The tower had drawn him back to the Realms. It had assisted him without his knowledge, and they had both grown the stronger for it.
“Oh, indeed?”
“By bringing me here you have allowed me to perceive you, who once were hidden from me.”
“You speak nonsense.”
“What else would you expect of a madman, abroad in the Land of dreams and lies?”
“So now you are a poet, as well as a madman,” said the Speaker. “But you are no lover, nor ever shall be.”
The mortal lowered his gaze. “But I was,” he said. He smiled and looked up. “Of course I was. I was a lover, like every other mortal. I loved so much my heart was full to bursting.”
“And then your heart burst,” said the Speaker.
The tower pulsed darkly.
“You make it sound obvious, but you couldn’t see it until I told you,” said the mortal. “You couldn’t dowse my past, and you still can’t divine what I’ve done to your Realms. And you haven’t even noticed what I’ve done to you while we have stood here chatting.”
“You have done nothing but flap your tongue.”
“I have flapped my tongue but I have also been observing what is going on around me.” The mortal gestured with his stick. “I would encourage you to do the same.”
The mirror-paned walls had darkened from grey to black, and the image of the tower was reflected in every facet.
The Speaker had no words.
“Come,” he said. “Lead me out of these halls, and I will show you.”
“There is no exit,” said the Speaker. “Sorcery is the only means by which this chamber can be accessed.”
“Bollocks and bullshit,” said the mortal. “As bloody usual.”
He limped over to one of the mirror-paned walls and struck it with his stick. The council chamber shattered and liquefied; cracking apart and slushing to the ground, panel by panel. The flooring split open beneath their feet, splintering into a fine layer of dust.
Outside, the City of the Magi was nowhere in evidence. Its towers and apartments, cast from purest magic, had vanished as if they never were. The uniform hills and valleys of the Realm that had once contained that city had been captured and occupied by a forest of bare, black-skinned trees.
The trees slouched in staggered file along the banks of the sine wave river; they stood in parade formation upon the planar plains. The soil underfoot was black and dead. The sky above was blue and bright and empty.
The Speaker struck its hands together and stepped forwards. “Enough!” it said. “Your hideous magic has fouled our Land for too long already.” It threw its hands out wide. “Council, attend to me. It is time this mortal met the fate of all of his kind.”
“Do your worst,” said the mortal, leaning on his stick.
The Speaker shook its hands, stiff-fingered, at the mortal. It danced and incanted and invoked and cursed. The other members of the Council stood silent and unmoving, pooling their collective powers for the Speaker’s use.
The mortal stood and watched them with a smile on his face. The Speaker continued to wave and chant and jump about, with no visible effect.
“Please stop that. I feel like I’m in a discotheque.”
After a while the Speaker became tired from the physical exertion. Panting for breath, it said: “What have you brought upon us?”
“Apocalypse,” said the mortal. He altered his grip on his stick and struck it upon the side of his boot.
The black trees and the dead soil receded, forming a depression beneath them. The exposed bedrock itself subsided and the floor sank deeper yet. Cliffs of jagged stone rose from the collapsing earth like opening fingers. And there, surmounting the cliffs, stood the tower.
The mortal looked up at the tower and nodded. “Go on, then.”
The fossilized skeletons of great and hideous leviathans arose from the dust; their chap-fallen bones drawing together, twitching and scraping. They jerked and unsteadily came upright, soft tissues spreading between their salt-caked joints before calcifying into armour. The creatures gasped and twitched as black water began to seep out of the ground.
The seabed filled with swirling brine, as dark as blood or oil. The saltwater swept the magi away, battering them, filling their lungs. The sea-beasts flopped and thrashed until there was enough fluid for them to swim properly. They churned the waters with obscene vigour, hungry from their restoration. In great gulping bites the leviathans consumed the drowned Councillors: their power was gone, but the meat on them was good enough.
18. Beneath the Poisoned Sea
The Poisoned Sea quickly filled to its capacity, driving its waters outwards and joining them to the rivers that flowed into all of the Realms; feeding the Land with loathing and darkness and malice; flooding out the great, grassy plains that had themselves once resembled a sea. The ruined city that stood on those plains grew up anew, restored, but the miserable folk that lived there could not breathe the black waters. Their salt tears were added to the brine.
The mortal did not know whether they wept for joy or for sorrow, but they went weeping to their deaths, and the terrible denizens of the Poisoned Sea consumed their remains.
Limping, he made his way out of the Sea City, with his naked eyes open to the lightless depths. He supposed that he was drowned, technically, but he did not seem to be dead. Fish-things swirled about him. Eyes too big for their sockets stared. Teeth too big for their mouths gnashed. Girning faces and rushing flukes made obeisance to him as they passed. Thus he crossed the sea floor, wending his way between the reefs of carnivorous and phosphorescent coral; walking amongst schools of fish and fiends that were armoured and finned, fanged and envenomed.
The rocks beneath his feet softened as the seabed began to rise. It was difficult to find traction in the sliding sand, but he trudged on. The mortal was a strong swimmer, but today he had to walk.
