Dead Stars - Part Two (The Emaneska Series) (21 page)

Farden was first into the wide corridor. It was emptier than a drunk’s wineskin, for now at least. As he moved to hug the wall, sword low and ready, he found his uncle’s hand on his shoulder. It gripped him hard, and pressed him against the stone. Farden turned to find Tyrfing staring at him with an angry look in his eye.

‘Tell me that was just a ruse,’ he snapped.

‘What?’

‘Tell me what you just said in there, about leaving the dragons behind, was a ruse.’

Farden tried to shrug himself free but Tyrfing held fast. His uncle’s fingers had the consistency of steel. Farden rolled his eyes. ‘You heard Saker’s dragon,’ he said. It was an answer, but then again it wasn’t. It was the best kind.

Tyrfing’s grip relaxed. ‘I did,’ he said, as if reminding himself. Something caught in his throat then and he turned away to cough it out. Farden surreptitiously rubbed his shoulder as he watched his uncle convulse. Farden sighed.

‘Are you finished? There’s an army of angry dragon-riders behind us.’

Tyrfing wiped his hand on his cloak and took the lead. Threads of light swirled absently around his crooked fingers.

Farden looked back as something crashed and roared behind them. He frowned. ‘Where are we going?’ He still had to shout over the noise.

‘The library!’ A memory of trawling through endless piles of useless books came floating back to Farden. He groaned. The words
hopeless
and
mission
scampered through his head in quick succession. ‘It’s not too far, from what I remember!’ Tyrfing yelled, already sprinting down the corridor.

Three stairwells, several fiery, bloody encounters, and a score of bodies later, a breathless pair of mages stumbled into the dusty mouth of a corridor that led to the library. It was dark there, too dark for their fire-blinded eyes.

‘A little light?’ Farden called, and Tyrfing quickly obliged. Rays of white light reached out into the shadows. Farden saw their problem almost immediately. He raised a finger, pointing into the dusty gloom before them. ‘Erm…’ was all he could say.

Where the ornate doors of a grand library had once stood guard, a wall of grey rubble and boulders had now taken their place. The end of the corridor looked as if the mountain had swallowed it, and then vomited it straight back up. Rock, impenetrable and solid.

Tyrfing rubbed his blood-spattered forehead with the knuckles of his fist. ‘Don’t say it,’ he snarled, eyes closed and deep in thought. ‘Don’t say anything.’

Farden looked around at the smooth walls that had escaped unscathed and intact. ‘This is the right corridor, isn’t it?’ he asked. Even as he voiced the question, little features began to ring bells in his memory; the shape of the columns, the low ceiling, even the dragonscript scratchings of some thoughtful stonemason, giving directions, an arrow pointing straight towards the rubble. Farden scratched his head, frustrated. ‘Would you like to go back and check with Towerdawn?’ he ventured, sourly.

His uncle didn’t answer. He was busy racking his brains, and quickly too. The trail of bodies they had left behind was no doubt being followed. They had minutes at most.

Farden stalked up and down the hall, aimlessly prodding bits of loose rubble and wreckage with the tip of his sword. A broken spear lying in a bed of its own splinters. A shoe with a bloody cut across its toe. A shield with a mosaic of dust and dents across its grey face. The cracked blade of a halberd or axe. A stray bit of cloth, burnt to a memory. ‘What a mess,’ he remarked. ‘Cave-in, do you reckon?’

‘Has to be.’ Tyrfing cracked open an eye and followed the grooves of claws and the scars of spells across the walls. ‘Over-zealous wizards, maybe. Now be quiet. I’m trying to think what I might have missed, before we get cornered.’

Farden kicked out maliciously at a cracked stone and watched it bounce off the wall of rubble at the dead end of the corridor. It struck with a thud. A rather hollow thud, come to think of it. Farden raised an eyebrow. Not the sound one expects from stone striking stone. ‘What have we here?’ he mumbled to himself.

‘Shh!’ his uncle flapped his hands, muttering to himself about escape routes and riddles.

Farden padded softly to where his stone had skittered to a halt, just at the foot of the rockfall. He peered closely at the rubble, at its nobbled contours, its deep, bloated veins of mica, at the dust that coated it. It certainly looked like rock, but what was rock that didn’t sound like rock? Farden raised his sword and prodded one of the boulders with its tip. The blade sung dully as it kissed the rock.

