The Iron Ghost (32 page)

‘Has anyone from outside – has anyone who wasn’t a Narhl ever ridden one?’ Sebastian asked, not quite sure why he needed to know.

Dallen looked at him in surprise. ‘Never. The wyverns dislike warmlings even more than my father does, as difficult as that may be to believe.’

‘You are close to them,’ said Sebastian after a few moments. He was thinking of the nest of snakes under the thorn bushes, and how Ephemeral had stilled them with a look. ‘There is a connection between you?’

Dallen nodded. ‘I felt the death of each wyvern as keenly as I felt the death of Olborn, of Krestin, of all of them. To lose all of them at once . . . such grief will never leave me.’

They lapsed into silence, and the sky grew gradually darker. Light flurries of snow began to fall and Sebastian pulled up his hood.

He thought of Wydrin and Nuava, somewhere beneath the ground now, looking for this mysterious nexus.
She’ll be fine
, he told himself. Wydrin had faced down a dragon, not to mention half the tavern owners in Crosshaven. She could take care of herself.

‘Tell me about your order,’ said the prince into the silence. ‘Your order of Ynnsmouth knights.’

Sebastian shrugged. ‘There is not much to tell. I thought it was where I belonged, but I was wrong. I paid for that mistake, and, in the end, so did they.’

‘I like to hear about these things, you see,’ said Dallen softly. The snow was dusting the top of his head, and as Sebastian watched, a few errant flakes landed in his beard and on his eyebrows. They did not melt. ‘I’ve only ever known this place, all my life. My soldiers used to laugh at me for it, but I collected all sorts of items from outside the Frozen Steps. Maps, books, even cooking utensils, scavenged from travellers coming through these northern lands. Anything I could get that reminded me that there was a world outside this cold place.’

Sebastian nodded. He could feel his own beard growing rigid with ice, but he felt strangely comfortable even so. Soon he would have to move away from the prince and build a fire, but just for the moment it felt good to sit here looking out across the broken rocks with this strange man at his side.

‘We were a celibate order,’ he said, ignoring the heat suddenly suffusing his cheeks. ‘And I fell in love with a man in my company, a man who looked up to me as a leader. It did not end well.’

Dallen nodded carefully, not quite looking at him. ‘The Order of the Ynnsmouth Knights . . . they did not tolerate . . . such things?’

‘No. There are places that do,’ said Sebastian, turning towards the prince. Suddenly it seemed quite important to say this. ‘Out in the world beyond the Frozen Steps, and beyond Skaldshollow. Where Wydrin comes from, for example, a place called Crosshaven, such things hardly merit a raised eyebrow. There are better places, out in the world. But Ynnsmouth was not one of them. I was exiled, cast out from my order and banished from the land of my birth.’

‘This is most interesting,’ said Prince Dallen. His voice had taken on a carefully speculative note. ‘My father, and indeed most Narhl, would not look kindly on such things. It may have,’ he took a deep breath, ‘it may have made life difficult for me, over the last few years.’

For a little while they sat in silence. The snow grew heavier, sending swirls of white flakes dancing around the broken rocks and shadows, making them look like they were almost moving themselves; a great waltz of ghosts and stone.

It didn’t take long for it to become clear that this was a cave unlike any Wydrin had been in before. The tunnel walls were curiously rounded, as though something had bored its way through the earth, and the deeper they went the smoother it became. After a time, they started to see small patches of odd creatures that Wydrin could only guess were some sort of cross between a fungus and a living animal; she paused by one with her dagger out, and gestured to Nuava to bring the light closer.

‘Here, look at this.’

It looked rather like a swollen bunch of grapes, except that each small sac was pale and translucent, and gathered in the very centre were a number of tiny appendages, like rubbery fingers. When Wydrin placed the point of her dagger on one of the swollen sacs, the entire thing seemed to thrum with anger and the ends of the small appendages lit up with a pearly green light. There were hundreds of the things, on the floor and the walls and the ceiling, some growing in patches as large as a man.

Nuava peered at it closely. ‘I’ve never seen such a thing,’ she said. Without seeming to think about it, her hand drifted towards the notebook on her belt. ‘But that light. It looks to be Edeian-generated. Perhaps the creatures here, living in such close proximity to the rock, are affected by it. I should very much like to make some drawings, take a few notes.’

