The Unmaking: The Last Days of Tian Di, Book Two

by Egan, Catherine

  Chapter

  ~18~

  Rea woke up screaming. Instantly she was in Rom’s arms, his mouth against her ear, his voice telling her, It’s just a dream, it’s a bad dream, his body strong and close. But this was no dream. She had lost herself and would never find herself again. All she had been, all she had loved and fought for, all she had known and believed had been taken from her. Her entire life, her daughter. That tremendous power she had relied on, revelled in, had proved in the end insufficient, buckling and breaking before a greater power. She knew the horror of defeat, of finding one’s strength wanting. She had seen it again in the Kwellrahg’s eyes, her own fear, her own rage, her own absolute helplessness. She remembered only this – that Nia had broken her, torn her away from herself, stripped her down to next to nothing. All that remained was this lost ghost of what she had been, and she would walk the world so, always. It was not enough to have so little of oneself. It was not enough on which to try to build a new self. It was not enough even to have the ones you loved around you still when the full richness of that love and all its history was lost to you. It was no dream, the thousands of losses, her self yanked out of her piece by piece. She screamed until her voice gave out. Ry made her drink some mixture she choked on, the Sorma gathered to sing to her, burning herbs around the tent, and Rom clung to her and rocked her back and forth – but it meant nothing at all. They could not help her. Nia had been stronger and Rea had lost the battle. She had lost everything.

  ~~~

  When Eliza returned to the camp, a circle of five Sorma spirit-speakers were gathered around the Kwellrahg, just outside the barrier. Three of them sang in low voices while one kept up a steady drumbeat and another played a wooden flute – a soaring, brilliant sound that swooped and spun over the gentle voices and the deep rhythm of the drum. Ry had placed three bowls of herbs on the ground around the barrier and they were burning now, their fragrant smoke pouring over the beast, who twitched restlessly, angrily.

  “You feel better,” said Lai when Eliza joined them. It was not a question so Eliza did not answer it. She felt the pull of the Kwellrahg, the nightmares and panics it sought to draw from her. She gave them up willingly, let the burden of fear fall from her. She remembered what Nia had said about fear. True freedom is the freedom from fear. Eliza had faced before the loss of all she loved, all she was, and now she would face it again. She knew what had to be done. She knew she might fail but that was barely the point. It was just a matter of doing, now.

  “I’m ready,” she said, and stepped into the barrier. The air went out of her lungs.

  ~~~

  Swarn had taught Eliza what the Sorma knew also – in battle, balance trumps strength. What she had understood as an idea, yet struggled to enact with her body, became now her physical nature. A profound change had taken place in the desert by the tree. She did not need to untangle its meaning yet. She knew simply that she could rely on her Magic, that it would not let her down.

  The Kwellrahg lunged at her and she swung aside, letting it crash against the barrier. She drove her dagger into its side and withdrew it. The monster was slowed and disoriented by the herbs of the Sorma, its innate viciousness quelled somewhat by their music. It stumbled and roared but it could not strike her with its powerful spiked fists, it could not catch her. She circled it for hours, letting it fall again and again, jabbing it with her dagger and dancing out of its reach. Whenever her lungs began to ache she leaped out of the barrier to draw in a breath, for the Sperre-Tahore contained the Magic of the beast, including its ability to draw the oxygen out of the air around it.

  She did not meet the force of the Kwellrahg with force of her own, but with her dagger pulled it in the same direction it was lunging, so its own momentum brought it crashing forward into the sand. She rallied. When it was losing its balance or staggering away, she used all the force she had to push it back. Again and again she drove it down to the ground, then let it rise again. The Kwellrahg grew ragged and weary and furious. The barrier was weakening but she spared no thought for that. Lava flowed from the beast’s many wounds. The vast dome of sky overhead faded to black and the stars appeared, countless numbers of them sprinkled across the darkness. She stumbled slightly in the sand and stepped outside the barriers quickly.

