by Darius Hinks
‘Alhena,’ she groaned, looking for her child.
As she flew further she saw more hunks of white flesh and then, the final, dreadful proof: spread across the riverbank, like a stranded sea monster, was the mound of tentacles that had once been the daemon’s face.
She flew towards it, starting to sob, but before she could embrace her fallen child, arrows began whistling past her.
She tried again to dive lower, but more of the asrai archers had seen her now and hundreds of arrows began flying from the trees. Some of them sliced through her wings, turning her sobs into furious cries, and she flew south, gliding up into the clouds and leaving the carnage behind.
‘What happened?’ she screamed, singling out a tallyman who was hurrying off from the valley.
She landed on a monstrous, blue-green mushroom and glared at the daemon. ‘You had them trapped. How can you have allowed them to drive you out like this?’
The daemon was clutching a long, tail-like piece of meat that was crawling with lice and disease. It gave Ordaana a vacant, loose-lipped grin and held up its treasure.
‘Our grandfather will be so pleased with this. An entirely new strain of jelly spine. See how the bones have started to congeal and melt.’ The daemon threw the spine over its shoulder and took out a rotten, leather notebook that was dripping with pus. ‘Look at the records, proctor,’ said the daemon, tracing one of its long, crooked fingers over tiny, neatly written names. ‘There has never been such a virulent strain. This is the first time–’
Ordaana leapt from the mushroom with feline grace and attacked the daemon, grabbing its necrotic neck and slamming its head against the ground.
‘How could you lose?’ she screamed, spewing maggots into the daemon’s face. ‘I handed you a victory!’ Her voice spiralled higher. ‘How could you let my child be killed?’
The daemon’s single, yellow eye stared back as its skull collapsed.
‘What could be more of a victory?’ it said in a bloody garble, holding up the piece of meat and pointing at the white dots that were scurrying over it. ‘This disease has never been seen before. We have created new life, proctor – do you see? New life. When I bring this to our grandfather he will mingle it with all his other great works. It will feed the change he is working.’
Ordaana remained crouched on top of the daemon for a moment, then howled and reeled off through the quivering stems and the garish, bell-shaped caps. She ran for a moment, then launched herself into the air, still howling with grief and panic. She had lost her child, but also she had lost the battle. She had failed Alkhor. He would be furious. What if he denied her the revenge he had promised? Everything was slipping away from her.
She flew higher over the glades of fungus and clouds of spores and saw that it would be easy enough to find her master. The rivers of bile that networked the forest had formed the shape of a huge, eight-pointed star and, where the arms of the star joined, several miles to the south, a huge black column of flies was reaching up, tornado-like, to the clouds.
Ordaana flew with all the speed she could muster, horrified by the battles that raged below. Bands of asrai, emboldened by their victory at the falls, were pushing the daemons back, driving them south towards the column of flies. She had failed horribly. The asrai were winning.
As she travelled further south, she left the fighting behind and entered a region so confusing it seemed like the world had broken down into nothing but colour. It was as though a collection of paints had been spilled across the landscape, spiralling into a bewildering vortex of pinks, blues and yellows. The rivers of bile burned on through all of it though, seething and bubbling and growing wider as they went. Tallymen were dashing through the fungus and steam, clutching their finds: fragments of diseased flesh; twitching, mutated creatures and bell jars filled with swirling, luminous gases.
There were other shapes dashing between the legs of the plaguebearers – tiny replicas of Alkhor. Ordaana grimaced at the sight of them – bloated little balls of blubber, no bigger than a child. They had wide, grinning faces and skirts of intestines that trailed from their gaping bellies. These smaller daemons carried prizes too – gastropods with human heads and sacks filled with wriggling, glistening worms. And, slithering alongside these smaller shapes were larger creatures – oozing, ponderous molluscs with teetering spiral shells and probing, glistening antennae. There was a revolting opera of squelching slurps and moist pops as the creatures slithered towards the centre of the star. The air was heavy with a damp, saccharine stench.
