by Jen Williams
‘Took it from you?’
‘I didn’t know you had a brother,’ Frith said quietly, then wondered why he’d said it. ‘Yes, after he revealed what he was he drained the magic from me somehow. I passed out. I don’t remember much of what happened afterwards …’
‘And the blue light is a barrier?’ asked Wydrin. She sounded very tired.
‘Yes,’ said Frith. ‘Look.’ He picked up a piece of wood from the beach, washed smooth with seawater, and threw it at the storm-light. When it hit the light, it seemed to stop, held in place for a moment, and then it was consumed in writhing, searing light. It flew back at them with an audible pop, landing at Frith’s feet. It was smoking slightly. ‘He’s in there still, him and his birds.’ He pointed up at the dark, swirling cloud. Wydrin came a few steps closer, almost too close, so that Frith had to hold her back with one hand.
‘They’re black birds,’ she said after a moment. ‘The cloud is made up of thousands of birds. And there’s something larger flying with them?’
‘That’s O’rin himself,’ said Frith. ‘He isn’t exactly human.’
‘And he has your powers.’
‘I did try to go back in, but the barrier is dangerous.’ He held up his left hand, one side of which was red with blisters. ‘There is nothing we can do.’
They stood and looked up at the flickering blue barrier. The storm of birds flowed and surged and crackled silently above them.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Gallo into the silence. ‘But I might have an idea.’
61
‘If you lie there like that all day you’ll get sunburnt.’
Sebastian opened his eyes. Ip was staring down at him, one bare foot resting on his arm. When she saw that he was awake she gave him another small kick. Her eyes, he noticed, were no longer blood-red; they were back to their icy blue. Beyond her the sky was almost too bright to look at.
‘I’ve been asleep long?’
‘All morning you’ve been dead to the world.’ Ip gestured behind her. ‘Just like everyone else, really.’
Sebastian struggled to his feet. He’d been lying in ashes and his hands were grey. Even the finely wrought armour, which he had yet to gather the energy to remove, was smeared thickly with ash and blood. The skin on his face felt tight and hot, although he wasn’t sure if that was a result of the dragon’s fire or the sun on his face while he was sleeping.
‘We should go somewhere else,’ said Ip. ‘I’ve eaten all the food in your pack and I’m starving.’
Sebastian peered at her through the thumping of his head.
‘Where is the other one?’
The small girl sighed extravagantly, as though Sebastian were possibly the most boring person in the world.
‘He’s not here.’ She tapped her head. ‘He’s not always here.’
‘But you know about him? It?’
She shrugged.
‘Can’t hardly miss a demon in my head, can I? He used to be a picture in my mind. Then a little while ago the picture started talking.’ She sighed and turned a slow circle with her arms held out to either side. ‘I’m hungry.’
Sebastian looked around. They were still in the middle of the scrubby patch of land where the Ynnsmouth knights’ final stand had taken place; it was now a warped and twisted field of ash and blackened corpses. Most had been burned right down to the bone, and jagged skeletons seemed to sprout all around. We’ve sown the seeds, thought Sebastian, and now we have a field of the freshly harvested dead. He was dimly aware that some time had passed since Y’Ruen’s attack, and that he’d been sleeping in this cursed place for – how many nights? He wasn’t sure. A charred body lay just next to where he’d been sleeping, the skull twisted into the dirt, as though the hapless soldier had pressed his face into the ground at the last minute in a desperate attempt to escape the flames.
I lay here all night in the arms of the dead. What would Wydrin make of it all?
Thinking of his friend brought a tremor of feeling, at least. He rubbed a filthy hand across his eyes.
A gust of wind swirled the ashes up into a fine cloud that danced briefly around his ankles and settled again. Sebastian began to walk towards what had been the camp, now the smoking remains of the army’s supplies, tents and cooking apparatus. Ip ran alongside, occasionally hopping and skipping over twisted bones.
