It turned and waddled away, leaving a slimy pink trail.
The villagers discussed the matter unhappily. Several of them were not especially popular, but none were sufficiently hated to be sacrificed without qualms. Two roads led into Obun, both of them joining the Imperial Highway at points several leagues apart, so passing strangers were not an option since nobody came to Obun who didn’t have business there, and there wasn’t any.
The obvious answer was to kill the creature. Tog remarked that it shouldn’t be too difficult, since it had neither claws nor fangs to speak of, and was at once thanked for volunteering to do the job. He was, in fact, the obvious choice, since he was a burly fellow and had neither wife nor children but did have a good axe.
The villagers woke next morning to find their god in the market square with Tog’s body on the ground beside it, drained of all its juices. In its chilly, polite voice it thanked them for their zeal in providing a sacrifice so promptly, but pointed out that the full moon had only just passed so it would take Tog as a late payment on that account and would expect another installment next month. It should be paid at noon, here, in the market square.
The days dragged miserably and rancorously by. A number of families tried to leave, rather than risk any of them being chosen, but the monster met them in the road and herded them back. On the eve of the full moon they agreed to draw lots next morning. It was already dark when the exhausted stranger staggered into the village, not coming up either road but down from the hills. He had been in a hurry to reach Barda, he said, and had taken a short cut.
The villagers welcomed him and offered him food and a bed for the night. The stew they gave him was pungent enough to conceal the slight tang of the powder that the herb-mother had added to it. He woke shortly before noon to find himself lashed to a stake in the deserted market square. Nobody had cared to stay in sight, in case the god rejected their offering and chose one of them instead, but many eyes watched through cracks in shutters and doors.
The stranger wrestled with his bonds, not in a mad frenzy but systematically. He loosened a wrist enough to be able to dip a finger into a belt purse, but withdrew it and wrestled some more. He had his left arm almost free and a knife in his hand when the god waddled into the square. The stranger glanced at it and sawed at a rope. If he had woken only a few minutes earlier he would have freed himself in time. As it was the monster reached him as he was bending to cut his ankles loose.
It paused a couple of paces from him, waiting for him to finish the job, and then exhaled delicately. He collapsed.
At that point the new god arrived. There was a minor mystery about how this happened. According to most accounts she simply swooped down from the east, but the only house in the village with an upper story faced in that direction, and the witnesses at those windows had a clear view of the sky. They all declared that at one moment there had been nothing to be seen but storm clouds, and at the next there had been a woman riding a winged horse immediately above the opposite roofs.
That is a minor matter. She undoubtedly appeared, gave a great shout, and as the god reared up to pour out its poisonous breath, lashed out with a fiery whip which curled around it, then swung her horse round and round it in the other direction, binding it, tighter and tighter. The gas squeezed from its lungs and ignited into a roaring flare.
She landed, leaped from the horse, heaved the inert stranger across her saddle bow, and mounted. The horse thundered aloft. She shouted again and hauled on the whip, and the god rose spinning into the air. At her third shout the cobbles of the market square split apart, the vanquished god plummeted into the roiling fires below and the cobbles closed neatly together as woman, horse and stranger sped away eastward.
As has been said, the villagers of Obun didn’t know much about gods, but they decided that it takes a god to vanquish another god, so the woman must be one. She seemed to have done them a good turn, but perhaps she had simply wanted the sacrifice for herself, in which case they didn’t want her coming back for another one. At any rate, they were relieved to see her go.
CHAPTER
21
Silence encased the island. Maja clutched Ribek to her and steeled herself for the arrival of the Watchers. She didn’t have long to wait. A group of five erupted through the turf and stood in a line on the far side of the little arena. Benayu, Zara and the Ropemaker turned to face them. The Jexes scuttled down from their perches and massed in front of them, carpeting a great swath of the turf with a protective barrier, all set to absorb and channel away whatever magic they might deploy.
