In some places the ground was silver; in others it was grey. Tabitha wondered whether there was a difference. The sound that came off the desert changed subtly when they galloped over the darker soil. The screeching hiss of wildfire became more like the soft hiss of a pot just beginning to boil. She didn’t think it was much better, but if she was going to fall, she decided she would choose the grey sand over the silver. Maybe the wildfire had already done its worst there.
Her thighs ached. Her waist was bruised from Mulrano’s fierce grip, but she couldn’t ask him to ease his hold. She knew how desperate he must be to stop himself slipping. He was seated further back on Sharrow’s leathery rump, and he was having a worse time with the whorse’s lumbering gallop. She turned to look at him.
She caught a fearsome sight past his head. A jawful of teeth was opening wide just behind him, straining to reach his back. Garyll’s beast was galloping flat out, trying to close the gap between them. Garyll was smacking it on top of its head with his left arm, but he could not use his baton—his right hand was holding tight to a fold of skin on its neck. He had lost his reins. There looked to be scant purchase on the beast for a rider.
“Mulrano!” she cried. “Mulrano!” In her panic she couldn’t find the words to tell him what was happening, but he read the expression on her face and turned.
“Hua!”
He released her waist with one hand and fumbled for his weapon. The whorse snapped at his shoulder. Sharp teeth pierced his jacket, and a chunk of fabric was ripped away. The beast tossed its head and stretched its gait for a few thundering paces. Then it was close enough.
Mulrano swung his axe. “Don’t kill it!” shouted Tabitha, but too late, the axe had already fallen upon the beast’s snout. The whorse shrieked and reeled back. Blood stained its teeth—its own blood. It didn’t try to close the gap again.
They galloped on, the landscape blurring by in low ragged spines that looked like scalloped shells. They crossed a dried rocky wash that might have once been a river. They ran across a wasteland filled with shattered rocks, then a more disturbing patch of whitened slivers that looked like broken bones. They passed the dark mouth of a great cave buried beneath an overhanging slab of rock. They crested a ridgeline and dropped into a hard-packed sloping valley. The sun burned down on Tabitha.
Her thighs ached, her throat was dry and her mouth tasted of dust. She shook with the strain of trying to avoid falling. She was growing weak, but so was Sharrow beneath her. Then something boomed, and her beast stumbled beneath her, and she was almost thrown out of the saddle.
The distant boom was repeated behind them, and she felt the ground move through Sharrow.
It was like a hammer blow.
Boom! The ground rippled again. A boulder rolled down the spine to their right, crashing into smaller rocks on the way and setting them tumbling in its wake. Tabitha could make no sense of what she could feel. A place filled with discordant elemental music, sounds and breathing, a moving mountain. The rocks shivered with the rhythmic pounding, shaking in their places, jumping clear of the surface, slipping down into the hollows.
The whorses took off. The ground lurched with great shuddering jolts, like the tread of something massive approaching. A figure crashed over the ridge-top behind them. Tabitha’s whorse ran sideways to see what it was, four legs stumbling awkwardly across the grit. A wild man, but so big he looked taller than a tree. It had to be an illusion caused by their position, looking up to where he stood, momentarily outlined on the ridge. Maybe something distorted their view—he couldn’t really be so big, so colossal. He shielded his close-set eyes with his great hand and looked from side to side. His hair was wild and matted, coiled like ropes upon his shoulders. His massive knees were covered in tattered leather, his thick legs ending in huge boots. When he took another step, the ground heaved.
The world had become altogether too strange. They fled from the walking nightmare on weird creatures across the deadly plains. A horrible realisation pressed in against Tabitha and clenched her stomach in fear. They were going to die out here. They would trip and fall, and tumble headlong into a patch of silver ash and one or all of them would be changed forever. Tabitha squeezed her eyes shut. This was Chaos—this land of nightmares, this horror of altered reality. Above them the blinding sun skittered across the broken sky, like a mad god peering down upon them through shattered panes of glass.
