by Mark McCabe
As Fire is to Gold
Chronicles of the Ilaroi
Book One
Mark McCabe
Serotine Press Australia
Copyright © 2018 Mark McCabe
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Serotine Press Australia
www.sereotinepress.com.au
ISBN: 978-0-6484918-1-1
Cover artwork and design by Jeff Brown Graphics
www.jeffbrowngraphics.com
Maps by Fictive Maps
www.facebook.com/fictivemaps/
Author website: https://markmccabeauthor.com
To my mother, Edith, who told me stories and imbued me with a love of books.
To Walter Bellin, who showed me the way to make it happen.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to John Clark, Wayne Barlow and Michael West for all those war games and role-playing games that helped shape my love of fantasy worlds.
Thanks to Jeff Brown for his cover art and cover design. Jeff was a pleasure to deal with. He made the effort to listen to my thoughts and goals, and then wove his magic to reflect them in his work.
A big thank you to the Dunedin Speculative Fiction Group for their support and a special thank you to Kura Carpenter who kept asking the questions I hadn’t considered.
And finally, thank you to all those who gave me feedback on the draft text and helped me to mould the story into its final shape.
Chapter 1
Later, when she’d had time to reflect on what had followed, Sara wondered if the words she had uttered had been the link . . . a thread they had followed, purely by chance, that had led them to her. But that was later. Here, looking up into the seemingly infinite darkness, she had no idea there could be such consequences to something so innocently done. The words had just rolled off her tongue, as easy as the blinking of an eye.
“I wish, just for once,” she had said, “that something extraordinary would happen to me.”
She had spoken the words out loud . . . well, not ‘loud’ really; it had been more like a whisper. After all, she didn’t want to wake her parents. It was nearly midnight.
Sara had sat up watching television for ages after she’d come home from the library. She found that to be the best form of therapy to balance such intense studying. ‘Vegging out’ she called it, and it always did the trick, stopping the incessant whirring of her brain cells, slowing everything right down and readying her for sleep.
And that’s almost where she was now, about to cross that threshold, the one that takes you from dozing into a deep slumber. She was halfway through the door, almost there. Almost, but not quite.
Just as her fluttering eyelids were about to close for the last time, she heard a noise, a creak of the floorboards. Instinctively, she opened her eyes and turned her head in the direction the noise had come from, knowing as soon as she did so how pointless her reaction was. With the heavy drapes closed, and the light off, her room was blacker than the deepest hole. It would take a while for her eyes to accustom themselves once again to the darkness that enveloped her room. Still, the sound had startled her and she couldn’t help but respond.
She lay as still as she could, listening intently in the darkness. The room was silent. All she could hear was her own breathing. She was just overtired. That had to be it. She remembered how, when she was much younger, she would be so scared in the dark sometimes that the slightest noise would startle her. Then she would creep off and slip into her parents’ bed. Her dad would carry her back to her own room in the middle of the night and she would wake up the next morning blissfully oblivious to how she had got there.
But she was grown up now. Rational thought had replaced childhood fears. She would have heard if someone had opened the door, and there was certainly nowhere to hide in her room. Apart from her bed, the only pieces of furniture it contained were a chair, a cupboard, and her dressing table. She’d had the cupboard open putting her clothes away just before she went to bed so there couldn’t have been someone hiding in there. Sara brought her line of thinking to a halt, wondering what she was doing entertaining such thoughts. It was just a creak of the floorboards after all. Their house always creaked as it cooled in the night air.
Then she heard it again. This time it definitely sounded like it had come from right next to her bed. Slowly, she turned her head, half opening her eyes again despite the improbability of seeing anything. Maybe it was just her mum or dad checking to see if she was all right. They’d been in bed when she got home but it was possible that one of them had got up to check on her. They always worried about her when she went out at night.
Before Sara could turn her head around, her heart jumped as a body pounced on her and a hand clamped over her mouth. More hands grabbed her as she began to fight back. After a brief and frenzied struggle, strong hands finally flipped her over on to her stomach. A knee in Sara’s back pinned her in place as a cloth rag replaced the hand over her mouth. She felt someone tying it behind her head, quickly gagging her attempts to cry out for help. At the same time, her arms were roughly pulled up behind her back and twisted painfully towards her shoulder blades. She felt something, rope she assumed, being wound around her wrists, binding them together, pinching her skin as it was pulled tight. Within a matter of seconds, she’d been immobilised.
Sara was frantic. She tried to scream through the gag and desperately wriggled and struggled, but whoever they were, and she could tell that there were at least two of them, they were quick and strong, and they knew what they were doing.
If it hadn’t been for the gag, her screams would have been heard a block away. Even as it was, her muffled cries had a clear and instant effect. Someone moved to straddle her waist, sitting astride her lower back. Her heart skipped a beat then as she felt her head yanked back. The person behind her had grabbed her ponytail so violently she arched up from the bed like a bow. Her hair felt like it was being wrenched right out of her scalp and she wondered if they intended to snap her neck. She knew it couldn’t possibly stretch any further. Then she felt hot breath against the side of her face as a strange voice came out of the darkness.