The Watchers paid no attention, showed no sign of surprise. One of them stooped and laid a limp, pale object on the turf. Before he was upright it had grown to the thing Maja had glimpsed in the tunnel, a Watcher’s mask and robe, with a skeletal hand protruding from a sleeve. So these must be the Watchers who had been trapped on the other side of the touching point.
The rest of them appeared rapidly, in ones or twos, or several at a time. One of them was different from the rest, wearing a dark cloak and hood. It was clearly a woman, short and plump, though the hood concealed her features. She moved like a sleepwalker as one of the Watchers took her by the hand and led her to the body on the ground. The pale robe floated up and enveloped her. The Watcher stooped, picked up the mask and handed it to her. As she took it the Ropemaker broke the silence with a snap of his fingers.
The mask crumbled to dust. She raised her hands and threw back the hood of her cloak, shaking her head as she stumbled across the arena, like someone emerging from a dream. With a shock of horror and fear Maja saw that she was Chanad.
“All here, then?” said the Ropemaker affably. “One of you speak for the rest, eh?”
“We speak for ourself,” said a bloodless voice out of the air.
“Yourselves,” he corrected. “Twenty-three of you now. All different people. Bound you to cooperate while I was gone. Back now, so that’s over.”
“You are mistaken,” said the voice. “We are neither twenty-three nor twenty-four, but one. True, with our consent you bound us, and can release us from that binding. But of our own choice we have since bound ourself further and more fully, and there is no power other than our own that can release us. You have made a vacancy in our wholeness. Your choice is either to fill that vacancy and become one with us, or be destroyed. Your time is over, Ramdatta.”
The name they should never have known took the Ropemaker by surprise. He hesitated as the three quietly spoken syllables woke whispering echoes in the rocks, echoes which reverberated to and fro, growing louder and louder and louder, until they became three gigantic raps on the doors of time.
He flinched, staggered, and at the third blow he reeled back, throwing up his arms in front of his face. His turban unraveled and fell to the ground. His magical mane hung limp around him, a dull yellowish orange, streaked with gray. He fell to his knees and put his head in his hands. Zara was already a pile of silvery fabric on the turf. Chanad had fallen beside her and was struggling to rise. Benayu too reeled, but grasped the staff, and steadied himself. As the echoes rumbled into silence Zara’s urn cracked apart, leaving a mound of crystal phials lying among the shards.
Soundlessly, one by one, they burst, like soap bubbles. Each time, a puff of pale smoke rose, carrying brilliant flashes of multi-colored light, like sparks flying up from a bonfire, no sooner glimpsed than gone. The smoke streamed away on the gusty wind, and the animas of the original Watchers, the hostages that Zara had guarded through the centuries in the mysterious space beyond her cell, all that had once made them human, her ultimate power against them, were gone.
Benayu was the first to move. He plucked the staff from the ground, strode to the center of the triangle formed by the three stricken magicians and turned steadily round, with the point of the staff tracing a circle close beyond them. The air seemed to ripple above the invisible line, though the ripples didn’t rise steadily, like waves of heat, but twisted and eddied in an increasingly comp
lex, close-meshed pattern, forming a visible surface, a known shape, a shell of the entangled light of two universes. For a short while Maja could still see the four magicians, three of them sitting or lying as she had last seen them, with Benayu still grasping his staff but kneeling beside the Ropemaker. The Ropemaker took something out of his pouch and gave it to Benayu, who hesitated and took it. He was rising to his feet as the shell misted over, was briefly translucent, and finally became that strange, opaque, impossible substance that had kept them safe in a world where they shouldn’t have been able to exist. Its near side shimmered, and Benayu stepped through it. He touched it briefly with his staff and watched it sink into the turf, then turned confidently to face the Watchers.
