Chronicles of Ancient Darkness

by Michelle Paver

‘I knew you’d find me,’ he said. It didn’t begin to express what he felt.

  Her skin was warm and smooth; he didn’t want to let go.

  Smooth.

  No zigzag tattoos.

  ‘I knew I’d find you too,’ said Seshru the Viper Mage.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘How you’ve grown since last we met!’ said the Viper Mage with her mocking sideways smile.

  Her hair was a mantle of darkness, and the viper tattoo seemed to throb on her high white brow; but her beautiful lips were black.

  Torak tried to move, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t tied up, his limbs simply refused to obey. He said, ‘The crowberries. You poisoned them.’

  Her eyes glinted. ‘But I’m not going to hurt you.’

  ‘Why would I believe that?’

  ‘Because I would have done it by now. I could have cut out your heart and eaten it. Not even your wolves could have reached you up here.’ She leaned down and whispered in his ear. ‘But I want you alive!’

  His heart was thumping so hard that she must be able to hear it. ‘Why?’ he said.

  But she only laughed, and licked her lips with her little pointed black tongue.

  As she twisted to tend the fire, her tunic of supple buckskin fell about her like water. It was fringed with snakeskin which caressed her naked arms and calves, shimmering with every move. Torak couldn’t take his eyes off her. Fear and revulsion burned in him – this woman was evil, she’d helped kill his father – but he couldn’t look away.

  He watched her pass her hand over the lid of a basket, evoking a rustle from whatever lived within. He watched her twist a garland of herbs and set it on her brow, and paint long, wavering stripes on her arms: green snakes which wriggled to life on her pale skin. Fascinated and repelled, he watched – and she smiled her knowing smile, enjoying her power.

  With a forked stick, she dropped a stone from the fire into a rawhide pot, sending up a hiss of steam.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  Her lip curled. ‘Hot water. I was a Healer, remember?’

  Wringing out a piece of buckskin, she bathed his chest, then smoothed on a cooling salve. It felt good. The pain was gone.

  ‘It won’t fester any more,’ she told him. ‘I no longer need it to draw you to me. Though it’s as well I summoned you when I did.’

  I summoned you. The voice he’d heard in his sleep hadn’t been Renn, but Seshru.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said between his teeth.

  Rising to her feet, she went to the edge of the cliff and gazed down. ‘All the tiny creatures,’ she murmured. ‘The wolves, the frightened little Otter people. They belong to me now. They must submit – or I will empty the Lake.’

  Torak thought of the pine-needles on the black beach. The Lake was draining away. He tried to stir, but managed only a twitch of his head.

  The Viper Mage touched the green clay on her arm. ‘This – this has power! When I wear it, those I meet see only a woman masked in green: sick, frightened, like them. Not even your wolf knows my scent.’

  As if she’d called to Wolf, a howl rang out from below. Come down!

  Seshru smiled. ‘Now he knows me! I’ve shed my mask. He knows who has defeated him!’

  Torak saw that the garland she wore was nightshade, which on a single stem bore purple flowers, green berries and ripe scarlet ones: a most potent herb, whose every part was deadly, like the Viper Mage herself. She was too strong. For a moment, he despaired.

  He heard wings. Rip and Rek alighted on a boulder behind her.

  ‘Ah, but you’re strong!’ said Seshru, oblivious. Kneeling beside him, she drew off his headband and gently pushed the hair from his forehead. ‘To have spirit walked in an ice bear!’ She stroked his temple. ‘Brave, too. To cut out the mark of the Soul-Eater. Who taught you the rite? It must have been a Mage of great power.’

  She was trying to flatter him. She wouldn’t succeed. And yet – her touch was gentle. He struggled to keep his thoughts together.

  ‘You – stole the red deer antlers,’ he said. ‘You poisoned the drink when I did the rite. You made me spirit walk in the elk.’

  She smiled her beautiful, maddening smile. ‘So strong. And to fight off soul-sickness!’

  His thoughts were darkening, her fingers reaching into his mind. ‘The F-Far North,’ he stammered. ‘How did you get away? Where is the Oak Mage – the Eagle Owl Mage?’