  “I need to rest,” she said. The spirit speakers were waiting with a spiked harness. They went to work immediately. She watched for a moment, pitying the beast, as they skipped about it, quick on their feet, steady on the moving sand. It was not difficult for them to fix the harness around the Kwellrahg. The spikes carried a soothing drug that flowed when the harness remained loose. But they also held a pain-inducing poison that was activated by excess pressure. Any beast ensnared by the contraption learned quickly to obey the pull of the harness, to maintain the flow of the soothing drug and to avoid the poison.

  Eliza walked a little ways in the dark and then sat down on the cooling sand. She closed her eyes and felt her mind take flight on dark wings. She flew with a great flock along a canyon by night. They were of one mind, turning and dipping together. It was electrifying, the power of her own wings bearing her up, her sheer lightness in the air. She had always been a passenger, too heavy for the sky, borne up by another. Now she truly understood the joy of flight. She swooped up along the great white wall of the Mancer Citadel and saw below the dead dragon in the grounds, a few of the Cra creeping this way and that. Somewhere here, her grandmother Selva was kept alive, in secret. This was something to do with the Gehemmis she had read about. The Mancers and their books, the Mancers and their secrets, the Mancers and their dominion over Di Shang – her grandmother and her mother and how many before them had sacrificed themselves to serve the Mancers. It was a noble heritage, Foss told her, but, dearly as she loved him, she could no longer agree. She veered away from the Citadel.

  She wanted to find Charlie but encountered only fire and a terrible clashing sound when she sought him. Wings scorched, she flew back, then told herself, No, I cannot be burned. She flew through the fire into the deepest mist. There was nothing here. But that’s not true, she thought. Something is here. She flew into a tempest, where hail and wind assailed her, forced her back. But the storm was unreal. She drove through it into a wood full of snakes and thick webs and throttling vines. There was no up or down, no ground or sky, only the tangle of beast and branch and a slithering furious darkness that wrapped around her throat and squeezed-but she would not be strangled. There is no Guardian here, and I will pass. She found herself in a deep, mossy wood. Charlie and Nell were both there, asleep on beds of flowers, breathing softly. Swarn sat by a tree, her face buried in her hands. How had they all come to be in this place together? She wanted to go to them, ask them what had happened, but a wind came and caught her unguarded, swept her away. She fought it with all her might, blown across a landscape of strange, swirling rock formations to the wall of a great castle, where Nia stood alone, looking out into the night. The wind blew her into Nia’s oustretched hands.

