The Tower of Bones

by Frank P. Ryan

  Plague-rotted fate of a whorehound!

  They hurried on through a maze of plants that sprouted large, ugly-looking thorns. From the moment they had arrived in the swamps they had been beset with biting insects, from the whines of mosquitoes buzzing about their heads to swamp flies and horseflies as big as bumble bees, inflicting bites that turned into blisters. Now these thorns appeared more hazardous still. Turkeya led them into the shade of a lengthy face of cliff where the thorns were less threatening, but even here, to judge from the ground about them, they faced the alternative danger of falling rocks. You couldn’t drop your guard, not for an instant, amid the perils of falling rock, biting insects, poisonous thorns or the hungry shadows.

  Turkeya found balm leaves they could squeeze and rub over their smarting skins, while gazing about themselves at the mist that was rolling through the fangs of rock. At this deeper point in the valley the plants were more twisted still, deformed beyond anything recognisable, as if this were the price they had paid for survival in such a poisonous environment. The plants, and the animal life that battened on them and on one another, appeared perfectly attuned with a landscape that was unremittingly hostile, an omnipresent menace.

  While hurrying over rocky ground Kataba stumbled again – even with the help of Xeenra, his progress had been hampered by falls – but this time his ankle completely gave way under him, sending him sprawling.

  ‘Ainé – we’ve got to stop. See if the Aides can help him.’

  Kataba was helped to a ledge of rock, where Turkeya rubbed liniment into the swollen flesh, then he stood back to allow the Aides to strap the badly sprained ankle joint. As if encouraged by their halt, growls of hunger crept closer amid the shadows. When he had the chance to have a word with Alan, Turkeya admitted that the landscape increasingly dismayed him.

  ‘Never have I witnessed such plants before. All appears to be primitive, the forms, as I would imagine, from the time of beginnings. A great many are parasitic on others, yet so dense and entangled that it is impossible to pick out the parasites from the fruitful. I dread to think that perhaps none are truly fruitful – which would mean they are all parasitic upon one another.’ His eyes widened under a lined brow, then he drew close to Alan so as to whisper out of Mo’s earshot. ‘I think that some of the bigger plants – the ones with the gigantic flowers – might be maneaters.’

  They moved on into a narrow defile where walls of granite leant in towards them, evoking an overwhelming claustrophobia. Emerging from it the Shee were obliged to carry Kataba across wide slabs of the slippery rock, like treacherous stepping stones, while a drop of a hundred feet yawned below them into which a great river fell in a roaring cataract. It took something like an hour to inch their way across, only to discover that the ground on the other side had reverted to bog. A yellow slime oozed all around them and a family of overgrown slug-like creatures, banded in bright green, halted its slow slithering movements across their path to watch them.

  ‘Shaman!’ the Kyra’s voice called out.

  Turkeya hurried forward to see what troubled her. Ainé pointed to the way ahead. Inching forward, yard by yard, Turkeya peered into the gloom. Alan and Mo came forward to join him. The Kyra was wary about a dense proliferation of the giant plants Turkeya had warned Alan about earlier, extensive growths with enormous flowers made up of wide rings of misshapen petals, the flowers alone some twenty feet in diameter. Tendrils, as thick and ridged as the bore of a small palm tree, snaked out in a low curve from the base of the plants to end in fat bulbous organs.

  ‘What are they?’

  Turkeya picked up a piece of rock as big as a man’s head and rubbed it with a little of the smoked meat they carried in their back packs, then cast it onto one of the giant flowers. With lightning speed the central tendril snapped round and the bulb at the end of it opened out on pink jaws lined by rows of teeth, like the gaping mouth of a shark. The jaws snapped shut on the rock and the fronds of the giant flower closed over it, enclosing the captured prey. The tendril withdrew to hunt again. Meanwhile the gaps between the closed petals began to ooze copious amounts of a rank-smelling liquid, which hissed like acid.

  ‘They really are man-eaters!’ Turkeya sighed.

  Alan shook his head, hardly daring to imagine what it would mean to be a victim caught in that trap and digested alive.

  Qwenqwo nodded. ‘I have heard of such, but never have I encountered the like.’

