“Surely you know by now that I reflect only what I see within the minds of those who enter my domain? What is there, I wonder, in what I have drawn from your secret thoughts that makes you so afraid?”
Very slowly, Indigo exhaled the air that shock had trapped in her lungs, and with its release the burgeoning anger bloomed. Confusion and fright evaporated to a hot ember of contempt: she knew that, at last, she was facing the demon she had come to find. She had, indeed, been right—this was a vampire. But a vampire that must not only feed on the lives of its victims, but must also create its form from among the wealth of memories and dreams it found within their minds, for it had no form of its own.
“You,” she said scornfully, and saw Esty and Forth glance quickly at her, surprised by the sudden authority in her tone. “Now I know what you are, and why you cloak yourself in the images of others. You haven’t the courage, have you, to show yourself as you really are? Because you are nothing!”
“Indigo!” The truth, she saw, was beginning to dawn on Forth, and he reached quickly for the hilt of his knife. “If this is the demon—”
“It is.” She put a hand out to stay him. “But you can’t kill a shade; not that way.” Her gaze shifted to her phantom self again and she felt an unwonted surge of loathing, and of outrage that such a being should presume to taunt her with her own semblance. “You can’t use a blade against a thing that has no substance, and which can take only the forms which it usurps from their rightful owners.” She took a step forward; was gratified to see the demon move a prudent pace back in response. “Isn’t that true, my shadowy friend? You can’t show us your true shape, for you have none.” She smiled cruelly, taking cold pleasure from her hatred. “What a pitiful thing you are!”
The image lifted its shoulders fractionally, and inclined its head in an all too familiar gesture. “Oh, yes,” it said softly. “I am pitiful. But I live. And I will continue to live, and to thrive in my own fashion—unless you can complete the task you have come here to perform, and kill me.” The violet eyes looked up, challenging. “Do you think you can do that, Indigo? Or will you and your friends succumb to me in the end, as so many others have done?”
Indigo’s eyes narrowed. “You cannot kill me.”
“True. But I can hold you. There is no exit from this world, unless I should choose to create one. And while you may not die, your companions are another matter.” It looked speculatively first at Esty, then at Forth. “The substance of those who fight me takes, longer to absorb than that of those who give themselves willingly; but the sustenance they offer is the greater for that. I will consume your friends, eventually. I must consume them, as I must consume all that is within my reach.”
“Must?” Indigo repeated with harsh disgust. “I see no must in the draining of Bruhome’s crops and land, and in the devouring of innocent souls!”
“They are life,” the demon replied. “And I must consume life, if I myself am to live.” It sighed heavily. “I wish it were otherwise, but I cannot change the inevitable.”
Disgusted by this sham of regret, Indigo opened her mouth to fire back a furious retort, but before she could speak, Forth stepped towards her. He had one arm protectively about Esty’s shoulders; now he slipped the other around Indigo and glared hotly at the demon.
“You won’t cow us!” he declared venomously. “And you won’t have our lives, however invincible you claim to be! We came here to destroy you—and we’ll do it!”
“Ah.” The demon regarded him sorrowfully. “Would that you could, little human. Would that it were possible; for in death there might be freedom from the hunger that drives me.” The violet gaze slid now to Esty’s face, and the demon’s expression grew poignant. “Esty knows of my loneliness and my suffering. Do you remember, sweet Esty? Do you recall how you shared the grief of my burden, and how you pitied me?” And suddenly what faced them was not Indigo but the sad, beautiful young man of the moorland pool, his face pale and fragile above the swathe of his black cloak, his deep-set eyes haunted with longing.
Esty made a dreadful sound and Forth swung her round, forcing her to avert her gaze.
“Enough!” he said ferociously. “You don’t deceive us, and we have no pity for the likes of you. We want only one thing from you before we kill you—we want our family and friends restored to us.” He released the two women and stepped menacingly forward, touching his knife again. “We demand it!”
