Darkfall

by Isobelle Carmody

  Refusing to dwell on what she had heard, she reached out a throbbing arm to find out what she had banged into. She was expecting to feel a stump, but was elated to discover that she had reached the outer wall.

  Her heart leapt and she began to follow the wall. There was slightly more room, and Glynn turned with relief onto her belly. This way, she could propel herself more swiftly forward. The wall went right to the ground as she had remembered, but the breeze was still blowing into her face, chilly with promise.

  On and on she crawled, aware that she was using what her father would have termed a leopard crawl. She was thinking of his smile at the exact moment she found the opening. The wind in her face came suddenly from the side, cold and fresh with the merest elusive hint of sether. There was no moonlight after all, but she lifted her hand and ran it along the wall until she found the edge of the opening. She thrust her hand out into freedom and gave a laughing sob.

  She had done it!

  She brought her hand slowly back, and clasped the stone lip with both hands to heave herself out. Then she felt them. Bars.

  ‘No, please!’ she whispered in disbelief. It could not be that she had endured this ordeal only to be stopped on the very threshold of freedom. There must be a space between the bars that she could get through.

  But no. She put her head against the gap between the bars but it would not fit. She pressed her face to the metal as if it would give way before her consuming desperation. But the bars were mute and impervious.

  For a long moment, she lay beside the opening in black despair. But in the end, she knew she must go back to the cell. Heavy-hearted, she peered into the darkness in search of the lantern light. It was not visible and she realised that it must be obscured by the stone stumps.

  She turned onto her back and forced herself to make her way from the wall and towards the centre. As she progressed she thought only of the light; her eyes wove back and forwards in the blackness, searching for it.

  At length she stopped to rest. She could hear nothing other than the shifting of earth under her feet and hands and her own ragged breathing. No drums or chanting. Perhaps the ceremony had ended.

  ‘Please don’t let Bayard come to check on me,’ she prayed. ‘Let her come tomorrow as she said she would do.’

  On and on she went like a worm. She was so hot. The air seemed to have thickened and congealed, and would not be brought easily into her lungs.

  Don’t panic, she told herself fiercely when, some time later, she had still not found the light. She had to fight the urge to start pounding at the flags and screaming. She stopped and closed her eyes, forcing herself to breathe normally.

  ‘This time when I open my eyes I will see light,’ she whispered, and opened her eyes to scan the darkness around her.

  Nothing but blackness, thick as syrup, deep as death.

  Again she wrestled with terror.

  ‘Just calm down,’ she said savagely. ‘You have all night to find the crack.’

  Something shifted in the darkness.

  Glynn froze.

  You’re imagining things now, she told herself, clinging desperately to common-sense. You’re letting this get to you. Concentrate. The opening has to be close.

  Again she heard the sound of something dragging softly on the stones.

  A rat? Do they have rats here? Glynn wondered. Could a snake come through those bars?

  That was bad enough but then a worse thought occurred to her: could whatever owned that voice she had heard with the Draaka be down here? Creeping along in the darkness whispering, Feed me …

  Something touched her arm and terror bubbled up in her throat in a lunatic gurgle. A kind of madness filled her and she jack-knifed forward, smashing her head through the net onto the stone flags above.

  Glynn was dreaming.

  He is trapped-dying-hurting. She is running-running biting-man-thing. She digs-claws under man-thing, but deep-too-deep. He sends image of She-going. She sends image of She-staying. He spirit-soul-flame gutters-dying!

  Youngling-seeds inside clamour, ready-coming! But how without He? He soul-spar fading. Pain! Man-thing stabs-pins-holds She. Clamouring young-seeds send urgent-urgent. He soul-spar gone. If She soul-spar fades-too they-younglings will never-be. If never-be, never-live never-die never-hear-Song.

  Soul-spars tear. He-She severed. Too-late.

  Pink-hairless man-She comes touches-She. Nausea-hatred-fear burns She. But She must-live for-younglings.

  Reaches torn soul-spar into man-She to bind.

  Wrong-wrong to bind not-same-thing! Soul-spar poisoned. Pain-pain!

  But youngling-seeds-come clamouring-terror-fear. Reaching-reaching for He. Man-She does not send soul-spar to younglings. Not-know not-understand. Younglings-dead. Cannot fade because of soul-spar binding She to man-She.

  Trapped-trapped …

  Glynn woke to a grinding pain in her head. She opened her eyes and found there was no difference between having them closed and open. There was complete darkness. She tried to move and could not. Something was holding her shoulders. She remembered going under the floor in a useless attempt to escape. She had become lost and then something had frightened her, and she had panicked and knocked herself out.

  She moved her head, and felt something brush against her cheek. She whimpered in fear. Then she heard an anxious chirrup.

  Glynn gave a sobbing laugh.

  It was the feinna! It licked her cheek and laid a cold paw on her neck.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath and tried in vain to move. She must have turned slightly while unconscious, jamming her shoulders. Easing herself around, she was able to get free. She was still unable to see the lantern light; without it, she doubted she would find her way back to the cell.

  She thought for a bit, round the edges of the pain in her head. Hearing the feinna breathing gave her an idea.

