Dead Stars - Part Two (The Emaneska Series) (23 page)

Tyrfing wore a stern face. ‘You Sirens have kept very quiet about this,’ he said.

‘It is not a power that one should brag about.’

Farden was talking to the book again. ‘Show me Elessi.’

The book replied with a flick of pages. Entire sections as thick as thumbs turned themselves over in great big flaps and thuds. The book was nearing its end when it suddenly stopped. The lights began to weave, though this time they were uncertain of themselves. They would take it in turns to stutter and flash, scrawling a lock of curled hair here, the angle of an elbow there. The onlookers squinted and peered as each feature became apparent. Even though the image never seemed to quite reach completion, and despite it flickering like a wind-harried candle, it was easy to see that it was Elessi. She looked serene and calm. The lights flicked back and forth, constantly adjusting her feet.

‘She’s walking,’ Farden muttered, realising what the lights were doing.

It was easy to see that despite his frustration, Tyrfing was spellbound. ‘Walking where?’

The Grimsayer answered with a muttering heave and then a solid bang as the entire weight of the book slammed on Elessi’s head and fell open at its very first page. Even before the dust had cleared, the lights quickly went to work, drawing their subject. This time it was not a creature, not a person, but thin spires of rock arranged in little crowns and circles of five or four. They reared up from the page like the spines along a dragon’s back. There were nine clusters of them altogether, spread haphazardly across the page. Some lay broken and smashed, while others were wrapped in moss and upended. Only three seemed perfect. A memory tugged at Farden. He couldn’t quite pin it down.

‘What are they?’ asked Eyrum.

‘I feel I should know, but I don’t,’ Farden replied. The Grimsayer rustled its pages. It was a very disturbing sound.

‘Gates to the other side perhaps. Like elf wells,’ Tyrfing suggested.

‘Maybe. Whatever they are, Elessi is going towards one.’

‘Well, perhaps this book can enlighten us on where the nearest one is,’ Tyrfing thought aloud. He prodded one of the brighter clusters of stone with a finger. ‘One like this.’

Eyrum sighed. ‘The Grimsayer does not wor…’ he began, but his words failed him. The Grimsayer apparently had other ideas. The lights began to zip and flutter across the page, drawing a mountain, their mountain, then a shoreline running and flying southwest, almost faster than their eyes could follow. They saw the fortress of Ragjarak, then icebergs and the mountainous waves that crashed against them. Soon the lights were drawing flat, sweeping lines of blank ice fields and bold hills, frozen waterfalls and trees trapped in an armour of snow. As the lights began to trace the jagged lines of foothills and colossal mountain crags, they stopped. While one kept the scenery at bay, the other flit about almost lazily, as if tired, sketching a ring of five thin monoliths.

Farden turned around to look at the big Siren. ‘Apparently it does.’

‘Eyrum!’ a shout barrelled down the hallway. It was swiftly accompanied by a dull boom. ‘We’ve company!’

‘Blast it all!’ Eyrum snarled, before sprinting back up the corridor.

Tyrfing was already running after him. ‘Come on, Farden! We’ll be needed.’

Farden nodded and instinctively checked his armour. His fingers grasped his vambraces and he froze. ‘I’ll be right behind you!’ he lied, turning back to spread his hands over the Grimsayer’s first page instead. He licked his lips. ‘Show me the ninth,’ he whispered to the lights. ‘Show me the last knight.’ The lights hesitated, unsure of what to do. ‘Show me the ninth Scalussen knight! Come on, show me where he is.’ Farden tapped the pages eagerly as the lights momentarily shivered, but it was just that; a teasing little flutter. They swam back and forth in a slow figure-of-eight. Farden could imagine the little things shrugging at him.

‘Farden!’ shouted his uncle.

‘Agh,’ Farden grunted, unable to tear himself away.

‘Move!’

‘I’m coming!’

There are moments in a person’s life where the mind experiences an extraordinary moment of thoughtlessness, of pure action, as if the clouds have opened and the sunlight has poured in. For that brief moment, muscles are given the freedom to do what they do best, to move, and the mind can only sit back and watch. Ethics, morals, judgement, they are all barged aside as undiluted instinct comes sprinting through. This was one of those moments for Farden.

The mage slammed the Grimsayer shut and drove his arms under its scaly cover. He could feel his back twinge in protest as he heaved, but he ignored it. There was a crackle as the book was forced to face its own weight. Farden begged for it not to disintegrate. He pulled it tight to his chest, arms out flat, and waddled backwards.
Heavy
was not a word that did the big tome justice. Even with his elbows at his ribs the book still nudged his throat.