The ground jumped up and down under their galloping steeds. The wind whipped in Tabitha’s hair. The whorses ran at the leading edge of their own cloud of metallic dust. Tremors passed through the earth like waves that ran ahead of the company. The giant was gaining on them. Tabitha knew they wouldn’t be fast enough. Rocks began to roll around them. The whole slope would soon be moving. The giant’s great boots crashed into the barren land, lifting his own plumes of dust. Every stride brought him closer.
Tabitha gripped Sharrow’s neck fiercely as she careened over loose rock. “Run, Sharrow, run!” she cried, her stomach clenched even tighter in fear, but the beast was already galloping flat out. They approached a semicircle of white pebbles. Something was different about the desert beyond, something about the light. Tabitha had only an instant to wonder what it was before she hit something hard. It felt as if she rode into a wall, or passed through one.
Her breath was knocked out of her chest, her stomach was left behind. She tried to draw air.
Nothing happened. A deep hum resonated in her ears.
She began to panic, but then the first warm thread of air entered her lips, a breath so slow she would surely die before she filled her lungs. She tried to rise in her saddle, but the movement took forever.
A deep, slow impact sounded below her, then another a long time after. Fwa…dooff.
Hoofbeats, she realised, stretched out in time.
There, another.
Everything was occurring in slow motion.
She tried to call out to Garyll, but her words made an endless groan. Her voice was so deep and slurred she couldn’t recognise it herself. The air hardly moved—the dust hung in nearly static swirls around the whorse’s hooves. She began the turn to look over her shoulder, but that took longer even than her first breath. It was as if they had ridden into a place where time was stretched out.
The giant wasn’t yet in that place, and he was unhindered. He was suddenly right behind them. His great boot crashed into the place where Garyll’s whorse had left its last clawed print. He towered above them. He reached for Garyll with a hand big enough to crush him, big enough to gather his steed up as well.
The Lifesong, she needed to sing the second stanza! But there was no time.
Another single hoofbeat sounded clearly in her ears.
Fwa-dooff.
Tabitha tried to cry out, but the slowed time prevented the sound from escaping. The giant began to close his fingers. His fingernails were jagged and stained with earth.
Suddenly they were released from that strange place of altered time. The deep elemental hum became a high-pitched whine. Their cruel crippled pace became sudden speed, a manic rush, as if they had been fired from a bow. The giant’s hand closed on thin air. Garyll was ten paces clear, then twenty, then more. Their hoof beats sounded like a frantic roll of drums in Tabitha’s ears. The wind shrieked by. Her breaths came like the beats of a hummingbird’s wings.
It was too fast. Tabitha’s breath was a maddening in-and-out. She felt like a shaken ragdoll. Everything flickered and jerked past, the whorses moved like shooting stars, the world flashed by in a silver-grey blur, the sounds of hooves and breaths blended in a jumbled babble.
The giant was trapped in the place where they had been, immobilised by the lethargic time of that strange space. They raced away from him at breakneck speed. The giant soon become a distant stationary figure.
They burst through another transition and her stomach was left behind again. The whorses galloped with a regular cadence. She could breathe evenly, slowly.
“What the hell
was that?” shouted Garyll from behind her.
“Something the Chaos-magic has done,” she guessed aloud. “It’s changed time. How can it do that? The giant is in the slow-time now.”
“He’ll find the fast section as well then. Tabitha! Can’t you do anything with your song? Can’t you strike at him? We aren’t going to survive!”
Garyll was right. She had to prepare a spell.
What could she use? Her first act in Oldenworld could not be to kill. Had the giant once been a man? Maybe he had just stepped in the wildfire, like the whorses, and been transformed. Maybe they would become like him if they fell off their beasts. Like him, or something worse.
Spriteblind! If he couldn’t see them he wouldn’t chase them.
She had to draw clear essence to her hands and coax it to become Light essence. There was something nagging to do with wildfire, but she couldn’t remember what it was. She had no choice. The giant had escaped from slowed time, into fast. His accelerated footfalls shuddered through the air. There was no time for doubt. She started the Morningsong and reached out to the clear essence. To make sprites was just a twist in her mind, a simple movement according to the pattern.
