Fdoff! it fell upon the dead, splattering grit into their open mouths and staring eyes.
The veteran laughed down at the corpses. “You shouldn’t have dabbled in the dark!”
“Come on, Dirk!” complained the youngest digger, a slack-lipped lout with nervous eyes. “Don’t mess with the spirits! We must be done by nightfall!”
“Spirits be damned, boy! The only thing’ll rise from these rotters is their stench!”
Kirjath clenched his fist; it formed a barely visible lump in the air. It would not be solid enough to hurt the gravedigger Dirk, not in the way he deserved to be hurt. The old gravedigger went to the heap again, struck a load with his shovel, and returned to the brink of the grave, his chalky lips stretched in a sardonic grin.
“This one’s for you, demon-rider!” He turned slightly to address the others. “You heard about the demon-rider, eh? He was a bad piece of work. Good bloody riddance, I says!”
Kirjath swooped down on the gravedigger from behind. The man turned casually back to the pit, heaved his shovel.
Schrink! The soil arced away.
Kirjath slammed into the back of Dirk’s head, arm outstretched. He lost his left hand.
Fdoff. The soil cascaded over the abandoned bodies below.
The veteran spun. “Who was that?” he demanded.
“What?” asked the youngest digger.
“You be careful where you swing your load,” the veteran warned. “One of you clipped me then.”
“Can’t be, Dirk. We’re throwing the other way.”
“Well, I felt the wind of it over here, I’m telling you!”
“Hey, what’s that above you?” asked the young digger.
Dirk searched the air, but he was looking toward the sun, and couldn’t see. Kirjath tried to fade by spreading himself outward and it seemed to work.
“Where?”
The younger digger looked uncertain. “Nothing. Thought I saw something, is all.”
“Don’t mess around, boys! Don’t screw with me.” Dirk the gravedigger glared at the other two until they resumed their work. Dirk’s heels were barely a foot from the crumbling edge. Kirjath pulled himself together upon his malice, and his glistening form returned. Below, Dirk bent to shift his grip lower on the shaft of his shovel. Kirjath came at him, fast. He tried to scream as he swooped, but he could make no sound.
The veteran straightened, and as he did so he looked up. His eyes widened. He raised his shovel to defend his face and took one, doomed step backward. Kirjath swept at him with all the force of his rage.
“B-bullshit!” the man cried, stumbling and fending awkwardly with the shovel, but the flailing strike carried his weight further over the edge. The ground gave way. Kirjath advanced, careful to avoid the living man’s flesh this time. The veteran cried out desperately as he wheeled his arms to regain his balance, but he’d already lost it, and Kirjath was too close, right there, in his face.
“Dirk! Dirk!” the youngest digger shouted as he ran, but the veteran had already toppled into the pit. Kirjath smiled as the man fell away, turned slowly and landed hard on his head among the corpses. His shovel followed him, and smacked into the back of his skull with a resounding clang.
The old gravedigger lay still. Kirjath sank down and spread out beside him, amid the soiled corpses.
“Dirk! Shit! Dirk!” The youngster stared down into the crowded grave.
The second gravedigger clipped him on the back of the head for the curse. “Get up, you wagwit!” he called down. “Stop messing with us. That’s enough, Dirk!”
Kirjath could see the awkward angle of Dirk’s spine. The back of his neck was folded over. The scornful expression drained from the second digger’s face.
“D-did he jump?” the youngster asked. “Did you see why he fell in?”
“He’s not going to get up. He’s dead, oh sweet Ethea, he’s dead, man!”
“Why’d he fall in?” The youngster’s voice was shrill. “What happened? Barrok! What just happened?”
Kirjath rose, and this time they saw him rippling toward them, his ghostly lips drawn back in a snarl, his fury written in his eyes. He wished he could tear them apart, let them feel his spirit invading them, infecting them, ruining them. It was maddening to see them so alive and vital, when he was so ... wasted.
The youth cried out, fleeing from the lip of the grave. The other gravedigger fell on his butt. He scrabbled at the ground as Kirjath rose overhead then he found his feet and fled.
