The Iron Ghost (40 page)

‘She’s not breathing,’ said Nuava in a low voice. ‘I’ve checked. Her blood is still.’

Frith ignored them all. The light grew stronger, until the hill was bathed in rosy light. Wydrin did not move.

‘Come on,’ muttered Frith. He was shaking with the effort of it now, the first droplets of sweat forming on his forehead. In the strange pink light his eyes were lost in hollows of shadow. ‘Wydrin, please. Come on.’

Sebastian knelt back down and placed a hand on her forehead, pushing her hair back from her brow. Her eyelids did not so much as flicker.

‘Frith,’ he said, hating himself for speaking, hating himself for saying anything at all. ‘Frith, I don’t think—’

‘
Shut up
.’ The pink light blazed with sudden brilliance, a strange grapefruit sun in the middle of that cold place, before suddenly winking out and throwing them back into the gloom. Frith fell backwards, gasping and trembling.

Wydrin lay utterly still.

‘Frith, I don’t think there’s anything we can do,’ said Sebastian. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No,’ said Frith, and now his voice was a broken croak. ‘I won’t allow it, I won’t.’

‘Look at that.’ Nuava came over and knelt on the blankets next to Wydrin. She took one of Wydrin’s cold hands in her own and held it up to them. The chip of green Heart-Stone in the palm of her hand was glowing, on and off, like a heartbeat. ‘I’ve never seen one do that before. What do you suppose it means?’

Sebastian looked over to Mendrick, who was still standing without moving, his green eyes apparently fixed on Wydrin’s inert form.

‘I think it means that there’s nothing
we
can do.’

Wydrin opened her eyes. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done.

She found herself lying on her side, her limbs curled up as though she were trying to deflect a blow. Around her there was a grey darkness, and underneath, a shining web of green light, shifting and trembling. It was holding her up, she realised. Without it she’d be lost in the void.

‘Mendrick? Are you there?’

‘I am.’ His voice was faint, but all around her.

‘What’s happening?’

‘You are dying, I believe,’ he said, in his utterly calm voice. ‘But I caught you before you went. The thread between us wasn’t completely severed.’

‘Oh.’ She tried to move, and the web shivered alarmingly. She felt very weak. ‘Well, thanks for that. Now what?’

‘You must decide if you wish to go back,’ he said. ‘You must decide if you have the will to go on living, or—’

‘Of course I bloody do!’ Wydrin tried to sit up again and the net of green lights swung and pulsed. ‘What sort of bloody question is that?’

There was a moment’s silence from Mendrick. Wydrin pressed her fingers against one of the strands of light, watching as it shone through her palm, revealing the bones inside. She tried not to think about the yawning darkness below the web.

‘Humans are so concerned with moving about and living,’ Mendrick said dryly. ‘I am not sure I understand it. Everything comes to the same end, eventually.’

‘Yes, but not right
now
. I have things to do.’

‘In that case, I will push you back,’ said Mendrick. ‘Be ready.’

It was like being thrown into the ocean fully clothed. The shock of the cold air and the warmth of her own body hit her all at once and Wydrin jerked violently, gasping for air. The small group of people all gathered round her cried out as one, and then there was a lot of shouting from Sebastian.

‘By Isu! Give her some space, get back!’ Completely ignoring his own advice he knelt in the snow and grabbed her, squeezing her into a backbreaking bear hug. ‘Wydrin, you’re alive!’

She smacked him weakly on the back. Behind him Nuava and Dallen stood together, joint grins on their faces, while Frith knelt in the snow next to her, his eyes wide with shock.

‘I’m alive all right, although you’re squeezing it back out of me, you big idiot.’

Sebastian held her at arm’s length. ‘How do you feel? What hurts? Are you warm enough?’

‘I feel quite good considering how dead I was a moment ago, and my head hurts like a bastard, and I’m freezing bloody cold. What happened to Joah?’

‘The mage fled,’ said Dallen, ‘in some sort of infernal machine. He still has the Heart-Stone.’

‘He struck you with a bolt of lightning,’ said Frith. She turned to him and was alarmed to see that he looked even worse than he had in Joah’s Forge; his cheeks looked hollowed out and his hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. He also appeared to be shaking slightly. ‘It must have stopped your heart. I couldn’t – I couldn’t bring you back.’

Wydrin glanced over to where the werken stood.

