A Blackbird In Darkness (Book 2) (51 page)

Its head was flat out on the snow, and its pale eyes – siblings of the Egg-Stone – glinted at them, filled with implacable malice. And it seemed to be looking down at them, as if towering above them, ballooned to many times its actual size, a grotesque parody of Arlenmia’s vision, while they were trapped by their own arrogance in the bottom of a slimy pit, helpless and humiliated.

Fires spat around the Worm, brown and ochre and olive-green; and in their glow basked obscene creatures; discoloured, malformed creations of the Serpent. Some were laughing, some weeping and some expressionless, but all were so pitiable and repulsive that merely to look upon them induced madness. Estarinel and Ashurek cried out in horror as awful thoughts began to crawl about in their minds. In danger of forgetting who or where they were, they wandered before the Serpent as if blind.

Medrian knew they were struggling, but she could do nothing to help except to sing on above the Serpent’s groan, praying they would not lose their sense of purpose altogether.

#

Silvren was pacing up and down on the snow, clasping the cloak around herself with one hand, gripping the Silver Staff in the other. She was shivering involuntarily, unaware of how cold she really was. She watched as the three approached the Serpent, saw it take off and held her breath for ten heartbeats before it dropped to the snow again. Now they were trying to approach it, their figures rimmed by its baleful aura. Silvren felt as distressed by her helplessness as by anxiety.

Unable to bear watching alone, she went to sit by Arlenmia, who was kneeling in the snow with her back to M’gulfn.

‘Arlenmia,’ Silvren said. ‘I know how you feel.’ Arlenmia looked up at her, her face as white as alabaster.

‘Do you?’ she said without expression.

‘Well, I suppose I do not. What can I say?’

‘I don’t know why you want to say anything. It is no thanks to me that you are still alive, is it? You warned me, and I would not listen, and now you are proved right.’

Silvren took her hand, and held onto it when she tried to pull away. ‘It was a dream, Arlenmia. Only a dream. This is real.’ She held up Arlenmia’s hand in her own. ‘You and I, talking to each other. There is nothing else; but this is everything. This is what we are fighting to save.’

‘Must you be so forgiving?’ Arlenmia exclaimed. ‘You make things very difficult.’

‘They are difficult,’ Silvren replied. ‘My power is all but gone, but they need help. I must do something.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Their weapons. If I could only imbue their axes with some degree of sorcerous energy, it would give them a greater chance of killing the Serpent. I can’t do it alone, but if you would only link hands and help me…?’

She expected a flat refusal, but to her surprise Arlenmia turned to her and said, ‘Yes.’ Colour came back to her face and her eyes were burning. ‘M’gulfn has betrayed me. Yes, I would like to help them kill it.’

#

Medrian’s throat was raw, scoured by the Serpent’s acrid stench. Its groans were echoing in her ears and head, but still she continued the chant. She saw Estarinel and Ashurek stumble past her, going to the left and right of M’gulfn’s head. Its tiny eyes swivelled to follow them and it writhed frantically against Medrian’s restraint.

Ashurek’s axe was a dead weight trailing in his hands. With an effort he lifted it, balancing it ready for battle. He was trying grimly to shut his mind against the Serpent’s confounding aura and remember his purpose. Its head and neck loomed before him, thickly roped with muscle under the flaky membrane. Close to, it seemed huge, and he could not see Estarinel on the other side.

He swung the axe in an arc and it bit into M’gulfn’s neck, sending a shuddering, painful shock through his arms and shoulders.

The membrane parted like paper and the edge sank into its flesh as if through a putrescent gel, only to be stopped by an iron-hard sinew. Ashurek pulled the weapon clear and staggered back, gasping. The Serpent flung its head into the air and howled with rage. Its body contracted into an S-shape, and despite the restraining song, it tried to attack.

Its hideous mouth was gaping before him and Ashurek saw between its jaws a glistening scarlet cavern, with fangs like stalactites of ivory, glutinous with bloody slaver. Its hot-cold, foul breath caught him full in the face.