  She laughed. ‘Ah, we’re so alike, you and I! Both outcasts, both unimaginably strong. That’s why the clans hunt us. The weak will always fear the strong.’

  Rip and Rek flew away. Torak scarcely noticed.

  ‘So alike,’ breathed Seshru. ‘Why fight it? Why not accept it?’

  ‘No,’ he said with an effort. ‘We’re not alike. You’ve killed people. You’ve broken clan law.’

  ‘But that’s all it is,’ she countered, ‘the law of the clans. Only the Soul-Eaters know the law of the World Spirit. That’s why it delivered the spirit walker to me.’ She paused. ‘But why didn’t I know you at once for what you are? How did you conceal yourself from me? The answer must lie somewhere.’ With a supple movement, she reached for his gear.

  The spell of her touch was broken. Torak hated seeing her handle his things.

  ‘Your father’s knife,’ she said with distaste. ‘A traitor’s knife. Slate, antler, sinew. Nothing there. The axe, then. Not yours, I think.’ Taking his hand, she measured it against the axehead. How clever she was! If the axe had been made for him, its head would have spanned from the heel of his palm to the tip of his middle finger. It was slightly longer.

  ‘It has the Raven mark on the handle,’ she mused, ‘but the head is greenstone . . . They say that Fin-Kedinn lived with the frog-eaters for a time.’

  She read the truth in his face. ‘So it is his! You stole Fin-Kedinn’s axe! You broke clan law!’

  Next, she took his medicine pouch and drew out his medicine horn. Her lips thinned. ‘Your mother’s.’ She set it down. ‘Nothing. The answer lies elsewhere.’

  With a shudder of relief, Torak remembered that the strand of Renn’s hair was inside the pouch. Seshru hadn’t found it. She was not all-powerful. She could make mistakes.

  Seshru sensed the change in him, and her features turned colder than wind-carved ice. ‘Do not imagine you can hide from me.’

  Torak met her stare and held it.

  With the speed of a striking snake, she brought her face close to his. ‘You cannot defy me! Not while I have this!’ In her fingers she held something small, caught in the coils of a green clay serpent.

  Torak’s belly turned over. The pebble he’d made for Renn.

  ‘Have you any idea of the power this gives me?’ she hissed. ‘With this I blighted your souls! You have no will of your own. You belong to me!’

  Her fist tightened on the pebble – and Torak’s heart clenched.

  She opened her fist – and he breathed again.

  She laughed, and on her breath he smelt the carrion stink of the root which turned her mouth black. How could he have thought her beautiful? Her spirit was hollow, and where her heart used to be there was only a shadow, like the dark stain where a carcass once lay.

  Now she was casting off the lid of the basket, and a viper was sliding over the edge. Silently, silently it flowed into her lap. Its zigzag markings were stark down its glistening silver length, and its lidless red eye was fixed on its mistress.

  Seshru picked it up and it wound itself about her arm, its black tongue flickering out to meet hers. ‘Keep very still,’ she told Torak. ‘Their bite is worse than any you will encounter in the Forest. Their bite can kill . . . ’

  A second viper, black as a moonless night, poured from the basket, and Seshru showed it the pebble. As its forked tongue flicked out to taste it, Torak gasped. He had felt that tongue on his skin.

  ‘You wanted this, spirit walker,’ breathed the Viper Mage. ‘You put yourself in my power. You left the stone for me to find.’

>   ‘No,’ he whispered.

  Her eyes pierced his souls. ‘Then why make it?’

  ‘A – a present,’ he stammered.

  ‘For whom?’

  ‘- A girl.’

  ‘Why take it back?’

  ‘To tell her I was gone.’ He tried to push Renn’s image from his mind, but the Viper Mage was faster.

  ‘Her name is Renn,’ she said. ‘Who is she?’

  With a huge effort, he dragged his gaze from hers – only to settle on the greenstone axe.

  Seshru was on it in a heartbeat. ‘Fin-Kedinn’s. She’s Fin-Kedinn’s child.’

  ‘- His brother’s.’

  There was a moment of stillness. Then the Viper Mage turned her back on him and sat, staring at the Lake, while the snakes in her lap twined their sleek coils about each other.

  ‘- His brother’s child,’ she said tonelessly. ‘Of course. He would have cared for his brother’s child.’