  Even as they stared in amazement at the feeding plant a tendril of another appeared out of the mist and moved, with a swaying, searching motion, close to Turkeya.

  ‘Beware!’ the Kyra roared, hauling him backwards.

  They probed the land about them with even more care. Everywhere they encountered man-eaters in a variety of different kinds. Some had long narrow tendrils that hunted thirty or forty yards away from the ground-based flowers. Others had black creepers, spiked with dagger-like thorns, that burrowed under the soil and lay in wait.

  They struggled chest deep across a vile swamp whose vapours attacked their nostrils and throats, leaving them choking. Pressing onwards, the Kyra refused to rest in such perilous surroundings. By degrees the noise of water became louder. They had entered a water-laden basin, where the streams and rivers fed by the mountains emptied into a morass of lakes. Thick bulbous forms dominated the plants, with nothing that could be recognisably described as leaves, yet crawling with vines and creepers, rank-smelling and fleshy, with hives of insects in wait above, ready to swarm down and attack the intruders. Suddenly, huge globular pods burst in the branches over the company, showering them with thick, musky clouds of pollen, provoking panic.

  ‘Turkeya?’

  ‘The pollen may be poisonous. We must wash it off our skins – anywhere we come into contact with it.’

  Alan splashed stream water all over his face, his hands, his arms, with his sleeves pulled up to his elbows. There was a livid scar running up his left shin, from ankle to knee, where he had been scratched by one of the thorns. Many of the company were coughing, as if their lungs were inflamed from inhaling the pollen.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ Turkeya exclaimed. ‘There is little nourishment in the soil. Yet these plants grow so thick and strong!’

  Hearing a screech from overhead they turned their bug-bitten faces up to glimpse Gargs, wheeling and spiralling in an updraught. Alan heard another anguished cry in the near distance, followed by thrashing sounds, and then, heart-stopping silence.

  The Kyra spoke without pausing. ‘Another Aides! And the Shee, Llediana, who tried to save her!’

  At the next rest stop Ainé, looking grim, took Alan to one side. ‘We need to talk in private – you and I – and perhaps the Fir Bolg too!’

  Alan exchanged glances with Qwenqwo, wondering what to expect.

  When they were alone Ainé announced that she had come to a decision. ‘This landscape is too dangerous to risk the following army of Shee.’

  Alan dropped his head. They would have to face the Tower on their own.

  He recalled the scene on the beach when the Kyra had thought it necessary to pass on her learning to her daughter-sister, who was no more than a child. The Shee were very secretive. He realised that he knew next to nothing about them, or their homeland in the Guhttan Mountains. How old were they when the mother-sisters bore their cloned daughter-sisters? He had no idea. The new Kyra looked perhaps twenty years old and the daughter he had glimpsed in the ceremony on the beach no more than six. It suggested that they bore their daughters as soon as possible after puberty. An early birth made sense when you realised that the immortality of their lineage depended on it. They were warriors who anticipated death. The realisation shocked him into silence.

  Qwenqwo spoke softly. ‘It’s unfortunate, but may prove less than a catastrophe.’

  ‘How so?’ the Kyra asked.

  The dwarf mage plucked at his red beard, as if gathering his thoughts. ‘We know that at journey’s end there will be no conventional battle of swo
rd or javelin. The enemy will be the Great Witch herself. I have given thought to this, as no doubt you have. The might of a conventional army would serve little purpose in such a confrontation, which will be determined not by military force but by a battle of powers – that of the Witch against the Mage Lord’s oraculum.’

  The Kyra’s voice was icy. ‘But first we need to survive the journey there. Do you imagine that the approaches to her fastness will be unprotected? And what of the Gargs who have no need to tramp through such perils on foot? Will they attack us when they realise that this small force is all they face?’