  “You’ve found your Guide,” said Nia, “and space won’t trap you now. But you’re not really here, Eliza. Can you feel this?” She snapped the wings of the bird and let it drop towards the ground, but there was no ground. Eliza plummeted and opened her eyes. The desert was dark and she could hear the furious roar of the Kwellrahg. She could still feel the broken wings on her back where there was nothing. She didn’t know what it meant but there was no time to think about it. First things first – the Kwellrahg. She had to get back to it.

  ~~~

  They fought through the night and as the sun rose over the edge of the sandy horizon. Eliza held the reins to the Kwellrahg’s harness in one hand, her dagger in the other. As the day grew brighter the terrible beast regarded Eliza with flaming eyes, groaning pitifully as if to say, Just let me be. She felt all the forces of the universe aligned with her, flowing through her. She was not tired. She was not afraid. The barrier weakened and fell away. The Kwellrahg’s Magic was faltering too – the air a
round it was breathable, if thin. The Kwellrahg groaned deeply. She drove her dagger into it again and again, tears blurring her vision. She thought of the Cra, the countless numbers of them she had cut down with this very blade, the stink of their blood and the terrified screams of their deaths. She thought of Abimbola Broom. “I have two daughters,” he’d said, his face a desperate mask. And yet she had brought him to the Mancers to face punishment instead of to the Sorma for a chance at redemption. She remembered her grandmother. “No pity?” Where was her pity, then? She had been so sure, so righteous. Where had that righteousness come from? And where was it now? Her pity for the Kwellrahg washed through her, overwhelmed her. Distracted, distraught, she stumbled in the sand. A flash of fear cleared her mind and she readied herself for the blow the Kwellrahg would surely land.

  But the Kwellrahg was hunched before her, silent, unmoving. All its will to fight had left it. She led it this way and that with the harness and it followed wearily. She forced it to climb the dunes after her, to crawl along the burning desert floor at whatever speed she determined. She brought it to lay on its belly before the Sorma.

  “Now we will do what we can to ease its pain,” said her grandmother.

  “Not yet,” said Eliza. “I’m not finished. I need the wizard.”

  A bewildered Uri Mon Lil was brought to her.

  “I do apologize –” he began, but Eliza cut him off with an exhausted smile.

  “Dinnay apologize. Help me to rename this thing.”

  “Ye-es,” he said hesitantly, his eyes fixing on hers. There was something so commanding in her gaze that he asked no more questions.

  Eliza put her hands on either side of the Kwellrahg’s burning face. The sky went black with ravens and the air filled with the sound of beating wings. In this moving darkness she spoke to the Kwellrahg in the Language of First Days, while Uri Mon Lil knelt in the sand and gave all his own power to her task. It was not a spell or anything he understood. She was taking possession of the beast and he simply channeled his power into the tremendous Magic that flowed all about them. Sometimes the Kwellrahg snarled and tried to writhe out of her grasp, but mostly it lay very still and seemed to be listening. The sun completed its journey from east to west and disappeared from view. In the darkness the ravens rattled, Name him Urkleis, name him, take him, name him, name him Urkleis.

  It was like entering the earth, being buried alive in its hot centre. She had to wrestle a thing she could not get her hands on, a dark tangle. She saw it with her mind’s eye but could hardly move towards it. The thing wheeled about freely while she was trapped, her mouth and eyes stopped. Her fingers felt like mud; how could they grasp? She heard her own voice and the words she spoke somewhere else, somewhere on a sandy strip on the surface of a tiny world, but they were such small words and the universe was endless and empty and uncaring. The dark swirling thing she had to catch was falling away from her, fast, and she would be alone out here, utterly alone. She was afraid, she burst the solid mass around her and it became an avalanche, sweeping her away, to a place where she would spin forgotten forever. The wizard’s Magic held her as the avalanche poured over her and that voice of a girl kept speaking, determined. Now she could move, and she dove through empty black space after the thing she could feel but no longer see. It had eternity within which to flee her. The wizard’s Magic carried her like a current in space and she called the thing to her and it came, Nia’s spell, it slithered and mocked and bound her hands and filled up her ears with its gleeful clamour. It was stronger than her, stronger by far. It twisted about her and squeezed, like an anaconda. See if you pop. See what comes out. See what you are made of, little girl.

  ~~~

  “What’s happening to her?” Rom asked his mother, horrified. The sky was full of screaming ravens. Eliza knelt in the sand in a cloud of beating wings, her hands clenched around the head of the felled Kwellrahg, her eyes rolled back in her head. She was gasping for breath as if someone was strangling her, her body rigid and shaking. Choked words burst out of her intermittently. The wizard knelt by her, eyes closed, brow furrowed, while the Sorma looked on in awed silence.

  “She is working Magic,” said Lai.

  “Stop her,” said Rom. “It’s hurting her!”

  The Sorma looked uncertain. Rom pushed past them to his daughter, tried to catch her by the shoulder and shake her free. A charge like electricity surrounded her and sent him stumbling back, rattled to his very bones. The ravens swarmed about him, shrieking angrily. He could not lay a hand on her.

  “Eliza!” he shouted. “Come back to me!”

  She was choking now, not breathing at all, her arms and hands twitching in tiny spasms, as if something unseen was squeezing out her last breath.

  “Eliza!”

  He felt a hand on his trouser leg and looked down. Rea had crawled after him from the tent and he hadn’t heard her. She looked up at him, hollow-eyed.

  “Don’t distract her,” she said. “You can’t help.”

