The Written (19 page)

After what seemed like hours,
the old man paused to stretch and yawn and rub his eyes. His
eyelids felt like they were burning and the yellow light of the
dying candle was beginning to fade. Without taking his eyes from
the writing on Farden’s back the old healer moved to snuff the
flickering flame. With the back of his hand he knocked it to the
floor where it spat and dribbled wax on the flagstones. The Siren
cursed and bent to pick it up.

He froze.

There was something in the room
behind him. A huge shadow fell over him like a blanket and the old
man shivered with sudden cold. He made a brief squeaking noise as
his throat closed up with fear and scrabbled for the candle.
Whispering voices called his name and he rubbed his eyes again to
try and rid of himself of the shadows dancing around him. He wiped
his face and blood from his nose smeared his fingers. He choked on
acrid smoke and tasted ice, shivered as hands groped at his legs. A
terrified wail broke from the Siren’s throat and he bolted for the
door leaving the candle to die on the floor. Breath clogged at the
very back of his throat and his heart jumped in his chest with
every thundering beat. He groped for the key in the darkness.
Terror gripped him and all he could do was run. He fled down the
dark corridor, listening to the whispers and shrieks biting at his
heels. He skidded and fell into his room, slammed the door, and
groped about in the darkness for his bed, his only refuge. Ghosts
threw the fingers of dead men at his door. They scraped at the
walls and called his name as he quivered beneath a blanket and
several pillows. Dark letters swam around his eyes and sleep flew
from him like crows. They danced and fluttered their terrible black
wings, swarming his room with cawing and scratching, reminding him
of every mistake he had ever made, every bad thing he had ever
done. The old man cried and sobbed, huddled in a ball under the
blanket.

In a dark room down the
corridor, a tallow candle finally burned out on the cold
flagstones. A man breathed heavily in the dark. Farden was dreaming
his way through a deep, healing sleep, and the life slowly started
to return to his weary body.

‘Why am I here?’ asked
Farden.

You tell
me
said the voice. The cat looked at him with the same
deadpan look.

‘I don’t even know this place,’
said Farden, annoyed. He looked up and tried to melt into his
cerulean sky, tried to leave the aching pain in his body
behind.

It’s a little of you, and a
little of me.

‘Well who are you then?’

I’m trying to
help
.

‘If you wanted to help, you’d
get me out of here, you’d help me up and make the pain go away,
you’d get me back to Krauslung and you’d find the book and save
Emaneska.’ Farden sighed, feeling the weight of his sky pushing
down on him. The heat was unbearable this time. ‘I never asked for
this.’

The cat yawned and stretched.
Its skinny black tail swished back and forth through the dust.
We never do
said the deep voice in his
head.
We never ask for this, nor do we ever
complain, we just do what we’re told. Its what people like you and
me do; we fight, and we never ask for anything in
return.

‘Who are you?’ asked Farden. A
wind whined through the desert, a cold cackling wind that whipped
the sand into spirals and eddies.

I’m just like you.

‘You’re nothing like me,’
scoffed Farden.

The voice sounded disappointed
but earnest.
Keep an eye on the weather, Farden,
there’s more to this than first appears. You’ve found the dragons,
now listen to them.

‘Leave me alone, I don’t need
your help. I don’t need anybody,’ said Farden, and he crossed his
arms stubbornly. The whirling sand whipped his face, and in the
spinning dust he discerned faces, faces of Cheska, of Durnus, of
Vice, and an old face that he hadn’t seen in a very long time. Grit
burned his eyes, and hot tears were stolen by the wind.

As you wish. Keep an eye on the
weather.

Something rustled near him. Hay
scattered and an animal snuffled. Farden kept his eyes tightly
closed. His body ached in a thousand places and wrists were
screaming against the iron shackles. Straw pricked his back and the
wall behind his head was ice-cold. Farden could feel the heat of a
fever burning his forehead, and he slowly raised a hand to his skin
to see for himself. Chains encircled his wrists, and his vambraces
were gone. He was surprised to feel that he still wore his cloak,
ripped and torn as it was, but the sackcloth tunic he wore under it
felt strange and rough. He blithely wondered where his old one was,
and who had dressed him, but a ripple of sickening dizziness
brought him back to the matter at hand. He clenched his jaw and
slowly, ever so slowly, opened his eyes to peer around the
unfamiliar chamber. There was a disgusting stench in the air.

