The Tower of Bones

by Frank P. Ryan

  ‘How terrible your suffering must have been. Once you lived in beauty and harmony with all of life. But the coming of the Great Witch changed you. She ravaged your spirit, and with it all hope, so you came to know only despair. You have endured that despair. But now, through the power given to me by Granny Dew, I return the spirit of life to you. I return the joy of the seasons, the hope of the seed in spring, the life-giving sunlight in your leaves, the healing rain, the flight of pollinating insects among your flowers, the song of the birds among your branches.’

  Alan had arrived to stand beside her, his arm about her shoulders, staring out with her at the rain that was now pattering over the smoking ashes. As the first large drops struck their faces they saw the rising green begin to sprout everywhere, the tiny shoots penetrating the ash before throwing apart their embryonic leaves.

  With a noisy flapping of wings, Iyezzz alighted before them. He knelt before Kate, kissing the rain-soaked ash so the white of it coated his gargoyle face like a mask. Qwenqwo, Mo and Turkeya had come to join them, their faces lifted to the rain, speechless with shock, yet their feelings altogether clear from their tear-filled eyes. The wounds that had cut their arms to the bone were closing.

  ‘The Kyra – the others?’ Alan hardly dared to ask.

  ‘All healing!’

  Alan threw his arms about Kate and hugged her. ‘Oh, wow! Kate! How we’ve needed you!’

  Golden Heart

  ‘I’m not Mr Nice Guy!’ Mark addressed the silence in which he basically didn’t exist, except in spirit, needing to communicate with the being that was the Temple Ship, which was unable to communicate in words.

  ‘No, you are not.’

  He imagined Nan, and within a second he saw her. In his mind she was standing beside him on the white beach, wearing Kate’s clothes. He assumed she was imagining him also, standing beside her, wearing jeans and leather jacket.

  ‘I’m Mr Angry.’

  He saw, mind-to-mind, that she was reaching out as if to touch his cheek. By now she was sufficiently practised to know the feel of his cheek. He even felt the touch of her fingers on it.

  They could do this more easily now. It was comforting – helped to keep him sane. But he needed more. They both did.

  ‘I’m not Mr Romeo.’

  ‘No – you are Mark Grimstone.’

  He laughed, making a little snort through his nose, a nose that in reality did not exist. ‘That’s right!’

  ‘Good!’

  ‘Good?’

  ‘If you are Mr Angry, I am Queen Angry!’

  She was a fast learner. He laughed again. ‘If only we were together, really together. If I could touch you, I’d kiss you now.’

  ‘Kiss me, then!’

  They kissed, as best they could. There was something thrilling about it, but it was a long way from a real kiss.

  ‘It’s no good, Nan. I can’t rest – I can’t focus on anything else but the thought of getting out of here.’

  It was a bad idea to think too much about it. You could become overwhelmed by it, frantic. He couldn’t rest until he attempted the crossing between worlds, even if the risks – and he had a suspicion that there were almighty risks involved – might cost them the spiritual life that was all they had. ‘Okay. The thing to do is to get it crystal clear in our minds. There must be a first step?’

  ‘Which is to grasp the impossible nature of our dilemma.’

  He chuckled, again. ‘You’re really good for me.’

  ‘To visualise our extraordinary need.’

  ‘Keep on talking – I like it!’

  ‘You mock me?’

  ‘What – Her Royal Majesty, Queen Angry?’

  ‘If I had flesh, I would slap your cheek for your impudence.’

  ‘Ow!’

  They laughed together.

  He was silent again for a while, thinking deeply. In spirit he knew that he and the Ship were one. But that didn’t seem to be enough.

  ‘To be born again.’ He whispered it slowly, musingly, finding words to best express what he was now thinking.

  ‘To be born again.’ Her answering concord.

  ‘I don’t fully understand what it involves, how it happens. But I sense, even if it’s only vaguely, that it involves something like that … When the Ship changes. When it metamorphoses.’