  Torak couldn’t bear to hear her mention Renn.

  But Renn is far away, he told himself. Renn is safe.

  ‘No.’ Seshru twisted round again. ‘She is here on the Lake. I saw her in a boat with a boy, a tall boy with yellow hair. But they can’t help you now.’

  Was she telling the truth? Were Renn and Bale looking for him, or was it another of her lies?

  ‘Why do you want me alive?’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You know what I want.’

  ‘My power. You want to be the spirit walker.’

  ‘I have that already. I can make you spirit walk whenever I wish. I want more. I want – the fire-opal.’

  To hear her name it . . . Her voice breathed life into the image in his mind. He saw its pulsing red heart.

  ‘It – it was lost in the ice,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t lie to me,’ said Seshru. ‘I am a Mage, don’t you think I have ways of knowing? When your father shattered it, three pieces were left – three! One held by the Seal Mage, one taken by the black ice. One remains. Your father must have told you before he died.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He hid it. He hid it and he told you where, as he lay dying – ’

  ‘No – ’

  ‘- as he lay in agony, his life bleeding away, his guts ripped out by the demon bear – ’

  ‘No!’ he screamed.

  Clawing the nightshade from her brow, she flung it on the fire. Blue smoke wound about her, pungent, dizzying.

  Powerless, Torak watched her open a pouch at her breast and dip in her finger. He tried to resist, but she held his jaw and smeared a stinking black sludge on his lips. Grasping the dark viper in one hand, the silver in the other, she brought them to her mouth and whispered a charm. Then she placed both snakes on his chest.

  He didn’t dare breathe. He felt their cool softness gliding over him; the tiny contractions as their scales gripped his flesh. He felt their tongues on his skin. Seshru observed his terror with the dispassionate gaze of a serpent watching its prey.

  ‘Your body can’t move, but your souls can. Your souls will go wherever I command. Your souls will do whatever I want.’

  The black sludge was bitter in his mouth. Lights flashed behind his eyes, sickening spirals of light.

  He saw the dark hair of the Viper Mage floating like snakes about her white face. He felt his souls ripped from his marrow. He screamed . . .

  . . . silently, his black tongue tasted the air.

  The last thing he heard before he became snake was the voice of the Viper Mage, commanding him to find Renn.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Faster than thought, the snake slithered down the rockface.

  It tasted the scent of cricket and fern. It felt the scurrying of ant and shrew. Air, leaf, water, prey, light – it ignored them all. Its mistress had sent it after richer quarry.

  The rocks burned with the heat of the vanished sun, and the snake took in that heat as it passed. Noiselessly, it slid off the rocks; the water enfolded it, and it took in the chill of the Lake.

  The snake felt this change, but that was all it felt. No pleasure or discomfort, eagerness or fear. Those feelings it recognized, because it tasted them on the struggling prey and on the mountains of warm meat which shook the earth – but such feelings were not snake.

  This made the souls of the snake very strong: pure intent, unclouded by emotion. Torak would not have believed such strength could exist in so slender a body. His own souls were weak from the poison; he couldn’t turn the snake from its purpose. He could only shiver inside its small, cold brain as it sped through the Lake, deadly as an arrow.

  He felt the coolness of weed and water flowing over his coils. His lidless eyes knew the flash and flicker of fish. Then he was out in the heat again, and the scent of pine was thick on his tongue. The sand was rough, he gripped it with his scales. Raising his snake head, he tasted the scent of raven.

  The hot bird swooped – its cries muffled by air, then piercingly loud as it thudded to earth. The snake darted into a hole and prepared to strike.

  He felt the raven hop towards the hole. It smelt him, but it couldn’t reach. Frustrated, it pecked the tree-root which sheltered him. The ground shuddered as it flew away.

  When the threat was past, he emerged. He crested the mossy hillside of a log, slithered under bracken taller than trees. At last he caught the scent of slumbering male, and beyond it, the sweeter scent of female.

  Torak’s souls fought to get free – to turn the snake from its purpose – but it glided on, relentless. And now as he slid under leaf and over stone, he felt waves of heat from sleeping flesh.

  Bite, bite. The voice of his mistress wove in and out of his snake mind.

