‘Yes, it is cold, isn’t it?’ she murmured. He bent his head to hear her, but she seemed to be talking to herself. ‘I am not yours, but I am hers, and the more you hate her, the more she will give me healing. You have not destroyed the wall yet. It is colder than you know…’
She awoke with a start and looked up in confusion at Estarinel. In one sinuous movement she drew herself out of his arms and stood up.
‘Now what?’ said Ashurek, looking levelly at her.
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘I hope you are not about to conveniently forget everything that has just transpired. I still require an answer.’
‘Then I must disappoint you,’ said Medrian curtly, picking up her pack. ‘I wanted to say something, but as you have observed, I cannot.’
‘In that case, don’t assume that we can still risk you coming with us.’
‘How do you propose to stop me?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ashurek said. ‘As you have the enviable talent of receiving fatal wounds without dying, I may have to think of something else.’
‘Understand,’ she said softly, lowering her eyes, ‘I never had any intention of harming you. I apologise for what happened. But I must come, Ashurek. I swear that you have no hope of finishing the Quest without me.’
‘And less hope of finishing it with you, apparently.’
‘Ashurek, let her alone and let us carry on,’ said Estarinel. ‘We all need to eat and rest by a good fire. Let’s forget all this and find somewhere to camp.’
‘Very well; I will say no more about it for the time being. But I will be watching you, Medrian – and be warned, I will see this matter resolved before ever we set foot in the Arctic.’
#
They spent one night in the forest with the sound of the distant river echoing as if through a great cave. In the morning they moved on. Forest gave way to a barren terrain of rock that changed gently from black to brown to russet as they crossed it. The ground became flatter, the trees sparse and stunted. The cold had only come in biting gusts before, but now it became constant and they knew that the true tundra was not far ahead.
They marched on for several more days, their isolation from each other growing more acute. The air between them seemed threaded with black wires of tension that both bonded them together and kept them apart. Medrian became totally withdrawn and barely spoke at all to either of them. Since the return to Earth she had become so thin it seemed impossible that she could walk such a distance every day. It was as if something had sucked from her the last remnant of the Blue Plane’s healing strength. The way she still carried on was unnatural. With her gaunt, white face and dark eyes, Estarinel, if he caught a sideways glimpse of her, often got the horrible impression of a walking skeleton, animated by some unknown, demonic purpose.
Almost as distressing was the way Ashurek kept her under observation, like some silent, omniscient bird of prey.
Estarinel had no real fear that Ashurek actually meant to harm Medrian; but sometimes he wondered if he should be more worried. He thought he’d grown to know Ashurek quite well, but now he realised he hardly knew him at all. Perhaps he shouldn’t be so sure that the Gorethrian’s behaviour would be predictable or even reliable.
Nor could he be certain that whatever madness induced Medrian to attack Ashurek would not possess her again. So he found himself watching them both, not with Ashurek’s suspicion, but with the love he had come to feel for both of them like a perpetual cold ache in his chest. And the invisible wires thickened and tightened about them like a bizarre, meshed cage that might exist in the Dark Regions.
Sometimes, in the darkest moments of the night, Estarinel would rest his hand on top of the Silver Staff and feel a sense of peace. The Staff’s innocence and power would flow into him until he felt reassured, purposeful, free from doubt and pain. The mood was transient; as soon as he broke contact with the Staff, his calm strength eluded him, not to be recaptured. So he viewed it as a false feeling. He could place no reliance on it. He came to avoid touching the Staff, lest it prove as treacherous and addictive as a drug.
In a cold blue morning they crossed an area of coppery rock patterned with concentric circles. The terrain was rough, dotted with windblown trees, with grass and hardy plants growing in every crevice. The rock blended gradually to pale red as they walked, and presently the landscape through which they were travelling became unearthly. The stone beneath their feet changed to a delicate pinkish mineral, rising all around them in strange, lacy formations like coral. It was fascinating to see, but hard to traverse. It yielded no vegetation for them to build a fire.