  Rom stared at his wife and then back at his struggling daughter. Again, he thought, once again I am of no use at all to Eliza.

  ~~~

  The snarl of darkness swallowed Eliza, pressing hard on her heart. Inside it, she could feel the deep Magic, too intricate, too complete for one such as her to unravel. Always, in the end, she came up against her own limits, and that was where she would remain now. In the place where she could do nothing because she was not strong enough. The thing carried her beyond space, to a place that was not a place but rather collapse. I’m going to leave you by the river, little girl. What river? A thick darkness that will carry you between the paws of the Guardian and then no more, no more, no more. She is almost relieved. Look at that unhappy man in the desert, he is worried about his daughter. He doesn’t understand how vast it is, what a brief sliver of life we have in any case. Her tooth snags what feels like a loose thread, she takes it between her teeth and pulls. I won’t go to the river. You were not Made perfect. She is only a Sorceress after all, strong though she may be. I can unravel you. The thing twists about her neck like a noose and hangs her from the top of the universe but she doesn’t need to breathe anymore. She only needs to pull the thing between her teeth until the noose loosens, comes at her like a snake. They fall into the wizard’s Magic and he holds them fast as they struggle there. She pulls the name, she pulls it and pulls it, beyond endurance, this is all there is. And, at last, a slackening, a kind of surrender. The Kwellrahg gives it up with a groan or a sigh. The young Sorceress lies flat on the sand, hands still gripping it, and the ravens cover her like a blanket. No, she cannot sleep, not yet. She hears her own voice again, good, she knows the words, she knows them, they are part of the fabric of everything. She takes the name and gives him another. Then he belongs to her.

  ~~~

  “Silver is the best conduit,” said Lai. In a basket they had tens of silver needles threaded with silver fine as hair. The ends of these threads were wound through rough gemstones.

  “What will the stones do?” asked Eliza.

  “They are not all stones,” said Lai. She picked up a rough shard of something black. “This is petrified wood, for calming fear. Here, amethyst and jade for quieting and soothing. Lapis for cooling and drawing out heat. For quieting temper, coral. Serpentine is for healing. We are ready.”

  All night the Sorma toiled on the thing Eliza and Uri Mon Lil had named the Urkleis. At times he began to struggle or groan but Eliza stopped him with a sharp command and he obeyed her. With the silver needles and silver thread, the Sorma bound his torn flesh and broken bones. Each needle in the end found its way to his centre and was driven into the black rock Nia had made, the life-giving core of the Urkleis. The healers burned herbs and sang as they worked. The Urkleis became more and more docile, until at last as dawn broke he moved not at all. As the positive and soothing elements the Sorma introduced flowed through the beast, the flesh and bone began to fall away from the centre. Soon his body was a burning heap. Eliza re
ached into the fire and took out the hard rock, the thing Nia had made and that she had renamed. She removed the silver needles and put it in her pocket.

  “Bury the body with the gems, somewhere safe,” said Eliza to her grandmother.

  “It shall be done,” said Lai, and the Sorma said “Arash.”

  Chapter

  ~19~

  Tariro greeted the human visitors graciously and granted them permission to visit her mines. She had never seen humans before and she was interested but not much impressed. The man was unpleasant to look at, ill-shaped, with lines on his face and tufts of grey in his hair. She assumed this was the result of his age; she had heard that advancing years ravaged human bodies and minds in terrible ways, making them weak and confused and prone to illness until they died and decayed. She did not like the boy, either. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and looked wary, without showing any of the amazement that was written so clearly on the faces of the other two humans. There was something not quite right about him, though she could not put her finger on it. The man and the girl, to her satisfaction, stared in awe at the giant carved pillars soaring skyward to a vaulting roof, at herself seated on an ornate throne at the top of a flight of marble steps, gleaming with jewels, her fine dress spread out around her, the cliff plunging behind her. But though she found herself disliking the old man and the boy, it was the girl she watched anxiously as the little group made their way down the mountainside. If human age was a horrifying sight to the ageless faeries, human youth was tantalizing. This girl was in the full bloom of it, fresh-faced and glossy-haired, glowing with that strange combination of fragility and passion that marked all mortals. There were many songs and stories about Faeries who fell in love with young mortals and, although the lesson was always that these unions ended badly, their attraction remained undeniable. There was something so moving in their inevitable deaths, and they seemed so very much of the earth, so real. She saw Jalo’s pleasure in this young girl, the tenderness of his gaze on her when she curtseyed awkwardly to Tariro. They were to leave tomorrow – good. She could not allow her promising younger son to fall in love with a human girl.