  ‘The Ship is born again?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘How glorious!’

  ‘Yeah! But the question is – what does that really mean?’

  ‘But you did it – you brought about the raptor change.’

  ‘My friend’s life was threatened.’

  ‘So?’

  Somehow that threat, in Mark’s heart and mind, had become a visceral fear. Mark’s desperate need to save Alan had communicated itself to the Ship. But this situation – this present need – was too subtle, perhaps.

  ‘There’s something missing. Something I’ve been racking my brains to think through. Like back then, when we were stuck in the ice-bound lake …’

  ‘Think back.’

  ‘We all sensed the Ship. I sensed it deeper than the others. A feeling of desolation, of sadness.’

  ‘Like loneliness?’

  ‘Yeah! Maybe. The Olhyiu were about to set the Ship on fire.’

  He was aware that she was looking at him. He showed her the image of himself blinking. We’re becoming more subtly aware of each other.

  ‘They had to melt the ice to escape.’

  ‘So you felt it – you felt the Ship’s sadness?’

  ‘It was more than that. I knew that was what they were planning to do – and I felt strongly about it. It was similar in Isscan.’

  He knew that she was lifting her fingers to touch his lips. He imagined that he was feeling her touch.

  ‘How similar?’

  ‘Kind of empathic. As if the Ship understood our need. Nan – it needs to know how desperately we feel it.’

  ‘Think harder.’

  ‘I’m so wound up. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Let the memories come. Do not force them. This experience, the feelings you shared with the Ship. It must have been frightening – terrifying.’

  ‘We connected … Somehow.’

  In spirit, in his mind, Mark recalled the feeling, how overwhelming it had felt. Strange – so terribly sad. And then …

  ‘That’s what we did – we connected!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The union felt close, physical.’

  ‘Mark! Don’t you see?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This union with the Ship – you became one.’

  ‘Yeah. But I’m not sure what that means.’

  ‘Can’t you see what is abundantly clear to me? We are becoming one. I see what you are thinking. I feel what you are feeling.’

  ‘It was different with the Ship …’

  ‘How different?’

  ‘I’m still not sure …’

  ‘If only I could slap your face!’

  He laughed. ‘I’d slap you right back.’

  In his mind, he blinked again. He tried putting it into words: I need your help. I’m desperate. I need to return to my world – to Earth. I need to get away from the control of the Third Power. I need to feel my body again – Nan and I both need to. If it involves risk, we are prepared to take it. Because if we can’t feel our bodies again, if we can’t reach out and touch one another, we might as well be dead.

  He stopped, nauseated by his own words, his rising desperation. It’s all a waste of time. No bloody good!

  He felt weighted down, as if his body and mind were trapped in lead. This would never change. There would be no escape.

  Despair overwhelmed him …

  He stood within a pentagonal chamber whose walls were liquidly golden. He had no memory of how he had arrived here. When he looked down at himself – when he held his hands before his face – he appeared to be real. He paused, finding it difficult to fill his lungs with brea
th, for several seconds.

  Fill my lungs …

  It had to be some new kind of virtual reality. Nevertheless he felt strangely at ease with the impression of a presence that went deeper than the sheen of the golden walls about him, a presence he felt even more strongly as he reached out to touch the golden walls with the tips of his fingers, and then the flats of his hands. The walls felt heavy and soft like mercury, and yet they were curiously devoid of reflection. They were pulsating. Not expanding and contracting, but pulsating with energy, in liquid-sheening waves.

  ‘Hey!’

  He hardly dared to think of where he might be. It was the strangest feeling – the sensation that came back to him through fingertips, passing through his arms, like pins and needles, to arrive like a tranquil whisper in his mind.

  ‘My God!’

  He was flooded by a new sensation. It was exhilarating, like … rapture. The depression, the sense of desolation, was gone from his mind. These walls, the entire chamber, were as sensitive as living tissue. They were alive in the sense that he himself was alive.

