Shadowgod (33 page)

“No, its mine...this body is
mine
...you'll not have it, not…have it, for I will fly, you'll see...no…Nooooh!”

At the same time another pair of similarly garbed figures were untying the limp form of Gilly from the shattered mast. In a sudden burst of fury she swung herself over onto the deck, drew her sword and said;

“Release him, you scum, or you'll feel my blade in your hearts - ”

All five of the cloaked figures looked round at her as one, and her tongue froze in her mouth at the sight. Each and every one of them had Gilly's face, chalk-white features and blank grey eyes, but still his face…

“In the Mothers name,” she said falteringly. “What is…”

Something struck the old Wracktown vessel with a mighty crash, knocking Keren off her feet. As she struggled upright by leaning on the bulwark there was another thunderous impact and a series of shudders. Then the deck began to fall in, and the remnants of the mast toppled, dragged down by its own weight, crashing through the planks. The entire ship seemed to be breaking open like a rotten fruit, as if some ghastly curse of age and decay had finally caught up with it.

Across from her the five men with Gilly's face held Coireg and Gilly up between them, and as she watched they leaped straight into the dark gaping chasm of the disintegrating vessel. She screamed in wordless horror as they did so. She edged over to look down but another shock threw her backwards. Sobbing, she clambered back over the bulwark, holding on to the rough, sodden netting, swaying in the swell of the sea. From that height she saw the two remaining ramships nearby, one pulling away, the other coming for another strike.

It was then that the net from which she hung tore away and sent her plunging into the icy sea where her head struck a floating timber. Near-blinded by pain but driven by desperation, she clung to the same plank, paddling weakly. A large section of decking came into view and she somehow swam over to it, dragging herself up onto the solid, wooden sanctuary where she promptly passed out….

The last light of day was fading above her, and night was spreading out its cold and furtive cloak, but she now remembered what had happened, the battles and the perils, and the horrors, all of it. And right now her eyes needed to close and she needed to sleep, if only that scrape, scrape, scrape noise would stop…

After a while, voices penetrated her drowse.

“By the Tree! - that's her, ain't it, and right where they said she'd be.”

“O'course, laddie - when they say they know, you can take it as fact. But is she alive?”

Keren forced her eyes open, saw two blurred figures looking down, one taller as if he were sitting one something which twitched its ears and whickered….

“Ah, yes, y'see? - don't you worry, m'lady, soon 'ave yer safe and sound.”

“Better move her up to the wagon. Domas'll not be happy if she catches her death o' it out here…”

Domas
. As she sank into grey sleep, she held the name close like a warming candle of hope.

Lost upon seas of sleep,
With tattered sails and failing hull,
We founder in the gloom and plunge,
Unresisting into the sepulchral abyss.

—Eshen Caredu,
Storm Voyage
, Ch3

Alael finally returned to her chambers almost a day after the encounter with the spellcaster at the College of Hendred's Hall. The subsequent pursuit had led north then around the mound of the Chapel Fort, across the Bridge of Hawks and off into the heart of the city. Osper Traum's spell-imbued musical device helped track the man's taint up to the Highcliffe district and down again, eventually petering out near the abandoned buildings of the empty quarter. Weary and exhausted, Alael and Nerek had ridden back to the palace, escorted by Ghazrek and his men.

After changing into a nightshift, Alael ate from a cold platter sent up by the kitchen then dismissed her attendant, Nuri, and shuffled into her small, cold bedchamber. The embers of a fire smouldered in the grate and a single candle burned on a delicate tabouret. Next to the bronze candleholder, shaped like a seashell, was a small slip of parchment on which was a message from Bardow asking her to come and see him tomorrow on a most urgent matter. Could it be to do with the book and the translation that she had hurriedly left in his study the night before? - it seemed likely.