“Forthright.” The demon smiled again, thinly. “You were aptly named, were you not? But I’m afraid I must disappoint you. I could not release your kin, even if I wished to. They are mine now; and I must use all that is mine to sustain me.” The smile widened a little, and became predatory. “My hunger is unending, and it can never be sated. When all the husks of Bruhome are drained and have nothing left to give me, then I must find more. I must take all there is, no matter how insignificant. I must feed.”
“Vampire!” Esty spat. “Hell-spawned leech!”
The being nodded. “That, yes; but also far more than that, as Indigo knows.” The hollow, glittering eyes turned to regard Indigo once more. “Can you name me, Indigo? Can you name one who has the power to contain everything, and yet contains nothing? Can you reach into the darkest corners of your mind, and tell me, from the depths of your own experience, what I am?”
Indigo didn’t reply. Her lips had whitened and were pressed tightly together, and memories roiled in her mind. Nemesis, laughing. Slaughter and carnage and destruction, as the Tower of Regrets fell. Her family dying. Her lover, Fenran, tortured and imprisoned between dimensions. And the Earth Mother’s emissary, whose pity was tempered with implacable will …
The demon chuckled softly. “Yes,” it said. “You know me, Indigo. I am Despair. And despair never sleeps, and always hungers for a release which it cannot achieve.”
The intense gaze was hypnotic, and as the demon spoke Indigo felt her mind respond with a kindred surge of misery. She understood the bleakness of its existence, the hopelessness, the futility of eternally living, eternally hungering, without even the cold comfort granted by the promise of eventual death.
“It is a poignant paradox, is it not?” the demon said more gently. “To live forever, without hope of death. I want nothing more than to die, Indigo, for my future is an empty one with nothing to cheer me. But I cannot be killed. Not by you; not by any living being. And so I must continue in my dismal sojourn, and hunger, and feed, and suffer, for all time.”
A constricting pain assailed Indigo’s lungs as empathy swelled within her. Surely this creature’s plight had terrible parallels with her own? She knew its despair, and knowing it, she could feel for the demon, almost pity it.
“No!” With a great effort she threw off the thoughts, and as she banished them the hate came back, redoubled by realization that, again, the demon had lured her into perilous waters, almost seducing her into its own miasma of hopeless misery. She stared again into the mesmeric eyes, but this time her own eyes were hard and ablaze with anger.
“I shall kill you,” she said savagely. “There will be a way, and I’ll find it!”
The demon sighed, and it seemed that shadows began to gather in on them from the corners of the hall, intensifying the gloom. Esty looked nervously about her, and moved closer to Forth.
“Try, and with my blessing,” the demon said. “I would welcome death. But you will fail.”
The shadows deepened, and at the periphery of her vision Indigo glimpsed indistinct shapes stirring within them.
“I won’t fail.” Now her voice was contemptuous, though the growing darkness and the suddenly claustrophobic atmosphere were making her pulse quicken uneasily.
“Ah, but you will.” The demon’s tone became sibilant. “For how can any of you fight a power that draws its inspiration from your own dark selves?” It raised one hand in a graceful gesture, then pointed towards her. “Remember your own words, Indigo. All that I am, and all that my world contains, can take only the forms which I usu
rp from their rightful owners. To prevail against me, you must first prevail against yourself. Solve that conundrum, if you can!”
Behind them, something snarled. Esty cried out, and Indigo spun round to see a wall of churning darkness boiling across the hall. Tendrils of the dark reached out to become hands, clawing in desperation: among the hands thorns clashed murderously; and, twisting and turning in the midst of the blackness was a mayhem of silently screaming human faces, and misshapen horrors, and crimson-eyed, slavering wolves.
“Your darkness, Indigo!” the demon called mockingly. “Yours!”
Hooting, monstrous, filling the hall with its shadowy presence, the Brown Walker stalked through the gloom. With it came a vast, bloated, winged worm with the head of an owl, and behind the worm lurched a huge and grotesque troll that Indigo knew could only be the Jachanine. Horrors from her homeland’s mythology and from the legends of Forth and Esty’s people, dragged from the depths of their minds and memories and conjured to a hideous semblance of reality as the truth of the demon’s taunt slammed home.