‘My link to Mendrick saved me. It stopped me from falling.’

There were a few moments of silence. Wydrin saw the confusion on every face and sighed inwardly; there was no easy way to explain such things.

‘How is that possible?’ asked Nuava. ‘We’ve never noticed such a benefit before.’

‘Wydrin’s link to the mountain-spirit is very deep,’ said Prince Dallen. He looked pointedly at Nuava. ‘I strengthened the link myself, in order to prove that the being you call a werken was a thinking, feeling entity. It appears this link prevented Wydrin’s soul from leaving her body.’

‘Never mind all that now,’ said Wydrin. She tried to sit up. ‘We have to get after that bastard, before he does any more damage.’

Sebastian laid a heavy hand on her arm. ‘There is a lot we have to talk about. We need to hear from Frith about what exactly Joah has been up to all this time, and you need to eat something and have a rest.’ He glanced at the young lord. ‘You
both
need some food and rest.’

Later, when all the talking was done and Frith could barely see through his headache, he excused himself from the campfire and walked some distance away, trying to ignore how the cold wind cut through him like a fine blade. He walked until he found a likely spot and then, using the word for Force, focussed down to a blunt shape, he dug a shallow grave before wrapping the body of Gwiddion in a piece of his own cloak. He held it for a moment; it felt so light, like it was made of air and feathers. It hardly seemed possible that the griffin had once carried them across oceans: ever fleet, never tiring.

Wydrin appeared out of the evening’s darkness; she was as quiet as a cat when she wanted to be. He looked up at her.

‘I cannot just keep him in my pocket.’

Wydrin nodded, and knelt beside him. They sat in silence for a few moments.

‘He was a good griffin,’ she said. ‘I mean, not that I knew that many, obviously.’ She cleared her throat. ‘He always smelt . . . he always had this particular smell. Like flowers from far away, and the sea.’

Frith placed the pitifully small bundle into the hole, and covered it over with dirt.

‘Here.’ Wydrin reached behind her and plucked a jagged piece of rock out of the snow. She placed it carefully on top of Gwiddion’s makeshift grave. ‘At least we’ll know he’s here.’

‘He was an important gift,’ said Frith. ‘A blessing I did not deserve. Because of me, he is dead. And as unlikely as it seems, O’rin is in danger now too.’

Wydrin placed her hands on her knees, staring at the grave. ‘This Rivener contraption. You think Joah will use it?’

‘I know he will,’ said Frith. ‘Human life is nothing to him. He sees us as inherently inferior.’ He paused, frowning. ‘It’s almost as though he doesn’t mean it maliciously. As though humans are so inconsequential that he doesn’t even ponder it.’ Explaining the Rivener and its workings had been difficult. He had struggled to convey his horror as the small scruffy man had screamed inside the tank, his sense of creeping despair at the sight of his bright eyes turned cloudy.

‘Then it sounds as though we will have to stop him, then, doesn’t it?’ She smiled at him lopsidedly. ‘If we keep up these heroics we shall start getting a reputation.’

Frith swallowed. He felt as though he barely had the strength to stand, let alone fight Joah Demonsworn.

‘The city, and then the sword,’ he said, hoping he sounded surer than he felt. ‘Temerayne, and the god-blade. If what Xinian told me is true, then it is the only way to kill him.’

‘Of course, I always make a point of trusting anything a ghost tells me,’ said Wydrin. Frith looked at her sharply, but she reached out and adjusted the rock on Gwiddion’s grave, turning it to some angle that pleased her. He found himself looking at the hollow of her neck, the way her unkempt hair curled against her cheek. ‘We know where the city is at least, although it sounds as though we’re going to have all sorts of fun getting there.’ When Frith had named the city, Dallen and Nuava had both started talking at once, proclaiming it ‘cursed’ and ‘lost’, although, curiously, they both knew where to find it. ‘Sebastian is glad to hear there is a sword that can actually kill the bastard. His was quite useless.’

‘Yes,’ said Frith, and then, ‘Wydrin, I thought you were dead.’

‘The Copper Cat has nine lives, and all that.’ She shrugged. ‘The Copper Cat is also really bloody lucky, it seems.’

‘I am the lucky one,’ said Frith. He squeezed his eyes shut briefly, wishing he didn’t feel so unwell. It was difficult to concentrate on the words, and they needed to be the right ones. ‘I have been an idiot. All the time, I have been thinking about the past, about what other people wanted, when they are gone and there is nothing I can do to bring them back.’

