A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) (23 page)

Without warning Ashurek drew his sword and swung around, slashing the arm of a villager. The others, who had been poised to capture him, fell back out of his range. All looked terrified and he knew they would not dare to approach him again.

Immediately Karadrek drew his own blade, shouting angrily at the villagers not to be such cowardly fools.

‘Prince Ashurek, please don’t make it necessary for me to kill you,’ he said, his expression desperate. ‘We need you.’

Ashurek only shook his head, his mouth set in a grim line. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you listen to me or not, General Karadrek,’ he said so faintly that Karadrek did not catch the words. ‘There’s only one way for you to be rid of the Shanin...’

He and Karadrek began to circle one another. Both were highly skilled swordsmen, having had the finest training the Gorethrian Army could provide. They had often fought each other before, though only in mock combat. Their blades clashed and they began to move into the familiar rhythm of sword-play.

Ashurek knew it was likely to be a long drawn out fight, and one he did not relish. Then he noticed that Karadrek was muttering as he fought, and he recognised the ancient Gorethrian tongue.

Karadrek was summoning his demon.

As always, the words filled Ashurek with cold, strength-sapping horror. There was a terrible pressure on his skull, and his mouth was full of cobwebs.

As soon as the demon materialised, Ashurek knew that he would be disarmed and bound in an instant. He had evaded the Shana once too often; they certainly would not permit him to escape again. He could not let the summoning be completed, and there was only one way to prevent it.

The air shimmered and groaned. Animals were squealing in fear and stampeding around their enclosures, sensing the evil aura before the humans did. There was a moment of pressure so intense that it seemed the very atmosphere would fracture – and a perfect, leering silver figure stepped out of nowhere.

Ashurek saw an opening and lunged desperately at Karadrek’s stomach. It was a risk – he could have miscalculated and impaled himself on Karadrek’s sword. But he did not. His weapon met its mark and drove up into his compatriot’s heart.

Karadrek, eyes and mouth gaping with shock, slid slowly off the blade with a soft rasping noise and lay dead, blood welling over his chest.

The demon, roaring with rage, was sucked back to its own Region.

Ashurek leaned on his sword, staring at Karadrek’s body. Now he had killed again, adding the blood of a former friend to that of his family. He felt stained from head to foot, as damnable as the Serpent itself. He was cursing silently, bitterly. Karadrek had had to die; a demon could only be banished by the death of the summoner. That was the bitter lesson he had learned with Meshurek. But this knowledge was no consolation. It did not make him feel any less stricken, less black with guilt.

Slowly he cleaned his blade and re sheathed it.

‘That was not for myself,’ he murmured. ‘That was for the Drishians, General Karadrek.’

He turned and made for his horse, oblivious to the men and women standing around him, staring. A man came running up to him, the thin, nervous one who had first spoken to him on the quay.

‘Sir – sir, what’s happened, what does this mean?’ he cried.

‘It’s over. Your master is dead and the demon will trouble you no more. You won’t have to sail to Gorethria; in fact I’d advise you to burn those caravels,’ Ashurek said brusquely, brushing his hand away.

The man caught hold of his cloak and followed him.

‘But, sir,’ he persisted, looking more distressed than ever. ‘The–’ he waved a hand at the temple-hut. Angered, Ashurek stopped and looked back.

Even as he turned, there were shouts of terror from within the hut. Seconds later the Amphisbaena came undulating out of the entrance, its heads wagging blindly in the air, the colours pulsing rapidly along its form. Its two mouths were gaping wide, revealing not teeth, but powerful ridges of muscle designed to crush and suck the flesh from its prey. They glistened crimson with the blood of its worshippers.

He should have realised. Karadrek – or the demon – had exerted some control over the creature. Now it was unrestrained, directionless – except for its Serpent-given need to destroy.

Shouting a warning, Ashurek sprinted towards it. The villagers did not even move. At the sight of it, fear left their eyes and they became ensorcelled, some dropping to their knees and others prostrating themselves in the mud. The beast was among them at once, crushing their limbs, torsos and heads in its merciless mouth. Some groaned as they died, and some made no sound at all.

