by Ian Irvine
“It’s a disaster,” she said in a deathly voice. “Shand has been corrupted by the drumming; Llian is lost because Esea betrayed us; Snoat got away with the Command device… and the Merdrun are coming through the Crimson Gate who knows where.”
91
A SCORPION IN MY HOUSE
“Please don’t do this,” Hingis said hoarsely from outside the pavilion.
Llian could hear each breath rasping as Hingis fought to draw air into his withered lung. What was the matter with Esea? Had the drumming driven her over the edge? Was it affecting both of them?
“Her – or me?” Esea repeated.
“Don’t say it, Hingis,” Ussarine said softly. “You mustn’t choose.”
“You forced me, Esea,” Hingis choked. “And I choose… Ussarine!”
Esea let out a cry of anguish, then shrieked, “Then join her – forever!”
An almighty blast tore the copper roof off the pavilion and sent it whirling down the slope, scattering blazing paper lanterns everywhere. The rest of the columns fell. Outside, Ussarine screamed in agony, then fell silent. Some distance away a man groaned. A woman stumbled off, howling in grief and despair. Esea, surely. Had she killed them?
“Esea?” Llian called. “Hingis? Ussarine?”
No reply. He was on his own.
He realised that he had dropped the manuscript. Snoat rose, holding it in his left hand, the stubby Command device in his right. He was trembling all over, presumably from the effects of the deadly device. He pointed it at Llian, who hurled himself back over the desk. He landed on a burning paper lantern, extinguishing it, and pain seared up his back. The black blast peeled curling layers of bright blue lacquer off the desk and tossed them in all directions like wood shavings in the wind.
“No, Cumulus!” Ifoli cried. “You’ll let the Merdrun through.”
Snoat was shuddering now and his teeth were chattering. “What’s the matter with you?” he snarled. “Let… me… go!”
Thump. Llian peered over the desk. Ifoli was staggering backwards, a fist mark on her cheek. The drumming became a thumping crescendo that rattled his ribs. He could feel it calling him again – take the Command device and cut the bastard down.
“Get the Great Tales!” said Snoat.
Ifoli swept them into a large bag and slung it over her shoulder. Snoat jammed the manuscript into a leather bag.
Outside, fighting broke out in many places. Had the drumming made Snoat’s men turn on one another? It was too much to hope for. Llian scrambled out of the ruined pavilion. Something was burning down near the water. The sky ship should have been lit up by the flames but there was no sign of it.
Snoat was lurching down the slope towards the eastern bridge, waving the Command device wildly, and Ifoli was running after him, bent under the weight of her bag. Llian wanted to bolt back to the clearing and Karan, but the job had not been done. He followed Snoat and Ifoli down, across the bridge and onto a broad expanse of polished paving stones.
“Cumulus, you must not use it again,” cried Ifoli. She grabbed Snoat’s arm.
“How dare you question me!”
He struck her on the side of the head with the Command device, knocking it from his trembling hand and dropping the manuscript as well. The drumming roared in Llian’s ears. Was this his chance? He had to take it. He shouldered Snoat out of the way, snatched up the device and pointed it at his enemy’s half-masked face.
“Die, you bastard!”
“You imbecile!” said Ifoli. “You can’t use it.” She dropped the book bag and tried to snatch the device from Llian’s hand.
In a moment of drumming-fuelled madness, he turned to blast her down.
“Stop!” said Ifoli.
“How dare you tell me what to do?” Llian raged, and was about to end her when he remembered Sulien saying, “No, Daddy.” He lowered the device. Fool, what are you doing?
Ifoli hooked his legs from under him. He fell to the ground and the device skidded away across the stones. “Stay down!” she hissed.
“Guards,” Snoat bellowed, “to me!” He turned to Ifoli. “Kill him.”
Ifoli looked from Snoat to Llian, then back to Snoat. She shook her head.
“So,” he said. “It’s as I suspected. All this time there’s been a scorpion in my own house.”
What was he talking about?
