The Tower of Bones (10 page)

‘Tell me, Qwenqwo, is it true that the Temple Ship is able to think – to feel?’

‘The Mage Lord says so. And I believe him.’

She forced her reluctant mind to consider it again. When her spirit had been ravaged by the Legun, Alan had called on the help of the Temple Ship to save her. And now, the very thought that the Temple Ship could think and feel! It didn’t surprise her as much as it should, perhaps, because she had sensed a presence in the Ship from the time at the frozen lake when they had needed to escape from the Storm Wolves.

Qwenqwo squeezed her shoulder. ‘Is it the Ship that has called you here? Was it the Ship that directed you here to the water’s edge?’

She nodded, a thrill of awe running through her. ‘Qwenqwo – I need to know. You told us a tale, on the river journey, that the Temple Ship might once have been the Ark of the Arinn. Is this true?

‘I cannot say it is true. Merely that the legends have it so.’

‘I – I sense it is calling me. I feel that it is trying to tell me something.’

‘The Ship speaks to you?’

‘Not in words, but in feelings.’

He followed her gaze to where the Ship, a hundred yards broad from wingtip to wingtip, glowed with some inner, lambent source of energy.

‘What does it say to you?’

‘I sense foreboding.’ Mo shuddered. ‘Qwenqwo, I think – I feel – that it is calling me. I think I should go out to it. Please, will you take me to the Temple Ship?’

Qwenqwo’s face grew pensive. ‘I sense nothing of the kind, though I too am consumed with foreboding.’

‘Maybe it’s calling you too. I see you in my mind, when it calls me. I sense that it is also calling on the Mage of Dreams.’

‘My friend – recall, I beg of you, what happened when Alan demanded my help – when he insisted I take him back into the landscape of dreams!’

Mo remembered the dying of the High Architect at Ossierel. How Kate had not awoken from the experience.

He added, ‘The New Kyra will forbid it.’

‘That’s why we cannot tell her.’ Mo’s voice was little above a whisper: ‘I know how wrong it sounds. But I sense that the Ship is insisting I go out to it. It’s calling me, urgently, because Alan is in danger.’

The dwarf mage released Mo from the crook of his arm. He confronted her, gazing deeply into her eyes, then shook his head with an almighty frown. ‘Very well – if you so trust your senses we must do their bidding. Then
let us make haste. Before the others realise what we have in mind.’

Alan retraced the riddle in his mind. A point had become a vertical line. Then it reverted to a point again. The same point had moved through all of the angles of the pentagon, then reverted to the point. Each line, vertical or horizontal, had exactly measured the radius of a sphere that enclosed the pentagon. He felt a jolt of dread as he realised this could be some kind of mathematical riddle. It made no sense to be faced with a mathematical riddle in this world. It felt jarringly wrong. Had the Way recognised the fact he came from Earth where science, and mathematics, were so important? Did it toy with him in a setting a riddle appropriate to his all-too-scientific world?

He hadn’t got a clue.

But it was no good moaning about it. A mathematical riddle, then … A point that became a line. To his none-too-mathematical mind it pointed to the most obvious of numerals – one. One measured the vertical and the horizontal of a perfect square. One squared reverted to the point. Even a maths dumbo knew that. Did it just emphasise that one squared still equalled one? It seemed so piddlingly mundane, yet he had nothing to lose in speaking it aloud to see what happened. ‘One squared is one. For that matter, one cubed is one. And the square root of one is also one.’

Nothing happened.

Damn!
He should have guessed as much. It just wasn’t going to be anything as easy as that.

He sensed that a hostile force was beginning to invade his body. He could feel it working against him, weakening his will. The muscles of his neck were turning to ice. He could barely move. There was a sound in his ears, a faint sound, but there was something about it that caused him to break out into a sweat. Was it his imagination, or did he hear the thudding sound of his own heartbeat, slowed to maybe half its normal speed, like some clock inside his head that was slowly ticking?

Try the oraculum!

He tried again; this time rather than speaking his answer he thought it aloud through the oraculum. One squared was one. The square root of one was still one.

Nothing.