‘Why did I survive?’ he asked suddenly. It was the question that had been threatening to surface ever since he’d opened his eyes. ‘Everyone else here perished under the dragon fire. Bezcavar’s doing?’
‘You swore your sword to him,’ replied Ip. ‘That does come with some benefits, you know.’
Not enough to save anyone else.
They came to a pile of soot-covered rubble with a twisted confusion of melted metal at its centre. Next to what might have been the Commander’s folding table there was a blackened corpse; the heat had caused it to bend in on itself, like a child curled within a womb.
Sebastian squatted next to the body, trying to recognise something about it. He felt that if he knew for sure this corpse was the Lord Commander he would be able to understand what had happened, process it somehow. The skull grinned up at him, jaws agape. There was something wet and meaty at the back of the eye sockets, and part of the ribcage had shattered with the heat. He had no way of telling who this unfortunate soul had been.
‘This isn’t half bad,’ said Ip from behind him. ‘They didn’t always cook it back at the temple.’
Sebastian stood up.
‘What are you doing?’
Ip was crouched over another body, her deft fingers picking away at a charred section of flesh still clinging to the skeleton’s thigh bone. As Sebastian watched, she peeled away the black to reveal something red and raw underneath. She took a piece of that and stuck it in her mouth, chewing with relish.
‘Stop that.’ Before he knew he was moving Sebastian was next to her, pulling her up by her arm with more force than was necessary. ‘Stop it!’ He gave her a shake, and she flopped at the end of his arm like a fish on a line. ‘What do you think you are doing?’
‘Eating! I’m hungry.’ She glared up at him, an obscene smear of blood on her lips. ‘I’ve been all over this place while you were asleep and there’s nothing left to eat but what’s on the bones.’
He dropped the girl, shaking his head. He didn’t know if he was more repulsed by her behaviour or his own rage.
‘These are brave men and women who died a terrible death. They deserve more respect than to be picked at by little vultures.’
‘The birds do it,’ Ip pointed out sulkily. ‘Although there’s hardly enough left here for ravens.’
Sebastian scratched at his beard, trying to ignore the ash that floated up from it as he did so. They would have to move or they would starve, that much was clear. The brood army had been marching steadily north, and now he had lost sight of them on the plains.
‘Have you searched the other end of the battlefield?’ he asked Ip. The girl shrugged.
They set off back across the field of ash, until the scorch marks ended and the dead mainly consisted of green-skinned women in golden armour. There were pitifully few. When he’d been filled with the battle-rage he could have sworn he’d felled hundreds, but in reality he hadn’t made much of a dent in their numbers. Just enough, he’d thought, to turn the tide of the battle. What a joke that had been.
He spotted something sitting on the dirt. Amongst the devastation it looked strangely whole and untouched. It was a water skin, although not one he’d ever seen a soldier or a sell-sword wear. It appeared to be made of some sort of golden scaled material, like the carapace of a huge beetle. It sloshed as he picked it up.
‘Here.’ He passed it down to Ip, who snatched at it greedily. ‘Have a sip of that. Just a sip, mind, we’ll need to be careful.’
Ip took a few rapid gulps before he could get it back off her. Once he had it back in his hands he noticed there was a tightly rolled piece of parchment wedged in th
e strap that would normally attach the water skin to a belt. It was as if someone had deliberately removed the skin, pushed the parchment into a gap that would hold it and then left it out in plain sight.
‘What’s that?’ asked Ip, wiping her mouth and smearing the blood there onto her chin.
‘I don’t know.’ Sebastian removed the piece of parchment and unravelled it carefully. It was, he realised, a page from a book – there were lines about crop rotation and irrigation on one side, and on the other someone had written a message in large, slightly wobbly letters. It looked as though it had been scrawled by someone very young, or very unused to writing. ‘Greetings, Father,’ he read out loud. ‘We feel that you are here. We do not seek you in the fight. We go now to Ynnsmouth.’ He paused as a cold hand gripped his heart. The dragon was taking the army to his home. ‘We hope to see you, Father.’ He stopped and turned the page over in case there was more. ‘Then there’s just a list of odd words underneath that,’ he told Ip. ‘Ephemeral, Crocus, Ennui, Toast, Glorify, Belonging, Maelstrom … it doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Some of it does,’ said Ip, bending down to examine the body of a green-skinned warrior who had spilled her guts into the dust. She slipped a finger into the ropey purple innards, but didn’t appear to find it to her taste. ‘Sounds like someone likes you. Father.’
