Dead Stars - Part Two (The Emaneska Series) (34 page)

The general eyed her suspiciously. ‘And what would you want with the prisons?’

Jeasin huffed. ‘What do you think, Toskig?’

The general looked over the woman’s shoulder and frowned. A little lump blossomed in his stomach. ‘Malvus’ orders…’

‘…Mean shit. He ain’t here.’

‘Of course he’s not. But there are guards, there are eyes everywhere. Including mine.’

Jeasin put her free hand on her hip. ‘It’s food, man. Not a key to the door. That’s your old Arkmage in there, right? Your Undermage and his wife? Starvin’ probably. A little food won’t ‘urt. You going to tell him?’

Toskig didn’t reply. Jeasin sniffed. ‘An’ here I was thinkin’ you were the honest type.’

Toskig frowned. ‘You put me on dangerous ground, woman.’

‘You were already on it. So am I. Anyone is, where Malvus is concerned.’

‘Mind your tongue…’

‘I’m gettin’ bored of people tellin’ me that.’

Toskig sighed. He looked up the corridor, then down it. Nobody. He looked into the hallways that led to the prisons. He could see the guards at the end of it. Loitering by the torches, clacking their spears against the floor. ‘Men!’ he called. Their heads snapped around and they soon came running.

Toskig took a breath and crossed his arms as Jeasin stepped to the side, plate held behind her back. The two guards trotted up and smartly came to a halt. They saluted, and then glanced sideways at Jeasin. One recognised her; she had been there a few nights ago.
On Lord Malvus’ orders
, if he remembered rightly.

‘Eyes front, reprobates,’ snapped Toskig, in his best drill sergeant voice.

‘Yessir!’ they barked in reply.

As Toskig began to grill them, demanding unnecessary reports on the state of the prisoners, Jeasin quietly slipped down the corridor, heading straight for the deepest, darkest cell. Her hand trailed on the wall, feeling it turn from marble, to rough stone, then to iron in places, etched with runes and spells.

‘Durnus!’ she hissed through the grate. ‘Old man!’

A face soon appeared, a gaunt face, wrinkled with age. ‘Jeasin,’ he said. ‘What a pleasure.’

‘What does she want?’ came a mutter from inside the cell.

‘To feed us, by the smell of it.’

‘And that’s all tonight,’ she said, pushing the food through the gaps in the grate, piece by piece. She wrinkled her nose at the oily fish as she felt it between her fingers.

‘On Malvus’ orders again?’ said the other voice, that of the Undermage.

Jeasin shook her head. ‘No. One of the new generals provided a distraction. Seems to be on your side.’

Modren’s pushed his face up against the grate. ‘Which general?’

‘Toskig?’

‘You mean Sergeant Toskig?’

‘Yeah, well ‘e’s General Toskig now. Malvus took a shine to him.’

‘And Toskig was stupid enough to accept,’ Modren hissed.

‘Maybe he just wants to survive, not be locked up in a bloody cell, like you two,’ Jeasin shrugged. ‘I know I do.’

‘Well, thank you, Jeasin. For the food,’ Durnus said, quietly.

‘This is gettin’ dangerous, you know. Sneakin’ about like this.’

Modren snarled. ‘So’s being at the mercy of Krauslung’s newest dictator.’

‘That ain’t my fault.’

‘Do you have any news?’ asked Durnus.

Jeasin scratched at her head. ‘He got a letter. By hawk.’

‘From whom?’

‘Nelska.’

‘Saker then.’

Durnus put his head against the bars, trying not to betray the dark pit of hopelessness that was slowly digging its way into his stomach. ‘I can only wonder what he is planning,’ he muttered, before disappearing into the darkness of the cell.

Modren gripped the bars. ‘Jeasin,’ he asked. ‘How much do you know about hawks?’

Jeasin raised an eyebrow.

The birds smelled foul. She knew that much about hawks. They smelled foul, and they shuffled around on their perches, rattling their claws and making her flinch. Jeasin hated birds. She clutched the scrap of parchment in her hand and edged closer to the nearest hawk.

It screeched and Jeasin quickly backed away.
Curse those mages
, she hissed inside her head. If she had been standing on dangerous ground before, she was now perching on the edge of a very tall and very unstable cliff.

Jeasin bit her lip and tried again. The hawk stayed silent this time. She reached forward and gingerly felt its feathers, cold and soft. The hawk didn’t move. She took a breath and reached for its leg, where Modren had told her she would find a little loop of twine. The mage had been right, and her fingers found the roughness of it. While she tried not to think of the sharp beak, inches from her face, she rolled up the parchment with her nervous fingers and pushed it through the loop.

A noise in the corridor outside made her freeze. Boots, on cold marble. She paused, parchment halfway through the loop, heart beating, while she listened to the boots recede.

‘Too bloody close,’ she muttered, as she pulled the loop tight and tugged it hard. The bird whined. It seemed secure enough.

Jeasin moved to the window and felt for its latch. Gods.
Of course it was stuck.
Jeasin grit her teeth and jiggled it. Still stuck. She pushed harder and it came loose with a stomach-clenching bang. A blast of cold air slapped her in the face, and she winced. Behind her, the birds began to flap and screech. Jeasin flinched again. They were making far too much noise. Jeasin quickly reached for her hawk. Its wings hit her hard in the face as she lifted it from its perch but she hung on grimly, holding it up to the open window.

‘The Old Dragon!’ she snapped at it, before tossing it out into the night.