The room was forged from grey
granite walls, square and low with a matching floor, and hay was
strewn about him. The only entrance was apparently a stout pine
door. The source of the smell was an upturned bucket in the corner.
Its foul contents lay in a puddle on the floor. A whispering came
from his right, and a nervous rattling of shackles. Farden turned
his head gradually, trepidation growing in his throbbing heart. A
cackle echoed in the cell.

Chained to the wall about six
feet from him sat a dishevelled character, a mere shell of a Siren
man inside which lunacy had taken up residence. Wide green platters
of rapt madness were now peering out from the place where eyes used
to be, and a wide curve of yellow teeth squatted behind dangling
tendrils of matted grey hair thick with filth and dung. The Siren
cackled and spat, a thin tongue darted from behind his psychotic
smile.

‘The… mage! Awake from sleep,
dark dark sleep,’ he laughed, cross-eyed.

Farden backed further away from
the raving mad man. It was like stepping back in time to a painful
memory. He had seen this before, in his own uncle the last time he
had seen him, and the sharp similarity of it made him feel sick.
The man foamed at the mouth, grinning and pawing at the mage. The
Book carved into a Written’s back was strictly not for reading, and
the raw magick in the script could warp the mind of a weaker
person. There was a reason the tattoo was placed on the shoulders
and back, and the Written were sworn to keep it concealed at all
times, hence why Farden was so keen to keep inquisitive people such
as Elessi out of harm’s way.

The mad siren kept reaching out
to him, rolling his eyes madly. The resemblance to his uncle was
unsettling, a dark memory dug up and dumped at his feet. His broken
fingernails found cracks in the granite floor and left bloody
scrapes on the stone.

‘Where’d you go mage? Where’d
you go? Dark dreams you had…dark daemon dreams!’ He hooted, and
then muttered to himself. ‘Dreamdreamdream, stuck in a desert.’

‘Be quiet!’ Farden shouted and
the man twitched and snuffled.

‘Hah! I’ve read your mind! Felt
the lines on your back, felt the writing on my fingers calling to
me.’ The man grinned a scaly smile so wide Farden thought he might
break his face.

‘Silence!’

All of a sudden there was a
bang on the door, and the heavy bolts slid from their holes. Half a
dozen guards burst through the wide doorway and rushed in to grab
the two prisoners. A soldier hit the mad Siren around the head with
a club and he fell to the floor with a cry.

‘Do not move!’ Another shouted
inches from Farden’s face, and the mage froze. Heavy keys jiggled
in the locks around his wrists and he fell to the floor with a
flurry of hay. Farden was roughly hauled upright and dragged from
the room, with the shouts of his crazy cellmate ringing down the
corridor.

‘Beware the dragons mage!
They’ll steal your soul!’ He was silenced by a kick.

‘Where are you taking me?’
Farden coughed weakly. His body screamed out to him in pain.

‘Shut it, Arka, He wants to
speak with you,’ the man said from a mouth ringed with blue
scales.

‘Who… ?’ managed Farden.

The Siren narrowed his eyes at
the beaten mage. ‘No more questions!’ he elbowed him hard in an
already burning rib.

Farden was silent for the rest
of the journey, or dragging, and drifted in and out of a feverish
consciousness. He was manhandled up steps and through corridors,
along bridges and across bustling thoroughfares filled with gawking
Siren citizens. Pain from a hundred cuts and bruises blurred with
his fever as he was hauled onto a wide bridge that arched over a
massive cave carpeted by rolling fields. The dark walls rose
upwards and culminated in a huge ring of rocks like a crater.
Daylight surged through the opening high above Farden’s head and he
could see the snow drifting gently through the cold air. As the
party crossed the long road he managed to glimpse looks at the
farms and buildings below him. Countless people milled around below
them like ants, wandering through the furrowed fields and
farmhouses, down lanes and curving roads.