By the time Ashurek reached it, some fifteen of them were dead. With a howl of battle-lust he unsheathed his sword. The blade rang discordantly as it curved through the air. He held it two-handed, bringing it down onto one of the Amphisbaena’s necks and hacking until the head fell with strings of flesh and viscid blood whipping after it. The Amphisbaena began to make a dreadful keening noise that made Ashurek long to drop the sword and block his ears.

The remaining head wove back and forth, jaws opening and closing. He could see the rippling of the muscle ridges and he knew that once the mouth closed upon his arm or leg, he would never prise himself out of that deadly grip. Waves of colour beat frantically along its body and its tentacles were entwining themselves around his ankles. He almost lost his balance, extricating his feet just in time. Swinging the sword, he caught the Amphisbaena across the side of the head.

It screamed like a child and lurched towards him, the colours of its skin changing madly. Ashurek struck again, chopping repeatedly at its neck. Its blood spattered him. It is not going to die, he thought.

Then, all at once, it was over. The Amphisbaena’s second head was severed, and as the creature subsided lifeless to the ground its whole body flashed black, then pale luminous green. The tentacles continued to jerk convulsively for several seconds.

Ashurek stood back with the creature’s milky blood running down his face like tears. He scrubbed the stuff away, gasping with a mixture of exertion and horror at the preventable deaths of those poor men and women.

The creature’s strange body lay before him in a smooth, pale mound, the lovely hypnotic colours gone. Around him the rest of the villagers seemed to be returning to their senses. Some were weeping, others clinging to each other. But still they all seemed afraid to approach him.

As he turned away, wiping the slimy blood from his face, the thin man was in front of him again, staring accusingly at him. ‘This is all your fault,’ the man uttered, his voice tremulous. ‘What are we to do now?’

‘The Amphisbaena is dead,’ Ashurek said, feeling aggravated and exhausted.

‘You don’t understand. You damnable Gorethrians! At least the other one was protecting us. In return for our help, we had the Amphisbaena to worship, so that the Serpent would not vent its wrath upon us. We had enough to eat. Our master was not cruel. Now what do we have? Many of us are dead and the rest have nothing to worship, no one to protect us. The creatures that roam about in the hills will come down to prey upon us and our livestock, and we will starve or be killed.’

‘Then arm yourselves,’ said Ashurek curtly, pointing to the stone manor. He put the saddlebag of weapons over Vixata’s withers and vaulted on. She began to dance, unsettled. ‘You can’t defeat evil by worshipping it. Fight!’

He sent Vixata into a canter and the man jumped out of his way, unnerved by the viridian gleam of Ashurek’s eyes, startling against his dark face.

The other villagers shrank back as the fiery mare passed, their gaze following the rider out of the village and across the hillside beyond as if they were too stunned to do anything but stare at him.

Ashurek made Vixata gallop, his head lowered against a wind that was stinging his eyes like acid. ‘How many more deaths must I cause before the Serpent is satisfied?’ he asked himself, his mind raw with fresh pain.

Karadrek had been an agent of the Serpent, a bringer of evil, like Arlenmia and Gastada. And like me, Ashurek thought. If Karadrek deserved death then I am infinitely more deserving. My guilt is so much greater than his.

Karadrek had never known any way of life except unquestioning loyalty to Gorethria, and belief in her absolute supremacy. Was he to blame for that, or for becoming yet another wretched victim of M’gulfn? What is blame, what is evil? Ashurek wondered.

Ashurek believed himself to be evil. Yet Silvren believed the same thing of herself, wrongly but just as unshakably. Yet the infamy of what the Shana had done to her was far greater than any corruption she could attach to herself… the idea of ‘evil’ became meaningless… the more Ashurek tried to analyse right and wrong, the more senseless everything seemed, fading into a formless, indecipherable chaos like a swirling fog in which demons gibbered.

His brother Meshurek. His sister Orkesh. His once-loyal General... their eyes seemed to stare accusingly out of that fog, out of the terrible bodies in which they were imprisoned in hell.
The harder you fight the Worm, the more you aid it
, they seemed to be saying. And,
fight or surrender, it is all the same. If you fight, you will destroy everything... surrender, and the Earth is doomed anyway
... And then, contradicting their own words,
Help us. Avenge us. You must destroy the world to give us release.

Ashurek screamed as he rode, his voice lost on the wind. He felt that he was rushing headlong into a black destiny, had been rushing into it since birth, and all attempts to avert it were but painful delusions. He must accept his fate, because to resist it brought only torment, not escape...

