Dead Stars - Part One (The Emaneska Series) (18 page)

The shack itself was a makeshift house of brick, gathered driftwood, stolen doors, and pilfered iron sheets. It had four windows, two on the front, and two on the back, and a door that swung open at a drunken angle. The windows had been filled with borrowed glass, and behind them, thick blue curtains had been drawn. Moss gave the place a slightly greenish hue. Rust painted whatever metal had bared its face. Seagull droppings and sand coated the roof and the stubby chimney. Between the gaps in its three stone steps, patches of curious molluscs shone bright red and yellow, adding a little vibrancy to the jumbled-up shack and the overcast sky.

The storms had almost abated by the time Farden reached his little house. The flint road had died a few miles back, fading into the earth, but even in the remote wilds Farden had never failed to find his abode. He’d had a decade to practise, after all, and besides, he always had the tree to rely on.

He looked up through its branches as he passed underneath it, as he always did. An ash tree, so he had been told by Traffyd. A spindly, skeletal thing, he was sure he had never seen it blossom, not in all the years he had lived beside it. The tree itself was unremarkable. It was just an average tree, but what was strange about it was why such a thing had decided to grow here, on the edge of a barren moorland, without so much as an explanation nor a hint of how. There were no other trees for miles around. There weren’t even any gorse bushes nearby, just sharp-tongued grass. Farden had often puzzled over this on long walks and lonely days, and the answer had always eluded him.

The mage left the tree behind and walked down the hill to the shore and his shack. Two seagulls were perching on its roof. They looked half-asleep. Their long yellow and red beaks were gently resting on each other’s backs. Farden clapped loudly to shoo them away, and then went inside his little house.

The smell of mould was the first thing to hit him. He always noticed it after spending a long period away. He sniffed and grimaced; he would soon come to ignore it. He set his pot of rabbit stew on a nearby, and rather wonky, table, and then threw his haversack onto the cot of straw and cloth he called a bed. The haversack clanked as it landed.

The shack was barely big enough to swing a cat in. It couldn’t have measured more than twelve foot by eight in total, and the roof was low enough that if Farden jumped in the right place he could have made himself a new skylight. There was a half-stove, half-fireplace on one side of the room. Farden sat down in front of it. Even after all these years, his first habit was to reach out and spread his hands over the dry wood he had left inside it, but he caught himself, and swore as a shiver of pain ran across his forehead and down his back. Instead, he dug flint and tinder out of his pocket, drew his knife, and after a few moments, he had a crackling fire.

Before he could get comfy, Farden went to the bed to open up his haversack. He fished around in between clothes and supplies until he found his vambraces. Rolling up his sleeves, he swiftly put his hands into both of them and felt the cold metal contract around his skin, pinching it ever so lightly until it adjusted to him. Farden stood there for a moment, letting the cold seep across his forearms.

When he was done, he knelt down and used his fingernails to pry one of the rickety floorboards from its rusty nails. The floorboard came up easily, and he rolled it aside to reveal four pieces of red and gold armour: a pair of greaves and a pair of gauntlets, all covered in a thin film of dust. Farden grabbed them greedily. He clapped the greaves to his legs and then slid the gauntlets over his hands. They were cold too, and the mage drank it in.

He lingered there for a few moments, eyes closed and savouring the metallic kiss of his armour against his rain-battered skin, before getting up and sitting himself in front of the fire.

About nine years before he had somehow managed to salvage an armchair from a ship that had wrecked itself several miles down the coast. If one had looked very closely at the shack and its innards, they probably would have spotted several more things that had been pilfered from the stricken ship, such as the ropes tying the roof together, the glass from an iron porthole, a lobster trap serving as a basket. Farden had liberated them all. The armchair had been in the captain’s cabin, with a dead captain in it. It had taken several months to get the smell out of the threadbare cloth.

Farden sat down with a groan and kicked off his boots so he could warm his toes on the growing fire. He was teetering on the edge of exhaustion. Even the cold, sweet feeling seeping into his veins from the Scalussen armour could not stop his eyelids from drooping. He let his fingernail wander between the folds and scales of his left vambrace. He closed his eyes and tried to picture the breastplate Kiltyrin had somehow got his claws on, but all he could see in his tumultuous mind was the Duke’s smug face, and the etching of a beetle.

