‘What are those things?’ she demanded. ‘What are you going to do to him?’
Lady Holda spoke sharply to the chirurgeon, who managed to draw Bex away to the other side of the room. As dama of her caral, she was more than just a political leader or skilled artisan. There were powers over the wyrd which were hers to exercise by both right and responsibility. The next part of the sounding ritual was her prerogative, and it demanded her full attention.
Taking a moment or two to compose herself, she began to sing – though it was not singing as Bex understood it.
There was no melody, rhythm, or even discernible words (not that she would have understood them anyway); it was a long exploratory meandering up and down the scale, varying in tempo and volume apparently at random. In response to the song, the pieces of quartz began to glow – very faintly, with irregular, flickering colours. She changed the song in dozens of permutations, and it seemed to Bex that Holda was trying to chase those glowing motes, to pin them down and strengthen them, but for every one that brightened and stabilised, half a dozen others flickered at the edge of extinction. She persevered, though it was clear that the effort was taking its toll; sweat beaded her brow above clenched eyes, and several times Bruna had to step in to physically support her as she swayed. When she finally abandoned the song, she was near collapse, and the room was as hot as a sauna.
Bruna eased her into a chair as the chirurgeon and his prentice carefully removed the devices from Andy’s body.
‘Well?’ she said impatiently. ‘What? Did it work? Did you find him?’
Wearily, Lady Holda mimed two fingers walking away from her head and out into an open-palmed shrug. She wore an expression of helpless sympathy, which Bex thought must be universal amongst healers of every time and world.
The Lady’s meaning was clear: Andy was lost, and he was never coming back. And without him, she was never going home.
***
The others had cleared away their things and disappeared – even Ted had gone exploring – but Bex lingered by Andy’s bedside.
‘You know,’ she said, smoothing his bedclothes, ‘this would be a lot easier if you were on a machine. Oh don’t look so shocked,’ she chided his completely blank expression. ‘Like you weren’t thinking it too.’ She mimicked a flatline tone, and then sighed heavily. ‘Humourless sod.’ The shallow rise and fall of his chest was lost in the caral’s gentle sway, and outside she heard distant calls and laughter. She hoped Ted wasn’t getting into trouble.
‘The thing is,’ she continued, ‘I think I did the right thing. I came after you. Was that right? He was killing you – it had to be the right thing to do. It’s just that…’ she swallowed hard. ‘It’s just that we’re stuck here now, and I think Barber’s dead, but what if he isn’t? What if he’s just going to carry on doing whatever it was he had planned, only now there’s nobody who knows or can stop him?
‘Plus, I’ve got one of the bloody Famous Five running around after me now too. How can I be responsible for looking after a twelve-year old kid? I didn’t bring him here; it was all an accident! It’s not fair!’ Her flare of indignation subsided as quickly as it came. They were fewer these days and harder to sustain.
‘The honest to god truth is that I’m afraid I’ve really fucked things up badly this time, and for once I can’t run away.’
She unhooked the brass pendant from around her neck – the one which Walter had tried to give Andy – and tied it from the lamp which hung over his bed, so that it flashed and spun above his face. ‘I don’t think I’m the best person to look after this anymore,’ she said. ‘You were wrong.’
She left quietly and without looking back, and in so doing failed to see his eyes as they moved to follow the pendant’s swaying motion.
11 Proof
For Andy, the return to consciousness was like the re-forming of scattered droplets of mercury. Quicksilver flecks of awareness splashed across a hundred worlds ran together in fragmentary snatches of sound, taste and smell. They fought for coherence and lost it, spraying apart and back again – each time slightly more vivid than the last – eventually forming thread-thin trickles of thought which jumbled together in a blur, like the white noise of a city at night or the whine of blood in the ears.
Just above that, the rumbling creak of wooden movement. Voices, distant: calls and laughter. Closer: someone bustling nearby. A woman singing softly to herself.