  He laughed, abruptly, nervously, bringing his fingertips to his lips. He felt himself breathing again, even though there surely wasn’t any air, and he was breathing through non-existent lungs.

  He knew, without pretending to understand the mystery, that he was confronting the heart of the Temple Ship.

  Mark closed his eyes for a moment, and when he reopened them Nantosueta appeared, as if the thought of her was all it needed to make her real. Her eyes were very dark against the downy milkiness of her skin. Her hair was the gorgeous blue-black that he remembered. He felt the compulsion to touch it. He reached out, softly, with his left hand, and ran his fingers through it.

  ‘I can really feel your hair!’

  He heard her whisper in his mind.

  ‘I feel your touch!’

  His breath caught in his throat. He held her face with his splayed fingers, felt the firm roundness of the bone beneath, brushed with the backs of his fingers the features of her face, feeling the silken brush of her eyelashes as she blinked.

  She lightly slapped his face.

  He laughed. He couldn’t stop himself laughing. He could feel the tears that were rolling down his cheeks.

  ‘You said you would slap me back.’

  He kissed her instead. The feel of her lips, kissing him back, was extraordinary.

  ‘Hold me!’

  He held her. There was some awkwardness still in the tentative flow of their limbs, her arms now enfolding his neck, drawing him to her, and his embracing her in turn, each unable to quite believe how they had become so much more real in the soft, golden light, each needing to confirm the delight of the other, face to face, eye to eye.

  He kissed her again, with a strange, delightful awkwardness, as if to confirm the most intimate touch of her, lips on lips.

  She kissed him back, more certain of him, and this time he felt the soft, heavy brush of her lips without the need of communication, mind-to-mind.

  He hugged her fiercely to him, even as he was aware that the world about them was changing.

  ‘The Ship,’ he whispered against her ear, ‘something’s happening.’

  The golden glow of the Ship’s heart seemed to invade them, so they became one with the pulse of its heartbeat.

  Their eyes met – a fierceness shared – before the golden aura receded back into the walls and their bodies began to melt away again. Instinctively reaching out, Mark pressed his splayed hands against the yielding pulsation of two adjacent walls, yearningly, longingly, while he still could.

  It was late evening, close to pitch dark, when Snakoil Kawkaw escaped the nosy attentions of the Preceptress, whose evening abasement before the foulness of her master would consume her for an hour or so.

  Oh, my beloved Master! Punish me – make me deserving.

  Such an obsequious litany, accompanied by the burning touch of the sigil against adoring flesh, such self-mutilations and floggings – might she inflict many more hours of it! He gloated at the thought of it.

  The Shee guards were patrolling the waterfront so he had to be resourceful, moving quickly from rock to rock, and then biding patience.

  He spotted the dark-haired one – the one they kowtowed to as their spiritual guardian. She stood in a triangle of figures that included that buffoon, Siam, and the lovely Kehloke, outside a tent erected for their meetings and war preparations. They were staring out into the ocean, in the direction of the Temple Ship.

  Something’s going on – something has become the focus of their attentions!

  Intrigued, Kawkaw crept closer to the rocks at one end of the bay, from where he observed that the Ship appeared to be changing again. How strange that he should have grown up in its shadow without knowing anything of its secret nature. And what interesting secrets it had so deftly concealed! He peered out at it through a gap in the stones. He knew this was important. With a suppressed oath, he realised that he had allowed his enthusiasm to get the better of him, leaning too far forward, his boots slipping on the black volcanic pebbles as rounded as berries. He lost his footing, ending up with a sorely bruised arse on the rocks. But nobody noticed.

  Indeed, he thought, returning his attention to the Ship, it changes so very rapidly this very instant.

  As far as he could see there was no one on board, other than ghosts. He had heard their voices. Ghosts who appear to have plans of their own.

