Dead Stars - Part Two (The Emaneska Series) (53 page)

‘My lord,’ the rider whispered.

‘Rider,’ growled the dragon. The rider took a furtive step forward. Their camp was sparse. He had left the blanket in the snow.

‘It is cold,’ said his dragon. The rider nodded, trying to hide the trembling of his limbs.

‘Have you tinder?’ asked the dragon.

The rider looked up, shocked. ‘What are you suggesting?’

The Old Dragon sniffed the cold air, sombre. ‘It is time, rider. It is time you humans tasted our sacred fire.’

The rider bowed again, and folded to his knees. Hands shaking, he reached into his haversack and brought forth tinder and dry sticks, vestiges of a warmer, drier land. He laid them with reverence in the snow, and quickly stood back. No dragon had ever leant his flame before.

‘Spread your hands, and be warm, rider,’ whispered the Old Dragon, taking a deep breath. His chest swelled as took in the cold air, turning it to fire in his belly. Pursing his lips, he exhaled, and flame dribbled from his teeth, spilling on to the damp tinder beneath. Fire blossomed, and the rider felt the warmth on his hands. He smiled. The dragon had given the rider his fire.”

‘How the Dragon first gave Fire to his Rider’ - an old Siren proverb

A
s it turned out, Farden could have probably used that blanket.

Four days passed them by, and not by any means quickly. Time itself seemed to be affected by the cold. Traipsing past sluggishly, like a half-frozen beggar.

Farden had never been so cold in his life. Every day north they travelled, the colder it got. He spent the days hugging Ilios’ back and praying for a second skin, or even just a second cloak. The nights he spent sitting as close to his uncle as physically possible, while Tyrfing tried his hardest to keep a flame burning in his hands for as long as he could. There was nothing to burn in the icy crags of the mountains, nor down on the ice, amongst the glaciers and ever-rolling snow fields, or the crumbled skeletons of old, frozen empires. They would have had better luck trying to strike a flint under the sea. Only Farden’s iron pride kept him from asking Loki to produce a cloak or a blanket from one of his endless pockets. He would have rather frozen than ask for help from a trickster like him.

The Tausenbar Mountains were an inhospitable scrap of the world. Every inch of them seemed to scream “grave for hire” at one volume or another. They were a jagged bristle of black rock and sheer glacier, splayed east to west across the north. Young peaks, still waiting to be eroded and filed smooth by the ice-winds. Still saw-toothed and dangerous, miserly with caves or flats, barren and cold like the wastes they reared up from.

In their valleys the ice-fields wove and wandered, split into a thousand different threads by the rocks and foothills. Most ended in a sheer, black cliff or a wall of smirking, sapphire ice. Only a few led through the mountains to the other side, where the foothills stretched out into yet another wasteland of ice and snow, speckled with patches of frozen forests, rocks, cliffs, more rocks, and the occasional shard of black stone. But it was all just a preamble to the main event. A prelude. A warm-up act.

The real mountains sat in the distance.

The Spine made the Tausenbar look like a troll’s rock-garden. Those mountains were monstrous things, the smallest of them easily as tall as Emaneska’s highest peak, Lokki. Farden wondered why it still held that title, and then quickly realised why: nobody would have believed any adventurer if he had returned home telling of the Spine. Not even trusty old Wallium the Wanderer.

Ilios had taken them high above a storm on that day, to a peak so high they’d found it hard to breathe. They had seen the Spine instantly above the roof of the storm. A faint red glow pasted across the distant, jagged horizon, illuminating the peaks like the rotten, black teeth of a shark gnawing on bright crimson flesh. Plumes of ash sprouted up here and there between the monstrous summits, the remnants of the Roots. These were real mountains, like the gods would have wrought in their prime. Mountains that would have given giants a challenge of a climb. They were breathtaking in more ways than one.

Since then the sky had glowed constantly red. Even in the day the Spine turned the sky a rosy, bloody hue, like a constant sunrise. Farden hated it. He kept expecting to feel a little bit of warmth from such a glow, but the cold kept on being cold, and the wind kept on biting. More so with every wing-flap north.