Sight returned to his already-open eyes. A small brass wheel glittered and twisted above him, which he seemed to recognise from somewhere. Was it this that had called him back? Had he called himself back? Back to where? Where was he?
Who was he?
There was a dream of himself as a boy, lying much the same as he was now, looking up at the same bright talisman, and a nightmare vision of grey stones socketed in flesh. He knew now that this was not entirely a dream but was in part memory, but this brought its own uncertainty: because what if he were still that boy, dreaming himself forward into the fantasy of being a man? Two points at each end of a line that was his life from earliest memory to latest; or maybe the same point overlapping – a circle, not a line. A big, gaudy carousel with painted faces rising and falling. Except that he didn’t have to ride it anymore because he was… because he was…
‘Unfixed.’
The dark-haired girl who was rearranging things at the foot of the bed looked up in surprise at the sound of his voice.
‘Hello,’ he croaked, and tried to smile.
She gave a small shriek and fled.
Still got the old magic, he thought, but fell asleep again before he could appreciate the irony of it.
***
Bex’s head felt like it was churning with bilge-water, the sloshing filth of a deep-keeled ship rolling in storm-wracked seas. It was an entirely familiar sensation, and one for which she had a tried and tested remedy.
There was no door as such to lock, but she knotted the bottom corners of her berth’s curtain to the legs of a low table so that no-one could lift it aside and barge in. Not that anybody would, but the privacy was for herself, not from other people, and that was an important distinction to make. She especially didn’t want Ted to see this.
She was relieved to find that her hobby knife with its red plastic handle was still in the rucksack and hadn’t been lost in all the mad dashing about of the last few days. She could have used anything – a knife from one of the platters outside, or a bit of broken crockery – but the knife was an old friend and a small piece of home. She remembered using it for the first time up in her bedroom while Mum and Shithead Dave went for each other like hacksaws downstairs because Mum thought he’d been up in little Becky’s room again, but of course he hadn’t, he couldn’t have been, could he, good old Dave, everybody’s mate?
The bandages that Rosey had put on were a bit grubby by now, but he’d done a good job, and the flesh underneath was clean. The newest cuts looked a bit red, but there wasn’t any sign of infection. All that remained of the others was a row of thin white scars, like tally marks on a prison wall, counting off the days of a life sentence with no hope of time off for good behaviour. Bad girl, he’d said, good old Dave, when he’d finished. You know what happens to bad girls, don’t you? Whatever he thought it was, she bet it didn’t include getting slashed by a red plastic craft knife. The look on his face.
It didn’t stop him from being right, though. She was bad. Somewhere deep down, something essential inside her was broken, and it made everything she did broken too. She could fix it with her little knife – it was only a temporary fix, but it was all she had.
She found a clear space in the corrugation of white scar tissue, but as she put the tip of the blade to it, a small drop of oily black fluid oozed out of one pore.
She stared at it.
It was joined by another, and yet another, and still m
ore, seeping out of her skin like beads of condensation forming on a mirror – and they stung. They stung like an absolute bitch, almost as bad as the cut would have done. They grew until they ran into each other and became thin trickles down her left forearm – and then she felt her right arm growing wet in its sleeve, which she rolled up and saw that the same thing was happening there too.
Where it dripped, it left smoking scorch-marks on the bedspread. That was what galvanised her into action. Not wanting to avoid the damage, but the explanation for it. Her first instinct as a self-harmer – to hide the act itself – shook her out of dumbfounded surprise. She cupped her hands together and tilted her arms forward so that it, whatever it was, ran into the bowl of her palms instead of the floor. It burned like acid but without leaving a mark, and it was only as it began to collect into a viscous black puddle that she realised that it stank too.
‘Oh this is just charming, isn’t it?’