Esty began to wail on a high, hysterical note, and the sound fired Indigo’s own straining nerve almost to breaking point. She shut her eyes, feeling terror swelling in her like a rising storm-wave, and tried desperately to control the wild surge, channel its energy, impose the strength of her will over the power of the demon—
A hoarse shout rang through the hall, and Indigo’s eyes snapped open again in time to see Forth launch himself at the black wall as his own fear and fury erupted. He had snatched his knife from its sheath, and he stabbed and hacked like a madman at the roiling darkness.
“Kill them!” he yelled frenziedly. “Slay them, tear them apart—they don’t exist! Nothing exists in this hell but us—we’re real, but they’re only phantoms!”
Black fingers writhed from the fog to snatch and snare him, and he tore at them with his free hand, ripping them apart and casting the smoking shreds to the floor. The maelstrom heaved and twisted upon itself like some massive but mindless beast dimly sensing threat, and Forth’s yells took on a manic, triumphant timbre.
“Help me! Help me, and we can slaughter it!”
Indigo’s pent paralysis snapped at the goad of his voice, and she and Esty screamed a challenge together, drawing their own knives as they, too, ran at the churning horror, slashing furiously at the blackness. The wall heaved again, and then began to collapse. The warped forms, both human and monstrous, melted into a chaos of shrieking faces and writhing arms; from the heart of the darkness a howling rose, a myriad voices in ghastly discord. Indigo howled back, venting all the loathing and defiance and savagery that until that moment had been locked within her, and the mad scene leaped and flickered as, for a stunning instant, she seemed to see it through other eyes than her own. Silver eyes, glittering vengefully: eyes of milky gold, remote and detached: the hunting, amber eyes of a wolf—
Suddenly, thunder bellowed through the hall, drowning all other sound under its roar. The flagstones beneath Indigo’s feet heaved, humped upward, and the scene erupted in a single blast of light as she was thrown sideways to land with terrific force on the floor. Her ears rang with the thunder’s echoing ricochet; the black wall above her seemed to coalesce into a whirling, tornado-like column—
And she was flailing, struggling to regain her feet as grim and total silence took the hall in an iron hand.
Close beside her, someone said, in a voice too strained to be recognisable, “Goddess preserve us …”
Miasma cleared, and Indigo opened her eyes.
The black cloud was gone. The hall was empty, silent, completely still. The doors and the demon had vanished, and in their place were rotting walls that gaped to the blind stare of a cold, indifferent sky. Ancient stone shone with the cold nacre of decay, and great fissures had split the walls’ fabric, letting through the rampant, grasping arms of gnarled trees that coiled and clung. Hollow in the silence, she heard the steady, relentless drip of water on flint, and beneath her the ground shifted sluggishly, sodden with old and stagnant moisture.
Hands clasped her upper arms, pulling her up, breaking the thrall that held her. She sensed Forth’s closeness, heard Esty murmuring a heartfelt imprecation, and saw their eyes like the fearful eyes of a hunter’s prey, shocked and uncertain in the silent gloom.
And from a dank, crumbling distance, a thin voice spoke.
“Your courage does you credit. But it is futile. It will all be one, in the end.”
At the end of the hall one door remained, sagging on rusted hinges. And before the door, a vague shadow sat in a rotting chair of petrified wood that was all but obscured by moss and mould. Though the shadow had no face, they could sense that the demon was smiling.
“One round in the game, my friends. Or, as the Brabazon Fairplayers might prefer it, one scene in the play; and you have acted your parts commendably. What entertainment can be devised next, I wonder?”
Forth tensed angrily. “Damn your entertainments! Release my father and sister!”