The ground trembled. The clear essence rushed to her hands.
The sky grumbled overhead. The earth shuddered around her.
She drew more essence, and it came toward her like a torrent. Something had changed—her power was easy to summon, there was nothing holding her back. She felt as if she was linked to everything, touching everything, in everything. The air vibrated with her voice. The sunlight became brighter, flickering. The silver sands around them began to shiver and shift.
The giant boomed toward them. He passed out of the speeded area, staggered, then carried on running.
“Quickly, Tabitha!” Garyll shouted. “He’s almost on us!”
The ring burned like a bright star on her finger within the mass of Light essence that coiled around her hand. She tried to perfect the pattern of the Spriteblind before releasing it. The silver sand leapt into the air all around them, forming a strange pattern of little jagged ridges that pointed inward. The hairs on her arms stood on end. A queer tension filled the sky, and the giant loomed over them, his angry face impossibly high above them.
Tabitha released her hold on the Light and sent it rushing away. Her magic took effect with a resonant rush. The giant reached up to his face, staggered, then fell to his knees, and the ground heaved. A hollow terror gripped her stomach. Something was wrong.
The air crackled with sudden charge as above them, jagged lines of electric fury ran along the edge of one of the tilted panes of sky, and where four lines joined at the nexus, a sudden point of brightness arced, brighter than the sun, too bright to look at. The shimmering flare shot towards them, shrieking as it drove downward upon its intense glare, a fireball.
“Ride!” she shouted. “Ride, ride, ride!”
The wildfire. The wildfire had targeted her spell, it came for the magic. She remembered the warning all too clearly now, in the words of the Revelation.
Across Oldenworld shall his Wildfire spread, massing Chaos upon every spellcaster’s thread.
Sharrow swerved aside and Mulrano pulled at her. She clung on. The wildfire screamed downward at their backs. The air was lit with a bright flash. Incandescence rushed past them then a clap of thunder hit them. A wall of ash followed them like a wave. Garyll’s beast leapt past Tabitha into the lead, driven by the fear of the strange swirling dust grasping for its whipping tail. Chaos licked at their heels. Sharrow couldn’t run any faster.
All was still behind them. The whorses beat a quick rhythm on the steady earth. Garyll’s beast slowed to a lumbering canter beside Tabitha and Mulrano. “He’s gone!” he announced. “He was blasted!” Tabitha looked back. All that was left of the giant was a single rough white boulder resting upon a silver mound amid a great, sparkling cloud of dust which rolled slowly outward in a settling ring. If they had not ridden so fast, the company would have been incinerated, whorses and all. At last the rush of the tainted ash-plume slowed, and they drew farther away from its threat.
Tabitha felt numb. She didn’t want to think about what had just happened. The giant hadn’t had a chance to escape. He’d been blinded by her spell.
She groaned as her whorse slowed to a jolting trot, then a walk. Tabitha’s legs and arms were so cramped she couldn’t straighten them. She leant against Sharrow’s neck and hoped she wouldn’t fall. Was the Sorcerer aware of her presence already or had the wildfire just reacted to her spell? Tabitha looked up, dreading what she might see, but no second strike was arcing down upon them. Only a single tall column of cloud mushroomed upward through the panels of rich blue sky.
The whorses plodded on, exhausted but driven by some remnant of their fear to keep moving.
She could never heal the whorses, she realised. The wildfire strike had made that obvious. If the wildfire came down upon her with any more accuracy, she would die. Tabitha couldn’t even create grass for them to eat–the wildfire would burn it away. She couldn’t make water either, or they’d disappear in a puff of Chaos. They needed a trough or stream to drink from but in the scorched plains there was nothing. The poor animals hung their heads low as they plodded along and they snorted from time to time against the dryness deep in their nostrils.
As they proceeded at a walk, Tabitha watched the greying hard-packed earth pass by. She would fall, she knew she would. Mulrano held onto her for now, but she could feel his grip was weakening. An hour went by in agony. There was no wind, and the disturbed metallic dust hung in their wake. The dusty plain offered no shade, no water; no respite from the endless dry brightness. The sun beat down until it was obscured by the great massing cloud which built above the place where the giant had fallen.