Walter would have called it sha, life energy poisoned from being twisted out of its true course for too long. She remembered seeing it in the ley just before it hit them: twisting black streamers fouling the blue, like blood in water, the accumulated poison of Barber’s corruption. I healed it, though, she thought with savage pride. Whatever the result, whether Andy died or she and Ted were lost here forever, there would be that. I set it back on its true course. I did something good. One thing at least.
As if responding to her train of thought, the flow of sha began to ease.
Had the ley done this to her? Had that tormented dragon-line of earthpower resonated with something inside her or knocked it loose? Or woken it up?
Didn’t matter. Bollocks to Walter and his mystical hippy mumblings. This was real. It had come out of her flesh and was pooled in her cupped hands, and it was real. It wasn’t sha – it was her pain. This was what had been inside her all along. Before, she’d let it out in her blood, and the only difference now was that the process had been somehow distilled. Refined.
She found a chamberpot under the bed and emptied her hands. The smoking black vitriol evaporated quickly once out of contact with her skin, leaving the glaze pitted and scorched, and she found that the need to cut herself had disappeared along with it. She put away her little first aid kit and slowly slid the craft-knife’s blade back into its red plastic handle.
***
An acrid, ammonia-like stench jerked Andy out of sleep, and he twisted awake, sputtering. Through tears and the sudden shock of his eyes opening fully for the first time in nearly two days, it seemed for a moment that three shining figures stood over him. The central and tallest of them approached, saying ‘We know that you can understand us. Do not be afraid.’ As he blinked his eyes clear, the shape resolved into a perfectly normal-looking human woman, but even so, in their conversations over the next few days, he would always have that impression of brightness hidden beneath the surface of her skin.
She was flanked on one side by a beak-nosed man wearing a variety of amulets and arcane devices around his neck, and on the other by a second man who was clearly some kind of military commander, to judge from his tabard-style tunic and the sword at his side. His heavily-scarred forearms were crossed over a barrel chest, and every line of his body seemed to frown thunderously.
He tried to reply and suffered an apocalyptic sneezing attack which made his already dry throat feel like it had just been sandpapered. ‘Can I…?’ he swallowed. Grimaced. ‘Water?’
The younger, dark-haired girl from before came with a cup. She helped him sit up to drink, and in the touch of her hand he became aware that (Bruna her name is Bruna she is wiever-maiden to the Lady and dutiful it is an honour to be given the care of guests even though) somehow he had hurt her. He couldn’t imagine how. There was a defiance in the way she tended to him, as if daring him or readying herself for something painful. What have I done now?
All of this was driven out of his head when he tried to sit up and discovered the weight of the chirurgeon’s devices attached to his body. Nurse Barton’s face loomed in his memory, her scream and her mutilated hand, and he had a sudden horrible suspicion about what might have happened while he’d been unconscious and why Bruna was so wary of him. Alarmed, he started to pluck at the nearest device – a sun-rayed medallion gripping the skin above his heart chakra with dozens of tiny claws – and the chirurgeon jumped forward to stop him. ‘You must not do this!’ he admonished. ‘It is perfectly safe. Please…’
‘No,’ he grunted, digging with his fingers. ‘You don’t understand what’s going to happen if you leave these things in me.’
‘You are safe here, trust me. Whatever attacked you in your realm is not here. But you are not yet fully…’
‘It’s not me, it’s you lot who aren’t safe.’ The thing came half free, and a blue-white spark burnt his fingers.
‘Andrew.’ Lady Holda’s voice was low but pitched with an authority which made him pause. The way she had pronounced his name had sounded more like Indra. ‘You imperil yourself and my people with your actions. Please do not force me to treat you as a threat. It would grieve me to have to do so.’
‘Dama,’ the scarred warrior growled, ‘he is already a threat. All three of them were, from the moment they arrived.’
‘What my chirurgeon is trying to tell you,’ she continued, as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘is that you are not yet fully restored to yourself. Your mind is still fragmented, and your memory is incomplete. You are not aware that your partial recovery has already caused… difficulty.’