  The Momu

  Kate stood at the end of one of many promontories that led from the main city square and marvelled at the city of Ulla Quemar. Once – a very long time ago – there must have been an enormous natural cave beneath the ocean. It would have been as deep as direct sunlight could penetrate from the surface waters above, with an entrance, perhaps a quarter of a mile in diameter, opening onto the cave. Somehow the Cill had made a world out of it. They had built a gargantuan curtain wall of transparent quartz that swept down from the roof and extended out in a great semicircle into the ocean. This formed a partial seal, which, complemented by the pressure of air within the cave, enabled the city to hold onto its atmosphere, and in turn allowed the tide that flowed into the cavern. Like a prism, the quartz bent the sunlight so it illuminated the entire city with daylight, making the city one with a coral reef.

  Here, in the softness of evening, the beauty of the city was so intoxicating that Kate just wanted to breathe it in. The Cill were truly amphibian. That was what made Ulla Quemar so unique. They had constructed a meeting of worlds that flowed seamlessly and naturally into one another, an astonishing symbiosis of land and sea.

  Snuggling down in the sand at the very edge of the tide she let her fingers be washed over by the waves, marvelling at the turquoise luminescence beneath the ocean, and the life that darted and wheeled within it. The reef literally flowed past and around her deep into the city, the brilliantly coloured fish at home in the floral gardens of corals, anemones and flower-like creatures that seemed curiously intermediate between animals and plants, with so many bizarre and enchanting forms she couldn’t even begin to identify them. What a wonder it must be to live amid such an exuberance of beauty! Kate couldn’t help but be entranced.

  She felt refreshed by a restful sleep in a bed of eiderdown in a spacious chamber shaped like a sea urchin. Its inner walls seemed to be real mother-of-pearl, so she had woken into what felt a dream, bedazzled by glittering reflections. She was ravenously hungry when Shaami appeared with tiny plates of shellfish, two hot cakes of roasted seaweed, potato-like vegetables and lovely fruits sweetened with honey. The breakfast was curiously light, as if designed to stave off the worst of her hunger while not fully assuaging it. Even so, as she dined out of doors with the coral reef sweeping around her feet, the waning daylight told her that evening must be falling on the surface waters above, extinguishing the daylight filtering down through this great natural window.

  ‘How long have I slept?’ she asked Shaami, who kept her company across a table constructed out of a single piece of red coral.

  ‘You were very tired.’

  ‘A whole night and a day?’ She watched how the artificial lights had begun to twinkle and glow in the streets around her.

  Just how old might Ulla Quemar be? The interwoven labyrinths of land and reef couldn’t have been constructed in years and probably not even in centuries. This complex ecosystem must have evolved over thousands of years. The Cill were exquisitely sensitive to beauty and harmony. The construction, the evolution, of Ulla Quemar wouldn’t have been hurried. But there was more, much more, to wonder at.

  Oh, my!

  Her heart beat so in her breast as she paused to reflect on the nature of the Cill themselves. So powerful were the emotions this place evoked, and these beings in particular! Kate had marvelled at how delicate the Cill appeared on land. Watching a group of them swim by underwater, with their undulating limbs and streaming fins, she was all the more impressed by their exquisite natural grace, their streamlined bodies gliding like sylphs between the corals. They appeared so gentle, their world so well ordered, she couldn’t imagine a Cill wanting to hurt anyone. It made it all the more monstrous that such gentle beings should be exposed to the cruelties of the Witch. All her life, Kate had loathed fighting, aggression, war and the grief it caused to ordinary people. It was the stupidity of war that had killed her parents. She had always believed, deep in her heart, that their deaths had served nothing, no purpose at all.

  ‘Greeneyes is feeling better?’

  ‘In more ways than one. Your world is so lovely – and the air seems so clean, so pure, it’s a pleasure just to breathe it.’

  ‘Evening is restful, when the day closes its eyes. Yet look – see the large leaves, with bubbles rising from the water beneath.’

  Kate looked at the surface waters around her, assuming that Shaami was referring to plants that looked like water lilies. But now she looked more closely there were no flower heads, just broad leaves of a dappled green.

  ‘You see the opening at the centre of the pad? This is the nostril for a sunstealer tethered to the coral below.’

  ‘A sunstealer?’

  Kate had to leave her seat by the table and lie flat on the sand with her eyes only an inch or two from the surface water to peer into the shadowed depths. ‘What am I looking for? Is it that enormous greeny-yellow balloon?’