Much to Farden’s shock, the boulder twitched under his blade. A bright, flame-orange eye, almost as big as his fist, popped out from the stone, no more than an inch from his sword-tip. It squinted, staring straight up at him. There was an awkward, utterly confused silence.

‘Erm…’ Farden began, but he wasn’t given a chance to finish. With a scraping roar, the entire rockfall unfurled in a whirlwind of dust and crunching stone. Grey limbs flailed. Teeth flashed. Something strong and clawed wrapped around his waist and wrenched him inwards, sucking him into the swirling blur of rock and darkness.

Before he could even think to kick or scream, Farden abruptly found himself face-down on a cold and red-stained floor. He blinked, once, twice, to make sure he was alive. Apparently he was. Farden began to grope for the handle of his sword but his hand found a boot instead. He looked up, head still spinning, to find a muscular Siren staring down at him, a spear-butt raised ready to knock the daylights out of him. The Siren was about to strike when a gruff voice barked out an order. ‘Stay your hand!’

Farden was quickly and roughly rolled onto his back. He found himself gazing up at a scarred face. One from a dream, long ago, when Farden had been a different man. The face spoke. ‘By Thron. It
is
you.’ Hands the size of hams grabbed him by the scruff of his cloak and dragged him into the air. Farden was so bewildered he didn’t even struggle. Confusion was to be expected after being swallowed by a wall. Farden blinked owlishly at his saviour.

Eyrum smiled as widely as his freshly-bruised face would allow. The Siren looked a distinct and painful mess. His one good eye was bloodshot, the scar across his bad one knotted and taut with age. There was a blue-green pattern of ugly bruises running down his cheek and neck, the signatures of fists, or boots, or both. A tooth at the corner of his mouth looked decidedly loose. The Lost Clans had clearly had their way with him. Farden wondered absently how many of them it had taken to subdue this giant.

Eyrum gripped the mage’s shoulders. ‘Gods be blessed. You’re alive. And well, by the looks of you. By what Arka magick have you managed to stay so young, mage? Or are you a ghost of a dead man?’ he asked.

Farden managed to gather enough of his wits together to form a reply. ‘No, I’m perfectly alive, despite the rumours and the best attempts of many,’ Farden replied. He tapped his vambraces. ‘And no magick the Arka know of.’

Eyrum looked pleased. ‘We thought you dead,’ he muttered, leaning closer, as if it were an admission he didn’t feel happy making.

Farden patted his thick arm. ‘Apparently it’s not that easy,’ he said, and cracked a smile to ward off any more questions. ‘Where’s my uncle?’

There was a sudden and familiar scraping noise, and Eyrum pointed to something behind him. The mage looked around just in time to see the rockfall spit his uncle out onto the floor. The Arkmage landed hard on his chest, air driven out of him, face scrunched up into the very picture of confoundedness.

Farden watched as the strange pile of boulders revealed its true form: a long, lithe dragon that had coiled itself into an impossible shape, and wedged itself in the door. He watched the beast unfurl and stretch, its colouring changing from the stony-grey to a deep, charcoal black. It blinked its orange eyes and raised a claw to the visitors. ‘Well met, and good wishes,’ hissed the dragon, from behind needle-like teeth. ‘Shivertread, at your service.’ He looked between the two mages. ‘I believe you knew my mother, Havenhigh?’

‘We did,’ answered Farden, nodding slowly. He could see the family resemblance now, especially in the barbels hanging from the dragon’s jawline, as though he were part-carp. He was lithe too, like his mother, and he had her colouring. He was young though, little more than a wyrm.

Behind them. Eyrum let out a long sigh. ‘Too young,’ he rumbled. There was a muttering of sadness through the crowd of soldiers behind them. ‘Killed by the Clan.’

‘And they are paying for it, pint by pint,’ Shivertread eyed the floor at Farden’s feet, which was a dubious shade of reddish-brown.

‘Not fast enough for my liking.’

The black dragon turned his head, tasting the air with his long grey tongue. They could hear distant voices shouting. ‘More are coming.’