By reflex he hefted the axe and struck again. This time the edge cut into its lips and gums, and a virulent crimson liquid oozed from its mouth. The shock of the blow sent Ashurek reeling away onto the filthy snow, while the Worm half-rolled away in irritation.

On the other side, Estarinel was caught off-guard. He had aimed one blow at it, but it had barely nicked the membrane. The Worm’s creatures were sighing around him, worsening his disorientation. He felt that he was sinking slowly through a brown ocean, and that the corpses of those tragic monstrosities were drifting down with him… Even as he was struggling to shake off the illusion, the Worm’s thick body lurched into him and he fell with his legs trapped beneath it. The shock brought him back to himself, and he cried out in terror. The Serpent righted itself, releasing him, but before he could regain his feet, its head snapped round and he found himself caught in its lips.

Thick, heavy folds of soft flesh enveloped him and its stench was overwhelming. He could see every detail of its skin: the ridges and furrows crusted with dried venom, the pores like pits clotted with dark blood. Somehow he held onto his axe; in fact it was dragging painfully on his free arm, but he could not let go, his fingers were in spasm. He waited for the Worm’s jaws to crush him.

Instead, the Serpent spoke to him. Each word seemed as tangible as a monolith of fossilized bone, and each letter of each word was in itself a terrible image. Forluin, Medrian, Skord – all real yet distorted and imbued with a nightmarish, profound meaning, as if he saw them with super-conscious perception. He saw the Earth itself groaning in immedicable despair as it drifted through eternity under the Worm’s rule, and Miril, lying dead in the snow… On and on the Serpent spoke. The images were weights, crushing him with insufferable pressure. And at the same time, he felt that he was himself the words that M’gulfn spoke.

Medrian saw Estarinel caught in the Serpent’s maw, Ashurek prostrate on the snow, and it seemed to her in that moment that she had misjudged everything. There was no easy way to slay M’gulfn. Her only hope now was to retreat towards Silvren and take the Silver Staff from her, chanting all the while so that M’gulfn remained pinned to the snow. Then she must approach M’gulfn with the Staff and pierce its throat. Their lives would be lost and the Earth torn apart, but at least it would all be ended.

No. Even that last, drastic solution was beyond her power. She was exhausted, her grip on M’gulfn slipping. She knew that she could not slay it herself; and at that moment she could not even believe that the Silver Staff possessed the necessary power. She felt that they were all victims of some ghastly joke played on them by the Grey Ones, who were now smiling down at them, their impassive, callous amusement worse even than the Serpent’s mockery.

Ashurek regained his feet. He could not see Estarinel, but he knew something had happened to him. Perhaps M’gulfn had killed him. Fury possessed him and he determined to do it some dire harm before it destroyed them all. He struck at its neck, once and twice, his blows stopped short by its wire-hard muscles. He was gasping for breath, choking on the thick atmosphere. To bring the axe down a third time seemed a monumental, impossible task. It was dragging at his arms like an anchor, while his whole body felt nerveless, as if some paralysing fever had drained all his strength. He managed to half-lift the weapon, only to stagger and almost fall, put off his stroke by astonishment.

There were golden fires running up and down the length of the axe, stars scintillating on its sharp edge. He recognised Silvren’s sorcery, and it was for her sake that he made a renewed effort. Bracing his feet apart, he hauled the axe into the air and brought it down onto the Serpent’s neck with the full weight of his body behind it. This time the sinews split like fruit, while Medrian and the Serpent screamed in unison.

Estarinel was still glued to the Serpent’s lip, helpless, but as it shrieked with pain he became vividly aware of his situation and desperate to escape. Almost involuntarily he swung up his free hand, which held the axe. Showering silver-gold sparks, the edge caught M’gulfn across the eye. It flung up its head in agony, hurling Estarinel into the snow.

He rolled clear and leaped to his feet, experiencing a wonderful exhilaration; he was no longer afraid. He bore down on the Worm, axe held two-handed above his head, scattering sorcerous light. He was thinking, what gave this loathsome Worm the right to destroy people whose gentle lives were beyond its understanding; the right to cling like a diseased tick to a world whose beauty is outside the compass of its mean soul? It has gone far enough.