‘Are you all right?’ She reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘You really should rest while we have a moment.’

Frith nodded hurriedly. ‘I am fine. I was given a second chance, and I spent it fretting over old stones and past obligations, I –’ His head was swimming. Why was it so difficult to say, even now? ‘Joah said my heart was conflicted, but it is not. I am simply a coward.’

‘You are the last person I would describe as such,’ said Wydrin, her voice for once entirely serious.

‘The pair of you should go back to your fire.’ They both looked up at Dallen’s voice. He stood over them with an ice-spear held loosely in one hand; in the other he held a freshly killed rabbit. ‘There are Arichok around here, and they can rush out of the dark and overwhelm you.’

‘Thank you, your princelyness,’ said Wydrin. She took her hand away and stood up, not quite looking at Frith. ‘We wouldn’t want anything to overwhelm us, would we?’

It had been a cold night in Ynnsmouth. Sebastian paused in his trek back to the hidden temple to lay the heavy pack at his feet. He looked up at the mountain; freezing fog drifted down from its peak like a swarm of ghosts. The trees around him were wreathed in it, skeletal and black.

It was a longer walk back this time, but worth it; he had not found the will in his heart to return to Ragnaton, and Athallstown, the village two days’ travel to the south, was larger and better stocked anyway. With so many people coming and going, he was quite certain his face would not be recognised, and there would be no chance of seeing that grey figure, the kerchief failing to hide the disappointment in her eyes.

‘Ghosts,’ muttered Sebastian. ‘Ghosts everywhere.’

He picked up his pack and got moving again.

In a little while he would reach a certain stunted tree, and from there he would head directly west along a dried-up stream. The stream would turn into a ditch, which would eventually grow deep enough to be almost a tunnel, with only a narrow strip of sky overhead. At this time of night, it would be pitch-black, but in the last few months Sebastian had grown intimately familiar with its every muddy hole and jagged rock.

A figure appeared out of the mist, running at such a breakneck speed that it collided heavily with Sebastian and spun away, almost falling to the ground. Sebastian had his sword ready in seconds, but the face that turned up to his was green, the eyes round and yellow and shocked. After a moment he recognised Havoc, a brood sister who had cut her white hair very short.

‘Father, you must come.’ Sebastian was alarmed to hear genuine panic in her voice. ‘There is a man in the valley.’

‘What?’ Sebastian shoved his sword away. ‘Where?’

‘He approaches the training slopes now. He is some way ahead of you. He knew the secret way, Father.’

‘And you didn’t stop him?’

Havoc looked at him uncomprehendingly. ‘How should we have stopped him, Father?’

Sebastian shook his head abruptly. ‘Never mind. Has he seen any of you?’

‘We are hiding. But the others, at the temple – we cannot reach them before he does.’

Sebastian reached for the link with Ephemeral, that silver thread that joined them – it was something they had been working on over the last few weeks: a way to send messages, warnings, perhaps, when they were apart. But he could feel nothing save for the anxiety of Havoc, standing so close to him.

‘By Isu—’ Sebastian dumped the heavy pack between a pair of trees, resolving to come back for it later. ‘Let’s run. We may be able to catch up with him.’

Havoc went first, moving down the stream and into the ditch with fluid ease while Sebastian crashed along behind her, finding that the dark and his own anxiety had turned the path back into something unknowable.

They emerged breathing heavily at the bottom of the training slopes. Ahead of them the grass was empty save for a single figure, walking slowly up the gentle hill. At the top of the slopes the temple sat, warm lights shining from every window, and Sebastian felt his stomach turn over. This had to be a knight, perhaps returning from some distant campaign, and what would he think upon seeing those lights? That the Order were still intact, that there would be a warm welcome for him through those doors? Instead he would find a horde of women who would look monstrous to him, a horde whose exploits he may have heard tell of, may even have witnessed for himself.

‘Quickly, you head up around, keep out of sight as much as you can,’ said Sebastian, his voice low.

Havoc nodded once before running off into the dark. Sebastian watched until she was at the edge of the slopes, where the trees began, and then called across to the figure ahead of him.

‘Who goes there?’

The man turned round and stopped. Even in the dark Sebastian could see his hand straying to the dirk at his belt.