He thought he sensed a movement under his feet. A quaver of uncertainty, as if the ground he was standing on was no longer solid. It felt as if his feet were planted on a raft floating in water.
Goddam!
He tried to look beyond the glowing pentagon within the circle, but beyond its glow there was utter darkness.

The ticking was getting louder, like a clockwork mechanism that had come alive inside his brain. The slow, distant rapping sounded distinctly ominous.

He turned his mind back to what little had been given him as a clue. The contraction of the light to a pinpoint in space. The extending of the pinpoint to lines
and angles that were, maybe, like the extension of the single focus to the pentagon, drawn not in two dimensions on a floor but in three dimensions within a perfect sphere. Maybe the riddle had nothing to do with the numeral one, but with a three-dimensional pentagon within a sphere?

He felt himself spinning, as if he had become the point, his entire being moved along the many lines and angles, tracing the three-dimensional pentagon within the sphere. A numinous sense of power was all around him, so close it flooded all of his senses, yet he couldn’t understand it. It was the proximity to the power that was debilitating him. He felt increasingly weak, his head dizzy. He tried to clear his thoughts to think.
A perfect pentagon inside a sphere … and I’m at the dead centre of it
.

As in a dream, he recalled his old maths teacher at high school. Miss Pemberton was droning on about those ancient Greeks like Euclid, who had discovered how the relationship of a circle to its radius was always the same. The constant was something those ancient Greeks had called pi. She had worked some tired old analogy, with Granny’s apple pie, cut into slices, about the importance of pi. He hadn’t taken a great deal of notice of Miss Pemberton at the time. He didn’t have a clue what pi really meant – and to tell the truth Miss Pemberton hadn’t seemed much wiser – but he did recall that you had to use pi as the constant when you were figuring the radius that drew a circle. Maybe it was pi that translated a three-dimensional
pentagon into a sphere? How the hell would he know!

But he whispered it anyway.

‘The answer is pi.’

The force inside him began to expand. He sensed, without needing to have it explained, that if it continued to do that it would end with his death.

He had a vision of an expanding circle. As the circle expanded, a second circle formed at exactly right angles to it, so one expanding circle was within another. Then the inner circle began to rotate within the outer circle, which began to rotate in the opposite direction. And all the time they were expanding – spinning and expanding so very quickly it was becoming a blur.

He himself was at the very core of the inner circle. He was spinning, rapidly, in three dimensions. He had become a third circle, spinning within the two vaster circles.

Then, as if in a final moment of lucidity, he thought about his arch-enemy, the Tyrant of the Wastelands. The Tyrant’s symbol resembled a triple infinity. He considered that hated symbol, as he had seen it on the hilt of the Sword of Feimhin, or drawn into Mo’s sketchbook, or the swords and shields of the Tyrant’s legionary soldiers.

He allowed the symbol to fill his mind: a triple infinity. He tried to find words to describe it, but he didn’t possess the vocabulary. He thought of the symbol for infinity, the two interlocking circles, and then he amazed himself by imagining three interlocking infinities all meeting at their
centres, opening out into three-dimensional space. With little or no confidence in his jumbled thoughts, he hurled that image into the void. He felt a jarring dislocation. The mathematical symbols were gone. His body was dissolving, just as it had dissolved on that fateful day on the summit of Slievenamon. He felt that same agony as his physical being was being torn apart. Then, abruptly, he was standing on the infinite white plane of Dromenon.

For several moments he felt paralysed with shock, his mind numbed. It was as if his will no longer belonged to him.

He blinked repeatedly, struggling to regain control. Reaching up, he brushed his fingertips against his brow, as if to reassure himself that the oraculum was still there. He found its smooth inverted triangle, but it felt unresponsive – dead! Abruptly the ticking returned, louder than before, like a measured drumbeat invading his senses. The drumbeat must be important. He tried to locate the source of the rhythmical sound, which was accompanied by a distant tinkling, almost a musical accompaniment – and he glimpsed the distant glint of gold. The gold focused to a figure of sorts, so far away he could barely make it out, a figure that appeared to be striding towards him in a slow-motion majesty of movement. The very landscape looked contrived, like something produced by a computer program. Through this surreal landscape the tiny glinting figure was marching, step by step, in a slow advance in his direction.