Sebastian sighed.
‘See what else you can find,’ he told the girl. Ip leapt up again and began to skip from corpse to corpse, as cheerily as a child looking for blackberries in spring. Sebastian pushed the page into his belt, trying to ignore the dread now weighing on his shoulders. He should have known. Ynnsmouth, where his mother still tended his father’s grave, where no doubt she still thought of her son and contemplated the shame he’d brought on the family. Where the last of the Order of Ynnsmouth Knights would even now be wondering what had happened to their army. Y’Ruen was taking her brood there, where even the might of the god-peaks would offer no mercy from the dragon fire.
And there was nothing he could do about it.
62
The wall of storm-light stretched away in either direction, curving as the island curved to shroud it in a dome of lightning. Gallo stood at its very edge, his fingertips hovering above the surface.
‘It’s the silence that’s truly strange. To see so much violence and movement without noise is unsettling.’
‘Are you sure about this?’ asked Wydrin. She had her hands on her hips, and if there was no real concern for him on her face, there was at least an echo of doubt. ‘We can’t know what this will do to you.’
‘You will not go to Sebastian until your brother is healed. Am I right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I will take the risk.’ His features twitched into a grin. ‘What have I got to lose, after all?’
‘O’rin might not be easy to reason with,’ said Frith. ‘He is unpredictable.’
‘I have some experience of talking to gods,’ Gallo replied. ‘I’ll do what I can. It’s worth a try.’
He watched as Wydrin and Frith exchanged a look, and then the red-haired woman shrugged.
‘Get on with it, then.’
Gallo nodded, and stepped into the barrier.
At first it was like pushing through a sheet of stiff fabric; it pushed back at him, holding him out. There was a series of tiny shocks like a thousand snakes biting with needle-thin teeth, and after a few moments of this, a great heat began to envelop him all over.
He looked down at his hand, calmly observing the twists of smoke beginning to emerge from his skin.
‘I imagine that if I were alive, this would be very uncomfortable.’
Putting all his weight behind it, he thrust forward, and fell through to the other side. The eerie silence was replaced with a high-pitched wailing punctuated with the cries of birds. Everything within the storm-light was stained a sickly blue – the rocks, the trees, the pools of water – and there were shifting shadows everywhere. At first Gallo thought this was an effect of the flickering light, until he started to see impossible shadows, huge, hulking inhuman things with too many arms, or immense shapes that seemed to resemble buildings. The strangest thing about it was that it wasn’t strange. It was familiar.
It had been much the same within Y’Ruen’s mind.
Gallo took a few cautious steps, and when the flesh didn’t immediately fly from his bones, took a few more. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so hard.
‘What are you, little dead thing?’ came a booming voice from above. Gallo looked up to see a huge winged shape hovering some distance above him. He cupped both hands around his mouth to shout over the din of birds.
‘I think you’ve answered your own question there!’
‘How curious!’ Gallo could just make out the suggestion of a huge beak and a pair of shining, wet eyes. ‘What do you want?’
‘To talk to you!’ Gallo paused. ‘My lungs aren’t what they were. How about you come down here to talk?’
‘Down?’ The creature called O’rin laughed merrily. ‘Oh no, my little dead friend, I’ve spent far too many years down there. If you want to talk to me, you will have to come up.’ O’rin flew out of the swirl of birds and banked towards the east of the island. For a few moments Gallo thought the god was just showing off, but then he grimaced as he settled on the enormous statue on the eastern point of the island.