Farden was just thankful for the gryphon. Ilios was not only transport, but warmth in the night as they crouched and lay against his feathery back. He had even kept their stomachs full on two of the nights. The first, he had caught a snow-fox. The third, he found a leathery rabbit, long-dead but perfectly preserved in a patch of glassy ice. Tyrfing had melted it free and cooked it with his bare hands. It was leathery indeed, like nibbling a boot, but it was food at least. Ilios had crunched the bones and fur, and seemed happy enough with that.

The fourth night found them shivering on the northern side of the Tausenbar, in the lee of a rocky outcrop, tucked into its hollow. There was a faint dusting of snow on the rock, like icing on a market cake. Farden was distracting himself from how cold his extremities were by drawing pictures in it. A minotaur with a broken horn. A fish with sails. A wolf with eight legs. As he moved on to draw a book with a hat, he wondered absently if he were going insane. ‘Can you go mad from the cold?’ he asked aloud, behind chattering teeth.

‘We’ll soon find out,’ Tyrfing replied. He was warmer, though barely. He was trying to conserve his strength to fight off whatever illness was still plaguing him. His cough had returned with a vengeance. Barely a few minutes went by without him retching and spitting something on the rock. Tyrfing didn’t tell. Farden didn’t ask. It was a heavy lead lump between them. A bastion in the room.

On the other side of the hollow, Loki fished a small notebook from his coat, flipped through a few pages, and then put it back again. ‘No,’ said. ‘Apparently you cannot.’

Farden had given up wondering about the god’s pockets. They were as endless as he was annoying. If that was his only skill as a god, it made him about as useful as a feather in a sword-fight. Farden snorted to himself, and began to draw a feather with a sword-handle in the snow.

Ilios warbled something sleepily. The gryphon was curled up around the mouth of the hollow. Even with his thick feathers, he was still a desert creature. He wasn’t made for the cold. Farden could see his claws shivering. ‘Ilios wants to know how far we have to go. May I?’ Tyrfing asked hoarsely.

‘Be my guest,’ Farden said, and slid his haversack over. Tyrfing opened it up, half-expecting to find the thick tome wrestling for space with supplies. It wasn’t. It was practically alone in the sack. Tyrfing jiggled it free and heaved it onto his lap.

‘You didn’t bring much, did you?’

‘What was there to bring?’

‘A candle would have been good,’ sighed Loki.

Farden rolled his eyes. A candle would have been good; he would have had something to carve. He contemplated drawing Loki in a noose. That was a little too close to home. ‘Don’t you have one in those magick pockets of yours?’ he asked.

Loki clicked his fingers. ‘Actually, I do,’ he said, almost cheerily. It took him a moment of rummaging before he produced a fat tallow candle. He tossed it to Tyrfing, who had it lit in seconds. The faint, flickering yellow glow it threw out wasn’t much, but it was enough to bring a little lift in mood to the hollow. And a little heat, too. Farden shuffled closer and practically put his boots in the little flame. He was about to ask if Loki had another, when a deep orange glow suddenly bathed their hollow. It was the Grimsayer. It was glowing brighter than it ever had before. It must have been the northern magick. Tyrfing asked it the way, and the lights went to work, throwing shapes on the rock above and around them.

‘One more day,’ Tyrfing announced, as he watched the route replay itself. ‘One more day and we’ll be there.’

Farden watched the lights and had to agree. He had to. He didn’t want to believe anything else. He rubbed his hands together, trying to dispel the ache in the gap of his missing finger. He found Loki staring at it. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘How did you lose that?’

‘In a tavern brawl. Somebody was asking too many questions, so I cut it off myself and rammed it down his throat.’

‘Sounds clever.’

‘He thought he was.’

‘Honestly, how did it happen?’

Farden sighed. ‘Vice,’ he said, ‘Vice took it clean off in our last battle. When Durnus, Tyrfing, and I killed him.’

Loki nodded thoughtfully. ‘It is a bit of a shame, don’t you think?’