Ordaana realised that, despite the spores and gases, she could see with horrible clarity, in fact, she could catch every tiny movement of the fat little daemons waddling between the legs of the tallymen. As soon as she noticed this, she was assailed by thousands of images. It was as though her vision had been shattered into a mosaic of powerful lenses. She reached up to shield her eyes but immediately withdrew her hands in shock. Her eyes had grown; and they had changed.
Ordaana quashed her panic and fixed her powerful gaze on the column of flies up ahead. Nothing mattered now, but revenge. The changes warping her flesh were irrelevant – as long as she remained whole long enough to see Ariel die. Everything was the Mage Queen’s fault. Everything. Everything. Everything.
As she neared the sky-high column of flies, the sound of it became deafening. Its coiling, roiling mass roared like the ocean, drifting back and forth, wrenching tree-sized puffballs and mushrooms from the ground and hurling them through the air.
Where the eight rivers of bile met there was a broad, dazzling lake of yellow acid, filled with spiralling, serpentine shapes and, slumped proudly at the centre of it, like a grinning mountain of grey-blue fat, was Alkhor. The sac-like daemon was enormous and terrifyingly real. The insubstantiality of its flesh had all but vanished. It was now a great, leering boulder of disease, haloed by bluebottles and robed in screaming crows.
Ordaana frowned as she approached, thinking for a moment that the daemon had been wounded. Then she saw her mistake and, despite all the nauseating things it had already endured, her stomach finally rebelled. Ordaana vomited in disgust.
Alkhor had transformed its pockmarked, spherical body into a living cabinet. It had sliced open its chest, snapped its ribcage apart like a gate and allowed its viscera to spill out into the lake. In the space left by its absent organs there were now curving shelves of bone, lined with thousands of rusty meat hooks, all of which carried a specimen of some kind. Ordaana wiped the sick from her mouth and flew closer to look, conscious as she did so that Alkhor was watching her approach with interest.
Hanging from the hooks were a perplexing collection of objects: scraps of mildewed parchment, covered in tightly packed text; wooden crates full of scuttling rodents; locks of hair writhing with maggots; scraps of skin that twitched with infection; beautiful iridescent beetles, whirring and rattling against the walls of murky glass bottles; root-trailing plants, with eyes for fruit and fingers for leaves; featherless birds with the tails of fish and, finally, most disturbing of all, asrai nobles with rotten, featureless sacs for heads, reaching out blindly for help.
This whole collection was bathed in the harsh, yellow light of the lake and it seemed to Ordaana like a great bonfire of madness and decay, with the flies as its smoke.
For a while, Ordaana could do nothing but stare at Alkhor in amazement and disgust; then, recalling her purpose, she flew across the lake, feeling its heat on her flesh like a summer’s day and landed on one of Alkhor’s vast, pitted hooves.
‘We can still win,’ she cried out, struggling to be heard over the sound of the flies. She waved at the hundreds of tallymen that were wading through the bile, clutching more objects to be hung from Alkhor’s ribs. ‘Look how many children you have now. I can lead them out against the nobles.’ She spoke fast, tripping over her words in her haste to reassure him. ‘They may have defended Crowfoot Falls, but I can still drive them out. If you just give me more warriors I will finish what I started.’ Her voice f
altered as she thought of what they had done to her daemon child. ‘They must have played some trick. The forest must have helped them somehow. I do not understand. But if you just–’
Alkhor raised a webbed hand, splaying the long, black talons to signal that she should be silent.
‘My brave, beautiful Queen Ordaana,’ said the daemon. Its voice was like a thunderclap: rich and booming, but with a liquid rattle at the edge of the vowels. It was like the sound of food slops, gurgling through an enormous pipe. ‘We have won.’
Ordaana shook her head, confused. Thinking she might have misheard, she launched herself into the air and flew up towards Alkhor’s face. As she flew over the gaping cavern of the daemon’s torso, she could not help but look inside. She saw hundreds of the tiny, bloated daemons, hurrying back and forth along the bone shelves, tending and prodding the exhibits, scratching endless notes in their tiny ledgers and pinning yellowed labels on everything they passed.