A good half an hour later
Farden was dumped unceremoniously at the top of a flight of stairs.
Cold wind messed with his hair and he tried to push his head up to
see, but a guard yanked him backwards, and the refreshing mountain
air was taken away. Farden was dragged again, this time somewhere
that swung and wallowed as if he floated. There was a creaking and
he felt as though he were moving upwards. The mage tried to reserve
his strength for whatever was coming, so he kept his eyes shut and
concentrated on staying conscious.

After a while he was hauled
across what felt like a cold shiny floor and left in a foetal
position. All was silent. Behind him a large door was slammed and
the sound of boots ceased. Light shimmered behind Farden’s eyelids,
and he waited.

‘Can you stand?’ asked a
massive booming voice.

Farden lay still and kept his
eyes closed. Feeling his fingers stretch out beneath him he pushed
himself up shakily. Every limb wailed in protest. He cursed under
his breath and looked for the first time at his surroundings.

There had not been many times
in his life that Farden had felt such awe and shock, and been
speechless because of his surroundings. This was one of those
times. The humbled mage felt beyond tiny as he gazed upwards at a
massive domed roof that seemed to tower effortlessly hundreds of
feet above him. Thin shafts of bright light poked through the tough
granite rock like holes pierced in a grey blanket and a huge
skylight punctured the far side of the ceiling, a massive doorway
to the snowy skies outside. At least a thousand ledges were carved
into the rock, all over the hall, huge sconces carved from the
stone that ran up and along the walls like countless honeycombed
nests. The candlelight of hundreds of lamps flickered all around
him, and dragons, scores of dragons, filled the lower ledges of the
gigantic hall. They squatted and perched on piles of soft hay,
surrounded by little candles and pitchers of water and accompanied
by their riders. Farden noticed, with a somewhat unexpected dismay,
that only half the nests in the cave seemed to be occupied, dark
without their candles and visitors. He wondered what this hall
would have looked like before the war. The huge lizards shuffled
and shifted all around him, and the sound of their breathing and
their dragon-riders whispering to each other was deafening. The
smell of reptile and woodsmoke was a strange mix, but welcome after
the stench of his cell. A ring of guards surrounded him and watched
him carefully, but the mage’s eyes were now fixed on what he saw
before him.

There, laying on a huge wooden
bed of autumn leaves, spotlighted by a lone shaft of sunlight, was
the Old Dragon, Farfallen. He shone with a warm gold light,
vibrating with an ancient magick Farden did not fully understand.
The mage’s head swam between disbelief and bewilderment. Vice had
killed the Old Dragon, years ago in the battle of Ragjarak, and yet
here he was, sitting calmly on his roost with his dragon-rider
beside him.

Farfallen’s Siren was a tall
thin willow of a woman. Her stern lightning face was like a thin
blade, serious and commanding. Her jaw was set and her thin hands
were neatly folded behind her back. The woman’s long green dress
draped over her incredibly slender body and fell to the floor like
a moss-covered tree branch. Her long autumn-gold hair was tied back
apart from two long strands that fell in front of each ear, long
like the fangs of a sabre cat. She seemed to have a habit of
flaring her nostrils, whether through irritation or tendency,
Farden could not tell. Golden scales covered her cheekbones, and
they ran in stripes up her neck to meet her chin. Her yellow eyes
pierced Farden’s and he felt himself blinking weakly even in the
low light.

The great dragon stirred loudly
behind her and she turned. He stretched out one colossal gold wing
briefly like a huge canvas and blinked each golden eye separately.
They were like black orbs flecked with liquid gold and stardust.
Farden felt like falling into them. Farfallen finished stretching
and watched the quiet mage impassively. A lizard tongue graced
sharp teeth and flicked over mottled lips.

‘Well met and good wishes
stranger. Can you speak?’ His voice rumbled again like distant
thunder.

‘Yes sire,’ croaked Farden.

‘From where did you come from
thief?’ His dragon-rider, the stern woman, spat.

‘Be calm, Svarta. Speak, guest,
tell us,’ Farfallen lifted a huge claw to silence her and then
nodded for him to carry on.

Farden took a deep breath and
attempted a shaky bow. ‘My name is Farden, I am an Arka mage sent
here to speak with the Siren council. My masters wish you all kind
greetings and express their desire to bring peace between our two
people,’ he said. Farden felt dizzy under the gaze of the dragons.
There was a pause.