  ‘Food,’ she whispered in a quavering voice.

  She sensed that it was listening.

  ‘Food,’ she said more urgently. ‘Get food.’

  The feinna did not move.

  ‘In the tray. Food. Go get it,’ Glynn whispered. Please, she thought. Please go back to the room so I can find my way out. Remembering that Bayard had said the animal communicated in images, she visualised a bowl of creamy porridge on the floor of the cell as vividly as she could.

  The feinna touched her arm with its wet nose and Glynn saw again the He-feinna dying in the man-thing. Man-thing?

  She could hear the feinna moving away and, abandoning conjecture, began to follow after it. Her fingers and heels were grated raw and her head clanged but she did not stop. The feinna waited until she caught up, then went on. It was a new kind of nightmare, but Glynn did not allow herself to give way to despair. Better to die trying than to let the soul-spar fade.

  Soul-spar? God, what was happening to her?

  She bumped into the feinna.

  ‘Come on, little one,’ she croaked.

  The feinna chirped, stepped on to Glynn’s chest and then was gone. Hardly daring to hope, she reached up and found the torn net. The relief was indescribable and weak tears trickled from the corners of her eyes.

  Gathering herself, she wriggled and fought her way up through the net and the crack into the room. It was pitch dark, which meant the lantern had run out of oil. No wonder she had been unable to see anything.

  She groped her way to the bed and sat down and then it came to her: it had all been for nothing! All that effort and struggling and fear. She was scratched to pieces and had a gash on her forehead she would have no way of explaining. The tears felt like stones forcing themselves out of her soul, for shedding them was an admission of defeat she would not make. Yet she could not stop. It was as though an ocean of tears was draining through her.

  The feinna made a small miserable sound and Glynn felt for it in the darkness. Her anguish was hurting it; she forced herself to calm down. Remembering her strange dream, Glynn understood that somehow she had relived t
he feinna’s capture and the death of its mate. This sobered her, for what was the terrible night she had endured, compared to the feinna’s suffering? The savage death of its mate, the crippling of its soul-spar in an unnatural shape to link with Bayard, and to no avail, for its babies had died anyway.

  The feinna was trembling and pressing itself to Glynn. Its round belly rested in her hand and she could feel the little animal’s heart beating; the warmth of the younglings in its belly.

  Urgent-urgent, she remembered vividly the clamour of them as birthing neared.

  I remember what it was like to have them inside, she thought incredulously. She held the feinna close. We remember. We will not let the flame go out. We will protect the younglings.

  After a long time, Glynn forced herself to get up. She lifted the now-sleeping feinna onto the bed, and unstrapped the sandals from her chest, thinking it a miracle that they had not been dislodged. She pulled off her clothes, wincing where they were stuck, and found her way to the feinna’s water trough. Grimly she sluiced her face and hands and neck. She stung in a dozen places and the gash on her forehead throbbed as she patted it dry with her shirt. She was a mess and she had no idea how she was going to explain it to Bayard. Was too tired even to be concerned.

  Even so, she replaced the flags and pulled the mattress flat over them, before crawling into bed beside the feinna. Without waking, it shifted close to her and pressed its swollen form into her neck until hair and fur were so close there was no knowing where one ended and the other began.

  Glynn’s mind swam with images of running and floating and crawling through tunnels. And of the younglings.

  Poor little desperate mother, she thought dreamily. Both of us wanting so badly to protect what maybe can’t be protected. ‘What are we going to do?’ she whispered.

  The feinna twisted in her arms and gave a fluttering sigh.

  segue …

  The watcher withdrew, struck with wonder at what it had witnessed. The Song had woven itself deep into this strange bonding and who knew what would come of it. It had not been predicted; was not predictable.

  The watcher segued following the theme of love and sacrifice which resonated powerfully across the web, and set up echoes of response from many points in the Unraveller’s world.

  It entered a woman who had once known the girl Glynna …

  ‘What’s the matter?’ a man asked the woman.

  She looked at him for a moment, unseeing and full of a strange tugging sadness. What had he asked; if something was the matter? She cast through her unravelling thoughts. She had been thinking about taking him to the airport and deciding she must ring her agency to find out if anyone needed short-term home nursing to fill the time when he was away. Then she had started thinking about a queer anxious dream she had experienced in which she had been pregnant and trapped underneath something. Then she had been wondering whether she had enough cat food to last her cat the two days she would be absent. That had led to thoughts of a book she had been reading in which a cat had been left to die of thirst in an empty house. How often life imitated itself in that intriguing random way; a thing happened and then it would be replicated in some slightly altered form, seemingly for no reason. On her good days she felt there was a reason for everything, but on blue days like this, everything seemed pointlessly cruel or cruelly pointless.

  How could she put all of that into the sort of a coherent statement he liked to hear formulated?

  ‘Nothing. I don’t know,’ she said finally. But the sadness had grown heavier. ‘Let’s go.’

  He paid for their lunch.