Vixata was tiring, and it was nearly dark. He felt no desire to return to the relative comfort of the camp; instead he slept under an outcrop of rock, without food or a fire, as if daring some beast of M’gulfn to come and kill him. The keen, cold loneliness of the night matched the torture of his soul, and so excised the pain to some extent.

By the morning he felt calm, but his character had settled into a deeper grimness. It seemed the inevitable culmination of the anguish that had been stirred by his abortive excursion into the Dark Regions. He felt he had finally accepted his guilt and his doom; and if this was a form of madness, he was not aware of it.

He faced the new day with untroubled, black resolve.

‘Very well,’ he thought. ‘If I can defeat M’gulfn only by destroying everything and everyone else as well – so be it.’

Silvren lay in the Dark Regions, staring at the inside of the cell in which she was imprisoned. It was no more than a round burrow, a little longer than her body and about three feet in diameter, so that she had just enough room to turn over. The surface was soft and smooth, like flesh about to go rotten, mottled with sickly browns and blues. Across the open end, at her feet, was a transparent, impenetrable membrane. She had no wish to look through it; beyond were only lumpish mounds containing more cells. And sometimes there were grisly creatures meandering about on odd numbers of legs, or there might be one or two demons, leering mockingly at her. So she never looked out.

She wished she could get used to the smell of the Dark Regions. It was a metallic stench of corruption, instilling horror and wretchedness into the bravest of souls. She could not remember when she had last eaten, but could not have stomached food anyway, with that stench in her throat.

The Shana had used to feed her... before Ashurek came. It must have been food somehow brought from Earth, because it had been untainted and edible. And they had not confined her, nor subjected her to anything beyond the simple torment of simply being in the Dark Regions. Meheg-Ba and Diheg-El had been almost pleasant in their way, making her see that she was evil, and therefore better off out of harm’s way.

Yes, yes, she thought, closing her eyes. Out of harm’s way.

But after Ashurek had tried to rescue her, the Shana had not been so kind. She had not actually seen Meheg-Ba or Diheg-El, only Ahag-Ga, who had imprisoned her – for her own good, it said – so that she might contemplate her evil. Since then – it might have been yesterday, or ten years ago, for time was meaningless here – she had lain in the cell, barely sleeping, gazing upon the abhorrent form that was her self. She felt that the fleshy walls of the cell were only an extension of her evil, and that they stretched out from her in every direction, an infinite, bloated liver in which she lay cocooned like a maggot.

Often she wondered why she had not gone mad, but then, perhaps she had, without knowing.

Trying to remember her life before the Dark Regions was like poking about in an old wound. It filled her with a raw, shivering ache and made her want to writhe and squeeze her eyes shut and moan with black depression. Yet she was unable to resist inflicting that silvery, razor-sharp torment on herself. Again and again she saw Athrainy, her land, which she had loved and been forced to forsake. A country of stark, imposing beauty; sweeping hills of granite and silvery grass, great trees with bronze-purple foliage, a people whose hair, skin and eyes were different shades of deep gold. And, with anguish, she thought of her mother. Widowed young and burdened by many responsibilities, Silvren had been the only joy in her life.

This is evil, child. Evil
.

Silvren had been possessed of a strange power, unwanted, unpredictable and dangerous. At first it manifested as golden electricity that sometimes crackled about her face and hands, disturbing, but not frightening. But as she grew older it began to take a more terrible form, a force that could splinter a tree or tear a field from end to end with a careless thought. Silvren was a gentle and loving girl who dreaded harming anything, so the knowledge that she was involuntarily placing those around her in danger, and causing her mother anxiety, was unbearable.

‘Child, you are frightening me,’ her mother had said harshly. ‘Why do you do these things? Either it stops – or you will have to leave.’

Silvren, devastated, had hung on to her mother’s arm, pleading with her. ‘Please don’t say that. I can’t help it, truly. I’d do anything to be rid of the power.’

Her mother had pushed her away, made intransigent by fear. ‘This is evil, child. Evil! What have I done to deserve this – my only daughter, a witch?’

And in the end, Silvren had left. Barely sixteen, lonely and wretchedly homesick, she had boarded a ship bound for the House of Rede, desperate to find an answer. Eldor and Dritha had greeted her like a daughter, explaining gently that her power was not evil; rather, she was a sorceress born.