Then she was caught by a fit of yawning that made such considerations less important than sleep. So she crawled beneath chilly blankets which her body soon began to warm. Thus cocooned, she surrendered to the slumbering drowse that stole through her mind…

She began to dream that she was walking through a ruined city swathed in thick but strangely bright fog, her bare feet warmed by time-rounded stones, her hands caressing eroded marble columns and statues. Through arches she glimpsed gardens, fountains and pools and frequently passed trees which had grown up through the stonework. The smooth curves and bulges of their trunks and roots gave the impression of a living wood that had flowed from between the blocks in its unstoppable pursuit of the sun

Then she stepped through a doorway and the dream changed, sight and sound becoming noticeably sharper. She was standing in lush undergrowth near the edge of a forest, with the heady odours of earth and sap filling her head. Almost before she turned to see the Vale of Unburdening she knew she had come again to the Earthmother's realm.

The river was as she remembered it, a pale and silent torrent of struggling forms, as was the dense, tangled forest and the towering, rocky valley wall. With her eyes she followed the flow of spirits as it curved away behind the forest, then turned to look the other way….and almost jumped with surprise to see a woman standing only a couple of feet away.

“Who are you?” she said. “Where did you come from?”

The woman was a little taller than Alael and wore the pale blue robe of a priestess, with a loose-knit woollen shawl over her shoulders. She had golden hair gone mostly grey and a kindly face. She offered a ghostly smile.

“I do not know who I am, Alael, but I know that I came from there.” She pointed to the river.

Alael looked uncertainly from the newcomer to the river and back. “Have you been sent by the Earthmother? Are you a messenger?”

The woman had a serene emptiness about her. She gave an amused shrug. “Again, I do not know, but we have to go this way.”

At once she strode off through the knee-high grasses and flowers, and some compulsion led Alael on after her. All movement became a frantic blur for an eyeblink, then suddenly they were deep in the green forest, looking into a peaceful sheltering glade. Shafts and spears of light slanted down from above, making mossy rocks glow and dew-heavy leaves glitter. Reflected radiance sparkled in a small pool and whenever an insect wandered through the shafts of light they became for a moment winged, flashing jewels.

At the centre of the glade, four pillar lamps stood at the corners of a raised tomb of pure white stone. The lid was decorated with a multitude of animals and people, as were the sides, while carven figures sat at either end of the stone monument. One depicted a burly, bearded man in simple garments giving a book, a sword and a little ship into the upraised hands of a kneeling supplicant. The other showed the same man sitting next to a beautiful yet unsmiling woman in a gown of falling folds. Alael glanced at her guide but quickly saw that the statue was not of her.

“Is this…” Alael hesitated a moment, “...the tomb of the Fathertree?”

The woman seemed baffled by this and said, “Why should it be a tomb?” Then she held out her hand. “We'll see that next.”

Alael took her hand and together they walked forward. Again, there was the blur of surroundings that swept and turned past them till, only a few steps on, Alael was standing near the cliff-like face of the great valley wall. In the grass before her were five graves that appeared freshly dug, the rich brown soil heaped next to each one. Behind them was a flat, wide slab of rock that jutted from the foot of the cliff itself, and cut into its surface was an open tomb. At its head, leaning against the cliff, was a large, square-cut block of stone clearly meant to cover the sepulchre.

The woman released Alael's hand and went over to stare down into the open stone tomb for a long, intense moment.

“There can be no words between the living and the dead,” she said, seemingly to no-one. Then she raised her eyes and Alael saw that tears ran down features wrenched with anguish. “No words,” she said, voice choked with emotion. “Nothing…”

Troubled, Alael look away for an instant and when she glanced back the woman was standing right next to her, staring at her.

“She says that you must help Bardow,” the woman said.

“Who...the Earthmother?...”

“She says you will have her gift - use it wisely.”

Before Alael could answer, the woman calmly pushed her backwards. Off balance, she twisted as she toppled and saw that she was falling into one of the open graves and she screamed as the darkness rushed up at her -

- and in her night-darkened chamber she struggled awake as her attendant, Nuri, opened the door, lamp in hand.

“Did the commotion wake you, my lady?”

“What commotion?” Alael said. Then she began to hear faint shouts from outside. Nuri, clutching her nightgown fearfully, edged into the room.

“Oh, milady, one of the guards told me the news. The enemy's set fire to the city walls!”