“Stop struggling and be very quiet or I’ll bleed you here and now little hu-maan. I’ll slit that pretty throat of yours and let your blood pump out right here, trussed up like a pig for the Winterfest as you are.” It was a male voice with a thick accent. He was whispering right in her ear, so close to her neck she could smell his breath. Indeterminate odours wafted across her face. As he spoke, she felt what must have been a knife, cold and hard, pressing against her throat.
Sara froze. Her heart was pounding and wild thoughts flashed through her mind. She was certain she was going to be killed, or worse. For the first time in her life, she knew genuine terror.
Her fears seemed to be confirmed when she felt a hand on the back of her legs just above her knee. It clearly belonged to someone other than the individual who sat astride her waist; he still had her head pulled back with his knife at her throat. For a moment the offending hand lingered, as if its owner was uncertain what to do, then she felt it slowly sliding down her leg towards her ankles, its touch against her skin making her want to heave with revulsion. The muscles of her legs tensed involuntarily, betraying her fear. Sara felt like her heart might burst through her chest. It was hammeri
ng so loud she could barely think.
“Be still or die right now,” the voice at her ear whispered insistently.
Sara did as she was told. She didn’t doubt for one moment she was in serious trouble. It didn’t seem right. She was only eighteen; she was too young to die. For a moment, she felt her heart stop and she held her breath. She didn’t want to die like this, senselessly, before she’d had a chance to taste life to its full. No, please no, she screamed inside her mind, fighting the urge to urinate as her fear, careering out of control, began to peak.
She began to struggle again, kicking her legs violently as she felt the sudden touch of a cord against her ankles. They were trying to bind her legs. For some reason, she determined not to let them. She started to twist and writhe, flailing with her legs and struggling at the same time to throw off the attacker astride her back.
“That’s enough, Tug” the voice near her head hissed urgently to his companion. “She ain’t getting away. She’s already tied good and hard. It’ll be easier if she can walk, anyway. He said to make it quick.”
“By all the demons of Ergu, just cut the dog!” came the exasperated reply. “That’ll keep her quiet.” It was another male and he was at the other end of her bed, out of her view. His anger was obvious and he had the same strange accent as his companion.
As he spoke, Sara quickly stopped struggling. Somehow she sensed she’d had a minor victory. She didn’t want to push her luck. As she did so, the one astride her waist leaned in close to her ear again and spoke, his voice angry, harsh and full of menace. “That was stupid. I nearly cut you then. You try anything like that again and it’ll be the last thing you do.” As he spoke he jerked her arm up towards her shoulder blades again, wringing a muffled gasp of pain from his victim.
Without further ado, he moved from his position astride her waist. As he rose, he pulled Sara up as well so that she stood beside the bed next to him, her legs trembling and barely able to support her, her bound wrists held firmly in one of his hands. Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness and her state of semi-slumber had now well and truly fled. She could see the gleaming knife he held in the other hand. For the first time, she also was able to get a proper look at the two men who had somehow gained entry to her bedroom without her hearing a thing. She was more than confused by what she saw.
The man, or more accurately, the boy, who had touched her, was wearing some sort of costume. Sara could only assume it was a disguise, as absurd as that thought was. He looked like someone dressed up for a costume party, or Halloween. His garments, a pair of long trousers and a long-sleeved shirt with no collar, were made of leather, or some other sort of hide. The buttons on his shirt were of the hook and eye type and for a belt, he had a simple cord, knotted at the front. It was his face that really caught her eye, however.
His ears were slightly pointed at the top and his face was covered in a light down, almost like fur. Sara could only assume he was wearing a mask; one of those rubber masks you can buy in costume shops, the ones you pull right down over your whole head. This one was an elf-mask, or at least something like that. It was so realistic she could almost believe he really was an elf, the backwoods attire adding to its authenticity. Turning her head she saw that the person standing next to her was similarly dressed.
Sara thought it peculiar that someone would go to the trouble of such elaborate make-up for a break-in, or even an abduction. How in the hell a costume was going to help them if they tried to take her outside was beyond her. Her thoughts flitted back to the few words she had heard them speak. The one next to her had said something about a ‘he’, as if there was someone else waiting for them. It didn’t make sense. Was there a whole gang of them somewhere, perhaps downstairs, waiting for these two to join them? What could they possibly want?
Whatever they were after, she decided she wasn’t going anywhere without a struggle and as much noise as she could make. Once out in the corridor, she would make sure she made a hell of a racket no matter what the consequences.
For a moment it occurred to Sara she might be dreaming. What was happening to her was like something out of a movie, not real life. Before she could focus properly on the proposition, the one behind her yanked on her bonds, disrupting her line of thought. “Let’s get going,” he hissed as he took her elbow in a tight grip and started dragging her across the room.