“Who are you spying for?” said Snoat. “It’s pointless to deny it.”
“Nadiril,” Ifoli said softly.
“That doddering old fool!”
“He sent me to you in the first place. He’s fooled you all these years.”
No guards had answered Snoat’s call, but now a one-armed mancer ran up, carrying a snake-shaped staff. Scorbic Vyl, Llian assumed.
“Kill them,” said Snoat.
Vyl pointed his staff at Llian and Ifoli. Llian tried to get up.
“Stay down!” Ifoli mouthed.
“No, do it with that!” said Snoat, pointing at the Command device.
Vyl picked it up and was about to blast Llian and Ifoli when Esea staggered out of the darkness, her beautiful face twisted in despair. She extended an arm towards Vyl.
Snoat let out a derisive snort. “You don’t even have the power to tickle him.”
“Reshape it!” said Esea.
White fire roared from her fingertips and struck the Command device, reshaping it into a brass sphere with the dark crystal embedded in it like an evil eye. But the reshaping had perverted the intention of its design and the strain was too much: it shook, shuddered, shrieked and the crystal began to throb.
“Now reshape them!” said Esea, swinging her arm in a circle.
Ifoli dropped beside Llian, covering her face with her hands. As he did the same, the Command device exploded in a blast that reshaped Vyl grotesquely, hurled him backwards for fifty feet and set fire to the very stones he had been standing on. It reshaped Snoat too but left him where he stood.
“Can’t… be happening,” he gurgled, lurching around in a circle. His face was inside out, his belly outside in. “Not… to me! Can’t… go like this. Ifoli, my Great Tales… bring.”
She did not move. Esea, whose throat and chest were peppered with shards of brass, let out a little sigh, crumbled to the stones and lay still. Her face relaxed, and all the grief and anguish was gone.
“Damn you!” Llian snarled. He forced himself to his feet, picked up his precious manuscript, hesitated then tore the pages out and tossed them on the burning flagstones. Snoat screamed as though the very point of his life had been denied him, then staggered to the fire and threw himself onto it, as if to extinguish the flames with his own body. The fire roared higher, then, just as suddenly went out.
A shimmering red bubble formed around Llian and Ifoli. In a series of flashes he saw the Merdrun army, an icy plateau with the Crimson Gate at its centre, then Wilm in a luridly glowing cavern with a small silver-haired girl. Aviel.
Then the red bubble shrank to nothing and they were gone.
92
I’VE RUINED EVERYTHING
After Shand and Ussarine were hurled away in the gate, Aviel dared not remain in Carcharon. She and Wilm gathered food, water bottles, weapons and camping gear from the four frozen bodies in the yard. One body had a small coil of rope; he took it as well.
“Where can we hide?” said Aviel.
“Llian mentioned a way station further up the ridge,” said Wilm. “It’s out of sight of the tower; maybe Unick doesn’t know it exists.”
He made a ladder with the rope so they could climb down the rear wall. Aviel found it hard going. The way station turned out to be a tiny hut, ten feet by nine, built from slabs of shiny schist. It had a fireplace, a rough stone floor, no furniture and no window. Wood was stacked between the chimney and the wall. The door, though draughty, was sound.
Wilm lit the fire. Aviel put the food and water bottles near the heat to thaw. They ate and sat together, warming their hands on mugs of tea. Wilm kept looking at h
er sideways as if he did not know what to make of her. She was not the girl she had been when he left Casyme.
She was also mindful that he had made a friend in Chanthed and they had worked together to rescue Llian, then Unick had murdered her in front of him. Wilm must be angry and confused, and perhaps he felt guilty that he had not been able to save her.
Aviel was not confused about anything. She had expected to die a dozen times in the past weeks, and she knew exactly what she wanted: to rid the world of the stone and, if she survived, master the art of making scent potions.
“You look exhausted,” she said. “Get some sleep.”
“Do you want me to bind your ankle?”
“No!”
“Sorry,” he said hastily. “Just trying to help.”
“I’m used to doing everything for myself.”