* * *

Parts of Scallow were still ablaze by the time the night closed in, mostly dense rows of housing and shops down by the main walls, while other fires still raged all across the half-wrecked Bridges district. Medwin stood watching the burning buildings and the bucket chains of desperate citizens from the window of a small hillside villa overlooking the main dock where darkness masked the jutting masts of many sunken vessels. From recent accounts he knew that the remnants of the enemy fleet were fleeing out to sea while some surviving crews and shipboard troops had reached the western shore and were moving northwest in an attempt to join with allies in the hills. All of which he might have considered a hard-earned victory had he been able to say with certainty that Gilly and Keren were safe and well.

Feeling weary and cheerless, he leaned on the window frame. Just a short while ago he had ended a mostly fruitless search with the thought-canto Spiritwing, which had revealed nothing but the faintest and furthest hint of Keren's presence. Of Gilly he had found nothing. The Spiritwing, however, had drained the last of his stamina, forcing him to retire to this house, owned by a friend of Golwyth's. A servant had been sent ahead, and a good fire was buring in the iron hearth so he decided that now was a good moment to go within and lie down before he fell down. Medwin closed the shutters, pulled the drapes and stumbled across to a fur-heaped bed smelling of herbs and sweet forest scents. A lamp glowed on a shelf overhead but the impulse to put it out faded as sleep pounced…

He dreamed that he was walking through a strange house with only grey daylight coming in through the small windows. It seemed oddly drab and colourless as he passed through a low, narrow entryway, then a scullery and a cluttered room full of shelves and finally a wide, dark passage ending in double doors sitting ajar. Beyond was a large room full of golden light, tables heaped with all manner of timber, racks where varnished pieces were hung to dry, frames on which leather was stretched and shaped. Sawdust and offcuts littered the floor and the air was full of the pungency of wood sap.

Across the room a tall, dark-haired man was working on something at a bench and as Medwin made his way round a sense of distant familiarity began to nag at him. Then he saw the horse figurines and amulets sitting in wall niches just as the man straightened, and his surprise was profound. It was his grandfather, Jharlo Medwin, who had worked as a woodcrafter near Adnagaur for many a year. When Medwin was quite young, Grandfather Jharlo had apparently admitted to the rest of the family that he had been a secret Skyhorse worshipper for most of his life. Medwin's mother once remarked to his father, when both thought he was elsewhere, that it was 'a waste of time praying to an animal, and a disgrace'. Their visits to Grandfather's workshop had been rare after that.

As Medwin approached, his grandfather glanced up and smiled but kept on working. His large, weathered hands were gripping and sanding down a small statuette of a young boy on a horse carved in a fine-grained, yellowy wood. Medwin stared at it, and at the other carvings decorating the room.

“Is that an offering, Grandfather? Are you going to dedicate it to the Skyhorse?”

The elderly man laughed quietly. “Ah, laddie, it's only a carving, this one. Sometimes, y'know, a horse is just a horse…”

Then the dream drifted apart as Medwin opened his eyes, blinked uncomfortably in the now oddly-bright glow of the lamp above him. He levered himself upright, opened the lamp's glass door, blew out the flame and settled back under the warm furs.

And sometimes a dream is just a dream
, he thought to himself, though failing to convince.

* * *

In his well-heated chamber in the Keep of Day at the Imperial palace, Tauric lay in his large, ornate bed, one hand holding the horse pendant as he slept. In his dream he was down in a crypt suffused with pearly light and walking among scores of worn pillars, seeking a way out. At regular intervals along the stone walls were large alcoves fabulously decorated in a profusion of trees and flowers and vines, all interweaving and beautifully detailed. The recesses held the slanted tombs of kings, queens, mages and priests, who were also depicted in tall paintings hung beside each alcove.

As he walked the figures in the paintings smiled at him and climbed down to shake his hand, praise his deeds, remark wonderingly upon his metal arm, and accompany him on his progress through the crypt. Once or twice he thought he saw a black dog moving among the busy pillars, but dismissed it as shadows. Quite soon a sizeable crowd of monarchs, mages and priests were following him or rather, he realised, guiding him along in a particular direction.