As if simply saying it were enough to make it so, he caught the trailing ends of drifting memories: of fitting uncontrollably as the pieces of his consciousness tumbled together, his unfixed ch’i spasming in response, bright ribbons of energy arcing out into the room. He saw scorch-marks on the curtains and bedclothes and a bandage on Bruna’s forearm. It hadn’t been Hello, he realised now. It had been Help me.
‘The augurs attached to your skin are providing you with the stability which you lack,’ said the chirurgeon, readjusting the device. Andy felt faintly sick as he watched the little claws dig into his chest, but didn’t interfere again. ‘We do not know how this can be. It is as if you possess no bones and yet are still able to walk.’
‘Never mind that,’ snorted the warrior. ‘Why don’t we start with why your friends claim to not speak a word of our language, but you’re happy to. Either they are lying or you are wyrd-touched. Which is it?’
Andy looked from one to the other in utter confusion. If he expected the Lady to intercede and rein in the man’s belligerence, based on his first impression that she was the least bizarre of them and that the other two deferred to her, he was mistaken. She regarded him coolly, waiting for his reply, as if there were nothing untoward about interrogating half-conscious invalids. The only reason he knew his own name was because she’d used it a moment ago. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he protested. ‘What friends? I’m here on my own.’ Aren’t I?
‘As I said,’ the chirurgeon entreated the Lady, ‘it is too soon…’
There was a sudden commotion outside the room. Another female voice raised high in protest, demanding to be let in, using language as colourful as the fabrics surrounding him. Beyond the curtained doorway he could make out struggling movement as the guard (they set a guard on me?) attempted to prevent someone a lot smaller but extremely determined from getting in.
‘That damned girl…’ The soldier turned for the door.
‘Iaran, wait,’ commanded the Lady. ‘Allow her in. It may be that her presence will hasten his recovery.’
The chirurgeon was just as unhappy with this as Iaran. ‘Dama, it may also be that the sudden shock splinters his mind again, and with no hope of recovery this time.’
‘Nevertheless,’ was her sole reply.
The curtains parted, and Bex flew across the room without a glanc
e to anyone, flinging her arms around Andy’s neck. ‘They wouldn’t let me see you!’ she gasped. ‘Everybody suddenly started running around like headless chickens, and I could hear you calling out – things that didn’t make any sense – but they wouldn’t let me in! Are you okay? Are you hurt?’ Then she seemed to realise what she was doing – hugging him hard enough to make his eyes bulge – because she abruptly let go and stepped back apace. ‘And what exactly have you been doing for the last two bloody days, anyway?’
He gave her a small, embarrassed smile. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know I should know you, but…’ He shrugged.
‘No,’ she whispered, stricken. ‘Don’t you dare.’
‘I’m sure it will all come back to m…’
‘Nonono-no no no no!’ she screamed, and she was on him again, but this time she was pushing and punching and slapping him, with tears streaming down her cheeks, and the breath of her denial hot in his face. After everything else, to have got him back only to find this – how much more was she supposed to take?
Iaran peeled her off him, and the fight simply drained out of her, leaving her limp and sobbing. ‘Dama,’ he asked, holding the girl at arms’ length with distaste, ‘how much longer do you propose for this charade to continue?’
‘Have a care of her, Captain,’ the Lady answered him. ‘She is out of her realm – confused, afraid. This is to be expected.’ All the same, she was disappointed at the outcome, even making allowances for what manner of creatures they were and where they had come from.
She ordered the others to leave and sat alone with Andy while the augurs did their job.
‘You must not blame him, either,’ she said. ‘He is a soldier. It is in his nature to suspect everyone and everything. You should understand that your kind are not unknown to us, and on those rare occasions where you have strayed into our world, you have acted with fear and aggression, so it is not surprising that he considers you to be little more than animals. Are you anything more? Will you be only what the tales of others have made you, or do you have the strength to be greater? Tell me now everything about yourself and how you came to be here.’
The Narrows Page 28