She shuddered and flew on, until she was just a few feet away from Alkhor’s gaping mouth.
‘My lord?’ she asked, beating her wings against the clouds of flies.
‘You have played your part with all the grace and determination I expected, Ordaana.’
The daemon was still grinning and Ordaana thought for a moment that it was mocking her, but then it continued, explaining: ‘Crowfoot Falls meant nothing, my lover. It was just a distraction. All I needed was a little time to tend my garden. You and our brave prodigy have bought me the time I needed. Everything is now coming into bloom.’
The daemon raised its rusted, iron sword and waved it at the quagmire. The yellow pool was surrounded by slime, fungus, effluence and rotting meat, all painted in dazzling colours and shimmering with microscopic life. Everything was coated in fleas, mites, mould and bubbles of scum. Ordaana’s vision was now so fast and powerful that she could see all of it in mind-numbing detail.
The sight was too much for her. Vibrant, animated alluvium flooded her brain, drowning the remnants of her past. She saw one last, pure vision before she lost herself forever. She saw her lover, Thuralin, handsome, young and bursting with pride. It was the day she told him she was pregnant with Alhena. She recalled holding him and feeling how fast his heart was racing. She remembered the warmth of his tears on her face. Then her mind was gone – snatched away from her on a tide of animated sludge. Only one thing remained – the certainty of revenge. As she looked into the filmy void of Alkhor’s eyes, she saw her purpose reflected back: she would kill Ariel.
There would be vengeance.
Chapter Thirteen
Atolmis rode hard, thundering through the shadows, his spear extended before him. When the forest began to die, Naieth had joined them, bringing dark prophecies and fresh, powerful steeds – piebald stags, with amber runes blazing between their eyes and antlers that spiralled around their proud, equine faces. The prophecies had not been much help, but the stags made Atolmis’s heart sing.
There was a dull crunch as his spear tore through the chest of a daemon. He kept riding and slammed his prey against the bole of a tree. The tree was as rotten as everything else and it collapsed, spraying splinters and maggots through the air.
The horned priest rode on with the daemon struggling on his spear. It was a grinning, humanoid creature with russet, wrinkled skin and a single, yellow tusk jutting up from its forehead.
His face remained expressionless as the thing began hauling its rotten body down the length of the spear towards him. The stag knew, without any signal from Atolmis, to break from the grove of rotten trees and make for the shoulder of a nearby hill. They reached the summit and, just as the daemon was about to grasp Atolmis’s arm, the stag came to a halt, digging its hooves into the ground and hurling the daemon from the brow of the hill.
It grinned as it fell, tumbling into a deep crevasse. After a few seconds, it clipped the edge of the gulley and its skull exploded, spraying bone and black blood. Atolmis could still see the daemon’s expression for a few more minutes as it fell into the darkness below. He noticed that, even as its body was torn apart by the rocks, it never stopped smiling.
‘Blood, bark and bone,’ he muttered, attempting to calm himself by repeating the mantra, but the smile stayed with him.
He turned the stag around and looked back down the slope. His fellow priests were finishing off the last of the daemons. The valley was almost clear and they were less than a mile from the Crowfoot Falls – their destination and the setting for all of Naieth’s recent dreams.
He looked around for the witch and felt a moment’s fear as he failed to locate her. It occurred to him that, in all the long centuries they had served Ariel and Orion, he had never really considered how much she meant to him. With no king or queen to follow, and no clear hope of seeing them again, Naieth’s obscure visions were all he had to follow. Everything he trusted had been overturned. His life was guided by ritual and rite, but his rituals were now meaningless – they were tied to Orion and the changing of the seasons. Now there was no Orion – nor any seasons. He was lost in his own forest. Naieth was all he had.
He glimpsed her copper tangle of hair through the branches and relaxed. She was moving from tree to tree, examining each rotten husk for signs of life.
Atolmis rode the stag back down the slope and dismounted, stepping back beneath the drooping boughs.
