A Solitary Journey (19 page)

The rat stopped, hanging on a thin crack in the wall, looking at her as if awaiting an explanation for the interruption. In Meg’s mind a shape, a picture formed.
Looking,
it represented.

She remembered. The animal projected ideas and feelings and actions, not words. She projected her effort of,
Careful,
but the rat clambered from the crack onto a thin ledge without responding. Turning back to the figure bound to the statue, she thought, I’ll try. But I have to go back to the village. It will be getting close to
morning and if I’m not there my friends will be in trouble.

There’s no hurry, A Ahmud Ki assured her. This is Se’Treya. Time doesn’t matter here. I thought you knew that.

The situation was fast becoming more and more confusing to her. Time doesn’t matter?

The Dragonlords made this place so that they could come and go from it at will without losing any time in our world. It’s like a moment of thought trapped in one place, and when you are here, no matter how long you stay, time doesn’t change.

That can’t be true, Meg argued. If it was, then you wouldn’t be trapped in eternity at all. There’s no logic to it.

Trust me. That’s how it works.

She considered his words.
‘Trust me’ is so old and worn a phrase that no one trusts anyone who uses it. Who taught me that
? she wondered. Then she stopped, afraid that he could hear her thoughts regardless of whether she was directing them to him or not.
Perhaps he can’t,
she decided when he didn’t respond. She had some time left to at least try to break the glyph, if her sense of its rate of passing was accurate. She stared at the contorted figure. No one deserved such cruelty. Tell me how to begin, she projected.

His joy was clear in his reply. Glyphs are constructed from multiple spells, each one interlocked and interwoven with the others. There are key phrases and common words, and specific voice intonations needed to unlock the links without causing irreparable damage. I’ll lead you through each one. You’ll have to describe what you feel and see as you dismantle each level to help me select the right keys.

How do you know all this?

I learned it. I love magic.

Then why did the Dragonlord lock you away in the glyph like this?

I thought we’d gone past that question. I need to know.

She sensed uncertainty, mistrust and anger in the stranger’s tone as his reply formed. Mareg saw me as a—as competition. He was jealous of my abilities. In the end, he imprisoned me here.

Where is Mareg now?

How would I know? After he left me here, I only felt his presence twice again. The first time was when he brought in the first of his new minions, the Dammeraag warriors he transformed into the horsemen. He came to gloat that he was ready to destroy the usurping human king who’d dared to try to kill him. The last time I only felt his presence and it was fleeting, as if he was in a hurry, and then never since. You mustn’t waste any more time. I’ll tell you how to begin.

She wanted to contradict him on his urgency if time wasn’t in motion, but she had her answer. She would unravel the glyph and return to the village before dawn. And what would this prisoner do when she did that? I’m ready, she projected.

First, you have to explore the fabric and weave of the glyph with your mind, he instructed. You have to leave your body and immerse yourself in the light, like bathing in a waterfall, only you have to have all of your senses attuned to what you are in. You have to feel it, as if you are becoming one with it and it part of you.

S
weat poured from her chin, her arms and her forehead and her legs ached from standing and squatting. She felt as though she hadn’t eaten or taken a drink for a long time. She felt like wax paper, the kind Saltsack Carter used to bring into Summerbrook from Quick Crossing that her mother used for cooking cakes. She moved steadily through the fabric of spells creating the glyph, listening to A Ahmud Ki’s advice as she described what she ‘felt’, but she was surprised by how many tiny details of her lost life leapt into the light. Saltsack Carter; fishing in the stream with her brothers; the horse, Nightwind; Emma’s stuffed kookaburra; the past snapped into place as each of the links in the glyph unfolded and vanished.

You will sense something like lava—heat—at the next level, he said. This spell controls the fireball embedded in the glyph, gives it potency. The key words here are ancient Elvenaar words—bael-adilgian—and you must say them as if you’re the fire itself, in a rushing hiss of flame. You must say the phrase, Onlucan se heathowealm ond bael-adilgian, like the fire itself would speak.