“Ah, yes; of course.” The shadow quivered, as though with silent laughter. “As I have said before, I will not, and I cannot. But you have awakened my interest, Forthright Brabazon; you and your fellow performers. Isn’t that what you wish of your audience when you step out on to the stage? I am amused by you. I am entertained by you. And perhaps it will give me some small respite from my eternal misery to continue with this play for a while yet.” The nebulous form rose from the chair. “You think you can destroy me. You are wrong; but perhaps, while you persist in your fond delusion, I might arrange some diversion that will lead our drama towards a satisfying final act.” One dark, nebulous hand rose, and gestured towards the decayed door. “Beyond that portal lies a road which will lead you to your friends. All your friends.” The emphasis was clear, and Indigo sensed with a chill frisson that the demon was looking intently at her alone as it spoke. “It is a dangerous road, but no doubt you are well prepared for danger. And while you face what lies ahead, and learn or suffer from what you find, the modest entertainment of following your progress will hearten me a little in my unhappy sojourn.”
“We are not your puppets!” Indigo retorted furiously.
“Oh, but you are. For I shall set the scene as I please, and you shall be my fairplayers, with survival instead of coin as your fee. He whose purse is deepest is master of the revels: isn’t that the keystone of your trade? And my purse is deeper than that of any master you have ever known.”
Esty clenched her fists until her fingernails dug deep into her palms. “We won’t be your playthings! You monstrosity, you serpent’s offal—we won ‘t!” She spat, like an angry cat, towards the chair, but the spittle fell short.
“That choice is yours,” the demon said indifferently. “You may follow the road I offer, or you may stay here until you become as decayed as the stone walls around you. Whichever you choose, we will encounter one another again before long. And now, I shall leave you to debate your decision.” It paused. “One last word of caution. The wolves have teeth.” Its spectral form shimmered as though, again, it laughed soundlessly. “I bid you goodbye, for the present.”
The rotting chair vanished. For a moment the dark shadow stood gaunt and alone; then, like smoke blowing away on a gentle wind, it shivered, its form dissolved, and it was gone.
There was a long, tense silence. Finally, Forth broke it with an explosive and crude oath.
“Well,” Esty said with rancor as the tight atmosphere relaxed a fraction. “What are we to do?”
Indigo was staring silently at the crumbling door, and it was Forth who answered.
“I think we have to go,” he said. “If it wasn’t lying to us, and there is a chance of finding Da and Chari, we must try. The Mother knows it goes against the grain, knowing that we’ll be dancing to its filthy tune, but I can’t see any other choice.”
Esty, her earlier defiance sobered, nodded and looked uneasily at Indigo. “Indigo? What do you think?”
&nbs
p; All your friends, the demon had said. And: the wolves have teeth…. Indigo forced back her dark thoughts, and met Esty’s gaze.
“I agree,” she said. “There’s no other choice we can make.”
In subdued silence they gathered the few meager belongings that were left to them. Finally, though none of them was anxious to face it, they could prevaricate no longer, and turned towards the door.
Forth reached out and touched it. The hinges groaned—then abruptly the whole structure gave way, the wood splitting, crumbling, collapsing to splinters and dust, and revealing the new land beyond.
A pale dust road led away from the door, under the same starless, featureless, dimly lit sky that had hung over the moor and the gardens. To one side of the road, dark hills humped with a still air of menace; to the other lowlands swept away towards an indistinct horizon, patched here and there with darker areas which might have been tracts of woodland.
Esty said softly, “The fell road …”
It was a perfect replica of the main drovers’ way into Bruhome; the very road along which the Brabazon Fairplayers’ caravans had rolled to their ill-fated attendance at the Autumn Revels. Indigo could imagine the demon’s amusement at such an ironic jest; but she preferred not to consider what might lie beyond these black hills and vales where, in the true world, Bruhome itself should be.
She said nothing, but shouldered her harp more comfortably and, trying to ignore the feeling of foreboding that crept through her like the threat of some dire fever, stepped over the shattered door and through the arch. Forth and Esty followed, unspeaking; as their feet touched the dust and gravel of the track there was a sound like a softly inhaled breath, and they looked back.
The arched doorway and the rotting hall beyond it were gone. Behind them, the road stretched away under the empty sky, pale and faintly shining until it curved around a fold in the dark fells and was lost to sight.
Still no one spoke, but in the quiet gloom Esty reached out and took Forth’s hand, squeezing his fingers. Whether it was to reassure herself or him, Forth didn’t know; but he returned the gentle pressure before, side by side, they set off along the track in Indigo’s wake.
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