‘But this is very strange to us, for there is no sorcery upon this Earth,’ Eldor had said. ‘The Serpent and its servants are the only beings able to wield such power. There may come a time when the Serpent is no more, and sorcerers may exist freely... but for now, I cannot explain why you have this power. My dear, it seems that you have been born out of your time, and I know no easy remedy for it.’

He had given her a choice. To stay at the House of Rede for as long as she wished, or to be sent to another world in a different dimension, where there was a School of Sorcery. There she could learn, not just to control the power, but to wield it as a full Sorceress.

‘The difficulty is that if you return to Earth as a Sorceress you will possess at least equal power to a demon, and you may well be in great danger because of it. It is opposite to the Shana’s power, therefore they will fear and hate you.’

‘I’m not afraid,’ Silvren had answered resolutely. ‘I would like to go to the School of Sorcery. But one day I will come back, because I love this world, and I feel sure this power was given to me to fight the Serpent M’gulfn.’

In the Dark Regions, Silvren moaned and squirmed in her trance of memory. The School had been her home for ten years, the happiest of her life; how carefree and innocent she had been, walking arm-in-arm with Arlenmia, how trusting and unsuspecting.

‘Your world means a great deal to you, doesn’t it?’ Arlenmia would say. ‘Tell me again about the Serpent M’gulfn...’ and Silvren would confide everything to her as they walked in the gardens surrounding the fantastical, scintillating buildings of the School.

Never dreaming how bitterly she would one day regret these confidences.

Even now, she recalled vividly the brilliance of Arlenmia’s deep-lidded eyes, the charismatic intensity of her low voice. ‘And are you certain the Serpent is evil?’ she asked once.

‘Oh, yes – wholly diabolic!’ Silvren replied fervently. ‘It hates the world and would like to dominate it and destroy all life.’

‘Silvren, I don’t doubt you,’ Arlenmia reassured her. ‘It’s only that I am hesitant to judge between good and evil. It’s not that I have no standards, but I believe that such vast forces as the Serpent and the Shana you describe have such a different standard of good and evil that it is barely comprehensible to us. And unless we try to free ourselves of human ideals and encompass cosmic ones, we will never be truly powerful.’

It was not the first time that Arlenmia had spoken in this way, but Silvren still listened in wonder as she went on, ‘I have always believed that life must surely evolve onto a higher plane than this miserable mortality, and why do we possess sorcerous powers, if not to effect that change? Why mess about healing a wound here, an illness there, while life continues in the same wretched way all around us? It’s such a waste – when these skills should be used to effect a profound and radical healing of the whole world. All worlds.’

Silvren was astonished at this. ‘I thought I was idealistic, but you put me to shame. How do you hope to achieve these things?’

‘Dear heart, I don’t know. That is why I am here, the same as you, to learn. It seems that your world is in just such a state of change as I believe is necessary for life to evolve to higher levels. This Serpent cannot just be “fought”. Either it must be destroyed utterly, or it must reign supreme. But the transition is what is causing human suffering; most likely, on a cosmic scale, no cruelty is intended at all.’

‘Your words seem to make sense, but I can’t accept them. The Serpent intends great evil, and it must be destroyed.’

‘Silvren, I believe you. In fact, when you return there, would you let me come with you? I think you are going to need my help.’

‘Oh, do you mean it?’ Silvren exclaimed. ‘If only you would, it would mean everything to me. I am going to be so alone, otherwise.’

She had been overjoyed, sincerely believing that Arlenmia meant to help her. What agonising guilt there was in the memory of that naive, blind trust. Silvren writhed in her cell, but the train of recollection continued relentlessly.

Distraught at not being considered a true Sorceress, Arlenmia had half-devastated Ikonus and fled to Silvren’s world. Oh, what a fool I was, she groaned to herself, taking so long to realise where she’d gone. If only I’d found her sooner...

When Silvren finally discovered Arlenmia in Belhadra, she had already established herself in the Glass City. Silvren confronted her amid the shining towers, still outraged at what had happened to Ikonus. Yet she greeted Silvren like a long-lost sister, her face vivid with genuine affection and delight. She had never meant any harm to Ikonus, she said, it was a terrible mistake, an accident that she deeply regretted. Could Silvren not forgive her? And at last, swayed by her warmth and sincerity, Silvren relented.