‘What in gods’ name are you possibly doing now?!’ Tyrfing bellowed, seeing the shape of the silhouette running towards him.

Farden barged past, toting Grimsayer and all. ‘Who knew a book of ghosts could weigh this much!’ he yelled as he passed. The Arkmage was flabbergasted at the sheer audacity of it all. He slapped a nearby bookshelf with rage.

‘
How
are we possibly related?’ he shouted in utter despair.

Farden had already disappeared behind a winding corner, but his retort came back just fine. ‘I’ve been asking myself that for years!’

Of Ghostgates

“The Scribe is a curious man. Suspiciously old in my mind. Longevity comes at a cost, so they say, and I see no cost to him, save for the burden of torturing our hopeful mages with his needles, and I would hazard a guess that he enjoys that. Some whisper that he drinks daemon-blood, that that’s what keeps him alive, like in the old eddas and tales. Rubbish, I say, preposterous. Daemon-blood doesn’t exist. You’d have to find a daemon first…’

Excerpt from Arkmage Helyard’s diary, found after his death in 889

‘T
wo sixes. One blade.’

Roiks lifted his hand to smite the table in outrage, a long drawn out
F
sound hovering on his lips. ‘Ffffff…’ he began, but the female company changed his mind, ‘…fffbloody hell, woman. How do ye do it?’

‘Luck?’ Lerel chuckled.

Roiks scowled. ‘Tricks, I say. Magick and the like. I ‘eard about you and that Arkmage.’

‘A bitter loser, Roiks, as always,’ Lerel winked. A veritable hill of wooden coins, all painted different pastel hues, sat in front of her. Around it her winning card hands were spread, fanned out, each a little trophy, so the conquered Roiks and Loki could count how many times they had been so coldly and swiftly trounced.

‘What about you, sir?’ Roiks nodded deferentially to the hunched-over god sitting on the opposite side of the little table. He had no idea what Loki truly was. To him, he was simply an important guest aboard the
‘Blade
. Renowned scholar. Perhaps the exploring type. Foreign diplomat maybe. He certainly looked foreign. He smelled it too. If there was one part of his body Roiks was said to be glowingly proud of, it was his long and crooked nose. The crew said he could sniff out land at a hundred miles. It was the prime reason behind his nickname: “Sharknose,” an epithet Roiks was not entirely opposed to.

This Loki smelled of dust and earth, like road mud on old leather boots. He smelled like the cargo holds of the Paraian merchant dhows they sometimes traded with, of resinous wood that’d spent a decade or more soaking up the scent of spices and spilt oils. Foreign to the core.

Loki had his hands and dog-eared cards deep in his lap, below the table. He stared at them with narrowed eyes, silently calculating their worth and his chances. This was another new thing to him; cards and gambling, and he had quietly admitted to himself on the third round that he liked both intensely. Even though they gambled with humble wooden chips, Loki found the whole experience quite exciting. It suited his curious, cunning mind, tested his new-found intrigue of reading the expressions of humans. Gods were not used to such things, of course. They did not play games. They did not gamble. What treasures or currency could they have possibly wagered with, up in the darkness of the sky? All that gods have is time. Nobody likes gambling with time.

Loki shuffled in his seat. He hummed for a moment, as if thinking, and then brought his hand onto the table. He flicked a look at Lerel as he did it; the woman had won nine straight rounds already. ‘Two sixes and a black mule,’ he confessed.

Roiks thumped the table again.

With a wide grin, Lerel began to drag the rest of the wooden coins towards her mountain, looking very pleased with herself indeed. ‘I should start playing for real money.’

‘Gods, woman. You sure you ain’t a cheat?’ Roiks demanded in mock horror.

‘Bosun Roiks,’ replied Lerel, mimicking his expression, ‘dare you to accuse a superior officer of cheating?’

‘No ma’am! But I will ask a question. How’d you get so good?’

Lerel shrugged. ‘Practice,’ she said. It was an honest answer as any. She’d grown up on the dusty streets of Paraia. Cards could earn a clever girl a pretty coin. And coin meant food.

Loki had been shuffling around in his chair, as if he was sitting on a splinter. He readjusted his cloak and tapped the table. ‘Another round.’

Roiks chuckled. ‘You want to take another round of embarrassment?’

Loki looked to Lerel, who was busy relishing the thought. ‘Perhaps beginner’s luck takes a while to warm up?’ he suggested, tapping the table again. Lerel began to push his pile of coins back into the centre.

