She tried to strike at him, to claw at him, with the dagger. A scratch would surely be the end of him, since the blade was death.
‘Desist – desist most wonderful Mistress! Though my heart is broken, I go. I will fight the hopeless fight for you out there in the quagmire of defeat.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘No, most lovely . . .? You no longer want me to go?’
She wasn’t listening to him. She was talking to one other than him. Her lips were pressed again to the sigil. He would have sworn he saw sparks, a tiny flame at the point of contact. Then she gave a cry that was part wail and part screech of triumph.
She wept the words at him: ‘I have it! I have the command!’
‘What command?’
‘Yes – oh yes – my beloved Master!’
With her descent into sobbing, and caterwauling, he sensed a change from the directionless rage. But was this news of the same interest to Kawkaw? ‘Would you send me out there, Mistress, into that beer-sotted celebration of our common woe?’
‘Scheming you are! Adept with excuses, fish gutter. I shall indeed send you out, but with a most specific purpose. I require you to locate the holoima you once failed to deal with when you had the chance.’
‘What do you now command?’
Tears flowed over her burning cheeks. ‘My ultimate mission, a mission most sacred to His purpose. And you feral scum will have the undeserved honour of assisting me with its success.’
At that moment a thunderous detonation from the blazing city distracted them both. It gave Kawkaw a moment to think. What plan, in this time of loss and despair, did her master offer to change the tide of battle? Such hubris! Only she, with her vaunted adoration of the Tyrant, could see it as anything other than pissing into the face of a cyclone. He couldn’t bring himself to look in her direction.
‘You – you!’ She prodded the poisonous black spiral of a blade against his breast bone. ‘You misbegotten wretch!’
He was forced to retreat from the stinging point. ‘What?’
‘You had her and failed to kill her.’
He slapped the vicious blade away with his hook. ‘What in the plague-rotted fantasy of a whorehound are you babbling about?’
‘The brat of a girl who made a fool of you.’
What was she talking about? A time when his senses had been clouded by the pain of his recently amputated arm . . .
What brat?
‘The brat you sold to the Mage at Isscan.’
‘She’s the one?’
‘She is the nemesis the Master fears.’
He was taken aback by surprise. The huloima called Mo!
The dreaded Tyrant of the Wastelands feared a huloima brat?
Kawkaw abandoned the tent with his mind in a quandary. Surely he had to think this through this? He was being asked not merely to creep and spy, but to find a way to destroy one of the strangers. And not just one at random but the strangest of them – the witch urchin he had once held in his capture. An alien female shadowed by a fearsome guardian such that even to approach her was likely to prove suicidal? Was the Preceptress telling him the truth? Was it even remotely possible that the Tyrant feared this girl?
If so how might the Tyrant reward the person who brought her death? What if he, Snakoil Kawkaw, saved the day for the great lord? Saved the day when all appeared hopeless? How might such loyalty be rewarded?
Was he being stupid? Was her madness catching?
Everything around Kawkaw – the inferno now consuming the city, the air out here that filled one’s nostrils with the soot and the cinders of towering defeat – suggested the idiocy of such a plan.
You should run. You should lose yourself. Make yourself invisible in some hidey hole where none will find you.
Yet . . . Oh, glory of glories, were not the fates perfidious? Did the histories not speak of great battles turned on the loss of a horse, or a change of wind or tide?
To have even the slightest hope for his dreams to be resurrected, Snakoil Kawkaw had to stay alive. To do so he must keep the closest possible watch on the Preceptress herself, venturing out for short periods at a time, and returning ostensibly to give her the latest news, but in reality looking for the opportunity, any opportunity, to save his own skin. He still had the snotty–nosed urchins out there spying for him, but what hope could he expect from that miserable quarter? His nostrils provided a better source of information in such times. The lip-smacking odour of hops marked the increase in beer brewing in anticipation of some final celebration. The drink was being provided in plentiful quantities to the victorious troops of Prince Ebrit, whose navy was still pounding away at the ruins and flames.
Cautiously does it in such perilous circumstances!
He ignored those merrily singing to themselves, and those swaying with drunkenness having a piss in the dirt, searching for one of suitable size in suitable shadows, who had lapsed into a vomit-scented stupor. It was a shaking hand that inserted the blade between the drunk’s vertebrae at the point where the neck formally left the curve that joined it to the sweat-soaked head. A professional execution, quick and silent, the issue of blood controlled with a press of the thumb, and then a modicum of patience to wait for the heart to stop.