Meg acknowledged his instruction and practised the phrase, hissing the words through her teeth and rolling
her tongue to push the air through to sound like air sucked into a fire. How many more of these strange incantations did she have to make? Already she’d lost count since the opening words. And why all the strange languages? ‘Onlucan se heathowealm ond bael- adilgian’—why not just say ‘Unlock the fierce flames and fire-slayer’ in her own tongue? She could speak any language once she’d heard it. What was her tongue? She closed her eyes and let her spirit meld with the glyph, sensing its structure as if she held it against her skin, her mind-fingers sliding softly over its fabric, searching the gradation for the line, the edge where one spell ended and the next began. It made more sense to unpick it this way—with her mind—than with the words. Immersed in the magic, she was inside the glyph, a part of it. She could ‘see’ it clearly—could easily identify its locks. They weren’t locks, though—they were like the little puzzles she used to create for Jon.

The memory jolted her out of her concentration and her eyes snapped open. The chamber was duller than she remembered because the glyph before which she sat was no longer a vibrant green but muted and pale yellow. She closed her eyes, her tears sliding down her cheeks.

What happened?

She couldn’t answer. The image of a baby held aloft over the edge of a cliff by a man in blue robes riveted her to her place. He held her baby. He held Jon. And she knew what happened next.

Where are you?

Bad. Run.

Speak to me!

Run.

Her head was full of overwhelming sound and images.

Meg!

Run.

She opened her eyes. Whisper the rat was sitting on her haunches at the entrance to the space.
Run,
the rat was projecting.
Bad.

Both side corridors glowed with blue light. Meg remembered. She scrambled to her feet and sprinted after Whisper as the rat bolted into the tunnel and she reached the base of the steps before she dared to check for the Demon Horsemen. The yellow glow was subsumed by the blue light accompanying the Demon Horsemen into the chamber. Metal boots scraped on the stone and spurs jangled. Whisper pressed against her leg, so she bent and cradled the rat while she crouched in the darkness.

The blue light stayed longer than she expected. Had they discovered her meddling with the glyph? What would they do to the tortured soul on the dragon? She wanted to creep along the tunnel to see what the Demon Horsemen were doing to A Ahmud Ki, but fear gripped her and held her where she was. What would she do if they came out this way? Last time she hastily called a portal into being to escape. Could she still do that? It was one thing to recall how to make a portal, but what parts in the making had she forgotten? She only remembered the rule to dissolve portals to stop others following after she arrived in Se’Treya. What else had she forgotten?

The blue light diminished. She listened for telltale sounds, but the chamber at the tunnel’s end was silent. Whisper squirmed to be put down.
Looking,
the rat told her, and trotted towards the chamber while Meg waited, anticipating the rat making a mad dash back to her, but after a few moments the rat projected a clumsy image for
Gone.
Heart racing, Meg crept back to the chamber and peered along both side tunnels into darkness.

They’re gone, A Ahmud Ki informed her.

Where?

To find Mareg.

Do they know what’s happening?

A Ahmud Ki projected an ironic chuckle in his reply. They don’t understand it. They are here to guard me and to let Mareg know if anything happens to me.

What do we do now? Meg asked, her panic rising.

You finish the job.

But what if they come back?

Hurry. Can you remember where you were up to?

She gazed at the yellow light. Yes.

Then continue, he ordered.