Naieth did not look up at his approach – she was clawing at a piece of bark with one of her long, coiled fingernails. The bark came free with a loud creak and revealed a wriggling shape. She nodded, seeming pleased as she lifted a grub up into the light. Then she grimaced as the thing burst between her fingers, spewing yellow spores into the air. They billowed in the murky light, settling on her face and her intricately embroidered robes and smouldering there, like embers.
The sorceress lifted her staff of knotted twigs and slammed it into the mud. The spores flashed brightly then vanished, along with the grub that had spawned them.
‘The threads are undone,’ she said, her voice low and husky. ‘Every strand.’ She sensed Atolmis, watching her from a few feet away and turned to face him.
‘You said there was still a way,’ said Atolmis, unnerved by her tone. ‘Even without Éorann-Ostallis. Even without the spring. Even without the Consort-King.’ The words felt like ash in his throat. A life without Orion. What could be more pointless? He and the other horned riders lived for one purpose only – to serve their king. They were born to tend his ashes and guard his life, but the auguries had taken all that from them. The first blow was learning that Finavar was the Chosen One. How could Finavar be the soul who must undergo the Quickening? He was dead – thrown to the Wildwood by the lunatic sorcerer, Elatior. No such prophecy could be fulfilled. The second blow was more gradual, but just as crushing. As Atolmis and the other riders searched for answers, they had seen winter fade from the boughs around them. Not through a natural thaw – it was too early for that – but through the retreat of the seasons.
The world had turned itself inside out and become a reeking, festering lie.
The death of the seasons shocked Atolmis more profoundly than if his own hands had become flippers. The winter had been replaced with a fusty, turbid warmth that had no place in the forest. It had taken his very faith from him. What could he believe in now? Without seasons, how could there be a spring? With no great conjunction in the stars, how could there be an Orion?
When Naieth found them, the riders were heading north towards the boundary stones, lost, disconsolate and confused, their horned heads hanging low between their weary shoulders. Atolmis had no idea where he would go, but he could not bear the forest any longer. It had become alien and offensive. He would rather face death in the cities of the outsiders than this mockery of his home.
Naieth had been waiting for them by the stones. Atolmis doubted anyone else could have persuaded him to stay. He had once been an asrai lord, but that was no more than a dream to him now. His duties as a pyre warden had long ago lifted him bey
ond the mortal confines of his flesh. Like his lord, Atolmis had half a foot in the Otherworld. No pleas of logic would have halted his flight, but the cryptic, ominous words of the prophetess gave him pause.
‘You said there was a way,’ he said, fixing his featureless black eyes on her.
She studied the specks of ash she had scattered across the mud. Then she shook her head and looked up at him. Her expression was grim.
‘The Great Weave is undone.’ She was still speaking in quiet, husky tones. ‘But there is something crawling towards us. Someone.’ She squeezed Atolmis’s arm. ‘I believe it is a god. They have not forsaken us, Atolmis. They will paint the forest in its true colours.’
The other riders emerged from the shadows and surrounded Atolmis and Naieth, watching them in silence from the backs of their stags.
‘But what do we do?’ asked Atolmis. ‘Where are you leading us?’
She frowned. ‘Without the Gyre to lead my thoughts, I am hard-pressed to see my way, but Prince Haldus’s bravery was calling me. I saw his name in the flames of your master’s funeral pyre.’
Atolmis tensed. ‘Then perhaps the auguries lied. Perhaps Prince Haldus is the Chosen One?’ His claws sank into the shaft of his spear. ‘The signs spoke of a prince.’
Naieth shook her head. ‘No. He is something else, I’m sure of it.’
Atolmis frowned at her but she shook her head. ‘No matter. We must continue on our way.’ She pointed her staff south, into the festering haze. ‘I can see one thing clear enough: Haldus has gathered the last of our lords and ladies at the foot of the Limneonas. He seeks to guard the oldest of the Dark Paths, the Aisir-Anach.’
Atolmis knew the name and understood the significance. The Aisir-Anach was a route to their ancestors – a way back across the ocean to the silver, forgotten towers of their forebears, but it was the mention of Haldus that interested him more. ‘The prince is here?’