19. The Tree and
the Tower
The mortal emerged from the filthy tide and fell to his knees in the coarse black sand in order to purge the brine from his lungs. It was more painful than he had expected; far worse than the suffocating feeling the vomiting had relieved.
Weak and gasping, he raised his head. He could not see anything beyond the black trees, which grew thickly just beyond the high-water mark. As he knelt there, the night sky rose above him and the stars came out. The mortal wasn’t sure why, but somehow he had come to believe those stars to be blind and hungry things, not so different than the fish-beasts that ruled the Poisoned Sea.
The Sea had grown vast indeed, though it would never be a true ocean. The black forest, too, had spread; following the sea’s invasion of the rivers. The black had now conquered Realms which the mortal had never seen, or even imagined. This was the tower’s doing: mindlessly broadcasting its taroted message the length and breadth of the Realms.
The mortal scrambled over the sharp and porous rocks at the base of the cliffs and began to climb. The way was steep; the footing treacherous. The knife-wound in his leg pained him still. But he climbed on, cursing and muttering as he went. It felt like days or weeks or months, but he knew it was merely hours before he stood before the tower. His jacket was torn in many places, his hands were bloodied, and his jeans hung in tatters about his boots.
The tower had sprouted from the rock like the shoot of some fat plant, shattering the brittle ground when its shaft had burst through. Even now the rubble shifted, unsettled, though the tower stood firm. It was made of an unnatural material that was as much wood as obsidian, as much plant as stone, as much ebony as flesh—some alloy of sorcery and evil that was slick and scabrous and filmed with slime. The mortal fancied that he could see limbs or tendrils or arteries branching from its apex, to vein the sky.
“I should have known,” said the mortal, to any that might be listening. The tower was a tree. The tower was the Tree.
He sighed his weariness and began to limp around the base of the tower. There was no opening anywhere along its circumference. After a second circuit he still had not located an entrance, but the wound in his leg was bothering him less. The third circuit was just as fruitless, but his limp was almost gone and his other wounds were starting to scab or scar.
The mortal stood, leaning on his stick, waiting for the enemies he knew were coming. He did not have to wait for long.
“Turn around, pig-fucker,” said a resonant, female voice. “I want to see your face before I kill you.”
20. A Kiss Beneath the Tree
He turned around slowly.
The Warrior Queen Zelioliah, for whom he had once quested, regarded him down the barrel of an assault rifle. His heart surged, his eyes felt hot. He choked on his own breath.
It wasn’t Zelioliah. Dead faeries did not return. This was her daughter, as the Ore Queen had told him.
He looked away. His heart was still wild in his chest.
A young man stood behind the Warrior Queen; shoulders bunched, head hanging forwards. His breath hissed through clenched teeth. The man had olive skin and close-cropped, ragged black hair. Like his mistress, he was armed with an automatic weapon that looked almost as if it had come from the mortal realm.
“You’re not ugly,” said the Warrior Queen, “But you’re not handsome, either. I can’t fathom what my mother saw in you, that she gave you her life.”
“You look exactly like her,” the mortal said, “But she was the most beautiful thing in all the worlds, and you are not beautiful at all.”
“That beauty you destroyed forever.”
“Yes.”
“She went to you willingly,” said the Warrior Queen. “Had she known…”
“She knew,” the mortal replied. “She knew what she was, and she knew why I sought her.”
“If she had known what you intended she would have struck you down,” said the Warrior Queen. “My mother was a warrior; she would not have surrendered to any foe.”
“People aren’t that simple,” said the mortal. “Not real ones, anyway.”
“My mother was not a person, she was a faerie.”
“Perhaps,” he replied. “Perhaps she was, until I came looking for her. When she became also a person, and no longer just the Warrior Queen. That was when she knew that she had weakened. When I saw her as beautiful, as the object of my quest, she was diminished. But she knew there would be another Warrior Queen after her; stronger than she had ever been.”
“The creed of the warrior is to better oneself,” said the Warrior Queen. “To become the mightiest, or to fall trying.”
“Aye,” the mortal said. “And now the Warrior Queen is mightier than ever. The cost of it was cheap: a single, soulless life…and beauty beyond measure. Cheap as chips.”
“No,” said the Warrior Queen. “You can dress it up however you like, but in the end, you slew my mother because you wanted to destroy something beautiful.”
“That’s also true,” he replied. “And here’s another true fact: without me, you would not be the woman you have become.”
The Warrior Queen was silent. Her companion growled and swore at him in Spanish.
“You think that you raised me to greatness, but I was always the scion of the Warrior Queen—and you are still a petty murderer. For that, I’ll take your life.”
“Will you?” the mortal asked. “Or will your thrall?”
“My mother saved you from the dog-man,” replied the Warrior Queen. “It’s only fitting that I loose my own dog-man upon you. But this time, who will save you?”
The mortal opened his mouth, but another, smaller voice spoke first.
“That would be my job.”
The black thing slid around the curvature of the tower. It saunter-scampered to the mortal’s side and patted him upon the shoulder. Its teeth and eyes and hair and skin and garb shone darkly in the tower’s blacklight. “How’s that leg of yours doing?” it said.
“Kill it,” said the Warrior Queen to her companion. “Whatever it is.”