Now she knew she was dreaming. They weren’t heading for the door, or the window for that matter. In the corner, towards which she was being dragged, and where there should have been a chair with her dressing gown draped over it, there was some sort of opening. It looked completely surreal, a rough slit in the air from just above the floor to just below the ceiling, with light peeping through it. Sara shook her head, convinced it would disappear. But it didn’t. It was still there. It looked like a movie screen with a film being projected onto it and a long rip in it, with light shining through from behind. To Sara’s complete astonishment, before she could examine it more closely her captor stepped up to the slit, pulled it aside with one hand and stepped into the bright light, taking her with him. Sara felt herself pulled through.
I say through because that is what it felt like; as if she were pushing through a heavy curtain or some sort of similar barrier. Incredibly, it had no depth to speak off. She immediately moved from the darkness of her bedroom into an area of intense light. Now she could see nothing at all except herself, her abductor, and bright, sourceless light; sort of like being in a snowstorm, a whiteout she thought they called it. Wherever she was now, there were no apparent boundaries, no up or down, no sides. It seemed limitless.
Before she could make any sense of this new environment, she was pulled through yet another opening. The impossible scene she’d just experienced vanished as quickly as it had appeared. This time she found herself in a room again, though it was no room she had ever seen before, and certainly not one in her house. It had a wooden floor and the walls seemed to be made of large stone blocks. Sara swayed on her feet. She felt dizzy and slightly sick, like she had just got off a merry-go-round.
Although her heart was still hammering insistently against the walls of her chest, demanding to be let out, the turmoil in her mind took on a new form. Disabling fear receded to a corner of her awareness, allowing her senses a chance to absorb and analyse the new information that was flooding in. What was happening to her simply did not compute, however, and her mind struggled to make any sense of the bizarre situation she found herself in.
She had to be dreaming. That was the only explanation that made any sense at all. Only this was so weird. She had never had such a vivid dream in her life, or one where her sense of touch and smell had been so acute. She tended to think things were happening to her in her dreams, not to feel and smell them. But this didn’t seem like a dream at all; on the contrary, it felt very real. At the same time, she knew the things that she was experiencing, that she was seeing, simply didn’t happen in real life. Real people don’t have pointed ears and you can’t step through a rip in the air and go from your bedroom into some house you have never seen before. It had to be a dream. Her mind could find no other rational explanation.
More like a nightmare than a dream, she suddenly thought. Her arm hurt from where her captor was holding her. He still had her in a vice-like grip and the pinched skin stung like hell. She didn’t like the way the other boy had touched her either, the way his hand had lingered on her leg.
Pushing those thoughts from her mind, Sara stared at the opening through which she had come. It looked much the same from this side as it had done from her room. She watched the second boy pulling it open and stepping through to join them. Behind him, she could see the same bright light she had experienced. Once he was through, the opening closed and the slit simply winked out of existence. If it weren’t for her strange new surroundings, Sara would have been quite willing to believe it had never really been there in the first place. Its disappearance offered her no relief, however. Somehow Sara knew t
hat getting back home had just become a lot harder.
Looking around, she slowly took in her new surroundings. Her eyes were immediately drawn to a young girl seated at a table a few paces from where she stood. Sara hadn’t noticed her at first as she had been focusing on the strange means by which she had arrived in the room. Now that she saw they weren’t alone, however, she took little comfort from the presence of another person. If anything, it only served to heighten her fears.
The girl, who looked very young, perhaps twelve or thirteen years of age, was seated upright at the table, but with her head slumped forward, as if she was asleep or unconscious. With a shock, Sara realised she was tied to the chair. Her young face looked unusually pale and her hair was wet, as if matted with sweat. A thin trickle of blood ran from her nose to her upper lip. Sara reeled in horror at the spectacle before her. This was no longer a simple abduction. Her situation had suddenly changed from the incredible to the macabre, her state of mind from one of apprehension and confusion to revulsion.
Looking around frantically, she could see that the room they were now in was nearly twice as big as her bedroom. Two thick rugs covered wooden floorboards, and the walls, which consisted of big rough blocks of stone, seemingly held together with some sort of mortar, were bare except for a map on one wall and a large tapestry depicting a hunting scene of some kind on another. A big open fireplace in the centre of one wall, a heavy wooden table almost covered in old books and sheets of paper, some of the latter rolled up like scrolls, a few chairs, a window set into a deep casement and a wooden door were the only other items of note.
Looking up, Sara saw that the ceiling was made of wooden beams, blackened on the side closest to the fire, which was blazing away strongly. The thing she found most unusual, however, was the way everything appeared so roughly made, so old in some indefinable way. The room had none of the accoutrements Sara took for granted living in a modern city as she did. In fact, there were no signs of anything modern at all, no evidence of electricity, no appliances of any kind. Light was provided by the fire and a large wooden torch burning in a bracket on the wall beside the door.