He hunched his shoulders and stared at the fire. “What are we going to do about the stone?”
“I haven’t thought it through yet.”
“I don’t suppose you need my help with that either.”
Aviel realised that she was being mean-spirited. He had come all this way to save her from a brute, at great cost to himself. She did not like to touch, as a rule, but he was her oldest friend. She took his big hand and even drew some comfort from it.
“I’m really sorry, Wilm. Look, I don’t need the sleep, but you do. Why don’t we talk about it when you wake up?”
He took off his boots and lay down in his blankets. Aviel got out the grimoire and moved closer to the fire. The small, squashed writing was hard to read by the flickering light. She studied the Electuary of Compulsion. Could she compel Unick to destroy the stone that meant everything to him?
Ultimately, all forms of attacking mancery came down to a contest of wills, and his whole life had been a contest: himself versus the world. As for her, from the day she was born it had been her versus her six sisters, and her father, and everyone she had ever met save Wilm and Shand. Being crippled, overworked, underfed and chronically unlucky, her inner strength had to be all the stronger. She had to beat him.
Wilm was asleep, one fist clenched around his blankets. No one could have had a better friend. She smiled, rubbed salve into her swollen ankle and took up the grimoire.
Immersed in the work as she was, the night and the next day passed swiftly. The instructions for making the potion were complex and difficult, and made doubly so because she did not have all the scents she needed and had no way of making them here. She had to substitute them with ones she did have, but first she had to work out exactly how to use them and in what order, otherwise the completed potion could prove fatal.
“What are you doing?” said Wilm the following mid-afternoon.
Aviel sniffed the phial she was using, added another drop, sniffed again and frowned. “Step nine requires oil of bergamot and I don’t have any. I’m trying to make a substitute with lemon and almond oils, plus a hint of lavender and a few other things, but it’s not working. I’ll have to start afresh.”
“You’re so clever,” he said. “I wouldn’t be game.”
“Says the man who taught himself how to use a sword then beat Snoat’s best assassin.”
She might have said killed but Aviel did not want to think about that.
“How long is it going to take?” said Wilm.
“Another day or two – if we get that long. The drumming is getting louder.”
“It was in my dreams the whole time I was asleep. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Not really.”
“Then I’ll go and spy on Carcharon.”
Fear shivered through her. “Be careful.”
The next day passed, and the day after. The drumming grew ever louder, reminding Aviel that her work was urgent, but whenever she tried to hurry she made mistakes and had to do it all over again.
That evening the scent potion was finally done, and she knew it was as close to the true Electuary of Compulsion as she could make it. But would it work? There was no choice but to try it on Unick, and pray.
When they entered the yard of Carcharon it was clear that something had changed for the worse. The ground was shuddering beneath them, the drumming was loud and frantic, and showers of crimson and orange light kept bursting out of the tower windows and the air vents. She really did not want to go down there.
“Do you think this is the end?” said Wilm.
“Yes. I think it is.”
As they crept hand in hand down the yard, the tower shook; loose stones slid out of the wall and tumbled down the ridge, crashing and smashing all the way to the bottom. It had been sunny during the day and the frozen corpses of Rasper and his three assistants stood out above the melting snow like zombies in a white fog. It was a horrible omen.
“What if we’re too late?” said Wilm as they went in.
“We’ve got to keep going.”
“But the Merdrun drove the mighty Charon into extinction. What can we hope to do?”
Aviel was thinking the same thing but saying it aloud did not help. “Ordinary people have beaten great enemies before.”
Wilm’s silence was eloquent.
“Wilm?” she said, desperate for some encouragement, even the smallest.
“Malien said don’t use mancery near the stone. And scent potions are mancery.”
“What choice do we have?”
She took his cold hand in her freezing one. He seemed to take comfort from her courage – if only he knew how despairing she was – and they crept down between the juddering walls and through the cracking and crumbling passages. She was shaking and he was too. She did not want to go in; she never wanted to see Unick again. Most of all, she did not want to go anywhere near the stone. If he caught her he would feed her to it, and she was a bit corrupt now – this time it might take her.