In unison, he and Ashurek hacked at its neck, and at each blow they felt the snapping of blood vessels and tendons. Medrian had collapsed barely two feet from its cavernous mouth, and she was no longer singing, but crying out with shared pain. Ashurek and Estarinel were too intent on their work to see her, and the Serpent’s terrible moaning drowned her cries.

The ghastly creatures that thronged around it were dying, collapsing shapeless onto the snow, and the virulent Worm-fires were burning as pale as dead skin. The sky throbbed like a bruise.

Now a hideous greenish-white light began to stream from M’gulfn’s body. Its wrinkled membrane glistened with moisture, as if it had broken out in a dark sweat of fear. Viscid blood was pouring from its wounds, steaming like acid as it fell to the snow. Ashurek and Estarinel struck again and again, their axes blazing like suns as Silvren poured sorcery into them.

Those weapons bit into M’gulfn’s soul like bitter-cold iron, because they were a taste of a power that should not exist, that could only exist if it died. It lost the strength even to scream. Still it clung to its Wormish body, but its grip was becoming feeble, and it was whimpering inwardly, begging Medrian to help it.

‘Leave your body. Come to me,’ she said to it. ‘Quickly, so that this terrible pain will cease. Please, M’gulfn…’

There was a massive split in its neck now, and its head was half off. Chunks of flesh flew into the air with every blow, spattering the snow and their clothes. The sickly glow exuding from its sides had faded and they knew that it was dying. By the time their axes met its spine, it had ceased struggling altogether. There was a cracking and splintering of unnatural bone, then the remaining flesh of the neck parted like butter; a moment later the head lay severed. Then Ashurek and Estarinel proceeded to split the eyes and cleave the skull, striking manically as if they could not believe it was truly dead.

#

Indeed, M’gulfn clung desperately to its body for as long as it could bear to. But at the cold touch of that baneful sorcery within its skull, it could tolerate no more; it forsook hope of regenerating its physical form and, gathering up the cognizant atoms of its being, it fled wailing into Medrian.

As Estarinel’s and Ashurek’s axes cut through the brain, a leaden burst of dark power throbbed into the air, flinging them backwards. They lay winded on the snow, braced for a further shock.

Nothing happened.

The sudden, absolute silence was eerie. They dragged themselves to their feet and looked with objective disgust at their surroundings: the flat, defiled snowscape under an oppressive sky; the brown-tainted atmosphere; the ghastly body of the Serpent lying in the snow, its head severed and horribly crushed, its blood and glutinous venom smearing the snow for yards all around it.

And Medrian, lying unconscious in the snow just in front of the head.

Estarinel rushed over to her and lifted her gently off the ground. ‘She’s still alive. I don’t think she’s hurt,’ he said.

Ashurek, trying to wipe the gore from his hands, looked at him holding Medrian in his arms; and he suddenly understood about the Silver Staff. Feeling that he was going to weep, he turned away, only to find the ghastly remains of the Worm before him.

‘Ashurek, come on, let’s go back to Silvren,’ Estarinel said. ‘It’s dead. How can you bear to stay near it?’

‘Have you still got the H’tebhmellian fire?’ Ashurek asked as they walked back across the snow, begrimed and too exhausted to feel anything about the Serpent’s death – not elation, not even relief, nothing.

‘Yes, I retrieved it after Arlenmia knocked it into the snow. Why?’

‘Because I think the Worm’s body should be burned, and the H’tebhmellian fire is the only means we have to set it alight,’ Ashurek replied.

Silvren and Arlenmia both looked equally numb; it was partly the aftermath of their horror of M’gulfn, and partly the feeling that the horror was not yet quite over. There was no sense of release; the world still seemed to be sinking into a swamp of brown and grey filth.

Silvren came forward to meet them, embracing Ashurek with no regard for the blood on his clothing. ‘Oh, thank the Lady!’ she cried. ‘I was sure you would be killed.’

‘Only because of you were we able to destroy its body,’ he whispered into her hair. ‘But it is not yet over.’

#

Medrian
, groaned the Serpent.
How could you permit this? You have betrayed me; you should have let me go to another host. This pain is intolerable. I will make you sorry yet
.