  He recalled the huloima called Mark. He had been one of the four brats who had appeared out of a snowstorm back at the ice-bound lake. Thanks to Snakoil Kawkaw’s insistence they had been called to account in front of the council of the Olhyiu. They had described killings back in their home world. Killings of parents, for the most part. Those killings had enraged the brats. They had linked those killings, and their coming here, to the Tyrant himself. And curiously, the Tyrant, and latterly the Witch, had behaved as if threatened by them. That made them all the more interesting. And this one, this huloima called Mark, had some curious link with the Ship. Anything to do with the Ship – any tidbit of news – would be of interest to certain ears. And this, in turn, made these changes in the Ship mightily important.

  Yes! Yes, my beauty! I see you, I watch you as closely as the snake watches the mouse. And you are changing still, changing moment by moment, and all in utter silence and secrecy.

  He stared at it from his perch among the rocks, his eyes protruding with fascination, as its shape went through a temporary amorphousness, resembling a storm cloud, to emerge somewhat like the raptor but more streamlined, like a diving cormorant perhaps. A shape intended for very rapid fall – or flight.

  A bright glow permeated the thing even as it lifted, with hardly a ripple from the ocean, turning in a seemingly weightless fashion as if searching for its bearings. The prow directed itself heavenwards.

  ‘Serpent’s-tongued hogsturd!’

  Snakoil Kawkaw stared, his mouth fallen open, as the streamlined shape rose into the night air like an upwardly directed bolt of lightning. It was gone in a trice, diminishing to a point in less time than it took him to blink. And then there was nothing. It had winked out, as if lost amid the stars.

  Soul Stealers

  Things grew askew here, perverted in their desire for light and form. The most beautiful flower was a trap. The water was putrescent. Slime moved. It changed patterns, played tricks with you when you weren’t looking. Then, when you noticed, those patterns had evolved some primal intelligence, so they were gathering and thickening, creeping towards you. The insects were vicious and stinging – they laid eggs that hatched into monstrous parasites inside your body …

  A hand was shaking Alan’s shoulder. Ainé’s voice in his ear: ‘Wake up! You cry out in your dreams.’

  ‘Was it a dream?’ He sat up and rubbed his hands over his face. The events of yesterday had been so terrible, this place so threatening, he had lain awake for most of the night, assuming he would spend a second night without a wink
– and then …

  ‘A dream of darkness, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes!’ He had been confronting the Tyrant again. But it had been here, in this haunted landscape rather than Dromenon. And yet the buzzing words of malice still echoed within his skull as he climbed to his feet, shaking his head fully awake in the cool of the early dawn.

  ‘Kate – where is she?’

  ‘She tends the wounded land.’

  ‘What – on her own?’

  ‘She’s not alone. She is accompanied by the shaman. And the dwarf mage watches over both.’ The Kyra paused, as if deep in thought. Then she added: ‘I understand now – why you insisted on saving her. And perhaps more.’

  Alan looked up at the Kyra in the murky light. Was she reconsidering his offer to help her with her mother-sister’s memories?

  He climbed to his feet, brushing ash and the wrinkles of sleep from his clothes. He had to remind himself of where he was. They had rested here when they had reached the furthermost limits of what had been the Forest of Harrow.

  He said, ‘You were right, too – about the risks.’

  ‘There are times when risks must be taken.’

  He scanned the figures among the ashes of the thorn trees, glimpsing Kate and Turkeya at perhaps fifty yards distance. They were hard to discern in the drifting mists. They were huddled over the sprouting shoots that were the new growth, brought into being by Kate’s power of healing. For a little while he watched Kate, as if needing to reassure himself that this was real, and not merely another dream, feeling almost dizzy with the warmth of his love for her. He could just about hear the chatter of her voice, the soft Irish accent, even at this distance sounding curiously relaxed amid the devastation. Then, stretching limbs that ached with stiffness from a night on the ungiving ground, he accepted a dampened cloth from an Aides and used it to rub the sleep from his eyes. He knew that many Aides, as well as Shee, had died from wounds, but her face was impassive. He couldn’t help but reflect how brave they all were, Aides, Shee – Qwenqwo too.