The leather jerkin he quietly appropriated, then the pleated gambeson that reached to his knees. Ignoring the stink of piss and vomit, he dressed the body in his old clothes, so as to suggest a nobody, one whose death would cause no ripples. The implications for his own death were not lost on Snakoil Kawkaw. He held up his own trousers with the trooper’s belt, re-attaching sword and dagger. His hook would provoke no suspicion in a battle-scarred old warrior. So attired he swaggered out of the shadows, heading towards the lamp-lit benches.
Run, you hopeless dreamer, run . . . !
A cyclone of confusion, of humiliation and raging hurt, rose in his mind. Darkness, darkness, darkness . . . Here I am, now committed to the ultimate stupidity. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t see, or hear, for several moments. Then he realised that a plump young Olhyiu barmaid was staring up at him from the other side of the make-shift bar, made up of a single wide plank atop two barrels. She was brown-haired and, perhaps, even younger than his first impressions had suggested. She had a bonnet on her head that made her resemble a startled rabbit in the soft light of a nearby lantern. He blinked, his mind only half emerged from confusion. Why, in the name of sweet adversity, was she smiling at him as if she knew him, her rubicund cheeks a rash of pimples.
‘What are you staring at?’
‘A warrior – a hero, if I am not mistaken.’
He realised that he was snarling. He brought his rage back under control and lowered his head to think. He watched her place the gratuitous flagon of beer on the board in front of him. He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his hook.
‘Oh, my!’ She reached out and touched the hook as if it had feeling in its rusting steel coil. ‘What tales you might tell.’
He squinted his calculating eyes at her. ‘I might, mayhaps, be the devil himself, and you would not know it.’
The Creative Weave
Time was a stream running through Penny’s consciousness with a flow and direction all of its own. Unfamiliar mathematical concepts were expanding in her mind. As she considered a concept, an event, a place, a time, the thought became real and she found herself within it; there was no separation between the stream in her mind and the external world – she was making a new reality. And this new reality then became intrinsic to the next step in her tentative exploration.
She was aware of how clumsy she was compared to the Akkharu. The key thing she must now grasp was the concept of control – to begin with, control over her own creativity. How strange, she thought, as she absorbed this simple necessity, that the link between my own being and mind should be an obstacle. It felt as if she were learning how to use a re
mote control on a detached robot. She knew she must practice and practice to make this preliminary step perfect before attempting the next stage: control over the common mind of the Akkharu.
Jeremiah’s voice was little above a whisper in her mind:
‘A white glow that extends to infinity.’
Penny thought about this. ‘But what I am seeing in my mind is three dimensional – it extends everywhere.’
‘But the Akkharu are not here.’
‘What is it?’
‘What does it do?’
Penny was startled. ‘No – that cannot be.’
Penny hesitated. What he was saying intrigued her. It also frightened her. She still wasn’t sure she understood what he meant.
Penny recalled the creation she had asked the Akkharu to build – a liquidly flowing mother of pearl wonderland, with walls smooth as glass displaying an exotic variation of hues and degrees of opacity. It had curving walkways and glancing alleyways intersecting the walls, all illuminated from within their crystalline lattices. A mental brush upon the walls, as light as a kiss, would change illumination, build a new passageway, construct a place of rest, even construct a mysterious labyrinth that contained a thousand offices, or a single utterly magical bedroom.
‘Place my thoughts here in Dromenon?’
She thought about what he was asking of her. ‘I know we have talked about this wonderful place, Dromenon, but I don’t really understand it.’
‘How then—?’
The idea Jeremiah was placing within her mind was lovely – beyond definition. She thought about her joy in her family’s abandoned garden. Could she explain the wonder, the tranquillity she felt in the garden by defining the colours of flowers, of butterflies? Could she define the feeling of joy?
‘I am ready to begin.’
She decided that she would begin with something out of her memories, something as serene as the landscape with which she had repaired London. But this time she took her inspiration from the garden. She constructed a tree – an enormous tree, shaped like the baobab tree. She loved the story of those trees – they were said to have been planted upside down in the Arabian desert by the devil to stop their eternal wandering during the dark of night. This tree, with its enormous cylindrical trunk, bore thick fleshy branches that reached up into the sky. She watched it grow and grow so that the trunk, against which she now pressed her palms, became a hundred feet or more in diameter.
‘I was testing the limits.’
‘But the tree, the emerging garden in my mind, is still black and white.’
She willed it to become colourful.
The landscape was now perfused by brilliant sunshine. The sky was a deep cerulean with banks of cloud over the dome. The sea – where had the sea come from? – was Prussian blue, shimmering with light over and beneath its surface.
‘It’s just a lovely illusion?’
‘How?’