A couple of days further on, unusual plants appeared. There were huge pitchers, the height of a man, with gaping green mouths angled towards the sun. They had a smooth, sculptural beauty. There were fleshy obelisks with silver-blue tendrils writhing around them like mermaid hair in an eerie dance. Another sort bore flower-filled horns that lay along the ground, exuding sticky nectar to attract insects and rodents. Small decaying corpses were glued to to the lolling flower-tongues. The pitcher plants contained a viscous yellow fluid full of half-digested of birds and flies, and the tendrils of mermaid-hair were tangled with sparrows, bats, even owls.
All around these voracious organisms lived armoured insects the size of lobsters, scavenging whatever bits of flesh the plants dropped.
The travellers kept well clear of this carnivorous flora.
The tundra, which they’d dreaded reaching, now seemed enticing compared with this exquisite, venomous landscape. Further on the plants grew in thick profusion and the coral-pink rock was choked with the slimy remains of those that had died. Where there were too many, they sprang up and faded rapidly. The stench of decay was choking.
On the fourth evening, at sun set, they saw a boundary to the poison forest and clear land beyond. Relieved, they hurried through a final stand of mermaid-hairs, only to find themselves on the shore of a strange lake.
The far shore appeared about a mile distant, but to right and left, water stretched as far as the eye could see. However, it appeared only a few inches deep. A flat, sandy-gold lake bed gleamed just under the clear water, and the lake was dotted with cushiony clusters of stones. The air was ripe with sulphur. In the distance, mist curled from the water.
‘It looks shallow,’ said Estarinel. ‘Can we wade?’
‘I hope so,’ Ashurek replied. ‘The sooner we’re away from these ravenous plants, the happier I shall be. But we must be cautious. The floor of the lake could be quicksand.’ He knelt on the rock and touched the water, jerked out his hand with a curse. ‘It’s hot – boiling.’
Estarinel tested for himself. Ashurek was not exaggerating. ‘A volcanic spring,’ he said. ‘Look – it’s bubbling in places. That’s not mist, it’s steam.’
‘Well, we can’t wade, then. We’ll have to seek a way round. I suggest we rest until morning now. At least the shore is free of decomposing vegetation.’
So they rested by the lake, although none of them slept well. The rock-cushions in the lake glowed with eerie phosphorescence, and the night seemed filled with the sighing and groaning of spectres.
#
Ashurek woke violently from a restless doze and sat up with the knowledge that something was wrong. Overnight, a dozen fleshy mermaid-hair obelisks had sprung up in a half-circle around them, enclosing them at the lake’s edge. The sound that had disturbed them all night was the creaking of their rapid growth. Even as he watched, silver-blue streamers were peeling away from the plump stems, and fluttering on the wind, fragile and moist like the antennae of newly-emerged butterflies.
Ashurek woke Estarinel and Medrian, who took in the fresh danger with alarm. They were trapped. Their only escape route lay across the boiling lake.
‘Unless we can hack a way through them,’ said Ashurek. They all stood up and strapped on their packs, but as Medrian was fastening her cloak, a streamer whipped out and clung to her hand. She did not make a sound. Worse, it se
emed to have paralysed her.
Ashurek drew his knife and severed the tendril, then prised the remaining piece off her hand. It peeled off reluctantly, leaving a rash of stings in the reddened flesh.
Estarinel inspected her hand and felt her forehead. An icy sweat broke out on her skin. He could feel her trembling.
‘Don’t let those streamers touch you,’ she managed to say through chattering teeth. ‘I think they are lethal, worse than a snake bite.’
‘We must get these stings out of your hand,’ Estarinel said.
‘Not now, there isn’t time. I’ll survive. But all we need is for the wind to change, and they will all blow this way and snare us – do you see?’
‘She’s right. And the wind is changing,’ said Ashurek. He held up the knife to show the cutting edge had been eroded by the plant’s acid. ‘We are being driven,’ he added grimly. ‘So the Serpent commands plants, as much as animals.’