Kirjath chased them. He knew that once the wedge of fear had found a crack, one should keep driving it in but there was little he could do. The gravediggers ran from what had risen from the dead. Maybe they could be encouraged to find misfortune on the windy rocky trail—a stumble at the wrong moment to run headlong into a spiked branch, a swerve to avoid him at a steep corner. The nearest gravedigger threw a glance over his shoulder and saw Kirjath right behind him. He ran fast enough to overtake his comrade, but then the younger man ran even harder.
Kirjath chased, but he allowed a gap to grow between them. It would cost him too much if he touched them by accident. He’d lost his left hand when he’d hit the veteran. His arm was still missing, up to the elbow.
Essence, I’m made of essence, a few shades greyer than clear, a cloud of spirit held together by—what? Maybe I only exist until my essence has dispersed. Maybe that was how one finally ceased to be. Every time his essence was brushed aside by the denseness of living flesh, his spirit-body was damaged. Maybe his awareness would fade as well, until he truly did not exist at all. His body had died with a sudden dagger in his back, but his spirit would die a slow whimpering death, dissolving bit by bit until he was a part of everyone else, until his essence simply dispersed upon the wind.
He would be gone, in the end.
He refused to accept that. No! He was dead, but he was not ended.
He would keep a grasp on life as long as possible, even if it was only a half-life. He allowed the gravediggers to flee into the choked ravine ahead. They were not worth the risk. He would conserve his energy. By the blood of a needle-scoured babe! He would find a way to live again. He needed time to think it over.
He was somewhere near Slurryrig, he guessed, in the Broken Lands of Rockroute County. That was where they always buried peasants, paupers and criminals. Kirjath floated downhill, leaving the trail to travel westward, towards the Amberlake, Levin and the distant King’s Isle. Moving took no effort at all. He could glide as fast as he could keep up with his mind.
Behind him in the ravine, the crows would feast in the uncovered grave. The veteran would rot among the others, sharing the worms and liquids of decomposition. The crows would eat his eyes, as they would eat Kirjath’s own. He didn’t care. He didn’t need that body any more.
He needed another one. He needed someone who was alive, alive but tired. What if they were asleep? Yes. They said that when you slept, your spirit drifted away from your body, attached only by the thinnest of cords. If he came upon someone who was asleep, he might snip that cord and steal into the body himself.
It needed more thought, for sure. That host would need to be weakened or troubled, so that their spirits wouldn’t put up much of a fight. Who bore the greatest burden? He wouldn’t take the first tormented fool he encountered. He should choose carefully. He wanted to be…someone of influence.
He looked forward to nightfall. He was going to go hunting.
4. GODDESS
“How do you choose between two lives,
when you can only save one?”—Zarost
This man is going to die, thought Tabitha.
He was a small man, with an unkempt scattering of beard upon his chin. He had the delicate hands of a clerk; he shouldn’t have been a soldier. He had been run through with a sword during the taking of the Kingsbridge, and he had staggered away from the battle. He had been found many days later beside a stream on the way to Kironkiln. His open wound was an angry blight of infected flesh, his belly bl
oated. His eyes flickered. Tabitha didn’t know what kept him going. Maybe it was the desperate strength of his wife, who stood beside the raised stretcher and clasped onto those delicate hands while crying.
Tabitha stood with her lyre in hand, but she couldn’t begin her song. She turned her face away, to hide what she was feeling. Today, at least, she had space. She could not risk being down among the crowds anymore, so she had asked the wardens to create a separate area at the front of the Hall, where patients would be brought on stretchers, one by one. Those who simply wished to see her could do so, but from a distance.
The result was grander than Tabitha had intended. A great high-backed chair commanded a stage. Bowls of floating petals bordered the stairs. Flowers had been woven around two tall cressets. Red blossoms had been scattered upon the stage. Golden drapes formed wings, and a beautiful painting had been hung on the back wall, a great canvas depicting Tabitha singing, her arms spread wide. She couldn’t refuse it—the poor artist had pawned his boots and his silverware to buy the cloth and paints, and the artist had done good work, but Tabitha couldn’t help feeling self-conscious about it. In the painting, she was huge, and surrounded only by light, which wasn’t really the truth of how it had been that day in Stormhaven. Hundreds of Morgloth crossed the sky beneath boiling clouds, and an endless dark army marched towards her. Behind her, in the shelter of her light, people rejoiced. The King was among them, standing proud and tall, but due to the perspective he seemed shorter than Tabitha. Garyll Glavenor was nowhere to be seen in the painting.