Malo stepped forwards and slung the rifle off his shoulder. He cocked it, flipped the safety, and sighted his target.
The black hissed through its grin. Black-bladed knives slid into its hands from hidden sheathes.
Malo squeezed the trigger. The gun boomed, flat and hollow and staccato. Smoke and flame and rune-light flashed from its muzzle.
The black thing ruptured. Shredded guts and pulped meat sprayed off its splintering skeleton; a thick black mist of gore and shadow.
“Oh, shit,” said the mortal.
“Now the human,” said the Warrior Queen. Malo swung the gun towards him.
The mortal swallowed hard and said, in English: “Can you understand me?”
“Sí,” grunted Malo. He could understand every language, though he did not comprehend it as language at all.
“Are you a man, or are you a dog?”
“Man,” said Malo.
“What is your name?”
“I am El Cachorro Malo.”
Malo’s eyes were a pale, washed-out blue colour. The mortal wondered why he hadn’t noticed before. He frowned. “The Bad Puppy?”
“Sí.”
The Warrior Queen laughed.
The mortal had worked it out. “You are the son of the magus.”
“Sí.”
“And you will slay me—another mortal man—here, before your father’s tower?”
“Sí.”
“At the bidding of this woman? Like a faithful dog?”
Malo hesitated.
“It was a dog that killed your father.”
“I will kill you,” said Malo, in Spanish.
“I am the only one who can open the tower,” the mortal replied. “If you spare me, I’ll let you inside and you will have your birthright.”
The son of the magus tipped his head, considering.
“This fool cannot breach the Tower,” said the Warrior Queen. “He’s less of a sorcerer than you are.”
The mortal’s attention remained on Malo. “Well, what are you, then? Are you the son of a man, or a pet animal?”
Malo hesitated. “I am the son of the magus,” he said. “I am a man.” He spoke the last sentence in clear, unhalting Spanish.
“And a human,” the mortal added.
“I told you to kill him,” said the Warrior Queen. “Have you turned on me?”
Malo backed away from the Warrior Queen. “I won’t betray you,” he said, “But if you want him dead, you must kill him yourself.”
The Warrior Queen gave Malo a long, hard look. “I’ll brook no disobedience,” she said. “Not from a soldier, not from an officer, and certainly not from a dog.”
“Then punish me.”
“I will,” she said. “In good time. But first, I must deal with this pig-fucker.”
The Warrior Queen swung her head towards the mortal. He stood, leaning on his stick, before the dark tower. Before the Worldtree. He met her gaze, but he took a step back when she turned square to him.
The Warrior Queen shrugged the machinegun from her shoulders and dropped it at her feet. She drew a pistol from a holster on her belt and cocked it. “A bullet is more than you deserve,” she said, “but it’s the cheapest death I have for you.” The Warrior Queen raised the gun, steadied it with her second hand, drew a bead and squeezed the trigger in a single motion.
“We are agreed on that,” said the mortal.
The Warrior Queen squeezed the trigger twice more. The weapon did not fire.
The Warrior Queen checked the pistol, although she knew it hadn’t jammed. “Is this your doing?” she asked Malo. “Are you thwarting my sorcery?”
“No,” replied the son of the magus.
�
��Sorcery won’t work here,” said the mortal. “Not beneath the tower. Not against me.”
The Warrior Queen discarded the pistol and drew the bastard sword that hung from her back. “Magic will not protect you from my sword,” she said. “And you have no guardians remaining.”
The mortal regarded the Warrior Queen impassively. His lips parted for a long moment before he spoke. “I think,” he said, “that you are mistaken.”
A dark and fell creature came lurching out of the forest. It was clad in leather and chainmail and hung about with a variety weapons, in the manner of the warrior folk. It raised its head and squared its shoulders as it came on. Thick, livid scars ran up each side of its face, from its jaw to its eyes.
“No,” said the Warrior Queen. “It is you who are mistaken. This is one of mine.”
As the scarred warrior drew nearer to them, its sickness became more apparent. Its clothing was dishevelled and its hair, which had blackened from its natural brown, stood out in spikes and clumps. Veins of darkness writhed under its skin, and the pupils of its eyes had consumed both the irises and the whites.
“Not anymore,” said the mortal.
The scarred warrior twitched and jerked and shook. The black marbling in its skin thickened and merged; the veins bleeding together until only the pink ridges of scar tissue on its face retained their original pigmentation. Another fit of spasms brought the scarred warrior to its knees.
“This travesty is your last ally?”
The mortal shrugged apologetically.
The scarred warrior coughed, shook and rose to a half-kneel. Shadows boiled under its skin. Unsteadily it came to stand between the mortal and the Warrior Queen.
The Warrior Queen drew a second sword from a scabbard on her waist.
The scarred warrior flexed its trembling fingers. Its weapons and mail dissolved into black rust; its leathers dripped off as a thick inky sludge. It stood naked before the Warrior Queen and the son of the magus and the mortal, wracked with hate and shuddering with malice.
The scarred warrior raised her black-skinned face and opened her black, black eyes.
Faerie Apocalypse Page 23