She was affronted by his tone, but she put it aside as the tone of someone who’d been trapped and was seeing his escape looming. She refocussed, moving past her nascent fear of the Demon Horsemen, through the rags of the residual images of Jon and her renewed pain, until she could feel the glyph’s embracing energy—only it was no longer as strong, as all-encompassing, as when she’d started to unravel it. A Ahmud Ki’s ancient words resonated in her thoughts and she imagined how they would sound, but she instinctively felt that there was a better way to finish the task. The glyph’s energy tapped into her spine and the magical tingling that she recognised linked her inextricably to the glyph’s fabric. With a slow, deep breath, she let her mind fuse with the remaining energy until she felt that the glyph was her construction, part of her being that she understood in every facet. She drew on the rat’s unusual ability to communicate in images and realigned the glyph into an interconnected puzzle that revealed the links like chains. Then she disconnected each link, separating the images, and as each image was isolated it vanished, leaving the remaining links visible and vulnerable. Within moments she was left with a solitary image—the emaciated, bloodied pale figure of
A Ahmud Ki across the back of the statue—and she was shocked into wide-eyed consciousness by the most brutal scream she’d ever heard.

The chamber was dark. She jumped to her feet, created a light sphere and saw the shadowed silhouette of the figure on the dragon writhing violently. A shoulder ripped free of the black axe and the figure slid sideways, hanging on the ebony surface, pinned by the golden axe, screaming. Meg clambered onto the statue, slipping and struggling to get a foothold on the polished stone as she desperately reached for the golden axe handle, and when she finally got hold of it she heaved with all of her strength, but it wouldn’t budge. A Ahmud Ki screamed again and went limp. Her memory stirred. She focussed her psychic energy and imagined the axe coming free. The axe’s grip in the stone dissolved and she fell backwards, smacking heavily against the stone floor, and the axe slid down the statue and clattered on the floor beside her. She sat up. Along the left and right tunnels pale blue light was forming. The Demon Horsemen had heard the screams. She crawled to A Ahmud Ki’s side and found a multitude of bleeding wounds, especially the gaping cuts where the axes had pinned his shoulders to the dragon.
Whisper,
she projected.

Here,
the rat replied, emerging from behind the dragon statue, and she trotted towards Meg.

The light in the tunnels brightened. Meg could hear metallic steps.
Where do they keep their horses?
she wondered, cleared her thought and focussed on the exit doorway to form a portal. As the light flashed across the space, she scooped A Ahmud Ki’s unconscious form into her arms, surprised at how fragile and light he was, let Whisper leap through the portal first and then stepped through, her final thought closing the portal in her wake.

He was close to dying. The wounds on his shoulders, his back and his chest were deep, the kind that would have individually slain most people, but he showed uncommon resilience in the feeble ebb and flow of breath and his agonisingly slow heartbeat. His blood loss worried her most of all and the wounds were seeping their precious fluids into the straw of her shelter. Whisper watched with her head tilted as if she was interested in what was unfolding. ‘First, these leg bonds,’ she whispered. She looked at the gold wire cruelly cutting into A Ahmud Ki’s legs, binding him in an unnatural position. There was no way to cut him free so she created the spell and made the wire slip away. Blood seeped from the wire furrows.
No one deserves
this, she thought, as she knelt beside the ghostly pale body to straighten the legs from beneath the torso. When he was supine, she gently placed her hands across his chest, covering the wounds as she closed her eyes, and whispered, ‘I will heal you. You won’t die. I will heal you.’ A memory of Wombat flickered.

Light crept beneath the door and through the cracks in the wall to touch her hand and wake her. She blinked, and when she became aware that she was lying across a body she sat up to gaze at the pale, emaciated form stretched before her. His chest moved shallowly. She looked for his terrible wounds, but they were healed. Her spell worked.
Now it is up to you,
she thought as she considered to where she could shift him from the congealed pool of blood in the straw. She looked for Whisper, but the rat was gone. She listened. Outside, some distance away, she could hear voices, birdsong and a dog barking. ‘Chi-hway,’ she murmured, and was
surprised that he hadn’t come to wake her as normal—and glad because she would have had to explain A Ahmud Ki’s presence. She piled straw for A Ahmud Ki’s bed before she lifted him across to it, again surprised at his lack of weight. He needed clothing, at least a blanket for warmth. Hiding him from Chi-hway was impossible and explaining how he’d arrived made even less sense. Somehow, she had to keep Chi-hway out of her shelter.