They were on the very edge of the shore, and it would take only one gust from the south to sweep the venomous, stinging ribbons all around them. Ashurek said quickly, ‘Our boots should give some protection from the heat. Follow me.’
One stride took him into the scalding water, and the next to the nearest of the stone formations in the lake. He balanced there precariously for a moment, then took two splashing steps to the next. He gritted his teeth as the scalding heat began to penetrate his boots. Medrian and Estarinel followed.
In daylight, the stones gleamed with brilliant patterns of green and purple, magenta and blue. They protruded from the water in rounded lobes, broader at the top than the base. When Ashurek felt their springy resilience under his boots he realised they were not stones at all, but living things.
He hoped they were not malevolent cousins of those on land.
In the middle of the lake the water became cloudy, swirling and bubbling like a cauldron, thick with crusts of bacteria. A sulphurous miasma hung over the surface, and the lake bed slipped and sank where they trod on it. The cushiony pads grew densely here, helping them to keep clear of the seething water. Ashurek felt his feet skid on the silky, marbled surfaces. They could not afford to fall. Even Medrian, faint from her poisoned hand, found the energy to run and leap across the precarious path without faltering.
The growths began to thin, and the far shore was within reach at last. But there was a gap between the last of the pads and the shore, so they splashed through scalding water for several strides before gaining solid ground at last. Once safe on the bank, pain began to throb through their feet and legs like hot knives. Medrian collapsed, trembling convulsively.
They were on another stretch of coral-red rock, but no carnivorous succulents grew on this side. Ashurek hoped there were no more volcanic springs to negotiate. Perhaps it was his imagination, but the spongey growths in the lake appeared to be moving and regrouping.
He said, ‘Let’s not delay here.’
Estarinel was attending Medrian’s hand, drawing out each tiny sting. He dressed the wound with herbal cream he’d brought from the Blue Plane, then made her drink some H’tebhmellian wine.
‘I feel better. Can we go on?’ she said, although she was still shaking and her hands felt icy.
‘It will take a while for the venom to leave your system, and you’ll feel worse if you move about,’ said Estarinel. But Medrian rose unsteadily to her feet.
‘Ashurek is right, we should distance ourselves from the lake,’ she said. ‘I usually look worse than I feel.’
Arguing was pointless. It would be good to escape the hot stench of sulphur. Estarinel repacked his herbs and the three resumed their walk across the rockscape.
There seemed no immediate menace on this side. Nothing followed them from the lake. Soon they found themselves on the beginning of the tundra; there was grass beneath their feet and the roseate rock showed itself only in ridges breaking through the ground here and there. The country all around them was flat and featureless, bland. Ominous.
#
Medrian omitted to tell them that the plant’s poison should have been enough to kill her, but the Serpent would not let her die. At present its will alone was keeping her alive, as it had done on previous occasions. However, it did not protect her from enduring the discomfort of the venom working its slow way through her body; that was another weapon M’gulfn could use to break down her resistance. There was still the paradox that made physical pain a two-edged sword: the Serpent liked her to suffer, but her suffering distanced it, so that she was better able to resist. Sometimes she wondered if M’gulfn actually feared her pain.
While her mental fight eased, her body was racked by intolerable discomfort. The burning of her head and the cold heaviness in her back and limbs were not eased by resting, so she might as well walk, pretending as best she could that she was well.
Before long the poison clouded her mind, and walking became a mechanical reflex, impossible to cease.
She occasionally heard Estarinel, at her side, ask if she was all right or suggest that it was time they rested, but through the vague haze of her delirium he seemed unreal, a white shadow. By rights she should be dead, or at least unable to move, and yet she trudged on like one of Gastada’s re-animated corpses. She wondered if this was how it felt to die. How weird; to watch herself die and yet still be alive at the end of it, as if nothing had happened. M’gulfn’s sadism was infinitely inventive, but she could not find the strength to hate it. A strange delusion took her then; the memories of other hosts came thronging back, and she became convinced that she was the Morrenish woman whom the Serpent had forced to walk, with broken limbs and a mortal wound in her guts, thousands of miles from the Arctic to Morrenland. That woman’s agony and humiliation were joined to her own, and somewhere she could feel the Serpent laughing at her anguish. Around her, the tundra lay like her own desolation made physical, the whole of the terrible dark future under the Worm’s power reduced to a single flake of bone on which she was doomed to crawl for ever.