Despite her misgivings about the grandness of it all, the new arrangement seemed to work. The wardens could control the crowd to the edge of the stage, and the people seemed pacified by Tabitha’s regal status—she was higher than them, and therefore untouchable, and so some order was imposed upon the chaos.
There were more people in the hall than ever. Tabitha had expected the numbers of the sick and ailing to diminish with time, but the multitude was swelling as the news of her work spread. The crowd extended into the marketplace, she knew, interfering with the trading, as well as congesting the traffic there.
Tabitha closed her eyes. They weren’t going to stop coming, they’d keep on and on until she couldn’t sing another note, until her voice failed and her lyre broke. She was a phenomenon. She was the Wizard of Eyri, and they waited now, with hushed voices, for the first miracle of the day.
She feared what might happen when she began her song. She couldn’t forget what she had seen when she’d last reached toward Ethea for inspiration.
A hand touched her arm. It was the soldier’s wife. “Please, your Holiness. Please. He’s dying.”
She could not deny him the chance to live. She had to try.
She wished she wasn’t a wizard, but she had picked up the ring, and chosen to keep it.
The only way to hide the shaking of her hands was to play the lyre.
The music began the shift. Her ring warmed on her finger, the world became suddenly noisy then whispered and distant as she gathered her senses and focused her attention deeper within the dying man. Her wizard’s attention allowed her to see the inner flesh around the wounds, the troubled areas within the body; the course of the disease.
She drew a sharp breath. Every cell in his body was tainted by the poisonous infection. Every organ was soaked in the acids of decay. He was ruined.
“Don’t let him die! Don’t let him die!” whispered the wife.
“The Wizard will heal him!” one of the nearby wardens promised. “Just you watch.”
“She’s changing him already,” a second warden reassured. “Look! His lips are growing redder.”
Tabitha had done nothing; she hadn’t yet begun to sing.
She threw a glance to Garyll where he stood at the end of the stretcher, but his face was hidden in his cowl. The crowd grew restless behind her. She had never failed them. Yet to heal the soldier, she would have to draw deeply on her power, deeper than ever before. She needed to visualise every detail of his ravaged body in its healed form, perfected, created anew. She needed the Goddess to work through her.
Her hands played on and the rhythm of the Lifesong took her.
She sang. Clear essence came to her, a shimmering cloud of clarity. Her mind spiralled upward, beyond the vaulted roof of the hall, following the thread of music back to the source: further, deeper, into realms of pure music, back to living sound, back to the Goddess Ethea. She opened her soul, and reached out for the power to bring life into the world.
She touched vastness; currents of vaporous symbols passed her, releasing faint themes and trailing patterns. Soft voices sang in many layers of harmony. Then, suddenly, a silvery light spiralled beneath her. The voices became discordant, their harmony ruptured, their melody disturbing. She tried to veer away, but something pulled her down, down, as if a hidden beast grasped at her ankles. The air was becoming bright, opaque, changing and growing warm. A warped sound grew in her ears, like a single voice stretched out in time, calling.
It came again, louder, and the pressure mounted around Tabitha. “Hhhe ... llp.”
Then the call was all around her. “Help. Help.”
The air cleared. Blaring horns crashed against her. Heat pressed upon her skin. Tabitha lost her sense of balance. The world tipped. A grey stone slab was beneath her, designs scored in its surface. A heavy sky the colour of blood hung overhead, cluttered with wheeling birds: pigeons, doves, swallows, larks and finches—every size and colour—winging about in a spiralled current. Many fires burned around her, on the top of tall stakes, throwing thick smoke through the swirling birds. Before her stood a great and beautiful creature, almost a woman in form, many times taller, her body covered with shimmering feathers, her iridescent wings splayed up to where her hands were shackled to the hard rock. Her face was turned to the sky, to the birds.