  ‘You can follow the bubbles?’

  ‘Yes – I see them. They’re rising from its surface.’

  ‘This is the sunstealer.’

  ‘That’s an odd name.’

  ‘It isn’t really a plant – or even a single creature – but many plant-animals that join together to make the hollow balloon. A single balloon can grow to the size of a small house. It must hold onto the coral to prevent it rising up and floating away. Through their green leaves, sunstealers consume the daylight falling onto the sunlit waters – in doing so they also clean the air.’

  Kate clapped her hands. ‘Back home – on Earth – we have green plants, and the algae in the oceans, which do the same thing. They capture sunlight and make the oxygen we breathe.’

  ‘Are there witches also in your world?’

  ‘Well … No. Not like the one you’re thinking of.’

  ‘How fortunate you are. I would love to hear more of your world. But for now the Momu waits … If Greeneyes is sufficiently refreshed?’

  With a start Kate recalled something Driftwood had said, when he was desperate about his nautilus shell, his shiny thing. Gift from Momu – mine – my gift! The dragon had known all along about the Cill. He must have watched them dress her on the island as she slept. And he had brought her here, to the landward entrance to the city.

  She sighed: ‘I suppose I’m as ready as I’ll ever be!’

  Turning around to face the square she walked, barefoot, to where he was waiting for her. ‘Come,’ he said, with another of those strange expressions of his irises. ‘Long has the Momu dreamed of this meeting.’

  ‘She knew that I was coming?’

  ‘The Momu is knowing. She has cared for her people even from the ancient times, when Ulla Quemar was first created.’

  ‘Gosh – she must be very old.’

  His eyes performed the movements, a slow close followed by a rapid opening, that Kate now recognised as ‘Yes’.

  In the falling dusk she was reminded of how Shaami’s eyes actually glowed. And now she saw that everything about her was also glowing in a variety of soft pastel shades and colours.

  Shaami led her through the city, where none of the buildings took the boring rectangular forms she was used to back home. Here every house, temple or garden followed exquisitely naturalistic shapes. Oyster-shells the size of a three-storey building gaped ajar. Periwinkle shapes clustered in diminishing sizes into a spiral. Gigantic five-limbed starfish rose out of floral gardens, or
the whorled organic loveliness of the shapes of nautilus shells, or the ears of conchs. And even now in the quiet of evening she saw the abundance of plants, fluttering birds, the flight of butterflies, bees and other insects. Her fingers brushed against the velvety surface of toadstool-like growths, pungently fragrant, that must be cultivated foods. There was a sense of oneness with life, its needs and balances respected in a way she would have loved to have seen back home. She wasn’t sure where the boundary lay between architecture and what was natural any more, such was the weave and flow of one into the other.

  Shaami showed her inscriptions on walls that she would have passed by without noticing had he not reached out and brushed them into awareness. Hieroglyphs of their history, or murals, or simply artwork for its own sake – it was all so exhilarating Kate just let the wonder of it flow around her, and through her. A door irised open with the flat of a hand pressed against a hieroglyph and a chant – Shaami was allowing her to catch a little of what he must be hearing within his mind, the melody of interacting voices – so delightful when two or more were communicating with each other, a language far more complex than her own, one in which subtleties of insight and emotion were conveyed in music as much as in the words. Sometimes she noticed, and thought it must be significant, that many Cill voices chanted in unison, as if fusing into a single melodic symphony. And she realised what should have been immediately obvious, yet was so alien to her human perspective and senses, that she had probably resisted the notion. The city was a hive. A living, thinking, overwhelmingly interactive hive, in which the Momu …

  Oh, lord … Can it really be true?

  Kate hardly dared to think this through, it so startled her. Yet there was only one logical conclusion. The Momu was the hive queen.

  And now, as Shaami took her deeper into the city, she began to notice more. None of the buildings was new. Looking more closely, she saw signs of decay. Some of the streets were collapsing in on themselves. Even amid the decorous shapes there were places where the rainbow glitter over the dome of a shell-home had mouldered to lifeless grey, as if the gorgeous structures were withering and perishing.