Come to me then, all of you. I do not fear you. If you want to come to me, do so. It will please me to observe your shame when I have stripped your arrogance from you. Don’t you know I can crush you on a whim? Ah, your pride amuses me...
‘For the Lady’s sake, Medrian, will you stop?’ It was Ashurek’s voice. He was in front of her, physically restraining her. ‘It’s nearly dark. What is the matter with you?’
She looked dazed, as if she did not know where she was. She allowed herself to be seated by a fire that they made from scrubby furze bushes, but she did not speak and, to Estarinel’s increasing concern, refused to eat anything.
‘The poison is doing this to her,’ he said to Ashurek. ‘She will burn herself out. She must be made to rest.’
‘I think it’s more than the poison,’ said Ashurek.
That night Estarinel slept badly, and he was certain that Medrian had not slept at all. Before dawn he dropped off, only to wake with a sudden jolt. He sat up to find that Medrian was nowhere in sight. He woke Ashurek.
‘I only hope she has gone north,’ the Gorethrian said drily. ‘If not, we have no chance of finding her. I for one have no intention of scanning all the points of the compass for her.’
They were on the tundra proper now. It stretched around them in all directions, unrelieved by hills or trees, yet with a stark beauty of its own. The ground was carpeted with tough, dark grass and emerald green moss, starred with tiny flowers. As Estarinel and Ashurek walked, the mild wind from the south swung round to the north again, and they could taste snow on the air. They wrapped their cloaks round them and pulled on the thick gloves the H’tebhmellians had provided.
All day they walked, and were forced to stop when night fell. Estarinel was so distressed by their failure to find Medrian that he barely noticed Ashurek’s own morose mood. They roasted a hare over their furze fire and then slept as best they could, waking and walking on long before dawn.
‘Perhaps we have passed her in the dark,’ Estarinel said.
‘Don’t you care?’ Estarinel exclaimed.
‘Whether I care or not is not going to help us find her,’ Ashurek replied. ‘We cannot risk turning aside or back, it would be pointless. The important thing is that we have the Silver Staff. We must continue the Quest.’
As they went on, the sky became clotted with dense iron-grey clouds and snow swirled around them. They could see barely a few yards ahead in the gloom. Within Estarinel rose the awful knowledge that their search for Medrian could easily prove futile. Perhaps desperation tricked his eyes into seeing what he wanted. For a moment, it seemed that the horizon was illuminated by a ghastly, stormy light against which a small figure was staggering along in silhouette.
He broke into a run, leaving Ashurek behind, calling Medrian’s name. There was no reply, no sound except the mournful sighing of the wind. He felt eerily alone in the snow-filled twilight, oppressed and dwarfed by the freezing wastes that lay ahead. A horrible moment of disorientation came upon him in which he didn’t know where or who he was. There was a bird fluttering and falling on a cold wind that seemed to blow right through his soul, and he was falling too, a fleck of ash. A voice near him, yet very far away, murmured, ‘You must find me. Without me you are incomplete. While I am lost, you are lost. Remember…’ and such a profound sense of emptiness clawed at his throat that he cried out and grasped the top of the Silver Staff.
Immediately he was on firm ground again. Preternatural calmness filled him like a silver light that also flickered and played over the tundra and the clouds, leading him on with gentle sureness, as if the Lady of H’tebhmella herself was at his side. He was drifting over the snow-crusted turf like a mote of light, not needing to look, simply knowing exactly where–
All at once he came back to himself and nearly fell over a small, cloaked form, ice-frosted darkness like the tundra itself.
A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) Page 28