As she opened the door cautiously she was struck with how hungry and thirsty she was feeling.
It was probably the exertion with the magic,
she reasoned. It was later in the morning than she expected, almost the middle of the day. The sun darted between grey clouds and the air was very cool, warning her that it would rain. She spotted a group of Shesskar-sharel women washing clothes at the river and children playing nearby, and a red dog loping after birds. Two older men, sitting on logs and talking, looked up at her. There was no sign of Magpie or Chi-hway. Then she remembered that they were hunting. They must have left early and Chi-hway had chosen to let her sleep. Luck was on her side. She entered the house and, after eating carrots and a potato to stave her hunger, and drinking from the water bucket, she retrieved a brown smock and a blue blanket from Chi-hway’s possessions and retreated to her shelter where she covered A Ahmud Ki.

He was still breathing faintly, but his heartbeat was steady and he was sleeping soundly. He was strange to look at—a man with a thin frame and an elegant face—and his silver braided hair fascinated her because she wondered how long it had taken him to knot all of the intricate individual braids—or who had done it for him. His eyes were unusual too, even closed, shaped like a cat’s eyes. When she examined his body for residue of the
wounds she found livid purple marks of older scars that must have been earned before his imprisonment and the absence of a finger on his left hand—otherwise he was whole.

Satisfied that he was warm and stable, she went to the kitchen to start her daily duties of preparing for meals, until she realised that she didn’t know how long Chi-hway intended to be away hunting. She headed for Ah-tee-wana-see’s hut, but halfway there she heard the women calling from the river and they were pointing at her, yelling, ‘The wild one is back! She’s there!’ Confused, she continued walking and saw Ah-tee- wana-see emerge from her hut. Meg smiled as the old woman approached, and was startled to see her looking angry.

‘Do you think you can come and go as you please?’ Ah-tee-wana-see asked bluntly. ‘Or did you find it too hard to run away?’

‘I didn’t run anywhere,’ Meg replied.

Ah-tee-wana-see glared. ‘What nonsense is this, Sha- emen-sa-char? You have been gone three days and you say you ran nowhere?’

Meg stared, her mouth open. ‘I don’t understand,’ she muttered.

‘You understand perfectly well, child. My grandson goes hunting and you thought you could escape in his absence,’ the old woman accused, ‘but you found Shesskar-sharel unremitting on strangers, or you got lost and came back. You’re lucky my grandson is not returned from the hunt or you would be sorry for trying to make a fool of him.’

‘When is he coming back?’ Meg asked, trying to deflect the unexpected attack.

The old woman looked as if she wanted to keep the attack going, but she shrugged, sighed and said, ‘The hunters should already be back.’

Meg immediately thought of Magpie. ‘Then why aren’t they?’

Ah-tee-wana-see raised an eyebrow as if the question was impolite, but she held her answer while she waved to the women at the river who’d stopped their washing to watch the interchange. The women waved and returned to their task as if satisfied the matter was in control. ‘Tread warily, child. You are not the one to be asking questions, but I will answer this one. The men usually return from a hunt within two days. Sometimes it is longer if the wildcat is scarce in the mountains or if the animal they choose to hunt is smart. You have been wise to return before Chi-hway. I know my grandson and he would have hunted you down had you not come back. Don’t doubt my words, child. To become the wah ahtim, a man has to be proud and determined, not just strong and brave. Chi-hway would not brook being made a fool of and you would rue your actions for a long time.’

‘I understand,’ Meg said humbly. ‘I will make the house ready for Chi-hway’s return and see that he is cared for as a great man should be cared for.’

The old woman seemed unmoved by the words of contrition, her face set sternly. ‘Your role is to serve if you want sanctuary in our village. Repay kindness with gratitude, child, and your life will improve.’ Ah-tee- wana-see headed back to her hut. The meeting was over.