  Again the part of him that was Torak tried to turn the creature, but his muscles would not obey.

  Bite, bite.

  His coils gripped a naked foot, slid up a pale calf; over soft elk hide and rough wovengrass, into a band of warm raven feathers heaving in sleep. His snake head recoiled from the markings on the wrist – so like his, yet different – but beyond, his cloven tongue tasted uprotected flesh.

  No! shouted Torak in the cold snake brain. No! This is Renn!

  The snake stretched its jaws wide – its fangs unfolded from the roof of its mouth and pointed down – they filled with venom, ready to strike . . .

  Bite, bite.

  Torak woke.

  Above him the clouds spun, jolting him on a sea of sickness. Gradually, he became aware of the sound of the spring. At his side the Viper Mage sat motionless, her face as white as bone. The vipers were gone.

  ‘It is done?’ she said.

  He nodded.

  She breathed out. Rising to her feet, she gazed across the Lake. Then she turned, and he could tell that she wasn’t seeing him, but was looking through him to the power he could give her.

  ‘Until now, ‘she said, ‘not even I understood the strength of the spirit walker.’ Returning, she knelt, and her long hair brushed his chest as she brought her face close to his. ‘Think what I can do with such power! I can learn the darkest secrets. I can bend all, all to my will!’

  Torak shut his eyes. That made the churning worse. He tried to sit up – but although movement was returning to his limbs, he remained weak as a fledgling.

  Seshru pushed the sweat-soaked hair back from his forehead. ‘This is the will of the World Spirit! This is why it sent such a gift to me! With the spirit walker and the fire-opal I shall rule! All creatures, all demons will fear me and obey!’

  Sickness engulfed him. Clumsily, he raised himself on his elbow and retched.

  With her icy hand, the Viper Mage pressed him to her breast. ‘Great power is bought with suffering, I know. But now you understand. You belong to me.’

  Exhausted, he slumped against her.

  ‘Say it,’ she whispered, and her breath was hot and foetid on his skin. ‘Say that you belong to me!’

  He gazed up at her, and she was very beautiful. Even her black smile was beautiful.

 
He said, ‘I belong to you.’

  THIRTY

  Renn was shaken by her dream about the viper.

  ‘What did it mean?’ said Bale as they loaded the skinboat.

  ‘I’m not sure. But it was in colour, so it must be true. I think . . . ’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think it means she has him now.’

  Bale stopped with his paddle in his hands. ‘You said the Magecraft had worked.’

  ‘I said I thought it had. You can never be certain.’

  He considered that. ‘Well, I’ve got more faith in you. And in Torak.’

  Renn didn’t reply. She hadn’t told him about the real viper she’d glimpsed as she’d started awake. What would have happened if those ravens hadn’t chased it away?

  Oh, Seshru was cunning! She’d cut Torak off from the clans, from his friends, even from Wolf – and now she had him to herself, on this Lake which she was taking for her own. Somewhere, she was laughing at them all.

  It was a hot dawn, and with the wind at their backs they made good speed. Their islet turned out to have been much further west than they’d thought, and by mid-afternoon the Island of the Hidden People came into view.

  As they bobbed in the shallows, Renn made an offering, asking leave to go ashore; then they landed the skinboat on a black beach backed by a watchful Forest. It had rained recently, and a steamy haze rose from the trees. A smell of decay wafted from a band of reddish pine-needles which reminded Renn of a snake.

  ‘No sign of Torak,’ said Bale, returning from a search further up the beach. ‘But I found other tracks.’

  When Renn saw them, her heart quickened. ‘A wolf.’ She blew her grouse-bone whistle, but got no answer. Her unease deepened.

  As soon as they entered the Forest, the wind dropped and the heat settled on their skin. Clouds of midges whined in their ears. The rasp of crickets was loud, but there was no birdsong, except for the brief warble of a redstart.

  Wading through springy lingonberry scrub, they followed a rivulet upstream. They passed man-high nests of wood-ants, and hunched boulders mantled with steaming moss. Over her shoulder, Renn caught the glint of the Lake between the trees; then the pines closed in and she saw it no more. The presence of the Hidden People was strong. She saw Bale touch his seal-rib amulet.