Farden clenched his fist and listened to the cold metal whisper. Was it all a dream? A psychosomatic effect from his intense desire for them to be something special? Farden had asked that question countless times. From what he remembered, his uncle had been oblivious to the feeling of the gauntlets and the greaves. Farden pinched the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb and tried to clear his busy mind. Exhausted he might have been, but he needed to write this down before he forgot. With a sigh, he reached down the side of the armchair and felt around for his notebook and his stick of charcoal. But instead of a notebook, he found something hairy instead. He tested it with a squeeze and was rewarded with a squeak.

Whiskers.

The rat scuttled up the side of Farden’s armchair and onto his rain-wet lap. It sat back on its haunches and tail and sniffed the air in the way that rats do: head back, snout out, bobbing up and down. Farden reached out and cupped his hand and the big rat jumped in. He was getting fat in his old age. And old he was.

Whiskers had come with the armchair. It had shocked Farden no end to find a rat perched on his shoulder one afternoon. The beast had seemed perfectly tame, and industrious too. It had fashioned itself quite a warren in the bowels of the chair. He had often wondered if the captain of the ship had known about him, trained him even. Now he was Farden’s tailed nuisance. The animal had refused to leave, no matter how many times the mage had shooed him off or tried to scare him away. He had even carried him back to the ship and left him there, but lo and behold, three days later, the rat turned up again, sitting comfortably inside one of Farden’s Scalussen gauntlets. And that was how Farden had been given his idea.

Farden put the black rat on his shoulder and reached down to the side of the armchair where he kept his notebook. He lifted it up with a heave and laid it out on the nearby lobster pot. The notebook was more of a tome than a book. It bulged with scraps of parchment and snippets snatched from scrolls. Places, names, histories, all here, and every single word pointing in one direction of thought and one direction only: Scalussen. Durnus would have been proud.

Farden lifted its fraying cover and pried a small scrap of charcoal from a pouch glued onto its underside. He thumbed through the bedraggled and mouldy pages until he finally got to where he had left off, only a month before. With Whiskers watching intently, the mage began to scribble:

Whiskers still as fit as ever. No more grey in his coat. His nest inside one of my gauntlets seems to have stopped him ageing for good. It must be at least nine years now. For all I know, he’s the oldest rat in history.

The bastard duke has found himself some armour. breastplate no less. Says it was a present from somebody in the Crumbled Empire. Lies. I don’t trust it for a second. I’ll have to add him to the list of owners and possibles.

Is it real? one of the nine? I can tell if I can touch it, but he watches me like a hawk. He knows something.
Be careful
.

He knows the pieces of the Nine are somewhere, and they exist. Don’t know who he’s been listening to, but he’s right.
Dangerous
.

Need to examine the sketches for any sign of beetles on armour. Never seen that before. Usually bastions, sabre-cats, wolves. Only have four pictures so not impossible.

Must keep mine as hidden as possible.

If only I had the grimsayer… I could see if his body had the armour… where he might be…

That last sentence surprised him. He had thought of that strange book many times in the past, but it hadn’t crossed his mind in years. He could barely remember what it looked like. It was a silly notion, anyway. The book was locked up in Nelska. Even if he did have it, he didn’t know the name of the Knight whose armour he wore. Useless.

Farden shook his head and reached down to the other side of the armchair to retrieve a broken, jagged slice of mirror. He grimaced, but forced himself to check his temples, hair, and face before putting the mirror aside and scribbling some more notes:

few more greys. Skin fine. Scars still there. Time running out. No magick still.
Good.
Will scribe more tonight.

Farden tossed the charcoal into the centre of the page and slammed the book shut. Whiskers squeaked in his ear. The mage sighed and stared out of the window at the wind-blown sea. His mind was still churning. Usually the note taking, like his counting of his steps, kept him distracted for a while. The sad truth of it was this: that if a man was bound by his actions, then Farden was tethered and chained by his thoughts.