Tabitha was stunned. It was Ethea, as she had been portrayed in the myths, as Tabitha knew she should be. Chained! Surely the Goddess couldn’t be trapped? She wasn’t of the Earth, she existed in the worlds beyond! But Tabitha had seen this before, and knew it was true.
“Help,” Ethea called out, softly, as if she guessed no one could really hear her.
The air felt almost solid. It smelled of salt and smoke.
Where is this place? Could she escape?
The trumpets were upsetting; they seemed to be blown deliberately out of time. Large metal cymbals clashed, all discordant. She looked up to the top of the high bluff, and saw the people who were making the noise. Strange men clutched great tapered tubes in their arms, others rippled sheets of metal between them. More figures squatted casually on the rim as if waiting for something interesting to happen.
No one reacted to her presence. She looked down at herself. Nothing. She wasn’t really there at all, and yet her attention was bound to that place. She could not be anywhere else.
“Goddess, can I—can I talk to you?” Tabitha tried. “Can you hear me?”
Ethea turned her face from the sky: a beautiful face, with high cheeks and a noble nose. Her skin was wet with tears. Her eyes, so full of anguish, narrowed as she focused on Tabitha far below.
“A singer?” Her voice was so musical it danced in Tabitha’s ears like crystal chimes, despite the clamour created by the noisemakers above.
“I am Tabitha, I have learnt some of your song,” Tabitha answered. “Goddess! What has happened to you?”
“You have come, you will come, you came?”
Tabitha didn’t know how to answer the question. “Goddess, where are we?”
Ethea tilted her head to one side. “The angry brothers would know. So much is wrong. It is here, it is not everywhere. Ay-oh-la-ray-oh.” Her answer ended in a snatch of mournful song.
“Are we in Eyri?” Tabitha asked.
“I do not know the names you call your places. We are here, where the angry brothers are, in the noise. Beyond the hill I saw—buildings growing upon buildings, into the air. Ay-oh-la-rah. You c
ame?”
Tabitha turned around, but she couldn’t see what Ethea saw from her higher vantage. The ground sloped upward, carved from a dirty green rock in shallow curved steps. Randomly spaced channels came down toward Tabitha, as if great claws had raked through the rock. The circling birds swooped low over the steps, some landing briefly before taking fright and beating into the churning air again, turning and turning in frantic circles.
It’s like a whirlpool, with the Goddess at the centre.
“When are you here?” Ethea asked from behind her.
Tabitha turned. Again, Ethea’s question made no sense. “When? Now. Oh, Goddess, what do you mean?”
“Time is—strange—here. Time is not complete, as it should be. Time has sides, or a direction, a before, and after. Why-oh-ai-oh-ai. Time should be a loop, it should be renewed. How can this be?” She slipped to one side as if she had lost her balance, but the shackles held her wrists tight. The pain was evident on her face.
“Ethea! Can I help? What can I do?”
Ethea watched her sadly for a moment then shook her head. “Help is strange to think upon. I have never needed aid. Aid is what I offer, as a Goddess. I can sense that you are somewhere else than I am. I do not know how to reach to you from where I find myself. Different—places—make no sense. I am trapped in this—body. Ah-nahno-nay-me. They turned me into this flesh, the three of them together. I must escape this form that binds my voice to this pool. Who shall sing through the stars? Oh-way-na-no. This should not be.”
“What if I came to you, what if I found you, wherever you are. Could I do anything to help?”
Ethea cocked her head again, as if she was thinking. A flurry of birds passed across her face, each bird racing to lead the others. The horns blared louder suddenly, and the crashing sound of rippling metal became intense. “Perhaps I need your song, upon this skin,” Ethea shouted. “Perhaps.” She stiffened against her shackles. “Oh! Oh-way-oh-woe! They have caught another one!”
The avalanche of discords pressed against her so strongly, that for a moment Tabitha couldn’t turn. She felt trapped, by sound. “What is it?” Tabitha cried. “What do you see?”
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 5