Maja turned too, and stared at them, her heart pounding, as she waited for the next shock of disaster. Why had they done nothing to stop him? Surely they had the power. But they seemed not to have moved at all or even to have noticed what he was doing. Something was happening to them, though. Those smooth, pale masks had a greasy, oily look. Their robes too. Blobs of pale ooze were dribbling from their hems, forming into pools around their feet. Their erect, formal stances were losing their stiffness, sagging as if they’d been carved from butter and left in hot sunlight. And the dribbles were rivulets now, and the pools starting to coalesce as the whole line of Watchers melted slimily away and down and were absorbed into a single smooth expanse. A faint but cloying odor wafted to and fro on the gusting wind.
The army of Jexes recoiled, jostling to get away from the spreading edges of the pool. A yellow one with bright blue blotches was staggering directly toward her.
“Jex! Jex! What’s happening? Are you all right?”
“Poison to us,” came the faint and gasping whisper. “Hold me.”
Instantly he shrank into his granite form. She snatched him up, looped his cord round her neck and tucked him into her blouse. The rest of the Jexes were already scuttling off to the surrounding rocks and dissolving themselves into patches of colored lichen. All but three. One of these the liquid must actually have touched. He lay twitching at the edge of the pool until the other two, though themselves obviously already affected, took his forelimbs in their mouths and started to drag him away across the turf.
“Poison?” Ribek muttered. “He said something about that before, didn’t he? Demon magic, wasn’t it? I don’t like the look of this. And Saranja’s got Zald. What’s Benayu up to? Talking to someone?”
When she’d last looked Benayu had been standing sideways on to them, leaning on the staff, gazing broodingly out over the pool. Now he had half turned his head away as if listening to somebody beyond him. She heard the brief murmur of his voice. The words had the lilt of a question, but at the same time were full of purpose, tension, fire. Peering, Maja imagined for a moment that she could catch the faint outline of part of a human figure, shoulder, arm and flank, shadowy, almost transparent, like the smudge of a finger on clear glass. Then she lost it against the jumble of rocks beyond. A man, she thought, if it had been there at all, the top and back of a head, dense hair stiff as a bottlebrush, a broad and stocky body, some sort of stiff kilt.
Benayu turned back to the pool, drew himself up and waited, intent and watchful.
No wonder. The whole body of liquid had begun to stir, turn, spiral inward, a single huge eddy. But this was no normal eddy. When water eddies in a stream it too spirals inward, but when it reaches the center it sucks itself downward and is lost. This was doing the opposite, swirling upward into a twisting column, and at the same time sucking itself away from the edges of the pool and leaving behind it not green turf but a swath of sickly-yellow poisoned grass. As it withdrew it revealed, one after another, a row of fleshless skeletons, sprawled where the Watchers had stood.
Meanwhile, at the center, it continued to swirl silently and slimily upward. It quivered, and the lines of the spiral fell vertical and became the pleats of an ivory robe. Shoulders formed, and arms, folded across the chest, and, as the last glutinous ooze of the pool was absorbed, the hood of a gigantic Watcher grew from the shoulders, a Watcher as tall as a forest tree, glistening from head to foot with the slime of the pool. This wasn’t just a coating, Maja could tell. The monster was made of the stuff. Neither bones nor sinews held it into shape. No heart, lungs, stomach, nerves, brain provided it with the machinery of life. It was utterly dead, more dead than the skeletons it had left behind, more dead than the rocks of Angel Isle, death embodied and held into shape by a single, powerful magical will. This was the One that the Watchers had chosen to become.
It differed from the Watchers as they had been only in one thing. Beneath the shrouding hood there was no mask, not even a featureless blank, but a black cavern, a dark and endless emptiness. Though it had no eyes it seemed to Maja to be looking directly at her, telling her that she must come to it, come and begin to fill that void. Unlike the demon north of Larg it yearned and ached not simply for the flesh of her living body but for her thoughts, hopes, dreams, the small natural powers within her, for all of her. Even before the Watchers had made their choice, she realized, it had been there, waiting. Been there, perhaps for ever, an unseen presence, waiting for the body that would give it power to act in the world of things. And now it had not only their physical substance but also their immense magical powers and it could begin to absorb into itself all the spiritual energies of this material universe, to satisfy its infinite, unsatisfiable hunger.