‘But if I can’t see, or feel, or even sense its presence, how do I know that I am interacting with the Fáil?’
‘Are you saying that this . . . this creative essence . . . is, for want of a better word for it, essentially magical?’
Penny experimented. She willed her tree to grow to three hundred feet high, its foliage to adopt the shape of an old-fashioned kettle. She constructed another giant tree to the shape of a stag’s horns, its gigantic antlers some three hundred feet about the ground.
‘How amazing – enchanting!’
Penny tested it again. In her mind she created what artists in the nineteenth century would have called a fairy picture. She imagined fairies appearing in the garden of the lost souls painted by Hieronymus Bosch. She watched it evolve moment to moment, become ever more complex and real. She gasped at the horror of the empty husks of human souls who were infested with a perversity of bird’s beaks and fishes’ heads, while in the near darkness towns were erupting into flame. Then she tempered the horror of it with brightly coloured foliage and buried everything in a rapid proliferation of plants and flowers, roots and leaves – a massive brilliant floral exuberance – until the entire view became a melee of leaves and petals, a screen to hide the abominations.
‘Yes.’
‘Am I a True Believer?’
‘Why have you given me this gift?’
Penny saw him manifest before her, his face in profile. She saw his face turn to confront her own, those all black eyes devouring her.
She said: ‘What do you want me to do for you?’
‘There is a doorway – a portal – I must enter. Your creativity in this place of unlimited potential will allow me entry into that portal.’
‘And then what will happen?’
‘I will become a god.’
The Black Citadel
Alan pushed away the dead body of a Centurion he had killed with the Spear of Lug, streaking his armour and mail in yet more gore. He had to pause for breath within a circle of protective Shee, relieved to have recovered both the Spear and his strength of mind and purpose after the terrible battle with the Septemviles at the south gate. But the battle was not yet won. The burly legionary had managed to break through the Shee shield in an attempt to get at him. Suicidal attacks of this kind were becoming more common as the Tyrant’s legionaries fought a desperate rearguard action to block off their approach to the Citadel. Sweat ran in rivulets down Alan’s face, running underneath his armour to add to the itching. Everyone around him was haggard with fatigue. After Kate had healed him, the fighting had continued unabated for two whole days with night making no difference. By day the sun was blocked out by the billowing smoke that blanketed the sky. By night the battlefield was illuminated by the inferno of the blazing streets. Trumpet calls were rallying the Shee and Ebrit’s troops to his side. They fought for a total victory and until that was achieved, there would be no end – it was a war to the death and this, the heights surrounding the Black Citadel, was the final stretch of the battlefield.
Alan realised that in defeating the Septemviles including Lightbane, he had declared undying fealty to Mórígán as well as the First Power. He didn’t quite know what this might imply in time, but he sensed that it had changed him. He had discovered a way of turning his oraculum inwards as a source of reple
nishing his energy. He had learned of the possibility of doing this from the mother-sister of the present Kyra in that terrible confrontation with the Legun incarnate at Ossierel.
He assessed the situation anew while Ebrit’s cannons and the dual arrays of Shee archers and Ebrit’s naval assault crews rained fire arrows and heavy armour-piercing bolts into the massed ranks of the legionaries, whose numbers were being squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces. Bétaald had estimated that the city was defended by something like half a million troops, but the slaughter had been dreadful. Briefly, in breaks in the smoke, Alan caught glimpses of the towering architecture ahead. The Citadel capped the central tip of the mountain on which Ghork Mega had been built, a complex of tall buildings, black as obsidian. They couldn’t be more than half a mile distant by now. But that half mile promised to be perilous.
He studied the vast palatial complex – its adamantine walls carved from the solid granite of the original mountain top. How strange that he could make out no windows or internal illumination within the spiky towers or the surrounding labyrinth. He spoke to Iyezzz high overhead:
Alan could not see what Iyezzz had described from this distance, but as they pushed forwards again, fighting for every yard, he began to make out more details of the Citadel, acknowledging that, in spite of its bleak darkness, it possessed its own dark beauty. Closer to, he realised that he had been mistaken in assuming that it had been carved from a natural granite peak. He could now see that it had been cast out of some dark multihued crystal. Here and there he glimpsed architectural details of such intricacy that it was hard to imagine any human hand capable of carving them. The joins flowed seamlessly from building to building, which were all strangely iridescent. So tall were the central spikes he had to crane his neck to gaze up at them. And, in glimpses through the palls of smoke, he saw something of what Iyezzz had described: there was a strange circle of clouds whirling about the periphery of the Citadel.
The Return of the Arinn Page 35