Three things cleared his mind those days: the cold, quiet purpose of a kill; Jeasin, his blind favourite who looked like his lost Cheska; and lastly, the bitter acridity of a mouthful of nevermar smoke. His old favourite. The first two, aside from mental distraction, were means to his ends.

His work for the Duke gave him an iota of purpose at least. Even as questionable as it was, the mage had become used to it. It kept him busy. He had lied to Kiltyrin in Tayn. Whatever morals and sense of higher calling he’d had before had all but been numbed. Numbed as a blizzard numbs a lost traveller. It simply put coin in his hand. Coin that made the other two possible.

Jeasin satisfied the cravings that any lonely man felt and more besides. Somehow, his times with her managed to patch the gaping, dusty hole in his heart, if only for a little while. None of the other girls over the years had quite managed it. Maybe it was because of her appearance, maybe her brusque coldness, but somehow, she did.

But it was the third of these things that formed his true crutch, his true bolt-hole and sanctuary, as it always had been through the years. Nothing decimated thoughts and dark minds like the intoxicating, smoky tendrils of nevermar. Most of all, it kept his magick away, and that alone was precious. Farden had realised a long time ago that magick had been the root of all his problems. The wheels of the cart of sorrow. Without magick, he would never have been in this position. He wouldn’t have been sat there, hunched over a lobster pot, staring out at the waves rolling back and forth like windblown shale.

Farden growled bitterly at himself, and stood up. Placing Whiskers gently on the arm of his chair, he briefly stoked the fire and then wandered to the opposite end of the shack, where a large cabinet had been nailed to the wall. Farden took his knife from its sheath and then opened the cabinet doors. Inside, fifty candles had been crammed onto four shelves, and almost all of them had a face.

Some were long faces with bulging eyes, earlier attempts by the looks of them, while later ones exhibited freckles, wrinkles, even hair. Some stern looking ones had been half-melted, so that their faces were caught in the midst of their ghastly death-throes. Their eyes sagged, their features twisted, globules of wax residue clamping their mouths shut.

Farden used his knife to pry a chubby, half-melted one from the shelf. Squinting, he examined its unfinished features and then closed the cabinet. He walked to the back door and undid its latch. The mage kicked it open with his heel, and then, ignoring his lack of boots and the wild weather, he sauntered out onto the rocks and down onto the sea-battered spit of sand that arced into the frothing sea. The wind tugged at him, but he ignored it too. He paced across the gritty yellow sand, making sure to stamp on every single discarded seashell he could find, and then stood at the water’s edge, where the olive seaweed desperately tried to escape the pounding of the waves. Farden stood there for a moment to eye the receding storm, and then began to whittle the unfinished face of his fat little candle.

When his feet had gone numb, and the stump of the finger on his left hand throbbed with the cold, he wandered back indoors. He shut the door firmly behind him and slumped into his armchair. Whiskers had nibbled the twine from the pot of stew and was currently fishing around inside it, using his tail to hook himself to the side of the pot lest he fall in. Farden snorted.
Clever rat.

It was growing dark outside now, and the fire was going out. Farden examined the face he had carved into his candle. It was a chubby face, with jowls that hung beside its pursed mouth like curtains. A bulbous nose hovered above them, and squinting eyes above that. It stared at the mage with a mixture of distaste and judgement. Farden returned its haughty gaze and set it on the upturned lobster pot while he stoked the fire and removed his cloak. He returned to the armchair with a pipe, a length of smouldering twig, and a cloth bag.

Farden had made himself wait long enough.

He lit the candle with the twig and tossed it back in the fire. The little face began to sweat. It was the work of a moment to fill the bowl of his pipe with the precious nevermar. He made each little movement of his fingers meticulous and careful, in case he accidentally lost even the tiniest scrap. The smell of it, even now, made his mouth water. Farden took the candle, its face already sagging, and held it over the bowl.

Farden took a deep breath, and after setting the dying candle back onto the lobster pot, he melted into the armchair. Fingers of warm smoke clutched his brain, and he felt his face go numb as the feeling of the nevermar spread outwards from his lips, to his cheeks, to his neck, and down. Down. Down into his chest, until he was staring at the molten face of the candle through blurry eyes. It curled its lip at him until the very last moment.