Finally they approached the cavern. It was sweltering and the glow from the summon stone was such a lurid and penetrating crimson that it passed through the solid rock, lighting it up like glass. They turned the corner and Aviel’s knees gave.
“I… don’t think I can do it.”
Wilm held her up. “Yes, you can. You will.”
The summon stone seemed to have grown, though that might have been the baleful red corona surrounding it. The drumming, however, was oddly thick here, as if muffled.
“The time must be close,” croaked Wilm. Then he jumped. “Aviel, I can hear people talking.”
She could too, distant, echoing voices. “Lots of people… as if they’re on the other side of a wall. And one deeper voice. It sounds like he’s giving orders but I can’t make out the words.”
Wilm turned slowly to face her and in the garish light his eyes appeared to be bleeding. “Is he giving orders to an army,” he whispered, “or to the stone?”
Then one voice soared above the rest. Gergrig? Is it ready?
Almost.
“Quick, use the scent potion,” whispered Wilm.
“I can’t use it on the stone,” said Aviel. “Only on Unick. Where is he?”
“He’s here!” said Unick in a clotted voice. He stepped out from behind the stone, the Origin device swinging from what remained of his left hand.
Aviel let out a scream. All his toes were gone save for the big ones, and he had lost two fingers on his left hand, three on the right, and both ears. He was a lurching, scabrous monstrosity who should have been dead. Perhaps only willpower kept him alive, and how could she hope to master a will that strong? Surely only death could.
The floor quivered violently, tossing her off her feet. A crack formed across the middle of the cavern, opened to the width of a foot, then snapped closed, squirting dust up in a series of little grey fountains. The summon stone flared. Aviel’s innards knotted.
“Soon,” Unick said to the stone. “Very soon now.” He took a step towards her.
Wilm drew the black sword and sprang. But Unick ducked, caught Wilm’s free arm and jerked him forward so hard that he flew through the air
towards the stone.
Aviel screamed.
He struck it side on and the sword was jarred out of his hand. The right side of his head hit the summon stone, there was a red flash and a puff of smoke, and the drumming became a thundering roar. Wilm hurled himself aside, gasping and clutching at his bloody ear. Where his clothing and hair had touched the summon stone he was unharmed, but the top half of his right ear was gone, taken by the stone.
He began to shake uncontrollably. He reached for the sword but his knees gave and he went down on his back. Unick had been disabled for some minutes after the stone fed, and Wilm would be too.
Aviel felt sick, and guilty. He was only here because of her, and now he was going to die. She fumbled the scent potion out of her pouch, her hands trembling so badly she could barely undo the wrappings. Unick, who was bending over Wilm, turned and stared at her, a half-smile playing across his broken mouth.
As she dropped the wrappings and took hold of the stopper, the summon stone projected a red-tinged shadow onto the end wall, though the space between the two uprights was open, not closed. Was it the other side of the gate? Was it Cinnabar?
Through the gate Aviel saw the outline of an armed host. The Crimson Gate must be opening.
Gergrig, there’s someone at the summon stone.
Gergrig, a lean man with a shaven skull and a dense black beard, brandished a recurved blade in Aviel’s direction.
“That’s a good sign!” she said in a croaky voice. “He’s afraid we can still block him.”
“Use the potion, quick!” yelled Wilm.
Unick lurched towards her, smiling sickeningly. Aviel rehearsed the compulsion she planned to use on him – Smash the stone!
She tugged on the stopper – which stuck. Curse her bad luck. As she heaved on it her right foot twisted on a patch of jellied blood, she lost her balance, and the phial flew from her hand. She dived after it, ignoring the agony in her ankle, but the phial struck the wall and smashed. He wouldn’t even get a whiff of the potion she had spent so long making.
“I’m sorry, Wilm!” she wept. “I’ve ruined everything.” She knelt, paralysed, as Unick lurched towards her.