Roiks sighed. ‘Then I’m glad we ain’t playin’ fer real coin.’

The first round went to Lerel, as expected. When the second went to Loki, the others simply assumed it was an accident on her part, sympathy maybe. The third wiped Roiks from the game. He pushed all his chips to the centre after slyly glimpsing Lerel’s hand. He put so much of his coin into beating her that he completely forgot about Loki, who trounced both of them with a solid three blades.

Fourth, fifth, and sixth also went to Loki. Then a seventh. Lerel did her best to win the eighth, but Loki soon had the ninth too. Each time, his cards were near-perfect. Roiks, sitting back on his chair with his arms neatly folded under each dubiously-smelling armpit, eyed the game with hawk’s eyes. ‘Beginner’s luck, eh?’ he asked of Loki, as Lerel sniffed. The god was still hunched over the table, hands in his lap.

‘Must be,’ Loki flashed a white smile.

Roiks squinted. ‘Might I ask, sir, what land it is ye hail from?’

‘You may,’ replied Loki, buying time to think. ‘Albion.’

‘Ah,’ mused Roiks. ‘Couldn’t tell from the accent, see. I’d of said Hȃlorn, sir. Like your dark-eyed friend. The one that’s taken a likin’ to our crow’s nest.’

Loki nodded as his cards were dealt. He swiped them from the table and cradled them in his lap.

Roiks leant forward and jabbed the tabletop with his pointy elbows. He flashed a glance at Lerel, who was busy squinting at her cards. Loki had already placed his cards back on the table when he looked back. Roiks eyed them carefully, noting the lack of dog-ears and scratches. They looked pristine, in fact, not like a deck that had been shared round a ship’s crew once or twice. A sailor’s fingers weren’t the kindest to cards. ‘What’ve ye got, Lerel?’ Roiks asked.

Lerel took a moment to hum and whisper to herself. She swapped one of her cards out, and smirked, rather unintentionally. She flipped her cards over. ‘One eight. Two bloody crowns.’

‘A fine hand!’ Roiks slapped Lerel heartily on the shoulder, almost ploughing her head into the table. ‘One that’s mighty hard t’ beat, if’n you ask me,’ he added, flicking a look at the god.

‘That it is,’ Loki muttered.

‘Man’s got to have something downright special in his hands to beat that. Suspiciously special,’ Roiks grinned.

Loki palmed his cards and checked them again, just to be sure. He kept them right there on the table, so Roiks could see for himself that there was no foul play. ‘And might I enquire why you asked after my origins?’

Roiks winked at Lerel. ‘Some folk tell of a land where no man ever cheats. They don’t know how, see? No man lies, and no man cheats.’

‘Sounds perfect, Bosun,’ said Loki, crossing his arms, ‘but a little fictional.’

‘That it does.’

‘And what would be the name of such a place?’ asked the god.

Roiks raised an eyebrow. ‘I forgot a long time ago. Shame, really. But I know it ain’t called Albion, and it ain’t called Hȃlorn. Plenty of cheats come from there.’

‘Is that so?’ asked Loki.

‘Aye,’ Roiks replied. ‘That they do.’

Loki snorted. He turned his cards over with a careless flick. It was a pitiful hand: one three and a pair of green cudgels. ‘Well, if you know one, Bosun Roiks, then perhaps you could point him in my direction, so that he could teach me. G… men like me don’t know how to cheat,’ he said, staring the sailor right in the eye. Even as he spoke, he was sliding a pack of cards from his lap and back into the pocket he had fished them from. Cards identical to the ones they were playing with… if a little less dog-eared.

Roiks eyed the god for a few seconds, and then burst out laughing. ‘Beginner’s luck it is then,’ he brayed, slapping the table and making Lerel’s coins jump. Roiks reached deep into his breast pocket and brought forth a chubby cube of metal. It was a die. Each of its six faces was puckered with red spots. He pinched it between finger and thumb and held it up for all to see. ‘Now I was born at sea, and there are plenty of cheats out here for the playin’,’ he said, as though he were speaking to the die itself. He rolled it towards Lerel. It clattered across the wood and then landed on a six with a clunk. ‘Always lands a six. A loaded die it is. A mage put a charm in it for me many years ago. Treated me well in many a tavern and through many a late night I’ll tell ye that fer free. My lucky die.’

Loki was about to ask how magick made something lucky when something caught his eye. Something fluttering outside the window of their cabin, something dark against the grey that still clung to the ship. ‘Hawk!’ he cried.