to notice the effort it cost him just to speak. ‘It is not a spell I have been confident with in the past, but I have been thinking on it, on the words . . .’ He paused to take a breath. ‘As mad as he is, Joah showed me an awful lot during my time as his prisoner. I believe I can get us inside there. You, me and Sebastian. As I moved us before, at the Citadel.’

They were camped within a copse of trees at the top of the low sloping hill to the south-west of Skaldshollow. From their vantage point they could see the jagged hole the Rivener had torn in the southern wall, the deep grooves in the rock it had made as it scrabbled against the stones for purchase, and they could see the Rivener itself, curled awkwardly around the Tower of Waking like an attentive dog. It was full night now, and the city was almost completely dark, save for the violet eyes of the Rivener and the orange glow of a few fires still burning. When they had first come upon that view in the last smears of evening light, Nuava had dropped to her knees in the snow.

‘Where are my people?’ she had said eventually. ‘Have they all run away?’

They could see no one, and no tracks. The city was eerily quiet.

‘He is holding them there,’ Frith had answered, with a certainty Wydrin didn’t bother to question. ‘Those that are still alive, at least.’

Now Nuava was sleeping fitfully, curled up under a blanket next to Mendrick. Prince Dallen had melted away into the woods, intending to scout out the immediate location. Sebastian, tending their small fire, shook his head.

‘This will have to be entirely about surprise and misdirection,’ he said. ‘If he can stop us in our tracks with a single word, then we will have very little time to do this.’ The god-blade lay on the ground next to him. The firelight sent strange ripples of colour across its curious metal.
Not metal,
Wydrin corrected herself.
Not if what Sebastian says is true.
‘We will have to hope that our sudden appearance will throw him off his guard.’

‘Do not worry,’ said Frith. ‘I have no doubt Joah will be very surprised to see my face again.’ He shifted his weight, wincing as he did so. ‘He did seem to develop a certain fascination with me.’

‘But you must let us do the work,’ said Wydrin. ‘You can’t go in there all lit up with fireballs and who knows what else. You don’t have the strength.’

Frith frowned at that. ‘Indeed. Since I am apparently so frail now, you will not mind if I get some sleep?’

Wydrin sat back on her haunches. ‘We make our move in the hour before dawn. Be ready.’

Frith turned his back on them, covering himself over with his ragged cloak. Wydrin waited for his breathing to even out, which didn’t take long at all.

‘He is exhausted,’ she commented to Sebastian. ‘Even just that small conversation wore him out. He doesn’t remember much about our flight from Temerayne, or the journey from Turningspear.’ She pulled a twig up from the ground and used it to push some shapes into the mud. ‘I asked him, and he remembers the sea monster that came for us, but not much else.’

They fell silent for a few moments, the only sound the brittle crackle of the fire and the distant watery drip of snow melting somewhere beyond the trees.

‘How did we get into this mess?’ Sebastian said eventually. He caught Wydrin’s eye and smiled faintly. ‘Even for us, this seems like an especially doomed mission. If Joah is anywhere other than right in front of me, perhaps helpfully bearing his neck for the sword, then I can only see this going one way. Our own mage can offer very little help.’

Wydrin stared at the fire, letting herself become lost in the flames. The heat was a balm against her wind-chapped face.

‘We have to try, Seb. What choice do we have?’

‘I thought we always had a choice.’

She glanced up at him and saw that he was smiling at her, but his eyes were sad.

‘Perhaps you missed the bit about the mad mage with a device that tears the souls from people?’ Wydrin winked at him. ‘Or maybe you thought that was a particularly strange dream you had.’

‘Quite. But I seem to remember that there was a problem with a dragon before, and there was some question over what we would do about it, because we weren’t getting paid, and there was this big army in the way, and you only had the one dagger.’ Sebastian waved a hand airily, as if reciting a list of groceries. ‘My point is, Wyd, that we seem to be racing after Joah Demonsworn by choice. Even if we retrieve the Heart-Stone intact it will do Skaldshollow no good at all now, and I’m getting the impression that the copper promise isn’t what this is about.’

Wydrin returned to poking the earth with her twig. ‘Well. You know. We’re the ones who can sort this out. Who else is going to do it? People will die if we don’t. We’re the Black Feather Three.’ Sebastian grinned at her. ‘All right, shut up. All I know is, that bastard has to pay. For Bors, for Frith, and for the rest of Skaldshollow. I’m not letting it end this way.’

Dallen approached from the darkness, stepping up to the fire warily. Seeing the look that passed between him and Sebastian, Wydrin stood up and stretched her arms above her head until her shoulders clicked, and told them both that she needed to go for a piss. She glanced only briefly at Frith’s sleeping form before she moved off into the dark, walking slowly to let her eyes adjust to the shadows.

When she was some distance from their camp, she heard Mendrick’s voice in her head.

You intend to go through with this, then?

She stopped, keeping herself utterly still, before remembering that such evasive tactics would mean very little to the werken.

It’s a plan
, she told him.
I think it’s worth a shot.

And what do you suppose your companions would think of this plan?

Wydrin grinned to herself in the dark, glad that no one else could see the desperation of it.

Ah, they wouldn’t know a decent plan if it bit them on the arse.

Dallen paced around the fire in a wide circle, his arms crossed over his chest. His movements were precise, controlled.
There is a man who has taught himself to conceal his emotions
, thought Sebastian.
A vital skill in King Aristees’ court, no doubt.

‘You truly intend to go without me?’

Sebastian stood up. The sleeping forms of Nuava and Frith were still. He could hear a faint whistling snore coming from the girl.

‘We need you here, Dallen.’ Sebastian walked around the fire towards him. ‘If this doesn’t work, then you will have to go and speak to your father. I know how unpleasant that will be.’