  The sky was heavy and rain started to fall as they climbed into the car. By the time the seatbelts were clipped, the windows were fogged; a thing about her car that always irritated him. It was a black sports car, but there were dents along the side where she had run into a lightpole and the targa top was cracked because someone had dropped something on it. Before his time, of course. Then there were the windscreen wipers that screeched and the door and boot that wouldn’t open and the seals that leaked around the windows …

  He looked at her, and she had put the shades on. A sure sign something was wrong, and a sure sign, he thought, that she wanted him to know something was wrong. He was annoyed that she didn’t just say it, but concluded that she was quiet on the drive because she was feeling sad about him going away.

  ‘What is it?’ he coaxed, feeling tender.

  She saw that his eyes were soft and softened, too. What was the point in saying she felt guilty about the cat, and about her family and her friends, because when he had come along everything, including the animal, whom she had regarded as her closest ally, had of necessity been relegated to a minor role. In a strange way, the cat symbolised her life before he had entered it. It had been given to her by a family with whom she had once stayed for months. She had nursed one of the daughters, who had been dying of a tumour. She had not wanted a cat, but when the blonde daughter offered it, she sensed the girl needed her to take it. All attention in that family had been focused on the ailing daughter, and half the time neither the parents nor anyone else even seemed to notice the other one.

  So she had taken the cat out of pity for the girl, and she had come to love it. It had filled an emptiness in her life she had not been aware of. She had needed that cat. But when she went with him to his side of the world, the cat would be left behind with her mother.

  It was her decision and her desire to go, and she was living with it because she wanted to be with him and what else could you do? The cat was too old to endure the long journey and the far longer quarantine such a removal would entail. It wasn’t his fault or hers, but just the same she often felt that her devotion to the cat had been abandoned through expedience, and that it had deserved better from her. She felt mixed up and guilty and sad, but also resolute because life just wasn’t black and white and there were no simple right decisions.

  ‘I’m feeling sad about leaving the cat. That’s all,’ she said at last.

  Immediately his underlying irritation flickered to life. The cat again! ‘Why didn’t you stay with it then, if you feel that way?’

  She withdrew into herself at the harshness of his tone. He saw it happen and it irritated him further. Any minute now she would accuse him of hurting her feelings. Jesus, how he was sick of that phrase. Women always expected you to soothe their feelings if something you said – never mind that it might be true – upset them. Somehow you were supposed to separate their feelings from everything else.

  He started the car.

  ‘We have to get petrol,’ she murmured in that emotionless monotone she adopted when she withdrew, and which he hated. They drove in silence to the petrol station.

  ‘I know how you feel about the cat. But we have to live!’ he said, striving to be calm because he did not want to leave her in turmoil. Thinking at the same time: Here we go again. God, he would be glad to get away from her for a while. Her habit of changing her mind every five minutes and her precious feelings and her quick thoughtless decisions that always ended up backfiring. The cat was just a symptom.

  She wanted to say that the cat had rights, too, and it had been there before him. But that would be absurd. She didn’t want him to do anything, she realised. She just wanted him to understand how torn she was sometimes.

  ‘I said I felt sad about leaving it, that’s all,’ she began. Then she stopped abruptly, wondering what the hell she was doing arguing with him. As usual, he would consider that she was getting over-emotional about something minor and turning it into melodrama. She was so tired of hearing how inconsiderate and selfish and thoughtless she was. If he would just look at himself once in a while and see that he could be selfish, moody and inconsiderate, it wouldn’t be so bad. Jesus, neither of them was perfect, but it would be nice if he could acknowledge it once in a while.

  Putting their two lives together meant compromising, which never sounded hard until you tried it. All the love in the world wouldn’t make a
square peg fit into a round hole.

  Depressed, she wondered why it was so difficult to keep your ideals. Everything shining seemed to tarnish after a while, or crumble to nothing in your hands.

  The watcher segued, puzzled to find the blonde girl’s pity for the feinna so perfectly mirrored by the woman’s feelings for her pet. Were they separate sadnesses that simply mirrored one another, or were they somehow the same thing? Were the two worlds now wound together so that what occurred in one must occur in the other?

  22

  It has been said that the Song did not so much rise from the

  Void, as escape it. Perhaps in doing so, it took from the Void

  some essential thing, and like a jealous lover, the Chaos spirit

  hungers to breach the Void and crush all that was wrought by the

  Song in its effort to regain that which was lost … Is not the

  Song most truly, then, a thing to be sought but never found?

  Do we not idealise the Firstmade of the Song precisely because

  it reminds us, most sweetly and purely, of that which formed it?

  Did not even the Firstmade seek the Song of Making in

  Shenavyre? Indeed perhaps the search for love is no more than a

  search by each of us for one who will evoke the Song for us; and

  loving, no more than an attempt to recreate the Song and abate

  the emptiness within … If this is so, then the Chaos spirit may

  be said to love the Song.

  THE ALYDA SCROLLS

  Ember was sitting on a bench on the terrace. The citadel lay tranquil as a still-life painting in the early light of the morning. It was hard to imagine all that seethed beneath the thin membrane of calmness enveloping it at this hour. On her knee was the musical instrument from the apartment. She did not know why she had brought it out with her, except perhaps because she had dreamed of it or visioned of it being played by the manbeast.