They encountered an abandoned ruined town. The closer they came, the greater the town appeared to be. It was completely desolate, only ash inhabited the ruined buildings. Blocks had tumbled into the bare narrow streets. An empty river course wound through the town like a dead serpent; the stone-bordered hollow was choked with grey ash. They were glad to be past the dead town’s marker stone: Eastmark. A short strip of road led out of town to the north-east, but the grey dust soon reclaimed it.
Later on they passed through rock formations that cast long shadows, and yet still the heat radiated from the plains as off a furnace. A fitful wind brushed them but it brought no cooling. It only served to drive the dry heat deeper into their lungs. Small whirlwinds snatched the dust into tendrils that rose high around them, sometimes twisting into the base of the swelling thundercloud before dispersing. The dust devils spun with erratic tracks that worked on Tabitha’s nerves. She could never tell when the silver column would bend toward the company. When the ash was lifted into the air it sparkled erratically, as if diamonds were caught in it, and they had to dodge the malignant threat for fear of being touched by Chaos.
The whorses weakened. Garyll’s plodding beast led. Sharrow was taking on more dust than she could bear to think about. Her own boots were caked with grey. The orange sun sank toward the level horizon on their left, casting a glistening ruddy trail across the silver wastes. Some whitened pebbles passed beneath Sharrow’s hooves, like markers on the edge of normality.
Suddenly, a high-pitched whine surrounded them, and they were galloping.
And yet they weren’t. Tabitha hadn’t spurred Sharrow, and she suspected she was still walking, but the hoof-falls sounded in staccato in her ears, and her breath was as rapid as the beat of a hummingbird’s wings. They had entered another place of hastened time. On the distant horizon, a thin green line appeared, then grew, as if they were racing towards a forest. Tabitha couldn’t believe they were approaching that fast. Everything beside them was a blur. Only the sun stood still.
Tabitha’s strength drained away. With a gut-wrenching lurch, they crossed the transition into normality. They had covered more than a league yet the orange sun still sat one finger off the ho
rizon, bathing the silver wastes in its fading light. Tabitha didn’t know what to make of the time-gap. Time shouldn’t be different in two places so close beside each other. In the desert, the day hadn’t progressed more than a minute, but they had endured almost an hour’s worth of riding. It was fundamentally upsetting. Life was measured out by steady beats, the regular tempo of reality, but here beyond Eyri things followed a different law. If time wasn’t constant, what was?
The silver earth beneath them gave way to a grey hardpack. Scraped scars appeared on the surface, as if a great clawed hand had raked the desert to its bones. The dull hissing screech of wildfire dropped farther behind them. As the dusk gathered over the distant western horizon, the whorses crossed the edge of a rocky scoured valley, but as they moved onto the hardpack, they let them stray too close too each other.
Without warning, Garyll’s stallion lunged at Sharrow, raking her with its wicked talons. Sharrow squealed and spun to defend herself, and Tabitha slipped from Sharrow’s back. Mulrano tried to grab her, but he couldn’t stop her slide. She fell upon the hard earth. The whorses went wild above her, stamping, slashing and fighting. She was so scared she didn’t move. She just lay upon her face where she had fallen. The ground was warm against her cheek, but she felt the violent pounding of hooves.
“Be damned with you!” shouted Garyll. There was a scuffle, a tearing snap—a squeal, a roar then the sound of hoof beats.
Then, it was quiet beneath her.
Tabitha cried softly. She was utterly spent and terrified. She didn’t want to turn to see who might not be there. It was a horrible mistake to leave Eyri. She was not ready for this. It was too much, the Sorcerer’s power was too great; this world was too strange. When Tabitha failed, Ethea would die, and everything would be lost.
Footfalls sounded beside her. Hands reached for her, pulled her upright. Both Garyll and Mulrano were there. The relief made her cry even more.
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 29