Eyrum curled his bloodied lip. ‘Keep them at their guessing, Shiver, while we have guests. Blood can be spilt later.’

The dragon tapped his fangs together. His breath rattled in his throat, but he knew Eyrum was right. ‘Fine,’ he said, before quickly resuming his position. The dragon slipped in between the archway of the door and curled his tail and limbs about him. As he rolled himself into a tight, and dangerous, little ball, scales scraping on the stone, his wings pressed outwards to wedge him against the walls. Once he was in place, his scales began to fade through the spectrum of blacks into a dirty, dusty grey that perfectly matched the stone around him.

‘Why have I never seen a dragon do that before?’ asked Tyrfing. He stared hard at the pile of rocks in the doorway, trying to identify the component parts of a dragon. He was having a tough time doing so.

Eyrum shrugged. ‘Shivertread seems to be the first. Do not even ask me how he does it. Not even his mother knew,’ he said.

‘They say his egg used to change colour too,’ mumbled one of the nearby soldiers.

‘That it did,’ Eyrum hummed. ‘But that’s a story for another day. Come, mages, let me introduce you to our new abode.’

The old library had been transformed into a fortress. A fortress of books and dusty shelves but a fortress nonetheless. With Shivertread acting as guard and gate, the countless books and tomes of the library had been piled into extensive barricades and makeshift walls. There were even arrow slits in the thicker ones. The stout oak bookshelves had been gently toppled over to make secondary defences and rough barracks for the soldiers and riders. Farden counted them in his head. A paltry three dozen of them at most, with possibly more under the bookshelves or hidden deeper in the dark, cavernous room. It was hard to see in the gloom.

There were others there too, in the dusty shadows, shuffling to and fro, or standing stoic and sombre. Farden could hear the crying of little children being hushed and soothed. A few elderly women were absently flicking through a pile of works, sharing words with wizards. One man standing close by looked like a farmer. He was still holding a pitchfork. Sirens of all sorts, not just riders or soldiers. The lucky and the leftovers.

‘Is this all that’s left?’ asked Tyrfing.

‘All that we could gather. We haven’t left this room in three weeks,’ Eyrum sighed, and began to lead them a rather un-merry path through the twists and turns of the barricades.

‘What about food?’

‘Dwindling.’

‘Arms?’ This from Farden, as he sniffed the air. It felt close, still, and stale.

‘What we carry. A few spare staves made from bookshelves. We’ve been trying to make arrows but it’s slow going. Square wood does not fly straight, as our resident fletcher says.’

Farden stopped to stare at a group of wizards. There were four of them sitting in a square, tucked away behind a toppled desk, illuminated by sagging candles. Two had their eyes open, though just barely, while the other two had theirs closed, scrunched up in deep concentration. Even at that short distance, Farden could see the veins standing like cords on their necks and foreheads. Tyrfing came to stand at his side. ‘Feel it?’ he asked his nephew. ‘Their magick?’

Farden shook his head. All he felt was tired. He took a few steps towards them.

‘I would not interrupt them, Farden,’ Eyrum warned. Farden waved a hand, but kept on walking, drawing wary stares from the two resting wizards and the nearby soldiers.

There were open books lying in the wizards’ laps. Their pages glistened with sweat in the candlelight, their edges thumbed with grime. Farden bowed to them, and the two wizards politely returned his gesture with a pair of nods. Farden moved to the large window behind them. The glass had been blackened with soot and covered with rags to keep up the ruse of a cave-in. Farden knelt down to rub a miniscule section of the soot away with his little finger, making a little window for himself. All he could see was swirling grey.

Tyrfing broke the silence ‘So these are the fog-brewers Saker was talking about,’ he muttered.

‘A week solid, they have been casting. Keeps the Clan confused and got our ships away safe to Talen. There are eight wizards in total. They take it in turns.’

Farden couldn’t help but whistle. ‘I imagine they do,’ he said.

‘Farden?’ Tyrfing cleared his throat. Farden turned and saw his uncle pointing to a sorry-looking group of people further into the library. They were huddled around a single whale-oil lantern. Each one of them sported a bloody bandage of some kind. Heads, fingers, arms, legs, ribs, ears… each had something. A single wizened old man was edging around their circle, doing the best he could.