‘But if it was truly an accident, you should not have fled. And why have you come here?’ Silvren demanded, her suspicions not wholly assuaged.

‘Dear one, did I not agree to come to this Earth with you? This is not quite how I planned it, but Ikonus is in the past, and we are here together now.’ She was leading Silvren into her strange, metallic house.

‘You mean you still want to help me? Silvren exclaimed, thrown off-balance.

‘Yes, of course I do,’ Arlenmia smiled. ‘And I have already created the perfect stronghold. Mirrors are my medium; have you any idea how much power a whole City of Glass gives me?’

‘But this is not your City – you can’t just–’

‘Oh, what does that matter? Silvren, we are speaking of saving your Earth, and all life on it. Borrowing the Glass City is just one of several means to that end. Now, are you going to come here and work with me, or not?’

‘I suppose so,’ Silvren said, finding it impossible to remain angry with her. She knew that although Arlenmia’s ideals tended to operate on a plane beyond good and evil, her intentions were noble. ‘You must think I’m very ungrateful, when you’ve done so much already, and I can only sit here asking suspicious questions.’

Arlenmia smiled. ‘Now you sound like my Silvren again. I have also recruited us some helpers. I must say they were singularly rude and unhelpful when I first met them, but they were easy enough to master, and they are going to be exceedingly useful. Let me show you; but come into the courtyard. I don’t like them in the house.’ Mystified, Silvren followed Arlenmia outside. There was an oval mirror set into one of the walls – presumably for this purpose – and Arlenmia stood before it, sketching a few runes over its surface with practised ease. The mirror darkened... and Silvren felt suddenly afraid.

Out of it stepped two demons, shining with a pungent light, crackling with malice.

Silvren did not know she was running away until she went headlong into a wall. Stunned, she sank to her knees and hid her head like a terrified child, while a golden, protective lightning danced around her without her willing it. Distantly, she heard Arlenmia’s voice saying impatiently, ‘Oh, go back – yes, go – I’ll send for you later.’

A moment later Arlenmia was pulling her to her feet.

‘Silvren, whatever is the matter? It’s all right, I’ve sent them away.’

‘By the gods, Arlenmia, don’t you know what they are? They are the Shana, the demons I told you about. They are evil – they will possess you.’

‘Try to calm down. Come, I’ll get you some wine.’ Arlenmia led her back inside her house. Silvren swallowed the wine and sat clutching the goblet with white fingers.

‘Don’t you understand? You cannot – cannot work with these vile creatures. Oh, I’m sorry if I didn’t explain this to you – I thought I had.’

‘Silvren, I don’t know what you are so frightened of. They are only like children, really.’

Silvren stared at Arlenmia in amazement. ‘You mean it. You really are not afraid of them, are you? You called two together – and you just asked them to go, and they obeyed.’ She gave a shuddering sigh and closed her eyes. ‘I had no idea you were so powerful.’

‘You flatter me. I’m sure that you could control them as easily.’

‘No. I might fight one on equal terms – not more – and they would never obey me. Oh, Arlenmia. If only I had come after you as soon as you left! I would never have let you do this.’

‘Don’t worry. I will order them to obey you as well.’

‘No! You don’t understand,’ Silvren gasped, her eyes flying open. ‘You must not work with them at all. They are evil, the Serpent’s creatures. You cannot use them to fight against the Serpent.’

There was a long, strange silence. Sometimes, afterwards, Silvren felt that that silence had somehow got inside her soul, so that whenever she was alone, or not thinking about anything else, it would rise to the surface and envelop her like a cool, glassy void. And after a long time, Arlenmia’s soft words would filter into that emptiness, like her mother whispering,
This is evil, child, evil
– as shocking as the first time they were uttered: ‘We are not fighting against the Serpent.’

‘What?’ Silvren said, not trusting her ears.

‘Dear heart, I did bear in mind everything you said. But I have done much learning of my own since coming here. This Serpent is of such great power that it would be futile to resist it. What we must do is join our power to its own, and so increase it. The chaos it causes – which you call “evil” – is only the by-product of the transformation that it will eventually effect over the Earth. It will be swifter, less painful, if we help it. We must recruit as many as possible to this belief – because those who believe and understand will escape death and ascend to that higher level of being which is truth and beauty.’