He set off at a pace, feeling the queer energy that drove him surging into life in his chest. Once, his blood would have stirred at the anticipation of a new adventure, his skin would have prickled with sweat and his mouth might have been dry. Now his mouth was always dry, his blood was a black sludge beneath his skin and he couldn’t even remember what it felt like to sweat.
‘One last adventure anyway,’ he muttered as he climbed small jagged hills and stepped carefully around pools of water. The fish inside them were all dead, floating belly-up on the surface.
When eventually he stood at the foot of the statue he saw there was a rough series of steps cut into the side of it, just next to one gigantic foot. The further up they went the more perfunctory they became, and even in the height of his adventuring days Gallo would have thought twice about it.
‘Only one thing for it, then,’ he said aloud. ‘One hand after the other, that’s what I always told Sebastian. Keep moving and don’t look down.’
He began to climb the rough steps. It was only a few minutes before he found himself crawling up the vertical rock face, fingers wedged painfully into ledges that seemed to be growing too narrow too quickly. Still he did not sweat, although the skin on his hands and forearms was soon stiff and raw, and more than once his boots slipped and skidded across the surface. The worst of it, in Gallo’s opinion, was the bloody birds. The higher he got, the louder their noise.
‘It reminds me of the Chattering Men in Relios.’ Gallo blew air out through his lips. ‘You remember that, Seb?’ The handholds were further apart now, so that he had to stretch to reach the next one. He had no real idea how high up he was. ‘Figures of clay, all waiting in the dark, pottery mouths full of stolen teeth. A heavy footstep was all it took, and you were never good at being quiet, were you, Seb?’ He paused to risk a look down, and immediately wished he hadn’t. He’d been climbing swiftly and now the ground looked very far away. ‘Of course, by the time we had what we were after and were legging it out of the temple doors, there were hundreds of the buggers. Never known a noise like it. Save for this one, of course.’
The wind whipped up around him, blowing strands of lank hair across his face.
‘Who are you talking to?’
The voice was coming from directly above him. Gallo looked up to see a huge man-shaped creature with a great pair of black wings and a bird’s head. The eyes were large and intelligent, the feathers glossy and black. O’rin was perched on a wide ledge just above him, apparently part of the statue’s ornate belt.
‘A friend I haven’t seen for a while,’ said Gallo, trying to keep his voice as casual as pos
sible, just as though he chatted to giant bird-men all the time. ‘Would you mind terribly giving me a hand up?’
A long thin hand descended and dragged Gallo up onto the narrow platform. For a moment he was certain O’rin would just throw him off, as he would sweep a beetle from his shirt, but instead he stood there, peering at him with open curiosity.
‘You’ve certainly made an effort to come and talk to me. What do you want, human? If I can even call you that any more.’
‘I want you to return the mages’ powers to the man called Frith,’ he replied. There was no point in dancing around the subject. ‘I’d also like you to quieten these birds, but that’s rather secondary.’
O’rin tipped his head to one side, looking eerily like a pigeon considering its next worm.
‘And why should I do that?’
‘Because they were his. Believe me, I saw some of what he went through to get them. And my friend needs the magic to save her brother.’
O’rin looked away, out into the storm-light.
‘I’ve been hiding on this putrid island for centuries, do you know that? Once my brothers and sisters were trapped in the Citadel, and the mages eventually disappeared too, the Edenier just began to leak out of the world. And I grew smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until I was little more than a wizened creature, too tired to be a god any longer. If I’d know there was still Edenier in the world, perhaps I would have ventured to the Citadel myself – or perhaps not.’
‘Perhaps not,’ agreed Gallo. ‘Not if you suspected who might be waiting there for you.’
O’rin turned sharply, enormous beak opening and closing slightly.
‘What do you know of it?’
‘I know your sister.’ Gallo grimaced. ‘I knew her very well at one point.’
O’rin leaned closer, wet eyes swivelling in their sockets.
‘I can smell her on you,’ he said after a moment. ‘She was in your head.’
‘She was indeed,’ agreed Gallo. His voice was sour. ‘And when she left I was dead.’