‘What is?’

‘How none of you managed to get what you wanted? How in the end you all had to share a piece of the victory, rather than having complete revenge?’ Loki shook his head, as if it were truly sad news. Farden bit his tongue.

‘I got what I wanted,’ grunted Tyrfing. ‘We all had a personal reason to see him dead. We each got what we wanted. Vice dead. That was it. Doesn’t matter how.’

‘Of course,’ Loki smiled. He drummed his fingers together for a moment. ‘But now it’s a completely different story altogether, isn’t it?’

Farden glowered. ‘How’d you figure that?’

‘This time, you each have your own daemon to fight, if you will pardon the pun. You with Samara, Ruin, sorry,
Durnus
, with his father, should he come down from the sky. Towerdawn has Saker. And of course you, Tyrfing, have that cough of yours,’ Loki said, ticking off the names on his fingers. ‘We all have our own separate battles to pitch and win.’

Tyrfing leant forward. ‘I don’t see you fighting any battle,’ he croaked, deep in his throat.

Loki didn’t seem fazed by the sharp look in the Arkmage’s eye. ‘Oh, I am. I’m right there with you,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry.’

Farden slapped the rock with his gauntlet, making Ilios jump in his sleep. ‘Enough of this shit-talk, Loki, or I’ll strangle you with the very cords you’re trying to tug at. Go to sleep. Or whatever it is you god-shadows do. Just be quiet,’ he ordered. Loki shrugged and just stared at the candle flame.

Another fit of coughing took Tyrfing, and Farden winced as he heard his uncle retch. His throat sounded as raw as a butcher’s larder, like he was swallowing hot razors. He drew a circle in the snow and stabbed it with his metal finger until his uncle managed to catch his breath. Farden looked up. ‘You okay?’ he asked.

Tyrfing, eyes glistening with tears of strain, nodded, and even managed a smile. ‘Fine,’ he lied. Farden couldn’t help but notice the tiny fleck of blood smeared across his uncle’s lip. Tyrfing felt the stare, and wiped his mouth. Neither said anything. Farden went back to his drawings, Tyrfing leant against his gryphon, and Loki just smiled smugly to himself.

The world travelled through the bowels of night and came up for air in the morning. The sun made a cursory effort, barely summoning enough height to paint the sky a brighter shade of black.

Morning found Farden in a state of urgency. There were two burning issues on his mind that morning, as he rocked back and forth and muttered to himself. One was the cold. His toes had lost all feeling. His fingers were tingling. His lips were two strips of dead rubber. The cold had even seized his stubble, giving him a white beard of ice. It was unbearable.

The second was the powerful urge to piss.

The problem was simple. In a land where the breath froze in front of his face, what would it do to a man relieving himself? He had avoided the problem so far. It had been a smidgeon warmer the last time. Now he was afraid of freezing himself to the ground, or worse, freezing something else.

Farden got to his feet and strolled back and forth in what little space he had to manoeuvre. His boots kept sticking to the frost on the stone of their little ledge. Farden peeked over its edge at the black void below.
What a ridiculous situation this is
, he snapped at himself,
for a place to be so cold that a man is afraid to piss!
He did a little dance, making it worse. The cold now had a rival for unbearableness. He felt like he was going to pop.

‘Oh for gods’ sake. Come on, Farden,’ he muttered, shuffling to the edge. ‘Fortune favours the brave and all that.’ Farden gasped as he felt the cold of his gauntlets in a place where no man should ever feel such a thing. For a moment, he thought the metal had become stuck, but it was just the numbness of his hand, sluggish to move. He breathed a sigh of relief.

And that was it. Farden threw caution to the wind, so to speak. He stood there, swaying, face torn between a mix of pleasure at the release, and of pain at the icy morning wind blowing around his nethers. Thankfully, it only took a minute.

When he was finished, Farden sat down right there on the edge, sighing and watching his breath turn to cloud. Some stars were still out and about in the lightening sky. Once again he found himself trying to guess their shapes, trying to figure out if they were friend or foe, and whether he would meet any soon enough.