“The wind was a king’s daughter once. A beautiful, beautiful girl was she, with a face that could make a daemon’s heart melt. But her father the king was a jealous king, a fearful king. To keep her beauty from the leering eyes of men he locked her away in the highest tower of his castle. For years the daughter begged to be let go, so that she might glimpse the face of another man besides her father, and for years the king refused her, each time telling her that next year, she would be allowed. And so the years dragged on, until her nineteenth birthday, when once more she asked to see the face of another man. When the king refused again, the daughter wept and cried like never before. Three days she cried, until finally it broke the king’s heart to see her beauty so marred with grief, and so he finally relented.

The next day the king decreed that all nine cities should put forward a champion, not of sword nor of magick, but of ugliness. One by one the cities sent their champions, and one by one they came, revulsive to the very core. Scarred, disfigured, malformed, they came to stand before the king. All the court but he wilted before their gruesome visages. It took him three days to choose a champion. Finally he selected a quiet young man from the second city, a hideous creature yet pure of heart. The king had him dressed in sackcloth and ashes, and so disfigured was he that the maids needed blindfolds to dress him.

When the king called for the young man, they tread the thousand steps to the very top of the tallest tower together, until at long last they came to the doors of his daughter’s room. The king called for his daughter, and thrilled, she came, throwing the door wide open. There, the young man was shown to her, in all his vast hideousness. The young man, so overwhelmed by her beauty, fell to his knees, clutching his heart. The king looked on with a smile, watching his daughter’s face curl into disgust at the sight of him. But lo, it was not disgust, but a smile of her own. His face turned to horror as his daughter rushed forward to embrace the young man, kissing him on his twisted lips.

‘No!’ cried the king in anguish. He cast the young man to the floor, breaking his head upon the stone, and in a moment of rage, he cursed his daughter, there on her own steps. He cursed her face, saying, ‘You wish to know the faces of men? You wish to know them? So be it, you may see all the faces you please, but no man shall ever lay eyes upon your beauty, and yet every man will feel your caress.’ And in that instant she was turned. Her robes and skin fell away, vanishing from sight until nothing was left of her except the feel of her breath on the king’s cheeks, a strong breath, powerful in its force. For the daughter had become the wind, and with her first gust she lifted her father from his feet and hurled him from the tallest tower, lingering only to watch him fall to the rooftops of the city below.”

‘The Wind and the King’ - and ancient fairytale

M
elt-water flooded his nostrils, forcing their way into his brain like two daggers of ice, the very definition of cold. The water stung his throat as it sought out his lungs. It flushed them out like old wine-skins. Ice clutched his heart.

His whole mind screamed at him not to breathe. To force it out, not to take it in. There comes a point in a drowning man’s final moments where he will scream this to himself over and over, until finally he will relent, and he will grasp at the dangling hope that he could breathe water all along. Farden took such a breath; a deep, gasping breath that would have pulled the flames from a campfire.

But to his surprise, he tasted air on his tongue, and the fluffy cold of snow along with it.

Farden twitched. He pushed out his limp limbs and heard the crunch and creak of barely-settled snow. The snow was a warm blanket compared to the deathly cold of the water. He carefully unscrewed his eyes, wincing as the sharp brightness of the light stung him.

‘I thought I was done with all of this…’ Farden gargled through the snowflakes. Nobody was around to hear him grumble. Nobody but the sun, and the stars shining through the piercing blue only a winter could own.

One by one they fell. The stars punched the earth, throwing up great columns of snow and rock in their wakes. Farden flinched as the ground shook and the trees cracked. Ten, twenty, thirty, and still they came. Dark shapes began to stand against the white of his dream, leaking smoke and reeking of sulphur.

Farden stood to meet them, and found himself naked against their eyes, wearing only his tattoos for modesty. And they glowed. They glowed like he had never seen them glow before, not even as they had his first night as a Written, when he had crawled, sweat-soaked from the Scribe’s doorway, into the arms of the blind healers. Farden held his hands up to the dark shapes and found fire swirling around them.

The dream brought the daemons closer. Hundreds of them stood around him, but they spared him not a glance. They were too preoccupied with a figure standing behind Farden, a figure clad in glistening gold and red. It fit him badly, for the figure was small, boyish, and underneath the visor, Farden could glimpse a pair of small, grey-green eyes. His own eyes, so young and innocent, still untouched by the darkness of his history.

Farden cried out as the daemons reached for the boy. They barged him aside, tossing him back and forth as they rushed in, howling. The dream had taken his voice hostage, and his shouts were hoarse grunts that nobody and nothing heard.

Farden scrabbled forward through the chaos of black limbs and fiery eyes, clawing at anything and everything he could, but his fingers grasped nothing but smoke. When it cleared, the boy was gone. All that remained was a small girl with jet-black hair, standing in the snow. Samara. Her cheeks were rosy in the cold, and her hands were steaming hot. Her boots were half-buried in the snow. Farden tried to grab her, but she shook her head. ‘Come and get me,’ she said, and the world turned black.

Lerel watched the mage thrash around with a mixed expression of intrigue and fear. Farden reached out for the ceiling once more in the way that dreaming people do: feebly, half-realised, as though they were swimming in a vat of treacle. She winced as Farden’s head reared up and then came back to the deck with a thud. It seemed to do the trick. Whatever dream he was having was stifled, and he began to snore again. Lerel frowned.

Rolling over onto her back, she put her hands behind her neck and stared at the ceiling, counting the whorls in the stout wood as she felt the ship move underneath her. It took her three tries to get to twenty. Nothing is more distracting than a big rat scampering up and down the foot of the bed. It made her shiver. Farden’s rat was an ugly thing. She grimaced at an old memory of eating a rat just like it, the bones squeaking, the hair, stuck on her pink cat tongue… ‘Ugh,’ Lerel said aloud, shivering again.