Wydrin snorted. ‘We don’t have time for that I’m afraid, Nuava. While we’re in here messing about with weird plants our murderous mage could be up to anything.’

Nuava stepped away a little unsteadily. ‘Let’s keep moving, then.’

They walked on down the tunnel, the familiar heavy tread of Mendrick coming on behind them. He was silent in Wydrin’s head, but she could feel him there clearly. It was strange, she realised, to know that someone was there with you but to have no idea of their mood. There were no expressions on his stony face to interpret, and his voice was a disembodied echo inside her own mind.

As they moved deeper under the ground, the bulbous plants grew thicker, so that they brushed against them continually and, consequently, the tunnel was soon lit with enough green light for them to barely need the light-globe.

Do you know what these things are?

For a moment there was no reply from Mendrick, only the echoing silence.
They are lights for someone
, he said eventually.
And now lights for you.

That’s not exactly helpful
, she replied.
Are we going the right way?

Yes,
he replied,
although we have a way to go yet.

They walked on, Wydrin still with Frostling in her fist. They started to pass other tunnels, ones that bisected their own and passed on into the dark. All of them were smooth and round. Wydrin glanced at Nuava. The girl was looking at their surroundings with wide eyes, as though she could somehow drink in the knowledge by seeing everything at once.

‘For what it’s worth, I am sorry about your brother.’

Nuava looked up, her eyes filled with pain again, and inwardly Wydrin winced.

‘I mean, he was very kind to me. I’m sure that doesn’t help at all, but he seemed like the sort who was always helping people when he could, and those are the best sort of people. Rare people, often.’

Nuava sniffed and nodded. ‘I – I can’t believe he’s gone,’ she said. ‘We argued a lot, because we both wanted to craft the Edeian, but I was the only one naturally inclined that way. He would study Tamlyn’s designs for hours, and it never really helped.’ She paused, then shook her head. ‘That’s a lie actually. About the arguing, I mean.
I
would argue, and he would just listen, patiently, and then try to make me understand. It was infuriating.’

Wydrin smiled, thinking of Sebastian. ‘I know the sort.’ The girl was walking with her head down now, looking at her boots. ‘Some people will tell you it gets better,’ she said, ‘but that’s not really true, and I won’t tell you that. There’s a piece missing from you now, and you never get it back, but you do learn how to exist alongside that missing piece. It gets easier to navigate, over time. It’s terrible, really, that you can learn to live with such a thing, but you do. People are horribly resilient in that way.’

Nuava sniffed again, and quickly wiped a gloved hand across her face. Wydrin pretended not to see.

‘You’ve lost someone, then?’

Wydrin nodded shortly. The tunnel ahead of them branched off into two separate entrances, and after a moment she heard Mendrick in her head again.
To the left
, he said, so she led them on. The glass globe cast its sunny light over walls thick with the strange, vibrating creatures, and somewhere she could hear water running.

‘My father –’ she began as they made their way through the left-hand side passage. This way was narrower, and she and Nuava had to walk much closer, their arms brushing together periodically. ‘He was a merchant, and sometimes a pirate. He went looking for something impossible over the horizon, and never came back.’

‘He could still be alive, then,’ said Nuava hesitantly. Wydrin heard the hope in her voice, the irrational hope that the dead could somehow be returned to them, and felt a sliver of pain in her own heart.
No,
she thought bitterly,
it doesn’t work that way. We must live for the living
. ‘He could just be lost, or stranded somewhere. I’ve read about that, in stories. Men and women in shipwrecks, getting washed up on deserted islands.’

‘It’s a nice thought,’ said Wydrin, desperately trying to hide the sour note in her voice. ‘But it’s been years now. My father was no fool – at least, he wasn’t a fool in that sense – and he would have found a way to get a message to us by now. My mother and my half-brother have both looked for him, up and down a hundred coastlines.’ She sighed, suddenly annoyed that she was thinking about this at all. ‘If he ever did turn up at my door again, I’d probably knock him straight back into the sea for making us worry so much.’

Nuava half laughed, a tiny, nervous noise that echoed strangely off the walls.