This was the ultimate demon, the demon destined to devour the universes. Starting with her, Maja.
“Come,” it told her.
Her shielding faltered. She snatched at her amulet and dragged it down to her wrist. The black bead blazed with smoky fire as it withstood the call. But Ribek had heard it too and was trying to get to his feet. She flung her arms round him and forced him down, struggling feebly in her grip. The horses were already moving blindly forward in response to the summons. Sponge as well, whimpering miserably at the compelled disobedience to his master’s order. Benayu heard, glanced over his shoulder and flung out a hand. Ribek subsided with a groan and the animals stayed where they were.
The demon appeared to notice him for the first time. It turned its hunger toward him, raised a hand and beckoned. He seized the staff, anchoring himself to resist. A gale from nowhere tore at his clothes as if trying to drag him forward. With his free hand he tossed something upward, and the gale became a blizzard, dense, huge flakes streaming in the wind, blanketing the Watcher, melting for a moment and instantly freezing into a carapace of close-packed ice. There had been blizzards like that sometimes at Woodbourne, waking the sleepers in the farmhouse again and again in the night with the crash of another huge branch rent from a forest giant by the sheer weight of the ice that had formed around it.
The demon, though, accepted the blizzard as an offering to feed its hunger. Before it had begun to melt the ice started to flow, not downward as water would have done, but upward and inward, into the cavern within the hood. If any of the powers that Benayu had used to create the blizzard were still incorporated into it, they too were now lost in that darkness.
The call was universal. Already, creatures that had nothing to do with the struggle against the Watchers were beginning to answer it. The white seabirds that had soared around the cliffs of Angel Isle were streaming toward the cavern, their harsh cries of alarm falling suddenly silent as they disappeared. Four or five small bees that had been busy around a spike of sea holly suddenly forgot their job and followed the gulls. Right out in the open, easy prey to a predator, a family of voles was threading its way over the turf. Nothing was too small to be taken.
The monster raised its arm and beckoned to Benayu again. He answered with a bolt of lightning, blindingly bright even by daylight, aimed not at the head but at the midriff. In the instant of its flight it veered from its course and followed the gulls.
Maja’s ears were still ringing with the thunder when she caught Jex’s desperate whisper.
“He needs time, s
till. Only a little more time. We must all distract the demon if we can. Put me on the ground.”
She hardly had him out of her blouse before he resumed his true form.
A tremor shook him as she placed him on the turf. He turned toward the demon, choked convulsively, staggered a little way forward and then, with what was obviously an enormous effort, started to back away. Beyond him on the rocks she could see several patches of lichen swelling into lizard form.
“Us too. Did you hear what he said?” she whispered.
“Just about. Help me up. Make as if we don’t want to—we’re fighting against it. It’s got to pay attention to us—force us, step by step. Right?”
A pace. A struggle to retreat. Another pace. Reluctant, fearful. To left and right the Jexes, rank after rank of them, were doing the same. She could see one, a little ahead of her and to her left, that seemed already to have lost the use of its hind end and was using its forelegs to drag itself onward and then force itself back.
Another pace and she and Ribek had no need to pretend. They must have crossed whatever barrier Benayu had thrown between them and the demon, for now, suddenly, Ribek felt the call. His struggle to resist it became real. She forced his hand against her amulet. Nothing happened. No, it had barely worked for him with the demon north of Larg, and this was the ultimate demon.
Only his will remained, as he fought with all the slight strength of old age against every pace forward, groaning and gasping as he was forced on. And Maja fought to help him, fought by fighting against him, or rather against the demon through him. She could feel the already exhausted muscles weakening, and at the same time feel the invisible power that drove them on growing stronger and stronger as the demon answered their resistance.
Nothing else mattered. Vaguely she could hear faint, fluttering pipings of distress all around her as the army of Jexes fought their own individual versions of the same struggle. Hopeless, all of them. Each one less than a pinprick. But all together, perhaps, an itch. That was their only hope. That the demon would lose concentration for a moment, and scratch.
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