‘Bloody hell!’

The tinkling was coming from the golden figure and the drumbeat was the rhythm of its march. The whole scene, the gleam of gold moving through the immense white plain, was sublime beyond words, yet horribly mechanical at the same time. And now that he could make it out more clearly, the fantastic intricacies of design that made up the golden, glittering figure, it seemed vaguely familiar to him.

There must be a clue in the familiarity.

Another riddle; he guessed it had to be. Another trial, as if he were not fed up to the back teeth with riddles.

Alan studied it more closely now. He was forced to clench his eyes shut, rubbing at their aching shapes, to get them back into a clearer focus. When he opened them again the figure was significantly closer. The tinkling came from the movements of its clockwork. It was an automaton, a fancy robot. Why was it so maddeningly familiar to him?

He whispered, ‘This is not the portal!’

A voice, cold as a polar wind, replied:
A True Believer creates his own world through the power of his imagination
.

‘I didn’t create what I’m seeing.’

Yet is it not a world created of and for the imagination of your kind?

A nauseating dizziness caused him to clench his eyes shut again. When he reopened them he found himself in front of an elaborately carved desk. Behind the desk a frail old man was bent over his writing. Gazing about him,
Alan saw that he was standing in some kind of library, lined with ancient leather-bound books.

‘Is this supposed to tell me something?’

The old man did not look up, but his withered hand reached up, then spun round on its axis, as if dismissively responding to Alan’s question. A new complex of sensations invaded Alan’s mind. He sensed the waves of the sea. The movements of air on the breeze. The patterns of tissues and organs developing within the eggs or wombs that bore them. It was as if he was being allowed a glimpse of some ultimate truth – like the secrets of creation.

‘What’s it all supposed to mean?’

I
welcome you with an acknowledgement of what is dominant in your world
.

Startled, Alan gazed down at the bent head of the old man, a figure with a white beard and long, thinning hair. There was also something very familiar about this figure, something he recalled from a textbook at school. Suddenly he recognised who it was – one of the greatest thinkers and artists in history, the elderly figure of Leonardo da Vinci. Even as he recognised him, the old man raised his head. His eyes were now opened wide, but they were not the rheumy old blue that Alan recalled from the picture in the book, but a malignant all black.

We meet again, oraculum-bearer!

Alan realised at once who the figure really was. He had been hoodwinked into a confrontation not with the Fáil but with his arch enemy, the Tyrant of the Wastelands.

‘So it was a trap.’

The face, with its black orbits, beheld him in a contemplative silence. Then the claw-like hand spun once more on its axis and pointed, as if to indicate the golden robot, which had continued its march.

Mo stared overhead at the squealing flocks of seabirds that seemed to be drawn, as if through magnetism, to wheel around the stationary grandeur of the Temple Ship

‘Oh, Qwenqwo?’

‘Now then – let us face our fears together!’

They hesitated before the smooth flat expanse of ivory that was the blank face of the great horned head. Mo felt a fall in temperature, with the estuary breeze cutting through her clothes to numb her skin. The sound of the waves lapping against the prow beneath her seemed strangely muted in her ears, as if the imminence of change were blunting all of her senses.

‘You must promise me, Qwenqwo, that you’ll leave me here. As soon as you’ve helped me find the dream world.’

‘I can make no such promise.’

‘I won’t be alone, Qwenqwo,’ she spoke softly. ‘I have a very powerful friend to keep me company.’

Qwenqwo gazed about the Ship with evident scepticism. ‘I have no intention of abandoning you.’

‘Please do it for me, Qwenqwo.’

‘If I left you alone and you came to harm, I would never forgive myself. So I shall not leave you where there is the slightest danger. Accept my presence or there will be no entry into the world of dreams.’

Mo reached out and brushed the gnarled right shoulder of her protector. In that instant she knew what she had always instinctively assumed – that the emotion she felt for this man, who owed her nothing yet would surely die to protect her, was the love she might have felt for a father – perhaps even father and grandfather combined – which had been cruelly withheld from her life. Tears came into her eyes with the depth of that realisation as she gazed about her at the silent titan that was the Ship, which held itself so utterly still in spite of the movements of waves or weather.