‘The last time I saw him, he’d won a cargo boat full of oranges off some idiot in a card game.’ Wydrin smiled at the memory. ‘He was trying to figure out what he was going to do with them all, but I said to him—’

The ground beneath their feet trembled, causing Nuava to stagger to one side. Wydrin drew Glassheart in her free hand and looked around, but there was nothing to be seen.

‘What was that?’

Nuava shook her head. They had reached another of the intersections, and she stood where the tunnels met, looking back the way they’d come.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps the rocks are shifting?’

Something lurched out of the dark from her right, knocking her forward and then gathering her up in one movement. Wydrin had time to see a huge, segmented creature that half-filled the tunnel that passed through theirs, its body covered in shiny brown blisters like earthenware plates, before it had snatched up Nuava with a set of writhing mandibles, and then she was faced with its backside, disappearing off down the tunnel. The thing had scurrying, insectile legs, hundreds of them, and it was moving alarmingly fast.

Nuava screamed, once, and then already she was out of sight.

‘Ye gods and little fishes!’ Wydrin sheathed her dagger and scrambled up onto Mendrick’s back. ‘Follow that centipede!’

Mendrick pounded down the tunnel, sending up showers of stone and grit. The strange plants shimmered and shone, lighting their way down the passage. Ahead of them, Wydrin could just make out the barbed read-end of the monster that had stolen Nuava; the creature was twisting and turning, seemingly at random, and for long moments they would lose sight of it altogether, before Mendrick would put on an extra burst of speed.

‘The lights,’ she gasped as she clung to the leather strap around the werken’s neck. ‘You said they were someone’s lights. You could have mentioned that that someone was a giant carnivorous centipede!’

It is not carnivorous
, said Mendrick.
Not as such
.

‘Not as such?’

They tore around another corner, and now they were very close. Wydrin could see that the long, horn-like barbs on the centipede’s rear end were flexing at them aggressively, and there was some sort of dark fluid oozing from the pointed ends.

‘Of course it would be poisonous,’ she muttered. ‘Bastard thing that ugly would have to be.’

From ahead they heard Nuava shouting again, and Wydrin leaned forward over Mendrick’s neck.

‘Go for it, Mendrick,’ she urged. ‘I know you can catch this thing.’

Mendrick leapt forward, attempting to land on the creature’s rear end and crush it, but the centipede vanished from view, and then suddenly they were falling, catapulting down into the black. Wydrin heard Nuava screaming, and then realised she was screaming too. There was a confusion of lights – the light-globe, somehow still with Nuava, the weird shimmering lights of the wall fungus, and the twin green lamps of Mendrick’s eyes – and in it Wydrin caught sight of what looked like a whirlpool directly beneath them.

‘Shit!’

Clinging to Mendrick’s neck she closed her eyes and braced for the splash, but instead they landed with a messy crunch, quickly followed by a deafening chorus of chittering and clicking.

‘What the—?’

Wydrin opened her eyes. They had landed in a swirling mass of giant centipedes, all squirming together on the floor of a giant chamber. She and Mendrick had apparently fallen directly onto the back of one of them, causing its stringy yellow guts to explode messily all over its neighbours. Glancing to the head of the creature, she saw it raise its head weakly and wave lightly furred antennae, before keeling over.

We’re here
, said Mendrick in her head.

‘We’re
what
?’

‘Wydrin? Wydrin, are you there?’

Nuava appeared out of the gloom, clambering over the back of one of the writhing creatures, stumbling slightly as she came. Her clothes had been torn and she was spattered with centipede gore, but otherwise she looked unharmed. Wydrin waved at her.

‘It just dropped me,’ she said. Her voice was trembling. ‘It brought me all the way down here and just dropped me.’

‘Perhaps it was giving you a lift.’

Now that they were down in the chamber, the centipedes did indeed seem to be ignoring them. Wydrin urged Mendrick towards the girl, and the werken moved awkwardly against the whirling tide. The centipedes were all moving together, circling a stone edifice in the middle of the cavern which Wydrin couldn’t see clearly.

‘I could do without help like that,’ said Nuava. They reached her and Wydrin pulled her up onto the back of the werken. ‘I think I threw up a little.’